That there was no danger of Flaubert's merely palming off, in his novel work, replicas with a few superficial differences, had now been shown. It was further established by his third and longest book, L'Éducation Sentimentale. This was not only, as the others had been, violently attacked, but was comparatively little read—indeed it is the only one of his books, with the usual exception of Bouvard et Pécuchet, which has been called, by any rational creature, dull. I do not find it so; but I confess that I find its intrinsic interest, which to me is great, largely enhanced by its unpopularity—which supplies a most remarkable pendant to that of Jonathan Wild, and is by no means devoid of value as further illustrating the cause of the very limited popularity of Thackeray, and even of the rarity of whole-hearted enthusiasm for Swift. Satire is allowed to be a considerable, and sometimes held to be an attractive, branch of literature. But when you come to analyse the actual sources of the attraction, it is to be feared that you will generally find them to lie outside of the pure exposure of general human weaknesses. A very large proportion of satire is personal, and personality is always popular. Satire is very often "naughty," and "naughtiness" is to a good many, qua naughtiness, "nice." It lends itself well to rhetoric; and there is no doubt, whatever superior persons may say of it, that rhetoric does "persuade" a large portion of the human race. It is constantly associated with directly comic treatment, sometimes with something not unlike tragedy; and while the first, if of any merit, is sure, the second has a fair though more restricted chance, of favourable reception. Try Aristophanes, Horace, Juvenal, Lucian, Martial; try the modern satirists of all kinds, and you will always find these secondary sources of enjoyment present.
There is hardly one of them—if one—to be found in L'Éducation Sentimentale. It is simply a panorama of human folly, frailty, feebleness, and failure—never permitted to rise to any great heights or to sink to any infernal depths, but always maintained at a probable human level. We start with Frédéric Moreau as he leaves school at the correct age of eighteen. I am not sure at what actual age we leave him, though it is at some point or other of middle life, the most active part of the book filling about a decade. But "vanity is the end of all his ways," and vanity has been the beginning and middle of them—a perfectly quiet and everyday kind of vanity, but vain from centre to circumference and entire surface. He (one cannot exactly say "tries," but) is brought into the possibility of trying love of various kinds—illegitimate-romantic, legitimate-not-unromantic, illegitimate-professional but not disagreeable, illegitimate-conventional. Nothing ever "comes off" in a really satisfactory fashion. He is "exposed" (in the photographic-plate sense) to all, or nearly all, the influences of a young man's life in Paris—law, literature, art, insufficient means, quite sufficient means, society, politics—including the Revolution of 1848—enchantments, disenchantments—tout ce qu'il faut pour vivre—to alter a little that stock expression for "writing materials" which is so common in French. But he never can get any real "life" out of any of these things. He is neither a fool, nor a cad, nor anything discreditable or disagreeable. He is "only an or'nary person," to reach the rhythm of the original by adopting a slang form in not quite the slang sense. And perhaps it is not unnatural that other ordinary persons should find him too faithful to their type to be welcome. In this respect at least I may claim not to be ordinary. One goes down so many empty wells, or wells with mere rubbish at the bottom of them, that to find Truth at last is to be happy with her (without prejudice to the convenience of another well or two here and there, with an agreeable Falsehood waiting for one). I do not know that L'Éducation Sentimentale is a book to be read very often; one has the substance in one's own experience, and in the contemplation of other people's, too readily at hand for that to be necessary or perhaps desirable. But a great work of art which is also a great record of nature is not too common—and this is what it is.
La Tentation de Saint-Antoine.
Yet, as has been remarked before, nothing shows Flaubert's greatness better than his absolute freedom from the "rut." Even in carrying out the general "Vanity" idea he has no monotony. The book which followed L'Éducation had been preluded, twenty years earlier, by some fragments in L'Artiste, a periodical edited by Gautier. But La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, when it finally appeared, far surpassed the promise of these specimens. It is my own favourite among its author's books; and it is one of those which you can read merely for enjoyment or take as a subject of study, just as you please—if you are wise you will give "five in five score" of your attentions to the latter occupation and the other ninety-five to the former. The people who had made up their minds to take Flaubert as a sort of Devil's Gigadibs—a "Swiss, not of Heaven," but of the other place, hiring himself out to war on all things good—called it "an attack on the idea of God"! As it, like its smaller and later counterpart Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, ends in a manifestation of Christ, which would do honour to the most orthodox of Saints' Lives, the "attack" seems to be a curious kind of offensive operation.
As a matter of fact, the book takes its vaguely familiar subject, and embroiders that subject with a fresh collection of details from untiring research. The nearest approach to an actual person, besides the tormented Saint himself, is the Evil One, not at first in propria persona, but under the form of the Saint's disciple Hilarion, who at first acts as usher to the various elements of the Temptation-Pageant, and at last reveals himself by treacherous suggestions of unbelief. The pageant itself is of wonderful variety. After a vividly drawn sketch of the hermitage in the Thebaid, the drama starts with the more vulgar and direct incitements to the coarser Deadly Sins and others—Gluttony, Avarice, Ambition, Luxury. Then Hilarion appears and starts theological discussion, whence arises a new series of actual visions—the excesses of the heretics, the degradation of martyrdom itself, the Eastern theosophies, the monstrous cults of Paganism. After this, Hilarion tries a sort of Modernism, contrasting the contradictions and absurdities of actual religions with a more and more atheistic Pantheism. This failing, the Temptation reverts to the moral forms, Death and Vice contending for Anthony and bidding against each other. The next shift of the kaleidoscope is to semi-philosophical fantasies—the Sphinx, the Chimaera, basilisks, unicorns, microscopic mysteries. The Saint is nearly bewildered into blasphemy; but at last the night wanes, the sun rises, and the face of Christ beams from it. The Temptation is ended.[398]
The magnificence of the style, in which the sweep of this dream-procession over the stage is conveyed to the reader, is probably the first thing that will strike him; and certainly it never palls. But, if not at once, pretty soon, any really critical mind must perceive something different from, and much rarer than, mere style. It is the extraordinary power—the exactness, finish, and freedom from any excess or waste labour, of the narrative, in reproducing dream-quality. A very large proportion—and there is nothing surprising in the fact—of the best pieces of ornate prose in French, as well as in English, are busied with dreams; but the writers have not invariably remembered one of the most singular—and even, when considered from some points of view, disquieting—features of a dream,—that you are never, while dreaming, in the least surprised at what happens. Flaubert makes no mistake as to this matter. The real realism which had enabled him to re-create the most sordid details of Madame Bovary, the half-historic grime and gorgeousness mixed of Salammbô, and the quintessentially ordinary life of L'Éducation, came mightily to his assistance in this his Vision of the Desert. You see and hear its external details as Anthony saw and heard them: you almost feel its internal influence as if Hilarion had been—as if he was—at your side.
Trois Contes.
The Trois Contes which followed, and which practically completed (except for letters) Flaubert's finished work in literature,[399] have one of those half-extrinsic interests which, once more, it is the duty of the historian to mention. They show that although, as has been said, Flaubert suffered from no monotony of faculty, the range of his faculty—or rather the range of the subjects to which he chose to apply it—was not extremely wide. Of the twin stories, Un Cœur Simple is, though so unlike in particular, alike in general ordinariness to Madame Bovary and L'Éducation Sentimentale. The unlikeness in particular is very striking, and shows that peculiar victoriousness in accomplishing what he attempted which is so characteristic of Flaubert. It is the history-no-history of a Norman peasant woman, large if simple of heart, simple and not large of brain, a born drudge and prey to unscrupulous people who come in contact with her, and almost in her single person uniting the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. I admire it now, without even the touch of rather youthful impatience which used, when I read it first, to temper my admiration. It is not a berquinade, because a berquinade is never quite real. Un Cœur Simple shares Flaubert's Realism as marvellously as any equal number of pages of either of the books to which I have compared it. But there is, perhaps, something provocative—something almost placidly insolent—about the way in which the author says, "Now, I will give you nothing of the ordinary baits for admiration, and yet, were you the Devil himself, you shall admire me." And one does—in youth rather reluctantly—not so in age.
Herodias groups itself in the same general fashion, but even more definitely in particulars, with Salammbô—of which, indeed, it is a sort of miniature replica cunningly differentiated. Anybody can see how easily the story of the human witchcraft of Salome, and the decollation of the Saint, and the mixture of terror and gorgeousness in the desert fortress, parallel the Carthaginian story. But I do not know whether it was deliberate or unconscious repetition that made Flaubert give us something like a duplicate of the suffete Hanno in Vitellius. There is no lack of the old power, and the shortness of the story is at least partly an advantage. But perhaps the Devil's Advocate, borrowing from, but reversing, Hugo on Baudelaire, might say, "Ce frisson n'est pas nouveau."
The third story, Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, has always seemed to me as near perfection in its own kind as anything I know in literature, and one of the best examples, if not the very best example, of that adaptableness of the Acta Sanctorum to modern rehandling of the right kind, which was noticed at the beginning of this History.[400] The excessive devotion of the not yet sainted Julian to sport; the crime and the dooms that follow it; the double parricide which he commits under the false impression that his wife has been unfaithful to him; his self-imposed penance of ferrying, somewhat like Saint Christopher, and the trial—a harder one than that good giant bore, for Julian has, not merely to carry over but, to welcome, at board and bed, a leper—and the Transfiguration and Assumption that conclude the story, give some of the best subjects—though there are endless others nearly or quite as good—in Hagiology. And Flaubert has risen to them in the miraculous manner in which he could rise, retaining the strangeness, infusing the reality, and investing the whole with the beauty, deserved and required. There is not a weak place in the whole story; but the strongest places are, as they should be, the massacre of hart, hind, and fawn which brings on the curse; the ghastly procession of the beasts Julian has slain or not slain (for he has met with singular ill-luck); the final "Translation."[401] Nowhere is Flaubert's power of description greater; nowhere, too, is that other power noticed—the removal of all temptation to say "Very pretty, but rather added ornament"—more triumphantly displayed.