II Minds were turned elsewhere. The second Empire had seen the union of Science and Impassiveness produce a philosophy and a literary formula: Realism and the doctrine of Art for Art's sake.' Two Everything was sacrificed to scientific Realisms and technical accuracy. Renan, a marvellous restorer of historical science, had risked his 1 1 Champfleury claims to have founded this school by creating the Review le Réalisme (November 1856-April 1857). The whole bearing of the word does not seem to have been very well understood. George Sand says: We confess that we have never understood where the Real began, compared to the True." Yet, there is a difference between the realism of Flaubert and that of Champfleury. George Sand did not mark this distinction; she writes, à propos of Madame Bovary (1857): "This is a very striking and very good specimen of the realistic school. Realism therefore exists, for this is very new. . . . On reflection, we found that this was another Balzac, Balzac expurgated from every concession to romantic benevolence, Balzac bitter and afflicted, concentrated Balzac. . . ." Flaubert had protested beforehand: "I am thought to be in love with the real, whereas I execrate it; it is in hatred of realism that I have undertaken this novel." This letter was written in 1856 (Corr., 3rd series, p. 66). See, concerning G. Sand's words, a very accurate article by M. Faguet, in the Journal des Débats, July 25th, 1904. J. J. Weiss, in 1858, defined Realism as: "A Norman (Flaubert ?) invention, which consists in depriving oneself, on principle, of the small talents which Nature has not granted to you, or of those which it would cost too much trouble to acquire by study." And again: "It is a tranquil blossoming-out of conscientious platitude" (p. 147). But that is aimed chiefly at Champfleury, and perhaps a little, from the context, at Alexandre Dumas fils. 2 Flaubert is very precise: "The morality of Art consists in its beauty itself, and I value above all, first the style and then the Truth. (p. 71). See the manifesto of Leconte de Lisle, entitled Les Poètes Contemporains, published in the Nain Jaune of 1864, and added to the Derniers Poèmes, 1895, 8vo: "Art, of which poetry is the brilliant, intense and complete expression, religious, philosophical and social conception on the authenticity of a palimpsest. Taine had discovered that Life was a "living geometry," Man a "walking theorem," Vice and Virtue "products, like sugar and alcohol." Leconte de Lisle, Gautier, Flaubert, had confined poetry within the ivory tower of their Indifferentism, and within the active Nirvana of form. All had repeated in turn the words of Spinoza: "Neither in its mode of being, nor in its mode of living has Nature a principle to start from or a goal to attain." They had adhered to the laws dictated by Hegel' and by Darwin, the selection of species, the inevitable superiority of élites. They had subordinated the idea of a mother-country to their concept of Truth : I have no Fatherland but the land of my dreams.' Facts had answered them. Bismarck had real s an intellectual luxury only accessible to very few minds. . . . The Beautiful is not the servant of the True, for it contains Divine and human Truth, etc. . . . (p. 234). On the bourgeoise opinion concerning Art for Art's sake, see Maxime du Camp Mémoires, vol. ii., p. 183. 1 We can but mention as we pass the influence of German philosophy and of Hegel in particular. This subject is far from being exhausted, the war of 1870 having interrupted the stream. On January 25th, 1870, Renan and Taine, in a joint letter published by the Journal des Débats, initiated a subscription in France towards the statue of Hegel in Berlin, proclaiming him "the first thinker of the nineteenth century."-Victor Giraud, Essai sur Taine, Paris, 1902, p. 68 and 249. 2 Sully Prudhomme, Stances et Poèmes, l'Ambition. Sully Prudhomme himself wrote an answer to this poem; it appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes of October 1st, 1871 and is entitled Repentir. There is a curious passage about the feelings of this generation concerning the idea of a Fatherland in Gaston Paris, Penseurs et poètes, p. 221. |