GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The first thing I find to-day and on my very threshold[2] to say about

Gustave Flaubert is that he has been reported on by M. Émile Faguet in

the series of Les Grands Écrivains Français with such lucidity as may

almost be taken to warn off a later critic. I desire to pay at the

outset my tribute to M. Faguet’s exhaustive study, which is really in

its kind a model and a monument. Never can a critic have got closer to a

subject of this order; never can the results of the approach have been

more copious or more interesting; never in short can the master of a

complex art have been more mastered in his turn, nor his art more

penetrated, by the application of an earnest curiosity. That remark I

have it at heart to make, so pre-eminently has the little volume I refer

to not left the subject where it found it. It abounds in contributive

light, and yet, I feel on reflection that it scarce wholly dazzles

another contributor away. One reason of this is that, though I enter

into everything M. Faguet has said, there are things—things perhaps

especially of the province of the artist, the fellow-craftsman of

Flaubert—that I am conscious of his not having said; another is that

inevitably there are particular possibilities of reaction in our

English-speaking consciousness that hold up a light of their own.

Therefore I venture to follow even on a field so laboured, only paying

this toll to the latest and best work because the author has made it

impossible to do less.

Flaubert’s life is so almost exclusively the story of his literary

application that to speak of his five or six fictions is pretty well to

account for it all. He died in 1880 after a career of fifty-nine years

singularly little marked by changes of scene, of fortune, of attitude,

of occupation, of character, and above all, as may be said, of mind. He

would be interesting to the race of novelists if only because, quite

apart from the value of his work, he so personally gives us the example

and the image, so presents the intellectual case. He was born a

novelist, grew up, lived, died a novelist, breathing, feeling, thinking,

speaking, performing every operation of life, only as that votary; and

this though his production was to be small in amount and though it

constituted all his diligence. It was not indeed perhaps primarily so

much that he was born and lived a novelist as that he was born and lived

literary, and that to be literary represented for him an almost

overwhelming situation. No life was long enough, no courage great

enough, no fortune kind enough to support a man under the burden of this

character when once such a doom had been laid on him. His case was a

doom because he felt of his vocation almost nothing but the difficulty.

He had many strange sides, but this was the strangest, that if we argued

from his difficulty to his work, the difficulty being registered for us

in his letters and elsewhere, we should expect from the result but the

smallest things. We should be prepared to find in it well-nigh a

complete absence of the signs of a gift. We should regret that the

unhappy man had not addressed himself to something he might have found

at least comparatively easy. We should singularly miss the consecration

supposedly given to a work of art by its having been conceived in joy.

That is Flaubert’s remarkable, his so far as I know unmatched

distinction, that he has left works of an extraordinary art even the

conception of which failed to help him to think in serenity. The chapter

of execution, from the moment execution gets really into the shafts, is

of course always and everywhere a troubled one—about which moreover too

much has of late been written; but we frequently find Flaubert cursing

his subjects themselves, wishing he had not chosen them, holding himself

up to derision for having done so, and hating them in the very act of

sitting down to them. He cared immensely for the medium, the task and

the triumph involved, but was himself the last to be able to say why. He

is sustained only by the rage and the habit of effort; the mere _love_

of letters, let alone the love of life, appears at an early age to have

deserted him. Certain passages in his correspondence make us even wonder

if it be not hate that sustains him most. So, successively, his several

supremely finished and crowned compositions came into the world, and we

may feel sure that none others of the kind, none that were to have an

equal fortune, had sprung from such adversity.

I insist upon this because his at once excited and baffled passion gives

the key of his life and determines its outline. I must speak of him at

least as I feel him and as in his very latest years I had the fortune

occasionally to see him. I said just now, practically, that he is for

many of our tribe at large _the_ novelist, intent and typical, and so,

gathered together and foreshortened, simplified and fixed, the lapse of

time seems to show him. It has made him in his prolonged posture

extraordinarily objective, made him even resemble one of his own

productions, constituted him as a subject, determined him as a figure;

the limit of his range, and above all of his reach, is after this

fashion, no doubt, sufficiently indicated, and yet perhaps in the event

without injury to his name. If our consideration of him cultivates a

certain tenderness on the double ground that he suffered supremely in

the cause and that there is endlessly much to be learned from him, we

remember at the same time that, indirectly, the world at large possesses

him not less than the _confrère_. He has fed and fertilised, has

filtered through others, and so arrived at contact with that public from

whom it was his theory that he was separated by a deep and impassable

trench, the labour of his own spade. He is none the less more

interesting, I repeat, as a failure however qualified than as a success

however explained, and it is as so viewed that the unity of his career

attaches and admonishes. Save in some degree by a condition of health (a

liability to epileptic fits at times frequent, but never so frequent as

to have been generally suspected,) he was not outwardly hampered as the

tribe of men of letters goes—an anxious brotherhood at the best; yet

the fewest possible things appear to have ever succeeded in happening to

him. The only son of an eminent provincial physician, he inherited a

modest ease and no other incumbrance than, as was the case for Balzac,

an over-attentive, an importunate mother; but freedom spoke to him from

behind a veil, and when we have mentioned the few apparent facts of

experience that make up his landmarks over and beyond his interspaced

publications we shall have completed his biography. Tall, strong,

striking, he caused his friends to admire in him the elder, the florid

Norman type, and he seems himself, as a man of imagination, to have

found some transmission of race in his stature and presence, his

light-coloured salient eyes and long tawny moustache.

The central event of his life was his journey to the East in 1849 with

M. Maxime Du Camp, of which the latter has left in his “Impressions

Littéraires” a singularly interesting and, as we may perhaps say,

slightly treacherous report, and which prepared for Flaubert a state of

nostalgia that was not only never to leave him, but that was to work in

him as a motive. He had during that year, and just in sufficient

quantity, his revelation, the particular appropriate disclosure to which

the gods at some moment treat the artist unless they happen too

perversely to conspire against him: he tasted of the knowledge by which

he was subsequently to measure everything, appeal from everything, find

everything flat. Never probably was an impression so assimilated, so

positively transmuted to a function; he lived on it to the end and we

may say that in “Salammbô” and “La Tentation de Saint-Antoine” he almost

died of it. He made afterwards no other journey of the least importance

save a disgusted excursion to the Rigi-Kaltbad shortly before his death.

The Franco-German War was of course to him for the time as the valley of

the shadow itself; but this was an ordeal, unlike most of his other

ordeals, shared after all with millions. He never married—he declared,

toward the end, to the most comprehending of his confidants, that he had

been from the first “afraid of life”; and the friendliest element of his

later time was, we judge, that admirable comfortable commerce, in her

fullest maturity, with Madame George Sand, the confidant I just referred

to; which has been preserved for us in the published correspondence of

each. He had in Ivan Turgenieff a friend almost as valued; he spent each

year a few months in Paris, where (to mention everything) he had his

natural place, so far as he cared to take it, at the small literary

court of the Princess Mathilde; and, lastly, he lost toward the close of

his life, by no fault of his own, a considerable part of his modest

fortune. It is, however, in the long security, the almost unbroken

solitude of Croisset, near Rouen, that he mainly figures for us, gouging

out his successive books in the wide old room, of many windows, that,

with an intervening terrace, overlooked the broad Seine and the passing

boats. This was virtually a monastic cell, closed to echoes and

accidents; with its stillness for long periods scarce broken save by the

creak of the towing-chain of the tugs across the water. When I have

added that his published letters offer a view, not very refreshing, of

his youthful entanglement with Madame Louise Colet—whom we name

because, apparently not a shrinking person, she long ago practically

named herself—I shall have catalogued his personal vicissitudes. And I

may add further that the connection with Madame Colet, such as it was,

rears its head for us in something like a desert of immunity from such

complications.

His complications were of the spirit, of the literary vision, and though

he was thoroughly profane he was yet essentially anchoretic. I perhaps

miss a point, however, in not finally subjoining that he was liberally

accessible to his friends during the months he regularly spent in Paris.

Sensitive, passionate, perverse, not less than _immediately_

sociable—for if he detested his collective contemporaries this dropped,

thanks to his humanising shyness, before the individual encounter—he

was in particular and superexcellently not _banal_, and he attached men

perhaps more than women, inspiring a marked, a by no means colourless

shade of respect; a respect not founded, as the air of it is apt to be,

on the vague presumption, but addressed almost in especial to his

disparities and oddities and thereby, no doubt, none too different from

affection. His friends at all events were a rich and eager _cénacle_,

among whom he was on occasion, by his picturesque personality, a natural

and overtopping centre; partly perhaps because he was so much and so

familiarly at home. He wore, up to any hour of the afternoon, that long,

colloquial dressing-gown, with trousers to match, which one has always

associated with literature in France—the uniform really of freedom of

talk. Freedom of talk abounded by his winter fire, for the _cénacle_ was

made up almost wholly of the more finely distinguished among his

contemporaries; of philosophers, men of letters and men of affairs

belonging to his own generation and the next. He had at the time I have

in mind a small perch, far aloft, at the distant, the then almost

suburban, end of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where on Sunday afternoons,

at the very top of an endless flight of stairs, were to be encountered

in a cloud of conversation and smoke most of the novelists of the

general Balzac tradition. Others of a different birth and complexion

were markedly not of the number, were not even conceivable as present;

none of those, unless I misremember, whose fictions were at that time

“serialised” in the Revue des Deux Mondes. In spite of Renan and Taine

and two or three more, the contributor to the Revue would indeed at no

time have found in the circle in question his foot on his native heath.

One could recall if one would two or three vivid allusions to him, not

of the most quotable, on the lips of the most famous of

“naturalists”—allusions to him as represented for instance by M. Victor

Cherbuliez and M. Octave Feuillet. The author of these pages recalls a

concise qualification of this last of his fellows on the lips of Émile

Zola, which that absorbed auditor had too directly, too rashly asked

for; but which is alas not reproducible here. There was little else but

the talk, which had extreme intensity and variety; almost nothing, as I

remember, but a painted and gilded idol, of considerable size, a relic

and a memento, on the chimney-piece. Flaubert was huge and diffident,

but florid too and resonant, and my main remembrance is of a conception

of courtesy in him, an accessibility to the human relation, that only

wanted to be sure of the way taken or to take. The uncertainties of the

French for the determination of intercourse have often struck me as

quite matching the sharpness of their certainties, as we for the most

part feel these latter, which sometimes in fact throw the indeterminate

into almost touching relief. I have thought of them at such times as the

people in the world one may have to go more of the way to meet than to

meet any other, and this, as it were, through their being seated and

embedded, provided for at home, in a manner that is all their own and

that has bred them to the positive preacceptance of interest on their

behalf. We at least of the Anglo-American race, more abroad in the

world, perching everywhere, so far as grounds of intercourse are

concerned, more vaguely and superficially, as well as less

intelligently, are the more ready by that fact with inexpensive

accommodations, rather conscious that these themselves forbear from the

claim to fascinate, and advancing with the good nature that is the

mantle of our obtuseness to any point whatever where entertainment may

be offered us. My recollection is at any rate simplified by the fact of

the presence almost always, in the little high room of the Faubourg’s

end, of other persons and other voices. Flaubert’s own voice is clearest

to me from the uneffaced sense of a winter week-day afternoon when I

found him by exception alone and when something led to his reading me

aloud, in support of some judgment he had thrown off, a poem of

Théophile Gautier’s. He cited it as an example of verse intensely and

distinctively French, and French in its melancholy, which neither Goethe

nor Heine nor Leopardi, neither Pushkin nor Tennyson nor, as he said,

Byron, could at all have matched in _kind_. He converted me at the

moment to this perception, alike by the sense of the thing and by his

large utterance of it; after which it is dreadful to have to confess not

only that the poem was then new to me, but that, hunt as I will in every

volume of its author, I am never able to recover it. This is perhaps

after all happy, causing Flaubert’s own full tone, which was the note of

the occasion, to linger the more unquenched. But for the rhyme in fact I

could have believed him to be spouting to me something strange and

sonorous of his own. The thing really rare would have been to hear him

do that—hear him _gueuler_, as he liked to call it. Verse, I felt, we

had always with us, and almost any idiot of goodwill could give it a

value. The value of so many a passage of “Salammbô” and of “L’Éducation”

was on the other hand exactly such as gained when he allowed himself, as

had by the legend ever been frequent _dans l’intimité_, to “bellow” it

to its fullest effect.

One of the things that make him most exhibitional and most describable,

so that if we had invented him as an illustration or a character we

would exactly so have arranged him, is that he was formed intellectually

of two quite distinct compartments, a sense of the real and a sense of

the romantic, and that his production, for our present cognisance, thus

neatly and vividly divides itself. The divisions are as marked as the

sections on the back of a scarab, though their distinctness is

undoubtedly but the final expression of much inward strife. M. Faguet

indeed, who is admirable on this question of our author’s duality, gives

an account of the romanticism that found its way for him into the real

and of the reality that found its way into the romantic; but he none the

less strikes us as a curious splendid insect sustained on wings of a

different coloration, the right a vivid red, say, and the left as frank

a yellow. This duality has in its sharp operation placed “Madame Bovary”

and “L’Éducation” on one side together and placed together on the other

“Salammbô” and “La Tentation.” “Bouvard et Pécuchet” it can scarce be

spoken of, I think, as having placed anywhere or anyhow. If it was

Flaubert’s way to find his subject impossible there was none he saw so

much in that light as this last-named, but also none that he appears to

have held so important for that very reason to pursue to the bitter end.

Posterity agrees with him about the impossibility, but rather takes upon

itself to break with the rest of the logic. We may perhaps, however, for

symmetry, let “Bouvard et Pécuchet” figure as the tail—if scarabs ever

have tails—of our analogous insect. Only in that case we should also

append as the very tip the small volume of the “Trois Contes,”

preponderantly of the deepest imaginative hue.

His imagination was great and splendid; in spite of which, strangely

enough, his masterpiece is not his most imaginative work. “Madame

Bovary,” beyond question, holds that first place, and “Madame Bovary” is

concerned with the career of a country doctor’s wife in a petty Norman

town. The elements of the picture are of the fewest, the situation of

the heroine almost of the meanest, the material for interest,

considering the interest yielded, of the most unpromising; but these

facts only throw into relief one of those incalculable incidents that

attend the proceedings of genius. “Madame Bovary” was doomed by

circumstances and causes—the freshness of comparative youth and good

faith on the author’s part being perhaps the chief—definitely to take

its position, even though its subject was fundamentally a negation of

the remote, the splendid and the strange, the stuff of his fondest and

most cultivated dreams. It would have seemed very nearly to exclude the

free play of the imagination, and the way this faculty on the author’s

part nevertheless presides is one of those accidents, manœuvres,

inspirations, we hardly know what to call them, by which masterpieces

grow. He of course knew more or less what he was doing for his book in

making Emma Bovary a victim of the imaginative habit, but he must have

been far from designing or measuring the total effect which renders the

work so general, so complete an expression of himself. His separate

idiosyncrasies, his irritated sensibility to the life about him, with

the power to catch it in the fact and hold it hard, and his hunger for

style and history and poetry, for the rich and the rare, great

reverberations, great adumbrations, are here represented together as

they are not in his later writings. There is nothing of the near, of the

directly observed, though there may be much of the directly perceived

and the minutely detailed, either in “Salammbô” or in “Saint-Antoine,”

and little enough of the extravagance of illusion in that indefinable

last word of restrained evocation and cold execution “L’Éducation

Sentimentale.” M. Faguet has of course excellently noted this—that the

fortune and felicity of the book were assured by the stroke that made

the central figure an embodiment of helpless romanticism. Flaubert

himself but narrowly escaped being such an embodiment after all, and he

is thus able to express the romantic mind with extraordinary truth. As

to the rest of the matter he had the luck of having been in possession

from the first, having begun so early to nurse and work up his plan

that, familiarity and the native air, the native soil, aiding, he had

finally made out to the last lurking shade the small sordid sunny dusty

village picture, its emptiness constituted and peopled. It is in the

background and the accessories that the real, the real of his theme,

abides; and the romantic, the romantic of his theme, accordingly

occupies the front. Emma Bovary’s poor adventures are a tragedy for the

very reason that in a world unsuspecting, unassisting, unconsoling, she

has herself to distil the rich and the rare. Ignorant, unguided,

undiverted, ridden by the very nature and mixture of her consciousness,

she makes of the business an inordinate failure, a failure which in its

turn makes for Flaubert the most pointed, the most _told_ of anecdotes.

There are many things to say about “Madame Bovary,” but an old admirer

of the book would be but half-hearted—so far as they represent reserves

or puzzlements—were he not to note first of all the circumstances by

which it is most endeared to him. To remember it from far back is to

have been present all along at a process of singular interest to a

literary mind, a case indeed full of comfort and cheer. The finest of

Flaubert’s novels is to-day, on the French shelf of fiction, one of the

first of the classics; it has attained that position, slowly but

steadily, before our eyes; and we seem so to follow the evolution of the

fate of a classic. We see how the thing takes place; which we rarely

can, for we mostly miss either the beginning or the end, especially in

the case of a consecration as complete as this. The consecrations of the

past are too far behind and those of the future too far in front. That

the production before us _should_ have come in for the heavenly crown

may be a fact to offer English and American readers a mystifying side;

but it is exactly our ground and a part moreover of the total interest.

The author of these remarks remembers, as with a sense of the way such

things happen, that when a very young person in Paris he took up from

the parental table the latest number of the periodical in which

Flaubert’s then duly unrecognised masterpiece was in course of

publication. The moment is not historic, but it was to become in the

light of history, as may be said, so unforgettable that every small

feature of it yet again lives for him: it rests there like the backward

end of the span. The cover of the old Revue de Paris was yellow, if I

mistake not, like that of the new, and “Madame Bovary: Mœurs de

Province,” on the inside of it, was already, on the spot, as a title,

mysteriously arresting, inscrutably charged. I was ignorant of what had

preceded and was not to know till much later what followed; but present

to me still is the act of standing there before the fire, my back

against the low beplushed and begarnished French chimney-piece and

taking in what I might of that instalment, taking it in with so

surprised an interest, and perhaps as well such a stir of faint

foreknowledge, that the sunny little salon, the autumn day, the window

ajar and the cheerful outside clatter of the Rue Montaigne are all now

for me more or less in the story and the story more or less in them. The

story, however, was at that moment having a difficult life; its fortune

was all to make; its merit was so far from suspected that, as Maxime Du

Camp—though verily with no excess of contrition—relates, its cloth of

gold barely escaped the editorial shears. This, with much more,

contributes for us to the course of things to come. The book, on its

appearance as a volume, proved a shock to the high propriety of the

guardians of public morals under the second Empire, and Flaubert was

prosecuted as author of a work indecent to scandal. The prosecution in

the event fell to the ground, but I should perhaps have mentioned this

agitation as one of the very few, of any public order, in his short

list. “Le Candidat” fell at the Vaudeville Theatre, several years later,

with a violence indicated by its withdrawal after a performance of but

two nights, the first of these marked by a deafening uproar; only if the

comedy was not to recover from this accident the misprised lustre of the

novel was entirely to reassert itself. It is strange enough at

present—so far have we travelled since then—that “Madame Bovary”

should in so comparatively recent a past have been to that extent a

cause of reprobation; and suggestive above all, in such connections, as

to the large unconsciousness of superior minds. The desire of the

superior mind of the day—that is the governmental, official, legal—to

distinguish a book with such a destiny before it is a case conceivable,

but conception breaks down before its design of making the distinction

purely invidious. We can imagine its knowing so little, however face to

face with the object, what it had got hold of; but for it to have been

so urged on by a blind inward spring to publish to posterity the extent

of its ignorance, that would have been beyond imagination, beyond

everything but pity.

And yet it is not after all that the place the book has taken is so

overwhelmingly explained by its inherent dignity; for here comes in the

curiosity of the matter. Here comes in especially its fund of admonition

for alien readers. The dignity of its substance is the dignity of Madame

Bovary herself as a vessel of experience—a question as to which,

unmistakably, I judge, we can only depart from the consensus of French

critical opinion. M. Faguet for example commends the character of the

heroine as one of the most living and discriminated figures of women in

all literature, praises it as a field for the display of the romantic

spirit that leaves nothing to be desired. Subject to an observation I

shall presently make and that bears heavily in general, I think, on

Flaubert as a painter of life, subject to this restriction he is right;

which is a proof that a work of art may be markedly open to objection

and at the same time be rare in its kind, and that when it is perfect to

this point nothing else particularly matters. “Madame Bovary” has a

perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost

alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as

both excites and defies judgment. For it deals not in the least, as to

unapproachability, with things exalted or refined; it only confers on

its sufficiently vulgar elements of exhibition a final unsurpassable

form. The form is in _itself_ as interesting, as active, as much of the

essence of the subject as the idea, and yet so close is its fit and so

inseparable its life that we catch it at no moment on any errand of its

own. That verily is to _be_ interesting—all round; that is to be

genuine and whole. The work is a classic because the thing, such as it

is, is ideally _done_, and because it shows that in such doing eternal

beauty may dwell. A pretty young woman who lives, socially and morally

speaking, in a hole, and who is ignorant, foolish, flimsy, unhappy,

takes a pair of lovers by whom she is successively deserted; in the

midst of the bewilderment of which, giving up her husband and her child,

letting everything go, she sinks deeper into duplicity, debt, despair,

and arrives on the spot, on the small scene itself of her poor

depravities, at a pitiful tragic end. In especial she does these things

while remaining absorbed in romantic intention and vision, and she

remains absorbed in romantic intention and vision while fairly rolling

in the dust. That is the triumph of the book as the triumph stands, that

Emma interests us by the nature of her consciousness and the play of her

mind, thanks to the reality and beauty with which those sources are

invested. It is not only that they represent _her_ state; they are so

true, so observed and felt, and especially so shown, that they represent

the state, actual or potential, of all persons like her, persons

romantically determined. Then her setting, the medium in which she

struggles, becomes in its way as important, becomes eminent with the

eminence of art; the tiny world in which she revolves, the contracted

cage in which she flutters, is hung out in space for her, and her

companions in captivity there are as true as herself.

I have said enough to show what I mean by Flaubert’s having in this

picture expressed something of his intimate self, given his heroine

something of his own imagination: a point precisely that brings me back

to the restriction at which I just now hinted, in which M. Faguet fails

to indulge and yet which is immediate for the alien reader. Our

complaint is that Emma Bovary, in spite of the nature of her

consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her

creator, is really too small an affair. This, critically speaking, is in

view both of the value and the fortune of her history, a wonderful

circumstance. She associates herself with Frédéric Moreau in

“L’Éducation” to suggest for us a question that can be answered, I hold,

only to Flaubert’s detriment. Emma taken alone would possibly not so

directly press it, but in her company the hero of our author’s second

study of the “real” drives it home. Why did Flaubert choose, as special

conduits of the life he proposed to depict, such inferior and in the

case of Frédéric such abject human specimens? I insist only in respect

to the latter, the perfection of Madame Bovary scarce leaving one much

warrant for wishing anything other. Even here, however, the general

scale and size of Emma, who is small even of her sort, should be a

warning to hyperbole. If I say that in the matter of Frédéric at all

events the answer is inevitably detrimental I mean that it weighs

heavily on our author’s general credit. He wished in each case to make a

picture of experience—middling experience, it is true—and of the world

close to him; but if he imagined nothing better for his purpose than

such a heroine and such a hero, both such limited reflectors and

registers, we are forced to believe it to have been by a defect of his

mind. And that sign of weakness remains even if it be objected that the

images in question were addressed to his purpose better than others

would have been: the purpose itself then shows as inferior. “L’Éducation

Sentimentale” is a strange, an indescribable work, about which there

would be many more things to say than I have space for, and all of them

of the deepest interest. It is moreover, to simplify my statement, very

much less satisfying a thing, less pleasing whether in its unity or its

variety, than its specific predecessor. But take it as we will, for a

success or a failure—M. Faguet indeed ranks it, by the measure of its

quantity of intention, a failure, and I on the whole agree with him—the

personage offered us as bearing the weight of the drama, and in whom we

are invited to that extent to interest ourselves, leaves us mainly

wondering what our entertainer could have been thinking of. He takes

Frédéric Moreau on the threshold of life and conducts him to the extreme

of maturity without apparently suspecting for a moment either our wonder

or our protest—“Why, why him?” Frédéric is positively too poor for his

part, too scant for his charge; and we feel with a kind of

embarrassment, certainly with a kind of compassion, that it is somehow

the business of a protagonist to prevent in his designer an excessive

waste of faith. When I speak of the faith in Emma Bovary as

proportionately wasted I reflect on M. Faguet’s judgment that she is

from the point of view of deep interest richly or at least roundedly

representative. Representative of what? he makes us ask even while

granting all the grounds of misery and tragedy involved. The plea for

her is the plea made for all the figures that live without evaporation

under the painter’s hand—that they are not only particular persons but

types of their kind, and as valid in one light as in the other. It is

Emma’s “kind” that I question for this responsibility, even if it be

inquired of me why I then fail to question that of Charles Bovary, in

its perfection, or that of the inimitable, the immortal Homais. If we

express Emma’s deficiency as the poverty of her consciousness for the

typical function, it is certainly not, one must admit, that she is

surpassed in this respect either by her platitudinous husband or by his

friend the pretentious apothecary. The difference is none the less

somehow in the fact that they are respectively studies but of their

character and office, which function in each expresses adequately _all_

they are. It may be, I concede, because Emma is the only woman in the

book that she is taken by M. Faguet as _femininely_ typical, typical in

the larger illustrative way, whereas the others pass with him for images

specifically conditioned. Emma is this same for myself, I plead; she is

conditioned to such an excess of the specific, and the specific in her

case leaves out so many even of the commoner elements of conceivable

life in a woman when we are invited to see that life as pathetic, as

dramatic agitation, that we challenge both the author’s and the critic’s

scale of importances. The book is a picture of the middling as much as

they like, but does Emma attain even to _that_? Hers is a narrow

middling even for a little imaginative person whose “social”

significance is small. It is greater on the whole than her capacity of

consciousness, taking this all round; and so, in a word, we feel her

less illustrational than she might have been not only if the world had

offered her more points of contact, but if she had had more of these to

give it.

We meet Frédéric first, we remain with him long, as a _moyen_, a

provincial bourgeois of the mid-century, educated and not without

fortune, thereby with freedom, in whom the life of his day reflects

itself. Yet the life of his day, on Flaubert’s showing, hangs together

with the poverty of Frédéric’s own inward or for that matter outward

life; so that, the whole thing being, for scale, intention and

extension, a sort of epic of the usual (with the Revolution of 1848

introduced indeed as an episode,) it affects us as an epic without air,

without wings to lift it; reminds us in fact more than anything else of

a huge balloon, all of silk pieces strongly sewn together and patiently

blown up, but that absolutely refuses to leave the ground. The

discrimination I here make as against our author is, however, the only

one inevitable in a series of remarks so brief. What it really

represents—and nothing could be more curious—is that Frédéric enjoys

his position not only without the aid of a single “sympathetic”

character of consequence, but even without the aid of one with whom we

can directly communicate. Can we communicate with the central personage?

or would we really if we could? A hundred times no, and if he himself

can communicate with the people shown us as surrounding him this only

proves him of their kind. Flaubert on his “real” side was in truth an

ironic painter, and ironic to a tune that makes his final accepted

state, his present literary dignity and “classic” peace, superficially

anomalous. There is an explanation to which I shall immediately come;

but I find myself feeling for a moment longer in presence of

“L’Éducation” how much more interesting a writer may be on occasion by

the given failure than by the given success. Successes pure and simple

disconnect and dismiss him; failures—though I admit they must be a bit

qualified—keep him in touch and in relation. Thus it is that as the

work of a “grand écrivain” “L’Éducation,” large, laboured, immensely

“written,” with beautiful passages and a general emptiness, with a kind

of leak in its stored sadness, moreover, by which its moral dignity

escapes—thus it is that Flaubert’s ill-starred novel is a curiosity for

a literary museum. Thus it is also that it suggests a hundred

reflections, and suggests perhaps most of them directly to the intending

labourer in the same field. If in short, as I have said, Flaubert is the

novelist’s novelist, this performance does more than any other toward

making him so.

I have to add in the same connection that I had not lost sight of Madame

Arnoux, the main ornament of “L’Éducation,” in pronouncing just above on

its deficiency in the sympathetic. Madame Arnoux is exactly the author’s

one marked attempt, here or elsewhere, to represent beauty otherwise

than for the senses, beauty of character and life; and what becomes of

the attempt is a matter highly significant. M. Faguet praises with

justice his conception of the figure and of the relation, the relation

that never bears fruit, that keeps Frédéric adoring her, through

hindrance and change, from the beginning of life to the end; that keeps

her, by the same constraint, forever immaculately “good,” from youth to

age, though deeply moved and cruelly tempted and sorely tried. Her

contacts with her adorer are not even frequent, in proportion to the

field of time; her conditions of fortune, of association and occupation

are almost sordid, and we see them with the march of the drama, such as

it is, become more and more so; besides which—I again remember that M.

Faguet excellently notes it—nothing in the nature of “parts” is

attributed to her; not only is she not presented as clever, she is

scarce invested with a character at all. Almost nothing that she says is

repeated, almost nothing that she does is shown. She is an image none

the less beautiful and vague, an image of passion cherished and abjured,

renouncing all sustenance and yet persisting in life. Only she has for

real distinction the extreme drawback that she is offered us quite

preponderantly through Frédéric’s vision of her, that we see her

practically in no other light. Now Flaubert unfortunately has not been

able not so to discredit Frédéric’s vision in general, his vision of

everyone and everything, and in particular of his own life, that it

makes a medium good enough to convey adequately a noble impression.

Madame Arnoux is of course ever so much the best thing in his

life—which is saying little; but his life is made up of such queer

material that we find ourselves displeased at her being “in” it on

whatever terms; all the more that she seems scarcely to affect, improve

or determine it. Her creator in short never had a more awkward idea than

this attempt to give us the benefit of such a conception in such a way;

and even though I have still something else to say about that I may as

well speak of it at once as a mistake that gravely counts against him.

It is but one of three, no doubt, in all his work; but I shall not, I

trust, pass for extravagant if I call it the most indicative. What makes

it so is its being the least superficial; the two others are, so to

speak, intellectual, while this is somehow moral. It was a mistake, as I

have already hinted, to propose to register in so mean a consciousness

as that of such a hero so large and so mixed a quantity of life as

“L’Éducation” clearly intends; and it was a mistake of the tragic sort

that is a theme mainly for silence to have embarked on “Bouvard et

Pécuchet” at all, not to have given it up sooner than be given up by it.

But these were at the worst not wholly compromising blunders. What _was_

compromising—and the great point is that it remained so, that nothing

has an equal weight against it—is the unconsciousness of error in

respect to the opportunity that would have counted as his finest. We

feel not so much that Flaubert misses it, for that we could bear; but

that he doesn’t _know_ he misses it is what stamps the blunder. We do

not pretend to say how he might have shown us Madame Arnoux better—that

was his own affair. What is ours is that he really thought he was

showing her as well as he could, or as she might be shown; at which we

veil our face. For once that he had a conception quite apart, apart I

mean from the array of his other conceptions and more delicate than any,

he “went,” as we say, and spoiled it. Let me add in all tenderness, and

to make up for possibly too much insistence, that it is the only stain

on his shield; let me even confess that I should not wonder if, when all

is said, it is a blemish no one has ever noticed.

Perhaps no one has ever noticed either what was present to me just above

as the partial makeweight there glanced at, the fact that in the midst

of this general awkwardness, as I have called it, there is at the same

time a danger so escaped as to entitle our author to full credit. I

scarce know how to put it with little enough of the ungracious, but I

think that even the true Flaubertist finds himself wondering a little

that some flaw of taste, some small but unfortunate lapse by the way,

_should_ as a matter of fact not somehow or somewhere have waited on the

demonstration of the platonic purity prevailing between this heroine and

her hero—so far as we do find that image projected. It is alike

difficult to indicate without offence or to ignore without unkindness a

fond reader’s apprehension here of a possibility of the wrong touch, the

just perceptibly false note. I would not have staked my life on

Flaubert’s security of instinct in such a connection—as an absolutely

fine and predetermined security; and yet in the event that felicity has

settled, there is not so much as the lightest wrong breath (speaking of

the matter in this light of tact and taste) or the shade of a crooked

stroke. One exclaims at the end of the question “Dear old Flaubert after

all—!” and perhaps so risks seeming to patronise for fear of not making

a point. The point made for what it is worth, at any rate, I am the more

free to recover the benefit of what I mean by critical “tenderness” in

our general connection—expressing in it as I do our general respect,

and my own particular, for our author’s method and process and history,

and my sense of the luxury of such a sentiment at such a vulgar literary

time. It is a respect positive and settled and the thing that has most

to do with consecrating for us that loyalty to him as the novelist of

the novelist—unlike as it is even the best feeling inspired by any

other member of the craft. He may stand for our operative conscience or

our vicarious sacrifice; animated by a sense of literary honour,

attached to an ideal of perfection, incapable of lapsing in fine from a

self-respect, that enable us to sit at ease, to surrender to the age, to

indulge in whatever comparative meannesses (and no meanness in art is so

mean as the sneaking economic,) we may find most comfortable or

profitable. May it not in truth be said that we practise our industry,

so many of us, at relatively little cost just _because_ poor Flaubert,

producing the most expensive fictions ever written, so handsomely paid

for it? It is as if this put it in our power to produce cheap and

thereby sell dear; as if, so expressing it, literary honour being by his

example effectively secure for the firm at large and the general

concern, on its whole esthetic side, floated once for all, we find our

individual attention free for literary and esthetic indifference. All

the while we thus lavish our indifference the spirit of the author of

“Madame Bovary,” in the cross-light of the old room above the Seine, is

trying to the last admiration for the thing itself. That production puts

the matter into a nutshell: “Madame Bovary,” subject to whatever

qualification, is absolutely the most literary of novels, so literary

that it covers us with its mantle. It shows us once for all that there

is no _intrinsic_ call for a debasement of the type. The mantle I speak

of is wrought with surpassing fineness, and we may always, under stress

of whatever charge of illiteracy, frivolity, vulgarity, flaunt it as the

flag of the guild. Let us therefore frankly concede that to surround

Flaubert with our consideration is the least return we can make for such

a privilege. The consideration moreover is idle unless it be real,

unless it be intelligent enough to measure his effort and his success.

Of the effort as mere effort I have already spoken, of the desperate

difficulty involved for him in making his form square with his

conception; and I by no means attach general importance to these secrets

of the workshop, which are but as the contortions of the fastidious muse

who is the servant of the oracle. They are really rather secrets of the

kitchen and contortions of the priestess of _that_ tripod—they are not

an upstairs matter. It is of their specially distinctive importance I am

now speaking, of the light shed on them by the results before us.

They all represent the pursuit of a style, of the ideally right one for

its relations, and would still be interesting if the style had not been

achieved. “Madame Bovary,” “Salammbô,” “Saint-Antoine,” “L’Éducation”

are so written and so composed (though the last-named in a minor degree)

that the more we look at them the more we find in them, under this head,

a beauty of intention and of effect; the more they figure in the too

often dreary desert of fictional prose a class by themselves and a

little living oasis. So far as that desert is of the complexion of our

own English speech it supplies with remarkable rarity this particular

source of refreshment. So strikingly is that the case, so scant for the

most part any dream of a scheme of beauty in these connections, that a

critic betrayed at artless moments into a plea for composition may find

himself as blankly met as if his plea were for trigonometry. He makes

inevitably his reflections, which are numerous enough; one of them being

that if we turn our back so squarely, so universally to this order of

considerations it is because the novel is so preponderantly cultivated

among us by women, in other words by a sex ever gracefully, comfortably,

enviably unconscious (it would be too much to call them even

suspicious,) of the requirements of form. The case is at any rate

sharply enough made for us, or against us, by the circumstance that

women are held to have achieved on all our ground, in spite of this

weakness and others, as great results as any. The judgment is

undoubtedly founded: Jane Austen was instinctive and charming, and the

other recognitions—even over the heads of the ladies, some of them,

from Fielding to Pater—are obvious; without, however, in the least

touching my contention. For signal examples of what composition,

distribution, arrangement can do, of how they intensify the life of a

work of art, we have to go elsewhere; and the value of Flaubert for us

is that he admirably points the moral. This is the explanation of the

“classic” fortune of “Madame Bovary” in especial, though I may add that

also of Hérodias and Saint-Julien l’Hospitalier in the “Trois Contes,”

as well as an aspect of these works endlessly suggestive. I spoke just

now of the small field of the picture in the longest of them, the small

capacity, as I called it, of the vessel; yet the way the thing is done

not only triumphs over the question of value but in respect to it fairly

misleads and confounds us. Where else shall we find in anything

proportionately so small such an air of dignity of size? Flaubert _made_

things big—it was his way, his ambition and his necessity; and I say

this while remembering that in “L’Éducation” (in proportion I mean

again,) the effect has not been produced. The subject of “L’Éducation”

is in spite of Frédéric large, but an indefinable shrinkage has

overtaken it in the execution. The exception so marked, however, is

single; “Salammbô” and “Saint-Antoine” are both at once very “heavy”

conceptions and very consistently and splendidly high applications of a

manner.

It is in this assured manner that the lesson sits aloft, that the spell

for the critical reader resides; and if the conviction under which

Flaubert labours is more and more grossly discredited among us his

compact mass is but the greater. He regarded the work of art as

_existing_ but by its expression, and defied us to name any other

measure of its life that is not a stultification. He held style to be

accordingly an indefeasible part of it, and found beauty, interest and

distinction as dependent on it for emergence as a letter committed to

the post-office is dependent on an addressed envelope. Strange enough it

may well appear to us to have to apologise for such notions as

eccentric. There are persons who consider that style comes of itself—we

see and hear at present, I think, enough of them; and to whom he would

doubtless have remarked that it goes, of itself, still faster. The thing

naturally differs in fact with the nature of the imagination; the

question is one of proprieties and affinities, sympathy and proportion.

The sympathy of the author of “Salammbô” was all with the magnificent,

his imagination for the phrase as variously noble or ignoble in itself,

contribute or destructive, adapted and harmonious or casual and common.

The worse among such possibilities have been multiplied by the infection

of bad writing, and he denied that the better ever do anything so

obliging as to come of themselves. They scarcely indeed for Flaubert

“came” at all; their arrival was determined only by fasting and prayer

or by patience of pursuit, the arts of the chase, long waits and

watches, figuratively speaking, among the peaks or by the waters. The

production of a book was of course made inordinately slow by the fatigue

of these measures; in illustration of which his letters often record

that it has taken him three days[3] to arrive at one right sentence,

tested by the pitch of his ideal of the right for the suggestion aimed

at. His difficulties drew from the author, as I have mentioned, much

resounding complaint; but those voices have ceased to trouble us and the

final voice remains. No feature of the whole business is more edifying

than the fact that he in the first place never misses style and in the

second never appears to have beaten about for it. That betrayal is of

course the worst betrayal of all, and I think the way he has escaped it

the happiest form of the peace that has finally visited him. It was

truly a wonderful success to be so the devotee of the phrase and yet

never its victim. Fine as he inveterately desired it should be he still

never lost sight of the question Fine for what? It is always so related

and associated, so properly part of something else that is in turn part

of something other, part of a reference, a tone, a passage, a page, that

the simple may enjoy it for its least bearing and the initiated for its

greatest. That surely is to be a writer of the first order, to resemble

when in the hand and however closely viewed a shapely crystal box, and

yet to be seen when placed on the table and opened to contain

innumerable compartments, springs and tricks. One is ornamental either

way, but one is in the second way precious too.

The crystal box then figures the style of “Salammbô” and “Saint-Antoine”

in a greater degree than that of “Bovary,” because, as the two former

express the writer’s romantic side, he had in them, while equally

covering his tracks, still further to fare and still more to hunt.

Beyond this allusion to their completing his duality I shall not attempt

closely to characterise them; though I admit that in not insisting on

them I press most lightly on the scale into which he had in his own view

cast his greatest pressure. He lamented the doom that drove him so

oddly, so ruefully, to choose his subjects, but he lamented it least

when these subjects were most pompous and most exotic, feeling as he did

that they had then after all most affinity with his special eloquence.

In dealing with the near, the directly perceived, he had to keep down

his tone, to make the eloquence small; though with the consequence, as

we have seen, that in spite of such precautions the whole thing mostly

insists on being ample. The familiar, that is, under his touch, took on

character, importance, extension, one scarce knows what to call it, in

order to carry the style or perhaps rather, as we may say, sit with

proper ease in the vehicle, and there was accordingly a limit to its

smallness; whereas in the romantic books, the preferred world of

Flaubert’s imagination, there was practically no need of compromise. The

compromise gave him throughout endless trouble, and nothing would be

more to the point than to show, had I space, why in particular it

distressed him. It was obviously his strange predicament that the only

spectacle open to him by experience and direct knowledge was the

bourgeois, which on that ground imposed on him successively his three so

intensely bourgeois themes. He was obliged to treat these themes, which

he hated, because his experience left him no alternative; his only

alternative was given by history, geography, philosophy, fancy, the

world of erudition and of imagination, the world especially of this

last. In the bourgeois sphere his ideal of expression laboured under

protest; in the other, the imagined, the projected, his need for facts,

for matter, and his pursuit of them, sat no less heavily. But as his

style all the while required a certain exercise of pride he was on the

whole more at home in the exotic than in the familiar; he escaped above

all in the former connection the associations, the disparities he

detested. He could be frankly noble in “Salammbô” and “Saint-Antoine,”

whereas in “Bovary” and “L’Éducation” he could be but circuitously and

insidiously so. He could in the one case cut his coat according to his

cloth—if we mean by his cloth his predetermined tone, while in the

other he had to take it already cut. Singular enough in his life the

situation so constituted: the comparatively meagre human

consciousness—for we must come back to that in him—struggling with the

absolutely large artistic; and the large artistic half wreaking itself

on the meagre human and half seeking a refuge from it, as well as a

revenge against it, in something quite different.

Flaubert had in fact command of two refuges which he worked in turn. The

first of these was the attitude of irony, so constant in him that

“L’Éducation” bristles and hardens with it and “Bouvard et

Pécuchet”—strangest of “poetic” justices—is made as dry as sand and as

heavy as lead; the second only was, by processes, by journeys the most

expensive, to get away altogether. And we inevitably ask ourselves

whether, eschewing the policy of flight, he might not after all have

fought out his case a little more on the spot. Might he not have

addressed himself to the human still otherwise than in “L’Éducation” and

in “Bouvard”? When one thinks of the view of the life of his country, of

the vast French community and its constituent creatures, offered in

these productions, one declines to believe it could make up the _whole_

vision of a man of his quality. Or when all was said and done was he

absolutely and exclusively condemned to irony? The second refuge I speak

of, the getting away from the human, the congruously and measurably

human, altogether, perhaps becomes in the light of this possibility but

an irony the more. Carthage and the Thebaid, Salammbô, Spendius, Matho,

Hannon, Saint Anthony, Hilarion, the Paternians, the Marcosians and the

Carpocratians, what are all these, inviting because queer, but a

confession of supreme impatience with the actual and the near, often

queer enough too, no doubt, but not consolingly, not transcendently?

Last remains the question whether, even if our author’s immediate as

distinguished from his remote view had had more reach, the particular

gift we claim for him, the perfection of arrangement and form, would

have had in certain directions the acquired flexibility. States of mind,

states of soul, of the simpler kind, the kinds supposable in the Emma

Bovarys, the Frédérics, the Bouvards and the Pécuchets, to say nothing

of the Carthaginians and the Eremites—for Flaubert’s eremites are

eminently artless—these conditions represent, I think, his proved

psychological range. And that throws us back remarkably, almost

confoundingly, upon another face of the general anomaly. The “gift” was

of the greatest, a force in itself, in virtue of which he is a

consummate writer; and yet there are whole sides of life to which it was

never addressed and which it apparently quite failed to suspect as a

field of exercise. If he never approached the complicated character in

man or woman—Emma Bovary is not the least little bit complicated—or

the really furnished, the finely civilised, was this because,

surprisingly, he could not? _L’âme française_ at all events shows in him

but ill.

This undoubtedly marks a limit, but limits are for the critic familiar

country, and he may mostly well feel the prospect wide enough when he

finds something positively well enough done. By disposition or by

obligation Flaubert selected, and though his selection was in some

respects narrow he stops not too short to have left us three really

“cast” works and a fourth of several perfect parts, to say nothing of

the element of perfection, of the superlative for the size, in his three

_nouvelles_. What he attempted he attempted in a spirit that gives an

extension to the idea of the achievable and the achieved in a literary

thing, and it is by this that we contentedly gauge the matter. As

success goes in this world of the approximate it may pass for success of

the greatest. If I am unable to pursue the proof of my remark in

“Salammbô” and “Saint-Antoine” it is because I have also had to select

and have found the questions connected with their two companions more

interesting. There are numerous judges, I hasten to mention, who,

showing the opposite preference, lose themselves with rapture in the

strange bristling archæological picture—yet all amazingly vivified and

co-ordinated—of the Carthaginian mercenaries in revolt and the sacred

veil of the great goddess profaned and stolen; as well in the still more

peopled panorama of the ancient sects, superstitions and mythologies

that swim in the desert before the fevered eyes of the Saint. One may be

able, however, at once to breathe more freely in “Bovary” than in

“Salammbô” and yet to hope that there is no intention of the latter that

one has missed. The great intention certainly, and little as we may be

sweetly beguiled, holds us fast; which is simply the author’s

indomitable purpose of fully pervading his field. There are countries

beyond the sea in which tracts are allowed to settlers on condition that

they will really, not nominally, cultivate them. Flaubert is on his

romantic ground like one of these settlers; he makes good with all his

might his title to his tract, and in a way that shows how it is not only

for him a question of safety but a question of honour. Honour demands

that he shall set up his home and his faith there in such a way that

every inch of the surface be planted or paved. He would have been

ashamed merely to encamp and, after the fashion of most other

adventurers, knock up a log hut among charred stumps. This was not what

would have been for him taking artistic possession, it was not what

would have been for him even personal honour, let alone literary; and

yet the general lapse from integrity was a thing that, wherever he

looked, he saw not only condoned but acclaimed and rewarded. He lived,

as he felt, in an age of mean production and cheap criticism, the

practical upshot of which took on for him a name that was often on his

lips. He called it the hatred of literature, a hatred in the midst of

which, the most literary of men, he found himself appointed to suffer. I

may not, however, follow him in that direction—which would take us far;

and the less that he was for himself after all, in spite of groans and

imprecations, a man of resources and remedies, and that there was always

his possibility of building himself in.

This he did equally in all his books—built himself into literature by

means of a material put together with extraordinary art; but it leads me

again to the question of what such a stiff ideal imposed on him for the

element of exactitude. This element, in the romantic, was his merciless

law; it was perhaps even in the romantic that—if there could indeed be

degrees for him in such matters—he most despised the loose and the

more-or-less. To be intensely definite and perfectly positive, to know

so well what he meant that he could at every point strikingly and

conclusively verify it, was the first of his needs; and if in addition

to being thus synthetically final he could be strange and sad and

terrible, and leave the cause of these effects inscrutable, success then

had for him its highest savour. We feel the inscrutability in those

memorable few words that put before us Frédéric Moreau’s start upon his

vain course of travel, “Il connût alors la mélancholie des paquebots;”

an image to the last degree comprehensive and embracing, but which

haunts us, in its droll pathos, without our quite knowing why. But he

was really never so pleased as when he could be both rare and precise

about the dreadful. His own sense of all this, as I have already

indicated, was that beauty comes with expression, that expression is

creation, that it _makes_ the reality, and only in the degree in which

it _is_, exquisitely, expression; and that we move in literature through

a world of different values and relations, a blest world in which we

know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by

it, and in which the image is thus always superior to the thing itself.

This quest and multiplication of the image, the image tested and

warranted and consecrated for the occasion, was accordingly his high

elegance, to which he too much sacrificed and to which “Salammbô” and

partly “Saint-Antoine” are monstrous monuments. Old cruelties and

perversities, old wonders and errors and terrors, endlessly appealed to

him; they constitute the unhuman side of his work, and if we have not

the bribe of curiosity, of a lively interest in method, or rather in

evocation just _as_ evocation, we tread our way among them, especially

in “Salammbô,” with a reserve too dry for our pleasure. To my own view

the curiosity and the literary interest are equal in dealing with the

non-romantic books, and the world presented, the aspects and agents, are

less deterrent and more amenable both to our own social and expressional

terms. Style itself moreover, with all respect to Flaubert, never

_totally_ beguiles; since even when we are so queerly constituted as to

be ninety-nine parts literary we are still a hundredth part something

else. This hundredth part may, once we possess the book—or the book

possesses us—make us imperfect as readers, and yet without it should we

want or get the book at all? The curiosity at any rate, to repeat, is

even greatest for me in “Madame Bovary,” say, for here I can measure,

can more directly appreciate, the terms. The aspects and impressions

being of an experience conceivable to me I am more touched by the

beauty; my interest gets more of the benefit of the beauty even though

this be not intrinsically greater. Which brings back our appreciation

inevitably at last to the question of our author’s lucidity.

I have sufficiently remarked that I speak from the point of view of his

interest to a reader of his own craft, the point of view of his

extraordinary technical wealth—though indeed when I think of the

general power of “Madame Bovary” I find myself desiring not to narrow

the ground of the lesson, not to connect the lesson, to its prejudice,

with that idea of the “technical,” that question of the way a thing is

done, so abhorrent, as a call upon attention, in whatever art, to the

wondrous Anglo-Saxon mind. Without proposing Flaubert as the type of the

newspaper novelist, or as an easy alternative to golf or the bicycle, we

should do him less than justice in failing to insist that a masterpiece

like “Madame Bovary” may benefit even with the simple-minded by the way

it has been done. It derives from its firm roundness that sign of all

rare works that there is something in it for every one. It may be read

ever so attentively, ever so freely, without a suspicion of how it is

written, to say nothing of put together; it may equally be read under

the excitement of these perceptions alone, one of the greatest known to

the reader who is fully open to them. Both readers will have been

transported, which is all any can ask. Leaving the first of them,

however that may be, to state the case for himself, I state it yet again

for the second, if only on this final ground. The book and its

companions represent for us a practical solution, Flaubert’s own

troubled but settled one, of the eternal dilemma of the painter of life.

From the moment this rash adventurer deals with his mysterious matter at

all directly his desire is not to deal with it stintedly. It at the same

time remains true that from the moment he desires to produce forms in

which it shall be preserved, he desires that these forms, things of

_his_ creation, shall not be, as testifying to his way with them, weak

or ignoble. He must make them complete and beautiful, of satisfactory

production, intrinsically interesting, under peril of disgrace with

those who know. Those who don’t know of course don’t count for him, and

it neither helps nor hinders him to say that every one knows about life.

Every one does not—it is distinctly the case of the few; and if it were

in fact the case of the many the knowledge still might exist, on the

evidence around us, even in an age of unprecedented printing, without

attesting itself by a multiplication of masterpieces. The question for

the artist can only be of doing the artistic utmost, and thereby of

_seeing_ the general task. When it is seen with the intensity with which

it presented itself to Flaubert a lifetime is none too much for fairly

tackling it. It must either be left alone or be dealt with, and to leave

it alone is a comparatively simple matter.

To deal with it is on the other hand to produce a certain number of

finished works; there being no other known method; and the quantity of

life depicted will depend on this array. What will this array, however,

depend on, and what will condition the number of pieces of which it is

composed? The “finish,” evidently, that the formula so glibly postulates

and for which the novelist is thus so handsomely responsible. He has on

the one side to feel his subject and on the other side to render it, and

there are undoubtedly two ways in which his situation may be expressed,

especially perhaps by himself. The more he feels his subject the more he

_can_ render it—that is the first way. The more he renders it the more

he _can_ feel it—that is the second way. This second way was

unmistakeably Flaubert’s, and if the result of it for him was a bar to

abundant production he could only accept such an incident as part of the

game. He probably for that matter would have challenged any easy

definition of “abundance,” contested the application of it to the

repetition, however frequent, of the thing not “done.” What but the

“doing” makes the thing, he would have asked, and how can a positive

result from a mere iteration of negatives, or wealth proceed from the

simple addition of so many instances of penury? We should here, in

closer communion with him, have got into his highly characteristic and

suggestive view of the fertilisation of subject by form, penetration of

the sense, ever, by the expression—the latter reacting creatively on

the former; a conviction in the light of which he appears to have

wrought with real consistency and which borrows from him thus its high

measure of credit. It would undoubtedly have suffered if his books had

been things of a loose logic, whereas we refer to it not only without

shame but with an encouraged confidence by their showing of a logic so

close. Let the phrase, the form that the whole is at the given moment

staked on, be beautiful and related, and the rest will take care of

itself—such is a rough indication of Flaubert’s faith; which has the

importance that it was a faith sincere, active and inspiring. I hasten

to add indeed that we must most of all remember how in these matters

everything hangs on definitions. The “beautiful,” with our author,

covered for the phrase a great deal of ground, and when every sort of

propriety had been gathered in under it and every relation, in a

complexity of such, protected, the idea itself, the presiding thought,

ended surely by being pretty well provided for.

These, however, are subordinate notes, and the plain question, in the

connection I have touched upon, is of whether we would really wish him

to have written more books, say either of the type of “Bovary” or of the

type of “Salammbô,” and not have written them so well. When the

production of a great artist who has lived a length of years has been

small there is always the regret; but there is seldom, any more than

here, the conceivable remedy. For the case is doubtless predetermined by

the particular kind of great artist a writer happens to be, and this

even if when we come to the conflict, to the historic case, deliberation

and delay may not all have been imposed by temperament. The admirable

George Sand, Flaubert’s beneficent friend and correspondent, is exactly

the happiest example we could find of the genius constitutionally

incapable of worry, the genius for whom style “came,” for whom the

sought effect was ever quickly and easily struck off, the book freely

and swiftly written, and who consequently is represented for us by

upwards of ninety volumes. If the comparison were with this lady’s great

contemporary the elder Dumas the disparity would be quadrupled, but that

ambiguous genius, somehow never really caught by us in the _fact_ of

composition, is out of our concern here: the issue is of those

developments of expression which involve a style, and as Dumas never so

much as once grazed one in all his long career, there was not even

enough of that grace in him for a fillip of the finger-nail. Flaubert is

at any rate represented by six books, so that he may on that estimate

figure as poor, while Madame Sand, falling so little short of a hundred,

figures as rich; and yet the fact remains that I can refer the congenial

mind to him with confidence and can do nothing of the sort for it in

respect to Madame Sand. She is loose and liquid and iridescent, as

iridescent as we may undertake to find her; but I can imagine

compositions quite without virtue—the virtue I mean, of sticking

together—begotten by the impulse to emulate her. She had undoubtedly

herself the benefit of her facility, but are we not left wondering to

what extent _we_ have it? There is too little in her, by the literary

connection, for the critical mind, weary of much wandering, to rest

upon. Flaubert himself wandered, wandered far, went much roundabout and

sometimes lost himself by the way, but how handsomely he provided for

our present repose! He found the French language inconceivably difficult

to write with elegance and was confronted with the equal truths that

elegance is the last thing that languages, even as they most mature,

seem to concern themselves with, and that at the same time taste,

asserting rights, insists on it, to the effect of showing us in a

boundless circumjacent waste of effort what the absence of it may mean.

He saw the less of this desert of death come back to that—that

everything at all saved from it for us since the beginning had been

saved by a soul of elegance within, or in other words by the last

refinement of selection, by the indifference on the part of the very

idiom, huge quite other than “composing” agent, to the individual

pretension. Recognising thus that to carry through the individual

pretension is at the best a battle, he adored a hard surface and

detested a soft one—much more a muddled; regarded a style without

rhythm and harmony as in a work of pretended beauty no style at all. He

considered that the failure of complete expression so registered made of

the work of pretended beauty a work of achieved barbarity. It would take

us far to glance even at his fewest discriminations; but rhythm and

harmony were for example most menaced in his scheme by repetition—when

repetition had not a positive grace; and were above all most at the

mercy of the bristling particles of which our modern tongues are mainly

composed and which make of the desired surface a texture pricked

through, from beneath, even to destruction, as by innumerable thorns.

On these lines production was of course slow work for him—especially as

he met the difficulty, met it with an inveteracy which shows how it

_can_ be met; and full of interest for readers of English speech is the

reflection he causes us to make as to the possibility of success at all

comparable among ourselves. I have spoken of his groans and

imprecations, his interminable waits and deep despairs; but what would

these things have been, what would have become of him and what of his

wrought residuum, had he been condemned to deal with a form of speech

consisting, like ours, as to one part, of “that” and “which”; as to a

second part, of the blest “it,” which an English sentence may repeat in

three or four opposed references without in the least losing caste; as

to a third face of all the “tos” of the infinitive and the preposition;

as to a fourth of our precious auxiliaries “be” and “do”; and as to a

fifth, of whatever survives in the language for the precious art of

pleasing? Whether or no the fact that the painter of “life” among us has

to contend with a medium intrinsically indocile, on certain sides, like

our own, whether this drawback accounts for his having failed, in our

time, to treat us, arrested and charmed, to a single case of crowned

classicism, there is at any rate no doubt that we in some degree owe

Flaubert’s counter-weight for that deficiency to _his_ having, on his

own ground, more happily triumphed. By which I do not mean that “Madame

Bovary” is a classic because the “thats,” the “its” and the “tos” are

made to march as Orpheus and his lute made the beasts, but because the

element of order and harmony works as a symbol of everything else that

is preserved for us by the history of the book. The history of the book

remains the lesson and the important, the delightful thing, remains

above all the drama that moves slowly to its climax. It is what we come

back to for the sake of what it shows us. We see—from the present to

the past indeed, never alas from the present to the future—how a

classic almost inveterately grows. Unimportant, unnoticed, or, so far as

noticed, contested, unrelated, alien, it has a cradle round which the

fairies but scantly flock and is waited on in general by scarce a hint

of significance. The significance comes by a process slow and small, the

fact only that one perceptive private reader after another discovers at

his convenience that the book is rare. The addition of the perceptive

private readers is no quick affair, and would doubtless be a vain one

did they not—while plenty of other much more remarkable books come and

go—accumulate and count. They count by their quality and continuity of

attention; so they have gathered for “Madame Bovary,” and so they are

held. That is really once more the great circumstance. It is always in

order for us to feel yet again what it is we are held by. Such is my

reason, definitely, for speaking of Flaubert as the novelist’s novelist.

Are we not moreover—and let it pass this time as a happy hope!—pretty

well all novelists now?

-----

Footnote 2:

On the occasion of these prefatory remarks to a translation of “Madame

Bovary,” appearing in A Century of French Romance, under the auspices of

Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mr. William Heinemann, in 1902.

Footnote 3:

It was true, delightfully true, that, extravagance in this province of

his life, though apparently in no other, being Flaubert’s necessity and

law, he deliberated and hung fire, wrestled, retreated and returned,

indulged generally in a tragi-comedy of waste; which I recall a charming

expression of on the lips of Edmond de Goncourt, who quite recognised

the heroic legend, but prettily qualified it: “Il faut vous dire qu’il y

avait là-dedans beaucoup de coucheries et d’école buissonière.” And he

related how on the occasion of a stay with his friend under the roof of

the Princess Mathilde, the friend, missed during the middle hours of a

fine afternoon, was found to have undressed himself and gone to bed to

think!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

1902

I

Stronger than ever, even than under the spell of first acquaintance and

of the early time, is the sense—thanks to a renewal of intimacy and, I

am tempted to say, of loyalty—that Balzac stands signally apart, that

he is the first and foremost member of his craft, and that above all the

Balzac-lover is in no position till he has cleared the ground by saying

so. The Balzac-lover alone, for that matter, is worthy to have his word

on so happy an occasion as this[4] about the author of “La Comédie

Humaine,” and it is indeed not easy to see how the amount of attention

so inevitably induced could at the worst have failed to find itself

turning to an act of homage. I have been deeply affected, to be frank,

by the mere refreshment of memory, which has brought in its train

moreover consequences critical and sentimental too numerous to figure

here in their completeness. The authors and the books that have, as we

say, done something for us, become part of the answer to our curiosity

when our curiosity had the freshness of youth, these particular agents

exist for us, with the lapse of time, as the substance itself of

knowledge: they have been intellectually so swallowed, digested and

assimilated that we take their general use and suggestion for granted,

cease to be aware of them because they have passed out of sight. But

they have passed out of sight simply by having passed into our lives.

They have become a part of our personal history, a part of ourselves,

very often, so far as we may have succeeded in best expressing

ourselves. Endless, however, are the uses of great persons and great

things, and it may easily happen in these cases that the connection,

even as an “excitement”—the form mainly of the connections of youth—is

never really broken. We have largely been living on our

benefactor—which is the highest acknowledgment one can make; only,

thanks to a blest law that operates in the long run to rekindle

excitement, we are accessible to the sense of having neglected him. Even

when we may not constantly have read him over the neglect is quite an

illusion, but the illusion perhaps prepares us for the finest emotion we

are to have owed to the acquaintance. Without having abandoned or denied

our author we yet come expressly back to him, and if not quite in

tatters and in penitence like the Prodigal Son, with something at all

events of the tenderness with which we revert to the parental threshold

and hearthstone, if not, more fortunately, to the parental presence. The

beauty of this adventure, that of seeing the dust blown off a relation

that had been put away as on a shelf, almost out of reach, at the back

of one’s mind, consists in finding the precious object not only fresh

and intact, but with its firm lacquer still further figured, gilded and

enriched. It is all overscored with traces and impressions—vivid,

definite, almost as valuable as itself—of the recognitions and

agitations it originally produced in us. Our old—that is our

young—feelings are very nearly what page after page most gives us. The

case has become a case of authority _plus_ association. If Balzac in

himself is indubitably wanting in the sufficiently common felicity we

know as charm, it is this association that may on occasion contribute

the grace.

The impression then, confirmed and brightened, is of the mass and weight

of the figure and of the extent of ground it occupies; a tract on which

we might all of us together quite pitch our little tents, open our

little booths, deal in our little wares, and not materially either

diminish the area or impede the circulation of the occupant. I seem to

see him in such an image moving about as Gulliver among the pigmies, and

not less good-natured than Gulliver for the exercise of any function,

without exception, that can illustrate his larger life. The first and

the last word about the author of “Les Contes Drolatiques” is that of

all novelists he is the most serious—by which I am far from meaning

that in the human comedy as he shows it the comic is an absent quantity.

His sense of the comic was on the scale of his extraordinary senses in

general, though his expression of it suffers perhaps exceptionally from

that odd want of elbow-room—the penalty somehow of his close-packed,

pressed-down contents—which reminds us of some designedly beautiful

thing but half-disengaged from the clay or the marble. It is the scheme

and the scope that are supreme in him, applying this moreover not to

mere great intention, but to the concrete form, the proved case, in

which we possess them. We most of us aspire to achieve at the best but a

patch here and there, to pluck a sprig or a single branch, to break

ground in a corner of the great garden of life. Balzac’s plan was simply

to do everything that could be done. He proposed to himself to “turn

over” the great garden from north to south and from east to west; a

task—immense, heroic, to this day immeasurable—that he bequeathed us

the partial performance of, a prodigious ragged clod, in the twenty

monstrous years representing his productive career, years of

concentration and sacrifice the vision of which still makes us ache. He

had indeed a striking good fortune, the only one he was to enjoy as an

harassed and exasperated worker: the great garden of life presented

itself to him absolutely and exactly in the guise of the great garden of

France, a subject vast and comprehensive enough, yet with definite edges

and corners. This identity of his universal with his local and national

vision is the particular thing we should doubtless call his greatest

strength were we preparing agreeably to speak of it also as his visible

weakness. Of Balzac’s weaknesses, however, it takes some assurance to

talk; there is always plenty of time for them; they are the last signs

we know him by—such things truly as in other painters of manners often

come under the head of mere exuberance of energy. So little in short do

they earn the invidious name even when we feel them as defects.

What he did above all was to read the universe, as hard and as loud as

he could, _into_ the France of his time; his own eyes regarding his work

as at once the drama of man and a mirror of the mass of social phenomena

the most rounded and registered, most organised and administered, and

thereby most exposed to systematic observation and portrayal, that the

world had seen. There are happily other interesting societies, but these

are for schemes of such an order comparatively loose and incoherent,

with more extent and perhaps more variety, but with less of the great

enclosed and exhibited quality, less neatness and sharpness of

arrangement, fewer categories, sub-divisions, juxtapositions. Balzac’s

France was both inspiring enough for an immense prose epic and reducible

enough for a report or a chart. To allow his achievement all its dignity

we should doubtless say also treatable enough for a history, since it

was as a patient historian, a Benedictine of the actual, the living

painter of his living time, that he regarded himself and handled his

material. All painters of manners and fashions, if we will, are

historians, even when they least don the uniform: Fielding, Dickens,

Thackeray, George Eliot, Hawthorne among ourselves. But the great

difference between the great Frenchman and the eminent others is that,

with an imagination of the highest power, an unequalled intensity of

vision, he saw his subject in the light of science as well, in the light

of the bearing of all its parts on each other, and under pressure of a

passion for exactitude, an appetite, the appetite of an ogre, for _all_

the kinds of facts. We find I think in the union here suggested

something like the truth about his genius, the nearest approach to a

final account of him. Of imagination on one side all compact, he was on

the other an insatiable reporter of the immediate, the material, the

current combination, and perpetually moved by the historian’s impulse to

fix, preserve and explain them. One asks one’s self as one reads him

what concern the poet has with so much arithmetic and so much criticism,

so many statistics and documents, what concern the critic and the

economist have with so many passions, characters and adventures. The

contradiction is always before us; it springs from the inordinate scale

of the author’s two faces; it explains more than anything else his

eccentricities and difficulties. It accounts for his want of grace, his

want of the lightness associated with an amusing literary form, his

bristling surface, his closeness of texture, so rough with richness, yet

so productive of the effect we have in mind when we speak of not being

able to see the wood for the trees.

A thorough-paced votary, for that matter, can easily afford to declare

at once that this confounding duality of character does more things

still, or does at least the most important of all—introduces us without

mercy (mercy for ourselves I mean) to the oddest truth we could have

dreamed of meeting in such a connection. It was certainly _a priori_ not

to be expected we should feel it of him, but our hero is after all not

in his magnificence totally an artist: which would be the strangest

thing possible, one must hasten to add, were not the smallness of the

practical difference so made even stranger. His endowment and his effect

are each so great that the anomaly makes at the most a difference only

by adding to his interest for the critic. The critic worth his salt is

indiscreetly curious and wants ever to know how and why—whereby Balzac

is thus a still rarer case for him, suggesting that exceptional

curiosity may have exceptional rewards. The question of what makes the

artist on a great scale is interesting enough; but we feel it in

Balzac’s company to be nothing to the question of what on an equal scale

frustrates him. The scattered pieces, the _disjecta membra_ of the

character are here so numerous and so splendid that they prove

misleading; we pile them together, and the heap assuredly is monumental;

it forms an overtopping figure. The genius this figure stands for, none

the less, is really such a lesson to the artist as perfection itself

would be powerless to give; it carries him so much further into the

special mystery. Where it carries him, at the same time, I must not in

this scant space attempt to say—which would be a loss of the fine

thread of my argument. I stick to our point in putting it, more

concisely, that the artist of the Comédie Humaine is half smothered by

the historian. Yet it belongs as well to the matter also to meet the

question of whether the historian himself may not be an artist—in which

case Balzac’s catastrophe would seem to lose its excuse. The answer of

course is that the reporter, however philosophic, has one law, and the

originator, however substantially fed, has another; so that the two laws

can with no sort of harmony or congruity make, for the finer sense, a

common household. Balzac’s catastrophe—so to name it once again—was in

this perpetual conflict and final impossibility, an impossibility that

explains his defeat on the classic side and extends so far at times as

to make us think of his work as, from the point of view of beauty, a

tragic waste of effort.

What it would come to, we judge, is that the irreconcilability of the

two kinds of law is, more simply expressed, but the irreconcilability of

two different ways of composing one’s effect. The principle of

composition that his free imagination would have, or certainly might

have, handsomely imposed on him is perpetually dislocated by the quite

opposite principle of the earnest seeker, the inquirer to a useful end,

in whom nothing is free but a born antipathy to his yoke-fellow. Such a

production as “Le Curé de Village,” the wonderful story of Madame

Graslin, so nearly a masterpiece yet so ultimately not one, would be, in

this connection, could I take due space for it, a perfect illustration.

If, as I say, Madame Graslin’s creator was confined by his doom to

patches and pieces, no piece is finer than the first half of the book in

question, the half in which the picture is determined by his unequalled

power of putting people on their feet, planting them before us in their

habit as they lived—a faculty nourished by observation as much as one

will, but with the inner vision all the while wide-awake, the vision for

which ideas are as living as facts and assume an equal intensity. This

intensity, greatest indeed in the facts, has in Balzac a force all its

own, to which none other in any novelist I know can be likened. His

touch communicates on the spot to the object, the creature evoked, the

hardness and permanence that certain substances, some sorts of stone,

acquire by exposure to the air. The hardening medium, for the image

soaked in it, is the air of his mind. It would take but little more to

make the peopled world of fiction as we know it elsewhere affect us by

contrast as a world of rather gray pulp. This mixture of the solid and

the vivid is Balzac at his best, and it prevails without a break,

without a note not admirably true, in “Le Curé de Village”—since I have

named that instance—up to the point at which Madame Graslin moves out

from Limoges to Montégnac in her ardent passion of penitence, her

determination to expiate her strange and undiscovered association with a

dark misdeed by living and working for others. Her drama is a

particularly inward one, interesting, and in the highest degree, so long

as she herself, her nature, her behaviour, her personal history and the

relations in which they place her, control the picture and feed our

illusion. The firmness with which the author makes them play this part,

the whole constitution of the scene and of its developments from the

moment we cross the threshold of her dusky stuffy old-time birth-house,

is a rare delight, producing in the reader that sense of local and

material immersion which is one of Balzac’s supreme secrets. What

characteristically befalls, however, is that the spell accompanies us

but part of the way—only until, at a given moment, his attention

ruthlessly transfers itself from inside to outside, from the centre of

his subject to its circumference.

This is Balzac caught in the very fact of his monstrous duality, caught

in his most complete self-expression. He is clearly quite unwitting that

in handing over his _data_ to his twin-brother the impassioned economist

and surveyor, the insatiate general inquirer and reporter, he is in any

sort betraying our confidence, for his good conscience at such times,

the spirit of edification in him, is a lesson even to the best of us,

his rich robust temperament nowhere more striking, no more marked

anywhere the great push of the shoulder with which he makes his theme

move, overcharged though it may be like a carrier’s van. It is not

therefore assuredly that he loses either sincerity or power in putting

before us to the last detail such a matter as, in this case, his

heroine’s management of her property, her tenantry, her economic

opportunities and visions, for these are cases in which he never shrinks

nor relents, in which positively he stiffens and terribly towers—to

remind us again of M. Taine’s simplifying word about his being an artist

doubled with a man of business. Balzac was indeed doubled if ever a

writer was, and to that extent that we almost as often, while we read,

feel ourselves thinking of him as a man of business doubled with an

artist. Whichever way we turn it the oddity never fails, nor the wonder

of the ease with which either character bears the burden of the other. I

use the word burden because, as the fusion is never complete—witness in

the book before us the fatal break of “tone,” the one unpardonable sin

for the novelist—we are beset by the conviction that but for this

strangest of dooms one or other of the two partners might, to our relief

and to his own, have been disembarrassed. The disembarrassment, for

each, by a more insidious fusion, would probably have conduced to the

mastership of interest proceeding from form, or at all events to the

search for it, that Balzac fails to embody. Perhaps the possibility of

an artist constructed on such strong lines is one of those fine things

that are not of this world, a mere dream of the fond critical spirit.

Let these speculations and condonations at least pass as the amusement,

as a result of the high spirits—if high spirits be the word—of the

reader feeling himself again in touch. It was not of our author’s

difficulties—that is of his difficulty, the great one—that I proposed

to speak, but of his immense clear action. Even that is not truly an

impression of ease, and it is strange and striking that we are in fact

so attached by his want of the unity that keeps surfaces smooth and

dangers down as scarce to feel sure at any moment that we shall not come

back to it with most curiosity. We are never so curious about successes

as about interesting failures. The more reason therefore to speak

promptly, and once for all, of the scale on which, in its own quarter of

his genius, success worked itself out for him.

It is to that I _should_ come back—to the infinite reach in him of the

painter and the poet. We can never know what might have become of him

with less importunity in his consciousness of the machinery of life, of

its furniture and fittings, of all that, right and left, he causes to

assail us, sometimes almost to suffocation, under the general rubric of

_things_. Things, in this sense with him, are at once our delight and

our despair; we pass from being inordinately beguiled and convinced by

them to feeling that his universe fairly smells too much of them, that

the larger ether, the diviner air, is in peril of finding among them

scarce room to circulate. His landscapes, his “local colour”—thick in

his pages at a time when it was to be found in his pages almost

alone—his towns, his streets, his houses, his Saumurs, Angoulêmes,

Guérandes, his great prose Turner-views of the land of the Loire, his

rooms, shops, interiors, details of domesticity and traffic, are a short

list of the terms into which he saw the real as clamouring to be

rendered and into which he rendered it with unequalled authority. It

would be doubtless more to the point to make our profit of this

consummation than to try to reconstruct a Balzac planted more in the

open. We hardly, as the case stands, know most whether to admire in such

an example as the short tale of “La Grenadière” the exquisite feeling

for “natural objects” with which it overflows like a brimming wine-cup,

the energy of perception and description which so multiplies them for

beauty’s sake and for the love of their beauty, or the general wealth of

genius that can calculate, or at least count, so little and spend so

joyously. The tale practically exists for the sake of the enchanting

aspects involved—those of the embowered white house that nestles on its

terraced hill above the great French river, and we can think, frankly,

of no one else with an equal amount of business on his hands who would

either have so put himself out for aspects or made them almost by

themselves a living subject. A born son of Touraine, it must be said, he

pictures his province, on every pretext and occasion, with filial

passion and extraordinary breadth. The prime aspect in his scene all the

while, it must be added, is the money aspect. The general money question

so loads him up and weighs him down that he moves through the human

comedy, from beginning to end, very much in the fashion of a camel, the

ship of the desert, surmounted with a cargo. “Things” for him are francs

and centimes more than any others, and I give up as inscrutable,

unfathomable, the nature, the peculiar avidity of his interest in them.

It makes us wonder again and again what then is the use on Balzac’s

scale of the divine faculty. The imagination, as we all know, may be

employed up to a certain point in inventing uses for money; but its

office beyond that point is surely to make us forget that anything so

odious exists. This is what Balzac never forgot; his universe goes on

expressing itself for him, to its furthest reaches, on its finest sides,

in the terms of the market. To say these things, however, is after all

to come out where we want, to suggest his extraordinary scale and his

terrible completeness. I am not sure that he does not see character too,

see passion, motive, personality, as quite in the order of the “things”

we have spoken of. He makes them no less concrete and palpable, handles

them no less directly and freely. It is the whole business in fine—that

grand total to which he proposed to himself to do high justice—that

gives him his place apart, makes him, among the novelists, the largest

weightiest presence. There are some of his obsessions—that of the

material, that of the financial, that of the “social,” that of the

technical, political, civil—for which I feel myself unable to judge

him, judgment losing itself unexpectedly in a particular shade of pity.

The way to judge him is to try to walk all round him—on which we see

how remarkably far we have to go. He is the only member of his order

really monumental, the sturdiest-seated mass that rises in our path.

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Footnote 4:

The appearance of a translation of the “Deux Jeunes Mariées” in A

Century of French Romance.