Chapter 5

These are the familiar resources of a story-teller, which everybody uses as a matter of course. It is so natural to take advantage of them that unless we purposely keep an eye upon the writer's devices, marking them off as he turns from one to another, we hardly notice the change. He is telling a story in the ordinary way, the obvious and unconstrained. But in fact these variations represent differences of method that are fundamental. If the story is to be _shown_ to us, the question of our relation to the story, how we are placed with regard to it, arises with the first word. Are we placed before a particular scene, an occasion, at a certain selected hour in the lives of these people whose fortunes are to be followed? Or are we surveying their lives from a height, participating in the privilege of the novelist--sweeping their history with a wide range of vision and absorbing a general effect? Here at once is a necessary alternative. Flaubert, as a matter of fact, gives us first a scene--the scene of Bovary's arrival at school, as a small boy; the incident of the particular morning is rendered; and then he leaves that incident, summarizes the background of the boy's life, describes his parents, the conditions of his home, his later career as a student. It is the way in which nine novels out of ten begin--an opening scene, a retrospect, and a summary. And the spectator, the reader, is so well used to it that he is conscious of no violent change in the point of view; though what has happened is that from one moment to another he has been caught up from a position straight in front of the action to a higher and a more commanding level, from which a stretch of time is to be seen outspread. This, then, is one distinction of method; and it is a tell-tale fact that even in this elementary matter our nomenclature is uncertain and ambiguous. How do we habitually discriminate between these absolutely diverse manners of presenting the facts of a story? I scarcely know--it is as though we had no received expressions to mark the difference between blue and red. But let us assume, at any rate, that a "scenic" and a "panoramic" presentation of a story expresses an intelligible antithesis, strictly and technically.

There is our relation, again--ours, the reader's--with regard to the author. Flaubert is generally considered to be a very "impersonal" writer, one who keeps in the background and desires us to remain unaware of his presence; 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 Léon, 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 her romantic dreams; it is all presented in her terms, it appears as it appeared to her. And occasionally the point of view is shifted away from her to somebody else, and we get a brief glimpse of what _she_ is in the eyes of her husband, her mother-in-law, her lover.

Furthermore, whether the voice is that of the author or of his creature, there is a pictorial manner of treating the matter in hand and there is also a dramatic. It may be that the impression--as in the case of the marquis's ball--is chiefly given as a picture, the reflection of events in the mirror of somebody's receptive consciousness. The reader is not really looking _at_ the occasion in the least, or only now and then; mainly he is watching the surge of Emma's emotion, on which the episode acts with sharp intensity. The thing is "scenic," in the sense in which I used the word just now; we are concerned, that is to say, with a single and particular hour, we are taking no extended, general view of Emma's experience. But though it is thus a _scene_, it is not dramatically rendered; if you took the dialogue, what there is of it, together with the actual things described, the people and the dresses and the dances and the banquets--took these and placed them on the stage, for a theatrical performance, the peculiar effect of the occasion in the book would totally vanish. Nothing could be more definite, more objective, than the scene is in the book; but there it is all bathed in the climate of Emma's mood, and it is to the nature of this climate that our interest is called for the moment. The lords and ladies are remote, Emma's envying and wondering excitement fills the whole of the foreground. The scene is pictorially treated.

But then look on to the incident of the _comices agricoles_, the cattle-show at Yonville, with the crowd in the market-place, the prize-giving and the speech-making. This scene, like the other, is rendered on the whole (but Flaubert's method is always a little mixed, for reasons to be noted presently) from Emma's point of view; she sits beside Rodolphe, while he makes his advances to her under cover of the councillor's eloquence, and she looks out upon the assembly--and as she sees it, so the throng and the glare are imparted to the reader. But remark that on this occasion the facts of the scene are well to the fore; Emma's mood counts for very little, and we get a direct view of the things on which her eyes casually rest. We hear the councillor's rhetorical periods, Rodolphe's tender speeches, Emma's replies, with the rumour of the crowd breaking through from time to time. It is a scene which might be put upon the stage, quite conceivably, without any loss of the main impression it is made to convey in the book--an impression of ironic contrast, of the bustle and jostle round the oration of the pompous dignitary, of the commonplace little romance that is being broached unobserved. To receive the force of the contrast the reader has only to see and hear, to be present while the hour passes; and the author places him there accordingly, in front of the visible and audible facts of the case, and leaves it to these to tell the story. It is a scene treated dramatically.

This is a difference of method that constantly catches a critic's eye in reading a novel. Is the author writing, at a given moment, with his attention upon the incidents of his tale, or is he regarding primarily the form and colour they assume in somebody's thought? He will do both, it is probable, in the course of his book, on the same page, perhaps, or even in the same sentence; nothing compels him to forego the advantage of either method, if his story can profit in turn from both. Now and then, indeed, we shall find a writer deliberately confining himself to one method only, treating his whole book with a rigid consistency, and this for the sake of some particular aspect of his theme which an unmixed manner is best fitted to reveal. But generally a novelist retains his liberty to draw upon any of his resources as he chooses, now this one and now that, using drama where drama gives him all he needs, using pictorial description where the turn of the story demands it. The only law that binds him throughout, whatever course he is pursuing, is the need to be consistent on _some_ plan, to follow the principle he has adopted; and of course it is one of the first of his precepts, as with every artist in any kind, to allow himself no more latitude than he requires. A critic, then, looks for the principle on which a novelist's methods are mingled and varied--looks for it, as usual, in the novelist's subject, and marks its application as the subject is developed.

And so with the devices that I distinguish as scenic and panoramic--one watches continually to see how this alternation is managed, how the story is now overlooked from a height and now brought immediately to the level of the reader. Here again the need of the story may sometimes seem to pull decisively in one direction or the other; and we get a book that is mainly a broad and general survey, or mainly a concatenation of particular scenes. But on the whole we expect to find that the scene presently yields to some kind of chronicle or summary, and that this in turn prepares the way and leads into the occasion that fulfils it. The placing of this occasion, at the point where everything is ready for it, where it will thoroughly illuminate a new face of the subject and advance the action by a definite stage, is among the chief cares of the author, I take it, in planning his book. A scene that is not really wanted, and that _does_ nothing in particular--a scene that for lack of preparation fails to make its effect--is a weakness in a story that one would suppose a novelist to be always guarding against. Anyhow there is no doubt that the scene holds the place of honour, that it is the readiest means of starting an interest and raising a question--we drop into a scene on the first page and begin to speculate about the people concerned in it: and that it recurs for a climax of any sort, the resolution of the question--and so the scene completes what it began. In Madame Bovary the scenes are distributed and rendered with very rare skill; not one but seems to have more and more to give with every fresh reading of it. The ball, the _comices_, the evening at the theatre, Emma's fateful interview with Léon in the Cathedral of Rouen, the remarkable session of the priest and the apothecary at her deathbed--these form the articulation of the book, the scheme of its structure. To the next in order each stage of the story is steadily directed. By the time the scene is reached, nothing is wanting to its opportunity; the action is ripe, the place is resonant; and then the incident takes up the story, conclusively establishes one aspect of it and opens the view towards the next. And the more rapid summary that succeeds, with its pauses for a momentary sight of Emma's daily life and its setting, carries the book on once more to the climax that already begins to appear in the distance.

But the most obvious point of method is no doubt the difficult question of the centre of vision. With which of the characters, if with any of them, is the writer to identify himself, which is he to "go behind"? Which of these vessels of thought and feeling is he to reveal from within? I suppose his unwritten story to rise before him, its main lines settled, as something at first entirely objective, the whole thing seen from without--the linked chain of incident, the men and women in their places. And it may be that the story can be kept in this condition while it is written, and that the completed book will be nothing but an account of things seen from the point of view of the author, standing outside the action, without any divulging of anybody's thought. But this is rare; such restraint is burdensome, unless in a very compact and straightforward tale. Somewhere the author must break into the privacy of his characters and open their minds to us. And again it is doubtless his purpose to shift the point of view no more often than he need; and if the subject can be completely rendered by showing it as it appears to a single one of the figures in the book, then there is no reason to range further. Haphazard and unnecessary plunges into the inner life of the characters only confuse the effect, changing the focus without compensating gain. But which _is_ the centre, which is the mind that really commands the subject? The answer is not always evident at once, nor does it seem to be always correctly divined in the novels that we read. But of course in plenty of stories there can be little doubt; there is somebody in the middle of the action who is clearly the person to interpret it for us, and the action will accordingly be faced from his or her position. In Flaubert's Bovary there could be no question but that we must mainly use the eyes of Emma herself; the middle of the subject is in her experience, not anywhere in the concrete facts around her. And yet Flaubert finds it necessary, as I said, to look _at_ her occasionally, taking advantage of some other centre for the time being; and why he does so a nearer inspection of his subject will soon show.

Here we have, then, the elements of the novelist's method--essentially few and simple, but infinite in their possibilities of fusion and combination. They are arranged in a new design to suit every new theme that a writer takes in hand; we see them alternated, united, imposed one on another, this point of view blended with that, dramatic action treated pictorially, pictorial description rendered dramatically--and these words I use throughout, it will be understood, in the special sense that I have indicated. In well-fashioned work it is always interesting to discover how method tends to be laid upon method, so that we get, as it were, layers and stratifications in the treatment of a story. Some of these I shall try to distinguish, and the search is useful, I think, for an understanding of the novelist himself. For though it is true that a man's method depends upon the particular story he is engaged in telling, yet the story that occurs to him, the subject he happens upon, will be that which asks for the kind of treatment congenial to his hand; and so his method will be a part of himself, and will tell us about the quality of his imagination. But this by the way--my concern is only with the manner in which the thing is done; and having glanced at some of the features of that manner in Flaubert's Bovary, I may now seek the reason of them in a more attentive handling of the book.

VI

If Flaubert allows himself the liberty of telling his story in various ways--with a method, that is to say, which is often modified as he proceeds--it is likely that he has good cause to do so. Weighing every word and calculating every effect so patiently, he could not have been casual and careless over his method; he would not take one way rather than another because it saved him trouble, or because he failed to notice that there were other ways, or because they all seemed to him much the same. And yet at first sight it does seem that his manner of arriving at his subject--if his subject is Emma Bovary--is considerably casual. He begins with Charles, of all people--Charles, her husband, the stupid soul who falls heavily in love with her prettiness and never has the glimmer of an understanding of what she is; and he begins with the early history of Charles, and his upbringing, and the irrelevant first marriage that his mother forces upon him, and his widowhood; and then it happens that Charles has a professional visit to pay to a certain farm, the farmer's daughter happens to be Emma, and so we finally stumble upon the subject of the book. Is that the neatest possible mode of striking it? But Flaubert seems to be very sure of himself, and it is not uninteresting to ask exactly what he means.

As for his subject, it is of course Emma Bovary in the first place; the book is the portrait of a foolish woman, romantically inclined, in small and prosaic conditions. She is in the centre of it all, certainly; there is no doubt of her position in the book. But _why_ is she there? The true subject of the novel is not given, as we saw, by a mere summary of the course which is taken by the story. She may be there for her own sake, simply, or for the sake of the predicament in which she stands; she may be presented as a curious scrap of character, fit to be studied; or Flaubert may have been struck by her as the instrument, the victim, the occasion, of a particular train of events. Perhaps she is a creature portrayed because he thinks her typical and picturesque; perhaps she is a disturbing little force let loose among the lives that surround her; perhaps, on the other hand, she is a hapless sufferer in the clash between her aspirations and her fate. Given Emma and what she is by nature, given her environment and the facts of her story, there are dozens of different subjects, I dare say, latent in the case. The woman, the men, all they say and do, the whole scene behind them--none of it gives any clue to the right manner of treating them. The one irreducible idea out of which the book, as Flaubert wrote it, unfolds--this it is that must be sought.

Now if Emma was devised for her own sake, solely because a nature and a temper like hers seemed to Flaubert an amusing study--if his one aim was to make the portrait of a woman of that kind--then the rest of the matter falls into line, we shall know how to regard it. These conditions in which Emma finds herself will have been chosen by the author because they appeared to throw light on her, to call out her natural qualities, to give her the best opportunity of disclosing what she is. Her stupid husband and her fascinating lovers will enter the scene in order that she may become whatever she has it in her to be. Flaubert elects to place her in a certain provincial town, full of odd characters; he gives the town and its folk an extraordinary actuality; it is not a town _quelconque_, not a generalized town, but as individual and recognizable as he can make it. None the less--always supposing that Emma by herself is the whole of his subject--he must have lit on this particular town simply because it seemed to explain and expound her better than another. If he had thought that a woman of her sort, rather meanly ambitious, rather fatuously romantic, would have revealed her quality more intensely in a different world--in success, freedom, wealth--he would have placed her otherwise; Charles and Rodolphe and Homard and the rest of them would have vanished, the more illuminating set of circumstances (whatever they might be) would have appeared instead. Emma's world as it is at present, in the book that Flaubert wrote, would have to be regarded, accordingly, as all a _consequence_ of Emma, invented to do her a service, described in order that they may make the description of _her_. Her world, that is to say, would belong to the treatment of the story; none of it, not her husband, not the life of the market-town, would be a part of the author's postulate, the groundwork of his fable; it would be possible to imagine a different setting, better, it might be, than that which Flaubert has chosen. All this--_if_ the subject of the book is nothing but the portrait of such a woman.

But of course it is not so; one glance at our remembrance of the book is enough to show it. Emma's world could not be other than it is, she could not be shifted into richer and larger conditions, without destroying the whole point and purpose of Flaubert's novel. She by herself is not the subject of his book. What he proposes to exhibit is the history of a woman like her in just such a world as hers, a foolish woman in narrow circumstances; so that the provincial scene, acting upon her, making her what she becomes, is as essential as she is herself. Not a portrait, therefore, not a study of character for its own sake, but something in the nature of a drama, where the two chief players are a woman on one side and her whole environment on the other--that is Madame Bovary. There is a conflict, a trial of strength, and a doubtful issue. Emma is not much of a force, no doubt; her impulses are wild, her emotions are thin and poor, she has no power of passion with which to fight the world. All she has is her romantic dream and her plain, primitive appetite; but these can be effective arms, after all, and she may yet succeed in getting her way and making her own terms. On the other hand the limitations of her life are very blank and uncompromising indeed; they close all round her, hampering her flights, restricting her opportunities. The drama is set, at any rate, whatever may come of it; Emma marries her husband, is established at Yonville and faced with the poverty of her situation. Something will result, the issue will announce itself. It is the mark of a dramatic case that it contains an opposition of some kind, a pair of wills that collide, an action that pulls in two directions; and so far Madame Bovary has the look of a drama. Flaubert might work on the book from that point of view and throw the emphasis on the issue. The middle of his subject would then be found in the struggle between Emma and all that constitutes her life, between her romantic dreams and her besetting facts. The question is what will happen.