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 iconoclasm: "I analyse myself and others," he writes to a friend; "I am always anatomizing, and whenever I at last succeed in finding something, which all men consider pure and beautiful, but which is in reality a putrid spot, a gangrene, I shake my head and smile. I have come to the firm conclusion that vanity is the fundamental basis of all things, and that even that which we call conscience is in fact only a concealed and incipient vanity. You give in charity, partly, may be, out of compassion, out of pity, or from horror of suffering and sordidness, but also out of egotism; for the chief motive of your action is the desire to acquire the right to say to yourself: I have done good; there are very few people like me; I respect myself more than other men." Eight years later he writes to his devoted wife: "I love to analyze; it is an occupation that distracts me. Although I am not very much inclined to see the humorous side of things, yet I cannot regard my own personality altogether seriously, because I see myself how ridiculous I am, ridiculous not in the sense of being externally comic, but in the inner sense of that inherent irony which, being present in the life of men, shows itself sometimes even in the most obviously natural actions, in the most ordinary gestures.... All this one feels in oneself, but it is hard to explain. You do not understand it, because in you it is as simple and genuine as in a beautiful hymn of love and poetry. For I regard myself as a sort of arabesque or marqueterie work; there are within me pieces of ivory and of gold and of iron, some of painted paper, others of brilliants, and others again of lead."

This life is so rich in visions and imaginings, that they finally obscure the real world altogether, and receive in passing through this medium a reflected colouring in addition to their own. "I always see the antithesis of things; the sight of a child inevitably suggests to my mind the thought of old age; the sight of a cradle, the idea of the grave. When I look at my wife, I think of myself as her skeleton. That is why scenes of happiness sadden me,