XXXI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Palaiseau, 22 November, 1866
I think that it will bring me luck to say good evening to my dear
comrade before starting to work.
I am QUITE ALONE in my little house. The gardener and his family
live in the pavilion in the garden and we are the last house at the
end of the village, quite isolated in the country, which is a
ravishing oasis. Fields, woods, appletrees as in Normandy; not a
great river with its steam whistles and infernal chain; a little
stream which runs silently under the willows; a silence ... ah! it
seems to me that I am in the depths of the virgin forest: nothing
speaks except the little jet of the spring which ceaselessly piles
up diamonds in the moonlight. The flies sleeping in the corners of
my room, awaken at the warmth of my fire. They had installed
themselves there to die, they come near the lamp, they are seized
with a mad gaiety, they buzz, they jump, they laugh, they even have
faint inclinations towards love, but it is the hour of death and
paf! in the midst of the dance, they fall stiff. It is over,
farewell to dancing!
I am sad here just the same. This absolute solitude, which has
always been vacation and recreation for me, is shared now by a dead
soul [Footnote: Alexandre Manceau, the engraver, a friend of
Maurice Sand.] who has ended here, like a lamp which is going out,
yet which is here still. I do not consider him unhappy in the region
where he is dwelling; but the image that he has left near me, which
is nothing more than a reflection, seems to complain because of
being unable to speak to me any more.
Never mind! Sadness is not unhealthy. It prevents us from drying up.
And you dear friend, what are you doing at this hour? Grubbing also,
alone also; for your mother must be in Rouen. Tonight must be
beautiful down there too. Do you sometimes think of the "old
troubadour of the Inn clock, who still sings and will continue to
sing perfect love?" Well! yes, to be sure! You do not believe in
chastity, sir, that's your affair. But as for me, I say that SHE HAS
SOME GOOD POINTS, THE JADE!
And with this, I embrace you with all my heart, and I am going to,
if I can, make people talk who love each other in the old way.
You don't have to write to me when you don't feel like it. No real
friendship without ABSOLUTE liberty.
In Paris next week, and then again to Palaiseau, and after that to
Nohant. I saw Bouilhet at the Monday performance. I am CRAZY about
it. But some of us will applaud at Magny's. I had a cold sweat
there, I who am so steady, and I saw everything quite blue.
XXXII. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Tuesday
You are alone and sad down there, I am the same here.
Whence come these attacks of melancholy that overwhelm one at times?
They rise like a tide, one feels drowned, one has to flee. I lie
prostrate. I do nothing and the tide passes.
My novel is going very badly for the moment. That fact added to the
deaths of which I have heard; of Cormenin (a friend of twenty-five
years' standing), of Gavarni, and then all the rest, but that will
pass. You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head
in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find
a word. Ideas come very easily with you, incessantly, like a stream.
With me it is a tiny thread of water. Hard labor at art is necessary
for me before obtaining a waterfall. Ah! I certainly know THE
AGONIES OF STYLE.
In short I pass my life in wearing away my heart and brain, that is
the real TRUTH about your friend.
You ask him if he sometimes thinks of his "old troubadour of the
clock," most certainly! and he mourns for him. Our nocturnal talks
were very precious (there were moments when I restrained myself in
order not to KISS you like a big child).
Your ears ought to have burned last night. I dined at my brother's
with all his family. There was hardly any conversation except about
you, and every one sang your praises, unless perhaps myself, I
slandered you as much as possible, dearly beloved master.
I have reread, a propos of your last letter (and by a very natural
connection of ideas), that chapter of father Montaigne's entitled
"some lines from Virgil." What he said of chastity is precisely what
I believe. It is the effort that is fine and not the abstinence in
itself. Otherwise shouldn't one curse the flesh like the Catholics?
God knows whither that would lead. Now at the risk of repetition and
of being a Prudhomme, I insist that your young man is wrong.
[Footnote: Refers to Francis Laur.] If he is temperate at twenty
years old, he will be a cowardly roue at fifty. Everything has its
compensations. The great natures which are good, are above
everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves. One
must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate
as much as possible in all his being.
That is, I think, the real human existence.
XXXIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Palaiseau, 29 November, 1866
One need not be spiritualist nor materialist, you say, but one
should be a naturalist. That is a great question.
My Cascaret, that is what I call the little engineer, will decide it
as he thinks best. He is not stupid and he will have many ideas,
deductions and emotions before realizing the prophecy that you make.
I do not catechise him without reserve, for he is stronger than I am
on many points, and it is not Catholic spiritualism that stifles
him. But the question by itself is very serious, and hovers above
our art, above us troubadours, more or less clock-bearing or
clockshaped.
Treat it in an entirely impersonal way; for what is good for one
might be quite the reverse for another. Let us ask ourselves in
making an abstract of our tendencies or of our experiences, if the
human being can receive and seek its own full physical development
without intellectual suffering. Yes, in an ideal and rational
society that would be so. But, in that in which we live and with
which we must be content, do not enjoyment and excess go hand in
hand, and can one separate them or limit them, unless one is a sage
of the first class? And if one is a sage, farewell temptation which
is the father of real joys.
The question for us artists, is to know if abstinence strengthens us
or if it exalts us too much, which state would degenerate into
weakness,--You will say, "There is time for everything and power
enough for every dissipation of strength." Then you make a
distinction and you place limits, there is no way of doing
otherwise. Nature, you think, places them herself and prevents us
from abusing her. Ah! but no, she is not wiser than we who are also
nature.
Our excesses of work, as our excesses of pleasure, kill us
certainly, and the more we are great natures, the more we pass
beyond bounds and extend the limits of our powers.
No, I have no theories. I spend my life in asking questions and in
hearing them answered in one way or another without any victoriously
conclusive reply ever being given me. I await the brilliance of a
new state of my intellect and of my organs in a new life; for, in
this one, whosoever reflects, embraces up to their last
consequences, the limits of pro and con. It is Monsieur Plato, I
think, who asked for and thought he held the bond. He had it no more
than we. However, this bond exists, since the universe subsists
without the pro and con, which constitute it, reciprocally
destroying each other. What shall one call it in material nature?
EQUILIBRIUM, that will do, and for spiritual nature? MODERATION,
relative chastity, abstinence from excess, whatever you want, but
that is translated by EQUILIBRIUM; am I wrong, my master?
Consider it, for in our novels, what our characters do or do not do,
rests only on that. Will they or will they not possess the object of
their ardent desires? Whether it is love or glory, fortune or
pleasure, ever since they existed, they have aspired to one end. If
we have a philosophy in us, they walk right according to us; if we
have not, they walk by chance, and are too much dominated by the
events which we put in the way of their legs. Imbued by our own
ideas and ruled by fatality, they do not always appear logical.
Should we put much or little of ourselves in them? Shouldn't we put
what society puts in each one of us?
For my part, I follow my old inclination, I put myself in the skin
of my good people. People scold me for it, that makes no difference.
You, I don't really know if by method or by instinct, take another
course. What you do, you succeed in; that is why I ask you if we
differ on the question of internal struggles, if the hero ought to
have any or if he ought not to know them.
You always astonish me with your painstaking work; is it a coquetry?
It does not seem labored. What I find difficult is to choose out of
the thousand combinations of scenic action which can vary
infinitely, the clear and striking situation which is not brutal nor
forced. As for style, I attach less importance to it than you do.
The wind plays my old harp as it lists. It has its HIGH NOTES, its
LOW NOTES, its heavy notes--and its faltering notes, in the end it
is all the same to me provided the emotion comes, but I can find
nothing in myself. It is THE OTHER who sings as he likes, well or
ill, and when I try to think about it, I am afraid and tell myself
that I am nothing, nothing at all. But a great wisdom saves us; we
know how to say to ourselves, "Well, even if we are absolutely
nothing but instruments, it is still a charming state and like no
other, this feeling oneself vibrate."
Now, let the wind blow a little over your strings. I think that you
take more trouble than you need, and that you ought to let THE OTHER
do it oftener. That would go just as well and with less fatigue.
The instrument might sound weak at certain moments, but the breeze
in continuing would increase its strength. You would do afterwards
what I don't do, what I should do. You would raise the tone of the
whole picture and would cut out what is too uniformly in the light.
Vale et me ama.
XXXIV. TO GEORGE SAND
Saturday morning
Don't bother yourself about the information relative to the
journals. That will occupy little space in my book and I have time
to wait. But when you have nothing else to do, jot down on paper
whatever you can recall of '48. Then you can develop it in talking.
I don't ask you for copy of course, but to collect a little of your
personal memories.
Do you know an actress at the Odeon who plays Macduff in Macbeth?
Dugueret? She would like to have the role of Nathalie in Mont-
reveche. She will be recommended to you by Girardin, Dumas and me. I
saw her yesterday in Faustine, in which she showed talent. My
opinion is that she has intelligence and that one could profit by
her.
If your little engineer has made a VOW, and if that vow does not
cost him anything, he is right to keep it; if not, it is pure folly,
between you and me. Where should liberty exist if not in passion?
Well! no, IN MY DAY we didn't take such vows and we loved! and
swaggeringly. But all participated in a great eclecticism and when
one strayed FROM LADIES it was from pride, in defiance of one's
self, and for effect. In short, we were Red Romantics, perfectly
ridiculous to be sure, but in full bloom. The little good which
remains to me comes from that epoch.
XXXV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Palaiseau, 30 November, 1866
There would be a good deal to say on all that, my comrade. My
Cascaret, that is to say, the fiance in question, keeps himself for
his fiancee. She said to him, "Let us wait till you have
accomplished certain definite work," and he works. She said to him,
"Let us keep ourselves pure for each other," and he keeps himself
pure. It is not that he is choked by Catholic spiritualism; but he
has a high ideal of love, and why counsel him to go and lose it when
his conscience and his honor depend on keeping it?
There is an equilibrium which Nature, our ruler, herself puts in our
instincts, and she sets the limit to our appetites. Great natures
are not the most robust. We are not developed in all our senses by a
very logical education. We are compressed in every way, and we
thrust out our roots and branches when and how we can. Great artists
are often weak also, and many are impotent. Some too strong in
desire are quickly exhausted. In general I think that we have too
intense joys and sorrows, we who work with our brains. The laborer
who works his land and his wife hard by day and night is not a
forceful nature. His brain is very feeble. You say to develop one's
self in every direction? Come, not all at the same time, not without
rest.
Those who brag of that, are bluffing a bit, or IF THEY DO
everything, do everything ill. If love for them is a little bread-
and-butter and art a little pot-boiler, all right; but if their
pleasure is great, verging on the infinite, and their work eager,
verging on enthusiasm, they do not alternate these as in sleeping
and waking.
As for me, I don't believe in these Don Juans who are Byrons at the
same time. Don Juan did not make poems and Byron made, so they say,
very poor love. He must have had sometimes--one can count such
emotions in one's life--a complete ecstasy of heart, mind and
senses. He knew enough about them to be one of the poets of love.
Nothing else is necessary for the instrument of our vibration. The
continual wind of little appetites breaks them.
Try some day to write a novel in which the artist (the real artist)
is the hero, you will see what great, but delicate and restrained,
vigor is in it, how he will see everything with an attentive eye,
curious and tranquil, and how his infatuations with the things he
examines and delves into, will be rare and serious. You will see
also how he fears himself, how he knows that he can not surrender
himself without exhaustion, and how a profound modesty in regard to
the treasures of his soul prevents him from scattering and wasting
them.
The artist is such a fine type to do, that I have never dared really
to do him. I do not consider myself worthy to touch that beautiful
and very complicated figure; that is aiming too high for a mere
woman. But if it could certainly tempt you some day, it would be
worth while.
Where is the model? I don't know, I have never REALLY known any one
who did not show some spot in the sunlight, I mean some side where
the artist verged on the Philistine. Perhaps you have not that spot;
you ought to paint yourself. As for me I have it. I love
classifications, I verge on the pedagogue. I love to sew and to care
for children, I verge on the servant. I am easily distracted and
verge on the idiot. And then I should not like perfection; I feel it
but I shouldn't know how to show it.
But one could give him some faults in his nature. What ones? We
shall hunt for them some day. That is not really what you are
working on now and I ought not to distract you from it.
Be less cruel to yourself. Go ahead and when the afflatus shall have
produced everything you must elevate the general tone and cut out
what ought not to come down front stage. Can't that be done? It
seems to me that it can. What you do appears so easy, so abundant!
It is a perpetual overflow, I do not understand your anguish. Good
night, dear brother, my love to all yours. I have returned to my
solitude at Palaiseau, I love it. I leave it for Paris, Monday. I
embrace you warmly. Good luck to your work.