We are told that Flaubert originated a formula of art which Gautier cherished all the rest of his life: “The form is the parent of the idea.” In other words, you first think of a beautiful way to say something, and then you think of something to say which can be said in that way. It would be impossible for art perversity to go farther; and you have only to consider “Madame Bovary” to realize how little Flaubert followed his own theory. He did not first think of a prose work in two parts, the first part having nine chapters and the second part fifteen; what he thought of was the French formula, locating the seat of Nemesis in the genital glands. The secret of his masterpiece is the fact that he chose to illustrate this formula by means of characters which he knew intimately and loved with all the power of his instinctive being. That is the real basis of the greatness of “Madame Bovary”; the fact that with all her faults and all her follies her creator loved her, and believed in her, and made her real in every breath she drew and in every word she uttered. The important idea which he put across is that we are all of us, good or bad, wise or foolish, stupid or clever, passengers on the same ship of life, tossed by the same storms, and bound for the same unknown harbor. That is the propaganda which makes the greatness of every work of realism, if it has greatness. And so we can understand the failure of this unhappy genius in his other writings. He went back to ancient Carthage, and following his rigid art theories, he laboriously accumulated knowledge of detail, and wrote what he meant to be another masterpiece of realism, “Salammbô.” He creates for us a whole gallery of Carthaginian characters; but he doesn’t know these characters, he doesn’t love them, he doesn’t make us know them or love them--and his would-be masterpiece is therefore as lifeless as any gallery of wax works. We read it with curiosity because of the historical detail, the pictures of a far-off and cruel civilization; but we seldom finish it, and we forget everything but what a history-book might have given us. CHAPTER LXVI THE MATTRESS GRAVE We have paid a long visit to France, and must now cross the Rhine and see what is happening in Germany. It is interesting to note that the two artists whom we are about to study are men who had to flee from Germany and spend a considerable part of their lives as political exiles in Paris.