"Exuberance is better than taste"
About this Quote
Flaubert champions the unruly force of creative energy over the reassuring restraint of cultivated taste. The claim sounds paradoxical coming from a writer famed for le mot juste and an almost monastic devotion to form, yet it reveals how he understood artistic vitality. Exuberance is the surplus that makes art possible: an overflow of perception, feeling, and imagination. Taste is a regulator, a social and aesthetic code that trims, selects, and smooths. You can prune excess into shape; you cannot graft life into something bloodless.
The 19th century set Romantic heat against Classical cool, and Flaubert stood at the tense hinge between them. He distrusted cliche and kitsch, but he also loathed the complacency of bourgeois good taste, which confuses refinement with truth. In his novels the surfaces may be exquisitely controlled, but the energies beneath are volcanic. Think of the forensic clarity of Madame Bovary harnessing intense desire, or the lush historical sweep of SalammbO. The lesson is not that form is unimportant, but that form must channel abundance rather than replace it.
The aphorism also sketches a method. Begin with the draft that is too much: a messy profusion of images, arguments, rhythms. Then let taste do its proper work as an editor, a gardener with shears. What emerges retains the spark that initiated it. Start instead with taste alone and you get correctness without pulse, elegance without discovery, the careful pastiche that never risks failure and never achieves originality.
There is a moral nerve here as well. Exuberance wagers on the world; it trusts that the intensity of seeing and saying will make its own order. Taste, unmoored from that intensity, becomes timidity disguised as judgment. Flaubert asks for a disciplined life in service of wild work: let the frenzy of creation lead, then invite taste to follow, not as a censor but as a steward of what is vividly alive.
The 19th century set Romantic heat against Classical cool, and Flaubert stood at the tense hinge between them. He distrusted cliche and kitsch, but he also loathed the complacency of bourgeois good taste, which confuses refinement with truth. In his novels the surfaces may be exquisitely controlled, but the energies beneath are volcanic. Think of the forensic clarity of Madame Bovary harnessing intense desire, or the lush historical sweep of SalammbO. The lesson is not that form is unimportant, but that form must channel abundance rather than replace it.
The aphorism also sketches a method. Begin with the draft that is too much: a messy profusion of images, arguments, rhythms. Then let taste do its proper work as an editor, a gardener with shears. What emerges retains the spark that initiated it. Start instead with taste alone and you get correctness without pulse, elegance without discovery, the careful pastiche that never risks failure and never achieves originality.
There is a moral nerve here as well. Exuberance wagers on the world; it trusts that the intensity of seeing and saying will make its own order. Taste, unmoored from that intensity, becomes timidity disguised as judgment. Flaubert asks for a disciplined life in service of wild work: let the frenzy of creation lead, then invite taste to follow, not as a censor but as a steward of what is vividly alive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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