d has not been surpassed by the studies of Zola
or the stories of De Maupassant. On the other hand, there is nothing in
Hugo, even, more romantic than _The Temptation of Saint Antony_. But it
is necessary to look for many things in romanticism; and the romanticism
of Hugo, which was one of the delights of Flaubert, did not resemble
that of De Musset, (Lord de Musset, as Flaubert called him) which he
strongly disliked. What he loved in romanticism was the "colour," and
nothing but the colour. He loved the romanticism of the Orientals, of
Hugo and Chateaubriand, that plastic romanticism, whose object is to
substitute in literature "sensations of art" for the "expression of
ideas," or even of sentiments. It is precisely here that naturalism and
romanticism--or at least French naturalism, which is very different from
that of the Russians or the English--join hands. In the one case, as in
the other, the attempt is made to "represent"--as he himself puts it;
and when one represents nothing except the vulgar, the common, the
mediocre, the everyday, commonplace, or grotesque, he is a "naturalist,"
like the author of _Madame Bovary_; but one is a "romanticist" when,
like the author of _Salammbo_, he makes this world vanish, and recreates
a strange land filled with Byzantine or Carthaginian civilization, with
its barbaric luxury, its splendour of corruption, immoderate appetites,
and monstrous deities.

We have done wrong in considering Flaubert a naturalist impeded by his
romanticism, or a romanticist impenitent, irritated with himself because
of his tendency to naturalism. He was both naturalist and romanticist.
And in both he was an artist, so much of an artist (I say this without
fear of contradiction) that he saw nothing in his art but
"representation," the telling of the truth in all its depth and
fidelity. _Les Fileuses_ and _La Reddition de Breda_ are always by
Velasquez; but the genius of the painter has nothing in common with the
subject he has chosen or the circumstances that inspired him.

From this source proceeds that insensibility in Flaubert with which he
has so often been reproached, not without reason, and which divides his
naturalism from that of the author of _Adam Bede_ or that of the author
of _Anna Karenina_ by an abyss. Honest, as a man, a good citizen, a good
son, a good brother, a good friend, Flaubert was indifferent, as an
artist, to all that did not belong to his art. "I believe that it is
necessary