I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with the
beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable,
what not?--

The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art,
and count everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of
all beside when it is established on a large basis. Work! God
wills it. That, it seems to me, is clear.--+

I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I
repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay
in one's head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical
airs which are for ever returning, and cause you pain, you love
them so much. I observe that I no longer laugh much, and am no
longer depressed. I am ripe. You talk of my serenity, and envy
me. It may well surprise you. Sick, [29] irritated, the prey
a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I continue my labour like
a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of
his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling himself whether
it rains or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not like that
formerly. The change has taken place naturally, though my will
has counted for something in the matter.--

Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect
of ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician
were something else than healing, of the painter than painting-
as if the end of art were not, before all else, the beautiful.

What, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursued
with so much fervour, with so much self-command? Let us hear a