Chapter IX: Act II: does he escape the lack of variety. For instance, in Act (4)

Nor is there cause for alarm in the word anarchy, which means in its ideal state unfettered self-government. If we all were self-governed governments would be sinecures. Anarchy often expresses itself in rebellion against conventional art forms—the only kind of anarchy that interests me. A most signal example is Henry James. Surprising it is to find this fastidious artist classed among the anarchs of art, is it not? He is one, as surely as was Turgénieff, the de Goncourts, or Flaubert. The novels of his later period,—What Maisie Knew, The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, The Better Sort, The Sacred Fount, The Awkward Age, and the rest,—do they not all betray the revolution of Henry James from the army of the conventional? He will be no dull realist or flamboyant romantic or desiccated idealist. Every book he has written, from The Lesson of the Master and The Pattern in the Carpet, is at once a personal confession and a declaration of artistic independence. Subtle Henry James among the revolutionists! Yes, it is even so. He has seceded forever from the army of English tradition, from Bronté, Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray. He may be the discoverer of the fiction of the future.

* * * * *

The fiction of the future! It is an idea that propounds itself after reading The Wings of the Dove. Here at last is companion work to the modern movement in music, sculpture, painting. Why prose should lag behind its sister arts I do not know; possibly because every drayman and pothouse politician is supposed to speak it. But any one who has dipped into that well of English undefiled, the seventeenth-century literature, must realize that to-day we write parlous and bastard prose. It is not, however, splendid, stately, rhythmic prose that Mr. James essays or ever has essayed. For him the “steam-dried style” of Pater, as Brander Matthews cruelly calls it, has never offered attractions. The son of a metaphysician and moralist,—I once fed full on Henry James, senior,—the brother of that most brilliant psychologist, William James, of Harvard, it need hardly be said that character problems are of more interest to this novelist than are the external qualities of rhetorical sonority, the glow and fascination of surfaces. Reared upon the minor moralities of Hawthorne, and ever an interested, curious observer of manners, the youthful James wrote books which pictured in his own exquisite orchestra of discreet tints and delicate grays the gestures, movements, and thoughts of many persons, principally those of travelled Americans. He pinned to the printed page a pronounced type in his Daisy Miller, and shall we ever forget his Portrait of a Lady, the Princess Cassimassima,—the latter not without a touch of one of Turgénieff’s bewilderingly capricious heroines. It is from the great, effortless art of the Russian master that Mr. James mainly derives. But Turgénieff represented only one form of influence, and not a continuing one. Hawthorne it was in whom Mr. James first planted his faith; the feeling that Hawthorne’s love of the moral problem still obsesses the living artist is not missed in his newer books. The Puritan lurks in James, though a Puritan tempered by culture, by a humanism only possible in this age. Mr. James has made the odious word, and still more odious quality of cosmopolitanism, a thing of rare delight. In his newer manner, be it never so cryptic, his Americans abroad suffer a rich sea change, and from Daisy Miller to Milly Theale is the chasm of many years of temperamental culture. We wonder if the American girl has so changed, or whether the difference lies with the author; whether he has readjusted his point of vantage with the flight of time; or if Daisy Miller was but a bit of literary illusion, the _pia fraus_ of an artist’s brain. Perhaps it is her latest sister, Milly, whose dovelike wings hover about the selfish souls of her circle, that is the purer embodiment of an artistic dream.

The question that most interests me is the one I posed at the outset: Is this to be the fiction of the future, are The Wings of a Dove or The Ambassadors—the latter is a marvellous illusion—and studies of the like to be considered as prose equivalents of such moderns as Whistler, Monet, Munch, Debussy, Rodin, Richard Strauss, and the rest? In latter-day art the tendency to throw overboard superfluous baggage is a marked one. The James novel is one of grand simplifications. As the symphony has been modified by Berlioz and Liszt until it assumed the shape of the symphonic poem, and was finally made over into the guise of the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so the novel of manners of the future must stem from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education or else remain an academic imitation, a replica of Thackeray or of George Eliot’s inelastic moulds. Despite its length—“heavenly,” as Schumann would say—Sentimental Education contains in solution all that the newer novelists have since accomplished. Zola has clumsily patterned after it, Daudet found there his impressionism anticipated. All the new men, Maupassant, Huysmans, Loti, Barrès, Mirbeau, and others, discovered in this cyclopædic man what they needed; for if Flaubert is the father of realism he is also a parent of symbolism. His excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric significance to his words sound the note of symbolism. Mr. James dislikes Sentimental Education, yet he has not failed to benefit by the radical formal changes Flaubert introduced in his novel, changes more revolutionary than Wagner’s in the music-drama. I call the James novel a simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed with; many are suspended cadences. All barren modulations from event to event are swept away—unprepared dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding—that bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at every speech of a character’s name. The elliptical method James has absorbed from Flaubert; his oblique psychology is his own. All this makes difficult reading for the reader accustomed to the cheap hypnotic passes of fiction mediums. Nothing is forestalled, nothing is obvious, and one is forever turning the curve of the unexpected; yet while the story is trying in its bareness, the situations are not abnormal. You rub your eyes when you finish, for with all your attention, painful in its intensity, you have witnessed a pictorial evocation; both picture and evocation wear magic in their misty attenuations. And there is always the triumph of poetic feeling over mere sentiment. Surely Milly Theale is the most exquisite portrait in his gallery of exquisite portraiture. Her life is a miracle, and her ending supreme art. The entire book is filled with the faintly audible patter of destiny’s tread behind the arras of life, of microphonic reverberations, of a crescendo that sets your soul shivering long before the climax. It is all art in the superlative, the art of Jane Austen raised to the _n_th degree, superadded to Mr. James’s implacable curiosity about causes final. The question whether his story is worth telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered: what most concerns us is his manner in the telling.

The style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions, repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in which the heads of young adjectives gaze despairingly and from afar at verbs that come thundering in Teutonic fashion at the close of sentences leagues long. It is all very bewildering, but more bewildering is the result when you draft out in smooth, journalistic style this peculiarly individual style. Nothing remains; Mr. James has not spoken; his dissonances cannot be resolved except by his own matchless art. In a word, his meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating things and it may not. Either way it is not to the point. And yet the James novels may be the fiction of the future; a precursor of the book our children and grandchildren will enjoy when all the hurly-burly of noisy adventure, of cheap historical tales and still cheaper drawing-room struttings shall have vanished. A deeper notation, a wider synthesis will, I hope, be practised. In an illuminating essay Arthur Symons places Meredith among the decadents, the dissolvers of their mother speech, the men who shatter syntax to serve their artistic purposes. Henry James has belonged to this group for a longer time than any of his critics have suspected; French influences, purely formal, however, have modified his work into what it now is, what the critical men call his “third manner.” In his ruthless disregard for the niceties and conventionalities of sentence structure I see, or seem to see, the effect of the Goncourts, notably in Madame Gervaisais. No matter how involved and crabbed appears his page, a character emerges from the smoke of muttered enchantments. The chiefest fault is that his characters always speak in purest Jamesian. So do Balzac’s people. So do Dickens’s and Meredith’s. It is the fault, or virtue, of all subjective genius. Yet in his obliteration of self James recalls Flaubert; like the wind upon the troubled waters, his power is sensed rather than seen.

* * * * *

I have left Berlioz and Strauss for the last. The former all his life long was a flaming individualist. His books, his utterances, his conduct, prove it. Hector of the Flaming Locks, fiery speech, and crimson scores, would have made a picturesque figure on the barricades waving a red flag or casting bombs. His Fantastic Symphony is full of the tonal commandments of anarchic revolt. As Strauss is a living issue, the only one,—Dvořák, Saint-Saëns, Grieg, Goldmark, and the neo-Russians are only rewriting musical history,—it is best that his theme is separately considered. But I have written so much of Strauss that it is beginning to be a fascination, as is the parrot in Flaubert’s Un Cœur Simple—and this is not well. Sufficient to add that as in politics he is a Social Democrat, so in his vast and memorial art he is the anarch of anarchs. Not as big a fellow in theme-making as Beethoven, he far transcends Beethoven in harmonic originality. His very scheme of harmonization is the sign of a soul insurgent.

In The Anarchists, with its just motto, “A hundred fanatics are found to support a theological or metaphysical statement, but not one for a geometric theorem,” it cannot be denied that Lombroso has worked in futile veins. His conclusions are rash; indeed, his whole philosophy of Degeneration and Madness has a literary color rather than a sound scientific basis. But he has contrived to throw up many fertile ideas; and secretly the reading world likes to believe that its writers, artists, composers, are more or less crazy. Hence the neat little formula of artistic Mattoids, gifted men whose brains are tinged with insanity. Hazlitt, in one of his clear, strongly fibred essays, disposed of the very idea a century back, and with words of stinging scorn. Yet it is fanaticism that has given the world its artistic beauty, given it those dreams that overflow into our life, as Arthur Symons so finely said of Gérard de Nerval. And the most incomplete and unconvincing chapter of the Lombroso book is that devoted to sane men of genius. At the risk of inconsistency I feel like asserting that there are no sane men of genius.

VI

THE BEETHOVEN OF FRENCH PROSE

I

FLAUBERT AND HIS ART

The maker of a great style, a lyric poet, who selected as an instrument the “other harmony of prose,” a master of characterization and the creator of imperishable volumes, Gustave Flaubert is indeed the Beethoven of French prose. Never was the life of a genius so barren of content, never had there been seemingly such a waste of force. In forty years only four completed books, three tales, and an unfinished volume; a sort of satyricon and lexicon of stupidity—what else is Bouvard et Pécuchet? The outlay of power was just short of the phenomenal, and this Colossus of Croisset,—one falls into superlatives when dealing with him,—this man tormented by an ideal of style, a man who formed a whole generation of writers, is only coming into his kingdom. In his correspondence he is the most facile, the most personal, the least impassable of artists; in his work the most concentrated, objective, and reticent. There never has been in French prose such a densely spun style,—the web fairly glistening with the idea. Yet of opacity there is none. Like one of those marvellous tapestries woven in the hidden East, the clear woof of Flaubert’s motive is never obscured or tangled. George Moore declares L’Education Sentimentale to be as great a work as Tristan und Isolde. It is the polyphony, the magical crossings, recrossings, the interweaving of the subject and the long, elliptical thematic loops made with such consummate ease that command admiration. Flaubert was above all a musician, a musical poet. The ear was his final court of appeal, and to make sonorous cadences in a language that lacks essential richness—it is without the great diapasonic undertow of the Anglo-Saxon—was just short of the miraculous. Until Chateaubriand’s and Victor Hugo’s time the French tongue was rather a formal pattern than a plastic, liquid collocation of sounds. They blazed the path for Flaubert, and he, with almost Spartan restraint and logical mind, made the language richer, more flexible, more musical, polished, and precise. The word and the idea were indissolubly associated, a perfect welding of matter and manner. Omnipresent with him was the musician’s idea of composing a masterpiece that would float by sheer style, a masterpiece unhampered by an idea. The lyric ecstasy of his written speech quite overmastered him. He was a poet as were De Quincey, Pater, and Poe. The modulation of his style to his themes caused him inconceivable agony. A man of equal gifts, and less exacting conscience, would have calmly written at length, letting style go free in his pursuit of theme; but Flaubert strove ceaselessly to overcome the antinomianism of his material. He wrote La Tentation de Saint Antoine, and its pages sing with golden throats; transpose this style to the lower key of L’Education Sentimentale, and we find the artist maddened by the incongruity of surface and subject. In Madame Bovary, with its symphonic descriptions, Flaubert’s style was happily mated; while in the three short tales he is almost flawless. Then came Bouvard et Pécuchet, and here his most ardent lover recognizes the superb stylistic curve. The book is a mound of pitiless irony, yet a mound, not a living organism. Despite its epical breadth, there is something inhuman, too, in the Homeric harmonies of Salammbô.

With the young wind of the twentieth century blowing in our faces it is hardly necessary to pose Flaubert academically. His greatness consists in his not being speared by any literary camp. The romanticists claimed him; they were right. The realists declared that he was their leader, and the extreme naturalists cried up to him, “O Master!” They too were wise. Something of the idealist, of the realist, is in Flaubert; he is never the doctrinaire. Temperamentally he was a poet; masked epilepsy made him a pessimist. In a less cramped milieu he might have accomplished more, but he would have lost as a writer. It was his fanatical worship of form that ranks him as the greatest artist in fiction the world has ever read. Without Balzac’s invention, without Turgénieff’s tenderness, without Tolstoy’s broad humanity, he nevertheless outstrips them all as an artist. It is his music that will live when his themes are rusty with the years; it is his glorious vision of the possibilities of formal beauty that has made his work classic. You may detect the heart-beat in Flaubert if your ear is finely attuned to his harmonies. A despiser of the facile triumph, of the appeal sentimental, he reminds me more of Landor than De Quincey,—a Landor informed by a passion for fiction. There are pages of Flaubert that one lingers over for the melody, for the evocation of dim landscapes, for the burning hush of noon. In the presence of passion he showed his ancestry; he became the surgeon, not the sympathetic nurse, as was the case with many of his contemporaries. He studied the amorous malady with great cold eyes, for his passions were all intellectual. He had no patience with conventional sentimentality. And how clearly he saw through the hypocrisy of patriotism, the false mouthing of politicians! A small literature has been modelled after his portrait of the discontented demagogues in L’Education Sentimentale. The grim humor of that famous meeting at the Club of Intellect set Turgénieff off into huge peals of laughter. It is incredibly lifelike. A student of detail, Flaubert gave the imaginative lift to all he wrote: his was a winged realism, and in Madame Bovary we are continually confronted with evidences of his idealistic power. Content to create a small gallery of portraits, he wreaked himself in giving them adequate expression, in investing them with vitality, characteristic coloring, with everything but charm. Flaubert has not the sympathetic charm of his brother-at-arms, Iván Turgénieff. In private life a man of extraordinary magnetism, his bonze-like suppression of personal traits in his books tells us of martyrdom to a lofty theory of style. He sacrificed his life to art, and an unheeding, ungrateful generation first persecuted and then passed him by. It is the very tragedy of literature that a man of robust individuality, handsome, flattered, and wealthy, should retire for life to a room overlooking the Seine, near Rouen, and there wrestle with the seven devils of rhetoric. He subdued them—made them bond-slaves; but he wore himself out in the struggle. He sought to extort from his instrument music that was not in it. What he might have done with the organ-toned English language after so triumphantly mastering the _technique_ of the French keyboard—a genuine piano keyboard—we may only hazard. His name is one of the glories of French literature, and in these times of scamped workmanship, when the cap and bells of cheap historical romance and the evil-smelling weed of the dialect novel are ruling fiction, the figure of the great Frenchman is at once a refuge and an evocation.

* * * * *

Many years have passed since Gustave Flaubert published his third novel, L’Education Sentimentale; and whether it was the unhappy title or the political condition of France at the time,—Turgénieff declared that it was the former,—the big book of five hundred pages failed to attract much attention. There was no public prosecution, as with Madame Bovary, nor did the subject-matter invite the controversy of archæologists; so to the chagrin of the great pupil of Châteaubriand and Balzac this masterpiece of “pitiless observation” hardly aroused a protest. To be sure, M. René Taillandier saw in its pages a covert attack on the idea of young manhood, but then M. Taillandier was given to the discovery of literary mare’s nests, and the Franco-Prussian war intervening, one of the greatest of descriptive novels was allowed to repose in dusty peace.

As George Moore, in one of the most luminous of his criticisms, so truthfully says, “Since then it has been read by novelists in search of material, and they held their tongues, partly because it was easier to steal than to appreciate, partly because they did not wish to draw attention to their thefts.” Yet L’Education Sentimentale was not altogether missed by the critics. Paul Bourget won his way to critical fame with his exhaustive study of its creator; Henri Taine wrote sympathetically of him; Henry James, who will yield to no one in his admiration of the dead master, frankly confesses that the novel is dead, is as sawdust and ashes, while George Saintsbury cannot sufficiently praise it. It is for him “a whole _Comédie Humaine_ of failure in two volumes,” and Flaubert “can do with a couple of epithets what Balzac takes a page of laborious analysis to do less perfectly.” It remained for Mr. Moore to cry the work to heaven and to point out that while Balzac might have written Madame Bovary, no one but Flaubert could have produced L’Education Sentimentale.

Mr. Moore is right; the novel is stupendous, is appalling in its magnitude and handling of the unpromising material of life, in its piercing analysis, power of concrete characterization, and overwhelming mastery of style. “The ignoble pleases me,” Flaubert said once; “it is the sublime of the lower slopes.” L’Education Sentimentale is the very lowest slope of the ignobly sublime.

“The great artists are those who impose on humanity their particular illusions,” cries Guy de Maupassant, after serving seven long years of apprenticeship to Flaubert and literature, with what results we all know. Flaubert’s particular illusion was so completely magnificent that but few of his intimates absolutely realized it. Life, he confessed, was to him a bad odor; “it was like an odor of unpleasant cooking escaping by a vent-hole.” Yet despite his love of the exotic, of the barbarous, of the Orient, he forced himself to see it, handle it, estimate it, and write of it. When he wished to roam in the East or in old Carthaginian times, he took up the history of the daughter of Farmer Roualt, and we got Emma Bovary. When Egypt and the Thebaid tempted him with its ascetic gloom and dream splendors, he resolutely tied himself to his monkish desk at Croisset and worked for six years at L’Education Sentimentale.

Picture to yourself this green-eyed Norman giant, stalking up and down his terrace spouting aloud Châteaubriand, whose sonorous, cadenced lines were implacably engraved on his memory. Flaubert’s favorite passage was this from Atala: “Elle répand dans le bois ce grand secret de mélancholie qu’elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes et aux rivages antiques des mers.” One recalls Matthew Arnold’s love for Maurice de Guerin’s Centaur, and his eternal quotation of that marmoreal phrase, “But upon the shores of what ocean have they rolled the stone that hides them, O Macareus?” Little wonder that the passengers on the steamboat bound for Rouen enjoyed the spectacle of the inspired martyr to style as he paced his garden in an old dressing-gown, chanting the swelling phrases of Châteaubriand!

Relentlessly pursued by the demon of perfection, a victim to epilepsy, a despiser of the second-hand art of his day, is it not strange that Flaubert ever wrote a line? Execution was for him a painful parturition; he was delivered of his phrases in agony, and yet his first book, born after ten years of herculean effort, was a masterpiece. Did not a great critic say, “Madame Bovary is one of the glories of French literature?” But it almost sent its author to jail. Without the toleration, the adaptability of his dear comrade, Turgénieff, Flaubert took life symphonically. It was a sad, serious thing, and to escape its rigors he surrounded himself in the magic cloud of an ironic art,—an art addressed to the elect. He felt the immedicable pity of existence, yet never resorted to the cheap religious nostrums and political prophylactics of his contemporaries. He despised the bourgeois; this lifelong rancor was at once his deliverance and his downfall; it gave us L’Education Sentimentale, but it also produced Bouvard et Pécuchet. Judged by toilsome standards of criticism, Flaubert was a failure, but a failure monstrous, outrageous, and almost cosmical; there is something elemental in this failure. As satirical as Swift, he was devoured by a lyrism as passionate as Victor Hugo’s. This colossus of ennui set out to conquer material life, to crush it with superb, indifferent hands and was himself vanquished by it; and in the smoke and dust of defeat his noble figure went down as if some strange meteor had shot from the dark blue to the very bowels of the globe. After forty years of toil in his hermitage, he left only six volumes, nearly all masterpieces, but not masterpieces for the million.

Flaubert, as Saintsbury justly points out, occupied “a very singular middle position between romanticism and naturalism, between the theory of literary art, which places the idealizing of merely observed facts first of all, and is sometimes not too careful about the theory which places the observation first if not also last, and is sometimes ostentatiously careless of any idealizing whatsoever.” His was a realism of a vastly superior sort to that of his disciples. The profound philosophic bias of his mind enabled him to pierce behind appearances, and while his surfaces are extraordinary in finish, exactitude, and detail, the aura of things and persons is never wanting. His visualizing power has never been excelled, not even by Balzac,—a stroke or two and a man or woman peers out from behind the types. He ambushed himself in the impersonal, and thus his criticism of life seems hard, cold, and cruel to those readers who look for the occasional amiable fillip of Gautier, Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens. This frigid withdrawal of self behind the screen of his art gave him all the more freedom to set moving his puppets; it is this quality that caused him to be the only naturalist to receive mercy from Brunetière’s remorseless pen. Those who mortise the cracks in their imagination with current romanticism, Flaubert will never captivate. He seems too remote; he regards his characters too dispassionately. This objectivity is carried to dangerous lengths in Sentimental Education, for the book is minor in tone, without much exciting incident—exciting in the Dumas or Stevenson sense—and is inordinately long. Five hundred pages seem too much by half to be devoted to a young man who does not know his own mind. Yet Frédéric Moreau is a man you are sure to meet on your way home. He is born in great numbers and in every land, and his middle name is Mediocrity. Only the golden mean of his gifts has not brought him happiness. He has some money, and was born of middle-class parents in the provinces. His mother’s hope, he is sent to Paris to the schools, and has just taken his bachelor degree when the book begins. On the steamboat bound for Nogent-sur-Seine, Frédéric meets Arnoux, the art dealer,—an admirably drawn personality,—and falls in love with Madame Arnoux. That love—the leading motive of the work—proves his ruin, and it is his one pure love; a sample of Flaubert’s irony, who refuses to be satisfied with the conventional minor moralities and our conventional disposition of events. Frédéric goes home, but cannot forget Madame Arnoux. He is romantic, rather silly, good-hearted, and hopelessly weak. Like the sound of a firm, clanging chord his character is indicated at the outset and there is little later development. As the flow of some sluggish river through flat lands, oozing banks, and neat embankments, Frédéric’s life canalizes in leisurely fashion. He loses his fortune, he inherits another, he goes back to Paris, he lives in Bohemia—such a real Bohemia—and he frequents the salons of the wealthy. He encounters fraud, meanness, hypocrisy, rapacity, on every side, and like Rastignac is a bit of a snob. He is fond of women, but a constitutional timidity prevents him from reaping any sort of success with them, for he is always afraid of some one “coming in.” When he does assert himself, he fears the sound of his own voice, yet in the duel with Cisy—one of the most superbly satirical set pieces in any literature—he is seemingly brave. His relations with La Maréchale are wonderfully set forth; he is her dupe, yet a dupe with eyes wide open and without the power of retaliation. Infirmity of will allied to a charming person, this young man is a memorable portrait. He is not the hero, for the book is without one, just as it is plotless and apparently motiveless. Elimination is practised unceasingly, yet the broadest effects are secured; the apparent looseness of construction vanishes on a second reading. Almost fugal in treatment is the development of episodes, and while the rhythms are elliptical, large, irregular—rhythm there always is—the unrelated, unfinished, unrounded, decomposed semblance to life is all the while cunningly preserved. What Mr. James would call the “figure in the carpet,” the decorative, the thematic pattern, is never lost, the assonant web being exquisitely spun. The whole book floats in the air; it is a miracle work. It is full of the clangor and buzz of Time’s loom.

For me Rosalie Arnoux is the unique attraction. Henry James calls her a failure—spiritually. She is one of the most charming portraits in French fiction, and yet a perfectly virtuous woman. The aroma of her character pervades the pages of this wonderful “encyclopædia of life.” What shall I tell you of the magical descriptions of the ball at the Alhambra and other masked balls at La Maréchale’s; of the duel; of the street fighting during the revolution of ’48; of the cynical journalist, Hussonet, a type for all times; of the greedy Des Lauriers; of peevish Senecal; of good-hearted Dussardier; of Pellerin, who reads all the works on æsthetics extant so as to paint beautifully; of Mlle. Vatnaz, skinny, slender, amorous, and enigmatic? What shall I say of M. Roque, of Louise, of the actor Delmar, who turns his profile to his audiences; of Madame Dambreuse and her sleek infidelities; of her avaricious husband; of Frédéric’s foolish mother, so like himself; of Regimbart, formidable, thirsty Regimbart, with his oaths, his daily café-route, and his magnificent air of bravado? 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 philosophy of disenchantment, and about the book hangs the inevitable atmosphere of defeat, of mortification, of unheroic resignation. It is 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. An unhappy book, you say! Yes; and proves nothing except that life is but a rope of sand. Read it if you care for art in its most quintessentialized form, but if you are better pleased with the bravery and show of things external, avoid this novel, I beseech you, for it is as bitter in the mouth as a page torn from Ecclesiastes.

“And thus it is that Flaubert ... became a sort of monk of literature, shut away from the world, solitary and morose, beholding humanity with horror, with repulsion, with irony, with sarcasm, with an evil laugh sadder than tears, and casting upon mankind what are called glances of pity—in other words, pitiless glances, ... just as a friar passes a life of contemplation and meditation, saying to himself that God is great and that men are small, so he spent almost the whole of a fairly long life saying to himself again and again that men are small and that art is great, scorning the one and serving the other with an equal fervor and an equal ardor of uncompromising devotion.”

Émile Faguet in his excellent monograph on Flaubert—in Les Grands Ecrivains Français—thus summed up his life. Paul Bourget called his works “a manual of nihilism,” and declared that in each sentence of Flaubert’s “inheres a hidden force.” More significant still is Bourget’s anecdote illustrating Flaubert’s almost insane devotion to style.

“He was very proud,” relates Bourget, “of furnishing his story of Herodias with the adverb _alternativement_,—alternately. This word whose two accents on _ter_ and _ti_ give it a loose swing, seemed to him to render concrete and almost perceptible the march of the two slaves who in turn carried the head of St. John the Baptist.” And in the preface by Flaubert to Dernières Chansons de Louis Bouilhet may be found his startling yet rational theory that good prose alone can stand the test of being read aloud, for “a well-constructed phrase adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration.”

“While remaining itself obscure,” writes George Moore of L’Education Sentimentale, “this novel has given birth to a numerous literature. The Rougon-Macquart series is nothing but L’Education Sentimentale rewritten into twenty volumes by a prodigious journalist—twenty huge balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes getting clear of the housetops. Maupassant cut it into numberless walking sticks; Goncourt took the descriptive passages and turned them into Passy rhapsodies. The book has been a treasure cavern known to forty thieves, whence all have found riches and fame. The original spirit has proved too strong for general consumption, but, watered and prepared, it has had the largest sale ever known.”

Some one in Henry Labouchere’s London Truth wrote this of the author of Boule de Suif: “Guy de Maupassant’s death has revived an interest in his works. He was admittedly the son of Flaubert, from whom he inherited his sanguine temperament, ruddy complexion, the full starting veins in his temples, the bull neck, and the flaw in his nervous system. Flaubert was subject to epileptic fits, and Guy de Maupassant died of general paralysis, preceded by madness, before he had reached middle age. As a writer he was with ease what Flaubert tried to be by great efforts, and something more, he having a deeper insight into what seem the ordinary circumstances of life.”

The Beethoven of French prose was, every one knows, whimsical and fastidious to a degree with his style. Be it true or not, one of his friends relates that he found him one day standing in front of a high music desk, on which stood a paragraph written in large letters. “What are you doing there?” said his friend. “Scanning these words because they don’t sound well.” Flaubert would spend a day over a sentence because it did not sound well, and every sentence he sent to press was equally closely analyzed. Well, why not! If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it would be more sonorous, more rhythmic, in a word, more artistic. I believe the story, although it does not appear in Tarvers’s book on Flaubert. It is glorious, true or false; it fixes an ideal for young writers.

II

THE TWO SALAMMBÔS

After doggedly working like a galley slave for six years Gustave Flaubert published Salammbô in Paris near the close of 1862. He was then forty-one years old, in the prime of his laborious and picturesque life, recluse, man of the world, traveller, and one of the most devoted of sons. In 1849, with Maxime du Camp—who later imprudently lifted the curtain on the sad secret of his friend’s life—Flaubert made a journey up the Nile, through Egypt, Nubia, by the Red Sea, through Palestine and Syria, into Cyprus, Rhodes, Asia Minor, Turkey in Europe, and Greece. Before Dr. Schliemann, the great Flaubert dug in Mycenæ, and from the “trenches of Herculaneum, on to the rocks of Cape Misenum,” he explored, furiously obsessed by a fantastic idea. In 1850 we find him in Phœnicia, a wanderer and an excavator of buried pasts. During 1858 he went to Tunis, and to the ruins of Carthage. From these delvings was born the epical romance of Salammbô, a book full of sonorous lines like the sweeping harmonies of Wagner, a book of mad dreams, blood, lust, cruelty, and love faithful unto death.

Following the publication of this story Flaubert, a lion in literary Paris since his artistic and legal victories with Madame Bovary, found himself the centre of many attacks by historians, archæologists, pedants, and the critical small fry of the town. To one adversary the blond giant of Croisset deigned a reply. It was M. Froehner, then editor of the _Revue Contemporaine_, and an expert in archæology—that is, an expert until Flaubert answered his arguments and literally blew them off the globe. He admitted having created Salammbô; that the aqueduct which Mathô and Spendius traversed the night Salammbô first saw the Zäimph was also an invention; that Hanno was really crucified in Sardinia; and a few other minor changes. Then to Froehner’s animadversions he gave text for text, authority for authority, and when a question of topography arose, Flaubert clinched his answer with: “Is it to shine by trying to make the dunces believe that I do not distinguish between Cappadocia and Asia Minor? But I know it, sir; I have seen it, I have taken walks in it.”

If the question was consecrating apes to the moon, or whether beards covered in bags in sign of mourning are in Cahen [Ezekiel xxiv. 17] and on the chins of Egyptian colossi—any doubtful fact, be it ethnic, archæologic, ethic, æsthetic, or historic, was met by a volley of answers, a flood of learning, a wealth of reading, that simply overwhelmed his antagonist. The affair was tremendously diverting for the lookers-on, but it is to be doubted if art was benefited. For two dusty German professors such a controversy might have proved useful; in it Flaubert simply wasted his glorious powers.

Salammbô, despite its erudition, is a love story, original in design, set in a strange environment, a love story withal. The accusations of a too impersonal style and of a lack of human interest do not altogether hold when the wonderfully vital portrait of Salammbô is studied; and the fiery Mathô, the leper Hanno, Hamilcar, stern, but loving his little son Hannibal like the apple of his eye; the wily Spendius, the fanatical high priest—here is a group of living humans, animated by the same passions as ours, a delineation almost cruel in its clearness, and all surrounded by an atmosphere of realistic beauty that bespeaks the art of its creator. The style, the superb cadenced prose which passes us in processional splendor or else penetrates the soul like a strange perfume, this style so sharp in outline, so canorous to the ear, a style at once pictorial and musical,—to this unique verbal presentation I cannot accord justice. Flaubert is first the musician and then the psychologist.

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Ernest Reyer was born in 1823. His family name was Rey, and he hails from Marseilles. A very old but active man, Reyer is librarian of the Opéra, and is, or was, critic of the _Journal des Débats_, a position formerly held by Berlioz. In 1876 he succeeded Félicien David as a member of the Institute. These two composers exerted the major influence upon the work of Reyer. He imitated David in his choice of Eastern subjects and Berlioz in his modern instrumentation. Beginning as a reformer, writing music that was classed as too advanced, Reyer lived to hear himself called a reactionary—and with justice, for in his setting to Salammbô he harks back to Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Félicien David. The mighty wave of Wagner had no attraction for this Frenchman until he heard the Tristan Prelude in 1884. From that time he became an ardent preacher of the faith Wagnerian. He modelled his orchestration after Wagner, wrote of his music in his critical journal, and became known as one of the men in Paris who could be counted upon for the Bayreuth propaganda.

Yet in practice Reyer seems timid. Not possessing much musical individuality, he attempted what most unoriginal men attempt, he temporized, became a composer of compromises and an eclectic. So in his music, even in his best work, Sigurd, the want of a strong, individual style is noticeable. As early as 1876 selections from Sigurd had been given in concert by Pasdeloup. The theme of the opera is almost identical with Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the book of which was finished in 1853. Is it any wonder that Reyer speaks of his early music as coming too late after David and his later music too soon after Wagner? Berlioz produced his Erostrate at Baden-Baden, and Bizet said that La Statue was one of the most remarkable operas given in France for two decades. With all his half successes—for Sigurd is in the repertory of the Paris Opéra—Reyer cannot be considered as a strong man in any way. He has imitated Gluck and Wagner, Berlioz and Wagner. Years ago, after hearing Sigurd, I called him “le petit Berlioz,” but I now consider the phrase a pleasing exaggeration. Berlioz was a master of orchestration. Reyer is not. And he has nothing new to say. We all recognize those impotent phrases, hollow and sonorous as the wind in a tall chimney, that are plastered over his scores. Those cries “O Ciel!” “Je t’aime!” and “Horreur!” are they not idiotic in librettos and music! Here is the musical phrase _cliché_ in all its banal perfection, and the thunderous choruses _à la_ Meyerbeer which punctuate Reyer’s scenes weary the nerves, beat down our sympathies, and stun our ears.

Sigurd is the one opera that betrays fancy, science, and a feeling for characterization. I have enjoyed parts of it at the Paris Opéra, but wondered why the composer had selected the subject. Brunhild lies asleep on the fiery mountain, situated in Iceland. Sigurd, Gunther, and Hagen swear friendship, and Sigurd puts on the tarn-cap, winning Hilda, as she is called, for Gunther. There is the episode of the naked sword, and later Sigurd is slain by Gunther. The ballet is very pretty, and Wagner’s influence is in evidence. Sigurd, though produced in 1884, was really composed before Götterdämmerung. Again Reyer came too late.

In 1889 he finished the score of Salammbô. It was first sung at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, February 10, 1890, with Rose Caron, Sellier, Bouvet, Vergnet, and Renaud in the cast. Two years later, May 23, 1892, Paris listened to the opera with Rose Caron, Albert Saléza, Vaquet, Delmas, and Renaud in the production. Wednesday night, March 20, 1901, in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York viewed its spectacle, for spectacle Salammbô is, spectacle and naught else. The cast is given as a matter of record: Lucienne Bréval, Salammbô; Saléza, Mathô; Salignac, High Priest; Journet, Narr’ Havas; Gilibert, Giscon; Scotti, Hamilcar; Sizes, Spendius; Dufriche, Autharite, and Carrie Bridewell, Taanach. Luigi Mancinelli conducted. The production was an elaborate and costly one.

Camille du Locle, who butchered Flaubert’s book to make a holiday for the Parisians, accomplished his task successfully according to his lights—theatrical lights. He altered the story, suppressed much of its humanity, and eliminated the magnificent picturesqueness of the romance. Du Locle divides his scene plots thus:—