At its first appearance, Madame Bovary was prosecuted, though unsuccessfully, as offensive to public morals.  In derision of this famous prosecution, Henry James with studious jauntiness, asserts that in the heat of his first admiration he thought what an excellent moral tract it would make.  “It may be very seriously maintained,” he continues, “that M. Flaubert’s masterpiece is the pearl of ‘Sunday reading.’” As a work of fiction and recreation the book lacks, in his opinion, one quite indispensable quality:  it lacks charm.  Well, there are momentary flashes of beauty and grace, dazzling bits of color, haunting melancholy cadences in every chapter of Flaubert; but a charming book he never wrote.  A total impression of charm he never gave—­he never could give; because his total impression of life was not charming but atrocious.  It is perhaps an accident, as has been suggested, that one can so readily employ Madame Bovary to illustrate that text on the “wages of sin.”  Emma, to be sure, goes down the easy and alluring path to disgrace and ruin.  But that is only an incident in the wider meaning of Flaubert’s fiction, a meaning more amply expressed in Salammbo, where not one foolish woman alone but thousands on thousands of men, women, and children, mingled with charging elephants and vipers, flounder and fight in indescribable welters of blood and filth, and go down to rot in a common pit.  If I read Flaubert’s meaning right, all human history is there; you may show it by painting on broad canvas a Carthaginian battle-scene or by photographing the details of a modern bedroom:  a brief brightness, night and the odor of carrion, a crucified lion, a dying woman, the jeering of ribald mercenaries, the cackle of M. Homais.  It is all one.  If Flaubert deserved prosecution, it was not for making vice attractive, but for expressing with invasive energy that personal and desperately pessimistic conception of life by which he was almost overwhelmed.

That a bad physical regimen, bad habits of work in excessive quantities, and the solitude of his existence were contributory to Flaubert’s melancholy, his exacerbated egotism, and his pessimism is sufficiently obvious in the letters.  This Norman giant with his aching head buried all day long in his arms, groping in anguish for a phrase, has naturally a kindly disposition towards various individuals of his species—­is even capable of great generosity; but as he admits with a truth and pathos, deeply appealing to the maternal sympathies of his correspondent, he has no talent for living.  He has never been able, like richer and more resourceful souls, to reconcile being a man with being an author.  He has made his choice; he has renounced the cheerful sanities of the world: 

“I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being; and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a single day nor any event whatsoever.  I see my mother and my niece on Sundays, and that is all.  My only company consists of a band of rats in the garret, which make an infernal racket above my head, when the water does not roar or the wind blow.  The nights are black as ink, and a silence surrounds me comparable to that of the desert.  Sensitiveness is increased immeasurably in such a setting.  I have palpitations of the heart for nothing.