Even to those who have read little or nothing of Flaubert, it is well
known that in the year 1856 he created an extraordinary sensation in
Paris, and very soon throughout Europe, with a novel entitled "Madame
Bovary." An absurd lawsuit,--the state attorney prosecuted both author
and publisher, on the plea of the immoral tendencies of the work, and
a unanimous verdict of acquittal on the part of the jury, could do
little to increase the attention which the strongly individual new
talent had excited. The book appeared singular and scandalous, as is
apt to be the case with new attempts in literature. It was a token of
opposition. People compared it with the literary productions of earlier
times, and asked themselves if it was poetry. It was rather a reminder
of surgery, of anatomy. Very much later, in Parisian literary circles
where fidelity to a former conception of poetry was maintained, it was
said: "Will you please excuse us from reading M. Flaubert's skeletons."
The author was called an ultra-realist; people found in his novel only
the merciless, inexorable physiology of every-day life in its sorrowful
ugliness.
In the first moment of excitement, people overlooked the fact that now
and then there escaped from this physiologist a thoroughly impersonal,
it is true, yet figurative, richly colored expression, which seemed
freighted with a message from quite a different world than that of
vulgar life. The half-cultured literary public did not perceive that
these descriptions of simple provincial circumstances and provincial
misfortunes, of pitiful errors and of a wretched death, were produced
in a style which was at once as clear as a mirror and as pleasant to
the ear as harmonious music. There lay buried in the book a lyric poet,
and ever and anon there burst from the grave a word of flame.
It was precisely the epoch when the generation born between 1820
and 1830 was assuming the mastery in literature, and revealing its
physiognomic type by an analysis of real life, executed with harsh
hands. The new generation turned from philosophic idealism, and from
all that pertained to romance, and wielded the dissecting-knife with
genuine enthusiasm. In the same year in which "Madame Bovary" appeared,
Taine, in his work "Les philosophes français du 19e siècle,"
dissected the prevailing spiritualistic doctrines, annihilated Cousin
as a thinker, and declared, with the utmost nonchalance, and without
entering into any controversy with the romantic school, that Victor
Hugo and Lamartine were already classic writers, who were read by young
people rather from curiosity than from sympathy, and who were as far
removed from them as Shakespeare and Racine. They were "admirable and
worthy remains of a period which had been great, but which no longer
existed." His friend, Sarcey, wrote, not much later, in "Figaro," that
article which was so often quoted and so much derided by Banville, the
disciple of the great romantic school, and which culminated in the
words: "Forward, my friends! Down with romance! Voltaire and the Normal
School forever!"[2] In dramatic poetry, opposition to the romantic
school appeared to have been frustrated by the unfruitful little _École
de bon sens._ Ponsard and those who were intellectually allied to him
had not been able to maintain long what people had once expected of
them; but the more modern realistic dramatic writers at this juncture
combined with them. Augier, who had dedicated his first poetry to
Ponsard, and who had at first followed the sentimental, _bourgeois_
tendency of the latter, entered on a new career, in 1855, devoted
to drastic description of the immediate past. The way had just been
pointed out to him by the bolder, hardier Dumas, with whom, in spite
of all his respect for the generation to which his father belonged,
had commenced the direct and pertinent derision of the romantic
ideal; this can be seen in the _rôles_ of Nanjac, in "Le Demimonde"
and of Montègre, in "L'ami des femmes." The answer that Montègre,
bewildered by the superiority of Ryon, makes the latter, _"Vous êtes un
physiologiste, monsieur_," was in reality the sole reply that the elder
generation could offer to the critic of the younger.
Augier was born in 1820, Dumas in 1824, Sarcey and Taine in 1828. The
author of "Madame Bovary," who first saw the light in 1821, evidently
had kindred spirits among his contemporaries. He differed from them in
his secret, unshaken fidelity to the ideals of the past generation;
but he united with them so unhesitatingly in their attacks on the
caricatures of these ideals that, without further ceremony, he must be
classed in the group of these anti-romantic writers.
And yet, through his harshness and coldness, he was much more of a
reminder of Mérimée, who stood alone in the past generation; to many,
indeed, he appeared but a heavier, broader Mérimée. For the first thing
noticeable in him was that he was a cold-blooded poet; and these two
epithets, cold-blooded and poet, had previously been united in Mérimée
alone.
A closer study, however, would have shown that the cold-blooded
deliberation of Mérimée was of quite a different character than that
of Flaubert. Mérimée treated romantic material in an unromantic, dry,
and meagre manner. His tone and his style corresponded, for the tone
was ironical, the style lacking in imagery, and cold. With style and
tone, however, the wildness of the theme and its barbaric, impassioned
character were at variance.
Flaubert, on the contrary, harmonized theme and tone. With infinitely
superior irony he pictured the vapid and the absurd; but with theme
and tone his style was at variance. He was not, as Mérimée, rational
and meagre; he was all radiant with coloring, and harmonious, and he
spread the gold-wrought veil of this style over all the commonplace
and sorrowful incidents he narrated. No one could read the book
aloud without being astonished at the music of its prose. The style
contains a thousand melodious secrets; it aims the keenest satire at
human weakness, powerless yearnings and aspirations, self-deception
and self-satisfaction, to an accompaniment of organ music. While the
surgeon in the text, without the slightest manifestation of sympathy,
is lacerating and tearing to pieces, a beauty-loving lyric poet is
sobbing out a low, wailing accompaniment. If we should turn to a page
in which a village apothecary utters his half scientific prattle, in
which a diligence tour is depicted, or an old casket described, we
would find it, viewed from a stylistic standpoint, as highly colored
and enduring as a mosaic, owing to the freshness of its expressions and
the solid structure of its sentences. Each clause is so carefully put
together that no two words could possibly be removed without destroying
the entire page. The assured refinement of the imagery, the metallic
ring of the musical flow of words, the rolling breadth of the prose
rhythms, invested the narrative with a marvellous power that was now
picturesque, now comic.
There was evidently something singularly dual in his temperament. His
character was composed of two distinct elements which were complements
of each other: a burning hatred of stupidity and an unbounded love of
art. This hatred, as is so often the case with hatred, felt itself
irresistibly attracted to its object. Stupidity in all its forms, such
as folly, superstition, self-conceit, and illiberality, attracted him
magnetically, and inspired him. He was compelled to depict it trait
by trait; he deemed it, in and for itself, entertaining, even when
others could not discover it to be interesting or comical. He made
a formal collection of stupidities, absurd pleas for law-suits, and
vapid illustrations; he collected a mass of wretched verse, written
by physicians alone; every evidence of human stupidity, as such, had
its value to him. In his works, indeed, he has done nothing else than
erect monuments with a masterly hand to human limitation and blindness,
to our misfortunes, so far as they depend upon our stupidities. I
almost fear that the world's history was to him the history of human
stupidity. His faith in the progress of the human race was exceedingly
wavering. The mass, even the reading public, was to him "that
everlasting blockhead which we call they (_on_)." If we wished to label
this side of his character, and absolutely stamp him with one of those
popular, but to him so detestable, words ending with "ist," it could
not with full justice be pessimist, nor yet nihilist; imbecillist would
be the word.
To this unremitting pursuit of stupidity, whose embittered character
was shrouded in its purely impersonal form, corresponded, as before
stated, a passionate love of literature, which to him signified beauty
and harmony, which was considered by him the highest, in fact the only
true, art, and which he cultivated with a yearning for perfection that
first kept him long silent, then caused him at a late day to become
a master, and finally rendered him early unfruitful again. When he
depicted the commonplace, it caused him more distress than others; he
therefore endeavored to elevate his materials through the artistic
manner of his treatment, and since in his eyes the most important
attribute of authorship was the plastic power, he strove beyond all
else to attain perspicuity. He has said so himself, and we feel it to
be true when we study him through his style.
In his very first work all the merits of this style came to light.
Read the following passage from "Madame Bovary," where Emma, yet
unmarried, accompanies Bovary to the door, after his medical visit to
her father: "She always went with him to the first step of the outside
stairs. If his horse had not yet been brought forward they remained
there. They had said adieu, they attempted no further remark; the
fresh air encompassed her, played with the downy hair of her neck,
or blew about her side the strings of her apron, which twisted and
twirled like a little flag. Once when a thaw had set in, the water was
trickling down from the bark of the trees, and the snow was melting on
the roofs of the buildings. She stood on the threshold; she went back
to get her parasol; she opened it. The parasol was of a changeable
green and blue silk, and the sun shining through it lent a radiant and
flickering lustre to her white complexion. She smiled beneath it, while
the soft zephyrs played about her, and the raindrops were heard to come
pattering down, one by one, on the outstretched silk of the parasol."
So insignificant a matter as this ordinary leave-taking becomes
interesting through the loving care bestowed on the description, and
the separation obtains individual life from the prominence given to a
single day, when, after all, nothing of moment transpires. The accuracy
with which this commonplace situation is portrayed, transforms it into
a painting of high rank, one that reproduces simultaneously the visible
and the audible, the tableau and the mobile life.
Or recall the passage where Emma, after her marriage, falls in love for
the first time:--
"Emma grew thin, her cheeks became pale, her face lengthened. With her
smoothly brushed black hair, neatly tied with a ribbon, her large eyes,
her straight nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent as she was,
she almost seemed to glide through existence without touching it, and
to bear on her brow the indistinct impress of some sublime destiny.
She was so sorrowful and so calm, and at the same time so gentle and
so reserved, that in her presence people felt as though seized by some
icy spell, just as a shudder is apt to run through the frame in church
where the perfume of flowers is mingled with the chill of the marble."
The comparison is new, is striking and brief. We here detect the poet
in the narrative.