Henry James on Flaubert, Maupassant, and Stendhal
He hovered for ever at the public door, in the outer court, the splendour of which very properly beguiled him, and in which he seems still to stand as upright as a sentinel and as shapely as a statue. From the first James shared this compassion, and the following extract, though somewhat long, is worth quoting because it is a kind of summary of what James thought of Flaubert as a man and as a writer:.
He had failed, on the whole, more than he had succeeded, and the great machinery of erudition,—the great polishing process,—which he brought to bear upon his productions, was not accompanied with proportionate results. He had talent without having cleverness, and imagination without having fancy. His effort was heroic, but except in the case of Madame Bovary, a masterpiece, he imparted something to his works it was as if he had covered them with metallic plates which made them sink rather than sail.
He had a passion for perfection of form and for a certain splendid suggestiveness of style. He wished to produce perfect phrases, perfectly interrelated, and as closely woven together as a suit of chain-mail. He looked at life altogether as an artist, and took his work with a seriousness that never belied itself. To write an admirable page—and his idea of what constituted an admirable page was transcendent—seemed to him something to live for. He tried it again and again, and he came very near it; more than once he touched it, for Madame Bovary surely will live.
But there was something ungenerous in his genius. He had had too much of some sorts of experience and not enough of others. And yet this failure of an organ, as I may call it, inspired those who knew him with a kindness. If Flaubert was powerful and limited, there is something human, after all, and even rather august in a strong man who has not been able completely to express himself. He liked him, not as he liked Daudet or George Sand, but with the kind of sympathy we cannot help feeling for a strong man full of possibilities but suffering from a mysterious illness which paralyzes half his movements.
Whenever he was on the point of passing a severe judgment on Flaubert, James seemed to retract a little, to make it milder, as though he remembered to be indulgent to a man who had already been so ill-treated by nature. The disease appeared to James as one of the mind, psychological rather than physical. He found something immensely sad in this man who took everything so hard, who never knew exactly how to come to terms with life for the simple reason that he hated life as well as humanity as a whole and the bourgeois in particular; a man whose main occupation consisted in trying to write beautiful pages and who decided to lead a flat, uneventful and secluded life at Croisset in order to reach an aim that always eluded him.
From the start, James admired Madame Bovary. He never forgot his first impressions when, as a child, he read its first instalments in the Revue des Deux Mondes. But he was pleased they had been written because a lesson could be derived from them:.
Lying there before us so unmistakably still-born, they are a capital refutation of the very dogma in defence of which they appeared. The fatal charmlessness of each and all of them is an eloquent plea for the ideal. Flaubert merely aimed at being pictorial and even his picturesque is cold-blooded and artificial; infinite labour and research can be felt behind the finished work. James does not understand why the novelist chose such a subject if its appeal to him was only pictorial. As it is, the performance gratifies the senses but leaves the mind unsatisfied.
There was an idea, an interesting human problem but Flaubert passed by without seeming to notice it. James concludes his review with a general remark on the condition of the French literary intellect: His style, rich as it is, renders only the visible, the world of the senses. His beauty is merely verbal, his conception merely plastic. He does not concern himself with the life of the soul; therefore he is cold, and his work never totally beguiles.
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Unfortunately, he lacked facility and he was so conscientious a writer that he was doomed to remain for ever in the realm of the visible. His emotional development did not keep pace with his technical development. He encountered so many obstacles on his way that he never even reached the door of the soul; he began on the outside but also ended there:. What our eyes show us is all that we are sure of; so with this we will, at any rate, begin.
As this is infinitely curious and entertaining, if we know how to look at it, and as such looking consumes a great deal of time and space, it is very possible that with this also we may end. For him mankind was made up of three or four persons who shared his interest in literature: Though Flaubert and James cared for their art more than for anything else, their experience of life was quite different: Flaubert did not care for an anecdote or for an idea.
All that counted was the way to do it. He did it and he did it, in fact, to perfection, but it was at the cost of life. All this is of the first importance for younger novelists: By the time James wrote this article reprinted in Notes on Novelists Madame Bovary was generally recognized as a classic. How a book becomes a classic is an adventure that greatly interests James. Young as he was at the time when he first became acquainted with Madame Bovary in the Revue des Deux Mondes, James was already one of these perceptive private readers, and he felt that the novel gave promise of a glorious future.
He mentioned it in the review of the Temptation, in which he said that, as a picture of the misery that results from vice, Madame Bovary should be used for educational purposes.
Henry James
He devoted the greatest part of his article on Flaubert in French Poets and Novetists to Madame Bovary and called it the most characteristic work among the literary production in France. The book, he said, could never have been written in English:. It is not in the temper of English vision to see things as M.
Flaubert sees them, and it is not in the genius of the English language to present them as he presents them. Moreover, since there were a great many potential Madame Bovarys it could serve as a warning. Flaubert was shy, and yet extremely sensitive and arrogant; he passed from silence to an indignant and noisy flow of language. The same inconsistencies marked his physical nature; he had the build of a guardsman with a Viking head, but his health was uncertain from childhood, and he was neurotic to the last degree. This ruddy giant was secretly gnawed by misanthropy and disgust of life.
His hatred of the bourgeois began in his childhood and developed into a kind of monomania. He despised his fellow men, their habits, their lack of intelligence, and their contempt for beauty with a passionate scorn that has been compared to that of an ascetic monk. Madame Bovary is Flaubert's first published and easily most famous novel. It remains one of the most frequently taught works of French literature both in that country and in comparative literature departments in universities across the world.
The book was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between October 1 and December 15, , resulting in a trial in January , that made it notorious. After Flaubert was acquitted on February 7, it became a bestseller, and is now seen as one of the first modern realistic novels. The novel focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.
Henry James - Flaubert - Presses universitaires de Liège
Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Madame Bovary takes place in provincial northern France , near the town of Rouen in Normandy. A doctor, Charles Bovary, marries a beautiful farm girl, Emma Rouault.
She is filled with a desire for luxury and romance, which stems from her reading of popular novels. Charles means well, but is boring and clumsy. Emma believes that the birth of a baby boy will "cure" their marriage. After Emma gets pregnant and eventually gives birth to a daughter, she believes her life is virtually over.
Swept away by romantic fantasy, she makes a plan to run away with him. Rodolphe, however, does not love her, and breaks off the plan the evening before it was to take place, with a letter at the bottom of a basket of apricots. The shock is so great that she falls deathly ill, for a time turning to religion.
They begin an affair: Emma travels to the city each week to meet him, while Charles believes that she is taking piano lessons. Meanwhile, Emma is spending exorbitant amounts of money.
When Emma's debts begin to pile up and people begin to suspect her adultery, she sees suicide as her only means of escape. She swallows arsenic and dies, painfully and slowly. The loyal Charles is distraught, even more so after finding the letters that Rodolphe wrote to her. Soon after, he dies, leaving their daughter an orphan. The book, loosely based on the life story of a school friend who had become a doctor, was written at the urging of friends, who were trying unsuccessfully to "cure" Flaubert of his deep-seated Romanticism by assigning him the dreariest subject possible, and challenging him to make it interesting without allowing anything out-of-the-way to occur.
Although Flaubert had little liking for the styles of Honore de Balzac or Emile Zola , the novel is now seen as a prime example of realism , a fact that contributed to the trial for obscenity. Flaubert, as the author of the story, does not comment directly on the moral character of Emma Bovary and abstains from explicitly condemning her adultery. Due to this decision, some accused Flaubert of glorifying adultery, creating a scandal—but it probably reflects instead the narrative strategy of the realist novel.
The romantic writer generally is an omniscient author, inside the inner thoughts of each of his characters and free to comment on them. The realist approach tends to narrate from a more limited perspective of the individual character. Whether first person subjective or third objective , this limited perspective depends on the plot to work itself and mete out justice or punishment.
Considering Emma's perpetual disappointment and grim fate, the charge against Flaubert seems groundless, although it is clear that Flaubert does feel some sympathy for his character; Emma Bovary, c'est moi "Emma Bovary is me". Part of that sympathy derives from the pettiness and venality of the other characters in the novel. From the absurdity of the scientific "rational" figures, to the uselessness of the representatives of the church, to the self-serving bourgeois Lheureux who tricks Emma into buying off credit from him , to the banality of Charles himself, Flaubert's creation depicts the world of proper society as spiritually bankrupt.
Realism aims for verisimilitude, the willing suspension of disbelief, through a focus on character development and on the plain details of everyday life. The movement was a reaction to the idealism of Romanticism , a mode of thought that rules Emma's actions. Emma's problem is that she is a romantic trapped in a realist novel. Her romantic delusions are crashed against the rocks of not only her social milieu, but also the rather ignoble characters with whom she falls in love. She becomes increasingly dissatisfied since her larger than life fantasies are, by definition, not able to be realized.
Flaubert's curious modes of composition favored and were emphasized by his own peculiarities. He worked in sullen solitude, sometimes occupying a week in the completion of one page; he was never satisfied with what he had composed, violently tormenting his brain for the best turn of a phrase, the most absolutely final adjective. His incessant labors were not unrewarded. His private letters show that he was not one of those to whom easy and correct language is naturally given; he gained his extraordinary perfection only through his Herculean effort.
The exactitude with which he adapts his expression to his purpose is seen in all parts of his work, but particularly in the portraits he draws of the figures in his principal romances.
But even after the decline of the realistic school Flaubert did not lose prestige; other facets of his genius became evident. His power of observation was second to none. Like his predecessor, Stendhal , Flaubert is most appreciated by other authors because of his craftsmanship. He viewed the lax felicities of improvisation as a disloyalty to the most sacred procedures of the literary artist. Another edition 10 vols. Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand was published in , with an introduction by Guy de Maupassant.
Gustave Flaubert
He has been admired or written about by almost every major literary personality of the twentieth century, including philosophers such as Pierre Bourdieu. Georges Perec named Sentimental Education as one of his favorite novels. Apart from Perpetual Orgy, which is solely devoted to Flaubert's art, one can find lucid discussions in Llosa's recently published Letters to a Young Novelist.