To avoid the commonplace you lapse into bombast and, on the other hand, simplicity is so close to the merely platitudinous.
What a splendid Ernest! There he is married, established and perpetually magistrate besides. Behold, a bourgeois and a gentleman! Defender, now more than ever before, of order, propriety and the family. He has nevertheless followed the normal path. He too has been an artist, has carried a dagger and dreamed up ideas for plays. He's been a frivolous student in the Latin Quarter; he had a local shop-girl that he called "his mistress" and I used to scandalise her with my talk when I went to see him in his fetid rooms. He sampled the cancan at the Chaumiere and he drank spiced wine at the Voltaire. Then he got his doctorate. Henceforth began the comedy of being serious, as a sequel to the serious pursuit of the comic.
Republic or monarch, we won't get beyond all that stuff for some time. It's the outcome of protracted endeavours in which all have played their part from de Maistre down to pere Enfantin. And the republicans have done more than most. What is equality then if it is not the negation of all liberty, all forms of superiority, of Nature itself. Equality, it's slavery. That is why I love art. There, at least, all is liberty in this world of fictions. - Every wish is granted, you can do anything, simultaneously be king and subject, active and passive, victim and priest. No limits there; for you and your kind humanity is a puppet with little bells on its costume to be set jingling with a prod of the pen, just like the street-corner puppeteer who works the strings with his foot.
In my opinion one of the things that proves that art is completely forgotten is the quantity of artists there are swarming about. The more choristers there are in a church, the more it may be supposed that the parishioners themselves are not real believers. They are not concerned about praying to the Good Lord, nor are they concerned about cultivating their gardens, as Candide puts it. They are more interested in having splendid vestments. Instead of towing the public along, you let it pull you. There is more pure bourgeoisdom among men of letters than there is in the grocery business. What are they actually doing, if not endeavouring by every possible device to diddle the customer, while still believing themselves honest! (artists in other words), all of which is the epitome of bourgeoisdom
Everything feeds into Affectation: oneself, other people, sunlight, graveyards, and so on. . .
If I had a more solid brain I would certainly not have fallen ill from the vexation of doing law. Instead of taking hurt, I would have turned it to my advantage. My grief, instead of sitting in my skull, trickled down into my limbs and twisted them with convulsions. It was a deviation. You often find children who are injured by music. They have real talent, they remember tunes after hearing them once, they become over-excited when they play the piano; their hearts flutter, they lose weight, they go pale, they fall ill. And their poor nerves, like a dog's, are wrenched with pain at the sound of the notes. They are certainly not the Mozarts of the future. The vocation has been displaced. The idea has slipped into the body and there it lies barren, and the body is wrecked in the process. Neither genius nor good health can come of it.
Same thing in art. Lines of poetry are not made from the passions. And the more personal you are, the weaker you will be. I have always transgressed in that way; because I have always put myself into everything that I have done. For instance, it was me who was in the place of Saint Antony [in F's first-written novel The Temptation of Saint Antony. CS] The temptation was mine rather than the reader's. 187
That is why I detest poetry that comes out in phrases. When it comes to things for which there are no words, the eye is enough. The exhalations of the soul, lyricism, descriptions, I want it all to be done with style. Otherwise it is a prostitution, of art, and even of feeling. . . They are all essentially the same, all the people who tell you about their lost love, their mother's grave, their father's grave, their sacred memories, who kiss medallions, who weep in the moonlight, who go into raptures when they see children, swoon at the theatre, look thoughtful when they stand by the Ocean. Fakers! fakers! triple charlatans! who use their hearts as trampolines in order to reach up to something.
I am turning towards a kind of aesthetic mysticism (if those two words can go together), and I would wish it stronger. When you receive no encouragement from other people, when the outside world disgusts you, enfeebles you, corrupts you and wears you down, then decent and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live. If society carries on the way it is going, I do believe that we shall see a revival of mysticism, as has happened in every gloomy era. Unable to find any outlet, the human spirit will be condensed. Perhaps the day is not far away when we shall witness the return of a universal apathy, of beliefs in the end of the world, of a new Messiah. But because the theological foundations are missing, where will this oblivious enthusiasm find its field of action? Some will seek it out in sex, some in the old religions, some in art; and the human race, like the jews wandering in the desert will chase after all kinds of idols. We have come upon the scene a little too early. In another twenty-five years the point of intersection will be superb. In the hands of a master, when that day comes, prose will be able to play a formidable humanitarian symphony. Books like the Satyricon and The Golden Ass could come back again, transposing into psychic excess everything that such books offered by way of carnal excess.
When the brain droops, the cock stands up.
The best authors believe that they write tolerably well. (La Bruyere)
I do know that it is impossible to get published anywhere, at the moment, and that all the actual reviews are squalid whores playing the coquette. Pox-ridden to the very marrow, they pull a face at opening their legs to the healthy creations that are desperate to get in. So, the best way is to do what you do, publish in book form, it's more daring, and be on your own. F to Louise Colet, March 1853
We used to have a poor devil of a servant, a man who now drives a hackney-coach; this wretched Louis had - or thought he had - a tapeworm. He talks about it as if it were a real person who talks to him and tells him what it wants, and he always refers to this creature inside him as he. Sometimes he has cravings and he attributes them to the tapeworm: "He wants it," and Louis immediately obliges. Recently he wanted thirty sous worth of brioche; another time he had to have some white wine, and next day he would kick up a fuss if he were given red wine. This poor man eventually sank in his own estimation to the same level as the tapeworm; they are equals and they are locked in a dreadful battle. "Madame," (he said to my sister-in-law recently), that scoundrel has got it in for me; we are daggers drawn, you see; but I shall have my revenge. One of us will be left standing." Well it's the man who will be left standing or should I say the man who will step aside for the tapeworm. So as to kill it and get rid of it, he has recently swallowed a bottle of vitriol, and he is now dying as a result. I am not sure if you appreciate the profundity of this story. Can you see this man finally believing in the almost human existence of what was perhaps only an idea, becoming the slave of his tapeworm! I find it quite dizzying. What a strange thing is the human mind!
I think that the sufferings of the modern artist, by comparison with artists of former times, are like factories compared to craft production.
The political situation has confirmed my old a priori theories about the featherless biped, whom I regard as a cross between a turkey and a vulture.
Perhaps I would've been a great writer if language had not been so unmanageable. (Goethe)
If the moral sciences had two or three primordial laws at their disposal, as in mathematics, then they would make real progress. But they are groping in the shadows, bumping into things at random and wanting to establish them as axiomatic. This word, soul, has spawned almost as many stupid remarks as there are souls!
People write books for everyone, art for everyone, science for everyone, just as they build railways and soup-kitchens. The human race has a passion for moral degradation. And I am angry at having to be part of it.
One thing is for sure, I am part monk. I have always greatly admired those fine sturdy fellows who lead solitary lives, whether dedicated to drunkenness or mysticism. It was really one in the eye for the human race, for the useful, for general well-being.
exposition . . . the purest poetry. . .
If you want to know my frank and confidential opinion, I have not written anything which I find fully satisfactory. There is in me, very distinctly I believe, an ideal (apologies for that word), an ideal of style, the pursuit of which leaves me gasping without respite. Despair is consequently my normal state of mind. It takes a violent distraction to fetch me out of it. And anyway, I am not naturally cheerful. Gross buffoonery and obscenity in unlimited quantities, but underneath it all is my lugubriousness. In short, life pisses me off considerably and that is the declaration of my faith.
Reread and rework your story. Leave it alone and then take it up again, because books are not sired like children, they are raised like pyramids, according to a premeditated plan, by transporting great blocks and piling them up one on top of the other, a back-breaking grinding toil. And it's totally useless! And it sits in the desert casting a prodigious shadow! The jackals piss all round it and the bourgeois come and clamber over it, and so on; extend the analogy. F to E Feydeau, October 1857
What is the best guise in which to give voice occasionally to one's opinion concerning the events of this world, without having to risk looking like an imbecile later on? This is a rather serious problem. I think the best thing is to portray, in all sincerity, the things you find exasperating. Dissection is a form of revenge.
Those who have no need for the supernatural are rare indeed. Philosophy will always be exclusively the portion of aristocrats. You can fatten up the human throng, bed them up to their bellies in straw and even cover their stables in gold leaf, brutish they will always be, whatever anyone says. The only progress we can hope for is that the brute can be made a little less spiteful.
Lucretius ought to be mentioned with some respect. I see nobody to match him except for Byron, and Byron doesn't have his gravitas, or the sincerity of his sadness. I think the melancholy of the Ancients runs deeper than that of the Moderns, who all more or less hint at immortality beyond the black hole. But for the Ancients that black hole was infinity itself; their dreams dawn and fade against a background of ebony darkness. No cries, no convulsions, nothing but a face fixed in thought. From Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when the gods had gone and Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment when only man existed. Nowhere else do I find such grandeur.
I am suspicious of your novel about the theatre. You are too fond of them, those people! Have you met many who love their art? So many artists are merely bourgeois who have strayed from the path. F to George Sand, September 1868
In the days of Pericles the Greeks produced works of art without knowing whether they would have enough to eat on the morrow. Let us be like the Greeks!
Paganism, Christianity and now the Age of the Lout: these are the three great phases of human history. It is unpleasant to find oneself at the beginning of the third.
The downfall of the bourgeoisie has begun, because it shares the feelings of the rabble. I cannot see that it reads different newspapers, that it enjoys different music, that its pleasures are any more dignified. In both cases, there is the same love of money, the same reverence for the fait accompli, the same need for idols to overturn, the same hatred of anything superior, the same spirit of denigration, the same crass ignorance!
Because of your contempt for intelligence, you think yourselves full of common sense, realistic, practical! But people are only truly practical on the condition that they are a little more than that. . . You would not be enjoying all the benefits of industry if the only ideal of your eighteenth century ancestors had been material usefulness.F to the Municipal Council of Rouen, 1872
I am not a Nature man: I find it's "marvels" less moving than those of Art. It overwhelms me without imparting any "great ideas". I am inclined to tell it inwardly: "that's lovely; I emerged from you quite recently; in a few minutes I shall be back inside you; just leave me in peace. I have better things to do."
From: Flaubert, Selected Letters
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