CCXLVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 8 December, 1872
Oh! well, then, if you are in the realm of the ideal about this, if
you have a future book in your mind, if you are accomplishing a task
of confidence and conviction, no more anger and no more sadness, let
us be logical.
I myself arrived at a philosophical state of very satisfactory
serenity, and I did not OVERSTATE the matter when I said to you that
all the ill any one can do me, or all the indifference that any one
can show me, does not affect me really any more and does not prevent
me, not only from being happy outside of literature, but also from
being literary with pleasure, and from working with joy.
You were pleased with my two novels? I am repaid, I think that they
are SATISFACTORY, and the silence which has invaded my life (it must
be said that I have sought it) is full of a good voice that talks to
me and is sufficient to me. I have not mounted as high as you in my
ambition. You want to write for the ages. As for me, I think that in
fifty years, I shall be absolutely forgotten and perhaps unkindly
ignored. Such is the law of things that are not of first rank, and I
have never thought myself in the first rank. My idea has been rather
to act upon my contemporaries, even if only on a few, and to share
with them my ideal of sweetness and poetry. I have attained this end
up to a certain point; I have at least done my best towards it, I do
still, and my reward is to approach it continually a little nearer.
That is enough for myself, but, as for you, your aim is greater, I
see that clearly, and success is further off. Then you ought to put
yourself more in accord with yourself, by being still calmer and
more content than I am. Your momentary angers are good. They are the
result of a generous temperament, and, as they are neither malicious
nor hateful, I like them, but your sadness, your weeks of spleen, I
do not understand them, and I reproach you for them. I have
believed, I do still, that there is such a thing as too great
isolation, too great detachment from the bonds of life. You have
powerful reasons to answer me with, so powerful that they ought to
give you the victory.
Search your heart, think it over, and answer me, even if only to
dispel the fears that I have often on your account; I don't want you
to exhaust yourself. You are fifty years old, my son is the same or
nearly. He is in the prime of his strength, in his best development,
you are too, if you don't heat the oven of your ideas too hot. Why
do you say often that you wish you were dead? Don't you believe then
in your own work? Do let yourself be influenced then by this or that
temporary thing? It is possible, we are not gods, and something in
us, something weak and unimportant sometimes, disturbs our theodicy.
But the victory every day becomes easier, when one is sure of loving
logic and truth. It gets to the point even of forestalling, of
overcoming in advance, the subject of ill humor, of contempt or of
discouragement.
All that seems easy to me, when it is a question of self control:
the subjects of great sadness are elsewhere, in the spectacle of the
history that is unrolling around us; that eternal struggle of
barbarity against civilization is a great bitterness for those who
have cast off the element of barbarity and find themselves in
advance of their epoch. But, in that great sorrow, in these secret
angers, there is a great stimulant which rightly raises us up, by
inspiring in us the need of reaction. Without that, I confess, for
my part, that I would abandon everything.
I have had a good many compliments in my life, in the time when
people were interested in literature. I have always dreaded them
when they came to me from unknown people; they made me doubt myself
too much. I have made enough money to be rich. If I am not, it is
because I did not care to be; I have enough with what Levy makes for
me. What I should prefer, would be to abandon myself entirely to
botany, it would be for me a Paradise on earth. But it must not be,
that would be useful only to myself, and, if chagrin is good for
anything it is for keeping us from egoism, one must not curse nor
scorn life. One must not use it up voluntarily; you are enamoured of
JUSTICE, begin by being just to yourself, you owe it to yourself to
conserve and to develop yourself.
Listen to me; I love you tenderly, I think of you every day and on
every occasion: when working I think of you. I have gained certain
intellectual benefits which you deserve more than I do, and of which
you ought to make a longer use. Consider too, that my spirit is
often near to yours, and that it wishes you a long life and a
fertile inspiration in true joys.
You promise to come; that is a joy and a feast day for my heart, and
in my family.