"Ah!" he remarked, "M. Flaubert! M. Paul de Cassagnac!—a great man, Monsieur P-paul!" He stuttered a little. Now I only remember "M. Flaubert," with his eyes like a bit of faded blue sky. Was it a dream? Was it Flaubert? Did some stranger cruelly deceive me? But I'll never relinquish the memory of my glorious mirage.
Where was he going, Gustave Flaubert, on that sunny afternoon? It was at the time when Jules Ferry appointed him an assistant-librarian at the Mazarine;hors cadre, a sinecure, a veiled pension with 3,000 francs a year; a charity, as the great writer bitterly complained. He was poor. He had given up, without a murmur, his entire fortune to his niece, then Madame Caroline Commainville, and through the influence of Turgenev and a few others this position had been created for him. He had no duties, yet he insisted on arriving at his post as early as half-past seven in the morning. He planned later that the government should be reimbursed for its outlay. His brother, Dr. Achille Flaubert, of Rouen, gave him a similar allowance, so the unhappy man had enough to live upon. Perhaps he was going to the Gare Saint-Lazare to take a train for Croisset; perhaps he was starting for Ancient Corinth—I thought—to see once more his Salammbô veiled by the sacred Zaïmph; or he might have been on the point of departing for Taprobana, the Ceylon of the antique world; that island whose very name he repeated with the same pleasure as did the old woman the blessed name of "Mesopotamia."
Fac-simile of an unpublished Flaubert letter.
Fac-simile of an unpublished Flaubert letter.
Taprobana! Taprobana! would cry Gustave Flaubert, to the despair of his friends. He was a man in love with beautiful sounds. He filled his books with them and with beautiful pictures. You must go to Beethoven or Liszt for a like variety in rhythms; the Flaubertian prose rhythms change in every sentence, like a landscape alternately swept by sunlight or shadowed by clouds. They vary with the moods and movements of the characters. They are music for ear and eye. And they can never be translated. He is poet, painter, and composer, and he is the most artistic of novelists. If his work is deficient in sentiment; if he fails to strike the chords of pity of Dostoïevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy; if he lacks the teeming variety of Balzac, he is superior to them all as an artist. Because of his stern theories of art, he renounced the facile victories of sentimentalism. He does not invite his readers to smile or weep with him. He is not a manipulator of marionettes. And he can compress in a page more than Balzac in a volume. In part he derives from Chateaubriand, Gautier, and Hugo, and he was a lover of Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Montaigne. His psychology is simple; he believed that character should express itself by action. His landscapes in the Dutch, "tight," miniature style, or the large, luminous, "loose" manner of Hobbema; or again full of the silver repose of Claude and the dark romantic beauty of Rousseau—witness the forest of Fontainebleau in Sentimental Education—are ravishing. He has painted interiors incomparably—this novel is filled with them: balls, café-life, political meetings, receptions, ladies in their drawing-rooms, Meissonier-like virtuosity in details or the bourgeois elegance of Alfred Stevens. As a portraitist Flaubert recalls Velasquez, Rembrandt, or Hals, and not a little of thediablerieto be found in the Flemish masters of grotesque. Emma Bovary is the most perfectly finished portrait in fiction and Frédéric Moreau is nearly as lifelike—the eternal middle-class Young Man. Madame Arnoux, chiefly rendered by marvellous evasions, is in the clear-obscure of Rembrandt. Homais stands alone, a subject the delineation of which Swift would have envied. And Rosannette Bron—the truest record of her class ever depicted, and during the same decade that saw the odious sentimental and false Camille. Or Salome in Hérodias, that vision, cruel, feline, exquisite, which lesser writers have sought vainly to imitate. (Gustave Moreau alone transposed her to paint—Moreau, too, was a cenobite of art.) Or Félicité in Trois Contes. Or the perpetual journalist, Hussonet, the swaggering politician, Regimbart, Pellerin, the dilettante painter, the socialist, Sénecal, and Arnoux, the immortal charlatan. Whatever subject Flaubert attacked, a masterpiece emerged. He left few books; each represents the pinnacle of itsgenre: Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, Hérodias, Bouvard and Pécuchet—this last-named an epitome of human stupidity. Not an original philosophic intellect, nevertheless a philosophy has been drawn from Flaubert's work by the brilliant French philosopher Jules Gaultier, who definesBovaryismeas that tendency in mankind to appear other than it is; a tendency which is an important factor in our mental and social evolution. Without illusions mankind would take to the trees, the abode, we are told, of our prehistoric arboreal ancestors. Nevertheless, Emma Bovary as a philosophic symbol would have greatly astonished Gustave Flaubert.
"Since Goethe," might be a capital title for an essay on the epics that were written after the death of the noblest German of them all. The list would be small. In France there are only the rather barren rhetorical exercise of Edgar Quinet's Ahasvérus, the surging insurrectionary poems of Hugo, and the faultlessly frigid performance of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of such heroic power and proportions as Faust there is not, except Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Antony, which is so impregnated by the Faustian spirit—though poles apart from the German poem in its development—that, when we hear the youthful Gustave was a passionate admirer and student of Goethe, even addressing a long poem in alexandrines to his memory, we are not surprised. The real Flaubert is only beginning to be revealed. His four volumes of correspondence, his single volume of letters addressed to George Sand, and the recently published letters to his niece Caroline—now Madame Franklin Grout of Antibes—have shown us a very different Flaubert from the legend chiefly created by Maxime du Camp. Dr. Félix Dumesnil, in his remarkable study, has told us of the Rouen master's neurasthenia and has utterly disproved Du Camp's malicious yarns about epilepsy. Above all, Flaubert's devotion to Goethe and the recent publication of the first version of his Saint Antony have presented a novel picture of his personality. We now know that, striving to become impersonal in art, he is personal and present in every page he ever wrote; furthermore that, despite his incessant clamours and complaints, he, in reality, loved his galley-like, self-imposed labours.
The Temptation of Saint Antony is the only modern poem of epical largeness that may be classed with Brand or Zarathustra. It recalls at times the Second Part of Faust in its sweep and grandeur, in its grandiose visions; but though it is superior in verbal beauty it falls short of Goethe in its presentation of the problems of human will. Faust is a man who wills; Antony is static, not dynamic; the one is tempted by the Devil and succumbs, but does not lose his soul; Flaubert's hermit resists the Devil at his subtlest, yet we do not feel that his soul is as much worth the saving as Faust's. Ideas are the heroes in Flaubert's prose epic. Saint Antony is a metaphysical drama, not a human one like Faust; nevertheless, to Faust alone may we compare it.
Flaubert was born at Rouen, December 12, 1821, where he died May 18, 1880. That he practically passed his years at Croisset, his mother's home, below Rouen facing the Seine, and in his study toiling like a titan over his books, should be recorded in every text-book of literature. For he is the patron-saint of all true literary men. He had a comfortable income. He thought, talked, lived literature. His friends Du Camp, Louis Bouilhet, Turgenev, Taine, Baudelaire, Zola, the Goncourts, Daudet, Renan, Maupassant, Henry James, have testified to his absorption in his art. It is almost touching in these times when a man goes into the writing business as if vending tripe, to recall the example of Flaubert for whom art was more sacred than religion. Naturally, he has been proved by the madhouse doctors to have been half cracked. Perhaps he was not as sane as a stockbroker, but it takes all sorts to make a world and a writer of Flaubert's rank should not be weighed in the same scales with, say, a successful politician.
He was endowed with a nervous temperament, though up to his twenty-second year he was as handsome and as free from sickness as a god. He was very tall and his eyes were sea-green. A nervous crisis supervened and at wide intervals returned. It was almost fatal for Gustave. He became pessimistic and afraid of life. However, the talk of his habitual truculent pessimism has been exaggerated. Naturally optimistic, with a powerful constitution and a stout heart, he worked like the Trojan he was. His pessimism came with the years during his boyhood—Byronic literary spleen was in the air. He was a grumbler and rather overdid the peevish pose. As Zola asked: "What if he had been forced to earn his living by writing?" But, even in his blackest moods, he was glad to see his friends at Croisset, glad to go up to Paris for recreation. His letters, so free, fluent, explosive, give us the true Flaubert who childishly roared yet was so hearty, so friendly, so loving to his mother, niece, and intimates. His heredity was puzzling. His father was, like Baudelaire's grandfather, of Champenois stock; bourgeois, steady, a renowned surgeon. From him Gustave inherited his taste for all that pertained to medicine and science. Recall his escapades as a boy when he would peep for hours into the dissecting-room of the Rouen hospital. Such matters fascinated him. He knew more about the theory and practice of medicine than many professional men. An air of mortality exhales from his pages. He is in Madame Bovary the keen soul-surgeon. His love of a quiet, sober existence came to him from his father. He clung to one house for nearly a half century. He has said that one must live like a bourgeois and think like an artist; to be ascetic in life and violent in art—that was a Flaubert maxim. "I live only in my ideas," he wrote. But from the mother's side, a Norman and aristocrat she was, he inherited his love of art, his disdain for philistines, his adventurous disposition—transposed because of his malady to the cerebral region, to his imagination. He boasted Canadian blood, "red skin," he called it, but that was merely a mystification. The dissonance of temperament made itself felt early. He was the man of Goethe with two spirits struggling within him. Dual in temperament, he swung from an almost barbaric Romanticism to a cruel analysis of life that made him the pontiff of the Realistic school. He hated realism, yet an inner force set him to the disagreeable task of writing Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education—the latter, with its daylight atmosphere, the supreme exemplar of realism in fiction. So was it with his interior life. He was a mystic who no longer believed. These dislocations of his personality he combated all his life, and his books show with what success. "Flaubert," wrote Turgenev, his closest friend, to George Sand, "has tenacity without energy, just as he has self-love without vanity." But what tenacity!
Touching on the question of epilepsy, a careful reading of Dumesnil convinces anyone, but the neurologist with a fixed idea, that Flaubert was not a sufferer from genuine epilepsy. Not that there is any reason why epilepsy and genius should be divorced; we know in many cases the contrary is the reverse. Take the case of Dostoïevsky—his epilepsy was one of the most fruitful of motives in his stories. Nearly all his heroes and heroines are attainted. (Read The Idiot or the Karamsoff Brothers.) But Flaubert's epilepsy was arranged for him by Du Camp, who thought that by calling him an epilept in his untrustworthy Memoirs he would belittle Flaubert. And he did, for in his time the now celebrated—and discredited—theory of genius and its correlation with the falling-sickness had not been propounded. Flaubert had hystero-neurasthenia. He was rheumatic, asthmatic, predisposed to arterio-sclerosis and apoplexy. He died of an apoplectic stroke. His early nervous fits were without theauraof epilepsy; he did not froth at the mouth nor were there muscular contractions; not even at his death. Dr. Tourneaux, who hastened to aid him in the absence of his regular physician, Dr. Fortin, denied the rumours of epilepsy that were so gaily spread by that sublime old gossip, Edmond de Goncourt, also by Zola and Du Camp. The contraction of Flaubert's hands was caused by the rigidity of death; most conclusive of all evidence against the epileptic theory is the fact that during his occasional fits Gustave never lost consciousness. Nor did he suffer from any attacks before he had attained his majority, whereas epilepsy usually begins at an early age. He studied with intense zeal his malady and in a dozen letters refers to it, tickets its symptoms, tells of plans to escape the crises, and altogether, has furnished students of pathology many examples of nerve-exhaustion and its mitigation. His first attacks began at Pont-Audemar, in 1843. In 1849 he had a fresh attack. His trip to the Orient relieved him. He was a Viking, a full-blooded man, who scorned sensible hygiene; he took no exercise beyond a walk in the morning, a walk in the evening on his terrace, and in summer an occasional swim in the Seine. He ate copiously, was moderate in drinking, smoked fifteen or twenty pipes a day, abused black coffee, and for months at a stretch worked fifteen hours out of the twenty-four at his desk. He warned his disciple, Guy de Maupassant, against too much boating as being destructive of mental productivity. After Nietzsche read this he wrote: "Sedentary application is the very sin against the Holy Ghost. Only thoughts won by walking are valuable." In 1870 another crisis was brought on by protracted labours over the revision of the definitive version of the Saint Antony. His travels in Normandy, in the East, his visits to London (1851) and to Righi-Kaltbad, together with sojourns in Paris—where he had a little apartment—make up the itinerary of his fifty-eight years. Is it any wonder that he died of apoplexy, stricken at his desk, he of a violently sanguine temperament, bull-necked, and the blood always in his face?
Maurice Spronck, who took too seriously the saying of Flaubert—a lover of extravagant paradox—thinks the writer had a cerebral lesion, which he calledaudition colorée. It is a malady peculiar to imaginative natures, which transposes tone to colour, or odour to sound. As this "malady" may be found in poets from the dawn of creation, "coloured audition" must be a necessary quality of art. Flaubert took pains to exaggerate his speech when in company with the Goncourts. He suspected their diary-keeping weakness and he humoured it by telling fibs about his work. "I have finished my book, the cadence of the last paragraph has been found. Now I shall write it." Aghast were the brothers at the idea of an author beginning his book backward. Flaubert boasted that the colour of Salammbô was purple. Sentimental Education (a bad title, as Turgenev wrote him; Withered Fruits, his first title, would have been better) was gray, and Madame Bovary was for him like the colouring of certain mouldy wood-vermin. The Goncourts solemnly swallowed all this, as did M. Spronck. Which moved Anatole France to exclaim: "Oh these young clinicians!"
But what is all this when compared with the magnificent idiocy of Du Camp, who asserted that if Flaubert had not suffered from epilepsyhe would have become a genius! Hénaurme!as the man who made such masterpieces as Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Temptation of Saint Antony, the Three Tales, Bouvard et Pécuchet, had a comical habit of exclaiming. Enormous, too, was Guy de Maupassant's manner of avenging his master's memory. In the final edition—eight volumes long—Maupassant, with the unerring eye of hatred, affixed an introduction to Bouvard et Pécuchet. Therein he printed Maxime du Camp's letters to Flaubert during the period when Madame Bovary was appearing in theRevue de Paris. Du Camp was one of its editors. He urged Flaubert to cut the novel—the concision of which is so admirable, the organic quality of which is absolute. Worse still remains. If Flaubert couldn't perform the operation himself, then the aforesaid Du Camp would hire some experienced hack to do it for the sensitive author; wounded vanity Du Camp believed to be the cause of indignant remonstrances. They eliminated the scene of the agricultural fair and the operation on the hostler's foot—one scene as marvellous as agenrepainting by Teniers with its study of the old farm servant, and psychologically more profound; the other necessary to the development of the story. Thus Madame Bovary was slaughtered serially by a man ignorant of art, that Madame Bovary which is one of the glories of French literature, as Mr. James truly says. Flaubert scribbled on Du Camp's letters another of his favourite expletives,Gigantesque!Flaubert never forgave him, but they were apparently reconciled years later. Du Camp went into the Academy; Flaubert refused to consider a candidacy, though Victor Hugo—wittily nicknamed by Jules Laforgue "Aristides the Just"—urged him to do so. Even the mighty Balzac was too avid of glory and gold for Flaubert, to whom art and its consolations were all-sufficing.
Bouvard et Pécuchet was never finished. Its increasing demands killed Flaubert. In his desk were found many cahiers of notes taken to illustrate the fatuity of mankind, its stupidity, itsbêtise. He was as pitiless as Swift or Schopenhauer in his contempt for low ideals and vulgar pretensions, for the very bourgeois from whom he sprung. In the collection we find this gem of wisdom uttered by Louis Napoleon in 1865: "The richness of a country depends on its general prosperity." To it should be included the Homais-like dictum of Maxime du Camp that if Flaubert had not been an epilept he would have been a genius! Or, the following hospital criticism; Flaubert was denied creative ability! Who has denied it to him? Homais alone in his supreme asininity should be a beacon-light of warning for any one of these inept critics. Flaubert once wrote: "I am reading books on hygiene; how comical they are! What impertinence these physicians have! What asses for the most part they are!" And he, the son of a celebrated surgeon and the brother of another, a medical student himself, might have made Homais a psychiatrist instead of a druggist, if he had lived longer.
Du Camp—who, clever and witty as well as inexact and reckless in statement, was a man given to envies and literary jealousies—never got over Flaubert's startling success with Madame Bovary. He once wrote a fanciful epitaph for Louise Colet, a French woman of mediocrity, the "Muse" of Flaubert, a general trouble-breeder and a recipient of Flaubert's correspondence. The Colet had embroiled herself with De Musset and published a spiteful romance in which poor Flaubert was the villain. This the Du Camp inscription: "Here lies the woman who compromised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de Musset ridiculous, calumniated Gustave Flaubert, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr: Requiescat in pace." A like epitaph suggests itself for Maxime du Camp:Hic jacetthe man who slandered Baudelaire, traduced his loving friend Gustave Flaubert, and was snuffed out of critical existence by Guy de Maupassant.
The massive-shouldered Hercules, Flaubert, a Hercules spinning prose for his exacting Dejanira of art, was called unintelligent by Anatole France. He had not, it is true, the subtle critical brain and thorough scholarship of M. France; yet Flaubert was learned. Brunetière even taxed him with an excess of erudition. But his multitudinous conversation, his lack of logic, his rather gross sense of humour, are not to be found in his work. Without that work, without Salammbô, for example, should we have had the pleasure, thrice-distilled, of reading Anatole France's Thaïs? (See a single instance in the definitive edition Temptation, page 115, the episode of the Gymnosophist.) All revivals of the antique world are unsatisfactory at best, whether Chateaubriand's Martyrs, or the unsubstantial lath and plaster of Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, or the flabbiness and fustian of Quo Vadis. The most perfect attempt is Salammbô, an opera in words, and its battlements of purple prose were riddled by Sainte-Beuve, by Froehner, and lately by Maurice Pézard—who has proved to his own satisfaction that Flaubert was sadly amiss in his Punic archæology. Well, who cares if he was incorrect in details? His partially successful reconstruction of an epoch is admitted, though the human element is somewhat obliterated. Flaubert was bound to be more Carthaginian than Carthage.
After the scandal caused by the prosecution of Madame Bovary Flaubert was afraid to publish his 1856, second version of Saint Antony. He had been advised by the sapient Du Camp to cast the manuscript into the fire, after a reading before Bouilhet and Du Camp lasting thirty-three hours. He refused. This was in September, 1849. Du Camp declares that he asked him to essay "the Delaunay affair" meaning the Delamarre story. This Flaubert did, and the result was the priceless history of Charles and Emma Bovary. D'Aurevilly attacked the book viciously; Baudelaire defended it. Later Turgenev wrote to Flaubert: "After all you are Flaubert!" George Sand was a motherly consoler. Their letters are delightful. She did not quite understand the bluff, naïve Gustave, she who composed so flowingly, and could turn on or off her prose like the tap of a kitchen hydrant (the simile is her own). How could she fathom the tormented desire of her friend for perfection, for the blending of idea and image, for the eternal pursuit of the right word, the shapely sentence, the cadencedcodaof a paragraph? And of the larger demands of style, of the subtle tone of a page, a chapter, a book, why should this fluent and graceful writer, called George Sand, concern herself with such superfluities! It was alwaysO altitudoin art with Flaubert—the most copious, careless of correspondents. He had set for himself an impossible standard of perfection and an ideal of impersonality neither of which he realized. But there is no outward sign of conflict in his work; all trace of the labour bestowed upon his paragraphs is absent. His style is simple, direct, large, above all, clear, the clarity of classic prose.
His declaiming aloud his sentences has been adduced to prove his absence of sanity. Beethoven, too, was pronounced crazy by his various landladies because he sang and howled in his voice of a composer his compositions in the making. Flaubert was the possessor of an accurate musical ear; not without justice did Coppée call him the "Beethoven of French prose." His sense of rhythm was acute; he carried it so far that he would sacrifice grammar to rhythmic flow. He tested his sentences aloud. Once in his apartment, Rue Murillo, overlooking Parc Monceau, he rehearsed a page of a new book for hours. Belated coachmen, noting the open windows, hearing an outrageous vocal noise, concluded that a musical soiree was in progress. Gradually the street filled on either side with carriages in search of passengers. But the guests never emerged from the house. In the early morning the lights were extinguished and the oaths of the disappointed ones must have been heard by Flaubert.
He would annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts. His bump of scrupulousness was large. In twenty pages he sometimes saved three or four from destruction. He did not become, however, as captious as Balzac in the handling of proofs. A martyr of style, he was not altogether an enameller in precious stones, not a patient mosaic-maker, superimposing here and there a precious verbal jewel. First, the image, and then its appropriate garb; sometimes image and phrase were born simultaneously, as was the case with Richard Wagner. These extraordinary things may happen to men of genius, who are neither opium-eaters nor lunatics. The idea that Flaubert was ever addicted to drugs—beyond the quinine with which his good father dosed him after the fashion of those days—is ridiculous. The gorgeous visions of Saint Antony are the results of stupendous preparatory studies, a stupendous power of fantasy, and a stupendous concentration. Opium superinduces visions, but not the power and faculty of attention to record them in terms of literature for forty years. George Saintsbury has pronounced Saint Antony the most perfect specimen of dream literature extant. And because of its precision in details, its architectonic, its deep-hued waking hallucinations.
Flaubert was a very nervous man, "as hysterical as an old woman," said Dr. Hardy of the hospital Saint-Louis, but neither mad nor epileptic. His mental development was not arrested in his youth, as asserted by Du Camp; he had arranged his life from the time he decided to become a writer. He was one with the exotic painter, Gustave Moreau, in his abhorrence of the mob. He was a poet who wrote a perfect prose, not prose-poetry. Enamoured of the antique, of the Orient, of mystical subjects, he spent a lifetime in the elaboration of his beloved themes. That he was obsessed by them is merely to say that he was the possessor of mental energy and artistic gifts. He was not happy. He never brought his interior and exterior lives into complete harmony. An unparalleled observer, an imaginative genius, he was a child outside the realm of art. Soft of heart, he raised his niece as a daughter; a loving son, he would console himself after his mother's death by looking at the dresses she once wore. Flaubert a sentimentalist! He outlived his family and his friends, save a few; death was never far away from his thoughts; he would weep over his souvenirs. At Croisset I have talked with the faithful Colange, whose card reads: "E. Colange, ex-cook of Gustave Flaubert!" The affection of the novelist for cats and dogs, he told me, was marked. The study pavilion is to-day a Flaubert Memorial. The parent house is gone, and in 1901 there was a distillery on the grounds, which is now a printing establishment. Flaubert cherished the notion that Pascal had once stopped in the old Croisset homestead; that Abbé Prévost had written Manon Lescaut within its walls. He had many such old-fashioned and darlingtics, and he is to be envied them.
Since Madame Bovary French fiction, for the most part, has been Flaubert with variations. His influence is still incalculable. François Coppée wrote: "By the extent and the magnificence of his prose, Gustave Flaubert equals Bossuet and Chateaubriand. He is destined to become a great classic. And several centuries hence—everything perishes—when the French language shall have become only a dead language, candidates for the bachelor's degree will be able to obtain it only by expounding (along with the famous exordium, He Who Reigns in the Heavens, etc., or The Departure of the Swallows, of René) the portrait of Catharine le Roux, the farm servant, in Madame Bovary, or the episode of the Crucified Lions in Salammbô."
With the critical taste that uncovers bare the bones of the dead I have no concern, nor shall I enter the way which would lead me into the dusty region of professional ethics. Every portrait painter from Titian to John Sargent, from Velasquez to Zuloaga, has had a model. Novelists are no less honest when they build their characters upon human beings they have known and studied, whether their name be Fielding or Balzac or Flaubert.
The curiosity which seeks to unveil the anonymity of a novelist's personages may not be exactly laudable; it is yet excusable. I am reminded of its existence by a certain Parisian journalist who, acting upon information that appeared in the pages of a well-known French literary review, went to Normandy in search of the real Emma Bovary. Once called wicked, the novel has been pronounced as moral as a Sunday-school tract. Thackeray admired its style, but deplored, with his accustomed streak of sentimentalism, the cold-blooded analysis which hunted Emma to an ignominious grave. Yet the author of Vanity Fair did not hesitate to pursue through many chapters his mercurial Rebecca Sharp.
The story of Emma Bovary would hardly attract, if published in the daily news columns, much attention nowadays. A good-looking young provincial woman tires of her honest, slow-going husband. She reads silly novels, as do thousands of silly married girls to-day. Emma lived in a little town not far from Rouen. Flaubert named it Yonville. We read that Emma flirted with a country squire who in order to escape eloping with the romantic goose suddenly disappeared. She consoled herself with a young law student, but when he tired of her the consequences were lamentable. Harassed by debt, Emma took poison. Her stupid husband, a hard-working district doctor, was aghast at her death and puzzled by the ruin which followed fast at its heels. He found it all out, even the love-letters of the squire. He died suddenly.
A sordid tale, but perfectly told and remarkable not only for the fidelity of the landscapes, the chaste restraint of the style, but also because there are half a dozen marvellously executed characters, several of which have entered into the living current of French speech. Homais, the vainglorious, yet human and likable Homais, is a synonym for pedantic bragging mediocrity. He is a druggist. He would have made an ideal politician. He stands for a shallow "modernity" but is more superstitious than a mediæval sexton. Flaubert's novel left an indelible mark in French fiction and philosophy. Even Balzac did not create a Homais.
Now comes the curious part of the story. It was the transcription of a real occurrence. Flaubert did not invent it. In a town near Rouen named Ry there was once a young physician, Louis Delamarre. He originally hailed from Catenay, where his father practised medicine. In the novel Ry is called Yonville. Delamarre paid his addresses to Delphine Couturier, who in 1843 was twenty-three years of age. She was comely, had a bright though superficial mind, spoke in a pretentious manner, and over-dressed. From her father she inherited her vanity and the desire to appear as occupying a more exalted position than she did. The elder Couturier owned a farm, though heavily mortgaged, at Vieux-Château. He was a close-fisted Norman anxious to marry off his daughters—Emma had a sister. He objected to the advances of the youthful physician, chiefly because he saw no great match for his girl. Herein the tale diverges from life.
But love laughs at farmers as well as locksmiths, and by a ruse worthy of Paul de Kock, Delphine, by feigning maternity, got the parental permission. She soon regretted her marriage. The husband, Louis, was prosaic. He earned the daily bread and butter of the household, and even economised so that his pretty wife could buy fallals and foolish books. She hired a servant and had her day at home—Fridays. No one visited her. She was only an unimportant spouse of a poverty-stricken country doctor. At Saint-Germain des Essours there still lives an octogenarian peasant woman once the domestic of the Delamarres-Bovarys. She said, when asked to describe her mistress: "Heavens, but she was pretty. Face, figure, hair, all were beautiful."
In Ry there was a druggist named Jouanne. He is the original Homais. Delphine's, or rather Emma Bovary's, first admirer was a law clerk, Louis Bottet. He is described as a small, impatient, alert old man at the time of his death. The faithless Rodolphe—what a name for sentimental melodrama—was really a proprietor named Campion. He lost his farm and revenue after Emma's death and went to America to make his fortune. Unsuccessful, he returned to Paris, and about 1852 shot himself on the boulevard. Who may deny, after this, that truth is stranger than Flaubert's fiction?
The good, sensible old Abbé Boumisien, who advised Emma Bovary, when she came to him for spiritual consolation, to consult her doctor husband, was, in reality, an Abbé Lafortune. The irony of events is set forth in sinister relief by the epitaph which the real Emma's husband had carved on her tomb: "She was a good mother, a good wife." Gossips of Ry aver that after the truth came to Dr. Delamarre he took a slow poison. But this seems turning the screw a trifle too far. Mme. Delamarre, or Emma Bovary, was buried in the graveyard of the only church at Ry. To-day the tomb is no longer in existence. She died March 6, 1848. The inhabitants still show the church,—the porch of which was too narrow to allow the passage of unlucky Emma's coffin—the house of her husband, and the apothecary shop of M. Homais. The latter survived for many years the unhappy heroine, who stole the poison that killed her from his stock. A delightful touch of Homais-like humour was displayed—one that exonerated Flaubert from the charge of exaggeration in portraying Homais—when the novel appeared. The characters were at once recognized, both in Rouen and Ry. This druggist, Jouanne-Homais, was flattered at the lengthy study of himself, of course missing its relentless ironic strokes. He regretted openly that the author had not consulted him; for, said he, "I could have given him many points about which he knew nothing." The epitaph which the real Homais composed for the tomb of his wife—surely you can never forget her after reading the novel—is magnificent in its bombast. Flaubert knew his man.
The distinguished writer is a sober narrator of facts. His is not a domain of delicate thrills. His women are neither doves nor devils. He does not paint those acrobats of the soul so dear to psychological fiction. Despite his pretended impassibility, he is tender-hearted; the pity he felt for his characters is not effusively expressed. But the larger rhythms of humanity are ever present. If he had been hard of heart, he would have related the Bovary tale as it happened in life. Charles Bovary finds the love-letters and meets Rodolphe. Nothing happens. The real Charles never knew of the real Emma's treachery. Madame d'Epinay was not far amiss when she wrote: "The profession of woman is very hard."
No less a masterpiece than Don Quixote has been cited in critical comparison with Madame Bovary. Flaubert was called the Cervantes who had ridiculed from the field the Romantic School. This irritated him, for he never posed as a realist; indeed, he confessed that he had intended to mock the Realistic School—then headed by Champfleury—in his Bovary. The very name of this book would arouse a storm of abuse from him. He knew that he had more than one book in him, he believed better books; the indifference of the public to Sentimental Education and the Temptation he never understood. Much astonishment was expressed, after the appearance of Bovary, that such a mature work of art should have been the author's first. But Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms did not permit their juvenile efforts to see the light; the same was the case with Flaubert. In 1835—he was fourteen at the time—he wrote Mort du Duc de Guise; in 1836 another historical study. Short stories in the style of Hoffmann, with thrilling titles, such as Rage et Impuissance, Le Rêve d'Enfer (1837), and a psychologic effort, Agonies (dedicated to Alfred le Poittevin—as are both versions of the Temptation; Alfred's sister later became the mother of Guy de Maupassant): all these exercises, as is a Dance of Death, are still in manuscript. But in 1839 a scenario of a mystery bearing the cryptic title of Smarh was written; and this with Novembre, and a study of Rabelais, and Nuit de Don Juan, have been published in the definitive edition; with a record of travels in Normandy. The Memoirs of a Madman appeared a few years ago in a Parisian magazine. It was a youthful effort. There is also in the collection of Madame Grout a 300-page manuscript (1843-1845) named L'Education Sentimentale—vaguely inspired by Wilhelm Meister—which has nothing in common with his novel of the same name published in 1869.
Flaubert's taste in the matter of titles was lamentable. He made a scenario for a tale called Spiral, and he often asserted that he hankered to write in marmoreal prose the Combat of Thermopylae; he meditated, too, a novel the scene and characters laid in the Second Empire, and dilated upon the beauty of a portrait executed in microscopic detail of that immortal character, M. le Préfet. We might have had a second Homais if he had made this project a reality. He told Turgenev that he had another idea, a sort of modern Matron of Ephesus —in the Temptation there is an episode that suggests the Ephesus. He did not lack invention and he was an extremely rapid writer—but his artistic conscience was morbidly sensitive. It pained him to see Zola throwing his better self to the dogs in his noisy, inartistic novels—in which, he said, was neither poetry nor art. And he wrote this opinion to Zola, who promptly called him an idiot. In that correct but colourless book of Faguet's on Flaubert, the critic makes note of all the novelist's grammatical errors and reaches the conclusion that he was a stylist unique, but not careful in his grammar. Now, while this is piffling pedantry, the facts are in Faguet's favour; Faguet, who holds the critical scales nicely, as he always does, though listlessly. But in the handling of such a robust, red-blooded subject as Flaubert the college professor was hardly a wise selection. The Faguet study is clear and painstaking but not sympathetic. Mr. James has praised it, possibly because Faguet agrees with him as to the psychology of Sentimental Education. Not a study, Faguet's, for Flaubertians, who see the faults of their Saint Polycarp—his favourite self-appellation—and love him for his all-too-human imperfections.
In 1845 Flaubert, on a visit to Italy, stopped at Genoa. There, in the Palace Balbi-Senarega—and not at the Doria, as Du Camp wrote, with his accustomed carelessness—the young Frenchman saw an old picture by Breughel (probably by Pieter the Younger, surnamed Hell-Breughel) that represents a temptation of Saint Antony. It is hardly a masterpiece, this Breughel, and is dingy in colour. But Flaubert, who loved the grotesque, procured an engraving of this picture and it hung in his study at Croisset until the day of his death. It was the spring-board of his own Temptation. The germ may be found in his mystery, Smarh, with its Demon and metaphysical colouring. Breughel set into motion the mental machinery of the Temptation that never stopped whirring until 1874. The firstbrouillonof the Temptation was begun May 24, 1848, and finished September 12, 1849. It numbered 540 pages of manuscript. Set aside for Bovary, Flaubert took up the draft again and made the second version in 1856. When he had done with it, the manuscript was reduced to 193 pages. Not satisfied, he returned to the work in 1872, and when ready for publication in 1874 the number of pages were 136. He even then cut, from ten chapters, three. Last year the French world read the second version of 1856 and was astonished to find it so different from the definitive one of 1874. The critical sobriety and courage of Flaubert were vindicated. In 1849, reading to Bouilhet and Du Camp, he had been advised to burn the stuff; instead he boiled it down for the 1856 version. To Turgenev he had submitted the 1872 draft, and thus it came that this wonderful coloured-panorama of philosophy, this Gulliver-like travelling amid the master ideas of the antique and the early Christian worlds, was published.
All the youthful romantic Flaubert—the "spouter" of blazing phrases, the lover of jewelled words, of monstrous and picturesque ideas and situations—is in the first turbulent version of the Temptation. In the later version he is more critical and historical. Flaubert had grown intellectually as his emotions had cooled with the years. The first Temptation is romantic and religious; the 1874 version cooler and more sceptical. Dramatic, arranged more theatrically than the first, the author's affection for mysticism, the East, and the classic world shows more in this version. Psychologic gradations of character and events are clearer in the second version. I cannot agree with Louis Bertrand, who edited the 1856 version, that it is superior in interest to the 1874 version. It is a novelty, but Flaubert was never so much the surgeon as when he operated upon his own manuscript. He often hesitated, he always suffered, and he never flinched when his mind was finally satisfied. Faguet calls the Temptation an abstract pessimistic novel. He also complains that the philosophic ideas are not novel; a new philosophy would be a veritable phoenix. Why should they be? Flaubert does not enunciate a new philosophy. He is the artist who shows us apocalyptic visions of all philosophies, all schools, ethical systems, cultures, religions. The gods from every land defile by and are each in turn swept away by the relentless Button-Moulder, Oblivion. There was a talking and amusing pig in the first version; he is not present in the second—possibly because Flaubert discovered that it was not Saint Antony of Egypt, but Saint Antony of Padua, who had a pig. (Rops has remembered the animal in his etching of Flaubert's Antony.) The Antony of 1856 has a more modern soul; the second reveals the determinism of Flaubert. He is phlegmatic, almost stupid, a supine Faust incapable of self-irony. Everything revolves about him—the multi-coloured splendours of Alexandria, of the Queen of Sheba; Satan, Death and Luxury, Hilarion, Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana tempt him; upon his ears fall the enchanting phrases of the eternal dialogue between Sphinx and Chimera—we dream of the Songs of Solomon when reading: "Je cherche des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus larges, des plaisirs inéprouvés"; the speech of the Chimera. Flaubert knew the Old Testament rhythms and beauty of phrase; witness this speech of Death's: "et on fait la guerre avec de la musique, des panaches, des drapeaux, des harnais d'or...." You seem to overhear the golden trumpets of Bayreuth.
The demon retires baffled at the end of the first version. He is diabolic and not a little theatrical. The Devil of 1874 is more artful. He shows Antony the Cosmos, but he is not the victor in the duel. The new Antony studies the protean forms of life and at the end is ravished by the sight of protoplasm. "O bliss!" he cries, and longs to be transformed into every species of energy, "to be matter." Then the dawn comes up like the uplifted curtains of a tabernacle —Flaubert's image—and in the very disc of the sun shines the face of Jesus Christ. "Antony makes the sign of the cross and resumes his prayers." Thus ends the 1874 edition, ends a book of irony, dreams, and sumptuous landscapes. A sense of the nothingness of human thought, human endeavour, assails the reader, for he has traversed all the metaphysical and religious ideas of the ages, has viewed all the gods, idols, demi-gods, ghosts, heresies, and heresiarchs; Jupiter on his throne and the early warring Christian sects vanish into smoke, crumble into the gulf ofNéant. A vivid episode was omitted in the definitive version. At the close of the gods' procession the Saviour appears. He is old, white-haired, and weary from the burden of the cross and the sins of mankind. Some mock him; He is reproached by kings for propounding the equality of the poor; but by the majority He is unrecognised; and, spurned, the Son of Man falls into the dust of life. A poignant page, the spirit of which may be recognised in some latter-day French pictures and in the eloquent phrases of Jehan Rictus. M. Bertrand has pointed out that the 1849 version of the Temptation contains colour and imagery similar to the Légendes des Siècles, though written ten years before Hugo's poem. The Temptation of Saint Antony was neither a popular nor a critical success in 1874. France realises that in Flaubert's prose epic she has a masterpiece of intellectual power, profound irony, and unsurpassed beauty. The reader is alternately reminded of the Apocalypse, of Dante's grim visions, and of the second Faust.
Corrected proof page of Madame Bovary, produced from the original manuscript.
Corrected proof page of Madame Bovary, produced from the original manuscript.
Almost numberless are the studies of Flaubert's method in composing his books. A small library could be filled by books about his style. We have seen the reproductions of the various drafts that he made in the description of Emma Bovary's visit to Rouen. Armand Weil, with a patience that is itself Flaubertian, has shown us the variations in the manuscript of Salammbô (see,Revue Universitaire, April 15, 1902). Yet, compared with Balzac's spider-haunted, scribbled-over proofs, Flaubert's seem virginal of corrections. The one reproduced here is from two pages of original manuscript that I was lucky enough to secure at Paris in 1903. They contain instructions to the printer, as may be seen, and demonstrate Flaubert's sharp eye; in every instance his changes are an improvement. One of the arguments in favour of the last version of the Temptation is its shrinkage in bulk from the 1856 manuscript. The letter, hitherto unpublished—for it will not be found in the six volumes of the Correspondence—is possibly addressed to his niece, Caroline Hamard. Unusual for Flaubert is the absence of any date; he was scrupulous in giving hour, day, month, and year, in his letters. The princess referred to is the Princess Mathilde Bonaparte-Demidoff, the patron of artists and literary men, an admirer of Flaubert's. He often dined with her at Saint-Gratien. Madame Pasca the actress was also a friend and visited Croisset when he fractured his leg. He had a genius for friendships with both women and men. His mother, often telling him that his devotion to style had dried up his natural affections, admitted that he had a bigger heart than head. And, after all, this motherly estimate gives us the measure of the real Flaubert.
In the first part of that great, human Book, dear to all good Pantagruelists, is this picture: "From the Tower Anatole to the Messembrine were faire spacious galleries, all coloured over and painted with the ancient prowesses, histories and descriptions of the world." The Tower Anatole is part of the architecture of the Abbey of Thélème, in common with the other towers named, Artick, Calaer, Hesperia, and Caiere.
For lovers of the exquisite and whimsical artist, Anatole France, a comparison to Rabelais may not appear strained. Anatole, the man, has written much that contains, as did the gracious Tower Anatole, "faire spacious galleries ... painted with ancient ... histories." He has in his veins some infusion of the literary blood of that "bon gros libertin," Rabelais, a figure in French literature who refuses to be budged from his commanding position, notwithstanding the combined prestige of Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Balzac. And the gentle Anatole has a pinch of Rabelais'sesprit gaulois, which may be found in both Balzac and Maupassant.
To call France a sceptic is to state a common-place. But he is so many other things that he bewilders. The spiritual stepson of Renan, a partial inheritor of his gifts of irony and pity, and a continuator of the elder master's diverse and undulating style, France displays affinities to Heine, Aristophanes, Charles Lamb, Epicurus, Sterne, and Voltaire. The "glue of unanimity"—to use an expression of the old pedantic Budæus—has united the widely disparate qualities of his personality. His outlook upon life is the outlook of Anatole France. His vast learning is worn with an air almost mocking. After the bricks and mortar of the realists, after the lyric pessimism of the morally and politically disillusioned generation following the Franco-German war, his genius comes in the nature of a consoling apparition. Like his own Dr. Trublet, in Histoire Comique, he can say: "Je tiens boutique de mensonges. Je soulage, je console. Peut-il consoler et soulager sans mentir?" And he does deceive us with the resources of his art, with the waving of his lithe wand which transforms whales into weasels, mosques into cathedrals.
Perhaps too much stress has been set upon his irony. Ironic he is with a sinuosity that yields only to Renan. It is irony rather in the shape of the idea, than in its presentation; atmospheric is it rather than surface antithesis, or the witty inversion of a moral order; he is a man of sentiment, Shandeàn sentiment as it is at times. But the note we always hear, if distantly reverberant, is the note of pity. To be all irony is to mask one's humanity; and to accuse Anatole France of the lack of humanity is to convict oneself of critical colour-blindness. His writings abound in sympathetic overtones. His pity is without Olympian condescension. He is a most lovable man in the presence of the eternal spectacle of human stupidity and guile. It is not alone that he pardons, but also that he seeks to comprehend. Not emulating the cold surgeon's eye of a Flaubert, it is with the kindly vision of a priest he studies the maladies of our soul. In him there is an ecclesiasticalfond. He forgives because he understands. And after his tenderest benediction he sometimes smiles; it may be a smile of irony; yet it is seldom cruel. He is an adroit determinist, yet sets no store by the logical faculties. Man is not a reasoning animal, he says, and human reason is often a mirage.
But to label him with sentimentalismà la russe—the Russian pity that stems from Dickens—would shock him into an outburst. Conceive him, then, as a man to whom all emotional extravagance is foreign; as a detester of rhetoric, of declamation, of the phrase facile; as a thinker who assembles within the temple of his creations every extreme in thought, manners, sentiment, and belief, yet contrives to fuse this chaos by the force of his sober style. His is a style more linear than coloured, more for the eye than the ear; a style so pellucid that one views it suspiciously—it may conceal in its clear, profound depths strange secrets, as does some mountain lake in the shine of the sun. Even the simplest art may have its veils.
In the matter of clarity, Anatole France is the equal of Renan and John Henry Newman, and if this same clarity was at one time a conventional quality of French prose, it is rarer in these days. Never syncopated, moving at a moderatetempo, smooth in his transitions, replete with sensitive rejections, crystalline in his diction, a lover and a master of large luminous words, limpid and delicate and felicitous, the very marrow of the man is in his unique style. Few writers swim so easily under such a heavy burden of erudition. A loving student of books, his knowledge is precise, his range wide in many literatures. He is a true humanist. He loves learning for itself, loves words, treasures them, fondles them, burnishes them anew to their old meanings—though he has never tarried in the half-way house of epigram. But, over all, his love of humanity sheds a steady glow. Without marked dramatic sense, he nevertheless surprises mankind at its minute daily acts. And these he renders for us as candidly "as snow in the sunshine"; as the old Dutch painters stir our nerves by a simple shaft of light passing through a half-open door, upon an old woman polishing her spectacles. M. France sees and notes many gestures, inutile or tragic, notes them with the enthralling simplicity of a complicated artist. He deals with ideas so vitally that they become human; yet his characters are never abstractions, nor serve as pallid allegories; they are all alive, from Sylvestre Bonnard to the group that meets to chat in the Foro Romano of Sur la Pierre Blanche. He can depict a cat or a dog with fidelity; his dog Riquet bids fair to live in French literature. He is an interpreter of life, not after the manner of the novelist, but of life viewed through the temperament of a tolerant poet and philosopher.
This modern thinker, who has shed the despotism of the positivist dogma, boasts the soul of a chameleon. He understands, he loves, Christianity with a knowledge and a fervour that surprise until one measures the depth of his affection for the antique world. To further confuse our perceptions, he exhibits a sympathy for Hebraic lore that can only be set down to a remote lineage. He has rifled the Talmud for its forgotten stories; he delights in juxtaposing the cultured Greek and the strenuous Paul; he adores the contrast of Mary Magdalen with the pampered Roman matron. Add to this a familiarity with the proceeds of latter-day science, astronomy in particular, with the scholastic speculation of the Renaissance, mediæval piety, and the Pyrrhonism of a boulevard philosopher. So commingled are these contradictory elements, so many angles are there exposed to numerous cultures, so many surfaces avid for impressions, that we end in admiring the exercise of a magic which blends into a happy synthesis such a variety of moral dissonances, such moral preciosity. It is magic—though there are moments when we regard the operation as intellectual legerdemain of a superior kind. We suspect dupery. But the humour of France is not the least of his miraculous solvents; it is his humour that often transforms a doubtful campaign into a radiant victory. We see him, the protagonist of his own psychical drama, dancing on a tight rope in the airiest manner, capering deliciously in the void, and quite like a prestidigitator bidding us doubt the existence of his rope.
His life long, Renan, despite his famous phrase, "the mania of certitude," was pursued by the idea of an absolute. He cried for proofs. To Berthelot he wrote: "I am eager for mathematics." It promised finality. As he aged, he was contented to seek an atmosphere of moral feeling; though he declared that "the real is a vast outrage on the ideal." He tremulously participated in the ritual of social life, and in the worship of the unknown god. He at last felt that Nature abhorred an absolute; that Being was ever a Becoming; that religion and philosophy are the result of a partial misunderstanding. All is relative, and the soul of man must ever feed upon chimeras! The Breton harp of Renan became sadly unstrung amid the shallow thunders of agnostic Paris.
But France, his eyes quite open and smiling, gayly Pagan Anatole, does not demand proofs. He rejoices in a philosophic indifference, he has the gift of paradox. To Renan's plea for the rigid realities of mathematics, he might ask, with Ibsen, whether two and two do not make five on the planet Jupiter! To Montaigne's "What Know I?" he opposes Rabelais's "Do What Thou Wilt!" And then he adorns the wheel of Ixion with garlands.
He believes in the belief of God. He swears by the gods of all times and climes. His is the cosmical soul. A man who unites in his tales something of the Mimes of Herondas, La Bruyère's Characters, and the Lucian Dialogues, with faint flavours of Racine and La Fontaine, may be pardoned his polygraphic faiths. With Baudelaire he knows the tremours of the believing atheist; with Baudelaire he would restrain any show of irreverence before an idol, be it wooden or bronze. It might be the unknown god!—as Baudelaire once cried.
This pleasing chromatism in beliefs, a belief in all and none, is not a new phenomenon. The classical world of thought has several matches for Anatole France, from the followers of Aristippus to the Sophists. But there is a specific note of individuality, arouladequite Anatolian in the Frenchman's writings. No one but this accomplished Parisian sceptic could have framed The Opinions of Jérôme Coignard and his wholly delightful scheme for a Bureau of Vanity; "man is an animal with a musket," he declares; Sylvestre Bonnard and M. Bergeret are new with a dynamic novelty.
As Walter Pater was accused of a silky dilettanteism, so France, as much a Cyrenaic as the English writer, was nevertheless forced to step down from his ivory tower to the dusty streets and there demonstrate his sincerity by battling for his convictions. After the imbecile Dreyfus affair had rolled away, there was little talk in Paris of Anatole France, Epicurean. He was saluted with every variety of abuse, but this amateur of fine sensations had forever settled the charge of morose aloofness, of voluptuous cynicism. (Though to-day he is regarded with a certain suspicion by all camps.) At a similar point where the endurance of Ernest Renan had failed him, Anatole France proved his own faith. Renan during the black days of the Commune retired to Versailles, there to meditate upon the shamelessness of the brute, Caliban, with his lowest instincts unleashed. But France believes in the people, he has said that the future belongs to Caliban, and he would scout his master's conception of the Tyrant-Sage, a conception that Nietzsche partially transposed later to the ecstatic key of the Superman. M. France would probably advocate the head-chopping of such wise monster-despots. An aristocrat by culture and fastidiousness, he is without anarrière-penséeof the snobbery of the intellect, of the cerebral exaltation displayed by Hugo, Baudelaire, and the Goncourts.
When France published his early verse—his début was as a poet and Parnassian poet—Catulle Mendès divined the man. He wrote, "I can never think of Anatole France ... without fancying I see a young Alexandrian poet of the second century, a Christian, doubtless, who is more than half Jew, above all a neoplatonist, and further a pure theist deeply imbued with the teachings of Basilides and Valentinus, and the Perfumes of the Orphic poems of some recent rhetorician, in whom subtlety was pushed to mysticism and philosophy to the threshold of the Kabbalah."
Some critics have accused him of not being able to build a book. He knows the rhythms of poems, but he "does not know" the harmony of essences, said the late Bernard Lazare; he is an excellent Parnassian but a mediocre philosopher: he is a charmingraconteur, but he cannot compose a book. Precise in details, diffuse in ensembles, clear and confused, neat and ambiguous, continued M. Lazare, he searches his object in concentric circles. Furthermore, he has the soul of a Greek in the decadence, and the voice of a Sistine Chapel singer—pure and irresolute. To all this admission may be made without fear of decomposing the picture which France has set up before us of his own personality—a picture, however, he does not himself hesitate to efface from the canvas whenever his perversity prompts. He is all that his critic asserts and much more. It is this moral eclecticism, this jumble of opposites, this violent contrast of traits, and these apparently irreconcilable elements of his character, which appal, interest, yet make him so human. But his art never swerves; it records invariably the fluctuations of his spirit, a spirit at once desultory, savant, and subtle, records all in a style, concrete and clairvoyant.
His books are not so much novels as chronicles of designedly simple structure; his essays are confessions; his confessions, a blending of the naïve and the corrupt, for there are corroding properties in these novel persuasive disenchantments. Upon the robust of faith Anatole France makes no more impression than do Augustine, Saint Teresa, the Imitation of Christ, or the Provincial Letters. Suchnuancesof scepticism as his are for those who love the comedies of belief and disbelief. Not possessing the Huysmans intensity of temperament, France will never be betrayed into such affirmations; Huysmans, who dropped like a ripe plum into the basket of the ecclesiastical fruit-gatherer. France will never lose his balance in the fumes of a personal conversion. Of Plato himself he would ask: "What is Truth?" and if Pilate posed the same question, France would reply by handing him his Jardin d'Epicure—a veritable breviary of scepticism. In Socrates he would discover a congenial companion; yet he might mischievously allude to Montaigne "concerning cats," or quote Aristotle on the form of hats. A wilful child of philosophy andbelles-lettres, he may be always expected to say the startling.
Be humble! he exhorts. Be without intellectual pride! for the days of man, who is naught but a bit of animated pottery, are brief, and he vanishes like a spark. Thus Job—Anatole. Be humble! Even virtue may be unduly praised: "Since it is overcoming which constitutes merit, we must recognise that it is concupiscence which makes saints. Without it there is no repentance, and it is repentance which makes saints." To become a saint one must have been first a sinner. He quotes, as an example, the conduct of the blessed Pelagia, who accomplished her pilgrimage to Rome by rather unconventional means. Here, too, we recognise the amiable casuistry of Anatole—Voltaire. And there is something of Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly's piety of imagination with impiety of thought, in France's pronouncement. He is a Chrysostom reversed; from his golden mouth issue spiritual blasphemies.
Mr. Henry James has said that the province of art is "all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision." According to this rubric, France is a profound artist. He plays with the appearances of life, occasionally lifting the edge of the curtain to curdle the blood of his spectators by the sight of Buddha's shadow in some grim cavern beyond. He has the Gallic tact of adorning the blank spaces of theory and the ugly spots of reality. A student of Kant in his denial of the objective, we can never picture him as following Königsberg's sage in his admiration of the starry heavens and the moral law. Both are relative, would be the report of the Frenchman. But, if he is sceptical about things tangible, he is apt to dash off at a tangent and proclaim the existence of that "school of drums kept by the angels," which the hallucinated Arthur Rimbaud heard and beheld. His method of surprising life, despite his ingenuous manner, is sometimes as oblique as that of Jules Laforgue. And, in the words of Pater, his is "one of the happiest temperaments coming to an understanding with the most depressing of theories."
For faith he yearns. He humbles himself beneath the humblest. He excels in picturing the splendours of the simple soul; yet faith has not anointed his intellect with its chrism. He admires the golden filigree of the ciborium; its spiritual essence escapes him. He stands at the portals of Paradise; there he lingers. He stoops to some rare and richly coloured feather. He eloquently vaunts its fabulous beauty, but he will not listen to the whirring of the wings from which it has fallen. Pagan in his irony, his pity wholly Christian, Anatole France has in him something of Petronius and not a little of Saint Francis.
Born to the literary life, one of the elect whose career is at once a beacon of hope and despair for the less gifted or less fortunate, Anatole François Thibault first saw the heart of Paris in the year 1844. The son of a bookseller, Noël France Thibault, his childhood was spent in and around his father's book-shop, No. 9 du quai Voltaire, and his juvenile memories are clustered about books. There are many faithful pictures of old libraries and book-worms in his novels. He has a moiety of that Oriental blood which is said to have tinctured the blood of Montaigne, Charles Lamb, and Cardinal Newman. The delightful Livre de Mon Ami gives his readers many glimpses of his early days. Told with incomparable naïveté and verve, we feel in its pages the charm of the writer's personality. A portrait of the youthful Anatole reveals his excessive sensibility. His head was large, the brow was too broad for the feminine chin, though the long nose and firm mouth contradict the possible weakness in the lower part of the face. It was in the eyes, however, that the future of the child might have been discerned—they were lustrous, beautiful in shape, with the fulness that argued eloquence and imagination. He was, he tells us, a strange boy, whose chief ambition was to be a saint, a second St. Simon Stylites, and, later, the author of a history of France in fifty volumes. Fascinating are the chapters devoted to Pierre and Suzanne in this memoir. His tenderness of touch and power of evoking the fairies of childhood are to be seen in Abeille. The further development of the boy may be followed in Pierre Nozière. In college life, he was not a shining figure, like many another budding genius. He loved Virgil and Sophocles, and his professors of the Stanislas College averred that he was too much given to day-dreaming and preoccupied with matters not set forth in the curriculum, to benefit by their instruction. But he had wise parents—he has paid them admirable tributes of his love—who gave him his own way. After some further study in L'Ecole des Chartes, he launched himself into literature through the medium of a little essay, La Légende de Sainte Radégonde, reine de France. This was in 1859. Followed nine years later a study of Alfred de Vigny, and in 1873 Les Poëmes dorées attracted the attention of the Parnassian group then under the austere leadership of Leconte de Lisle. Les Noces Corinthiennes established for him a solid reputation with such men as Catulle Mendès, Xavier de Ricard, and De Lisle. For this last-named poet young France exhibited a certain disrespect—the elder was irritable, jealous of his dignity, and exacted absolute obedience from his neophytes; unluckily a species of animosity arose between the pair. When, in 1874, he accepted a post in the Library of the Senate, Leconte de Lisle made his displeasure so heavily felt that France soon resigned. But he had his revenge in an article which appeared inLe Temps, and one that put the pompous academician into a fury. Catulle Mendès sang the praises of the early France poems: "Les Noces Corinthiennes alone would have sufficed to place him in the first rank, and to preserve his name from the shipwreck of oblivion," declared M. Mendès.
In 1881, with The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard he won the attention of the reading world, a crown from the Academy, and the honour of being translated into a half-dozen languages. From that time he became an important figure in literary Paris, while his reputation was further fortified by his criticisms of books—vagrom criticism, yet charged with charm and learning. He followed Jules Claretie onLe Temps, and there he wrote for five years (1886-1891) thecritiques, which appeared later in four volumes, entitled La Vie Littéraire. Georg Brandes had said that, in the strict sense of the word, M. France is not a great critic. But Anatole France has said this before him. He despises pretentious official criticism, the criticism that distributes good and bad marks to authors in a pedagogic fashion. He may not be so "objective" as his one-time adversary, Ferdinand Brunetière, but he is certainly more convincing.
The quarrel, a famous one in its day, seems rather faded in our days of critical indifference. After his clever formula, that there is no such thing as objective criticism, that all criticism but records the adventures of one's soul among the masterpieces, France was attacked by Brunetière—of whom the ever-acute Mr. James once remarked that his "intelligence has not kept pace with his learning." Those critical watchwords, "subjective" and "objective," are things of yester-year, and one hopes, forever. But in this instance there was much ink spilt, witty on the part of France, deadly earnest from the pen of Brunetière. The former annihilated his adversary by the mode metaphysical. He demonstrated that in the matter of judgment we are prisoners of our ideas, and he also formed a school that has hardly done him justice, for every impressionistic value is not necessarily valid. It is easy to send one's soul boating among masterpieces and call the result "criticism"; the danger lies in the contingency that one may not boast the power of artistic navigation possessed by Anatole France, a master steersman in the deeps and shallows of literature.
His own critical contributions are notable. Studies of Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Renan, Balzac, Zola, Pascal, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Rabelais, Hamlet, Baudelaire, George Sand, Paul Verlaine—a masterpiece of intuition and sympathy this last—and many others, vivify and adorn all they touch. A critic such as Sainte-Beuve, or Taine, or Brandes, France is not; but he exercises an unfailing spell in everything he signs. His "august vagabondage"—the phrase is Mr. Whibley's—through the land of letters has proved a boon to all students.
In 1897 he was received at the Académie Française, as the successor of Ferdinand de Lesseps. His addresses at the tombs of Zola and Renan are matters of history. As a public speaker, France has not the fiery eloquence of Jean Jaurès or Laurent Tailhade, but he displays a cool magnetism all his own. And he is absolutely fearless.
It is not through lack of technique that the structure of the France novels is so simple, his tales plotless, in the ordinary meaning of the word. Elaborate formal architecture he does not affect. The novel in the hands of Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola would seem to have reached its apogee as a canvas upon which to paint a picture of manners. In the sociological novel, the old theatrical climaxes are absent, the old recipes for cooking character find no place. Even the love motive is not paramount. The genesis of this form may be found in Balzac, in whom all the modern fiction is rooted. Certain premonitions of thegenreare also encountered in L'Education Sentimentale of Flaubert, with its wide gray horizons, its vague murmurs of the immemorial mobs of vast cities, its presentation of undistinguished men and women. Truly democratic fiction, by a master who hated democracy with creative results.
Anatole France, Maurice Barrès, Edouard Estaunie, Rosny (the brothers Bex), René Bazin, Bertrand, and the astonishing Paul Adam are in the van of this new movement of fiction with ideas, endeavouring to exorcise the "demon of staleness." French fiction in the last decade of the past century saw the death of the naturalistic school. Paris had become a thrice-told tale, signifying the wearisome "triangle" and the chronicling of flat beer. Something new had to be evolved. Lo! the sociological novel, which discarded the familiar machinery of fiction, rather than miss the new spirit. It is unnecessary to add that in America the fiction of ideas has not been, thus far, of prosperous growth; indeed, it is viewed with suspicion.
Loosely stated, the fiction of Anatole France may be divided into three kinds: fantastic, philosophic, and realistic. This arbitrary grouping need not be taken literally; in any one of his tales we may encounter all three qualities. For example, there is much that is fantastic, philosophic, real, in that moving and wholly human narrative of Sylvestre Bonnard. France's familiarity with cabalistic and exotic literatures, his deep love and comprehension of the Latin and Greek classics, his knowledge of mediæval legends and learning, coupled with his command of supple speech, enable him to project upon a ground-plan of simple narrative extraordinary variations.
The full flowering of France's knowledge and imagination in things patristic and archæologic is to be seen in Thaïs, a masterpiece of colour and construction. Thaïs is that courtesan of Alexandrin, renowned for her beauty, wit, and wickedness, who was converted by the holy Paphnutius, saint and hermit of the Thebaïd. How the devil finally dislodges from the heart of Paphnutius its accumulation of virtue, is told in an incomparable manner. If Flaubert was pleased by the first offering of his pupil, Guy de Maupassant, (Boule de Suif), what would he not have said after reading Thaïs? The ending of the wretched monk, following his spiritual victories as a holy man perched on a pillar—a memory of the author's youthful dream—is lamentable. He loves Thaïs, who dies; and thenceforth he is condemned to wander, a vampire in this world, a devil in the next. A monument of erudition, thick with pages of jewelled prose, Thaïs is a book to be savoured slowly and never forgotten. It is the direct parent of Pierre Loüys's Aphrodite, and later evocations of the antique world.
Of great emotional intensity is Histoire Comique (1903). It is a study of the histrionic temperament, and full of the major miseries and petty triumphs of stage life. It also contains a startling incident, the suicide of a lovelorn actor. The conclusion is violent and morbid. The nature of the average actress has never been etched with such acrid precision. There are various tableaux of behind and before the footlights; a rehearsal, an actor's funeral, and the life of the greenroom. Set forth in his most disinterested style, M. France shows us that he can handle with ease so-called "objective" fiction. His Doctor Trublet is a new France incarnation, wonderful and kindly old consoler that he is. He is attached as house physician to the Odéon, and to him the comedians come for advice. He ministers to them body and soul. His discourse is Socratic. He has wit and wisdom. And he displays the motives of the heroine so that we seem to gaze through an open window. As vital as Sylvestre Bonnard, as Bergeret, Trublet is truly an avatar of Anatole France. Histoire Comique! The title is a rare jest aimed at mundane and bohemian vanity.
Passing Jocaste et le Chat maigre, and Le Puits de Sainte-Claire, we come to L'Etui de Nacre, a volume of tales published in 1892. This book may be selected as typical of a certain side of its author, a side in which his fantasy and historic sense meet on equal terms. The most celebrated is Le Procurateur de Judée, who is none other than Pontius Pilate, old, disillusioned of public ambition, and grumbling, as do many retired public officers, at the ingratitude of governments and princes. To his friend he confesses finally, after his memory has been vainly prompted, that he has no recollection of Jesus, a certain anarchistic prophet of Judea, condemned by him to death. His final phrases give us, as in the flare of lightning, the withering, double-edged irony of the author. He has quite forgotten the tremendous events that occurred in Jerusalem; forgotten, too, is Jesus. Not all the stories that follow, not the pious records of Sainte Euphrosine, of Sainte Oliverie et Liberetta, of Amyeus and Celestin, of Scolastica, can rob the reader of this first cruel impression. In Balthasar the narratives are of a superior quality. Nothing could be better, for example, than the recital of the Ethiopian king who sought the love of Balkis, Queen of Sheba, was accepted, after proofs of his bravery, and then quietly forgotten. He studies the secrets of the spheres, and when Balkis, repenting of her behaviour, seeks Balthasar anew, it is too late. He has discovered the star of Bethlehem which leads him straightway to the crib in company with Gaspar and Melchior, there to worship the King of Kings. Powerful, too, in its fantastic evocation is La Fille de Lilith, which relates the adventure of a modern Parisian with a deathless daughter of Adam's first wife, Lilith, so named in the Talmud. Laeta Acilia tells us one of France's best anecdotes about a Roman matron residing at Marseilles during the reign of Tiberius. She encounters Mary Magdalen, who almost converts the woman by a promise of children, long desired. The conclusion is touching. It discloses admirably the psychology of the two women. L'Oeuf Rouge is a tale of Cæsarian madness, and the bizarre Le Réséda du Curé is so simply related that we are disarmed by the style.
A graceful collection is that called Clio, illustrated in the highly decorative manner of Mucha. Possibly the first is the best, a story of Homer. Some confess a preference for a Gaulish recital of the times when Cæsar went to Britain. Napoleon, too, is in the list. An interesting discussion of Napoleon and the Napoleonic legend is in a full-fledged novel, The Red Lily. "Napoleon," says one of its characters, "was violent and frivolous; therefore profoundly human.... He desired with singular force, all that most men esteem and desire. He had the illusions which he gave to the people. He believed in glory. He retained always the infantile gravity which finds pleasure in playing with swords and drums, and the sort of innocence which makes good military men. It is this vulgar grandeur which makes heroes, and Napoleon is the perfect hero. His brain never surpassed his hand—that hand, small and beautiful, which crumpled the world.... Napoleon lacked interior life.... He lived from the outside." In the art of attenuating great reputations Anatole France has had few superiors.
This novel displeased his many admirers, who pretend to see in it the influence of Paul Bourget. Yet it is a memorable book. Paul Verlaine is depicted in it with freshness, that poet Paul, and his childish soul so ironically, yet so lovingly distilled by his critic. There are glimpses of Florence, of Paris; the study of an English girl-poet will arouse pleasant memories of a lady well known to Italian, Parisian, and London art life. And there is the sculptor, Jacques Dechartres, who may be a mask, among many others of M. France. But Chouiette-Verlaine is the lode-stone of the novel.