464
PARTISAN REVIEW
They will admit that it is not a sentimental novel, but they will
claim that it may be regarded as a philosophical one; they will in–
sist that the descriptions are extraordinary, and that beneath
them there is always an idea that holds them up and carries them
along.
J ames was really of both parties to the debate he imagined - he
rebuked Flaubert for a morally repellent subject and at the same
time for lack of feeling; he could not deny his astonished regard for
this absolute triumph of realist technique. And, besides, the character
of Emma somehow eluded his own reductive interpretation–
described so minutely as she is, "from the hem of her garment to the
texture of her fingernails," she remains, he admitted, a living
creature. His understanding of her deepened, and, despite all his
repugnance, he saw, in time, the romantic element in her character–
ization. In his introduction to the English translation of the novel in
1902 (he had by this time absorbed Gustave Faguet's distinction be–
tween the two Flauberts), he wrote, "Emma Bovary's adventures are
a tragedy for the very reason that in a world, unsuspecting, un–
assistiag, unconsoling, she has herself to distill the rich and the
rare." But still, she was "too small an affair." He insisted that it was
not possible to recognize her dreams as one's own and that one is
forced to regard her from the height of her creator's own aloofness.
It is a judgment that has become standard, though everyone
remembers that Flaubert said,
"Madame Bovary, c'est moi. "
It
would
have greatly disappointed Flaubert. His
"impassibilite,"
Gervais
believes, only testifies to his passionate immersion in the soul he
depicts. What James failed to understand is the role of the darkly
comic, the ironic, in Flaubert's conception of tragedy, though he
calls the fate of Emma "tragic" in the remark quoted above. He really
means "pathetic," for he denies her title to his own conception of the
tragic which calls for an awakening of moral insight and heroism in
the protagonist - the traditional English-Shakespearean definition.
Flaubert's art is only apparently cold; it contains an irony which is
"the measure of the conquest of hysteria" we feel in contemplating
the true awfulness of life. "If Bovary is worth something, the book
will not lack heart," Flaubert had written during its composition.
"Yet to me irony seems to dominate life.... The comic pushed to an
extreme, comedy which doesn't make you laugh and lyricism in jest.
Le Malade Imaginaire
goes more deeply into the inner world than all
the Agamemnons."
It
is precisely this comic element that reminds us
