For me Rosalie Arnoux is the unique attraction. Henry James calls her a failure—spiritually. She is one of the most charming portraits in French fiction, and yet a perfectly virtuous woman. The aroma of her character pervades the pages of this wonderful “encyclopædia of life.” What shall I tell you of the magical descriptions of the ball at the Alhambra and other masked balls at La Maréchale’s; of the duel; of the street fighting during the revolution of ’48; of the cynical journalist, Hussonet, a type for all times; of the greedy Des Lauriers; of peevish Senecal; of good-hearted Dussardier; of Pellerin, who reads all the works on æsthetics extant so as to paint beautifully; of Mlle. Vatnaz, skinny, slender, amorous, and enigmatic? What shall I say of M. Roque, of Louise, of the actor Delmar, who turns his profile to his audiences; of Madame Dambreuse and her sleek infidelities; of her avaricious husband; of Frédéric’s foolish mother, so like himself; of Regimbart, formidable, thirsty Regimbart, with his oaths, his daily café-route, and his magnificent air of bravado? The list is not large, but every figure is painted by a master. And the vanity, the futility, the barrenness of it all! It is the philosophy of disenchantment, and about the book hangs the inevitable atmosphere of defeat, of mortification, of unheroic resignation. It is life, commonplace, quotidian life, and truth is stamped on its portals. All is vanity and vexation of spirit. The tragedy of the petty has never before been so mockingly, so menacingly, so absolutely displayed. An unhappy book, you say! Yes; and proves nothing except that life is but a rope of sand. Read it if you care for art in its most quintessentialized form, but if you are better pleased with the bravery and show of things external, avoid this novel, I beseech you, for it is as bitter in the mouth as a page torn from Ecclesiastes.
“And thus it is that Flaubert ... became a sort of monk of literature, shut away from the world, solitary and morose, beholding humanity with horror, with repulsion, with irony, with sarcasm, with an evil laugh sadder than tears, and casting upon mankind what are called glances of pity—in other words, pitiless glances, ... just as a friar passes a life of contemplation and meditation, saying to himself that God is great and that men are small, so he spent almost the whole of a fairly long life saying to himself again and again that men are small and that art is great, scorning the one and serving the other with an equal fervor and an equal ardor of uncompromising devotion.”
Émile Faguet in his excellent monograph on Flaubert—in Les Grands Ecrivains Français—thus summed up his life. Paul Bourget called his works “a manual of nihilism,” and declared that in each sentence of Flaubert’s “inheres a hidden force.” More significant still is Bourget’s anecdote illustrating Flaubert’s almost insane devotion to style.
“He was very proud,” relates Bourget, “of furnishing his story of Herodias with the adverb alternativement,—alternately. This word whose two accents on ter and ti give it a loose swing, seemed to him to render concrete and almost perceptible the march of the two slaves who in turn carried the head of St. John the Baptist.” And in the preface by Flaubert to Dernières Chansons de Louis Bouilhet may be found his startling yet rational theory that good prose alone can stand the test of being read aloud, for “a well-constructed phrase adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration.”
“While remaining itself obscure,” writes George Moore of L’Education Sentimentale, “this novel has given birth to a numerous literature. The Rougon-Macquart series is nothing but L’Education Sentimentale rewritten into twenty volumes by a prodigious journalist—twenty huge balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes getting clear of the housetops. Maupassant cut it into numberless walking sticks; Goncourt took the descriptive passages and turned them into Passy rhapsodies. The book has been a treasure cavern known to forty thieves, whence all have found riches and fame. The original spirit has proved too strong for general consumption, but, watered and prepared, it has had the largest sale ever known.”
Some one in Henry Labouchere’s London Truth wrote this of the author of Boule de Suif: “Guy de Maupassant’s death has revived an interest in his works. He was admittedly the son of Flaubert, from whom he inherited his sanguine temperament, ruddy complexion, the full starting veins in his temples, the bull neck, and the flaw in his nervous system. Flaubert was subject to epileptic fits, and Guy de Maupassant died of general paralysis, preceded by madness, before he had reached middle age. As a writer he was with ease what Flaubert tried to be by great efforts, and something more, he having a deeper insight into what seem the ordinary circumstances of life.”
The Beethoven of French prose was, every one knows, whimsical and fastidious to a degree with his style. Be it true or not, one of his friends relates that he found him one day standing in front of a high music desk, on which stood a paragraph written in large letters. “What are you doing there?” said his friend. “Scanning these words because they don’t sound well.” Flaubert would spend a day over a sentence because it did not sound well, and every sentence he sent to press was equally closely analyzed. Well, why not! If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it would be more sonorous, more rhythmic, in a word, more artistic. I believe the story, although it does not appear in Tarvers’s book on Flaubert. It is glorious, true or false; it fixes an ideal for young writers.
II
THE TWO SALAMMBÔS
After doggedly working like a galley slave for six years Gustave Flaubert published Salammbô in Paris near the close of 1862. He was then forty-one years old, in the prime of his laborious and picturesque life, recluse, man of the world, traveller, and one of the most devoted of sons. In 1849, with Maxime du Camp—who later imprudently lifted the curtain on the sad secret of his friend’s life—Flaubert made a journey up the Nile, through Egypt, Nubia, by the Red Sea, through Palestine and Syria, into Cyprus, Rhodes, Asia Minor, Turkey in Europe, and Greece. Before Dr. Schliemann, the great Flaubert dug in Mycenæ, and from the “trenches of Herculaneum, on to the rocks of Cape Misenum,” he explored, furiously obsessed by a fantastic idea. In 1850 we find him in Phœnicia, a wanderer and an excavator of buried pasts. During 1858 he went to Tunis, and to the ruins of Carthage. From these delvings was born the epical romance of Salammbô, a book full of sonorous lines like the sweeping harmonies of Wagner, a book of mad dreams, blood, lust, cruelty, and love faithful unto death.
Following the publication of this story Flaubert, a lion in literary Paris since his artistic and legal victories with Madame Bovary, found himself the centre of many attacks by historians, archæologists, pedants, and the critical small fry of the town. To one adversary the blond giant of Croisset deigned a reply. It was M. Froehner, then editor of the Revue Contemporaine, and an expert in archæology—that is, an expert until Flaubert answered his arguments and literally blew them off the globe. He admitted having created Salammbô; that the aqueduct which Mathô and Spendius traversed the night Salammbô first saw the Zäimph was also an invention; that Hanno was really crucified in Sardinia; and a few other minor changes. Then to Froehner’s animadversions he gave text for text, authority for authority, and when a question of topography arose, Flaubert clinched his answer with: “Is it to shine by trying to make the dunces believe that I do not distinguish between Cappadocia and Asia Minor? But I know it, sir; I have seen it, I have taken walks in it.”