deep,
Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
The rim o' the sun to-morrow,
In eastern sky.

But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then die, dear, die;
'Tis deeper, sweeter,
Than on a rose-bank to lie dreaming
With folded eye;
And then alone, amid the beaming
Of love's stars, thou'lt meet her
In eastern sky.

A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming, morbid, and magnificent poetry
in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, of
English poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones and
Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writer
of more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had
certainly a more personal passion to express in his rough and
tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actual
poetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts:
actual poetical genius.

1891.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

_Salammbo_ is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told
us, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the
modern novel.' By the modern novel he means the novel as he had
reconstructed it; he means _Madame Bovary_. That perfect book is perfect
because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject suited to his
method, had made his method and his subject one. On his scientific side
Flaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps a more intimately
personal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in a large, sweeping way.
The lyric poet in him made _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_, the analyst
made _L'Education Sentimentale_; but in _Madame Bovary_ we find the
analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman,
as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and
observed in surroundings of the most ordinary kind. But Flaubert finds
the romantic material which he loved, the materials of beauty, in
precisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly.
Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical,
incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile
aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to
Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of
reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes
exquisite in Flaubert's renderin