humanity is placed, like the
pessimism of the Frankfort philosopher. Flaubert was rather a victim of
what Theophile Gautier, in his well-known _Emaux et Camees_, calls by
the singularly happy name of "the Luminous Spleen of the Orient." To
tell the truth, what Flaubert could not pardon in humanity was that it
did not make enough of art, and so his pessimism was a consequence of
his aestheticism. "As lovers of the beautiful," he tells us, "we are all
outlaws! Humanity hates us; we do not serve it; we hate it because it
wounds us! Let us love, then, in art, as the Mystics love their God; and
let all pale before this love."

These lines are dated 1853, before he had published anything. Therefore,
Flaubert did not express himself thus because he was not successful. His
self-love was not in question! No one had yet criticised or discussed
him. But he felt that his ideal of art, an art which he could not
renounce, was opposed to the ideal methods, if they are ideal, held by
his contemporaries; and the vision of the combats that he must face at
once exalted and exasperated him. His pessimism was of the elite, or
rather the minority of one who feels himself, or at least believes
himself to be, superior, and who, knowing well that he will always be in
the minority, fears, and rightly too, that he will not be recognised. It
is a form of pessimism less rare in our day than one would think, and
Taine, among others, said practically the same thing when he averred
that "one writes only for one or two hundred people in Europe, or in the
world." It may be that this is too individual a case! A more liberal
estimate would be that we write for all those who can comprehend us;
that style has for its first object the increase of such a number; and,
after that, if there still be those who cannot comprehend us, no reason
for despair exists on our part or on theirs.

Let us follow, now, the consequences of this principle in Flaubert's
work, and see successively all that his work means, and the dogma of
art which proceeds from it.

At first you are tempted to believe that Flaubert's work is diverse,
though inconsiderable in volume; and, primarily do not see clearly the
threads which unite the _Education Sentimentale_ with the _Tentation de
Saint Antoine_ or _Salammbo_ with _Madame Bovary_.

On the one side Christian Egypt, and on the other the France of 1848,
Madame Arnoux, Rosanette, and Frederick Moreau, the Orleanist carnival,
and the "u