VITHE BEETHOVEN OF FRENCH PROSE
The maker of a great style, a lyric poet, who selected as an instrument the “other harmony of prose,” a master of characterization and the creator of imperishable volumes, Gustave Flaubert is indeed the Beethoven of French prose. Never was the life of a genius so barren of content, never had there been seemingly such a waste of force. In forty years only four completed books, three tales, and an unfinished volume; a sort of satyricon and lexicon of stupidity—what else is Bouvard et Pécuchet? The outlay of power was just short of the phenomenal, and this Colossus of Croisset,—one falls into superlatives when dealing with him,—this man tormented by an ideal of style, a man who formed a whole generation of writers, is only coming into his kingdom. In his correspondence he is the most facile, the most personal, the least impassable of artists; in his work themost concentrated, objective, and reticent. There never has been in French prose such a densely spun style,—the web fairly glistening with the idea. Yet of opacity there is none. Like one of those marvellous tapestries woven in the hidden East, the clear woof of Flaubert’s motive is never obscured or tangled. George Moore declares L’Education Sentimentale to be as great a work as Tristan und Isolde. It is the polyphony, the magical crossings, recrossings, the interweaving of the subject and the long, elliptical thematic loops made with such consummate ease that command admiration. Flaubert was above all a musician, a musical poet. The ear was his final court of appeal, and to make sonorous cadences in a language that lacks essential richness—it is without the great diapasonic undertow of the Anglo-Saxon—was just short of the miraculous. Until Chateaubriand’s and Victor Hugo’s time the French tongue was rather a formal pattern than a plastic, liquid collocation of sounds. They blazed the path for Flaubert, and he, with almost Spartan restraint and logical mind, made the language richer, more flexible, more musical, polished, and precise. The word and the idea were indissolubly associated, a perfect welding of matter and manner. Omnipresent with him was the musician’s idea of composing a masterpiece that would float by sheer style, a masterpiece unhampered by an idea. The lyric ecstasy of hiswritten speech quite overmastered him. He was a poet as were De Quincey, Pater, and Poe. The modulation of his style to his themes caused him inconceivable agony. A man of equal gifts, and less exacting conscience, would have calmly written at length, letting style go free in his pursuit of theme; but Flaubert strove ceaselessly to overcome the antinomianism of his material. He wrote La Tentation de Saint Antoine, and its pages sing with golden throats; transpose this style to the lower key of L’Education Sentimentale, and we find the artist maddened by the incongruity of surface and subject. In Madame Bovary, with its symphonic descriptions, Flaubert’s style was happily mated; while in the three short tales he is almost flawless. Then came Bouvard et Pécuchet, and here his most ardent lover recognizes the superb stylistic curve. The book is a mound of pitiless irony, yet a mound, not a living organism. Despite its epical breadth, there is something inhuman, too, in the Homeric harmonies of Salammbô.
With the young wind of the twentieth century blowing in our faces it is hardly necessary to pose Flaubert academically. His greatness consists in his not being speared by any literary camp. The romanticists claimed him; they were right. The realists declared that he was their leader, and the extreme naturalists cried up to him, “O Master!” They too were wise. Somethingof the idealist, of the realist, is in Flaubert; he is never the doctrinaire. Temperamentally he was a poet; masked epilepsy made him a pessimist. In a less cramped milieu he might have accomplished more, but he would have lost as a writer. It was his fanatical worship of form that ranks him as the greatest artist in fiction the world has ever read. Without Balzac’s invention, without Turgénieff’s tenderness, without Tolstoy’s broad humanity, he nevertheless outstrips them all as an artist. It is his music that will live when his themes are rusty with the years; it is his glorious vision of the possibilities of formal beauty that has made his work classic. You may detect the heart-beat in Flaubert if your ear is finely attuned to his harmonies. A despiser of the facile triumph, of the appeal sentimental, he reminds me more of Landor than De Quincey,—a Landor informed by a passion for fiction. There are pages of Flaubert that one lingers over for the melody, for the evocation of dim landscapes, for the burning hush of noon. In the presence of passion he showed his ancestry; he became the surgeon, not the sympathetic nurse, as was the case with many of his contemporaries. He studied the amorous malady with great cold eyes, for his passions were all intellectual. He had no patience with conventional sentimentality. And how clearly he saw through the hypocrisy of patriotism, the false mouthing of politicians! A small literature hasbeen modelled after his portrait of the discontented demagogues in L’Education Sentimentale. The grim humor of that famous meeting at the Club of Intellect set Turgénieff off into huge peals of laughter. It is incredibly lifelike. A student of detail, Flaubert gave the imaginative lift to all he wrote: his was a winged realism, and in Madame Bovary we are continually confronted with evidences of his idealistic power. Content to create a small gallery of portraits, he wreaked himself in giving them adequate expression, in investing them with vitality, characteristic coloring, with everything but charm. Flaubert has not the sympathetic charm of his brother-at-arms, Iván Turgénieff. In private life a man of extraordinary magnetism, his bonze-like suppression of personal traits in his books tells us of martyrdom to a lofty theory of style. He sacrificed his life to art, and an unheeding, ungrateful generation first persecuted and then passed him by. It is the very tragedy of literature that a man of robust individuality, handsome, flattered, and wealthy, should retire for life to a room overlooking the Seine, near Rouen, and there wrestle with the seven devils of rhetoric. He subdued them—made them bond-slaves; but he wore himself out in the struggle. He sought to extort from his instrument music that was not in it. What he might have done with the organ-toned English language after so triumphantly mastering thetechniqueof the French keyboard—agenuine piano keyboard—we may only hazard. His name is one of the glories of French literature, and in these times of scamped workmanship, when the cap and bells of cheap historical romance and the evil-smelling weed of the dialect novel are ruling fiction, the figure of the great Frenchman is at once a refuge and an evocation.
Many years have passed since Gustave Flaubert published his third novel, L’Education Sentimentale; and whether it was the unhappy title or the political condition of France at the time,—Turgénieff declared that it was the former,—the big book of five hundred pages failed to attract much attention. There was no public prosecution, as with Madame Bovary, nor did the subject-matter invite the controversy of archæologists; so to the chagrin of the great pupil of Châteaubriand and Balzac this masterpiece of “pitiless observation” hardly aroused a protest. To be sure, M. René Taillandier saw in its pages a covert attack on the idea of young manhood, but then M. Taillandier was given to the discovery of literary mare’s nests, and the Franco-Prussian war intervening, one of the greatest of descriptive novels was allowed to repose in dusty peace.
As George Moore, in one of the most luminous of his criticisms, so truthfully says, “Since then it has been read by novelists in search of material,and they held their tongues, partly because it was easier to steal than to appreciate, partly because they did not wish to draw attention to their thefts.” Yet L’Education Sentimentale was not altogether missed by the critics. Paul Bourget won his way to critical fame with his exhaustive study of its creator; Henri Taine wrote sympathetically of him; Henry James, who will yield to no one in his admiration of the dead master, frankly confesses that the novel is dead, is as sawdust and ashes, while George Saintsbury cannot sufficiently praise it. It is for him “a wholeComédie Humaineof failure in two volumes,” and Flaubert “can do with a couple of epithets what Balzac takes a page of laborious analysis to do less perfectly.” It remained for Mr. Moore to cry the work to heaven and to point out that while Balzac might have written Madame Bovary, no one but Flaubert could have produced L’Education Sentimentale.
Mr. Moore is right; the novel is stupendous, is appalling in its magnitude and handling of the unpromising material of life, in its piercing analysis, power of concrete characterization, and overwhelming mastery of style. “The ignoble pleases me,” Flaubert said once; “it is the sublime of the lower slopes.” L’Education Sentimentale is the very lowest slope of the ignobly sublime.
“The great artists are those who impose onhumanity their particular illusions,” cries Guy de Maupassant, after serving seven long years of apprenticeship to Flaubert and literature, with what results we all know. Flaubert’s particular illusion was so completely magnificent that but few of his intimates absolutely realized it. Life, he confessed, was to him a bad odor; “it was like an odor of unpleasant cooking escaping by a vent-hole.” Yet despite his love of the exotic, of the barbarous, of the Orient, he forced himself to see it, handle it, estimate it, and write of it. When he wished to roam in the East or in old Carthaginian times, he took up the history of the daughter of Farmer Roualt, and we got Emma Bovary. When Egypt and the Thebaid tempted him with its ascetic gloom and dream splendors, he resolutely tied himself to his monkish desk at Croisset and worked for six years at L’Education Sentimentale.
Picture to yourself this green-eyed Norman giant, stalking up and down his terrace spouting aloud Châteaubriand, whose sonorous, cadenced lines were implacably engraved on his memory. Flaubert’s favorite passage was this from Atala: “Elle répand dans le bois ce grand secret de mélancholie qu’elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes et aux rivages antiques des mers.” One recalls Matthew Arnold’s love for Maurice de Guerin’s Centaur, and his eternal quotation of that marmoreal phrase, “But upon the shores ofwhat ocean have they rolled the stone that hides them, O Macareus?” Little wonder that the passengers on the steamboat bound for Rouen enjoyed the spectacle of the inspired martyr to style as he paced his garden in an old dressing-gown, chanting the swelling phrases of Châteaubriand!
Relentlessly pursued by the demon of perfection, a victim to epilepsy, a despiser of the second-hand art of his day, is it not strange that Flaubert ever wrote a line? Execution was for him a painful parturition; he was delivered of his phrases in agony, and yet his first book, born after ten years of herculean effort, was a masterpiece. Did not a great critic say, “Madame Bovary is one of the glories of French literature?” But it almost sent its author to jail. Without the toleration, the adaptability of his dear comrade, Turgénieff, Flaubert took life symphonically. It was a sad, serious thing, and to escape its rigors he surrounded himself in the magic cloud of an ironic art,—an art addressed to the elect. He felt the immedicable pity of existence, yet never resorted to the cheap religious nostrums and political prophylactics of his contemporaries. He despised the bourgeois; this lifelong rancor was at once his deliverance and his downfall; it gave us L’Education Sentimentale, but it also produced Bouvard et Pécuchet. Judged by toilsome standards of criticism, Flaubert was a failure, but a failure monstrous,outrageous, and almost cosmical; there is something elemental in this failure. As satirical as Swift, he was devoured by a lyrism as passionate as Victor Hugo’s. This colossus of ennui set out to conquer material life, to crush it with superb, indifferent hands and was himself vanquished by it; and in the smoke and dust of defeat his noble figure went down as if some strange meteor had shot from the dark blue to the very bowels of the globe. After forty years of toil in his hermitage, he left only six volumes, nearly all masterpieces, but not masterpieces for the million.
Flaubert, as Saintsbury justly points out, occupied “a very singular middle position between romanticism and naturalism, between the theory of literary art, which places the idealizing of merely observed facts first of all, and is sometimes not too careful about the theory which places the observation first if not also last, and is sometimes ostentatiously careless of any idealizing whatsoever.” His was a realism of a vastly superior sort to that of his disciples. The profound philosophic bias of his mind enabled him to pierce behind appearances, and while his surfaces are extraordinary in finish, exactitude, and detail, the aura of things and persons is never wanting. His visualizing power has never been excelled, not even by Balzac,—a stroke or two and a man or woman peers out from behind the types. He ambushedhimself in the impersonal, and thus his criticism of life seems hard, cold, and cruel to those readers who look for the occasional amiable fillip of Gautier, Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens. This frigid withdrawal of self behind the screen of his art gave him all the more freedom to set moving his puppets; it is this quality that caused him to be the only naturalist to receive mercy from Brunetière’s remorseless pen. Those who mortise the cracks in their imagination with current romanticism, Flaubert will never captivate. He seems too remote; he regards his characters too dispassionately. This objectivity is carried to dangerous lengths in Sentimental Education, for the book is minor in tone, without much exciting incident—exciting in the Dumas or Stevenson sense—and is inordinately long. Five hundred pages seem too much by half to be devoted to a young man who does not know his own mind. Yet Frédéric Moreau is a man you are sure to meet on your way home. He is born in great numbers and in every land, and his middle name is Mediocrity. Only the golden mean of his gifts has not brought him happiness. He has some money, and was born of middle-class parents in the provinces. His mother’s hope, he is sent to Paris to the schools, and has just taken his bachelor degree when the book begins. On the steamboat bound for Nogent-sur-Seine, Frédéric meets Arnoux, the art dealer,—an admirably drawn personality,—and falls inlove with Madame Arnoux. That love—the leading motive of the work—proves his ruin, and it is his one pure love; a sample of Flaubert’s irony, who refuses to be satisfied with the conventional minor moralities and our conventional disposition of events. Frédéric goes home, but cannot forget Madame Arnoux. He is romantic, rather silly, good-hearted, and hopelessly weak. Like the sound of a firm, clanging chord his character is indicated at the outset and there is little later development. As the flow of some sluggish river through flat lands, oozing banks, and neat embankments, Frédéric’s life canalizes in leisurely fashion. He loses his fortune, he inherits another, he goes back to Paris, he lives in Bohemia—such a real Bohemia—and he frequents the salons of the wealthy. He encounters fraud, meanness, hypocrisy, rapacity, on every side, and like Rastignac is a bit of a snob. He is fond of women, but a constitutional timidity prevents him from reaping any sort of success with them, for he is always afraid of some one “coming in.” When he does assert himself, he fears the sound of his own voice, yet in the duel with Cisy—one of the most superbly satirical set pieces in any literature—he is seemingly brave. His relations with La Maréchale are wonderfully set forth; he is her dupe, yet a dupe with eyes wide open and without the power of retaliation. Infirmity of will allied to a charming person,this young man is a memorable portrait. He is not the hero, for the book is without one, just as it is plotless and apparently motiveless. Elimination is practised unceasingly, yet the broadest effects are secured; the apparent looseness of construction vanishes on a second reading. Almost fugal in treatment is the development of episodes, and while the rhythms are elliptical, large, irregular—rhythm there always is—the unrelated, unfinished, unrounded, decomposed semblance to life is all the while cunningly preserved. What Mr. James would call the “figure in the carpet,” the decorative, the thematic pattern, is never lost, the assonant web being exquisitely spun. The whole book floats in the air; it is a miracle work. It is full of the clangor and buzz of Time’s loom.
For me Rosalie Arnoux is the unique attraction. Henry James calls her a failure—spiritually. She is one of the most charming portraits in French fiction, and yet a perfectly virtuous woman. The aroma of her character pervades the pages of this wonderful “encyclopædia of life.” What shall I tell you of the magical descriptions of the ball at the Alhambra and other masked balls at La Maréchale’s; of the duel; of the street fighting during the revolution of ’48; of the cynical journalist, Hussonet, a type for all times; of the greedy Des Lauriers; of peevish Senecal; of good-hearted Dussardier; of Pellerin, who reads all the works on æsthetics extantso as to paint beautifully; of Mlle. Vatnaz, skinny, slender, amorous, and enigmatic? What shall I say of M. Roque, of Louise, of the actor Delmar, who turns his profile to his audiences; of Madame Dambreuse and her sleek infidelities; of her avaricious husband; of Frédéric’s foolish mother, so like himself; of Regimbart, formidable, thirsty Regimbart, with his oaths, his daily café-route, and his magnificent air of bravado? The list is not large, but every figure is painted by a master. And the vanity, the futility, the barrenness of it all! It is the philosophy of disenchantment, and about the book hangs the inevitable atmosphere of defeat, of mortification, of unheroic resignation. It is life, commonplace, quotidian life, and truth is stamped on its portals. All is vanity and vexation of spirit. The tragedy of the petty has never before been so mockingly, so menacingly, so absolutely displayed. An unhappy book, you say! Yes; and proves nothing except that life is but a rope of sand. Read it if you care for art in its most quintessentialized form, but if you are better pleased with the bravery and show of things external, avoid this novel, I beseech you, for it is as bitter in the mouth as a page torn from Ecclesiastes.
“And thus it is that Flaubert ... became a sort of monk of literature, shut away from the world, solitary and morose, beholding humanity with horror, with repulsion, with irony, with sarcasm, with an evil laugh sadder than tears, andcasting upon mankind what are called glances of pity—in other words, pitiless glances, ... just as a friar passes a life of contemplation and meditation, saying to himself that God is great and that men are small, so he spent almost the whole of a fairly long life saying to himself again and again that men are small and that art is great, scorning the one and serving the other with an equal fervor and an equal ardor of uncompromising devotion.”
Émile Faguet in his excellent monograph on Flaubert—in Les Grands Ecrivains Français—thus summed up his life. Paul Bourget called his works “a manual of nihilism,” and declared that in each sentence of Flaubert’s “inheres a hidden force.” More significant still is Bourget’s anecdote illustrating Flaubert’s almost insane devotion to style.
“He was very proud,” relates Bourget, “of furnishing his story of Herodias with the adverbalternativement,—alternately. This word whose two accents onterandtigive it a loose swing, seemed to him to render concrete and almost perceptible the march of the two slaves who in turn carried the head of St. John the Baptist.” And in the preface by Flaubert to Dernières Chansons de Louis Bouilhet may be found his startling yet rational theory that good prose alone can stand the test of being read aloud, for “a well-constructed phrase adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration.”
“While remaining itself obscure,” writes George Moore of L’Education Sentimentale, “this novel has given birth to a numerous literature. The Rougon-Macquart series is nothing but L’Education Sentimentale rewritten into twenty volumes by a prodigious journalist—twenty huge balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes getting clear of the housetops. Maupassant cut it into numberless walking sticks; Goncourt took the descriptive passages and turned them into Passy rhapsodies. The book has been a treasure cavern known to forty thieves, whence all have found riches and fame. The original spirit has proved too strong for general consumption, but, watered and prepared, it has had the largest sale ever known.”
Some one in Henry Labouchere’s London Truth wrote this of the author of Boule de Suif: “Guy de Maupassant’s death has revived an interest in his works. He was admittedly the son of Flaubert, from whom he inherited his sanguine temperament, ruddy complexion, the full starting veins in his temples, the bull neck, and the flaw in his nervous system. Flaubert was subject to epileptic fits, and Guy de Maupassant died of general paralysis, preceded by madness, before he had reached middle age. As a writer he was with ease what Flaubert tried to be by great efforts, and something more, he having a deeper insight into what seem the ordinary circumstances of life.”
The Beethoven of French prose was, every one knows, whimsical and fastidious to a degree with his style. Be it true or not, one of his friends relates that he found him one day standing in front of a high music desk, on which stood a paragraph written in large letters. “What are you doing there?” said his friend. “Scanning these words because they don’t sound well.” Flaubert would spend a day over a sentence because it did not sound well, and every sentence he sent to press was equally closely analyzed. Well, why not! If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it would be more sonorous, more rhythmic, in a word, more artistic. I believe the story, although it does not appear in Tarvers’s book on Flaubert. It is glorious, true or false; it fixes an ideal for young writers.
After doggedly working like a galley slave for six years Gustave Flaubert published Salammbô in Paris near the close of 1862. He was then forty-one years old, in the prime of his laborious and picturesque life, recluse, man of the world, traveller, and one of the most devoted of sons. In 1849, with Maxime du Camp—who later imprudently lifted the curtain onthe sad secret of his friend’s life—Flaubert made a journey up the Nile, through Egypt, Nubia, by the Red Sea, through Palestine and Syria, into Cyprus, Rhodes, Asia Minor, Turkey in Europe, and Greece. Before Dr. Schliemann, the great Flaubert dug in Mycenæ, and from the “trenches of Herculaneum, on to the rocks of Cape Misenum,” he explored, furiously obsessed by a fantastic idea. In 1850 we find him in Phœnicia, a wanderer and an excavator of buried pasts. During 1858 he went to Tunis, and to the ruins of Carthage. From these delvings was born the epical romance of Salammbô, a book full of sonorous lines like the sweeping harmonies of Wagner, a book of mad dreams, blood, lust, cruelty, and love faithful unto death.
Following the publication of this story Flaubert, a lion in literary Paris since his artistic and legal victories with Madame Bovary, found himself the centre of many attacks by historians, archæologists, pedants, and the critical small fry of the town. To one adversary the blond giant of Croisset deigned a reply. It was M. Froehner, then editor of theRevue Contemporaine, and an expert in archæology—that is, an expert until Flaubert answered his arguments and literally blew them off the globe. He admitted having created Salammbô; that the aqueduct which Mathô and Spendius traversed the night Salammbô first saw the Zäimph was also an invention; that Hanno was really crucified in Sardinia;and a few other minor changes. Then to Froehner’s animadversions he gave text for text, authority for authority, and when a question of topography arose, Flaubert clinched his answer with: “Is it to shine by trying to make the dunces believe that I do not distinguish between Cappadocia and Asia Minor? But I know it, sir; I have seen it, I have taken walks in it.”
If the question was consecrating apes to the moon, or whether beards covered in bags in sign of mourning are in Cahen [Ezekiel xxiv. 17] and on the chins of Egyptian colossi—any doubtful fact, be it ethnic, archæologic, ethic, æsthetic, or historic, was met by a volley of answers, a flood of learning, a wealth of reading, that simply overwhelmed his antagonist. The affair was tremendously diverting for the lookers-on, but it is to be doubted if art was benefited. For two dusty German professors such a controversy might have proved useful; in it Flaubert simply wasted his glorious powers.
Salammbô, despite its erudition, is a love story, original in design, set in a strange environment, a love story withal. The accusations of a too impersonal style and of a lack of human interest do not altogether hold when the wonderfully vital portrait of Salammbô is studied; and the fiery Mathô, the leper Hanno, Hamilcar, stern, but loving his little son Hannibal like the apple of his eye; the wily Spendius, the fanatical high priest—here is a group of living humans, animated bythe same passions as ours, a delineation almost cruel in its clearness, and all surrounded by an atmosphere of realistic beauty that bespeaks the art of its creator. The style, the superb cadenced prose which passes us in processional splendor or else penetrates the soul like a strange perfume, this style so sharp in outline, so canorous to the ear, a style at once pictorial and musical,—to this unique verbal presentation I cannot accord justice. Flaubert is first the musician and then the psychologist.
Ernest Reyer was born in 1823. His family name was Rey, and he hails from Marseilles. A very old but active man, Reyer is librarian of the Opéra, and is, or was, critic of theJournal des Débats, a position formerly held by Berlioz. In 1876 he succeeded Félicien David as a member of the Institute. These two composers exerted the major influence upon the work of Reyer. He imitated David in his choice of Eastern subjects and Berlioz in his modern instrumentation. Beginning as a reformer, writing music that was classed as too advanced, Reyer lived to hear himself called a reactionary—and with justice, for in his setting to Salammbô he harks back to Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Félicien David. The mighty wave of Wagner had no attraction for this Frenchman until he heard the Tristan Prelude in 1884. From that time he became an ardent preacherof the faith Wagnerian. He modelled his orchestration after Wagner, wrote of his music in his critical journal, and became known as one of the men in Paris who could be counted upon for the Bayreuth propaganda.
Yet in practice Reyer seems timid. Not possessing much musical individuality, he attempted what most unoriginal men attempt, he temporized, became a composer of compromises and an eclectic. So in his music, even in his best work, Sigurd, the want of a strong, individual style is noticeable. As early as 1876 selections from Sigurd had been given in concert by Pasdeloup. The theme of the opera is almost identical with Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the book of which was finished in 1853. Is it any wonder that Reyer speaks of his early music as coming too late after David and his later music too soon after Wagner? Berlioz produced his Erostrate at Baden-Baden, and Bizet said that La Statue was one of the most remarkable operas given in France for two decades. With all his half successes—for Sigurd is in the repertory of the Paris Opéra—Reyer cannot be considered as a strong man in any way. He has imitated Gluck and Wagner, Berlioz and Wagner. Years ago, after hearing Sigurd, I called him “le petit Berlioz,” but I now consider the phrase a pleasing exaggeration. Berlioz was a master of orchestration. Reyer is not. And he has nothing new to say. We all recognizethose impotent phrases, hollow and sonorous as the wind in a tall chimney, that are plastered over his scores. Those cries “O Ciel!” “Je t’aime!” and “Horreur!” are they not idiotic in librettos and music! Here is the musical phraseclichéin all its banal perfection, and the thunderous chorusesà laMeyerbeer which punctuate Reyer’s scenes weary the nerves, beat down our sympathies, and stun our ears.
Sigurd is the one opera that betrays fancy, science, and a feeling for characterization. I have enjoyed parts of it at the Paris Opéra, but wondered why the composer had selected the subject. Brunhild lies asleep on the fiery mountain, situated in Iceland. Sigurd, Gunther, and Hagen swear friendship, and Sigurd puts on the tarn-cap, winning Hilda, as she is called, for Gunther. There is the episode of the naked sword, and later Sigurd is slain by Gunther. The ballet is very pretty, and Wagner’s influence is in evidence. Sigurd, though produced in 1884, was really composed before Götterdämmerung. Again Reyer came too late.
In 1889 he finished the score of Salammbô. It was first sung at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, February 10, 1890, with Rose Caron, Sellier, Bouvet, Vergnet, and Renaud in the cast. Two years later, May 23, 1892, Paris listened to the opera with Rose Caron, Albert Saléza, Vaquet, Delmas, and Renaud in the production. Wednesday night, March 20, 1901,in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York viewed its spectacle, for spectacle Salammbô is, spectacle and naught else. The cast is given as a matter of record: Lucienne Bréval, Salammbô; Saléza, Mathô; Salignac, High Priest; Journet, Narr’ Havas; Gilibert, Giscon; Scotti, Hamilcar; Sizes, Spendius; Dufriche, Autharite, and Carrie Bridewell, Taanach. Luigi Mancinelli conducted. The production was an elaborate and costly one.
Camille du Locle, who butchered Flaubert’s book to make a holiday for the Parisians, accomplished his task successfully according to his lights—theatrical lights. He altered the story, suppressed much of its humanity, and eliminated the magnificent picturesqueness of the romance. Du Locle divides his scene plots thus:—
Act I. The Gardens of Hamilcar’s Palace.
Act II. The Temple of Tanit.
Act III. First Scene. The Temple of Moloch. Second Scene. The Terrace of Salammbô.
Act IV. First Scene. The Camp of the Mercenaries. Second Scene. The Tent of Mathô. Third Scene. The Field of Battle.
Act V. The Forum.
I need hardly tell you the original story—how Mathô, the fierce Libyan warrior, first saw the lovely daughter of Hamilcar; how he resolved to win her; the rape of the sacred veil of Tanit, called the Zäimph, and Salammbô’s terrorat seeing it shroud the person of a Barbarian in her sleeping chamber; the pursuit, the escape, the return of Hamilcar and the resolve of Salammbô to win back for Carthage its holy veil. Who can describe after Flaubert the massed shock of armies, the pillage of cities and the crucifixion of the lions! To the march of his sonorous sentences we move through strange scenes, scenes of repulsive horror, slaughtered men and beasts, and the odor of sun-baked carcasses, over which hover obscene winged creatures seeking carrion.
Salammbô, after a hieratic ceremonial with the huge sacred serpent of the temple—Rodin alone might execute this episode in shivering marble—visits the tent of Mathô, recovers the Zäimph, but meets with an accident. She discovers her love for the Mercenary chief, who justly besieges Carthage for the pay of his soldiers, and she snaps the gold anklet-chain that daughters of patricians wore in those times. Mathô is captured, tortured by having to run the gantlet of Carthage’s enraged populace, and finally drops before the terraced throne upon which sits Salammbô beside her affianced husband, Narr’ Havas, the Numidian. The poor hunted wretch, over whose red flesh the skin hangs in bloody strips, dies, and his heart is cut out before the eyes of Salammbô. She takes poison from a goblet handed her by the expectant bridegroom. All who touch the veil ofTanit must perish. So is it decreed by the law and the prophets!
M. du Locle has altered this significant ending by making Salammbô stab herself, and then Mathô—by the usual “frenzied and superhuman effort”—breaks his bonds and carves himself into eternity. It is sweetly gory and melodramatic, this ending. Of course, the trip through the aqueduct is omitted and the theft of the Zäimph takes place before Salammbô’s eyes. This is in the second act. The librettist, with memories of Faust, causes Mathô to make an imaginary circle through which it would be impious to penetrate. Incidentally he wooes the young lady with true Gallic ardor. Yet this act, far removed as it is from the book, is the best of the five.
What follows is of no consequence; the council chamber is lugged in for its picture, and the spectacle of Salammbô dressing on a terrace under the rays of a Carthaginian moon, as round as a silver buckler, does not advance the action materially. The camp and battle scenes do credit to the taste of the decorator, though they are meaningless. But in Mathô’s tent, where Salammbô presently arrives, Reyer strikes fire for the first time. His hero and heroine have thus far been smothered by processions of chanting priests, by mobs of soldiery, by ballets and by monster choruses. Here the man and the woman, face to face, bare their souls, and themusic, not so passionate or so desperate as Valentine and Raoul’s duo in the fourth act of Les Huguenots, is yet sincere and touching. After that the opera oozes away in mere pantomime. There is a fall down a series of lofty staircases, which is not high art.
I could only distinguish two well-defined leading-motives in thepartition. One came from Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, fourth act, the other is a slight deviation from Tristan’s cry in Act III: “O Isolde.” For the rest, I have a vague remembrance ofcantilenawithout melody, finales without climax, a thin, noisy, shallow, and irritating stream of orchestration and a vocal score that either screamed or roared. The harmonic scheme is dull and there is little rhythmic variety. Reyer, as I said before, has few musical ideas, and he does not conceal this deficiency by the graceful externals of a brilliant instrumentation. As well meant as was Reyer’s admiration for the immortal story, a story that will outlive the mock antiquities of Bulwer, Ebers, and Sienkiewicz, the French critic and composer was not the man to give it a musical setting. Wagner or Verdi—none other—could have made of his glowing Oriental prose-poem a music-drama of vital power and exquisite coloring.
It is a holy and wholesome thing to visit the graves of genius, for the memories arousedmay serve as an inspiration and a consolation in the spiritually arid tracts of daily and doleful existence. But as the emotions aroused at the sight of great men’s relics are profound only to the individual—they seldom make interesting reading—so more than a record of the fact that I have visited Rouen several times to view the tomb of Gustave Flaubert is not of burning importance. I cannot help protesting, however, at the tardy official recognition accorded one of the greatest prose masters France can boast, and one of the great world novelists. In the Solferino Gardens there is the marble memorial by the sculptor Chapu, and up on the heights of the Monumental Cemetery lie his remains in the Flaubert family plot, not very far from the Joan of Arc monument. The Government has done nothing, though it has erected marble quarries to mediocrities not worthy to unlatch the shoes of Flaubert. Guy de Maupassant is remembered in the Solferino Gardens by a statuevis-à-visto the master whom he loved and to whom he owed so much. At Paris another loving memorial stands in the Parc Monceau; yet for Flaubert, a giant when compared to the unhappy writer of the Contes, there is nothing—not even a commemorative tablet.
The least reparation for this neglect that the French Government can offer is the purchase and preservation of the little house in which Madame Bovary was composed with such painfultravail. It still stands, though fast crumbling into decay, on the bank of the Seine at Croisset about half an hour below Rouen. The paternal house has vanished, and occupying part of the little park is a dismantled manufactory. Abbé Prévost is said to have written Manon Lescaut in the old house—at least, Flaubert believed the story.
The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert household, keeps a small café near his former home, and is always ready to talk of the master and of his mother, Madame Flaubert. For two seasons I vainly tried to get from Colange a photograph of this mother. To me the mothers of great men are of extraordinary interest. No money could tempt the old man, though he might have had the picture reproduced and sold the copies.
With his phrase uttered at Flaubert’s grave, M. François Coppée fastened more firmly to history the name of that noble artist, “The Beethoven of French Prose.”