I have taken up the Bovary again, and since Monday have five pages almost done; almost is the word, for it is necessary to take it up again. How difficult it is! I fear that my comices (primary meetings) may be too long; it is a hard place. I have there all the personages of my book in action and in dialogue, mingled with one another, and beyond them all is a great landscape which envelopes them; if I can succeed with it, it will be very symphonic.
Bouilhet has finished the descriptive part of his Fossils. His mastodon ruminating in the moonlight on a prairie is enormously full of poesy and will be, perhaps, to the public, the most effective of all his pieces! There only remains the philosophic part, which is the last. About the middle of next month, he will go to Paris to select a lodging where he can install himself the first of November. Would that I were in his place!
Decidedly, the article by Verdun on Leconte (which I have an idea is Jourdan’s) is more stupid than hostile; I have laughed much at the comparison they make with the beautiful lines of the Fall of an Angel; what bearish politeness! As for the Indian Poems and the piece about Dies iræ, not a word. There is a certain ingenuousness about them, but why call the sperchius, sperkhios? That seems to me a true janoterie. What has become of the good Leconte,—is he progressing with his Celtic poem?
I have been re-reading some of Boileau, or rather all of Boileau, and with my pencil on the margin. This seems to me truly strong; one does not tire of what is well written, for style is life! It is the blood of the thought! Boileau has a little river, straight, not deep, but admirably limpid and well within its banks; and that is the reason why the waters have not dried up; nothing is lost of what he wishes to say. But how much art he has used and with so little effort!
Within the next two or three years, I intend to re-read attentively all the French classics and to annotate them; this is work that will serve me in my prefaces (my work of literary critic, you know); I wish to state there the insufficiency of schools as they are, and to declare plainly that we make no claim to being one of them, we outsiders, nor is it necessary to be one of them. On the contrary, we are in the line of transmission; that seems to me strictly exact; it reassures and encourages me. What I admire in Boileau is what I admire in Hugo; and where one has been good, the other is excellent. There is only one standard of beauty; it is the same everywhere, although under different aspects, and more or less coloured by the reflections that dominate it. Voltaire and Chateaubriand, for example, were mediocre for the same reasons, etc. I shall try to make it seen why the æsthetic critic is so much behind the historic and scientific critic; he has never had any base. The knowledge that is wanting is that of the anatomy of style; to know how a phrase is constructed, and where it should be attached. They study manikins and translations with professors,—imbeciles incapable of holding the instrument of the science they teach (I mean the pen), and the result is, they lack life!
Love! Love! the secret of the good God which does not easily give itself up,—the soul, without which nothing is understood.
When I have finished that (and the Bovary and Anubis first of all), I shall without doubt, enter into a new phase, and it seems slow getting there; I, who write so slowly, am gnawed by my plans. I wish to produce two or three long, epic antiques—romances in a grandiose setting, where the action may be forcefully fertile and the details rich in themselves, and luxurious and tragic as a whole; books of grand mural painting, of heroic size.
There was in the Revue de France (a fragment by Michelet upon Danton) a judgment of Robespierre that pleased me much; it stamped him as being in himself a government; and it was for that reason that all Republican governmental maniacs loved him. Mediocrity cherishes rules, but I hate them. I feel myself against them and against all restrictions, corporations, caste, hierarchy, levels, and droves, with an execration that fills my soul; it is on this side, perhaps, that I comprehend the martyr.