GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.*

THE most sceptical of Mr. Tarver's readers will, at all events, agree with him that the well-known French novelist, who, under the bold and comprehensive category of " one of the best and noblest men of the nineteenth century," is intro- duced by him to the English public as the hero of his book, was, at all events, a remarkable boy. At the age of nine and three weeks, on January 1st, 1831, he wrote to a boy-friend, Ernest Chevalier, a letter of " doubtful orthography and hazardous punctuation," but of decided character :— "DEAR FIIIEND,—YOU are right in saying that New Year's-day is a stupid thing. My friend they have just sent the grey haired Lafayette the bravest of the brave, the liberty of the two worlds. Friend, I will send you some of my political, consti-. tutional liberal speeches, you are right to say you will make me happy by coming to Rouen, it will please me very much. I wish you a happy New Year for 1831. Kiss your good family for me with all your heart. The playmate that you have sent me has the air of being a good fellow, although I have only seen him once. I will also send you some of my comedies. If you wish us to join writing, I will write comedy, and you shall write your dreams; and as there is a lady who comes to our house, and who always talks silly things to us, I will write them. I am not writing well because I have a box from Nogent to receive. Good-bye; reply to me as soon as possible. , Good- bye, good health, your friend alway. Reply to me as soon as possible, I pray."

Some of my comedies and some of my speeches" would, under any circumstances, be a pleasant piece of precocity at

* Gustave Flaubert as Seen in his Works and Correspondence. By John Charles Terror. London : Constable and Co. 1895. nine and three weeks, but what ranks the achievement with the miraculous is that, as we learn two pages later, "up to

the age of nine Gustavus had not learned to read." His sister learned the art easily, but he "remained confused and stupefied in presence of the mysterious forms of letters." It is true that he listened eagerly to the talk and stories of a jewel of a nurse, such as these boys always seem to have, and also that he was submitted to the inflexible discipline of a semi- military kind of boarding-school, where he was obliged "rapidly, in the presence of necessity,"to surmount the reading difficulty, a little before he was nine years old, by methods of a detest- able, but apparently rather effective, kind. At all events, by the age of eleven, he was able to write currently to his young friend about his tragic and comic performances upon the family billiard-table, and the condition of "literary exalta- tion," which was the motive-spring of the circle of romantic boys of which he was the centre, with the apparent consent of his parents. But it must be confessed that the exact mental and intellectual condition of a child who could write the letter quoted, three weeks after he could not read, at about the age of nine, is a little mysterious, and fitly heralds a rather mysterious book. To learn writing before reading was an original education enough, and at all events allows us to appreciate the style of which Flaubert was so unquestionably a master. At thirteen and seven months, he was able to indulge his feelings freely :-

" I see with indignation," he wrote, "that the censorship of the stage is to be established again, and the liberty of the Press abolished. Yes,—this law will pass, for the representatives of the people are nothinc, but a foul heap of mercenaries. Their aim is self-interest, ineptitude is their hobby, a brute pride their honour, their soul a mud-heap ; but one day, a day that will soon come, the people will begin the third revolution ; then take care of your head, look out for rivers of blood. It is of his conscience that the man of letters is now being robbed, of his artist's con- science. Yes—our age is fertile in sudden and bloody changes. Fare thee well,—and as for us, let us concern ourselves always with art, that is greater than peoples, than crown and Kings, always there, floating on enthusiasm with her heavenly diadem."

There is something beautifully boyish in this anticipation of an indignant nation rising in blood for the sake of the men of letters. From a signal vindication of that kind, to Sir Walter Besant and his Society of Authors, is certainly some- thing of a fall; and if some rash censor morum at the Lord Chamberlain's Office were suddenly to put a veto upon the New Woman of Mr. Pinero or his emulators, we dare hardly anticipate that the rejected heroine will parade the streets upon a bicycle in the guise of Th4voigne de Mericourt.

Young as he was, however, this letter, stripped of its boyish rhetoric, contained, according to Mr. Tarver, the key of Flaubert's life, devoted as it was to what he conceived to be the duty and mission of literature. Deep before he was seven- teen in all the literature of Rabelais and Montaigne, of Byron and of Victor Hugo, he acquired the conviction that in true literature there is nothing immoral and nothing wrong, and protested vehemently against the universal blockade of certain schools of letters which has always been a marked feature of French education. To the majority of boys, to whom all reading is lessons, this might make little difference ; but on those gifted with the literary temperament the restrictions produced a sense of rebellion, and a grievance which was life- long. "It seemed to them," says Mr. Tarver, "that all

authority was banded together in enmity against what they felt to be the best thing in life," and so in all clandestine

ways they prematurely studied works to measure whose true meaning and value they had not the necessary experience. This has been often said of others, and there is a sense, of course, in which it is true. But to us it appears almost an impossibility to deprive teachers of a certain responsibility of selection in the books trusted to the young, and to leave them to wander on the difficult and dangerous plea of the "literary temperament" over all fields of reading at will. The very turn which Flaubert's mind took in the after-years might have been modified and strengthened by stricter selection, and the general world would not have had to pass the severe judgment which it certainly has passed, however Mr. Tarver may defend it, upon a notorious book like Madame Bovary. The worst of the writer who protests on general grounds against any form of expurgatory index, is that he nearly always ends in being placed on it himself.

We have no desire, however, to enter again into the endless controversy as to the merits and demerits of what the

censorious world has rather briefly if not very fairly summed up under the general name of " French novels," or to discuss with Mr. Tarver such an unarguable proposition as "what is not decent in England is venial in France." We like rather to read the account of Flaubert himself, of whom Louis Bouilhet said, " There is a curse upon him; the man is a lyric poet, and cannot write a verse." Certainly no man could write more gracefully than he did of Chateaubriand's poet-tomb upon the little islet of St. Malo :-

" There he will sleep, his head turned to the west, in the tomb built on a cliff ; his immortality will be like his life, deserted of all and surrounded by storms. The waves, with the centuries, will long murmur round this great monument; they will spring to his feet in the tempests, and in the summer mornings, when the white sails are spread and the swallow comes from beyond the seas, long and gentle, they will bring him the voluptuous melan- choly of distance and the caress of the open air. And the days thus slipping by, while the billows of his native beach shall be for ever swinging between his birthplace and his tomb, the heart of Rene, cold at last, will slowly crumble into nothingness to the

endless rhythm' of that eternal music."

We like M. Flaubert better when he is writing like this than when he is figuring as "undoubtedly contrary," deliberately saying and writing things which he knew would shock the sense of others, simply to prove that he was unconventional. At times the sense of rebellion against the conventionalities is universal in minds of the freer and more highly strung amongst the eons of men; but we cannot agree with Mr.

Tarver about the "conventional morality of the nineteenth century," that it is the " age of whitewash," and so forth. There are always conventionalists and false moralists every- where, but it certainly seems to us that the age is very outspoken indeed, both in its writing and its talk, upon many matters which a few years ago were not talked and written about at all. Perhaps M. Flaubert, and writers like him, may have had a good deal to do with it. But at all events, "antres temps mitres mcenrs " is always, and always must be, the keynote of these discussions. Nothing seems to us more hopeless than a comparison between Falstaff's conversation and that of the "smug citizens of Rouen, applauding the

Government for protecting morality, and at the same time slily sniggering in coffee-houses about the life led by students at Paris." Flaubert's indelicacy, which Mr. Tarver seems to be always defending and never admitting, he attributes partly to his having been the son of a hard-working country surgeon, and to his early initiation into very rough methods of

doctoring.

The story of Flaubert's life is interesting and attractive, from the days when his early habit of close observation enabled him to give a description of his father, under the name of Canivel, in Madame Bovary. He complained, as Mr. Tarver complains, that this father never understood him ; but the world has been full of these unappreciative parents when that same literary temperament turns up to derange the balance. And the worthy surgeon seems to have done his best generally. Of Madame Bovary and Salammbo, Flaubert's two most famous books, we have an elaborate account, and an elaborate analysis, with the story of the prosecution which was set on foot against him for the publication of the former work. We must admit to wondering why, out of the infinite number of French novels, Madame Bovary should have been visited with this especial reprobation ; but on the other hand it is amusing to find the author piquing himself, above all things, when writing to his " muse "—a certain Madame Colet, rather a poor sort of Muse we think—upon its high moral purpose and character. According to him, none of his readers can loathe his characters and their pro- ceedings more than he does himself, but he fulfilled a sacred duty in anatomising them; and telling the "ower true " tale of Madame Delaunay under the imaginative guise of Madame Bovary. We take it that Mr. Tarver's own admission, that to the ordinary palate it is a very unpleasant book, will be the verdict that on the whole will finally attach to its history.

There is plenty of matter of interest in the book in relation to George Sand and others whose names are well in the months of men, but to ourselves there is nothing that will appeal more than Flaubert's honest adoration for Shakespeare, which we should hardly have expected from a writer of his vein. It is part of the strong poetic instinct rightly claimed for him. After saying that "generalisation and creation" are the distinctions of great genius, and alluding to Don Quixote as a reality as great as Caesar, he proceeds—" Shake-

speare is something tremendous in this respect ; he wat not a man but a continent, there were great men in him, whole crowds—countries." At another time he writes to George Sand that he has just read Pickwick,. " There are superb passages in it," he says, " but what a defective coin- position ! All the English writers have this fault, except Walter Scott. They want plan. This is unendurable to us Latins." Mr. Tarver wonders at this on the ground that no man improvised in his novels more readily than Scott ; but that does not affect the main fact that his plans, especially in books like The Bride of Lammermoor and The Heart of Midlothian, must have been carefully prepared. And M. Flaubert could not have said the same with the same truth of Dickens's later work. Like many such broad propositions, this difference between the Celtic and the Latin mind is one which requires careful examination before it can be dismissed or assented to. Flaubert's latter days were soothed by the companionship of poor Guy de Maupassant, another of the irregular heroes of French letters who have been so conspicuous at such different periods. His death was very sudden. And the frontispiece gives us a quaint little picture of the old house at Croiset, where the passengers on the steamer from Rouen to La Bourne, after May 8th, 1880, " looked in vain for that queer M. Flaubert, who used to stand in his dressing-gown at the window."