Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners

Front matter

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SOME PRESS OPINIONS ON M. FRENCH SHELDON’S TRANSLATION OF “SALAMMBO.”

Introduction

4]|O write anything of such a man as Gustave Flaubert, and of such a work as “ Madame - Bovary,”’ must give the boldest pause. But Flaubert is still so little known in England, his work so completely misunderstood, that some words of introduction to this translation—the first English one of “ Madame Bovary ”—are.a necessity.

Of the life of the man I need say little, since all purely biographical details are dealt with by Mr. Chartres in his Introduction to “Salambo.”! I am concerned with these only in so far as they bear upon Flaubert’s work as a whole, or upon this work in particular. But before I speak of either life or work, let me protest against the pernicious habit of so many of Flaubert’s critics, who, according to their own peculiar tastes or prejudices, speak of him as “the author of‘ Madame Bovary,’” or of “Salambo,” or (in rare cases) of the “Tentation de St. Antoine.” We do not speak of Shakespeare as the author of “ Hamlet” or “ Macbeth.” Whatever our individual preferences, we bear in mind that he was also the author of “Othello,” “King Lear,” and thirty-two other plays. We cdo not refer to Balzac as the creator of “ Pere Goriot” or “‘Cousine Bette” only, but as the author of the “Comédie Humaine.” So it should be with Flaubert. While I agree with many critics that “ Madame Bovary” is the greatest of his works,

1 See the English version of ‘‘Salambo,” by J. S. Chartres, issued uniform with the present volume. b viii INTRODUCTION.

I remember that Flaubert himself constantly reminded his friends and critics that he had also produced “ other booklets” (autres bouguins), and that it is, after all, but a part of his work. To fully appreciate that work we must study it in its entirety. English readers have now translations of “Salambo” and “ Madame Bovary,” the two first volumes published by Flaubert, and it is to be hoped these will be followed at least by the “ Education Sentimentale” and the inimitable “ Trois Contes.” By all these, and not by any one of these alone, must Flaubert be judged.

Believers in heredity will note with interest that Gustave Flaubert’s grandfather on the mother’s side was a doctor (his grandmother had been a playmate of Charlotte Corday), and his father an eminent physician, for thirty-two years surgeon-inchief of the Rouen Hétel-Dieu, a position subsequently filled by Gustave’s elder brother. There is much of this doctor blood in Flaubert. We not merely find it in the elaborate and scientifically accurate accounts of actual disease, as in the descriptions of the club-foot, the blind man, Emma's death. In every line of this work we see the great physician’s infinite patience in observing, his quick power of diagnosis, his inexorable calm and deterinination, his kindly yet somewhat contemptuous pity for every form of human weakness, Nothing escapes him; 1iot the most secret thought or the most carefully hidden infirmity. “ He looks quite through the deeds of men,”

Gustave’s father—immortalised as the great Doctor Larivicre— was in his way a man of genius, but quite incapable of understanding a genius that differed from his own or sought expression in another fashion. For ‘‘ letters” he had a hearty contempt. An author was to him a thoroughly useless member of society. To dissect a mind, lay bare the inmost workings of a human heart, seemed to him a frivolous occupation as compared with the dissection of a body, the healing of a disease. Hence, while really attached one to the other, there was always a certain constraint between father and son, a certain friction, a want of complete harmony and ease. The old man died long before the son had done anything to justify his extraordinary choice of “writing” asacareer. The relations between mother and son were warmer, closer. With her he lived all her life, and of her he could write

INTRODUCTION. ix after her death in 1872, “TI have learnt during the last fortnight that my dear old mother (ma pauvre bonne femme de maman) was the one I have most loved. It is as if I had lost part of myself,”

Gustave had been anything but an infant phenomenon. It was with the utmost difficulty that he could be taught to read, and, in fact, he could barely do so when nine years old. But the bent of his genius was already manifest. ‘ His great passion in childhood,” says Guy de Maupassant, “was to have stories told him. He listened to them motionless, fixing on the story-teller his great blue eyes. Then he remained for hours dreaming, a finger in his mouth, entirely absorbed, as if asleep. His mind, however, was at work, for he already composed pieces that he could not write down, but that he acted by himself, improvising long dialogues.”

As a youth, Gustave Flaubert, like his sister Caroline, seems to have possessed beauty of the most striking kind, Those who remember him as he was, still speak with enthusiasm of “this adolescent Love.” But, despite this gift of beauty and great personal charm of manner, Gustave was at no time a man @ bonne fortune. Woman indeed plays no part in his life, hardly indeed entered into it; for the early and quite resultless passion for the woman afterwards drawn as Madame Arnoux in the “ Education Sentimentale” cannot be considered seriously. “ Woman,” writes Flaubert to George Sand some few years before his death, “has never dovetailed into my existence.’ But if love and love affairs had no influence on his life, it was not so with his friendships. Gustave Flaubert was an ideal friend. His love for his friends, whether worthy or unworthy, was absolute, supreme, all-forgiving, all-enduring, passing the love of woman.

It is through the licensed indiscretion of one of these friends, the oldest of them all, that the world has been informed of the illness that struck down Flaubert in his early youth, and that was to be the terror of his life—epilepsy. The influence of this dread malady on his whole being must, no doubt, have been considerable, but assuredly not so overwhelming as M. Du Camp would have us think. Everything in Flaubert that M. Du Camp could not understand—and we shall see that this included a great deal—he sets down as unnatural, therefore diseased, therex INTRODUCTION.

fore due to disease. That Art was to Flaubert “a jealous god,” who must be worshipped unreservedly ; that Flaubert was “ready for martyrdom” in the service of his divinity ; that “he did not understand one could shrink from persecution, because he would never himself have made the slightest concession,” —all this seems unnatural to M. Du Camp,and must be ascribed to unnatural causes. In a word, M. Du Camp scems to think that if Flaubert had not suffered from epilepsy he might have been almost as great amanas Du Camp. I believe it is the De Goncourts who said of Flaubert that he seemed to bear “the weariness of a vain clambering towards some heaven,” Yes; he was striving after the heaven of the artist-—ideal perfection ; that ideal ever eluding the grasp, but that the great ones of the earth must still strain after, yearn for—‘‘ or what’s a heaven for?” To these men, and even Shakespeare had his hours of doubt and despair, life seems but too often “a striving anda striving, and an ending in nothing.” It is only we who come after them who know how much that striving has achieved.

The journey of Gustave Flaubert, for the most part in company with Maxime Du Camp, tothe East and Italy, has also its bearing on “Madame Bovary.” The East, according to Du Camp, soon began tobore lim, Itisprobablethat with him, as with Emma, no reality ever came up to his own ardent imagination. The realisation of his dreams always brought with it a sense of disappointment and disillusion. Buta point worthy of note is the characteristic fact that, while apparently remarking nothing, utterly indifferent to all around and about him, Flaubert really saw everything. How close had been his observations ‘Salambo” was to bear witness, This apparent indifference has led his friends, even Maupassant, into the curious error of supposing Flaubert lived “ outside the world,” apart. Let any one who believes this read his letters to George Sand—to that great soul Flaubert could show all himself— let him turn to his lines on Thiers, for example, whoin he calls a “triumphant imbecile, a most abject muddler (crodtard), a most fecal bourgeois,” and he will see that Flanbert not only “saw everything,” but saw with a prophetic eye, and that his claim “to have his little opinions on the things of this world” was not unfounded.

' M. Du Camp, ‘‘Mes Souvenirs,” vol. ii. p 200,

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On his return from this journey Flaubert settled down to a life of constant work, interrupted only by the hours spent with his literary friends in Paris, or in receiving his intimates at his home of Croisset. The amount of reading got through during these years, apart from the labour of writing—and for Flaubert writing meantenormous labour—was prodigious. Philosophy, art, science, poetry, belles-lettres, everything. Homer and Shakespeare were his favourite study. “ Homer and Shakespeare,” he writes to Du Camp, “all is there. Other poets, even the greatest, seem small by their side” And to George Sand he writes many years later (1875): “I am reading nothing, with the exception of Shakespeare, whom I have gone through again from end to end. It strengthens one and puts air into your lungs, as if you were on some high mountain, All else seems mediocre by the side of this tremendous fellow” (ce prodigieux bonhonme), Involuntarily we call to mind Emerson’s words: “TJ am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakespeare over all other writers. ... This love does not consist with self-conceit.”

At last, one May-day in 1880, when he was but fifty-nine years old, Flaubert was suddenly struck down hy the disease that had haunted him all his days. He fell dead at the foot of his writing-table, that altar on which he had offered up his whole life in the pursuance of his one aim and ideal, “turning neither to the right nor to the left,’ his last volume still incomplete, the unfinished page lying on his desk.

In 1856 there appeared in the Revue de Paris, edited by M. Laurent Pichat, with the aid of his friend M. Maxime Du Camp, a mutilated edition of “Madame Bovary” (of this mutilation more anon). To the eternal honour of Flaubert, this book was prosecuted as immoral by, of all people in the world, the Government of Napoleon the Third. But not even the Bonaparust judges could be induced to condemn Flaubert. As a sop to the Imperial prosecutor, the judgment certainly blamed some portions of the book, but decided that it was on the whole a serious, earnest work, and dismissed the charge against its author, ’

Now that English people will have a chance of reading xii INTRODUCTION.

“Madame Bovary” and seeing for themselves whether there is even the slightest foundation for this charge of immorality, it scems almost superfluous to refer to this prosecution at all. But unfortunately there are many persons who, though they have never read the book, hold up their hands in holy horror at the bare mention of its name, and it 1s incumbent, therefore, that we should see of what the charges consisted.

The Imperial prosecutor, in a speech so grotesquely ridiculous that it might have been drawn up by Homais himself, and that Flaubert, with lis strong sense of humour, must have thoroughly enjoyed, began by giving what he called the outline, the story of the novel. Needless to say that the most Innocent expression, the most refined thought, became vicious and coarse when seen through the eyes of this moral gentleman. According to him, - Fiaubert’s first fault lay in his portraiture of Bovary as “the type of the inane” (Le type de la nullité). Then, and here we see plainly how little he had understood of the story, comes the charee that Enina had not only “never loved,” but “never tried to love her husband.” Next, after an account of the visit to Vaubyessard and the removal to Yonville, utterly vulgarised in the telling, came the main charges : the adultery with Rodolphe and with Léon. Not that M. P’Avocat objects much to the adultery in itself. No; it is only to the fact that, instead of insinuating, Flaubert speaks frankly, honestly, with the calm of a doctor describing a disease : that the fig-leaf morality of the avocat revolts, After a recital of the final scenes and death, M. PAvocat proceeded : “ Gentlemen, the first part of my task is fulfilled. . . Now I shall quote and then point out the incriminating passages, the offences against morality and religion.” Here followed certain quotations, Those who, like Flaubert, care to see to what depths © human stupidity ” may descend, will find these passages on the pages of the present volume given in the subjoined footnote.!

In conclusion the avocat said: “ We shall be told perhaps that at bottom the novel is moral, since adultery is punished in it. To this I say, gentlemen, that lascivious details (!) cannot be covered by a moral conclusion, ... And who reads the novel of M.

INTRODUCTION. xiii

Flaubert? Are they men occupying themselves with political or social economy? No! These pages fall into the hands of young girls, sometimes of married women. ... I maintain that the novel of ‘Madame Bovary,’ looked at from the philosophic point of view, is not moral. .. . Who in this book can condemn this woman? No one. In the book there is not one person who could condemn her. .. . There is not a line, an idea, by virtue of which adultery is stigmatised. . . . Could it be in the name of conjugal honour that the book should be condemned? Why, conjugal honour is represented by an idiotic husband. . .. I ask you, js it in the name of conjugal honour that you can stigmatise this woman? ... Could it be in.the name of public opinion ? But public opinion is ‘personified in a grotesque being, in the chemist Homais, surrounded by ridiculous personages whom this woman dominates, Could it be in the name of religious sentiment? But this sentiment is personified in the Curé Bournisien, a priest almost as grotesque as the chemist, believing only in physical sufferings, never in moral sufferings, almost a materialist. Could you condemn it in the name of the conscience of the author? JI do not know what the conscience of the author thinks ; but on p. 360 I find the following phrase: ‘There is always after the death of any one a kind of stupefaction, so difficult ig it to grasp this advent of nothingness, and to resign ourselves to believe in it” This is not a ery of incredulity, but it is at least a cry of scepticism.” After such a brilliant discovery M, lAvocat could not but demand the severest penalty against the sceptical Flaubert,

The reply to the prosecutor was a masterpiece. One by one Maitre Senard took up is “ arguments,” completely annihilating the poor man. But indeed Maitre Senard’s task was an easy one, He had only tu quote from the work itself. He concluded by asking the pertinent question : “ Does the reading of such a book give you a love for vice or inspire you with horror of vice? The terrible expiation of a fault, does if not urge, excite to virtue?... You have judged of the bonk as a whole and in its details. Itis impossible that you should hesitate.” As we already know, Flaubert was acquitted, and when the book appeared as a volume, it was dedicated by Flaubert to his eloquent defender, Maitre Senard.

XIV INTRODUCTION,

But besides this historical trial, there is a “seerct history” attaching to * Madame Bovary,” a full account of which is given by Guy de Maupassant and carefully concealed by M. Du Camp. To this it is worth referring, since it must have pained Flaubert far more than the public prosecution,

Flaubert had spent five years in writiny “Madame Bovary,” and on concluding it had handed over the MS. to lis friend Du Camp, who in tum gave it to Pichat, editor of the Revue de Puris. Soon after M. Du Camp addressed to Flaubert the following letter, which Maupassant may well call “extraordinary.” After explaining that he and Pichat had arrived at the same eonclusion quite independently, M. Du Camp continued: “The advice which he (Pichat) cives is good, and I will even add it is the only advice you should follow. Leave us masters of your novel to publish it in the 2evue,; we will make the excisions we think indispensable ; then you can publish it in a volume as you choose ; that concerns you. Be courageous ; shut your eyes during the operation, and confide yourself, if not to our talent, at least to our experience of this sort of thing and our affection for you. You have buried your novel beneath a mass of things well done, but useless ; it does not stand out enough. It is a question of making it freer; the work is easy. We will have it done under our eyes by an experienced and clever person ; nothing shall be added to your MS, We will only eliminate ; it will cost you about a hundred francs, which will be deducted from your profits, and you will have published something really good, instead of an incomplete and padded work.” For the small sum of one hundred franes the disinterested Du Camp was ready to mutilate his friend’s work. And such a work! M. Du Camp, in his account of Flaubert’s last and unfinished book, “Bouvard et Pécuchet,” says his friend always spoke of it as “the book of my avenging.” And M. Du Camp has the naiveté to ask, “But what did he want to avenve?” Whena man has been cursed with such a friend as M. Du Camp, it seems to me that he certainly has “ soinething toavenge.” In the meantime, Flaubert simply wrote on the back of this extraordinary epistle the one word—“ in lis largest hand” ~—“ GIGANTESQUE !”

Then Messieurs Pichat and Du Camp set to work. Whether they employed the “experienced and clever person” they men-

INTRODUCTION. XV tioned or did the sorry work themselves, we do not know, but it seems to bear traces of the “fine Roman hand” of both these gentlemen. “On page after page, lines, paragraphs, whole passages are cut out.” On a copy of this mutilated work Flaubert has written (these words will not be found in M. Du Camp’s “Souvenirs”): “This copy represents my MS, just as it left the hands of the Sieur Laurent Pichat, poet, and editor and proprietor of the Revue de Paris,—Gustave Flaubert, 2oth April 1557.” And on the last page: “According to Maxime Du Camp, I ought to have cut out the whole wedding, and according to Pichat considerably shortened or rewritten the agricultural show from end to end! It was the general opinion of the Revue that the club-foot was considerably too long, ‘useless,’ ”

M. Du Camp seeks to explain the occasional bitterness and sadness, the touch of misanthropy, in Flaubert by his illness. Was not the disillusion, the shock of finding even his friend so utterly incapable of understanding him and appreciating his cenius, sufficient to account for this side of Flaubert’s character ? “Delving into human stupidity” (bétese) Flaubert often found a disheartening work, and how doubly disheartening when the “ stupidity ” was personified in his friend !

For some years there was a coldness between Flaubert and Du Camp ; but after a time the latter was forgiven, The word “friend” to Flaubert covered a multitude of sins, even when the friend betrayed him.

The appearance of “ Madame Bovary” unmutilated and in volume form produced something like a revolution in the literary world. This exquisite perfection of style—and, like Coleridge, Flaubert maintained that prose must have its rhythm as well | as poetry—combined with this strange power of observation and analysis, this poetical form allied to the self-restraint of a scientific treatise, this complete effacement of the author's personality and the reality of all his personages, of whom the very least is a living, breathing being,—all this was something new in those early days of the Empire. And because Flaubert had the genius and — courage to paint a woman in her habit as she lived, he was at once classed among the naturalistes. The legend has lived on, and to-day nine persons out of ten will tell you that Flaubert eee oe eee xvi INTRODUCTION.

and Zola belong to the same school. Nothing could be more erroneous. They have nothing in common. In Zola we sce the photographer, who occasionally indeed produces a likeness, but who more frequently distorts and caricatures his models. It is no answer to tell us the men or women of his books “sat to him.” The result is something that does not live, that is unreal. We shrink from much that Zola writes, not because it is immoral, not because it is coarse and painful, but because it is untrue. To answer that these wen and women have actually existed makes no difference. A thing may be true in itself, but not true to us. There is never anything tnevitable about Zola’s creations. His creatures act after a certain way because Zola so wills it; because such act fits in with the cadre Zola has traced ; because, ina word, Zola wishes to produce a certain effect. In him, as Heine has it, “ Man merkt die Absicht und wird Verstimuint.”

In Flaubert we have the direct antithesis of Zola. He is no photographer, but a great painter, whose men and wonien live. He is painful often, not like Zola, because he is untrue, but because he is true, and shows us the truth uncompromisingly. He never stops to tell us this or the other is a fact, or to explain why it isa fact ; and there is no need. We know it is true and why it must be true. That Emma Bovary was copied from a woman who actually lived makes her neither more nor less real. We know she is real—real as Hamlet or Lear, Goriot or Euvénie Grandet. The tragedy of I'laubert’s characters lies, as Hegel said it did in Shakespeare’s, in the fact that they act as they do because they must. It may be unmoral, contrary even to their own personal interests, to act thus or thus; but it must be—it is inevitable. Good Philistines hke Gervinus may point out that if only Desdemona had remained in Venice she would not have been smothered at Cyprus. But then she would not have been Desdemona. And if Emma Bovary had abstained from all wrong-doing, she night have lived happy ever after, but she would not have been Ema.

Like Shakespeare, Flaubert never preaches. More than any other novelist with whom I am acquainted does he succeed in altogether suppressmg his own personality. He only shows ‘Virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,” with the result that

INTRODUCTION. xVii we rise from a work like “Madame Bovary,” saddened perhaps, but strengthened morally and mentally. We have not been told that Virtue’s own feature is lovely, but we have seen it ; we have not merely been told that wrong-doing brings its own punishment. In the gradual deterioration of an originally not ignoble nature we see why this ‘must be so. There is no cheap moralising, no claptrap sentiment ; and the work is essentially moral and healthy. We have been shown ill, but have not been contaminated by it. There is no pleasant dallying with vice,. no coquetting with evil. All is stern, severe, simple. Flaubert leaves no ill taste in the mouth. “ Young girls might read this book,” cried the mdignant Imperial prosecutor. And why not? At heart they would be less likely to fall victims to the premder Rodolphe venu. The story of Emma’s life could be only a warning, never a temptation, Flaubert holds up a mirror, That some, recognising their own image, should be shocked, is only natural. Then, too, we have the persons to whom any question involving sex-relationship is matter for foolish jest or coarse joke ; the sentimentalists, who, like Léon, seek to hide, even from themselves, the aridity of their hearts, the narrowness of their minds, the littleness of their lives, by dwelling “in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness.” Finally, there are the men—and we must not forget that “ public opinion” to-day, whether “ educated ” or otherwise, is the’ opinion of men— who revolt at such pictures as those of Leon and of Rodolphe. Few men will, with the Imperial prosecutor, have the naiveté to recognise themselves in Bovary, the “type of the inane,” but many in their heart of hearts will feel the truth of the portraiture of Rodolphe, of Léon; and though, or rather because, they recognise the truth, they “hold it not honesty to have it thus set down.” To these and such as these, to the ordinary person who lets Mudie “select” Ins books as he lets Maple “select” lis furniture, to the extraordinary person who thinks young girls may read “The Cenci” but must on no account sce the play performed, to the British matron and the Philistine generally, to all the Homais and Madame Tuvaches, “ Madame Bovary ” is and must be an immoral book. To the healthily constituted individual, man or woman, the work contains only the greatest lessons. In the words of the author of the “City of Dreadful

Il xViil INTRODUCTION.

Nicht,’ to call “Madame Bovary’? immoral is a monstrous absurdity. ... Lasciviousness certainly cannot coexist with profound thought, with intense imagination, with unswerving temperance, with austerest self-repression ; and all tiese dominate throughout ¢ Madame Bovary.’”

Of living novelists, so far as my knowledge of them eocs, there are but two who can be said to belong to the school of Flaubert, as opposed to the “ naturalist” school of Zola—the Norwesian Alexander Kielland and the Irishman George Moore, Their master was prosecuted as immoral by the Government of the Second Empire. George Moore has been dubbed immoral by the tradesmen who circulate books that would make a drazoon blush ; and Kielland is considered immoral by many inhabitants of “virtuous little Norway.” This is encourayine for the others !

LT have protested against the classing of Flaubert (or his followers), as 1s but too often done, with the “naturalists.” 1 must protest equally against those eritics—even so excellent a one as M. Bourget—-who would class him with the Romanticists. The profound influence of the Romantic School (Luse the term in its original, not in its present conventional sense) is undeniable ; but it affected Flaubert the man and critic of others’ work, far more than it influenced the work of Flaubert the author. Of course the influence is there. We find cchoes of the Romantic method again and again in Flaubert’s style ; but Flaubert is ever master of the method, never its slave. He uses it just when and where it suits his purpose, and then only. With almost all other writers we soon know their little tricks and manners : indeed we often Jearn to Jove their mannerixins. But whether we love them or not, we know them by heart. Not so (save in a few and altozether insignificant details) with Flaubert. And this is why Flaubert has followers but no imitators, Tlaubert cannot be imitated, He never imitated himself. Carlyle learnt to write Carlylese. Hugo faisatt de UiLugo ; even Heine occasionally is “Heinisch.” In Flaubert there is no lne of Flaubertism.

It is the property of genius to be all things to all men; and that different readers should discover different qualities and defects in Flaubert is to be expected. That some of us find much in him that Flaubert himself never dreamt of is likely, and whether the

INTRODUCTION. XIX things were dreamt of in his philosophy or not, they are there all the same. But whatever the qualities we may individually sec, there are some that must be patent to all. We cannot but note the peculiar combination of youthfulness and maturity, the freshness of impression allied to the power of analysis, This we may account for by the fact that his works were almost all conceived in the flush of his youth, executed in the maturity of lis manhood. We cannot but be struck by his cold impartiality and warm sympathy, his ruthless condemnation of ill-doing, and infinite pity for and comprehension of the ill-doer, Flaubert himself has said, ‘I wish to have [in writing] neither love, nor hate, nor pity, nor anger. As to sympathy, that is different : we can never have enough... . Is it not time to introduce Justice into Art? Then the impartiality of the painting would attain to the majesty of Law and the precision of Science.” ! This majesty and this science were attained by him.

And if critics have seen so many different things in Flaubert himself, it goes without saviny that they have done the same by his creations. ‘Here I can deal but with one of lis works, his first in point of tine, and, as many think, in point of merit—'f Madame Bovary.” To take Emma herself. Bourget sees in her dreams ‘“an enchanted poesy of all hours;” he finds hers “an exquisite nature.” It is true he discounts his admiration by applying almost the same terms to the weakling Frédéric of the “education Sentimentale.” Maupassant has an eye chiefly for Emma’s silliness, while Baudelaire sees in her the virility, the ardent desires of a man cramped within the frail body of a woman, All three critics are right. There is this and much more in Emma. She is also the embodiment of the artistic temperament as opposed to the temperament of the artist. Jemma has not the power to work off her emotions in music, or painting, or poem. She has no means of expression, and her passions consuming her, they must result only in disappointment, disillusion, and disgust, She can “give no exact measure of her needs, nor of her conceptions, nor of her sorrows.” What has been this woman’s childhood, what her youth? At the convent, the reading of sickly love-stories—storivs in which the coquetting with wrong is a main feature—has been one of her occupations ; marriage