IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
297
and carefully employed-Flaubert's artistic practice rests.
This
is a
very old, classic French tradition. There is already something of it
in Boileau's line concerning the power of the rightly used word (on
Malherbe:
U
D'un mot mis en sa place enseigna Ie pouvoir");
there
are similar statements in La Bruyere. Vauvenargues said:
ull n'y
aurait poin·t d'erreurs qui ne perissent d'elles-memes, exprimees claire–
ment."
Flaubert's faith in language goes further than Vauvenargues's:
he believes that the truth of the phenomenal world is also revealed in
linguistic expression.
Flaubert is a man who works extremely consciously and possesses
a critical comprehension of art to a degree uncommon even in
France; hence 'there occur in his letters, particularly of the years
1852-54 during which he was writing
Madame Bovary ((Troisieme
Sene"
in the
«Nouvelle edition augmentee"
of the
Correspondance,
1927), many highly informative statements on the subject of his
aim
in art. They lead to a theory-mystical in the last analysis, but
in practice, like
all
true mysticism, based upon reason, experience
and discipline-of a self-forgetting absorption in the subjects of reality
which transforms them
((par une chimie merveilleuse")
and permits
them to develop to mature expression. In this fashion subjects com–
pletely fill the writer; he forgets himself, his heart no longer serves
him
save to feel the hearts of others, and when, by fanatical patience,
this condition is achieved, the perfect expression, which at once
entirely comprehends the momentary subject and impartially judges
it, comes of itself; subjects are seen as God sees them, in
I
their true
essence. With all this there goes a view of the mixture of styles which
proceeds from the same mystical-realistic insight: there are no high
and low subjects; the universe is a work of art produced without any
taking of sides, the realistic artist must imitate the procedures of
creation, and every subject in its essence contains, in God's eyes,
both the serious and the comic, both dignity and vulgarity; if it is
rightly and surely reproduced, the level of style which is proper to it
will
be
rightly and surely found; there is no need either for a
general theory of levels, in which subjects are arranged according to
their dignity, or for any analyses by the writer commenting upon the
subject after its presentation with a view to better comprehension
and more accurate classification;
all
this must result from the presen–
tation of the subject itself.
