desirable. But a
great work of art which is also a great record of nature is not too
common--and this is what it is.

[Sidenote: _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_.]

Yet, as has been remarked before, nothing shows Flaubert's greatness
better than his absolute freedom from the "rut." Even in carrying out
the general "Vanity" idea he has no monotony. The book which followed
_L'Education_ had been preluded, twenty years earlier, by some fragments
in _L'Artiste_, a periodical edited by Gautier. But _La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine_, when it finally appeared, far surpassed the promise of
these specimens. It is my own favourite among its author's books; and it
is one of those which you can read merely for enjoyment or take as a
subject of study, just as you please--if you are wise you will give
"five in five score" of your attentions to the latter occupation and the
other ninety-five to the former. The people who had made up their minds
to take Flaubert as a sort of Devil's Gigadibs--a "Swiss, not of
Heaven," but of the other place, hiring himself out to war on all things
good--called it "an attack on the idea of God"! As it, like its smaller
and later counterpart _Saint Julien l'Hospitalier_, ends in a
manifestation of Christ, which would do honour to the most orthodox of
Saints' Lives, the "attack" seems to be a curious kind of offensive
operation.

As a matter of fact, the book takes its vaguely familiar subject, and
_embroiders_ that subject with a fresh collection of details from
untiring research. The nearest approach to an actual person, besides the
tormented Saint himself, is the Evil One, not at first _in propria
persona_, but under the form of the Saint's disciple Hilarion, who at
first acts as usher to the various elements of the Temptation-Pageant,
and at last reveals himself by treacherous suggestions of unbelief. The
pageant itself is of wonderful variety. After a vividly drawn sketch of
the hermitage in the Thebaid, the drama starts with the more vulgar and
direct incitements to the coarser Deadly Sins and others--Gluttony,
Avarice, Ambition, Luxury. Then Hilarion appears and starts theological
discussion, whence arises a new series of actual visions--the excesses
of the heretics, the degradation of martyrdom itself, the Eastern
theosophies, the monstrous cults of Paganism. After this, Hilarion tries
a sort of Modernism, contrasting the contradictions and absurdities of
actual religions with a more and more ath