A TRIPLE CENTENARY

The present year is the centenary of two of the greatest masters of fiction the world has known, and also that of a poet, whose chief claim to distinction is that he achieved the supremely difficult task of combining a black and abiding pessimism with an imagination capable of producing verse of a peculiarly magnificent, though terribly sinister, description. Gustave Flaubert, born in December, 1821, was the first French novelist definitely to break away from the outworn traditions of the Romantic School. Yet, strangely enough, he was at heart a romanticist. He lived, as M. Faguet says in his monograph on Flaubert, "beyond the horizon," in a land of incomparable colour and a beauty idealised by that sublimated devotion to his art which was to him the "summum bonum" of existence. Such was his natural inclination--the worship of Art for Art's sake. But, on the other hand, he was deeply imbued with the realist's passionate reverence for truth, his consuming hatred of all shams, his contempt for anything in the way of self-deception. And this blend of romanticism and realism is doubtless responsible for the dual nature of his work--for that singular apotheosis of the commonplace contained in "Madame Bovary." the highest and most characteristic expression of Flaubert's genius, and, diametrically opposed, for that resplendent resurrection of Carthaginian civilisation which we find in the pages of "Salammbo." "I am tired of ugly things and vulgar surroundings," said Flaubert to one of his friends. "I am going to live for some years perhaps in a splendid subject, and away from the modern world, of which I am sick." He had just laid aside "Madame Bovary;" and in his desire to escape from the petty affairs of life in a provincial French town, he conceived, on a stupendous scale, the colossal canvas of "Salammbo." The book is a wonderful "tour de force" from a reconstructive point of view, but the reader soon wearies of its theatricalities, its strained romanticism, and, in some scenes, its barbaric, almost blatant, melodrama. Far more worthy of Flaubert's powers is that strange chimerical medley of weird dreams and fantastic visitations which beset the solitary soul of St. Anthony in his hermit's hat in the Thebaid, shut in by great rocks among the Libyan hills overlooking the desert and the remote and serpent-like undulations of the Nile. In the case of a writer like Flaubert, so passionately possessed by the,"idee fixe" that in style alone—the perfection of finish—true literary salvation is to be found, five works—one of them left unfinished at the time of his death represent a labour few, if any, novelists have surpassed in intensity of application. Nothing could be much more dissimilar to his other books than the "Education Sentimentale," while the encyclopaedic "Bouvard et Pecuchet," even had it been completed would hardly have added to his reputation.
One of the greatest ironies in the history, of literature is to be found in the fact that when "Madame Bovary" appeared, its author was prosecuted for immorality by a generation blessed with such inestimable gifts of morality and fine feeling as the generation of Napoleon III. One has heard of Satan reproving sin; but as far as "Madame Bovary" is concerned, her sins, which were many, were fully and completely expiated when the Nemesis that attended this unfortunate woman's every lapse unrelentingly doomed her to self-destruction. Indeed, the force of the irony becomes doubly apparent when we consider that "Madame Bovary" is almost puritanical in its morality, as much so as Tolstoi's "Anne Karenine," to which book it bears, in some respects, no small resemblance. Although Tolstoi stands out as the most intellectual and seer-like of the great Russian writers, and Tourgenieff as the most sympathetically imaginative, and wholly artistic, Feodor Dostoieffski (born October; 1821) is the high-priest, "par excellence," of the religion of human suffering. The most pathetic and certainly the most Christ-like figure in Russian letters, Dostoieffski, in the course of the 60 intolerable years which constituted his life-in-death, never for one moment abandoned his trust in God, and, what is stranger still in the face of all he underwent at the hands of his fellow men, his firm faith in humanity. Dostoieffski must, to use his own expression as applied to himself, have, had "the vitality of a cat." A gambler, an epileptic, a convict—he spent four years in Siberia, a period he describes in the "House of the Dead," to which must be added three more weary years of exile— his subsequent existence was one of unremitting privation and suffering. Long before death came to him he had forestalled the agonies of dissolution on that bleak December morning when, with 21 fellow-prisoners, he stood stripped to the shirt, while for nearly half-an-hour he listened to the reading of the death sentence, with a squad of soldiers lined up in front of him with rifles ready to shoot. At the last moment a reprieve came, but the bitter memory of that morning remained with him to his latest hour. Recognition of his splendid gifts as a writer came too slowly to be of any real benefit to him. But, as is the way of the world, public opinion sought to atone for the neglect of a lifetime by making his death the occasion of a demonstration unique in the history of literature. "A procession of 100,000 mourners and spectators, princes of the Imperial Court, Cabinet Ministers, students, tradesmen, and artisans conducted to his last resting place the former Siberian convict, the bankrupt journalist, the idol of the Russian people." Dostoieffski's novels comprise the sum of human misery. "The Idiot," "The Demons," "Humiliated and Insulted," "Poor Folk." the "House of the Dead," "Crime and Punishment"—the very titles reveal something of their sordid subject matter. They deal with terrible mysteries of psychology, with fierce Slavonin passions, and strange inexplicable impulses, all described with a realism pitiless in its artistic sincerity, though the man Dostoieffski is compact of pity, not only for those who sin and suffer, but also for those whose evil deeds are hidden be neath the cloak of a worldly prosperity. Down to the end of his life Dostoieffski had no word of condemnation for those who had consistently ill-used him. He rigorously upheld the laws of the country that had trodden him into the dust, and repaid her with an inexhaustible and passionate love. He never once lost hold of the three cardinal virtues of humanity—faith, hope and charity; and for him, mankind, if capable of descending to unplumbed depths of degradation and sin, had also the capacity of rising to supreme heights of self-sacrifice and devotion.
The centenary of Charles Baudelaire's birth has evoked a considerable amount of literature, mostly of the periodical kind. Baudelaire has been described as the Swift of poetry. "His vision is black and terrible. Some of his descriptions are even more disgusting than those of Swift, and most of his pages are not fit reading for the young and ignorant. But the wise reader will find in this lurid poetry elements of profundity and power which are rare indeed. Above all, he will find in it a quality not common in French poetry—a passionate imagination which clothes the thoughts with splendour, and lifts the strange words of this unhappy mortal into the death less regions of the sublime." If Baudelaire was influenced by anybody, it was by the American Poe, for whose writings, both in prose and verse, he professed an almost boundless admiration. In his turn, the French poet certainly influenced, in some degree, Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson (the "king of the minor poets," as he has been called), and perhaps, though slightly, Pater; this influence is more especially noticeable in the "Conclusion" of the "Renaissance" studies. That Baudelaire was prosecuted in the French Courts for producing "immoral" literature in the same year as Flaubert, goes for nothing. It was Tartuffe's last and, possibly, most ridiculous performance. Few writers have experienced the extremes of abuse and glorification in the same measure as the author of the "Fleurs du Mal." In Gautier's famous monograph, that shining light of the Romanticists constitutes himself devil's advocate with a success the chief factor in which is a singularly ornate and persuasive prose style. The latest study of Baudelaire is by Arthur Symons, one of the few remaining of the young men of the 'nineties, grown a little older and a little less prone to unqualified enthusiasms. When Mr. Symons calls Baudelaire a modern Catullus, he shoots not far wide of the mark. Both the Roman poet and the French decadent alternately, worshipped and crucified the flesh; and Mr. Symons is peculiarly happy in his rendering of Catullus's immortal two-line epigram:
I hate and l love; you ask me how I do it ?
I know not; I know that it hurts; I am going through it.

Many writers have expressed their conviction that the perverse actions which characterised Baudelaire's conduct throughout life were the germinating seeds of that dreadful form of insanity which he ultimately came to suffer. Doubtless there is something in this; but there is another side to the question. Writing in the "Fortnightly Review," Professor Shanks says: "The puzzle of Baudelaire's personality hinges on the question of his sincerity. Was it a degraded Byronic or Mephistophelean pose which inspired his love of displeasing, his pursuit of perversity? When he horrified the cafe by his calm pretence of having eaten human flesh, when he took a dog's decaying carcass as a poetic symbol of earthly Love, was it not through pure love of mystification? Certainly his 'legende' and his best-known poems make him seem the Ajax of Romantic charlatans, a 'poseur' unique and unparalled." That Baudelaire was an arch-poseur is demonstrated in many of his poems, and in none more clearly than in the celebrated "Litany" he addressed to Satan. No doubt he wrote, this to "astonish the bourgeoisie," just as his friend Gautier assumed a red waistcoat and the manners of a dissolute buccaneer for the same benevolent purpose.

 1921., The West Australian DEC. 10,