The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life-Work of Flaubert, by
Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky

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Title: The Life-Work of Flaubert
From the Russian of Merejowski

Author: Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky

Translator: George Augustus Mounsey

Release Date: October 12, 2010 [EBook #33933]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE LIFE-WORK

OF

FLAUBERT

FROM THE RUSSIAN OF MEREJKOWSKI

BY G. A. MOUNSEY

ALEXANDER MORING LTD

THE DE LA MORE PRESS

32 GEORGE STREET

HANOVER SQUARE

LONDON W

FLAUBERT

I

Balzac in one of his novels gives utterance to the following thought:
"Genius is a terrible disease. Every writer of genius cherishes in his
heart a monster which devours all his emotions as soon as he gives birth
to them. Which is to be the conqueror? Will the disease vanquish the
man, or the man the disease? He must be a great man who can establish a
perfect equilibrium between his genius and his character. Unless the
poet be a giant, unless he be possessed of the shoulders of a Hercules,
he must inevitably remain bereft of heart, or else bereft of talent."

Here, unfortunately, Balzac breaks off his dissertation, and does not
state what in his opinion is the cause of this disease of genius, why
the development and power of the artistic personality stand in many
respects in inverse ratio to the development and power of the moral
type, or on what fundamental ground depends that primary antagonism
between these two elements which is so often to be observed in the daily
experience of life. Every one knows, for instance, that writers of
talent, artists or musicians, are in the majority of cases men of the
most unpractical nature, that their eccentricities and irresponsibility
verge not uncommonly on complete moral disintegration, that they are bad
fathers of families and bad husbands, and that while expressing great
sensitiveness in the