Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century: Literary Portraits

by Georg Brandes

He was actuated by a belief—in my estimation a correct one—that the writer of fiction in our day cannot be a mere writer for amusement, or a maître de plaisir. He felt that the ship of poesy, without scientific ballast, ran great risk of being capsized. It was soon proved, too, that with this ballast it sailed better, more securely, and with a prouder bearing. By degrees, however, as his development progressed, the passion for overcoming difficulties took complete possession of him; he wanted to carry the heaviest loads, the largest stones he could find, until gradually his vessel became freighted with so enormous a cargo that it grew too heavy, sank too far into the water, and was stranded. His last novel is little else than a wearisome series of abstracts from a couple of dozen different scientific discoveries and technical methods. As a work of fiction it is scarcely readable, and is only interesting psychologically as a consistent and definite expression of a remarkable personalty and of an erroneous æsthetic standpoint.

The general tendency to the study of externals is not peculiar to Flaubert; it characterizes the entire group of creative minds to which he belongs. It sprang from a justifiable aversion to the rationalistic conception of man as an abstract rational being, and from the bias of our age toward determinism, which aimed at explaining the psychic life of the individual from climatic, national, psychological and physiological causes. This endeavor is found in various phases in the most noted of the contemporaries and fellow-countrymen of Flaubert; in his friend and teacher, Théophile Gautier, in Renan, in Taine, and in the Goncourt brothers. Different as these minds are, they have in common this very modern stamp, and, moreover, nearly all of them possess, also, the no less modern quality of displaying too decidedly marked traces in their artistically executed works of the labor that lies behind these and the pains with which they were created, often producing an extremely distressing impression of being over-freighted. Renan, to whom this is less applicable than to the others, not infrequently portrays matters which lie wholly beyond his framework. Gautier is, perhaps, the only one of these great artists from whose brain word and image seem to flow without constraint, and even he was rarely without the dictionary and the encyclopædia in his hand.

With Flaubert the encyclopædia gradually supplants the emotions. Gautier, as years passed, grew to be less of a poet and more of a picturesque delineator. Flaubert, with the lapse of years, became ever more and more of a savant and a collector.

If we cast a glance over his entire literary production, from its first beginning until its close, we shall find that the human element, which originally bubbled over and fructified everything, gradually ebbed, withdrew, and left behind it only the arid, stony soil of historic or scientific fact.

In "Madame Bovary" all is yet life. The descriptions are infrequent and brief. Even the description of Rouen, the birthplace of the author, which occurs in the part where Emma journeys in the diligence from Yonville to meet Léon, is given in a very few lines, and is, moreover, enlivened by the account of the dizziness that ascends to Emma from this throbbing mass of thousands of existences, as though the fumes of the passions she attributed to them had been wafted toward her. The direct description of the city, the picturesque point, gives place at once to the psychologic analysis of the impression the great city makes upon the main character of the book,—a tendency which becomes more and more rare with Flaubert. In "Salammbô," the previous study and all that is purely descriptive must necessarily assert themselves more vigorously. There are long passages of this work which would be far more likely to lead us to think we were reading a scrap of the history of ancient warfare, or some archæologic treatise, than a novel, and which, therefore, are exceedingly tedious. Nevertheless, "Salammbô" was rich in purely human themes and delineations. Read, by way of example, the chapter that tells about how the priests resolve to propitiate Moloch through the sacrifice of the first-born son of each house; how some of them knock at the door of Hamilcar, and how he strives to rescue his little son Hannibal. The state of public sentiment here represented by Flaubert is precisely what must have existed in a Tunic city the moment such a wholesale slaughter of the innocents was commanded, and this single incident stands forth from the background of this sentiment in a manner never to be forgotten. Hamilcar rushes into his daughter's room, grasps Hannibal with one hand, and with the other a cord that is lying on the floor, binds the boy hand and foot, thrusts what still remains of the cord into his mouth for a gag, and hides him under the bed. Then he claps his hands, and calls for a slave child of eight or nine years of age, with black hair and protruding brow. There is brought to him a poor, wasted, yet at the same time bloated child, whose skin is as gray as the cloth about its loins. Hamilcar is in despair. How would it be possible to make this child pass for Hannibal? But the minutes are precious, and, in spite of his repugnance, the proud Suffet begins to wash, to rub, and to anoint the wretched slave child. He attires it in a purple robe, which he fastens at the shoulders with diamond clasps, and the little fellow laughs, delighted with all this splendor, and skips about the room with joy. Hamilcar leads the child away with him. When, with feigned anguish, he is giving it up to the priests in the court below, there appears, between the ivory pillars on the third floor of the house, a pale, wretchedly clad, dreadful looking man, with outstretched arms. "My child!" he cries. "He is the foster-father of the boy," Hamilcar hastens to say; and, as though to make the parting brief, he pushes the priests from the door. When they are gone, he sends the slave the best that his kitchen can afford,—meat, beans, and conserves. The old man, who for a long time has not tasted a morsel of food, pounces upon the bounteous supply, and devours it amid tears. Coming home in the evening, Hamilcar finds the slave, surfeited and half-intoxicated, lying asleep on the marble floor of the great hall, through the crevices of whose dome a flood of moonlight streams. Hamilcar gazes at him, and something akin to pity stirs within his soul. With the tip of his foot he pushes a rug under the slumberer's head.

Here is the essence of human universality extracted from a specific Carthaginian situation.

"Salammbô," as already intimated, created not a little sensation, but was none the less of a disappointment to the reading world and the critics. People did not share the author's fondness for colossal and tropical themes; they did not enjoy wading through long descriptions of antique catapults, battering-rams and sieges, and they begged Flaubert to write a new "romance de passion," a love story.

Toward the close of the year 1869, he finally yielded to their solicitations by issuing his novel "L'éducation sentimentale," his most characteristic and most profound work, which, however, met with a decided failure. From this time forth he experienced nothing but literary defeats. The public favor which had been cooled by "Salammbô," now wholly forsook him.

The new novel was a new style of book altogether. The almost untranslatable title (the approximate meaning being "The education of the heart") is not a correct one; for no one and nothing is educated throughout the work. The novel treats, to be sure, of an emotional life; but it deals rather with the gradual drilling and final extirpation of the emotion of love than with any development of the latter. It might more justly be called, "The illusion of love and its eradication." It is one of Flaubert's main efforts to distil absolute nothing in the form of pure illusion out of all the aspirations and pursuits of ordinary, every-day human life. In "Salammbô" everything revolves about a sacred veil of the goddess Tanit, known as Zaimpf. This veil is radiant and light; the city from which it is stolen goes to ruin; the mortal who wears it is invulnerable as long as he is enveloped in it; but whoever has once been shrouded in it is sure to perish. Illusion is like this veil. It is as radiant as the sun and as light as the air; it imparts the security of the somnambulist, and it consumes as surely as a Nessos robe.

I said that Flaubert believed in a passionate love which, although never gratified, was capable of enduring throughout life. Such a love he has depicted in the affection of Frédéric for Madame Arnoux. It is utterly hopeless; utterly bashful; it is suppressed; it only finds vent in certain unwise sacrifices for the husband of Madame Arnoux, and in certain half-uttered Platonic assurances of mutual sympathy. Nor does it lead to anything beyond a promise that is withdrawn by the lady, a few attempts which fail, and finally, after the lapse of twenty years, a fruitless confession and one single embrace, from which the lover recoils in terror, as the object of his affections has, meanwhile, grown old, and, with her white hair, inspires him with repugnance.