No less a masterpiece than Don Quixote has been cited in critical comparison with Madame Bovary. Flaubert was called the Cervantes who had ridiculed from the field the Romantic School. This irritated him, for he never posed as a realist; indeed, he confessed that he had intended to mock the Realistic School--then headed by Champfleury--in his Bovary. The very name of this book would arouse a storm of abuse from him. He knew that he had more than one book in him, he believed better books; the indifference of the public to Sentimental Education and the Temptation he never understood. Much astonishment was expressed, after the appearance of Bovary, that such a mature work of art should have been the author's first. But Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms did not permit their juvenile efforts to see the light; the same was the case with Flaubert. In 1835--he was fourteen at the time--he wrote Mort du Duc de Guise; in 1836 another historical study. Short stories in the style of Hoffmann, with thrilling titles, such as Rage et Impuissance, Le Rêve d'Enfer (1837), and a psychologic effort, Agonies (dedicated to Alfred le Poittevin--as are both versions of the Temptation; Alfred's sister later became the mother of Guy de Maupassant): all these exercises, as is a Dance of Death, are still in manuscript. But in 1839 a scenario of a mystery bearing the cryptic title of Smarh was written; and this with Novembre, and a study of Rabelais, and Nuit de Don Juan, have been published in the definitive edition; with a record of travels in Normandy. The Memoirs of a Madman appeared a few years ago in a Parisian magazine. It was a youthful effort. There is also in the collection of Madame Grout a 300-page manuscript (1843-1845) named L'Education Sentimentale--vaguely inspired by Wilhelm Meister--which has nothing in common with his novel of the same name published in 1869.
Flaubert's taste in the matter of titles was lamentable. He made a scenario for a tale called Spiral, and he often asserted that he hankered to write in marmoreal prose the Combat of Thermopylae; he meditated, too, a novel the scene and characters laid in the Second Empire, and dilated upon the beauty of a portrait executed in microscopic detail of that immortal character, M. le Préfet. We might have had a second Homais if he had made this project a reality. He told Turgenev that he had another idea, a sort of modern Matron of Ephesus --in the Temptation there is an episode that suggests the Ephesus. He did not lack invention and he was an extremely rapid writer--but his artistic conscience was morbidly sensitive. It pained him to see Zola throwing his better self to the dogs in his noisy, inartistic novels--in which, he said, was neither poetry nor art. And he wrote this opinion to Zola, who promptly called him an idiot. In that correct but colourless book of Faguet's on Flaubert, the critic makes note of all the novelist's grammatical errors and reaches the conclusion that he was a stylist unique, but not careful in his grammar. Now, while this is piffling pedantry, the facts are in Faguet's favour; Faguet, who holds the critical scales nicely, as he always does, though listlessly. But in the handling of such a robust, red-blooded subject as Flaubert the college professor was hardly a wise selection. The Faguet study is clear and painstaking but not sympathetic. Mr. James has praised it, possibly because Faguet agrees with him as to the psychology of Sentimental Education. Not a study, Faguet's, for Flaubertians, who see the faults of their Saint Polycarp--his favourite self-appellation--and love him for his all-too-human imperfections.