Ten Novels And Their Authors (26 page)

It is not unreasonable to ask oneself how near Flaubert came, by taking the immense pains I have described, to achieve the perfect style at which he aimed. Style is a matter of which a foreigner, even though he knows a language pretty well, can be but an uncertain judge: the finer points, the music, the subtlety, the aptness, the rhythm, can hardly fail to escape him. He must accept
the opinions of the native born. For a generation after Flaubert’s death his style was highly regarded in France; now it is less admired. The French writers of to-day find in it a lack of spontaneity. He had, as I have before mentioned, a horror of ‘this new maxim that one must write as one speaks’. And of course one must no more write as one speaks than one must speak as one writes; but written language has life and vitality only if it is firmly grounded on current speech. Flaubert was a provincial, and in his prose was apt to use provincialisms which offend the purists; I don’t suppose that a foreigner, unless they were pointed out to him, would be aware of them; nor would he notice the grammatical mistakes of which Flaubert, like nearly every writer who ever wrote, was sometimes guilty. Few Englishmen, though able to read French with ease and pleasure, could point out what is grammatically wrong with the following phrase:
‘Ni moi! reprit vivement M. Homais, quoiqu’il lui faudra suivre les autres au risque de passer pour un Jésuite
’; and fewer still could tell how to put it right.

The French language tends to rhetoric, as the English to imagery (thereby marking a profound difference between the two peoples), and the basis of Flaubert’s style is rhetorical. He made abundant, even excessive, use of the triad. This is the sentence of three members which are arranged, as a rule, either in an ascending or descending scale of importance. It is both an easy and a satisfying way of achieving balance, and orators have taken full advantage of it. Here is an example from Burke: ‘Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention.’ The danger of this sort of sentence, and one from which Flaubert did not escape, is that when used too often it is monotonous. Flaubert in one of his letters wrote; ‘I’m devoured with similes as one is with lice, and I spend all my time crushing them, my phrases swarm with them.’ Critics have observed that in his letters the similes are
spontaneous, whereas in
Madame Bovary
they are too studied, too neatly balanced, to be natural. Here is a good example: Charles Bovary’s mother has come to pay Emma and her husband a visit.
‘Elle observait le bonheur de son fils, avec un silence triste, comme quelqu’un de ruiné qui regarde, à travers les carreaux, des gens attablés dans son ancienne maison
.’ This is admirably put, but the simile is in itself so striking that it distracts your attention from the mood it is supposed to illustrate; the object of a simile, however, is to add force and importance to a statement, not to weaken it.

The best French writers of to-day, so far as I have been able to discover, deliberately avoid rhetoric. They attempt to say what they have to say simply and naturally. They eschew the effective triad. They avoid similes, as though they were indeed the vermin to which Flaubert likened them. That, I believe, is why they are apt to hold his style in small esteem, at least the style of
Madam Bovary
, for when he came to write
Bouvard et Pécuchet
he abandoned every form of ornament and decoration; and that is why they prefer the easy, flowing, animated and natural manner of his letters to the laboured manner of his greater novels. This is, of course, merely a matter of fashion, and justifies us in forming no judgment on the merits of Flaubert’s style. A style may be stark, like Swift’s, flowery, like Jeremy Taylor’s, or grandiloquent, like Burke’s: each is good, and whether you prefer one to another depends merely on your individual taste.

(5)

After the publication of
Madame Bovary
Flaubert wrote
Salammbô
, which is generally considered a failure, then another version of
L’Education Sentimentale
, in which he again described his love for Elisa Schlesinger. Many men of letters in France look upon it as his masterpiece. It is confused and hard to read. Frédéric Moreau, the hero,
is partly a portrait of Flaubert, as he saw himself, and partly a portrait of Maxime du Camp, as he saw
him
; but the two men were too different to make a plausible amalgam, and the character remains unconvincing. He is singularly uninteresting. The book, however, begins admirably, and towards the end there is a parting scene between Madam Arnoux (Elisa Schlesinger) and Frédéric (Flaubert) of rare beauty. Then, for the third time, he wrote
La Tentation de St. Antoine
. Though Flaubert said he had enough ideas for books to last him to the end of his life, they remained vague projects. It is curious that with the exception of
Madame Bovary
, the story of which was given him ready-made, the only novels he wrote were founded on ideas he had had early in life. He aged prematurely. At thirty he was already bald and potbellied. It may well be, as Maxime du Camp said, that his nerve storms and the depressing sedatives he took to counteract them impaired his power of imaginative creation.

Time passed, and Caroline, his niece, married. Flaubert and his mother were left alone. His mother died. For some years he had had an apartment in Paris, but there he lived almost as solitarily as at Croisset. He had few friends, except the literary men who met once or twice a month to dine together at Magny’s. He was a provincial, and Edmond de Goncourt said that the more he lived in Paris the more provincial he became. When dining at a restaurant, he insisted on a private room, because he could not bear noise or to have people near him; and he could not eat at his ease without taking off his coat and his boots. After the defeat of France in 1870, Caroline’s husband found himself in financial difficulties, and finally, to save him from bankruptcy, Flaubert handed over his entire fortune. He was left with little except his old home. The worry of this brought on again the fits from which for some years he had been free, and when he dined out, Guy de Maupassant went to fetch him to see him safely
home. Goncourt describes him at this time as irritable, sarcastic, irascible and quick to take offence at anything or nothing; but, he added in another note in his journal, ‘so long as you give him the principal part and let yourself catch cold because he keeps on opening the windows, he’s an agreeable companion. He has a ponderous gaiety and the laughter of a child, which is contagious, and in the contact of every day life a hearty affectionateness which is not without charm.’ There Goncourt did him no less than justice. Du Camp said of him: ‘This impetuous, imperious giant, exploding at the least contradiction, was the most respectful, the gentlest, the most attentive son that a mother could dream of.’ And you have only to read his charming letters to his niece to see of what tenderness he was capable.

Flaubert’s last years were lonely. He spent most of the year at Croisset. He smoked too much. He ate too much and drank too much. He took no exercise. His means were straitened. Friends eventually got him the offer of a sinecure which would bring him in three thousand francs a year, and though it deeply humiliated him, he was obliged to accept it. He did not live long enough to profit by it.

The last work he published was a volume of three stories, one of which,
Un Coeur Simple
, is of a rare excellence. He engaged upon a novel called
Bouvard et Pécuchet
, in which he determined to have still another fling at the stupidity of the human race, and with his usual thoroughness he read fifteen hundred books to provide himself with the material he thought necessary. It was to be in two volumes, and he almost reached the end of the first. On the morning of May 8, 1880, the maid went into the library at eleven to bring him his lunch. She found him lying on the divan, muttering incomprehensible words. She ran for the doctor and brought him back with her. He could do nothing. In less than an hour Gustave Flaubert was dead.

The only woman he sincerely, devotedly and disinterestedly loved in his life was Elisa Schlesinger. One evening at dinner
chez Magny
, when Théophile Gautier, Taine and Edmond de Goncourt were present, Flaubert made a curious statement: he said that he had never really possessed a woman, that he was virgin, that all the women he had had were never anything but ‘mattresses’ for another woman, the woman of his dreams. Maurice Schlesinger’s speculations had ended in disaster, and he took his wife and children to live in Baden. In 1871 he died. Flaubert, after loving Elisa for thirty-five years, wrote his first love letter to her. Instead of beginning as he had been used to do,
‘Chère Madame
,’ he began: ‘My old love, my only loved one.’ She came to Croisset. Both were greatly changed since they had last seen one another. Flaubert was gross and fat, his face red and blotchy; he wore an immense moustache and to cover his baldness a black cap. Elisa had grown thin, her skin had lost its delicate hues and her hair was white. The lovely description in
L’Education Sentimentale
of the last meeting of Madame Arnoux and Frédéric Moreau probably faithfully describes the meeting of Flaubert and Elisa after so many years. They met once or twice after that, and then, so far as anyone knows, never again.

A year after Flaubert’s death, Maxime du Camp spent the summer at Baden, and one day, when he was out shooting, found himself near the lunatic asylum of Illenau. The gates were opened to allow the female inmates, under the care of keepers, to take their daily walk. They came out two by two. Among them was one who bowed to him. It was Elisa Schlesinger, the woman whom Flaubert so long and so vainly loved.

(1)

Hitherto I have been dealing with novels which, with all their differences, descend in a fairly direct line from the novels of a remote past. ‘The novel,’ I learn from
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
, ‘has been made a vehicle for satire, for instruction, for political or religious exhortation, for technical information; but these are side issues. The plain and direct purpose of the novel is to amuse by a succession of scenes painted from nature, and by a thread of emotional narrative.’ This puts the matter in a nutshell. The novel, I learn further, came into favour in Alexandrian times, when life was sufficiently easy for people to take pleasure in accounts, realistic or fanciful, of the adventures and emotions of imaginary characters; but the first work of fiction that has come down to us which can strictly be called a novel is one that was written by a Greek called Longus and entitled
Daphnis and Chloe
. From this, through unnumbered generations, with many ups and downs, with many diversions, are derived the novels I have been briefly considering, whose direct purpose is, as the
Encyclopaedia
puts it, to amuse by a succession of scenes painted from nature, and by a thread of emotional narrative.

But now I come to a small group of novels which are so different in their effect on the reader, which seem to be written with an intention so extraneous, that they must be put in a class by themselves. Such novels are
Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights
and
The Brothers Karamazov
; and such are the novels of James Joyce and Kafka. Novelists are, of course, mutations from the common stock of bishops and bar-tenders, policemen and politicians, and so forth; and mutations occur repeatedly. But biologists tell us that most are harmful, and many lethal. Now, since the sort of book an author writes depends on the sort of man he is, and this depends partly on the association in the chromosome of genes from different parents and partly on the environment, it is surely significant that novelists are inclined to sterility; there are only two in history, Tolstoy and Dickens, who were greatly fertile. The mutation is evidently lethal. But perhaps that is just as well, since, whereas oysters when they proliferate produce oysters, novelists generally produce nitwits. The particular mutation I am now concerned with has left, so far as I know, no literary descendants.

I am going to take first the author of that strange and powerful book,
Moby Dick
. I have read Raymond Weaver’s
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
, Lewis Mumford’s
Herman Melville
, Charles Roberts Anderson’s
Melville in the South Seas
, William Ellery Sedgwick’s
Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind
, and Newton Arvin’s
Melville
. I have read them with interest, profited by most of them, and learnt from them a number of facts useful to my modest purpose; but I cannot persuade myself that I know more about Melville, the man, than I knew before.

According to Raymond Weaver, an ‘uncircumspect critic at the time of Melville’s centenary in 1919’ wrote: ‘Owing to some odd psychological experience, that has never been definitely explained, his style of writing, his view of life underwent a complete change.’ I don’t quite know why this unnamed critic should be described as uncircumspect. He hit upon the problem which must puzzle everyone who is interested in Melville. It is on this account that one scrutinises every known detail of
his life and reads his letters and books, books some of which can only be read by a determined effort of will, to discover some hint that may help to elucidate the mystery.

But first let us take the facts, so far as they are made known to us by the biographers. On the face of it, but only on the face of it, they are simple enough.

Herman Melville was born in 1819. His father, Allan Melville, and his mother, Maria Gansevoort, were gentlefolk. Allan was a cultivated, travelled man, and Maria an elegant, well-bred and pious woman. For the first five years of their marriage they lived at Albany, and after that settled in New York, where Allan’s business – he was an importer of French dry goods – for a time prospered, and where Herman was born. He was the third of their eight children. But by 1830 Allan Melville had fallen on evil days and moved back to Albany, where two years later he died bankrupt and, it is said, insane. He left his family penniless. Herman went to the Albany Classical Institute for boys and, on leaving school at the age of fifteen, was employed as a clerk in the New York State Bank; in 1835 he worked in his brother Gansevoort’s fur store, and the following year on his uncle’s farm at Pittsfield. For a term he was a teacher at the common school in the Sykes district. At seventeen he went to sea. Much has been written to account for this, but I cannot see why any further reason need be sought than the one he gives himself: ‘Sad disappointments in several plans which I had sketched out for my future life; the necessity of doing something for myself, united to a naturally roving disposition, had now conspired within me, to send me to sea as a sailor.’ He had tried his hand without success at various occupations, and from what we know of his mother we may surmise that she did not hesitate to express her displeasure. He went to sea, as many a boy before and after has done, because he was unhappy at home. Melville was a very strange man, but it is unnecessary
to look for strangeness in a perfectly natural proceeding.