"Since Goethe," might be a capital title for an essay on the epics
that were written after the death of the noblest German of them
all. The list would be small. In France there are only the rather
barren rhetorical exercise of Edgar Quinet's Ahasvérus, the surging
insurrectionary poems of Hugo, and the faultlessly frigid performance
of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of such heroic power and proportions as
Faust there is not, except Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Antony, which
is so impregnated by the Faustian spirit--though poles apart from
the German poem in its development--that, when we hear the youthful
Gustave was a passionate admirer and student of Goethe, even addressing
a long poem in alexandrines to his memory, we are not surprised. The
real Flaubert is only beginning to be revealed. His four volumes of
correspondence, his single volume of letters addressed to George Sand,
and the recently published letters to his niece Caroline--now Madame
Franklin Grout of Antibes--have shown us a very different Flaubert
from the legend chiefly created by Maxime du Camp. Dr. Félix Dumesnil,
in his remarkable study, has told us of the Rouen master's neurasthenia
and has utterly disproved Du Camp's malicious yarns about epilepsy.
Above all, Flaubert's devotion to Goethe and the recent publication of
the first version of his Saint Antony have presented a novel picture
of his personality. We now know that, striving to become impersonal
in art, he is personal and present in every page he ever wrote;
furthermore that, despite his incessant clamours and complaints, he, in
reality, loved his galley-like, self-imposed labours.
The Temptation of Saint Antony is the only modern poem of epical
largeness that may be classed with Brand or Zarathustra. It recalls
at times the Second Part of Faust in its sweep and grandeur, in its
grandiose visions; but though it is superior in verbal beauty it
falls short of Goethe in its presentation of the problems of human
will. Faust is a man who wills; Antony is static, not dynamic; the
one is tempted by the Devil and succumbs, but does not lose his soul;
Flaubert's hermit resists the Devil at his subtlest, yet we do not feel
that his soul is as much worth the saving as Faust's. Ideas are the
heroes in Flaubert's prose epic. Saint Antony is a metaphysical drama,
not a human one like Faust; nevertheless, to Faust alone may we compare
it.
Flaubert was born at Rouen, December 12, 1821, where he died May 18,
1880. That he practically passed his years at Croisset, his mother's
home, below Rouen facing the Seine, and in his study toiling like
a titan over his books, should be recorded in every text-book of
literature. For he is the patron-saint of all true literary men. He
had a comfortable income. He thought, talked, lived literature. His
friends Du Camp, Louis Bouilhet, Turgenev, Taine, Baudelaire, Zola,
the Goncourts, Daudet, Renan, Maupassant, Henry James, have testified
to his absorption in his art. It is almost touching in these times when
a man goes into the writing business as if vending tripe, to recall
the example of Flaubert for whom art was more sacred than religion.
Naturally, he has been proved by the madhouse doctors to have been half
cracked. Perhaps he was not as sane as a stockbroker, but it takes all
sorts to make a world and a writer of Flaubert's rank should not be
weighed in the same scales with, say, a successful politician.
He was endowed with a nervous temperament, though up to his
twenty-second year he was as handsome and as free from sickness as a
god. He was very tall and his eyes were sea-green. A nervous crisis
supervened and at wide intervals returned. It was almost fatal for
Gustave. He became pessimistic and afraid of life. However, the talk
of his habitual truculent pessimism has been exaggerated. Naturally
optimistic, with a powerful constitution and a stout heart, he worked
like the Trojan he was. His pessimism came with the years during his
boyhood--Byronic literary spleen was in the air. He was a grumbler
and rather overdid the peevish pose. As Zola asked: "What if he had
been forced to earn his living by writing?" But, even in his blackest
moods, he was glad to see his friends at Croisset, glad to go up to
Paris for recreation. His letters, so free, fluent, explosive, give
us the true Flaubert who childishly roared yet was so hearty, so
friendly, so loving to his mother, niece, and intimates. His heredity
was puzzling. His father was, like Baudelaire's grandfather, of
Champenois stock; bourgeois, steady, a renowned surgeon. From him
Gustave inherited his taste for all that pertained to medicine and
science. Recall his escapades as a boy when he would peep for hours
into the dissecting-room of the Rouen hospital. Such matters fascinated
him. He knew more about the theory and practice of medicine than
many professional men. An air of mortality exhales from his pages.
He is in Madame Bovary the keen soul-surgeon. His love of a quiet,
sober existence came to him from his father. He clung to one house
for nearly a half century. He has said that one must live like a
bourgeois and think like an artist; to be ascetic in life and violent
in art--that was a Flaubert maxim. "I live only in my ideas," he
wrote. But from the mother's side, a Norman and aristocrat she was, he
inherited his love of art, his disdain for philistines, his adventurous
disposition--transposed because of his malady to the cerebral region,
to his imagination. He boasted Canadian blood, "red skin," he called
it, but that was merely a mystification. The dissonance of temperament
made itself felt early. He was the man of Goethe with two spirits
struggling within him. Dual in temperament, he swung from an almost
barbaric Romanticism to a cruel analysis of life that made him the
pontiff of the Realistic school. He hated realism, yet an inner
force set him to the disagreeable task of writing Madame Bovary and
Sentimental Education--the latter, with its daylight atmosphere, the
supreme exemplar of realism in fiction. So was it with his interior
life. He was a mystic who no longer believed. These dislocations of
his personality he combated all his life, and his books show with what
success. "Flaubert," wrote Turgenev, his closest friend, to George
Sand, "has tenacity without energy, just as he has self-love without
vanity." But what tenacity!
Touching on the question of epilepsy, a careful reading of Dumesnil
convinces anyone, but the neurologist with a fixed idea, that Flaubert
was not a sufferer from genuine epilepsy. Not that there is any
reason why epilepsy and genius should be divorced; we know in many
cases the contrary is the reverse. Take the case of Dostoïevsky--his
epilepsy was one of the most fruitful of motives in his stories.
Nearly all his heroes and heroines are attainted. (Read The Idiot or
the Karamsoff Brothers.) But Flaubert's epilepsy was arranged for
him by Du Camp, who thought that by calling him an epilept in his
untrustworthy Memoirs he would belittle Flaubert. And he did, for in
his time the now celebrated--and discredited--theory of genius and
its correlation with the falling-sickness had not been propounded.
Flaubert had hystero-neurasthenia. He was rheumatic, asthmatic,
predisposed to arterio-sclerosis and apoplexy. He died of an apoplectic
stroke. His early nervous fits were without the _aura_ of epilepsy;
he did not froth at the mouth nor were there muscular contractions;
not even at his death. Dr. Tourneaux, who hastened to aid him in the
absence of his regular physician, Dr. Fortin, denied the rumours of
epilepsy that were so gaily spread by that sublime old gossip, Edmond
de Goncourt, also by Zola and Du Camp. The contraction of Flaubert's
hands was caused by the rigidity of death; most conclusive of all
evidence against the epileptic theory is the fact that during his
occasional fits Gustave never lost consciousness. Nor did he suffer
from any attacks before he had attained his majority, whereas epilepsy
usually begins at an early age. He studied with intense zeal his malady
and in a dozen letters refers to it, tickets its symptoms, tells of
plans to escape the crises, and altogether, has furnished students
of pathology many examples of nerve-exhaustion and its mitigation.
His first attacks began at Pont-Audemar, in 1843. In 1849 he had a
fresh attack. His trip to the Orient relieved him. He was a Viking, a
full-blooded man, who scorned sensible hygiene; he took no exercise
beyond a walk in the morning, a walk in the evening on his terrace,
and in summer an occasional swim in the Seine. He ate copiously, was
moderate in drinking, smoked fifteen or twenty pipes a day, abused
black coffee, and for months at a stretch worked fifteen hours out of
the twenty-four at his desk. He warned his disciple, Guy de Maupassant,
against too much boating as being destructive of mental productivity.
After Nietzsche read this he wrote: "Sedentary application is the
very sin against the Holy Ghost. Only thoughts won by walking are
valuable." In 1870 another crisis was brought on by protracted labours
over the revision of the definitive version of the Saint Antony. His
travels in Normandy, in the East, his visits to London (1851) and
to Righi-Kaltbad, together with sojourns in Paris--where he had a
little apartment--make up the itinerary of his fifty-eight years. Is
it any wonder that he died of apoplexy, stricken at his desk, he of a
violently sanguine temperament, bull-necked, and the blood always in
his face?
Maurice Spronck, who took too seriously the saying of Flaubert--a lover
of extravagant paradox--thinks the writer had a cerebral lesion, which
he called _audition colorée_. It is a malady peculiar to imaginative
natures, which transposes tone to colour, or odour to sound. As this
"malady" may be found in poets from the dawn of creation, "coloured
audition" must be a necessary quality of art. Flaubert took pains to
exaggerate his speech when in company with the Goncourts. He suspected
their diary-keeping weakness and he humoured it by telling fibs about
his work. "I have finished my book, the cadence of the last paragraph
has been found. Now I shall write it." Aghast were the brothers at
the idea of an author beginning his book backward. Flaubert boasted
that the colour of Salammbô was purple. Sentimental Education (a
bad title, as Turgenev wrote him; Withered Fruits, his first title,
would have been better) was gray, and Madame Bovary was for him like
the colouring of certain mouldy wood-vermin. The Goncourts solemnly
swallowed all this, as did M. Spronck. Which moved Anatole France to
exclaim: "Oh these young clinicians!"
But what is all this when compared with the magnificent idiocy of Du
Camp, who asserted that if Flaubert had not suffered from epilepsy
_he would have become a genius! Hénaurme!_ as the man who made such
masterpieces as Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Temptation of
Saint Antony, the Three Tales, Bouvard et Pécuchet, had a comical
habit of exclaiming. Enormous, too, was Guy de Maupassant's manner
of avenging his master's memory. In the final edition--eight volumes
long--Maupassant, with the unerring eye of hatred, affixed an
introduction to Bouvard et Pécuchet. Therein he printed Maxime du
Camp's letters to Flaubert during the period when Madame Bovary was
appearing in the _Revue de Paris_. Du Camp was one of its editors.
He urged Flaubert to cut the novel--the concision of which is so
admirable, the organic quality of which is absolute. Worse still
remains. If Flaubert couldn't perform the operation himself, then the
aforesaid Du Camp would hire some experienced hack to do it for the
sensitive author; wounded vanity Du Camp believed to be the cause of
indignant remonstrances. They eliminated the scene of the agricultural
fair and the operation on the hostler's foot--one scene as marvellous
as a _genre_ painting by Teniers with its study of the old farm
servant, and psychologically more profound; the other necessary to
the development of the story. Thus Madame Bovary was slaughtered
serially by a man ignorant of art, that Madame Bovary which is one of
the glories of French literature, as Mr. James truly says. Flaubert
scribbled on Du Camp's letters another of his favourite expletives,
_Gigantesque!_ Flaubert never forgave him, but they were apparently
reconciled years later. Du Camp went into the Academy; Flaubert refused
to consider a candidacy, though Victor Hugo--wittily nicknamed by Jules
Laforgue "Aristides the Just"--urged him to do so. Even the mighty
Balzac was too avid of glory and gold for Flaubert, to whom art and its
consolations were all-sufficing.