Others would arrive, from time to time; M. Taine, his eyes concealed behind his spectacles, of timid gait, carrying historical documents containing unknown facts, all with the odor and savor of stirred-up archives, a vision of ancient life perceived by the piercing eye of philosophy.
Here were MM. Frederic Baudry, a member of the institute and director of the Mazarine Library; Georges Pouchet, professor of comparative anatomy in the Museum of Natural History; Claudius Popelin, the master enameler; Philippe Burty, writer, collector, art critic, of subtle and charming mind.
Then there was Alphonse Daudet, who brought the air of Paris, the living Paris, a lover of pleasure, brisk and gay. He would trace in a few words some infinitely droll silhouettes, walk over each and all with his charming irony, Southern and personal, accentuating the fine points of his lively mind with his attractiveness of face and gesture, as well as with the skill of his recitals, always composed like his written stories. His head, shapely and very fine, was covered with a mass of black hair falling to his shoulders, mingling with his curly beard, the pointed ends of which he often rolled between his fingers. His eye, long in cut but little open, sent forth a look as black as ink, vague sometimes, by reason of excessive short-sightedness. His voice sang a little; his gesture was lively, manner active; in short, he had all the signs of a son of the South.
Émile Zola enters in his turn, breathless from climbing the five stories, and always followed by his faithful son, Paul Alexis. He throws himself into an armchair and seeks, with a glance of his eye over the faces, the state of mind, the tone and nature of the talk. Seated a little at one side, one leg under him, holding his ankle in his hand, and speaking little, he listens attentively. Sometimes when literary enthusiasm, an artists’ muddle, carries them away, throwing them into excessive theories and paradoxes so dear to men of lively Imagination, he becomes restless, removes the leg, utters, from time to time, a “But — ” suppressed in the great uproar; then, when Flaubert’s lyric is over, he takes up the discussion tranquilly, in a calm voice and peaceable words. He is of medium height, a little stout, of gentlemanly and obstinate aspect. His head, much like those seen in old Italian paintings, without being beautiful shows a great character of power and intelligence. His short hair springs from a very well developed brow, and the straight nose stops as if cut short by a blow of the shears, too abruptly, above the lip shaded by a rather heavy black moustache. The lower part of the face is full but energetic, and is covered with a trimmer beard almost beautiful. His black, short-sighted, penetrating eye smiles often ironically, while a peculiar fold draws back the upper lip in a droll and mocking fashion.
Some others still arrive; here is the editor, Charpentier. Except for some white hairs among the long black locks, one might take him for a youth. He is a slender and handsome bachelor, with a thin pointed chin shaded blue from the closely shaved beard. He wears only a moustache. He laughs easily with a young and sceptical laugh, listens, and promises all that each writer asks of him, as they seize him and push him into a corner, recommending to him a thousand things. Here is the charming poet, Catulle Mendès, with the face of a sensual, seductive saint, whose silken beard and light hair surround, in a blonde cloud, a fine, pale face. An incomparable talker, a refined artist, subtle, seizing upon all the most fugitive literary sensations, he especially pleases Flaubert by the charm of his words and the delicacy of his mind. Here is Émile Bergerat, his brother-in-law, who married the second daughter of Théophile Gautier. Here is José-Maria Hérédia, that marvellous maker of sonnets, who will live as one of the most perfect poets of his time. Here are Huysmans, Hennique, Céard, and others still, Léon Cladel, the difficult and refined stylist, and Gustave Toudouze.
Then enters, almost always the last, a man of tall, thin figure, whose serious face, although often laughing, shows a great character of a high and noble order. He has long, grayish hair that has a faded appearance, a moustache a little lighter, still, and singular eyes whose pupils are strangely dilated. He has the aspect of a gentleman, that fine, nervous air of people of blood. He is (one can feel it) of the world, and of the best of it. It is Edmond de Goncourt. He advances holding in his hand a package of tobacco which he carefully guards while he extends to his friends his free hand.
The little drawing-room is overflowing. Some groups pass into the dining-room. It is then that one sees Gustave Flaubert.
With large gestures, by which he appears to fly, going about from one to another, crossing the apartment with a single step, his long robe swelling out behind him in his brusque movements like the brown sail of a fishing barque, full of exaltations, indignations, of vehement flames, of resounding eloquence, he amuses with his rage, his good nature, stupefies with his prodigious erudition, to which his surprising memory is an aid, terminates a discussion by a clear, profound word, runs through the centuries at a bound of thought to bring together two facts of the same order, two men of the same race, two lessons of the same nature, whence light would leap out as if flint struck flint.
Then the friends depart, one after another. He accompanies them into the anteroom where they chat a moment, each alone with him, shaking hands vigorously, tapping each other on the shoulder with a good, affectionate laugh. And when Zola, who was the last to leave, was gone, always followed by Paul Alexis, Flaubert slept an hour under a large canopy before changing his coat to call upon his friend, the Princess Mathilde, who received every Sunday.
He loved the world, although he grew indignant over some of the conversation in it; and he had for women a tender and paternal friendship, although he judged them severely at a distance and often repeated that phrase of Proudhon’s: “Woman is the desolation of the just”; he loved great luxury and sumptuous elegance; it was apparent, although he lived in the most simple manner possible.
Among his intimates he was gay and good. His powerful gayety seemed to have descended directly from the joviality of Rabelais. He loved farces and amusements throughout the whole year. He laughed often, with a contented, frank, deep laugh; and this laugh seemed even more natural to him, and more normal than his exasperation against humanity. He loved to receive his friends and to dine with them. When one went to see him at Croisset it was a great happiness for him, and he prepared the reception beforehand with a cordial and visible pleasure. He was a great eater and loved fine, delicate things for the table.
This sad misanthropy which has been so much spoken of was not innate with him, but came little by little from a permanent realization of human stupidity. His soul was naturally joyous and his heart full of generous impulses. In short, he loved to live and he lived fully, sincerely, as one can live with the French temperament, with which melancholy never takes the same desolating way that it does among certain Germans and certain Englishmen.
And now, is it not sufficient to have loved life with a long and powerful passion? He had it, this passion, until his death. He had given, from his youth up, all his life to letters, and he never took it away. He used his existence in this immoderate, exalted tenderness, passing feverish nights, like a lover, trembling with ardour, falling from fatigue after hours of taxing and violent love, and beginning again each morning from the time of his waking to give his thought to the well-beloved.
Finally, one day he fell, stricken, against the foot of his work-table, killed by HER, by LITERATURE; killed as are all great passionate souls by the passion that fires them.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
PREFACE
IN 1849 Flaubert, accompanied by his close friend and ardent admirer, Maxime Ducamp, set out for a lengthened tour in the East. That they might enjoy every facility for their expedition, Ducamp succeeded in obtaining governmental missions of a nominal nature for himself and his companion, Flaubert’s charge being the collection of any information that might be thought suitable for communication to the Chambers of Commerce. The two friends journeyed through Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, Syria, and Rhodes, and so home through Asia Minor, Turkey in Europe, and Greece. During all
the earlier portions of their travels, and in spite of the eagerness with which he had anticipated them, Flaubert displayed only listlessness and lack of curiosity, though, strange to say, the scenes which at that time impressed him so slightly came back to him afterwards with great vividness, and were of infinite service to him when writing Salammbô. On arriving in Greece, however, and finding himself surrounded by those historic scenes with which books had made him so familiar, a change came. His enthusiasm was kindled; he began to make notes; he resolved to write the tale of Thermopylae; (lxiii)
he laughed at difficulty and hardship, and flung himself, with all the ardour of which his nature was capable, into the enjoyment of the hour. It was a time which dwelt long in his memory; a gleam of light falling across his darkened life, to which in after days he was wont to look back with lingering regret.
On his return to France in 1851 Flaubert resumed his former life at Croisset, a house which had belonged to his father, near Rouen. Here for the most part he lived, working, feeling, remembering, distrusting, until 1857, when his first published work, Otiadame Bovary, made its appearance in the columns of the Revue de Paris, a journal established a few years before by some of his own friends. The story of the publication of this pitiless book, the hubbub it created, and the prosecution to which it gave rise, can’only be alluded to in passing. A fact, however, to be noted, is that it struck loudly the keynote of a new literary school. Flaubert may be called the creator of realism in modern French literature. For its subsequent development away from and down from himself he is, of course, in no way responsible. Indeed, seeing, as he did, much writing that he despised characterized as “realistic,” he shrank from the application of the epithet to his own books. Yet he was wrong. Realism in art is simply minute and impersonal presentation. Part of Flaubert’s work was anticipated by his predecessors. Scrupulosity of description is to be found in Balzac. Flaubert, taking up the work where Balzac laid it down, added impersonality and perfected the new literary creed.
It was a cardinal principle with him that to the reader the author should be altogether non-existent, that of his private views and feeling there should be absolutely no trace. Not a phrase, not an epithet must betray him. What he preached was the pure objectivity of literature. He conceived it to be the duty of an author to hold the mirror up to nature, but to be no less his duty sedulously to refrain from adding any comment on the reflections that he obtained. It was no part of art, as art, to teach. Any didactic face that it possessed, whether for good or evil, could inhere only in the facts themselves. And these facts must be scrupulously and faithfully portrayed. Flaubert, then, was undoubtedly a realist, and if we find him at times impatiently repudiating the title, it is because it had come to be frequently applied to men who were clever copyists — unimaginative though faithful presenters of fact — and little if anything more. But Flaubert himself was much more. He was a realist, it is true, but he was a great artist as well, — how great only those possessed of the literary sense and of some poetical feeling can fully know.
There is the same distinction between Flaubert’s work and that of many imitators of his method as there is between a waxen figure at Madame Tussaud’s and a masterpiece of portraiture by Millais. Both are truthful, both are real, but the one possesses what the other lacks — that power, namely, of stimulating the imagination which differences a picture from a design, or a description from a catalogue. Flaubert was no mere depicter of crude facts. A fact in itself was nothing to him. He held it valuable only in so far as it was capable, in combination with other facts, of assisting to set forth a picture that should be artistic as well as true. His works are constructions, not compilations.
Flaubert’s literary ideals were therefore two — Truth and Art — and his devotion to them guided and leavened his whole career. To attain to the first he shrank from no toil, and the subjects of most of his works were such as to render the most arduous toil necessary. His appetite for knowledge was Gargantuan. His researches were extraordinary and were sometimes so recondite as to be superfluous. He would ransack volumes to furnish forth the detail of a phrase, and his books bear testimony to his extraordinary capacity for assimilating and utilising the information that he acquired. Yet his writings are not the products of a pedant. Truth stood high in his estimation, but Art held a higher place still. Indeed he frequently dwelt upon its claims with an almost extravagantly enthusiastic insistence. “What is said is nothing; the manner in which it is said is everything. A work of art which seeks to prove anything fails from that very reason. A fine verse with no meaning is superior to one which is less fine and which has a meaning.” And in phrases such as these he frequently and passionately emphasised the necessity of perfection in form.
It is not surprising to find that to Flaubert, with his lofty ideas concerning art, writing was literally an anguish. His distress was no doubt partly the sad effect of nervous disease, and partly the outcome of that natural anxiety felt by many great writers respecting their work, and of the existence of which George Eliot’s experience affords a recent proof. To a very large extent, however, it proceeded from a peculiarly eager restlessness after an ideal perfection of form and phrase. “Style” was to him something lofty and. almost sacred. As commonly employed the term denotes a manner of writing characteristic of an individual. Flaubert understood it differently. Art, he believed, was impersonal. “Style,” accordingly, denoted not one method, but the only method, of expressing a given idea, and it was to the discovery of this intimate relationship between thought and speech that his mighty energies were directed. “Amid all these expressions,” he says, “all these forms and all these terms, there is but one expression, one turn, and one form to describe what I wish to say.”
The labour bestowed by Flaubert upon the execution of his work, was, therefore, as prodigious as that devoted to the accumulation of material for them. His letters to George Sand are studded with allusions to the “terrors of style,” and to his “literary agonies.” He considers the writing of twenty pages within a month as an extraordinary feat. He describes his work as being both a pleasure and a torture. He was harassed by an intense longing after an ideal perfection of style. His language must be at once the jxact and the harmonious expression of his thought.
Immediately after the publication of (Madame ‘Bovary, Flaubert set about the writing of Salammbô, which appeared in 1862. It is interesting to learn that he had intended his second book to be a reply to those critics who accused him of merely copying what he had seen and of being altogether incapable of invention. “No one,” he said, speaking of what he would put into his projected work, “shall accuse me of realism.” His purpose, however, was not fulfilled. Salammbô is to the full as realistic as (Madame ‘Bovary, the difference between the two consisting simply in the fact that whereas the author had actually seen the life depicted in the latter, that in the former had to be framed by his imagination out of the materials afforded him by long and painful study.
Salammbô must be regarded as Flaubert’s masterpiece. It is the book in which his powers found the freest scope, and in which he is at his best. It was, further, the book for which he himself entertained most affection, and so much was this the case that he would grow angry when people spoke of him as “the author of IMadame Hovary.”
In 1838 he had visited Tunis and the ruins of Carthage in order to prosecute his researches amid the very scenes in which the action of his story was to proceed, while the studies which he undertook to enable him to conjure up so vividly before us the events of a most obscure historical period were, to use a favourite expression of his own, “enormous.” His replies to Sainte-Beuve and Frcehner, contained in the appendix in Volurrçe II. of this edition of Salammbô, will give some idea of the conscientious care with which he executed his work, and which on this occasion was all the more honourable to him, seeing that the obscurity of his subject and the absence of general information about it, almost invited to a lax exercise of the imagination. He was true to
his principles, nevertheless, and was in a position to adduce authorities for every detail in his book, from the name of a god to the epithet given to a precious stone, and from the costume of Salammbô to the ingredients of a medicament. His critics certainly experienced le quart d’heure de Rabelais when he took up his pen to reply to them. Had some of them known th® man with whom they had to deal, their strictures would have been less sweeping, and they would have regarded him with a feeling of awe similar to that with which the accomplishments of our own Ben Jonson inspired the critics of his day.
It is no small merit in Salammbô that all its wealth of detail is rarely oppressive, and that the human interest distinctly dominates throughout.
Of the characters in the book the highest praise has generally been given to Hamilcar. He is certainly a grand creation. There is infinite art displayed in the manner in which his various qualities are contrasted with one another, and at the same time harmonised into a single living whole. His tender affection for his little son, his brutal treatment of his slaves, his generosity to the poor, his commercial dishonesty, his lofty scorn of the Ancients, and his faithless cruelty towards his vanquished foes, are all combined to form a portrait that is both congruous and real. Nevertheless I should, for my own part, be inclined to award the palm to Matho. Nothing could be more excellent than the delineation of this African Hercules. The savage simplicity of his nature is wrought out with marvellous skill. His utter lack of self-consciousness or self-restraint, his passionate tears and groans, his stupefaction at the sight of Salammbô, the fitful play of his moods in the tent scene, his dogged submission to his fate when he realizes that he can never again see the woman that he loves, — all his actions and feelings, from his first appearance in Hamilcar’s gardens down to the climax of his great agony in the presence of assembled Carthage, are depicted with a vividness so startling that the man seems to be living before our eyes. Such a character as this finds an excellent foil in the wily Greek, Spendius. Subtle, keen-witted, audacious, cowardly, he contrasts in every way with the simple, one- idead, brutally-brave Libyan, who, save on the one occasion when the ardour of his passion bears down all attempts at opposition, is as wax in his hands. Some of Flaubert’s most artistic touches are to be found in the contrasts suggested between these two widely different natures.
Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert Page 557
