critics, no longer wounded his self-pride;
he merely hated them. "All this avalanche of folly neither disturbs nor
grieves me. Only one would prefer to inspire one's fellow men with
pleasant feelings."

Then finally, even his last consolation--his art--deserts him. "In vain
I gather my strength; the work will not come, will not come. Everything
disturbs and upsets me. In the presence of others I can still control
myself, but when I am alone I often burst into such senseless, spasmodic
tears that I think I am going to die from them." In his declining years,
when he can no longer turn to the past, and no longer correct his life,
he asks himself the question: what if even that beauty, in the name of
which he has destroyed his faith in God, in life, and in humanity, is as
visionary and delusive as all else? What if his art, for the sake of
which he had given up his life, his youth, and happiness, and love,
should have abandoned him on the very edge of the grave?

"The Shadow is enveloping me," he says, as he realises that the end is
at hand. This exclamation is as the cry of eternal anguish uttered
before his death by another artist, Michael Angelo, the brother of
Flaubert in his ideals and aims and genius:

"Io parto a mano a mano,
Crescemi ognor piu l'ombra, e il sol vien manco,
E son presso a cadere, infermo e stanco."

"Inch by inch I sink,
The shadows lengthen, the sun sinks down,
And I am ready to depart,
Broken and weary."

Death struck him down at his work-table, quite suddenly, like a
thunder-bolt. Dropping his pen from his hand, he sank down lifeless,
killed by his one great, single passion, the love of his art.

Plato in one of his myths relates how the souls of men travel in
chariots on winged steeds along the heavenly way; to some of whom it is
given after a short time to approach that spot whence is visible the
domain of Ideas; with yearning do they gaze aloft, and a few stray rays
of light fall deep down among them. Then, when these souls are
re-incarnated, to return and suffer on earth, all that is best in the
human heart appeals to them and touches them, as a reflection of some
eternal light, as a confused remembrance of another world, into which it
was granted them to peep for the space of a single moment.

Surely there must have fallen upon the soul of Flaubert in the glorious
sphere of the imagination a ray of beauty that was perhaps too bright.

_Pri