How he loved and how he cursed his language! Is it not highly characteristic that in "Madame Bovary" he only forgets himself and speaks in his own name in a single place, and that is in the passage where, in referring to Raoul's _blasé_ indifference to Emma's declaration of affection, which proceeded from a genuine passion, however commonplace it may have sounded, he indignantly exclaims, "As though the abundance of the soul did not at times overflow in the most vapid similitudes, as though any one could reproduce the exact measure of his needs, conceptions, or sufferings, since human language is but a cracked kettledrum, upon which we hammer out melodies that sound as though they were played for a bear-dance, when it is our wish to move the stars!" Such a lament from such lips is, nevertheless, what it declares human words not to be: the exact _measure_ of the agonized striving of the great stylist for artistic perfection. When an aspiration of that kind has once appeared in an art, it cannot become extinct. None of the initiated who have written after Flaubert, and who understood his literary ideal, have been able with clear consciences to make essentially smaller demands upon themselves than he made upon himself. Therefore the friends, the spiritual kindred, the disciples of Flaubert, are the most severe, the most original stylists of our century. Not that Flaubert himself theoretically favored originality of style. He cherished a naïve belief in one ideal, absolutely correct style. He called this style, which he strove earnestly to realize, wholly impersonal, because it was nothing but an expression of his own personality, which had not occurred to him in what he had written. Guy de Maupassant has wittily remarked that the trite saying, "The style is the man!" admitted of being reversed in Flaubert's case. He was the man who was the style. In other words, he was the personification of style. It is no unimportant or indifferent matter that the author who beyond all others represents the modern tendency and the modern formula of French literature, far from being an imitator of chance nature, or, as the reproach was usually worded, a photographer, was, on the contrary, an artist _sans reproche._ IV.