1881.
Gustave Flaubert was born at Rouen, in the year 1821. When, in 1880, he
was snatched away by sudden death, he did not leave European literary
art in the same condition in which he had found it. No artist, as such,
could desire to hand down to posterity a better renown. The work of his
life marks a step in the history of the novel.
He was a prose author of the first rank; for several years indeed no
one stood higher than he in France. His strength as a prosaist reposed
upon an artistic and literary conscientiousness, which was exalted
almost to the dignity of genius. He became a great artist because he
was unsparing in his efforts, both when he was making preparations to
write and when he was engaged in writing; he collected the results
of his observations, facts, and illustrations, with the painstaking
of a mere savant, while striving, with the passionate eagerness of
a mere adorer of form, to fashion his materials in a plastic and
harmonious manner. He became a master of modern fiction because he was
sufficiently self-denying to be willing to represent real psychological
events alone, and to shun all effects of poetic eloquence, all pathetic
or dramatic situations which appeared beautiful or interesting at the
expense of the truth. His name is synonymous with artistic earnestness
and literary rigor.
He was not a savant who was at the same time a writer of fiction,
or who, in the course of his life, became a writer of fiction. His
literary work is based on earnest, slowly acquired preparatory studies.
His books have nothing in them that is juvenile or frivolous, nothing
that is smiling or versatile. These books are the results of a slowly
developed and late maturity. He did not make his début until he was
thirty-five years old, and, although he devoted his whole time to
literature, he left behind him in his fifty-ninth year but seven
works.[1]
His was a profoundly original, but by no means elementary character.
His originality was dependent on the fact that two literary currents
united in his temperament and there formed a new well-spring. In
his youth he received simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, two
impulses, which determined his intellectual career.
The first current that reached him was the romantic-descriptive
tendency in literature originating with Chateaubriand, a tendency
characterized by a style fraught with lyrical emotion and brilliant
coloring, which charmed the French reading public for the first time
in "Atala" and "Les Martyres," and which later gained a far firmer and
more powerful rhythm, as well as a far superior picturesque vigor, in
Victor Hugo's "Les Orientales," and "Notre Dame de Paris." Like all
poets, indeed like all human beings, Flaubert was inclined in youth
to the lyrical, and his lyric muse, through the historic development
of French poesie, became a varied-hued and melancholy homage to
the religion of beauty. The second current directed into his inner
being, was the tendency of Balzac's novels against the modern, their
employment of what was hideous and brutal as characteristic, their
passionate realistic bias, and their fidelity of observation.
While these two currents flowed at one and the same time through his
inner being, and after the lapse of some time became blended together,
they received a new coloring and a new name.
As a youth he had composed for the drawers of his writing-table many
descriptive and pathetic lyrics, in Hugo's, Gautier's, and Byron's
style; but justly feeling that his originality could not assert itself
in this direction, and that, upon the whole, there was no longer room
for anything original in this department, he withheld his productions
from the public, and reconciled himself to the idea of appearing
comparatively ungifted, or, at all events, unproductive. About the
same time he made literary efforts in an opposite direction; he spoke
himself sometimes of a tragi-comedy on the smallpox; but this attempt,
too, he refrained from publishing. Not until Chateaubriand and Balzac
had fostered in his mind a new poetic form, did he feel sure of his
originality, and made his first public appearance.