The letters of Flaubert, published in two volumes, offer rich material for the study, from a living example, of the question of the antagonism which exists between the artistic and moral personality.
"Art is higher than life"; such is the formula which stands as the corner-stone of the whole, not only of Flaubert's æsthetic view, but also of his philosophical view of life. As a young man of thirty he writes to one of his school friends: "If I did not introduce into the plot of my poems a French queen of the fifteenth century, I should feel an utter disgust of life, and long ere this a bullet would have freed me from this humiliating folly." Within a year's time he is, with half serious rhetoric and youthful enthusiasm, encouraging the same young friend to proceed with his own work. "Let us ever devote ourselves to our art, which, being more powerful than all nations, crowns, or rulers, holds, in virtue of its glorious diadem, eternal sway over the whole universe." When over forty years of age, and on the verge of the tomb, Flaubert repeats with even greater emphasis and audacity the same device: "L'homme n'est rien; l'œuvre est tout."—"Man is nothing; work is everything."
In the flower of his early manhood, though possessed of beauty, wit, and talent, he forsook the world for the sake of his art, like an ascetic in the desert: he immersed himself in his solitude, as the Christian hermits immured themselves in their caverns. "To bury oneself in one's art, and spurn all else, is the only way to evade unhappiness," he writes to his friend. "Pride makes up for all things, if there be only a broad enough foundation for it.... I certainly lack little; I should no doubt like to be as generous as the richest, as happy as a lover, as sensuous as those who give up their lives to pleasure; ... But in the meanwhile I covet neither riches, nor love, nor pleasures; ... Now, as for a long time past, I ask only for five or six hours of repose in my own chamber; in winter a big fire in my fireplace, and at night two candles on my table." A year later he is advising the same friend: "Do as I do, break from the outside world, and live like a bear, like a white bear; send all else to the devil, and yourself as well, everything except only your thoughts. There is at the present moment such a great gulf fixed between myself and the rest of the world, that I oft-times experience a feeling of astonishment when I hear even the most ordinary and natural things; ... there are certain gestures, certain intonations of the voice, which fill me with surprise, and there are certain silly things which nearly make me giddy."
Even in moments of overwhelming passion, Flaubert places his literary vocation immeasurably above his personal happiness; and love of woman strikes him as insignificant by the side of his love of poetry. "No," he writes to his fiancée, "you had far better love my art and not myself; for this attachment will never leave you, nor can illness or death deprive you of it. Worship thought, for in thought alone is truth, because it is one and imperishable. Can art, the only thing in life that is true and valuable, be compared with earthly love? Can the adoration of relative beauty be preferred to an eternal worship? Veneration for art—that is the best thing that I possess; it is the one thing for which I respect myself."
He refuses to see anything relative in poetry, but regards it as absolutely independent of and entirely cut off from life, and as being more real than action; he perceives in art "the most self-satisfying principle imaginable which requires as little external support as a star." "Like a star," he says, "fixed and glittering in its own heaven, does art observe the globe of the world revolve; that which is beautiful will never be utterly destroyed." In the unity of the various portions of a work, in the every detail, in the harmony of the whole, Flaubert feels that "there is some inner essence, something in the nature of a divine force, something like an eternal principle." "For how otherwise would there exist any relation between the most exact and the most musical expression of thought?"
The sceptic who is not bound by any creed, but has spent his whole life in doubt and hesitation in face of the ideas of God, religion, progress, and scientific humanity, becomes pious and reverential when face to face with the question of art. The true poet is, in his opinion, distinguished from all other people by the divine inspiration of his ideas, "by the contemplation of the immutable (la contemplation de l'immuable), that is to say, religion in the highest sense of the word." He regrets that he was not born in that age when people worshipped art, when there still existed genuine artists in the world, "whose life and thoughts were the blind instruments of the instinct of beauty. They were the organs of God, by means of which He Himself revealed His true essence to them; for these artists there was no happiness; no one knew how much they suffered; each night as they lay down sadly to rest they gazed wearily at the life of men with an astonished eye, just as we might gaze at an ant-hill."
To most artists beauty is a more or less abstract quality; to Flaubert it was as concrete an object of passion as is gold to the miser, power to the ambitious, or his lady to the lover. His work was like a deliberate suicide; he gave himself entirely up to it, with the fanaticism of a man possessed by a mania, with the mystic submission and enthusiasm of a martyr, with the awe of a priest as he enters the sacred sanctuary. Thus does he describe his own work: "Sick and irritable at heart, enduring a thousand times in the day moments of anguish and despondency, and having neither wife nor any of the joys of life to distract me, I continue to toil at my weary task, like a good workman who, with sleeves rolled up and brow streaming with sweat, strikes on his anvil without fear of rain or hail, of storm or thunder." Here is an extract from a biography of Flaubert written by Maupassant, one of his favourite pupils and disciples, which gives an accurate picture of the gifted writer's energy for work: "His head bowed, his face and brow and neck bathed in moisture, all his muscles tense, like an athlete at the height of the contest, he set himself to face the desperate strife with his ideas and words, rejecting, uniting, or forging them as in an iron grip by the power of his will, condensing them and gradually with superhuman strength working out his thought, and confining it, like a wild beast in a cage, in a definite, indestructible form."
III
Flaubert, more than any other man, has experienced in his own life, the destructive power of his over-sharpened, analytical disposition. With the malevolence, which was so strangely mingled in him with the then fashionable Byronism, and with a confused presentiment of an impending and inevitable catastrophe, he embarks at the early age of seventeen upon his work of destruction and internal iconoclasm: "I analyse myself and others," he writes to a friend; "I am always anatomizing, and whenever I at last succeed in finding something, which all men consider pure and beautiful, but which is in reality a putrid spot, a gangrene, I shake my head and smile. I have come to the firm conclusion that vanity is the fundamental basis of all things, and that even that which we call conscience is in fact only a concealed and incipient vanity. You give in charity, partly, may be, out of compassion, out of pity, or from horror of suffering and sordidness, but also out of egotism; for the chief motive of your action is the desire to acquire the right to say to yourself: I have done good; there are very few people like me; I respect myself more than other men." Eight years later he writes to his devoted wife: "I love to analyze; it is an occupation that distracts me. Although I am not very much inclined to see the humorous side of things, yet I cannot regard my own personality altogether seriously, because I see myself how ridiculous I am, ridiculous not in the sense of being externally comic, but in the inner sense of that inherent irony which, being present in the life of men, shows itself sometimes even in the most obviously natural actions, in the most ordinary gestures.... All this one feels in oneself, but it is hard to explain. You do not understand it, because in you it is as simple and genuine as in a beautiful hymn of love and poetry. For I regard myself as a sort of arabesque or marqueterie work; there are within me pieces of ivory and of gold and of iron, some of painted paper, others of brilliants, and others again of lead."
This life is so rich in visions and imaginings, that they finally obscure the real world altogether, and receive in passing through this medium a reflected colouring in addition to their own. "I always see the antithesis of things; the sight of a child inevitably suggests to my mind the thought of old age; the sight of a cradle, the idea of the grave. When I look at my wife, I think of myself as her skeleton. That is why scenes of happiness sadden me, while sad things leave me indifferent. I weep so much internally in my own soul, that my tears cannot flow outwardly as well; things that I read of in a book agitate me much more than any actually existing sorrows." Here we encounter a distinguishing trait of the majority of natures that are gifted with strong artistic temperaments. "The more oppressed I feel, the more melancholy and highly strung and prone to tears and to give myself over to a sense of imaginary suffering, so much the more do my real feelings remain dry and hard and dead within my heart; they are crystallized within it." This is the mental attitude described by Pushkin: