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The George Sand Gustave Flaubert Letters

G >> George Sand, Gustave Flaubert >> The George Sand Gustave Flaubert Letters




Critics have spent much time in discussing the conflict of
"romantic" and "realistic" tendencies in Flaubert's works. And it is
obviously easy, so far as subject-matter is concerned, to group his
books in two divisions: on the one hand, The Temptation of St.
Anthony, Salammbo, and two of the Trois Contes; on the other hand,
Madame Bovary, L'Education Sentimentale, and the incomplete Bouvard
and Pecuchet. We may call the tales in the first group romantic,
because the subject-matter is remote in time and place, and because
in them Flaubert indulges his passion for splendor--for oriental
scenery, for barbaric characters, the pomp of savage war and more
savage religion, events strange, terrible, atrocious. We may call
the stories in the other group realistic, because the subject-matter
is contemporary life in Paris and the provinces, and because in them
Flaubert indulges his hatred for mediocrity--for the humdrum
existence of the country doctor, the apothecary, the insipid clerk,
the vapid sentimental woman, and the charlatans of science. But as a
matter of fact, ALL his books are essentially constructed on the
same theory: all are just as "realistic" as Flaubert could make
them.

Henry James called Madame Bovary a brilliantly successful
application of Flaubert's theory; he pronounced L'Education
Sentimentale "elaborately and massively dreary"; and he briefly
dismissed Salammbo as an accomplished work of erudition. Salammbo is
indeed a work of erudition; years were spent in getting up its
archaeological details. But Madame Bovary is also a work of
erudition, and Bouvard and Pecuchet is a work of enormous erudition;
a thousand volumes were read for the notes of the first volume and
Flaubert is said to have killed himself by the labor of his
unfinished investigations. There is no important distinction to be
made between the method or the thoroughness with which he collected
his facts in the one case or the other; and the story of the war of
the mercenaries against the Carthaginians is evolved with the same
alternation of picture and dramatic spectacle and the same hard
merciless externality that distinguish the evolution of Emma
Bovary's history.

We may go still farther than that towards wiping out the distinction
between Flaubert's "romantic" and his "realistic" works; and by the
same stroke what is illusory in the pretensions of the realists,
namely, their aspiration to an "impersonal art."

If we were seeking to prove that an author can put NOTHING BUT
HIMSELF into his art, we should ask for no more impressive
illustions than precisely, Madame Bovary and Salammbo. These two
masterpieces disclose to reflection, no less patently than the works
of George Sand, their purpose and their meaning. And that purpose
and meaning are not a whit less personal to Flaubert than the
purpose and meaning of Indiana, let us say, are personal to George
Sand. The "meaning" of Madame Bovary and Salammbo is, broadly
speaking, Flaubert's sense of the significance--or, rather, of the
insignificance--of human life; and the "purpose" of the books is to
express it. The most lyrical of idealists can do no more to reveal
herself.

The demonstration afforded by a comparison of Salammbo and Madame
Bovary is particularly striking because the subject-matters are
superficially so unlike. But take any characteristic series of
pictures or incidents from Salammbo: take the passing of the
children through the fire to Moloch, or the description of the
leprous Hanno, or the physical surrender of the priestess to her
country's enemy, or the following picture of the crucified lion:

"They were marching through a wide defile, hedged in by two chains
of reddish hillocks, when a nauseous odor struck their nostrils, and
they believed that they saw something extraordinary at the top of a
carob tree; a lion's head stood up above the foliage.

"Running towards it, they found a lion attached to a cross by its
four limbs, like a criminal; his enormous muzzle hung to his breast,
and his forepaws, half concealed beneath the abundance of his mane,
were widely spread apart, like a bird's wings in flight; under the
tightly drawn skin, his ribs severally protruded and his hind legs
were nailed together, but were slightly drawn up; black blood had
trickled through the hairs, and collected in stalactites at the end
of his tail, which hung straight down the length of the cross. The
soldiers crowded around the beast, diverting themselves by calling
him 'Consul!' and 'Citizen of Rome!' and threw pebbles into his eyes
to scatter the swarming gnats."

And now take any characteristic series of pictures or incidents from
Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the
club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape;
take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to
Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself for three thousand
francs to Rodolphe; or the following bit, only a bit, from the
detailed account of the heroine's last hours, after the arsenical
poisoning:

"Emma's head was turned towards her right shoulder, the corner of
her mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower
part of her face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her
hands; a kind of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes
were beginning to disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a
thin web, as if spiders had spun it over. The sheet sunk in from her
breast to her knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes, and it
seemed to Charles that infinite masses, an enormous load, were
weighing upon her.

"The church clock struck two. They could hear the loud murmur of the
river flowing in the darkness at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur
Bournisien from time to time blew his nose noisily and Homais' pen
was scratching over the paper."

In these two detached pictures--the one from a so-called "romantic,"
the other from a so-called "realistic" book--one readily observes
the likeness in the subjects, which are of a ghastly repulsiveness;
the same minuteness of observation--e.g., the lion's hind legs
"slightly drawn up," the woman's thumbs "bent into the palms of her
hands"; the same careful notation of effect on the several senses;
the same rhetorical heightening--e.g., the "stalactites at the end
of his tail," the web in the woman's eyes "as if spiders had spun it
over"; and finally, that celebrated detachment, that air as of a
medical examiner, recording the results of an autopsy. What can we
know of such an author? All, or nearly all, that he knew of himself,
provided we will searchingly ask ourselves what sort of mind is
steadily attracted to the painting of such pictures, to the
representation of such incidents, and what sort of mind expresses a
lifetime of brooding on the significance of life in two such books
as Madame Bovary and Salammbo.

At its first appearance, Madame Bovary was prosecuted, though
unsuccessfully, as offensive to public morals. In derision of this
famous prosecution, Henry James with studious jauntiness, asserts
that in the heat of his first admiration he thought what an
excellent moral tract it would make. "It may be very seriously
maintained," he continues, "that M. Flaubert's masterpiece is the
pearl of 'Sunday reading.'" As a work of fiction and recreation the
book lacks, in his opinion, one quite indispensable quality: it
lacks charm. Well, there are momentary flashes of beauty and grace,
dazzling bits of color, haunting melancholy cadences in every
chapter of Flaubert; but a charming book he never wrote. A total
impression of charm he never gave--he never could give; because his
total impression of life was not charming but atrocious. It is
perhaps an accident, as has been suggested, that one can so readily
employ Madame Bovary to illustrate that text on the "wages of sin."
Emma, to be sure, goes down the easy and alluring path to disgrace
and ruin. But that is only an incident in the wider meaning of
Flaubert's fiction, a meaning more amply expressed in Salammbo,
where not one foolish woman alone but thousands on thousands of men,
women, and children, mingled with charging elephants and vipers,
flounder and fight in indescribable welters of blood and filth, and
go down to rot in a common pit. If I read Flaubert's meaning right,
all human history is there; you may show it by painting on broad
canvas a Carthaginian battle-scene or by photographing the details
of a modern bedroom: a brief brightness, night and the odor of
carrion, a crucified lion, a dying woman, the jeering of ribald
mercenaries, the cackle of M. Homais. It is all one. If Flaubert
deserved prosecution, it was not for making vice attractive, but for
expressing with invasive energy that personal and desperately
pessimistic conception of life by which he was almost overwhelmed.

That a bad physical regimen, bad habits of work in excessive
quantities, and the solitude of his existence were contributory to
Flaubert's melancholy, his exacerbated egotism, and his pessimism is
sufficiently obvious in the letters. This Norman giant with his
aching head buried all day long in his arms, groping in anguish for
a phrase, has naturally a kindly disposition towards various
individuals of his species--is even capable of great generosity; but
as he admits with a truth and pathos, deeply appealing to the
maternal sympathies of his correspondent, he has no talent for
living. He has never been able, like richer and more resourceful
souls, to reconcile being a man with being an author. He has made
his choice; he has renounced the cheerful sanities of the world:

"I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being;
and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a
single day nor any event whatsoever. I see my mother and my niece on
Sundays, and that is all. My only company consists of a band of rats
in the garret, which make an infernal racket above my head, when the
water does not roar or the wind blow. The nights are black as ink,
and a silence surrounds me comparable to that of the desert.
Sensitiveness is increased immeasurably in such a setting. I have
palpitations of the heart for nothing.

"All that results from our charming profession. That is what it
means to torment the soul and the body. But perhaps this torment is
our proper lot here below."

To George Sand, who wrote as naturally as she breathed and almost as
easily, seclusion and torment were by no means the necessary
conditions of literary activity. Enormously productive, with a
hundred books to his half-a-dozen, she has never dedicated and
consecrated herself to her profession but has lived heartily and a
bit recklessly from day to day, spending herself in many directions
freely, gaily, extravagantly. Now that she has definitely said
farewell to her youth, she finds that she is twenty years younger;
and now that she is, in a sense, dissipating her personality and
living in the lives of others, she finds that she is happier than
ever before. "It can't be imperative to work so painfully"--such is
the burden of her earlier counsels to Flaubert; "spare yourself a
little, take some exercise, relax the tendons of your mind, indulge
a little the physical man. Live a little as I do; and you will take
your fatigues and illnesses and occasional dolours and dumps as
incidents of the day's work and not magnify them into the
mountainous overshadowing calamities from which you deduce your
philosophy of universal misery." No advice could have been more
wholesome or more timely. And with what pictures of her own busy
felicity she reenforces her advice! I shall produce three of them
here in order to emphasize that precious thing which George Sand
loved to impart, and which she had the gift of imparting, namely,
joy, the spontaneous joyousness of her own nature. The first passage
is from a letter of June 14, 1867:

"I am a little remorseful to take whole days from your work, I who
am never bored with loafing, and whom you could leave for whole
hours under a tree, or before two lighted logs, with the assurance
that I should find there something interesting. I know so well how
to live OUTSIDE OF MYSELF. It hasn't always been like that. I also
was young and subject to indignations. It is over! Since I have
dipped into real nature, I have found there an order, a system, a
calmness of cycles which is lacking in mankind, but which man can,
up to a certain point, assimilate when he is not too directly at
odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties
return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup
of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against
the ephemeral and relative truth."

The second passage is of June 21:

"I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the
carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a
thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the
waters. I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I
love everything that is around me, no matter where I am."

The last passage gives a glimpse of the seventeenth of January,
1869, a typical day in Nohant:

"The individual named George Sand is well: he is enjoying the
marvellous winter which reigns in Berry, gathering flowers, noting
interesting botanical anomalies, making dresses and mantles for his
daughter-in-law, costumes for the marionettes, cutting out scenery,
dressing dolls, reading music, but above all spending hours with the
little Aurore, who is a marvellous child. There is not a more
tranquil or a happier individual in his domestic life than this old
troubadour retired from business, who sings from time to time his
little song to the moon, without caring much whether he sings well
or ill, provided he sings the motif that runs in his head, and who,
the rest of the time, idles deliciously.... This pale character has
the great pleasure of loving you with all his heart, and of not
passing a day without thinking of the other old troubadour, confined
in his solitude of a frenzied artist, disdainful of all the
pleasures of the world."

Flaubert did "exercise" a little--once or twice--in compliance with
the injunctions of his "dear master"; but he rather resented the
implication that his pessimism was personal, that it had any
particular connection with his peculiar temperament or habits. He
wished to think of himself as a stoic, quite indifferent about his
"carcase." His briefer black moods he might acknowledge had
transitory causes. But his general and abiding conceptions of
humanity were the result of dispassionate reflections. "You think,"
he cries in half-sportive pique, "that because I pass my life trying
to make harmonious phrases, in avoiding assonances, that I too have
not my little judgments on the things of this world? Alas! Yes! and
moreover I shall burst, enraged at not expressing them." And later:
"Yes, I am susceptible to disinterested angers, and I love you all
the more for loving me for that. Stupidity and injustice make me
roar,--and I howl in my corner against a lot of things 'that do not
concern me.'" "On the day that I am no longer in a rage, I shall
fall flat as the marionette from which one withdraws the support of
the stick."

So far as Flaubert's pessimism has an intellectual basis, it rests
upon his researches in human history. For Salammbo and The
Temptation of St. Anthony he ransacked ancient literature, devoured
religions and mythologies, and saturated himself in the works of the
Church Fathers. In order to get up the background of his Education
Sentimentale he studied the Revolution of 1848 and its roots in the
Revolution of 1789. He found, shall we say? what he was looking for-
-inexhaustible proofs of the cruelty and stupidity of men. After
"gulping" down the six volumes of Buchez and Roux, he declares: "The
clearest thing I got out of them is an immense disgust for the
French.... Not a liberal idea which has not been unpopular, not a
just thing that has not caused scandal, not a great man who has not
been mobbed or knifed. 'The history of the human mind is the history
of human folly,' as says M. Voltaire. ... Neo-Catholicism on the one
hand, and Socialism on the other, have stultified France." In
another letter of the same Period and similar provocation: "However
much you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their
bellies, and even gilding their stable, they will remain brutes, no
matter what one says. All the advance that one can hope for, is to
make the brute a little less wicked. But as for elevating the ideas
of the mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human
conception of God, I have my doubts."

In addition to the charges of violence and cruelty, which he brought
against all antiquity as well as against modern times, much in the
fashion of Swift or the older Mark Twain, Flaubert nursed four grave
causes of indignation, made four major charges of folly against
modern "Christian" civilization. In religion, we have substituted
for Justice the doctrine of Grace. In our sociological
considerations we act no longer with discrimination but upon a
principle of universal sympathy. In the field of art and literature
we have abandoned criticism and research for the Beautiful in favor
of universal puffery. In politics we have nullified intelligence and
renounced leadership to embrace universal suffrage, which is the
last disgrace of the human spirit.

It must be acknowledged that Flaubert's arraignment of modern
society possesses the characteristics commended by the late Barett
Wendell: it is marked in a high degree by "unity, mass, and
coherence." It must be admitted also that George Sand possessed in a
high degree the Pauline virtue of being "not easily provoked," or
she never could have endured so patiently, so sweetly, Flaubert's
reiterated and increasingly ferocious assaults upon her own master
passion, her ruling principle. George Sand was one whose entire life
signally attested the power of a "saving grace," resident in the
creative and recuperative energies of nature, resident in the
magical, the miracle-working, powers of the human heart, the powers
of love and sympathy. She was a modern spiritual adventurer who had
escaped unscathed from all the anathemas of the old theology; and
she abounded, like St. Francis, in her sense of the new dispensation
and in her benedictive exuberance towards all the creatures of God,
including not merely sun, moon, and stars and her sister the lamb
but also her brother the wolf. On this principle she loves
Flaubert!--and archly asserts her arch-heresy in his teeth. He
complains that her fundamental defect is that she doesn't know how
to "hate." She replies, with a point that seems never really to have
pierced his thick casing of masculine egotism:

"Artists are spoiled children and the best are great egotists. You
say that I love them too well; I like them as I like the woods and
the fields, everything, everyone that I know a little and that I
study continually. I make my life in the midst of all that, and as I
like my life, I like all that nourishes it and renews it. They do me
a lot of ill turns which I see, but which I no longer feel. I know
that there are thorns in the hedges, but that does not prevent me
from putting out my hands and finding flowers there. If all are not
beautiful, all are interesting. The day you took me to the Abbey of
Saint-Georges I found the scrofularia borealis, a very rare plant in
France. I was enchanted; there was much----in the neighborhood where
I gathered it. Such is life!

"And if one does not take life like that, one cannot take it in any
way, and then how can one endure it? I find it amusing and
interesting, and since I accept EVERYTHING, I am so much happier and
more enthusiastic when I meet the beautiful and the good. If I did
not have a great knowledge of the species, I should not have quickly
understood you, or known you or loved you."

Two years later the principles and tempers of both these
philosophers were put to their severest trial. In 1870, George Sand
had opportunity to apply her doctrine of universal acceptance to the
Prussians in Paris. Flaubert had opportunity to welcome scientific
organization in the Prussian occupation of his own home at Croisset.
The first reaction of both was a quite simple consternation and
rage, in which Flaubert cries, "The hopeless barbarism of humanity
fills me with a black melancholy," and George Sand, for the moment
assenting, rejoins: "Men are ferocious and conceited brutes." As the
war thickens around him and the wakened militancy of his compatriots
presses him hard, Flaubert becomes more and more depressed; he
forebodes a general collapse of civilization--before the century
passes, a conflict of races, "in which several millions of men kill
one another in one engagement." With the curiously vengeful
satisfaction which mortals take in their own misery when it offers
occasion to cry "I told you so," he exclaims: "Behold then, the
NATURAL MAN. Make theories now! Boast the progress, the
enlightenment and the good sense of the masses, and the gentleness
of the French people! I assure you that anyone here who ventured to
preach peace would get himself murdered."

George Sand in her fields at Nohant--not "above" but a little aside
from the conflict--turns instinctively to her peasant doggedly,
placidly, sticking at his plow; turns to her peasant with a kind of
intuition that he is a symbol of faith, that he holds the keys to a
consolation, which the rest of us blindly grope for: "He is
imbecile, people say; no, he is a child in prosperity, a man in
disaster, more of a man than we who complain; he says nothing, and
while people are killing, he is sowing, repairing continually on one
side what they are destroying on the other." Flaubert, who thinks
that he has no "illusions" about peasants or the "average man,"
brings forward his own specific of a quite different nature: "Do you
think that if France, instead of being governed on the whole by the
crowd, were in the power of the mandarins, we should be where we are
now? If, instead of having wished to enlighten the lower classes, we
had busied ourselves with instructing the higher, we should not have
seen M. de Keratry proposing the pillage of the duchy of Baden."

In the great war of our own time with the same foes, our
professional advocates of "preparedness," our cheerful chemists, our
scientific "intellectuals"--all our materialistic thinkers hard-
shell and soft-shell,--took the position of Flaubert, just
presented; reproached us bitterly for our slack, sentimental
pacificism; and urged us with all speed to emulate the scientific
spirit of our enemy. There is nothing more instructive in this
correspondence than to observe how this last fond illusion falls
away from Flaubert under the impact of an experience which
demonstrated to his tortured senses the truth of the old Rabelaisian
utterance, that "science without conscience is the ruin of the
soul."

"What use, pray," he cries in the last disillusion, "is science,
since this people abounding in scholars commits abominations worthy
of the Huns and worse than theirs, because they are systematic,
cold-blooded, voluntary, and have for an excuse, neither passion nor
hunger?" And a few months later, he is still in mad anguish of
desolation:

"I had some illusions! What barbarity! What a slump! I am wrathful
at my contemporaries for having given me the feelings of a brute of
the twelfth century! I'm stifling in gall! These officers who break
mirrors with white gloves on, who know Sanskrit, and who fling
themselves on the champagne; who steal your watch and then send you
their visiting card, this war for money, these civilized savages
give me more horror than cannibals. And all the world is going to
imitate them, is going to be a soldier! Russia has now four millions
of them. All Europe will wear a uniform. If we take our revenge, it
will be ferocious in the last degree; and, mark my word, we are
going to think only of that, of avenging ourselves on Germany."

Under the imminence of the siege of Paris, Flaubert had drilled men,
with an out-flashing of the savage fighting spirit of his ancestors,
of which he was more than half ashamed. But at heart he is more
dismayed, more demoralized, more thoroughly prostrated than George
Sand. He has not fortitude actually to face the degree of depravity
which he has always imputed to the human race, the baseness with
which his imagination has long been easily and cynically familiar.
As if his pessimism had been only a literary pigment, a resource of
the studio, he shudders to find Paris painted in his own ebony
colors, and his own purely "artistic" hatred of the bourgeois,
translated into a principle of action, expressing itself in the
horrors of the Commune, with half the population trying to strangle
the other half. Hatred, after all, contempt and hatred, are not
quite the most felicitous watchwords for the use of human society.
Like one whose cruel jest has been taken more seriously than he had
intended and has been turned upon his own head, Flaubert considers
flight: "I cherish the following dream: of going to live in the sun
in a tranquil country." As a substitute for a physical retreat, he
buries himself in a study of Buddhism, and so gradually returns to
the pride of his intellectual isolation. As the tumult in his senses
subsides, he even ventures to offer to George Sand the anodyne of
his old philosophical despair: "Why are you so sad? Humanity offers
nothing new. Its irremediable misery has filled me with sadness ever
since my youth. And in addition I now have no disillusions. I
believe that the crowd, the common herd will always be hateful. The
only important thing is a little group of minds always the same--
which passes the torch from one to another."

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