The Temptation of St. Anthony
The Temptation of St. Anthony INTRODUCTIONIIIIIIIVV.VIVIIFINISCopyright
The Temptation of St. Anthony
Gustave Flaubert
INTRODUCTION
It was at some period between 1875 and 1876 that Lafcadio
Hearn—still a "cub" reporter on a daily paper in Cincinnati—began
his translation of Flaubert's "Temptation of St. Anthony." The
definitive edition of the work, over which the author had laboured
for thirty years, had appeared in 1874.Hearn was, in his early youth, singularly indifferent to the
work of the Englishmen of the Victorian period. Though he knew the
English masterpieces of that epoch, their large, unacademic freedom
of manner awakened no echoes in his spirit. His instinctive taste
was for the exquisite in style: for "that peculiar kneading,
heightening, and recasting" which Matthew Arnold thought necessary
for perfection. Neither did the matter, more than the manner of the
Victorians appeal to him. The circumstances of his life had at so
many points set him out of touch with his fellows that the
affectionate mockery of Thackeray's pictures of English society
were alien to his interest. The laughing heartiness of Dickens'
studies of the man in the street hardly touched him. Browning's
poignant analyses of souls were too rudely robust of manner to move
him. Before essaying journalism Hearn had served for a while as an
assistant in the Public Library, and there he had found and fallen
under the spell, of the great Frenchman of the Romantic School of
the '30's—that period of rich flowering of the Gallic genius.
Gautier's tales of ancient weirdnesses fired his imagination. The
penetrating subtleties of his verse woke in the boy the felicitous
emotions which the virtuoso knows in handling cameos and
enamellings by hands which have long been dust. So, also, Hugo's
revivals of the passions and terrors of the mediæval world stirred
the young librarian's eager interest. But most of all his spirit
leapt to meet the tremendous drama of the "Temptation." He
comprehended at once its large significance, its great import, and
in his enthusiastic recognition of its value and meaning he set at
once about giving it a language understood of the people of his own
tongue.Tunison tells of the little shy, shabby, half-blind boy—the
long dull day of police reporting done—labouring at his desk into
the small hours, with the flickering gas jet whistling overhead,
and his myopic eyes bent close to the papers which he covered with
beautiful, almost microscopic characters—escaping thus from the
crass, raw world about him to delicately and painstakingly turn
into English stories of Cleopatra's cruel, fantastic Egyptian
Night's Entertainment. Withdrawing himself to transliterate tales
of pallid beautiful vampires draining the veins of ardent boys: of
lovely faded ghosts of great ladies descending from shadowy
tapestries to coquette with romantic dreamers; or to find an
English voice for the tragedy of the soul of the Alexandrian
cenobite.It was in such dreams and labours that he found refuge from
the environment that was so antipathetic to his tastes, and in his
immersion in the works of these virtuosos of words, in his
passionate search for equivalents of the subtle nuances of their
phrases, he developed his own style. A style full of intricate
assonances, of a texture close woven and iridescent."One of Cleopatra's Night's"—a translation of some of
Gautier's tales of glamour—was issued in 1882, but at "The
Temptation of St. Anthony" the publishers altogether balked. The
manuscript could not achieve even so much as a reading. America had
in the '70's just begun to emerge from that state of provincial
propriety in which we were accused of clothing even our piano legs
in pantelettes. The very name of the work was sufficient to start
modest shivers down the spine of all well regulated purveyors of
books. It was largely due to the painters' conceptions of the
nature of the hermit's trials that the story of Saint Anthony's
spiritual struggle aroused instinctive terrors in all truly modest
natures. The painters—who so dearly love to display their skill in
drawing legs and busts—had been wont to push the poor old saint
into the obscure of the background, and fill all the foreground
with ladies of obviously the very lightest character, in garments
still lighter, if possible. What had reputable American citizens to
do with such as these jades? More especially such jades as seen
through a French imagination! That Flaubert had brushed aside the
gross and jejune conceptions of the painters the publishers would
not even take the pains to learn.It is amusing now to recall the nervous, timid proprieties of
those days. At the time Hearn failed to see the laughable side of
it. He was then too young and earnest, too passionate and too
melancholy to have a sense of its humours.He had brought his unfinished manuscript from Cincinnati to
New Orleans, and had continued to work upon it in strange lodgings
in gaunt, old half-ruined Creole houses; at the tables of odd
little French cafés, or among the queer dishes in obscure Spanish
and Chinese restaurants. He had snatched minutes for it amidst the
reading and clipping of exchanges in a newspaper office; had toiled
drippingly over it in the liquifying heats of tropic nights; had
arisen from the "inexpungable langours" of yellow fever to complete
its last astounding pages.I can remember applauding, with ardent youthful sympathy, his
tirades against the stultifying influence of blind puritanism upon
American literature. I recall his scornful mocking at the
inconsistency which complacently accepted the vulgar seduction, and
the theatrical Brocken revels of Faust, while shrinking piously
from Flaubert's grim story of the soul of man struggling to answer
the riddle of the universe. He had however an almost equal contempt
for the author's countrymen, who received with eager interest and
pleasure the deliberate analysis—inMadame
Bovary—of a woman's degradation and ruin, while
they yawned over the amazing history of humanity's tremendous
spiritual adventures. Hearn's own sensitiveness shrank in pain from
the cold insight which uncovered layer by layer the brutal squalour
of a woman's moral disintegration. But he was moved and astounded
by the revelation, in St. Anthony, of the tragedy and pathos of
man's long search for some body of belief or philosophy by which he
could explain to himself the strange great phenomena of life and
death, and the inscrutable cruelties of Nature. The young
translator was filled with a sort of astonished despair at his
inability to make others see the book as he did—not realizing, in
his youthful impatience, that the average mind clings to the
concrete, and is puzzled and terrified by outlines of thought too
large for its range of vision; that the commonplace intelligence
cannot "see the wood for the trees," and becomes confused and
over-weighted when confronted with the huge outlines of so great a
picture as that drawn by Flaubert in his masterpiece.There were many points of resemblance between Lafcadio Hearn
and the grandson of the French veterinary. A resemblance rather in
certain qualities of the spirit than in social conditions and
physical endowments. Flaubert, born in 1821, was the son of a
surgeon. His father was long connected with the Hôtel Dieu of
Rouen, in which the boy was born, and in which he lived until his
eighteenth year, when he went to Paris to study law. One of the
friends of his early Parisian days describes him as "a young Greek.
Tall, supple, and as graceful as an athlete. He was
charming,mais un peu farouche.Quite unconscious of his physical and mental gifts; very
careless of the impression he produced, and entirely indifferent to
formalities. His dress consisted of a red flannel shirt, trousers
of heavy blue cloth, and a scarf of the same colour drawn tight
about his slender waist. His hat was worn 'any how' and often he
abandoned it altogether. When I spoke to him of fame or
influence.... he seemed superbly indifferent. He had no desire for
glory or gain.... What was lacking in his nature was an interest
inles choses extérieures, choses
utiles." ...One who saw him in 1879 found the young Greek athlete—now
close upon sixty, and having in the interval created some of the
great classics of French literature—"a huge man, a tremendous old
man. His long, straggling gray hair was brushed back. His red face
was that of a soldier, or a sheik—divided by drooping white
moustaches. A trumpet was his voice, and he gesticulated freely ...
the colour of his eyes a bit of faded blue sky."The study of the law did not hold Flaubert long. It was one
of thosechoses extérieures, choses
utilesto which he was so profoundly indifferent.
Paris bored him. He longed for Rouen, and for his little student
chamber. There he had lain upon his bed whole days at a time;
apparently as lazy as a lizard; smoking, dreaming; pondering the
large, inchoate, formless dreams of youth.In 1845 his father died, and in the following year he lost
his sister Caroline, whom he had passionately loved, and for whom
he grieved all his life. He rejoined his mother, and they
established themselves at Croisset, near Rouen, upon a small
inherited property. It was an agreeable house, pleasantly situated
in sight of the Seine. Flaubert nourished with pleasure a local
legend that Pascal had once inhabited the old Croisset homestead,
and that the Abbé Prevost had writtenManon
Lescautwithin its walls. Near the house—now
gone—he built for himself a pavilion to serve as a study, and in
this he spent the greater portion of the following thirty-four
years in passionate, unremitting labour.He made a voyage to Corsica in his youth; one to Brittany,
with Maxime du Camp, in 1846; and spent some months in Egypt,
Palestine, Turkey, and Greece in 1849. This Oriental experience
gave him the most intense pleasure, and was the germ ofSalammbo, and of theTemptation of St. Anthony.He never
repeated it, though he constantly talked of doing so. He nursed a
persistent, but unrealized dream of going as far as Ceylon, whose
ancient name, Taprobana, he was never weary of repeating; utterance
of its melifluous syllables becoming a positiveticwith him. Despite these yearnings
he remained at home. Despite his full-blooded physique he would
take no more exercise than his terrace afforded, or an occasional
swim in the Seine. He smoked incessantly, and for months at a
stretch worked fifteen hours out of the twenty-four at his desk.
Three hundred volumes might be annotated for a page of facts. He
would write twenty pages, and reduce these by exquisite concisions,
by fastidious rejections to three; would search for hours for the
one word that perfectly conveyed the colour of his thought, and
would—as in the case of theTemptation—wait fifteen years for a sense of satisfaction with a
manuscript before allowing it to see the light. To Maxime du Camp,
who urged him to hasten the completion of his book in order to take
advantage of a favourable opportunity, he wrote
angrily:"Tu me parais avoir à mon endroit un tic ou vice
rédhibitoire. Il ne m'embête pas; n'aie aucune crainte; mon parti
est pris là-dessus depuis long temps. Je te dirai seulement que
tous ces mots;se dépêcher, c'est le moment, place
prise, se poser, ...sont pour moi un vocabulaire
vide de sens...."In one of his letters he says that on occasion he worked
violently for eight hours to achieve one page. He endeavoured never
to repeat a word in that page, and tried to force every phrase to
respond to a rhythmic law. Guy do Maupassant, his nephew and pupil,
says that to ensure this rhythm Flaubert "prenait sa feuille de
papier, relevait à la hauteur du regard et, s'appuyant sur un
coude, déclaimait, d'une voix mordant et haute. Il écoutait la
rythme de sa prose, s'arrêtait comme pour saisir une sonorité
fuyant, combinait les tons, éloignait les assonances, disposait les
virgules avec conscience, commes les haltes d'un long chemin."
...Flaubert said himself, "une phrase est viable quand elle
correspond à toutes les nécessités de respiration. Je sais qu'elle
est bonne lorsqu'elle peut être lu tout haut."Henry Irving used to say of himself that it was necessary he
should work harder than other actors because nature had dowered him
with flexibility of neither voice nor feature, and Faguet says that
Flaubert was forced to this excessive toil and incessant
watchfulness because he did not write well naturally. Nevertheless
Flaubert's work did not smell of the lamp. Whatever shape his ideas
may have worn at birth when full grown they moved with large
classic grace and freedom, simple, sincere, and beautiful in form.
François Coppée calls him "the Beethoven of French
prose."So conscientious a workman, so laborious and self-sacrificing
an artist had a natural attraction for Lafcadio Hearn, who even in
boyhood began to feel his vocation as "a literary monk." The whole
tendency of his tastes prepared him to understand the true
importance of Flaubert's masterpiece, fitted him especially of all
living writers to turn that masterpiece into its true English
equivalent. The two men had much in common. Both were proud and
timid. Both had a fundamental indifference tochoses extérieures, choses utiles.Both
were realists of the soul. Actions interested each but slightly;
the emotions from which actions sprung very much. To both stupidity
was even more antipathetic than wickedness, because each realized
that nearly all cruelty and vice have their germ in ignorance and
stupidity rather than in innate rascality. Flaubert declared, with
a sort of rage, that "la bêtise entre dans mes pores." He might too
have been speaking for Hearn when he said that the grotesque, the
strange, and the monstrous had for him an inexplicable charm. "It
corresponds," he says, "to the intimate needs of my nature—it does
not cause me to laugh, but to dream long dreams." Hearn, however,
mixed with this triste interest a quality that Flaubert seemed
almost wholly to lack—a great tenderness for all things humble,
feeble, ugly and helpless. Both from childhood were curious of
poignant sensations, of the sad, the mysterious and the exotic. And
for both the tropics had an irresistible fascination. Flaubert
says, in one of his letters:"I carry with me the melancholy of the barbaric races, with
their instincts of migration, and their innate distaste of life,
which forced them to quit their homes in order to escape from
themselves. They loved the sun, all those barbarians who came to
die in Italy; they had a frenzied aspiration toward the light,
toward the blue skies, toward an ardent existence.... Think that
perhaps I will never see China, will never be rocked to sleep by
the cadenced footsteps of camels ... will never see the shine of a
tiger's eyes in the forest.... You can treat all this as little
worthy of pity, but I suffer so much when I think of it ... as of
something lamentable and irremediable."This is the nostalgia for the strange, for the unaccustomed,
that all born wanderers know. Fate arranges it for many of them
that their lives shall be uneventful, passed in dull, provincial
narrowness; but behind these bars the clipped wings of their spirit
are always flutteringly spread for flight. They know not what they
seek, what desire drives them, but a sense of "the great adventure"
unachieved keeps them restless until they die. It is such as these,
thesevoyageurs empassionés,
when condemned by fortune to a static existence—who find their
outlet in mental wanderings amid the unusual, the grotesque, and
the monstrous. Hearn and Flaubert both were at heart nomads,
seekers of the unaccustomed; stretching toward immensities of space
and time, toward the ghostly, the hidden, the unrealized. Like that
wild fantasticChimeraof the
"Temptation" each such soul declares "je cherche
des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus large, des plaisirs
inéprouvés."Flaubert was but twenty-six when the first suggestion of his
masterpiece came to him. ForLa Tentation de St.
Antoine, it is coming to be understood, is his
masterpiece; is one of the greatest literary achievements of the
French mind.Madame Bovaryis
more widely famous and popular, but Flaubert himself always deeply
resented this preference, and was always astonished at the
comparative indifference of the world to the "Temptation." He, too,
found it difficult to realize how hardly the average mind is
awakened to an interest in the incorporeal; how surely cosmic
generalizations escape the grasp of the commonplace
intelligence.Wagner waited a lifetime before the world was dragged
reluctantly and resentfully up to a point from which it could
discern the superiority of the tremendous finale of the
Götterdämmerung to the Christmas-card chorus of angels chanting
"Âme chaste et pure" to the
beatified Marguerite. The whole prodigious structure of Wagner's
dramatic and musical thought might have remained a mere adumbration
in the soul of one German had chance not set a mad genius upon the
throne of Bavaria. The bourgeoisie would—lacking this royal
bullying—have continued to prefer Goethe and Gounod. Flaubert's
great work unfortunately failed of such patronage.It was in 1845 that an old picture by Breughel, seen at
Genoa, first inspired Flaubert to attempt the story of St. Anthony.
He sought out an engraving of this conception of Peter the Younger
(surnamed "Hell-Breughel" for his fondness for such subjects), hung
it on his walls at Croisset, and after three years of brooding upon
it began, May 24, 1848,La Tentation de St.
Antoine.In twelve months he had finished the
first draught of the work, which bulked to 540 pages. It was laid
aside for "Bovary," and a second version of the "Temptation" was
completed in 1856, but this time the manuscript had been reduced to
193 pages, and the "blazing phrases, the jewelled words, the
turbulence, the comedy, the mysticism" of the first version had
been superseded by a larger, more dramatic conception. In 1872 he
made still a new draught, and by this time it had shrunk to 136
pages. He even then eliminated three chapters, and finally gave to
the world in 1874 "this wonderful coloured panorama of philosophy,
this Gulliver-like travelling amid the master ideas of the antique
and early Christian worlds."Faguet says, "In its primitive and legendary state the
temptation of St. Anthony was nothing more than the story of a
recluse tempted by the Devil through the flesh, by all the
artifices at the Devil's disposal. In the definite thought of
Flaubert the temptation of St. Anthony has become man's soul
tempted by all the illusions of human thought and imagination. St.
Anthony to the eyes of the first naive hagiologists is a second
Adam, seduced by woman, who was inspired by Satan. St. Anthony
conceived by Flaubert is a more thoughtful Faust; a Faust incapable
of irony, not a Faust who could play with illusions and with
himself—secretly persuaded that he could withdraw when he chose to
give himself the trouble to do so—rather a Faust who approached,
accosted, caressed all possible forms of universal
illusions."Flaubert's studies for the "Temptation" were tremendous. For
nearly thirty years he touched and retouched, altered, enlarged,
condensed. He kneaded into its substance the knowledge, incessantly
sought, of all religions and philosophies; of all the forms man's
speculations had taken in his endless endeavours to explain to
himself Life and Fate; humanity's untiring, passionate effort to
find the meaning of its mysterious origin and purpose, and final
destiny. How terrible, how naive, how fantastic, bloody,
grovelling, and outrageous were most of the solutions accepted, the
gigantic panorama of the book startlingly sets forth. What gory
agonies, what mystic exaltations, what dark cruelties, frenzied
abandons, and inhuman self denials have marked those puzzled
gropings for light and truth are revealed as by lightning flashes
in the crowding scenes of the epic. For the Temptation of St.
Anthony is an epic. Not a drama of man's actions, as all previous
epics have been, but a drama of the soul. All its movement is in
the adventure and conflict of the spirit. St. Anthony remains
always in the one place, almost as moveless as a mirror. His
vision—clarified of the sensual and the actual by his fastings and
macerations—becomes like the surface of an unruffled lake. A lake
reflecting the aberrant forms of thoughts that, like clouds, drift
between man and the infinite depths of knowledge. Clouds of
illusion forever changing, melting, fusing; assuming forms
grotesque, monstrous, intolerable; until at last the writhing mists
of speculation and ignorance are drunk up by the widening light of
wisdom and the fogs and phantasms vanish, leaving his consciousness
aware, in poignant ecstasy, of the cloudless deeps of truth. The
temptation of the flesh is but a passing episode. An eidolon of
Sheba's queen offers him luxury, wealth, voluptuous beauty, power,
dainty delights of eye and palate in vain. Man has never found his
most dangerous seductions in the appetites. More lamentable
disintegration has grown from his attempts to pierce beyond the
body's veil. The parched and tortured saint is whirled by
vertiginous visions through cycles of man's straining efforts to
know why, whence, whither. He assists at the rites of Mithira, the
prostrations of serpent-and-devil-worshippers, worshippers of fire,
of light, of the Greeks' deified forces of nature; of the northern
enthronement of brute force and war. He is swept by the soothing
breath of Quietism, plunges into every heresy and philosophy, sees
the orgies, the flagellations, the self mutilations, the battles
and furies of sects, each convinced that it has found the answer at
last to the Great Question, and endeavouring to constrain the rest
of humanity to accept the answer. He meets the Sphinx—embodied
interrogation—and the Chimera—the simulacrum of the fantasies of
the imagination—dashing madly about the stolid
querist.Lucifer—spirit of doubt of all dogmatic solutions—mounts with
Anthony into illimitable space. They rise beyond these struggles
and furies into the cold uttermost of the universe; among
innumerable worlds; worlds yet vaguely forming in the womb of time,
newly come to birth, lustily grown to maturity; worlds dying,
decaying, crumbling again into atomic dust. Overcome by the
intolerable Vast, Anthony sinks once more to his cell, and Lucifer,
who has shown him the macrocosm, opens to him the equal immensity
of the microcosm. Makes him see the swarming life that permeates
the seas, the earth and atmosphere, the incredible numerousness of
the invisible lives that people every drop of water, every grain of
sand, every breath of air. The unity of life dawns upon him, and
his heart, withered by dubiety, melts into joyousness and peace. As
the day dawns in gold he beholds the face of Christ.Flaubert's Lucifer has no relation to the jejune Devil of
man's early conception of material evil, nor does he resemble
Goethe's Mephistopheles; embodiment of the Eighteenth Century's
spirit of sneering disbeliefs and negation. He is rather our own
tempter—Science. He is the spirit of Knowledge: Nature itself
calling us to look into the immensities and read just our dogmas by
this new and terrible widening of our mental and moral horizons.
This last experience of the Saint reproduces the spiritual
experiences of the modern man; cast loose from his ancient
moorings, and yet finding at last in his new knowledge a truer
conception of the brotherhood of all life in all its forms, and
seeing still, in the growing light, the benignant eyes of
God.It is not remarkable that Flaubert resented the banality, the
dull grossness of the reception of his work, or that Hearn shared
his amazement and bitterness. Even yet the world wakes but slowly
to the true character of this masterpiece; this epic wrought with
so great a care and patience, so instinct with genius, dealing
perhaps more profoundly than any other mind has ever done with the
Great Adventure of humanity's eternal search for
Truth.ELIZABETH BISLAND.
I
I
It is in the Thebaid at the summit of a mountain, upon a
platform, rounded off into the form of a demilune, and enclosed by
huge stones.The Hermit's cabin appears in the background. It is built
of mud and reeds, it is flat-roofed and doorless. A pitcher and a
loaf of black bread can be distinguished within also, in the middle
of the apartment a large book resting on a wooden stela; while here
and there, fragments of basketwork, two or three mats, a basket,
and a knife lie upon the ground.