[From Ten Novels and Their Authors, Heinemann, 1954, pp. 152-77:]

If, as I believe, the sort of books an author writes depends on the sort of man he is, and so it is well to know what is relevant to his personal history, this, as will presently appear, in the case of Flaubert is essential. He was a very unusual man. No writer that we know of devoted himself with such a fierce and indomitable industry to the art of literature. It was not with him, as it is with most authors, an activity of paramount importance but one that allows for other activities which rest the mind, refresh the body and enrich experience. He did not think that to live was the object of life; for him the object of life was to write: no monk in his cell more resolutely sacrificed the pleasures of the world to the love of God than Flaubert sacrificed the fullness and variety of life to his ambition to create a work of art. He was at once a romantic and a realist. Now, at the bottom of romanticism, as I said in speaking of Balzac, is a hatred of reality and a passionate desire to escape from it. Like the rest of the romantics, Flaubert sought refuge in the extraordinary and the fantastic, in the Orient and in antiquity; and yet, for all his hatred of reality, for all his loathing of the meanness, the platitude, the imbecility of the bourgeois, he was fascinated by it; for there was something in his nature that horribly attracted him to what he most detested. Human stupidity had a revolting charm for him, and he took a morbid delight in exhibiting it in all its odiousness. It got on his nerves with the force of any obsession; it was like a sore on the body that is pain to touch and that yet you can’t help touching. The realist in him pored over human nature as though it were a pile of garbage, not to find something he could value, but to show to all and sundry how base, for all their outward seeming, were human beings.

[…]

He was emotional and imaginative, and, like many another child and boy, was troubled by that sense of inner loneliness which the sensitive carry with them all their lives. ‘I went to school when I was only ten,’ he wrote, ‘and I very soon contracted a profound aversion to the human race.’ This is not just a quip; he meant it. He was a pessimist from his youth up.

[…]

‘Your love isn’t love,’ Louise [Colet, his mistress] wrote, ‘in any case it doesn’t mean much in your life.’ To this he replied: ‘You want to know if I love you. Well, yes, as much as I can love; that’s to say, for me love isn’t the first thing in life, but the second.’ Flaubert prided himself on his frankness; it was indeed brutal. On one occasion, he asked Louise to find out from a friend of hers who had lived in Cayenne what had happened to Eulalie Foucaud, the object of his adventure in Marseilles, and even asked her to have a letter delivered to her; he was frankly astonished when she accepted the commission with irritation. He even told her of his encounters with prostitutes, for whom he had, according to his own story, an inclination which he frequently gratified. But there is nothing men lie about so much as about their sex life, and it is probable that he was boasting of powers which he did not possess.

With the exception of La Tentation de St Antoine, the more important of his early works had been strictly personal; they were, in fact, novelizations of his amorous experience: his aim now was to be strictly objective. He determined to tell the truth without being bias or prejudice, narrating the facts and exposing the characters of the persons he had to deal with without comment of his own, neither condemning nor praising: if he sympathized with one, not to show it; if the stupidity of another exasperated him, the malice of a third outraged him, not to allow word of his own to reveal it. This, on the whole, is what he succeeded in doing, and that is perhaps why many readers have found a certain coldness in the novel. There is nothing heart-warming in this calculated, obstinate detachment. Though it may be a weakness in us, my impression is that, as readers, we find comfort in knowing that the author shares the emotions he had made us feel.

But the attempt at complete impersonality fails with Flaubert, as it fails with every novelist, because complete impersonality is impossible to achieve. It is very well that the writer should let his characters explain themselves and, as far as may be, let their actions be the outcome of their natures, and he may easily make a nuisance of himself when he draws your attention to his heroine’s charm or his villain’s malevolence, when he moralizes or irrelevantly digresses, when, in short, he is a personage in the story he is telling; but this is only a matter of method, one that some very good novelists have used and, if it happens to have gone out of fashion at the moment, this is not to say it is a bad one. But the author who avoids it keeps his personality only out of the surface of his novel; he reveals it willy-nilly by his choice of subject, his choice of character and the point of view from which he describes them. Flaubert eyed the world with gloomy indignation. He was violently intolerant. He had no patience with stupidity. The bourgeois, the commonplace, the ordinary filled him with exasperation. He had no pity. He had no charity. Most of his adult life he was a sick man, oppressed by the humiliation which his distemper caused him to feel. His nerves were in a constant state of perturbation. He was, as I have said, at once a romantic and a realist; and he flung himself into the sordid story of Emma Bovary with the fury of a man revenging himself by wallowing in the gutter because life has not met the demands of his passion for the ideal. We are introduced to many persons in the course of the novel’s five hundred pages, and but for Dr Lariviére, a minor character, they have hardly a redeeming feature. They are base, mean, stupid, trivial and vulgar. A great many people are, but not all; and it is inconceivable that in a town, however small, there should not be found one person at least, if not two or three, who is sensible, kindly and helpful. Flaubert failed to keep his personality out of his novel.

[…]

After the publication of Madame Bovary Flaubert wrote Salambô, which is generally considered a failure, then another version of L’Education Sentimentale, in which he again described his love for Elisa Schlesinger. Many men of letters in France look upon it as his masterpiece. It is confused and hard to read. Frédéric Moreau, the hero, is partly a portrait of Flaubert, as he saw himself, and partly a portrait of Maxime du Camp as he saw him; but the two men were two different to make a plausible amalgam, and the character remains unconvincing. He is singularly uninteresting. The book, however, begins admirably, and towards the end there is a parting scene between Madame Arnoux (Elisa Schlesinger) and Frédéric (Flaubert) of rare beauty. Then, for the third time, he wrote La Tentation de St. Antoine. Though Flaubert said he had enough ideas for books to last him to the end of his life, they remained vague projects. It is curious that with the exception of Madame Bovary, the story of which was given him ready-made, the only novels he wrote were founded on ideas he had had early in his life. He aged prematurely. At thirty he was already bald and pot-bellied. It may well be, as Maxime de Camp said, that his nerve storms and the depressing sedatives he took to counteract them impaired his power of imagination creation.

[…]

The last work he published was a volume of three stories, one of which, Un Coeur Simple, is of a rare excellence. He engaged upon a novel called Bouvard et Pecuchet, in which he determined to have still another fling at the stupidity of the human race, and with his usual thoroughness he read fifteen hundred books to provide himself with the material he thought necessary. It was to be in two volumes, and he almost reached the end of the first. On the morning of May 8, 1880, the maid went into the library into eleven to bring him lunch. She found him lying on the divan, muttering incomprehensible words. She ran for the doctor and brought him back with her. He could do nothing. In less than an hour Gustave Flaubert was dead.

The only woman he sincerely, devotedly and disinterestedly loved in his life was Elisa Schlesinger. One evening at dinner chez Magny, when Theophile Gautier, Taine and Edmond de Goncourt were present, Flaubert made a curious statement: he said that he had never really possessed a woman, that he was virgin, that all the women that he had had were never anything but “mattresses” for another woman, the woman of his dreams. Maurice Schlesinger’s speculations had ended in disaster, and he took his wife and children to Baden. In 1871 he died. Flaubert, after loving Elisa for thirty-five years, wrote his first love letter to her. Instead of beginning as he had been used to do: “Chère Madame,” he began: “My old love, my only loved one.” She came to Croisset. Both were greatly changed since they had last seen one another. Flaubert was gross and fat, his face red and blotchy; he wrote an immense moustache and to cover his baldness a black cap. Elisa had grown thin, her skin had lost its delicate hues and her hair was white. The lovely description in L’Education Sentimentale of the last meeting of Madame Arnoux and Frédéric Moreau probably faithfully describes the meeting of Flaubert and Elisa after so many years. They met once or twice after that, and then, so far as anyone knows, never again.

A year after Flaubert’s death, Maxime du Camp spent the summer at Baden, and one day, when he was out shooting, found himself near the lunatic asylum of Illenau. The gates were opened to allow the female inmates, under the care of keepers, to take their daily walk. They came out two by two. Among them was one who bowed to him. It was Elisa Schlesinger, the woman whom Flaubert so long and so vainly loved.

[From Ten Novels and Their Authors, Heinemann, 1954, pp. 12-13:]

I will venture now to state what in my opinion are the qualities that a good novel should have. […] I think it is all the better if the characters are in themselves interesting. In Flaubert’s L’Éducation Sentimentale he wrote a novel which has a great reputation among many excellent critics, but he chose for his hero a man so null, so featureless, so vapid that it is impossible to care what he does or happens to him; and in consequence, for all its merits, the book is hard to read.

[Preface to First Person Singular, Heinemann, The Collected Edition, 1936:]

Objectivity is apt to give a slight sensation of bleakness. Complete objectivity is probably impossible to achieve. It would indeed make a novel of an unwieldy length and the short story almost impossible. For a complete objectivity would see all the persons of the fiction from their own standpoint, since each one of us is of supreme importance to himself, and there is no reason for the author to pay more attention to one of his persons than to another. As soon as he selects one character out of several for more detailed description he ceases to be rigidly objective. The moment his sympathy is engaged he is personal. It is probably direction of interest that makes a work of fiction readable. In the very rare instances (Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale is one of them, I think) in which an author has attained complete objectivity you are bored because the author instead of directing your interest has impartially dispersed it.

[From Tellers of Tales, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1939, p. xxx:]

I was able to put in Flaubert's A Simple Heart, which he himself called a short story, but which is really a short novel. Such unity of impression as it has depends only on the fact that the interest is concentrated on a single person. But it is only as short as it is and no longer, because in comparatively few pages Flaubert was able to say all there was to say about the straightforward, limited character he set out to describe. It is a moving tale, and it is somewhat important in the history of fiction because it has given rise to numberless studies, sometimes in the form of the short story, sometimes in that of the novel, of women of the servant class. It is besides a story which, I think, no one can read without gaining a sympathetic understanding of the French nature, with its great virtues and pardonable failings; for all France is there.