[387] Perhaps I may add another subject for those who like it. "Both Manon and Iza do _prefer_, and so to speak only _love_, the one lover.
Does this in Iza"s case aggravate, or does it partially redeem, her general behaviour?" A less disputable addition, for the reason given above, may be a fairly long note on the author"s work outside of fiction.
[Sidenote: Note on Dumas _fils"_ drama, etc.]
With the drama which has received such extraordinary encomia (the great name of Moliere having even been brought in for comparison) I have no exhaustive acquaintance; but I have read enough not to wish to read any more. If the huge prose tirades of _L"etrangere_ bore me (as they do) in the study, what would they do on the stage, where long speeches, not in great poetry, are always intolerable? (I have always thought it one of the greatest triumphs of Madame Sarah Bernhardt that, at the very beginning of her career, she made the heroine of this piece--_if_ she did so--interesting.) Over the _Fils Naturel_ I confess that even I, who have struggled with and mastered my thousands, if not my tens of thousands, of books, broke down hopelessly. _Francillon_ is livelier, and might, in the earlier days, have made an amusing novel. But discounting, judicially and not prejudicially, the excessive laudation, one sees that even here he did what he meant to do, and though there is higher praise than that, it is praise only too seldom deserved. As for his Prefaces and Pamphlets, I think nearly as much must be granted; and I need not repeat what has been said above on the other side. The charity "puff" of _Les Madeleines Repenties_ is an admirable piece of rhetoric not seldom reaching eloquence; and it has the not unliterary side-interest of suggesting the question whether its ironic treatment of the general estimate of the author as Historiographer Royal to the venal Venus is genuine irony, or a mere mask for annoyance. The Preface to the dreary _Fils Naturel_ (it must be remembered that Alexander the Younger himself was originally illegitimate and only later legitimated), though rhetorical again, is not dreary at all. It contains a very agreeable address to his father--he was always agreeable, though with a suspicion of rather amusing patronage-upside-down, on this subject--and a good deal else which one would have been sorry to lose. In fact, I can see, even in the dramas, even in the prose pamphleteering, whether the matter gives me positive delight or not, evidence of that _competence_, that not so seldom mastery, of treatment which ent.i.tles a man to be considered not the first comer by a long way.
[388] The obliging gentleman who on this occasion plays the part of "subst.i.tute" in a cricket-match, is the most elaborate and confessed example of Dumas" "theorised" _men_. He is what the seedsmen call an "improved Valmont," with more of lion in him than to meddle with virgins, but absolutely destructive to d.u.c.h.esses and always ready to suggest subst.i.tution to distressed gra.s.s-widows.
CHAPTER XI
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
[Sidenote: The contrast of Flaubert and Dumas _fils_.]
In doing, as may at least be hoped, justice to M. Alexandre Dumas _fils_ in the last chapter, one point was excepted--that though I could rank him higher than I ever expected to do as a novelist, I could not exactly rank his work in the highest range of literature. When you compare him--not merely with those greatest in novel-work already discussed, but with Musset or Vigny, with Nodier, or with Gerard de Nerval, not to mention others, there is something which is at once "weird and wanting,"
as the admirable Captain Mayne Reid says at the beginning of _The Headless Horseman_, though one cannot say here, as there, "By Heavens!
it is "the head!"" There is head enough of a kind--a not at all unkempt or uncomely headpiece, very well filled with brains. But it has no aureole, as the other preferred persons cited in the last sentence and earlier have. This aureole may be larger or smaller, brighter or less bright--a full circlet of unbroken or hardly broken splendour, or a sort of will-o"-the-wisp cl.u.s.ter of gleam and darkness. But wherever it is found there is, in differing degrees, _literature_ of the highest cla.s.s; of the major prose _gentes_; literature that can show itself with poetry, under its own conditions and with its own possibilities, and fear no disqualification. Of this I am bound to say I do not find very much in this second division of our volume, and I find none in Dumas _fils_. But I find a great deal more than in any one else in Gustave Flaubert.
[Sidenote: Some former dealings with him.]
As I have said this, the reader may expect, magisterially, dreadingly, or perhaps in some very "gentle" cases hopefully, a full chapter on Flaubert. He shall have it. But the same cause, or group of causes, which has been at work before prevents this from being a very long one, and from containing very full accounts of his novels. One of the longest and most careful of those detailed surveys of forty years ago, to which I have perhaps too often referred, was devoted to Flaubert, and was slightly supplemented after his death. The earlier form had, though I did not know it for a considerable time, not displeased himself--a fortunate result not too common between author and critic[389]--and there are, consequently, special reasons for leaving it unaltered and unrehashed. I shall, therefore, as with Balzac and Dumas, attempt a shorter but more general judgment, which--his work being so much less voluminous than theirs--may be perhaps even less extensive than in the other cases,[390] but which should leave no doubt as to the writer"s opinion of his "place in the story."
[Sidenote: His style.]
No small part of that high claim to purely literary rank which has been made for him rests, of course, upon his mere style--that famous and much debated "chase of the single word" which, especially since Mr. Pater took up the discussion of it, has been a "topic" of the most usitate in England as well as in France. When I left my chair and my library at Edinburgh I burnt more lecture-notes on the subject than would have furnished material for an entire chapter here, and I have no intention of raking my memory for their ashes. The battle on the one side with the anti-Unitarians who regard "monology" as a fond thing vainly invented, and on the other with Edmond de Goncourt"s foolish and b.u.mptious boast that Flaubert"s epithets were not so "personal" as his own and his brother"s, would be for a different division of literary history. But there is something--a very important, though not a very long something--which must be said on the subject here. I have never found myself in the very slightest degree _gene_--as the _abonne_ was by Gautier"s and as others are by the styles of Mr. George Meredith and Mr.
Henry James--by Flaubert"s style. It has never put the very smallest impediment, effected the most infinitesimal delay, in my comprehension of his meaning, or my enjoyment of his art and of his story.[391] What is more, though it has intensified that enjoyment, it has never--as may perhaps have been the case with some other great "stylists"--_diverted_, a little illegitimately, my attention and fruition from the story itself. Style-craft and story-craft have married each other so perfectly that they are one flesh for the lover of literature to rejoice in. And if there be higher praise than this to be bestowed in the cases and circ.u.mstances, I do not know what it is. It seems to belong in perfection--I do not deny it to others in lesser degree--to three writers only in this volume--Gautier, Merimee, and Flaubert--though if any one pleads hard for the addition of Maupa.s.sant, it will be seen when we come to him that I am not bound to a rigid _non possumus_; and though there is still one living writer with whom, if he were not happily disqualified by the fact of his living, I should not refuse to complete the Pentad. But let this suffice for the mere point of style in its purer and therefore more controversial aspect. There may be a little more to say incidentally as we take the general survey under the old heads of plot, etc. But before doing this we must--the books being so few and so individually remarkable--say a little about each of them, though only a very little about one.
[Sidenote: The books--_Madame Bovary_.]
Flaubert, after fairly early promise, the fulfilment of which was postponed, began late, and was a man of eight and thirty when his first complete book, _Madame Bovary_, appeared in 1859--a year, with its predecessor 1858, among the great years of literature, as judged by the books they produced. An absurd prosecution was got up against it by the authorities of that most moral of _regimes_, the Second Empire, with the even more absurd result of a "not guilty, but please don"t do anything of the kind again" judgment. This, however, belongs mostly--not (_v.
inf._) entirely--to the biographical part of the matter, with which we have little or nothing to do.[392] The book itself is, beyond all question, a great novel--if it had a greater subject[393] it would have been one of the greatest of novels. The immense influence of _Manon Lescaut_ appears once more in it; but Emma Bovary, with far more than all the bad points of Manon, has none of her good ones. Nor has she the half-redeeming greatness in evil of her somewhat younger sister Iza in _Affaire Clemenceau_. Except her physical beauty (of which we do not hear much), there is not one attractive point in her. She sins, not out of pa.s.sion, but because she thinks a married woman ought to have lovers.
She ruins her husband, not for any intrinsic and genuine love of splendour, luxury, or beauty, but because other women have things and she ought to have them. She has a taste _for_ men, but none _in_ them.
Yet her creator has made her absolutely "real," and, sc.u.m of womanhood as she is, has actually evolved something very like tragedy out of her worthlessness, and has saved her from being detestable, because she is such a very woman. He has, indeed, subjected her to a _kenosis_, an evisceration, exantlation--or, in plain English, "emptying out"--of everything positively good (she has the negative but necessary salve of not being absolutely ill-natured) that can be added to an abstract pretty girl; and no more. I have paid a little attention to the heroines of the greater fiction; but she is the only one of all the _mille e tre_ I know whom the author has managed to present as acceptable, without its being in the least possible to fall in love with her, and at the same time without its being necessary to detest her.
This defiant and victorious naturalness--not "naturalism"--pervades the book: from the other main characters--the luckless, brainless, tasteless, harmless husband; the vulgar Don Juans of lovers; the apothecary Homais[394]--one of the most original and firmly drawn characters in fiction--from all, down to the merest "supers." It floods the scene-painting (admirable in itself) with a light of common day--not too cheerful, but absolutely real. It animates the conversation, though Flaubert is not exactly prodigal of this;[395] and it presides over the weaving of the story as such in a fashion very little, if at all, inferior to that which prevails in the very greatest masters of pure story-telling.
[Sidenote: _Salammbo._]
Hardly any one, speaking critically, could, I suppose, also speak thus positively about Flaubert"s second book, _Salammbo_--a romance of Carthaginian history at the time of the Mutiny of the Mercenaries. Even Sainte-Beuve--no weak-stomached reader--was put off by its blotches of blood and grime, and by the sort of ghastly gorgeousness which, if it does not "relieve" these, forms a kind of background to throw them up.
It was violently attacked by clever carpers like M. de Pontmartin, by eccentrics of half-genius and whole prejudice like M. Barbey d"Aurevilly, and by dull pedants like M. Saint-Rene Taillandier; while it may be questioned whether, to the present day, its friends have not mostly belonged to that "Save-me-from-them" cla.s.s which simply extols the "unpleasant" because other people find it unpleasant.[396] For my own part, I did not enjoy it much at the very first; but I felt its power at once, and, as always happens in such cases when admiration does not come from the tainted source just glanced at, the enjoyment increased, and the sense of power increased with it, the "unpleasantness," as a known thing, becoming merely "discountable" and disinfected. The book can, of course, never rank with _Madame Bovary_, because it is a _tour de force_ of abnormality--a thing incompatible with that highest art which consists in the transformation and transcendentalising of the ordinary. The leprosies, and the crucifixions, and the sorceries, and the rest of it are ugly; but then Carthage _was_ ugly, as far as we know anything about it.[397] Salammbo herself is shadowy; but how could a Carthaginian girl be anything else?
The point to consider is the way in which all this unfamiliar, uncanny, unpleasant stuff is _fused_ by sheer power of art into something which has at least the reality of a bad dream--which, as most people know, is a very real thing indeed while it lasts, and for a little time after. It increases the wonder--though to me it does not increase the interest--to know that Flaubert took the most gigantic pains to make his task as difficult as possible by acquiring and piecing together the available knowledge on his subject. This process--the ostensible _sine qua non_ of "Realism" and "Naturalism"--will require further treatment. It is almost enough for the present to say that, though not a novelty, it had been, and for the matter of that has been, rarely a success. It has, as was pointed out before, spoilt most cla.s.sical novels, reaching its acme of boredom in the German work of Ebers and Dahn; and it has scarcely ever been very successful, even in the hands of Charles Reade, who used it "with a difference." But it can hardly be said to have done _Salammbo_ much harm, because the "fusing" process which is above referred to, and to which the imported elements are often so rebellious, is here perfectly carried out. You may not like the colour and shape of the ingot or cast; but there is nothing in it which has not duly felt and obeyed the fire of art.
[Sidenote: _L"education Sentimentale._]
That there was no danger of Flaubert"s merely palming off, in his novel work, replicas with a few superficial differences, had now been shown.
It was further established by his third and longest book, _L"education Sentimentale_. This was not only, as the others had been, violently attacked, but was comparatively little read--indeed it is the only one of his books, with the usual exception of _Bouvard et Pecuchet_, which has been called, by any rational creature, dull. I do not find it so; but I confess that I find its intrinsic interest, which to me is great, largely enhanced by its unpopularity--which supplies a most remarkable pendant to that of _Jonathan Wild_, and is by no means devoid of value as further ill.u.s.trating the cause of the very limited popularity of Thackeray, and even of the rarity of whole-hearted enthusiasm for Swift.
Satire is allowed to be a considerable, and sometimes held to be an attractive, branch of literature. But when you come to a.n.a.lyse the actual sources of the attraction, it is to be feared that you will generally find them to lie outside of the pure exposure of general human weaknesses. A very large proportion of satire is personal, and personality is always popular. Satire is very often "naughty," and "naughtiness" is to a good many, _qua_ naughtiness, "nice." It lends itself well to rhetoric; and there is no doubt, whatever superior persons may say of it, that rhetoric _does_ "persuade" a large portion of the human race. It is constantly a.s.sociated with directly comic treatment, sometimes with something not unlike tragedy; and while the first, if of any merit, is sure, the second has a fair though more restricted chance, of favourable reception. Try Aristophanes, Horace, Juvenal, Lucian, Martial; try the modern satirists of all kinds, and you will always find these secondary sources of enjoyment present.
There is hardly one of them--if one--to be found in _L"education Sentimentale_. It is simply a panorama of human folly, frailty, feebleness, and failure--never permitted to rise to any great heights or to sink to any infernal depths, but always maintained at a probable human level. We start with Frederic Moreau as he leaves school at the correct age of eighteen. I am not sure at what actual age we leave him, though it is at some point or other of middle life, the most active part of the book filling about a decade. But "vanity is the end of all his ways," and vanity has been the beginning and middle of them--a perfectly quiet and everyday kind of vanity, but vain from centre to circ.u.mference and entire surface. He (one cannot exactly say "tries," but) is brought into the possibility of trying love of various kinds--illegitimate-romantic, legitimate-not-unromantic, illegitimate-professional but not disagreeable, illegitimate-conventional.
Nothing ever "comes off" in a really satisfactory fashion. He is "exposed" (in the photographic-plate sense) to all, or nearly all, the influences of a young man"s life in Paris--law, literature, art, insufficient means, quite sufficient means, society, politics--including the Revolution of 1848--enchantments, disenchantments--_tout ce qu"il faut pour vivre_--to alter a little that stock expression for "writing materials" which is so common in French. But he never can get any real "life" out of any of these things. He is neither a fool, nor a cad, nor anything discreditable or disagreeable. He is "only an or"nary person,"
to reach the rhythm of the original by adopting a slang form in not quite the slang sense. And perhaps it is not unnatural that other ordinary persons should find him too faithful to their type to be welcome. In this respect at least I may claim not to be ordinary. One goes down so many empty wells, or wells with mere rubbish at the bottom of them, that to find Truth at last is to be happy with her (without prejudice to the convenience of another well or two here and there, with an agreeable Falsehood waiting for one). I do not know that _L"education Sentimentale_ is a book to be read very often; one has the substance in one"s own experience, and in the contemplation of other people"s, too readily at hand for that to be necessary or perhaps desirable. But a great work of art which is also a great record of nature is not too common--and this is what it is.
[Sidenote: _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_.]
Yet, as has been remarked before, nothing shows Flaubert"s greatness better than his absolute freedom from the "rut." Even in carrying out the general "Vanity" idea he has no monotony. The book which followed _L"education_ had been preluded, twenty years earlier, by some fragments in _L"Artiste_, a periodical edited by Gautier. But _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_, when it finally appeared, far surpa.s.sed the promise of these specimens. It is my own favourite among its author"s books; and it is one of those which you can read merely for enjoyment or take as a subject of study, just as you please--if you are wise you will give "five in five score" of your attentions to the latter occupation and the other ninety-five to the former. The people who had made up their minds to take Flaubert as a sort of Devil"s Gigadibs--a "Swiss, not of Heaven," but of the other place, hiring himself out to war on all things good--called it "an attack on the idea of G.o.d"! As it, like its smaller and later counterpart _Saint Julien l"Hospitalier_, ends in a manifestation of Christ, which would do honour to the most orthodox of Saints" Lives, the "attack" seems to be a curious kind of offensive operation.
As a matter of fact, the book takes its vaguely familiar subject, and _embroiders_ that subject with a fresh collection of details from untiring research. The nearest approach to an actual person, besides the tormented Saint himself, is the Evil One, not at first _in propria persona_, but under the form of the Saint"s disciple Hilarion, who at first acts as usher to the various elements of the Temptation-Pageant, and at last reveals himself by treacherous suggestions of unbelief. The pageant itself is of wonderful variety. After a vividly drawn sketch of the hermitage in the Thebaid, the drama starts with the more vulgar and direct incitements to the coa.r.s.er Deadly Sins and others--Gluttony, Avarice, Ambition, Luxury. Then Hilarion appears and starts theological discussion, whence arises a new series of actual visions--the excesses of the heretics, the degradation of martyrdom itself, the Eastern theosophies, the monstrous cults of Paganism. After this, Hilarion tries a sort of Modernism, contrasting the contradictions and absurdities of actual religions with a more and more atheistic Pantheism. This failing, the Temptation reverts to the moral forms, Death and Vice contending for Anthony and bidding against each other. The next shift of the kaleidoscope is to semi-philosophical fantasies--the Sphinx, the Chimaera, basilisks, unicorns, microscopic mysteries. The Saint is nearly bewildered into blasphemy; but at last the night wanes, the sun rises, and the face of Christ beams from it. The Temptation is ended.[398]
The magnificence of the style, in which the sweep of this dream-procession over the stage is conveyed to the reader, is probably the first thing that will strike him; and certainly it never palls. But, if not at once, pretty soon, any really critical mind must perceive something different from, and much rarer than, mere style. It is the extraordinary power--the exactness, finish, and freedom from any excess or waste labour, of the narrative, in reproducing dream-quality. A very large proportion--and there is nothing surprising in the fact--of the best pieces of ornate prose in French, as well as in English, are busied with dreams; but the writers have not invariably remembered one of the most singular--and even, when considered from some points of view, disquieting--features of a dream,--that you are never, while dreaming, in the least surprised at what happens. Flaubert makes no mistake as to this matter. The real realism which had enabled him to re-create the most sordid details of _Madame Bovary_, the half-historic grime and gorgeousness mixed of _Salammbo_, and the quintessentially ordinary life of _L"education_, came mightily to his a.s.sistance in this his Vision of the Desert. You see and hear its external details as Anthony saw and heard them: you almost feel its internal influence as if Hilarion had been--as if he _was_--at your side.
[Sidenote: _Trois Contes._]
The _Trois Contes_ which followed, and which practically completed (except for letters) Flaubert"s finished work in literature,[399] have one of those half-extrinsic interests which, once more, it is the duty of the historian to mention. They show that although, as has been said, Flaubert suffered from no monotony of faculty, the range of his faculty--or rather the range of the subjects to which he chose to apply it--was not extremely wide. Of the twin stories, _Un Coeur Simple_ is, though so unlike in particular, alike in general _ordinariness_ to _Madame Bovary_ and _L"education Sentimentale_. The unlikeness in particular is very striking, and shows that peculiar _victoriousness_ in accomplishing what he attempted which is so characteristic of Flaubert.
It is the history-no-history of a Norman peasant woman, large if simple of heart, simple and not large of brain, a born drudge and prey to unscrupulous people who come in contact with her, and almost in her single person uniting the Beat.i.tudes of the Sermon on the Mount. I admire it now, without even the touch of rather youthful impatience which used, when I read it first, to temper my admiration. It is not a _berquinade_, because a _berquinade_ is never quite real. _Un Coeur Simple_ shares Flaubert"s Realism as marvellously as any equal number of pages of either of the books to which I have compared it. But there _is_, perhaps, something provocative--something almost placidly insolent--about the way in which the author says, "Now, I will give you nothing of the ordinary baits for admiration, and yet, were you the Devil himself, you shall admire me." And one does--in youth rather reluctantly--not so in age.
_Herodias_ groups itself in the same general fashion, but even more definitely in particulars, with _Salammbo_--of which, indeed, it is a sort of miniature replica cunningly differentiated. Anybody can see how easily the story of the human witchcraft of Salome, and the decollation of the Saint, and the mixture of terror and gorgeousness in the desert fortress, parallel the Carthaginian story. But I do not know whether it was deliberate or unconscious repet.i.tion that made Flaubert give us something like a duplicate of the suffete Hanno in Vitellius. There is no lack of the old power, and the shortness of the story is at least partly an advantage. But perhaps the Devil"s Advocate, borrowing from, but reversing, Hugo on Baudelaire, might say, "Ce frisson _n"est pas_ nouveau."
The third story, _Saint Julien l"Hospitalier_, has always seemed to me as near perfection in its own kind as anything I know in literature, and one of the best examples, if not the very best example, of that adaptableness of the _Acta Sanctorum_ to modern rehandling of the right kind, which was noticed at the beginning of this _History_.[400] The excessive devotion of the not yet sainted Julian to sport; the crime and the dooms that follow it; the double parricide which he commits under the false impression that his wife has been unfaithful to him; his self-imposed penance of ferrying, somewhat like Saint Christopher, and the trial--a harder one than that good giant bore, for Julian has, not merely to carry over but, to welcome, at board _and_ bed, a leper--and the Transfiguration and a.s.sumption that conclude the story, give some of the best subjects--though there are endless others nearly or quite as good--in Hagiology. And Flaubert has risen to them in the miraculous manner in which he could rise, retaining the strangeness, infusing the reality, and investing the whole with the beauty, deserved and required.
There is not a weak place in the whole story; but the strongest places are, as they should be, the ma.s.sacre of hart, hind, and fawn which brings on the curse; the ghastly procession of the beasts Julian has slain or _not_ slain (for he has met with singular ill-luck); the final "Translation."[401] Nowhere is Flaubert"s power of description greater; nowhere, too, is that other power noticed--the removal of all temptation to say "Very pretty, but rather _added_ ornament"--more triumphantly displayed.
[Sidenote: _Bouvard et Pecuchet._]
Little need be said of the posthumous torso and failure,[402] _Bouvard et Pecuchet_. Nothing ever showed the wisdom of the proverb about half-done work, children and fools, better; and, alas! there is something of the child in all of us, and something of the fool in too many. It was to be a sort of extended and varied _education_, not _Sentimentale_. Two men of retired leisure and sufficient income resolve to spend the rest of their lives "in books and work and healthful play,"
and almost as many other recreative occupations (including "teaching the young idea how to shoot") as they or you can think of. But the work generally fails, the books bore and disappoint them, the young ideas shoot in the most "divers and disgusting" ways, and the play turns out to be by no means healthful. Part of it is in scenario merely; and Flaubert was wont to alter so much, that one cannot be sure even of the other and more finished part. Perhaps it was too large and too dreary a theme, unsupported by any real novel quality, to acquire even that interest which _L"education Sentimentale_ has for some. But the more excellent way is to atone for the mistake of his literary executors, in not burning all of it except the monumental phrase quoted above,
Ainsi tout leur a craque dans la main,
by simply remembering this--which is the initial and conclusion of the whole matter--and letting the rest pa.s.s.
There is one slight danger in the estimate of Flaubert to which, though I actually pointed it out, I think I may have succ.u.mbed a little when I first wrote about him. He is so great a master of literature that one may be led to concentrate attention on this; and if not to neglect, to regard somewhat inadequately, his greatness as a novelist. Here at any rate such failure would be petty, if not even high, treason.
[Sidenote: General considerations.]
One may look at his performance in the novel from two points of view--that of "judging by the result" simply and in the fashion of a summing-up; and that of bringing him under certain ticket-qualifications, and enquiring whether they are justly applicable to him or not. I need hardly tell any one who has done me the honour to read either this or any other critical work of mine, which of these two I think the more excellent way; but the less excellent in this particular instance, may demand a little following.
Was Flaubert a Romantic? Was he a Realist? Was he a Naturalist? This is how the enquiries come in chronological order. But for convenience of discussion the first should be postponed to the others.
"Realist," like a good many other tickets, is printed on both sides, and the answer to our question will be by no means the same whichever side be looked at. That Flaubert was a Realist "in the best sense of the term" has been again and again affirmed in the brief reviews of his novels given above. He cannot be unreal--the "convincingness" of his most sordid as of his most splendid pa.s.sages; of his most fantastic _diableries_ as of his most everyday studies of society; is unsurpa.s.sed.
It is, in fact, his chief characteristic. But this very fact that it _pervades_--that it is as conspicuous in the _Tentation_ and in _Saint Julien l"Hospitalier_ as in _Madame Bovary_ and the _education_--at once throws up a formidable, I think an impregnable, line of defence against those who would claim him for "Realism" of the other kind--the cult of the ugly, because, being ugly, it is more real than the beautiful. He has no fear of ugliness, but he cultivates the ugly because it is the real, not the real because it is the ugly. Being to a great extent a satirist and (despite his personal boyishness) saturnine rather than jovial in temperament, there is a good deal in him that is _not_ beautiful. But he can escape into beauty whenever he chooses, and in these escapes he is always at his best.
This fact, while leaving him a Realist of the n.o.bler type, at once shuts him off from community with his friends Zola and the Goncourts, and saves him from any stain of the "sable streams." But besides this--or rather looking at the same thing from a slightly different point of view--there is something which not only permits but demands the most emphatic of "Noes!" to the question, "Was Flaubert a Naturalist?"
This something is itself the equally emphatic "Yes!" which must be returned to the third and postponed question, "Was he a Romantic?" There are many strange things in the History of Literature: its strangeness, as in other cases, is one of its greatest charms. But there have been few stranger than the obstinacy and almost pa.s.sion with which the Romanticism of Heine, of Thackeray, and of Flaubert has been denied.
Again and again it has been pointed out that "to laugh at what you love"
is not only permissible, but a sign of the love itself. Moreover, Flaubert does not even laugh as the great Jew and the great Englishman did. He only represents the failures and the disappointments and the false dawns of Love itself, while in other respects he is _romantique a tous crins_. Compare _Le Reve_ with _La Tentation_ or _Saint-Julien l"Hospitalier_; compare _Madame Bovary_ with _Germinie Lacerteux_; even compare _L"education Sentimentale_, that voyage to the Cythera of Romance which never reaches its goal, with _Sapho_ and _L"evangeliste_, and you will see the difference. It is of course to a certain extent "Le Coucher du Soleil Romantique" which lights up Flaubert"s work, but the _c.r.a.pauds imprevus_ and the _froids limacons_ of Baudelaire"s epitaph have not yet appeared, and the hues of the sunset itself are still gorgeous in parts of the sky.