rue idea of any matter whatever. What
Buffon said is a big blasphemy: genius is not long-continued patience.
Still, there is some truth in the statement, and more than people
think, especially as regards our own day. Art! art! art! bitter
deception! phantom that glows with light, only to lead one on to
destruction...

Again--

I am growing so peevish about my writing. I am like a man whose ear is
true but who plays falsely on the violin: his fingers refuse to
reproduce precisely those sounds of which he has the inward sense.
Then the tears come rolling down from the poor scraper's eyes and the
bow falls from his hand.

Coming slowly or quickly, when it comes, as it came with so much labour
of mind, but also with so much lustre, to Gustave Flaubert, this
discovery of the word will be, like all artistic success and felicity,
incapable of strict analysis: effect of an intuitive condition of mind,
it must be recognised by like intuition on the part of the reader, and
a sort of immediate sense. In every one of those masterly sentences of
Flaubert there was, below all mere contrivance, shaping and
afterthought, by some happy instantaneous concourse of the various
faculties of the mind with each other, the exact apprehension of what
was needed to carry the meaning. And that it fits with absolute
justice will be a judgment of [34] immediate sense in the appreciative
reader. We all feel this in what may be called inspired translation.
Well! all language involves translation from inward to outward. In
literature, as in all forms of art, there are the absolute and the
merely relative or accessory beauties; and precisely in that exact
proportion of the term to its purpose is the absolute beauty of style,
prose or verse. All the good qualities, the beauties, of verse also,
are such, only as precise expression.

In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one
indispensable beauty is, after all, truth:--truth to bare fact in the
latter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from men's
ordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy, truth
here as expression, that finest and most intimate form of truth, the
vraie verite. And what an eclectic principle this really is! employing
for its one sole purpose--that absolute accordance of expression to
idea--all other literary beauties and excellences whatever: how many
kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same time
safe