ce; he places the story before us and suppresses
any comment of his own. But this point has been over-laboured, I
should say; it only means that Flaubert does not announce his opinion
in so many words, and thence it has been argued that the opinions of a
really artistic writer ought not to appear in his story at all. But of
course with every touch that he lays on his subject he must show what
he thinks of it; his subject, indeed, the book which he finds in his
selected fragment of life, is purely the representation of his view,
his judgement, his opinion of it. The famous "impersonality" of
Flaubert and his kind lies only in the greater tact with which they
express their feelings--dramatizing them, embodying them in living
form, instead of stating them directly. It is not to this matter,
Flaubert's opinion of Emma Bovary and her history--which indeed is
unmistakable--that I refer in speaking of our relation to the writer
of the book.

It is a matter of method. Sometimes the author is talking with his own
voice, sometimes he is talking _through_ one of the people in the
book--in this book for the most part Emma herself. Thus he describes a
landscape, the trim country-side in which Emma's lot is cast, or the
appearance and manners of her neighbours, or her own behaviour; and in
so doing he is using his own language and his own standards of
appreciation; he is facing the reader in person, however careful he
may be to say nothing to deflect our attention from the thing
described. He is making a reproduction of something that is in his own
mind. And then later on he is using the eyes and the mind and the
standards of another; the landscape has now the colour that it wears
in Emma's view, the incident is caught in the aspect which it happens
to turn towards her imagination. Flaubert himself has retreated, and
it is Emma with whom we immediately deal. Take, for example, the two
figures of her lovers, Rodolphe and Leon, the florid country-gentleman
and the aspiring student; if Flaubert were to describe these men as
_he_ sees them, apart from their significance to Emma, they would not
occupy him for long; to his mind, and to any critical mind, they are
both of them very small affairs. Their whole effect in the book is the
effect they produce upon the sensibility of a foolish and limited
little woman. Or again, take the incident of Emma's single incursion
into polite society, the ball at the great house which starts so many
of h