while sad things leave me indifferent. I weep so much internally in my own soul, that my tears cannot flow outwardly as well; things that I read of in a book agitate me much more than any actually existing sorrows." Here we encounter a distinguishing trait of the majority of natures that are gifted with strong artistic temperaments. "The more oppressed I feel, the more melancholy and highly strung and prone to tears and to give myself over to a sense of imaginary suffering, so much the more do my real feelings remain dry and hard and dead within my heart; they are crystallized within it." This is the mental attitude described by Pushkin:

This condition of incomprehensible indifference towards the beloved one, this despair arising not out of grief, but as a result of his own coldness, of his lack of commiseration and pity was all too familiar to Flaubert; and according to his custom, he boldly proceeds to analyse this trait, which it is the one endeavour of most other artists to conceal, not only from others, but even from themselves, regarding it mistakenly as a form of egoism that is entirely in conflict with Nature. He describes his feelings at the grave of his dearly loved sister: "I was as cold as the grave-stone, and only terribly bored." What does he do at the moment when an ordinary man, forgetful of all else, would give himself up entirely to his grief? With pitiless curiosity, "himself catching nothing of their emotions," he analyzes them "like an artist." "This melancholy occupation alleviated my grief remarkably," he writes to a friend, "perhaps you will regard me as utterly heartless if I confess to you that my present sorrow" (that is to say the grief experienced at the death of his sister) "does not strike me as the heaviest lot that I have ever had to endure. At times when there was apparently nothing to be sad about, it has been my fate to be much sadder." A little further on comes a long discourse upon the Infinite, upon Nirvana,—a discourse in which the author gives utterance to much inspired poetry, but to very little simple human sorrow.

In the letter in which Flaubert describes the funeral of a friend of his childhood, his æsthetic cult of sadness reaches a still higher plane of meditativeness. "On the body of the departed there appeared the signs of a terrible transformation; we hid the corpse in a double shroud. So covered, he looked like an Egyptian mummy enveloped in the bandages of the tomb, and I cannot describe the feelings of joy and freedom which I experienced at sight of him at that moment. There was a white mist over everything, the forest trees stood out against the sky, and the funeral lights were still shining in the pallor of the dawning day; the birds were twittering, and I recalled a verse of his poem: 'He flies away like a winged bird to meet the rising sun in the pine wood,' or, to put it better, I heard his voice uttering these words and the whole day long they haunted me with their enchantment. They placed him in the ante-chamber, the doors were left ajar, and the cool morning air penetrated into the room, mingled with a refreshing rain, which had just then begun to fall.... My soul was filled with emotions, till then unknown, and upon it there flamed forth like summer lightning such