Flaubert, GUSTAVE, who is considered by competent judges the most remarkable French novelist of the second half of the 19th century, was born at Rouen on the 12th December 1821. He was the son of a physician of eminence, and inherited, though not wealth, a fortune sufficient to enable him to choose his own way of life. He hesitated long between his father's profession and literature; and in literature he began with poetry, which, however, he definitely gave up before long for prose. Flaubert's life was extremely uneventful in outward incident, the turning-point of it being, according to his intimate friend M. Maxime du Camp (whose account, though traversed by some of Flaubert's other friends, seems to be accurate in the main), the access when he was still a young man of some obscure form of brain-disease, which altered, and even to some extent arrested, his intellectual development. M. du Camp goes so far as to hold that almost all the original part of Flaubert's work was conceived, if not actually sketched, before this time. But however this may be, Flaubert was a very late producer, and his work, when it did appear, was marked by a very strong and somewhat morbid idiosyncrasy. He had comparatively early (before 1849) written some fragments of a work only completed much later on the Temptation of St Anthony, but his first published book was the famous novel of Madame Bovary, which appeared in 1857. This is the history of a girl of some education, with strong aspirations after elegance of life and depth of passion, whose fate condemns her to live in the country as the wife of a well-intentioned but utterly stupid and commonplace doctor. Her successive lapses into vice, her desertion by each of her lovers, her extravagance, and her final suicide form the central part of a story, the outline of which is filled up by a series of the most wonderful studies of scene and character, charged with satiric melancholy, and expressed in an extraordinarily careful and vivid style. Style, indeed, was the object of Flaubert's main devotion, and as he advanced in years he for the most part shut himself up in his small country-house near Rouen to wrestle, as his own favourite phrase expressed it, with the language which was to clothe his thought. Although Madame Bovary is not constructed according to English ideas of decorum, its license in that respect does not exceed what had long been common in French, and the author was most indignantly surprised at its prosecution as an offence against morals, a prosecution which did not succeed. His second work, Salammbô (1862), dealt with the last struggle of Rome and Carthage. The author had taken immense pains to study the locality and all the authorities; and he put into his book in consequence an amount of archaeological detail and local colour which sometimes seems to overweight the story. Salammbô is moreover deeply tinged with the sombre horror which was one of Flaubert's notes.
In 1866 Flaubert was decorated with the Legion of Honour. Three years later L'Éducation Sentimentale, a much longer book, appeared, but was far less popular. No book of Flaubert's displays more accurate observation of life, but the absence of central interest and the disheartening effect of a mere succession of disillusionments undergone by the hero make it a book for few. In 1874 appeared the splendid phantasmagoria of La Tentation de St-Antoine, worked up from the early fragments already referred to, and the masterpiece of its kind; while in the same year the author produced a play, Le Candidat, with little success, and of no merit. In 1877 there followed his last book (exclusive of posthumous work), Trois Contes, which represents all his best manners; the first tale, on the daughter of Herodias, being a Salammbô in little, Un Cœur Simple displaying all the power of Madame Bovary with a perfectly harmless subject, and St-Julien l'Hospitalier being in the same vein as the Tentation, with the addition of something like a central thread of interest. Flaubert died on May 9, 1880, and after his death appeared a novel, Boward et Péeuchet, which had not received his final revision, and which is somewhat undigested. It tells of the attempts of two retired men of the middle class to interest themselves in literary and scientific researches. There has been published (also posthumously) an extremely interesting correspondence with George Sand; and other letters throwing much light on Flaubert's character have followed. In his last years he was a member of a small set of distinguished writers (the other three being the great Russian novelist Turgeneff, M. Daudet, and M. Zola), who frequently met, and who acquired the reputation as of a sort of headquarters-staff of what has been successively called realism and naturalism in fiction. Flaubert, however, never belonged to either of these schools, least of all to that of naturalism. His minute and exhaustive description was indeed a point in common with both; but this description was always subordinated to a strictly romantic conception of the general scheme of story-telling. Flaubert was in fact a pure romanticist who came late and had engrafted on the earlier romanticism not a few characteristics rather inherited than borrowed from Balzac on the one hand, and Stendhal on the other. It is improbable that any more remarkable examples of this combined mode will ever be created than Madame Bovary and Salammô, each in its kind, though from the mere fact of the combination it follows that some readers will fix their attention most on the realism, others on the romance. A splendid 'édition définitive' of Flaubert's works was issued in 8 vols. (1885). See work by J. C. Tarver (1895).