What would Flaubert have done had France not bred Bouvards and Pécuchets with rabbit-like fecundity? Can nature ever be thanked enough for Sir Sampson Legend, Mantalini, Boswell’s Johnson, Falstaff or any such types of Comedy, composed of the nastiest excrement and washiest imbecilities? No one would diminish by one ounce the meat of art that resides in folly or deformity; or see snobbery, gluttony or cruelty reduced by one single exemplaire, once his mind was fixed on the benefits that the æsthetic sense has received from their abundance in Nature! A less self-indulgent satirist like Aristophanes, it is true, will attach a stink or some disgusting attribute to his absurd character, relying on the squeamishness of his audience, sending his characters about like skunks. But most authors are not so moral as to poison our pleasure with these gases. A stupid form is for the painter the same food as a stupid man for a writer like Gogol or Flaubert. So it is very debatable whether without the stimulation of stupidity, or every bestial, ill-made, tasteless object that abounds in life to-day, the artist would be as well off and well nourished. Would he not be in the position of a satirist, like Flaubert, without a Bouvard, or of an artist like Boswell without his rich and very unusual dish? The irritation with the particular French folly that surrounded him, and that Flaubert ate every day as regularly as his breakfast; the consequent pessimism that became the favourite manure for his thoughts; we cannot see Flaubert without that, any more than we can conceive of Rousseau the Douanier without his squab little bourgeois, and blank, paunchy little villas. The point rather lies in the _attitude_ that was Flaubert’s and that was the Douanier’s. Flaubert hated Bouvard, and considered the vulgarity and idiocy that he witnessed a very sad and improper affair. The Douanier, on the other hand, probably admired his Bouvards very much. It was with a naively respectful eye, it may be assumed, that he surveyed the bourgeois on Sunday, and noted his peculiarities like a child, directly, without judging. Shakespeare, it is true, must have relished the absurd or deformed more consciously; and Dickens made a cult of it. But with Shakespeare it was against a vast background of other matter, and as comic relief, or used in farces, and so labelled. It has never amounted to what has practically become, in our day, a _rejection_ of anything as dull or useless unless it lends itself to our appetite for the comic or the “queer.”