Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert

by Gustave Flaubert

  When such revelations are made, however, they are made, and the generous attitude is doubtless at that stage to catch them in sensitive hands. Poor Flaubert has been turned inside out for the lesson, but it has been given to him to constitute practically — on the demonstrator’s table with an attentive circle round — an extraordinary, a magnificent “ case.” Never certainly in literature was the distinctively literary idea, the fury of execution, more passionately and visibly manifested. This rare visibility is probably the excuse that the responsible hand will point to. The letters enable us to note it, to follow it from phase to phase, from one wild attitude to another, through all the contortions and objurgations, all the exaltations and despairs, tensions and collapses, the mingled pieties and profanities of Flaubert’s simplified yet intemperate life. Their great interest is that they exhibit an extraordinary singleness of aim, show us the artist not only disinterested but absolutely dishumanised. They help us to perceive what Flaubert missed almost more than what he gained, and if there are many questions in regard to such a point of view that they certainly fail to settle, they at least cause us to turn them over as we have seldom turned them before. It was the lifelong discomfort of this particular fanatic, but it is our own extreme ad

  vantage, that he was almost insanely excessive. “In literature,” he wrote in 1861, “the best chance one has is by following out one’s temperament and exaggerating it.” His own he could scarcely exaggerate; but it carried him so far that we seem to see on distant heights his agitations outlined against the sky. “ Impersonal” as he wished his work to be, it was his strange fortune to be the most expressive, the most vociferous, the most spontaneous of men. The record of his temperament is therefore complete, and if his ambiguities make the illuminating word difficult to utter, it is not because the picture is colourless.

  Why was such a passion, in proportion to its strength, after all so sterile? There is life, there is blood in a considerable measure in Madame Bovary, but the last word about its successors can only be, it seems to me, that they are splendidly and infinitely curious. Why may, why must indeed in certain cases, the effort of expression spend itself, and spend itself in success, without completing the circle, without coming round again to the joy of evocation? How can art be so genuine and yet so unconsoled, so unhumorous, so unsociable? When it is a religion, and therefore an authority, why should it not be, like other authorities, a guarantee? How can it be such a curse without being also a blessing? What germ of treachery lurks in it to make it, not necessarily but so easily that there is but a hair-line to cross, delusive for personal happi

  ness? Why in short when the struggle is success should the success not be at last serenity? These mysteries and many others pass before us as we listen to Flaubert’s loud plaint, which is precisely the profit we derive from his not having, with his correspondents, struck, like Balzac, only the commercial note. Nothing in his agitated and limited life, which began at Rouen in 1821, is more striking than the prompt, straightforward way his destiny picked him out and his conscience handed him over. As most young men have to contend with some domestic disapproval of the muse, so this one had rather to hang back on the easy incline and to turn away his face from the formidable omens. It was only too evident that he would be free to break his heart, to gueuler, as he fondly calls it, to spout, to mouth and thresh about, to that heart’s content. No career was ever more taken for granted in its intensity, nor any series of tribulations more confidently invited. It was recognised from the first that the tall and splendid youth, green-eyed and sonorous (his stature and aspect were distinguished), was born to gueuler, and especially his own large cadences.

  His father, a distinguished surgeon, who died early, had purchased near Rouen, on the Seine, the small but picturesque property of Croisset; and it was in a large five-windowed corner room of this quiet old house, his study for forty years, that his life was virtually spent. It was marked by two great events; his journey to the East and return through the south of Europe with Maxime Du Camp in 1849, and the publication of Madame Bovary (followed by a train of consequences) in 1857. He made a second long journey (to Algeria, Tunis and the site of Carthage) while engaged in writing Salammbo; he had before his father’s death taken part in a scanted family pilgrimage to the north of Italy, and he appears once to have spent a few weeks on the Righi and at another time a few days in London, an episode, oddly enough, of which there is but the faintest, scarcely a recognisable, echo in his correspondence. For the rest, and save for an occasional interlarding of Paris, his years were spent at his patient table in the room by the rural Seine. If success in life (and it is the definition open perhaps to fewest objections), consists of achieving in maturity the dreams of one’s prime, Flaubert’s measure may be said to have been full. M. Maxime Du Camp, in those two curious volumes of Impressions Litteraires which in 1882 treated a surprised world and a scandalised circle to the physiological explanation of his old friend’s idiosyncrasies, declares that exactly as that friend was with intensity at the beginning, so was he with intensity in the middle and at the end, and that no life was ever simpler or straighter in the sense of being a case of growth without change. Doubtful indeed were the urgency of M. Du Camp’s revelation and the apparent validity of his evidence; but whether or no Flaubert was an epileptic subject, and whether or no there .was danger in our unconsciousness of the question (danger to any one but M. Maxime Uu Camp), the impression of the reader of the letters is in complete conformity with the pronouncement to which I allude. The Flaubert of fifty differs from the Flaubert of twenty only in size. The difference between Bouvard et Pecuchet and Madame Bovary is not a difference of spirit; and it is a proof of the author’s essential continuity that his first published work, appearing when he had touched middle life and on which his reputation mainly rests, had been planned as long in advance as if it had been a new religion.

  Madame Bovary was five years in the writing, and the Tentation de Saint-Antoinc, which saw the light in 1874, but the consummation of an idea entertained in his boyhood. Bouvard et Peeuchet, the intended epos of the blatancy, the comprehensive betise of mankind, was in like manner the working out at the end of his days of his earliest generalisation. It had literally been his life-long dream to crown his career with a panorama of human ineptitude. Everything in his literary life had been planned and plotted and prepared. One moves in it through an atmosphere of the darkest, though the most innocent, conspiracy. He was perpetually laying a train, a train of which the inflammable substance was “ style.” His great originality was that the long siege of his youth was successful. I can recall no second case in which poetic justice has interfered so gracefully. He began Madame Bovary from afar off, not as an amusement or a profit or a clever novel or even a work of art or a morceau de vie, as his successors say to-day, not even, either, as the best thing he could make it; but as a premeditated classic, a masterpiece pure and simple, a thing of conscious perfection and a contribution of the first magnitude to the literature of his country. There would have been every congruity in his encountering proportionate failure and the full face of that irony in things of which he was so inveterate a student. A writer of tales who should have taken the extravagance of his design for the subject of a sad “ novelette “ could never have permitted himself any termination of such a story but an effective anticlimax. The masterpiece at the end of years would inevitably fall very flat and the overweening spirit be left somehow to its illusions. The solution in fact was very different, and as Flaubert had deliberately sown so exactly and magnificently did he reap. The perfection of Madame Bovary is one of the commonplaces of criticism, the position of it one of the highest a man of letters dare dream of, the possession of it one of the glories of France. No calculation was ever better fulfilled, nor any train more successfully laid. It is a sign of the indefeasible bitterness to which Flaubert’s temperament condemned him and the expression of which, so oddly, is yet as obstreperous and boyish as that of the happiness arising from animal
spirits — it is a mark of his amusing pessimism that so honourable a first step should not have done more to reconcile him to life. But he was a creature of transcendent dreams and unfathomable perversities of taste, and it was in his nature to be more conscious of one broken spring in the couch of fame, more wounded by a pin-prick, more worried by an assonance, than he could ever be warmed or pacified from within. Literature and life were a single business to him, and the “ torment of style” that might occasionally intermit in one place was sufficiently sure to break out in another. We may polish our periods till they shine again, but over the style of life our control is necessarily more limited.

  To such limitations Flaubert resigned himself with the worst possible grace, He polished ferociously, but there was a side of the matter that his process could never touch. Some other process might have been of use; some patience more organised, some formula more elastic, or simply perhaps some happier trick of good-humour; at the same time it must be admitted that in his deepening vision of the imbecility of the world any remedy would have deprived him of his prime, or rather of his sole, amusement. The b£tise of mankind was a colossal comedy, calling aloud to heaven for an Aristophanes to match, and Flaubert’s nearest approach to joy was in noting the opportunities of such an observer and feeling within himself the stirrings of such a genius. Toward the end he found himself vibrating at every turn to this ideal, and if he knew to the full the tribulation of proper speech no one ever suffered less from that of proper silence. He broke it in his letters, on a thousand queer occasions, with all the luxury of relief. He was blessed with a series of correspondents with whom he was free to leave nothing unsaid; many of them ladies too, so that he had in their company all the inspiration of gallantry without its incidental sacrifices. The most interesting of his letters are those addressed between 1866 and 1876 to Madame George Sand, which, originally collected in 1884, have been re-embodied in Madame Commanville’s publication. They are more interesting than ever when read, as we are now able to tread them, in connection with Madame Sand’s equally personal and much more luminous answers, accessible in the fifth and sixth volumes of her own copious and strikingly honourable Correspondance. No opposition could have been more of a nature to keep the ba’l rolling than that of the parties to this candid commerce, who were as united by affection and by common interests as they were divided by temper and their way of feeling about those interests. Living, each of them, for literature (though Madame Sand, in spite of her immense production, very much less exclusively for it than her independent and fastidious friend), their comparison of most of the impressions connected with it could yet only be a lively contrast of temperaments. Flaubert, whose hark indeed (it is the rule) was much worse than his bite, spent his life, especially the later part of it, in a state of acute exasperation; but her inalterable serenity was one of the few irritants that were tolerable to him.

  Their letters are a striking lesson in the difference between good-humour and bad, and seem to point the moral that either form has only to be cultivated to become our particular kind of intelligence. They compared conditions at any rate, her expansion with his hard contraction, and he had the advantage of finding in a person who had sought wisdom in ways so many and so devious one of the few objects within his ken that really represented virtue and that he could respect. It gives us the pattern of his experience that Madame Sand should have stood to him for so much of the ideal, and we may say this even under the impression produced by a reperusal of her total correspondence, a monument to her generosity and variety. Poor Flaubert appears to us to-day almost exactly by so much less frustrated as he was beguiled by this happy relation, the largest he ever knew. His interlocutress, who in the evening of an arduous life accepted refreshment wherever she found it and who could still give as freely as she took, for immemorial habit had only added to each faculty, his correspondent, for all her love of well-earned peace, offered her breast to his aggressive pessimism, had motherly, reasoning, coaxing hands for it, made in short such sacrifices that she often came to Paris to go to brawling Magny dinners to meet him and wear, to please him, as I have heard one of the diners say, unaccustomed peach-blossom dresses. It contributes to our sense of what there was loveable at the core of his effort to select and his need to execrate that he should have been able to read and enjoy so freely a writer so fluid; and it also reminds us that imagination is after all, for the heart, the safest quality. Flaubert had excellent honest inconsistencies, crude lapses from purity in which he could like the books of his friends. He was susceptible of painless amusement (a rare emotion with him) when his imagination was touched, as it was infallibly and powerfully, by affection. To make a hard rule never to be corrupted, and then to make a special exception for fondness, is of course the right attitude.

  He had several admirations, and it might always be said of him that he would have admired it he could, for he could like a thing if he could be proud of it, and the act adapted itself to his love of magnificence. He could like indeed almost any one he could say great coloured things about: the ancients, almost promiscuously, for they never wrote in newspapers, and Shakespeare (of whom he could not say fine things enough), and Rabelais, and Montaigne, and Goethe, and Victor Hugo (his biggest modern enthusiasm), and Leconte de Lisle, and Renan, and Thdophile Gautier. He did scant justice to Balzac and even less to Alfred de Musset. On the other hand he had an odd and interesting indulgence for Boileau. Balzac and Musset were not, by his measure, “ writers,” and he maintains that be it in verse, be it in prose, it is only so far as they “ write “ that authors live; between the two categories he makes a fundamental distinction. The latter indeed, the mere authors, simply did not exist for him, and with Mr, Bcsant’s Incorporated Society he would have had nothing whatever to do. He declares somewhere that it is only the writer who survives in the poet. In spite of his patience with the “muse” to whom the majority of the letters in the earlier of the volumes before us were addressed, and of the great invidious coup de chapeau with which he could here and there render homage to versification, his relish for poetry as poetry was moderate. Far higher was his estimate of prose as prose, which he held to be much the more difficult art of the two, with more maddening problems and subtler rhythms, and on whose behalf he found it difficult to forgive the “ proud sister” attitude of verse. No man at any rate, to make up for scanty preferences, can have had a larger list of literary aversions. His eye swept the field in vain for specimens untainted with the “ modern infection,” the plague which had killed Thdophile Gautier and to which he considered that he himself had already succumbed. If he glanced at a feuillcton he saw that Madame Sarah Bernhardt was “ a social expression,” and his resentment of this easy wisdom resounded disproportionately through all the air he lived in. One has always a kindness for people who detest the contemporary tone if they have done something fine; but the baffling thing in Flaubert was the extent of his suffering and the inelasticity of his humour. The jargon of the newspapers, the slovenliness of the novelists, the fatuity of Octave Feuillet, to whom he was exceedingly unjust, for that writer’s love of magnificence was not inferior to his critic’s, all work upon him with an intensity only to be explained by the primary defect of his mind, his want of a general sense of proportion. That sense stopped apparently when he had settled the relation of the parts of a phrase, as to which it was exquisite.