IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
301
she comic; surely not; for that, she is understood far too deeply from
within her fateful entanglement: though Flaubert never practices any
"psychological understanding" but simply lets the state of the facts
speak for itself. He has found an attitude toward the reality of con–
temporary life which is entirely different from earlier attitudes and
stylistic levels, including-and especially-Balzac's and Stendhal's. It
could be called, quite simply, "objective seriousness." This sounds
strange as a designation of the style of a literary work. Objective
seriousness, which seems to penetrate to the depths of the p.assions
and entanglements of a human life, but without itself becoming
moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved-this is an at–
titude which one would expect from a priest, a teacher, or a psycho–
logist rather than from an artist. But priest, teacher, and psychologist
wish to accomplish something direct and practical-which is far
from Flaubert's mind. He wishes, by his attitude-Upas
de cris, pas
de convulsion, rien que la fixite d'un regard pensif"-to
force lan–
guage to render the truth concerning the subjects of his observation:
ule style etant
Ii
lui tout seul une maniere absolue de voir les choses"
(Corr.
II, 346). Yet this leads in the end to a didactic purpose:
criticism of the contemporary world; and we must not hesitate to
say so, much as Flaubert may insist that he is an artist and nothing
but an artist. The more one studies Flaubert, the clearer it becomes
how much insight into the problematic nature and the hollowness of
nineteenth-century bourgeois culture is contained in
his
realistic
works; and many important passages from his letters confirm this.
The demonification of everyday social intercourse which is to be
found in Balzac is certainly entirely lacking in Flaubert: life no
longer surges and foams, it flows viscously and sluggishly. The es–
sence of the happenings of ordinary contemporary life seemed to
Flaubert to consist not in tempestuous actions and passions, not in
demonic men and forces, but in the prolonged chronic state whose
surface movement is mere empty bustle, while underneath it there is
another movement, almost imperceptible but universal and unceasing,
so that the political, economic, and social subsoil appears compara–
tively stable and at the same time intolerably charged with tension.
Events seemed to him hardly to change; but in the concretion of
duration, which Flaubert is able to suggest both
in
the individual oc–
currence (as in our example) and
in
his total picture of the times,
