13
FlAUBERT'S POLITICS*
Edmund Wilson
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
has figured for decades as the great glorifier
and practitioner of literary art at the expense of human affairs both
public and personal. We have heard about his asceticism, his nihilism,
his consecration to the search for
le mot juste.
His admirers have
tended to praise him on the same assumption: that he has no moral
or social interests. At most,
Madame Bovary
has been taken as a para-
ble of the romantic temperament.
Really Flaubert owed his superiority to those of his contempora-
ries-Gautier, for example-who professed the same literary creed, to
the seriousness of his concern with the large questions of human
destiny. It was a period when the interest in history was intense; and
Flaubert, in his intellectual tastes as well as in his personal relations,
was almost as close to the historians Michelet, Renan and Taine, and
to the historical critic Sainte-Beuve, as to Gautier and Baudelaire. In
the case of Taine and Sainte-Beuve, he came to deplore their preoc-
cupation in their criticism with the social aspects of literature at the
expense of all its other values; but he himself always seems to see
humanity in social terms and historical perspective. His point of view
may be gauged pretty accurately from his comments in one of his
letters on Taine's
History of English Literature:
"There is something
else in art beside the milieu in which it is practised and the physio-
logical antecedents of the worker. On this system you can explain
the series, the group, but never the individuality, the special fact which
makes him this person and not another. This method results inevitably
in leaving
talent
out of consideration. The masterpiece has no longer
any significance except as an historical document. It is the old critical
method of La Harpe precisely turned around. People used to believe
that literature was an altogether personal thing and that books fell
out of the sky like meteors. Today they deny that the will and the
absolute have any reality at all. The truth, I believe, lies between the
two extremes."
But it was also a period in France-Flaubert's lifetime, 1820-81
-of alternating republics and monarchies, of bogus emperors and
defeated revolutions, when political idea." were in confusion. The
" Parts of this essay are based on an article which appeared in the
H erald-
Tribune
book supplement, February 21, 1932.
