But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern
times was Gustave Flaubert. His agonies in quest of the _mot propre_,
the one and only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to have
broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would
annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.... In twenty pages
he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course
of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of _The Temptation of Saint
Anthony_, he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136,
even reducing it still further after its first publication.

On _Madame Bovary_ he worked six years, and in writing _Salammbo_,
which, took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and
exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for
documentary evidences.

Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion for perfection to the
point of mania, and it will be a question with some whether, with all
his pains, he can be called a great novelist, after all. But that he was
a great stylist and a master in the art of making terrible and beautiful
bas-reliefs admits of no doubt.

To be a great world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well,
such as we find in Tolstoy's _War and Peace_--but that great book, need
one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary,
Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted
as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript
no less than seven times!

Yes! though it be doubtless true, in Mr. Kipling's famous phrase, that

There are nine and sixty ways
Of inditing tribal lays,
And every blessed one of them is right,

I think that the whole nine and sixty of them include somewhere in their
method those sole preservative virtues of truth to life and passionate
artistic integrity. The longest-lived books, whatever their nature, have
usually been the longest growing; and even those lasting things of
literature that have seemed, as it were, to spring up in a night, have
been long in secret preparation in a soil mysteriously enriched and
refined by the hid processes of time.

XXVII

THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN

Bulwer's deservedly famous phrase, "The pen is mightier than the sword,"
beneath its surface application, if you think it over, has this further
suggestion to make to the believer in literature--t