"In vain did I appeal to the emotions within me,
With unmoved ears I heard the breath of Death,
And all unmoved I gazed on her.
So that is what I loved with flaming soul,
With such intensity of passion,
With so great anguish and agony of love,
With such torment and unreason!
Where is now pain and where is love?
Alas, for the poor credulous shade in my soul!
For the sweet memory of days for ever passed
I can now find neither tears nor reproaches."
This condition of incomprehensible indifference towards the beloved one, this despair arising not out of grief, but as a result of his own coldness, of his lack of commiseration and pity was all too familiar to Flaubert; and according to his custom, he boldly proceeds to analyse this trait, which it is the one endeavour of most other artists to conceal, not only from others, but even from themselves, regarding it mistakenly as a form of egoism that is entirely in conflict with Nature. He describes his feelings at the grave of his dearly loved sister: "I was as cold as the grave-stone, and only terribly bored." What does he do at the moment when an ordinary man, forgetful of all else, would give himself up entirely to his grief? With pitiless curiosity, "himself catching nothing of their emotions," he analyzes them "like an artist." "This melancholy occupation alleviated my grief remarkably," he writes to a friend, "perhaps you will regard me as utterly heartless if I confess to you that my present sorrow" (that is to say the grief experienced at the death of his sister) "does not strike me as the heaviest lot that I have ever had to endure. At times when there was apparently nothing to be sad about, it has been my fate to be much sadder." A little further on comes a long discourse upon the Infinite, upon Nirvana,—a discourse in which the author gives utterance to much inspired poetry, but to very little simple human sorrow.
In the letter in which Flaubert describes the funeral of a friend of his childhood, his æsthetic cult of sadness reaches a still higher plane of meditativeness. "On the body of the departed there appeared the signs of a terrible transformation; we hid the corpse in a double shroud. So covered, he looked like an Egyptian mummy enveloped in the bandages of the tomb, and I cannot describe the feelings of joy and freedom which I experienced at sight of him at that moment. There was a white mist over everything, the forest trees stood out against the sky, and the funeral lights were still shining in the pallor of the dawning day; the birds were twittering, and I recalled a verse of his poem: 'He flies away like a winged bird to meet the rising sun in the pine wood,' or, to put it better, I heard his voice uttering these words and the whole day long they haunted me with their enchantment. They placed him in the ante-chamber, the doors were left ajar, and the cool morning air penetrated into the room, mingled with a refreshing rain, which had just then begun to fall.... My soul was filled with emotions, till then unknown, and upon it there flamed forth like summer lightning such thoughts as I can never repeat again: a thousand recollections of the dead were wafted to me on the fumes of the incense, in the chords of the music." ... And here the artist, in the midst of his æsthetic abstraction, converts his genuine grief into a thing of beauty, so that in his enlightened view the death of his beloved friend not only causes him no pang, or suffering, but, on the contrary, gives him a mystic resignation, incomprehensible to ordinary men, an ecstasy that is foreign to and removed from life, a joy that is entirely impersonal.
During his sojourn in Jerusalem, Flaubert paid a visit to the lepers. Here is the account of his impressions: "This place (that is the plot of land set aside for those who are afflicted with leprosy) is situated outside the town, near a marsh, whence a host of crows and vultures arose and took their flight at our approach. The poor sufferers, both women and men (in all about a dozen persons) lie all huddled together in a heap. They have no covering on their heads, and there is no distinction of sex. Their bodies are covered with putrefying scars, and they have sombre cavities in place of noses. I was forced to put on my eye-glasses in order to discover what was hanging to the ends of their arms. Were they hands, or were they some greenish-looking rags? They were hands! (There is a prize for colourists!) A sick man was dragging himself to the water's edge to drink some water. Through his mouth, which yawned black and empty of the gums, that seemingly had been burned away, the palate was clearly visible. A rattle sounded in his throat as he dragged the limbs of his dead-white body towards us. And all around us reigned tranquil Nature, the ripples of the stream, the green of the trees, all bubbling over with the abundance of sap and youth, and the coolness of the shadows beneath the scorching sun." This extract is taken from no novel, in which a poet might force himself to be objective, but from a traveller's notes, from a letter to a friend, wherein the author has no kind of motive for concealing the subjective character of his emotions. And yet in spite of this, except for the two rather common-place epithets of "poor wretches" (pauvres misérables), there is not a single touch of pity, not even a suggestion of compassion.
IV
"I am not a Christian" (je ne suis pas Chrétien), says Flaubert in a letter to Georges Sand. The French Revolution was, in his opinion, unsuccessful, because it was too intimately bound up with the idea of religious pity. The idea of equality, on which is based the essence of the democracy of to-day, is a contradiction of all the principles of equity. See what a preponderating influence is given at this day to grace. Emotion is everything, justice nothing. "We are degenerating owing to our superfluity of indulgence and of compassion, and to our moral drought." "I am convinced," he remarks, "that the poor envy the rich, and that the rich fear the poor; it will be so for ever—and vain it is to preach the Gospel of Love."
Flaubert tries to justify his instinctive antipathy to the idea of brotherhood by the assertion that this idea is always found to be in irreconcilable contradiction to the principle of equity. "I hate democracy (in the sense at least in which the word is accepted in France), that is to say the magnifying of grace to the detriment of justice, the negation of right—in a word, the anti-social principle (l'anti-sociabilité)." "The gift of grace (within the province of theology) is the negation of justice; what right has a man to demand any change in the execution of the law?" Yet he hardly believes in this principle himself, and only enunciates it in order to have an argument with which to refute the idea of brotherhood. At least this is what he says, in a moment of complete frankness, in a letter to an old friend: "Human justice seems to me the most unstable thing in the whole world. The sight of a man daring to judge his neighbour would send me into convulsions of laughter if it did not arouse my disgust and pity, and if I were not at the present moment" (he was at that time engaged in studying for the law) "obliged to study a system of absurdities, by virtue of which men consider that they acquire the right to judge. I know of nothing so absurd as law, except, perhaps, the study of it." In another letter he confesses that he never could understand the abstract and dry conception of duty, and that "it did not seem to him to be inherent in the nature of mankind (il ne me paraît pas inhérent aux entrailles humaines)." Evidently, then he believes as little in the idea of justice as he does in that of fraternity. As a matter of fact, he has no moral ideal.
"There is only one thing in the world that I really value, and that is beautiful verse; an elegant, harmonious, melodious style; the warmth of the sun; a picturesque landscape; moonlight nights; antique statues, and the character in a profile.... I am a fatalist, in fact, like a Mahometan, and I believe that all that we do for the progress of humanity is of no use. As to this idea of progress, I am mentally incapable of grasping such nebulous and dreary conceptions. All the nonsense talked on this subject simply bores me beyond endurance.... I cherish a deep respect for the ancient form of tyranny, for to me it is the finest expression of humanity that has ever been made manifest." "I have few convictions," he writes to Georges Sand, "but one of those I have I cherish firmly—it is the conviction that the masses are always composed of idiots. And yet one may not consider the masses as stupid, because within them is concealed the seed of an incalculable fecundity (d'une fécondité incalculable)."
Flaubert makes a half-jesting attempt to contrast the doctrines of the socialists with his own ideas of the political order of the future. "The only logical conclusion is an administration consisting of mandarins, if only these mandarins be possessed of some knowledge, and if possible, even considerable knowledge. The mass of the people will thus always remain as minors, and will always hold the lowest place in the hierarchy of the social orders, seeing that it is composed of unlimited numbers.... In this lawful aristocracy of the present time is our whole salvation." ... "Humanity represents nothing new. Its irremediable worthlessness filled my soul even in my early youth with bitterness. And that is why I now experience no disappointment. I am convinced that the crowd, the common herd will always be odious.... Until the time comes when men shall submit to set up mandarins, and shall have substituted for the Roman Pope an Academy of Sciences, until that time comes, all politics, and all society even to its deepest roots, must be merely a collection of revolting lies (de blagues écœurantes.)" Nevertheless in his novel "Bouvard et Pécuchet" Flaubert makes every effort to destroy faith even in the strength of the principles of science, and to prove that modern science is as impermanent a structure, as contradictory and superstitious a system as was the theology of the Middle Ages. To his disbelief in science Flaubert, moreover, is constantly giving utterance: thus, for instance, when he comes upon the Positivism of Comte, he finds this system "unbearably stupid" (c'est assommant de bêtise).