A Note on Flaubert

IN his essay on Gustave Flaubert Mr. Henry James, Jr., states the undisputed fact that Madame Bovary, the author’s first novel, has remained altogether his best. As for Salammbô, La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, L’Education Sentimentale, and Trois Contes, to say nothing of the posthumous work, Bouvard et Pécuehet, Mr. James was right in saying that “ the mass of the public finds them dull, and wonders how a writer can expend such an immensity of talent in making himself unreadable.”

In his essay on Salammbô, SainteBeuve concluded by begging Flaubert to return to modern life and write another novel, strong, powerful, living, finely observed, in the realistic vein of Madame Bovary, though with more sympathy for humanity, and with a larger acknowledgment of its good sides. Let M. Flaubert, he said, relax his style and method. In Salammbô, Sainte-Beuve complained, the enchanter never appears. “ Effort, labor, combination, are evident even in those parts where the talent of the author is most eminent. Oh, how much more facile are the inventions of genius! By genius I mean something felicitous, easy, trouvé. This is the kind of unforeseen that one loves. The unforeseen in M. Flaubert’s work is forced, sought after, worked up, achieved by digging and delving, and much more strange and odd than original.” Apart from one’s own personal impressions in reading Flaubert, it would be easy to multiply citations from the critics to the same effect. Now, as years go by, it seems more and more certain that of all Flaubert’s work Madame Bovary alone has elements of immortality. But how was it that the man who could write that work could produce nothing afterwards that approached it ? How did it happen that in his later works the toil and effort with which they were written became more and more evident ?

The few persons who were intimate with Flaubert during his life-time knew where to seek the explanation of this immobilization of bis talent. But they kept the secret to themselves, and it is only within the past few weeks that that secret has been revealed to the public by a man who was intimate with Flaubert from his youth, M. Maxime du Camp, of the French Academy. In his recently published Literary Souvenirs, M. du Camp devotes half, and certainly the most interesting half, of his volume to Gustave Flaubert.¹ The two men became acquainted at Paris in 1842. Flaubert was then about twenty, and had come to Paris to study law, in accordance with the desire of his parents. He was a splendidly handsome fellow, of gigantic stature, with blue eyes, an abundant golden blonde beard, a voice like a trumpet, excessive in his gestures and violent in his laughter, — a sort of Gaulish chieftain. At that early age his intellectual development was extraordinary and his memory prodigious. As regards acquirements, M. Maxime du Camp says he was a sort of walking dictionary. At that time he had written a novel of psychological analysis, a sort of moral autobiography, called November, produced under the stylistic influence of Châteaubriand and Edgar Quinet, with whose works he was then impregnated.

“It has been said,” writes M. du Camp, “ that Flaubert was a realist, a naturalist; he has been regarded as a sort of literary surgeon, dissecting passion and making a post-mortem examination of the human heart, He was himself the first to smile at this idea ; he was a lyric. He had arrived at this singular theory, that the most harmonious word is always the right word ; he sacrificed everything to the harmony of his phrases, sometimes even grammar. He used often to repeat, ‘ What you say is nothing; it is the way you say It. A work of art that seeks to prove something is null for that very reason ; a fine verse that signifies nothing is superior to a less fine verse that signifies something. Without form there is no salvation ; whatever be the subject of a book, it is good if it allows the use of fine language.’ From the day when he took up a pen to the hour when death broke it in his hand, Flaubert was a workman of art for art’s sake.”

At this time, M. du Camp tells us, Flaubert was meditating two works : one an Oriental tale, several episodes of which he had prepared, and which were crystallized in Salammbô; the other a Dictionary of Received Ideas, a repertory of commonplaces, prudhommismes, and stupidities, which afterwards found their place in the character of Homais in Madame Bovary, and in Bouvard et Pécuchet. Flaubert, although he had filled volume after volume in copying out his legal text-books, — this was his way of studying, — failed to pass his examination. He was pitilessly rejected, and this was the end of his student life. In August, 1843, he left Paris, and returned to his home at Rouen, apparently in the most perfect health and vigor. In the month of October of the same year he was struck, suddenly and without the slightest premonitory symptoms, by epilepsy. Flaubert remained to the end of his life subject to these terrible nervous paroxysms. He rarely dared to go out except in a carriage, and often he passed whole months in his cottage at Croisset, near Rouen, without even going down into his garden. He felt secure only in his own rooms. He became shy and solitary.

“One becomes accustomed to everything,” continues M. du Camp, “ even to the terror, even to that permanent anguish, that grips the heart in prevision of a certain danger whose hour is unknown ; and so Flaubert was able, later on, to accustom himself to the constant uneasiness that tormented him. He made himself some relations, and entered once more into common life up to a certain point. ... If this nervous affection had resulted only in increasing his natural shyness, the inconvenience would have been slight; but it had a far graver influence upon him, — an influence which only those who were intimate with him then could see. I have said that at the age of twenty Flaubert had an exceptional intellectual development. He was very strange, original in an excellent way, open to things, and appropriating them with extraordinary rapidity. His stock of reading was already considerable, and his memory had been abundantly stored. He worked with facility. . . . When his nervous system lost its balance, and inflicted upon him the terrible torture in question, Flaubert stopped; his intellectual skein became suddenly tangled ; he remained stationary. His memory, once so exact and faithful, began to fail him ; he lost the curiosity of his youth, and restricted his field of action more and more to his reverie of the moment. . . . From this time dates the inconceivable difficulty he experienced in working, a difficulty that he seemed to study to increase, and of which he finally became proud. He loved to show those pages covered with erasures which, sometimes, he had the greatest trouble in making out himself. This was due to the fact that his conceptions were confused, and that he succeeded only in clarifying them by the execution. Often Flaubert wrote to me, ‘ I am weary to death; I have written twenty pages this month, an enormous quantity for me.’ This was true, but these twenty pages represented a hundred and fifty, written and rewritten, and which in the end perhaps reproduced the work that was accomplished at the beginning. He was like Penelope: he kept incessantly weaving tire same woof, destroying one day the work of the previous day, only in order to begin it over again. The more lie advanced in life the greater this difficulty became. He bad written November in two months ; he employed five years in writing bis novel of Bouvard et Pecuchet, which he left unfinished, and which is hardly any longer.”

One other extract from M. du Camp’s Souvenirs Littéraires will complete this sad physiological explanation of Gustave Flaubert’s literary career. We translate simply, without comment. The reader who is familiar with Flaubert’s works will be able to comment for himself. “ Such,” M. du Camp goes on to say, — " such as I found Flaubert in February, 1844, in his little chamber in the Hôtel-Dieu at Rouen, such he was destined to be for the rest of his life. Ten, twenty, years afterwards. on the eve of his death, he repeated the same jokes that used to amuse us then : he became enthusiastic over the same books, admired the same verses, sought the same comic effects, had the same infatuations, and, in spite of the real chastity of his life, took pleasure in a kind of reading whose coarse stupidity never came to disgust him. Often and often, we, his old friends, the companions of his youth, the confidents of his earliest aspirations, were surprised to see that no progress had taken place within him, that his considerable faculties had not acquired the amplitude that they promised, and that he kept turning invariably in the same circle, — the circle that we knew. He seems to have had all his conceptions by his twentieth year, and to have spent his whole life in giving body to them.” In 1843 Flaubert described to M. du Camp the plan of the novel of Bouvard et Pécuchet, which death prevented him from finishing some thirtyfive years afterwards. He had remained stationary ever since then, a giant stunted in his growth. “ My conviction is immutable,” concludes M. du Camp : “ Gustave Flaubert was a writer of rare talent. If it had not been for the nervous malady that seized him at the outset of his youth, he would have been a man of genius.”