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 safeguards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply
pondered evocation of "the phrase," are equally good art. Say what