The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters | Page 5

epitomises her
distinction as a woman and as an author in this playful sally:
"Sainte-Beuve, who loves you nevertheless, pretends that you are
dreadfully vicious. But perhaps he sees with eyes a bit dirty, like that
learned botanist who pretends that the germander is of a DIRTY yellow.
The observation was so false that I could not help writing on the
margin of his book: 'IT IS YOU, WHOSE EYES ARE DIRTY.'"
We have spoken of George Sand as a faithful daughter of the French
Revolution; and by way of contrast we may speak of Flaubert as a
disgruntled son of the Second Empire. Between his literary advent and

hers there is an interval of a generation, during which the proud
expansive spirit and the grandiose aspirations imparted to the nation by
the first Napoleon dwindled to a spirit of mediocrity and bourgeois
smugness under a Napoleon who had inherited nothing great of his
predecessor but his name. This change in the time-spirit may help to
explain the most significant difference between Flaubert and George
Sand. He inherited the tastes and imagination of the great romantic
generation; but he inherited none of its social and political enthusiasm.
He was disciplined by the romantic writers; yet his reaction to the
literary culture of his youth is not ethical but aesthetic; he finds his
inspiration less in Rousseau than in Chateaubriand. He is bred to an
admiration of eloquence, the poetic phrase, the splendid picture, life in
the grand style; with increasing disgust he finds himself entering a
society which, he feels, neither understands nor values any of these
things, and which threatens their destruction. Consequently, we find
him actuated as a writer by two complementary passions--the love of
splendor and the hatred of mediocrity--two passions, of which the
second sometimes alternates with the first, sometimes inseparably fuses
with it, and ultimately almost extinguishes it.
The son of an eminent surgeon of Rouen, Gustave Flaubert may have
acquired from his father something of that scientific precision of
observation and that cutting accuracy of expression, by which he
gained his place at the head of modern French realism and won the
discipleship of the Goncourts, Daudet, Zola, and Maupassant and the
applause of such connoisseurs of technique as Walter Pater and Henry
James. From his mother's Norman ancestry he inherited the physique of
a giant, tainted with epilepsy; a Viking countenance, strong- featured
with leonine moustaches; and a barbaric temper, habitually somewhat
lethargic but irritable, and, when roused, violent and intolerant of
opposition. He had a private education at Rouen, with wide desultory
reading; went to Paris, which he hated, to study law, which he also
hated; frequented the theatres and studios; travelled in Corsica, the
Pyrenees, and the East, which he adored, seeing Egypt, Palestine,
Constantinople, and Greece; and he had one, and only one, important
love-affair, extending from 1846 to 1854--that with Mme. Louise Colet,
a woman of letters, whose difficult relations with Flaubert are
sympathetically touched upon in Pater's celebrated essay on "Style."

When by the death of his father, in 1845, he succeeded to the
family-seat at Croisset, near Rouen, he settled himself in a studious
solitude to the pursuit of letters, which he followed for thirty-four years
with anguish of spirit and dogged persistence.
Flaubert probably loved glory as much as any man; but he desired to
receive it only on his own terms. He profoundly appeals to writers
endowed with "the artistic conscience" as "the martyr of literary style."
In morals something of a libertine, in matters of art he exhibited the
intolerance of weakness in others and the remorseless self-examination
and self-torment commonly attributed to the Puritan. His friend
Maxime Du Camp, who tried to bring him out and teach him the arts of
popularity, he rebuffed with deliberate insult. He developed an aversion
to any interruption of his work, and such tension and excitability of
nerves that he shunned a day's outing or a chat with an old companion,
lest it distract him for a month afterward. His mistress he seems to have
estranged by an ill- concealed preference to her of his exacting Muse.
To illustrate his "monkish" consecration to his craft we cannot do better
than reproduce a passage, quoted by Pater, from his letters to Madame
Colet:
"I must scold you for one thing, which shocks, scandalises me, the
small concern, namely, you show for art just now. As regards glory be
it so--there I approve. But for art!--the one thing in life that is good and
real--can you compare with it an earthly love?--prefer the adoration of a
relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty? Well! I tell you the truth.
That is the one thing good in me: the one thing I have, to me estimable.
For yourself, you blend