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fairly surprising) . He comes at last to accept as a desperate justifica–
tion for his desire to live a kind of aesthetic passion, a supreme thirst
for the beautiful, the vanity of political power and the conjuring tricks
of high finance having been revealed to him throughout his mephisto–
phelian adventure. Faust looks for something which might tempt him;
Anthony longs not to be tempted.
It seems to me that Flaubert did little more than catch a glimpse
of the themes, possibilities and points of departure for a truly superior
work offered by the story of the
Temptation.
His very insistence on
exactitude and pedantic correctness show to what degree he lacked
the decision of mind and ordering will necessary for the construction
of a high-powered literary machine.
His over-concern to astonish with many episodes, apparitions,
and an abruptly changing scene, with various theses and voices,
engenders in his reader a growing sensation of being caught in a
library suddenly on the rampage, a library
all
of whose volumes are
vociferating their millions of words in unison and all of whose muti–
nous shelves are pouring out their etchings and drawings. "He read
too much," one says of the author, as one says of a man that he drank
too much.
But Goethe, in
EckermannJ
speaking of the
W alpurgis N achtJ
says this:
"An infinite number of mythological figures demand to be
included in it; but I am on my guard. And I accept only those that
hold before me the images I seek."
This wisdom is not to be found in the
T l11mptation.
Flaubert was
always haunted by the demon of encyclopedic knowledge; he tried to
exorcise
this
demon by writing
Bouvard et Pecuchet.
Intent on
surrounding Anthony with marvels, he was not satisfied merely to
leaf through the big, secondary reference books, the thick dictionaries
of Bayle, Moreri, Trevoux and their colleagues; he explored the
most original texts available. He became positively drunk on refer–
ences and notes. But
all
the work he gave to the torrent of figures
and formulas which desolate the night of the anchorite, all the wit
he expended on the innumerable entries in this devilish ballet, the
themes of gods and deities, of heresiarchs and allegorical monsters,
he withdrew from and refused to the hero himself, who remains a
