er force of its own; it
might be a strife of characters and wills, in which the men and women
would take the matter into their own hands and make all the interest
by their action; it might be a drama, say, as Jane Eyre is a drama,
where another obscure little woman has a part to play, but where the
question is how she plays it, what she achieves or misses in
particular. To Flaubert the situation out of which he made his novel
appeared in another light. It was not as dramatic as it was pictorial;
there was not the stuff in Emma, more especially, that could make her
the main figure of a drama; she is small and futile, she could not
well uphold an interest that would depend directly on her behaviour.
But for a picture, where the interest depends only on what she
_is_--that is quite different. Her futility is then a real value; it
can be made amusing and vivid to the last degree, so long as no other
weight is thrown on it; she can make a perfect impression of life,
though she cannot create much of a story. Let Emma and her plight,
therefore, appear as a picture; let her be shown in the act of living
her life, entangled as it is with her past and her present; that is
how the final fact at the heart of Flaubert's subject will be best
displayed.

Here is the clue, it seems, to his treatment of the theme. It is
pictorial, and its object is to make Emma's existence as intelligible
and visible as may be. We who read the book are to share her sense of
life, till no uncertainty is left in it; we are to see and understand
her experience, and to see _her_ while she enjoys or endures it; we
are to be placed within her world, to get the immediate taste of it,
and outside her world as well, to get the full effect, more of it than
she herself could see. Flaubert's subject demands no less, if the
picture is to be complete. She herself must be known thoroughly--that
is his first care; the movement of her mind is to be watched at work
in all the ardour and the poverty of her imagination. How she creates
her makeshift romances, how she feeds on them, how they fail her--it
is all part of the picture. And then there is the dull and limited
world in which her appetite is somehow to be satisfied, the small town
that shuts her in and cuts her off; this, too, is to be rendered, and
in order to make it clearly tell beside the figure of Emma it must be
as distinct and individual, as thoroughly characterized as she is. It
is more than a setting for