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Title: The Life-Work of Flaubert
From the Russian of Merejowski
Author: Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky
Translator: George Augustus Mounsey
Release Date: October 12, 2010 [EBook #33933]
Language: English
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THE LIFE-WORK
OF
FLAUBERT
FROM THE RUSSIAN OF MEREJKOWSKI
BY G. A. MOUNSEY
ALEXANDER MORING LTD
THE DE LA MORE PRESS
32 GEORGE STREET
HANOVER SQUARE
LONDON W
FLAUBERT
I
Balzac in one of his novels gives utterance to the following thought:
"Genius is a terrible disease. Every writer of genius cherishes in his
heart a monster which devours all his emotions as soon as he gives birth
to them. Which is to be the conqueror? Will the disease vanquish the
man, or the man the disease? He must be a great man who can establish a
perfect equilibrium between his genius and his character. Unless the
poet be a giant, unless he be possessed of the shoulders of a Hercules,
he must inevitably remain bereft of heart, or else bereft of talent."
Here, unfortunately, Balzac breaks off his dissertation, and does not
state what in his opinion is the cause of this disease of genius, why
the development and power of the artistic personality stand in many
respects in inverse ratio to the development and power of the moral
type, or on what fundamental ground depends that primary antagonism
between these two elements which is so often to be observed in the daily
experience of life. Every one knows, for instance, that writers of
talent, artists or musicians, are in the majority of cases men of the
most unpractical nature, that their eccentricities and irresponsibility
verge not uncommonly on complete moral disintegration, that they are bad
fathers of families and bad husbands, and that while expressing great
sensitiveness in the forcible language of their works, they very often
show themselves in real life to be at heart hard and unfeeling egotists.
An enquiry into the origin of the causes responsible for the deep
contrast which exists between the æsthetic and ethical points of view,
between the artist and the man, between genius and character, would
undoubtedly open up one of the most interesting chapters in the history
of creative psychology.
Let us take, as an illustration of our thesis, the tragic scene of the
destruction of Laocoon, as described in the Æneid. Picture the horror
and anguish with which the citizens of Troy witness the seizure and
suffocation of Laocoon and his children by the gigantic serpents. The
onlookers are filled with terror, grief, and a desire to save the
unfortunate victims. In bringing out the psychic differences of
constitution among the crowd, the crucial moment of action plays a most
important _rôle_, developing the instinct of self-preservation among the
more timid ones, or the efforts of the more manly to lend their aid.
Then imagine a sculptor moving about in this wavering and undecided
crowd, and studying the terrible tragedy which is being enacted before
his eyes as a fit theme for a future work of art. He alone remains an
unmoved spectator amid the general confusion, lamentation, cries, and
prayers. His moral instincts are all absorbed in an intense æsthetic
curiosity. Tears would hinder his vision, and he keeps them sternly
back, because it is imperatively necessary for him to see every form,
every outline of the muscles distorted under the crushing force of the
snakes' huge coils. Every detail of the picture which in the others
awakens loathing and terror, evokes in him a joy that is outside the ken
of other men. While they weep and waver, the artist rejoices in the
expression of agony on the countenance of Laocoon, rejoices that the
father is unable to bring aid to his children, that the serpents are
compressing their bodies with irresistible force. The next moment,
perchance, the man will have conquered the artist. But the deed is done,
the fact remains, the moment of cruel contemplation has had the power to
brand upon his heart its ineradicable impression.
A series of similar episodes must sooner or later create in the mind of
the artist the habit of withdrawing himself from life, of regarding it
from one side, from without, from the point of view no longer of a
living human being, but from that of an unmoved observer, who seeks in
all that comes to pass before his eyes only some material for his own
artistic reproduction. And in proportion as his powers of imagination
and observation increase, so in equal measure must his sensitiveness and
the exercise of that power of will which is indispensable for all moral
activity diminish. If nature has neither endowed the mind of the artist
with an adamantine stoicism, nor filled his heart with an inexhaustible
spring of love, his æsthetic qualities will little by little devour his
ethical instincts; genius may, in the words of Balzac, "consume" the
heart. In such a case as this, the categories of good and evil which
people have most to do with in real life, _i.e._, the will and the
passions, are confused in the artist's mind with the categories of the
beautiful and the ugly, the characterless and the characteristic, the
artistically interesting and the inane. Wickedness and vice attract the
imagination of the poet, if only they be concealed under forms that are
externally beautiful and attractive; while virtue looks dull and
insignificant unless she can afford some material for a poetical
apotheosis.
But the artist excels not only in the quality of being able to
contemplate objectively and dispassionately the emotions of others, he
is unique also in this, that he can, as an impartial observer, subject
his own heart to the same hard, æsthetic scrutiny that he applies to the
actions of others. Ordinary people can, or at least believe that they
can, entirely recover from the emotions which may have seized upon them,
be they transports of love or hatred, of joy or sorrow. An honourable
man, when he makes his vow of love to a woman, honestly believes in the
truth of that vow--it never enters his head to inquire whether he really
is as much in love as he says he is. One would on the face of things
expect a poet more than other men to be inclined to give way to emotion,
to be credulous, and to let himself be carried away; but in reality
there always remains in his soul, however deeply it may be swayed by
passion, the power to look into its own depths as into those of a
character in a dream or novel; to follow with attention, even in moments
of complete intoxication, the infinite intangible changes of his
emotions, and to focus upon them the force of his merciless analysis.
Human emotions are hardly ever simple or unalloyed: in the majority of
cases they are composed of a mixture of parts differing immensely in the
values of their components. And a psychological artist involuntarily
discovers so many contradictions in himself and in others, even in
moments of genuine exaltation, that by degrees he comes to lose all
faith in his own rectitude, as well as in the rectitude of others.
II
The letters of Flaubert, published in two volumes, offer rich material
for the study, from a living example, of the question of the antagonism
which exists between the artistic and moral personality.
"Art is higher than life"; such is the formula which stands as the
corner-stone of the whole, not only of Flaubert's æsthetic view, but
also of his philosophical view of life. As a young man of thirty he
writes to one of his school friends: "If I did not introduce into the
plot of my poems a French queen of the fifteenth century, I should feel
an utter disgust of life, and long ere this a bullet would have freed me
from this humiliating folly." Within a year's time he is, with half
serious rhetoric and youthful enthusiasm, encouraging the same young
friend to proceed with his own work. "Let us ever devote ourselves to
our art, which, being more powerful than all nations, crowns, or rulers,
holds, in virtue of its glorious diadem, eternal sway over the whole
universe." When over forty years of age, and on the verge of the tomb,
Flaubert repeats with even greater emphasis and audacity the same
device: "_L'homme n'est rien; l'oeuvre est tout._"--"Man is nothing;
work is everything."
In the flower of his early manhood, though possessed of beauty, wit, and
talent, he forsook the world for the sake of his art, like an ascetic in
the desert: he immersed himself in his solitude, as the Christian
hermits immured themselves in their caverns. "To bury oneself in one's
art, and spurn all else, is the only way to evade unhappiness," he
writes to his friend. "Pride makes up for all things, if there be only a
broad enough foundation for it.... I certainly lack little; I should no
doubt like to be as generous as the richest, as happy as a lover, as
sensuous as those who give up their lives to pleasure; ... But in the
meanwhile I covet neither riches, nor love, nor pleasures; ... Now, as
for a long time past, I ask only for five or six hours of repose in my
own chamber; in winter a big fire in my fireplace, and at night two
candles on my table." A year later he is advising the same friend: "Do
as I do, break from the outside world, and live like a bear, like a
white bear; send all else to the devil, and yourself as well, everything
except only your thoughts. There is at the present moment such a great
gulf fixed between myself and the rest of the world, that I oft-times
experience a feeling of astonishment when I hear even the most ordinary
and natural things; ... there are certain gestures, certain intonations
of the voice, which fill me with surprise, and there are certain silly
things which nearly make me giddy."
Even in moments of overwhelming passion, Flaubert places his literary
vocation immeasurably above his personal happiness; and love of woman
strikes him as insignificant by the side of his love of poetry. "No," he
writes to his _fiancée_, "you had far better love my art and not myself;
for this attachment will never leave you, nor can illness or death
deprive you of it. Worship thought, for in thought alone is truth,
because it is one and imperishable. Can art, the only thing in life that
is true and valuable, be compared with earthly love? Can the adoration
of relative beauty be preferred to an eternal worship? Veneration for
art--that is the best thing that I possess; it is the one thing for
which I respect myself."
He refuses to see anything relative in poetry, but regards it as
absolutely independent of and entirely cut off from life, and as being
more real than action; he perceives in art "the most self-satisfying
principle imaginable which requires as little external support as a
star." "Like a star," he says, "fixed and glittering in its own heaven,
does art observe the globe of the world revolve; that which is beautiful
will never be utterly destroyed." In the unity of the various portions
of a work, in the every detail, in the harmony of the whole, Flaubert
feels that "there is some inner essence, something in the nature of a
divine force, something like an eternal principle." "For how otherwise
would there exist any relation between the most exact and the most
musical expression of thought?"
The sceptic who is not bound by any creed, but has spent his whole life
in doubt and hesitation in face of the ideas of God, religion, progress,
and scientific humanity, becomes pious and reverential when face to face
with the question of art. The true poet is, in his opinion,
distinguished from all other people by the divine inspiration of his
ideas, "by the contemplation of the immutable (_la contemplation de
l'immuable_), that is to say, religion in the highest sense of the
word." He regrets that he was not born in that age when people
worshipped art, when there still existed genuine artists in the world,
"whose life and thoughts were the blind instruments of the instinct of
beauty. They were the organs of God, by means of which He Himself
revealed His true essence to them; for these artists there was no
happiness; no one knew how much they suffered; each night as they lay
down sadly to rest they gazed wearily at the life of men with an
astonished eye, just as we might gaze at an ant-hill."
To most artists beauty is a more or less abstract quality; to Flaubert
it was as concrete an object of passion as is gold to the miser, power
to the ambitious, or his lady to the lover. His work was like a
deliberate suicide; he gave himself entirely up to it, with the
fanaticism of a man possessed by a mania, with the mystic submission and
enthusiasm of a martyr, with the awe of a priest as he enters the sacred
sanctuary. Thus does he describe his own work: "Sick and irritable at
heart, enduring a thousand times in the day moments of anguish and
despondency, and having neither wife nor any of the joys of life to
distract me, I continue to toil at my weary task, like a good workman
who, with sleeves rolled up and brow streaming with sweat, strikes on
his anvil without fear of rain or hail, of storm or thunder." Here is an
extract from a biography of Flaubert written by Maupassant, one of his
favourite pupils and disciples, which gives an accurate picture of the
gifted writer's energy for work: "His head bowed, his face and brow and
neck bathed in moisture, all his muscles tense, like an athlete at the
height of the contest, he set himself to face the desperate strife with
his ideas and words, rejecting, uniting, or forging them as in an iron
grip by the power of his will, condensing them and gradually with
superhuman strength working out his thought, and confining it, like a
wild beast in a cage, in a definite, indestructible form."
III
Flaubert, more than any other man, has experienced in his own life, the
destructive power of his over-sharpened, analytical disposition. With
the malevolence, which was so strangely mingled in him with the then
fashionable Byronism, and with a confused presentiment of an impending
and inevitable catastrophe, he embarks at the early age of seventeen
upon his work of destruction and internal iconoclasm: "I analyse myself
and others," he writes to a friend; "I am always anatomizing, and
whenever I at last succeed in finding something, which all men consider
pure and beautiful, but which is in reality a putrid spot, a gangrene, I
shake my head and smile. I have come to the firm conclusion that vanity
is the fundamental basis of all things, and that even that which we call
conscience is in fact only a concealed and incipient vanity. You give in
charity, partly, may be, out of compassion, out of pity, or from horror
of suffering and sordidness, but also out of egotism; for the chief
motive of your action is the desire to acquire the right to say to
yourself: I have done good; there are very few people like me; I respect
myself more than other men." Eight years later he writes to his devoted
wife: "I love to analyze; it is an occupation that distracts me.
Although I am not very much inclined to see the humorous side of things,
yet I cannot regard my own personality altogether seriously, because I
see myself how ridiculous I am, ridiculous not in the sense of being
externally comic, but in the inner sense of that inherent irony which,
being present in the life of men, shows itself sometimes even in the
most obviously natural actions, in the most ordinary gestures.... All
this one feels in oneself, but it is hard to explain. You do not
understand it, because in you it is as simple and genuine as in a
beautiful hymn of love and poetry. For I regard myself as a sort of
arabesque or marqueterie work; there are within me pieces of ivory and
of gold and of iron, some of painted paper, others of brilliants, and
others again of lead."
This life is so rich in visions and imaginings, that they finally
obscure the real world altogether, and receive in passing through this
medium a reflected colouring in addition to their own. "I always see the
antithesis of things; the sight of a child inevitably suggests to my
mind the thought of old age; the sight of a cradle, the idea of the
grave. When I look at my wife, I think of myself as her skeleton. That
is why scenes of happiness sadden me, while sad things leave me
indifferent. I weep so much internally in my own soul, that my tears
cannot flow outwardly as well; things that I read of in a book agitate
me much more than any actually existing sorrows." Here we encounter a
distinguishing trait of the majority of natures that are gifted with
strong artistic temperaments. "The more oppressed I feel, the more
melancholy and highly strung and prone to tears and to give myself over
to a sense of imaginary suffering, so much the more do my real feelings
remain dry and hard and dead within my heart; they are crystallized
within it." This is the mental attitude described by Pushkin:
"In vain did I appeal to the emotions within me,
With unmoved ears I heard the breath of Death,
And all unmoved I gazed on her.
So that is what I loved with flaming soul,
With such intensity of passion,
With so great anguish and agony of love,
With such torment and unreason!
Where is now pain and where is love?
Alas, for the poor credulous shade in my soul!
For the sweet memory of days for ever passed
I can now find neither tears nor reproaches."
This condition of incomprehensible indifference towards the beloved one,
this despair arising not out of grief, but as a result of his own
coldness, of his lack of commiseration and pity was all too familiar to
Flaubert; and according to his custom, he boldly proceeds to analyse
this trait, which it is the one endeavour of most other artists to
conceal, not only from others, but even from themselves, regarding it
mistakenly as a form of egotism that is entirely in conflict with Nature.
He describes his feelings at the grave of his dearly loved sister: "I
was as cold as the grave-stone, and only terribly bored." What does he
do at the moment when an ordinary man, forgetful of all else, would give
himself up entirely to his grief? With pitiless curiosity, "himself
catching nothing of their emotions," he analyzes them "like an artist."
"This melancholy occupation alleviated my grief remarkably," he writes
to a friend, "perhaps you will regard me as utterly heartless if I
confess to you that my present sorrow" (that is to say the grief
experienced at the death of his sister) "does not strike me as the
heaviest lot that I have ever had to endure. At times when there was
apparently nothing to be sad about, it has been my fate to be much
sadder." A little further on comes a long discourse upon the Infinite,
upon Nirvana,--a discourse in which the author gives utterance to much
inspired poetry, but to very little simple human sorrow.
In the letter in which Flaubert describes the funeral of a friend of his
childhood, his æsthetic cult of sadness reaches a still higher plane of
meditativeness. "On the body of the departed there appeared the signs of
a terrible transformation; we hid the corpse in a double shroud. So
covered, he looked like an Egyptian mummy enveloped in the bandages of
the tomb, and I cannot describe the feelings of joy and freedom which I
experienced at sight of him at that moment. There was a white mist over
everything, the forest trees stood out against the sky, and the funeral
lights were still shining in the pallor of the dawning day; the birds
were twittering, and I recalled a verse of his poem: 'He flies away like
a winged bird to meet the rising sun in the pine wood,' or, to put it
better, I heard his voice uttering these words and the whole day long
they haunted me with their enchantment. They placed him in the
ante-chamber, the doors were left ajar, and the cool morning air
penetrated into the room, mingled with a refreshing rain, which had just
then begun to fall.... My soul was filled with emotions, till then
unknown, and upon it there flamed forth like summer lightning such
thoughts as I can never repeat again: a thousand recollections of the
dead were wafted to me on the fumes of the incense, in the chords of the
music." ... And here the artist, in the midst of his æsthetic
abstraction, converts his genuine grief into a thing of beauty, so that
in his enlightened view the death of his beloved friend not only causes
him no pang, or suffering, but, on the contrary, gives him a mystic
resignation, incomprehensible to ordinary men, an ecstasy that is
foreign to and removed from life, a joy that is entirely impersonal.
During his sojourn in Jerusalem, Flaubert paid a visit to the lepers.
Here is the account of his impressions: "This place (that is the plot of
land set aside for those who are afflicted with leprosy) is situated
outside the town, near a marsh, whence a host of crows and vultures
arose and took their flight at our approach. The poor sufferers, both
women and men (in all about a dozen persons) lie all huddled together in
a heap. They have no covering on their heads, and there is no
distinction of sex. Their bodies are covered with putrefying scars, and
they have sombre cavities in place of noses. I was forced to put on my
eye-glasses in order to discover what was hanging to the ends of their
arms. Were they hands, or were they some greenish-looking rags? They
were hands! (_There_ is a prize for colourists!) A sick man was dragging
himself to the water's edge to drink some water. Through his mouth,
which yawned black and empty of the gums, that seemingly had been burned
away, the palate was clearly visible. A rattle sounded in his throat as
he dragged the limbs of his dead-white body towards us. And all around
us reigned tranquil Nature, the ripples of the stream, the green of the
trees, all bubbling over with the abundance of sap and youth, and the
coolness of the shadows beneath the scorching sun." This extract is
taken from no novel, in which a poet might force himself to be
objective, but from a traveller's notes, from a letter to a friend,
wherein the author has no kind of motive for concealing the subjective
character of his emotions. And yet in spite of this, except for the two
rather common-place epithets of "poor wretches" (_pauvres misérables_),
there is not a single touch of pity, not even a suggestion of
compassion.
IV
"I am not a Christian" (_je ne suis pas Chrétien_), says Flaubert in a
letter to Georges Sand. The French Revolution was, in his opinion,
unsuccessful, because it was too intimately bound up with the idea of
religious pity. The idea of equality, on which is based the essence of
the democracy of to-day, is a contradiction of all the principles of
equity. See what a preponderating influence is given at this day to
grace. Emotion is everything, justice nothing. "We are degenerating
owing to our superfluity of indulgence and of compassion, and to our
moral drought." "I am convinced," he remarks, "that the poor envy the
rich, and that the rich fear the poor; it will be so for ever--and vain
it is to preach the Gospel of Love."
Flaubert tries to justify his instinctive antipathy to the idea of
brotherhood by the assertion that this idea is always found to be in
irreconcilable contradiction to the principle of equity. "I hate
democracy (in the sense at least in which the word is accepted in
France), that is to say the magnifying of grace to the detriment of
justice, the negation of right--in a word, the anti-social principle
(_l'anti-sociabilité_)." "The gift of grace (within the province of
theology) is the negation of justice; what right has a man to demand any
change in the execution of the law?" Yet he hardly believes in this
principle himself, and only enunciates it in order to have an argument
with which to refute the idea of brotherhood. At least this is what he
says, in a moment of complete frankness, in a letter to an old friend:
"Human justice seems to me the most unstable thing in the whole world.
The sight of a man daring to judge his neighbour would send me into
convulsions of laughter if it did not arouse my disgust and pity, and if
I were not at the present moment" (he was at that time engaged in
studying for the law) "obliged to study a system of absurdities, by
virtue of which men consider that they acquire the right to judge. I
know of nothing so absurd as law, except, perhaps, the study of it." In
another letter he confesses that he never could understand the abstract
and dry conception of duty, and that "it did not seem to him to be
inherent in the nature of mankind (_il ne me paraît pas inhérent aux
entrailles humaines_)." Evidently, then he believes as little in the
idea of justice as he does in that of fraternity. As a matter of fact,
he has no moral ideal.
"There is only one thing in the world that I really value, and that is
beautiful verse; an elegant, harmonious, melodious style; the warmth of
the sun; a picturesque landscape; moonlight nights; antique statues, and
the character in a profile.... I am a fatalist, in fact, like a
Mahometan, and I believe that all that we do for the progress of
humanity is of no use. As to this idea of progress, I am mentally
incapable of grasping such nebulous and dreary conceptions. All the
nonsense talked on this subject simply bores me beyond endurance.... I
cherish a deep respect for the ancient form of tyranny, for to me it is
the finest expression of humanity that has ever been made manifest." "I
have few convictions," he writes to Georges Sand, "but one of those I
have I cherish firmly--it is the conviction that the masses are always
composed of idiots. And yet one may not consider the masses as stupid,
because within them is concealed the seed of an incalculable fecundity
(_d'une fécondité incalculable_)."
Flaubert makes a half-jesting attempt to contrast the doctrines of the
socialists with his own ideas of the political order of the future. "The
only logical conclusion is an administration consisting of mandarins, if
only these mandarins be possessed of some knowledge, and if possible,
even considerable knowledge. The mass of the people will thus always
remain as minors, and will always hold the lowest place in the hierarchy
of the social orders, seeing that it is composed of unlimited
numbers.... In this lawful aristocracy of the present time is our whole
salvation." ... "Humanity represents nothing new. Its irremediable
worthlessness filled my soul even in my early youth with bitterness. And
that is why I now experience no disappointment. I am convinced that the
crowd, the common herd will always be odious.... Until the time comes
when men shall submit to set up mandarins, and shall have substituted
for the Roman Pope an Academy of Sciences, until that time comes, all
politics, and all society even to its deepest roots, must be merely a
collection of revolting lies (_de blagues écoeurantes_.)" Nevertheless
in his novel "Bouvard et Pécuchet" Flaubert makes every effort to
destroy faith even in the strength of the principles of science, and to
prove that modern science is as impermanent a structure, as
contradictory and superstitious a system as was the theology of the
Middle Ages. To his disbelief in science Flaubert, moreover, is
constantly giving utterance: thus, for instance, when he comes upon the
Positivism of Comte, he finds this system "unbearably stupid" (_c'est
assommant de bêtise_).
V
We have thus seen that Flaubert's attempt to reach a compromise with
regard to the preponderating tendency of the age did not succeed; of his
views respecting the structure of society, the only true one is his
insight into the lower classes of the people. "However well you may feed
the animal man, however thickly you gild his stable, even though you
give him the softest and most luxurious litter, still he will ever
remain a beast. The only progress upon which one can count is the effort
to make the beast less of a cannibal. But as to raising the level of his
ideas, or inspiring the masses with a broader conception of God, I
seriously doubt whether this can ever be achieved."
In another letter he frankly admits that he has no faith, no principles
of morality, no political ideals, and in this admission, wrung from the
depths of his heart, the note of despair is already struck: "In the
present day there seems to be as little possibility of establishing any
new belief as of obtaining respect for the old faith. And so I seek and
fail to find that one idea upon which all the rest should depend." These
few words throw a clearer light on the attitude of Flaubert during the
latter years of his life than anything else. Formerly he had found this
idea in his art, while now he assumes that there is another and higher
basis, upon which art itself must rest; but to find this principle is
beyond his power. He seeks forgetfulness in work, but work only brings
exhaustion, and he is still more dissatisfied. He realises his
singularity, and it draws him out of his objective attitude into that
incomprehensible existence, the very conception of which he himself
denies.
The real tragedy of his position lies in the fact that he is alone in
the midst of a strange and unknown world. And little by little his
despair reaches its utmost limits: "Whenever I am without a book in my
hand, or whenever I am not writing, such anguish seizes on me that I
simply find myself on the verge of tears." So he writes in a letter to
Georges Sand. "It seems to me that I have literally turned into a
fossil, and that I am deprived of all connection with the universe
around me." "A feeling of universal destruction and agony possesses me,
and I am deathly sad." "When I am tired out from my work, I grow anxious
about myself. No one remembers me, I belong to another sphere. My
professional friends are so little friendly to me." "I pass whole weeks
without exchanging a word with a single human creature, and at the end
of the week I find it hard to recall any special day or any particular
event during the course of that time. On Sundays I see my mother and
niece, and that is all. A gathering of rats in the attic, that is my
whole society. They make an infernal noise over my head, when the rain
is not roaring, and the wind is not howling. The nights are blacker than
coal, and a silence is all around me, infinite as in the desert. One's
senses are terribly sharpened in such surroundings, and my heart starts
beating at the slightest sound." "I am losing myself in the
reminiscences of my youth, like an old man. Of life I ask nothing more,
save a few sheets of paper that I may scratch ink upon. I feel as though
I were wandering through an endless desert, wandering, not knowing
whither; and that at one and the same time, I am the wanderer, and the
camel, and the desert." "One hope alone sustains me, that soon I shall
be parted from life, and that I shall surely find no other existence
that might be still more painful.... No, no! Enough of misery!"
All his letters to Georges Sand are one weary restless martyr's
confession of the "disease of genius." Sometimes a simple plaint bursts
from him, and in it, through the impenetrable pride of the fighter, can
be detected something soft and broken, as in the voice of a man who is
over-tired. The fury of his enemies, the calumnies of his friends, the
lack of understanding of his critics, no longer wounded his self-pride;
he merely hated them. "All this avalanche of folly neither disturbs nor
grieves me. Only one would prefer to inspire one's fellow men with
pleasant feelings."
Then finally, even his last consolation--his art--deserts him. "In vain
I gather my strength; the work will not come, will not come. Everything
disturbs and upsets me. In the presence of others I can still control
myself, but when I am alone I often burst into such senseless, spasmodic
tears that I think I am going to die from them." In his declining years,
when he can no longer turn to the past, and no longer correct his life,
he asks himself the question: what if even that beauty, in the name of
which he has destroyed his faith in God, in life, and in humanity, is as
visionary and delusive as all else? What if his art, for the sake of
which he had given up his life, his youth, and happiness, and love,
should have abandoned him on the very edge of the grave?
"The Shadow is enveloping me," he says, as he realises that the end is
at hand. This exclamation is as the cry of eternal anguish uttered
before his death by another artist, Michael Angelo, the brother of
Flaubert in his ideals and aims and genius:
"Io parto a mano a mano,
Crescemi ognor piu l'ombra, e il sol vien manco,
E son presso a cadere, infermo e stanco."
"Inch by inch I sink,
The shadows lengthen, the sun sinks down,
And I am ready to depart,
Broken and weary."
Death struck him down at his work-table, quite suddenly, like a
thunder-bolt. Dropping his pen from his hand, he sank down lifeless,
killed by his one great, single passion, the love of his art.
Plato in one of his myths relates how the souls of men travel in
chariots on winged steeds along the heavenly way; to some of whom it is
given after a short time to approach that spot whence is visible the
domain of Ideas; with yearning do they gaze aloft, and a few stray rays
of light fall deep down among them. Then, when these souls are
re-incarnated, to return and suffer on earth, all that is best in the
human heart appeals to them and touches them, as a reflection of some
eternal light, as a confused remembrance of another world, into which it
was granted them to peep for the space of a single moment.
Surely there must have fallen upon the soul of Flaubert in the glorious
sphere of the imagination a ray of beauty that was perhaps too bright.
_Printed by Alexander Moring Ltd._
_The De La More Press, 32 George Street,_
_Hanover Square, London W_
[Transcriber's note: To represent italic font, _underscores_ have been
used.]
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