The Merry Heart by Robertson Davies

Author:Robertson Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

It’s human natur, p’raps – if so,

Oh, isn’t human natur low!

Perhaps, in a more generous mood, we may say that human nature is not so much low, as unreflecting. It is people like ourselves who have determined to reflect on this theme of literature and moral purpose, and I have put forward my opinion that literature at its higher levels must beware of allowing moral purpose to assume a dominant place in its creation. Moral purpose, if it asserts itself as it has done in much of the finest literature we possess, will come unbidden from the place where literature of the serious kind has its origin, and it will be part of the fabric of the whole work, and not something that can be abstracted and discussed as an element in itself.

Consider a novel acknowledged to be great, from the French Literature of the nineteenth century. I speak of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). In it we follow the brief life of Emma Bovary, who is fated to live in provincial dullness, with a dull if worthy husband; she is not a woman of strong character or intellect; she has been sentimentally educated, and what intelligence she has is poorly employed; she seeks a broader life through ill-fated romances with men of no greater intellectual or moral stature than herself, and in the end she dies wretchedly, a disappointed woman. It sounds a dismal theme, but as Flaubert treats it, it is transfixing in its depth of understanding and its illumination of a kind of life that is led by millions of people. Is Emma treated by the author with compassion? No, she is treated with justice. Has the author no pity for Emma? It does not appear, but it is plain to the understanding reader that the author has great pity for mankind. It is not the pity that slops and gushes, nor would it be just to Flaubert to say that it attempts to be godlike. It is the pity of the observer, the recorder of things as they are, rather than as they should be.

It is significant that on a famous occasion when a lady said to him: “How could you write so profoundly about Emma Bovary? Where did you find your extraordinary understanding of woman’s nature?” Flaubert replied: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

He spoke the simple truth. A writer finds his themes and his characters in the depth of his own being, and his understanding of them is an understanding of himself. This is not to say that Don Quixote is Miguel de Cervantes or that Mr. Pickwick is Charles Dickens in any simple sense. It is to say that Cervantes and Dickens are capable of the Don and Mr. Pickwick; they embrace the character, not because it is an obvious part of their own nature, but because it is a possibility which they are capable of seizing and bringing to a fictional life. They have intuitions of the Don and of Pickwick, as Flaubert had his intuition of Madame Bovary.

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