e with the daughter of a
neighbouring farmer, a pretty and fanciful young woman, who marries
him. She is deeply bored by existence in a small market town, finds a
lover, wearies of him and finds another, gets wildly into debt,
poisons herself and dies. After her death Bovary discovers the proof
of her infidelity, but his slow brain is too much bewildered by sorrow
and worry, by life generally, to feel another pang very distinctly. He
soon dies himself. That is all the story, given as an "argument," and
so summarized it tells us nothing of Flaubert's subject. There might
be many subjects in such an anecdote, many different points of view
from which the commonplace facts might make a book. The way in which
they are presented will entirely depend on the particular subject that
Flaubert sees in them; until this is apparent the method cannot be
criticized.

But the method can be watched; and immediately it is to be noted that
Flaubert handles his material quite differently from point to point.
Sometimes he seems to be describing what he has seen himself, places
and people he has known, conversations he may have overheard; I do not
mean that he is literally retailing an experience of his own, but that
he writes as though he were. His description, in that case, touches
only such matters as you or I might have perceived for ourselves, if
we had happened to be on the spot at the moment. His object is to
place the scene before us, so that we may take it in like a picture
gradually unrolled or a drama enacted. But then again the method
presently changes. There comes a juncture at which, for some reason,
it is necessary for us to know more than we could have made out by
simply looking and listening. Flaubert, the author of the story, must
intervene with his superior knowledge. Perhaps it is something in the
past of the people who have been moving and talking on the scene; you
cannot rightly understand this incident or this talk, the author
implies, unless you know--what I now proceed to tell you. And so, for
a new light on the drama, the author recalls certain circumstances
that we should otherwise have missed. Or it may be that he--who
naturally knows everything, even the inmost, unexpressed thought of
the characters--wishes us to share the mind of Bovary or of Emma, not
to wait only on their words or actions; and so he goes below the
surface, enters their consciousness, and describes the train of
sentiment that passes there.