The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters | Page 6

with the beautiful a heap of alien things, the
useful, the agreeable, what not?
"The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count
everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all beside when it is
established on a large basis. Work! God wills it. That, it seems to me, is
clear.
"I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I repeat to
myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in one's head, by
which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are forever
returning, and cause you pain, you love them so much. I observe that I
no longer laugh much, and am no longer depressed. I am ripe, you talk
of my serenity, and envy me. It may well surprise you. Sick, irritated,

the prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I continue my labour like
a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of his
brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling himself whether it rains
or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not like that formerly."
The half-dozen works which Flaubert beat out on his "anvil," with an
average expenditure of half-a-dozen years to each, were composed on a
theory of which the prime distinguishing feature was the great doctrine
of "impersonality." George Sand's fluent improvisations ordinarily
originated, as we have noted, in an impulse of her lyrical idealism; she
began with an aspiration of her heart, to execute which she invented
characters and plot so that she is always on the inside of her story.
According to Flaubert's theory, the novel should originate in a desire to
present a certain segment of observed life. The author is to take and
rigorously maintain a position outside his work. The organ with which
he collects his materials is not his heart but his eyes, supplemented by
the other senses. Life, so far as the scientific observer can be sure of it,
and so far as the artist can control it for representation, is a picture or
series of pictures, a dramatic scene or a concatenation of dramatic
scenes. Let the novelist first, therefore, with scrupulous fidelity and
with minute regard for the possible significance of every observable
detail, fill his notebooks, amass his materials, master his subject. After
Flaubert, a first-rate sociological investigator is three-fourths of a
novelist. The rest of the task is to arrange and set forth these facts so
that they shall tell the truth about life impressively, in scene and
dramatic spectacle, the meaning of which shall be implicit in the plot
and shall reach the reader's consciousness through his senses.
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