fortunate story, and of talking about it with a kind of exasperated
spite, as though it had somehow got possession of him unfairly and he
owed it a grudge for having crossed his mind. That is strange enough,
but that is quite a different affair; his personal resentment of the
intrusion of such a book upon him had nothing to do with the
difficulty he found in writing it. His classic agonies were caused by
no unruliness in the story he had to tell; his imagined book was
rooted in his thought, and never left its place by a hair's breadth.
Year after year he worked upon his subject without finding anything in
it, apparently, to disturb or distract him in his continuous effort to
treat it, to write it out to his satisfaction. This was the only
difficulty; there was no question of struggling with a subject that he
had not entirely mastered, one that broke out with unforeseen demands;
Bovary never needed to be held down with one hand while it was written
with the other. Many a novelist, making a further and fuller
acquaintance with his subject as he proceeds, discovering more in it
to reckon with than he had expected, has to meet the double strain, it
would seem. But Flaubert kept his book in a marvellous state of
quiescence during the writing of it; through all the torment which it
cost him there was no hour when it presented a new or uncertain look
to him. He might hate his subject, but it never disappointed or
disconcerted him.

In Bovary, accordingly, the methods of the art are thrown into clear
relief. The story stands obediently before the author, with all its
developments and illustrations, the characters defined, the small
incidents disposed in order. His sole thought is how to present the
story, how to tell it in a way that will give the effect he desires, how
to show the little collection of facts so that they may announce the
meaning he sees in them. I speak of his "telling" the story, but of
course he has no idea of doing that and no more; the art of fiction does
not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be
_shown_, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself. To hand over to
the reader the facts of the story merely as so much information--this is
no more than to state the "argument" of the book, the groundwork upon
which the novelist proceeds to create. The book is not a row of facts,
it is a single image; the facts have no validity in themselves, they are
nothing until they have been used. I