Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert

by Gustave Flaubert

  Salammbô herself is the only unsatisfactory character in the book. She is an enigma. Flaubert himself recognised this, but the plea which he urged in excuse can scarcely be admitted. It may be true that we can have no intimate knowledge of the Eastern woman, but nevertheless if the actions of one are to be described at all, there should surely be some attempt to indicate their motives. Respecting Salammbô’s motives, however, we are left altogether in the dark. Her earlier conduct, indeed, is not wholly unintelligible. Her secluded life and burning religious enthusiasm might perhaps have induced that semi-ecstatic state which apparently is hers, a condition which almost defies analysis, and in which actions seem to be the creatures of wholly unaccountable impulses. But the description of her behaviour subsequent to her disillusion is disappointing.- There are incidents that seem to denote the dull, purposeless atony of despair, and others that point to a loss of religious faith. The gradual growth of a tender feeling towards Matho is also hinted at, but all is left in provoking uncertainty, and if her conduct is not inexplicable it is certainly not explained. Yet, in spite of all its defects, the portrait of Salammbô is a striking one. In the gardens among the soldiers, on the terrace invoking Tanith, with Matho in the tent, or bending down in the last scene towards the tortured man whose life she would now gladly save, she is very real to us. She may perplex us but she certainly lives. She is at once as vivid and as incomprehensible as a dream.

  The world in which these characters move is brought before us with a realism that is a triumph of art. We feel indeed as if we had been transported bodily into a new region. We are given no vague description of what once has been. We are placed in the centre of what, for the time being, actually is. The surroundings are by no means pleasant ones, it is true, and it is very possible to sympathise with the feeling which prompted Sainte-Beuve to declare that the atmosphere irritated him, and to deplore the absence of some character who might have bridged over the gulf lying between the ideas of Modern Europe and those of Ancient Carthage. Yet the existence of this very feeling is a testimony to Flaubert’s artistic skill. The people whom we are called upon to contemplate revolt us at every turn, but there is that in them, nevertheless, which compels us to recognise that they are our own flesh and blood. The inhuman humanity of the book tries us often as we read, but the pain that it causes us is in itself a proof of the author’s realistic power.

  Nothing can in fact exceed the vividness of the scenes described. Flaubert excels himself in this work as a metteur en scène. The bustling, selfish, immoral, superstitious town seems to live before us. The brutal, unsophisticated, credulous Mercenaries stare us in the face. We reel with the Barbarians at their feast; we hold our breath in agony as Matho makes his wondrous escape; we can see every incident in the siege; we shudder at the horrors of the Pass, and we are harrowed almost beyond endurance by the spectacle of Matho’s terrible end.

  It would be a graceless task to dwell upon the faults in such a book as this. Faults, of course, there are, for the greatest artist cannot command complete success. There are some improbabilities in the story, the most notable of which is, perhaps, Hanno’s escape from the camp at Sicca. Occasionally, too, insufficient regard is paid to the necessity of perspective, and the elaboration of detail for the purpose of producing a realistic effect is carried to an extreme which defeats its own object. Instances are the disaster to the woman and child in Chapter XIII., and the contest for the rat in Chapter IX. But, after all, the scratches at the base of a cathedral do not detract from the grandeur of the pile, and in spite of such relatively microscopic blemishes, Salammbô is a work which will always be noted for its grand simplicity and purity of diction, its artistic construction, its dramatic force, and its truth to humanity.

  Extract from ‘FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES’ by Arthur Symons

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  Salammbô is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told us, to ‘perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the modern novel.’ By the modern novel he means the novel as he had reconstructed it; he means Madame Bovary. That perfect book is perfect because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject suited to his method, had made his method and his subject one. On his scientific side Flaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps a more intimately personal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in a large, sweeping way. The lyric poet in him made La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, the analyst made L’Education Sentimentale; but in Madame Bovary we find the analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman, as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and observed in surroundings of the most ordinary kind. But Flaubert finds the romantic material which he loved, the materials of beauty, in precisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly. Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert’s rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric in his rendering of it.

  In writing Salammbô Flaubert set himself to renew the historical novel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted, doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible, by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of the reality of the things about us, only able to translate them approximately into any form of art. How much is left over, in the closest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a passing steamer, of one’s next-door neighbour, of the point of view of a foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one’s own state of mind, moment by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble Arch? Think, then, of the attempt to reconstruct no matter what period of the past, to distinguish the difference in the aspect of a world perhaps bossed with castles and ridged with ramparts, to two individualities encased within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his antiquity wisely: a period of which we know too little to confuse us, a city of which no stone is left on another, the minds of Barbarians who have left us no psychological documents. ‘Be sure I have made no fantastic Carthage,’ he says proudly, pointing to his documents; Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him with ‘the exact form of a door’; the Bible and Theophrastus, from which he obtains his perfumes and his precious stones; Gresenius, from whom he gets his Punic names; the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions. ‘As for the temple of Tanit, I am sure of having reconstructed it as it was, with the treatise of the Syrian Goddess, with the medals of the Duc de Luynes, with what is known of the temple at Jerusalem, with a passage of St. Jerome, quoted by Seldon (De Diis Syriis), with the plan of the temple of Gozzo, which is quite Carthaginian, and best of all, with the ruins of the temple of Thugga, which I have seen myself, with my own eyes, and of which no traveller or antiquarian, so far as I know, has ever spoken.’ But that, after all, as he admits (when, that is, he has proved point by point his minute accuracy to all that is known of ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to every indication which can serve for his guidance, his patience in grouping rather than his daring in the invention of action and details), that is not the question. ‘I care little enough for archæology! If the colour is not uniform, if the details are out of keeping, if the manners do not spring from the religion and the actions from the passions, if the characters are not consistent, if the costumes are not appropriate to the habits and the architecture to the climate, if, in a word, there is not harmony, I am in error. If not, no.’

  And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can give a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time a definition of the merit which sets Salammbô above all other historical novels. Everything in the book is strange, some of it might easily be bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony. The harmony is like
that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying its charm, or even the secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a monotony coiling perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its own. Or rather, it is like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite colours, firmly detached from a background of burning sky; a procession of Barbarians, each in the costume of his country, passes across the wall; there are battles, in which elephants fight with men; an army besieges a great city, or rots to death in a defile between mountains; the ground is paved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living burden, stand against the sky; a few figures of men and women appear again and again, expressing by their gestures the soul of the story.

  Flaubert himself has pointed, with his unerring self-criticism, to the main defect of his book: ‘The pedestal is too large for the statue.’ There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more about Salammbô. He declares: ‘There is not in my book an isolated or gratuitous description; all are useful to my characters, and have an influence, near or remote, on the action.’ This is true, and yet, all the same, the pedestal is too large for the statue. Salammbô, ‘always surrounded with grave and exquisite things,’ has something of the somnambulism which enters into the heroism of Judith; she has a hieratic beauty, and a consciousness as pale and vague as the moon whom she worships. She passes before us, ‘her body saturated with perfumes,’ encrusted with jewels like an idol, her head turreted with violet hair, the gold chain tinkling between her ankles; and is hardly more than an attitude, a fixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom one sees passing, with oblique eyes and mouths painted into smiles, their faces curiously traced into a work of art, in the languid movements of a pantomimic dance. The soul behind those eyes? the temperament under that at times almost terrifying mask? Salammbô is as inarticulate for us as the serpent, to whose drowsy beauty, capable of such sudden awakenings, hers seems half akin; they move before us in a kind of hieratic pantomime, a coloured, expressive thing, signifying nothing. Mâtho, maddened with love, ‘in an invincible stupor, like those who have drunk some draught of which they are to die,’ has the same somnambulistic life; the prey of Venus, he has an almost literal insanity, which, as Flaubert reminds us, is true to the ancient view of that passion. He is the only quite vivid person in the book, and he lives with the intensity of a wild beast, a life ‘blinded alike’ from every inner and outer interruption to one or two fixed ideas. The others have their places in the picture, fall into their attitudes naturally, remain so many coloured outlines for us. The illusion is perfect; these people may not be the real people of history, but at least they have no self-consciousness, no Christian tinge in their minds.

  ‘The metaphors are few, the epithets definite,’ Flaubert tells us, of his style in this book, where, as he says, he has sacrificed less ‘to the amplitude of the phrase and to the period,’ than in Madame Bovary. The movement here is in briefer steps, with a more earnest gravity, without any of the engaging weakness of adjectives. The style is never archaic, it is absolutely simple, the precise word being put always for the precise thing; but it obtains a dignity, a historical remoteness, by the large seriousness of its manner, the absence of modern ways of thought, which, in Madame Bovary, bring with them an instinctively modern cadence.

  Salammbô is written with the severity of history, but Flaubert notes every detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural things. A slave is being flogged under a tree: Flaubert notes the movement of the thong as it flies, and tells us: ‘The thongs, as they whistled through the air, sent the bark of the plane trees flying.’ Before the battle of the Macar, the Barbarians are awaiting the approach of the Carthaginian army. First ‘the Barbarians were surprised to see the ground undulate in the distance.’ Clouds of dust rise and whirl over the desert, through which are seen glimpses of horns, and, as it seems, wings. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the desert? The Barbarians watch intently. ‘At last they made out several transverse bars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser, larger; dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes came into view; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, “The Carthaginians!” arose.’ Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes, unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves, taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert puts himself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them as to see for them.

  Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will find that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its subject-matter. That style, which has almost every merit and hardly a fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of most writers careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire, and you will find that the aim of these writers has been to construct a style which shall be adaptable to every occasion, but without structural change; the cadence is always the same. The most exquisite word-painting of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm into English, without difficulty; once you have mastered the tune, you have merely to go on; every verse will be the same. But Flaubert is so difficult to translate because he has no fixed rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regular march-music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has no theory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a living thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and interprets. ‘If I call stones blue, it is because blue is the precise word, believe me,’ he replies to Sainte-Beuve’s criticism. Beauty comes into his words from the precision with which they express definite things, definite ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where the material is so hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheer exactitude which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure and order, seen equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage, at the time of their flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on the corpses of the Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains.

  1901.

  Extract from ‘ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE’ by Henry James

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  In the year 1877 Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend : “ You speak of Balzac’s letters. I read them when they appeared, but with very little enthusiasm. The man gains from them, but not the artist. He was too much taken up with business. You never meet a general idea, a sign of his caring for anything beyond his material interests. . . . What a lamentable life!” At the time the volumes appeared (the year before), he had written to Edmond de Goncourt: “ What a preoccupation with money and how little love of art! Have you noticed that he never once speaks of it? He strove for glory, but not for beauty.”

  The reader of Flaubert’s own correspondence,1 lately given to the world by his niece Madame Commanville and which in the fourth volume is brought to the eve of his death — the student of so much vivid and violent testimony to an intensely exclusive passion is moved to quote these words for the sake of contrast. It will not be said of the 1 Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert. Quatrieme Serie. Paris, 1893.

  writer that he himself never once speaks of art; it will be said of him with a near approach to truth that he almost never once speaks of anything else. The effect of contrast is indeed strong everywhere in this singular publication, from which Flaubert’s memory receives an assault likely to deepen the air of felicity missed that seemed destined henceforth to hang over his personal life. “ May I be skinned alive,” he writes in 1854, “before I ever turn my private feelings to. literary account.” His constant refrain in his letters is the impersonality, as he calls it, of the artist, whose work should consist exclusively of his subject and his style, without an emotion, an idiosyncrasy that is not utterly transmuted. Quotation does but scanty justice to his rage for this idea; almost all his feelings were such a rage that we wonder what form they would have borrowed from a prevision of such posthumous betrayal. “ It’s one of my principles that one must never write down one’s self. The artist must be present in his work like God
in Creation, invisible and almighty, everywhere felt but nowhere seen.” Such was the part he allotted to form, to that rounded detachment which enables the perfect work to live by its own life, that he regarded as indecent and dishonourable the production of any impression that was not intensely calculated. “ Feelings “ were necessarily crude, because they were inevitably unselected, and selection (for the picture’s sake) was Flaubert’s highest morality.

  This principle has been absent from the counsels of the editor of his letters, which have been given to the world, so far as they were procurable, without attenuation and without scruple. There are many of course that circumstances have rendered inaccessible, but in spite of visible gaps the revelation is full enough and remarkable enough. These communications would of course not have been matter for Flaubert’s highest literary conscicnce; but the fact remains that in our merciless age ineluctable fate has overtaken the man in the world whom we most imagine gnashing his teeth under it. His ideal of dignity, of honour and renown, was that nothing should be known of him but that he had been an impeccable writer. “ I feel all the same,” he wrote in 1852, “that I shall not die before I’ve set a - roaring somewhere (sans avoir fait rugir quclque part) such a style as hums in my head and which may very well overpower the sound of the parrots and grasshoppers.” This is a grievous accident for one who could write that “ The worship of art contributes to pride, and of pride one has never too much.” Sedentary, cloistered, passionate, cynical, tormented, in his love of magnificent expression, of subjects remote and arduous, with an unattainable ideal, he kept clear all his life of vulgarity and publicity and newspaperism only to be dragged after death into the middle of the market-place, where the electric light beats fiercest. Madame Commanville’s publication hands him over to the Philistines with every weakness exposed, every mystery dispelled, every secret betrayed. Almost the whole of her second volume, to say nothing of a large part of her first, consists of his love-letters to the only woman he appears to have addressed in the accents of passion. His private style moreover was as unchastened as his final form was faultless. The result happens to be deeply interesting to the student of the famous “ artistic temperament “; it can scarcely be so for a reader less predisposed, I think, for Flaubert was a writers’ writer as much as Shelley was a “ poets’ poet”; but we may ask ourselves if the time has not come when it may well cease to be a leading feature of our homage to a distinguished man that we shall sacrifice him with sanguinary rites on the altar of our curiosity. Flaubert’s letters indeed bring up with singular intensity the whole question of the rights and duties, the decencies and discretions of the insurmountable desire to know. To lay down a general code is perhaps as yet impossible, for there is no doubt that to know is good, or to want to know, at any rate, supremely natural. Some day or other surely we shall all agree that everything is relative, that facts themselves are often falsifying and that we pay more for some kinds of knowledge than those particular kinds are worth. Then we shall perhaps be sorry to have had it drummed into us that the author of calm, firm masterpieces, of Madame Bovary, of Salammbo, of Saint - JuHcn VHospitalier, was narrow and noisy and had not personally and morally, as it were, the great dignity of his literary ideal.