(SAINT} FLAUBERT
203
(What I have said about the true in Literature applies also to
those works which pretend to "truthfulness" in the observation of
inner life. Stendhal flattered himself that he knew the human heart,
that is to say, that he invented nothing in speaking of it. But what
interests us in what he has to say about the human heart comes from
Stendhal himself.
As
to his desire to make his notions part of an
organic knowledge of man in general, this intention would either
presuppose a very modest claim with respect to such knowledge, or
a confusion like that of mistaking the actual enjoyment of a delicious
dish, product of an exquisite cuisine, for the definite acquisition at–
tained by an exact and impersonal chemical analysis.)
It is not impossible that some suspicion of the difficulties raised
by the will to realism in art, and of the contradictions consequent on
its becoming categorical, made Flaubert partial to the idea of writing
a
Tempation of Saint Anthony.
This "Temptation"-a temptation
throughout his life-was to him a kind of intimate antidote for the
boredom he felt (as he admits) in writing his novels of modern
mores
and in constructing stylistic monuments to the platitude of provincial
and bourgeois life.
And something else may have served him as a goad. I am not
thinking of the picture of Breughel he saw at the Balbi palace in
Genoa in 1845. This naive and complicated painting, composed of
monstrous details-horned demons, hideous beasts, women much too
tender, a work of an imagination always superficial and often amus–
ing-may have awakened in him a desire for deviltries: for qescrip–
tions of impossible beings, incarnate sins, all the morbid develop–
ments of fear, desire, remorse; but the actual impulse to conceive
and begin the work seems to me due, rather, to his reading of Goethe's
Faust. Faust
and the
Temptation
are inspired by similar origins and
the analogies between the themes of both are evident : folk creations,
with popular careers at fairs, the two legends could be inscribed
under the one exergue: Man and the Devil. In the
Temptation
the
devil attacks the faith of the solitary man whose nights he crowds with
heart-breaking visions, contradictory doctrines and beliefs, corrupting
and luxurious promises. But Faust has already read everything, known
everything, already burned all that could be worshipped. He has
exhausted by his own efforts what the devil proposes or demonstrates
to Anthony by means of images, and from the very first it is only
the most juvenile kind of love which can seduce him (this I find
