Fortunately he had confidants to whom he could cry out when he was hurt and whose position, as he took life for the most part as men take a violent toothache, was assuredly no sinecure. To more than one intense friendship were his younger and middle years devoted; so close was his union with Louis Bouilhet, the poet and dramatist, that he could say in 1870 : “ I feel no longer the need to write, because I wrote especially for a being who is no more. There’s no taste in it now — the impulse has gone.” As he wrote for Bouilhet, so Bouilhet wrote for him. “ There are so few people who like what I like or^ have an idea of what I care for.” That was the indispensable thing for him in a social, a personal relation, the existence in another mind of a love of literature sufficiently demonstrated to relieve the individual from the great and damning charge, the charge perpetually on Flaubert’s lips in regard to his contemporaries, the accusation of malignantly hating it. This universal conspiracy he perceived, in his own country, in every feature of manners, and to a degree which may well make us wonder how high he would hove piled the indictment if he had extended the inquiry to the manners of ours. We draw a breath of relief when we think to what speedier suffocation he would have yielded had he been materially acquainted with the great English-speaking peoples. When he declared, naturally enough, that liking what he liked was a condition of intercourse, his vision of this community was almost destined, in the nature of things, to remain unachievable; for it may really be said that no one in the world ever liked anything so much as Flaubert liked beauty of style. The mortal indifference to it of empires and republics was the essence of that “ modern infection” from which the only escape would have been to ne faire que de Vart. Mankind, for him, was made up of the three or four persons, Ivan Turgenieff in the number, who perceived what he was trying for, and of the innumerable millions who didn’t. Poor M. Maxime Du Camp, in spite of many of the leading characteristics of a friend, was one of this multitude, and he pays terribly in the pages before us for his position. He pays, to my sense, excessively, for surely he had paid enough and exactly in the just and appropriate measure, when, in the introduction contributed to the “ definitive “ edition of Madame Bovary, M. Guy de Maupassant, avenging his master by an exquisite stroke, made public the letter of advice and remonstrance addressed to Flaubert by M. Du Camp, then editor of the Revue de Paris, on the eve of the serial appearance of the former’s first novel in that periodical. This incomparable effusion, with its amazing reference to excisions and its suggestion that the work be placed in the hands of an expert and inexpensive corrector who will prepare it for publication, this priceless gem will twinkle for ever in the setting M. de Maupassant has given it, or we may perhaps still more figuratively say in the forehead of the masterpiece it discusses. But there was surely a needless, there was surely a nervous and individual ferocity in such a vindictive giving to the world of every passage of every letter in which the author of that masterpiece has occasion to allude to his friend’s want of tact. It naturally made their friendship unsuccessful that Flaubert disliked M. Du Camp, but it is a monstrous imputation on his character to assume that he was small enough never to have forgiven and forgotten the other’s mistake. Great people never should be avenged; it diminishes their privilege. What M. Du Camp, so far as an outsider may judge, had to be punished for was the tone of his reminiscences. But the tone is unmistakably the tone of affection. He may have felt but dimly what his old comrade was trying for, and even the latent L
richness of L Education Sentimentale, but he renders full justice to Flaubert’s noble independence. The tone of Flaubert’s own allusions is a different thing altogether. It is not unfair to say that all this disproportionate tit-for-tat renders the episode one of the ugliest little dramas of recent literary history. The irony of a friend’s learning after long years and through the agency of the press how unsuspectedly another friend was in the habit of talking of him, is an irony too cruel for impartial minds. The disaster is absolute, and our compassion goes straight to the survivor. There are other survivors who will have but little more reason to think that the decencies have presided over such a publication.
It is only a reader here and there in all the wide world who understands to-day, or who ever understood, what Gustave Flaubert tried for; and it is only when such a reader is also a writer, and a tolerably tormented one, that he particularly cares. Poor Flaubert’s great revenge, however, far beyond that of any editorial treachery, is that when this occasional witness does care he cares very peculiarly and very tenderly and much more than he may be able successfully to say. Then the great irritated style- seeker becomes, in the embracing mind, an object of interest and honour; not so much for what he altogether achieved as for the way he strove and for the inspiring image that he presents. There is no reasoning about him; the more we take him as he is the more he has a special authority. Salammbo, in which we breathe the air of pure aesthetics, is as hard as stone; L’Education, for the same reason, is as cold as death; Saint-Antoine is a medley of wonderful bristling metals and polished agates, and the drollery of Bouvard et Pfcuchet (a work as sad as someth:ng perverse and puerile done for a wager), about as contagious as the smile of a keeper showing you through the ward of a madhouse. In Madame Bovary alone emotion is just sufficiently present to take off the chill. This truly is a qualified report, yet it leaves Flaubert untouched at the points where he is most himself, leaves him master of a province in which, for many of us, it will never be an idle errand to visit him. The way to care for him is to test the virtue of his particular exaggeration, to accept for the sake of his aesthetic influence the idiosyncrasies now revealed to us, his wild gesticulation, his plaintive, childish side, the side as to which one asks one’s self what has become of ultimate good-humour, of human patience, of the enduring man. lie pays and pays heavily for his development in a single direction, for it is probable that no literary effort so great, accompanied with an equal literary talent, ever failed on so large a scale to be convincing. It convinces only those who are converted, and the number of such is very small. It is an appeal so technical that we may say of him still, but with more resignation, what he personally wailed over, that nobody takes his great question seriously. This is indeed why there may be for each of the loyal minority a certain fine scruple against insistence. If he had had in his nature a contradiction the less, if his indifference had been more forgiving, this is surely the way in which he would have desired most to be preserved.
To no one at any rate need it be denied to say that the best way to appreciate him is, abstaining from the clumsy process of an appeal and the vulgar process of an advertisement, exclusively to use him, to feel him, to be privately glad of his message. In proportion as we swallow him whole and cherish him as a perfect example, his weaknesses fall into their place as the conditions about which, in estimating a man who has been original, there is a want of tact in crying out. There is of course always the answer that the critic is to be suborned only by originalities that fertilise; the rejoinder to which, of equal necessity, must ever be that even to the critics of unborn generations poor Flaubert will doubtless yield a fund of amusement, To the end of time there will be something flippant, something perhaps even “ clever “ to be said of his immense ado about nothing. Those for some of whose moments, on the contrary, this ado will be as stirring as music, will belong to the group that has dabbled in the same material and striven with the same striving. The interest he presents, in truth, can only be a real interest lor fellowship, for initiation of the practical kind; and in that case it becomes a sentiment, a sort of mystical absorption or fruitful secret. The sweet
est things in the world of art or the life of letters are the irresponsible sympathies that seem to rest on divination. Flaubert’s hardness was only the act of holding his breath in the reverence of his search for beauty; his universal renunciation, the long spasm of his too-fixed attention, was only one of the absurdest sincerities of art. To the participating eye these things are but details in the little square
picture made at this distance of time by his forty years at the battered table at Croisset. Everything lives in this inward vision of the wide room on the liver, almost the cell of a monomaniac, but consecrated ground to the faithful, which, as he tried and tried again, must so often have resounded with the pomp of a syntax addressed, in his code, peremptorily to the ear. If there is something tragi-comic in the scene, as of a tenacity in the void or a life laid down for grammar, the impression passes when we turn from the painful process to the sharp and splendid result. Then, since if we like people very much we end by liking their circumstances, the eternal chamber and the dry Benedictine years have a sufficiently palpable offset in the repousst bronze of the books.
An incorruptible celibate and dedaigneux des femmes (as, in spite of the hundred and forty letters addressed to Madame Louise Colet, M. de Maupassant styles him and, in writing to Madame Sand, he confesses himself), it was his own view of his career that, as art was the only thing worth living for, he had made immense sacrifices to application —
sacrificed passions, joys, affections, curiosities and opportunities. He says that he shut his passions up in cages and only at long intervals, for amusement, had a look at them. The orgie Je littdraturc, n short, had been his sole form of excess. He knew best of course, but his imaginations about himself (as about other matters) were, however justly, ri;h, and to the observer at this distance he appears truly to have been made of the very stuff of a Benedictine. He compared himself to the camel, who can neither be stopped when he is going nor moved when he is resting. He was so sedentary, so averse to physical exercise, which he speaks of somewhere as an occupation funeste, that his main alternative to the chair was, even by day, the bed, and so omnivorous in research that the act of composition, with him, was still more impeded by knowledge than by taste. “ I have in me,” he writes to the imperturbable Madame Sand, “ a fond d eccUsiastique that( people don’t know “ — the clerical basis of the Catholic clergy. “ We shall talk of it,” he adds, “.much better viva voce than by letter”; and we can easily imagine the thoroughness with which between the unfettered pair, when opportunity favoured, the interesting subject was treated. At another time indeed, to the same correspondent, who had given him a glimpse of the happiness of being a grandmother, he refers with touching sincerity to the poignancy of solitude to which the “ radical absence of the feminine element” in his life had condemned him. “ Yet I was born with every capacity for tenderness. One doesn’t shape one’s destiny, one undergoes it. I was pusillanimous in my youth — I was afraid of life. We pay for everything.” Besides, it was his theory that a “ man of style “ should never stoop to action. If he had been afraid of life in fact, I must add, he was preserved from the fear of it in imagination by that great “ historic start,” the sensibility to the frisson historique, which dictates the curious and beautiful outburst, addressed to Madame Colct, when he asks why it had not been his lot to live in the age of Nero. “ How I would have talked with the Greek rhetors, travelled in the great chariots on the Roman roads, and, in the evening, in the hostelries, turned in with the vagabond priests of Cybele! . . . I have lived, all over, in those directions; doubtless in some prior state of being. I’m sure I’ve been, under the Roman empire, manager of some troop of strolling players, one of the rascals who used to go to Sicily to buy women to make actresses, and who were at once professors, panders and artists. These scoundrels have wonderful ‘ mugs’ in the comedies of Plautus, in reading which I seem to myself to remember things.”
He was an extreme admirer of Apuleius, and his florid inexperience helps doubtless somewhat to explain those extreme sophistications of taste of which La Tentation de Saint-Antoine is so elaborate an example. Far and strange are the refuges in which such an imagination seeks oblivion of the immediate and the ugly. His life was that of a pearl-diver, breathless in the thick element while he groped for the priceless word, and condemned to plunge again and again. He passed it in reconstructing sentences, exterminating repetitions, calculating and comparing cadences, harmonious chutes de phrase, and beating about the bush to deal death to the abominable assonance. Putting aside the particular ideal of style which made a pitfall of the familiar, few men surely have ever found it so difficult to deal with the members of a phrase. He loathed the smug face of facility as much as he suffered from the nightmare of toil; but if he had been marked in the cradle for literature it may be said without paradox that this was not on account of any native disposition to write, to write at least as he aspired and as he understood the term. He took long years to finish his books, and terrible months and weeks to deliver himself of his chapters and his pages. Nothing could exceed his endeavour to make them all rich and round, just as nothing could exceed the unetherised anguish in which his successive children were born. His letters, in which, inconsequently for one who had so little faith in any rigour of taste or purity of perception save his own, he takes everybody into his most intimate literary confidence, the pages of the publication before us are the record of everything that retarded him. The abyss of reading answered to the abyss of writing; with the partial exception of Madame Bovary every subject that he treated required a rising flood of information. There are libraries of books behind his most innocent sentences. The question of “ art” for him was so furiously the question of form, and the question of form was so intensely the question of rhythm, that from the beginning to the end of his correspondence we scarcely ever encounter a mention of any beauty but verbal beauty. He quotes Goethe fondly as to the supreme importance of the “ conception,” but the conception remains for him essentially the plastic one.
There are moments when his restless passion for form strikes us as leaving the subject out of account altogether, as if he has taken it up arbitrarily, blindly, preparing himself the years of misery in which he is to denounce the grotesqueness, the insanity of hi.? choice. Four times, with his orgueil, his love of magnificence, he condemned himself incongruously to the modern and familiar, groaning at every step over the horrible difficulty of reconciling “ style “ in such cases with truth and dialogue with surface. He wanted to do the battle of Thermopylae, and he found himself doing Bouvard et Ptcuchet. One of the sides by which he interests us, one of the sides that will always endear him to the student, is his extraordinary ingenuity in lifting without falsifying, finding a middle way into grandeur and edging off from the literal without forsaking truth. This way was open to him from the moment he could look down upon his theme from the position of une blague suptrieurc, as he calls it, the amused freedom of an observer as irreverent as a creator. But if subjects were made for style (as to which Flaubert had a rigid theory : the idea was good enough if the expression was), so style was made for the ear, the last court of appeal, the supreme touchstone of perfection. He was perpetually demolishing his periods in the light of his merciless gueulades. He tried them on every one; his gtteulades could make him sociable. The horror, in particular, that haunted all his years was the horror of the cliche, the stereotyped, the thing usually said and the way it was usually said, the current phrase that passed muster. Nothing, in his view, passed muster but freshness, that which came into the world, with all the honours, for the occasion. To use the ready-made was as disgraceful as for a self-respecting cook to buy a tinned soup or a sauce in a bottle. Flaubert considered that the dispenser of such wares was indeed the grocer, and, producing his ingredients exclusively at home, he would have stabbed himself for shame like Vatel. This touches on the strange weakness of his mind, his puerile dread of the grocer, the bourgeois, the sentiment that in his generation and the preceding misplaced, as it were, the spirit of adventure and the sense of honour, and sterilised a whole province of French literature. That worthy citizen ought never to have kept a poet from dreaming.
He had for his delectation and for satiric purposes a large collection of those second-hand and approximate expressions which begged the whole literary question. To light upon a perfect example was his nearest approach to natural blis
s. Bnuvard et Ptcuchct is a museum of such examples, the cream of that Dictionnaire des Idtfes Regies for which all his life he had taken notes and which eventually resolved itself into the encyclopaedic exactitude and the lugubrious humour of the novel. Just as subjects were meant for style, so style was meant for images; therefore as his own were numerous and admirable he would have contended, coming back to the source that he was one of the writers to whom the significance of a work had ever been most present. This significance was measured by the amount of style and the quanity of metaphor thrown up. Poor subjects threw up a little, fine subjects threw up much, and the finish of his prose was the proof of his profundity. If you pushed far enough into language you found yourself in the embrace of thought. There are doubtless many persons whom this account of the matter will fail to satisfy, and there will indeed be no particular zeal to put it forward even on the part of those for whom, as a writer, Flaubert most vividly exists. He is a strong taste, like any other that is strong, and he exists only for those who have a constitutional need to feel in some direction the particular aesthetic confidence that he inspires. That confidence rests on the simple fact that he carried execution so far and nailed it so fast. No one will care for him at all who does not care for his metaphors, and those moreover who care most for those will be discreet enough to admit that even a style rich in similes is limited when it renders only the visible. The invisible Flaubert scarcely touches; his vocabulary and all his methods were unadjusted and alien to it. He could not read his French Wordsworth, M. Sully Prudhomme; he had no faith in the power of the moral to offer a surface. He himself offers such a flawless one that this hard concretion is success. If he is impossible as a companion he is deeply refreshing as a reference; and all that his reputation asks of you is an occasional tap of the knuckle at those firm thin plates of gold which constitute the leaves of his books. This passing tribute will yield the best results when you have been prompted to it by some other prose.
Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert Page 560