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