Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (78 page)

The list is not large, but every figure is painted by a master. And the vanity, the futility, the barrenness of it all. It is the concentrated philosophy of disenchantment—as Edgar Saltus would say—and about the book hangs the inevitable atmosphere of mortification, of defeat, of unheroic resignation. But it is genuine life, commonplace, quotidian life, and Truth is stamped on its portals. All is vanity and vexation of spirit. The tragedy of the petty has never before been so mockingly, so menacingly, so absolutely displayed. Tchekoff, with his gray-in-gray miniatures of misery, comes nearer to the French story than any other modern. Perhaps Henry James is right in declaring that “Sentimental Education” (a misleading title; it was to have been “Withered Fruits”) is like the mastication of sawdust and ashes. A pitiless book, you will say! Yes, and it proves nothing, except that life is but a rope of sand. Read it, if you care for art in its quintessence; but if you are better pleased with the show and bravery of things external, avoid this novel for it is as bitter as a page from Ecclesiastes.

—from
Puck
(September 9, 1916)

That there was no danger of Flaubert’s merely palming off, in his novel work, replicas with a few superficial differences, had now been shown. It was further established by his third and longest book,
L’Éducation Sentimentale.
This was not only, as the other had been, violently attacked, but was comparatively little read—indeed it is the only one of his books, with the usual exception of
Bouvard et Pécuchet,
which has been called, by any rational creature, dull. I do not find it so; but I confess that I find its intrinsic interest, which to me is great, largely enhanced by its unpopularity ...

It is simply a panorama of human folly, frailty, feebleness, and failure—never permitted to rise to any great heights or to sink to any infernal depths, but always maintained at a probable human level. We start with Frédéric Moreau as he leaves school at the correct age of eighteen. I am not sure at what actual age we leave him, though it is at some point or other of middle life, the most active part of the book filling about a decade. But “vanity is the end of all his ways,” and vanity has been the beginning and middle of them—a perfectly quiet and everyday kind of vanity, but vain from centre to circumference and entire surface. He (one cannot exactly say “tries,” but) is brought into the possibility of trying love of various kinds—illegitimate-romantic, legitimate-not-unromantic, illegitimate-professional but not disagreeable, illegitimate-conventional. Nothing ever “comes off” in a really satisfactory fashion. He is “exposed” (in the photographic-plate sense) to all, or nearly all, the influences of a young man’s life in Paris—law, literature, art, insufficient means, quite sufficient means, society, politics—including the Revolution of 1848—enchantments, disenchantments—
tout ce qu‘il faut pour vivre-to
alter a little that stock expression for “writing materials” which is so common in French. But he never can get any real “life” out of any of these things. He is neither a fool, nor a cad, nor anything discreditable or disagreeable. He is “only an or’nary person,” to reach the rhythm of the original by adopting a slang form in not quite the slang sense. And perhaps it is not unnatural that other ordinary persons should find him too faithful to their type to be welcome. In this respect at least I may claim not to be ordinary. One goes down so many empty wells, or wells with mere rubbish at the bottom of them, that to find Truth at last is to be happy with her (without prejudice to the convenience of another well or two here and there, with an agreeable Falsehood waiting for one). I do not know that
L‘Éducation Sentimentale
is a book to be read very often; one has the substance in one’s own experience, and in the contemplation of other people’s, too readily at hand for that to be necessary or perhaps desirable. But a great work of art which is also a great record of nature is not too common—and this is what it is.

—rrom
History of the French Novel
(1917-1919)

Of the faculty which employs visual imagery to differentiate the subtler emotions of the soul, Flaubert had little or nothing at all. The true faculty of metaphor was denied him.

Lacking this, a writer cannot be reckoned among the great masters of style. But Flaubert lacked something more fundamental still. If we consider his works in the order they were written we are chiefly struck by the strange absence of inward growth which they reveal. The surface texture of L’Éducation Sentimentale is more closely woven than that of Madame Bovary, but the scope of the story itself is, if anything, less significant. Flaubert’s vision of life had not deepened in the long interval which separates the two works. He saw a larger extent of life, perhaps, but he saw no further into it; he had acquired more material, but no greater power of handling it; he manipulated more characters, but he could not make them more alive. Though the epicure of technical effects may find more to interest him in the later book, it is impossible not to endorse the general verdict that Madame Bovary is Flaubert’s masterpiece. Undoubtedly the choice lies between those books, for La Tentation de St Antoine and Salammbô are set-pieces which will not kindle, and Bouvard et Pécuchet (which de Gourmont declared the equal of Don Quixote!) cannot be redeemed from dullness by the mildly amusing bubbles which float to the surface of its viscous narrative.

We may suspect that a writer who does not really develop, the vitality and significance of whose latest work is less than that of his first, has not the root of the matter in him. And Flaubert had not. It may not be given to mortal men to understand life more deeply at the end than at the beginning of their share of it; but they can more keenly feel its complexity and its wonder; they can attain to an eminence from which they contemplate it calmly and undismayed.

The great writers do this, and convey the issue of their contemplation to us through the created world which they devise. But of this unmortified detachment Flaubert was incapable. He lived and died indignant at the stupidity of the human race. As he was at thirty, so he was at sixty; in stature of soul he was a child.

—from
The Dial
(December 1921)

1. Given everything that happens in
Sentimental Education,
is Flaubert’s pessimism justified? Even if it is internally justified, can it possibly correspond with external reality? Is his pessimism directed toward the times, the historical moment, or the nature of human life?

2. In
Sentimental Education
we get something more like a process than a plot. No governess marries a great lord. No young hero finds the Holy Grail stuffed with bank notes. No lofty hero or heroine suffers a fall because of a fatal flaw. Does Flaubert sacrifice too much, does he have difficulty holding the readers’ attention, by not having a clearly articulated plot to order his incidents and create suspense? What does he gain?

3. What should Frédéric have done to create for himself a satisfying and meaningful life? If
Sentimental Education
is a novel of education, what exactly does Frédéric learn?

4. What is Flaubert’s view of love between the sexes? Is it redemptive ? An irresistible biological urge? Projected narcissism? Contaminated by ulterior motives? The best thing in life? A spark of the divine in mortal flesh? A swindle? A delusion?

Madame Bovary (1857)

Salammbô
(1862)

Le Candidat
(performed 1874, published 1904;
The Candidate)

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