Gustave Flaubert will live for times to come less by what he did than by his gesture in doing it. He was, before all, the explicit artist, the art-for-art’s-sake, neck-or-nothing artist; and as such he will stand in history when these strange creatures come up for review. He made the enormous assumption of an aristocracy of intelligence. As, once upon a time, Venice, and later on we British, claimed to hold the gorgeous East in fee, so Flaubert, and the handful of poets, novelists and playwrights whom he admitted as his equals, looked upon the world at large with its hordes of busy people as so much stuff for the workshop. Bourgeois all, Philistines all. They were the quarry; upon them as they went about their affairs he would peep and botanise. He would lay bare their hearts in action, their scheming brains, their secret longings, dreams, agonies of remorse, desire, fear. All this as a god might do it, a being apart, and for the diversion of a select Olympus. It was useless to write for the rest, for they could not even begin to understand you. More, it was an unworthy condescension. It exposed you either to infamy, as when they prosecuted you for an outrage against morals, or to ridicule, as when they asked you what your novel “proved.” Write for ever, wear yourself to a thread, hunting word or nuance; but write for the Olympians, not for the many. Such was the doctrine of Flaubert, gigantic, bald, cavern-eyed, with the moustaches of a Viking, and the voice of a bull; and so Anatole France saw him in 1873:
“I had hardly been five minutes with him when the little parlour hung with Arab curtains swam in the blood of twenty thousand bourgeois with their throats cut. Striding to and fro, the honest giant ground under his heels the brains of the municipal councillors of Rouen.”
That was the sort of man who, in 1863, struck up a friendship with George Sand.
And she, the overflowing, mannish, brown old woman, his antithesis; her vast heart still smouldering like a sleepy volcano; she who had kicked over all the traces, sown all the wild oats, made spillikins of the Ten Commandments, played leapfrog with the frying-pan and the fire; written a hundred novels, as many plays, a thousand reviews, ten thousand love-letters; grandmother now at Nohant, with a son whom she adored, a little Aurore whom she idolised; still enormously busy, writing a novel with each hand, a play with each foot, and reviews (perhaps) with her nose; she of Elle et Lui, of Consuelo and Valentine and François le Champi—how on earth came she to cope with the Berserk of Croisset, who hated every other person in the world, took four years to write a novel, and read through a whole library for the purpose? The answer is easy. She made herself his grandmother, took him to her capacious bosom, and handled him as he had never been handled before. Affectionately—to him she was “cher maitre,” to her he was her “pauvre enfant” or her “cher vieux”—but she could poke fun at him too. She used to send him letters from imaginary bourgeois, injured by his attacks, or stimulated by them, as might be. One was signed, “Victoire Potelet, called Marengo Lirondelle, Veuve Dodin”:
“I have read your distinguished works, notably Madame Bavarie, of which I think I am capable of being a model to you.... I am well preserved for my advanced age and if you have a repugnance for an artist in misfortune I should be content with your ideal sentiments. You can then count on my heart not being able to dispose of my person being married to a man of light character who squandered my wax cabinet wherein were all figures of celebrities, Kings, Emperors ancient and modern and celebrated crimes....”
A delicious letter to write and to receive.
With all that, in spite of her impulse to love, to admire, to fall at his feet, she saw what was the matter with her “pauvre enfant.” Madame Bovary hurt her because it was heartless. She understood the prosecution of that dreadful book; she saw that the passionless analysis of passion may be exceedingly indecent. She is guarded in her references to it, but she saw quite well that the book was condemned, not because it was indecent (though it was indecent), but because it was cruel. She thought L’Education Sentimentale a failure; ugly without being reasonable:
“All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with ... when people do not understand us it is always our fault.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It is false in the highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.”
Not a doubt but she was right. You cannot with impunity leave your heart out of your affair. I will not say that a good book cannot be written with the intellect and the will; but I am convinced that a great book was never yet so written. The greatest books in the world’s history are those which the world at large knows to be good; and to the making of such books goes the heart of a man as well as his brain.
But eighteen-seventy was at hand. Isidore, as they called him, was diddled into war. Everything went badly. French armies blew away like smoke, France was invaded, the Prussians were at Rouen, and there was no time to theorise about art. Sedan; the Prussians in Paris; then the senseless rage of the Commune. Flaubert took it all à sa manière: