l'immuable_), that is to say, religion in the highest sense of the
word." He regrets that he was not born in that age when people
worshipped art, when there still existed genuine artists in the world,
"whose life and thoughts were the blind instruments of the instinct of
beauty. They were the organs of God, by means of which He Himself
revealed His true essence to them; for these artists there was no
happiness; no one knew how much they suffered; each night as they lay
down sadly to rest they gazed wearily at the life of men with an
astonished eye, just as we might gaze at an ant-hill."

To most artists beauty is a more or less abstract quality; to Flaubert
it was as concrete an object of passion as is gold to the miser, power
to the ambitious, or his lady to the lover. His work was like a
deliberate suicide; he gave himself entirely up to it, with the
fanaticism of a man possessed by a mania, with the mystic submission and
enthusiasm of a martyr, with the awe of a priest as he enters the sacred
sanctuary. Thus does he describe his own work: "Sick and irritable at
heart, enduring a thousand times in the day moments of anguish and
despondency, and having neither wife nor any of the joys of life to
distract me, I continue to toil at my weary task, like a good workman
who, with sleeves rolled up and brow streaming with sweat, strikes on
his anvil without fear of rain or hail, of storm or thunder." Here is an
extract from a biography of Flaubert written by Maupassant, one of his
favourite pupils and disciples, which gives an accurate picture of the
gifted writer's energy for work: "His head bowed, his face and brow and
neck bathed in moisture, all his muscles tense, like an athlete at the
height of the contest, he set himself to face the desperate strife with
his ideas and words, rejecting, uniting, or forging them as in an iron
grip by the power of his will, condensing them and gradually with
superhuman strength working out his thought, and confining it, like a
wild beast in a cage, in a definite, indestructible form."

III

Flaubert, more than any other man, has experienced in his own life, the
destructive power of his over-sharpened, analytical disposition. With
the malevolence, which was so strangely mingled in him with the then
fashionable Byronism, and with a confused presentiment of an impending
and inevitable catastrophe, he embarks at the early age of seventeen
upon his work of destruction and internal