greater emphasis and audacity the same device: "L'homme n'est rien; l'œuvre est tout."—"Man is nothing; work is everything."

In the flower of his early manhood, though possessed of beauty, wit, and talent, he forsook the world for the sake of his art, like an ascetic in the desert: he immersed himself in his solitude, as the Christian hermits immured themselves in their caverns. "To bury oneself in one's art, and spurn all else, is the only way to evade unhappiness," he writes to his friend. "Pride makes up for all things, if there be only a broad enough foundation for it.... I certainly lack little; I should no doubt like to be as generous as the richest, as happy as a lover, as sensuous as those who give up their lives to pleasure; ... But in the meanwhile I covet neither riches, nor love, nor pleasures; ... Now, as for a long time past, I ask only for five or six hours of repose in my own chamber; in winter a big fire in my fireplace, and at night two candles on my table." A year later he is advising the same friend: "Do as I do, break 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 fiancée, "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 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