Complete works of gustav.., p.553
Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert, page 553
This was also the origin of the coolness which arose in the ardent friendship between Flaubert and M. Ducamp. If it were necessary to produce a more definite proof of this, it could be found in this fragment of a letter from Louis Bouilhet to Flaubert:
“As for Maxime Ducamp, I have gone fifteen days without seeing him and should have passed another week in the same fashion if he had not appeared at my house on Thursday of last week. I must say that he was very amiable both as regards my welfare and your own. This may have been policy, but I state the fact simply as a historian. He offered me his services in finding an editor, and later in finding a library. He is well informed about you and your work. What I told him about Bovary interested him very much. He said to me, in incidental phrases, that he was very glad the wrong was on your side for never having pardoned him the matter of the Revue, that he saw with happiness your works in his magazine, etc., etc. He seemed to speak with conviction and frankness. . . .”
These small details are important only from the point of view of M. Ducamp’s judgment of his friend. A reconciliation took place between them later.
The appearance of Madame Bovary was a revolution in letters. The great Balzac, forgotten, had shown his genius in some powerful books, stuffed, taken from life, observations, or rather revelations of humanity. He divined, invented, created an entire world, born of his mind. Little of the artist, in the delicate sense of the word, he wrote strong language, full of imagery, a little confused and laborious.
Carried away by his inspiration, he seemed to be ignorant of that difficult art, the giving to ideas their true value through words, sonorousness and context of phrase.
He put into his work the weight of a colossus; and there are few pages from this great man which can be cited as masterpieces of language, as one cites Rabelais, La Bruyère, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, Michelet, Gautier, etc.
Gustave Flaubert, on the contrary, proceeding more by penetration than intuition, makes use of an admirable new language, precise, sober, sonorous, for a study of human life, profound, surprising, complete.
This is no longer the romance such as the greatest have made, the romance where one always feels a little imagination, a little of the author; a romance that can be classed among the tragic kind, the sentimental kind, the passionate kind; the romance where the purpose, the opinions of the author and his manner of thought show themselves. It is life itself made evident. One would say that the personages arose under his eyes as he turned the pages; that the landscapes unrolled themselves, with their sorrows, their gaieties, their odours, their charm; that objects surged before the reader, as he called them forth with an invisible power, concealed one knows not where.
Gustave Flaubert, in fact, was the most ardent apostle of impersonality in art. He would not admit, that the author ever should be surmised, that he should let fall in a page, in a line, in a word, a single particle of his opinion, nor any appearance of purpose. He should be the mirror of facts, but a mirror which should reproduce them by giving to them that inexpressible reflection, that, I know not what of something almost divine which is called art.
It is not “impersonal” that one should call it, in speaking of this impeccable artist, but impassible. If he attached considerable importance to observation and analysis, he laid still greater stress on composition and style. For with him these two qualities were the essentials of an imperishable book. By composi — tion, he meant that vexatious labour which consists in expressing only the essence of actions that follow each other in an existence, in choosing uniquely the characteristic traits and grouping them, combining them in such a way that they concur in a manner most perfect for producing the effect one wishes to obtain, but not with any purpose of instruction whatever.
Nothing so irritated him as the doctrines of the pawns of criticism upon moral art or honest art. “Since humanity has existed,” he would say, “all the great writers have protested through their works against such impotent counsel.”
Morality, honesty, and such principles are indispensable things in the maintenance of established social order; but there is nothing in common between social order and letters. Romance writers have as their chief object the observation and description of human passions, good and bad. Their mission is not to moralise, nor to scourge, nor to teach. A book with these tendencies ceases to be an artistic book.
The writer looks at and tries to penetrate the soul and the heart, to sound their depths, the propensities, shameful or magnanimous, together with all the complicated mechanism of movable mortals. He observes according to his temperament as a man, and his artistic conscience. He ceases to be conscientious and artistic if he systematically forces himself to glorify humanity, to gloss things over, to attenuate the passions that he judges dishonestly to the profit of the passions he judges honestly.
Any act, good or bad, has importance for the writer only as a subject for writing, without any idea of good or bad to be attached to it. It is worth more or less as a literary document, that is all.
Beyond the truth, observed in good faith and expressed with talent, there is nothing except the powerless efforts of the pawns.
The great writers are not preoccupied with either morals or chastity. For example: Aristophanes, Apuleius, Ovid, Virgil, Rabelais, Shakespeare and many others.
If a book carries a lesson, it should be in spite of the author, through the very force of the facts it relates. Flaubert considered these principles as articles of faith.
When Madame Bovary appeared, the public, accustomed to the unctuous syrup of the elegant romances, likewise to the unlikely adventures of the chance romances, classed the new writer among the realists. This is a gross error and stupid folly. Gustave Flaubert was no more a realist because he observed life with care than M. Cherbuliez is not an idealist because he observed badly. The realist is he who occupies himself only with the brutal fact without comprehending its relative importance or noting its reverberations. To Gustave Flaubert, a fact in itself signified nothing. He explains himself thus in one of his letters:
“You complain that the events are not varied, — that is the plaint of a realist, and besides, how do you know this? It may be necessary to look at them more closely. Have you ever believed in the existence of things? Is not everything an illusion? There is no truth except in its relation, that is to say, the fashion in which we perceive the objects.”
No observer, however, was ever more conscientious; and no one strove more to comprehend the causes which led to the effects. His process of work, his artistic process held much more to penetration than to observation. Instead of displaying the psychology of his personages in explanatory dissertations, he simply made it appear by their acts. The inward was thus unveiled by the outward, and without any psychological argument.
In the first place, he imagined his types; then, proceeding by deduction, he gave to these beings the characteristic actions which they would naturally accomplish, following their temperaments with an absolute logic. Life, then, that he studied so minutely, could serve him only as a title of instructions.
Never does he announce the events; one would say on reading them that the facts spoke for themselves, so much importance did he attach to a visible appearance of men and things.
It is this rare quality of scene-setter and impassible portrayer which baptized him a realist by the superficial minds who know how to comprehend the deep meaning of a work only when it is spread out in philosophic phrases.
He was much irritated over this epithet of realist, which they pasted on his back, and pretended to have written his Bovary only out of hatred to the school of M. Champflèury.
In spite of a great friendship for Émile Zola, and a great admiration for his powerful talent, which he qualified as genial, he could never pardon him his naturalism. It is sufficient to read Madame Bovary with intelligence to understand how far removed he was from realism. The plan of the realistic writer consists in simply relating the facts that have happened among personages whom they have known or ob-
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served. In Madame Bovary, each personage is a type, that is to say, a résumé of a series of beings belonging to the. same intellectual order.
The country doctor, the provincial dreamer, the chemist, — a sort of Prudhomme, — the curate, the lovers, and even all the accessory figures, are types, endowed with a relievo much more energetic than are they in whom are concentrated great powers of observation, and much more lifelike than those represented by a pattern, or model, of their class.
But Gustave Flaubert continued to grow great up to the hour of the blossoming of romanticism; he was nourished by echoing phrases of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, and felt in his soul a lyric need which could not completely expand in such clearly-defined books as Madame Bovary.
And this is one of the most singular sides of this great man: this innovator, this revealer, this man-who-dared was, up to the time of his death, under the dominating influence of romanticism. Almost in spite of himself, almost unconsciously, driven by the irresistible force of his genius, by the creative force shut up within him, has he written these romances in a style so novel, and a note so personal. From his own taste, he would have preferred epic subjects, which unrolled themselves in a kind of song, like tableaux in an opera.
In Madame Bovary, besides, as in the Sentimental Education, his style, constrained to the rendition of common things, has often some flights, some sonorousness of tone, above the subjects it expresses. It makes departures, as if tired of being held back, of being forced to such platitude and, in speaking of Homais’ stupidity or Emma’s silliness, it becomes pompous or confusing, as if he were translating the movement of a poem.
Not being able to resist this need of grandeur, he composed, after the fashion of a Homeric recital, his second romance, Salammbô.
And is that a romance? Or is it rather an opera in prose? The tableaux are developed with prodigious magnificence, with a surprising pomp, colour and rhythm. The phrase sings, cries, has the fury and sonorousness of the trumpet, the murmur of the hautboy, the undulations of the violoncello, the artifice of the violin and the finesse of the flute. And the personages, built for heroes, seem always on the stage, speaking after a superb mode, with an elegance strong and charming, with the air of moving about in antique and imposing garb and decorations.
This giant’s book, the most plastically beautiful that he has written, gives also the impression of a magnificent dream. Is it thus that events passed such as Gustave Flaubert relates? No, undoubtedly no. If the facts are exact, the pomp of poesy which he throws over them show them to us in a kind of apotheosis, the lyric art of which envelops whatever it touches.
But scarcely had he ended that sonorous recitation of a mercenary revolt, when he felt himself called on anew by subjects less superb, and he composed with slowness that great romance of patience, that long, sober, and perfect study which is called the Sentimental Education.
This time he took for his personages, no longer types, as in the Bovary, but any sort of men, mediocre men, the kind we meet every day. Although this work demanded a superhuman amount of labour in its composition, so much does it resemble life itself that it has the air of being executed without plan or purpose. It is the perfect image of what takes place each day; it is an exact journal of existence. And yet, the philosophy in it remains so completely latent, so completely concealed behind the facts; the psychology is so perfectly enclosed in the action, attitudes and words of the personages, that the great public, accustomed to underscored effects, to manifest teaching, did not comprehend the value of this incomparable romance.
Only very keen minds and observers have seized the purport of this unique book, so artless, so sad, so simple in appearance, but so profound, so veiled, and so bitter. The Sentimental Education, scorned for the most part by the critics, accustomed as they are to the known forms and the immutable in art, has, nevertheless, numerous and enthusiastic admirers who give it the highest place among Flaubert’s works.
But it became necessary for him, in consequence of one of those inevitable reactions of the mind, to undertake a new subject, something large and poetic; and he finished a work, sketched some time before, entitled The Temptation of Saint Antony.
This is certainly the most powerful effort of the mind he ever made. But the very nature of the subject, its extent, its inaccessible height, rendered such a work almost beyond human strength. Taking up the old legend, he no longer has him assailed by visions of nude women and succulent nourishment alone, but by all the doctrines, all the beliefs and superstitions by which the disturbed mind of man is bewildered. It is a colossal defile of religious escort, of -all the strange conceptions, simple and complicated, enclosed in the brain of dreamer, priest, or philosopher who is tortured by a desire to penetrate the unknown.
As soon as this enormous task was finished (a work somewhat painful and confused, a chaos of tottering beliefs), he began again upon nearly the same subject, taking the sciences in place of religion and two narrow-minded citizens instead of the ecstatic saint.
Here are some of the ideas and the development of this encyclopaedic book, Bouvard and Pécuchet, which might have as a sub-title: “Concerning false methods in the study of human knowledge.”
Two copyists employed in Paris met by chance and became bound together in the closest friendship. One of them had a small inheritance, the other his savings. With the combined sum they bought a farm in Normandy, the dream of their existence, and left the capital. Then they began a series of studies and experiences embracing all human knowledge, and thus are developed the philosophic data of the work.
At first, they took to gardening, then to agriculture, to chemistry, astronomy, medicine, archaeology, history, literature, politics, hygiene, to magnetism and sorcery; they finally came to philosophy, losing themselves in its abstractions; they fell into religion, which soon disgusted them; they took up the education of two orphans, but finding themselves frustrated again and in despair, they go back to copying as in days gone by.
The book is thus a review of all the sciences, as they appear to two lucid enough minds of the mediocre, simple order. It is at the same time a formidable collection of knowledge, and above all a prodigious criticism on all scientific systems, opposing the one to the other, tearing down both sides by bringing fact to bear upon them, contradicting them by the aid of accepted and undisputed laws. It is a history of the feebleness of human intelligence, a promenade through the labyrinth of erudition with a thread in one’s hand. This thread is the grand irony of a thinker who proves, in all things and without ceasing, eternal and universal stupidity.
Beliefs, established for some centuries, are exposed, developed, and dismembered in ten lines by placing in opposition other beliefs so deftly and briskly as to undo and demolish them. From page to page, from line to line, a notion comes up, and immediately another rises in its turn, when the first withdraws or falls, struck down by its neighbor.
What Flaubert did for religions and antique philosophy in The Temptation of Saint Antony, he has here accomplished anew for all modern knowledge. It is the Tower-of-Babel of science, where all doctrines, diverse, contrary, and absolute (above all), speaking each its own language, demonstrate the impotence of effort, the vanity of affirmation and always “the eternal misery of all.”
The truth of to-day becomes the error of to-morrow; all is uncertain, variable, containing in unknown proportions, some quantity of the true and of the false. At least, what is there is neither true nor false. The moral of the book seems contained in this phrase of Bouvard’s: “Knowledge is gained by following the data furnished by an angle in space. Perhaps it will not bring all that we are igncrant of, which would require so much greater space that one can never hope to discover it.”
This book touches upon that which is greatest, most curious, most subtle and most interesting in man: it is the history of an idea under all its forms, in all its manifestations, with all its transformations, in its weakness and in its power.
It is curious to notice here in Gustave Flaubert a tendency towards an ideal more and more abstract and elevated. By ideal must not be understood that sentimental kind which seduces the common citizen’s imagination. For the ideal, with most men, is nothing other than the unlikely. For the rest, it is simply the domain of the idea.
Flaubert’s early romances have been first of all a study of customs, very true and very human; then, a dazzling poem, a procession of images and visions. In Bouvard and Pécuchet, the personages themselves belong to systems and not to mankind. The actors serve uniquely for expressing ideas which, as if they were beings, move, unite, combat and destroy each other. And some particularly comic part, or wicked idea, takes its place in the procession of beliefs in the brains of these two poor gentlemen who personify humanity. They are always of good faith, always zealous; and invariably experience contradicts the best established theory, and the most subtle reasoning is demolished by the most simple fact.
This surprising edifice of knowledge, built for demonstrating human impotence, should have a crowning conclusion, a shining justification. After this formidable array, the author has heaped up an irresistible amount of proof, the wrong side of foolishness culled from among great men.
When Bouvard and Pécuchet, disgusted with everything, returned to their copying, they naturally opened the books that they had read, taking them in the natural order of their studies, and transcribed minutely some choice passages from them into the works from which they were drawing. Then begins a series of frightful absurdities, ignorance, flagrant contradictions, monstrous errors, shameful statements, and mistakes inconceivable to high minds and those of more intelligence. Whoever has written upon a subject has sometime said a foolish thing. This foolish statement Flaubert has unfailingly found and set down; and, putting with it another, then another, then another, he has made a formidable array which disconcerts all belief and all statement.
