The correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, if
approached merely as a chapter in the biographies of these heroes of
nineteenth century letters, is sufficiently rewarding. In a
relationship extending over twelve years, including the trying
period of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, these
extraordinary personalities disclose the aspects of their diverse
natures which are best worth the remembrance of posterity. However
her passionate and erratic youth may have captivated our
grandfathers, George Sand in the mellow autumn of her life is for us
at her most attractive phase. The storms and anguish and hazardous
adventures that attended the defiant unfolding of her spirit are
over. In her final retreat at Nohant, surrounded by her affectionate
children and grandchildren, diligently writing, botanizing, bathing
in her little river, visited by her friends and undistracted by the
fiery lovers of the old time, she shows an unguessed wealth of
maternal virtue, swift, comprehending sympathy, fortitude, sunny
resignation, and a goodness of heart that has ripened into wisdom.
For Flaubert, too, though he was seventeen years her junior, the
flamboyance of youth was long since past; in 1862, when the
correspondence begins, he was firmly settled, a shy, proud, grumpy
toiling hermit of forty, in his family seat at Croisset, beginning
his seven years' labor at L'Education Sentimentale, master of his
art, hardening in his convictions, and conscious of increasing
estrangement from the spirit of his age. He, with his craving for
sympathy, and she, with her inexhaustible supply of it, meet; he
pours out his bitterness, she her consolation; and so with equal
candor of self-revelation they beautifully draw out and strengthen
each the other's characteristics, and help one another grow old.
But there is more in these letters than a satisfaction for the
biographical appetite, which, indeed, finds ITS account rather in
the earlier chapters of the correspondents' history. What impresses
us here is the banquet spread for the reflective and critical
faculties in this intercourse of natural antagonists. As M. Faguet
observes in a striking paragraph of his study of Flaubert:
"It is a curious thing, which does honor to them both, that Flaubert
and George Sand should have become loving friends towards the end of
their lives. At the beginning, Flaubert might have been looked upon
by George Sand as a furious enemy. Emma [Madame Bovary] is George
Sand's heroine with all the poetry turned into ridicule. Flaubert
seems to say in every page of his work: 'Do you want to know what is
the real Valentine, the real Indiana, the real Lelia? Here she is,
it is Emma Roualt.' 'And do you want to know what becomes of a woman
whose education has consisted in George Sand's books? Here she is,
Emma Roualt.' So that the terrible mocker of the bourgeois has
written a book which is directly inspired by the spirit of the 1840
bourgeois. Their recriminations against romanticism 'which
rehabilitates and poetises the courtesan,' against George Sand, the
Muse of Adultery, are to be found in acts and facts in Madame
Bovary."
Now, the largest interest of this correspondence depends precisely
upon the continuance, beneath an affectionate personal relationship,
of a fundamental antagonism of interests and beliefs, resolutely
maintained on both sides. George Sand, with her lifelong passion for
propaganda and reformation, labors earnestly to bring Flaubert to
her point of view, to remould him nearer to her heart's desire. He,
with a playful deference to the sex and years of his friend,
addresses her in his letters as "Dear Master." Yet in the essentials
of the conflict, though she never gives over her effort, he never
budges a jot; he has taken his ground, and in his last unfinished
work, Bouvard and Pecuchet, he dies stubbornly fortifying his
position. To the last she speaks from a temperament lyrical,
sanguine, imaginative, optimistic and sympathetic; he from a
temperament dramatic, melancholy, observing, cynical, and satirical.
She insists upon natural goodness; he, upon innate depravity. She
urges her faith in social regeneration; he vents his splenetic
contempt for the mob. Through all the successive shocks of
disillusioning experience, she expects the renovation of humanity by
some religious, some semi-mystical, amelioration of its heart; he
grimly concedes the greater part of humanity to the devil, and can
see no escape for the remnant save in science and aristocratic
organization. For her, finally, the literary art is an instrument of
social salvation--it is her means of touching the world with her
ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the literary art is the
avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of existence--it is his
subtly critical condemnation of the world.
The origins of these unreconciled antipathies lie deep beneath the
personal relationship of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert; lie deep
beneath their successors, who with more or less of amenity in their
manners are still debating the same questions today. The main
currents of the nineteenth century, with fluent and refluent tides,
clash beneath the controversy; and as soon as one hears its "long
withdrawing roar," and thinks it is dying away, and is become a part
of ancient history, it begins again, and will be heard, no doubt, by
the last man as a solemn accompaniment to his final contention with
his last adversary.
George Sand was, on the whole, a natural and filial daughter of the
French Revolution. The royal blood which she received from her
father's line mingled in her veins with that of the Parisian
milliner, her mother, and predestined her for a leveller by
preparing in her an instinctive ground of revolt against all those
inherited prejudices which divided the families of her parents. As a
young girl wildly romping with the peasant children at Nohant she
discovered a joy in untrammeled rural life which was only to
increase with years. At the proper age for beginning to fashion a
conventional young lady, the hoyden was put in a convent, where she
underwent some exalting religious experiences; and in 1822 she was
assigned to her place in the "established social order" by her
marriage at seventeen to M. Dudevant. After a few years of rather
humdrum domestic life in the country, she became aware that this
gentleman, her husband, was behaving as we used to be taught that
all French husbands ultimately behave; he was, in fact, turning from
her to her maids. The young couple had never been strongly united--
the impetuous dreamy girl and her coarse hunting mate; and they had
grown wide apart. She should, of course, have adjusted herself
quietly to the altered situation and have kept up appearances. But
this young wife had gradually become an "intellectual"; she had been
reading philosophy and poetry; she was saturated with the writings
of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of Byron. None of the spiritual
masters of her generation counselled acquiescence in servitude or
silence in misery. Every eloquent tongue of the time-spirit urged
self-expression and revolt. And she, obedient to the deepest
impulses of her blood and her time, revolted.
At the period when Madame Dudevant withdrew her neck from the
conjugal yoke and plunged into her literary career in Paris, the
doctrine that men are created for freedom, equality and fraternity
was already somewhat hackneyed. She, with an impetus from her own
private fortunes, was to give the doctrine a recrudescence of
interest by resolutely applying it to the status of women. We cannot
follow her in detail from the point where she abandons the domestic
sewing-basket to reappear smoking black cigars in the Latin Quarter.
We find her, at about 1831, entering into competition with the
brilliant literary generation of Balzac, Hugo, Alfred de Musset,
Merimee, Stendhal, and Sainte-Beuve. To signalize her equality with
her brothers in talent, she adopts male attire: "I had a sentry-box
coat made, of rough grey cloth, with trousers and waist-coat to
match. With a grey hat and a huge cravat of woolen material, I
looked exactly like a first-year student." In the freedom of this
rather unalluring garb she entered into relations Platonic,
fraternal, or tempestuously passionate with perhaps the most
distinguished series of friends and lovers that ever fluttered about
one flame. There was Aurelien de Seze; Jules Sandeau, her first
collaborator, who "reconciled her to life" and gave her a nom de
guerre; the inscrutable Merimee, who made no one happy; Musset--an
encounter from which both tiger-moths escaped with singed wings; the
odd transitional figure of Pagello; Michel Euraed; Liszt; Chopin,
whom she loved and nursed for eight years; her master Lamennais; her
master Pierre Leroux; her father-confessor Sainte-Beuve; and Gustave
Flaubert, the querulous friend of her last decade.
As we have compressed the long and complex story of her personal
relationships, so we must compress the intimately related history of
her works and her ideas. When under the inspiration of Rousseau, the
emancipated George Sand began to write, her purposes were but
vaguely defined. She conceived of life as primarily an opportunity
for unlimited self-expansion, and of literature as an opportunity
for unrestricted self-expression. "Nevertheless," she declares, "my
instincts have formed, without my privity, the theory I am about to
set down,--a theory which I have generally followed unconsciously.
... According to this theory, the novel is as much a work of poetry
as of analysis. It demands true situations, and characters not only
true but real, grouped about a type intended to epitomize the
sentiment or the main conceptions of the book. This type generally
represents the passion of love, since almost all novels are love-
stories. According to this theory (and it is here that it begins)
the writer must idealize this love, and consequently this type,--and
must not fear to attribute to it all the powers to which he inwardly
aspires, or all the sorrows whose pangs he has observed or felt.
This type must in no wise, however, become degraded by the
vicissitude of events; it must either die or triumph."
In 1831, when her pen began its fluent course through the lyrical
works of her first period--Indiana, Valentine, Lelia, Jacques, and
the rest--we conceive George Sand's culture, temper, and point of
view to have been fairly comparable with those of the young Shelley
when, fifteen years earlier, he with Mary Godwin joined Byron and
Jane Clairmont in Switzerland--young revoltes, all of them,
nourished on eighteenth century revolutionary philosophy and Gothic
novels. Both these eighteenth century currents meet in the work of
the new romantic group in England and in France. The innermost
origin of the early long poems of Shelley and the early works of
George Sand is in personal passion, in the commotion of a romantic
spirit beating its wings against the cage of custom and circumstance
and institutions. The external form of the plot, whatever is
fantastic and wilful in its setting and its adventures, is due to
the school of Ann Radcliffe. But the quality in Shelley and in
George Sand which bewitched even the austere Matthew Arnold in his
green and salad days is the poetising of that liberative eighteenth
century philosophy into "beautiful idealisms" of a love emancipated
from human limitations, a love exalted to the height of its gamut by
the influences of nature, triumphantly seeking its own or shattered
in magnificent despair. In her novels of the first period, George
Sand takes her Byronic revenge upon M. Dudevant. In Indiana and its
immediate successors, consciously or unconsciously, she declares to
the world what a beautiful soul M. Dudevant condemned to sewing on
buttons; in Jacques she paints the man who might fitly have matched
her spirit; and by the entire series, which now impresses us as
fantastic in sentiment no less than in plot, she won her early
reputation as the apologist for free love, the adversary of
marriage.
In her middle period--say from 1838 to 1848--of which The Miller of
Aginbault, Consuelo, and The Countess of Rudolstadt are
representative works, there is a marked subsidence of her personal
emotion, and, in compensation, a rising tide of humanitarian
enthusiasm. Gradually satiated with erotic passion, gradually
convinced that it is rather a mischief-maker than a reconstructive
force in a decrepit society, she is groping, indeed, between her
successive liaisons for an elusive felicity, for a larger mission
than inspiring Musset's Alexandrines or Chopin's nocturnes. It is
somewhat amusing, and at the same time indicative of her vague but
deep-seated moral yearnings, to find her writing rebukingly to
Sainte-Beuve, as early as 1834, apropos of his epicurean Volupte:
"Let the rest do as they like; but you, dear friend, you must
produce a book which will change and better mankind, do you see? You
can, and therefore should. Oh, if poor I could do it! I should lift
my head again and my heart would no longer be broken; but in vain I
seek a religion: Shall it be God, shall it be love, friendship, the
public welfare? Alas, it seems to me that my soul is framed to
receive all these impressions, without one effacing another ... Who
shall paint justice as it should, as it may, be in our modern
society?"
To Sainte-Beuve, himself an unscathed intellectual Odysseus, she
declares herself greatly indebted intellectually; but on the whole
his influence seems to have been tranquillizing. The material for
the radical program, economic, political, and religious, which, like
a spiritual ancestor of H. G. Wells, she eagerly sought to
popularize by the novels of her middle years, was supplied mainly by
Saint-Simon, Lamennais, and Leroux. Her new "religion of humanity,"
a kind of theosophical socialism, is too fantastically garbed to
charm the sober spirits of our age. And yet from the ruins of that
time and from the emotional extravagance of books grown tedious,
which she has left behind her, George Sand emerges for us with one
radiant perception which must be included in whatever religion
animates a democratic society: "Everyone must be happy, so that the
happiness of a few may not be criminal and cursed by God."
One of George Sand's French critics, M. Caro, a member of the
Academy, who deals somewhat austerely with her religiose enthusiasms
and with her Utopian projects for social reformation, remarks
gravely and not without tenderness:
"The one thing needful to this soul, so strong, so rich in
enthusiasm, is a humble moral quality that she disdains, and when
she has occasion to speak of it, even slanders,--namely resignation.
This is not, as she seems to think, the sluggish virtue of base
souls, who, in their superstitious servitude to force, hasten to
crouch beneath every yoke. That is a false and degrading
resignation; genuine resignation grows out of the conception of the
universal order, weighed against which individual sufferings,
without ceasing to be a ground of merit, cease to constitute a right
of revolt. ... Resignation, in the true, the philosophical, the
Christian sense, is a manly acceptance of moral law and also of the
laws essential to the social order; it is a free adherence to order,
a sacrifice approved by reason of a part of one's private good and
of one's personal freedom, not to might nor to the tyranny of a
human caprice, but to the exigencies of the common weal, which
subsists only by the concord of individual liberty with obedient
passions."
Well, resigned in the sense of defeated, George Sand never became;
nor did she, perhaps, ever wholly acquiesce in that scheme of things
which M. Caro impressively designates as "the universal order." Yet
with age, the abandonment of many distractions, the retreat to
Nohant, the consolations of nature, and her occupation with tales of
pastoral life, beginning with La Mare au Diable, there develops
within her, there diffuses itself around her, there appears in her
work a charm like that which falls upon green fields from the level
rays of the evening sun after a day of storms. It is not the charm,
precisely, of resignation; it is the charm of serenity--the serenity
of an old revolutionist who no longer expects victory in the morning
yet is secure in her confidence of a final triumph, and still more
secure in the goodness of her cause. "A hundred times in life," she
declares, "the good that one does seems to serve no immediate
purpose; yet it maintains in one way and another the tradition of
well wishing and well doing, without which all would perish." At the
outset of her career we compared her with Shelley. In her last
phase, she reminds us rather of the authors of Far from the Madding
Crowd and The Mill on the Floss, and of Wordsworth, once, too, a
torch of revolution, turning to his Michaels and his leech-gatherers
and his Peter Bells. Her exquisite pictures of pastoral life are
idealizations of it; her representations of the peasant are not
corroborated by Zola's; to the last she approaches the shield of
human nature from the golden side. But for herself at least she has
found a real secret of happiness in country life, tranquil work, and
a right direction given to her own heart and conscience.
It is at about this point in her spiritual development that she
turns towards Gustave Flaubert--perhaps a little suspiciously at
first, yet resolved from the first, according to her natural
instinct and her now fixed principles, to stimulate by believing in
his admirable qualities. Writing from Nohant in 1866 to him at
Croisset, she epitomises her distinction as a woman and as an author
in this playful sally: "Sainte-Beuve, who loves you nevertheless,
pretends that you are dreadfully vicious. But perhaps he sees with
eyes a bit dirty, like that learned botanist who pretends that the
germander is of a DIRTY yellow. The observation was so false that I
could not help writing on the margin of his book: 'IT IS YOU, WHOSE
EYES ARE DIRTY.'"
We have spoken of George Sand as a faithful daughter of the French
Revolution; and by way of contrast we may speak of Flaubert as a
disgruntled son of the Second Empire. Between his literary advent
and hers there is an interval of a generation, during which the
proud expansive spirit and the grandiose aspirations imparted to the
nation by the first Napoleon dwindled to a spirit of mediocrity and
bourgeois smugness under a Napoleon who had inherited nothing great
of his predecessor but his name. This change in the time-spirit may
help to explain the most significant difference between Flaubert and
George Sand. He inherited the tastes and imagination of the great
romantic generation; but he inherited none of its social and
political enthusiasm. He was disciplined by the romantic writers;
yet his reaction to the literary culture of his youth is not ethical
but aesthetic; he finds his inspiration less in Rousseau than in
Chateaubriand. He is bred to an admiration of eloquence, the poetic
phrase, the splendid picture, life in the grand style; with
increasing disgust he finds himself entering a society which, he
feels, neither understands nor values any of these things, and which
threatens their destruction. Consequently, we find him actuated as a
writer by two complementary passions--the love of splendor and the
hatred of mediocrity--two passions, of which the second sometimes
alternates with the first, sometimes inseparably fuses with it, and
ultimately almost extinguishes it.
The son of an eminent surgeon of Rouen, Gustave Flaubert may have
acquired from his father something of that scientific precision of
observation and that cutting accuracy of expression, by which he
gained his place at the head of modern French realism and won the
discipleship of the Goncourts, Daudet, Zola, and Maupassant and the
applause of such connoisseurs of technique as Walter Pater and Henry
James. From his mother's Norman ancestry he inherited the physique
of a giant, tainted with epilepsy; a Viking countenance, strong-
featured with leonine moustaches; and a barbaric temper, habitually
somewhat lethargic but irritable, and, when roused, violent and
intolerant of opposition. He had a private education at Rouen, with
wide desultory reading; went to Paris, which he hated, to study law,
which he also hated; frequented the theatres and studios; travelled
in Corsica, the Pyrenees, and the East, which he adored, seeing
Egypt, Palestine, Constantinople, and Greece; and he had one, and
only one, important love-affair, extending from 1846 to 1854--that
with Mme. Louise Colet, a woman of letters, whose difficult
relations with Flaubert are sympathetically touched upon in Pater's
celebrated essay on "Style." When by the death of his father, in
1845, he succeeded to the family-seat at Croisset, near Rouen, he
settled himself in a studious solitude to the pursuit of letters,
which he followed for thirty-four years with anguish of spirit and
dogged persistence.
Flaubert probably loved glory as much as any man; but he desired to
receive it only on his own terms. He profoundly appeals to writers
endowed with "the artistic conscience" as "the martyr of literary
style." In morals something of a libertine, in matters of art he
exhibited the intolerance of weakness in others and the remorseless
self-examination and self-torment commonly attributed to the
Puritan. His friend Maxime Du Camp, who tried to bring him out and
teach him the arts of popularity, he rebuffed with deliberate
insult. He developed an aversion to any interruption of his work,
and such tension and excitability of nerves that he shunned a day's
outing or a chat with an old companion, lest it distract him for a
month afterward. His mistress he seems to have estranged by an ill-
concealed preference to her of his exacting Muse. To illustrate his
"monkish" consecration to his craft we cannot do better than
reproduce a passage, quoted by Pater, from his letters to Madame
Colet:
"I must scold you for one thing, which shocks, scandalises me, the
small concern, namely, you show for art just now. As regards glory
be it so--there I approve. But for art!--the one thing in life that
is good and real--can you compare with it an earthly love?--prefer
the adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty?
Well! I tell you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the
one thing I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with the
beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable, what
not?
"The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and
count everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all
beside when it is established on a large basis. Work! God wills it.
That, it seems to me, is clear.
"I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I
repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in
one's head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs
which are forever returning, and cause you pain, you love them so
much. I observe that I no longer laugh much, and am no longer
depressed. I am ripe, you talk of my serenity, and envy me. It may
well surprise you. Sick, irritated, the prey a thousand times a day
of cruel pain, I continue my labour like a true working-man, who,
with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his
anvil, never troubling himself whether it rains or blows, for hail
or thunder. I was not like that formerly."
The half-dozen works which Flaubert beat out on his "anvil," with an
average expenditure of half-a-dozen years to each, were composed on
a theory of which the prime distinguishing feature was the great
doctrine of "impersonality." George Sand's fluent improvisations
ordinarily originated, as we have noted, in an impulse of her
lyrical idealism; she began with an aspiration of her heart, to
execute which she invented characters and plot so that she is always
on the inside of her story. According to Flaubert's theory, the
novel should originate in a desire to present a certain segment of
observed life. The author is to take and rigorously maintain a
position outside his work. The organ with which he collects his
materials is not his heart but his eyes, supplemented by the other
senses. Life, so far as the scientific observer can be sure of it,
and so far as the artist can control it for representation, is a
picture or series of pictures, a dramatic scene or a concatenation
of dramatic scenes. Let the novelist first, therefore, with
scrupulous fidelity and with minute regard for the possible
significance of every observable detail, fill his notebooks, amass
his materials, master his subject. After Flaubert, a first-rate
sociological investigator is three-fourths of a novelist. The rest
of the task is to arrange and set forth these facts so that they
shall tell the truth about life impressively, in scene and dramatic
spectacle, the meaning of which shall be implicit in the plot and
shall reach the reader's consciousness through his senses.
Critics have spent much time in discussing the conflict of
"romantic" and "realistic" tendencies in Flaubert's works. And it is
obviously easy, so far as subject-matter is concerned, to group his
books in two divisions: on the one hand, The Temptation of St.
Anthony, Salammbo, and two of the Trois Contes; on the other hand,
Madame Bovary, L'Education Sentimentale, and the incomplete Bouvard
and Pecuchet. We may call the tales in the first group romantic,
because the subject-matter is remote in time and place, and because
in them Flaubert indulges his passion for splendor--for oriental
scenery, for barbaric characters, the pomp of savage war and more
savage religion, events strange, terrible, atrocious. We may call
the stories in the other group realistic, because the subject-matter
is contemporary life in Paris and the provinces, and because in them
Flaubert indulges his hatred for mediocrity--for the humdrum
existence of the country doctor, the apothecary, the insipid clerk,
the vapid sentimental woman, and the charlatans of science. But as a
matter of fact, ALL his books are essentially constructed on the
same theory: all are just as "realistic" as Flaubert could make
them.
Henry James called Madame Bovary a brilliantly successful
application of Flaubert's theory; he pronounced L'Education
Sentimentale "elaborately and massively dreary"; and he briefly
dismissed Salammbo as an accomplished work of erudition. Salammbo is
indeed a work of erudition; years were spent in getting up its
archaeological details. But Madame Bovary is also a work of
erudition, and Bouvard and Pecuchet is a work of enormous erudition;
a thousand volumes were read for the notes of the first volume and
Flaubert is said to have killed himself by the labor of his
unfinished investigations. There is no important distinction to be
made between the method or the thoroughness with which he collected
his facts in the one case or the other; and the story of the war of
the mercenaries against the Carthaginians is evolved with the same
alternation of picture and dramatic spectacle and the same hard
merciless externality that distinguish the evolution of Emma
Bovary's history.
We may go still farther than that towards wiping out the distinction
between Flaubert's "romantic" and his "realistic" works; and by the
same stroke what is illusory in the pretensions of the realists,
namely, their aspiration to an "impersonal art."
If we were seeking to prove that an author can put NOTHING BUT
HIMSELF into his art, we should ask for no more impressive
illustions than precisely, Madame Bovary and Salammbo. These two
masterpieces disclose to reflection, no less patently than the works
of George Sand, their purpose and their meaning. And that purpose
and meaning are not a whit less personal to Flaubert than the
purpose and meaning of Indiana, let us say, are personal to George
Sand. The "meaning" of Madame Bovary and Salammbo is, broadly
speaking, Flaubert's sense of the significance--or, rather, of the
insignificance--of human life; and the "purpose" of the books is to
express it. The most lyrical of idealists can do no more to reveal
herself.
The demonstration afforded by a comparison of Salammbo and Madame
Bovary is particularly striking because the subject-matters are
superficially so unlike. But take any characteristic series of
pictures or incidents from Salammbo: take the passing of the
children through the fire to Moloch, or the description of the
leprous Hanno, or the physical surrender of the priestess to her
country's enemy, or the following picture of the crucified lion:
"They were marching through a wide defile, hedged in by two chains
of reddish hillocks, when a nauseous odor struck their nostrils, and
they believed that they saw something extraordinary at the top of a
carob tree; a lion's head stood up above the foliage.
"Running towards it, they found a lion attached to a cross by its
four limbs, like a criminal; his enormous muzzle hung to his breast,
and his forepaws, half concealed beneath the abundance of his mane,
were widely spread apart, like a bird's wings in flight; under the
tightly drawn skin, his ribs severally protruded and his hind legs
were nailed together, but were slightly drawn up; black blood had
trickled through the hairs, and collected in stalactites at the end
of his tail, which hung straight down the length of the cross. The
soldiers crowded around the beast, diverting themselves by calling
him 'Consul!' and 'Citizen of Rome!' and threw pebbles into his eyes
to scatter the swarming gnats."
And now take any characteristic series of pictures or incidents from
Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the
club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape;
take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to
Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself for three thousand
francs to Rodolphe; or the following bit, only a bit, from the
detailed account of the heroine's last hours, after the arsenical
poisoning:
"Emma's head was turned towards her right shoulder, the corner of
her mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower
part of her face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her
hands; a kind of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes
were beginning to disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a
thin web, as if spiders had spun it over. The sheet sunk in from her
breast to her knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes, and it
seemed to Charles that infinite masses, an enormous load, were
weighing upon her.
"The church clock struck two. They could hear the loud murmur of the
river flowing in the darkness at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur
Bournisien from time to time blew his nose noisily and Homais' pen
was scratching over the paper."
In these two detached pictures--the one from a so-called "romantic,"
the other from a so-called "realistic" book--one readily observes
the likeness in the subjects, which are of a ghastly repulsiveness;
the same minuteness of observation--e.g., the lion's hind legs
"slightly drawn up," the woman's thumbs "bent into the palms of her
hands"; the same careful notation of effect on the several senses;
the same rhetorical heightening--e.g., the "stalactites at the end
of his tail," the web in the woman's eyes "as if spiders had spun it
over"; and finally, that celebrated detachment, that air as of a
medical examiner, recording the results of an autopsy. What can we
know of such an author? All, or nearly all, that he knew of himself,
provided we will searchingly ask ourselves what sort of mind is
steadily attracted to the painting of such pictures, to the
representation of such incidents, and what sort of mind expresses a
lifetime of brooding on the significance of life in two such books
as Madame Bovary and Salammbo.
At its first appearance, Madame Bovary was prosecuted, though
unsuccessfully, as offensive to public morals. In derision of this
famous prosecution, Henry James with studious jauntiness, asserts
that in the heat of his first admiration he thought what an
excellent moral tract it would make. "It may be very seriously
maintained," he continues, "that M. Flaubert's masterpiece is the
pearl of 'Sunday reading.'" As a work of fiction and recreation the
book lacks, in his opinion, one quite indispensable quality: it
lacks charm. Well, there are momentary flashes of beauty and grace,
dazzling bits of color, haunting melancholy cadences in every
chapter of Flaubert; but a charming book he never wrote. A total
impression of charm he never gave--he never could give; because his
total impression of life was not charming but atrocious. It is
perhaps an accident, as has been suggested, that one can so readily
employ Madame Bovary to illustrate that text on the "wages of sin."
Emma, to be sure, goes down the easy and alluring path to disgrace
and ruin. But that is only an incident in the wider meaning of
Flaubert's fiction, a meaning more amply expressed in Salammbo,
where not one foolish woman alone but thousands on thousands of men,
women, and children, mingled with charging elephants and vipers,
flounder and fight in indescribable welters of blood and filth, and
go down to rot in a common pit. If I read Flaubert's meaning right,
all human history is there; you may show it by painting on broad
canvas a Carthaginian battle-scene or by photographing the details
of a modern bedroom: a brief brightness, night and the odor of
carrion, a crucified lion, a dying woman, the jeering of ribald
mercenaries, the cackle of M. Homais. It is all one. If Flaubert
deserved prosecution, it was not for making vice attractive, but for
expressing with invasive energy that personal and desperately
pessimistic conception of life by which he was almost overwhelmed.
That a bad physical regimen, bad habits of work in excessive
quantities, and the solitude of his existence were contributory to
Flaubert's melancholy, his exacerbated egotism, and his pessimism is
sufficiently obvious in the letters. This Norman giant with his
aching head buried all day long in his arms, groping in anguish for
a phrase, has naturally a kindly disposition towards various
individuals of his species--is even capable of great generosity; but
as he admits with a truth and pathos, deeply appealing to the
maternal sympathies of his correspondent, he has no talent for
living. He has never been able, like richer and more resourceful
souls, to reconcile being a man with being an author. He has made
his choice; he has renounced the cheerful sanities of the world:
"I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being;
and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a
single day nor any event whatsoever. I see my mother and my niece on
Sundays, and that is all. My only company consists of a band of rats
in the garret, which make an infernal racket above my head, when the
water does not roar or the wind blow. The nights are black as ink,
and a silence surrounds me comparable to that of the desert.
Sensitiveness is increased immeasurably in such a setting. I have
palpitations of the heart for nothing.
"All that results from our charming profession. That is what it
means to torment the soul and the body. But perhaps this torment is
our proper lot here below."
To George Sand, who wrote as naturally as she breathed and almost as
easily, seclusion and torment were by no means the necessary
conditions of literary activity. Enormously productive, with a
hundred books to his half-a-dozen, she has never dedicated and
consecrated herself to her profession but has lived heartily and a
bit recklessly from day to day, spending herself in many directions
freely, gaily, extravagantly. Now that she has definitely said
farewell to her youth, she finds that she is twenty years younger;
and now that she is, in a sense, dissipating her personality and
living in the lives of others, she finds that she is happier than
ever before. "It can't be imperative to work so painfully"--such is
the burden of her earlier counsels to Flaubert; "spare yourself a
little, take some exercise, relax the tendons of your mind, indulge
a little the physical man. Live a little as I do; and you will take
your fatigues and illnesses and occasional dolours and dumps as
incidents of the day's work and not magnify them into the
mountainous overshadowing calamities from which you deduce your
philosophy of universal misery." No advice could have been more
wholesome or more timely. And with what pictures of her own busy
felicity she reenforces her advice! I shall produce three of them
here in order to emphasize that precious thing which George Sand
loved to impart, and which she had the gift of imparting, namely,
joy, the spontaneous joyousness of her own nature. The first passage
is from a letter of June 14, 1867:
"I am a little remorseful to take whole days from your work, I who
am never bored with loafing, and whom you could leave for whole
hours under a tree, or before two lighted logs, with the assurance
that I should find there something interesting. I know so well how
to live OUTSIDE OF MYSELF. It hasn't always been like that. I also
was young and subject to indignations. It is over! Since I have
dipped into real nature, I have found there an order, a system, a
calmness of cycles which is lacking in mankind, but which man can,
up to a certain point, assimilate when he is not too directly at
odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties
return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup
of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against
the ephemeral and relative truth."
The second passage is of June 21:
"I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the
carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a
thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the
waters. I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I
love everything that is around me, no matter where I am."
The last passage gives a glimpse of the seventeenth of January,
1869, a typical day in Nohant:
"The individual named George Sand is well: he is enjoying the
marvellous winter which reigns in Berry, gathering flowers, noting
interesting botanical anomalies, making dresses and mantles for his
daughter-in-law, costumes for the marionettes, cutting out scenery,
dressing dolls, reading music, but above all spending hours with the
little Aurore, who is a marvellous child. There is not a more
tranquil or a happier individual in his domestic life than this old
troubadour retired from business, who sings from time to time his
little song to the moon, without caring much whether he sings well
or ill, provided he sings the motif that runs in his head, and who,
the rest of the time, idles deliciously.... This pale character has
the great pleasure of loving you with all his heart, and of not
passing a day without thinking of the other old troubadour, confined
in his solitude of a frenzied artist, disdainful of all the
pleasures of the world."
Flaubert did "exercise" a little--once or twice--in compliance with
the injunctions of his "dear master"; but he rather resented the
implication that his pessimism was personal, that it had any
particular connection with his peculiar temperament or habits. He
wished to think of himself as a stoic, quite indifferent about his
"carcase." His briefer black moods he might acknowledge had
transitory causes. But his general and abiding conceptions of
humanity were the result of dispassionate reflections. "You think,"
he cries in half-sportive pique, "that because I pass my life trying
to make harmonious phrases, in avoiding assonances, that I too have
not my little judgments on the things of this world? Alas! Yes! and
moreover I shall burst, enraged at not expressing them." And later:
"Yes, I am susceptible to disinterested angers, and I love you all
the more for loving me for that. Stupidity and injustice make me
roar,--and I howl in my corner against a lot of things 'that do not
concern me.'" "On the day that I am no longer in a rage, I shall
fall flat as the marionette from which one withdraws the support of
the stick."
So far as Flaubert's pessimism has an intellectual basis, it rests
upon his researches in human history. For Salammbo and The
Temptation of St. Anthony he ransacked ancient literature, devoured
religions and mythologies, and saturated himself in the works of the
Church Fathers. In order to get up the background of his Education
Sentimentale he studied the Revolution of 1848 and its roots in the
Revolution of 1789. He found, shall we say? what he was looking for-
-inexhaustible proofs of the cruelty and stupidity of men. After
"gulping" down the six volumes of Buchez and Roux, he declares: "The
clearest thing I got out of them is an immense disgust for the
French.... Not a liberal idea which has not been unpopular, not a
just thing that has not caused scandal, not a great man who has not
been mobbed or knifed. 'The history of the human mind is the history
of human folly,' as says M. Voltaire. ... Neo-Catholicism on the one
hand, and Socialism on the other, have stultified France." In
another letter of the same Period and similar provocation: "However
much you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their
bellies, and even gilding their stable, they will remain brutes, no
matter what one says. All the advance that one can hope for, is to
make the brute a little less wicked. But as for elevating the ideas
of the mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human
conception of God, I have my doubts."
In addition to the charges of violence and cruelty, which he brought
against all antiquity as well as against modern times, much in the
fashion of Swift or the older Mark Twain, Flaubert nursed four grave
causes of indignation, made four major charges of folly against
modern "Christian" civilization. In religion, we have substituted
for Justice the doctrine of Grace. In our sociological
considerations we act no longer with discrimination but upon a
principle of universal sympathy. In the field of art and literature
we have abandoned criticism and research for the Beautiful in favor
of universal puffery. In politics we have nullified intelligence and
renounced leadership to embrace universal suffrage, which is the
last disgrace of the human spirit.
It must be acknowledged that Flaubert's arraignment of modern
society possesses the characteristics commended by the late Barett
Wendell: it is marked in a high degree by "unity, mass, and
coherence." It must be admitted also that George Sand possessed in a
high degree the Pauline virtue of being "not easily provoked," or
she never could have endured so patiently, so sweetly, Flaubert's
reiterated and increasingly ferocious assaults upon her own master
passion, her ruling principle. George Sand was one whose entire life
signally attested the power of a "saving grace," resident in the
creative and recuperative energies of nature, resident in the
magical, the miracle-working, powers of the human heart, the powers
of love and sympathy. She was a modern spiritual adventurer who had
escaped unscathed from all the anathemas of the old theology; and
she abounded, like St. Francis, in her sense of the new dispensation
and in her benedictive exuberance towards all the creatures of God,
including not merely sun, moon, and stars and her sister the lamb
but also her brother the wolf. On this principle she loves
Flaubert!--and archly asserts her arch-heresy in his teeth. He
complains that her fundamental defect is that she doesn't know how
to "hate." She replies, with a point that seems never really to have
pierced his thick casing of masculine egotism:
"Artists are spoiled children and the best are great egotists. You
say that I love them too well; I like them as I like the woods and
the fields, everything, everyone that I know a little and that I
study continually. I make my life in the midst of all that, and as I
like my life, I like all that nourishes it and renews it. They do me
a lot of ill turns which I see, but which I no longer feel. I know
that there are thorns in the hedges, but that does not prevent me
from putting out my hands and finding flowers there. If all are not
beautiful, all are interesting. The day you took me to the Abbey of
Saint-Georges I found the scrofularia borealis, a very rare plant in
France. I was enchanted; there was much----in the neighborhood where
I gathered it. Such is life!
"And if one does not take life like that, one cannot take it in any
way, and then how can one endure it? I find it amusing and
interesting, and since I accept EVERYTHING, I am so much happier and
more enthusiastic when I meet the beautiful and the good. If I did
not have a great knowledge of the species, I should not have quickly
understood you, or known you or loved you."
Two years later the principles and tempers of both these
philosophers were put to their severest trial. In 1870, George Sand
had opportunity to apply her doctrine of universal acceptance to the
Prussians in Paris. Flaubert had opportunity to welcome scientific
organization in the Prussian occupation of his own home at Croisset.
The first reaction of both was a quite simple consternation and
rage, in which Flaubert cries, "The hopeless barbarism of humanity
fills me with a black melancholy," and George Sand, for the moment
assenting, rejoins: "Men are ferocious and conceited brutes." As the
war thickens around him and the wakened militancy of his compatriots
presses him hard, Flaubert becomes more and more depressed; he
forebodes a general collapse of civilization--before the century
passes, a conflict of races, "in which several millions of men kill
one another in one engagement." With the curiously vengeful
satisfaction which mortals take in their own misery when it offers
occasion to cry "I told you so," he exclaims: "Behold then, the
NATURAL MAN. Make theories now! Boast the progress, the
enlightenment and the good sense of the masses, and the gentleness
of the French people! I assure you that anyone here who ventured to
preach peace would get himself murdered."
George Sand in her fields at Nohant--not "above" but a little aside
from the conflict--turns instinctively to her peasant doggedly,
placidly, sticking at his plow; turns to her peasant with a kind of
intuition that he is a symbol of faith, that he holds the keys to a
consolation, which the rest of us blindly grope for: "He is
imbecile, people say; no, he is a child in prosperity, a man in
disaster, more of a man than we who complain; he says nothing, and
while people are killing, he is sowing, repairing continually on one
side what they are destroying on the other." Flaubert, who thinks
that he has no "illusions" about peasants or the "average man,"
brings forward his own specific of a quite different nature: "Do you
think that if France, instead of being governed on the whole by the
crowd, were in the power of the mandarins, we should be where we are
now? If, instead of having wished to enlighten the lower classes, we
had busied ourselves with instructing the higher, we should not have
seen M. de Keratry proposing the pillage of the duchy of Baden."
In the great war of our own time with the same foes, our
professional advocates of "preparedness," our cheerful chemists, our
scientific "intellectuals"--all our materialistic thinkers hard-
shell and soft-shell,--took the position of Flaubert, just
presented; reproached us bitterly for our slack, sentimental
pacificism; and urged us with all speed to emulate the scientific
spirit of our enemy. There is nothing more instructive in this
correspondence than to observe how this last fond illusion falls
away from Flaubert under the impact of an experience which
demonstrated to his tortured senses the truth of the old Rabelaisian
utterance, that "science without conscience is the ruin of the
soul."
"What use, pray," he cries in the last disillusion, "is science,
since this people abounding in scholars commits abominations worthy
of the Huns and worse than theirs, because they are systematic,
cold-blooded, voluntary, and have for an excuse, neither passion nor
hunger?" And a few months later, he is still in mad anguish of
desolation:
"I had some illusions! What barbarity! What a slump! I am wrathful
at my contemporaries for having given me the feelings of a brute of
the twelfth century! I'm stifling in gall! These officers who break
mirrors with white gloves on, who know Sanskrit, and who fling
themselves on the champagne; who steal your watch and then send you
their visiting card, this war for money, these civilized savages
give me more horror than cannibals. And all the world is going to
imitate them, is going to be a soldier! Russia has now four millions
of them. All Europe will wear a uniform. If we take our revenge, it
will be ferocious in the last degree; and, mark my word, we are
going to think only of that, of avenging ourselves on Germany."
Under the imminence of the siege of Paris, Flaubert had drilled men,
with an out-flashing of the savage fighting spirit of his ancestors,
of which he was more than half ashamed. But at heart he is more
dismayed, more demoralized, more thoroughly prostrated than George
Sand. He has not fortitude actually to face the degree of depravity
which he has always imputed to the human race, the baseness with
which his imagination has long been easily and cynically familiar.
As if his pessimism had been only a literary pigment, a resource of
the studio, he shudders to find Paris painted in his own ebony
colors, and his own purely "artistic" hatred of the bourgeois,
translated into a principle of action, expressing itself in the
horrors of the Commune, with half the population trying to strangle
the other half. Hatred, after all, contempt and hatred, are not
quite the most felicitous watchwords for the use of human society.
Like one whose cruel jest has been taken more seriously than he had
intended and has been turned upon his own head, Flaubert considers
flight: "I cherish the following dream: of going to live in the sun
in a tranquil country." As a substitute for a physical retreat, he
buries himself in a study of Buddhism, and so gradually returns to
the pride of his intellectual isolation. As the tumult in his senses
subsides, he even ventures to offer to George Sand the anodyne of
his old philosophical despair: "Why are you so sad? Humanity offers
nothing new. Its irremediable misery has filled me with sadness ever
since my youth. And in addition I now have no disillusions. I
believe that the crowd, the common herd will always be hateful. The
only important thing is a little group of minds always the same--
which passes the torch from one to another."
There we must leave Flaubert, the thinker. He never passes beyond
that point in his vision of reconstruction: a "legitimate
aristocracy" established in contempt of the average man--with the
Academy of Sciences displacing the Pope.
George Sand, amid these devastating external events, is beginning to
feel the insidious siege of years. She can no longer rally her
spiritual forces with the "bright speed" that she had in the old
days. The fountain of her faith, which has never yet failed of
renewal, fills more slowly. For weeks she broods in silence, fearing
to augment her friend's dismay with more of her own, fearing to
resume a debate in which her cause may be better than her arguments
and in which depression of her physical energy may diminish her
power to put up a spirited defence before the really indomitable
"last ditch" of her position. When Flaubert himself makes a
momentary gesture towards the white flag, and talks of retreat, she
seizes the opportunity for a short scornful sally. "Go to live in
the sun in a tranquil country! Where? What country is going to be
tranquil in this struggle of barbarity against civilization, a
struggle which is going to be universal?" A month later she gives
him fair warning that she has no intention of acknowledging final
defeat: "For me, the ignoble experiment that Paris is attempting or
is undergoing, proves nothing against the laws of the eternal
progression of men and things, and, if I have gained any principles
in my mind, good or bad, they are neither shattered nor changed by
it. For a long time I have accepted patience as one accepts the sort
of weather there is, the length of winter, old age, lack of success
in all its forms." But Flaubert, thinking that he has detected in
her public utterances a decisive change of front, privately urges
her in a finely figurative passage of a letter which denounces
modern republicanism, universal suffrage, compulsory education, and
the press--Flaubert urges her to come out openly in renunciation of
her faith in humanity and her popular progressivistic doctrines. I
must quote a few lines of his attempt at seduction:
"Ah, dear good master, if you could only hate! That is what you
lack, hate. In spite of your great Sphinx eyes, you have seen the
world through a golden colour. That comes from the sun in your
heart; but so many shadows have risen that now you are not
recognizing things any more. Come now! Cry out! Thunder! Take your
great lyre and touch the brazen string: the monsters will flee.
Bedew us with drops of the blood of wounded Themis."
That summons roused the citadel, but not to surrender, not to
betrayal. The eloquent daughter of the people caught up her great
lyre--in the public Reponse a un ami of October 3, 1871. But her
fingers passed lightly over the "brazen string" to pluck again with
old power the resonant golden notes. Her reply, with its direct
retorts to Flaubert, is not perhaps a very closely reasoned
argument. In making the extract I have altered somewhat the order of
the sentences:
"And what, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that I
have been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible,
hateful, that it always has been and always will be so? ... What,
then, do you want me to do, so as to isolate myself from my kind,
from my compatriots, from the great family in whose bosom my own
family is only one ear of corn in the terrestrial field? ... But it
is impossible, and your steady reason puts up with the most
unreasonable of Utopias. In what Eden, in what fantastic Eldorado
will you hide your family, your little group of friends, your
intimate happiness, so that the lacerations of the social state and
the disasters of the country shall not reach them? ... In vain you
are prudent and withdraw, your refuge will be invaded in its turn,
and in perishing with human civilization you will be no greater a
philosopher for not having loved, than those who threw themselves
into the flood to save some debris of humanity. ... The people, you
say! The people is yourself and myself. It would be useless to deny
it. There are not two races. ... No, no, people do not isolate
themselves, the ties of blood are not broken, people do not curse or
scorn their kind. Humanity is not a vain word. Our life is composed
of love, and not to love is to cease to live."
This is, if you please, an effusion of sentiment, a chant of faith.
In a world more and more given to judging trees by their fruits, we
should err if we dismissed this sentiment, this faith, too lightly.
Flaubert may have been a better disputant; he had a talent for
writing. George Sand may have chosen her side with a truer instinct;
she had a genius for living. This faith of hers sustained well the
shocks of many long years, and this sentiment made life sweet.