This something is itself the equally emphatic "Yes!" which must be returned to the third and postponed question, "Was he a Romantic?" There are many strange things in the History of Literature: its strangeness, as in other cases, is one of its greatest charms. But there have been few stranger than the obstinacy and almost passion with which the Romanticism of Heine, of Thackeray, and of Flaubert has been denied. Again and again it has been pointed out that "to laugh at what you love" is not only permissible, but a sign of the love itself. Moreover, Flaubert does not even laugh as the great Jew and the great Englishman did. He only represents the failures and the disappointments and the false dawns of Love itself, while in other respects he is romantique à tous crins. Compare Le Rêve with La Tentation or Saint-Julien l'Hospitalier; compare Madame Bovary with Germinie Lacerteux; even compare L'Éducation Sentimentale, that voyage to the Cythera of Romance which never reaches its goal, with Sapho and L'Évangéliste, and you will see the difference. It is of course to a certain extent "Le Coucher du Soleil Romantique" which lights up Flaubert's work, but the crapauds imprévus and the froids limaçons of Baudelaire's epitaph have not yet appeared, and the hues of the sunset itself are still gorgeous in parts of the sky.
Of Flaubert's famous doctrine of "the single word" perhaps a little more should, after all, be said. The results are so good, and the processes by which they are attained get in the way of the reader so little, that it is difficult to quarrel with the doctrine itself. But it was perhaps, after all, something of a superstition, and the almost "fabulous torments" which it occasioned to its upholder and practitioner seem to have been somewhat Fakirish. We need not grudge the five years spent over Salammbô; the seven over L'Éducation; the earlier and, I think, less definitely known gestation of Madame Bovary; and that portion of the twenty which, producing these also, filled out those fragments of La Tentation that the July Monarchy had actually seen. Perhaps with Bouvard et Pécuchet he got into a blind alley, out of which such labour was never like to get him, and in which it was rather likely to confine him. But if the excess of the preparation had been devoted to the completion of, say, only half a dozen of such Contes as those we actually have, it would have been joyful.
Yet this is idle pining, and the goods which the gods provided in this instance are such as ought rather to make us truly thankful. Flaubert was, as has been said, a Romantic, but he was born late enough to avoid the extravagances and the childishnesses of mil-huit-cent-trente while retaining its inspiration, its diable au corps, its priceless recovery of inheritances from history. Nor, though he subjected all these to a severe criticism of a certain kind, did he ever let this make him (as something of the same sort made his pretty near contemporary, Matthew Arnold, in England) inclined to blaspheme.[403] He did not, like his other contemporary and peer in greatness of their particular country and generation, Baudelaire, play unwise tricks with his powers and his life.[404] He was fortunately relieved from the necessity of journey-work—marvellously performed, but still journey-work—which had beset Gautier and never let go of him.[405]
And he utilised these gifts and advantages as few others have done in the service of the novel. One thing may be brought against him—I think one only. You read—at least I read—his books with intense interest and enjoyment, but though you may recognise the truth and humanity of the characters; though you may appreciate the skill with which they are set to work; though you may even, to a certain extent, sympathise with them, you never—at least I never—feel that intense interest in them, as persons, which one feels in those of most of the greatest novelists. You can even feel yourself in them—a rare and great thing—you can be Saint Anthony, and feel an unpleasant suspicion as if you had sometimes been Frédéric Moreau. But this is a different thing (though it is a great triumph for the author) from the construction for you of loves, friends, enemies even—in addition to those who surround you in the actual world.
Except this defect—which is in the proper, not the vulgar sense a defect—that is to say, not something bad which is present, but only something good which is absent—I hardly know anything wrong in Flaubert. He is to my mind almost[406] incomparably the greatest novelist of France specially belonging to the second half of the nineteenth century, and I do not think that Europe at large has ever had a greater since the death of Thackeray.
FOOTNOTES:
[389] He might have said—to make a Thackerayan translation of what was actually said later of an offering of roses rashly made to some French men of letters at their hotel in London: "Who the devil is this? Let them flank him his vegetables to the gate!" But what he did say, I believe, though he did not know or mention my name, was that "a blonde son of Albion" had ventured something gigantesque on him. And gigantesque had, if I do not again fondly err, sometimes if not always its "milder shade" of meaning in Flaubert's energetic mouth.
[390] As in those cases, and perhaps even more than in most, I have taken pains to make the new criticism as little of a replica of the old as possible.
[391] Possibly this is exactly what M. de Goncourt meant.
[392] There is some scandal and infinite gossip about Flaubert, with all of which I was once obliged to be acquainted, but which I have done the best that a rather strong memory will allow me to forget. I shall only say that his early friend and quasi-biographer, Maxime du Camp, seems to me to have had nearly as hard measure dealt out to him as Mr. Froude in the matter of Mr. Carlyle. Both were indiscreet; I do not think either was malevolent or treacherous.