Hers is a ghost story whose shudder we covet, and experience, in spite of ourselves, in spite of the half-incredulous story-teller, by virtue of those simple facts so cunningly put together. [Strength or charm.] But to write analytically of such stories is to write with compass and rule, dully, awkwardly, technically, badly. It is impossible to express the excellence of a bridge except by showing how perfectly its curves represent the principles of its design, and to talk like an architect of the method of its building. And that is so very inadequate. It is easy to write of warmth, of delicacy, of sweetness; there is nothing harder in the world than to write of the icy strength that is shown not in action but in construction. And although there is a real charm about the shy, active, intellectual man who made them, a charm that is shown in his love-letters, yet there is no charm at all about Mérimée's stories. The difference between them and such tales as Nathaniel Hawthorne's is that between the little Grecian lady in baked clay, who stands upon my mantelpiece, still removing with what grace of curved body and neck and delicate arm the thorn that pricked her tiny foot some thousand years ago, and the copy of an Egyptian god, standing upright, one straight leg advanced, his jackal head set square upon his shoulders, his arms stiff at his sides, his legs like pillars, so strong in the restraint of every line that to look at him is a bracing of the muscles. There is no charm in him, no grace, no delicacy, and he needs neither delicacy, grace, nor charm. Erect in his own economy of strength he has an implacable, strenuous power that any added tenderness would weaken and perhaps destroy. FLAUBERT FLAUBERT