-a series of letters which, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed anguish, its tone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in which the whole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes supposed, one of his own fictions.

I must scold you," he writes, " for one thing, which shocks, scandalizes me—the small concern, namely, you show for art just now. As regards glory be it so: there, I approve. But for art!—the one thing in life that is good and real—can you compare with it an earthly love? prefer the adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty? Well! I tell you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the one thing I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with the beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable, what not?

"The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all beside when it is established on a large basis. Work! God wills it. That, it seems to me, is clear.—

"I am reading over again the Æneid, certain verses of which I repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in one's head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are forever returning and cause you pain, you love them so much. I observe that I no longer laugh much and am no longer depressed. I am ripe. You talk of my serenity and envy me. It may well surprise you. Sick, irritated, the prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I continue my labor like a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling himself whether it rains or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not like that formerly. The change has taken place naturally, though my will has counted for something in the matter.—

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Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect of ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the

physician were something else than healing, of the painter than painting-as if the end of art were not, before all else, the beautiful."

What, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursued with so much fervor, with so much self-command? Let us hear a sympathetic

commentator:

Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman labor for the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. In this way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of expression, and when a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went on seeking another, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got hold of the unique word. . . . A thousand preoccupations would beset him at the same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his spirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but one-one form, one mode-to express what I want to say."

The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!—the unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within. In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point, from single epithets

to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes it a fine art.

One seems to detect the influence of a philosophic idea there the idea of a natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between a relative, somewhere in the world of thought and its correlative, somewhere in the world of language—both alike, rather, somewhere in the mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, inventive-meeting each other with the readiness of "soul and body reunited" in Blake's rapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his theory philosophical expression.

"There are no beautiful thoughts," he would say, "without beautiful forms, and conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a physical body the qualities which really constitute it—color, extension, and the like-without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, without destroying it; just so it is impossible to detach the form from the idea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form,"

All the recognized flowers, the removable ornaments of literature (including harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully considered by him), counted, certainly; for these too are part of the actual value of what one says. But still, after all, with Flaubert, the search, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth, or winsome, or forcible word, as such, as with false Ciceronians, but quite simply and honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning. The first condition of this must be, of course, to know yourself, to have ascertained your own sense

exactly. Then, if we suppose an artist, he says to the reader, I want you to see precisely what I see. Into the mind sensitive to "form" a flood of random sounds, colors, incidents, is ever penetrating from the world without, to become, by sympathetic selection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the visible vesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within, nay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined, enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just at those doubtful points, that the function of style as tact or taste, intervenes.

-In this way, according to the well-known saying, "The style is the man," complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions regarding style arising out of so many natural scruples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that. Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristic or expressive, finds thus its justification, the sumptuous good taste of Cicero being as truly the man himself, and not another, justified, yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as would have been his portrait by Raffaelle, in full consular splendor, on his ivory chair.

NOTES.

THESE topical analyses and suggestions are designed for the use of students-not of teachers. The editor has learned by experience that many read passages assigned for study without seeming able to derive distinct impressions of the leading ideas, and also without developing the full meaning of many brief or allusive expressions, or following out principles and views to their consequences, and making them distinct by definite illustration. The pages that follow will perhaps aid in focusing the attention and stimulating the thought of those to whom much æsthetic criticism is difficult. They are by no means intended to be exhaustive, either as topics of the text or as hints for reflection. The few points in the text that appear to require explanation will be noticed in connection with these other suggestions.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

The elements in Sidney's conception of poetry.

Expressions that illustrate his ideal spirit;-his poetic feeling.

His contrast between poetry and philosophy.

The instructive element in poetry. [Is this synonymous with didactic?]

Sidney's figures and illustrations,-homely; poetical; their ease, and aptness.

The contrast between the diction of prose and poetry.

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