On Flaubert

In the course of these studies on the literary manifestations of contemporary sensibility I now come to speak of an artist who happens to have struggled all his lifetime against the incursion of personal sensibility into literature. From his years of apprenticeship, when his friends Bouilhet, Du Camp, Lepoittevin, would listen to him elaborate the projects of his superb adolescence, until the period of lucid and half-disheartened labor, Gustave Flaubert did not waver on this aspect of his aesthetic, that is, “that any work in which the author allows himself to be detected is to be condemned . . .” A poet, in his eyes, was truly the poet, the creator—in the etymological and broadest sense of the term—only if he remained outside the drama being told, and showed his heroes without revealing anything of himself. Thus Flaubert is the literary figure in this century who has most rarely written the syllable “I” at the beginning of a sentence, that syllable whose tyrannical egoism already repulsed Pascal: “The self is hateful,” reads a well-known fragment in the Pensées. But the moralist immediately adds, “Mitton, you conceal it, you do not remove it for all that . . .” Similarly, though Flaubert concealed his “self,” he did not remove it from his work. Literary modesty is like physical modesty: the garment, be it made of homespun like a nun’s vestment or of soft silk like a morning negligee that veils the delicate and graceful lines of a woman’s body, still suggests them and gives away their suppleness. The garment of sentences that dresses the sensibility of a writer conveys its own betrayals and suggestions. In the preface he wrote for the industrious Louis Bouilhet’s Dernières Chansons, was it not Flaubert who said of the writer that “the world’s events all seemed to him transposed, as if for the purpose of an illusion to be described?” And does not that illusion vary according to the minds that develop it? Does not each of us perceive, not the universe, but our universe; not plain reality, but what our temperament allows us to embrace of that reality? We depict only our dream of human life, and in a certain sense every product of the imagination is an autobiography, if not strictly factual at least true to our intimate being, and profoundly indicative of our deepest nature. Our thought is a seal that leaves its stamp in wax, and knows of that wax only the imprint it first gave it. Flaubert did not escape this basic law of the human mind. Throughout all of his books one finds the same distinctive sensibility that channels an intensely personal perception of events which it always colors with the same shades. I will attempt to point out those shades that seem to me to correspond most particularly to new states of the contemporary soul, those that make Gustave Flaubert a model for a few young men—ten thousand, or a thousand, or a hundred, what does it matter? Had I not already condemned myself to analyzing the exception, and to a sort of nosography, when I undertook to search for the psychological peculiarities scattered through the work of our most modern writers—I mean those who have left their mark, who have signaled a new discovery in the science of enjoying life bitterly or sweetly, to which in the end all art can perhaps be reduced?

I. On Romanticism

Not much thought is required to recognize that what most deeply influenced Gustave Flaubert was romanticism on the wane. Even if the Souvenirs of Maxime Du Camp did not reveal the depth of this influence, even if we did not have the letter to Louis de Cormenin in which the future author of Madame Bovary hails in Nero “the greatest man of the ancient world” and formulates the most decisive profession of romantic faith, even so, everything would have indicated this initial education in the person, in the friendships, in the enthusiasms, as well as in the practices of the great writer. This mustachioed giant’s manner of walking, the...