nature necessitated an epical subject, in which he could give full play to his love of musical phrase, of truculent grandeur. In "Salammbô " he will revel in pure art, though he knows in advance that a work of pare art will find few readers. However, he will at least have the satisfaction of "upsetting the digestions of the good folk" who may possibly come across it. But soon he feels enthusiasm lacking here also; he fears to fall into the melodramatic. It is a desert into which he has been driven by his disgust at modern life. He finds that "one must be absolutely mad to undertake such a work," and feels that the deeper he plunges into the antique, the more he is seized by the necessity of undertaking something modern. Gladly he throws it on the indifferent world, so that he may escape the fatigue resultant on the continued vision of the beautiful, and begins “L'Éducation Sentimentale," in which he will delineate "the moral, or rather sentimental, history of the men of my generation-a work of love, of passion, but of passion such as passion can be nowadays, that is, inactive." Being profoundly true, it is not likely to be amusing, he tears; but "the thought of the stupidities it will make the bourgeois utter sustains him in his purpose. It is an effort to fuse his two natures, as he remarks, but an ineffectual effort. "It will take a year only;" after that "I shall bid a definite good-bye to the odious ourgeois." "It is too difficult, too ugly; and it is time I wrote something beautiful and pleasing to myself." What on earth could have made him select such a subject? he cries. Consequently, he revents for the third time to his "Saint-Antoine ;" the eight months he spends in putting it into its final form being "the most perfectly voluptuous" in his life. He was in his element then, he pathetically whites in retrospection. But at the time of composition he is convanced it is a failure, an absurdly difficult subject, and fears he is becoming sterile. He turns with delight from Saint Anthony's nightmace of the inanity of ancient philosophies and creeds, to a precisely seat theme in his "Bouvard et Pecuchet," but which is modern in

These poor drivellers cull in succession all the flowers of mec con tolly, and are as dazed and hopeless as Saint Anthony himIn the process of thus "vomiting his bile" on his contemporanes, he tears to become as imbecile himself as Bouvard and Tebe, and uncharitably wishes his reader to be driven to the

perciocy also. Naturally, he cannot resign himself to his work— “..., wax oly to undertake it." He writes his artistic "Trois Contes" by way be reaction, and returns to his book of vengeance against his corcopotanics, to his manner of being an Aristophanes ;" once tin shed and he died at the task-he would touch the bourgeois no more; he will "purge himself, and become Clympian and serene."

= LII ans, në to myER CONCURSOONA O frenata Not as those si, to crate deans, te Tara. The per masters poses the chamns they ar sement of aspec and mcomprehension. As to ther methou. Dei are monones a diffs, surpm & the sa till of budung, 10.ące, and murmus as fress: melanchor as the desert, hitt að heaven. Home Rancais Michael Angela, Shakesert, Goethe, annear to me press, 14 endless, limitess, muhiarn. Through, little crannie you set precipices: Is back down then, and von grow du, v, NA something singularly sweet hovers over all. It is the ideal a highi, the smile of sunshine, and it is calm! Its calm and it is strong, with dewlaps like Leconte de Lisic's bull." He is never wear, d expressing his disdain of any personal expression, in his works, be will vent his personal judgments in the memoirs he intends to write in his old age. This art is a religion, in a truer sense, he dooms, than it was to Alfred de Musset, who fell into the common era of mistaking sentiment for religion; or to Lamartine, who lacked that independence of personality, that swift, free comprehension of li that vision of truth, which was the only way to attain groat of A emotion. He is a lyrist, and yet his ideal is to escape his own an happy personality by impersonal creation. The dramati BIN envied ideal; but what of his scorn of the futility of chamace methods when busy with the dialogues in "Madame Bovan"). And what of his sole dramatic essay "Le Candidat ”? And, terdet, one might ask, is the dramatist so very impersonal after all? Dramaxx indeed, like Scribe, seem to find no difficulty in leaving the roader in utter doubt as to their philosophy, possibly because not good w ch such a defect. But in the hands of a great master, a single p^raw) a line, is sufficient to reveal his personality. In vain Taubet endeavoured to be as impartial as science, to contemplate his pop pets from the Spinozistic point of indifference. "Madame Bovary" has exactly Flaubert's imagination, that highly developed, intense recollection of past sensations. Madame Bovary and Salammbó are

sisters of Flaubert in their dolorous curiosity, in their sad recognition of the emptiness of human desires, and the Stendhalian ce n'est que ça of attainment. Frédéric of “L'Éducation Sentimentale" is the young Flaubert who loved platonically the woman once beheld on the beach at Trouville, and Frédéric suffers, like Flaubert, from the malady of ever wishing to be other and elsewhere than he is, unconscious of happiness when in possession of its factors, regretting the past which, when present, seemed so empty and sordid. Whenever Flaubert is interested in Madame Bovary, and not disgusted with her environment, he confesses he "feels" all she feels; he regrets when emotion fails him in the composition of "Salammbô." "The study of costume, of the external," he says, "makes me forget the soul." "I would give the half-quire of notes I have written in the last five months, and the ninety-eight volumes I have read, to be for three seconds only 'really' moved by the passions of my heroes." To an inquiry of M. Taine, he replies, "My imaginary personages affect me, pursue me, or rather it is I that am within them. When I wrote the poisoning of Emma Bovary I felt so thoroughly the taste of arsenic in my mouth that I inflicted on myself two very real indigestions, one after the other." The imperious theory of impersonality must, therefore, be reduced to an avoidance of any didactic attitude on the part of the author, to a complete abstention from any taking of the reader into his confidence in, say, Thackeray's manner, or from introducing the slightest commendation or blame of the conduct of his puppets. Another "father of realism," Stendhal, so far from following the impersonal method, cannot refrain from expressing his satisfaction when his puppets have committed any imprudence, such as the unenthusiastic bourgeois, in his detestable common sense, would never commit. Flaubert, also, is delighted at the thought of shocking the bourgeois, in the true romanticist fashion, but he reserves all such expressions of delight for his correspondence. As to the moral of a book, he is certainly in the right when he maintains to George Sand that "if the reader does not derive from a book the morality which ought to be found in it, the reader is either an imbecile, or the book is false from the point of view of exactness. The instant a thing is true, it is good. because they lack truth. life."

Obscene books, even, are only immoral Things do not take place 'like that' in

"I would have bitterness in everything, an eternal hiss in the midst of our triumphs, and desolation even in enthusiasm." And his works effectually realise this wish of his. Ugly pessimism and voluptuous bitterness impregnate the world of his creation; and the reader

speedily discovers, behind the "impersonal" characters, the author who, even in his eighteenth year, "despises men too much to do them good or evil," who promises to himself that, if ever he takes an active part in the world, it will be "as a thinker and demoraliser." "I will only tell the truth, but it shall be terrible, cruel, and nude." His mysterious mirth-slaying maladie noire in early youth had left its mark on him; out of mere pride, and a sense of beauty which could not be gratified on a fitting scale, except in dreams, he will not imitate others in imprecating Providence; the exuberance of his youth and that of Nature are but "bitter buffooneries " in his eyes. He is, on his own confession, a connoisseur in "the unhealthy," and his vision of art is a sonorous and gorgeous exposition of the nothingness of human life. In spite of his Spinozistic creed, in spite of his conviction of fatality-that "Providence of evil"-the only attitude in which he could endure to contemplate human insufficiency was that of indignation. The composition of books was a method of living for him; existence was only tolerable in a delirium of literature, in turning, "dervishlike, in the eternal medley of forms and ideas." "Let us be religious," he cries to Madame Louise Colet, that is to say, leave life for the severe transcendent sphere of art. But he knows only too well that this serenity was beyond his nature; he could only envy the aged Goethe; he was unable to strip off the Goth and turn Greek, as Goethe did-imperfectly enough. He had breathed from birth the mist of the North, and though he strove to forget himself and disperse his melancholy by strenuous erudition, he was unredeemably saturated with innate melancholy. He is not a Greek, but "a barbarian, with their muscular apathy, their nervous langour, their grey eyes, and lofty stature; possessing also their impetuosity, obstinacy, and irritability; a Norseman by blood, with a Norseman's instincts of migration, and innate disgust of life." He is a lover of decadent epochs ; what would he not give to have lived in the days of Nero, to have beheld a Roman triumph, to have listened to the Greek sophists of the Roman empire! But, pagan as he was, and utterly unable, as he says, to comprehend the idea of duty-unless it were the duty of selfdevelopment-he recognised the impossibility of a return to paganism now that the Christianity of successive generations has indelibly marked the race. There is a large element of Christian, or rather Buddhist, asceticism in him. Like the monks of the Thebaid, he scorned existence, and shared their contempt for the meanness of practical life. Thus, too, his scorn of modern socialists, and the modern self-satisfaction of utilitarian humanity. Flaubert is an amalgam, a strangely assorted mosaic of tendencies. The original robust

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ness of his temperament had been clouded by misanthropy, by his "fixed idea" of the stupidity of man; yet, perhaps it needed but a slight shake, as it were, or the mere addition of another element to his complexity, to precipitate a temperament which would have regarded life from the standpoint of a humourist, the temperament of a comic dramatist, who finds material for easy-if not kindly-laughter in this same stupidity of man.

II.

The female heart is an enigma confessedly inscrutable, and anything that can be said about its affections is well within the bounds of possibility. Among its most often-recurring series of phenomena is the ready inclination of self-conscious mutability and weakness towards contrasting masculine strength and consistency, supposed or actual; and women's idealising nature divines in the kind giant Flaubert, a natural compatibility of tenderness with rugged and imposing firmness, and in pity desires to console the weary Titan. Thus, there is no wonder that, in spite of his later exclusive avoidance of the "Eternal Feminine " as a hindrance to the cult of Art, his life did not pass without the ministration of women, drawn to him by his reputation-would-be priestesses of the same cult, gentle or passionate spirits to console or be consoled. When the first volume of this correspondence appeared, the critics were ready to discover one more victim of posthumous publication, and especially of posthumous publication by an editress admiring or vindictive-for the result comes to about the same in either case. But his niece's prefatory notice, at least, does not deserve the hard things said of it. Its tone throughout is quiet, respectful, and affectionate; there is no striving at effect, no hysterical prostration or unnecessary incense-burning before an idol. Of this, the brief statement of the generosity which seemed Quixotism to his friends is ample testimony-the generosity which freely and readily sacrificed the assured comfort of his old age to tide over the commercial difficulties of his niece's husband. It is true that Madame Commanville tells us little we might not gather from the correspondence itself; she pretends to nothing more than the merit of simple recollections. When she remarks abruptly that as an artist he was a pagan and a pantheist by nature, we can modify this by the letters she has placed within our reach. When she explains her statement by saying that Spinoza had influenced him, but that beyond his deep-rooted belief in beauty, Montaigne's repose on the "pillow of doubt" seemed the safest attitude to him, we find nothing to object. She throws no special light on the nervous malady