14
PARTISAN REVIEW
French historians of the Enlightenment tradition, which was the tradi-
tion of the Revolution, were steadily becoming less hopeful; and a
considerable group of the novelists and poets held political and social
issues in contempt and staked their careers on art as an end in itself:
their conception of their relation to society was expressed in their
damnation of the bourgois, who gave his tone to all the world, and
their art was a defiance of him. The Goncourts in their journal have
put the attitude on record: "Lying phrases, resounding words, blarny
-that's just about all we get from the political men of our time.
Revolutions are a simple
demenagement
followed by the moving back
of the same ambitions, corruptions and villainies into the apartment
which they have just been moved out of-and all involving great
breakage and expense. No political morals whatever. When I look
about me for a disinterested opinion, I can't find a single one. People
take risks and compromise themselves on the chance of getting future
jobs....
You are reduced, in the long run, to disillusion, to a disgust
with all beliefs, a tolerance of any power at all, an indifference to
political passion, which I find in all my literary friends, and in
Flaubert as in myself. You come to see that you must not die for
any cause, that you must live with any government that exists, no
matter how antipathetic it may be to you-you must believe in no-
thing but art and profess only literature. All the rest is a lie and a
booby-trap." In the field of art, at least, it was possible, by heroic ef-
fort, to prevent the depreciation of values.
This attitude, as the Goncourts say, Flaubert fully shared. "To-
day," he wrote Louise Colet in 1853: "I even believe that a thinker
(and what is an artist if he is not a triple thinker?) should have neither
religion nor fatherland nor even any social conviction. It seems to me
that absolute doubt is now indicated so cleorly that it would be
almost an absurdity to want to formulate it." And "the citizens
who work themselves up for or against the Empire or the
Republic," he wrote George Sand in 1869, "seem to be just about
as useful as the ones who used to argue about efficacious grace and
efficient grace." Nothing exasperated him more-and we may sym-
pathize with him today--than the idea that the soul is to be saved
by the profession of correct political opinions.
Yet Flaubert is a thundering idealist. "The idea" which turns up
in his letters of the fifties-"genius like a powerful horse drags hu-
manity at her tail along the roads of the idea," in spite of all that
human stupidity can do to rein her in-is evidently, under its guise
of art, none other than the Hegelian "Idea," which served Marx
and so many others under a variety of different guises. There are
great forces in humanity, Flaubert feels, which the present is somehow
suppressing but which may some day be gloriously set free. "The
