Bouvard et Pécuchet was never finished. Its increasing demands killed
Flaubert. In his desk were found many cahiers of notes taken to
illustrate the fatuity of mankind, its stupidity, its _bêtise_. He was
as pitiless as Swift or Schopenhauer in his contempt for low ideals
and vulgar pretensions, for the very bourgeois from whom he sprung. In
the collection we find this gem of wisdom uttered by Louis Napoleon in
1865: "The richness of a country depends on its general prosperity." To
it should be included the Homais-like dictum of Maxime du Camp that
if Flaubert had not been an epilept he would have been a genius! Or,
the following hospital criticism; Flaubert was denied creative ability!
Who has denied it to him? Homais alone in his supreme asininity should
be a beacon-light of warning for any one of these inept critics.
Flaubert once wrote: "I am reading books on hygiene; how comical they
are! What impertinence these physicians have! What asses for the
most part they are!" And he, the son of a celebrated surgeon and the
brother of another, a medical student himself, might have made Homais a
psychiatrist instead of a druggist, if he had lived longer.
Du Camp--who, clever and witty as well as inexact and reckless in
statement, was a man given to envies and literary jealousies--never got
over Flaubert's startling success with Madame Bovary. He once wrote
a fanciful epitaph for Louise Colet, a French woman of mediocrity,
the "Muse" of Flaubert, a general trouble-breeder and a recipient
of Flaubert's correspondence. The Colet had embroiled herself with
De Musset and published a spiteful romance in which poor Flaubert
was the villain. This the Du Camp inscription: "Here lies the woman
who compromised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de Musset ridiculous,
calumniated Gustave Flaubert, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr:
Requiescat in pace." A like epitaph suggests itself for Maxime du Camp:
_Hic jacet_ the man who slandered Baudelaire, traduced his loving
friend Gustave Flaubert, and was snuffed out of critical existence by
Guy de Maupassant.
The massive-shouldered Hercules, Flaubert, a Hercules spinning prose
for his exacting Dejanira of art, was called unintelligent by Anatole
France. He had not, it is true, the subtle critical brain and thorough
scholarship of M. France; yet Flaubert was learned. Brunetière
even taxed him with an excess of erudition. But his multitudinous
conversation, his lack of logic, his rather gross sense of humour, are
not to be found in his work. Without that work, without Salammbô, for
example, should we have had the pleasure, thrice-distilled, of reading
Anatole France's Thaïs? (See a single instance in the definitive
edition Temptation, page 115, the episode of the Gymnosophist.) All
revivals of the antique world are unsatisfactory at best, whether
Chateaubriand's Martyrs, or the unsubstantial lath and plaster of
Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, or the flabbiness and fustian of Quo
Vadis. The most perfect attempt is Salammbô, an opera in words, and its
battlements of purple prose were riddled by Sainte-Beuve, by Froehner,
and lately by Maurice Pézard--who has proved to his own satisfaction
that Flaubert was sadly amiss in his Punic archæology. Well, who cares
if he was incorrect in details? His partially successful reconstruction
of an epoch is admitted, though the human element is somewhat
obliterated. Flaubert was bound to be more Carthaginian than Carthage.
After the scandal caused by the prosecution of Madame Bovary Flaubert
was afraid to publish his 1856, second version of Saint Antony. He had
been advised by the sapient Du Camp to cast the manuscript into the
fire, after a reading before Bouilhet and Du Camp lasting thirty-three
hours. He refused. This was in September, 1849. Du Camp declares that
he asked him to essay "the Delaunay affair" meaning the Delamarre
story. This Flaubert did, and the result was the priceless history
of Charles and Emma Bovary. D'Aurevilly attacked the book viciously;
Baudelaire defended it. Later Turgenev wrote to Flaubert: "After all
you are Flaubert!" George Sand was a motherly consoler. Their letters
are delightful. She did not quite understand the bluff, naïve Gustave,
she who composed so flowingly, and could turn on or off her prose
like the tap of a kitchen hydrant (the simile is her own). How could
she fathom the tormented desire of her friend for perfection, for the
blending of idea and image, for the eternal pursuit of the right word,
the shapely sentence, the cadenced _coda_ of a paragraph? And of the
larger demands of style, of the subtle tone of a page, a chapter, a
book, why should this fluent and graceful writer, called George Sand,
concern herself with such superfluities! It was always _O altitudo_ in
art with Flaubert--the most copious, careless of correspondents. He had
set for himself an impossible standard of perfection and an ideal of
impersonality neither of which he realized. But there is no outward
sign of conflict in his work; all trace of the labour bestowed upon his
paragraphs is absent. His style is simple, direct, large, above all,
clear, the clarity of classic prose.
His declaiming aloud his sentences has been adduced to prove his
absence of sanity. Beethoven, too, was pronounced crazy by his various
landladies because he sang and howled in his voice of a composer his
compositions in the making. Flaubert was the possessor of an accurate
musical ear; not without justice did Coppée call him the "Beethoven
of French prose." His sense of rhythm was acute; he carried it so
far that he would sacrifice grammar to rhythmic flow. He tested his
sentences aloud. Once in his apartment, Rue Murillo, overlooking Parc
Monceau, he rehearsed a page of a new book for hours. Belated coachmen,
noting the open windows, hearing an outrageous vocal noise, concluded
that a musical soiree was in progress. Gradually the street filled on
either side with carriages in search of passengers. But the guests
never emerged from the house. In the early morning the lights were
extinguished and the oaths of the disappointed ones must have been
heard by Flaubert.
He would annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts. His
bump of scrupulousness was large. In twenty pages he sometimes saved
three or four from destruction. He did not become, however, as
captious as Balzac in the handling of proofs. A martyr of style, he
was not altogether an enameller in precious stones, not a patient
mosaic-maker, superimposing here and there a precious verbal jewel.
First, the image, and then its appropriate garb; sometimes image and
phrase were born simultaneously, as was the case with Richard Wagner.
These extraordinary things may happen to men of genius, who are neither
opium-eaters nor lunatics. The idea that Flaubert was ever addicted to
drugs--beyond the quinine with which his good father dosed him after
the fashion of those days--is ridiculous. The gorgeous visions of Saint
Antony are the results of stupendous preparatory studies, a stupendous
power of fantasy, and a stupendous concentration. Opium superinduces
visions, but not the power and faculty of attention to record them in
terms of literature for forty years. George Saintsbury has pronounced
Saint Antony the most perfect specimen of dream literature extant. And
because of its precision in details, its architectonic, its deep-hued
waking hallucinations.
Flaubert was a very nervous man, "as hysterical as an old woman," said
Dr. Hardy of the hospital Saint-Louis, but neither mad nor epileptic.
His mental development was not arrested in his youth, as asserted by
Du Camp; he had arranged his life from the time he decided to become
a writer. He was one with the exotic painter, Gustave Moreau, in his
abhorrence of the mob. He was a poet who wrote a perfect prose, not
prose-poetry. Enamoured of the antique, of the Orient, of mystical
subjects, he spent a lifetime in the elaboration of his beloved
themes. That he was obsessed by them is merely to say that he was the
possessor of mental energy and artistic gifts. He was not happy. He
never brought his interior and exterior lives into complete harmony. An
unparalleled observer, an imaginative genius, he was a child outside
the realm of art. Soft of heart, he raised his niece as a daughter;
a loving son, he would console himself after his mother's death by
looking at the dresses she once wore. Flaubert a sentimentalist! He
outlived his family and his friends, save a few; death was never far
away from his thoughts; he would weep over his souvenirs. At Croisset I
have talked with the faithful Colange, whose card reads: "E. Colange,
ex-cook of Gustave Flaubert!" The affection of the novelist for cats
and dogs, he told me, was marked. The study pavilion is to-day a
Flaubert Memorial. The parent house is gone, and in 1901 there was
a distillery on the grounds, which is now a printing establishment.
Flaubert cherished the notion that Pascal had once stopped in the old
Croisset homestead; that Abbé Prévost had written Manon Lescaut within
its walls. He had many such old-fashioned and darling _tics_, and he is
to be envied them.
Since Madame Bovary French fiction, for the most part, has been
Flaubert with variations. His influence is still incalculable. François
Coppée wrote: "By the extent and the magnificence of his prose, Gustave
Flaubert equals Bossuet and Chateaubriand. He is destined to become a
great classic. And several centuries hence--everything perishes--when
the French language shall have become only a dead language, candidates
for the bachelor's degree will be able to obtain it only by expounding
(along with the famous exordium, He Who Reigns in the Heavens, etc.,
or The Departure of the Swallows, of René) the portrait of Catharine
le Roux, the farm servant, in Madame Bovary, or the episode of the
Crucified Lions in Salammbô."