GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
[Sidenote: The contrast of Flaubert and Dumas _fils_.]
In doing, as may at least be hoped, justice to M. Alexandre Dumas _fils_
in the last chapter, one point was excepted--that though I could rank
him higher than I ever expected to do as a novelist, I could not exactly
rank his work in the highest range of literature. When you compare
him--not merely with those greatest in novel-work already discussed, but
with Musset or Vigny, with Nodier, or with Gérard de Nerval, not to
mention others, there is something which is at once "weird and wanting,"
as the admirable Captain Mayne Reid says at the beginning of _The
Headless Horseman_, though one cannot say here, as there, "By Heavens!
it is 'the head!'" There is head enough of a kind--a not at all unkempt
or uncomely headpiece, very well filled with brains. But it has no
aureole, as the other preferred persons cited in the last sentence and
earlier have. This aureole may be larger or smaller, brighter or less
bright--a full circlet of unbroken or hardly broken splendour, or a sort
of will-o'-the-wisp cluster of gleam and darkness. But wherever it is
found there is, in differing degrees, _literature_ of the highest class;
of the major prose _gentes_; literature that can show itself with
poetry, under its own conditions and with its own possibilities, and
fear no disqualification. Of this I am bound to say I do not find very
much in this second division of our volume, and I find none in Dumas
_fils_. But I find a great deal more than in any one else in Gustave
Flaubert.
[Sidenote: Some former dealings with him.]
As I have said this, the reader may expect, magisterially, dreadingly,
or perhaps in some very "gentle" cases hopefully, a full chapter on
Flaubert. He shall have it. But the same cause, or group of causes,
which has been at work before prevents this from being a very long one,
and from containing very full accounts of his novels. One of the longest
and most careful of those detailed surveys of forty years ago, to which
I have perhaps too often referred, was devoted to Flaubert, and was
slightly supplemented after his death. The earlier form had, though I
did not know it for a considerable time, not displeased himself--a
fortunate result not too common between author and critic[389]--and
there are, consequently, special reasons for leaving it unaltered and
unrehashed. I shall, therefore, as with Balzac and Dumas, attempt a
shorter but more general judgment, which--his work being so much less
voluminous than theirs--may be perhaps even less extensive than in the
other cases,[390] but which should leave no doubt as to the writer's
opinion of his "place in the story."
[Sidenote: His style.]
No small part of that high claim to purely literary rank which has been
made for him rests, of course, upon his mere style--that famous and much
debated "chase of the single word" which, especially since Mr. Pater
took up the discussion of it, has been a "topic" of the most usitate in
England as well as in France. When I left my chair and my library at
Edinburgh I burnt more lecture-notes on the subject than would have
furnished material for an entire chapter here, and I have no intention
of raking my memory for their ashes. The battle on the one side with the
anti-Unitarians who regard "monology" as a fond thing vainly invented,
and on the other with Edmond de Goncourt's foolish and bumptious boast
that Flaubert's epithets were not so "personal" as his own and his
brother's, would be for a different division of literary history. But
there is something--a very important, though not a very long
something--which must be said on the subject here. I have never found
myself in the very slightest degree _gêné_--as the _abonné_ was by
Gautier's and as others are by the styles of Mr. George Meredith and Mr.
Henry James--by Flaubert's style. It has never put the very smallest
impediment, effected the most infinitesimal delay, in my comprehension
of his meaning, or my enjoyment of his art and of his story.[391] What
is more, though it has intensified that enjoyment, it has never--as may
perhaps have been the case with some other great "stylists"--_diverted_,
a little illegitimately, my attention and fruition from the story
itself. Style-craft and story-craft have married each other so perfectly
that they are one flesh for the lover of literature to rejoice in. And
if there be higher praise than this to be bestowed in the cases and
circumstances, I do not know what it is. It seems to belong in
perfection--I do not deny it to others in lesser degree--to three
writers only in this volume--Gautier, Mérimée, and Flaubert--though if
any one pleads hard for the addition of Maupassant, it will be seen when
we come to him that I am not bound to a rigid _non possumus_; and though
there is still one living writer with whom, if he were not happily
disqualified by the fact of his living, I should not refuse to complete
the Pentad. But let this suffice for the mere point of style in its
purer and therefore more controversial aspect. There may be a little
more to say incidentally as we take the general survey under the old
heads of plot, etc. But before doing this we must--the books being so
few and so individually remarkable--say a little about each of them,
though only a very little about one.
[Sidenote: The books--_Madame Bovary_.]
Flaubert, after fairly early promise, the fulfilment of which was
postponed, began late, and was a man of eight and thirty when his first
complete book, _Madame Bovary_, appeared in 1859--a year, with its
predecessor 1858, among the great years of literature, as judged by the
books they produced. An absurd prosecution was got up against it by the
authorities of that most moral of _régimes_, the Second Empire, with the
even more absurd result of a "not guilty, but please don't do anything
of the kind again" judgment. This, however, belongs mostly--not (_v.
inf._) entirely--to the biographical part of the matter, with which we
have little or nothing to do.[392] The book itself is, beyond all
question, a great novel--if it had a greater subject[393] it would have
been one of the greatest of novels. The immense influence of _Manon
Lescaut_ appears once more in it; but Emma Bovary, with far more than
all the bad points of Manon, has none of her good ones. Nor has she the
half-redeeming greatness in evil of her somewhat younger sister Iza in
_Affaire Clémenceau_. Except her physical beauty (of which we do not
hear much), there is not one attractive point in her. She sins, not out
of passion, but because she thinks a married woman ought to have lovers.
She ruins her husband, not for any intrinsic and genuine love of
splendour, luxury, or beauty, but because other women have things and
she ought to have them. She has a taste _for_ men, but none _in_ them.
Yet her creator has made her absolutely "real," and, scum of womanhood
as she is, has actually evolved something very like tragedy out of her
worthlessness, and has saved her from being detestable, because she is
such a very woman. He has, indeed, subjected her to a _kenosis_, an
evisceration, exantlation--or, in plain English, "emptying out"--of
everything positively good (she has the negative but necessary salve of
not being absolutely ill-natured) that can be added to an abstract
pretty girl; and no more. I have paid a little attention to the heroines
of the greater fiction; but she is the only one of all the _mille e tre_
I know whom the author has managed to present as acceptable, without its
being in the least possible to fall in love with her, and at the same
time without its being necessary to detest her.
This defiant and victorious naturalness--not "naturalism"--pervades the
book: from the other main characters--the luckless, brainless,
tasteless, harmless husband; the vulgar Don Juans of lovers; the
apothecary Homais[394]--one of the most original and firmly drawn
characters in fiction--from all, down to the merest "supers." It floods
the scene-painting (admirable in itself) with a light of common day--not
too cheerful, but absolutely real. It animates the conversation, though
Flaubert is not exactly prodigal of this;[395] and it presides over the
weaving of the story as such in a fashion very little, if at all,
inferior to that which prevails in the very greatest masters of pure
story-telling.
[Sidenote: _Salammbô._]
Hardly any one, speaking critically, could, I suppose, also speak thus
positively about Flaubert's second book, _Salammbô_--a romance of
Carthaginian history at the time of the Mutiny of the Mercenaries. Even
Sainte-Beuve--no weak-stomached reader--was put off by its blotches of
blood and grime, and by the sort of ghastly gorgeousness which, if it
does not "relieve" these, forms a kind of background to throw them up.
It was violently attacked by clever carpers like M. de Pontmartin, by
eccentrics of half-genius and whole prejudice like M. Barbey
d'Aurevilly, and by dull pedants like M. Saint-René Taillandier; while
it may be questioned whether, to the present day, its friends have not
mostly belonged to that "Save-me-from-them" class which simply extols
the "unpleasant" because other people find it unpleasant.[396] For my
own part, I did not enjoy it much at the very first; but I felt its
power at once, and, as always happens in such cases when admiration does
not come from the tainted source just glanced at, the enjoyment
increased, and the sense of power increased with it, the
"unpleasantness," as a known thing, becoming merely "discountable" and
disinfected. The book can, of course, never rank with _Madame Bovary_,
because it is a _tour de force_ of abnormality--a thing incompatible
with that highest art which consists in the transformation and
transcendentalising of the ordinary. The leprosies, and the
crucifixions, and the sorceries, and the rest of it are ugly; but then
Carthage _was_ ugly, as far as we know anything about it.[397] Salammbô
herself is shadowy; but how could a Carthaginian girl be anything else?
The point to consider is the way in which all this unfamiliar, uncanny,
unpleasant stuff is _fused_ by sheer power of art into something which
has at least the reality of a bad dream--which, as most people know, is
a very real thing indeed while it lasts, and for a little time after. It
increases the wonder--though to me it does not increase the interest--to
know that Flaubert took the most gigantic pains to make his task as
difficult as possible by acquiring and piecing together the available
knowledge on his subject. This process--the ostensible _sine qua non_ of
"Realism" and "Naturalism"--will require further treatment. It is almost
enough for the present to say that, though not a novelty, it had been,
and for the matter of that has been, rarely a success. It has, as was
pointed out before, spoilt most classical novels, reaching its acme of
boredom in the German work of Ebers and Dahn; and it has scarcely ever
been very successful, even in the hands of Charles Reade, who used it
"with a difference." But it can hardly be said to have done _Salammbô_
much harm, because the "fusing" process which is above referred to, and
to which the imported elements are often so rebellious, is here
perfectly carried out. You may not like the colour and shape of the
ingot or cast; but there is nothing in it which has not duly felt and
obeyed the fire of art.
[Sidenote: _L'Éducation Sentimentale._]
That there was no danger of Flaubert's merely palming off, in his novel
work, replicas with a few superficial differences, had now been shown.
It was further established by his third and longest book, _L'Éducation
Sentimentale_. This was not only, as the others had been, violently
attacked, but was comparatively little read--indeed it is the only one
of his books, with the usual exception of _Bouvard et Pécuchet_, which
has been called, by any rational creature, dull. I do not find it so;
but I confess that I find its intrinsic interest, which to me is great,
largely enhanced by its unpopularity--which supplies a most remarkable
pendant to that of _Jonathan Wild_, and is by no means devoid of value
as further illustrating the cause of the very limited popularity of
Thackeray, and even of the rarity of whole-hearted enthusiasm for Swift.
Satire is allowed to be a considerable, and sometimes held to be an
attractive, branch of literature. But when you come to analyse the
actual sources of the attraction, it is to be feared that you will
generally find them to lie outside of the pure exposure of general human
weaknesses. A very large proportion of satire is personal, and
personality is always popular. Satire is very often "naughty," and
"naughtiness" is to a good many, _qua_ naughtiness, "nice." It lends
itself well to rhetoric; and there is no doubt, whatever superior
persons may say of it, that rhetoric _does_ "persuade" a large portion
of the human race. It is constantly associated with directly comic
treatment, sometimes with something not unlike tragedy; and while the
first, if of any merit, is sure, the second has a fair though more
restricted chance, of favourable reception. Try Aristophanes, Horace,
Juvenal, Lucian, Martial; try the modern satirists of all kinds, and you
will always find these secondary sources of enjoyment present.
There is hardly one of them--if one--to be found in _L'Éducation
Sentimentale_. It is simply a panorama of human folly, frailty,
feebleness, and failure--never permitted to rise to any great heights or
to sink to any infernal depths, but always maintained at a probable
human level. We start with Frédéric Moreau as he leaves school at the
correct age of eighteen. I am not sure at what actual age we leave him,
though it is at some point or other of middle life, the most active part
of the book filling about a decade. But "vanity is the end of all his
ways," and vanity has been the beginning and middle of them--a perfectly
quiet and everyday kind of vanity, but vain from centre to
circumference and entire surface. He (one cannot exactly say
"tries," but) is brought into the possibility of trying love
of various kinds--illegitimate-romantic, legitimate-not-unromantic,
illegitimate-professional but not disagreeable, illegitimate-conventional.
Nothing ever "comes off" in a really satisfactory fashion. He is
"exposed" (in the photographic-plate sense) to all, or nearly all, the
influences of a young man's life in Paris--law, literature, art,
insufficient means, quite sufficient means, society, politics--including
the Revolution of 1848--enchantments, disenchantments--_tout ce qu'il
faut pour vivre_--to alter a little that stock expression for "writing
materials" which is so common in French. But he never can get any real
"life" out of any of these things. He is neither a fool, nor a cad, nor
anything discreditable or disagreeable. He is "only an or'nary person,"
to reach the rhythm of the original by adopting a slang form in not
quite the slang sense. And perhaps it is not unnatural that other
ordinary persons should find him too faithful to their type to be
welcome. In this respect at least I may claim not to be ordinary. One
goes down so many empty wells, or wells with mere rubbish at the bottom
of them, that to find Truth at last is to be happy with her (without
prejudice to the convenience of another well or two here and there, with
an agreeable Falsehood waiting for one). I do not know that _L'Éducation
Sentimentale_ is a book to be read very often; one has the substance in
one's own experience, and in the contemplation of other people's, too
readily at hand for that to be necessary or perhaps desirable. But a
great work of art which is also a great record of nature is not too
common--and this is what it is.
[Sidenote: _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_.]
Yet, as has been remarked before, nothing shows Flaubert's greatness
better than his absolute freedom from the "rut." Even in carrying out
the general "Vanity" idea he has no monotony. The book which followed
_L'Éducation_ had been preluded, twenty years earlier, by some fragments
in _L'Artiste_, a periodical edited by Gautier. But _La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine_, when it finally appeared, far surpassed the promise of
these specimens. It is my own favourite among its author's books; and it
is one of those which you can read merely for enjoyment or take as a
subject of study, just as you please--if you are wise you will give
"five in five score" of your attentions to the latter occupation and the
other ninety-five to the former. The people who had made up their minds
to take Flaubert as a sort of Devil's Gigadibs--a "Swiss, not of
Heaven," but of the other place, hiring himself out to war on all things
good--called it "an attack on the idea of God"! As it, like its smaller
and later counterpart _Saint Julien l'Hospitalier_, ends in a
manifestation of Christ, which would do honour to the most orthodox of
Saints' Lives, the "attack" seems to be a curious kind of offensive
operation.
As a matter of fact, the book takes its vaguely familiar subject, and
_embroiders_ that subject with a fresh collection of details from
untiring research. The nearest approach to an actual person, besides the
tormented Saint himself, is the Evil One, not at first _in propria
persona_, but under the form of the Saint's disciple Hilarion, who at
first acts as usher to the various elements of the Temptation-Pageant,
and at last reveals himself by treacherous suggestions of unbelief. The
pageant itself is of wonderful variety. After a vividly drawn sketch of
the hermitage in the Thebaid, the drama starts with the more vulgar and
direct incitements to the coarser Deadly Sins and others--Gluttony,
Avarice, Ambition, Luxury. Then Hilarion appears and starts theological
discussion, whence arises a new series of actual visions--the excesses
of the heretics, the degradation of martyrdom itself, the Eastern
theosophies, the monstrous cults of Paganism. After this, Hilarion tries
a sort of Modernism, contrasting the contradictions and absurdities of
actual religions with a more and more atheistic Pantheism. This failing,
the Temptation reverts to the moral forms, Death and Vice contending for
Anthony and bidding against each other. The next shift of the
kaleidoscope is to semi-philosophical fantasies--the Sphinx, the
Chimaera, basilisks, unicorns, microscopic mysteries. The Saint is
nearly bewildered into blasphemy; but at last the night wanes, the sun
rises, and the face of Christ beams from it. The Temptation is
ended.[398]
The magnificence of the style, in which the sweep of this
dream-procession over the stage is conveyed to the reader, is probably
the first thing that will strike him; and certainly it never palls. But,
if not at once, pretty soon, any really critical mind must perceive
something different from, and much rarer than, mere style. It is the
extraordinary power--the exactness, finish, and freedom from any excess
or waste labour, of the narrative, in reproducing dream-quality. A very
large proportion--and there is nothing surprising in the fact--of the
best pieces of ornate prose in French, as well as in English, are busied
with dreams; but the writers have not invariably remembered one of the
most singular--and even, when considered from some points of view,
disquieting--features of a dream,--that you are never, while dreaming,
in the least surprised at what happens. Flaubert makes no mistake as to
this matter. The real realism which had enabled him to re-create the
most sordid details of _Madame Bovary_, the half-historic grime and
gorgeousness mixed of _Salammbô_, and the quintessentially ordinary life
of _L'Éducation_, came mightily to his assistance in this his Vision of
the Desert. You see and hear its external details as Anthony saw and
heard them: you almost feel its internal influence as if Hilarion had
been--as if he _was_--at your side.
[Sidenote: _Trois Contes._]
The _Trois Contes_ which followed, and which practically completed
(except for letters) Flaubert's finished work in literature,[399] have
one of those half-extrinsic interests which, once more, it is the duty
of the historian to mention. They show that although, as has been said,
Flaubert suffered from no monotony of faculty, the range of his
faculty--or rather the range of the subjects to which he chose to apply
it--was not extremely wide. Of the twin stories, _Un Coeur Simple_ is,
though so unlike in particular, alike in general _ordinariness_ to
_Madame Bovary_ and _L'Éducation Sentimentale_. The unlikeness in
particular is very striking, and shows that peculiar _victoriousness_ in
accomplishing what he attempted which is so characteristic of Flaubert.
It is the history-no-history of a Norman peasant woman, large if simple
of heart, simple and not large of brain, a born drudge and prey to
unscrupulous people who come in contact with her, and almost in her
single person uniting the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. I
admire it now, without even the touch of rather youthful impatience
which used, when I read it first, to temper my admiration. It is not a
_berquinade_, because a _berquinade_ is never quite real. _Un Coeur
Simple_ shares Flaubert's Realism as marvellously as any equal number of
pages of either of the books to which I have compared it. But there
_is_, perhaps, something provocative--something almost placidly
insolent--about the way in which the author says, "Now, I will give you
nothing of the ordinary baits for admiration, and yet, were you the
Devil himself, you shall admire me." And one does--in youth rather
reluctantly--not so in age.
_Herodias_ groups itself in the same general fashion, but even more
definitely in particulars, with _Salammbô_--of which, indeed, it is a
sort of miniature replica cunningly differentiated. Anybody can see how
easily the story of the human witchcraft of Salome, and the decollation
of the Saint, and the mixture of terror and gorgeousness in the desert
fortress, parallel the Carthaginian story. But I do not know whether it
was deliberate or unconscious repetition that made Flaubert give us
something like a duplicate of the suffete Hanno in Vitellius. There is
no lack of the old power, and the shortness of the story is at least
partly an advantage. But perhaps the Devil's Advocate, borrowing from,
but reversing, Hugo on Baudelaire, might say, "Ce frisson _n'est pas_
nouveau."
The third story, _Saint Julien l'Hospitalier_, has always seemed to me
as near perfection in its own kind as anything I know in literature, and
one of the best examples, if not the very best example, of that
adaptableness of the _Acta Sanctorum_ to modern rehandling of the right
kind, which was noticed at the beginning of this _History_.[400] The
excessive devotion of the not yet sainted Julian to sport; the crime and
the dooms that follow it; the double parricide which he commits under
the false impression that his wife has been unfaithful to him; his
self-imposed penance of ferrying, somewhat like Saint Christopher, and
the trial--a harder one than that good giant bore, for Julian has, not
merely to carry over but, to welcome, at board _and_ bed, a leper--and
the Transfiguration and Assumption that conclude the story, give some of
the best subjects--though there are endless others nearly or quite as
good--in Hagiology. And Flaubert has risen to them in the miraculous
manner in which he could rise, retaining the strangeness, infusing the
reality, and investing the whole with the beauty, deserved and required.
There is not a weak place in the whole story; but the strongest places
are, as they should be, the massacre of hart, hind, and fawn which
brings on the curse; the ghastly procession of the beasts Julian has
slain or _not_ slain (for he has met with singular ill-luck); the final
"Translation."[401] Nowhere is Flaubert's power of description greater;
nowhere, too, is that other power noticed--the removal of all temptation
to say "Very pretty, but rather _added_ ornament"--more triumphantly
displayed.
[Sidenote: _Bouvard et Pécuchet._]
Little need be said of the posthumous torso and failure,[402] _Bouvard
et Pécuchet_. Nothing ever showed the wisdom of the proverb about
half-done work, children and fools, better; and, alas! there is
something of the child in all of us, and something of the fool in too
many. It was to be a sort of extended and varied _Éducation_, not
_Sentimentale_. Two men of retired leisure and sufficient income resolve
to spend the rest of their lives "in books and work and healthful play,"
and almost as many other recreative occupations (including "teaching the
young idea how to shoot") as they or you can think of. But the work
generally fails, the books bore and disappoint them, the young ideas
shoot in the most "divers and disgusting" ways, and the play turns out
to be by no means healthful. Part of it is in scenario merely; and
Flaubert was wont to alter so much, that one cannot be sure even of the
other and more finished part. Perhaps it was too large and too dreary a
theme, unsupported by any real novel quality, to acquire even that
interest which _L'Éducation Sentimentale_ has for some. But the more
excellent way is to atone for the mistake of his literary executors, in
not burning all of it except the monumental phrase quoted above,
Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans la main,
by simply remembering this--which is the initial and conclusion of the
whole matter--and letting the rest pass.
There is one slight danger in the estimate of Flaubert to which, though
I actually pointed it out, I think I may have succumbed a little when I
first wrote about him. He is so great a master of literature that one
may be led to concentrate attention on this; and if not to neglect, to
regard somewhat inadequately, his greatness as a novelist. Here at any
rate such failure would be petty, if not even high, treason.
[Sidenote: General considerations.]
One may look at his performance in the novel from two points of
view--that of "judging by the result" simply and in the fashion
of a summing-up; and that of bringing him under certain
ticket-qualifications, and enquiring whether they are justly applicable
to him or not. I need hardly tell any one who has done me the honour to
read either this or any other critical work of mine, which of these two
I think the more excellent way; but the less excellent in this
particular instance, may demand a little following.
Was Flaubert a Romantic? Was he a Realist? Was he a Naturalist? This is
how the enquiries come in chronological order. But for convenience of
discussion the first should be postponed to the others.
"Realist," like a good many other tickets, is printed on both sides, and
the answer to our question will be by no means the same whichever side
be looked at. That Flaubert was a Realist "in the best sense of the
term" has been again and again affirmed in the brief reviews of his
novels given above. He cannot be unreal--the "convincingness" of his
most sordid as of his most splendid passages; of his most fantastic
_diableries_ as of his most everyday studies of society; is unsurpassed.
It is, in fact, his chief characteristic. But this very fact that it
_pervades_--that it is as conspicuous in the _Tentation_ and in _Saint
Julien l'Hospitalier_ as in _Madame Bovary_ and the _Éducation_--at once
throws up a formidable, I think an impregnable, line of defence against
those who would claim him for "Realism" of the other kind--the cult of
the ugly, because, being ugly, it is more real than the beautiful. He
has no fear of ugliness, but he cultivates the ugly because it is the
real, not the real because it is the ugly. Being to a great extent a
satirist and (despite his personal boyishness) saturnine rather than
jovial in temperament, there is a good deal in him that is _not_
beautiful. But he can escape into beauty whenever he chooses, and in
these escapes he is always at his best.
This fact, while leaving him a Realist of the nobler type, at once shuts
him off from community with his friends Zola and the Goncourts, and
saves him from any stain of the "sable streams." But besides this--or
rather looking at the same thing from a slightly different point of
view--there is something which not only permits but demands the most
emphatic of "Noes!" to the question, "Was Flaubert a Naturalist?"
This something is itself the equally emphatic "Yes!" which must be
returned to the third and postponed question, "Was he a Romantic?" There
are many strange things in the History of Literature: its strangeness,
as in other cases, is one of its greatest charms. But there have been
few stranger than the obstinacy and almost passion with which the
Romanticism of Heine, of Thackeray, and of Flaubert has been denied.
Again and again it has been pointed out that "to laugh at what you love"
is not only permissible, but a sign of the love itself. Moreover,
Flaubert does not even laugh as the great Jew and the great Englishman
did. He only represents the failures and the disappointments and the
false dawns of Love itself, while in other respects he is _romantique à
tous crins_. Compare _Le Rêve_ with _La Tentation_ or _Saint-Julien
l'Hospitalier_; compare _Madame Bovary_ with _Germinie Lacerteux_; even
compare _L'Éducation Sentimentale_, that voyage to the Cythera of
Romance which never reaches its goal, with _Sapho_ and _L'Évangéliste_,
and you will see the difference. It is of course to a certain extent "Le
Coucher du Soleil Romantique" which lights up Flaubert's work, but the
_crapauds imprévus_ and the _froids limaçons_ of Baudelaire's epitaph
have not yet appeared, and the hues of the sunset itself are still
gorgeous in parts of the sky.
Of Flaubert's famous doctrine of "the single word" perhaps a little more
should, after all, be said. The results are so good, and the processes
by which they are attained get in the way of the reader so little, that
it is difficult to quarrel with the doctrine itself. But it was perhaps,
after all, something of a superstition, and the almost "fabulous
torments" which it occasioned to its upholder and practitioner seem to
have been somewhat Fakirish. We need not grudge the five years spent
over _Salammbô_; the seven over _L'Éducation_; the earlier and, I think,
less definitely known gestation of _Madame Bovary_; and that portion of
the twenty which, producing these also, filled out those fragments of
_La Tentation_ that the July Monarchy had actually seen. Perhaps with
_Bouvard et Pécuchet_ he got into a blind alley, out of which such
labour was never like to get him, and in which it was rather likely to
confine him. But if the excess of the preparation had been devoted to
the completion of, say, only half a dozen of such _Contes_ as those we
actually have, it would have been joyful.
Yet this is idle pining, and the goods which the gods provided in this
instance are such as ought rather to make us truly thankful. Flaubert
was, as has been said, a Romantic, but he was born late enough to avoid
the extravagances and the childishnesses of _mil-huit-cent-trente_ while
retaining its inspiration, its _diable au corps_, its priceless recovery
of inheritances from history. Nor, though he subjected all these to a
severe criticism of a certain kind, did he ever let this make him (as
something of the same sort made his pretty near contemporary, Matthew
Arnold, in England) inclined to blaspheme.[403] He did not, like his
other contemporary and peer in greatness of their particular country and
generation, Baudelaire, play unwise tricks with his powers and his
life.[404] He was fortunately relieved from the necessity of
journey-work--marvellously performed, but still journey-work--which had
beset Gautier and never let go of him.[405]
And he utilised these gifts and advantages as few others have done in
the service of the novel. One thing may be brought against him--I think
one only. You read--at least I read--his books with intense interest and
enjoyment, but though you may recognise the truth and humanity of the
characters; though you may appreciate the skill with which they are set
to work; though you may even, to a certain extent, sympathise with them,
you never--at least I never--feel that intense interest in them, as
persons, which one feels in those of most of the greatest novelists. You
can even feel yourself in them--a rare and great thing--you can _be_
Saint Anthony, and feel an unpleasant suspicion as if you had sometimes
been Frédéric Moreau. But this is a different thing (though it is a
great triumph for the author) from the construction for you of loves,
friends, enemies even--in addition to those who surround you in the
actual world.
Except this defect--which is in the proper, not the vulgar sense a
defect--that is to say, not something bad which is present, but only
something good which is absent--I hardly know anything wrong in
Flaubert. He is to my mind almost[406] incomparably the greatest
novelist of France specially belonging to the second half of the
nineteenth century, and I do not think that Europe at large has ever had
a greater since the death of Thackeray.
FOOTNOTES:
[389] He _might_ have said--to make a Thackerayan translation of what
was actually said later of an offering of roses rashly made to some
French men of letters at their hotel in London: "Who the devil is this?
Let them flank him his vegetables to the gate!" But what he did say, I
believe, though he did not know or mention my name, was that "a blonde
son of Albion" had ventured something _gigantesque_ on him. And
_gigantesque_ had, if I do not again fondly err, sometimes if not always
its "milder shade" of meaning in Flaubert's energetic mouth.
[390] As in those cases, and perhaps even more than in most, I have
taken pains to make the new criticism as little of a replica of the old
as possible.
[391] Possibly this is exactly what M. de Goncourt meant.
[392] There is some scandal and infinite gossip about Flaubert, with all
of which I was once obliged to be acquainted, but which I have done the
best that a rather strong memory will allow me to forget. I shall only
say that his early friend and quasi-biographer, Maxime du Camp, seems to
me to have had nearly as hard measure dealt out to him as Mr. Froude in
the matter of Mr. Carlyle. Both were indiscreet; I do not think either
was malevolent or treacherous.
[393] For in novels, to a greater degree than in poems, greatness _does_
depend on the subject.
[394] Somebody has, I believe, suggested that if Emma had married
Homais, all would have been well. If this means that he would have
promptly and comfortably poisoned her, for which he had professional
facilities, there might be something in it. Otherwise, hardly.
[395] His forte is in single utterances, such as the unmatched "J'ai un
amant!" to which Emma gives vent after her first lapse (and which
"speaks" her and her fate, and the book in ten letters, two spaces, and
an apostrophe), or as the "par ce qu'elle avait touché au manteau de
Tanit" of _Salammbô_; and the "Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans la main" of
the unfinished summary of _Bouvard et Pécuchet_.
[396] It is known that Flaubert, perhaps out of rather boyish pique
(there was much boyishness in him), had originally made its offence
ranker still. One of the most curious literary absurdities I have ever
seen--the absurd almost drowning the disgusting in it--was an American
attempt in verse to fill up Flaubert's _lacuna_ and "go one better."
[397] The old foreign comparison with London was merely rhetorical; but
there really would seem to have been some resemblance between Carthage
and modern Berlin, even in those very points which Flaubert (taking
advice) left out.
[398] There is a recent and exceptionally good translation of the book.
[399] The Letters are almost, if not quite, of first-rate quality. The
play, _Le Candidat_, is of no merit.
[400] Vol. I. p. 4.
[401] All these will be found Englished in the Essay referred to.
[402] Too much must not be read into the word "failure": indeed the next
sentence should guard against this. I know excellent critics who,
declining altogether to consider the book as a novel, regard it as a
sort of satire and _satura_, Aristophanic, Jonsonian or other, in gist
and form, and by no means a failure as such. But as such it would have
no, or very small, place here. I think myself that it is, from that
point of view, nearer to Burton than to any one else: and I think
further that it might have been made into a success of this kind or even
of the novel sort itself. But _as it stands with the sketch of a
completion_, I do not think that Flaubert's alchemy had yet achieved or
approached projection.
[403] I have sometimes wished that Mr. Arnold had written a novel. But
perhaps _Volupté_ frightened him.
[404] There is controversy on this point, and Baudelaire's indulgence in
artificial and perilous Paradises may have been exaggerated. That it
existed to some extent is, I think, hardly doubtful.
[405] I know few things of the kind more pathetic than Théo's quiet
lament over the "artistic completeness" of his ill-luck in the collapse
of the Second Empire just when, with Sainte-Beuve dead and Mérimée
dying, he was its only man of letters of the first rank left, and might
have had some relief from collar-work. But it must be remembered that
though he had ground at the mill with slaves, he had never been one of
them, and perhaps this would always have prevented his promotion.
[406] Reserving Maupassant under the "almost."