FLAUBERT, Mbar', GUSTAVE (1821-80), A French novelist. lle united the minute realistic vision of Balzae with very great rhetorical skill, and devoted his life to the production of five volumes of rare literary art. But the impor tance of Madame Bovary (1857), Salammbd (1862, well translated by J. W. Matthews, 1891), L'eduea-tion, sentimentale (1869), La ten tat ion de Saint-Antoine (1874), the Trois eontes (1877), and the unfinished Bouvard et Peenrhet lies not only in their faultless style, but in the precision with which they enunciate a view of the art of fiction that was to dominate the suc ceeding generation. Madame Borary gave the formula of the modern novel" (Zola), the code of the naturalistic school. Flaubert was born in Rouen, December 12, 1821, the son of a surgeon, and inherited a power of psychic diagnosis and dissection. His vocation for literature was un mistakable. He was wealthy, able to cultivate his taste by travel, and to produce at leisure. Ilis early influences were strongly romantic, fos tered by a violent love affair with a lady whom he has pictured as Madame Arneux in L'ednea lion sentimentale, and by a tenderly platonic at tachment to Madame Colet. Hating democracy and wishing to hide the epilepsy to which he was subject, he became more and more a recluse. Ex cept for literary journeys to the East, particular ly to Carthage, he spent his life at a suburban house in Rouen, cloistered for months together in unremitting study, relieved by occasional visits to Paris, where he gave free scope to a Rabelaisian fancy in the society of the Goncourts, whose Journal is filled with his sayings. In general he affected. and in good measure attained, an objec tive attitude toward life, which, be says. ap peared to him as material for description, an end in itself ; and he is thus the type of the artist for art's sake. Madame Bovary is the epic of
the commonplace, the bitterest satire on roman ticism. In it sentiment leads to shipwreck, self sufficient mediocrity to success. Salammbo ap plies the same method and philosophy to the civilization of ancient Carthage; L'ednention sen timental(' to the Paris of 1848, seeking to be 'implacable,' and becoming unjust, but producing what Zola pronounces "the only truly historical novel that I know in which the resurrection of dead hours is absolute, with no trace of the nov elist's trade." In La tentation de Saint-Antoine Flaubert pushed the paradox to its extreme, and in three hundred pages of the most polished prose of his century sought to express the essential folly and futility of thought itself and of the whole sentient world. La imitation is the su preme expression in fiction of nihilistic of the idealist turned skeptic, and withal the best example of dream-literature in the world. The Trois conies show Flaubert's genin_s epit omized. There is pathos of sordid commonplace in Um c(rur simple; a remarkable power of pro jection into other realms of thought and life is in La legende de Julien l'hospitalier, and in Herodias there is a grandiosely romantic realism. These three tales would alone suffice to define Flaubert's place as the connecting link between the romantic and the naturalistic schools. Be longing to neither, he unites both in a synthesis of romanticism and science that was to guide the development of the French novel for a genera tion. He died at Croiset, May 8, 1880. Consult: Tarver, Gustave Flaubert as Seen in his Works and Correspondence (London, 1895) ; Faguet, Flaubert (Paris, 1899).