FLAUBERTS POLITICS
15
soul is asleep today, drunk with the words she has listened to, but
she will experience a wild awakening in which she will give herself
up to the ecstasies of liberation, for there will be nothing more to
constrain her, neither government nor religion, not a formula; the
republicans of all shades of opinion seem to me the most ferocious
pedagogues, with their dream of organizations, of a society con-
structed like a convent."
When he reasons about society-which he never does except in
his letters-his conceptions seem incoherent. But Flaubert, who be-
lieved that the artist should be a triple thinker and who was certain-
ly one of the great minds of his time-was the kind of imaginative
writer who works dramatically in images and does not deal at all in
ideas. His informal expressions of his general opinions are as unsys-
stematized and impromptu as his books are well-built and precise.
But it is worth while to quote a few from his letters because, though
they are so very far from formulating a social philosophy-when
George Sand accused him of not having one, he admitted it-they
do indicate the instincts and emotions which are the prime movers in
the world of his art.
Flaubert is opposed to the socialists because he regards them as
materialistic and because he dislikes their authoritarianism, which he
says derives straight from the tradition of the Church. Yet they have
"denied
pain,
have blasphemed three-quarters of modern poetry, the
blood of Christ, which quickens in us." And: "0 socialists, there is
your ulcer: the ideal is lacking to you; and that very matter which
you pursue slips through your fingers like a wave; the adoration of
humanity for itself and by itc;elf (which brings us to the doctrine of
the useful in Art, to the theories of public safety and reason of state,
to all the injustices and all the intolerances, to the immolation of the
right, to the levelling of the Beautiful), that cult of the belly, I say,
breeds wind (pardon the pun)." One thing he makes clear by reitera-
tion through the various periods of his lift his disapproval of the
ideal of equality. What is wanted, he keeps insisting, is "justice";
and behind this demand for justice h evidently Flaubert's resentment,
arising from his own literary experience, against the false reputations,
the undeserved rewards and the stupid repressions of the Second
Empire. And he was skeptical of popular education and opposed to
universal suffrage.
Yet among the contemporaries whom he admired most were
democrats, humanitarians, and reformers. "You are certainly the
French author," he wrote Michelet, "whom I have read and teread
most"; and he said of Victor Hugo that Hugo was the living man "in
whose skin" he would be happiest to be. George Sand was one of his
closest friends.
Un Coeur Simple
was written for her-apparently to
