As the result of such a frame of mind it was that Flaubert, in mature
manhood, resolved to come forward as an author, and wrote "Madame
Bovary." There was wafted from this book a breath of icy coldness.
It seemed as though the author at length had succeeded in drawing
forth the truth from the deep, cold well where it had been lying, and
as though it were now standing on its pedestal and freezing, having
brought with it all the cold, shuddering horror of the abyss. A
singular book, written without the slightest degree of tenderness for
its subject! Others had depicted the simple life of the country and
of the province with melancholy, with humor, and at least with that
attempt at idealizing which contemplation from afar is apt to bring
with it. He regarded it without sympathy, and represented it as insipid
and spiritless as it was. His landscapes were devoid of so-called
poetry, and were painted briefly and yet completely. In his severe,
masterly style he contented himself with reproducing the chief outlines
and coloring, but gave thus an accurate presentation of the landscape.
And he was wholly without tenderness for his principal character,
a rare phenomenon in a poet whose principal character is a young,
beautiful, and exceedingly attractive woman, who passes her life in
yearning, languishing, and passionate desire, who errs and is deceived,
is ruined, and finally perishes without properly sinking beneath the
level of her surroundings. But every dream, every hope, every delusion,
every naïve and unhealthy desire that floated through her brain was
investigated; and brought to light without agitation, indeed with an
overwhelming irony. There was scarcely a phase of her existence in
which she failed to appear ridiculous or morally repulsive, and not
until she dies a hideous death does the suppressed irony wholly recede,
and she breathes her last, not as an object of sympathy, it is true,
yet not as an object of contempt.
The author seemed thoroughly cold, even in the description of the hour
of her death. That this appearance was deceptive is proved by a letter
from Flaubert, which may be found in Taine's work, "De l'intelligence"
(I., 94), and in which he says, "When I wrote the poisoning scene of
Emma Bovary, I had so strong a taste of arsenic in my mouth, I was
so thoroughly poisoned myself, that for two consecutive days I could
digest nothing; indeed, I found it impossible to keep a morsel of food
on my stomach." How deeply the author was affected, body and soul,
was concealed in the novel, owing to the supreme self-control he had
exercised while engaged on the work.
Throughout the entire book there appeared not a single personage with
whom the author could possibly have anything in common, or with whom
he could, in ever so slight a degree, be supposed to wish to change
places. His characters were all, without exception, commonplace,
unlovely, vicious, or unfortunate. Nor did he attempt the slightest
deviation from the standpoint taken. The young wife, for instance,
dangerous though her instincts were, in her yearning for the beautiful,
her aspirations after the ideal, and her persistent faith in the
romance of love, possesses attributes which, if portrayed differently,
or with a more sparing hand, might have rendered the character noble,
even in its errors. What would not George Sand have made of her!
But Flaubert is determined not to fall into the old ruts, and so he
assiduously robs the so-called fascinating sins of every trace of
poetry. The betrayed husband, likewise, notwithstanding his lack of
skill as a physician and his awkwardness as a man, is kind-hearted,
patient, upright, and truly devoted to Emma, and thus has elements
which, under other circumstances, might have produced a most touching
effect. Moreover, he develops, at her death, qualities, such as
profound attachment and self-forgetfulness, which a slight pressure
from the finger of the author might have made seem significant and
worthy of respect. But the creative artist refuses to give the clay
this slight pressure; his love of truth compels him to keep the
form within the limits that to him appear the correct ones, and so
he permits Bovary to remain, from beginning to end, a good-natured,
undignified, inefficient, and unattractive person.
There is in the novel but a single character with whom we are made
to feel partially in sympathy, and that is the little apothecary
apprentice, Justin, who adores Emma from afar. There is one situation,
after her death, in which the author almost seems inclined to idealize
him. When all the other mourners have left the churchyard, Justin draws
near her grave, and we read:--
"On the grave among the fir-trees there knelt a weeping child, whose
heart was ready to burst with the sobs that; shook his frame; and
there he remained, in that shaded! spot, groaning beneath the weight
of an immeasurable anguish, which was milder than the moon, and more
unfathomable than the night."
We marvel to think that these lines have Flaubert for their author.
But then we read in continuation: "Suddenly the wicket gate turned
on creaking hinges. It was the grave-digger Lestiboudois; he came in
search of his spade, which he had forgotten a little while before. He
recognized Justin, as the boy clambered over the wall, and knew at once
who was the offender that had stolen his potatoes."
This passage is the only one that remained in my mind ten years after
my first perusal of "Madame Bovary," and it is a most admirable
passage. It is not arbitrarily ironical, _à la_ Heine; irony, in this
case, is simply keen pénétration, the work of a versatile mind. It is
quite natural that Justin should be stirred to the most profound and
poetic emotions by the death of the lady whom he adored; but it is none
the less natural that he should previously have stolen potatoes, and
that the grave-digger should intuitively discover in the fact of his
clambering over the wall of the churchyard an indication of his potato
theft. But that Flaubert should have these two circumstances, these
two sides of life, before his eyes at the same time, is proof of an
intellectual vigor and a command of his subject which, as far as I am
aware, have never before appeared in a similar form.
The artistic irony of Flaubert is here impersonal, necessary, true, and
profound, in quite a different way than that of Mérimée. It is merely
a stereoscopic view, by means of which reality is set forth in bold
relief.
It is no wonder that at first people scarcely discovered anything else
in the work than this mode of contemplation, and the fidelity to real
life that was its product. If we leave out of consideration the brief
period when the absurd notion was afloat that Flaubert was an immoral
writer, it may safely be said that the prevailing idea concerning him
was that he was what is called a realist. He copied the insignificant
and the important with equal conscientiousness, but with an evident
predilection for the commonplace and the morally repulsive; in fact,
everything with him centred in one plan, vigorous but harsh. The
admirers of the book found it a most remarkable work; the fault-finders
pronounced the tendency introduced by Flaubert photographic, but not
artistic. People expected, or rather dreaded, a new "Madame Bovary"
from his hand.
But they waited for it in vain, for nothing further was heard from him.
Years passed, and he still remained silent. Finally, after the lapse of
seven years, he appeared before the public with a new novel, and the
reading world proclaimed aloud its astonishment. This new book bore
the reader far away from the villages of Normandy and the nineteenth
century. The vanished author of "Madame Bovary" was found again amid
the ruins of ancient Carthage. He represented, in "Salammbô," nothing
more or less than Carthage in the days of Hamilcar; a city and a
civilization of which people had scarcely any reliable knowledge,--a
war between Carthage and the hireling troops of the city, which did not
so much as offer general historic, or even so-called ideal interest. A
Parisian novel, whose plot centred in violated marriage vows, had been
looked for, and in its stead was received one whose scenes were laid
amid ancient Punic culture, Tanit's worship, and Moloch adoration,
sieges and battles, terrors without number or measure, the death of
an entire army by starvation, and the slow martyrdom of an imprisoned
Lybian chieftain.
And the strangest part of it was that all this subject-matter, about
which no one knew anything, or could in the least control, this whole
extinct barbaric world, was produced with a clearness and a minute
accuracy that was in no respect inferior to that of "Madame Bovary."
People discovered that Flaubert's methods were in no wise dependent
upon the character of his materials, that they were the same in regard
to this colossal, foreign subject as they had been in dealing with
his former commonplace theme. He had played a prank on the public,
manifesting in a striking manner how little he had been understood. Any
one who had looked upon him as a realist servilely bound to the clod,
could now learn how thoroughly at home Flaubert felt in tropical lands.
Any one who had thought that the petty affairs of every-day life, in
their ugliness and their absurdity, were the sole objects that had
power to captivate him, must now discover that Flaubert in his youth
had shared the enthusiasms of the men of 1830, and that he, as well as
they, had been attracted by primitive passions and barbaric customs.
Yet to how great a degree Flaubert actually entered into the sympathies
and naïveté of the extreme romantic school, very few had the most
remote idea, even after reading "Salammbô." The sun of Africa and the
life of the Orient had been made hallowed to him by Byron and Victor
Hugo, and his personal impressions in the Orient had only confirmed the
poetic ones. The aroma of coffee gave him hallucinations of wandering
caravans, and he swallowed the most horrible dishes with a sense of
piety, if they but had an exotic name.
Flaubert had done his utmost to produce something that resembled
ancient Carthage. He was artist enough, however, to know that the
main point was not the outward truth, but the inner truth which makes
probability. His descriptions were to many unconditionally convincing.
A doubt concerning their conformity with a long since vanished reality,
was once answered in my presence by one of the first critics in France
with a simple "I am quite sure it is true." Flaubert himself came
out openly and boldly against the doubters, in his defensive reply
to an attack of Sainte-Beuve, with the following words: "I believe I
have produced something that resembles Carthage. But that is not the
question. I don't care a straw for archæology! If the colors are not
harmonious, if the details do not accord, if the morals cannot be
traced to religion or the occurrences to passion, if the characters are
not well sustained, if the costumes do not correspond to the customs,
or the buildings to the climate, then my book is, of course, untrue.
Otherwise it is true."
These words hit the nail on the head; we are impressed by them with
the master's good conscience and the authority with which it invests
him. His work was not, as were so many later archæological novels, a
masquerade, in which modern emotions and views of life are brought
forward in antique costumes. No; everything here was on a par, and
had the same wild, formidable stamp. Love, stratagem, revenge, piety,
strength of character, all were unmodern.
The poet's love of truth was evidently as ardent and as vehement as
it had been when he had written his first novel. Now, however, in the
presence of this victory over death and the past, it seemed absurd to
speak of Flaubert's photographing. Therefore this new book yielded
a more correct standpoint for the "realism" of its predecessor.
That Flaubert could not be classed among those who were copyists of
accidental truth, became clear. It was seen that his accuracy of
description and information was rooted in a peculiar precision of
imagination. He evidently possessed in an equally high degree the
two elements that constitute the being of the artist: the gift of
observation and the power of investing with form. He had the bias
and the capacity for the study of nature and for historic study,
the scrutinizing eye which no relation between details escaped. To
speak now of photography in connection with him was impossible. For
study implies activity, ardor, and an eye for the essential; while
photography, on the other hand, is something passive, mechanical,
and totally indifferent to the distinctions between essential and
non-essential matters. And Flaubert, furthermore, had the temperament
of the artist, that condition of mind which heats red-hot everything
acquired by observation, marking it with its own stamp, and which
reveals itself as style through the impress given. For what is style
but the sensated result of the temperament, the medium by means of
which an author compels the reader to see as he has seen! Style marks
the difference between the artistically truthful delineation and a good
photography, and style is omnipresent with Flaubert.
No sooner had he collected his observations, and made his preliminary
studies for a book, than they ceased, as such, to interest him.
Thenceforth the chief matter of import to him was to write this book in
perfect language. And language became everything, while the carefully
prepared notes dwindled into wholly subordinate affairs. That he
was accurate and reliable he was in the habit of declaring to be no
merit on his part, simply the justice an author owed the public; for
truthfulness, in and for itself, had nothing whatever to do with art.
"No," he would cry, in tones of thunder, flinging out his arms as
he spoke, "the only important and enduring thing under the sun, is a
well-formed sentence, a sentence with hand and foot, that harmonizes
with the sentences preceding and following it, and that falls
pleasantly on the ear when it is read aloud." So he wrote very little
each day, at the utmost not more than two or three pages, weighed each
word in order to avoid repetitions, rhymes, and crude expressions, and
relentlessly pursued a repeated word, even at a distance of thirty or
forty lines; indeed he could not so much as endure the recurrence of
the same syllable in one sentence. Often a single letter vexed him,
and he would search patiently for words in which it was not found;
sometimes he devoted considerable energy to an eager chase for an
"r" when he needed a rolling sound. He always read aloud what he had
written, singing it out in his stentorian voice, so that the passers-by
would stand still in front of his house to listen. Many called him the
advocate, and believed that he was practising a speech for court.
He suffered torments during his efforts to attain perfection. They
were the pangs of childbirth which every author knows, but his were so
agonizing that he was many times forced to spring to his feet, shriek
aloud, and call himself a blockhead, an idiot! for no sooner was one
doubt overcome than another had already arisen. At his writing-table
he sat as one magnetized, wholly absorbed in his work, and lost in
silent contemplation of his subject. Turgenief, who was his faithful
and intimate friend, and saw him very often, declared that it was
exceedingly touching to see Flaubert, the most impatient of mortals,
so patient in his struggles with language. One day, after he had been
working uninterruptedly the whole day at a single page of his last
novel, he went out to take a meal, and when he returned late in the
evening he thought he would edify himself by reading his page in
bed; but alas! it failed to satisfy him. He sprang excitedly out of
bed,--tall man of over fifty years of age as he was,--began to rewrite
the page, clad in no other apparel than his night-shirt, and wrote and
rewrote the whole night long, sometimes working at his writing-table,
sometimes, when driven from it by the cold, continuing his labors in
bed.
How he loved and how he cursed his language! Is it not highly
characteristic that in "Madame Bovary" he only forgets himself and
speaks in his own name in a single place, and that is in the passage
where, in referring to Raoul's _blasé_ indifference to Emma's
declaration of affection, which proceeded from a genuine passion,
however commonplace it may have sounded, he indignantly exclaims, "As
though the abundance of the soul did not at times overflow in the most
vapid similitudes, as though any one could reproduce the exact measure
of his needs, conceptions, or sufferings, since human language is but
a cracked kettledrum, upon which we hammer out melodies that sound as
though they were played for a bear-dance, when it is our wish to move
the stars!"
Such a lament from such lips is, nevertheless, what it declares human
words not to be: the exact _measure_ of the agonized striving of the
great stylist for artistic perfection.
When an aspiration of that kind has once appeared in an art, it cannot
become extinct. None of the initiated who have written after Flaubert,
and who understood his literary ideal, have been able with clear
consciences to make essentially smaller demands upon themselves than he
made upon himself. Therefore the friends, the spiritual kindred, the
disciples of Flaubert, are the most severe, the most original stylists
of our century.
Not that Flaubert himself theoretically favored originality of style.
He cherished a naïve belief in one ideal, absolutely correct style.
He called this style, which he strove earnestly to realize, wholly
impersonal, because it was nothing but an expression of his own
personality, which had not occurred to him in what he had written.
Guy de Maupassant has wittily remarked that the trite saying,
"The style is the man!" admitted of being reversed in Flaubert's
case. He was the man who was the style. In other words, he was the
personification of style. It is no unimportant or indifferent matter
that the author who beyond all others represents the modern tendency
and the modern formula of French literature, far from being an
imitator of chance nature, or, as the reproach was usually worded, a
photographer, was, on the contrary, an artist _sans reproche._