(SAINT) FLAUBERT
205
poor and pitiful victim in the center of an infernal whirlwind of
apparitions and errors.
Anthony, it must be acknowledged, scarcely exists.
His reactions are disconcertingly weak. We are surprised that
he is not more charmed, more dazzled, more irritated or shocked
by what he sees and hears; we see him at a loss for invective and
raillery and even not apt with violently ejaculated prayers when -he
confronts the foul masquerade and the flux of revolting, blasphemous
and beautiful phrases which haunt him. He is fatally passive; he
neither yields nor resists; he a'Yaits the end of the nightmare, through–
out which he
will
have found occasion to do little more than give
vent to mediocre exclamations from time to time. His replies are
dodges and we, like the Queen of Sheba, have a violent desire to
pinch
him.
(But maybe in this respect Anthony is more "true to life," that
is to say, more like most men? Do we not live a really frightening
dream, wholly absurd, and what do we do about it?)
It
would seem that Flaubert was carried away by what was
accessory and lost sight of what was essential. He was too attentive
to the engaging effects of scenery, contrasts, "pleasing" precisions of
detail, picked here and there in books seldom or carelessly read:
hence, like Anthony himself (but a fallen Anthony), Flaubert lost
his
soul-I mean the soul of
his
theme, which was dedicated to
become a masterpiece. He missed one of the most beautiful dramas
conceivable, a work of first rank which only asked to be created. In
not concerning himself at every point with the problem of giving
his
hero power and life, he neglected the very essence of
his
theme:
he did not hear the call from the depths. Now what exactly was
involved? Nothing less than the task of bodying forth what might be
called the physiology of temptation, the entirety of that essential
mechanism in which colors, savors, the hot and the cold, silence and
sound, the true and the false, good and evil appear as material forces
and establish themselves in us as ever impending antagonisms. It is
clear that any "temptation" is the result of seeing or imagining some–
thing which gives the character of a definite sensation to our lack
of that thing. Thus is created a need which either did not exist or
slept, and straightway we are modified in some respect, importuned
in some part of our being, and the rest of our being is swept along
in the train of the over-excited part. In Breughel the neck of the
