16
PARTISAN REVIEW
answer her reproach that Art was "not merely criticism and satire"
and to show her that he, too, had a heart.
When we come to Flaubert's books themselves, we find a much
plainer picture of things.
It is not true, as is sometimes supposed, that he disclaimed any
moral intention. He deliberately refrained in his novels from com-
menting on the action in his own character: "the artist ought not to
appear in his work any more than God in nature." But, like God,
he rules his universe through law; and the reader, from what he hears
and sees, must infer the moral system.
What
are
we supposed to infer from Flaubert's work? His gen-
eral historical point of view is, I believe, pretty well known. He held
that "the three great evolutions of humanity" had been
tcpaganisme,
christianisme, muflisme (muckerism),"
and that Europe was in the
third of these phases. Paganism he depicted in
SalammbO
and in the
short story
Hhodias.
The Carthaginians of
Salammbo
had been
savage barbarians: they had worshipped serpents, crucified lions,
sacrificed their children to Mo!och and trampled armies down with
herds of elephants; but they had slaughtered, lusted and agonized
superbly. Christianity is exemplified in the two saints' legends,
La
Tentation de Saint Antoine
and
La Legende de Saint Julien l'Hos-
pitalier.
The Christian combats his lusts, he expiates human cruelty;
but this attitude, too, is heroic: Saint Anthony, who inhabits the
desert, Saint Julien, who lies down with the leper, have pushed to
their furthest limits the virtues of abnegation and humility. But
when we come to the
muflisme
of the nineteenth century-in
Madame
Bovary
and
L'Education Sentimentale-all
is meanness, mediocrity
and timidity.
The villain here is, of course, the bourgeois; and it is true that
these two novels of Flaubert damn the contemporary world as flatly
as the worlds of Salammbo and Saint Anthony have been roundly
and dogmatically exalted. But in these pictures of modem life there
is a greater complexity of human values and an analysis of social
processes which does not appear in the books about the past.
This social analysis of Flaubert's has, it seems to me, been too
much disregarded, and this has resulted in the underestimation of
one of his greatest books,
L' Education Sentimentale.
In
Madame Bovary,
Flaubert criticizes the nostalgia for the
exotic which played such a large part in his own life and which led
him to write
Salammbo
and
Saint Antoine.
What cuts Flaubert off
from the other romantics and makes him primarily a social critic is
his grim realization of the futility of dreaming about the splendors
of the orient and the brave old days of the past as an antidote to
