GUSTAVE FLAUBERT (1821-1880) BY PAUL BOURGET FANCY that when 'Madame Bovary' appeared in 1856, even the most alert of French critics, like Sainte-Beuve or J. J. Weiss, would have been thoroughly astonished if some one had said to him:-"Do not deceive yourself; this novel of passion, which everybody is reading and which has suddenly made its author. the fashion; this picture of morals, so boldly brushed that it disquiets the governing powers and summons the painter before the censors of morals; this study of style, so brilliantly executed that the most determined revolutionists marvel at it,-in forty years will have become part of the classical tradition of France. Among all the names of the century, that of Gustave Flaubert will be linked with that of Courier alone, in the list of the prose writers of the great Latin line after La Bruyère, Pascal, and Montesquieu. This little book is not an accident. It is an event, and its author is the master whom hundreds of other artists in France and abroad will follow; the man, perhaps, whose ideas will modify most deeply the æsthetics of the century." Yes, I can see Sainte-Beuve smile at this prophecy, although his valiant essay in the 'Lundis' shows how deeply he was impressed by Flaubert's début. I see witty Weiss shrug his shoulders, although his criticism written at that time shows a stirring of extreme curiosity concerning the new-comer. It is not given to any one to construct the orbit of contemporary works, or to foresee their place with posterity. In certain books and in certain kinds of genius there inheres a hidden force, a latent virtue, which does not at once develop. In the case of Flaubert, for example, we hardly yet see clearly all that he put in his novels, which in reality he himself did not quite comprehend. For if an artist's contemporaries cannot measure him with exactness, neither can he measure himself. Would it not have amazed Voltaire to learn that he would live only through 'Candide,' and Diderot that his work would reduce itself to the Neveu de Rameau,' two pamphlets scribbled in a few days, the second not even published by its author? I In seeking to discover why a book or a writer grows greater as the years pass, instead of dwindling away with the first successes, one finds that this book and this writer strikingly disclose a moral unity. Nothing that is not typical endures in human memory. The posthu mous fame and the influence of Flaubert confirm this great law of literary history. Few writers have more deeply impressed this moral unity upon more diverse works. From that youthful day when he read to his friend Maxime Du Camp his great unpublished novel 'Novembre,' to the eve of his death, when he traced the last lines of 'Bouvard and Pécuchet,' he developed without pause or modification one changeless system and expressed one changeless conclusion concerning human life. One metaphysical conviction lightens the pages of his youth and those of his approaching age, as the same sun irradiates morning and evening of the same day with universal light. This doctrine, born with Flaubert, as I shall try to show, is the old doctrine of pessimism, but of a verified, studied-out, hopeless pessimism, as atomically established as that of Schopenhauer in Germany and of old Heraclitus in Greece. From the point of view of the novelist, as from that of the two philosophers, the evil of life does not arise from circumstances, but is inherent in the very fact of humanity. Whether barbarian or civilized, whether belonging to the antique world or to modern society, to an age of faith or to an epoch of skepticism, whether artist or artisan, simple or complex, the human being lives to see the failure of his ambition, be it noble or base, narrow or boundless. The mocking hand of Fate seems to have written a negative sign before the colossal sum of human efforts, and the total always shows a loss; the greatness of these efforts augmenting the greatness of the predetermined ruin. Such is the idea permeating from end to end all the books composed by this admirable artist, the thesis he struggled to demonstrate by examples not far-fetched and abstract, but concrete and living, and of such extraordinary intensity that the series of six volumes really constitutes the most absolute, the most uncompromising manual of nihilism ever composed. To comprehend the doctrine back of the accident and the theory behind the fact, one must consider the chief characters of these books successively. By a process quite opposed to that of authors who are simply misanthropic, Flaubert does not make the final miseries of his characters result from their faults, but from their qualities. At the same time he is careful to select ordinary and not exceptional types, and to surround them with ordinary circumstances. Thus constituted, they cease to be individual and become representative, and their symbolic failure becomes the failure of their whole class. Take as examples Madame Bovary in the novel of that name, and Frédéric Moreau in 'L'Éducation Sentimentale.' Both are results of the legitimate and indeed very noble effort which pushes the lower classes toward culture and refinement. Emma Bovary is the daughter of a farmer who wished her to become a "lady," and Frédéric is the son of a middle-class father who has resolved that his boy shall have a "liberal" profession. She has been sent to a convent. He has been put in school. In their class of society this is the accepted educational process, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Both pupils respond to the instruction they receive. Ah, well! if the first descends, step by step, the ladder which leads to vice, to crime, to suicide, it is simply because, played upon by the religious and poetical emotions of the convent which was so long her home, she has formed too exquisite, too complex, too sequestered a dream of existence, and has felt too acutely the meagreness of her environment. She is perverted by the noblest characteristics of her nature; and in that experience she resembles the sentimental Frédéric, her brother in delicacy as in weakness. If the man of society, young, rich, intelligent, spoils his hours one by one, as a child who cannot draw, uncleanly and foolishly spoils his sheets of fair white paper, he does so because he has surrendered himself too freely to the charm of the books and dreams which enchanted his youth, and has longed too eagerly for higher emotions, for romantic affections, and glorious adventures. Again, if the two grotesque protagonists of 'Bouvard et Pécuchet' make the most imbecile use of their late-coming independence, of their will and energy, it is because the hearts of these bureau clerks suddenly released from servitude beat with the noblest zeal for the Ideal,-in that form, however, "which deceives the least; that is, science" and do not say that singleness of heart is lacking in these more than in the others. story of Un old maid who Again, it is the romantic novelist who wrote the Cœur Simple,' the pathetically foolish adventure of an adores with religious fervor a stuffed paroquet. And again, do not say that the decadence of contemporary society is responsible for these failures. Would it have been better for these men and women to take root in the soil of a world still new, and to share the heroic youth of civilization? The sinister brutality, staining red the landscapes of 'Salammbô,' answers the question. Matthô, like Frédéric, like the daughter of Hamilcar, like the child of Farmer Ronault, struggles painfully in the heavy nightmare of existence; the gloomy frenzy of the savage has no more appreciable result than the shrinking trepidation of the civilized man. Nor will it suffice to say that these civilized folk and these barbarians were alike wanting in that great supernatural strength, faith. St. Anthony the hermit of the Thebaid, after years of maceration, cries, like Emma, like Frédéric, "Of old I was not so wretched!"* The depth of his penitence has but intensified his power to feel and suffer. A cataleptic, haunted *The Temptation of St. Anthony.' by visions, terrified at night by the howling of the jackal, by the desert winds, by the shadow of a cross upon the sand, at last he bows down like a slave before the stupid and inert Thing, shapeless and multiform Matter. "I would," he sighs, "that I were Matter!" Supreme aspiration, containing the drama, at once tragic and farcical, of our poor humanity! An appeal which recalls Goya's picture of a skeleton straining to lift up the stone of his tomb to write upon it the terrible word Nada,-"Nothing!" There is nothing! "Who knows?" wrote Flaubert himself in one of his letters: "doubtless death has nothing more to tell than life." II For the source and principle of this pessimism, one must search through the four volumes of correspondence recently published. It is easy to see that this way of feeling and of judging life is not with the author of 'Madame Bovary,' as with so many others, an amusement of dilettantism. It is the deep and personal moral of these frank letters that the convincing force of a work of art is always proportionate to its sincerity. If to Flaubert's readers his creations have this authenticity of authority, it is because they are struck out of his own life and spirit. I mean that they express what was essential in his life, and most personal, least incidental, in his spirit. The whole difference between objective artists, among whom Flaubert enrolled himself, and the subjective school, is that the first exclude all anecdote, all petty individual and local circumstance, from their written confessions. They can give expression to their genius only when they reveal the inmost depths of their nature. From the first, Flaubert's letters show that his heart, as another great unquiet spirit declared, was "born with a wound."* To-day we know that his mental structure was sustained by an organism prematurely touched at the very centre of life. Epilepsy was destroying Flaubert. The Souvenirs of Maxime Du Camp contain a very touching account of the first attack of this fatal nervous malady. But long before that attack, a hypersensitiveness, strange alternations of exaltation and repression, of enthusiasm and disgust, indicated that a secret malady was preying upon this robust fellow. From his twentieth year he contended with those humiliating fatalities against which human energy, however ambitious, is doomed to dash itself. Moreover, he was environed by contradictions. His prose astonishes the reader by the lyric amplitude of his least sentence. A poet quivers in the prose writer with all the passion, all the ardor, of a Shakespeare or a Byron. Now, this poet was the son * Lamennais of himself. |