FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
629
draws me above
all
things,' he wrote in 1857, 'is religion. I mean all
religions, not one rather than another. Each dogma on its own repels
me, but I consider the feeling that created them as the most natural
and poetical in humanity. I don't like philosophers who find there
only fraud and foolishness.''' A man who can speak thus does not
easily "turn to" religion, and the
Three Tales
must not be thought of
even as the tribute to religion of an unbeliever who perceives the
charms and advantages of faith and who regrets
his
inability to be–
lieve. Flaubert was a very serious man.
But we shall not be wrong if we think of the stories as a tribute
to what Flaubert took to be a characteristic mode of Christianity, the
"negation of life's goodness"-life's goodness in general and specific–
ally the goodness of man's life in culture.
In
each of the stories the
protagonist exists beyond the life in culture and stands divested of
every garment that culture weaves. Julian passes beyond parental love,
beyond social rank, beyond heroism and fame, beyond the domestic
affections, beyond all the things, persons, and institutions that bind
us to the earth, and he reaches that moment of charity which is the
surrender of what Flaubert believed to be the richest luxury of culture,
the self in the separateness of sensibility and pride that define it.
Felicite, endow6d by nature and culture with no other gift than that
of the power to love and serve, is deprived of every person upon
whom her love has fixed, and is left with no other object to cherish
than her poor stuffed parrot, the dumb effigy of the Speaking Bird,
the Logos, the Holy Ghost. John the Baptist, naked and solitary,
cries out from his prison-pit against the court of Antipas, and Flau–
bert is at his usual pains to specify not only the deeds but the artifacts
-the garments and the food and the armament hidden beneath the
palace-of which the Baptist's naked and solitary voice
is
the
negation.
The
Tales,
that is, continue Flaubert's old despair of culture,
which was, we may say, the prime condition of his art; it was a de–
spair which was the more profound, we need scarcely say, because it
was the issue of so great a hope. Emma Bovary had tried to live by
the promises of selfhood which culture had seemed to make, and cul–
ture had destroyed her. Frederic Moreau had ruined himself by never
quite believing in the selfhood which culture cherishes as its dearest
gift. Now Flaubert considers the condition of the spirit which puts
