te the quality of soul in literary art.
They seem to know a person, in a book, and make way by intuition: yet,
although they thus enjoy the completeness of a personal information, it
is still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that it
does but suggest what can never be uttered, not as being different
from, or more obscure than, what actually gets said, but as containing
that plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet in
what is there expressed.

If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps
rank as the martyr of literary style. In his printed correspondence, a
curious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year, records
what seems to have been his one other passion--a series of letters
which, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed anguish, its
tone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in which the
whole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes supposed, one
of his own fictions. Writing to Madame X. certainly he does display,
by "taking thought" mainly, by constant and delicate pondering, as in
his love for literature, a heart really moved, but [28] still more, and
as the pledge of that emotion, a loyalty to his work. Madame X., too,
is a literary artist, and the best gifts he can send her are precepts
of perfection in art, counsels for the effectual pursuit of that better
love. In his love-letters it is the pains and pleasures of art he
insists on, its solaces: he communicates secrets, reproves, encourages,
with a view to that. Whether the lady was dissatisfied with such
divided or indirect service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees
that, on Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival of
what was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat solitary
and exclusive one.

I must scold you (he writes) for one thing, which shocks, scandalises
me, the small concern, namely, you show for art just now. As regards
glory be it so: there, I approve. But for art!--the one thing in life
that is good and real--can you compare with it an earthly love?--prefer
the adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty?
Well! I tell you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the one
thing I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with the
beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable, what not?--

The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and