Flaubert, possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it, gave himself to superhuman labors for the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that adjective. And the desperate certitude in his spirit always was: "Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but _one_--one form, one mode--to express all I want to say." He desired, above all things, impersonality; and yet, in spite of the fact that he is the most impersonal of novelists, the artist is always felt; for as Pater said: "his subjectivity must and will color the incidents, as his very bodily eye selects the aspects of things." Yet again, in spite of the fact that Flaubert did keep _Madame Bovary_ at a great distance from himself, we find in these pages the analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman, as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and observed in surroundings of the most extraordinary kind. He creates Emma cruelly, morbidly, marvelously; he creates in her, as Baudelaire says, the adulterous woman with a depraved imagination. "_Elle se donne_" he writes, "_magnifiquement, généreusement, d'une manière toute masculine, à des drôles qui ne sont pas ses égaux, exactement comme les poètes se livrent a des drôlesses._" As Flaubert invented the rhythm of every sentence I choose this one from the novel I have referred to, this magnificently tragic sentence: "_Et Emma se mit à rire, d'un rire atroce, frénétique, désespéré, croient voir la face hideuse du misérable qui se dressait dans les ténèbres éternelles comme un épouvantent._" Aeschylus might have put such words as these on the lying and crying lips of Clytemnestra in her atrocious speech after she has slain Agamemnon. With this compare a sentence I translate from Petrus Bórel. "I have often heard that certain insects were made for the amusement of children: perhaps man also was created for the same pleasures of superior beings, who delight in torturing him, and disport themselves in his groans." This is a sentence which might almost have been written by Hardy, so clearly does it state, in an image like one of his own, the very center of his philosophy. Take, for example, these sentences in _The Return of the Native_: "Yet, upon the whole, neither the man nor the woman lost dignity by sudden death. Misfortune had struck them gracefully, cutting off their erratic histories with a catastrophic dash." Swinburne, who invariably overpraises Victor Hugo, overpraises his atrocious novel _L'Homme qui rit._ But I forgive him everything when he writes such Baudelairean sentences as these: