Flaubert’s life is so almost exclusively the story of his literary application that to speak of his five or six fictions is pretty well to account for it all. He died in 1880 after a career of fifty-nine years singularly little marked by changes of scene, of fortune, of attitude, of occupation, of character, and above all, as may be said, of mind. He would be interesting to the race of novelists if only because, quite apart from the value of his work, he so personally gives us the example and the image, so presents the intellectual case. He was born a novelist, grew up, lived, died a novelist, breathing, feeling, thinking, speaking, performing every operation of life, only as that votary11; and this though his production was to be small in amount and though it constituted all his diligence. It was not indeed perhaps primarily so much that he was born and lived a novelist as that he was born and lived literary, and that to be literary represented for him an almost overwhelming situation. No life was long enough, no courage great enough, no fortune kind enough to support a man under the burden of this character when once such a doom12 had been laid on him. His case was a doom because he felt of his vocation13 almost nothing but the difficulty. He had many strange sides, but this was the strangest, that if we argued from his difficulty to his work, the difficulty being registered for us in his letters and elsewhere, we should expect from the result but the smallest things. We should be prepared to find in it well-nigh a complete absence of the signs of a gift. We should regret that the unhappy man had not addressed himself to something he might have found at least comparatively easy. We should singularly miss the consecration14 supposedly given to a work of art by its having been conceived in joy. That is Flaubert’s remarkable15, his so far as I know unmatched distinction, that he has left works of an extraordinary art even the conception of which failed to help him to think in serenity16. The chapter of execution, from the moment execution gets really into the shafts17, is of course always and everywhere a troubled one—about which moreover too much has of late been written; but we frequently find Flaubert cursing his subjects themselves, wishing he had not chosen them, holding himself up to derision for having done so, and hating them in the very act of sitting down to them. He cared immensely for the medium, the task and the triumph involved, but was himself the last to be able to say why. He is sustained only by the rage and the habit of effort; the mere18 love of letters, let alone the love of life, appears at an early age to have deserted19 him. Certain passages in his correspondence make us even wonder if it be not hate that sustains him most. So, successively, his several supremely20 finished and crowned compositions came into the world, and we may feel sure that none others of the kind, none that were to have an equal fortune, had sprung from such adversity.
I insist upon this because his at once excited and baffled passion gives the key of his life and determines its outline. I must speak of him at least as I feel him and as in his very latest years I had the fortune occasionally to see him. I said just now, practically, that he is for many of our tribe at large the novelist, intent and typical, and so, gathered together and foreshortened, simplified and fixed22, the lapse23 of time seems to show him. It has made him in his prolonged posture24 extraordinarily25 objective, made him even resemble one of his own productions, constituted him as a subject, determined26 him as a figure; the limit of his range, and above all of his reach, is after this fashion, no doubt, sufficiently27 indicated, and yet perhaps in the event without injury to his name. If our consideration of him cultivates a certain tenderness on the double ground that he suffered supremely in the cause and that there is endlessly much to be learned from him, we remember at the same time that, indirectly28, the world at large possesses him not less than the confrère. He has fed and fertilised, has filtered through others, and so arrived at contact with that public from whom it was his theory that he was separated by a deep and impassable trench30, the labour of his own spade. He is none the less more interesting, I repeat, as a failure however qualified31 than as a success however explained, and it is as so viewed that the unity32 of his career attaches and admonishes33. Save in some degree by a condition of health (a liability to epileptic fits at times frequent, but never so frequent as to have been generally suspected,) he was not outwardly hampered34 as the tribe of men of letters goes—an anxious brotherhood35 at the best; yet the fewest possible things appear to have ever succeeded in happening to him. The only son of an eminent5 provincial36 physician, he inherited a modest ease and no other incumbrance than, as was the case for Balzac, an over-attentive, an importunate37 mother; but freedom spoke38 to him from behind a veil, and when we have mentioned the few apparent facts of experience that make up his landmarks39 over and beyond his interspaced publications we shall have completed his biography. Tall, strong, striking, he caused his friends to admire in him the elder, the florid Norman type, and he seems himself, as a man of imagination, to have found some transmission of race in his stature40 and presence, his light-coloured salient eyes and long tawny41 moustache.
The central event of his life was his journey to the East in 1849 with M. Maxime Du Camp, of which the latter has left in his “Impressions Littéraires” a singularly interesting and, as we may perhaps say, slightly treacherous42 report, and which prepared for Flaubert a state of nostalgia43 that was not only never to leave him, but that was to work in him as a motive44. He had during that year, and just in sufficient quantity, his revelation, the particular appropriate disclosure to which the gods at some moment treat the artist unless they happen too perversely45 to conspire47 against him: he tasted of the knowledge by which he was subsequently to measure everything, appeal from everything, find everything flat. Never probably was an impression so assimilated, so positively48 transmuted49 to a function; he lived on it to the end and we may say that in “Salammb?” and “La Tentation de Saint-Antoine” he almost died of it. He made afterwards no other journey of the least importance save a disgusted excursion to the Rigi-Kaltbad shortly before his death. The Franco-German War was of course to him for the time as the valley of the shadow itself; but this was an ordeal50, unlike most of his other ordeals51, shared after all with millions. He never married—he declared, toward the end, to the most comprehending of his confidants, that he had been from the first “afraid of life”; and the friendliest element of his later time was, we judge, that admirable comfortable commerce, in her fullest maturity52, with Madame George Sand, the confidant I just referred to; which has been preserved for us in the published correspondence of each. He had in Ivan Turgenieff a friend almost as valued; he spent each year a few months in Paris, where (to mention everything) he had his natural place, so far as he cared to take it, at the small literary court of the Princess Mathilde; and, lastly, he lost toward the close of his life, by no fault of his own, a considerable part of his modest fortune. It is, however, in the long security, the almost unbroken solitude53 of Croisset, near Rouen, that he mainly figures for us, gouging54 out his successive books in the wide old room, of many windows, that, with an intervening terrace, overlooked the broad Seine and the passing boats. This was virtually a monastic cell, closed to echoes and accidents; with its stillness for long periods scarce broken save by the creak of the towing-chain of the tugs55 across the water. When I have added that his published letters offer a view, not very refreshing56, of his youthful entanglement57 with Madame Louise Colet—whom we name because, apparently58 not a shrinking person, she long ago practically named herself—I shall have catalogued his personal vicissitudes59. And I may add further that the connection with Madame Colet, such as it was, rears its head for us in something like a desert of immunity60 from such complications.
His complications were of the spirit, of the literary vision, and though he was thoroughly61 profane62 he was yet essentially63 anchoretic. I perhaps miss a point, however, in not finally subjoining that he was liberally accessible to his friends during the months he regularly spent in Paris. Sensitive, passionate64, perverse46, not less than immediately sociable—for if he detested66 his collective contemporaries this dropped, thanks to his humanising shyness, before the individual encounter—he was in particular and superexcellently not banal67, and he attached men perhaps more than women, inspiring a marked, a by no means colourless shade of respect; a respect not founded, as the air of it is apt to be, on the vague presumption68, but addressed almost in especial to his disparities and oddities and thereby69, no doubt, none too different from affection. His friends at all events were a rich and eager cénacle, among whom he was on occasion, by his picturesque70 personality, a natural and overtopping centre; partly perhaps because he was so much and so familiarly at home. He wore, up to any hour of the afternoon, that long, colloquial71 dressing-gown, with trousers to match, which one has always associated with literature in France—the uniform really of freedom of talk. Freedom of talk abounded72 by his winter fire, for the cénacle was made up almost wholly of the more finely distinguished73 among his contemporaries; of philosophers, men of letters and men of affairs belonging to his own generation and the next. He had at the time I have in mind a small perch74, far aloft, at the distant, the then almost suburban75, end of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where on Sunday afternoons, at the very top of an endless flight of stairs, were to be encountered in a cloud of conversation and smoke most of the novelists of the general Balzac tradition. Others of a different birth and complexion76 were markedly not of the number, were not even conceivable as present; none of those, unless I misremember, whose fictions were at that time “serialised” in the Revue des Deux Mondes. In spite of Renan and Taine and two or three more, the contributor to the Revue would indeed at no time have found in the circle in question his foot on his native heath. One could recall if one would two or three vivid allusions77 to him, not of the most quotable, on the lips of the most famous of “naturalists”—allusions to him as represented for instance by M. Victor Cherbuliez and M. Octave Feuillet. The author of these pages recalls a concise79 qualification of this last of his fellows on the lips of émile Zola, which that absorbed auditor80 had too directly, too rashly asked for; but which is alas81 not reproducible here. There was little else but the talk, which had extreme intensity82 and variety; almost nothing, as I remember, but a painted and gilded83 idol84, of considerable size, a relic85 and a memento86, on the chimney-piece. Flaubert was huge and diffident, but florid too and resonant87, and my main remembrance is of a conception of courtesy in him, an accessibility to the human relation, that only wanted to be sure of the way taken or to take. The uncertainties88 of the French for the determination of intercourse89 have often struck me as quite matching the sharpness of their certainties, as we for the most part feel these latter, which sometimes in fact throw the indeterminate into almost touching90 relief. I have thought of them at such times as the people in the world one may have to go more of the way to meet than to meet any other, and this, as it were, through their being seated and embedded91, provided for at home, in a manner that is all their own and that has bred them to the positive preacceptance of interest on their behalf. We at least of the Anglo-American race, more abroad in the world, perching everywhere, so far as grounds of intercourse are concerned, more vaguely92 and superficially, as well as less intelligently, are the more ready by that fact with inexpensive accommodations, rather conscious that these themselves forbear from the claim to fascinate, and advancing with the good nature that is the mantle93 of our obtuseness94 to any point whatever where entertainment may be offered us. My recollection is at any rate simplified by the fact of the presence almost always, in the little high room of the Faubourg’s end, of other persons and other voices. Flaubert’s own voice is clearest to me from the uneffaced sense of a winter week-day afternoon when I found him by exception alone and when something led to his reading me aloud, in support of some judgment95 he had thrown off, a poem of Théophile Gautier’s. He cited it as an example of verse intensely and distinctively96 French, and French in its melancholy98, which neither Goethe nor Heine nor Leopardi, neither Pushkin nor Tennyson nor, as he said, Byron, could at all have matched in kind. He converted me at the moment to this perception, alike by the sense of the thing and by his large utterance99 of it; after which it is dreadful to have to confess not only that the poem was then new to me, but that, hunt as I will in every volume of its author, I am never able to recover it. This is perhaps after all happy, causing Flaubert’s own full tone, which was the note of the occasion, to linger the more unquenched. But for the rhyme in fact I could have believed him to be spouting100 to me something strange and sonorous101 of his own. The thing really rare would have been to hear him do that—hear him gueuler, as he liked to call it. Verse, I felt, we had always with us, and almost any idiot of goodwill102 could give it a value. The value of so many a passage of “Salammb?” and of “L’éducation” was on the other hand exactly such as gained when he allowed himself, as had by the legend ever been frequent dans l’intimité, to “bellow” it to its fullest effect.
One of the things that make him most exhibitional and most describable, so that if we had invented him as an illustration or a character we would exactly so have arranged him, is that he was formed intellectually of two quite distinct compartments103, a sense of the real and a sense of the romantic, and that his production, for our present cognisance, thus neatly104 and vividly105 divides itself. The divisions are as marked as the sections on the back of a scarab, though their distinctness is undoubtedly106 but the final expression of much inward strife107. M. Faguet indeed, who is admirable on this question of our author’s duality, gives an account of the romanticism that found its way for him into the real and of the reality that found its way into the romantic; but he none the less strikes us as a curious splendid insect sustained on wings of a different coloration, the right a vivid red, say, and the left as frank a yellow. This duality has in its sharp operation placed “Madame Bovary” and “L’éducation” on one side together and placed together on the other “Salammb?” and “La Tentation.” “Bouvard et Pécuchet” it can scarce be spoken of, I think, as having placed anywhere or anyhow. If it was Flaubert’s way to find his subject impossible there was none he saw so much in that light as this last-named, but also none that he appears to have held so important for that very reason to pursue to the bitter end. Posterity108 agrees with him about the impossibility, but rather takes upon itself to break with the rest of the logic109. We may perhaps, however, for symmetry, let “Bouvard et Pécuchet” figure as the tail—if scarabs ever have tails—of our analogous110 insect. Only in that case we should also append as the very tip the small volume of the “Trois Contes,” preponderantly of the deepest imaginative hue111.
His imagination was great and splendid; in spite of which, strangely enough, his masterpiece is not his most imaginative work. “Madame Bovary,” beyond question, holds that first place, and “Madame Bovary” is concerned with the career of a country doctor’s wife in a petty Norman town. The elements of the picture are of the fewest, the situation of the heroine almost of the meanest, the material for interest, considering the interest yielded, of the most unpromising; but these facts only throw into relief one of those incalculable incidents that attend the proceedings112 of genius. “Madame Bovary” was doomed113 by circumstances and causes—the freshness of comparative youth and good faith on the author’s part being perhaps the chief—definitely to take its position, even though its subject was fundamentally a negation114 of the remote, the splendid and the strange, the stuff of his fondest and most cultivated dreams. It would have seemed very nearly to exclude the free play of the imagination, and the way this faculty115 on the author’s part nevertheless presides is one of those accidents, man?uvres, inspirations, we hardly know what to call them, by which masterpieces grow. He of course knew more or less what he was doing for his book in making Emma Bovary a victim of the imaginative habit, but he must have been far from designing or measuring the total effect which renders the work so general, so complete an expression of himself. His separate idiosyncrasies, his irritated sensibility to the life about him, with the power to catch it in the fact and hold it hard, and his hunger for style and history and poetry, for the rich and the rare, great reverberations, great adumbrations, are here represented together as they are not in his later writings. There is nothing of the near, of the directly observed, though there may be much of the directly perceived and the minutely detailed116, either in “Salammb?” or in “Saint-Antoine,” and little enough of the extravagance of illusion in that indefinable last word of restrained evocation117 and cold execution “L’éducation Sentimentale.” M. Faguet has of course excellently noted118 this—that the fortune and felicity of the book were assured by the stroke that made the central figure an embodiment of helpless romanticism. Flaubert himself but narrowly escaped being such an embodiment after all, and he is thus able to express the romantic mind with extraordinary truth. As to the rest of the matter he had the luck of having been in possession from the first, having begun so early to nurse and work up his plan that, familiarity and the native air, the native soil, aiding, he had finally made out to the last lurking119 shade the small sordid120 sunny dusty village picture, its emptiness constituted and peopled. It is in the background and the accessories that the real, the real of his theme, abides121; and the romantic, the romantic of his theme, accordingly occupies the front. Emma Bovary’s poor adventures are a tragedy for the very reason that in a world unsuspecting, unassisting, unconsoling, she has herself to distil122 the rich and the rare. Ignorant, unguided, undiverted, ridden by the very nature and mixture of her consciousness, she makes of the business an inordinate123 failure, a failure which in its turn makes for Flaubert the most pointed124, the most told of anecdotes125.
There are many things to say about “Madame Bovary,” but an old admirer of the book would be but half-hearted—so far as they represent reserves or puzzlements—were he not to note first of all the circumstances by which it is most endeared to him. To remember it from far back is to have been present all along at a process of singular interest to a literary mind, a case indeed full of comfort and cheer. The finest of Flaubert’s novels is to-day, on the French shelf of fiction, one of the first of the classics; it has attained126 that position, slowly but steadily128, before our eyes; and we seem so to follow the evolution of the fate of a classic. We see how the thing takes place; which we rarely can, for we mostly miss either the beginning or the end, especially in the case of a consecration as complete as this. The consecrations of the past are too far behind and those of the future too far in front. That the production before us should have come in for the heavenly crown may be a fact to offer English and American readers a mystifying side; but it is exactly our ground and a part moreover of the total interest. The author of these remarks remembers, as with a sense of the way such things happen, that when a very young person in Paris he took up from the parental129 table the latest number of the periodical in which Flaubert’s then duly unrecognised masterpiece was in course of publication. The moment is not historic, but it was to become in the light of history, as may be said, so unforgettable that every small feature of it yet again lives for him: it rests there like the backward end of the span. The cover of the old Revue de Paris was yellow, if I mistake not, like that of the new, and “Madame Bovary: M?urs de Province,” on the inside of it, was already, on the spot, as a title, mysteriously arresting, inscrutably charged. I was ignorant of what had preceded and was not to know till much later what followed; but present to me still is the act of standing130 there before the fire, my back against the low beplushed and begarnished French chimney-piece and taking in what I might of that instalment, taking it in with so surprised an interest, and perhaps as well such a stir of faint foreknowledge, that the sunny little salon131, the autumn day, the window ajar and the cheerful outside clatter132 of the Rue133 Montaigne are all now for me more or less in the story and the story more or less in them. The story, however, was at that moment having a difficult life; its fortune was all to make; its merit was so far from suspected that, as Maxime Du Camp—though verily with no excess of contrition—relates, its cloth of gold barely escaped the editorial shears134. This, with much more, contributes for us to the course of things to come. The book, on its appearance as a volume, proved a shock to the high propriety135 of the guardians136 of public morals under the second Empire, and Flaubert was prosecuted137 as author of a work indecent to scandal. The prosecution138 in the event fell to the ground, but I should perhaps have mentioned this agitation139 as one of the very few, of any public order, in his short list. “Le Candidat” fell at the Vaudeville140 Theatre, several years later, with a violence indicated by its withdrawal141 after a performance of but two nights, the first of these marked by a deafening142 uproar143; only if the comedy was not to recover from this accident the misprised lustre144 of the novel was entirely145 to reassert itself. It is strange enough at present—so far have we travelled since then—that “Madame Bovary” should in so comparatively recent a past have been to that extent a cause of reprobation146; and suggestive above all, in such connections, as to the large unconsciousness of superior minds. The desire of the superior mind of the day—that is the governmental, official, legal—to distinguish a book with such a destiny before it is a case conceivable, but conception breaks down before its design of making the distinction purely147 invidious. We can imagine its knowing so little, however face to face with the object, what it had got hold of; but for it to have been so urged on by a blind inward spring to publish to posterity the extent of its ignorance, that would have been beyond imagination, beyond everything but pity.
And yet it is not after all that the place the book has taken is so overwhelmingly explained by its inherent dignity; for here comes in the curiosity of the matter. Here comes in especially its fund of admonition for alien readers. The dignity of its substance is the dignity of Madame Bovary herself as a vessel148 of experience—a question as to which, unmistakably, I judge, we can only depart from the consensus149 of French critical opinion. M. Faguet for example commends the character of the heroine as one of the most living and discriminated150 figures of women in all literature, praises it as a field for the display of the romantic spirit that leaves nothing to be desired. Subject to an observation I shall presently make and that bears heavily in general, I think, on Flaubert as a painter of life, subject to this restriction151 he is right; which is a proof that a work of art may be markedly open to objection and at the same time be rare in its kind, and that when it is perfect to this point nothing else particularly matters. “Madame Bovary” has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme21 unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment. For it deals not in the least, as to unapproachability, with things exalted152 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 tragic153 end. In especial she does these things while remaining absorbed in romantic intention and vision, and she remains154 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 eminence155 of art; the tiny world in which she revolves156, the contracted cage in which she flutters, is hung out in space for her, and her companions in captivity158 there are as true as herself.
I have said enough to show what I mean by Flaubert’s having in this picture expressed something of his intimate self, given his heroine something of his own imagination: a point precisely159 that brings me back to the restriction at which I just now hinted, in which M. Faguet fails to indulge and yet which is immediate65 for the alien reader. Our complaint is that Emma Bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her creator, is really too small an affair. This, critically speaking, is in view both of the value and the fortune of her history, a wonderful circumstance. She associates herself with Frédéric Moreau in “L’éducation” to suggest for us a question that can be answered, I hold, only to Flaubert’s detriment160. Emma taken alone would possibly not so directly press it, but in her company the hero of our author’s second study of the “real” drives it home. Why did Flaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict161, such inferior and in the case of Frédéric such abject163 human specimens164? I insist only in respect to the latter, the perfection of Madame Bovary scarce leaving one much warrant for wishing anything other. Even here, however, the general scale and size of Emma, who is small even of her sort, should be a warning to hyperbole. If I say that in the matter of Frédéric at all events the answer is inevitably detrimental165 I mean that it weighs heavily on our author’s general credit. He wished in each case to make a picture of experience—middling experience, it is true—and of the world close to him; but if he imagined nothing better for his purpose than such a heroine and such a hero, both such limited reflectors and registers, we are forced to believe it to have been by a defect of his mind. And that sign of weakness remains even if it be objected that the images in question were addressed to his purpose better than others would have been: the purpose itself then shows as inferior. “L’éducation Sentimentale” is a strange, an indescribable work, about which there would be many more things to say than I have space for, and all of them of the deepest interest. It is moreover, to simplify my statement, very much less satisfying a thing, less pleasing whether in its unity or its variety, than its specific predecessor166. But take it as we will, for a success or a failure—M. Faguet indeed ranks it, by the measure of its quantity of intention, a failure, and I on the whole agree with him—the personage offered us as bearing the weight of the drama, and in whom we are invited to that extent to interest ourselves, leaves us mainly wondering what our entertainer could have been thinking of. He takes Frédéric Moreau on the threshold of life and conducts him to the extreme of maturity without apparently suspecting for a moment either our wonder or our protest—“Why, why him?” Frédéric is positively too poor for his part, too scant167 for his charge; and we feel with a kind of embarrassment168, certainly with a kind of compassion169, that it is somehow the business of a protagonist170 to prevent in his designer an excessive waste of faith. When I speak of the faith in Emma Bovary as proportionately wasted I reflect on M. Faguet’s judgment that she is from the point of view of deep interest richly or at least roundedly representative. Representative of what? he makes us ask even while granting all the grounds of misery171 and tragedy involved. The plea for her is the plea made for all the figures that live without evaporation172 under the painter’s hand—that they are not only particular persons but types of their kind, and as valid173 in one light as in the other. It is Emma’s “kind” that I question for this responsibility, even if it be inquired of me why I then fail to question that of Charles Bovary, in its perfection, or that of the inimitable, the immortal174 Homais. If we express Emma’s deficiency as the poverty of her consciousness for the typical function, it is certainly not, one must admit, that she is surpassed in this respect either by her platitudinous175 husband or by his friend the pretentious176 apothecary177. The difference is none the less somehow in the fact that they are respectively studies but of their character and office, which function in each expresses adequately all they are. It may be, I concede, because Emma is the only woman in the book that she is taken by M. Faguet as femininely typical, typical in the larger illustrative way, whereas the others pass with him for images specifically conditioned. Emma is this same for myself, I plead; she is conditioned to such an excess of the specific, and the specific in her case leaves out so many even of the commoner elements of conceivable life in a woman when we are invited to see that life as pathetic, as dramatic agitation, that we challenge both the author’s and the critic’s scale of importances. The book is a picture of the middling as much as they like, but does Emma attain127 even to that? Hers is a narrow middling even for a little imaginative person whose “social” significance is small. It is greater on the whole than her capacity of consciousness, taking this all round; and so, in a word, we feel her less illustrational than she might have been not only if the world had offered her more points of contact, but if she had had more of these to give it.
We meet Frédéric first, we remain with him long, as a moyen, a provincial bourgeois178 of the mid-century, educated and not without fortune, thereby with freedom, in whom the life of his day reflects itself. Yet the life of his day, on Flaubert’s showing, hangs together with the poverty of Frédéric’s own inward or for that matter outward life; so that, the whole thing being, for scale, intention and extension, a sort of epic162 of the usual (with the Revolution of 1848 introduced indeed as an episode,) it affects us as an epic without air, without wings to lift it; reminds us in fact more than anything else of a huge balloon, all of silk pieces strongly sewn together and patiently blown up, but that absolutely refuses to leave the ground. The discrimination I here make as against our author is, however, the only one inevitable180 in a series of remarks so brief. What it really represents—and nothing could be more curious—is that Frédéric enjoys his position not only without the aid of a single “sympathetic” character of consequence, but even without the aid of one with whom we can directly communicate. Can we communicate with the central personage? or would we really if we could? A hundred times no, and if he himself can communicate with the people shown us as surrounding him this only proves him of their kind. Flaubert on his “real” side was in truth an ironic181 painter, and ironic to a tune10 that makes his final accepted state, his present literary dignity and “classic” peace, superficially anomalous182. There is an explanation to which I shall immediately come; but I find myself feeling for a moment longer in presence of “L’éducation” how much more interesting a writer may be on occasion by the given failure than by the given success. Successes pure and simple disconnect and dismiss him; failures—though I admit they must be a bit qualified—keep him in touch and in relation. Thus it is that as the work of a “grand écrivain” “L’éducation,” large, laboured, immensely “written,” with beautiful passages and a general emptiness, with a kind of leak in its stored sadness, moreover, by which its moral dignity escapes—thus it is that Flaubert’s ill-starred novel is a curiosity for a literary museum. Thus it is also that it suggests a hundred reflections, and suggests perhaps most of them directly to the intending labourer in the same field. If in short, as I have said, Flaubert is the novelist’s novelist, this performance does more than any other toward making him so.
I have to add in the same connection that I had not lost sight of Madame Arnoux, the main ornament184 of “L’éducation,” in pronouncing just above on its deficiency in the sympathetic. Madame Arnoux is exactly the author’s one marked attempt, here or elsewhere, to represent beauty otherwise than for the senses, beauty of character and life; and what becomes of the attempt is a matter highly significant. M. Faguet praises with justice his conception of the figure and of the relation, the relation that never bears fruit, that keeps Frédéric adoring her, through hindrance185 and change, from the beginning of life to the end; that keeps her, by the same constraint186, forever immaculately “good,” from youth to age, though deeply moved and cruelly tempted187 and sorely tried. Her contacts with her adorer are not even frequent, in proportion to the field of time; her conditions of fortune, of association and occupation are almost sordid, and we see them with the march of the drama, such as it is, become more and more so; besides which—I again remember that M. Faguet excellently notes it—nothing in the nature of “parts” is attributed to her; not only is she not presented as clever, she is scarce invested with a character at all. Almost nothing that she says is repeated, almost nothing that she does is shown. She is an image none the less beautiful and vague, an image of passion cherished and abjured188, renouncing189 all sustenance190 and yet persisting in life. Only she has for real distinction the extreme drawback that she is offered us quite preponderantly through Frédéric’s vision of her, that we see her practically in no other light. Now Flaubert unfortunately has not been able not so to discredit191 Frédéric’s vision in general, his vision of everyone and everything, and in particular of his own life, that it makes a medium good enough to convey adequately a noble impression. Madame Arnoux is of course ever so much the best thing in his life—which is saying little; but his life is made up of such queer material that we find ourselves displeased192 at her being “in” it on whatever terms; all the more that she seems scarcely to affect, improve or determine it. Her creator in short never had a more awkward idea than this attempt to give us the benefit of such a conception in such a way; and even though I have still something else to say about that I may as well speak of it at once as a mistake that gravely counts against him. It is but one of three, no doubt, in all his work; but I shall not, I trust, pass for extravagant193 if I call it the most indicative. What makes it so is its being the least superficial; the two others are, so to speak, intellectual, while this is somehow moral. It was a mistake, as I have already hinted, to propose to register in so mean a consciousness as that of such a hero so large and so mixed a quantity of life as “L’éducation” clearly intends; and it was a mistake of the tragic sort that is a theme mainly for silence to have embarked194 on “Bouvard et Pécuchet” at all, not to have given it up sooner than be given up by it. But these were at the worst not wholly compromising blunders. What was compromising—and the great point is that it remained so, that nothing has an equal weight against it—is the unconsciousness of error in respect to the opportunity that would have counted as his finest. We feel not so much that Flaubert misses it, for that we could bear; but that he doesn’t know he misses it is what stamps the blunder. We do not pretend to say how he might have shown us Madame Arnoux better—that was his own affair. What is ours is that he really thought he was showing her as well as he could, or as she might be shown; at which we veil our face. For once that he had a conception quite apart, apart I mean from the array of his other conceptions and more delicate than any, he “went,” as we say, and spoiled it. Let me add in all tenderness, and to make up for possibly too much insistence195, that it is the only stain on his shield; let me even confess that I should not wonder if, when all is said, it is a blemish196 no one has ever noticed.
Perhaps no one has ever noticed either what was present to me just above as the partial makeweight there glanced at, the fact that in the midst of this general awkwardness, as I have called it, there is at the same time a danger so escaped as to entitle our author to full credit. I scarce know how to put it with little enough of the ungracious, but I think that even the true Flaubertist finds himself wondering a little that some flaw of taste, some small but unfortunate lapse by the way, should as a matter of fact not somehow or somewhere have waited on the demonstration197 of the platonic198 purity prevailing199 between this heroine and her hero—so far as we do find that image projected. It is alike difficult to indicate without offence or to ignore without unkindness a fond reader’s apprehension200 here of a possibility of the wrong touch, the just perceptibly false note. I would not have staked my life on Flaubert’s security of instinct in such a connection—as an absolutely fine and predetermined security; and yet in the event that felicity has settled, there is not so much as the lightest wrong breath (speaking of the matter in this light of tact29 and taste) or the shade of a crooked201 stroke. One exclaims at the end of the question “Dear old Flaubert after all—!” and perhaps so risks seeming to patronise for fear of not making a point. The point made for what it is worth, at any rate, I am the more free to recover the benefit of what I mean by critical “tenderness” in our general connection—expressing in it as I do our general respect, and my own particular, for our author’s method and process and history, and my sense of the luxury of such a sentiment at such a vulgar literary time. It is a respect positive and settled and the thing that has most to do with consecrating202 for us that loyalty203 to him as the novelist of the novelist—unlike as it is even the best feeling inspired by any other member of the craft. He may stand for our operative conscience or our vicarious sacrifice; animated204 by a sense of literary honour, attached to an ideal of perfection, incapable205 of lapsing206 in fine from a self-respect, that enable us to sit at ease, to surrender to the age, to indulge in whatever comparative meannesses (and no meanness in art is so mean as the sneaking207 economic,) we may find most comfortable or profitable. May it not in truth be said that we practise our industry, so many of us, at relatively208 little cost just because poor Flaubert, producing the most expensive fictions ever written, so handsomely paid for it? It is as if this put it in our power to produce cheap and thereby sell dear; as if, so expressing it, literary honour being by his example effectively secure for the firm at large and the general concern, on its whole esthetic209 side, floated once for all, we find our individual attention free for literary and esthetic indifference210. All the while we thus lavish211 our indifference the spirit of the author of “Madame Bovary,” in the cross-light of the old room above the Seine, is trying to the last admiration212 for the thing itself. That production puts the matter into a nutshell: “Madame Bovary,” subject to whatever qualification, is absolutely the most literary of novels, so literary that it covers us with its mantle. It shows us once for all that there is no intrinsic call for a debasement of the type. The mantle I speak of is wrought213 with surpassing fineness, and we may always, under stress of whatever charge of illiteracy214, frivolity215, vulgarity, flaunt216 it as the flag of the guild217. Let us therefore frankly218 concede that to surround Flaubert with our consideration is the least return we can make for such a privilege. The consideration moreover is idle unless it be real, unless it be intelligent enough to measure his effort and his success. Of the effort as mere effort I have already spoken, of the desperate difficulty involved for him in making his form square with his conception; and I by no means attach general importance to these secrets of the workshop, which are but as the contortions219 of the fastidious muse183 who is the servant of the oracle220. They are really rather secrets of the kitchen and contortions of the priestess of that tripod—they are not an upstairs matter. It is of their specially7 distinctive97 importance I am now speaking, of the light shed on them by the results before us.
They all represent the pursuit of a style, of the ideally right one for its relations, and would still be interesting if the style had not been achieved. “Madame Bovary,” “Salammb?,” “Saint-Antoine,” “L’éducation” are so written and so composed (though the last-named in a minor221 degree) that the more we look at them the more we find in them, under this head, a beauty of intention and of effect; the more they figure in the too often dreary222 desert of fictional223 prose a class by themselves and a little living oasis224. So far as that desert is of the complexion of our own English speech it supplies with remarkable rarity this particular source of refreshment225. So strikingly is that the case, so scant for the most part any dream of a scheme of beauty in these connections, that a critic betrayed at artless moments into a plea for composition may find himself as blankly met as if his plea were for trigonometry. He makes inevitably his reflections, which are numerous enough; one of them being that if we turn our back so squarely, so universally to this order of considerations it is because the novel is so preponderantly cultivated among us by women, in other words by a sex ever gracefully226, comfortably, enviably unconscious (it would be too much to call them even suspicious,) of the requirements of form. The case is at any rate sharply enough made for us, or against us, by the circumstance that women are held to have achieved on all our ground, in spite of this weakness and others, as great results as any. The judgment is undoubtedly founded: Jane Austen was instinctive228 and charming, and the other recognitions—even over the heads of the ladies, some of them, from Fielding to Pater—are obvious; without, however, in the least touching my contention229. For signal examples of what composition, distribution, arrangement can do, of how they intensify230 the life of a work of art, we have to go elsewhere; and the value of Flaubert for us is that he admirably points the moral. This is the explanation of the “classic” fortune of “Madame Bovary” in especial, though I may add that also of Hérodias and Saint-Julien l’Hospitalier in the “Trois Contes,” as well as an aspect of these works endlessly suggestive. I spoke just now of the small field of the picture in the longest of them, the small capacity, as I called it, of the vessel; yet the way the thing is done not only triumphs over the question of value but in respect to it fairly misleads and confounds us. Where else shall we find in anything proportionately so small such an air of dignity of size? Flaubert made things big—it was his way, his ambition and his necessity; and I say this while remembering that in “L’éducation” (in proportion I mean again,) the effect has not been produced. The subject of “L’éducation” is in spite of Frédéric large, but an indefinable shrinkage has overtaken it in the execution. The exception so marked, however, is single; “Salammb?” and “Saint-Antoine” are both at once very “heavy” conceptions and very consistently and splendidly high applications of a manner.
It is in this assured manner that the lesson sits aloft, that the spell for the critical reader resides; and if the conviction under which Flaubert labours is more and more grossly discredited231 among us his compact mass is but the greater. He regarded the work of art as existing but by its expression, and defied us to name any other measure of its life that is not a stultification232. He held style to be accordingly an indefeasible part of it, and found beauty, interest and distinction as dependent on it for emergence233 as a letter committed to the post-office is dependent on an addressed envelope. Strange enough it may well appear to us to have to apologise for such notions as eccentric. There are persons who consider that style comes of itself—we see and hear at present, I think, enough of them; and to whom he would doubtless have remarked that it goes, of itself, still faster. The thing naturally differs in fact with the nature of the imagination; the question is one of proprieties234 and affinities235, sympathy and proportion. The sympathy of the author of “Salammb?” was all with the magnificent, his imagination for the phrase as variously noble or ignoble236 in itself, contribute or destructive, adapted and harmonious237 or casual and common. The worse among such possibilities have been multiplied by the infection of bad writing, and he denied that the better ever do anything so obliging as to come of themselves. They scarcely indeed for Flaubert “came” at all; their arrival was determined only by fasting and prayer or by patience of pursuit, the arts of the chase, long waits and watches, figuratively speaking, among the peaks or by the waters. The production of a book was of course made inordinately238 slow by the fatigue239 of these measures; in illustration of which his letters often record that it has taken him three days[3] to arrive at one right sentence, tested by the pitch of his ideal of the right for the suggestion aimed at. His difficulties drew from the author, as I have mentioned, much resounding240 complaint; but those voices have ceased to trouble us and the final voice remains. No feature of the whole business is more edifying241 than the fact that he in the first place never misses style and in the second never appears to have beaten about for it. That betrayal is of course the worst betrayal of all, and I think the way he has escaped it the happiest form of the peace that has finally visited him. It was truly a wonderful success to be so the devotee of the phrase and yet never its victim. Fine as he inveterately242 desired it should be he still never lost sight of the question Fine for what? It is always so related and associated, so properly part of something else that is in turn part of something other, part of a reference, a tone, a passage, a page, that the simple may enjoy it for its least bearing and the initiated243 for its greatest. That surely is to be a writer of the first order, to resemble when in the hand and however closely viewed a shapely crystal box, and yet to be seen when placed on the table and opened to contain innumerable compartments, springs and tricks. One is ornamental244 either way, but one is in the second way precious too.
The crystal box then figures the style of “Salammb?” and “Saint-Antoine” in a greater degree than that of “Bovary,” because, as the two former express the writer’s romantic side, he had in them, while equally covering his tracks, still further to fare and still more to hunt. Beyond this allusion78 to their completing his duality I shall not attempt closely to characterise them; though I admit that in not insisting on them I press most lightly on the scale into which he had in his own view cast his greatest pressure. He lamented245 the doom that drove him so oddly, so ruefully, to choose his subjects, but he lamented it least when these subjects were most pompous246 and most exotic, feeling as he did that they had then after all most affinity247 with his special eloquence248. In dealing249 with the near, the directly perceived, he had to keep down his tone, to make the eloquence small; though with the consequence, as we have seen, that in spite of such precautions the whole thing mostly insists on being ample. The familiar, that is, under his touch, took on character, importance, extension, one scarce knows what to call it, in order to carry the style or perhaps rather, as we may say, sit with proper ease in the vehicle, and there was accordingly a limit to its smallness; whereas in the romantic books, the preferred world of Flaubert’s imagination, there was practically no need of compromise. The compromise gave him throughout endless trouble, and nothing would be more to the point than to show, had I space, why in particular it distressed250 him. It was obviously his strange predicament that the only spectacle open to him by experience and direct knowledge was the bourgeois, which on that ground imposed on him successively his three so intensely bourgeois themes. He was obliged to treat these themes, which he hated, because his experience left him no alternative; his only alternative was given by history, geography, philosophy, fancy, the world of erudition and of imagination, the world especially of this last. In the bourgeois sphere his ideal of expression laboured under protest; in the other, the imagined, the projected, his need for facts, for matter, and his pursuit of them, sat no less heavily. But as his style all the while required a certain exercise of pride he was on the whole more at home in the exotic than in the familiar; he escaped above all in the former connection the associations, the disparities he detested. He could be frankly noble in “Salammb?” and “Saint-Antoine,” whereas in “Bovary” and “L’éducation” he could be but circuitously251 and insidiously252 so. He could in the one case cut his coat according to his cloth—if we mean by his cloth his predetermined tone, while in the other he had to take it already cut. Singular enough in his life the situation so constituted: the comparatively meagre human consciousness—for we must come back to that in him—struggling with the absolutely large artistic253; and the large artistic half wreaking254 itself on the meagre human and half seeking a refuge from it, as well as a revenge against it, in something quite different.
Flaubert had in fact command of two refuges which he worked in turn. The first of these was the attitude of irony255, so constant in him that “L’éducation” bristles256 and hardens with it and “Bouvard et Pécuchet”—strangest of “poetic” justices—is made as dry as sand and as heavy as lead; the second only was, by processes, by journeys the most expensive, to get away altogether. And we inevitably ask ourselves whether, eschewing257 the policy of flight, he might not after all have fought out his case a little more on the spot. Might he not have addressed himself to the human still otherwise than in “L’éducation” and in “Bouvard”? When one thinks of the view of the life of his country, of the vast French community and its constituent258 creatures, offered in these productions, one declines to believe it could make up the whole vision of a man of his quality. Or when all was said and done was he absolutely and exclusively condemned259 to irony? The second refuge I speak of, the getting away from the human, the congruously and measurably human, altogether, perhaps becomes in the light of this possibility but an irony the more. Carthage and the Thebaid, Salammb?, Spendius, Matho, Hannon, Saint Anthony, Hilarion, the Paternians, the Marcosians and the Carpocratians, what are all these, inviting260 because queer, but a confession261 of supreme impatience262 with the actual and the near, often queer enough too, no doubt, but not consolingly, not transcendently? Last remains the question whether, even if our author’s immediate as distinguished from his remote view had had more reach, the particular gift we claim for him, the perfection of arrangement and form, would have had in certain directions the acquired flexibility263. States of mind, states of soul, of the simpler kind, the kinds supposable in the Emma Bovarys, the Frédérics, the Bouvards and the Pécuchets, to say nothing of the Carthaginians and the Eremites—for Flaubert’s eremites are eminently artless—these conditions represent, I think, his proved psychological range. And that throws us back remarkably264, almost confoundingly, upon another face of the general anomaly. The “gift” was of the greatest, a force in itself, in virtue265 of which he is a consummate266 writer; and yet there are whole sides of life to which it was never addressed and which it apparently quite failed to suspect as a field of exercise. If he never approached the complicated character in man or woman—Emma Bovary is not the least little bit complicated—or the really furnished, the finely civilised, was this because, surprisingly, he could not? L’ame fran?aise at all events shows in him but ill.
This undoubtedly marks a limit, but limits are for the critic familiar country, and he may mostly well feel the prospect267 wide enough when he finds something positively well enough done. By disposition268 or by obligation Flaubert selected, and though his selection was in some respects narrow he stops not too short to have left us three really “cast” works and a fourth of several perfect parts, to say nothing of the element of perfection, of the superlative for the size, in his three nouvelles. What he attempted he attempted in a spirit that gives an extension to the idea of the achievable and the achieved in a literary thing, and it is by this that we contentedly269 gauge270 the matter. As success goes in this world of the approximate it may pass for success of the greatest. If I am unable to pursue the proof of my remark in “Salammb?” and “Saint-Antoine” it is because I have also had to select and have found the questions connected with their two companions more interesting. There are numerous judges, I hasten to mention, who, showing the opposite preference, lose themselves with rapture271 in the strange bristling272 arch?ological picture—yet all amazingly vivified and co-ordinated—of the Carthaginian mercenaries in revolt and the sacred veil of the great goddess profaned273 and stolen; as well in the still more peopled panorama274 of the ancient sects275, superstitions276 and mythologies277 that swim in the desert before the fevered eyes of the Saint. One may be able, however, at once to breathe more freely in “Bovary” than in “Salammb?” and yet to hope that there is no intention of the latter that one has missed. The great intention certainly, and little as we may be sweetly beguiled278, holds us fast; which is simply the author’s indomitable purpose of fully227 pervading279 his field. There are countries beyond the sea in which tracts280 are allowed to settlers on condition that they will really, not nominally281, cultivate them. Flaubert is on his romantic ground like one of these settlers; he makes good with all his might his title to his tract157, and in a way that shows how it is not only for him a question of safety but a question of honour. Honour demands that he shall set up his home and his faith there in such a way that every inch of the surface be planted or paved. He would have been ashamed merely to encamp and, after the fashion of most other adventurers, knock up a log hut among charred282 stumps283. This was not what would have been for him taking artistic possession, it was not what would have been for him even personal honour, let alone literary; and yet the general lapse from integrity was a thing that, wherever he looked, he saw not only condoned284 but acclaimed285 and rewarded. He lived, as he felt, in an age of mean production and cheap criticism, the practical upshot of which took on for him a name that was often on his lips. He called it the hatred286 of literature, a hatred in the midst of which, the most literary of men, he found himself appointed to suffer. I may not, however, follow him in that direction—which would take us far; and the less that he was for himself after all, in spite of groans287 and imprecations, a man of resources and remedies, and that there was always his possibility of building himself in.
This he did equally in all his books—built himself into literature by means of a material put together with extraordinary art; but it leads me again to the question of what such a stiff ideal imposed on him for the element of exactitude. This element, in the romantic, was his merciless law; it was perhaps even in the romantic that—if there could indeed be degrees for him in such matters—he most despised the loose and the more-or-less. To be intensely definite and perfectly288 positive, to know so well what he meant that he could at every point strikingly and conclusively289 verify it, was the first of his needs; and if in addition to being thus synthetically290 final he could be strange and sad and terrible, and leave the cause of these effects inscrutable, success then had for him its highest savour. We feel the inscrutability in those memorable291 few words that put before us Frédéric Moreau’s start upon his vain course of travel, “Il conn?t alors la mélancholie des paquebots;” an image to the last degree comprehensive and embracing, but which haunts us, in its droll292 pathos293, without our quite knowing why. But he was really never so pleased as when he could be both rare and precise about the dreadful. His own sense of all this, as I have already indicated, was that beauty comes with expression, that expression is creation, that it makes the reality, and only in the degree in which it is, exquisitely294, expression; and that we move in literature through a world of different values and relations, a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by it, and in which the image is thus always superior to the thing itself. This quest and multiplication295 of the image, the image tested and warranted and consecrated296 for the occasion, was accordingly his high elegance297, to which he too much sacrificed and to which “Salammb?” and partly “Saint-Antoine” are monstrous298 monuments. Old cruelties and perversities, old wonders and errors and terrors, endlessly appealed to him; they constitute the unhuman side of his work, and if we have not the bribe299 of curiosity, of a lively interest in method, or rather in evocation just as evocation, we tread our way among them, especially in “Salammb?,” with a reserve too dry for our pleasure. To my own view the curiosity and the literary interest are equal in dealing with the non-romantic books, and the world presented, the aspects and agents, are less deterrent300 and more amenable301 both to our own social and expressional terms. Style itself moreover, with all respect to Flaubert, never totally beguiles302; since even when we are so queerly constituted as to be ninety-nine parts literary we are still a hundredth part something else. This hundredth part may, once we possess the book—or the book possesses us—make us imperfect as readers, and yet without it should we want or get the book at all? The curiosity at any rate, to repeat, is even greatest for me in “Madame Bovary,” say, for here I can measure, can more directly appreciate, the terms. The aspects and impressions being of an experience conceivable to me I am more touched by the beauty; my interest gets more of the benefit of the beauty even though this be not intrinsically greater. Which brings back our appreciation303 inevitably at last to the question of our author’s lucidity.
I have sufficiently remarked that I speak from the point of view of his interest to a reader of his own craft, the point of view of his extraordinary technical wealth—though indeed when I think of the general power of “Madame Bovary” I find myself desiring not to narrow the ground of the lesson, not to connect the lesson, to its prejudice, with that idea of the “technical,” that question of the way a thing is done, so abhorrent304, as a call upon attention, in whatever art, to the wondrous305 Anglo-Saxon mind. Without proposing Flaubert as the type of the newspaper novelist, or as an easy alternative to golf or the bicycle, we should do him less than justice in failing to insist that a masterpiece like “Madame Bovary” may benefit even with the simple-minded by the way it has been done. It derives306 from its firm roundness that sign of all rare works that there is something in it for every one. It may be read ever so attentively307, ever so freely, without a suspicion of how it is written, to say nothing of put together; it may equally be read under the excitement of these perceptions alone, one of the greatest known to the reader who is fully open to them. Both readers will have been transported, which is all any can ask. Leaving the first of them, however that may be, to state the case for himself, I state it yet again for the second, if only on this final ground. The book and its companions represent for us a practical solution, Flaubert’s own troubled but settled one, of the eternal dilemma308 of the painter of life. From the moment this rash adventurer deals with his mysterious matter at all directly his desire is not to deal with it stintedly. It at the same time remains true that from the moment he desires to produce forms in which it shall be preserved, he desires that these forms, things of his creation, shall not be, as testifying to his way with them, weak or ignoble. He must make them complete and beautiful, of satisfactory production, intrinsically interesting, under peril309 of disgrace with those who know. Those who don’t know of course don’t count for him, and it neither helps nor hinders him to say that every one knows about life. Every one does not—it is distinctly the case of the few; and if it were in fact the case of the many the knowledge still might exist, on the evidence around us, even in an age of unprecedented310 printing, without attesting311 itself by a multiplication of masterpieces. The question for the artist can only be of doing the artistic utmost, and thereby of seeing the general task. When it is seen with the intensity with which it presented itself to Flaubert a lifetime is none too much for fairly tackling it. It must either be left alone or be dealt with, and to leave it alone is a comparatively simple matter.
To deal with it is on the other hand to produce a certain number of finished works; there being no other known method; and the quantity of life depicted312 will depend on this array. What will this array, however, depend on, and what will condition the number of pieces of which it is composed? The “finish,” evidently, that the formula so glibly313 postulates314 and for which the novelist is thus so handsomely responsible. He has on the one side to feel his subject and on the other side to render it, and there are undoubtedly two ways in which his situation may be expressed, especially perhaps by himself. The more he feels his subject the more he can render it—that is the first way. The more he renders it the more he can feel it—that is the second way. This second way was unmistakeably Flaubert’s, and if the result of it for him was a bar to abundant production he could only accept such an incident as part of the game. He probably for that matter would have challenged any easy definition of “abundance,” contested the application of it to the repetition, however frequent, of the thing not “done.” What but the “doing” makes the thing, he would have asked, and how can a positive result from a mere iteration of negatives, or wealth proceed from the simple addition of so many instances of penury315? We should here, in closer communion with him, have got into his highly characteristic and suggestive view of the fertilisation of subject by form, penetration316 of the sense, ever, by the expression—the latter reacting creatively on the former; a conviction in the light of which he appears to have wrought with real consistency317 and which borrows from him thus its high measure of credit. It would undoubtedly have suffered if his books had been things of a loose logic, whereas we refer to it not only without shame but with an encouraged confidence by their showing of a logic so close. Let the phrase, the form that the whole is at the given moment staked on, be beautiful and related, and the rest will take care of itself—such is a rough indication of Flaubert’s faith; which has the importance that it was a faith sincere, active and inspiring. I hasten to add indeed that we must most of all remember how in these matters everything hangs on definitions. The “beautiful,” with our author, covered for the phrase a great deal of ground, and when every sort of propriety had been gathered in under it and every relation, in a complexity318 of such, protected, the idea itself, the presiding thought, ended surely by being pretty well provided for.
These, however, are subordinate notes, and the plain question, in the connection I have touched upon, is of whether we would really wish him to have written more books, say either of the type of “Bovary” or of the type of “Salammb?,” and not have written them so well. When the production of a great artist who has lived a length of years has been small there is always the regret; but there is seldom, any more than here, the conceivable remedy. For the case is doubtless predetermined by the particular kind of great artist a writer happens to be, and this even if when we come to the conflict, to the historic case, deliberation and delay may not all have been imposed by temperament319. The admirable George Sand, Flaubert’s beneficent friend and correspondent, is exactly the happiest example we could find of the genius constitutionally incapable of worry, the genius for whom style “came,” for whom the sought effect was ever quickly and easily struck off, the book freely and swiftly written, and who consequently is represented for us by upwards320 of ninety volumes. If the comparison were with this lady’s great contemporary the elder Dumas the disparity would be quadrupled, but that ambiguous genius, somehow never really caught by us in the fact of composition, is out of our concern here: the issue is of those developments of expression which involve a style, and as Dumas never so much as once grazed one in all his long career, there was not even enough of that grace in him for a fillip of the finger-nail. Flaubert is at any rate represented by six books, so that he may on that estimate figure as poor, while Madame Sand, falling so little short of a hundred, figures as rich; and yet the fact remains that I can refer the congenial mind to him with confidence and can do nothing of the sort for it in respect to Madame Sand. She is loose and liquid and iridescent321, as iridescent as we may undertake to find her; but I can imagine compositions quite without virtue—the virtue I mean, of sticking together—begotten by the impulse to emulate322 her. She had undoubtedly herself the benefit of her facility, but are we not left wondering to what extent we have it? There is too little in her, by the literary connection, for the critical mind, weary of much wandering, to rest upon. Flaubert himself wandered, wandered far, went much roundabout and sometimes lost himself by the way, but how handsomely he provided for our present repose323! He found the French language inconceivably difficult to write with elegance and was confronted with the equal truths that elegance is the last thing that languages, even as they most mature, seem to concern themselves with, and that at the same time taste, asserting rights, insists on it, to the effect of showing us in a boundless324 circumjacent waste of effort what the absence of it may mean. He saw the less of this desert of death come back to that—that everything at all saved from it for us since the beginning had been saved by a soul of elegance within, or in other words by the last refinement325 of selection, by the indifference on the part of the very idiom, huge quite other than “composing” agent, to the individual pretension326. Recognising thus that to carry through the individual pretension is at the best a battle, he adored a hard surface and detested a soft one—much more a muddled327; regarded a style without rhythm and harmony as in a work of pretended beauty no style at all. He considered that the failure of complete expression so registered made of the work of pretended beauty a work of achieved barbarity. It would take us far to glance even at his fewest discriminations; but rhythm and harmony were for example most menaced in his scheme by repetition—when repetition had not a positive grace; and were above all most at the mercy of the bristling particles of which our modern tongues are mainly composed and which make of the desired surface a texture328 pricked329 through, from beneath, even to destruction, as by innumerable thorns.
On these lines production was of course slow work for him—especially as he met the difficulty, met it with an inveteracy330 which shows how it can be met; and full of interest for readers of English speech is the reflection he causes us to make as to the possibility of success at all comparable among ourselves. I have spoken of his groans and imprecations, his interminable waits and deep despairs; but what would these things have been, what would have become of him and what of his wrought residuum, had he been condemned to deal with a form of speech consisting, like ours, as to one part, of “that” and “which”; as to a second part, of the blest “it,” which an English sentence may repeat in three or four opposed references without in the least losing caste; as to a third face of all the “tos” of the infinitive331 and the preposition; as to a fourth of our precious auxiliaries332 “be” and “do”; and as to a fifth, of whatever survives in the language for the precious art of pleasing? Whether or no the fact that the painter of “life” among us has to contend with a medium intrinsically indocile, on certain sides, like our own, whether this drawback accounts for his having failed, in our time, to treat us, arrested and charmed, to a single case of crowned classicism, there is at any rate no doubt that we in some degree owe Flaubert’s counter-weight for that deficiency to his having, on his own ground, more happily triumphed. By which I do not mean that “Madame Bovary” is a classic because the “thats,” the “its” and the “tos” are made to march as Orpheus and his lute179 made the beasts, but because the element of order and harmony works as a symbol of everything else that is preserved for us by the history of the book. The history of the book remains the lesson and the important, the delightful333 thing, remains above all the drama that moves slowly to its climax334. It is what we come back to for the sake of what it shows us. We see—from the present to the past indeed, never alas from the present to the future—how a classic almost inveterately grows. Unimportant, unnoticed, or, so far as noticed, contested, unrelated, alien, it has a cradle round which the fairies but scantly335 flock and is waited on in general by scarce a hint of significance. The significance comes by a process slow and small, the fact only that one perceptive336 private reader after another discovers at his convenience that the book is rare. The addition of the perceptive private readers is no quick affair, and would doubtless be a vain one did they not—while plenty of other much more remarkable books come and go—accumulate and count. They count by their quality and continuity of attention; so they have gathered for “Madame Bovary,” and so they are held. That is really once more the great circumstance. It is always in order for us to feel yet again what it is we are held by. Such is my reason, definitely, for speaking of Flaubert as the novelist’s novelist. Are we not moreover—and let it pass this time as a happy hope!—pretty well all novelists now?
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1
lucidity
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| n.明朗，清晰，透明 | |
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copious
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| adj.丰富的，大量的 | |
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penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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eminent
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| adj.显赫的，杰出的，有名的，优良的 | |
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abounds
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| v.大量存在，充满，富于( abound的第三人称单数 ) | |
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specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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toll
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| n.过路(桥)费；损失，伤亡人数；v.敲(钟) | |
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tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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votary
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| n.崇拜者；爱好者；adj.誓约的，立誓任圣职的 | |
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doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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vocation
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| n.职业，行业 | |
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consecration
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| n.供献，奉献，献祭仪式 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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serenity
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| n.宁静，沉着，晴朗 | |
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shafts
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| n.轴( shaft的名词复数 )；（箭、高尔夫球棒等的）杆；通风井；一阵（疼痛、害怕等） | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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supremely
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| adv.无上地，崇高地 | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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lapse
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| n.过失，流逝，失效，抛弃信仰，间隔；vi.堕落，停止，失效，流逝；vt.使失效 | |
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posture
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| n.姿势，姿态，心态，态度；v.作出某种姿势 | |
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extraordinarily
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| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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indirectly
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| adv.间接地，不直接了当地 | |
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tact
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| n.机敏，圆滑，得体 | |
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trench
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| n./v.(挖)沟，(挖)战壕 | |
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qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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admonishes
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| n.劝告( admonish的名词复数 )；训诫；（温和地）责备；轻责v.劝告( admonish的第三人称单数 )；训诫；（温和地）责备；轻责 | |
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hampered
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| 妨碍，束缚，限制( hamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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importunate
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| adj.强求的；纠缠不休的 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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landmarks
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| n.陆标( landmark的名词复数 )；目标；（标志重要阶段的）里程碑 ~ (in sth)；有历史意义的建筑物（或遗址） | |
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stature
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| n.（高度）水平，（高度）境界，身高，身材 | |
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tawny
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| adj.茶色的，黄褐色的；n.黄褐色 | |
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treacherous
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| adj.不可靠的，有暗藏的危险的；adj.背叛的，背信弃义的 | |
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nostalgia
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| n.怀乡病，留恋过去，怀旧 | |
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motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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perversely
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| adv. 倔强地 | |
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perverse
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| adj.刚愎的；坚持错误的，行为反常的 | |
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conspire
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| v.密谋，（事件等）巧合，共同导致 | |
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positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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transmuted
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| v.使变形，使变质，把…变成…( transmute的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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50
ordeal
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| n.苦难经历，（尤指对品格、耐力的）严峻考验 | |
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ordeals
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| n.严峻的考验，苦难的经历( ordeal的名词复数 ) | |
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52
maturity
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| n.成熟；完成；(支票、债券等)到期 | |
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53
solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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gouging
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| n.刨削[槽]v.凿( gouge的现在分词 )；乱要价；（在…中）抠出…；挖出… | |
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tugs
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| n.猛拉( tug的名词复数 )；猛拖；拖船v.用力拉，使劲拉，猛扯( tug的第三人称单数 ) | |
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refreshing
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| adj.使精神振作的，使人清爽的，使人喜欢的 | |
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entanglement
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| n.纠缠，牵累 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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vicissitudes
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| n.变迁，世事变化；变迁兴衰( vicissitude的名词复数 )；盛衰兴废 | |
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immunity
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| n.优惠；免除；豁免，豁免权 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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profane
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| adj.亵神的，亵渎的；vt.亵渎，玷污 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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detested
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| v.憎恶，嫌恶，痛恨( detest的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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banal
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| adj.陈腐的，平庸的 | |
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presumption
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| n.推测，可能性，冒昧，放肆，[法律]推定 | |
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thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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colloquial
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| adj.口语的，会话的 | |
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abounded
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| v.大量存在，充满，富于( abound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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perch
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| n.栖木，高位，杆；v.栖息，就位，位于 | |
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suburban
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| adj.城郊的，在郊区的 | |
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complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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allusions
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| 暗指，间接提到( allusion的名词复数 ) | |
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allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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concise
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| adj.简洁的，简明的 | |
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auditor
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| n.审计员，旁听着 | |
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81
alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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82
intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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gilded
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| a.镀金的，富有的 | |
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idol
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| n.偶像，红人，宠儿 | |
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relic
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| n.神圣的遗物，遗迹，纪念物 | |
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86
memento
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| n.纪念品，令人回忆的东西 | |
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87
resonant
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| adj.(声音)洪亮的，共鸣的 | |
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88
uncertainties
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| 无把握( uncertainty的名词复数 )； 不确定； 变化不定； 无把握、不确定的事物 | |
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89
intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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90
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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91
embedded
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| a.扎牢的 | |
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92
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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93
mantle
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| n.斗篷，覆罩之物，罩子；v.罩住，覆盖，脸红 | |
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94
obtuseness
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| 感觉迟钝 | |
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95
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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96
distinctively
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| adv.特殊地，区别地 | |
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97
distinctive
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|
| adj.特别的，有特色的，与众不同的 | |
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98
melancholy
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|
| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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99
utterance
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| n.用言语表达，话语，言语 | |
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100
spouting
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|
| n.水落管系统v.（指液体）喷出( spout的现在分词 )；滔滔不绝地讲；喋喋不休地说；喷水 | |
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101
sonorous
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|
| adj.响亮的，回响的；adv.圆润低沉地；感人地；n.感人，堂皇 | |
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102
goodwill
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| n.善意，亲善，信誉，声誉 | |
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103
compartments
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|
| n.间隔( compartment的名词复数 )；（列车车厢的）隔间；（家具或设备等的）分隔间；隔层 | |
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104
neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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105
vividly
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|
| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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106
undoubtedly
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|
| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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107
strife
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| n.争吵，冲突，倾轧，竞争 | |
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108
posterity
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| n.后裔，子孙，后代 | |
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109
logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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110
analogous
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| adj.相似的；类似的 | |
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111
hue
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| n.色度；色调；样子 | |
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112
proceedings
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| n.进程，过程，议程；诉讼(程序)；公报 | |
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113
doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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114
negation
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| n.否定；否认 | |
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115
faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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116
detailed
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| adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的 | |
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117
evocation
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| n. 引起，唤起 n. <古> 召唤，招魂 | |
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118
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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119
lurking
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| 潜在 | |
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120
sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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121
abides
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| 容忍( abide的第三人称单数 )； 等候； 逗留； 停留 | |
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122
distil
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| vt.蒸馏；提取…的精华，精选出 | |
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123
inordinate
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| adj.无节制的；过度的 | |
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124
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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125
anecdotes
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|
| n.掌故，趣闻，轶事( anecdote的名词复数 ) | |
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126
attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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127
attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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128
steadily
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|
| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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129
parental
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| adj.父母的；父的；母的 | |
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130
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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131
salon
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| n.[法]沙龙；客厅；营业性的高级服务室 | |
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132
clatter
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| v./n.(使)发出连续而清脆的撞击声 | |
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133
rue
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|
| n.懊悔，芸香，后悔；v.后悔，悲伤，懊悔 | |
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134
shears
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| n.大剪刀 | |
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135
propriety
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|
| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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136
guardians
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| 监护人( guardian的名词复数 )； 保护者，维护者 | |
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137
prosecuted
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| a.被起诉的 | |
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138
prosecution
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|
| n.起诉，告发，检举，执行，经营 | |
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139
agitation
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|
| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
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140
vaudeville
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| n.歌舞杂耍表演 | |
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141
withdrawal
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|
| n.取回，提款；撤退，撤军；收回，撤销 | |
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142
deafening
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|
| adj. 振耳欲聋的, 极喧闹的 动词deafen的现在分词形式 | |
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143
uproar
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|
| n.骚动，喧嚣，鼎沸 | |
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144
lustre
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|
| n.光亮，光泽；荣誉 | |
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145
entirely
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|
| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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146
reprobation
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|
| n.斥责 | |
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147
purely
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|
| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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148
vessel
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|
| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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149
consensus
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|
| n.(意见等的)一致，一致同意，共识 | |
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150
discriminated
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|
| 分别，辨别，区分( discriminate的过去式和过去分词 )； 歧视，有差别地对待 | |
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151
restriction
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|
| n.限制，约束 | |
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152
exalted
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|
| adj.(地位等)高的，崇高的；尊贵的，高尚的 | |
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153
tragic
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|
| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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154
remains
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|
| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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155
eminence
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|
| n.卓越，显赫；高地，高处；名家 | |
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156
revolves
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| v.（使）旋转( revolve的第三人称单数 )；细想 | |
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157
tract
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|
| n.传单，小册子，大片(土地或森林) | |
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158
captivity
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|
| n.囚禁；被俘；束缚 | |
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159
precisely
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|
| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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160
detriment
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|
| n.损害；损害物，造成损害的根源 | |
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161
depict
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|
| vt.描画，描绘；描写，描述 | |
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162
epic
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|
| n.史诗，叙事诗；adj.史诗般的，壮丽的 | |
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163
abject
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|
| adj.极可怜的，卑屈的 | |
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164
specimens
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|
| n.样品( specimen的名词复数 )；范例；（化验的）抽样；某种类型的人 | |
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165
detrimental
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|
| adj.损害的，造成伤害的 | |
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166
predecessor
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| n.前辈，前任 | |
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167
scant
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|
| adj.不充分的，不足的；v.减缩，限制，忽略 | |
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168
embarrassment
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|
| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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169
compassion
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|
| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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170
protagonist
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|
| n.(思想观念的)倡导者；主角，主人公 | |
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171
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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172
evaporation
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| n.蒸发，消失 | |
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173
valid
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|
| adj.有确实根据的；有效的；正当的，合法的 | |
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174
immortal
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|
| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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175
platitudinous
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|
| adj.平凡的，陈腐的 | |
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176
pretentious
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|
| adj.自命不凡的，自负的，炫耀的 | |
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177
apothecary
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|
| n.药剂师 | |
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178
bourgeois
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|
| adj./n.追求物质享受的(人)；中产阶级分子 | |
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179
lute
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| n.琵琶，鲁特琴 | |
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180
inevitable
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|
| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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181
ironic
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|
| adj.讽刺的，有讽刺意味的，出乎意料的 | |
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182
anomalous
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|
| adj.反常的；不规则的 | |
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183
muse
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| n.缪斯（希腊神话中的女神），创作灵感 | |
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184
ornament
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|
| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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185
hindrance
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|
| n.妨碍，障碍 | |
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186
constraint
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|
| n.(on)约束，限制；限制(或约束)性的事物 | |
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187
tempted
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|
| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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188
abjured
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|
| v.发誓放弃( abjure的过去式和过去分词 )；郑重放弃（意见）；宣布撤回（声明等）；避免 | |
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189
renouncing
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|
| v.声明放弃( renounce的现在分词 )；宣布放弃；宣布与…决裂；宣布摒弃 | |
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190
sustenance
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|
| n.食物，粮食；生活资料；生计 | |
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191
discredit
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| vt.使不可置信；n.丧失信义；不信，怀疑 | |
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192
displeased
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| a.不快的 | |
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193
extravagant
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|
| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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194
embarked
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| 乘船( embark的过去式和过去分词 )； 装载； 从事 | |
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195
insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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196
blemish
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| v.损害；玷污；瑕疵，缺点 | |
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197
demonstration
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| n.表明，示范，论证，示威 | |
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198
platonic
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|
| adj.精神的；柏拉图（哲学）的 | |
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199
prevailing
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| adj.盛行的；占优势的；主要的 | |
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200
apprehension
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|
| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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201
crooked
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|
| adj.弯曲的；不诚实的，狡猾的，不正当的 | |
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202
consecrating
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|
| v.把…奉为神圣，给…祝圣( consecrate的现在分词 )；奉献 | |
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203
loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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204
animated
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| adj.生气勃勃的，活跃的，愉快的 | |
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205
incapable
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|
| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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206
lapsing
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| v.退步( lapse的现在分词 )；陷入；倒退；丧失 | |
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207
sneaking
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| a.秘密的，不公开的 | |
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208
relatively
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|
| adv.比较...地，相对地 | |
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209
esthetic
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|
| adj.美学的，审美的；悦目的，雅致的 | |
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210
indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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211
lavish
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|
| adj.无节制的；浪费的；vt.慷慨地给予，挥霍 | |
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212
admiration
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|
| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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213
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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214
illiteracy
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| n.文盲 | |
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215
frivolity
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| n.轻松的乐事，兴高采烈；轻浮的举止 | |
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216
flaunt
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| vt.夸耀，夸饰 | |
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217
guild
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| n.行会，同业公会，协会 | |
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218
frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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219
contortions
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| n.扭歪，弯曲；扭曲，弄歪，歪曲( contortion的名词复数 ) | |
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220
oracle
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| n.神谕，神谕处，预言 | |
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221
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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222
dreary
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| adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的 | |
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223
fictional
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| adj.小说的，虚构的 | |
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224
oasis
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| n.（沙漠中的）绿洲，宜人的地方 | |
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225
refreshment
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| n.恢复，精神爽快，提神之事物；（复数）refreshments:点心，茶点 | |
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226
gracefully
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| ad.大大方方地；优美地 | |
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227
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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228
instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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229
contention
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| n.争论，争辩，论战；论点，主张 | |
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230
intensify
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| vt.加强；变强；加剧 | |
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231
discredited
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| 不足信的，不名誉的 | |
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232
stultification
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| n.使显得愚笨，使变无效 | |
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233
emergence
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| n.浮现，显现，出现，（植物）突出体 | |
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234
proprieties
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| n.礼仪，礼节；礼貌( propriety的名词复数 )；规矩；正当；合适 | |
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235
affinities
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| n.密切关系( affinity的名词复数 )；亲近；（生性）喜爱；类同 | |
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236
ignoble
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| adj.不光彩的，卑鄙的；可耻的 | |
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237
harmonious
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| adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的 | |
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238
inordinately
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| adv.无度地，非常地 | |
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239
fatigue
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| n.疲劳，劳累 | |
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240
resounding
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| adj. 响亮的 | |
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241
edifying
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| adj.有教训意味的，教训性的，有益的v.开导，启发( edify的现在分词 ) | |
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242
inveterately
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| adv.根深蒂固地，积习地 | |
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243
initiated
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| n. 创始人 adj. 新加入的 vt. 开始，创始，启蒙，介绍加入 | |
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244
ornamental
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| adj.装饰的；作装饰用的；n.装饰品；观赏植物 | |
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245
lamented
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| adj.被哀悼的，令人遗憾的v.（为…）哀悼，痛哭，悲伤( lament的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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246
pompous
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| adj.傲慢的，自大的；夸大的；豪华的 | |
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247
affinity
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| n.亲和力，密切关系 | |
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248
eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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249
dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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250
distressed
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| 痛苦的 | |
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251
circuitously
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| 曲折地 | |
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252
insidiously
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| 潜在地，隐伏地，阴险地 | |
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253
artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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254
wreaking
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| 诉诸（武力），施行（暴力），发（脾气）( wreak的现在分词 ) | |
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255
irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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256
bristles
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| 短而硬的毛发，刷子毛( bristle的名词复数 ) | |
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257
eschewing
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| v.（尤指为道德或实际理由而）习惯性避开，回避( eschew的现在分词 ) | |
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258
constituent
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| n.选民；成分，组分；adj.组成的，构成的 | |
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259
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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260
inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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261
confession
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| n.自白，供认，承认 | |
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262
impatience
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| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
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263
flexibility
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| n.柔韧性，弹性，（光的）折射性，灵活性 | |
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264
remarkably
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| ad.不同寻常地，相当地 | |
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265
virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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266
consummate
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| adj.完美的；v.成婚；使完美 [反]baffle | |
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267
prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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268
disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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269
contentedly
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| adv.心满意足地 | |
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270
gauge
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| v.精确计量；估计；n.标准度量；计量器 | |
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271
rapture
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| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
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272
bristling
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| a.竖立的 | |
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273
profaned
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| v.不敬( profane的过去式和过去分词 )；亵渎，玷污 | |
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274
panorama
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| n.全景，全景画，全景摄影，全景照片[装置] | |
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275
sects
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| n.宗派，教派( sect的名词复数 ) | |
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276
superstitions
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| 迷信，迷信行为( superstition的名词复数 ) | |
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277
mythologies
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| 神话学( mythology的名词复数 )； 神话（总称）； 虚构的事实； 错误的观点 | |
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278
beguiled
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|
| v.欺骗( beguile的过去式和过去分词 )；使陶醉；使高兴；消磨（时间等） | |
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279
pervading
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| v.遍及，弥漫( pervade的现在分词 ) | |
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280
tracts
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| 大片土地( tract的名词复数 )； 地带； （体内的）道； （尤指宣扬宗教、伦理或政治的）短文 | |
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281
nominally
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| 在名义上，表面地； 应名儿 | |
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282
charred
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| v.把…烧成炭( char的过去式)；烧焦 | |
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283
stumps
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| （被砍下的树的）树桩( stump的名词复数 )； 残肢； （板球三柱门的）柱； 残余部分 | |
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284
condoned
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| v.容忍，宽恕，原谅( condone的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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285
acclaimed
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| adj.受人欢迎的 | |
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286
hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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287
groans
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| n.呻吟，叹息( groan的名词复数 )；呻吟般的声音v.呻吟( groan的第三人称单数 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
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288
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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289
conclusively
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| adv.令人信服地，确凿地 | |
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290
synthetically
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| adv. 综合地，合成地 | |
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291
memorable
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| adj.值得回忆的，难忘的，特别的，显著的 | |
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292
droll
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| adj.古怪的，好笑的 | |
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293
pathos
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| n.哀婉，悲怆 | |
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294
exquisitely
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| adv.精致地；强烈地；剧烈地；异常地 | |
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295
multiplication
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| n.增加，增多，倍增；增殖，繁殖；乘法 | |
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296
consecrated
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| adj.神圣的，被视为神圣的v.把…奉为神圣，给…祝圣( consecrate的过去式和过去分词 )；奉献 | |
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297
elegance
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| n.优雅；优美，雅致；精致，巧妙 | |
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298
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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299
bribe
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| n.贿赂；v.向…行贿，买通 | |
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300
deterrent
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| n.阻碍物，制止物；adj.威慑的，遏制的 | |
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301
amenable
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| adj.经得起检验的；顺从的；对负有义务的 | |
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302
beguiles
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| v.欺骗( beguile的第三人称单数 )；使陶醉；使高兴；消磨（时间等） | |
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303
appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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304
abhorrent
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| adj.可恶的，可恨的，讨厌的 | |
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305
wondrous
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| adj.令人惊奇的，奇妙的；adv.惊人地；异乎寻常地；令人惊叹地 | |
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306
derives
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| v.得到( derive的第三人称单数 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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307
attentively
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| adv.聚精会神地；周到地；谛；凝神 | |
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308
dilemma
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| n.困境，进退两难的局面 | |
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309
peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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310
unprecedented
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| adj.无前例的，新奇的 | |
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311
attesting
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| v.证明( attest的现在分词 )；证实；声称…属实；使宣誓 | |
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312
depicted
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| 描绘，描画( depict的过去式和过去分词 )； 描述 | |
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313
glibly
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| adv.流利地，流畅地；满口 | |
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314
postulates
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| v.假定，假设( postulate的第三人称单数 ) | |
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315
penury
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| n.贫穷，拮据 | |
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316
penetration
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| n.穿透，穿人，渗透 | |
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317
consistency
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| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
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318
complexity
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| n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物 | |
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319
temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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320
upwards
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| adv.向上，在更高处...以上 | |
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321
iridescent
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| adj.彩虹色的，闪色的 | |
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322
emulate
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| v.努力赶上或超越，与…竞争；效仿 | |
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323
repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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324
boundless
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| adj.无限的；无边无际的；巨大的 | |
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325
refinement
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| n.文雅；高尚；精美；精制；精炼 | |
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326
pretension
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| n.要求；自命，自称；自负 | |
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327
muddled
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| adj.混乱的；糊涂的；头脑昏昏然的v.弄乱，弄糟( muddle的过去式)；使糊涂；对付，混日子 | |
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328
texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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329
pricked
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| 刺，扎，戳( prick的过去式和过去分词 )； 刺伤； 刺痛； 使剧痛 | |
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330
inveteracy
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| n.根深蒂固，积习 | |
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331
infinitive
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| n.不定词；adj.不定词的 | |
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332
auxiliaries
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| n.助动词 ( auxiliary的名词复数 )；辅助工，辅助人员 | |
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333
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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334
climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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335
scantly
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| 缺乏地，仅仅 | |
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336
perceptive
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| adj.知觉的，有洞察力的，感知的 | |
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