that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and
removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which
it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing
itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point,
from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific,
indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibility
of which constitutes it a fine art.

One seems to detect the influence of a philosophic idea there, the idea
of a natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between a
relative, somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative,
somewhere in the world of language--both alike, rather, somewhere in
the mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, inventive--meeting
each other with the readiness of "soul and body reunited," in Blake's
rapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his theory
philosophical expression.--

There are no beautiful thoughts (he would say) without beautiful forms,
and conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a physical body
the qualities which really constitute it--colour, extension, and the
like--without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, without
destroying it; just so it is impossible to detach the form from the
idea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form.

All, the recognised flowers, the removable ornaments of literature
(including harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully considered
[31] by him) counted, certainly; for these too are part of the actual
value of what one says. But still, after all, with Flaubert, the
search, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth, or winsome, or
forcible word, as such, as with false Ciceronians, but quite simply and
honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning. The first condition
of this must be, of course, to know yourself, to have ascertained your
own sense exactly. Then, if we suppose an artist, he says to the
reader,--I want you to see precisely what I see. Into the mind
sensitive to "form," a flood of random sounds, colours, incidents, is
ever penetrating from the world without, to become, by sympathetic
selection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the visible
vesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within,
nay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined,
enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just at