FLAUBERT
199
first moment of wonder has passed, if we examine the pictures we
paint, we see that there
is
something dubious, disturbing even, about
their charm.
The fact
is
that these pictures are very different from those
offered us by good painting. Words, and words alone, for which we
must supply the content-which,
in
and of themselves, are nothing
-permit us to see them. So we do our utmost, we work hard, we
hunt through our store of recollections. HamiIcar's trireme is men–
tioned and the words bring to mind the sumptuous splendors of
Carthage; we read of a sail bellied the length of its mast, and im–
mediately
all
the masts and sails that make us construct
this
par–
ticular
mas~ .
and sail come crowding into memory. And here
is
our
foam, here are
our
keels, which resemble
our
ploughshares. Here,
too, is the ivory-headed horse, rearing as it races across the sea,
our
immense sea, which stretches out like
our
plains. But are these things
that we manufacture so hurriedly really what we should presume to
call works of art? Where do these reminiscences come from? How
did we come by these prefabricated objects in our stockrooms, these
vast series of identical objects from which we draw samples? What
common denominator exists between these mental pictures and a
work of art, a canvas like those painted by Flaubert's contemporary,
Delacroix, for instance? When we look at a Delacroix painting, every
line, every juxtaposition of color impinges upon us directly, without
our having to make the effort to substitute other lines and other
colors of our own. Our effort begins with the picture as it is shown
us, with
this
picture and no other, then shifts to an ineffable some–
thing beyond it which, for the first time, has been revealed to us by
lines and colors and gives us pure esthetic delight.
But the task set us by Flaubert and the Pamassians is one of
fabricating mental pictures, and no doubt the hostility that Flaubert's
style has so frequently encountered comes from the effort he demands
of us as well as from its results.
For our recollections of triremes and ivory horses dashing
through foam are, alas, both flat and conventional. They are like
paintings of dubious quality; their beauty of form and their brilliance
give us the same sort of pleasure. Only subjective description, one that
is
distorted and purged of all impurities, can keep us from making
it adhere to a preexistent, necessarily conventional picture.
This is a far cry from the modern quest for pure sensation, from
