Lionel Trilling
FLAUBERT ' S LAST TESTAMENT
t
Flaubert died suddenly in 1880, having brought close to
its end but leaving unfinished and unrevised the novel that had occu–
pied his thought for eight years. The entire dedication of himself with
which Flaubert responded to the claims of art is of course the very
essence of his legend, but to
Bouvard and Pecuchet
he gave a special
and savage devotion which went beyond the call of literary duty as
even he understood it. The book was to him more than a work of
art; it was a deed. At the moment of what he conceived to be the
ultimate defeat of true culture, it was an act of defiance and revenge.
Flaubert was not unique
in
nineteenth-century France for his belief
that bourgeois democracy was bringing about the death of mind,
beauty, literature, and greatness; this opinion, among the distinguished
writers of the century, was virtually a commonplace. But he was
unique in the immediacy and simplicity with which he experienced
the debacle- HI can no longer talk with anyone without growing
angry; and whenever I read anything by one of my contemporaries
I rage."2 He was unique too in the necessity he felt to see the crisis
in all its possible specificity of detail. For him the modern barbarism
was not merely a large general tendency which could be compre–
hended by a large general emotion; he was constrained to watch it
with a compulsive and obsessive awareness of its painful particularities.
1 This essay was written as the introduction to the edition of
Bouvard and
Pecuchet
which New Directions will bring out in January in the translation of
G. W. Stonier and T. W. Earp.
2 All the quotations from Flaubert's letters are from the admirable
Selected
Letters of Gustave Flaubert
edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller which
Farrar, Straus and Young will publish in January.
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