Relentlessly pursued by the demon of perfection, a victim to epilepsy, a despiser of the second-hand art of his day, is it not strange that Flaubert ever wrote a line? Execution was for him a painful parturition; he was delivered of his phrases in agony, and yet his first book, born after ten years of herculean effort, was a masterpiece. Did not a great critic say, “Madame Bovary is one of the glories of French literature?” But it almost sent its author to jail. Without the toleration, the adaptability of his dear comrade, Turgénieff, Flaubert took life symphonically. It was a sad, serious thing, and to escape its rigors he surrounded himself in the magic cloud of an ironic art,—an art addressed to the elect. He felt the immedicable pity of existence, yet never resorted to the cheap religious nostrums and political prophylactics of his contemporaries. He despised the bourgeois; this lifelong rancor was at once his deliverance and his downfall; it gave us L’Education Sentimentale, but it also produced Bouvard et Pécuchet. Judged by toilsome standards of criticism, Flaubert was a failure, but a failure monstrous, outrageous, and almost cosmical; there is something elemental in this failure. As satirical as Swift, he was devoured by a lyrism as passionate as Victor Hugo’s. This colossus of ennui set out to conquer material life, to crush it with superb, indifferent hands and was himself vanquished by it; and in the smoke and dust of defeat his noble figure went down as if some strange meteor had shot from the dark blue to the very bowels of the globe. After forty years of toil in his hermitage, he left only six volumes, nearly all masterpieces, but not masterpieces for the million.