In this work of fiction we have Flaubert complete, with his sluggish blood, his gloomy imagination, his intrusive erudition, and his need of bringing to a level old and new illusions, ancient and modern faiths. The almost savage vehemence of his temperament reveals itself when he thrusts the god Crepitus before the God Jehovah. That he chose the legend of St. Antonius as a medium through which to free his mind, and utter some bitter truths to mankind, was because he was brought into contact by this material with antiquity and the Orient which he loved. Through it he could use the large cities and landscapes of Egypt as a background on which to lavish brilliant colors and gigantic forms. And with this theme he no longer painted the helplessness and stupidity of a society, but of a world. He depicted, quite impersonally, humanity as having waded up to its ankles until that hour of its existence, in mire and in blood, and pointed to science—which is as much shunned and dreaded as the devil—as the sole salvation.
The idea was as grand as it was new. The execution by no means attained the level of the plan. The book was crushed by the material used in its preparation. It is not a poetic work; it is partly a theogony, partly a piece of church history, and it is moulded in the form of a psychology of frenzy. There is in it an enumeration of details that is as wearisome as the ascent of an almost perpendicular mountain wall. Certain parts in it, indeed, are only thoroughly intelligible to savants, and seem almost unreadable to the general public. The great author had gradually passed into abstract erudition and abstract style. "It was a sorrowful sight," Emile Zola has pertinently remarked, "to see this powerful talent become petrified like the forms of antique mythology. Very slowly, from the feet to the girdle, from the girdle to the head, Flaubert became a marble statue."
VII.
I have delayed speaking of the last vision of St. Antonius because it seems to me the most remarkable of all, and was undoubtedly the poet's own vision. After all the gods have vanished, and the journey through the heavens has come to an end, Antonius beholds, upon the opposite shore of the Nile, the Sphinx, lying on its belly, with outstretched claws. But springing, flying, howling, snorting fire through its nostrils, and beating its wings and its dragon's tail, Chimera is circling about the Sphinx. What is the Sphinx? What else than the gloomy riddle that is chained to earth, the eternal question,—brooding science! What is the Chimera? What else than the winged imagination, which speeds through space, and touches the stars with the tips of its wings.
The Sphinx (the word is of the masculine gender in French) says: "Stand still, Chimera! Do not run so fast, do not fly so high, do not howl so loud. Cease snorting thy flames into my face; thou canst not possibly melt my granite."
The Chimera replies, "I never stand still. Thou canst never grasp me, thou dread Sphinx."
The Chimera gallops through the corridor of the labyrinth, flies across the sea, and holds fast with its teeth to the sailing clouds.
The Sphinx lies motionless, tracing the alphabet in the sand with its claws, musing and calculating; and while the sea ebbs and flows, the grain waves to and fro, caravans pass by, and cities fall to decay, it keeps its firm gaze bent fixedly on the horizon.
Finally it exclaims, "O phantasy! lift me up on thy pinions, out of my deadly ennui!"