Chapter 8

[1]A strong kind of beer, first brewed by Chr. Mumme, of Brunswick, Germany, in 1492. Pope says: "The clamorous crowd is hushed with mugs of mum."—TR.

[2]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 143.

[3]Translated by J. S.

[4]Longfellow's translation.

[5]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 159.

[6]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 240.

[7]Referring to Sveaborg, Finland, built according to the plans of Field-Marshal Count Augustus Ehrensvärd, whose name is hewn in gigantic characters on the granite rock from which the great ship-basin is constructed.

[8]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 171.

[9]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 175.

[10]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 356-7.

[11]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 308.

[12]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 196.

[13]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 157.

[14]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 157.

[15]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 237.

[16]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 341.

[17]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 213.

[18]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 213.

[19]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, pp. 97, 98.

[20]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 82.

[21]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 292.

[22]"Lovely Rose" is a passionate love-song, whose interest centres in the anguish of a butterfly at being removed from the rose at night, and only being permitted to caress her during the day.

[23]R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 269-271.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

Gustave Flaubert was born at Rouen, in the year 1821. When, in 1880, he was snatched away by sudden death, he did not leave European literary art in the same condition in which he had found it. No artist, as such, could desire to hand down to posterity a better renown. The work of his life marks a step in the history of the novel.

He was a prose author of the first rank; for several years indeed no one stood higher than he in France. His strength as a prosaist reposed upon an artistic and literary conscientiousness, which was exalted almost to the dignity of genius. He became a great artist because he was unsparing in his efforts, both when he was making preparations to write and when he was engaged in writing; he collected the results of his observations, facts, and illustrations, with the painstaking of a mere savant, while striving, with the passionate eagerness of a mere adorer of form, to fashion his materials in a plastic and harmonious manner. He became a master of modern fiction because he was sufficiently self-denying to be willing to represent real psychological events alone, and to shun all effects of poetic eloquence, all pathetic or dramatic situations which appeared beautiful or interesting at the expense of the truth. His name is synonymous with artistic earnestness and literary rigor.

He was not a savant who was at the same time a writer of fiction, or who, in the course of his life, became a writer of fiction. His literary work is based on earnest, slowly acquired preparatory studies. His books have nothing in them that is juvenile or frivolous, nothing that is smiling or versatile. These books are the results of a slowly developed and late maturity. He did not make his début until he was thirty-five years old, and, although he devoted his whole time to literature, he left behind him in his fifty-ninth year but seven works.[1]

His was a profoundly original, but by no means elementary character. His originality was dependent on the fact that two literary currents united in his temperament and there formed a new well-spring. In his youth he received simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, two impulses, which determined his intellectual career.

The first current that reached him was the romantic-descriptive tendency in literature originating with Chateaubriand, a tendency characterized by a style fraught with lyrical emotion and brilliant coloring, which charmed the French reading public for the first time in "Atala" and "Les Martyres," and which later gained a far firmer and more powerful rhythm, as well as a far superior picturesque vigor, in Victor Hugo's "Les Orientales," and "Notre Dame de Paris." Like all poets, indeed like all human beings, Flaubert was inclined in youth to the lyrical, and his lyric muse, through the historic development of French poesie, became a varied-hued and melancholy homage to the religion of beauty. The second current directed into his inner being, was the tendency of Balzac's novels against the modern, their employment of what was hideous and brutal as characteristic, their passionate realistic bias, and their fidelity of observation.

While these two currents flowed at one and the same time through his inner being, and after the lapse of some time became blended together, they received a new coloring and a new name.

As a youth he had composed for the drawers of his writing-table many descriptive and pathetic lyrics, in Hugo's, Gautier's, and Byron's style; but justly feeling that his originality could not assert itself in this direction, and that, upon the whole, there was no longer room for anything original in this department, he withheld his productions from the public, and reconciled himself to the idea of appearing comparatively ungifted, or, at all events, unproductive. About the same time he made literary efforts in an opposite direction; he spoke himself sometimes of a tragi-comedy on the smallpox; but this attempt, too, he refrained from publishing. Not until Chateaubriand and Balzac had fostered in his mind a new poetic form, did he feel sure of his originality, and made his first public appearance.

Even to those who have read little or nothing of Flaubert, it is well known that in the year 1856 he created an extraordinary sensation in Paris, and very soon throughout Europe, with a novel entitled "Madame Bovary." An absurd lawsuit,—the state attorney prosecuted both author and publisher, on the plea of the immoral tendencies of the work, and a unanimous verdict of acquittal on the part of the jury, could do little to increase the attention which the strongly individual new talent had excited. The book appeared singular and scandalous, as is apt to be the case with new attempts in literature. It was a token of opposition. People compared it with the literary productions of earlier times, and asked themselves if it was poetry. It was rather a reminder of surgery, of anatomy. Very much later, in Parisian literary circles where fidelity to a former conception of poetry was maintained, it was said: "Will you please excuse us from reading M. Flaubert's skeletons." The author was called an ultra-realist; people found in his novel only the merciless, inexorable physiology of every-day life in its sorrowful ugliness.

In the first moment of excitement, people overlooked the fact that now and then there escaped from this physiologist a thoroughly impersonal, it is true, yet figurative, richly colored expression, which seemed freighted with a message from quite a different world than that of vulgar life. The half-cultured literary public did not perceive that these descriptions of simple provincial circumstances and provincial misfortunes, of pitiful errors and of a wretched death, were produced in a style which was at once as clear as a mirror and as pleasant to the ear as harmonious music. There lay buried in the book a lyric poet, and ever and anon there burst from the grave a word of flame.

It was precisely the epoch when the generation born between 1820 and 1830 was assuming the mastery in literature, and revealing its physiognomic type by an analysis of real life, executed with harsh hands. The new generation turned from philosophic idealism, and from all that pertained to romance, and wielded the dissecting-knife with genuine enthusiasm. In the same year in which "Madame Bovary" appeared, Taine, in his work "Les philosophes français du 19esiècle," dissected the prevailing spiritualistic doctrines, annihilated Cousin as a thinker, and declared, with the utmost nonchalance, and without entering into any controversy with the romantic school, that Victor Hugo and Lamartine were already classic writers, who were read by young people rather from curiosity than from sympathy, and who were as far removed from them as Shakespeare and Racine. They were "admirable and worthy remains of a period which had been great, but which no longer existed." His friend, Sarcey, wrote, not much later, in "Figaro," that article which was so often quoted and so much derided by Banville, the disciple of the great romantic school, and which culminated in the words: "Forward, my friends! Down with romance! Voltaire and the Normal School forever!"[2]In dramatic poetry, opposition to the romantic school appeared to have been frustrated by the unfruitful littleÉcole de bon sens.Ponsard and those who were intellectually allied to him had not been able to maintain long what people had once expected of them; but the more modern realistic dramatic writers at this juncture combined with them. Augier, who had dedicated his first poetry to Ponsard, and who had at first followed the sentimental,bourgeoistendency of the latter, entered on a new career, in 1855, devoted to drastic description of the immediate past. The way had just been pointed out to him by the bolder, hardier Dumas, with whom, in spite of all his respect for the generation to which his father belonged, had commenced the direct and pertinent derision of the romantic ideal; this can be seen in therôlesof Nanjac, in "Le Demimonde" and of Montègre, in "L'ami des femmes." The answer that Montègre, bewildered by the superiority of Ryon, makes the latter,"Vous êtes un physiologiste, monsieur," was in reality the sole reply that the elder generation could offer to the critic of the younger.

Augier was born in 1820, Dumas in 1824, Sarcey and Taine in 1828. The author of "Madame Bovary," who first saw the light in 1821, evidently had kindred spirits among his contemporaries. He differed from them in his secret, unshaken fidelity to the ideals of the past generation; but he united with them so unhesitatingly in their attacks on the caricatures of these ideals that, without further ceremony, he must be classed in the group of these anti-romantic writers.

And yet, through his harshness and coldness, he was much more of a reminder of Mérimée, who stood alone in the past generation; to many, indeed, he appeared but a heavier, broader Mérimée. For the first thing noticeable in him was that he was a cold-blooded poet; and these two epithets, cold-blooded and poet, had previously been united in Mérimée alone.

A closer study, however, would have shown that the cold-blooded deliberation of Mérimée was of quite a different character than that of Flaubert. Mérimée treated romantic material in an unromantic, dry, and meagre manner. His tone and his style corresponded, for the tone was ironical, the style lacking in imagery, and cold. With style and tone, however, the wildness of the theme and its barbaric, impassioned character were at variance.

Flaubert, on the contrary, harmonized theme and tone. With infinitely superior irony he pictured the vapid and the absurd; but with theme and tone his style was at variance. He was not, as Mérimée, rational and meagre; he was all radiant with coloring, and harmonious, and he spread the gold-wrought veil of this style over all the commonplace and sorrowful incidents he narrated. No one could read the book aloud without being astonished at the music of its prose. The style contains a thousand melodious secrets; it aims the keenest satire at human weakness, powerless yearnings and aspirations, self-deception and self-satisfaction, to an accompaniment of organ music. While the surgeon in the text, without the slightest manifestation of sympathy, is lacerating and tearing to pieces, a beauty-loving lyric poet is sobbing out a low, wailing accompaniment. If we should turn to a page in which a village apothecary utters his half scientific prattle, in which a diligence tour is depicted, or an old casket described, we would find it, viewed from a stylistic standpoint, as highly colored and enduring as a mosaic, owing to the freshness of its expressions and the solid structure of its sentences. Each clause is so carefully put together that no two words could possibly be removed without destroying the entire page. The assured refinement of the imagery, the metallic ring of the musical flow of words, the rolling breadth of the prose rhythms, invested the narrative with a marvellous power that was now picturesque, now comic.

There was evidently something singularly dual in his temperament. His character was composed of two distinct elements which were complements of each other: a burning hatred of stupidity and an unbounded love of art. This hatred, as is so often the case with hatred, felt itself irresistibly attracted to its object. Stupidity in all its forms, such as folly, superstition, self-conceit, and illiberality, attracted him magnetically, and inspired him. He was compelled to depict it trait by trait; he deemed it, in and for itself, entertaining, even when others could not discover it to be interesting or comical. He made a formal collection of stupidities, absurd pleas for law-suits, and vapid illustrations; he collected a mass of wretched verse, written by physicians alone; every evidence of human stupidity, as such, had its value to him. In his works, indeed, he has done nothing else than erect monuments with a masterly hand to human limitation and blindness, to our misfortunes, so far as they depend upon our stupidities. I almost fear that the world's history was to him the history of human stupidity. His faith in the progress of the human race was exceedingly wavering. The mass, even the reading public, was to him "that everlasting blockhead which we call they (on)." If we wished to label this side of his character, and absolutely stamp him with one of those popular, but to him so detestable, words ending with "ist," it could not with full justice be pessimist, nor yet nihilist; imbecillist would be the word.

To this unremitting pursuit of stupidity, whose embittered character was shrouded in its purely impersonal form, corresponded, as before stated, a passionate love of literature, which to him signified beauty and harmony, which was considered by him the highest, in fact the only true, art, and which he cultivated with a yearning for perfection that first kept him long silent, then caused him at a late day to become a master, and finally rendered him early unfruitful again. When he depicted the commonplace, it caused him more distress than others; he therefore endeavored to elevate his materials through the artistic manner of his treatment, and since in his eyes the most important attribute of authorship was the plastic power, he strove beyond all else to attain perspicuity. He has said so himself, and we feel it to be true when we study him through his style.

In his very first work all the merits of this style came to light.

Read the following passage from "Madame Bovary," where Emma, yet unmarried, accompanies Bovary to the door, after his medical visit to her father: "She always went with him to the first step of the outside stairs. If his horse had not yet been brought forward they remained there. They had said adieu, they attempted no further remark; the fresh air encompassed her, played with the downy hair of her neck, or blew about her side the strings of her apron, which twisted and twirled like a little flag. Once when a thaw had set in, the water was trickling down from the bark of the trees, and the snow was melting on the roofs of the buildings. She stood on the threshold; she went back to get her parasol; she opened it. The parasol was of a changeable green and blue silk, and the sun shining through it lent a radiant and flickering lustre to her white complexion. She smiled beneath it, while the soft zephyrs played about her, and the raindrops were heard to come pattering down, one by one, on the outstretched silk of the parasol."

So insignificant a matter as this ordinary leave-taking becomes interesting through the loving care bestowed on the description, and the separation obtains individual life from the prominence given to a single day, when, after all, nothing of moment transpires. The accuracy with which this commonplace situation is portrayed, transforms it into a painting of high rank, one that reproduces simultaneously the visible and the audible, the tableau and the mobile life.

Or recall the passage where Emma, after her marriage, falls in love for the first time:—

"Emma grew thin, her cheeks became pale, her face lengthened. With her smoothly brushed black hair, neatly tied with a ribbon, her large eyes, her straight nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent as she was, she almost seemed to glide through existence without touching it, and to bear on her brow the indistinct impress of some sublime destiny. She was so sorrowful and so calm, and at the same time so gentle and so reserved, that in her presence people felt as though seized by some icy spell, just as a shudder is apt to run through the frame in church where the perfume of flowers is mingled with the chill of the marble."

The comparison is new, is striking and brief. We here detect the poet in the narrative.

We detect him still more clearly when he continues thus:—

"The ladies of the city admired her housewifely taste, the patients her courtesy, the poor her benevolence. But she herself was full of desire, full of rage and hatred. Her dress, with its rigid folds, concealed a troubled heart, whose pangs these chaste lips of hers did not reveal. She was in love with Léon.... She investigated his every footstep; she searched his countenance; she invented a whole history in order to have a pretext for a visit to his room. She esteemed the apothecary's wife happy because she slept under the same roof with him; and her thoughts were continually alighting on the house, precisely as the doves of the 'Golden Lion' that were always flying there to moisten their rosy feet and their white wings in the muddy water of the eaves."

This is not a striking general comparison; it is a comparison borrowed from a positive occurrence in the village where Emma lives. So vividly does this village present itself to the mind's eye of the author.

Sometimes he condenses an entire description into one powerful poetic phrase. So it is in the passage where he introduces the old maid-servant who has been summoned to a meeting of the agricultural union in order to receive for her faithful service of fifty-four years on one farm a silver medal valued at twenty-five francs.

Katharina Niçaise Elizabeth Leroux, a little old woman who looks all shrivelled up in her poor garments, appears upon the estrade. We see her thin face with its deep wrinkles beneath her cap, and her long hands with their knotted joints, which had been coated by the dust of the barn, the grease of wool-picking, and the potash of the wash-tub, with so hard a crust that, although they had been washed in pure spring water, they still seemed dirty, and which could no longer be wholly closed, but always remained open, as though in testimony of too much toil. We see the nun-like rigidity of her expression, the animal stupidity of her wan visage, her motionless bewilderment at the unusual spectacle of banners, flourish of trumpets, and smiling gentlemen in black coats, decorated with the cross of the Legion of Honor. Then Flaubert condenses the picture into this one sentence:—

"Thus stood in the presence of these well-to-do old fogies this half-century of slavery."

Trivially accurate as are the details of the description, the style of this recapitulating sentence is grand and finished. We feel plainly that for this author the art of literary composition was the highest of all arts.

Not only was literary composition his unconditional, his sole calling, but, as may be stated without any undue exaggeration, his conception of the world was equivalent to the thought: The world exists in order that it may be described.

He once gave expression to this opinion of his in a thoroughly suggestive manner. In his introduction to the posthumous poems of Louis Bouilhet, alluding to his friendship with the author, he addresses the following words to youth:—

"And since upon every occasion a moral is demanded, here follows mine:

"If there be anywhere two young people who pass their Sundays in reading the poets together, who confide to each other all their efforts and their plans, all the striking similes and every pertinent word that may occur to them, and who, although otherwise indifferent to the opinion of the world, conceal this passion of theirs with virgin modesty, I would give them this advice.

"Go, side by side, into the forests, repeat verses to each other, take into your souls the sap of the trees, and the everlasting might of the masterworks of creation, yield to the impression of the sublime. Should you ever progress so far that, in all the occurrences about you, as soon as they fall under your observation, you see only an illusion that is to be described, and this to so great a degree that nothing, not even your own existence seems to you to have any other purpose than to serve as an object for description, and you become firmly resolved to make whatever sacrifice the calling may demand, then come boldly forward and give books to the world."

Rarely has an author, without making a direct effort to that effect, more keenly characterized his own peculiarity. He has consecrated his life to the calling of describing illusions. I know very well that, in his estimation, everything that transpires is for the true author an image, merely a phantom to be held fast by art. We can, however, unhesitatingly invest his words with the wider significance that life, as a whole, is to be conceived as a series of dissolving phantoms, and then the sentence applies accurately to himself. Take a mental survey of his materials from the first unworldly and worldly dreams through which Emma Bovary strives to rise above the emptiness of provincial life and the insipidity of her marriage, to the hallucinations of a St. Antonius,—what else have they all been to him than illusions for description!

An illusion has the dual character that corresponds to Flaubert's temperament. The phantom, apart from its delusive attribute, is beautiful; it has coloring and perfume; it fills the mind and communicates to it an increase of life. Thus tempered, it attracted the adorer of beauty in Flaubert. But an illusion is, furthermore, hollow and empty, is often foolish and hideous, is not rarely, at the same time, comic; and thus conceived it captivated the realist in Flaubert, the man whose gaze penetrated the soul's life, and who found satisfaction in dissolving the air-castles of fancy into their simplest elements.

How did he become what in his first novel we learned him to be?

His father was a celebrated surgeon in Rouen, a strictly upright, and kind-hearted man, who brought up his son independently and well. That his first home was the house of a physician is felt in his books. He studied medicine himself for a little while, later took up the study of law, but even in his school-days cast himself passionately into literature; and in this enthusiasm of his he met a friend of his own age, who became a friend for life,—the poet Louis Bouilhet. Without doubt there are autobiographical elements in the description of the friendship between Frédéric and Deslauriers in his novel, "L'éducation sentimentale." Flaubert, like Frédéric, went to Paris when nineteen years old, to pursue his studies. His father purchased the villa Croisset at Rouen, which he afterward inherited; he passed his life alternately in Rouen and in Paris, a life in which there were but two external events,—a journey to the Orient, which he undertook when he was thirty years of age, and a later journey to northern Africa, which preceded the completion of "Salammbô." In Rouen he took delight in shutting himself up for months at a time, to study and to write; in Paris he chiefly sought diversion. He was in youth persevering in his labors and violent in his pleasures.

His temperament corresponded to his exterior. I only saw him in his later years, and then I had but a cursory view of him. But no one could forget this large-eyed, blue-eyed Hercules, with his rosy-hued complexion, his high, bald brow, and his long mustache, which concealed the large mouth and the vigorous jaws. He carried his head high and slightly thrown back; his abdomen protruded somewhat. He was not fond of walking; but he inclined to violent gestures; and he beat the air wildly with his arms, when hurling forth monstrous paradoxes in tones of thunder. Like all blustering giants, he was good-natured. His wrath, says one of his friends, boiled over and fell like milk.

He had, indeed, grown up at the time when the French romantic school was in its prime. He had received his first stamp from this school, and retained traces of it in his style and in his manner of abusing thebourgeoisie,which recalled Théophile Gautier's "truculent" form of speech, as well as in his mode of dress. He was fond of wearing large, broad-brimmed hats, enormously wide pantaloons, and coats that were made to fit tight at the waist. In the summer time he went about his own dwelling in broad, white and red striped breeches, and a sort of jacket that made him resemble a Turk. There was a report among his friends that the citizens of Rouen, when preparing for Sunday excursions into the country, would promise their children to let them see M. Flaubert in his garden if they were good.

I said that some journeys were the main events of his life. Women have taken less place in it than in the lives of most men. He had, when he was twenty years old, loved them as a troubadour. At that time he had repeatedly walked several miles in order to kiss the muzzle of a Newfoundland dog that a lady he admired was in the habit of caressing. Later he accustomed himself to a more matter-of-fact mode of contemplation and practice in erotic matters. He was a friend of anecdotes and stories of the manner of Rabelais, and in his books the erotic illusion was grasped by him with quite as hardy hands as all other illusions.

Nevertheless, in this point, as in so many others in the character of Flaubert, there was an abiding duality. He, the old bachelor, the passionate tobacco-smoker, who held intimate, friendly relations with men alone, and who felt at ease in no other female society than in that of certain pretty but not over-fastidious ladies,—held the belief, apparently the result of personal experience as well as of a deeply rooted abstract conviction, that it was the natural, so to say proper, thing for man to cherish for life one grand amatory passion, which must forever remain unrequited.

Fully in accord with this, we find in a letter to a lady, dating from the last year of Flaubert's life, the playful, yet at the same time mournfully true, words: "We poor laborers of literature! Why is that denied to us which is so readily granted to commonplace people? They have a heart! We have none at all! So I repeat to you once again that I, for my part, am an uncomprehended soul, the lastgrisette,the sole survivor of the old race of troubadours."

This "uncomprehended soul," however, was not in the habit of turning to women for comprehension. He dreaded love as a danger and a burden. Friendship alone was to him a religion, and among his friends there was no one who stood so near to him as that first and enduring friend, Bouilhet.

I do not exactly know if there have been times that were especially propitious to independent minds. But this much I do know: these two young men, who stepped forth into life when thebourgeoisieunder Louis Philippe had gained the dominion and acquired a poetic expression partly from the feeble and righteously inclinedÉcole de bon sens, and partly from the "Vaudevilles" of Scribe, found the period it was their destiny to live in, the worst of all times. The romantic school had outlived itself and produced its own caricature. It was the fashion everywhere to praise common sense and to deride poesy. Inspiration and passion were out of date, and consequently laughable. Everything that was not commonplace was found tiresome. The two youths conceived the age in which they lived to be that of the sway of mediocrity and of the commonplace; they saw the victorious mediocrity, like a monstrous black water-spout, absorb all things, and whirl all things away with it.

This gave them both a fund of melancholy and deep earnestness, an under-current of contempt for humanity, a sensation of spiritual isolation, and through it an inclination for productions of an impersonal, objective kind.

As the result of such a frame of mind it was that Flaubert, in mature manhood, resolved to come forward as an author, and wrote "Madame Bovary." There was wafted from this book a breath of icy coldness. It seemed as though the author at length had succeeded in drawing forth the truth from the deep, cold well where it had been lying, and as though it were now standing on its pedestal and freezing, having brought with it all the cold, shuddering horror of the abyss. A singular book, written without the slightest degree of tenderness for its subject! Others had depicted the simple life of the country and of the province with melancholy, with humor, and at least with that attempt at idealizing which contemplation from afar is apt to bring with it. He regarded it without sympathy, and represented it as insipid and spiritless as it was. His landscapes were devoid of so-called poetry, and were painted briefly and yet completely. In his severe, masterly style he contented himself with reproducing the chief outlines and coloring, but gave thus an accurate presentation of the landscape. And he was wholly without tenderness for his principal character, a rare phenomenon in a poet whose principal character is a young, beautiful, and exceedingly attractive woman, who passes her life in yearning, languishing, and passionate desire, who errs and is deceived, is ruined, and finally perishes without properly sinking beneath the level of her surroundings. But every dream, every hope, every delusion, every naïve and unhealthy desire that floated through her brain was investigated; and brought to light without agitation, indeed with an overwhelming irony. There was scarcely a phase of her existence in which she failed to appear ridiculous or morally repulsive, and not until she dies a hideous death does the suppressed irony wholly recede, and she breathes her last, not as an object of sympathy, it is true, yet not as an object of contempt.

The author seemed thoroughly cold, even in the description of the hour of her death. That this appearance was deceptive is proved by a letter from Flaubert, which may be found in Taine's work, "De l'intelligence" (I., 94), and in which he says, "When I wrote the poisoning scene of Emma Bovary, I had so strong a taste of arsenic in my mouth, I was so thoroughly poisoned myself, that for two consecutive days I could digest nothing; indeed, I found it impossible to keep a morsel of food on my stomach." How deeply the author was affected, body and soul, was concealed in the novel, owing to the supreme self-control he had exercised while engaged on the work.

Throughout the entire book there appeared not a single personage with whom the author could possibly have anything in common, or with whom he could, in ever so slight a degree, be supposed to wish to change places. His characters were all, without exception, commonplace, unlovely, vicious, or unfortunate. Nor did he attempt the slightest deviation from the standpoint taken. The young wife, for instance, dangerous though her instincts were, in her yearning for the beautiful, her aspirations after the ideal, and her persistent faith in the romance of love, possesses attributes which, if portrayed differently, or with a more sparing hand, might have rendered the character noble, even in its errors. What would not George Sand have made of her! But Flaubert is determined not to fall into the old ruts, and so he assiduously robs the so-called fascinating sins of every trace of poetry. The betrayed husband, likewise, notwithstanding his lack of skill as a physician and his awkwardness as a man, is kind-hearted, patient, upright, and truly devoted to Emma, and thus has elements which, under other circumstances, might have produced a most touching effect. Moreover, he develops, at her death, qualities, such as profound attachment and self-forgetfulness, which a slight pressure from the finger of the author might have made seem significant and worthy of respect. But the creative artist refuses to give the clay this slight pressure; his love of truth compels him to keep the form within the limits that to him appear the correct ones, and so he permits Bovary to remain, from beginning to end, a good-natured, undignified, inefficient, and unattractive person.

There is in the novel but a single character with whom we are made to feel partially in sympathy, and that is the little apothecary apprentice, Justin, who adores Emma from afar. There is one situation, after her death, in which the author almost seems inclined to idealize him. When all the other mourners have left the churchyard, Justin draws near her grave, and we read:—

"On the grave among the fir-trees there knelt a weeping child, whose heart was ready to burst with the sobs that; shook his frame; and there he remained, in that shaded! spot, groaning beneath the weight of an immeasurable anguish, which was milder than the moon, and more unfathomable than the night."

We marvel to think that these lines have Flaubert for their author. But then we read in continuation: "Suddenly the wicket gate turned on creaking hinges. It was the grave-digger Lestiboudois; he came in search of his spade, which he had forgotten a little while before. He recognized Justin, as the boy clambered over the wall, and knew at once who was the offender that had stolen his potatoes."

This passage is the only one that remained in my mind ten years after my first perusal of "Madame Bovary," and it is a most admirable passage. It is not arbitrarily ironical,à laHeine; irony, in this case, is simply keen pénétration, the work of a versatile mind. It is quite natural that Justin should be stirred to the most profound and poetic emotions by the death of the lady whom he adored; but it is none the less natural that he should previously have stolen potatoes, and that the grave-digger should intuitively discover in the fact of his clambering over the wall of the churchyard an indication of his potato theft. But that Flaubert should have these two circumstances, these two sides of life, before his eyes at the same time, is proof of an intellectual vigor and a command of his subject which, as far as I am aware, have never before appeared in a similar form.

The artistic irony of Flaubert is here impersonal, necessary, true, and profound, in quite a different way than that of Mérimée. It is merely a stereoscopic view, by means of which reality is set forth in bold relief.

It is no wonder that at first people scarcely discovered anything else in the work than this mode of contemplation, and the fidelity to real life that was its product. If we leave out of consideration the brief period when the absurd notion was afloat that Flaubert was an immoral writer, it may safely be said that the prevailing idea concerning him was that he was what is called a realist. He copied the insignificant and the important with equal conscientiousness, but with an evident predilection for the commonplace and the morally repulsive; in fact, everything with him centred in one plan, vigorous but harsh. The admirers of the book found it a most remarkable work; the fault-finders pronounced the tendency introduced by Flaubert photographic, but not artistic. People expected, or rather dreaded, a new "Madame Bovary" from his hand.

But they waited for it in vain, for nothing further was heard from him. Years passed, and he still remained silent. Finally, after the lapse of seven years, he appeared before the public with a new novel, and the reading world proclaimed aloud its astonishment. This new book bore the reader far away from the villages of Normandy and the nineteenth century. The vanished author of "Madame Bovary" was found again amid the ruins of ancient Carthage. He represented, in "Salammbô," nothing more or less than Carthage in the days of Hamilcar; a city and a civilization of which people had scarcely any reliable knowledge,—a war between Carthage and the hireling troops of the city, which did not so much as offer general historic, or even so-called ideal interest. A Parisian novel, whose plot centred in violated marriage vows, had been looked for, and in its stead was received one whose scenes were laid amid ancient Punic culture, Tanit's worship, and Moloch adoration, sieges and battles, terrors without number or measure, the death of an entire army by starvation, and the slow martyrdom of an imprisoned Lybian chieftain.

And the strangest part of it was that all this subject-matter, about which no one knew anything, or could in the least control, this whole extinct barbaric world, was produced with a clearness and a minute accuracy that was in no respect inferior to that of "Madame Bovary." People discovered that Flaubert's methods were in no wise dependent upon the character of his materials, that they were the same in regard to this colossal, foreign subject as they had been in dealing with his former commonplace theme. He had played a prank on the public, manifesting in a striking manner how little he had been understood. Any one who had looked upon him as a realist servilely bound to the clod, could now learn how thoroughly at home Flaubert felt in tropical lands. Any one who had thought that the petty affairs of every-day life, in their ugliness and their absurdity, were the sole objects that had power to captivate him, must now discover that Flaubert in his youth had shared the enthusiasms of the men of 1830, and that he, as well as they, had been attracted by primitive passions and barbaric customs. Yet to how great a degree Flaubert actually entered into the sympathies and naïveté of the extreme romantic school, very few had the most remote idea, even after reading "Salammbô." The sun of Africa and the life of the Orient had been made hallowed to him by Byron and Victor Hugo, and his personal impressions in the Orient had only confirmed the poetic ones. The aroma of coffee gave him hallucinations of wandering caravans, and he swallowed the most horrible dishes with a sense of piety, if they but had an exotic name.

Flaubert had done his utmost to produce something that resembled ancient Carthage. He was artist enough, however, to know that the main point was not the outward truth, but the inner truth which makes probability. His descriptions were to many unconditionally convincing. A doubt concerning their conformity with a long since vanished reality, was once answered in my presence by one of the first critics in France with a simple "I am quite sure it is true." Flaubert himself came out openly and boldly against the doubters, in his defensive reply to an attack of Sainte-Beuve, with the following words: "I believe I have produced something that resembles Carthage. But that is not the question. I don't care a straw for archæology! If the colors are not harmonious, if the details do not accord, if the morals cannot be traced to religion or the occurrences to passion, if the characters are not well sustained, if the costumes do not correspond to the customs, or the buildings to the climate, then my book is, of course, untrue. Otherwise it is true."

These words hit the nail on the head; we are impressed by them with the master's good conscience and the authority with which it invests him. His work was not, as were so many later archæological novels, a masquerade, in which modern emotions and views of life are brought forward in antique costumes. No; everything here was on a par, and had the same wild, formidable stamp. Love, stratagem, revenge, piety, strength of character, all were unmodern.

The poet's love of truth was evidently as ardent and as vehement as it had been when he had written his first novel. Now, however, in the presence of this victory over death and the past, it seemed absurd to speak of Flaubert's photographing. Therefore this new book yielded a more correct standpoint for the "realism" of its predecessor. That Flaubert could not be classed among those who were copyists of accidental truth, became clear. It was seen that his accuracy of description and information was rooted in a peculiar precision of imagination. He evidently possessed in an equally high degree the two elements that constitute the being of the artist: the gift of observation and the power of investing with form. He had the bias and the capacity for the study of nature and for historic study, the scrutinizing eye which no relation between details escaped. To speak now of photography in connection with him was impossible. For study implies activity, ardor, and an eye for the essential; while photography, on the other hand, is something passive, mechanical, and totally indifferent to the distinctions between essential and non-essential matters. And Flaubert, furthermore, had the temperament of the artist, that condition of mind which heats red-hot everything acquired by observation, marking it with its own stamp, and which reveals itself as style through the impress given. For what is style but the sensated result of the temperament, the medium by means of which an author compels the reader to see as he has seen! Style marks the difference between the artistically truthful delineation and a good photography, and style is omnipresent with Flaubert.

No sooner had he collected his observations, and made his preliminary studies for a book, than they ceased, as such, to interest him. Thenceforth the chief matter of import to him was to write this book in perfect language. And language became everything, while the carefully prepared notes dwindled into wholly subordinate affairs. That he was accurate and reliable he was in the habit of declaring to be no merit on his part, simply the justice an author owed the public; for truthfulness, in and for itself, had nothing whatever to do with art. "No," he would cry, in tones of thunder, flinging out his arms as he spoke, "the only important and enduring thing under the sun, is a well-formed sentence, a sentence with hand and foot, that harmonizes with the sentences preceding and following it, and that falls pleasantly on the ear when it is read aloud." So he wrote very little each day, at the utmost not more than two or three pages, weighed each word in order to avoid repetitions, rhymes, and crude expressions, and relentlessly pursued a repeated word, even at a distance of thirty or forty lines; indeed he could not so much as endure the recurrence of the same syllable in one sentence. Often a single letter vexed him, and he would search patiently for words in which it was not found; sometimes he devoted considerable energy to an eager chase for an "r" when he needed a rolling sound. He always read aloud what he had written, singing it out in his stentorian voice, so that the passers-by would stand still in front of his house to listen. Many called him the advocate, and believed that he was practising a speech for court.

He suffered torments during his efforts to attain perfection. They were the pangs of childbirth which every author knows, but his were so agonizing that he was many times forced to spring to his feet, shriek aloud, and call himself a blockhead, an idiot! for no sooner was one doubt overcome than another had already arisen. At his writing-table he sat as one magnetized, wholly absorbed in his work, and lost in silent contemplation of his subject. Turgenief, who was his faithful and intimate friend, and saw him very often, declared that it was exceedingly touching to see Flaubert, the most impatient of mortals, so patient in his struggles with language. One day, after he had been working uninterruptedly the whole day at a single page of his last novel, he went out to take a meal, and when he returned late in the evening he thought he would edify himself by reading his page in bed; but alas! it failed to satisfy him. He sprang excitedly out of bed,—tall man of over fifty years of age as he was,—began to rewrite the page, clad in no other apparel than his night-shirt, and wrote and rewrote the whole night long, sometimes working at his writing-table, sometimes, when driven from it by the cold, continuing his labors in bed.

How he loved and how he cursed his language! Is it not highly characteristic that in "Madame Bovary" he only forgets himself and speaks in his own name in a single place, and that is in the passage where, in referring to Raoul'sblaséindifference to Emma's declaration of affection, which proceeded from a genuine passion, however commonplace it may have sounded, he indignantly exclaims, "As though the abundance of the soul did not at times overflow in the most vapid similitudes, as though any one could reproduce the exact measure of his needs, conceptions, or sufferings, since human language is but a cracked kettledrum, upon which we hammer out melodies that sound as though they were played for a bear-dance, when it is our wish to move the stars!"

Such a lament from such lips is, nevertheless, what it declares human words not to be: the exactmeasureof the agonized striving of the great stylist for artistic perfection.

When an aspiration of that kind has once appeared in an art, it cannot become extinct. None of the initiated who have written after Flaubert, and who understood his literary ideal, have been able with clear consciences to make essentially smaller demands upon themselves than he made upon himself. Therefore the friends, the spiritual kindred, the disciples of Flaubert, are the most severe, the most original stylists of our century.

Not that Flaubert himself theoretically favored originality of style. He cherished a naïve belief in one ideal, absolutely correct style. He called this style, which he strove earnestly to realize, wholly impersonal, because it was nothing but an expression of his own personality, which had not occurred to him in what he had written.

Guy de Maupassant has wittily remarked that the trite saying, "The style is the man!" admitted of being reversed in Flaubert's case. He was the man who was the style. In other words, he was the personification of style. It is no unimportant or indifferent matter that the author who beyond all others represents the modern tendency and the modern formula of French literature, far from being an imitator of chance nature, or, as the reproach was usually worded, a photographer, was, on the contrary, an artistsans reproche.

Flaubert, personally, has never made the slightest revelation to the public concerning himself. He has maintained the same silence in regard to his artistic principles as in reference to his private experiences. Under these circumstances we must examine all the paths that are open and that might lead us into his inner being. One of the nearest and best of these that presents itself to us is a careful study of the works of his fraternal friend and companion-in-arms, Louis Bouilhet. These two men, superficially considered, appear very unlike in their tastes and in their endowments. Flaubert was an epoch-maker in French literature; Bouilhet, a second or third rate poet. Flaubert was a novel writer; Bouilhet, a lyric and dramatic poet. But this dissimilarity does not affect the character of the friends. They were fond of each other because they were spiritually akin. Not without cogent reasons did Flaubert dedicate his first book to Bouilhet, and the latter all his best productions to Flaubert. A careful comparison shows such striking analogies between the poetry of Bouilhet and the prose works of Flaubert that it puts the eyes keenly on the alert to detect the more suppressed of the peculiarities of the greater of the two friends.

One of the most remarkable of Bouilhet's poems, "Les fossiles," opens with an ambitious picture of prehistoric scenery and animal life, followed by a portrayal, in poetic form and scientific spirit, of the development of the globe until the appearance of the first human pair, and ends with a glowing vision of the humanity of the future.

We encounter this predilection for the colossal and marvellously prodigious once more in the author of "Salammbô." In Flaubert's excavation of vanished nations and religions we detect the same proclivity for fossils displayed by Bouilhet, and finally, there is plainly revealed in Flaubert the tendency manifested by his friend, in more poems than one, to blend science and poetry in one perfect whole.

As Flaubert was absorbed in classic and Semitic literature, so Bouilhet studied Chinese, and treated Chinese themes and plots in a long series of poems. Through these investigations, and the poetic efforts that were their results, both hoped to escape from a period that was distasteful to them, and both were unconsciously following the example of Goethe. They were both, moreover, satisfying one and the same impulse to show the reader the relative nature of all life-forms, to teach him not to pride himself on the glorious progress the world had made, and to impart to him some idea of the fact that our civilization, excavated and described after the lapse of centuries, would not make a much more reasonable figure than that of far-off antiquity.

Both desired to bring forward antiquity in its historic and prehistoric purity, without any disturbing modern additions, and were deterred by no difficulties. As though it were not difficult enough in itself to depict the antediluvian world, with its singular vegetation, its formless, stupendous animals, Bouilhet has deprived himself of every expression that might recall modern ideas. He describes the pterodactyls, the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, the mammoths and mastodons, without calling them by name; we only recognize them by their form, their bearing, their demeanor. In a similar way Flaubert, in his "Salammbô," has refrained from making the most remote allusion to the modern world; he seems to be wholly unacquainted with it, or to have forgotten its existence. The artistic objectivity here accords with the scientific.

And this, with both authors, is the main point. They obeyed, consciously or unconsciously, a new idea of the relation of poetry to science. They wished to contribute their share toward creating a poesy built wholly upon a scientific foundation.

The highest ambition of Bouilhet was to write a poem which should embrace the results of modern science, and be to our age what that most admirable poem of Lucretius, "De rerum natura," was to antiquity. Flaubert had apparently a similar dream. But in his case the desire was more decidedly stamped with his hatred of human stupidity. He brought it into realization negatively, and in two different forms; in his work, "La Tentation de Sainte Antoine" (The Temptation of Saint Anthony), where he allowed all the religious and moral systems of humanity to pass in review before the reader's eye, as the insane hallucinations of the hermit; and, in his last story, "Bouvard et Pécuchet," where the numerous errors and blunders of two poor blockheads gave the author a pretext for furnishing a sort of encyclopædia of all the departments of human knowledge in which they had made mistakes. In "La Tentation de Sainte Antoine," he gave the tragedy of the human mind, which here reveals itself in magnificent, frantic, and wailing madness, a King Lear on the world's heath. In "Bouvard et Pécuchet" he delineates caricature, naïve ignorance, and the bungling of dilettanteism in all scientific and technical provinces, as personified by two ludicrous old bachelors. The work is posthumous, and only the first part exists, even that being in an unfinished state; but highly characteristic of Flaubert was his design to supplement this first part with a second, in which the two poor old bachelors, who begin and end their career as clerks, carry out the idea of taking notes on the blunders of all the well-known writers (M. Flaubert included), and collecting them into a volume.

Both Flaubert and Bouilhet, therefore, were spurred on in their labors by the powerful impulse to preserve in their works, in one form or another, either positive or negative, the results of modern science. What Flaubert said of Bouilhet is equally applicable to both, that the fundamental thought, the innate element of his mind, was a sort of naturalism, that was a reminder of therenaissance.But while Bouilhet dissipated his best powers in mediocre and traditional romantic dramas, Flaubert has not paid homage to tradition in a single one of his works; on the contrary, he has always made profound scientific study the preparation for literary composition; and for this reason the relation between science and poetry is with him the nerve and sinew and the main interest of the work.

It almost seems as if, in our day, the time were past when the novelist would sit calmly down before a large sheet of white paper some fine day, and, without further preparation, begin the execution of his work of fiction.

Flaubert, at all events, has introduced a method which places poetic production very nearly on a scientific basis. It was his wont to pass whole weeks in the libraries, that he; might gain light on some single point in his subject; and he would devote hours to a careful study of a mass of engravings, in order to acquire a thorough knowledge of the costumes or bearing of a former generation. In the course of his preparatory studies for "Salammbô," he read ninety-eight volumes of ancient and modern literature, and undertook, besides, a journey to Tunis, in view of studying the landscapes and monuments of ancient Carthage. Indeed, even in order to paint phantastic landscapes, such as those in "La Légende de St. Julien," he visited regions calculated to give him an impression similar to that of which he had dreamed.

As soon as he had sketched the plan for a book, he began to seek reliable facts for each separate chapter; each had its own individual outline, which must be gradually filled in. He read through the entire collection of the "Charivari" from the time of Louis Philippe to the latest date, in order to supply the literary Bohemian, Hussonet, in "L'éducation sentimentale," with witticisms in the style of his period. He made a study of not less than one hundred and seven works, in order to be able to write the thirty pages on agriculture in "Bouvard et Pécuchet." His excerpts for this last novel, if printed, would fill no less than five octavo volumes.

During all these preliminary studies he apparently lost sight, for a time, of his novel, and merely kept in view the desire to increase his knowledge. His fondness for accumulating information was almost as intense as that for fashioning the psychic contents of his work, or rather it gradually became so.

If we take a survey of his productions, in chronologic order, we shall find an ever plainer transfer of the centre of gravity from the poetic to the scientific element; in other words, from the human, psychologic element to historic, technical, and scientific externalities, which fill an unwarranted amount of space. Flaubert was always in danger of becoming a tedious author, and grew more and more prolix as time went on.

He was actuated by a belief—in my estimation a correct one—that the writer of fiction in our day cannot be a mere writer for amusement, or amaître de plaisir.He felt that the ship of poesy, without scientific ballast, ran great risk of being capsized. It was soon proved, too, that with this ballast it sailed better, more securely, and with a prouder bearing. By degrees, however, as his development progressed, the passion for overcoming difficulties took complete possession of him; he wanted to carry the heaviest loads, the largest stones he could find, until gradually his vessel became freighted with so enormous a cargo that it grew too heavy, sank too far into the water, and was stranded. His last novel is little else than a wearisome series of abstracts from a couple of dozen different scientific discoveries and technical methods. As a work of fiction it is scarcely readable, and is only interesting psychologically as a consistent and definite expression of a remarkable personalty and of an erroneous æsthetic standpoint.

The general tendency to the study of externals is not peculiar to Flaubert; it characterizes the entire group of creative minds to which he belongs. It sprang from a justifiable aversion to the rationalistic conception of man as an abstract rational being, and from the bias of our age toward determinism, which aimed at explaining the psychic life of the individual from climatic, national, psychological and physiological causes. This endeavor is found in various phases in the most noted of the contemporaries and fellow-countrymen of Flaubert; in his friend and teacher, Théophile Gautier, in Renan, in Taine, and in the Goncourt brothers. Different as these minds are, they have in common this very modern stamp, and, moreover, nearly all of them possess, also, the no less modern quality of displaying too decidedly marked traces in their artistically executed works of the labor that lies behind these and the pains with which they were created, often producing an extremely distressing impression of being over-freighted. Renan, to whom this is less applicable than to the others, not infrequently portrays matters which lie wholly beyond his framework. Gautier is, perhaps, the only one of these great artists from whose brain word and image seem to flow without constraint, and even he was rarely without the dictionary and the encyclopædia in his hand.

With Flaubert the encyclopædia gradually supplants the emotions. Gautier, as years passed, grew to be less of a poet and more of a picturesque delineator. Flaubert, with the lapse of years, became ever more and more of a savant and a collector.

If we cast a glance over his entire literary production, from its first beginning until its close, we shall find that the human element, which originally bubbled over and fructified everything, gradually ebbed, withdrew, and left behind it only the arid, stony soil of historic or scientific fact.

In "Madame Bovary" all is yet life. The descriptions are infrequent and brief. Even the description of Rouen, the birthplace of the author, which occurs in the part where Emma journeys in the diligence from Yonville to meet Léon, is given in a very few lines, and is, moreover, enlivened by the account of the dizziness that ascends to Emma from this throbbing mass of thousands of existences, as though the fumes of the passions she attributed to them had been wafted toward her. The direct description of the city, the picturesque point, gives place at once to the psychologic analysis of the impression the great city makes upon the main character of the book,—a tendency which becomes more and more rare with Flaubert. In "Salammbô," the previous study and all that is purely descriptive must necessarily assert themselves more vigorously. There are long passages of this work which would be far more likely to lead us to think we were reading a scrap of the history of ancient warfare, or some archæologic treatise, than a novel, and which, therefore, are exceedingly tedious. Nevertheless, "Salammbô" was rich in purely human themes and delineations. Read, by way of example, the chapter that tells about how the priests resolve to propitiate Moloch through the sacrifice of the first-born son of each house; how some of them knock at the door of Hamilcar, and how he strives to rescue his little son Hannibal. The state of public sentiment here represented by Flaubert is precisely what must have existed in a Tunic city the moment such a wholesale slaughter of the innocents was commanded, and this single incident stands forth from the background of this sentiment in a manner never to be forgotten. Hamilcar rushes into his daughter's room, grasps Hannibal with one hand, and with the other a cord that is lying on the floor, binds the boy hand and foot, thrusts what still remains of the cord into his mouth for a gag, and hides him under the bed. Then he claps his hands, and calls for a slave child of eight or nine years of age, with black hair and protruding brow. There is brought to him a poor, wasted, yet at the same time bloated child, whose skin is as gray as the cloth about its loins. Hamilcar is in despair. How would it be possible to make this child pass for Hannibal? But the minutes are precious, and, in spite of his repugnance, the proud Suffet begins to wash, to rub, and to anoint the wretched slave child. He attires it in a purple robe, which he fastens at the shoulders with diamond clasps, and the little fellow laughs, delighted with all this splendor, and skips about the room with joy. Hamilcar leads the child away with him. When, with feigned anguish, he is giving it up to the priests in the court below, there appears, between the ivory pillars on the third floor of the house, a pale, wretchedly clad, dreadful looking man, with outstretched arms. "My child!" he cries. "He is the foster-father of the boy," Hamilcar hastens to say; and, as though to make the parting brief, he pushes the priests from the door. When they are gone, he sends the slave the best that his kitchen can afford,—meat, beans, and conserves. The old man, who for a long time has not tasted a morsel of food, pounces upon the bounteous supply, and devours it amid tears. Coming home in the evening, Hamilcar finds the slave, surfeited and half-intoxicated, lying asleep on the marble floor of the great hall, through the crevices of whose dome a flood of moonlight streams. Hamilcar gazes at him, and something akin to pity stirs within his soul. With the tip of his foot he pushes a rug under the slumberer's head.

Here is the essence of human universality extracted from a specific Carthaginian situation.

"Salammbô," as already intimated, created not a little sensation, but was none the less of a disappointment to the reading world and the critics. People did not share the author's fondness for colossal and tropical themes; they did not enjoy wading through long descriptions of antique catapults, battering-rams and sieges, and they begged Flaubert to write a new "romance de passion," a love story.

Toward the close of the year 1869, he finally yielded to their solicitations by issuing his novel "L'éducation sentimentale," his most characteristic and most profound work, which, however, met with a decided failure. From this time forth he experienced nothing but literary defeats. The public favor which had been cooled by "Salammbô," now wholly forsook him.

The new novel was a new style of book altogether. The almost untranslatable title (the approximate meaning being "The education of the heart") is not a correct one; for no one and nothing is educated throughout the work. The novel treats, to be sure, of an emotional life; but it deals rather with the gradual drilling and final extirpation of the emotion of love than with any development of the latter. It might more justly be called, "The illusion of love and its eradication." It is one of Flaubert's main efforts to distil absolute nothing in the form of pure illusion out of all the aspirations and pursuits of ordinary, every-day human life. In "Salammbô" everything revolves about a sacred veil of the goddess Tanit, known as Zaimpf. This veil is radiant and light; the city from which it is stolen goes to ruin; the mortal who wears it is invulnerable as long as he is enveloped in it; but whoever has once been shrouded in it is sure to perish. Illusion is like this veil. It is as radiant as the sun and as light as the air; it imparts the security of the somnambulist, and it consumes as surely as a Nessos robe.

I said that Flaubert believed in a passionate love which, although never gratified, was capable of enduring throughout life. Such a love he has depicted in the affection of Frédéric for Madame Arnoux. It is utterly hopeless; utterly bashful; it is suppressed; it only finds vent in certain unwise sacrifices for the husband of Madame Arnoux, and in certain half-uttered Platonic assurances of mutual sympathy. Nor does it lead to anything beyond a promise that is withdrawn by the lady, a few attempts which fail, and finally, after the lapse of twenty years, a fruitless confession and one single embrace, from which the lover recoils in terror, as the object of his affections has, meanwhile, grown old, and, with her white hair, inspires him with repugnance.

The peculiarity of this novel, in a still more striking way than in "Madame Bovary," is that it has no hero, and is quite as devoid of claims to a heroine. In the antiquated epithet "hero" lies the entire traditional usage of old-fashioned poesy. For centuries authors had paraded a hero before the public; he was characterized by his manly strength and beauty, was grand in his virtues or his vices, and was in every respect an example to be imitated or shunned. There had at length arisen a poet who was willing to deal with a young man of the average type, and who, without expressing either disapproval or regret, showed how completely null and void was the life of such a young man, and how disappointments were showered upon him. These were neither great nor unusual disappointments; to be sure, there was nothing great or unusual in the young man's experiences,—no, they were all those petty disappointments that go to make up the sum of existence. A long chain of petty disappointments, intermingled with a few great ones, is to Flaubert the definition of human life. The charm of the book, however, does not rest chiefly on the prevailing sentiment of its pages. Its main charm to me is the graceful, chaste manner in which the pen is wielded in passages descriptive of Frédéric's great love. This profound comprehension of the young man's dreamy devotion denotes personal experience. Nowhere has Flaubert written more directly from the depths of his own soul and gained less from the five or six artificial souls which he, in common with every critically disposed and critically endowed nature, had the power to give himself.

Frédéric loves without any ulterior thought, without hope of reciprocal affection, with a feeling that is akin to gratitude, with a positive need of utter self-renunciation and complete self-sacrifice for the sake of the object of his devotion, which is all the stronger because it finds no requital. As the years pass, however, a feeling of a similar nature develops in the breast of the woman whom he loves. It is a settled thing between them that they can never belong to each other; but their tastes, their judgment, is in harmony. "Often one of them, listening to words of the other, would exclaim: 'I too!' and very soon the other in turn would also cry: 'I too!' And they dream that if Providence had so willed, their lives would have been filled with love alone, 'something as sweet, as glittering, and as sublime as the twinkling of the stars.'

"The greater part of their time was passed on the veranda in the open air, while the trees, with their autumnal crowns of glory, were spread in rich masses before them, gradually sloping up to the pale horizon; or they sat in a pavilion at the end of the alley, whose sole article of furniture was a sofa covered with gray linen. Black spots defiled the mirror; the walls exhaled a mouldy odor; yet the two sat undisturbed, chatting of themselves, of others, of anything whatsoever, in a state of mutual rapture. Sometimes the sunbeams, working their way through the Venetian blinds from the ceiling to the floor, formed the strings of an enormous lyre."

This lyre, I am quite confident, was the genuine lyre of old, dating from the days of the troubadours, and the days of Flaubert's youth. At this point, it actually seems as though Flaubert had wakened it from its slumbers.

"L'éducation sentimentale" appeared just as the empire was entering upon the epoch of its last crisis. The book had but a moderate sale. The press unanimously pronounced it tedious, and, of course, immoral. The most painful thing of all to Flaubert was the long silence that followed. The work of seven years seemed lost.

The cause of this was simply that the author had labored too hard. In order to portray the Paris of the forties, he had studied old pictures and old plans of the city, had reconstructed vanished streets, and had searched through several thousand newspapers for references to public speeches, and descriptions of street life and street fights. It had been his desire to give an absolutely perfect picture of the times, and he had made it too elaborate. The historic apparatus is most wearisome in its effect. Flaubert's hatred of stupidity, as in so many other instances, had led him too far. Even in his youth it had belonged to the amusements he and Bouilhet had entered into together, to make as faithful copies as possible of official speeches, of poems written for special occasions, such as the dedication of a bell, or the burial of a monarch, of festival addresses and popular orations of every kind. Great quantities of such things were found after Bouilhet's death. In "Madame Bovary" Flaubert had entertained himself by communicating the entire speech of achef de bureauat the agricultural exposition, with its feigned enthusiasm and stylistic naïveté; in this last work he furnishedin extensoand, furthermore, in Spanish, a liberal speech delivered by a "patriot from Barcelona," in the year 1848, at an assemblage of the people in Paris. The speech is unsurpassed as an example of the phraseology of freedom and progress; but both the speech I and the entire assemblage before whom it is delivered, are out of place owing to their very slight connection with the main personages of the book. The picture of the times exceeds its proper limits: here, as well as in "Salammbô," the pedestal has become too large for the figure. Flaubert must undoubtedly have felt this himself, for while he was still at work on "Salammbô" he wrote dejectedly to a friend: "The study of costumes beguiles us to forget the soul. I would gladly give the half-ream of paper I have been filling with notes for the past five months, merely to feel truly moved for three seconds by the passions of my characters." But he was unable to keep in the background his descriptions of the surroundings of his theme and the general state of public sentiment and conditions in the country and period where the scenes were laid. We feel that his studies follow ever closer and closer on the tracks of his imagination, precisely as the monster Maanegarm (the moon-swallower) in Norse mythology pursues the moon, and the poor moon is continually in danger of being devoured.

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