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Updated: May 25, 2025
It must be admitted also that George Sand possessed in a high degree the Pauline virtue of being "not easily provoked," or she never could have endured so patiently, so sweetly, Flaubert's reiterated and increasingly ferocious assaults upon her own master passion, her ruling principle.
Louis Napoleon and Baron Haussmann destroyed picturesque Paris to the consternation of Meryon, who to the eye of an archæologist united the soul of an artist. He loved old Paris. We can evoke it to-day, thanks to these etchings, just as the Paris of 1848 is forever etched in the pages of Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale.
The closest parallelisms are noticeable, the technique so admirable that the scherzo floats in mid-air Flaubert's ideal of a miraculous style. And then follows that deadly Marche Funebre! Ernest Newman, in his remarkable "Study of Wagner," speaks of the fundamental difference between the two orders of imagination, as exemplified by Beethoven and Chopin on the one side, Wagner on the other.
Why should I take the occasion of such distinguished honours to say that I begin to see deeper into Gustave Flaubert's doleful refrain about the hatred of literature? I refer you again to the perverse constitution of man. "The Princess is a massive lady with the organisation of an athlete and the confusion of tongues of a valet de place.
Occasionally a soldier bought a serious book when it was to be found in the dusty files of the "Collection Nelson"; I remember seeing a young lieutenant of artillery buying Ségur's "Histoire de la Grande Armée en 1812," and another taking Flaubert's "Un cur simple."
But as a matter of fact, ALL his books are essentially constructed on the same theory: all are just as "realistic" as Flaubert could make them. Henry James called Madame Bovary a brilliantly successful application of Flaubert's theory; he pronounced L'Education Sentimentale "elaborately and massively dreary"; and he briefly dismissed Salammbo as an accomplished work of erudition.
It was generally considered, however, as the starting point of a new phase in letters, frankly realistic, and intent on understanding and expressing everything. Such success might have influenced Flaubert's artistic inclinations but did not, for while Madame Bovary was appearing in the Revue de Paris, the Artiste was publishing fragments of La Tentation de Saint Antoine.
To realize this principle in work you must proceed scientifically, and, in this connection, we may notice that Flaubert's idea is that of Leconte de Lisle in the preface to his Poèmes Antiques, and of Taine in his lectures upon L'Idéal dans l'art. Romanticism had confounded the picturesque with the anecdotal; character with accident; colour with oddity.
It would place the poison at the door of all, the remedy at the doors of few, if there were any remedy. Who are the ones to read M. Flaubert's romance? Are they men who are interested in political or social economy? No! The light pages of Madame Bovary fall into hands still lighter, into the hands of young girls, sometimes of married women.
How a man lacking the critical faculty may be misled is to be seen in What is Art? To master his subject the deluded novelist read all the essays, disquisitions, and works he could find on the theme of æsthetics. This as a preparation for clear thinking. It reminds one of that comical artist Pellerin, in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale, who devoured all the æsthetic treatises, ancient and modern, in search of a true theory of the beautiful before he painted a picture; and he had so thoroughly absorbed the methods of various painters that he could not sit down at his easel in the presence of his model without asking himself: Shall I "do" her
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