THE ATHENÆUM, AUGUST 3, 1889
Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert. Deuxième Série (1850-54). (Paris, Charpentier.)
THE second volume of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence, just now published, is even richer than the first, alike in those counsels of literary art Flaubert was pre-eminently fitted to give, and in lights, direct and indirect, on his own work. The letters belong to a short period in his life, from his twenty-eighth to his thirty-second year (1850-54), during which he was an exceptionally expansive correspondent, but otherwise chiefly occupied in the composition of ‘Madame Bovary,’ a work of immense labour, as also of great and original genius. The more systematic student might draw from these letters many an interesting paragraph to add, by way of foot-notes, to that impressive book.
The earlier letters find Flaubert still in the East, recording abundantly those half-savage notes of ancient civilisation which are in sympathy with the fierce natural colouring of the country he loved so well. The author of ‘Salammbô’ and ‘Herodias’ is to be detected already in this lively vignette from an Oriental square: —
“Nothing is more graceful than the spectacle of all those men [the Dervishes] waltzing, with their great petticoats twisted, their ecstatic faces lifted to the sky. They turn, without a moment’s pause, for about an hour. One of them assured us that, if he were not obliged to hold his hands above his head, he could turn for six hours continuously.”
Even here, then, it is the calm of the East which expresses itself — the calm, perhaps the emptiness, of the Oriental, of which he has fixed the type in the following sketch: —
“I have seen certain dancing girls, who balanced themselves with the regularity of a palm tree. Their eyes, of a profound depth, express calm only — nothing but the calm, the emptiness, of the desert. It is the same with the men. What admirable heads! heads which seem to be turning over within them the grandest thoughts in the world. But tap on them! and there will be only the empty beer-glass, the deserted sepulchre. Whence then the majesty of their external form? of what does it really hold? Of the absence, I should reply, of all passion. They have the beauty of the ruminating ox, of the greyhound in its race, the floating eagle — that sentiment of fatality which is fulfilled in these. A conviction of the nothingness of man gives to all they do, their looks, their attitudes, a resigned but grandiose character. Their loose and easy raiment, lending itself freely to every movement of the body, is always in closest accord with the wearer and his functions; with the sky, too, by its colour: and then the sun! There is an immense ennui there in the sun, which consumes everything.”
But it is as brief essays in literary criticism that these letters are most effective. Exquisitely personal essays, self-explanatory, or by way of confession, written almost exclusively to one person — a perfectly sympathetic friend, engaged like the writer in serious literary work — they possess almost the unity, the connected current of a book. It is to Madame - X., however, that Flaubert makes this cynical admission about women:
“What I reproach in women, above all, is their need of poetisation, of forcing poetry into things. A man may be in love with his laundress, but will know that she is stupid, though he may not enjoy her company the less. But if a woman loves her inferior, he is straightway an unrecognised genius, a superior soul, or the like. And to such a degree does this innate disposition to see crooked prevail, that woman can perceive neither truth when they encounter it, nor beauty where it really exists. This fault is the true cause of the deceptions of which they so often complain. To require oranges of apple trees is a common malady with them.”
Flaubert, as seen in these letters, was undoubtedly a somewhat austere lover. His true mistress was his art. Counsels of art there are — for the most part, the best thing he has to offer. Only rarely does he show how he could play the lover: —
“Your love penetrates me at last, like warm rain, and I feel myself searched through with it, to the bottom of my heart Have you not everything that could make me love you? body, wit, tenderness? You are simple of soul and strong of head; not poetic, yet a poet in extreme degree. There is nothing but good in you: and you are wholly, as your bosom is, white, and soft to touch. I try sometimes to fancy how your face will look when you are old, and it seems to me I shall love you still as much as now, perhaps more.”
In contrast with the majority of writers, apt to make a false pretence of facility, it is of his labour that Flaubert boasts. That was because, after all, labour did but set free the innate lights of a true diamond; it realised, was a ministry to, the great imaginative gift of which he was irresistibly conscious. It was worth his while!
“As for me, the more I feel the difficulties of good writing, the more my boldness grows. It is this preserves me from the pedantry into which I should otherwise fall. I have plans for books, the composition of which would occupy the rest of my life: and if there happen to me, sometimes, cruel moments, which wellnigh make me weep with anger (so great do I feel my weakness to be), there are others also when I can scarce contain myself for joy: something from the depths within me, for which voluptuous is no word, overflows for me in sudden leaps. I feel transported, almost inebriate, with my own thoughts, as if there came to me, at some window within, a puff of warm perfumes. I shall never go very far, and know how much I lack; but the task I undertake will surely be executed by another. I shall have put on the true road some one better endowed, better born, for the purpose, than myself. The determination to give to prose the rhythm of verse, leaving it still veritable prose; to write the story of common life as history or the epic gets written (that if to say, without detriment to the natural truth of the subject), is perhaps impossible. I ask myself the question sometimes. Yet it is perhaps a considerable, an original thing, to have tried. I shall have had my permanent value for my obstinacy. And who knows? One day I may find a good motif an air entirely within the compass of my voice: and at any rate I shall have passed my life not ignobly, often with delight. Yet still it is saddening to think how many great men arrive easily at the desired effect, by means beyond the limits of conscious art. What could be worse built than many things in Rabelais, Cervantes, Molière, Hugo? But, then, what sudden thrusts of power! What power in a single word!”
Impersonality in art, the literary ideal of Gustave Flaubert, is perhaps no more possible than realism. The artist will be felt; his subjectivity must and will colour the incidents, as his very bodily eye selects the aspects of things. By force of an immense and continuous effort, however, the whole scope of which these letters enable us to measure, Flaubert did keep ‘Madame Bovary’ at a great distance from himself; the author might be thought to have been completely hidden out of sight in his work. Yet even here he transpires, clearly enough, from time to time; and the morbid sense of life, everywhere impressed in the very atmosphere of that sombre history, came certainly of the writer himself. The cruelty of the ways of things — that is a conviction of which the development is partly traceable in these letters.
“Provided the brain remains! That is the chief thing. But how nothingness invades us! We are scarcely born ere decay begins for us, in such a way that the whole of life is but one long combat with it, more and more triumphant, on its part, to the consummation, namely, death; and then the reign of decay is exclusive. There have been at most two or three years in which I was really entire — from seventeen to nineteen. I was splendid just then, though I scarce like to say so now; enough to attract the eyes of a whole assembly of spectators, as happened to me at Rouen, on the first presentation of ‘Ruy Bias.’ Ever since then I have deteriorated at a furious pace. There are mornings when I feel afraid to look at myself, so worn and used-up am I grown.”
‘ Madame Bovary,’ of course, was a tribute to science; and Flaubert had no dread, great hopes rather, of the service of science in imaginative literature, though the combat between scientific truth — mental physiology and the like — and that perfectly finished academic style he preferred, might prove a hard one. We might be all of us, since Sophocles — well, “tattooed savages!” but still, there was “something else in art besides rectitude of line and the well-polished surface.” The difficulty lay in the limitations of language, which it would be the literary artist’s true contention to enlarge. “We have too many things, too few words. ’Tis from that comes the torture of the fine literary conscience.” But it was one’s duty, none the less, to accept all, “imprint all, and, above all, fix one’s point d’appui in the present.” Literature, he held, would take more and more the modes of action which now seem to belong exclusively to science. It would be, above all, exposante — by way of exposition; by which, he was careful to point out, he by no means intended didactic. One must make pictures, by way of showing nature as she really is; only, the pictures must be complete ones. We must paint both sides, the upper and under. Style — what it might be, if writers faithfully cherished it — that was the subject of his perpetual consideration. Here is a sketch of the prose style of the future: —
“Style, as I conceive it, style as it will be realised some day — in ten years, or ten generations! It would be rhythmical as verse itself, precise as the language of science; and with undulations — a swelling of the violin I plumage of fire! A style which would enter into the idea like the point of a lancet; when thought would travel over the smooth surfaces like a canoe with fair winds behind it. Prose is but of yesterday, it must be confessed. Verse is par excellence the form of the ancient literatures. All possible prosodic combinations have been already made; those of prose are still to make.”
The effort, certainly, cost him much; how much we may partly see in these letters, the more as ‘Madame Bovary,’ on which he was then mainly at work, made a large demand also on his impersonality: —
“The cause of my going so slowly is just this, that nothing in that book [‘Madame Bovary’] is drawn from myself. Never has my own personality been so useless to me. It may be, perhaps, that hereafter I shall do stronger things. I hope so, but I can hardly imagine I shall do anything more skilful. Here everything is of the head. If it has been false in aim, I shall always feel that it has been a good mental exercise. But after all, what is the non-natural to others is the natural to me — the extraordinary, the fantastic, the wild chase, mythologic, or metaphysic.
‘Saint Antoine’ did not require of me one quarter of the tension of mind ‘Madame Bovary’ has caused me.
‘Saint Antoine’ was a discharge: I had nothing but pleasure in writing it; and the eighteen months devoted to the composition of its five hundred pages were the most thoroughly voluptuous of my life, hitherto. Judge, then, of my condition in writing ‘Madame Bovary.’ I must needs put myself every minute into a skin not mine, and antipathetic to me. For six months now I have been making love Platonically; and at the present moment my exaltation of mind is that of a good Catholic: I am longing to go to confession.”
A constant reader of Montaigne, Flaubert pushed to the utmost the habit of doubt, as leading to artistic detachment from all practical ends: —
“Posterity will not be slow in cruel desertion of those who have determined to be useful, and have sung ‘for a cause.’ It cares very little for Chateaubriand, and his resuscitation of mediæval religion; for Béranger, with his libertine philosophy; will soon care little for Lamartine and his religious humanitarianism. Truth is never in the present; and if one attaches oneself to the present, there comes an end of one. At the present moment, I believe that even a thinker ( and the artist, surely, is three times a thinker) should have no convictions.”
Flaubert himself, whatever we may think of that, had certainly attained a remarkable degree of detachment from the ordinary interests of mankind.
Over and above its weightier contributions to the knowledge of Flaubert, to the knowledge and practice of literature at its best, this volume, like its predecessor, abounds in striking occasional thoughts: —
“There is no imagination in France. If you want to make real poetry pass, you must be clever enough to disguise it.”
“In youth one associates the future realisation of one’s dreams with the existence of the actual people around us. In proportion as those existences disappear, our dreams also depart.”
“Nothing is more useless than those heroic friendships which require exceptional circumstances to prove them. The great difficulty is to find some one who does not rack your nerves in every one of the various ordinary occurrences of life.”
“The dimensions of a soul may be measured by its power of suffering, as we calculate the depth of rivers by their current.”
“Formerly, people believed that the sugar-cane alone yielded sugar; nowadays it is extracted from almost anything. It is the same with poetry. Let us draw it, no matter whence, for it lies everywhere, and in all things. Let us habituate ourselves to regard the world as a work of art, the processes of which are to be reproduced in our works.”
“To have talent, one must be convinced one has it; and to keep the conscience pure, we must put it above the consciences of all other people.”
“We retain always a certain grudge against any one who instructs us.”
“What is best in art will always escape people of mediocrity, that is to say, more than three quarters of the human race.”
“Let our enemies speak evil of us! it is their proper function. It is worse when friends speak well of us foolishly.”
“Materialists and spiritualists, in about equal degree, prevent the knowledge of matter and spirit alike, because they sever one from the other. The one party make man an angel, the other a swine.”
“In proportion as it advances, art will be more and more scientific, even as science will become artistic. The two will rejoin each other at the summit, after separating at the base.”
“Let us be ourselves, and nothing else! ‘What is your duty? What each day requires.’ That is Goethe’s notion. Let us do our duty; which is, to try to write well. What a society of saints we should be, if only each one of us did his duty!”