Flaubert's prose is due, like his unhappiness, to his inhuman trueness of feeling. He realised that flexible as language is, there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of any one who wishes to put an idea accurately into words. He went to the bottom of all writing and announced that literature is founded on the word; and that unless you have the right word you have the wrong literature. He was a little puzzled at the survival of the mighty improvisations of older times, although he loved them; but there was no doubt in his mind that his own way was not 'a primrose path to the everlasting bonfire' of bad books. Whatever he wrote, he would have it in words chosen one by one, scrupulously matched in scent, colour, and atmosphere to the ideas or emotions he wished to express. His whole creed was to tell the truth. What exactly did he feel? These were the letters that were always flaming before him. It is vivid discomfort to a labourer to be cross-questioned, and forced to find words for his unrealised meanings. With increased facility of speech we grow callous, and, compromising with our words, write approximations to the thoughts that, not having accurately described, we can scarcely be said to possess. Flaubert, in disgust at such inexactitudes, forced on his own highly educated brain the discomfort of the cross-questioned labourer. Knowing the truth, he would say it or nothing, and rejected phrase after phrase in his search for precision. It was gain and loss to him; gain in texture, loss in scope. 'What a scope Balzac had,' he cried, and then: 'What a writer he would have been if only he had been able to write.' The work of such men is loosely knit in comparison with his, because built in a less resisting material. 'Oui,' says Gautier-- 'Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle D'une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.' Flaubert's attitude made prose a medium as hard, as challenging as these. It is difficult to believe that the older writers bought their excellence so dearly. Their thoughts cannot have been so biassed, for it is the expression of every bias, of the background, of the smell, of the feel of an idea that makes circumspicuity of writing so difficult. Montaigne, for example, sitting peaceably in his tower, asking himself with lively interest what were his opinions, was not at all like the almost terrible figure of Flaubert, striding to and fro in his chamber, wringing phrases from his nerves, asking passionately, ferociously, what he meant, and almost throttling himself for an accurate answer. Is it harder than it was to produce a masterpiece? [Romanticism and realism.]