Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert

by Gustave Flaubert

  But Thomas Mann is old — and we are young. Germany does not feel very young to me.

  Extracts from Virginia Woolf’s diary

  1936

  Sunday, June 21st.

  After a week of intense suffering - indeed mornings of torture - and I’m not exaggerating - pain in my head - a feeling of complete despair and failure - a head inside like the nostrils after hay fever - here is a cool quiet morning again, a feeling of relief, respite, hope. Just done the Robson: think it good. I am living so constrainedly: so repressedly: I can’t make notes of life. Everything is planned, battened down. I do half an hour down here: go up, often in despair: lie down: walk round the Square: come back and do another ten lines. Then to Lords yesterday. Always with a feeling of having to repress control. I see people lying on sofa between tea and dinner. Rose M„ Elizabeth Bowen, Nessa. Sat in the Square last night. Saw the dripping green leaves. Thunder and lightning. Purple sky. N. and A. discussing 4/8 time. Cats stealing round. L. dining with Tom and Bella. A very strange, most remarkable summer. New emotions: humility: impersonal joy: literary despair. I am learning my craft in the most fierce conditions. Really reading Flaubert’s letters I hear my own voice cry out Oh art! Patience: find him consoling, admonishing. I must get this book quietly, strongly, daringly into shape. But it won’t be out till next year. Yet I think it has possibilities, could I seize them. I am trying to cut the characters deep in a phrase: to pare off and compact scenes: to envelop the whole in a medium.

  Tuesday, June 23rd.

  A good day - a bad day - so it goes on. Few people can be so tortured by writing as I am. Only Flaubert I think. Yet I see it now, as a whole. I think I can bring it off, if I only have courage and patience: take each scene quietly: compose: I think it may be a good book. And then - oh when it’s finished!

  Not so clear today, because I went to dentist and then shopped. My brain is like a scale: one grain pulls it down. Yesterday it balanced: today dips.

  Friday, October 6th.

  Well I have succeeded in despite of distractions to belong to other nations in copying out again the whole of Roger. Needless to say, it’s still to be revised, compacted, vitalized. And can I ever do it? The distractions are so incessant. I compose articles on Lewis Carroll and read a great variety of books - Flaubert’s life, R.’s lectures, out at last, a life of Erasmus and Jacques Blanche. We are asked to lunch with Mrs Webb, who so often talks of us. And my hand seems as tremulous as an aspen. I have composed myself by tidying my room. Can’t quite see my way now as to the next step in composition. Tom this weekend. I meant to record a Third Class Railway Carriage conversation. The talk of business men. Their male detached lives. All politics. Deliberate, well set up, contemptuous and indifferent of the feminine. For example: one man hands the Evening Standard, points to a woman’s photograph. ‘Women? Let her go home and bowl her hoop,’ said the man in blue serge with one smashed eye. ‘She’s a drag on him,’ another fragment. The son is going to lectures every night. Odd to look into this cool man’s world: so weather tight: insurance clerks all on top of their work; sealed up; self-sufficient; admirable; caustic; laconic; objective; and completely provided for. Yet thin, sensitive: yet schoolboys; yet men who earn their livings. In the early train they said, ‘Can’t think how people have time to go to war. It must be that the blokes haven’t got jobs.’ ‘I prefer a fool’s paradise to a real hell.’ ‘War’s lunacy. Mr Hitler and his set are gangsters. Like A1 Capone.’ Not a chink through which one can see art, or books. They play crosswords when insurance shop fails.

  The Biography

  Commemorative Medal of the Flaubert Museum

  THE LIFE-WORK OF FLAUBERT by G. A. Mounsey

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  I

  Balzac in one of his novels gives utterance to the following thought: “Genius is a terrible disease. Every writer of genius cherishes in his heart a monster which devours all his emotions as soon as he gives birth to them. Which is to be the conqueror? Will the disease vanquish the man, or the man the disease? He must be a great man who can establish a perfect equilibrium between his genius and his character. Unless the poet be a giant, unless he be possessed of the shoulders of a Hercules, he must inevitably remain bereft of heart, or else bereft of talent.”

  Here, unfortunately, Balzac breaks off his dissertation, and does not state what in his opinion is the cause of this disease of genius, why the development and power of the artistic personality stand in many respects in inverse ratio to the development and power of the moral type, or on what fundamental ground depends that primary antagonism between these two elements which is so often to be observed in the daily experience of life. Every one knows, for instance, that writers of talent, artists or musicians, are in the majority of cases men of the most unpractical nature, that their eccentricities and irresponsibility verge not uncommonly on complete moral disintegration, that they are bad fathers of families and bad husbands, and that while expressing great sensitiveness in the forcible language of their works, they very often show themselves in real life to be at heart hard and unfeeling egotists. An enquiry into the origin of the causes responsible for the deep contrast which exists between the æsthetic and ethical points of view, between the artist and the man, between genius and character, would undoubtedly open up one of the most interesting chapters in the history of creative psychology.

  Let us take, as an illustration of our thesis, the tragic scene of the destruction of Laocoon, as described in the Æneid. Picture the horror and anguish with which the citizens of Troy witness the seizure and suffocation of Laocoon and his children by the gigantic serpents. The onlookers are filled with terror, grief, and a desire to save the unfortunate victims. In bringing out the psychic differences of constitution among the crowd, the crucial moment of action plays a most important rôle, developing the instinct of self-preservation among the more timid ones, or the efforts of the more manly to lend their aid. Then imagine a sculptor moving about in this wavering and undecided crowd, and studying the terrible tragedy which is being enacted before his eyes as a fit theme for a future work of art. He alone remains an unmoved spectator amid the general confusion, lamentation, cries, and prayers. His moral instincts are all absorbed in an intense æsthetic curiosity. Tears would hinder his vision, and he keeps them sternly back, because it is imperatively necessary for him to see every form, every outline of the muscles distorted under the crushing force of the snakes’ huge coils. Every detail of the picture which in the others awakens loathing and terror, evokes in him a joy that is outside the ken of other men. While they weep and waver, the artist rejoices in the expression of agony on the countenance of Laocoon, rejoices that the father is unable to bring aid to his children, that the serpents are compressing their bodies with irresistible force. The next moment, perchance, the man will have conquered the artist. But the deed is done, the fact remains, the moment of cruel contemplation has had the power to brand upon his heart its ineradicable impression.

  A series of similar episodes must sooner or later create in the mind of the artist the habit of withdrawing himself from life, of regarding it from one side, from without, from the point of view no longer of a living human being, but from that of an unmoved observer, who seeks in all that comes to pass before his eyes only some material for his own artistic reproduction. And in proportion as his powers of imagination and observation increase, so in equal measure must his sensitiveness and the exercise of that power of will which is indispensable for all moral activity diminish. If nature has neither endowed the mind of the artist with an adamantine stoicism, nor filled his heart with an inexhaustible spring of love, his æsthetic qualities will little by little devour his ethical instincts; genius may, in the words of Balzac, “consume” the heart. In such a case as this, the categories of good and evil which people have most to do with in real life, i.e., the will and the passions, are confused in the artist’s
mind with the categories of the beautiful and the ugly, the characterless and the characteristic, the artistically interesting and the inane. Wickedness and vice attract the imagination of the poet, if only they be concealed under forms that are externally beautiful and attractive; while virtue looks dull and insignificant unless she can afford some material for a poetical apotheosis.

  But the artist excels not only in the quality of being able to contemplate objectively and dispassionately the emotions of others, he is unique also in this, that he can, as an impartial observer, subject his own heart to the same hard, æsthetic scrutiny that he applies to the actions of others. Ordinary people can, or at least believe that they can, entirely recover from the emotions which may have seized upon them, be they transports of love or hatred, of joy or sorrow. An honourable man, when he makes his vow of love to a woman, honestly believes in the truth of that vow — it never enters his head to inquire whether he really is as much in love as he says he is. One would on the face of things expect a poet more than other men to be inclined to give way to emotion, to be credulous, and to let himself be carried away; but in reality there always remains in his soul, however deeply it may be swayed by passion, the power to look into its own depths as into those of a character in a dream or novel; to follow with attention, even in moments of complete intoxication, the infinite intangible changes of his emotions, and to focus upon them the force of his merciless analysis.

  Human emotions are hardly ever simple or unalloyed: in the majority of cases they are composed of a mixture of parts differing immensely in the values of their components. And a psychological artist involuntarily discovers so many contradictions in himself and in others, even in moments of genuine exaltation, that by degrees he comes to lose all faith in his own rectitude, as well as in the rectitude of others.

  II

  The letters of Flaubert, published in two volumes, offer rich material for the study, from a living example, of the question of the antagonism which exists between the artistic and moral personality.

  “Art is higher than life”; such is the formula which stands as the corner-stone of the whole, not only of Flaubert’s æsthetic view, but also of his philosophical view of life. As a young man of thirty he writes to one of his school friends: “If I did not introduce into the plot of my poems a French queen of the fifteenth century, I should feel an utter disgust of life, and long ere this a bullet would have freed me from this humiliating folly.” Within a year’s time he is, with half serious rhetoric and youthful enthusiasm, encouraging the same young friend to proceed with his own work. “Let us ever devote ourselves to our art, which, being more powerful than all nations, crowns, or rulers, holds, in virtue of its glorious diadem, eternal sway over the whole universe.” When over forty years of age, and on the verge of the tomb, Flaubert repeats with even greater emphasis and audacity the same device: “L’homme n’est rien; l’œuvre est tout.” — ”Man is nothing; work is everything.”

  In the flower of his early manhood, though possessed of beauty, wit, and talent, he forsook the world for the sake of his art, like an ascetic in the desert: he immersed himself in his solitude, as the Christian hermits immured themselves in their caverns. “To bury oneself in one’s art, and spurn all else, is the only way to evade unhappiness,” he writes to his friend. “Pride makes up for all things, if there be only a broad enough foundation for it.... I certainly lack little; I should no doubt like to be as generous as the richest, as happy as a lover, as sensuous as those who give up their lives to pleasure; ... But in the meanwhile I covet neither riches, nor love, nor pleasures; ... Now, as for a long time past, I ask only for five or six hours of repose in my own chamber; in winter a big fire in my fireplace, and at night two candles on my table.” A year later he is advising the same friend: “Do as I do, break from the outside world, and live like a bear, like a white bear; send all else to the devil, and yourself as well, everything except only your thoughts. There is at the present moment such a great gulf fixed between myself and the rest of the world, that I oft-times experience a feeling of astonishment when I hear even the most ordinary and natural things; ... there are certain gestures, certain intonations of the voice, which fill me with surprise, and there are certain silly things which nearly make me giddy.”

  Even in moments of overwhelming passion, Flaubert places his literary vocation immeasurably above his personal happiness; and love of woman strikes him as insignificant by the side of his love of poetry. “No,” he writes to his fiancée, “you had far better love my art and not myself; for this attachment will never leave you, nor can illness or death deprive you of it. Worship thought, for in thought alone is truth, because it is one and imperishable. Can art, the only thing in life that is true and valuable, be compared with earthly love? Can the adoration of relative beauty be preferred to an eternal worship? Veneration for art — that is the best thing that I possess; it is the one thing for which I respect myself.”

  He refuses to see anything relative in poetry, but regards it as absolutely independent of and entirely cut off from life, and as being more real than action; he perceives in art “the most self-satisfying principle imaginable which requires as little external support as a star.” “Like a star,” he says, “fixed and glittering in its own heaven, does art observe the globe of the world revolve; that which is beautiful will never be utterly destroyed.” In the unity of the various portions of a work, in the every detail, in the harmony of the whole, Flaubert feels that “there is some inner essence, something in the nature of a divine force, something like an eternal principle.” “For how otherwise would there exist any relation between the most exact and the most musical expression of thought?”

  The sceptic who is not bound by any creed, but has spent his whole life in doubt and hesitation in face of the ideas of God, religion, progress, and scientific humanity, becomes pious and reverential when face to face with the question of art. The true poet is, in his opinion, distinguished from all other people by the divine inspiration of his ideas, “by the contemplation of the immutable (la contemplation de l’immuable), that is to say, religion in the highest sense of the word.” He regrets that he was not born in that age when people worshipped art, when there still existed genuine artists in the world, “whose life and thoughts were the blind instruments of the instinct of beauty. They were the organs of God, by means of which He Himself revealed His true essence to them; for these artists there was no happiness; no one knew how much they suffered; each night as they lay down sadly to rest they gazed wearily at the life of men with an astonished eye, just as we might gaze at an ant-hill.”

  To most artists beauty is a more or less abstract quality; to Flaubert it was as concrete an object of passion as is gold to the miser, power to the ambitious, or his lady to the lover. His work was like a deliberate suicide; he gave himself entirely up to it, with the fanaticism of a man possessed by a mania, with the mystic submission and enthusiasm of a martyr, with the awe of a priest as he enters the sacred sanctuary. Thus does he describe his own work: “Sick and irritable at heart, enduring a thousand times in the day moments of anguish and despondency, and having neither wife nor any of the joys of life to distract me, I continue to toil at my weary task, like a good workman who, with sleeves rolled up and brow streaming with sweat, strikes on his anvil without fear of rain or hail, of storm or thunder.” Here is an extract from a biography of Flaubert written by Maupassant, one of his favourite pupils and disciples, which gives an accurate picture of the gifted writer’s energy for work: “His head bowed, his face and brow and neck bathed in moisture, all his muscles tense, like an athlete at the height of the contest, he set himself to face the desperate strife with his ideas and words, rejecting, uniting, or forging them as in an iron grip by the power of his will, condensing them and gradually with superhuman strength working out his thought, and confining it, like a wild beast in a cage, in a definite, indestructible form.”

  III

  Flaubert, more than any other man, has
experienced in his own life, the destructive power of his over-sharpened, analytical disposition. With the malevolence, which was so strangely mingled in him with the then fashionable Byronism, and with a confused presentiment of an impending and inevitable catastrophe, he embarks at the early age of seventeen upon his work of destruction and internal iconoclasm: “I analyse myself and others,” he writes to a friend; “I am always anatomizing, and whenever I at last succeed in finding something, which all men consider pure and beautiful, but which is in reality a putrid spot, a gangrene, I shake my head and smile. I have come to the firm conclusion that vanity is the fundamental basis of all things, and that even that which we call conscience is in fact only a concealed and incipient vanity. You give in charity, partly, may be, out of compassion, out of pity, or from horror of suffering and sordidness, but also out of egotism; for the chief motive of your action is the desire to acquire the right to say to yourself: I have done good; there are very few people like me; I respect myself more than other men.” Eight years later he writes to his devoted wife: “I love to analyze; it is an occupation that distracts me. Although I am not very much inclined to see the humorous side of things, yet I cannot regard my own personality altogether seriously, because I see myself how ridiculous I am, ridiculous not in the sense of being externally comic, but in the inner sense of that inherent irony which, being present in the life of men, shows itself sometimes even in the most obviously natural actions, in the most ordinary gestures.... All this one feels in oneself, but it is hard to explain. You do not understand it, because in you it is as simple and genuine as in a beautiful hymn of love and poetry. For I regard myself as a sort of arabesque or marqueterie work; there are within me pieces of ivory and of gold and of iron, some of painted paper, others of brilliants, and others again of lead.”