One day Flaubert took his disciple by the hand and led him into the secret places of art. The talent of the artist, he said, is a long patience spent in learning how to portray so that your portrayal leaves the object it offers just as individual as the thing is found. “When you pass a grocer sitting at his door, or a concierge smoking his pipe, or a stand of cabs, show me this grocer and this concierge, their pose, their physical appearance, suggesting also by the skill of your image all their moral nature in such wise that I do not confuse them with any other grocer or with any other concierge. And make me see with a single stroke in what a certain cab horse is unlike fifty others following him or going before.” Why, then, besides love and hate, art too claims to be that which individuates--and not because, if we may believe a certain philosophically minded critic, art has borrowed anything of love or hate. This disciple of Flaubert, this Maupassant, carried out his master’s teachings if ever an artist did, but there is that in his way of doing it which makes one feel that Anatole France’s account of him is not altogether wanting: “He is the great painter of the human grimace. He paints without hate and without love, without anger and without pity--hard-fisted peasants, drunken sailors, lost women, obscure clerks dried up in the air of the office, and all the humble folk whose humility is without beauty and without merit. All these grotesques and all these unfortunates he shows us so distinctly that we think we see them with our own eyes and find them more real than reality itself. He is a skillful artist who knows he has done all there is to do when he has given life to things. His indifference is as indifferent as nature.” I am not so very confident that all these claimants to the right of individuating--love, hate, art--are equal claimants. As for hate, some poverty of experience may account for the fact that all I know of this romantically valued emotion has sometime been directed against persons unknown, whose manner of conducting themselves on the earth beneath and in the waters under the earth showed nothing more clearly than that they had forgotten the human being and were utterly lost in loyalty. A hate of such poor quality cannot well be said to individuate, and it is certainly not any experience of my own that would lead me to suppose romantic hate, as we have imagined it, to be real. Respecting the impassibility of the creative artist, I am no less skeptical, and so I think is France at bottom; for of this same artist whose indifference is as indifferent as nature, he says in another passage of the same appreciation that his hardened hero “is ashamed of nothing but his large native kindliness, careful to hide what is most exquisite in his soul.”