from the outside world, and live like a bear, like a
white bear; send all else to the devil, and yourself as well, everything
except only your thoughts. There is at the present moment such a great
gulf fixed between myself and the rest of the world, that I oft-times
experience a feeling of astonishment when I hear even the most ordinary
and natural things; ... there are certain gestures, certain intonations
of the voice, which fill me with surprise, and there are certain silly
things which nearly make me giddy."

Even in moments of overwhelming passion, Flaubert places his literary
vocation immeasurably above his personal happiness; and love of woman
strikes him as insignificant by the side of his love of poetry. "No," he
writes to his _fiancee_, "you had far better love my art and not myself;
for this attachment will never leave you, nor can illness or death
deprive you of it. Worship thought, for in thought alone is truth,
because it is one and imperishable. Can art, the only thing in life that
is true and valuable, be compared with earthly love? Can the adoration
of relative beauty be preferred to an eternal worship? Veneration for
art--that is the best thing that I possess; it is the one thing for
which I respect myself."

He refuses to see anything relative in poetry, but regards it as
absolutely independent of and entirely cut off from life, and as being
more real than action; he perceives in art "the most self-satisfying
principle imaginable which requires as little external support as a
star." "Like a star," he says, "fixed and glittering in its own heaven,
does art observe the globe of the world revolve; that which is beautiful
will never be utterly destroyed." In the unity of the various portions
of a work, in the every detail, in the harmony of the whole, Flaubert
feels that "there is some inner essence, something in the nature of a
divine force, something like an eternal principle." "For how otherwise
would there exist any relation between the most exact and the most
musical expression of thought?"

The sceptic who is not bound by any creed, but has spent his whole life
in doubt and hesitation in face of the ideas of God, religion, progress,
and scientific humanity, becomes pious and reverential when face to face
with the question of art. The true poet is, in his opinion,
distinguished from all other people by the divine inspiration of his
ideas, "by the contemplation of the immutable (_la contemplation de