short tales he is almost flawless. Then came Bouvard et Pécuchet, and here his most ardent lover recognizes the superb stylistic curve. The book is a mound of pitiless irony, yet a mound, not a living organism. Despite its epical breadth, there is something inhuman, too, in the Homeric harmonies of Salammbô. With the young wind of the twentieth century blowing in our faces it is hardly necessary to pose Flaubert academically. His greatness consists in his not being speared by any literary camp. The romanticists claimed him; they were right. The realists declared that he was their leader, and the extreme naturalists cried up to him, “O Master!” They too were wise. Something of the idealist, of the realist, is in Flaubert; he is never the doctrinaire. Temperamentally he was a poet; masked epilepsy made him a pessimist. In a less cramped milieu he might have accomplished more, but he would have lost as a writer. It was his fanatical worship of form that ranks him as the greatest artist in fiction the world has ever read. Without Balzac’s invention, without Turgénieff’s tenderness, without Tolstoy’s broad humanity, he nevertheless outstrips them all as an artist. It is his music that will live when his themes are rusty with the years; it is his glorious vision of the possibilities of formal beauty that has made his work classic. You may detect the heart-beat in Flaubert if your ear is finely attuned to his harmonies. A despiser of the facile triumph, of the appeal sentimental, he reminds me more of Landor than De Quincey,—a Landor informed by a passion for fiction. There are pages of Flaubert that one lingers over for the melody, for the evocation of dim landscapes, for the burning hush of noon. In the presence of passion he showed his ancestry; he became the surgeon, not the sympathetic nurse, as was the case with many of his contemporaries. He studied the amorous malady with great cold eyes, for his passions were all intellectual. He had no patience with conventional sentimentality. And how clearly he saw through the hypocrisy of patriotism, the false mouthing of politicians! A small literature has been modelled after his portrait of the discontented demagogues in L’Education Sentimentale. The grim humor of that famous meeting at the Club of Intellect set Turgénieff off into huge peals of laughter. It is incredibly lifelike. A student of detail, Flaubert gave the imaginative lift to all he wrote: his was a winged realism, and in Madame Bovary we are continually confronted with evidences of his idealistic power. Content to create a small gallery of portraits, he wreaked himself in giving them adequate expression, in investing them with vitality, characteristic coloring, with everything but charm. Flaubert has not the sympathetic charm of his brother-at-arms, Iván Turgénieff. In private life a man of extraordinary magnetism, his bonze-like suppression of personal traits in his books tells us of martyrdom to a lofty theory of style.