THE TWO TEMPTATIONS

The two Temptations! Sounds melodramatic, doesn’t it? But it only refers to the various versions of a great book. All good Flaubertians will rejoice to learn that the earlier draft of Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Antony, has been given a fitting English garb. This translation is made from the 1849 and 1856 manuscripts, edited by Louis Bertrand, and is by René Francis. The preface is by Sir Gaston Maspero, distinguished archæologist, and there is also a prefatory note by Louis Bertrand. This version must not be confounded with the definitive one of 1874, Englished in superlative fashion by Lafcadio Hearn and published here in 1910. The new and bulky volume, admirably printed and copiously illustrated, is a literary curiosity without which no Flaubert collection would be complete. To be sure, Flaubert translated is Flaubert traduced, for as Arthur Symons has written, Flaubert is difficult to translate because he has no fixed rhythm.

“His prose keeps step with no regular march music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence; he changes his cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has no theory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a living thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and interprets. Compare the style,” continues Mr. Symons, “of Flaubert in his books and you will find that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its subject-matter. In Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire, the cadence is always the same; the most exquisite word painting of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm without difficulty into English. Once you have mastered the tune you have merely to go on; every verse will be the same.” Not so with Flaubert. His is truly polyphonic prose—a phrase, by the way, that Amy Lowell uses to describe an amorphous form of prose and poetry. When I invented the combination years ago I meant only prose, what George Saintsbury would call “numerous prose.” See his valuable critical History of English Prose Rhythm.

While on a visit in 1845, Flaubert visited Genoa. There, in the Palace Balbi-Senarega—not at the Doria, as Maxime du Camp wrote with his accustomed carelessness—the French writer saw an old picture by Breughel (probably Pieter the younger, surnamed Hell-Breughel) that represents a Temptation of St. Antony. It is dingy in color and far from a masterpiece. But Flaubert, who loved the grotesque, procured an engraving of this picture, and it hung till the day of his death in his study at Croisset, near Rouen. I have seen it, as it still hangs in the Flaubert Museum there. This picture was the spring-board for his two Temptations. Their germ may be found in his mystery play, Smarh, with its demon and its metaphysical coloring. But Breughel surely set into motion the mental machinery of the Temptation, which never stopped whirring till 1874.

The first draft of the Temptation was begun May 24, 1848, and finished September 12, 1849. The manuscript numbered five hundred and forty pages. Set aside for Madame Bovary, this draft was again taken up and the second version was made in 1856; when finished the manuscript was reduced to one hundred and ninety-three pages. Not satisfied, Flaubert returned to the work in 1872, and when ready for publication in 1874 the number of pages was one hundred and thirty-six; even then he cut out from ten chapters, three. When a few years later the 1856 version was given to the world French critics were astonished to find it so different from the definitive version of 1874. The critical taste of Flaubert was vindicated. His was true technical heroism. Reading in 1849 the earliest version to his friends Bouilhet and Du Camp he had been bidden to burn the stuff; instead he boiled it down into the 1856 version. To his dearest friend, Ivan Turgénieff, he submitted his 1872 draft. Thus it came that the wonderfully colored psychic and philosophic panorama, this Gulliver-like excursion round and about the master-ideas and religions of the antique and early Christian worlds was at last published.

All the youthful Flaubert, the “spouter” of blazing phrases, the lover of jewelled words, of picturesque and monstrous ideas and situations is in the first turbulent version of the Temptation; in the definitive version he is more critical, historical. As his emotions cooled with the years, Flaubert had grown intellectually. The first Temptation is romantic, religious; the 1874 is better composed and sceptical. Arranged more dramatically than the first, the author’s leanings toward Oriental mysticism and the dominating ideas of the classic world are better revealed in the last version. The psychological gradations of character are more clearly indicated in this version. We cannot agree with Louis Bertrand, editor of the 1856 version, that it is superior to the version of 1874. It seems more novel, that’s all. Flaubert was never so much the surgeon as when he operated upon this manuscript. He often hesitated, he always suffered, but he never flinched when his mind was fully resolved. It is for the student a subject of enthralling interest to follow the slow growth of these various versions.

“Since Goethe,” would be a suggestive title for an essay on the various epics written since his death. The list would not be large. In France there are only the barren rhetorical exercises of Edgar Quinet’s Ahasuerus, the insurrectionary poems of Hugo and the frigidly faultless verse of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of such profound depth and heroic power as Faust there is not, except the Temptation of St. Antony, which is impregnated by the Faustian spirit—though in its development poles apart from the older poem—that we are not surprised when we learn that the youthful Flaubert was a passionate admirer of Goethe, even addressing to his memory a long poem in alexandrines. The Temptation is the only poem—despite its prose it is poetic—that may be classed with Brand or Zarathushtra. At times, in its sweep of execution and grandeur of conception, it grazes certain episodes in Faust.

But though it may excel in verbal beauty or in its imaginative presentation of the problems of volition, it falls short of Goethe’s ethical vision. Faust is a man who wills. “In the beginning was the act.” Antony is static, not dynamic. Faust is tempted by Mephisto, yet does not lose his soul. Flaubert’s hermit resists Satan at his subtlest; withal, we do not feel that his soul is as much worth the saving as Faust’s. Man for man, Faust is the more significant; Antony is narrow-minded; indeed, almost besotted by superstition. He crystallizes, also symbolizes, a vanished period of mythology. Faust stands for the man of the present, and in the second part of the poem the man of the future. Ideas are the heroes of Flaubert’s epic, though St. Antony’s is a metaphysical history, not a human one like Faust’s.

But to Faust alone may the Temptation be compared. George Saintsbury has pronounced this masterpiece to be the most perfect example extant of dream literature. And precisely because of its precision in details, its astounding architectonic and its rich-hued waking hallucinations.