for the Vautrins and the Coralies. Now, Flaubert, though he professed to rate sympathy high, as a writer had little or none. He thinks meanly of the human spirit, and takes it as a compliment when some short-sighted admirer tells him that he is hard upon mankind. Truly, we suppose he belonged to the race of the gods, and could afford to be insolent! You may fatten the human beast,' he writes to George Sand; give him straw up to the stomach, and gild his manger, but he will remain a brute, say what you please. All the progress one can hope for is to make the brute less mischievous. But as for elevating the thoughts of the masses, or giving them a wider and consequently less anthropomorphic conception of God, I doubt it, I doubt it.'* The stupidity of the race, he often cries, is enough to choke him. To dissect them-as in Madame Bovary'he calls his revenge. And yet more as in 'L'Éducation Sentimentale.' We may allow to M. Guy de Maupassant that, in spite of its seeming to have been written without a plan, it is a deep and bitter study of common existence, a journal of the daily platitudes, of the levels and mediocrities of existence. The interest which in 'Madame Bovary' centres round one figure, making it typical and therefore not 'real' in the photographic sense, is here scattered; while the dramatic movement is tortuous, thwarted every moment by streamlets of public or private events which retard the catastrophe indefinitely. Flaubert's purpose, perhaps, was to bring his pseudo-hero and heroine, Frédéric Moreau and Madame Arnoux, up to the barriers of romantic or desperate resolutions, and then, in his great scorn for the ordinary mortal, to show how they failed to leap them. It is Realism, no doubt; men and women are not always heroic, whether in virtue or in guilt. But a larger knowledge of even the despised middle class would have taught him that courage and self-denial, instead of being rare, may be met with in every city and almost in every street. The moral of 'La Dame aux Camélias is truer to life. It is not those who have seen most of their fellow-creatures to whom heroism becomes incredible. Flaubert was a lonely spirit; he had not overcome the illusion that men of letters were of quite a different paste from mankind at large.† And, as M. Brunetière observes with epigrammatic bitterness, mankind revenged itself on the genius who was always satirizing that fool of a multitude' by goading him on to write 'L'Éducation Sentimentale.' If it was humiliating to be a man,' why did he spend seven years in minutely registering the * 'Lettres à George Sand,' p. 63. † Ibid., p. 118. scorn-provoking details? Was it that others might continue the task, and descend from the epic of platitude to the epic of pathology? 6 Romantic elements may still be discerned in the dramatic situations of Madame Bovary,' in the wild and grandiose though horror-striking battles, sieges, famines, slaughters, and Moloch sacrifices of 'Salammbò;' in the fantastic, high-coloured procession of gods and religions that sweeps as on wings of sullen tempest through 'La Tentation de Saint-Antoine;' in the dead gleams of sapphire, as from a Gothic window, which float over the story of St. Julien l'Hospitalier.' To mingle sentiment and sensation, to give the abstract a living form,making light visible, as it were, in the rainbow, that essentially surprising evocation of colour from the impalpable air,—was precisely the aim of Romantic literature. And if Flaubert's greatest triumph was achieved in doing so with common materials, with Norman backgrounds, and the sedges in the wayside ditch, he must have had implicit faith in the method which he enlarged. But in what else did he believe? Alas, in nothing! He was a worker in precious stones to whom no stones were precious; a dilettante, a Nihilist. When he touches the life of the spirit, his tongue stammers, and the miracle of his stately eloquence ceases. He knows how to compare sentiment with sensation; but he never rises to the realm of the Idea which has naught in common with either. Let a few years pass, and one who did not possess Flaubert's genius, but whose cast of mind was a vulgar repetition of his own in this respect,—we mean Jules Vallès, will exhibit in 'Jacques Vingtras' a total incapacity of transcending the base material, so that he must illustrate one piece of wood by another, so to speak, and fall to the lowest level of metaphor. In Flaubert's correspondence, as in his novels, there are indications of a similar defect. The peculiarity is remarkable. Modern French literature tends more and more to become word-painting;' it affects the sensitive memory, awakening it by scents and voluptuous sounds, and by a selection of delicate, or a barbaric display of ill-matched, colours. In other terms, it has descended from the region of the spirit, and is not so much Greek as Oriental. Its appeal to the senses is incessant. It has two kinds of style, the brutal and the exceedingly refined; but Pascal or Dante would look in vain through its entire range for the severe. And the logic of the change is incontestable. Do we grant to Mr. Herbert Spencer that consciousness is nothing but a stream of feelings, faint or vivid? What else, then, can literature be deemed, except the reflection of the same stream, always of feelings, whether whether it glides smoothly along in a monotonous current, or leaps upon us in foam and fury? Thus, a young critic, M. Hennequin, whose early death interrupted a brilliant if eccentric career, has defined literature in significant words as a combination of phrases intended to produce in the reader or hearer a special kind of emotion, viz. the aesthetic.' * A kind of emotion'! It follows as his benevolent defender, M. Tissot, grants, that the objective value of criticism can no longer be maintained, for how shall we reduce the varying emotions of individuals to a common standard? But, we ask in our turn, is there no appeal to reason, or is reason but a plexus' of emotions? Apparently it is the latter doctrine, disguised in the language of Kant, or asserted with brutal frankness: by M. Zola, which governs the ironical yet infinitely minute observation of Flaubert, the psychology of Stendhal, and M. Bourget's despairing, if tender and slightly rose-scented, scepticism. Want of faith in God and in the seriousness of life, which is only not to be railed at because it has never promised to satisfy our longing for the True and the Good, does it not all come to this at last? † Behind the veil there is, according to Flaubert, nothing. The curtain is the picture. Is it a poor distemper drawing, with crowds of lame, blind, and impotent struggling in hungry confusion? Even so, it is all the artist has to reproduce, and a wise man will set about the task with a quiet but ineffable scorn of the characters he is tracing. They are mean, but they are real. Flaubert cannot sympathise with George Sand, who, as he tells her often, is the dupe of her own nobleness, and creates what she believes in. Man is a brute; show him accordingly in his brutishness, with his rags and festering wounds; or if you will, practise a grimmer irony, and let him appear in the dull earthly hues which forbid him to excite even the compassion of the army surgeon or the interest which springs from tears and misery. The rags of Telephus were at any rate picturesque; but the bourgeois in his black coat and kid gloves is merely contemptible. When we have come into these depths, the selva selvaggia where no ray of the ideal penetrates, we look round with a certain fearful expectation for the creatures, haunting them, not insignificant buzzing swarms such as L'Éducation Sentimentale' torments us with, but the species obscene and ferocious, nourished on blood and lust, that are their suitable tenants. Flaubert, romantic in his way of throwing back horror and * Tissot, p. 328. + See André Cornélis,' passim. magnificence 6 magnificence into the past, was satisfied to show us the Carthage of Hanno and Hamilcar enveloped, as the poet might say, in a shower of bloody hail,' storm-swept and rained upon as with fire. But it was possible to come nearer home, and to mingle the revolting with the trivial, as gutters which have run with household rinsings may, on a day of barricades, run with blood. Après la littérature de sang, la littérature de fange,' wrote Théophile Gautier jestingly; and he was thus far a true prophet that these are types of imagination which pass quickly into one another. From the roman bourgeois to the roman canaille is but a step. Nay, as the De Goncourts have proved in Faustin' and Germinie Lacerteux,' the boudoir, with its Japanese lacquer and artistic decorations, may look straight down into what M. Zola has justly styled 'le milieu empesté de nos faubourgs.' Take a large sheet with a Take a large sheet with a lamp behind it, let one of these groups of figures pass over it as they live, and you will produce the divers kinds of Realism, the sanguinary, the muddy, and the 'quintessential.' The brothers De Goncourt will design costumes and furniture corresponding to each with historic fidelity; and M. Zola will supply characters to live and move in the Troisième Dessous' from which demons, ghosts, and other preternatural horrors rise upon the stage. But the best guide in that world is M. Macé, charged with the police des mœurs and well read in the dossiers which contain, as it were, a night-view of Paris enlightened by the dark lantern of the criminal Courts. Flaubert suffered from one great defect as a Realist. He could not abdicate his imperial style. The De Goncourts, too, though more pretentious than successful in moulding to their wish an artistic language, were as proud of their skill in mixing colours on the palette as of their supposed encyclopædic knowledge. But the man whose name, during the last twenty years, has stood for the practice and theory of Realism, M. Emile Zola, is burdened, happily, with none of these inheritances from an outworn past. He glories in being as ill-read as any of his drunken operatives or daughters of joy.' 'It is true,' remarks M. Brunetière pleasantly, that he has cultivated his ignorance; but it is a natural gift to begin with.' 'Non cuicunque datum est habere nasum,' said the Roman epigram. Nor is it every one in these years of enlightenment who could be so robustly individual as never to have heard, for instance, of the name of Niebuhr, and to confess it, as M. Zola has done. He vies in his contempt for history with a Texan cowboy; and he shows more sagacity than Flaubert in choosing, or rather settling down by instinct into, a style which is on a level with his subject. Of 'L'Assommoir' he declares boldly that it is a work of truth, the first romance of the people which does not tell lies and which has the smell of the people.' Since then he has, in his own opinion, uttered the first true word about the peasantry in 'La Terre'; and it is probable that no one will complain of the absence therein of local colouring or of a speech adequate to reproduce the abominations which he had set himself to describe. He has mocked and flouted the canon of French taste established by Boileau, which reads so ludicrously in the light of current literature :— 'Le lecteur français veut être respecté, The excellent Puritanical Boileau! Perhaps, after all, modesty is in the mind and not in the words a man uses. Flaubert goes near the mark when he writes that 'cynicism is allied to virtue;' and certainly there is truth in Coleridge's observation, that Fielding's hearty laugh clears the air. But we are compelled straightway to add that M. Zola does not laugh heartily. The air is as thick in his novels as on that Lethean wharf' where all things rot. No one would laugh willingly in a cancer-hospital. cancer-hospital. Over the debaucheries and horrid confusions of 'Nana,' 'Pot Bouille,' and the rest, there does not pass so much as the ripple of a smile. They are dulness incarnate. The author feels it, and gives a solid reason for what is a most instructive trait of his composition, in the first chapter of 'Nana,'-one of the few dramatic scenes he has successfully managed, which recals, like a bad copy, Flaubert's wonderful art. The human beast' does not laugh any more than he sings. He is too full of murderous, or hungry, or unclean appetites, and intensely pre-occupied, like a tiger in the jungle, with the means of satisfying them. Laughter means a degree of freedom, and he is never free. What freedom can there be in sensation? It is the spirit glancing from earth to Heaven, holding up its mirror of the ideal to things below, and never without a touch of pity-disinterested yet not alien,—which reveals in a kindly light the imperfections clinging to the finite, and breaks out into a good-humoured laugh, as though at its own failings. "The gods love a joke,' says Plato. But the less tamed and civilized a beast is, the more seriously it goes about its business, after the first grace of infancy. Those who know modern French literature, and the social atmosphere to which it belongs, will have observed how the sparkle is dying out of both. The working classes, we are told, have begun to load their brains |