George Sand lived like a healthy bourgeoise to the age of seventy-two; in her later years she retired to the country, and the fires of free love died, and she wrote novels about the peasants in her neighborhood. They are very human and simple, and make standard reading for French courses in American high schools. It is interesting to compare them with the old-style handling of the peasants in French art. Gone are the fancy pictures of beautiful young shepherds and shepherdesses in silks and satins and high-heeled slippers. Now for the first time a French artist finds it worth while to go out among the working people of the fields, and observe the external details of their lives, and at least try to imagine their feelings. We note the same thing happening also in pictorial art; instead of the elegancies of Fragonard, we now have a peasant painter, Millet, peasant born and peasant reared, making real pictures full of real proletarian feeling. That much as least the revolution has accomplished!
CHAPTER LXV
MAIN STREET IN FRANCE
“Eighteen years ago,” says Ogi, “a lanky, red-headed youth from Minnesota ran away from Yale University and showed up at Helicon Hall to stoke our furnace. We were never entirely sure about the furnace, but we could always count upon lively arguments on the literary side of our four-sided fireplace. Now this youth has grown up and added a new phrase to the American language—”
“‘Main Street’ or ‘Babbitt’?” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Recall the story of ‘Main Street.’ A young girl marries a doctor and lives with him in one of the desolate, cultureless villages of the Northwest. The novel is a long one, and the method that of minute detail; we learn everything about the little place and the people in it, their empty, sordid lives, the utter absence of vision. The girl is lonely and restless, she craves something beautiful and inspiring. She has luxurious tastes, and chafes at having to economize. She meets a handsome, attractive young man, and after many agonies of soul she takes him as her lover. In the end he leaves her; and after being heart-broken for a while she takes another lover. He also deserts her, and she is ill, in debt, and finally takes poison, and her husband, the doctor, dies of grief—”
“Hold on,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you must have been reading a sequel to ‘Main Street.’ I don’t remember any of those things happening. Carol Kennicott thought she loved the other man, but she didn’t deceive her husband, she held herself back—”
“It is another of my poor jokes,” says Ogi. “This is not the story of ‘Main Street,’ but of a famous French classic, ‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert. You see, the themes of the two novels are identical, and so is the method; the difference lies in the temperaments of two races. The young man from Sauk Centre and the young man from Rouen alike call themselves “realists”; but one proceeds upon the assumption that it is possible to restrain passion, and on the whole, better to try, while the other proceeds upon the assumption that it is impossible to restrain passion, and that if you pretend to do it, you are a Puritan, and what is worse, a hypocrite. So at the end of Carol Kennicott’s story we find her still trying to introduce a little light into Gopher Prairie, while Emma Bovary is dead and the town of Yonville-l’Abbaye is exactly what it was before.”
Flaubert is by many considered the greatest of all realists. He made his religion out of a theory of style; and he was absolutely certain that “Madame Bovary” was the final product of the “objective” method. He had coldly observed reality, and no predisposition had been allowed to interfere. My purpose in mixing him up with Main Street, Gopher Prairie, Minn., is to bring out the contention that “Madame Bovary” is as subjective as a lyric; from first to last an expression of its author’s personal, or shall we say racial conviction, that the sexual impulse dominates the lives of men and women. The great classic of realism is a legal brief, in which every detail has been carefully selected and arranged, and every sentence composed for the purpose of proving this argument. We have once more the old Greek tragedy with its lurking Nemesis; only this time the lurking-place is in the genital glands.
Flaubert was born in 1821, so that he was a youngster to the group of writers we have been considering: Balzac, Hugo, Gautier, George Sand. He was a tall, lanky, provincial fellow, with drooping mustaches, looking like a dragoon. He was epileptic and hysterical, and suffered agonies of melancholy, for the most part over problems of style. He would pace the floor all night in torment seeking for a missing word; he records that he spent eight unhappy days in avoiding one dissonance. The action of all his life which he repented most was a phrase in “Madame Bovary.” Translated literally, this phrase is “a crown of flowers of orange-tree”; the unforgivable sin lying in the two “ofs.”
We are told that Flaubert originated a formula of art which Gautier cherished all the rest of his life: “The form is the parent of the idea.” In other words, you first think of a beautiful way to say something, and then you think of something to say which can be said in that way. It would be impossible for art perversity to go farther; and you have only to consider “Madame Bovary” to realize how little Flaubert followed his own theory. He did not first think of a prose work in two parts, the first part having nine chapters and the second part fifteen; what he thought of was the French formula, locating the seat of Nemesis in the genital glands. The secret of his masterpiece is the fact that he chose to illustrate this formula by means of characters which he knew intimately and loved with all the power of his instinctive being. That is the real basis of the greatness of “Madame Bovary”; the fact that with all her faults and all her follies her creator loved her, and believed in her, and made her real in every breath she drew and in every word she uttered. The important idea which he put across is that we are all of us, good or bad, wise or foolish, stupid or clever, passengers on the same ship of life, tossed by the same storms, and bound for the same unknown harbor.