No! dear master! it is not true. Bouilhet never injured the
bourgeois of Rouen; no one was gentler to them, I add even more
cowardly, to tell the truth. As for me, I kept apart from them, that
is all my crime.
I find by chance just today in Nadar's Memoirs du Geant, a paragraph
on me and the people of Rouen which is absolutely exact. Since you
own this book, look at page 100.
If I had kept silent they would have accused me of being a coward. I
protested naively, that is to say brutally. And I did well.
I think that one ought never begin the attack; but when one answers,
one must try to kill cleanly one's enemy. Such is my system.
Frankness is part of loyalty; why should it be less perfect in blame
than in praise?
We are perishing from indulgence, from clemency, from COWISHNESS and
(I return to my eternal refrain) from lack of JUSTICE!
Besides, I have never insulted any one, I have kept to
generalities,--as for M. Decorde, my intentions are for open
warfare;--but enough of that! I spent yesterday, a fine day, with
Tourgueneff to whom I read the hundred and fifteen pages of Saint-
Antoine that are finished. After which, I read to him almost half of
the Dernieres Chansons. What a listener! What a critic! He dazzled
me by the depth and the clearness of his judgment. Ah! if all those
who attempt to judge books had been able to hear, what a lesson!
Nothing escapes him. At the end of a passage of a hundred lines, he
remembers a weak epithet! he gave me two or three suggestions of
exquisite detail for Saint-Antoine.
Do you think me very silly since you believe I am going to blame you
for your primer? I have enough philosophic spirit to know that such
a thing is very serious work.
Method is the highest thing in criticism, since it gives the means
of creating.
CCXIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 28 January, 1872
Your preface is splendid and the book [Footnote: Dernieres Chansons,
by Louis Bouilhet.] is divine! Mercy! I have made a line of poetry
without realizing it, God forgive me. Yes, you are right, he was not
second rank, and ranks are not given by decree, above all in an age
when criticism undoes everything and does nothing. All your heart is
in this simple and discreet tale of his life. I see very well now,
why he died so young; he died from having lived too extensively in
the mind. I beg of you not to absorb yourself so much in literature
and learning. Change your home, move about, have mistresses or
wives, whichever you like, and during these phases, must change the
end that one lights. At my advanced age I throw myself into
torrents of far niente; the most infantile amusements, the silliest,
are enough for me and I return more lucid from my attacks of
imbecility.
It was a great loss to art, that premature death. In ten years there
will not be one single poet. Your preface is beautiful and well
done. Some pages are models, and it is very true that the bourgeois
will read that and find nothing remarkable in it. Ah! if one did not
have the little sanctuary, the interior little shrine, where,
without saying anything to anyone, one takes refuge to contemplate
and to dream the beautiful and the true, one would have to say:
"What is the use?"