ck and empty of the gums, that seemingly had been burned
away, the palate was clearly visible. A rattle sounded in his throat as
he dragged the limbs of his dead-white body towards us. And all around
us reigned tranquil Nature, the ripples of the stream, the green of the
trees, all bubbling over with the abundance of sap and youth, and the
coolness of the shadows beneath the scorching sun." This extract is
taken from no novel, in which a poet might force himself to be
objective, but from a traveller's notes, from a letter to a friend,
wherein the author has no kind of motive for concealing the subjective
character of his emotions. And yet in spite of this, except for the two
rather common-place epithets of "poor wretches" (_pauvres miserables_),
there is not a single touch of pity, not even a suggestion of
compassion.

IV

"I am not a Christian" (_je ne suis pas Chretien_), says Flaubert in a
letter to Georges Sand. The French Revolution was, in his opinion,
unsuccessful, because it was too intimately bound up with the idea of
religious pity. The idea of equality, on which is based the essence of
the democracy of to-day, is a contradiction of all the principles of
equity. See what a preponderating influence is given at this day to
grace. Emotion is everything, justice nothing. "We are degenerating
owing to our superfluity of indulgence and of compassion, and to our
moral drought." "I am convinced," he remarks, "that the poor envy the
rich, and that the rich fear the poor; it will be so for ever--and vain
it is to preach the Gospel of Love."

Flaubert tries to justify his instinctive antipathy to the idea of
brotherhood by the assertion that this idea is always found to be in
irreconcilable contradiction to the principle of equity. "I hate
democracy (in the sense at least in which the word is accepted in
France), that is to say the magnifying of grace to the detriment of
justice, the negation of right--in a word, the anti-social principle
(_l'anti-sociabilite_)." "The gift of grace (within the province of
theology) is the negation of justice; what right has a man to demand any
change in the execution of the law?" Yet he hardly believes in this
principle himself, and only enunciates it in order to have an argument
with which to refute the idea of brotherhood. At least this is what he
says, in a moment of complete frankness, in a letter to an old friend:
"Human justice seems to me the most unstable thing in the