If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps
rank as the martyr of literary style. In his printed correspondence,
a curious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year,
records what seems to have been his one other passion--a series of
letters which, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed
anguish, its tone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in
which the whole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes
supposed, one of his own fictions. Writing to Madame X. certainly he
does display, by "taking thought" mainly, by constant and delicate
pondering, as in his love for literature, a heart really moved, but
[28] still more, and as the pledge of that emotion, a loyalty to his
work. Madame X., too, is a literary artist, and the best gifts he
can send her are precepts of perfection in art, counsels for the
effectual pursuit of that better love. In his love-letters it is the
pains and pleasures of art he insists on, its solaces: he
communicates secrets, reproves, encourages, with a view to that.
Whether the lady was dissatisfied with such divided or indirect
service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees that, on
Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival of what
was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat solitary and
exclusive one.

I must scold you (he writes) for one thing, which shocks,
scandalises me, the small concern, namely, you show for art
just now. As regards glory be it so: there, I approve. But
for art!--the one thing in life that is good and real--can you
compare with it an earthly love?--prefer the adoration of a
relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty? Well! I tell
you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the one thing