Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you....
I
It was some time in the late spring or early summer of 1879. I was
going through the Chaussée d'Antin when a huge man, a terrific old
man, passed me. His long straggling gray hair hung low. His red face
was that of a soldier or a sheik, and was divided by drooping white
moustaches. A trumpet was his voice, and he gesticulated freely
to the friend who accompanied him. I did not look at him with any
particular interest until some one behind me--if he be dead now may
he be eternally blest!--exclaimed: "C'est Flaubert!" Then I stared;
for though I had not read Madame Bovary I adored the verbal music of
Salammbô, secretly believing, however, that it had been written by
Melchior, one of the three Wise Kings who journeyed under the beckoning
star of Bethlehem--how else account for its planturous Asiatic prose,
for its evocations of a vanished past? But I knew the name of
Flaubert, that magic collocation of letters, and I gazed at him. He
returned my glance from prominent eyeballs, the colour of the pupil a
bit of faded blue sky. He did not smile. He was too tender-hearted,
despite his appreciation of the absurd. Besides, he knew, He, too, had
been young and foolish. He, too, had worn a velvet coat and a comical
cap, and had dreamed. I must have been a ridiculous spectacle. My hair
was longer than my technique. I was studying Chopin or lunar rainbows
then--I have forgotten which--and fancied that to be an artist one
must dress like a cross between a brigand and a studio model. But I
was happy. Perhaps Flaubert knew this, for he resisted the temptation
to smile. And then he passed from my view. To be frank, I was not very
much impressed, because earlier in the day I had seen Paul de Cassagnac
and that famous duellist was romantic-looking, which the old Colossus
of Croisset was not. When I returned to the Batignolles I told the
_concièrge_ of my day's outing.
"Ah!" he remarked, "M. Flaubert! M. Paul de Cassagnac!--a great man,
Monsieur P-paul!" He stuttered a little. Now I only remember "M.
Flaubert," with his eyes like a bit of faded blue sky. Was it a dream?
Was it Flaubert? Did some stranger cruelly deceive me? But I'll never
relinquish the memory of my glorious mirage.
Where was he going, Gustave Flaubert, on that sunny afternoon? It was
at the time when Jules Ferry appointed him an assistant-librarian at
the Mazarine; _hors cadre_, a sinecure, a veiled pension with 3,000
francs a year; a charity, as the great writer bitterly complained. He
was poor. He had given up, without a murmur, his entire fortune to his
niece, then Madame Caroline Commainville, and through the influence
of Turgenev and a few others this position had been created for him.
He had no duties, yet he insisted on arriving at his post as early as
half-past seven in the morning. He planned later that the government
should be reimbursed for its outlay. His brother, Dr. Achille Flaubert,
of Rouen, gave him a similar allowance, so the unhappy man had enough
to live upon. Perhaps he was going to the Gare Saint-Lazare to take a
train for Croisset; perhaps he was starting for Ancient Corinth--I
thought--to see once more his Salammbô veiled by the sacred Zaïmph; or
he might have been on the point of departing for Taprobana, the Ceylon
of the antique world; that island whose very name he repeated with the
same pleasure as did the old woman the blessed name of "Mesopotamia."
[Illustration: Fac-simile of an unpublished Flaubert letter.]
Taprobana! Taprobana! would cry Gustave Flaubert, to the despair of
his friends. He was a man in love with beautiful sounds. He filled
his books with them and with beautiful pictures. You must go to
Beethoven or Liszt for a like variety in rhythms; the Flaubertian
prose rhythms change in every sentence, like a landscape alternately
swept by sunlight or shadowed by clouds. They vary with the moods
and movements of the characters. They are music for ear and eye. And
they can never be translated. He is poet, painter, and composer,
and he is the most artistic of novelists. If his work is deficient in
sentiment; if he fails to strike the chords of pity of Dostoïevsky,
Turgenev, and Tolstoy; if he lacks the teeming variety of Balzac, he
is superior to them all as an artist. Because of his stern theories of
art, he renounced the facile victories of sentimentalism. He does not
invite his readers to smile or weep with him. He is not a manipulator
of marionettes. And he can compress in a page more than Balzac in a
volume. In part he derives from Chateaubriand, Gautier, and Hugo, and
he was a lover of Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Montaigne. His psychology
is simple; he believed that character should express itself by action.
His landscapes in the Dutch, "tight," miniature style, or the large,
luminous, "loose" manner of Hobbema; or again full of the silver
repose of Claude and the dark romantic beauty of Rousseau--witness
the forest of Fontainebleau in Sentimental Education--are ravishing.
He has painted interiors incomparably--this novel is filled with
them: balls, café-life, political meetings, receptions, ladies in
their drawing-rooms, Meissonier-like virtuosity in details or the
bourgeois elegance of Alfred Stevens. As a portraitist Flaubert recalls
Velasquez, Rembrandt, or Hals, and not a little of the _diablerie_ to
be found in the Flemish masters of grotesque. Emma Bovary is the most
perfectly finished portrait in fiction and Frédéric Moreau is nearly
as lifelike--the eternal middle-class Young Man. Madame Arnoux,
chiefly rendered by marvellous evasions, is in the clear-obscure of
Rembrandt. Homais stands alone, a subject the delineation of which
Swift would have envied. And Rosannette Bron--the truest record of her
class ever depicted, and during the same decade that saw the odious
sentimental and false Camille. Or Salome in Hérodias, that vision,
cruel, feline, exquisite, which lesser writers have sought vainly to
imitate. (Gustave Moreau alone transposed her to paint--Moreau, too,
was a cenobite of art.) Or Félicité in Trois Contes. Or the perpetual
journalist, Hussonet, the swaggering politician, Regimbart, Pellerin,
the dilettante painter, the socialist, Sénecal, and Arnoux, the
immortal charlatan. Whatever subject Flaubert attacked, a masterpiece
emerged. He left few books; each represents the pinnacle of its
_genre_: Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, Hérodias, Bouvard
and Pécuchet--this last-named an epitome of human stupidity. Not an
original philosophic intellect, nevertheless a philosophy has been
drawn from Flaubert's work by the brilliant French philosopher Jules
Gaultier, who defines _Bovaryisme_ as that tendency in mankind to
appear other than it is; a tendency which is an important factor in
our mental and social evolution. Without illusions mankind would take
to the trees, the abode, we are told, of our prehistoric arboreal
ancestors. Nevertheless, Emma Bovary as a philosophic symbol would have
greatly astonished Gustave Flaubert.