. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the desert? The
Barbarians watch intently. 'At last they made out several transverse
bars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser, larger;
dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes came into
view; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, "The
Carthaginians!" arose.' Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes,
unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves,
taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert puts
himself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them as
to see for them.

Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will find
that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its
subject-matter. That style, which has almost every merit and hardly a
fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of most
writers careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire,
and you will find that the aim of these writers has been to construct a
style which shall be adaptable to every occasion, but without structural
change; the cadence is always the same. The most exquisite word-painting
of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm into English, without
difficulty; once you have mastered the tune, you have merely to go on;
every verse will be the same. But Flaubert is so difficult to translate
because he has no fixed rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regular
march-music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his
cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has no
theory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a
living thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and
interprets. 'If I call stones blue, it is because blue is the precise
word, believe me,' he replies to Sainte-Beuve's criticism. Beauty comes
into his words from the precision with which they express definite
things, definite ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where the
material is so hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheer
exactitude which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure and
order, seen equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage, at the
time of their flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on the
corpses of the Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains.

1901.

GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET

Meredith has always suffered from the curse