Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

63

Bovary " has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that
makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme
unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment.
For it deals not in the least, as to unapproachability, with
things exalted or refined; it only confers on its sufficiently
vulgar elements of exhibition a final unsurpassable form. The
form is in itself as interesting, as active, as much of the essence
of the subject as the idea, and yet so close is its fit and so inseparable its life that we catch it at no moment on any errand
of its own. That verily is to be interesting-all round; that is
to be genuine and whole. The work is a classic because the
thing, such as it is, is ideally done, and because it shows that in
such doing eternal beauty may dwell. A pretty young woman
who lives, socially and morally speaking, in a hole, and who is
ignorant, foolish, flimsy, unhappy, takes a pair of lovers by
whom she is successively deserted; in the midst of the bewilderment of which, giving up her husband and her child,
letting everything go, she sinks deeper into duplicity, debt,
despair, and arrives on the spot, on the small scene itself of her
poor depravities, at a pitiful tragic end. In especial she does
these things while remaining absorbed in romantic intention
and vision, and she remains absorbed in romantic intention
and vision while fairly rolling in the dust. That is the triumph
of the book as the triumph stands, that Emma interests us by
the nature of her consciousness and the play of her mind,
thanks to the reality and beauty with which those sources are
invested. It is not only that they represent her state; they are
so true, so observed and felt, and especially so shown, that they
represent the state, actual or potential, of all persons like
her, persons romantically determined. Then her setting, the
medium in which she struggles, becomes in its way as important, becomes eminent with the eminence of art; the tiny
world in which she revolves, the contracted cage in which she
flutters, is hung out in space for her, and her companions in
captivity there are as true as herself.
I have said enough to show what I mean by Flaubert's