Gustave Flaubert was born at Rouen, in the year 1821. When, in 1880, he was snatched away by sudden death, he did not leave European literary art in the same condition in which he had found it. No artist, as such, could desire to hand down to posterity a better renown. The work of his life marks a step in the history of the novel.
He was a prose author of the first rank; for several years indeed no one stood higher than he in France. His strength as a prosaist reposed upon an artistic and literary conscientiousness, which was exalted almost to the dignity of genius. He became a great artist because he was unsparing in his efforts, both when he was making preparations to write and when he was engaged in writing; he collected the results of his observations, facts, and illustrations, with the painstaking of a mere savant, while striving, with the passionate eagerness of a mere adorer of form, to fashion his materials in a plastic and harmonious manner. He became a master of modern fiction because he was sufficiently self-denying to be willing to represent real psychological events alone, and to shun all effects of poetic eloquence, all pathetic or dramatic situations which appeared beautiful or interesting at the expense of the truth. His name is synonymous with artistic earnestness and literary rigor.
He was not a savant who was at the same time a writer of fiction, or who, in the course of his life, became a writer of fiction. His literary work is based on earnest, slowly acquired preparatory studies. His books have nothing in them that is juvenile or frivolous, nothing that is smiling or versatile. These books are the results of a slowly developed and late maturity. He did not make his début until he was thirty-five years old, and, although he devoted his whole time to literature, he left behind him in his fifty-ninth year but seven works.[1]
His was a profoundly original, but by no means elementary character. His originality was dependent on the fact that two literary currents united in his temperament and there formed a new well-spring. In his youth he received simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, two impulses, which determined his intellectual career.
The first current that reached him was the romantic-descriptive tendency in literature originating with Chateaubriand, a tendency characterized by a style fraught with lyrical emotion and brilliant coloring, which charmed the French reading public for the first time in "Atala" and "Les Martyres," and which later gained a far firmer and more powerful rhythm, as well as a far superior picturesque vigor, in Victor Hugo's "Les Orientales," and "Notre Dame de Paris." Like all poets, indeed like all human beings, Flaubert was inclined in youth to the lyrical, and his lyric muse, through the historic development of French poesie, became a varied-hued and melancholy homage to the religion of beauty. The second current directed into his inner being, was the tendency of Balzac's novels against the modern, their employment of what was hideous and brutal as characteristic, their passionate realistic bias, and their fidelity of observation.
While these two currents flowed at one and the same time through his inner being, and after the lapse of some time became blended together, they received a new coloring and a new name.
As a youth he had composed for the drawers of his writing-table many descriptive and pathetic lyrics, in Hugo's, Gautier's, and Byron's style; but justly feeling that his originality could not assert itself in this direction, and that, upon the whole, there was no longer room for anything original in this department, he withheld his productions from the public, and reconciled himself to the idea of appearing comparatively ungifted, or, at all events, unproductive. About the same time he made literary efforts in an opposite direction; he spoke himself sometimes of a tragi-comedy on the smallpox; but this attempt, too, he refrained from publishing. Not until Chateaubriand and Balzac had fostered in his mind a new poetic form, did he feel sure of his originality, and made his first public appearance.
I.
Even to those who have read little or nothing of Flaubert, it is well known that in the year 1856 he created an extraordinary sensation in Paris, and very soon throughout Europe, with a novel entitled "Madame Bovary." An absurd lawsuit,—the state attorney prosecuted both author and publisher, on the plea of the immoral tendencies of the work, and a unanimous verdict of acquittal on the part of the jury, could do little to increase the attention which the strongly individual new talent had excited. The book appeared singular and scandalous, as is apt to be the case with new attempts in literature. It was a token of opposition. People compared it with the literary productions of earlier times, and asked themselves if it was poetry. It was rather a reminder of surgery, of anatomy. Very much later, in Parisian literary circles where fidelity to a former conception of poetry was maintained, it was said: "Will you please excuse us from reading M. Flaubert's skeletons." The author was called an ultra-realist; people found in his novel only the merciless, inexorable physiology of every-day life in its sorrowful ugliness.