Flaubert's unsentimental education BOOKS
D. W. BROGAN
Before reviewing Dr Enid Starkie's fascinating new book, Flaubert: The Making of the Master (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 63s), I should, as they do in the House of Commons, declare my interest. Rather more than ten years ago, when I was writing a book on French history of the nineteenth century, I read or re-read a great deal of the French novelists of the time—read them as sources, but, of course, not quite able to dismiss from my mind their literary value. (I have never been able to attain Taine's heights of scholarliness and regard fiction purely as an historical source.) Thus I read or re-read a great deal of Balzac, a great deal of Zola, a great deal of Stendhal, all of Proust, all of Flaubert, including Salammb6. But—and this is where my con- fession comes in—in moving house recently I discovered that I had three copies of L'Education Sentimentale and only one copy of Madame Bovary and, as Dr Starkie's book is mainly about Madame Bovary, this made me hesitate to review it.
I must say that, much as I admire Flaubert, he is not a novelist I return to often for the pleasure of reading him as a novelist. It is very easy indeed to return to Proust: recently, very overtired by a great deal of academic work and the horrors of moving house, I took up what I find the most entertaining, though not the most important, part of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 'A l'Ombre des Jeunes Files en Fleur,' and re-read most of it quickly with my old delight. I can re-read Stendhal, any day at any moment, with delight. I do not often re-read Balzac or Zola. This is because there is so much of them that one can always read a book of theirs that one has not read before. But Flaubert, I think, is admired more than he is loved. Consequently, I find I cannot approach this book without asking myself again, 'In what does the real greatness of Flaubert consist?' That he was a great writer, and in some ways a great man, I fully believe. Emma Bovary represents so many women in the fairly representative psychological situation that the French call Bovarysme (a word which we could do well to borrow).
But there is in Flaubert's whole approach to the art of fiction—and to prose style— something that I do not find off-putting, but I do not find spontaneously attractive. In the same way, I am a great admirer of most of Milton, but I cannot re-read Paradise Regained. If I could not re-read Flaubert at all or Milton at all, it would be a very serious matter for me if not for them. But I should never think of applying to either of these great masters the savage comment of Lion Bloy on Paul Bourget, that he was living in a part of Hell that Dante never thought of, the part inhabited by authors whom no one can read twice. This said, I can turn to Dr Starkie's book-4 and praise it very warmly indeed. It is not one of those books about a celebrated author which one reads in preference to the work of the celebrated author. For example, I find Gordon Ray's life of Thackeray more ini
teresting than Thackeray's own novels, although I would not find it interesting if Thackeray had not written his novels, nor would Gordon Ray have written his life if Thackeray had remained a Punch hack artist and hack scribbler.
The most impressive thing about this book is its most acute and learned relation of the way in which Flaubert became a master. For I have no doubt that Madame Bovary is a masterpiece. Reading the account of the first thirty-five years of Flaubert's life, I reflected again on the importance of having private means. For Flaubert wrote, cancelled, put on one side a great deal of writing before he burst on the world with Madame Bovary. Without his private income, he could not have afforded to spend so much time training him- self for the masterpiece (any more than Proust could have afforded to write so much, cancel so much, put lean Santeuil on one side had he not had private means). Nor could Cezanne have painted in his own way if he had not had private means: he might have been tempted to take the advice of his school friend, Zola, and try to paint like Ary Scheffer! Indeed, Flaubert got lots of bad advice from his friends as to how he should write, even if the advice to kill the first Tentation de Saint- Antoine and the first L'Education Sentimentale was good advice.
All Flaubert's experiments, including his ex- periment of the journey to Egypt, were used by him in some form or other. And yet his most famous book did not demand from him any knowledge of life outside the north of France. Dr Starkie is insistent that there is no particular locale and no particular place in time for Madame Bovary. I do not think this is quite true. One cannot imagine Emma Bovary behaving in quite the same way in the Midi or in the Bronte's Yorkshire; nor can we imagine Emma Bovary as a contemporary of the Princesse de Cleves or, indeed, of Madame de Lafayette. True, there is no obvious location and time as there is in Le Rouge et le Noir, but the Parma of Stendhal is less located in time and not much more located in space than the Yonville of Madame Bovary, and it is almost as much located in time and space as the Combray of Proust. So although the extremely learned discussion by Dr Starkie of Flaubert's experiments and her study of the early works like Novembre and of such minor masterpieces as Un Coeur Simple are both fascinating and edifying to the student of literary education, they still leave us a little in the dark as to the actual genesis of Madame Bovary.
Dr Starkie treats kindly, but with some necessary severity, the somewhat casual scholar- ship of modern writers on Flaubert and of the history of his first great book. And we cer- tainly can see in him, with his prodigious dedi- cation to his work, a kind of literary saint like Proust and like Joyce. But this brings us to the centre of his achievement, namely Emma Bovary. We learn, gladly, that Flaubert reduced the emphasis on M Homais, although M Homais is a great comic character, almost the equal of M de Charlus.
But the great achievement is Emma herself. We have the testimony of Monseigneur Dupanloup, the famous bishop of Orleans and friend of Newman, that, after hearing a great many confessions in provincial France, he thought it was a very fair pre- sentation of a common enough type of woman. And it is rather odd to think that the sad history of Emma Bovary was the justification for a prosecution by the high moral regime of Napoleon III. Later, long after his grudging acquittal, Flaubert was given the Legion of Honour, not because of any improvement of the imperial taste, but because of the friendship of the Princesse Mathilde. If the objection to books dealing with adultery is that they make it attractive, never was there a more innocent book than Madame Bovary. It might be an elaborate sermon based on a text by Clough :
Adultery do not commit, Advantage seldom comes of it.
Indeed, the whole book is a warning to. foolish females, told with all the more con- viction that Dr Starkie is convinced that, tiasically, Flaubert was a homosexual, although his dreadful mistress, Louise Colet, gave an edge to his discussion of the unfortunate Emma. Her pleasure in adultery as such, which showed she had really become 'sophisticated' (in the modern sense), is innocently touching. But she exemplified the dictum of a French moraliste (Stendhal?), that while there are women who have never had a lover, there ate no women who have had only one lover. It seems a simple and remote time when adultery was taken so seriously! I doubt if many of the casual young women of today Who get into trouble, in and out of marriage, are as basically pleased with themselves as poor Emma was, until the truth of Clough's verse dawned on her in her last miserable months.
Sainte-Beuve thought that Madame Bovary marked the beginning of the modern novel. As Dr Starkie says, there were plenty of bogus 'realist' novelists of the time who are now totally forgotten, although they were then re- garded as just as 'powerful' as Flaubert. To anyone who is interested in French literature in relation to French social history, Dr Starkie's book will be precious. I can understand why a novelist like Henry James had such a poor opinion of the slapdash English practitioners from whom he had to escape. I certainly under- stand Flaubert's greatness much better than I did, and I have got rid of some foolish, or at any rate erroneous, ideas about his evangelical preparation for his career as a great master. And I have resolved, and as soon as I have time I will keep my resolve, to put away L'Education Sentimentale and re- read Madame Bovary.
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