Chapter X: Lessons in Art and Science (5)

Among the ancients, Homer and Æschylus were his gods. Aristophanes gave him more pleasure than Sophocles, Plautus than Horace, whose merit he thought over-praised. How many times have I heard him say that he would prefer above all things to be a comic poet!

Shakespeare, Byron, and Victor Hugo he profoundly admired, but he never comprehended Milton. He said: "Virgil has created the amorous woman, Shakespeare the amorous young girl; all others are more or less far-removed copies of Dido or Juliette."

In French prose he read again and again Rabelais and Montaigne, recommending them to all who wished to meddle with writing.

Literary enthusiasms had always existed in him; one that he loved to recall was that he experienced on his first reading of _Faust_. He read it on the eve of Easter as he was leaving college; instead of returning to his father's house, he found himself, not knowing how, in a spot called "Queen's walk." It is a beautiful promenade planted with high trees upon the left bank of the Seine, a little removed from the town. He was seated upon the steep bank; the clocks in the churches across the river resounded in the air and mingled with the poetry of Goethe. "Christ had arisen, peace and joy were complete. Announce then, deep bells, the beginning of the Easter day, celestial sounds, powerful and sweet! Why seek you me in the dust?" His head was turned and he came back like one lost in revery, scarcely realising things of earth.

How could this man, so great an admirer of the beautiful, find so much happiness in uncovering human turpitude, especially that found outside the realm of virtue? Must it not be from his worship of the true? His revelations seemed to be the confirmation of his philosophy and he rejoiced in them through love of that truth which he believed he was penetrating.

Numerous projects of work occupied his mind. He mentioned especially a story of the people of Thermopylæ that he intended to begin. He found that he had lost too much time in the preparatory research for his works and wished to employ the rest of his life in art, pure art. His belief in form would cross his mind; this caused him one day to cry out in his whimsical spontaneity: "I attach myself to the Ideal!" Then immediately laughing at our applause, he said: "Not bad, that! Poetry, isn't it? I begin to comprehend art."

A true artist, for him, never could be wicked, for an artist is before all an observer; the first quality for an observer is to possess good eyes. If they are blurred with passion, or personal interest, things escape them; a good heart makes a good mind!

His worship of the beautiful led him to say: "The moral is not only a part of the æsthetic, but its condition foundationally."

Two kinds of men were especially displeasing to him and were ever a subject for his disgust: the critic who never produced anything, but judges all things (to whom he preferred a candle merchant), and the educated gentleman who believes himself an artist, who has imagined Venice different from what it is, and has had disillusions. When he met a person of this kind, there was an explosion of scorn which showed itself, perhaps through cutting answers (he would pretend that he had no imagination, never fancied anything nor knew anything) or through a silence still more haughty.

Up to the time of his death, I had the advantage of continuing that serious, calm life from which my feminine mind had so much to gain. Many of my uncle's best friends were dead: Louis Bouilhet, Jules Duplan, Ernest Lemarié, Théophile Gautier, Jules de Goncourt, Ernest Feydeau, and Sainte-Beuve, while others were far away. His meetings with Maxime Ducamp were only rare; from 1852 the two friends no longer followed the same routes, as their correspondence witnesses.

In friendship my uncle was perfect; of a devotion absolutely faithful, without envy, happier in the success of a friend than in his own; but he brought into his friendly relations some exactions that those who were the object of them found it difficult to support. The heart that was bound to him by a common love of art (and all his deep attachments were upon this basis) should belong to him without reserve.

Wherefore, five years before his death, he received this short note in response to a package containing his _Three Stories_:--

"MY DEAR FRIEND: I thank you for your volume. I have not read any
of it, for I am absolutely besotted by the finishing of a work of
mine. I should have it done in eight or ten days and I shall then
reward myself by reading you. Yours,

MAXIME DUCAMP."

His heart suffered and recoiled on itself bitterly. Where now was the ardent desire of knowing quickly the thought that springs from the brain of a friend? Where were those beautiful years of youth? where was the faith in each other?

Nevertheless, there were still some natures that he loved much. Among the young, in the first rank, was the nephew of Alfred Le Poittevin, Guy de Maupassant, his "disciple," as he loved to call him. Then, his friendship with George Sand was for his mind no less than for his heart, a great comfort. But of his own generation, he often said that only Edmond de Goncourt and Ivan Tourgenief remained; with them he tasted the full joy of æsthetic conversation. Alas! they became more and more rare, these hours of intimate talks, because, for this overflow of soul it was necessary to find minds taken up with the same things, and the sojourns in Paris became farther and farther apart. His solitude, always terrible, became unbearable when I was not there, and often, to escape it, he would call on the old nurse of his childhood. At her fireside his heart would become warm again. In a letter to me he said: "To-day I have had an exquisite conversation with 'Mademoiselle Julie.' In speaking of the old times, she brought before me a crowd of portraits and images which expanded my heart. It was like a whiff of fresh air. She has (in language) an expression of which I shall make use. It was in speaking of a lady, 'She was very fragile,' she said, 'thundering so!' _Thundering_ after _fragile_ is full of depth! Then we spoke of Marmontel and of the _New Heloise_, something that could not be done among ladies nor scarcely among gentlemen."

When he was much alone, he would sometimes take up his love of nature, which would relieve him from his work for a moment. "Yesterday," he wrote, "in order to refresh my poor noddle, I took a walk to Canteleu. After travelling for two solid hours, Monsieur took a chop at Pasquet's, where they were making ready for New Year's Day. Pasquet showed a great joy at seeing me, because I recalled to him 'that poor Monsieur Bouilhet'; and he sighed many times. The weather was so beautiful, the moon so bright in the evening that I went out to walk again at ten o'clock in the garden, 'under the glimmer of the stars of night.' You cannot imagine what a lover of nature I have become; I look at the sky, the trees and the verdure with a pleasure I never knew before. I could wish to be a cow that I might eat grass."

But he would seat himself again at his table and let many months slip by without being seized with the same desire.

At the beginning of the year 1874, he began _Bouvard and Pécuchet_, a subject which had interested him for thirty years. He intended it at first to be very short--a novel of about forty pages. Here is how the idea came to him: Seated with Bouilhet on a bench of the Boulevard at Rouen, opposite the asylum for the aged, they amused themselves by dreaming of what they should be some day; and, having begun gaily the supposed romance of their existence, suddenly they cried: "And who knows? we may finish, perhaps, like these old decrepits in this asylum." Then they began to imagine the friendship of two clerks, their life, their retiring from business, etc., etc., in order finally to finish their days in misery. These two clerks became "Bouvard and Pécuchet." This romance, so difficult of execution, discouraged my uncle at more than one undertaking. He was even obliged to lay it aside and go to Concarneau to join his friend George Pouchet, the naturalist.

Down there, on the Brittany strand, he began the legend of _Saint Julian the Hospitaller_, which was immediately followed by _A Simple Soul_ and _Hérodias_. He wrote these three stories rapidly and then took up _Bouvard and Pécuchet_ again, a heavy care, under which he must die.

Few existences bear witness to unity so complete as his: his letters show that at nine years of age he was preoccupied with art as if he were fifty. His life, as has been stated by all those who have spoken about him, was, from the awakening of his intelligence to the day of his death, the long development of the same passion--Literature. He sacrificed all to that; his love and tenderness were never separated from his art. Did he regret in the last years of his life that he had not followed the common route? Some words which came from his lips one day when we were walking beside the Seine made me think so: we had just visited one of my friends whom we had found among her charming children. "They are in the right," he said to me, alluding to that household of the honest and good family; "Yes," he repeated to himself, gravely, "they are in the right." I did not trouble his thoughts, but remained silent by his side. This walk was one of our last.

Death took him in full health. It was at evening, and his letter was all good cheer, expressing the joy he felt at seeing himself confirmed in a conjecture that he had made regarding a plant. He had written me these interesting lines upon his work, of which only a few pages remained: "I am right! I have the assurance of the Professor of Botany in the _Jardin des Plantes_, and I was right; because the æsthetic is true, and to a certain intellectual degree (when one has some method) one is not deceived; the reality does not yield to the ideal, but confirms it. It has been necessary for me to make three journeys into different regions for _Bouvard and Pécuchet_ before finding their setting, that best fit for action. Ah! ha! I have triumphed! I flatter myself it is a success!"

He had made arrangements to set out for Paris to join me again. It was the day of his departure, he was coming from the bath and mounting to his study; the cook was going up to serve his breakfast, when she heard him call and hastened to him. Already his tense fingers could not loosen a bottle of salts which he held in his hand. He tried to utter some words that were unintelligible in which she could distinguish: "Eylau--go--bring--avenue--I know him--"

A letter received from me that morning had told him that Victor Hugo was going to live in the Avenue d'Eylau; it was without doubt a remembrance of this news that he had in mind, as well as an appeal for help. He was cared for by his neighbor and friend, Doctor Fortin.

The last glimmer of his thought evoked the great poet who had caused his whole nature to vibrate. Immediately he fell into unconsciousness. Some moments later they found that he no longer breathed. Apoplexy had been the thunderbolt.

CAROLINE COMMANVILLE.

PARIS, _December, 1886_.

CORRESPONDENCE.

TO MADAME X.

CROISSET, _Monday Night, June, 1853_.

Feeling myself in a grand humor of style this morning, after giving my niece her lesson in geography, I seized upon my _Bovary_, sketching three pages in the afternoon which I have just rewritten this evening. Its movement is furious and full, and I shall doubtless discover a thousand repetitions which it will be necessary to strike out as soon as I come to look it over a little. What a miracle it would be for me to write even two pages in a day, when heretofore I have scarcely been able to write three in a week! With the _Saint Antony_ that was, indeed, the way I worked, but I can no longer content myself with that. I wish _Bovary_ to be at the same time heavier and more flowing. I believe that this week will see me well advanced, and that in about a fortnight I shall be able to read Bouilhet the whole of the beginning (a hundred and twenty pages), which, if it goes well, would be a great encouragement, and I shall have passed if not the most difficult part at least the most annoying. But there are so many delays! I am not yet at the point where I can credit our last interview at Mantes. What foolish and severe vexation you must have passed through that week, my poor friend! About cases like M----, who throw themselves at your feet, the best thing to do is to pass the sponge over them immediately; but if you would care the least bit in the world for the elder Lacroix or the great Sainte-Beuve to receive something on the face or elsewhere, you have only to tell me and it is a commission of which I shall acquit myself with despatch on my next visit to Paris, in the old-time manner between two journeys; but could you not show Lacroix the door with a single word? What good is there in discussing, replying to, and angering him? This is all very easy to say in cold blood, is it not? It is always this accursed passion element which causes us all our annoyances. How true is Larochefoucauld's remark: "The virtuous man is he who allows himself to be concerned with nothing." Yes, it is necessary to bridle the heart, to hold it in leash like an enraged bulldog, and then let it loose at a bound at the opportune moment. Run, run, my old fellow, bark loudly and go at top speed; what these rogues have that is superior to us is patience. So in this story, Lacroix by his cowardly tenacity wearies De Lisle, who ends by becoming vexed and leaving the game and _Le Jeune irrité_ (the whole of Sainte-Beuve is in these words) will not have had finally either a sword in his paunch or a foot to his coat-tails, and will privately begin his machinations anew, as Homais would say.

You are astonished to find yourself the butt of so much calumny, opposition, indifference and ill-will. You will be more so and have more of it; it is the reward of the good and the beautiful: one may calculate the value of a man from the number of his enemies and the importance of a work by the evil said of it. Critics are like fleas which always jump upon white linen and adore lace. That reproach sent by Sainte-Beuve to the _Paysanne_ establishes my belief in the _Paysanne_ more firmly than Victor Hugo's praise of it; we give our praise to everybody, but our blame, no! Who is there that has not made a parody on the mediocre?

In regard to Hugo, I do not believe that it is time to write to him; you gave him a month for an answer, and it is not more than two weeks since our packet left; so it is necessary to wait at least as long as that, provided it has not been seized. Every precaution was taken, my mother addressing the letter herself.

What can this phrase in your letter this morning mean in speaking of De Lisle? "I believe that I was deceived in my impression of yesterday." The words of the _bourgeois_ at Préault are good. Have I told you what a curate of Trouville said one day after I had dined with him? When I refused champagne (I had already eaten and drunk enough to make me fall under the table), my curate was astonished and turned on me an eye! such an eye! an eye expressing envy, admiration, and disdain together, and said to me, shrugging his shoulders: "Come, now! all you young people from Paris who _gulp down champagne_ with your fine suppers, make very little mouths when you come to the provinces!" And it was so easy to understand that between the words "fine suppers" and "gulp" he meant to say "with the actresses!" What horizons! and to know that I excited this brave man! In this connection I am going to allow myself a quotation: "Come now!" said the chemist, shrugging his shoulders, "do you know about these fine parties at the house of the traitor! the masked balls! the champagne? All this goes on, I assure you."

"I do not believe that it injures him," objected Bovary.

"Nor I either," quickly replied M. Homais, "and it may be necessary for him to keep them up or be taken for a Jesuit. But if you only knew what lives those fellows lead, in the Latin Quarter with their actresses! Generally speaking, students are well looked upon in Paris. For the little attractiveness that they have, they are received into the best society, and there are even ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with them and, in consequence sometimes give them opportunities of making fine marriages." In two pages I believe I have collected all the stupidity that one hears in the provinces about Paris,--student life, actresses, the pickpockets you encounter in the public gardens, and the cooking at the restaurants, "always more unwholesome than provincial cooking."

That stiffness of which Préault accuses me is astonishing; it appears that when I have on a black coat, I am not the same man. And it is certain that I am then wearing a kind of disguise which my face and manners ought to resent, so much effect has the exterior upon the interior. It is the cap that moulds the head, and all troopers have about them the imbecile stiffness of hard lines. Bouilhet pretends that, out in the world, I have the air of a drilled, _bourgeois_ officer. Is it on this account that the illustrious Turgan calls me "the major?" He also maintains that I have a military air, and one could pay me no compliment that would be less agreeable. If Préault knew me, he would, on the contrary, find that I have a too bare-breasted air like the good captain; but how beautiful Ferrat must have been with his "good southern fury;" I can see him there now gasconading; it is tremendous. And, speaking of the grotesque, I was overwhelmed at the funeral of Madame Pouchet; decidedly, the good God is romantic, for he continually mingles the two kinds together. Nevertheless, while I was looking at the poor Pouchet, who was in torture, shaking like a reed in the wind, do you know what came up before me? A gentleman who asked me, on my voyage: "What kind of museums have they in Egypt? _What is the condition of their public libraries?_" And when I demolished his illusions, he was desolate. "Is it possible!" said he. "What an unfortunate country! What a civilization!" etc....

The burial was Protestant, the priest speaking in French beside the grave; Monsieur would prefer it so ... "since Catholicism is denuded of the flowers of rhetoric." O humans! O mortals! and to think we are always duped, that we have the vanity to believe ourselves imaginative, when the reality crushes us! I went to that ceremony with the intention of elevating my mind to the point of penetration; to try to discover a few pebbles; and then--these blocks fell upon my head! The grotesque deafened my ears, and the pathetic was in convulsions before my eyes. Whence I draw (or rather withdraw) this conclusion: _It is never necessary to fear exaggerating_; all the great ones have done it: Michael-Angelo, Rabelais, Shakespeare and Molière. It is a question of making a man take an injection when he has no syringe; well, we must fill the theatre with apothecaries' syringes; that is clearly the way to reach genius in its true centre, which is very ridiculous. But to suppress exaggeration, there must be continuity, proportion, and harmony in itself. If your good men have a hundred feet, your mountains should be twenty miles high; and what is the ideal if it is not a magnifying?

Adieu; work well, see only friends, mount to the ivory tower, and let come what may.

TO MADAME X.

CROISSET, _Saturday night_.

Finally I have finished my first part (of the second part); that is, I am at the point where I had intended to be at our last interview at Mantes; you see how great a delay this is! I shall pass still another week in re-reading all this and copying it, and a week from to-morrow I shall spout it to my lord Bouilhet. If this goes, a great anxiety will be removed, at least, and one good thing I can be sure of, that the foundation is well established; but I think however, that this book will have one great fault: that is, the fault of material proportion. I have already two hundred and sixty pages which contain only the preparation for action, some expositions, more or less disguised, of character (it is true that they are graduated), and of landscapes and places. My conclusion, which will be the recital of the death of my little woman, her funeral, and the sorrow of the husband, will follow with sixty pages at least. There remains, then, for the body of the action one hundred and twenty, or one hundred and sixty pages at the most. Is this not a great defect? What reassures me (in a slight degree), however, is that this book is a biography rather than a gradual development. The drama is a small part of it, so the dramatic element is well drowned in the general tone of the book; perhaps it will not be noticed that there is a want of harmony between the different phases so much as in their development; and then, it seems to me that life itself is a little like this. Our passions are like volcanoes; they grumble continually, but the eruption is only intermittent.

Unfortunately, the French mind has such a rage for amusement, it is necessary for it always to be seeing things! It cares so little for that which is poetry for me, or for knowing the _exposition_, that perhaps, as one may strike it picturesquely through tableaux, or morally through psychological analysis, it may serve exceedingly well that I wear a blouse, or have the appearance of doing so.

This is not the only day that I have suffered from writing in this language and thinking in it! At bottom I am German! The force of study has rubbed off all my southern mists. I wish to make books where only phrases are written (if one may so put it), as one lives by breathing only air; what vexes me is the trickery of the plan, the combinations for effect, and all the calculations which are the art of it, and upon which the effect of style depends exclusively.

And you, good muse, dear colleague in all (colleague comes from _colligere_, to bind together), have you worked well this week? I am curious to see that second recital. I have to recommend only two things: First, follow your metaphors closely; second, no details outside the subject; work in a straight line. _Parbleu!_ We shall make some arabesques when we wish to, and better than anybody's. We must show the classicists that we are more classic than they, and make the romanticists turn pale with rage by surpassing their attempts. I believe the thing feasible, although of no importance. When a verse is good, it loses its school. A good verse by Boileau resembles a good verse by Hugo. Perfection has everywhere the same character, which is precision and justness.

If the book I am writing with so much trouble comes to any good, I shall have established two truths by its execution alone, which are for me axioms of knowledge: first, that poesy is purely subjective, that there are not in literature beautiful art subjects, and that Yvetot is worth as much as Constantinople; consequently, one may write one thing as well as another, it matters not what. The artist must raise all; he is like a pump, having in him a great duct which descends to the entrails of things, to the deepest stratum, and makes leap into the light, in giant jets, what was under the earth and seen by no one but himself.

Shall I have a letter from you on awakening? Your letters have not been numerous this week, my friend! But I suppose it is work which has kept you. What an admirable face Father Babinet, member of the reading committee of the Odéon, will have! I can see now his _facies_, as my chemist would say, listening to the pieces as they are read.

There is taking place here an interesting case. A judge of the court of assizes, a brave man, is accused of killing his wife and then, having sewed her in a sack, of throwing her into the water. This poor woman had many lovers, and some one discovered at her house (it was a workman of the lowest class) a portrait and a letter from a gentleman, a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a rallying Legitimist, Member of the General Council, of the Building Associations, etc., ... of all the Associations, well known among the vestry, member of the Society of Saint-Vincent de Paul, of the Society of Saint-Regis, of the Children's Society, and all the humbugs possible; highly placed in fine society of the right kind, one of those persons who are an honour to a country and of whom it is said: "We are happy to possess such a gentleman"; and here, at a blow, it is discovered that this merry fellow has been carrying on relations (this is the phrase) with this merry lass--relations of the most disgusting kind, yes, Madame! Ah! great Heavens! I jeer like a beggar when I see all those fine people in the hands of the law; the humiliations these good gentlemen receive (they who find honours everywhere) seem to me to be the just punishment of their false pride. It is a disgrace to be always wishing to shine; it is debasing to mount to the heights and then sink into the mire with the mob! One should keep his level. And while there is not in my make-up much liking for democracy, I nevertheless love what is common, even ignoble, when it is sincere. But that which lies, which poses, which affects a condemnation of passion and assumes a grimace of virtue, revolts me beyond all limits. I feel now for my kind a serene hatred, or an inactive pity which is akin to it. I have made great progress in two years, and the political state of things has confirmed my old theories à _priori_, upon the biped without feathers, whom all in all I consider a turkey and a vulture.

Adieu, dear dove.

TO MADAME X.

CROISSET, _Tuesday, 1 A.M._

I AM overwhelmed; my brain is dancing in my head. I have been since six o'clock this evening until now recopying seventy-seven successive pages, and now they make but fifty-three. It is torture. The ramifications of my vertebræ to the neck, as M. Enault remarks, are broken from having bent my head so long. What with the repetition of words, the _alls_, the _buts_, the _fors_ and the _howevers_ I had to strike out, there is never any end to it, which is the way with this diabolical prose. There are, nevertheless, good pages, and I believe that, as a whole, it moves along; but I doubt if I shall be ready to read it all to Bouilhet on Sunday. Just think! since the end of February, I have written fifty-three pages! What a charming profession! It is like whipping cream when one would like to be rolling marbles.

I am very tired, but have, however, many things to say. I have just written four lines to Ducamp, not for you; that would have been a reason for his showing you more malevolence--I know the man. This is the reason why I wrote him: to-day I received the last package of his photographs, of which I had never spoken to him, and the note was to thank him for it. That was all; I said nothing further. If, in the article on the philosophers, on Wednesday, he uses your name accompanied with any harmful allusions, I will do what you wish; but for my part, I should propose to break off squarely in a pretty, well-defined letter. However, do not let us torment ourselves, since the thing will doubtless not take place. It is Bouilhet's opinion (my note to-day is from a contrary hypothesis) that it is best to be on good terms when the rupture comes and be able to say to him: here is still another time that you are disobliging to me; good evening and good-bye. Do you understand?

As for Enault's article, it seems to me, good Muse, as if you had exaggerated it. It is stupid and foolish and all that, with its _feminosities_, "sensible woman," "younger woman," etc.--which have evidently come from Madame ----, who is jealous of you from all reports, and on that I would bet my head. It is our opinion, both Bouilhet's and mine, that he labours hard over his little monthly billets without ever saying anything. Bouilhet is profoundly indignant and proposes not even going to see him when he next goes to Paris; but what difference does it make to us, the opinion of my lord Enault, either written or spoken? As Ducamp said to Ferrat: Can you expect, in the midst of the whirlwind in which he lives, with his fascinating personality, his officer's badge, his receptions at the house of M. de Persigny, etc., that he could preserve enough perspicacity to feel a new, original, or novel thing? Besides, in this arrangement, there may be something agreed upon. We never can turn a negro white and we never can hinder the mediocre from being mediocre. I assure you that if he were to say to me "I have had curvature of the spine or softening of the brain," it would make me laugh. Do you know what I found out to-day from his photographs? The only one he did not publish was the one representing our hotel at Cairo and the garden before our windows where I stood in Nubian costume; it is a bit of malice on his part. He wishes that I did not exist; I have weighed him, as have you and every body else. The work is dedicated to Cormenin, with a dedicatory epigraph in Latin, and in the text is an epigraph taken from Homer, all in Greek. The good Maxime does not know a declension, but that does not matter. He has had the German work of Leipsius translated and has pillaged it impudently (in the text that I looked over) without quoting it once. I heard that from a friend of his that I met on the train; you know I said he must have pillaged it, for there were all sorts of inscriptions that he never would have valued, which are not in the books that we meet in our travels, but which he reports as having been appreciated by him; it is like all the rest of his work. As for the _Paysanne_, the eulogy which Bouilhet wrote him about it (at the same time he wrote to De Lisle, a letter which has met with no response) is the cause, you may be sure, of his remark to Ferrat. Finally, all that is of very little importance. Still, we have been very much vexed all Sunday afternoon from it, these stories demoralising lord Bouilhet a little, in which respect I find him weak, and me also, for I am caught in it. Frankly now, it is stupid to permit these fellows to trouble us so. In fact, I find that in injuries, stupidities, foolishness, etc., it is necessary to be angry only when something is said to one's face. Make grimaces at my back as much as you wish, my breeches alone contemplate you.

I love you so much when I see you calm and know that you are working well, and still more, perhaps, when I know that you are suffering, for then you write me such superb letters, so full of fire. But, poor dear soul, take care of thyself, and tax only in moderation thy southern fury, as you called it in speaking of Ferrat.

The advice of De Lisle relative to the _Acropole_ is good. First, send the manuscript to Villemain as you sent it to Jersey (I have received no letter about it, which seems strange, and my mother will write some day to Madame Farmer if I receive nothing); you could even make some corrections if you find it necessary although it seems good to me, except about the Barbarians, which I persist in finding much the weakest; second, try to have it appear in the _Press_; third, we shall find some plan, you may be sure. Bouilhet will be there this winter and he will aid you. His last fossil, the third piece, "Springtime," is superb; there is in it a pecking of birds around gigantic nests which is gigantic in itself. But he gets too sad, my poor Bouilhet; it is necessary to straighten up and em ... humanity which em ... us! Oh! I shall be avenged! In fifteen years from now I shall have undertaken a great modern romance where they shall all pass in review. I think that _Gil Blas_ has perhaps done this, and Balzac remotely, but the fault of his style is that his work is rather more curious than beautiful and stronger than it is brilliant. These are projects of which I should not speak, as all my books are only the preparation for two, which I will finish if God lends me life. I mean this one and the Oriental story.

You must see the story of the journey that Enault has published on his return from Italy! He is a wag and a droll fellow, who will make an article in that cavalier fashion upon one with whom he has dined without first asking his permission. As for the article, it is simply stupid, and that one he wrote upon Bouilhet was no stronger. He underlines _bosom_ and _rags_, exclaims "Eight children! O, Poesy!" paints the school where he thinks it probable there are a certain number of children that will be known to literature! No, if one does not keep himself from all this, _I say it in all seriousness_, there is danger of his becoming an idiot.

My father said repeatedly that he never would wish to be a doctor in a hospital for the insane, because if one dealt seriously with madness, he ended by becoming mad himself. It is the same in this case; from becoming too much disturbed by these imbeciles, there is danger of becoming such ourselves. Heavens! what a headache I have! I must go to bed! my thumb is hollowed by my pen and my neck is twisted.

I find Musset's observation of Hamlet that of a profound _bourgeois_, and this is the reason why: he reproaches the inconsistency of Hamlet, a sceptic, seeing with his eyes the soul of his father. But first, it was not the soul that he saw, but a phantom, a shadow, a thing, a materially living shadow, which has no connection either in popular or in poetic ideas with the abstract idea of the soul. It is we, metaphysicians and modern people, who speak this language; and then, Hamlet did not _question_ at all the philosophic sense, he was _dreaming_. I believe this observation of Musset's is not his own but Mallefille's; in the preface of his _Don Juan_, he is superficial, to my mind. A peasant in our day could see a phantom perfectly and, the next day in broad daylight, reflect in cold blood upon life and death, but not upon flesh and the soul. Hamlet was not reflecting upon the subtleties of some school, but upon human thoughts. On the contrary, it is this state of perpetual fluctuation in Hamlet, this vagueness in which he holds himself, this want of decision in will and solution in thought, which makes him sublime.

But _people of mind_ will have their characters all of a piece and _consistent_ (since they can have them so only in books). There is not an aim of the human soul which is not reflected in this conception. Ulysses is perhaps the strongest type in all ancient literature, and Hamlet of all modern.

If I were not so weary, I should express my thought at greater length; it is so easy to prattle about the beautiful; but to say in proper style "Shut the door," or "He has a desire to sleep," requires more genius than to make all the Courses of Literature in the world.

Criticism is the lowest round on the ladder of literature, nearly always in form and in moral value; incontestably it comes after the end-rhyme and the acrostic, which demand at least the work of some invention.

Now, adieu.

TO LOUIS BOUILHET.

TROUVILLE, _Aug. 23, 1853_.

WHAT a confounded rain! How it falls! Everything is imbedded in water! From my window I can see bonnets passing shielded by red umbrellas; barques are putting out to sea; I hear the chains of the anchors which they are raising with general imprecations addressed to the bad weather. If it lasts three or four days more, which seems to me probable, we shall pack up and return home.

Admire here one of the polite ways of Providence which would be hard to believe: in whose house have I lodgings? In the house of a chemist! And of whom is he the pupil? Of Dupré! Like him, he deals in Seltzer water! "I am the only one in Trouville who manufactures Seltzer water" he says. In fact, at eight o'clock in the morning I am often awakened by the noise of corks which go off unexpectedly. Pif! paf! The kitchen is the laboratory as well as kitchen; a monstrous still stands humbly among the stewpans:

The frightful length of its copper smoking,

and often they cannot put on the dinner-pot because of pharmaceutical preparations. In order to go into the yard, it is necessary to pass over baskets filled with bottles. There creaks a pump which wets your legs; two boys are rinsing decanters; a parrot repeats from morning till night: "Have you breakfasted, Jacko?" and finally, a brat about ten years old, the son of the house and the hope of the pharmacy, exercises in all sorts of athletics, such as raising himself from the ground by his teeth.

This journey to Trouville has brought the whole inner story of my life before me. I have dreamed much in this theatre of my passions. I now take leave of them forever, I hope; in the part of life that remains, there is time to say adieu to youthful sadness. I cannot conceal, however, that it has come back to me in waves, during the last three weeks. I have had two or three good afternoons in full sunlight, all alone upon the sand, where I found again some other sad things beside broken shells! But I have finished with it now, God be thanked! We shall now cultivate our garden and no more raise our head at the cry of the crows.

How I long to finish _Bovary_, _Anubis_, and my three prefaces, in order to enter a new period and give myself up to the "purely beautiful!" The idleness in which I have lived for some time gives me the cutting desire to transform through art all that is "myself," all that I have felt. I feel no need of writing my memoirs; my personality even repels me, and immediate objects seem hideous or stupid. I go back to former ideas. I arrange the barques into old-time ships. I undress the sailors who pass, to make savages of them walking naked upon the silver shores; I think of India, of China, of my Oriental story (of which fragments are coming to me), and I feel like undertaking gigantic epics.

But life is so short! I never can write as I wish, nor the quarter part of what I dream. All that force that we feel and that stifles us must die with us without being allowed to overflow!

I revisited yesterday a village two hours' journey from here, where I went with that good Orlowski when I was eleven years old. Nothing was changed about the houses, the cliff, or the fishing-boats. The women at the wash-house were sewing in the same position, the same number were beating their soiled linen in the same blue water, and it rained a little as in former times. It seemed, at certain moments that the universe had become immovable, that everything had become a statue, and that we alone were living. And how insolent nature is! What waggishness on her impudent visage! One tortures his mind trying to comprehend the abyss that separates him from her, but something comes up more farcical still, that is, the abyss that separates us from ourselves. When I think that here, in this place, on looking at this white wall off-setting the green, I had some heart throbs, and that I was full of "poesy," I am amazed, lost in a vertigo, as if I had suddenly discovered myself on the peak of a wall two thousand feet high.

This little work that I am doing, I shall complete this winter, when you are no longer there, poor old man! to arrange, burn, and, classify all my scribblings. With the _Bovary_ finished, the age of reason will begin. And then, why encumber ourselves with so many souvenirs? The past eats up too much and we are never in the present, which alone is important in life. How I philosophise! I have need to, since you are there! It is difficult to write; words are wanting, and I should prefer being extended on my bear-skin, near you, discoursing "melancholically" together.

Do you know that in the last number of the _Review_ our friend Leconte was very badly treated? They are definitely low rascals; and "the phalanx" is a dog-kennel. All the animals there are much more stupid than ferocious. You who love the word "paltry," be assured that is what it is.

Write me an immeasurable letter as soon as you can, and embrace yourself for me; adieu.

TO MADAME X.

CROISSET, _Wednesday evening, Midnight_.

I HAVE taken up the _Bovary_ again, and since Monday have five pages almost done; _almost_ is the word, for it is necessary to take it up again. How difficult it is! I fear that my _comices_ (primary meetings) may be too long; it is a hard place. I have there all the personages of my book in action and in dialogue, mingled with one another, and beyond them all is a great landscape which envelopes them; if I can succeed with it, it will be very symphonic.

Bouilhet has finished the descriptive part of his _Fossils_. His mastodon ruminating in the moonlight on a prairie is enormously full of poesy and will be, perhaps, to the public, the most effective of all his pieces! There only remains the philosophic part, which is the last. About the middle of next month, he will go to Paris to select a lodging where he can install himself the first of November. Would that I were in his place!

Decidedly, the article by Verdun on Leconte (which I have an idea is Jourdan's) is more stupid than hostile; I have laughed much at the comparison they make with the _beautiful lines_ of the _Fall of an Angel_; what bearish politeness! As for the _Indian Poems_ and the piece about _Dies iræ_, not a word. There is a certain ingenuousness about them, but why call the _sperchius_, _sperkhios_? That seems to me a true _janoterie_. What has become of the good Leconte,--is he progressing with his Celtic poem?

I have been re-reading some of Boileau, or rather all of Boileau, and with my pencil on the margin. This seems to me truly strong; one does not tire of what is well written, for style is life! It is the blood of the thought! Boileau has a little river, straight, not deep, but admirably limpid and well within its banks; and that is the reason why the waters have not dried up; nothing is lost of what he wishes to say. But how much art he has used and with so little effort!

Within the next two or three years, I intend to re-read attentively all the French classics and to annotate them; this is work that will serve me in _my prefaces_ (my work of literary critic, you know); I wish to state there the insufficiency of schools as they are, and to declare plainly that we make no claim to being one of them, we outsiders, nor is it necessary to be one of them. On the contrary, we are in the line of transmission; that seems to me strictly exact; it reassures and encourages me. What I admire in Boileau is what I admire in Hugo; and where one has been good, the other is excellent. There is only one standard of beauty; it is the same everywhere, although under different aspects, and more or less coloured by the reflections that dominate it. Voltaire and Chateaubriand, for example, were mediocre for the same reasons, etc. I shall try to make it seen why the æsthetic critic is so much behind the historic and scientific critic; he has never had any base. The knowledge that is wanting is that of the anatomy of style; to know how a phrase is constructed, and where it should be attached. They study manikins and translations with professors,--imbeciles incapable of holding the instrument of the science they teach (I mean the pen), and the result is, they lack life!

Love! Love! the secret of the good God which does not easily give itself up,--the soul, without which nothing is understood.

When I have finished that (and the _Bovary_ and _Anubis_ first of all), I shall without doubt, enter into a new phase, and it seems slow getting there; I, who write so slowly, am gnawed by my plans. I wish to produce two or three long, epic antiques--romances in a grandiose setting, where the action may be forcefully fertile and the details rich in themselves, and luxurious and tragic as a whole; books of grand mural painting, of heroic size.

There was in the _Revue de France_ (a fragment by Michelet upon Danton) a judgment of Robespierre that pleased me much; it stamped him as being in himself a government; and it was for that reason that all Republican governmental maniacs loved him. Mediocrity cherishes rules, but I hate them. I feel myself against them and against all restrictions, corporations, caste, hierarchy, levels, and droves, with an execration that fills my soul; it is on this side, perhaps, that I comprehend the martyr.

Adieu, beautiful ex-democrat.

TO MADAME X.

CROISSET, _Wednesday, Midnight_.

HAVE you still your tooth? Take steps, then, immediately to have it removed. There is nothing in the world worse than physical pain; and it is worse than death for a man, as Montaigne says, "to put himself under the skin of a calf to escape it." Pain has this evil: it makes us feel life too much; it gives us, as it were, a proof of malediction to ourselves which weighs upon us; it humiliates us, and that is sad for beings that are sustained solely by their pride.

Certain natures suffer not so much, and people without nerves are happy; but of how many things are they not deprived? According as one rises in the scale of being, the nervous faculty increases, that is, the faculty for suffering. Are to suffer and to think the same thing, then? Is genius, after all, only a refinement of pain, that is to say, a meditation of the objective through the soul?

The sadness of Molière came wholly from the human stupidity which he felt contained in himself; he suffered from the Diaforus and Tartuffes which passed before the eyes of his brain. Do you not suppose that the soul of a Veronese imbibes colour like a piece of stuff plunged into the boiling vat of a dyer? All things appear to him as if magnifying glasses were before his eyes. Michael-Angelo said that marble trembled at his approach; what is sure is, that he himself trembled when he approached marble. Mountains, for this man, had souls; they were of a corresponding nature and there was a sympathy between them like that between analogous elements. And this should establish, I know not where or how, some kind of volcanic train that would make poor human implements explode.

I find myself nearly half through my _comices_. I have made fifteen pages this month, not finished them,--but whether they are good or bad, I know not. How difficult dialogue is when one especially wishes it to have character; to paint by dialogue, and keep it lively, precise, and distinguished while it remains commonplace is monstrous, and I know of no one who has done this in a book. It is necessary to write the dialogue in comedy, while the narrative takes the epic style.

This evening I began again that accursed page about the lamps which I have already written four times; it is enough to make one beat his head against a wall! I am trying to paint (in one page) the gradations of the enthusiasm of a multitude watching a good man as he places many lamps in succession upon the outside of the mayor's residence; it is necessary to make seen the crowd howling with astonishment and joy, and that without any apparent motive or reflection on the part of the author.

You are astonished at some of my letters, you say; you find in them well-written, pretty malice; well, I write what I think; but when it comes to writing for others, and making them speak as they would have spoken, what a difference! A moment ago, for example, I was trying to show in a dialogue a particular man who must be at the same time good-natured, commonplace, a little vulgar and pretentious! And beyond all this one must make sure that the point is clear. In a word, all the difficulties that we have in writing come from a lack of order. It is a conviction that I now have, that if you are troubled to give the right turn to an expression, it is sure that _you have not the idea_. A very clear image or sentiment in the head leads to the word on paper. The one flows from the other. "Whatever is well conceived," etc.... I have been re-reading this in old father Boileau; or rather I have read him entirely again (I am now on his prose works), and find him a master man and a great writer rather than a poet. But how stupid they have made him out! What paltry interpreters he has had! The race of college professors, pedants of pale ink, have lived upon him and stretched him thin, chattering over him like a cloud of locusts in a tree. He was not dense! No matter, he was solid of root and well planted, straight and well-poised.

The literary critic seems to me a thing to be made anew; those who have meddled with it are not of the trade, and while perhaps they know the anatomy of a phrase, they have not a drop of the physiology of style.

And about _La Servante_? Why was I afraid that it would not be long? Because it is better to be too long than too short, although the general defect of poets is the length, as it is of prose writers, which makes the first wearisome and the second disgusting. Lamartine, Eugène Suë.... Verse in itself is so convenient for disguising the absence of ideas! Analyse a beautiful passage of verse and another of prose, and you will see which is the fuller. Prose, art aside, must needs bristle with things to be discovered; but in verse the most trifling things appear. Thus we may say in comparison that the most unnoticed idea in a phrase of prose may suffice to make a whole sonnet; often, three or four plans are necessary in a prose work; do we expect to find this in poetry?