The massive-shouldered Hercules, Flaubert, a Hercules spinning prose for his exacting Dejanira of art, was called unintelligent by Anatole France. He had not, it is true, the subtle critical brain and thorough scholarship of M. France; yet Flaubert was learned. Brunetière even taxed him with an excess of erudition. But his multitudinous conversation, his lack of logic, his rather gross sense of humour, are not to be found in his work. Without that work, without Salammbô, for example, should we have had the pleasure, thrice-distilled, of reading Anatole France's Thaïs? (See a single instance in the definitive edition Temptation, page 115, the episode of the Gymnosophist.) All revivals of the antique world are unsatisfactory at best, whether Chateaubriand's Martyrs, or the unsubstantial lath and plaster of Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, or the flabbiness and fustian of Quo Vadis. The most perfect attempt is Salammbô, an opera in words, and its battlements of purple prose were riddled by Sainte-Beuve, by Froehner, and lately by Maurice Pézard--who has proved to his own satisfaction that Flaubert was sadly amiss in his Punic archæology. Well, who cares if he was incorrect in details? His partially successful reconstruction of an epoch is admitted, though the human element is somewhat obliterated. Flaubert was bound to be more Carthaginian than Carthage. After the scandal caused by the prosecution of Madame Bovary Flaubert was afraid to publish his 1856, second version of Saint Antony. He had been advised by the sapient Du Camp to cast the manuscript into the fire, after a reading before Bouilhet and Du Camp lasting thirty-three hours. He refused. This was in September, 1849. Du Camp declares that he asked him to essay "the Delaunay affair" meaning the Delamarre story. This Flaubert did, and the result was the priceless history of Charles and Emma Bovary. D'Aurevilly attacked the book viciously; Baudelaire defended it. Later Turgenev wrote to Flaubert: "After all you are Flaubert!" George Sand was a motherly consoler. Their letters are delightful. She did not quite understand the bluff, naïve Gustave, she who composed so flowingly, and could turn on or off her prose like the tap of a kitchen hydrant (the simile is her own). How could she fathom the tormented desire of her friend for perfection, for the blending of idea and image, for the eternal pursuit of the right word, the shapely sentence, the cadenced _coda_ of a paragraph? And of the larger demands of style, of the subtle tone of a page, a chapter, a book, why should this fluent and graceful writer, called George Sand, concern herself with such superfluities! It was always _O altitudo_ in art with Flaubert--the most copious, careless of correspondents. He had set for himself an impossible standard of perfection and an ideal of impersonality neither of which he realized. But there is no outward sign of conflict in his work; all trace of the labour bestowed upon his paragraphs is absent.