Nothing that is not typical endures in human memory. The posthumous fame and the influencé of Flaubert confirm this great law of literary history. Few writers have more deeply impressed this moral unity upon more diverse works. From that youthful day when he read to his friend Maxime Du Camp his great unpublished novel 'Novembre,' to the eve of his death, when he traced the last lines of 'Bouvard and Pécuchet,' he developed without pause or modification one changeless system and expressed one changeless conclusion concerning human life. One metaphysical conviction lightens the pages of his youth and those of his approaching age, as the same sun irradiates morning and evening of the same day with universal light. This doctrine, born with Flaubert, as I shall try to show, is the old doctrine of pessimism, but of a verified, studied-out, hopeless pessimism, as atomically established as that of Schopenhauer in Germany and of old Heraclitus in Greece. From the point of view of the novelist, as from that of the two philosophers, the evil of life does not arise from circumstances, but is inherent in the very fact of humanity. Whether barbarian or civilized, whether belonging to the antique world or to modern society, to an age of faith or to an epoch of skepticism, whether artist or artisan, simple or complex, the human being lives to see the failure of his ambition, be it noble or base, narrow or boundless. The mocking hand of Fate seems to have written a negative sign before the colossal sum of human efforts, and the total always shows a loss; the greatness of these efforts augmenting the greatness of the predetermined ruin. Such is the idea permeating from end to end all the books composed by this admirable artist, the thesis he struggled to demonstrate by examples not far-fetched and abstract, but concrete and living, and of such extraordinary intensity that the series of six volumes really constitutes the most absolute, the most uncompromising manual of nihilism ever composed.

To comprehend the doctrine back of the accident and the theory behind the fact, one must consider the chief characters of these books successively. By a process quite opposed to that of authors who are simply misanthropic, Flaubert does not make the final miseries of his characters result from their faults, but from their qualities. At the same time he is careful to select ordinary and not exceptional types, and to surround them with ordinary circumstances. Thus constituted, they cease to be individual and become representative, and their symbolic failure becomes the failure of their whole class. Take as examples Madame Bovary in the novel of that name, and Frédéric Moreau in 'L'Éducation Sentimentale.' Both are results of the legitimate and indeed very noble effort which pushes the lower classes toward culture and refinement. Emma Bovary is the daughter of a farmer who wished her to become a "lady," and Frédric is

the son of a middle-class father who has resolved that his boy shall have a "liberal" profession. She has been sent to a convent. He has been put in school. In their class of society this is the accepted educational process, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Both pupils respond to the instruction they receive. Ah, well! if the first descends, step by step, the ladder which leads to vice, to crime, to suicide, it is simply because, played upon by the religious and poetical emotions of the convent which was so long her home, she has formed too exquisite, too complex, too sequestered a dream of existence, and has felt too acutely the meagreness of her environment. She is perverted by the noblest characteristics of her nature; and in that experience she resembles the sentimental Frédéric, her brother in delicacy as in weakness. If the man of society, young, rich, intelligent, spoils his hours one by one, as a child who cannot draw, uncleanly and foolishly spoils his sheets of fair white paper,' he does so because he has surrendered himself too freely to the charm of the books and dreams which enchanted his youth, and has longed too eagerly for higher emotions, for romantic affections, and glorious 1

adventures.

Again, if the two grotesque protagonists of Bouvard et Pécuchet' make the most imbecile use of their late-coming independence, of their will and energy, it is because the hearts of these bureau clerks suddenly released from servitude beat with the noblest zeal for the Ideal,-in that form, however, "which deceives the least; that is, science" and do not say that singleness of heart is lacking in these more than in the others.

story of 'Un

old maid who

Again, it is the romantic novelist who wrote the Cœur Simple,' the pathetically foolish adventure of an adores with religious fervor a stuffed paroquet. And again, do not say that the decadence of contemporary society is responsible for these failures. Would it have been better for these men and women to take root in the soil of a world still new, and to share the heroic youth of civilization? The sinister brutality, staining red the landscapes of 'Salammbô,' answers the question. Matthô, like Frédéric, like the daughter of Hamilcar, like the child of Farmer Ronault, struggles painfully in the heavy nightmare of existence; the gloomy frenzy of the savage has no more app eciable result than the shrinking trepidation of the civilized man. Nor will it suffice to say that these civilized folk and these barbarians were alike wanting in that great supernatural strength, faith. St. Anthony the hermit of the Thebaid, after years of maceration, cries, like Emma, like Frédéric, "Of old I was not so wretched!»* The depth of his penitence has but intensified his power to feel and suffer. A cataleptic, haunted

The Temptation of St. Anthony.'

by visions, terrified at night by the howling of the jackal, by the desert winds, by the shadow of a cross upon the sand, at last he bows down like a slave before the stupid and inert Thing, shapeless and multiform Matter. "I would," he sighs, "that I were Matter!" Supreme aspiration, containing the drama, at once tragic and farcical, of our poor humanity! An appeal which recalls Goya's picture of a skeleton straining to lift up the stone of his tomb to write upon it the terrible word Nada,-"Nothing!" There is nothing! « Who knows?" wrote Flaubert himself in one of his letters: "doubtless death has nothing more to tell than life."

II

For the source and principle of this pessimism, one must search through the four volumes of correspondence recently published. It is easy to see that this way of feeling and of judging life is not with the author of 'Madame Bovary,' as with so many others, an amusement of dilettantism. It is the deep and personal moral of these frank letters that the convincing force of a work of art is always proportionate to its sincerity. If to Flaubert's readers his creations have this authenticity of authority, it is because they are struck out of his own life and spirit. I mean that they express what was essential in his life, and most personal, least incidental, in his spirit. The whole difference between objective artists, among whom Flaubert enrolled himself, and the subjective school, is that the first exclude all anecdote, all petty individual and local circumstance, from their written confessions. They can give expression to their genius only when they reveal the inmost depths of their nature. From the first, Flaubert's letters show that his heart, as another great unquiet spirit declared, was "born with a wound."* To-day we know that his mental structure was sustained by an organism prematurely touched at the very centre of life. Epilepsy was destroying Flaubert, The Souvenirs' of Maxime Du Camp contain a very touching account of the first attack of this fatal nervous malady. But long before that attack, a hypersensitiveness, strange alternations of exaltation and repression, of enthusiasm and disgust, indicated that a secret malady was preying upon this robust fellow. From his twentieth year he contended with those humiliating fatalities against which human energy, however ambitious, is doomed to dash itself. Moreover, he was environed by contradictions.

His prose astonishes the reader by the lyric amplitude of his least sentence. A poet quivers in the prose writer with all the passion, all the ardor, of a Shakespeare or a Byron. Now, this poet was the son

*Lamennais of himself.

of a surgeon. His early life, from 1821 when he was born, to 1839 when he came to Paris to study law, was passed in a hospital. His room overlooked a court where the invalids walked, and an amphitheatre where his father's pupils dissected bodies. The dreams of his childhood and youth moved side by side with horrible impressions of physical decay. He speaks somewhere of his nature as "drolly bitter." This sinister humor was doubtless born in that hospital room where by turns he read his favorite authors, Homer, Eschylus, Virgil, Dante, Victor Hugo,- and saw the rollicking students smoke and jest over the cadavers. The contrast was not less sharp between his precocious taste for imaginative literature and the employment his father wished him to undertake. He has drawn in 'Madame Bovary under the name of Doctor Larivière a slight but vigorous portrait of this father, whom he deeply admired. But it is nevertheless true that the rough practitioner, with his grim professional aspect and his habit of working on living matter, could not comprehend his second son's vocation for authorship. All the letters of this period bear traces of this cruel misunderstanding. As a mere lad, Flaubert lived in a state of constant rebellion against the paternal ideas and discipline. Nor was he more in harmony with the ideas and discipline of his time. When only fifteen he began to be fascinated by romanticism and its poets, at the very moment when public taste was ready to find fault with that school of 1830, which should rather be called the school of 1820. Finally, as his correspond ence clearly shows, this romantic youth, whose ideal was incarnated in the adorable figure of Madame Arnouse, an only love, never realized, always dreamed,- suffered the precocious disenchantment of a French school. What strange collisions of alien elements! How fate delights to entangle us in those irresistible impulses which set us forever in disharmony with life and with ourselves!

For Gustave Flaubert, played upon by such discordant influences, life soon became one long suffering. Soon too he perceived that this suffering was caused by no one mitigable chance, but that it grew out of the very fact of existence. In the long correspondence which extends from his precocious childhood to his premature old age, which shows us his student's cell, his traveler's tent, his Parisian abode of the famous author, he never varies his complaint. Whether writing to Le Portevin, his schoolfellow; to Du Camp, the comrade of his youth; to Louis Bouilhet, the associate of his maturity; to Louise Colet, the confidante of his critical days of apprenticeship; or to George Sand, the glorious alter ego of his years of achievement, everywhere and always he proclaims the narrowness of human destiny; the misery and sadness of existence; his distaste for his contemporary world; his horror of the future; the weariness of enduring; the

woefulness of yielding; the falsehood of desire; and the vanity of

hope.

The persistence of these lamentations is the more striking in that this pessimist is never disheartened. His fearless agnosticism has nothing in common with the languid negations of a Werther or an Obermann. No coward soul utters his accusation. His complaint, almost from the beginning, is more intellectual than sentimental. All the sweet poisonous melancholy on which he fed himself may be referred to the understanding rather than to the moral nature; and therein appears the characteristic which distinguishes him absolutely from authors who, like Byron, Châteaubriand, Musset, and Baudelaire, have expressed under very different forms what has been called the malady of the age.

In Flaubert, the contemporary of Taine, Renan, Berthelot, Pasteur, there is a scientific turn of mind. He is like the physiologist who from the symptoms of his own specific malady reasons to the general disease, and who finds in his own personality the opportunity to verify and to register a vaster hypothesis. Here we touch the explanation of the typical character of the work and the man.

Because of this scientific turn of mind, united to a sensibility both complex and passionately sad, Gustave Flaubert stands as one of the newest of the psychological oddities of our age. There is no denying the fact, however we dislike it, that in this nineteenth century science has been the all-powerful controller of human activity. Not only has it modified the material conditions under which this activity works, but still more has it changed our point of view and altered our mental methods. It has accustomed us to an idea which seems at first sight simple, yet which involves an immense revolution, the contemplation of everything as conditional, including even the most spontaneous creations of the mind. Thus we come to acknowledge, with Taine and Sainte-Beuve, that fixed laws control the production of literary work, and that a tragedy, a novel, a poem, are born under conditions as absolute as those which accompany the blooming of a flower. Laws govern the production of political systems and religious hypotheses, laws regulate the decadence and prosperity of races, of countries, of families,-laws, finally, dominate our own intellect and our own affections.

It must not be forgotten, however, that this conception leaves room for personal responsibility. Our free will is simply set to choose among these conditions those which will or which will not produce certain effects. But whether the will choose freely or not, these conditions always imply the same result. They share, and we share with them, in that universal and immeasurable order which science declares to exist, and which, fragment by fragment, detail by