_Salammbô_ is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has
told us, to "perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods
of the modern novel." By the modern novel he means the novel as he
had reconstructed it; he means _Madame Bovary._ That perfect book is
perfect because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject
suited to his method, had made his method and his subject one. On his
scientific side Flaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps
a more intimately personal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in
a large, sweeping way. The lyric poet in him made _La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine,_ the analyst made _L'Education Sentimentale;_ but in
_Madame Bovary_ we find the analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium.
It is the history of a woman, as carefully observed as any story
that has ever been written, and observed in surroundings of the most
ordinary kind. But Flaubert finds the romantic material which he
loved, the materials of beauty, in precisely that temperament which he
studies so patiently and so cruelly. Madame Bovary is a little woman,
half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; but her
trivial desires, her futile aspirations after second-rate pleasures and
second-hand ideals, give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity
to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of
Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by
that counterpoise of a commonness in the subject he is saved from any
vague ascents of rhetoric in his rendering of it.
In writing _Salammbô_ Flaubert set himself to renew the historical
novel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted,
doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible,
by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of
the reality of the things about us, only able to translate them
approximately into any form of art. How much is left over, in the
closest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a
passing steamer, of one's next-door neighbour, of the point of view
of a foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind,
moment by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble
Arch? Think, then, of the attempts to reconstruct no matter what
period of the past, to distinguish the difference in the aspect of
a world perhaps bossed with castles and ridged with ramparts, to
two individualities encased within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his
antiquity wisely: a period of which we know too little to confuse us,
a city of which no stone is left on another, the minds of Barbarians
who have left us no psychological documents. "Be sure I have made
no fantastic Carthage," he says proudly, pointing to his documents:
Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him with "the _exact_ form of a
door"; the Bible and Theophrastus, from which he obtains his perfumes
and his precious stones; Gesenius, from whom he gets his Punic names;
the _Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions._ "As for the temple
of Tanit, I am sure of having reconstructed it as it was, with the
treatise of the Syrian Goddess, with the medals of the Duc de Luynes,
with what is known of the temple at Jerusalem, with a passage of St.
Jerome, quoted by Seldon (_De Diis Syriis_), with the plan of the
temple of Gozzo, which is quite Carthaginian, and best of all, with
the ruins of the temple of Thugga, which I have seen myself, with my
own eyes, and of which no traveller or antiquarian, so far as I know,
has ever spoken." But that, after all, as he admits (when, that is, he
has proved point by point his minute accuracy to all that is known of
ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to every indication which can serve
for his guidance, his patience in grouping rather, than his daring in
the invention of action and details), that is not the question. "I
care little enough for archæology! If the colour is not uniform, if
the details are out of keeping, if the manners do not spring from the
religion and the actions from the passions, if the characters are not
consistent, if the costumes are not appropriate to the habits and the
architecture to the climate, if, in a word, there is not harmony, I am
in error. If not, no."
And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can
give a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time
a definition of the merit which sets _Salammbô_ above all other
historical novels. Everything in the book is strange, some of it
might easily be bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony.
The harmony is like that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying
its charm, or even the secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a
monotony coiling perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its
own. Or rather, it is like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite
colours, firmly detached from a background of burning sky; a procession
of Barbarians, each in the costume of his country, passes across the
wall; there are battles, in which elephants fight with men; an army
besieges a great city, or rots to death in a defile between mountains;
the ground is paved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living
burden, stand against the sky; a few figures of men and women appear
again and again, expressing by their gestures the soul of the story.
Flaubert himself has pointed, with his unerring self-criticism, to
the main defect of his book: "The pedestal is too large for the
statue." There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more
about Salammbô. He declares: "There is not in my book an isolated or
gratuitous description; all are useful to my characters, and have an
influence, near or remote, on the action." This is true, and yet,
all the same, the pedestal is too large for the statue. Salammbô,
"always surrounded with grave and exquisite things," has something
of the somnambulism which enters into the heroism of Judith; she has
a hieratic beauty, and a consciousness as pale and vague as the moon
whom she worships. She passes before us, "her body saturated with
perfumes," encrusted with jewels like an idol, her head turreted with
violet hair, the gold chain tinkling between her ankles; and is hardly
more than an attitude, a fixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom
one sees passing, with oblique eyes and mouths painted into smiles,
their faces curiously traced into a work of art, in the languid
movements of a pantomimic dance. The soul behind those eyes? the
temperament under that at times almost terrifying mask? Salammbô is as
inarticulate for us as the serpent, to whose drowsy beauty, capable of
such sudden awakenings, hers seems half akin; they move before us in a
kind of hieratic pantomime, a coloured, expressive thing, signifying
nothing. Mâtho, maddened with love, "in an invincible stupor, like
those who have drunk some draught of which they are to die," has the
same somnambulistic life; the prey of Venus, he has an almost literal
insanity, which, as Flaubert reminds us, is true to the ancient view
of that passion. He is the only quite vivid person in the book, and
he lives with the intensity of a wild beast, a life "blinded alike"
from every inner and outer interruption to one or two fixed ideas. The
others have their places in the picture, fall into their attitudes
naturally, remain so many coloured outlines for us. The illusion is
perfect; these people may not be the real people of history, but at
least they have no self-consciousness, no Christian tinge in their
minds.
"The metaphors are few, the epithets definite," Flaubert tells us,
of his style in this book, where, as he says, he has sacrificed less
"to the amplitude of the phrase and to the period," than in _Madame
Bovary._ The movement here is in briefer steps, with a more earnest
gravity, without any of the engaging weakness of adjectives. The style
is never archaic, it is absolutely simple, the precise word being put
always for the precise thing; but it obtains a dignity, a historical
remoteness, by the large seriousness of its manner, the absence of
modern ways of thought, which, in _Madame Bovary,_ bring with them an
instinctively modern cadence.
_Salammbô_ is written with the severity of history, but Flaubert notes
every detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural
things. A slave is being flogged under a tree: Flaubert notes the
movement of the thong as it flies, and tells us: "The thongs, as they
whistled through the air, sent the bark of the plane trees flying."
Before the battle of the Macar, the Barbarians are awaiting the
approach of the Carthaginian army. First "the Barbarians were surprised
to see the ground undulate in the distance." Clouds of dust rise and
whirl over the desert, through which are seen glimpses of horns, and,
as it seems, wings. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the
desert? The Barbarians watch intently. "At last they made out several
transverse bars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser,
larger; dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes
came into view; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, 'The
Carthaginians!' arose." Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes,
unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves,
taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert puts
himself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them
as to see for them.
Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will
find that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its
subject-matter. The style, which has almost every merit and hardly
a fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that
of most writers careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even
Baudelaire, and you will find that the aim of these writers has been
to construct a style which shall be adaptable to every occasion,
but without structural change; the cadence is always the same. The
most exquisite word-painting of Gautier can be translated rhythm for
rhythm into English, without difficulty; once you have mastered
the tune, you have merely to go on; every verse will be the same.
But Flaubert is so difficult to translate because he has no fixed
rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regular march-music. He invents
the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with every mood
or for the convenience of every fact. He has no theory of beauty in
form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a living thing,
the physical body of thought, which it clothes and interprets. "If I
call stones blue, it is because blue is the precise word, believe me,"
he replies to Sainte-Beuve's criticism. Beauty comes into his words
from the precision with which they express definite things, definite
ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where the material is so
hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheer exactitude
which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure and order, seen
equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage at the time of their
flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on the corpses of the
Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains.
1901.