thoughts as I can never repeat again: a thousand recollections of the dead were wafted to me on the fumes of the incense, in the chords of the music." ... And here the artist, in the midst of his æsthetic abstraction, converts his genuine grief into a thing of beauty, so that in his enlightened view the death of his beloved friend not only causes him no pang, or suffering, but, on the contrary, gives him a mystic resignation, incomprehensible to ordinary men, an ecstasy that is foreign to and removed from life, a joy that is entirely impersonal.

During his sojourn in Jerusalem, Flaubert paid a visit to the lepers. Here is the account of his impressions: "This place (that is the plot of land set aside for those who are afflicted with leprosy) is situated outside the town, near a marsh, whence a host of crows and vultures arose and took their flight at our approach. The poor sufferers, both women and men (in all about a dozen persons) lie all huddled together in a heap. They have no covering on their heads, and there is no distinction of sex. Their bodies are covered with putrefying scars, and they have sombre cavities in place of noses. I was forced to put on my eye-glasses in order to discover what was hanging to the ends of their arms. Were they hands, or were they some greenish-looking rags? They were hands! (There is a prize for colourists!) A sick man was dragging himself to the water's edge to drink some water. Through his mouth, which yawned black and empty of the gums, that seemingly had been burned away, the palate was clearly visible. A rattle sounded in his throat as he dragged the limbs of his dead-white body towards us. And all around us reigned tranquil Nature, the ripples of the stream, the green of the trees, all bubbling over with the abundance of sap and youth, and the coolness of the shadows beneath the scorching sun." This extract is taken from no novel, in which a poet might force himself to be objective, but from a traveller's notes, from a letter to a friend, wherein the author has no kind of motive for concealing the subjective character of his emotions. And yet in spite of this, except for the two rather common-place epithets of "poor wretches" (pauvres misérables), there is not a single touch of pity, not even a suggestion of compassion.

IV

"I am not a Christian" (je ne suis pas Chrétien), says Flaubert in a letter to Georges Sand. The French Revolution was, in his opinion, unsuccessful, because it was too intimately bound up with the idea of religious pity. The idea of equality, on which is based the essence of the democracy of to-day, is a contradiction of all the principles of equity. See what a preponderating influence is given at this day to grace. Emotion is everything, justice nothing. "We are degenerating owing to our superfluity of indulgence and of compassion, and to our moral drought." "I am convinced," he remarks, "that the poor envy the rich, and that the rich fear the poor; it will be so for ever—and vain it is to preach the Gospel of Love."

Flaubert tries to justify his instinctive antipathy to the idea of brotherhood by the assertion that this idea is always found to be in irreconcilable contradiction to the principle of equity. "I hate democracy (in the sense at least in which the word is accepted in France), that is to say the magnifying of grace to the detriment of justice, the negation of right—in a word, the anti-social principle (l'anti-sociabilité)." "The gift of grace (within the province of theology) is the negation of justice; what right has a man to demand any change in the execution of the law?" Yet he hardly believes in this principle himself, and only enunciates it in order to have an argument with which to refute the idea of brotherhood. At least this is what he says, in a moment of complete frankness, in a letter to an old friend: "Human justice seems to me the most unstable thing in the whole world. The sight of a man daring to judge his neighbour would send me into