The maker of a great style, a lyric poet, who selected as an instrument the “other harmony of prose,” a master of characterization and the creator of imperishable volumes, Gustave Flaubert is indeed the Beethoven of French prose. Never was the life of a genius so barren of content, never had there been seemingly such a waste of force. In forty years only four completed books, three tales, and an unfinished volume; a sort of satyricon and lexicon of stupidity—what else is Bouvard et Pécuchet? The outlay of power was just short of the phenomenal, and this Colossus of Croisset,—one falls into superlatives when dealing with him,—this man tormented by an ideal of style, a man who formed a whole generation of writers, is only coming into his kingdom. In his correspondence he is the most facile, the most personal, the least impassable of artists; in his work the most concentrated, objective, and reticent. There never has been in French prose such a densely spun style,—the web fairly glistening with the idea. Yet of opacity there is none. Like one of those marvellous tapestries woven in the hidden East, the clear woof of Flaubert’s motive is never obscured or tangled. George Moore declares L’Education Sentimentale to be as great a work as Tristan und Isolde. It is the polyphony, the magical crossings, recrossings, the interweaving of the subject and the long, elliptical thematic loops made with such consummate ease that command admiration. Flaubert was above all a musician, a musical poet. The ear was his final court of appeal, and to make sonorous cadences in a language that lacks essential richness—it is without the great diapasonic undertow of the Anglo-Saxon—was just short of the miraculous. Until Chateaubriand’s and Victor Hugo’s time the French tongue was rather a formal pattern than a plastic, liquid collocation of sounds. They blazed the path for Flaubert, and he, with almost Spartan restraint and logical mind, made the language richer, more flexible, more musical, polished, and precise. The word and the idea were indissolubly associated, a perfect welding of matter and manner. Omnipresent with him was the musician’s idea of composing a masterpiece that would float by sheer style, a masterpiece unhampered by an idea. The lyric ecstasy of his written speech quite overmastered him. He was a poet as were De Quincey, Pater, and Poe. The modulation of his style to his themes caused him inconceivable agony. A man of equal gifts, and less exacting conscience, would have calmly written at length, letting style go free in his pursuit of theme; but Flaubert strove ceaselessly to overcome the antinomianism of his material. He wrote La Tentation de Saint Antoine, and its pages sing with golden throats; transpose this style to the lower key of L’Education Sentimentale, and we find the artist maddened by the incongruity of surface and subject. In Madame Bovary, with its symphonic descriptions, Flaubert’s style was happily mated; while in the three short tales he is almost flawless. Then came Bouvard et Pécuchet, and here his most ardent lover recognizes the superb stylistic curve. The book is a mound of pitiless irony, yet a mound, not a living organism. Despite its epical breadth, there is something inhuman, too, in the Homeric harmonies of Salammbô.
With the young wind of the twentieth century blowing in our faces it is hardly necessary to pose Flaubert academically. His greatness consists in his not being speared by any literary camp. The romanticists claimed him; they were right. The realists declared that he was their leader, and the extreme naturalists cried up to him, “O Master!” They too were wise. Something of the idealist, of the realist, is in Flaubert; he is never the doctrinaire. Temperamentally he was a poet; masked epilepsy made him a pessimist. In a less cramped milieu he might have accomplished more, but he would have lost as a writer. It was his fanatical worship of form that ranks him as the greatest artist in fiction the world has ever read. Without Balzac’s invention, without Turgénieff’s tenderness, without Tolstoy’s broad humanity, he nevertheless outstrips them all as an artist. It is his music that will live when his themes are rusty with the years; it is his glorious vision of the possibilities of formal beauty that has made his work classic. You may detect the heart-beat in Flaubert if your ear is finely attuned to his harmonies. A despiser of the facile triumph, of the appeal sentimental, he reminds me more of Landor than De Quincey,—a Landor informed by a passion for fiction. There are pages of Flaubert that one lingers over for the melody, for the evocation of dim landscapes, for the burning hush of noon. In the presence of passion he showed his ancestry; he became the surgeon, not the sympathetic nurse, as was the case with many of his contemporaries. He studied the amorous malady with great cold eyes, for his passions were all intellectual. He had no patience with conventional sentimentality. And how clearly he saw through the hypocrisy of patriotism, the false mouthing of politicians! A small literature has been modelled after his portrait of the discontented demagogues in L’Education Sentimentale. The grim humor of that famous meeting at the Club of Intellect set Turgénieff off into huge peals of laughter. It is incredibly lifelike. A student of detail, Flaubert gave the imaginative lift to all he wrote: his was a winged realism, and in Madame Bovary we are continually confronted with evidences of his idealistic power. Content to create a small gallery of portraits, he wreaked himself in giving them adequate expression, in investing them with vitality, characteristic coloring, with everything but charm. Flaubert has not the sympathetic charm of his brother-at-arms, Iván Turgénieff. In private life a man of extraordinary magnetism, his bonze-like suppression of personal traits in his books tells us of martyrdom to a lofty theory of style. He sacrificed his life to art, and an unheeding, ungrateful generation first persecuted and then passed him by. It is the very tragedy of literature that a man of robust individuality, handsome, flattered, and wealthy, should retire for life to a room overlooking the Seine, near Rouen, and there wrestle with the seven devils of rhetoric. He subdued them—made them bond-slaves; but he wore himself out in the struggle. He sought to extort from his instrument music that was not in it. What he might have done with the organ-toned English language after so triumphantly mastering the technique of the French keyboard—a genuine piano keyboard—we may only hazard. His name is one of the glories of French literature, and in these times of scamped workmanship, when the cap and bells of cheap historical romance and the evil-smelling weed of the dialect novel are ruling fiction, the figure of the great Frenchman is at once a refuge and an evocation.
Many years have passed since Gustave Flaubert published his third novel, L’Education Sentimentale; and whether it was the unhappy title or the political condition of France at the time,—Turgénieff declared that it was the former,—the big book of five hundred pages failed to attract much attention. There was no public prosecution, as with Madame Bovary, nor did the subject-matter invite the controversy of archæologists; so to the chagrin of the great pupil of Châteaubriand and Balzac this masterpiece of “pitiless observation” hardly aroused a protest. To be sure, M. René Taillandier saw in its pages a covert attack on the idea of young manhood, but then M. Taillandier was given to the discovery of literary mare’s nests, and the Franco-Prussian war intervening, one of the greatest of descriptive novels was allowed to repose in dusty peace.
As George Moore, in one of the most luminous of his criticisms, so truthfully says, “Since then it has been read by novelists in search of material, and they held their tongues, partly because it was easier to steal than to appreciate, partly because they did not wish to draw attention to their thefts.” Yet L’Education Sentimentale was not altogether missed by the critics. Paul Bourget won his way to critical fame with his exhaustive study of its creator; Henri Taine wrote sympathetically of him; Henry James, who will yield to no one in his admiration of the dead master, frankly confesses that the novel is dead, is as sawdust and ashes, while George Saintsbury cannot sufficiently praise it. It is for him “a whole Comédie Humaine of failure in two volumes,” and Flaubert “can do with a couple of epithets what Balzac takes a page of laborious analysis to do less perfectly.” It remained for Mr. Moore to cry the work to heaven and to point out that while Balzac might have written Madame Bovary, no one but Flaubert could have produced L’Education Sentimentale.
Mr. Moore is right; the novel is stupendous, is appalling in its magnitude and handling of the unpromising material of life, in its piercing analysis, power of concrete characterization, and overwhelming mastery of style. “The ignoble pleases me,” Flaubert said once; “it is the sublime of the lower slopes.” L’Education Sentimentale is the very lowest slope of the ignobly sublime.
“The great artists are those who impose on humanity their particular illusions,” cries Guy de Maupassant, after serving seven long years of apprenticeship to Flaubert and literature, with what results we all know. Flaubert’s particular illusion was so completely magnificent that but few of his intimates absolutely realized it. Life, he confessed, was to him a bad odor; “it was like an odor of unpleasant cooking escaping by a vent-hole.” Yet despite his love of the exotic, of the barbarous, of the Orient, he forced himself to see it, handle it, estimate it, and write of it. When he wished to roam in the East or in old Carthaginian times, he took up the history of the daughter of Farmer Roualt, and we got Emma Bovary. When Egypt and the Thebaid tempted him with its ascetic gloom and dream splendors, he resolutely tied himself to his monkish desk at Croisset and worked for six years at L’Education Sentimentale.
Picture to yourself this green-eyed Norman giant, stalking up and down his terrace spouting aloud Châteaubriand, whose sonorous, cadenced lines were implacably engraved on his memory. Flaubert’s favorite passage was this from Atala: “Elle répand dans le bois ce grand secret de mélancholie qu’elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes et aux rivages antiques des mers.” One recalls Matthew Arnold’s love for Maurice de Guerin’s Centaur, and his eternal quotation of that marmoreal phrase, “But upon the shores of what ocean have they rolled the stone that hides them, O Macareus?” Little wonder that the passengers on the steamboat bound for Rouen enjoyed the spectacle of the inspired martyr to style as he paced his garden in an old dressing-gown, chanting the swelling phrases of Châteaubriand!
Relentlessly pursued by the demon of perfection, a victim to epilepsy, a despiser of the second-hand art of his day, is it not strange that Flaubert ever wrote a line? Execution was for him a painful parturition; he was delivered of his phrases in agony, and yet his first book, born after ten years of herculean effort, was a masterpiece. Did not a great critic say, “Madame Bovary is one of the glories of French literature?” But it almost sent its author to jail. Without the toleration, the adaptability of his dear comrade, Turgénieff, Flaubert took life symphonically. It was a sad, serious thing, and to escape its rigors he surrounded himself in the magic cloud of an ironic art,—an art addressed to the elect. He felt the immedicable pity of existence, yet never resorted to the cheap religious nostrums and political prophylactics of his contemporaries. He despised the bourgeois; this lifelong rancor was at once his deliverance and his downfall; it gave us L’Education Sentimentale, but it also produced Bouvard et Pécuchet. Judged by toilsome standards of criticism, Flaubert was a failure, but a failure monstrous, outrageous, and almost cosmical; there is something elemental in this failure. As satirical as Swift, he was devoured by a lyrism as passionate as Victor Hugo’s. This colossus of ennui set out to conquer material life, to crush it with superb, indifferent hands and was himself vanquished by it; and in the smoke and dust of defeat his noble figure went down as if some strange meteor had shot from the dark blue to the very bowels of the globe. After forty years of toil in his hermitage, he left only six volumes, nearly all masterpieces, but not masterpieces for the million.
Flaubert, as Saintsbury justly points out, occupied “a very singular middle position between romanticism and naturalism, between the theory of literary art, which places the idealizing of merely observed facts first of all, and is sometimes not too careful about the theory which places the observation first if not also last, and is sometimes ostentatiously careless of any idealizing whatsoever.” His was a realism of a vastly superior sort to that of his disciples. The profound philosophic bias of his mind enabled him to pierce behind appearances, and while his surfaces are extraordinary in finish, exactitude, and detail, the aura of things and persons is never wanting. His visualizing power has never been excelled, not even by Balzac,—a stroke or two and a man or woman peers out from behind the types. He ambushed himself in the impersonal, and thus his criticism of life seems hard, cold, and cruel to those readers who look for the occasional amiable fillip of Gautier, Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens. This frigid withdrawal of self behind the screen of his art gave him all the more freedom to set moving his puppets; it is this quality that caused him to be the only naturalist to receive mercy from Brunetière’s remorseless pen. Those who mortise the cracks in their imagination with current romanticism, Flaubert will never captivate. He seems too remote; he regards his characters too dispassionately. This objectivity is carried to dangerous lengths in Sentimental Education, for the book is minor in tone, without much exciting incident—exciting in the Dumas or Stevenson sense—and is inordinately long. Five hundred pages seem too much by half to be devoted to a young man who does not know his own mind. Yet Frédéric Moreau is a man you are sure to meet on your way home. He is born in great numbers and in every land, and his middle name is Mediocrity. Only the golden mean of his gifts has not brought him happiness. He has some money, and was born of middle-class parents in the provinces. His mother’s hope, he is sent to Paris to the schools, and has just taken his bachelor degree when the book begins. On the steamboat bound for Nogent-sur-Seine, Frédéric meets Arnoux, the art dealer,—an admirably drawn personality,—and falls in love with Madame Arnoux. That love—the leading motive of the work—proves his ruin, and it is his one pure love; a sample of Flaubert’s irony, who refuses to be satisfied with the conventional minor moralities and our conventional disposition of events. Frédéric goes home, but cannot forget Madame Arnoux. He is romantic, rather silly, good-hearted, and hopelessly weak. Like the sound of a firm, clanging chord his character is indicated at the outset and there is little later development. As the flow of some sluggish river through flat lands, oozing banks, and neat embankments, Frédéric’s life canalizes in leisurely fashion. He loses his fortune, he inherits another, he goes back to Paris, he lives in Bohemia—such a real Bohemia—and he frequents the salons of the wealthy. He encounters fraud, meanness, hypocrisy, rapacity, on every side, and like Rastignac is a bit of a snob. He is fond of women, but a constitutional timidity prevents him from reaping any sort of success with them, for he is always afraid of some one “coming in.” When he does assert himself, he fears the sound of his own voice, yet in the duel with Cisy—one of the most superbly satirical set pieces in any literature—he is seemingly brave. His relations with La Maréchale are wonderfully set forth; he is her dupe, yet a dupe with eyes wide open and without the power of retaliation. Infirmity of will allied to a charming person, this young man is a memorable portrait. He is not the hero, for the book is without one, just as it is plotless and apparently motiveless. Elimination is practised unceasingly, yet the broadest effects are secured; the apparent looseness of construction vanishes on a second reading. Almost fugal in treatment is the development of episodes, and while the rhythms are elliptical, large, irregular—rhythm there always is—the unrelated, unfinished, unrounded, decomposed semblance to life is all the while cunningly preserved. What Mr. James would call the “figure in the carpet,” the decorative, the thematic pattern, is never lost, the assonant web being exquisitely spun. The whole book floats in the air; it is a miracle work. It is full of the clangor and buzz of Time’s loom.