oppressed I feel, the more
melancholy and highly strung and prone to tears and to give myself over
to a sense of imaginary suffering, so much the more do my real feelings
remain dry and hard and dead within my heart; they are crystallized
within it." This is the mental attitude described by Pushkin:

"In vain did I appeal to the emotions within me,
With unmoved ears I heard the breath of Death,
And all unmoved I gazed on her.
So that is what I loved with flaming soul,
With such intensity of passion,
With so great anguish and agony of love,
With such torment and unreason!
Where is now pain and where is love?
Alas, for the poor credulous shade in my soul!
For the sweet memory of days for ever passed
I can now find neither tears nor reproaches."

This condition of incomprehensible indifference towards the beloved one,
this despair arising not out of grief, but as a result of his own
coldness, of his lack of commiseration and pity was all too familiar to
Flaubert; and according to his custom, he boldly proceeds to analyse
this trait, which it is the one endeavour of most other artists to
conceal, not only from others, but even from themselves, regarding it
mistakenly as a form of egotism that is entirely in conflict with Nature.
He describes his feelings at the grave of his dearly loved sister: "I
was as cold as the grave-stone, and only terribly bored." What does he
do at the moment when an ordinary man, forgetful of all else, would give
himself up entirely to his grief? With pitiless curiosity, "himself
catching nothing of their emotions," he analyzes them "like an artist."
"This melancholy occupation alleviated my grief remarkably," he writes
to a friend, "perhaps you will regard me as utterly heartless if I
confess to you that my present sorrow" (that is to say the grief
experienced at the death of his sister) "does not strike me as the
heaviest lot that I have ever had to endure. At times when there was
apparently nothing to be sad about, it has been my fate to be much
sadder." A little further on comes a long discourse upon the Infinite,
upon Nirvana,--a discourse in which the author gives utterance to much
inspired poetry, but to very little simple human sorrow.

In the letter in which Flaubert describes the funeral of a friend of his
childhood, his aesthetic cult of sadness reaches a still higher plane of
meditativeness. "On the body of the departed there appeared th