University of Virginia Library

THE PAINSTAKING OF FLAUBERT

But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern times was Gustave Flaubert. His agonies in quest of the mot propre, the one and only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to have broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts. . . . In twenty pages he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of "The Temptation of Saint Anthony," he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136, even reducing it still further after its first publication.

On "Madame Bovary" he worked six

years, and in writing "Salammbo," which took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for documentary evidences.

Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion for perfection to the point of mania, and it will be a question with some whether, with all his pains, he can be called a great novelist, after all. But that he was a great stylist and a master in the art of making terrible and beautiful bas-reliefs admits of no doubt.

To be a great world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well, such as we find in Tolstoy's "War and Peace"—but that great book, need one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary, Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript no less than seven times!

Yes! though it be doubtless true, in Mr. Kipling's famous phrase, that

I think that the whole nine and sixty of them include somewhere in their method those sole preservative virtues of truth to life and passionate artistic integrity. The longest-lived books, whatever their nature, have usually been the longest growing; and even those lasting things of literature that have seemed, as it were, to spring up in a night, have been long in secret preparation in a soil mysteriously enriched and refined by the hid processes of time.