In the first moment of excitement, people overlooked the fact that now and then there escaped from this physiologist a thoroughly impersonal, it is true, yet figurative, richly colored expression, which seemed freighted with a message from quite a different world than that of vulgar life. The half-cultured literary public did not perceive that these descriptions of simple provincial circumstances and provincial misfortunes, of pitiful errors and of a wretched death, were produced in a style which was at once as clear as a mirror and as pleasant to the ear as harmonious music. There lay buried in the book a lyric poet, and ever and anon there burst from the grave a word of flame.
It was precisely the epoch when the generation born between 1820 and 1830 was assuming the mastery in literature, and revealing its physiognomic type by an analysis of real life, executed with harsh hands. The new generation turned from philosophic idealism, and from all that pertained to romance, and wielded the dissecting-knife with genuine enthusiasm. In the same year in which "Madame Bovary" appeared, Taine, in his work "Les philosophes français du 19e siècle," dissected the prevailing spiritualistic doctrines, annihilated Cousin as a thinker, and declared, with the utmost nonchalance, and without entering into any controversy with the romantic school, that Victor Hugo and Lamartine were already classic writers, who were read by young people rather from curiosity than from sympathy, and who were as far removed from them as Shakespeare and Racine. They were "admirable and worthy remains of a period which had been great, but which no longer existed." His friend, Sarcey, wrote, not much later, in "Figaro," that article which was so often quoted and so much derided by Banville, the disciple of the great romantic school, and which culminated in the words: "Forward, my friends! Down with romance! Voltaire and the Normal School forever!"[2] In dramatic poetry, opposition to the romantic school appeared to have been frustrated by the unfruitful little École de bon sens. Ponsard and those who were intellectually allied to him had not been able to maintain long what people had once expected of them; but the more modern realistic dramatic writers at this juncture combined with them. Augier, who had dedicated his first poetry to Ponsard, and who had at first followed the sentimental, bourgeois tendency of the latter, entered on a new career, in 1855, devoted to drastic description of the immediate past. The way had just been pointed out to him by the bolder, hardier Dumas, with whom, in spite of all his respect for the generation to which his father belonged, had commenced the direct and pertinent derision of the romantic ideal; this can be seen in the rôles of Nanjac, in "Le Demimonde" and of Montègre, in "L'ami des femmes." The answer that Montègre, bewildered by the superiority of Ryon, makes the latter, "Vous êtes un physiologiste, monsieur," was in reality the sole reply that the elder generation could offer to the critic of the younger.
Augier was born in 1820, Dumas in 1824, Sarcey and Taine in 1828. The author of "Madame Bovary," who first saw the light in 1821, evidently had kindred spirits among his contemporaries. He differed from them in his secret, unshaken fidelity to the ideals of the past generation; but he united with them so unhesitatingly in their attacks on the caricatures of these ideals that, without further ceremony, he must be classed in the group of these anti-romantic writers.
And yet, through his harshness and coldness, he was much more of a reminder of Mérimée, who stood alone in the past generation; to many, indeed, he appeared but a heavier, broader Mérimée. For the first thing noticeable in him was that he was a cold-blooded poet; and these two epithets, cold-blooded and poet, had previously been united in Mérimée alone.
A closer study, however, would have shown that the cold-blooded deliberation of Mérimée was of quite a different character than that of Flaubert. Mérimée treated romantic material in an unromantic, dry, and meagre manner. His tone and his style corresponded, for the tone was ironical, the style lacking in imagery, and cold. With style and tone, however, the wildness of the theme and its barbaric, impassioned character were at variance.
Flaubert, on the contrary, harmonized theme and tone. With infinitely superior irony he pictured the vapid and the absurd; but with theme and tone his style was at variance. He was not, as Mérimée, rational and meagre; he was all radiant with coloring, and harmonious, and he spread the gold-wrought veil of this style over all the commonplace and sorrowful incidents he narrated. No one could read the book aloud without being astonished at the music of its prose. The style contains a thousand melodious secrets; it aims the keenest satire at human weakness, powerless yearnings and aspirations, self-deception and self-satisfaction, to an accompaniment of organ music. While the surgeon in the text, without the slightest manifestation of sympathy, is lacerating and tearing to pieces, a beauty-loving lyric poet is sobbing out a low, wailing accompaniment. If we should turn to a page in which a village apothecary utters his half scientific prattle, in which a diligence tour is depicted, or an old casket described, we would find it, viewed from a stylistic standpoint, as highly colored and enduring as a mosaic, owing to the freshness of its expressions and the solid structure of its sentences. Each clause is so carefully put together that no two words could possibly be removed without destroying the entire page. The assured refinement of the imagery, the metallic ring of the musical flow of words, the rolling breadth of the prose rhythms, invested the narrative with a marvellous power that was now picturesque, now comic.
There was evidently something singularly dual in his temperament. His character was composed of two distinct elements which were complements of each other: a burning hatred of stupidity and an unbounded love of art. This hatred, as is so often the case with hatred, felt itself irresistibly attracted to its object. Stupidity in all its forms, such as folly, superstition, self-conceit, and illiberality, attracted him magnetically, and inspired him. He was compelled to depict it trait by trait; he deemed it, in and for itself, entertaining, even when others could not discover it to be interesting or comical. He made a formal collection of stupidities, absurd pleas for law-suits, and vapid illustrations; he collected a mass of wretched verse, written by physicians alone; every evidence of human stupidity, as such, had its value to him. In his works, indeed, he has done nothing else than erect monuments with a masterly hand to human limitation and blindness, to our misfortunes, so far as they depend upon our stupidities. I almost fear that the world's history was to him the history of human stupidity. His faith in the progress of the human race was exceedingly wavering. The mass, even the reading public, was to him "that everlasting blockhead which we call they (on)." If we wished to label this side of his character, and absolutely stamp him with one of those popular, but to him so detestable, words ending with "ist," it could not with full justice be pessimist, nor yet nihilist; imbecillist would be the word.
To this unremitting pursuit of stupidity, whose embittered character was shrouded in its purely impersonal form, corresponded, as before stated, a passionate love of literature, which to him signified beauty and harmony, which was considered by him the highest, in fact the only true, art, and which he cultivated with a yearning for perfection that first kept him long silent, then caused him at a late day to become a master, and finally rendered him early unfruitful again. When he depicted the commonplace, it caused him more distress than others; he therefore endeavored to elevate his materials through the artistic manner of his treatment, and since in his eyes the most important attribute of authorship was the plastic power, he strove beyond all else to attain perspicuity. He has said so himself, and we feel it to be true when we study him through his style.
In his very first work all the merits of this style came to light.
Read the following passage from "Madame Bovary," where Emma, yet unmarried, accompanies Bovary to the door, after his medical visit to her father: "She always went with him to the first step of the outside stairs. If his horse had not yet been brought forward they remained there. They had said adieu, they attempted no further remark; the fresh air encompassed her, played with the downy hair of her neck, or blew about her side the strings of her apron, which twisted and twirled like a little flag. Once when a thaw had set in, the water was trickling down from the bark of the trees, and the snow was melting on the roofs of the buildings. She stood on the threshold; she went back to get her parasol; she opened it. The parasol was of a changeable green and blue silk, and the sun shining through it lent a radiant and flickering lustre to her white complexion. She smiled beneath it, while the soft zephyrs played about her, and the raindrops were heard to come pattering down, one by one, on the outstretched silk of the parasol."