Madame Bovary: A Tale of Provincial Life, Vol. 1 (of 2). Gustave Flaubert
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upon the representation, what matters the subject? Is one animal or plant more interesting than another to the naturalist? Does a name matter? All demand the same attention. Art can make exception in its subjects no more than science.
If we ask in what consists the difference between science and art, on this basis, Flaubert, with Leconte de Lisle and with Taine, will tell us that it is in the beauty which communicates prestige to the work, or in the power of form.
"What I have just written might be taken for something of Paul de Kock's, had I not given it a profoundly literary form," wrote Flaubert, while he was at work on Madame Bovary; "but how, out of trivial dialogue, produce style? Yet it is absolutely necessary! It must be done!" He went further still, and persuaded himself that style had a value in itself, intrinsic and absolute, aside from the subject. In fact, if the subject had no importance of its own, and if there were no personal motives for choosing one subject rather than another, what reason would there be for writing Madame Bovary or Salammbô? One alone: and that to "make something out of nothing," to produce a work of art from things of no import. For though everyone has some ideas, and everyone has had experience in some kind of life, it is given to few to be able to express their experience or their ideas in terms of beauty. This, precisely, is the goal of art.
Form, then, is the great preoccupation of the artist, since, if he is an artist, it is through form, and in the perfection or originality of that form, that his triumph comes. Nothing stands out from the general mediocrity except by means of form; nothing becomes concrete, assuming immortality, save through form. Form in art is queen and sovereign. Even truth makes itself felt only through the attractiveness of form. And further, we cannot part one from the other; they are not opposed to each other; they are at one; and art in every phase consists only in this union. It is the end of art to give the superior life of form to that which has it not; and finally, this superior life of form, this magic wand of style, rhythmic as verse and terse as science, by firmly establishing the thing it touches, withdraws it from that law of change, constant in its inconstancy, which is the miserable condition of existence.
All passes; art in its strength
Alone remains to all eternity;
The bust
Survives the city.
This it is that makes up the charm, the social dignity, and the lasting grandeur of art.
This is not the place to discuss the "æsthetic" quality, and I shall content myself with indicating briefly some of the objections it has called forth.
Has form indeed all the importance in literature that Flaubert claimed for it? And what importance has it in sculpture, for example, or in painting? Let us grant its necessity. Colour and line, which are, so to speak, the primal elements in the alphabet of painting and of sculpture, have not in themselves determined and precise significance. Yellow and red, green and blue are only general and confused sensations. But words express particular sentiments and well-defined ideas, and have a value that does not depend upon the form or the quality of the words. You cannot, then, in using them, distinguish between significance and form, or combine them independently of the idea they are intended to convey, as is possible with colours and with lines, solely for the beauty that results from combination. If literary art is a "representation," it is also something more; and the lapse in Flaubert, as in all those who have followed him in the letter, lies in having missed this distinction. You cannot write merely to represent; you write also to express ideas, to determine or to modify convictions; you write that you may act, or impel others to act: these are effects beyond the power of painting or of sculpture. A statue or a picture never brought about a revolution; a book, a pamphlet, nay, a few fiery words, have overturned a dynasty.
It is no longer true, as a whole generation of writers has believed, that art and science may be one and the same thing; or that the first, as Taine has said, may be an "anticipation of the second." We could not in the presence of our fellow-creatures and their suffering affect the indifference of a naturalist before the plant or the animal he is studying. Whatever the nature of "human phenomena" may be, we in our quality as man can only look at them with human eyes, and could temptation make us change our point of view, it would properly be called inhuman.
One might add that, if it is not certain that nature was made for man, and if, for that reason, science is wholly independent of conscience, as we take it, it is otherwise with art. We know that man was not made for art, but that art was made for man. We forget each time we speak of "art for art's sake" that there is need precisely to define the meaning of the expression and to recall that but for truth art could not have for its object the perfecting of political institutions, the uplifting of the masses, the correction of customs, the teachings of religion, and that although this may lead finally to the realization of beauty, it nevertheless remains the duty of man, and consequently, is human in its origin, human in its development, and human in its aim.
Upon all these points, it is only necessary to think sensibly, as also upon the question – which we have not touched upon, – of knowing under what conditions, in what sense, and in what degree the person of the artist can or should remain foreign to his work.
But a peculiarity of Flaubert's, – and one more personal, which even most of the naturalists have not shared with him, neither the Dutch in their paintings, nor the English in the history of romance (the author of Tom Jones or of Clarissa Harlowe), nor the Russians, Tolstoi or Dostoiefski, – is to despise the rôle of irony in art. "My personages are profoundly repugnant to me," he wrote, à propos of Madame Bovary. But they were not always repugnant to him, at least not all of them, and, in verification of this, we find that he has not for Spendius, Matho, Hamilcar, and Hanno, the boundless scorn that he affects for Homais or for Bournisien, for Bouvard or for Pecuchet.
We recognise here the particular and special form of Flaubert's pessimism. That there could be people in the world, among his contemporaries, who were not wholly absorbed and preoccupied with art, surpassed his comprehension, and when this indifference did not arouse an indignation which exasperated him even to blows, it drew from him a scornful laughter that one might call Homeric or Rabelaisian, since it incited more to anger than to gaiety. And this is the reason why Madame Bovary, Education Sentimentale, Un Cœur Simple, and Bouvard et Pecuchet would be more truly named were they called satires and not representations.
The exaggeration of the principle here recoils upon itself. That disinterestedness, that impartiality, that serenity which permitted him to "hover impartially above all objects" deserted him. A satirist, or to be more exact, a caricaturist, awoke within the naturalist. He raged at his own characters. He railed at them and mocked them. The interest of the representation had undergone a change. He was no longer in the attitude of mere fidelity to facts, but in a state of scorn and violent derision. Homais and Bournisien are no longer studies in themselves, but a burden to Flaubert. His Education Sentimentale, in spite of him, became, to use his own expression, an overflow of rancour. In Bouvard et Pecuchet he gave way to his hatred of humanity; here, as a favour, and under the mask of irony, he brings himself into his work, and, like a simple Madame Sand, or a vulgar De Musset, we perceive Flaubert himself, bull-necked and ruddy, with the moustaches of a Gallic chief, agonizing at each turn in the romance.
It is not necessary to exaggerate Flaubert's influence. In his time there were ten other writers, none of whom equalled him, – Parnassians in poetry, positivists in criticism, realists in romance or in dramatic writing, – who laboured at the same work. His æstheticism is not his alone, yet Madame Bovary and Salammbô shot like unexpected meteors out of a grey sky, the dull, low sky of the Second Empire. In 1860 the sky was not so grey or so low; and the Poèmes Antiques of Leconte de Lisle, the Études d'histoire religieuse of Renan, and the Essais de Critique of Taine, are possibly not unworthy to be placed in parallel or comparison with the first writings of Flaubert. An exquisite judge of things of the mind, J. J. Weiss, very clearly saw at that time what there was in common in all these works, in the glory of which he was not deceived when he added the Fleurs du Mai by Charles Baudelaire, and the first comedies of Alexandre Dumas fils. But the truth is, not one of these works was marked with signs of masterly maturity in like degree with Madame Bovary.
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