Embrace your charming niece for me. What a good and lovely letter
she wrote me! Tell her that I beg her to take care of herself and to
please get well quickly.
What do you mean! Littre a senator? It is impossible to believe it
when one knows what the Chamber is. All the same it must be
congratulated for this attempt at self-respect.
CCCI. TO GEORGE SAND
December, 1875
Your good letter of the 18th, so maternally tender, has made me
reflect a great deal. I have reread it ten times, and I shall
confess to you that I am not sure that I understand it. Briefly,
what do you want me to do? Make your instructions exact.
I am constantly doing all that I can to enlarge my brain, and I work
in the sincerity of my heart. The rest does not depend on me.
I do not enjoy making "desolation," believe me, but I cannot change
my eyes! As for my "lack of convictions," alas! I choke with
convictions. I am bursting with anger and restrained indignation.
But according to the ideal of art that I have, I think that the
artist should not manifest anything of his own feelings, and that
the artist should not appear any more in his work than God in
nature. The man is nothing, the work is everything! This method,
perhaps mistakenly conceived, is not easy to follow. And for me, at
least, it is a sort of permanent sacrifice that I am making to good
taste. It would be agreeable to me to say what I think and to
relieve Mister Gustave Flaubert by words, but of what importance is
the said gentleman?
I think as you do, dear master, that art is not merely criticism and
satire; moreover, I have never tried to do intentionally the one nor
the other. I have always tried to go into the soul of things and to
stick to the greatest generalities, and I have purposely turned
aside from the accidental and the dramatic. No monsters and no
heroes!
You say to me: "I have no literary advice to give you; I have no
judgments to formulate on the authors, your friends, etc." Well?
indeed! but I implore advice, and I am waiting for your judgments.
Who, pray, should give them, and who, pray, should formulate them,
if not you?
Speaking of my friends, you add "my school." But I am ruining my
temperament in trying not to have a school! A priori, I spurn them,
every one. The people whom I see often and whom you designate
cultivate all that I scorn and are indifferently disturbed about
what torments me. I regard as very secondary, technical detail,
local exactness, in short the historical and precise side of things.
I am seeking above all for beauty, which my companions pursue but
languidly. I see them insensible when I am ravaged with admiration
or horror. Phrases make me swoon with pleasure which seem very
ordinary to them. Goncourt is very happy when he has seized upon a
word in the street that he can stick in a book, and I am well
satisfied when I have written a page without assonances or
repetitions. I would give all the legends of Gavarni for certain
expressions and master strokes, such as "the shade was NUPTIAL,
august and solemn!" from Victor Hugo, or this from Montesquieu: "the
vices of Alexander were extreme like his virtues. He was terrible in
his wrath. It made him cruel."
In short, I try to think well, IN ORDER TO write well. But writing
well is my aim, I do not deny it.
"I lack a well-defined and extended vision of life." You are right a
thousand times over, but by what means could it be otherwise? I ask
you that. You do not enlighten my darkness with metaphysics, neither
mine nor that of others. The words religion or Catholicism on the
one hand; progress, fraternity, democracy on the other, do not
correspond to the spiritual needs of the moment. The entirely new
dogma of equality which radicalism praises is experimentally denied
by physiology and history. I do not see the means of establishing
today a new principle, any more than of respecting the old ones.
Therefore I am hunting, without finding it, that idea on which all
the rest should depend.
Meanwhile I repeat to myself what Littre said to me one day: "Ah! my
friend, man is an unstable compound, and the earth an inferior
planet."
Nothing sustains me better than the hope of leaving it soon, and of
not going to another which might be worse. "I would rather not die,"
as Marat said. Ah! no! enough, enough weariness!
I am writing now a little silly story, which a mother can permit her
child to read. The whole will be about thirty pages, I shall have
two months more at it. Such is my energy, I shall send it to you as
soon as it appears (not my energy, but the little story).
CCCII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, in Paris
Nohant, 12th January, 1876
My cherished Cruchard,
I want to write to you every day; time is lacking absolutely. At
last here is a free moment; we are buried under the snow; it is the
sort of weather that I adore: this whiteness is like general
purification, and the amusements of the house seem more intimate and
sweeter. Can anyone hate the winter in the country? The snow is one
of the most beautiful sights of the year!
It appears that I am not clear in my sermons; I have that much in
common with the orthodox, but I am not of them; neither in my idea
of equality, nor of authority, have I any fixed plan. You seem to
think that I want to convert you to a doctrine. Not at all, I don't
think of such a thing. Everyone sets off from a point of view, the
free choice of which I respect. In a few words, I can give a resume
of mine: not to place oneself behind an opaque glass through which
one can see only the reflection of one's own nose. To see as far as
possible the good, the bad, about, around, yonder, everywhere; to
perceive the continual gravitation of all tangible and intangible
things towards the necessity of the decent, the good, the true, the
beautiful.
I don't say that humanity is on the way to the heights. I believe it
in spite of everything; but I do not argue about it, it is useless
because each one judges according to his own personal vision, and
the general aspect is for the moment poor and ugly. Besides, I do
not need to be sure of the safety of the planet and its inhabitants
in order to believe in the necessity of the good and the beautiful;
if the planet departs from that law it will perish; if the
inhabitants discard it they will be destroyed. Other stars, other
souls will pass over their bodies, so much the worse! But, as for
me, I want to gravitate up to my last breath, not with the certitude
nor the need of finding elsewhere a GOOD PLACE, but because my sole
joy is in keeping myself with my family on an upward road.
In other words, I am fleeing the sewer, and I am seeking the dry and
the clean, certain that it is the law of my existence. Being a man
amounts to little; we are still near the monkey from which they say
we proceed. Very well! a further reason for separating ourselves
still more from it and for being at least at the height of the
relative truth that our race has been admitted to comprehend; a very
poor truth, very limited, very humble! well, let us possess it as
much as we can and not permit anyone to take it from us. We are, I
think, quite agreed; but I practice this simple religion and you do
not practice it, since you let yourself become discouraged; your
heart has not been penetrated with it, since you curse life and
desire death like a Catholic who yearns for compensation, were it
only the rest eternal. You are no surer than another of this
compensation. Life is perhaps eternal, and therefore work is
eternal. If this is so, let us do our day's work bravely. If it is
otherwise, if the MOI perishes entirely, let us have the honor of
having done our stated task, it is our duty; for we have evident
duties only toward ourselves and our equals. What we destroy in
ourselves, we destroy in them. Our abasement lowers them, our falls
drag them down; we owe it to them to remain erect so that they shall
not fall. The desire for an early death, as that for a long life, is
therefore a weakness, and I do not want you to admit any longer that
it is a right. I thought that had it once; I believed, however, what
I believe today; but I lacked strength, and like you I said: "I
cannot help it." I lied to myself. One can help everything. One has
the strength that one thinks one has not, when one desires ardently
to GRAVITATE, to mount a step each day, to say to oneself: "The
Flaubert of tomorrow must be superior to the one of yesterday, and
the one of day after tomorrow more steady and more lucid still."
When you feel you are on the ladder, you will mount very quickly.
You are about to enter gradually upon the happiest and most
favorable time of life: old age. It is then that art reveals itself
in its sweetness; as long as one is young, it manifests itself with
anguish. You prefer a well-turned phrase to all metaphysics. I also,
I love to see condensed into a few words what elsewhere fills
volumes; but these volumes, one must have understood them completely
(either to admit them or to reject them) in order to find the
sublime resume which becomes literary art in its fullest expression;
that is why one should not scorn the efforts of the human mind to
arrive at the truth.
I tell you that, because you have excessive prejudices AS TO WORDS.
In truth, you read, you dig, you work much more than I and a crowd
of others do. You have acquired learning that I shall never attain.
Therefore you are a hundred times richer than all of us; you are a
rich man, and you complain like a poor man. Be charitable to a
beggar who has his mattress full of gold, but who wants to be
nourished only on well-turned phrases and choice words. But brute,
ransack your own mattress and eat your gold. Nourish yourself with
the ideas and feelings accumulated in your head and your heart; the
words and the phrases, THE FORM to which you attach so much
importance, will issue by itself from your digestion. You consider
it as an end, it is only an effect. Happy manifestations proceed
only from an emotion, and an emotion proceeds only from a
conviction. One is not moved at all by the things that one does not
believe with all one's heart.
I do not say that you do not believe: on the contrary, all your life
of affection, of protection, and of charming and simple goodness,
proves that you are the most convinced individual in the world. But,
as soon as you handle literature, you want, I don't know why, to be
another man, one who should disappear, one who destroys himself, who
does not exist! What an absurd mania! what a false rule of GOOD
TASTE! Our work is worth only what we are worth.
Who is talking about putting yourself on the stage? That, in truth,
is of no use, unless it is done frankly by way of a chronicle. But
to withdraw one's soul from what one does, what is that unhealthy
fancy? To hide one's own opinion about the characters that one puts
on the stage, to leave the reader therefore uncertain about the
opinion that he should have of them, that is to desire not to be
understood, and from that moment, the reader leaves you; for if he
wants to understand the story that you are telling him, it is on the
condition that you should show him plainly that this one is a strong
character and that one weak.
L'Education sentimentale has been a misunderstood book, as I have
told you repeatedly, but you have not listened to me. There should
have been a short preface, or, at a good opportunity, an expression
of blame, even if only a happy epithet to condemn the evil, to
characterize the defect, to signalize the effort. All the characters
in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad
instincts; that is what you are reproached with, because people did
not understand that you wanted precisely to depict a deplorable
state of society that encourages these bad instincts and ruins noble
efforts; when people do not understand us it is always our fault.
What the reader wants, first of all, is to penetrate into our
thought, and that is what you deny him, arrogantly. He thinks that
you scorn him and that you want to ridicule him. For my part, I
understood you, for I knew you. If anyone had brought me your book
without its being signed, I should have thought it beautiful, but
strange, and I should have asked myself if you were immoral,
skeptical, indifferent or heart-broken. You say that it ought to be
like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste
if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It
is false in the highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and
seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to
sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest
in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.
I have already combated your favorite heresy, which is that one
writes for twenty intelligent people and does not care a fig for the
rest. It is not true, since the lack of success irritates you and
troubles you. Besides, there have not been twenty critics favorable
to this book which was so well written and so important. So one must
not write for twenty persons any more than for three, or for a
hundred thousand.
One must write for all those who have a thirst to read and who can
profit by good reading. Then one must go straight to the most
elevated morality within oneself, and not make a mystery of the
moral and profitable meaning of one's book. People found that with
Madame Bovary. If one part of the public cried scandal, the
healthiest and the broadest part saw in it a severe and striking
lesson given to a woman without conscience and without faith, to
vanity, to ambition, to irrationality. They pitied her; art required
that, but the lesson was clear, and it would have been more so, it
would have been so for everybody, if you had wished it, if you had
shown more clearly the opinion that you had, and that the public
ought to have had, about the heroine, her husband, and her lovers.
That desire to depict things as they are, the adventures of life as
they present themselves to the eye, is not well thought out, in my
opinion. Depict inert things as a realist, as a poet, it's all the
same to me, but, when one touches on the emotions of the human
heart, it is another thing. You cannot abstract yourself from this
contemplation; for man, that is yourself, and men, that is the
reader. Whatever you do, your tale is a conversation between you and
the reader. If you show him the evil coldly, without ever showing
him the good he is angry. He wonders if it is he that is bad, or if
it is you. You work, however, to rouse him and to interest him; you
will never succeed if you are not roused yourself, or if you hide it
so well that he thinks you indifferent. He is right: supreme
impartiality is an anti-human thing, and a novel ought to be human
above everything. If it is not, the public is not pleased in its
being well written, well composed and conscientious in every detail.
The essential quality is not there: interest. The reader breaks away
likewise from a book where all the characters are good without
distinctions and without weaknesses; he sees clearly that that is
not human either. I believe that art, this special art of narration,
is only worth while through the opposition of characters; but, in
their struggle, I prefer to see the right prevail. Let events
overwhelm the honest men, I agree to that, but let him not be soiled
or belittled by them, and let him go to the stake feeling that he is
happier than his executioners.