by W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

1

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT was a very unusual man. The French are of the opinion that he was a genius. If I were pressed to say what genius this twentieth century of ours has produced, I think that Albert Einstein is the only name that would occur to me. The nineteenth century was richer, but whether Flaubert can be counted among those who had this special gift the reader of this introduction may be able to decide for himself.

One thing admits of little doubt: Flaubert created the modern realistic novel and directly or indirectly has influenced all the writers of fiction since his day. Thomas Mann when he wrote Buddenbrooks, Arnold Bennett when he wrote The Old Wives’ Tale, Theodore Dreiser when he wrote Sister Carrie, were following a trail that Flaubert blazed. No writer that we know of devoted himself with such a fierce and indomitable industry to the art of literature. It was not with him as it is with most authors, an activity of paramount importance, but one that allows for other activities which rest the mind, refresh the body, or enrich the experience. He did not think that to live was the object of life; for him the object of life was to write: no monk in his cell ever more willingly sacrificed the pleasures of the world to the love of God than Flaubert sacrificed the fullness of life to his ambition to create a work of art.

The sort of books an author writes depends on the sort of man he is and that is why, if he is a good writer, it is well to know what is possible of his personal history. In the case of Flaubert this is peculiarly important. He was born at Rouen in 1821. His father was head of the hospital and lived there with his wife and children. It was a happy, highly respected and affluent family. Flaubert was brought up like any other French boy of his class; he went to school, he made friends with other boys, he worked little but read much. He was troubled by that sense of inner loneliness which the sensitive carry with them all their lives.

“I went to school when I was only ten,” he wrote, “and I very soon contracted a profound aversion to the human race.” That is not just a quip; he meant it. He was a pessimist from his youth up. It is true that just then romanticism was in full flower and pessimism was the fashion — one of the boys at Flaubert’s school blew his brains out, another hanged himself with his necktie. One cannot quite see why Flaubert, with a comfortable home, affectionate and indulgent parents, a doting sister and friends of whom he was passionately fond, should have found life intolerable and his fellow’ creatures hateful. His early stories, written when he was a boy, are a hotchpotch of the worst extravagances of romanticism, and the pessimism with which they are imbued might reasonably be looked upon as merely a literary affectation. But Flaubert’s was enduring; it was certainly not affected nor was it attributable to foreign influence. He was pessimistic by nature, and if one asks why, one must look into the abnormality of his physical constitution.

When he was fifteen an event took place that affected his whole life. His family went in the summer to Trouville, then a modest village by the sea with one hotel; and there that year they found staying Maurice Schlesinger, a music publisher and something of an adventurer, with his wife. It is worth while to transcribe the portrait Flaubert drew of her later: “she was tall, a brunette with magnificent black hair that fell in tresses to her shoulders; her nose was Greek, her eyes burning, her eyebrows high and admirably arched, her skin was glowing and as it were misty with gold; she was slender and exquisite, one saw the blue veins meandering on her brown and purple throat. Add to that a fine down that darkened her upper lip and gave her face a masculine and energetic expression such as to throw blonde beauties into the shade. She spoke slowly, her voice was modulated, musical and soft. I hesitate to translate pourpre with purple, but that is the translation and I think Flaubert used it in recollection of Ronsard’s most celebrated poem without considering the impression it would make when used to describe a lady’s throat.

He fell madly in love with her. She was twentysix and was nursing a baby. But Flaubert was timid and he would have been afraid even to speak to her if her husband had not been a jovial, hearty fellow with whom it was easy to make friends. Maurice Schlesinger took the boy riding with him. On one occasion the three of them went for a sail; Flaubert and Elisa Schlesinger sat side by side, their shoulders touched, her dress was against his hand, she spoke in her low, sweet voice; but Flaubert was in such a turmoil that he could not remember a word she said. The summer came to an end, the Schlesingers left, the Flauberts went back to Rouen and Gustave to school. He had entered upon the great, the lasting passion of his life.

Two years later he returned to Trouville and was told that she had been and gone. He was seventeen, It seemed to him then that he had been before too wrought up really to love her; he loved her differently now, with a man’s desire, and her absence only exacerbated his passion. When he got home he took up again a book he had started, The Memoirs of a Madman, and told the story of the summer when he fell in love with Elisa Schlesinger.

2

WHEN he was nineteen, to reward him for having graduated, his father sent him with a certain Dr. Cloquet on a trip to the Pyrenees and Corsica. He was then full-grown. His contemporaries have described him as a giant, but he was only five foot eight and in California or Texas they would call a man of that height a little fellow; he was thin and graceful; his black lashes veiled enormous sea-green eyes, and his long fine hair fell to his shoulders. A woman who knew him then said forty years later that he was as beautiful as a young Greek.

On the way back from Corsica the travelers stopped at Marseilles and one morning, coming from a bathe, Flaubert noticed a woman sitting in the courtyard of the hotel. She was young, and her sensual languor was attractive. Flaubert addressed her and they got into conversation. She was called Eulalie Foucaud and was waiting to join her husband, an official, in French Guiana. Flaubert and Eulalie Foucaud passed that night together — a night, according to his own account, of that flaming passion which is as beautiful as the setting of the sun in the snow. He left Marseilles and never saw her again. It was his first experience of the kind and it made a deep impression upon him.

Shortly after this episode he went to Paris to study law, not because he wanted to be a lawyer, but because he had to adopt some profession; but he was bored in Paris, bored by his law books, bored by the life of the university; and he despised his fellow students for their mediocrity, their poses, and their bourgeois tastes. It was during this period that he wrote a novelette called November in which he described his brief adventure with Eulalie Foucaud. But he gave her the shining eyes with their high arched brows, and the upper lip with its bluish down, of Elisa Schlesinger.

He got in touch with Elisa again by calling on her husband at his office who invited him forthwith to one of the dinner parties he gave every Wednesday in his apartment, Elisa was as beautiful as ever. When last she had seen Flaubert he was a hobbledehoy; now he was a man, eager, passionate, and handsome. It did not take her long to discover that he loved her. He was soon on terms of intimacy with husband and wife and dined regularly with them on Wednesdays. But Flaubert was as timid as ever and for long he had not the courage to declare his love. When at last he did she was not angry, as he had feared she might be, but she refused to become his mistress.

Her story was curious. When first Flaubert met her, in 1836, he thought, as did everyone else, that she was the wife of Maurice Schlesinger; she was not; she was married to a certain Emile Judée who had got into trouble, whereupon Schlesinger had come forward with the offer to provide money sufficient to save him from prosecution on the condition that he left France and gave up his wife. This he did and Schlesinger and Elisa Judee lived together, there being at tthe time no divorce in France, till Judée’s death in 1840 enabled them to marry. It is said that notwithstanding his absence and death Elisa continued to love Emile Judée; she was bound to Maurice by gratitude; and it may be that this old love, a sense of loyalty to the man who had saved her, made her hesitate to accede to Flaubert’s desires. But he was ardent and at last persuaded her to come one day to his apartment; he awaited her with feverish anxiety; it seemed that at length he was going to be rewarded for his long devotion. She never came.

Then, in 1844, once more an event occurred that was to have momentous consequences to Flaubert. One dark night he was driving back to Rouen with his brother from a property of their mother’s which they had been visiting. His brother, nine years older than he, had adopted their father’s profession. Suddenly, without warning, Flaubert “felt himself carried away in a torrent of flames and fell like a stone to the floor of the trap.” When he recovered consciousness he was covered with blood; his brother had carried him into a neighboring house and bled him. He was taken to Rouen, where his father bled him again; he was dosed with valerian and indigo, a seton was put in his neck; he was forbidden to smoke, drink, or cat meat. He continued for some time to have fits of great violence. He had visual and auditory symptoms, a convulsion, and then he lost consciousness. Afterwards he was exhausted and his nervous system was in a state of frantic tension.

A great deal of mystery has surrounded this illness and the doctors have discussed it from various points of view. Some have frankly said it was epilepsy and that is what his friends thought it was; his niece in her Recollections has passed the matter over in silence; M. René Dumesnil, himself a doctor and the author of an important work on Flaubert, claims that it was not epilepsy, but what he calls hystero-epilepsy, I think with the idea at the back of his mind that to acknowledge that a distinguished writer was an epileptic somewhat took away from the value of his work.

It: is possible that the attack did not come as a complete surprise to his family. He is reputed to have told Maupassant that he had first had auditory and visual hallucinations when he was twelve years old; when Flaubert was sent on a journey at the age of nineteen it was with a doctor and since change of scene was part of the treatment his father afterwards prescribed, it does not seem unlikely that he had had something in the nature of nervous attacks. Flaubert even as a boy had never felt himself quite like the people whom he came in contact with. Is it not possible that the curious pessimism of his early youth had its cause in the mysterious disease which must have even then been affecting his nervous system? Anyhow he was faced now with the fact that he was afflicted with a terrifying malady the attacks of which were unpredictable. It was necessary to change his mode of life. He decided, willingly enough it may be supposed, to abandon law and never to marry.

In 1845 his father died and two months later his sister Caroline, whom he adored, after giving birth to a daughter died also. As children they had been inseparable and till her marriage she was his dearest companion. Some time before his death Dr. Flaubert had bought a property, called Croisset, on the banks of the Seine, with a fine stone house two hundred years old, a terrace in front of it, and a little pavilion looking over the river. Here the widow settled with her son Gustave and the baby daughter of Caroline; her elder son, Achille, was married and, a surgeon like his father, succeeded him at the Rouen hospital.

3

CROISSET was to be Flaubert’s home for the rest of his life. He had been writing off and on from a very early age and now, cut off as he was from living as most men live, he made up his mind to devote himself wholly to literature. He had a large workroom on the ground floor with windows on the river and the garden. He adopted methodical habits. He got up about ten, read his letters and the papers, lunched lightly at eleven, and till one lounged about the terrace or sat in the pavilion reading. At one he set to work and worked till dinner at seven; then he took another stroll in the garden and went back to work till far into the night. He saw nobody but a friend or two whom now and then he invited to stay with him for a few days so that he might discuss his work with him. For the rest he denied himself any form of relaxation. But he was aware that to write, it was necessary to have experience of the world and that he could not afford to live entirely the life of a recluse. He made a point, therefore, of going to Paris for three or four months every year.

In course of time, as he became well known, he made the acquaintance of the intellectuals of the day. I seem to gather that he was admired rather than liked. His companions found him very sensitive and very irritable. He would suffer no contradiction and they took care not to disagree with him since if they ventured to do so his rage was alarming, He was a harsh critic of other men’s work and shared a delusion common to authors that what he could not do himself was worthless. On the other hand he was infuriated by any criticism of his own work and ascribed it to jealousy, malice, or stupidity. In this too he was not unlike many another distinguished author. He had no patience with the writers who wanted to earn their living by their pens or made any effort to advance themselves. He was of opinion that the artist demeaned himself by making money. It was of course less difficult for him to take up this disinterested attitude since he had for the period a substantial fortune.

But; this is somewhat to anticipate. In 1846, during one of his visits to Paris, he met in the studio of Pradier, the sculptor, a poetess called Louise Colet. Her husband, Hippolyte Colet, was a professor of music; her lover, Victor Cousin, a philosopher. She was one of those writers, far from rare in the world of letters, who suppose that push and pull are an adequate substitute for talent; and with beauty to help she had acquired something of a position in literary circles. She had a salon frequented by celebrities and was known as the Muse. She wore her fair hair in ringlets that framed her round face; her voice was passionate, violent, and tender. Within a month Flaubert became her lover, not of course displacing the philosopher, whose attachment to her was official, and when I say he became her lover it is in a manner of speaking, for to his mortification his excitement or his timidity had made it impossible for him to consummate the union.

He returned to Croisset and wrote to Louise Colet the first of a long series of as strange love letters as a lover can ever have written to his mistress. The Muse loved Flaubert, but she was exacting and jealous: he was neither. I think we may guess that he was proud to be the lover of a woman who was beautiful and very much in the public eye; but he was a man who lived a rich life of the imagination and, like many another daydreamer, found that the realization fell sadly short of the anticipation. He discovered that he loved the Muse more when he was at Croisset than when he was in Paris, and he told her so. She wanted him to come and live in Paris; he told her that he could not leave his mother. Then she asked him to come more often either to Paris or to Mantes where on rare occasions they met; he told her he could only get away if he had a reasonable excuse, whereupon she answered angrily: Does that mean that you’re watched over like a girl?

She suggested coming to Croisset, but this he wouldn’t let her do in any circumstances. “Your love isn’t love,” she wrote. “In any case it doesn’t mean much in your life.” To this he replied: “You want to know if I love you? Well, yes, as much as I can love; that’s to say, for me love isn’t the first thing in life, but the second.”

He was really very tactless: he asked her to find out from a friend of hers who had lived at Cayenne what had happened to Eulalie Foucaud, the object of his adventure at Marseilles, and even asked her to have a letter delivered to her; he was astonished that she accepted the commission with some show of vexation. He went so far as to tell her of his encounters with prostitutes, for whom he had, according to his own story, an inclination which he frequently gratified. But there is nothing men lie about so much as their sex life and I ask myself whether here he was not boasting of a virility which he somewhat lacked. No one knows how often he had the fits that left him weak and depressed, but he was constantly under the influence of sedatives and it may well be that he saw Louise Colet so seldom — he was then only twenty — because his sexual desires were not pressing. The affair, such as it was, lasted for nine months.

In 1849 Flaubert started for the Near East with Maxime du Camp. The two friends visited Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Greece and in the spring of 1851 returned to France. Flaubert resumed relations with Louise Colet and, as before, engaged in an increasingly acrimonious correspondence. She continued to press him to come to Paris or to let her come to Croisset; he continued to find reasons not to do the one nor to allow her to do the other; and in the end, in 1854, he wrote to tell her that he would not see her again. She hurried to Croisset. and was roughly turned away.

This was Flaubert’s last, serious affair. There had been more literature than life in it, more playacting than passion. The only woman Flaubert sincerely and devotedly loved in his life was Elisa Schlesinger. Her husband’s speculations had ended in disaster and the Schlesingers had gone with their children to live in Baden. When Flaubert saw Elisa again, it is supposed at Croisset, twenty years had passed since she failed to keep the appointment she had made. She was thin, her skin had lost its delicate hues, her hair was white; Flaubert had grown corpulent, he had an immense mustache, and he concealed his baldness by a black cap. They met, they parted. In 1871 Maurice Schlesinger died and Flaubert, after loving her for thirty-five years, wrote his first love letter to her: instead of beginning as he always had done, “Dear Madame,” he began, “My old love, my ever loved one.” She had to come to France on business. They met at Croisset, they met in Paris. After that, so far as anyone knows, they never met again.

4

DURING his journey in the East, Flaubert had been turning over in his mind the idea of a novel which was to be for him an entirely new departure. This was Madame Bovary. How he came to write it makes a curious story. On a trip to Italy he had seen at Genoa a picture by Breughel of the Temptation of St. Anthony which greatly impressed him and on his return to France he bought an engraving by Callot of the same subject. He then set about reading all the relevant material and when he had acquired the information he required he wrote the book which these two pictures had suggested to him. Having finished it, he sent for his two most intimate friends to come to Croisset to hear him read it. He read for four days, for four hours in the afternoon and for four hours at night. It was arranged that no opinion should be given till the whole work had been heard.

At midnight on the fourth day Flaubert, having read to the end, banged his fist on the table and said: “Well?”

One of them answered: “We think you ought to throw it in the fire and not speak of it again.” It was a shattering blow. Next, day the same friend, looking for some way to soften it, said to Flaubert: “Why don’t you write the story of Delamare?”

Flaubert gave a start, his face lit up and he said: “Why not?” Delamare had been an intern at the hospital at Rouen and his story was well known. I will not tell it since Flaubert has followed it very closely in his novel and I do not want to lessen the reader’s interest.

Flaubert was thirty when he began this book. He had published nothing. With the exception of The Temptation of St. Anthony the more important of his early works had been strictly personal; they were in fact novelizations of his amorous experiences. His aim now was to be not only realistic but objective. He determined to put the facts he had to tell and expose the characters of the persons he had to deal with without comment of his own, neither condemning nor praising; if he sympathized with one, not to show it; if the stupidity of another exasperated him, the malice of a third outraged him, not to allow a word of his to reveal it. This is what he did and that perhaps is why many readers have found a certain coldness in the novel. There is nothing heart-warming in this calculated detachment. Though it may be a weakness in us, as readers we find a comfort in knowing that the author shares the emotions he has made us feel.

But the attempt at complete impersonality fails with Flaubert as it fails with every novelist because complete impersonality is impossible. It is very well that the novelist should let his characters explain themselves and, as far as may be, let their actions be the outcome of their characters, and the author may easily make a nuisance of himself when he draws your attention to his heroine’s charm or his villain’s malevolence, when he moralizes or irrelevantly digresses, when in fact he is himself a personage in the story he is telling. But this is only a matter of method, a method that some very good novelists have used, and if it happens to have gone out of fashion at the moment, that is not to say it is a bad one. But the author who avoids it keeps his personality only out of the surface of his novel; he reveals it willy-nilly by his choice of subject, his choice of characters, and the point of view from which he describes them.

Flaubert as we know was a pessimist. He had no patience with stupidity. The bourgeois, the commonplace, the ordinary filled him with exasperation. He had no pity. He had no charity. All his adult life he was a sick man oppressed by the humiliation with which his disease filled him. His nerves were in a constant state of exacerbation. He was violently intolerant. He was a romantic who feared his romanticism. He flung himself into the sordid story of Madame Bovary with the zest of a man revenging himself on life that has not met the demands of his passion for the ideal by wallowing in the gutter. He did not keep his personality out of his novel when he decided to write the story of Delamare nor when he constructed the characters who were to take part in it. We are introduced to many persons in the course of the novel’s five hundred pages and with the exception of Dr. Larivière, a minor character, not one has a redeeming feature. They are base, mean, stupid, trivial, and vulgar. A great many people are, but not all; and it is inconceivable that in a village there should not be found one person at least, if not two or three, who was sensible, kindly, and helpful.

5

FLAUBERT’S deliberate intention was to choose a set of characters who were thoroughly commonplace and devise incidents that would inevitably arise from their nature and their circumstances; but he was faced with the possibility that no one would be interested in persons so dull and that the incidents he had to relate would prove tedious. How he proposed to deal with this I will come to later. Before doing so I want to consider how far he succeeded in his attempt.

First I want to point out that the characters are drawn with consummate skill. We are convinced of their truth. We no sooner meet them than we accept them as living creatures, in the world we know. It never occurs to us that they are figures in a novel. Homais, to mention one, is a creature as humorous as Mr. Micawber. He has become as familiar to the French as Mr. Micawber is to the English. We believe in him as we can never quite believe in Mr. Micawber, and unlike Mr. Micawber he is always consistently himself. But I cannot persuade myself that Emma Bovary is the ordinary farmer’s daughter. That there was in her something of every woman and of every man is true. When Flaubert was asked who was the model for her he said: Madame Bovary is me. We are all given to extravagant reveries in which we see ourselves rich, handsome, successful, the heroes or heroines of romantic adventures, but most of us are too sensible, too timorous or too unadventurous to let our reveries seriously affect our behavior.

Madame Bovary was exceptional in that she tried to live her dream-life; she was exceptional in her beauty. Nor have the incidents quite the inevitability that Flaubert sought. When Emma Bovary is let down by her first lover she has an attack of brain fever that brings her to death’s door and lasts for forty-three days. Now brain fever, for long a favorite illness with novelists who wanted to dispose for a while of a character, is not, I understand, a malady known to the medical profession, and if Flaubert let her suffer from it in so severe a form I suspect it was only because he wanted her to have a long and expensive illness. The episode does not enforce belief; nor, for the matter of that, does Bovary’s death: he dies merely because Flaubert wanted to finish his book.

As is well known, author and publisher were prosecuted on the charge that Madame Bovary was an immoral work. I have read the speeches of the public prosecutor and of the defending counsel. The prosecutor read a number of passages which he claimed were pornographic; they make one smile now, they are so decent in comparison with the descriptions of the art of love to which modern novelists have accustomed us; but one cannot believe that even then (in 1857) the prosecutor was shocked by them. The defending counsel pleaded that, these passages were necessary and that the moral of the novel was good because Madame Bovary suffered for her misbehavior. The judges accepted his view and the defendants were acquitted. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone at the time that if Madame Bovary came to a bad end it was not because she committed adultery but because she ran up bills that she hadn’t the money to pay. If she had had the economical instincts of the French peasant that we are told she was, there is no reason why she should not have gone from lover to lover without coming to harm.

I hope the reader will not think that I am tiresomely finding trivial faults in a great book; the point I want, to make is that Flaubert did not quite succeed in doing what he was attempting because he was attempting the impossible. A work of fiction is an arrangement of incidents devised to display a number of characters in action and to interest the reader. It is not a copy of life as it is lived. Just as, in a novel, conversations cannot be reproduced exactly as they take place in real life but have to be summarized so that only the essential points are given and then with a clearness and concision which is not found m real life, so the facts have to suffer some deformation in order to conform with the author’s plan and to hold the reader’s attention.

Irrelevant incidents must be omitted; repetitions must be avoided, and heaven knows, life is full of repetitions; events that may in real life be separated by a passage of time and unrelated occurrences may often have to be brought into proximity. No novel is entirely free of improbabilities and to the more usual ones indeed readers have become so used that they accept them as a matter of course. The novelist cannot give a literal transcript of life; he draws a picture for you which, if he is a realist, he tries to make lifelike; and if you believe him he has succeeded.

Flaubert has succeeded. Madame Bovary gives an impression of intense reality and this, I think, arises not only because his characters are eminently lifelike, but because, with his peculiar acuity of observation, he has described every detail essential to his purpose with extraordinary accuracy. The book is very well constructed. Some critics have found it a fault that though Emma is the central character it begins with a description of Bovary’s early youth and first marriage and finishes with his disintegration and death. I think Flaubert’s idea was to enclose the story of Emma within the story of her husband as you enclose a painting in a frame. He must have felt that so he rounded off his narrative and gave it the unity of a work of art. If this was his intention it would have been more evident if the end were not hurried and arbitrary.

There is one part of the book which I have not seen mentioned by the critics, but to which I should like to draw the reader’s attention since it is an admirable example of Flaubert’s skill in composition. The first months of Emma’s married life were passed in a village called Tostes; she was immensely bored there and for the balance of the book this period had to be described at the same pace and with the same detail as the rest.

Now it is very difficult to describe a boring time without boring the reader, yet you read this long passage with interest; I was curious to see how it had been done and read it over again. I discovered that Flaubert had narrated a long series of very trivial incidents, each one new, none repeated; and you are not bored because you are reading something fresh all the time; but because each little incident is so commonplace, so lacking in excitement, you do get a vivid, even a devastating sensation of Emma’s boredom. There is a set piece of description of Yonville, the village in which the Bovarys settled after leaving Tostes, but it is the only one; for the rest of the descriptions of country or town, beautifully done all of them, are interwoven with the narrative. Flaubert introduces his persons in action and we learn of their appearance, their mode of living, their setting in a continuous process, as in fact we come to know people in real life.

6

I REMARKED a few pages back that Flaubert was conscious that in setting out to write a novel about commonplace people he ran the risk of writing a very dull one. He was determined to produce a work of art and he felt that he could surmount the difficulties presented by the sordid nature of his subject and the vulgarity of his characters only by means of beauty of style.

Now I don’t know if such a creature exists as the natural born stylist, certainly Flaubert was not one; his early works, unpublished in his lifetime, appear to be verbose and rhetorical and his letters, written in a faulty French, show little sign that he had a feeling for the elegance and distinction of his native tongue. With Madame Bovary he made himself one of the greatest stylists in France. This is a matter upon which a foreigner, even if he knows a language well, can be but an uncertain judge; the finer points can hardly fail to escape him, and obviously in a translation the music, the subtlety, the aptness, the rhythm of the original must be lost. All the same it seems to me worth while to tell the reader what Flaubert was aiming at and how he set about achieving his aim, for much can be learned from his theory and practice that will be useful to the writer of any country.

Flaubert adopted as his own the maxim of Buffon that to write well, one must at the same time feel well, think well, and say well. He was of the opinion that there were not two ways of saying a thing, but only one, and that the wording must fit the thought as the glove fits the hand. His desire was to write a prose that was logical, precise, swift, and various. He wished to make it as rhythmical, sonorous, and musical as poetry and yet preserve the qualities of prose. He was prepared to use the words of everyday life, vulgarisms if need be, so long as he could so use them as to produce an effect of beauty.

Now all this is surely admirable. One may be permitted to think that sometimes he went too far. “ When I find a dissonance or a repetition in one of my phrases, he said, “I know that I’m ensnared in something false.” He would not allow himself to use the same word twice on a page. That seems absurd; if it is the right word in each place it is the right word to use and a synonym or a periphrase can never be as good. He was careful not to allow his sense of rhythm to obsess him but took pains to vary it. He had a peculiar skill in combining words and sounds to give an impression of speed or languor, of lassitude, intensity, in fact of whatever state he desired to represent. I have not space here to enlarge further on the particular qualities of Flaubert’s style, but I should like to say a few words about how he became the master he did.

First of all he worked hard. Before starting on a book he read everything he could find that was pertinent. He made voluminous notes. When writing he would sketch out roughly what he wished to say and then work on what he had written, elaborating, cutting, rewriting, till he got the effect he wanted. That done, he would go out on his terrace and shout out the phrases he had written, convinced that if they did not sound well to the ear, there must be something wrong with them. In that case he would take them back and work over them again until he was at last satisfied.

In one of his letters he writes: “The whole of Monday and Tuesday were taken up with a search for two lines.” This of course does not mean that he only wrote two lines in two days; it means that with all that labor he only succeeded in writing two lines as perfect as he wanted them. It is no wonder that Madame Bovary took him fifty-five months to write.

I have little more to say. After Madame Bovary he wrote Salammbo which is generally considered a failure; then he wrote another version of The Senti-menial Education, a novel he had written many years beforehand had been dissatisfied with, in which he again described his love for Elisa Schlesinger. It is by many good critics in France looked upon as his masterpiece. A foreigner must find it hard to read because great, sections of it are concerned with matters that today can be of no interest to him. After this, for the third time, he wrote The Temptation of St. Anthony.

It is curious to note that so great a writer should have had so few ideas for books which he developed sufficiently to write. He was apparently content to take up again and again the subjects that obsessed his youth: it is as though he could not disembarrass his soul of the burden of them until he had written them down in a definite form. Time passed and his niece Caroline married. Flaubert and his mother were left alone. His mother died.

After the defeat of France in 1870 his niece’s husband found himself in financial difficulties, and finally, to save him from bankruptcy, Flaubert handed over to him his whole fortune. He kept for himself only the old home he could not bear to part with. As long as he was affluent he had held money in some contempt, but when by his own disinterested act he was reduced to comparative poverty the worry brought on again the fits from which for a decade he had been almost free and then, whenever he was in Paris and went out to dinner, Guy de Maupassant went to fetch him and see him safely home. Though on the whole unfortunate in his love affairs he had always had a few devoted, loyal, and affectionate friends. One by one most of them died and his last years were lonely. He seldom left Croisset. He smoked too much. He drank too much apple brandy.

The last work he published was a volume of three stories. He engaged upon a novel called Bouvard et Pécuchet in which he determined to have his final fling at the stupidity of the human race and with his usual thoroughness he read fifteen hundred books to provide himself with the material he thought necessary. It was to be in two volumes and he almost reached the end of the first. On the morning of May 8, 1880, the maid went into the library at eleven to bring him his lunch. She found him lying on the divan muttering incomprehensible words. She ran for the doctor and brought him back with her. He could do nothing. In less than an hour Gustave Flaubert was dead.

A year later his old friend, Maxime du Camp, spent the summer in Baden and one day when he was out hunting found himself near the lunatic asylum of Illenau. The gates opened to allow the inmates to take their daily walk and they came out two by two. Among them was one who bowed to him. It was Flisa Schlesinger, the woman whom Flaubert had so long and so vainly loved.

(The next novel to be discussed by Mr. Maugham will be Fielding’s Tom Jones.)