count
everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all beside when
it is established on a large basis. Work! God wills it. That, it
seems to me, is clear.--+

I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I repeat to
myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in one's head,
by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are for
ever returning, and cause you pain, you love them so much. I observe
that I no longer laugh much, and am no longer depressed. I am ripe.
You talk of my serenity, and envy me. It may well surprise you. Sick,
[29] irritated, the prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I
continue my labour like a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned
up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling
himself whether it rains or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not like
that formerly. The change has taken place naturally, though my will
has counted for something in the matter.--

Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect of
ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician were
something else than healing, of the painter than painting-as if the end
of art were not, before all else, the beautiful.

What, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursued
with so much fervour, with so much self-command? Let us hear a
sympathetic commentator:--

Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of
expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify,
one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman labour for the
discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. In
this way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of expression, and
when a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went on seeking
another, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got hold
of the unique word.... A thousand preoccupations would beset him at
the same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his
spirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of
expression, there is but one--one form, one mode--to express what I
want to say.

The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of
words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!--the
unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely
proper to the single mental presentation or vision within.

[30] In