The sceptic who is not bound by any creed, but has spent his whole life in doubt and hesitation in face of the ideas of God, religion, progress, and scientific humanity, becomes pious and reverential when face to face with the question of art. The true poet is, in his opinion, distinguished from all other people by the divine inspiration of his ideas, "by the contemplation of the immutable (_la contemplation de l'immuable_), that is to say, religion in the highest sense of the word." He regrets that he was not born in that age when people worshipped art, when there still existed genuine artists in the world, "whose life and thoughts were the blind instruments of the instinct of beauty. They were the organs of God, by means of which He Himself revealed His true essence to them; for these artists there was no happiness; no one knew how much they suffered; each night as they lay down sadly to rest they gazed wearily at the life of men with an astonished eye, just as we might gaze at an ant-hill." To most artists beauty is a more or less abstract quality; to Flaubert it was as concrete an object of passion as is gold to the miser, power to the ambitious, or his lady to the lover. His work was like a deliberate suicide; he gave himself entirely up to it, with the fanaticism of a man possessed by a mania, with the mystic submission and enthusiasm of a martyr, with the awe of a priest as he enters the sacred sanctuary. Thus does he describe his own work: "Sick and irritable at heart, enduring a thousand times in the day moments of anguish and despondency, and having neither wife nor any of the joys of life to distract me, I continue to toil at my weary task, like a good workman who, with sleeves rolled up and brow streaming with sweat, strikes on his anvil without fear of rain or hail, of storm or thunder." Here is an extract from a biography of Flaubert written by Maupassant, one of his favourite pupils and disciples, which gives an accurate picture of the gifted writer's energy for work: "His head bowed, his face and brow and neck bathed in moisture, all his muscles tense, like an athlete at the height of the contest, he set himself to face the desperate strife with his ideas and words, rejecting, uniting, or forging them as in an iron grip by the power of his will, condensing them and gradually with superhuman strength working out his thought, and confining it, like a wild beast in a cage, in a definite, indestructible form." III