The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters | Page 8

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