Flaubert, personally, has never made the slightest revelation to the
public concerning himself. He has maintained the same silence in regard
to his artistic principles as in reference to his private experiences.
Under these circumstances we must examine all the paths that are open
and that might lead us into his inner being. One of the nearest and
best of these that presents itself to us is a careful study of the
works of his fraternal friend and companion-in-arms, Louis Bouilhet.
These two men, superficially considered, appear very unlike in their
tastes and in their endowments. Flaubert was an epoch-maker in French
literature; Bouilhet, a second or third rate poet. Flaubert was a novel
writer; Bouilhet, a lyric and dramatic poet. But this dissimilarity
does not affect the character of the friends. They were fond of each
other because they were spiritually akin. Not without cogent reasons
did Flaubert dedicate his first book to Bouilhet, and the latter all
his best productions to Flaubert. A careful comparison shows such
striking analogies between the poetry of Bouilhet and the prose works
of Flaubert that it puts the eyes keenly on the alert to detect the
more suppressed of the peculiarities of the greater of the two friends.
One of the most remarkable of Bouilhet's poems, "Les fossiles," opens
with an ambitious picture of prehistoric scenery and animal life,
followed by a portrayal, in poetic form and scientific spirit, of the
development of the globe until the appearance of the first human pair,
and ends with a glowing vision of the humanity of the future.
We encounter this predilection for the colossal and marvellously
prodigious once more in the author of "Salammbô." In Flaubert's
excavation of vanished nations and religions we detect the same
proclivity for fossils displayed by Bouilhet, and finally, there is
plainly revealed in Flaubert the tendency manifested by his friend, in
more poems than one, to blend science and poetry in one perfect whole.
As Flaubert was absorbed in classic and Semitic literature, so Bouilhet
studied Chinese, and treated Chinese themes and plots in a long
series of poems. Through these investigations, and the poetic efforts
that were their results, both hoped to escape from a period that was
distasteful to them, and both were unconsciously following the example
of Goethe. They were both, moreover, satisfying one and the same
impulse to show the reader the relative nature of all life-forms, to
teach him not to pride himself on the glorious progress the world had
made, and to impart to him some idea of the fact that our civilization,
excavated and described after the lapse of centuries, would not make a
much more reasonable figure than that of far-off antiquity.
Both desired to bring forward antiquity in its historic and prehistoric
purity, without any disturbing modern additions, and were deterred
by no difficulties. As though it were not difficult enough in itself
to depict the antediluvian world, with its singular vegetation,
its formless, stupendous animals, Bouilhet has deprived himself of
every expression that might recall modern ideas. He describes the
pterodactyls, the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, the mammoths and
mastodons, without calling them by name; we only recognize them by
their form, their bearing, their demeanor. In a similar way Flaubert,
in his "Salammbô," has refrained from making the most remote allusion
to the modern world; he seems to be wholly unacquainted with it, or to
have forgotten its existence. The artistic objectivity here accords
with the scientific.
And this, with both authors, is the main point. They obeyed,
consciously or unconsciously, a new idea of the relation of poetry to
science. They wished to contribute their share toward creating a poesy
built wholly upon a scientific foundation.
The highest ambition of Bouilhet was to write a poem which should
embrace the results of modern science, and be to our age what that
most admirable poem of Lucretius, "De rerum natura," was to antiquity.
Flaubert had apparently a similar dream. But in his case the desire
was more decidedly stamped with his hatred of human stupidity. He
brought it into realization negatively, and in two different forms;
in his work, "La Tentation de Sainte Antoine" (The Temptation
of Saint Anthony), where he allowed all the religious and moral
systems of humanity to pass in review before the reader's eye, as
the insane hallucinations of the hermit; and, in his last story,
"Bouvard et Pécuchet," where the numerous errors and blunders of two
poor blockheads gave the author a pretext for furnishing a sort of
encyclopædia of all the departments of human knowledge in which they
had made mistakes. In "La Tentation de Sainte Antoine," he gave the
tragedy of the human mind, which here reveals itself in magnificent,
frantic, and wailing madness, a King Lear on the world's heath. In
"Bouvard et Pécuchet" he delineates caricature, naïve ignorance,
and the bungling of dilettanteism in all scientific and technical
provinces, as personified by two ludicrous old bachelors. The work
is posthumous, and only the first part exists, even that being in an
unfinished state; but highly characteristic of Flaubert was his design
to supplement this first part with a second, in which the two poor old
bachelors, who begin and end their career as clerks, carry out the
idea of taking notes on the blunders of all the well-known writers (M.
Flaubert included), and collecting them into a volume.
Both Flaubert and Bouilhet, therefore, were spurred on in their labors
by the powerful impulse to preserve in their works, in one form or
another, either positive or negative, the results of modern science.
What Flaubert said of Bouilhet is equally applicable to both, that
the fundamental thought, the innate element of his mind, was a sort
of naturalism, that was a reminder of the _renaissance._ But while
Bouilhet dissipated his best powers in mediocre and traditional
romantic dramas, Flaubert has not paid homage to tradition in a
single one of his works; on the contrary, he has always made profound
scientific study the preparation for literary composition; and for this
reason the relation between science and poetry is with him the nerve
and sinew and the main interest of the work.