much to have faith in their progress ;" and so he, more even than Balzac, promoted the pessimistic weakening of the will that marks a considerable section of the literature of the fin de siècle.

The language of Mérimée is singularly limpid and pure, simple and remarkable for its sober condensation. It has been compared to a plate of glass through which all that he wishes to show, appears, while it leaves itself no sensation. But if the attention of the critic is concentrated on it one observes beneath the first impression of perfect ease and naturalness a gradual revelation of art, until at last it will seem as though all had been subordinated to an æsthetic purpose that had produced its full effect while still wholly unrecognized at the very first reading. Herein lies Mérimée's enduring charm. He is, among the novelists of his time, pre-eminently the artist.

MODERN FICTION.

CHAPTER XII.

-II. THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL.

BALZAC and his fellows had inaugurated the study of contemporary life in fiction; but both he and they had usually been diligent to seek such phases of it as had dramatic interest, and to arrange their observations so as to heighten this effect. That departure from the normal train of daily life was a concession, perhaps a fundamentally necessary concession, to Idealism and so to Romanticism; and this it was the endeavor of the next generation at all cost to exclude. Now, in so far as Naturalism effects a closer and more exact observation, a simpler and more robust style, it is the natural and healthy reaction from Idealism, for these are the two points between which the literary needle has swayed since the beginning of literature. But the Naturalism of the men we are about to study went much further than this. Zola announced his intention "to study man as he is, not your metaphysical jumping-jack, but the physical man, determined by environment, acting under the play of all his organs." "What a farce," he continues, "is this continuous and exclusive study of the functions of the brain! . . . What becomes of the nobility of the brain if the belly is sick?" Hence some ardent disciples have jumped at the conclusion that the novel was not to be psychological but abdominal; and this certainly is the tendency of these "slices of crude life," this topsy-turvy idealism

of an art which they have striven to make wholly impersonal, unsympathetic, and materialistic, and have at least succeeded in making wholly unnatural. It is the function of criticism to show that these men who have made Naturalism a byword were false Naturalists, and that it was because they were false Naturalists, and only in so far as they were false Naturalists, that they discredited Naturalism in discrediting themselves.

Flaubert marks the transition from Romanticism to this phase of materialistic realism. He exhibits exceptionally the continuity of literary development through reforms and changes that to those who preached them seemed radical and revolutionary. Not, indeed, that Flaubert ever associated himself with the extreme and intolerant claims of the theoretic doctrinaire critics of his school. He was a tolerant eclectic who combined the qualities of the men of his youthful admiration, Hugo and Chateaubriand, with those of his own disciples, Zola and Maupassant. This gives his work its peculiar interest, and an importance greater than its comparatively small bulk might suggest.

Flaubert grew up in the heyday of the Romantic movement, and shared its enthusiasms to the full. Writ

1 Born 1821; died 1880. Euvres, 8 vols., and Correspondance, 4 vols. Chronology of the more important novels: Mme. Bovary, 1857; Salammbo, 1862; L'Éducation sentimentale, 1869; La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, 1874; Trois contes, 1877; Bouvard et Pécuchet (unfinished).

Criticism: Brunetière, Roman naturaliste, pp. 29 and 161; Zola, Romanciers naturalistes, pp. 125-223; Bourget, Essais, p. 111; Tarver, Flaubert as seen in his Works and Correspondence; Spronck, Les Artistes littéraires, 239; Sainte-Beuve, Causeries, xiii. 346; Pellissier, op. cit. p. 326; Lanson, op. cit. p. 1047. Saintsbury, Essays on French Novelists, offers a mild antidote to some opinions expressed here and in chapters v. and xiii.

...

ing of 1840, he says: "Our dreams in college days were superbly extravagant, the last full flowering of Romanticism, . . . maintained by a provincial environment and making strange ebullitions in our brains. . . We were not only troubadours, rebels, Orientals; we were, more than all, artists. Our school tasks over, literature began. We put out our eyes reading novels in the dormitory; we carried daggers in our pockets. . . . One of us blew out his brains; another hung himself by his cravat. . . . What hatred we had of the commonplace; what aspirations to grandeur; what respect for the masters; how we admired Hugo!"1

Flaubert never lost sight of his Romantic ideals; but they had fallen on unromantic times, and mocked him so constantly that the vulgarity of life became at last his all-absorbing thought, and his contempt of the bourgeoisie a passionate hatred that he devoted his whole life to express in a form whose perfection should make it an enduring monument of human pettiness. This thought runs like a red thread through all his novels, whether the scene be a Norman town or ancient Carthage, the Paris of the Second Republic or the Egyptian hermitages of the Thebaid. Everywhere and always to strive for the ideal is to invite the heart-sickness of disillusion.

Flaubert is then a Romantic pessimist, a species that has tended not a little to confuse the popular conception of pessimism itself. His pessimism is a sentiment. "Strange," he says, " that I was born with so little faith in happiness. Even as a boy, I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the smell of a nauseating kitchen escaping through a ventilating hole. One had no need to taste to know that it was 1 Condensed from Bourget's citation, 1. c. p. 130.

sickening." If he is to be judged by his fiction, he regarded reading, and indeed intellectual progress generally, as likely to increase the evils of life. All his protagonists are nursed on nursed on literature. Books and meditation turn the brains of his Saint Antony and of his Emma Bovary, his Frédéric is the victim of a "sentimental education," and Salammbô has drunk deep of the legends of her people.

This pessimistic cast of mind produced in Flaubert, as it often has in others, a passion for formal beauty. The union in him of a deep poetic feeling with the keen analytic spirit 1 produced a bitter sense of disproportion between what might be and what is; and this made his literary composition labored and slow to. a degree that has become proverbial. Six years was the average interval between his longer novels, and he spent a score in elaborating the "Temptation of Saint Antony." He made minute studies, accumulated huge masses of notes. For an episode of a few pages he might consult a hundred volumes. And he was as meticulous in regard to form as to matter. Each paragraph was subjected to repeated scrutinies, obtrusive relatives were sedulously banished, the recurrence of vowel or consonant sounds was sought or avoided, and the melody of each sentence tested by loud declamation until it was attuned to satisfy his sensitive ear. He cited with approval the doctrine of Buffon, that "the beauties of style are truths as useful, and perhaps more precicus, for the public than those contained in the subject itself;" and, following to their logical conclusion the æsthetics of pessimism, with an instinct of harmony that he caught from Chateaubriand, he resolved to base a purely objective art on the ruins 1 Cp. Bourget, op. cit. p. 136.