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No one, naturally, will ever describe Fontainebleau better than Flaubert, in whose L'Education Sentimentale there are marvellous pictures; also a semi-burlesque painter, Pellerin, who reads all the works on æsthetics before he draws a line, and not forgetting that imperishable portrait of Jacques Arnoux, art dealer.
The citizens who are excited for or against the Empire or the Republic seem to me as useful as those who discuss efficacious or efficient grace. Politics are as dead as theology! They have had three hundred years of existence, that is quite enough. Just now I am lost in the Church Fathers. As for my novel l'Education sentimentale, I am paying no more attention to it, God be thanked!
For Flaubert, too, though he was seventeen years her junior, the flamboyance of youth was long since past; in 1862, when the correspondence begins, he was firmly settled, a shy, proud, grumpy toiling hermit of forty, in his family seat at Croisset, beginning his seven years' labor at L'Education Sentimentale, master of his art, hardening in his convictions, and conscious of increasing estrangement from the spirit of his age.
Il l'avait dressee dans l'art de gober des mouches, er l'y exercait continuellement, si bien qu'une mouche, du plus loin qu'elle apparaissait, etait une mouche perdue. Smiley avait coutume de dire que tout ce qui manquait a une grenouille, c'etait l'education, qu'avec l'education elle pouvait faire presque tout, et je le crois.
L'Education sentimentale has been a misunderstood book, as I have told you repeatedly, but you have not listened to me. There should have been a short preface, or, at a good opportunity, an expression of blame, even if only a happy epithet to condemn the evil, to characterize the defect, to signalize the effort.
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
But there are no men of letters, properly speaking. Before everything, one is a man. One wants to find man at the basis of every story and every deed. That was the defect of l'Education sentimentale, about which I have so often reflected since, asking myself why there was so general a dislike of a work that was so well done and so solid.
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