It is difficult to believe that the older writers bought their excellence so dearly. Their thoughts cannot have been so biassed, for it is the expression of every bias, of the background, of the smell, of the feel of an idea that makes circumspicuity of writing so difficult. Montaigne, for example, sitting peaceably in his tower, asking himself with lively interest what were his opinions, was not at all like the almost terrible figure of Flaubert, striding to and fro in his chamber, wringing phrases from his nerves, asking passionately, ferociously, what he meant, and almost throttling himself for an accurate answer. Is it harder than it was to produce a masterpiece?
Romanticism and realism.
Flaubert, who held Chateaubriand a master, was the friend of Gautier, and the director in his art of Guy de Maupassant, who wrote with one hand Madame Bovary and with the other Salammbo, who put in the same book St. Julien l'Hospitalier and Un Cœur Simple, is, on a far grander scale than Mérimée, an illustration as well as a reason of the development of romanticism into realism. Flaubert's passionate care for the truth, would, if he had lived before the Romantic movement, have confined itself to the elaboration of a very scrupulous prose. But after the discovery of local colour, after the surprising discovery of the variety that exists in things, as great as the variety that exists in words and in their combinations, it was sure to apply itself not only to the writing but also to those external things that had suggested the ideas the writing was to embody. It would try to make the sentences true to their author; it would also try to make them true to the life they were to represent. It was Flaubert who said to De Maupassant as they passed a cabstand, 'Young man, describe that horse in one sentence so as to distinguish him from every other horse in the world, and I shall begin to believe that you have possibilities as a writer.' This demand for accurate portraiture turned the romantic realism of Balzac's Comédie Humaine into the other realism of Madame Bovary. |Madame Bovary.|Balzac had his models, yes, as hints in the back of his head, but he made his characters alive with his own energy and his own brain. As I have already pointed out, they are all too alive to be true. But Flaubert, true to himself in his manner, wished to be true to life in his matter. Madame Bovary, that second-rate, ordinary, foolish, weak, little provincial wife, has no atmosphere about her but her own. She has not been inoculated with the blood of Flaubert, as all the veins of all the characters of Balzac have been scorched with fire from those of that 'joyful wild boar.' When Flaubert wrote that everything in the book was outside himself, he was saying no more than the truth. He was as honest towards her and her life as he was towards his own ideas. She talks like herself. Now the older writers, like Fielding and Smollett, are content to let their people talk as men and women should talk to be fit for good literature. Even the characters of men like Balzac or Hugo say what they think, as nearly as their creators are themselves able to express it. Flaubert is infinitely more scrupulous. The Bovary never says what she thinks. Flaubert knew well enough what she was thinking, but sought out exactly those phrases and sentences beneath which she would have hidden her thought, those horrible bourgeois inaccuracies that it was torture for him to hear.
A life so wholly concerned with intangible things seems too intellectual for humanity. I am glad to turn aside from it for a moment to remember the Flaubert who was loved by those who spent their days with him; the uncle who taught her letters to his little niece, and who would, as she says, have done anything imaginable to enliven her when sad or ill. 'One of his greatest pleasures was the amusement of those about him,' although he never saw a woman without thinking of her skeleton, a child without remembering that it would one day be old, or a cradle without finding in it the promise of a grave. He was one of the men who love their friends the dearer for their dislike of mankind in general. He never shaved without laughing at 'the intrinsic absurdity of human life,' and yet he lived out his own share in it with steadfast purpose, 'yoking himself to his work like an ox to the plough.'
The result of his incessant labour divides itself into four kinds; novels of the bourgeoisie, a novel of the East, three short stories, and two other books that are, as it were, twin keys to the whole.
Salammbo.
Madame Bovary and L'Éducation Sentimentale are the novels of the bourgeoisie, novels with an entirely new quality of vision, due to the sustained contrast between his own articulate habit of mind and the unconsciously inarticulate minds of his characters; these are the books commonly described as his contributions to Realism by men too ready to set him on their own level. Opposed to these two books there is Salammbo, an Oriental and ancient romance, a reposeful dream for him, in which move characters whose feelings and expressions are no more blurred than his own. All these books offer more delight at each re-reading, although the last, considered as an example of narrative, is almost a failure. The Romantics too often miss the trees for the wood. Flaubert's method makes it rather easy to miss the wood for the trees. But his trees are of such interest and beauty that we are ready to examine them singly. In writing Madame Bovary, his subject was close within his reach. Madame was too near to allow him to cover her up with a library of knowledge about his own times. But in Salammbo he was so anxious to be true to the life that he did not know, that he read until he knew too much. The book is made of perfect sentences, perfect descriptions, while the story itself is buried beneath a dust-heap of antiquity. Cartloads after cartloads of gorgeous things are emptied on the top of each other, until the whole is a glittering mass with here and there some splendid detail shining so brilliantly among the rest that we would like to remove it for a museum. The mass stirs: there are movements within it; but they are too heavily laden to shake themselves free and become visible and intelligible.
Trois Contes.
No such criticism can be urged against the three short stories, the Trois Contes, in which Flaubert proves himself not only one of the greatest writers of all time, but also one of the greatest story-tellers. This little book is a fit pendant to the novels, since it represents both the Flaubert of Madame Bovary and the Flaubert of Salammbo. Un Cœur Simple, the first of the three, is the story of a servant woman and her parrot, a subject that de Maupassant might have chosen. So completely is it weaned from himself, that no one would suspect that Flaubert wrote it after his mother's death, for the pleasure, in describing the provincial household, of remembering his own childhood. It and the two stories, St. Julien l'Hospitalier and Hérodias, which are purely romantic in subject and treatment, and more scrupulous in technique than the finest of Gautier, are among the most beautiful tales that the nineteenth century produced. All three answer the supreme test of a dozen readings as admirably as those old improvisations from whose spirit they are so utterly alien.
La Tentation de Saint Antoine and Bouvard et Pécuchet.