The Paradox of Flaubert

THE PARADOX OF FLAUBERT·w. F. GIESE T HERE are few religions that we .cannot on the . whole approve; there are few substitutes ,for religion that we are' not forced to disapprove. Unhappily, Flaubert's religion of art, so pure, so strenuous , and so disinterested, had its disqualifications. His aloofness from temptation was founded on a certain inhumanity , and his uncompromising artistic orthodoxy on a distressing intellectual narrowness. We cannot but feel that the man was sacrificed to the artist, and that life lost all that art gained. If the art had lost nothing in the process, if it were not itself debased by this ambiguous genesis, the whole matter might be dismissed with a sigh, at the -heavy cost paid for all greatly precious things. But the artist's work is inevitably an expr~ssion of.his inner and outer life; what is wanting in the man is the index of a corresponding deficiency in the work. There is, in truth, something disparate and strangely inharmonious in Flaubert's geni~s. Nature played the cruel trick of giving him with every gift a counter-gift. His penetrating and disillusioned insight into reality is counteracted by a childish faith that contentment may be ,found· in flight to some far-away, solitary lotus-land, some region of tropical savagery, where one can ride on camels and elephants instead of steam-cars, and run down lions and tigers, and perhaps even felicity, in the jungle or the desert. With this love for the remote, for the misty enlargement of autline which legend lends to reality, he combined a passionate scrupulosity,·a minute exactitude, that condemned him to work mainly in the contemporaneous , the bourgeois, and the humdrum, things which left 298 THE PARADOX OF FLAUBERT him cold or roused in him intense and denunciatoryhatred. He has a certain imaginative wildness, a passion for the grand, the extraordinary, the splendid, yet he tan render these things only with the precise methods of the scientist, and he achieves supreme success only when he abandons romance altogether and painfully renders the colourless and trivial things that he execrated. Accordingly he loves best the books in which he has failed and almost hates his one book that had-and deserved-phenomenal success. He has an excitable, ebullient, domineering, and nervously irritable temperament; yet he imposes upon himself, though often quivering under the yoke, an almost impossible etiquette of literary impersonality. . His natural style is incorrect, haphazard, rough-shod, careless of harmony, yet his literary style is, with intense and endless labour, moulded to achi~ve in coldly jewelled form those effects which the spontaneous artist obtains, vital with living fire, as the gift of inspiration. A worker in literary mosaic, cherishing an unattainable ideal of perfection , forcing his way toward it with endless industry and gr6aning patience, testing his achievement at every step, as ready to recoil as to advance, viewing every stroke of his work with misgiving, questioning his materials, his method, and his talent, half persuaded that what he writes is a failure, yet mortally wounded if another doubt that it is a masterpiece, rarely content, more rarely pleased, and chronically disgusted with his performancesuch is Flaubert, a literary self-tor.rp.entor, who aimed with admirable unworldliness at producing an absolutely perfect piece of fiction. Fate granted his prayer, and in Madame Bovary we-have, not the greatest of novels, something hardly to be expected from such calculating and laborious art, but the modern novel most perfect in construction and in style. This winning of a ((double first" 299 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY is agreat achievement and puts Flaubert at the head of French novelists, along with Balzac and George Sand. But though it brought'recognition for his talents, it brought him no happiness-for happiness he had no talent. The first sentence of Flaubert's earliest letter (he was in his ninth year) is this: "You are right in finding NewYear 's Day a very stupid affair." The last words of his last letter are: "I am weary to the very marrow of my bones." Boredom and lassitude, that is the resume of Flaubert's life, and pessimisticdisillusionment ts the burden...