he learnt for certain that the Duke of Richmond was about to bring forward a motion in the House of Lords which in effect admitted the independence of America. He threw off his lethargy and decided to oppose the motion in person. Shelburne appears to have conferred with him before he went to the House of Lords on April 7 to make the last of his speeches. The last scene is too well-known for us to linger on it here. enough to quote a few of Chatham's words: It is 'Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? . . . Shall a people that fifteen years ago was the terror of the world now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, "Take all we have, only give us peace.' 399 In this last of his utterances Chatham seems entirely absorbed by the danger from the House of Bourbon. The danger which he had foreseen and wished to avert at length threatened to overwhelm the country which he had made so great and glorious. This was a greater disaster even than the independence of the Americans, those 'froward children' whom he had soothed into obedience and nursed into loyalty in the past. For the last time Chatham spoke the language of heroic resolve, but he spoke also as if his hopes were faint. His letters show these hopes to have been almost as fitful and broken as were the last recorded snatches and flashes of his eloquence. All that he had lived for and had loved, the glory of England, the liberty of the Colonies, the 'Empire of free men' seemed at an end. What was there left for him who had embodied, created, and inspired all of these? It remained for him only to make a last protest and to die. HAROLD TEMPERLEY. Art. 2.-GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. 1. Euvres Complètes de Gustave Flaubert, augmentées de variantes, de notes d'après les manuscrits [&c.] de l'auteur et de sa correspondance. Eighteen vols. Paris: Conard, 1910-13. 2. Études sur Flaubert inédit. Par E. W. Fischer. Leipzig: Julius Zeitler, 1908. 3. Flaubert. Sa vie, son caractère et ses idées avant 1857. Par R. Descharmes. Paris: Ferroud Successeur, 1909. 4. Le Réalisme de Flaubert. Par Ernest Bovet. Extrait de la Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, Jan.Mars, 1911. Paris: Armand Colin, 1911. 5. Gustave Flaubert, avec des fragments inédits. Par Louis Bertrand. Paris: Mercure de France, 1912. 6. Autour de Flaubert. Études historiques et documentaires, suivies d'une Biographie chronologique [&c.]. Par René Descharmes et René Dumesnil. Two vols. Paris: Mercure de France, 1912. 7. La Jeunesse de Flaubert. Par Édouard Maynial. Paris: Mercure de France, 1913. 8. Le Génie de Flaubert. Par Jules de Gaultier. Paris: Mercure de France, 1913. 'ART for art's sake,' is the scorn of critics and professors; and the few who practise it wish to hear the phrase no more. A meaning they were never meant to convey has fastened on the words. Zola and Maupassant misunderstood them, but so do Messieurs Faguet and Anatole France. Flaubert was not the champion of Boileau and Racine against Byron and Shakespeare, or vice versa; he admired both kinds of eminence for opposite reasons. He would not have been with Prof. Santayana or with Matthew Arnold in appreciating Shelley; both are right and both are wrong; for no character of his work in general distinguishes his best. Why should sides be taken? The real task is to discern how much and what in each master's work lives. It is absurd to adore the whole production of either Wordsworth or Verlaine. The sectarian mania of the conquering hero or movement ruins modern æsthetics, and is dismally vulgar. The Vers-librist must not only do differently, but have found the one true way. The Post-impressionist must not only exist, but exist alone. The Bergsonian must wipe out Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and every straggler back to Plato. This gluttonous expropriation of fame has intensified as the machinery of journalism was perfected and the duration of interest dwindled. Over against the unseemly rabble of mutually abusive genius-hunters, Flaubert saw a company of masters each the complement of the others. They excelled variously; but all stood in some one respect cleanly apart. The man who wants to make a noise must invite others to help him; but he who speaks to be understood desires no echo. Flaubert honoured masters, but sought to descry the work, the passage, the quality in which supremacy had been attained. As a young man he carefully withdrew from the romantic movement, though it was ready to proclaim him a leader. Maxime du Camp was exasperated by such folly. The scandalous success of 'Madame Bovary,' proclaiming Flaubert the archrealist, put him in such a false position as still hides his true greatness from crowds of his countrymen. The world is so heavy-handed that its clap on the back is often a great misfortune. At Paris the young men are turning their faces from the ideal set by his example; his glory wanes. It has waned before, in the early 'seventies, and in the 'nineties, and will again many times before it be full. French boys and girls are taught by a legion of professors to admire him, till the most independent among them rebel. This revolt has been conjured by the middle-aged, who recognised that they could not open the door closed by the perfection of his craftsmanship. Like M. Suarez, they cannot breathe in his books though every line is beautiful,' and prefer Dostoievsky, where less beauty has been reduced still further by translation. Patient book-worms apply lenses to his masterpieces, measuring their visionary horizons with six inches of logic; they praise his information but deplore his invention. The poor scratch the hand that fed them. It lends irony to the sounding march of Fame that every step is backward, every note rings false, and yet she advances and fascinates. Flaubert is constantly better studied and admired. Now that he is accepted as a text-book and hated as a task, the litter of his prentice-pen has been bound up in uniform volumes with his finished productions, so as to make his heroic self-criticism seem as useless as possible. Yet this also is gain and claims gratitude. I regret that Flaubert did not burn these blackened reams as he intended, for no one else could rightly do so. Investigation gains whatever is lost to mystery; the truth is of course never known; and his fascination for all save the superficial remains as secure as Leonardo's. The two volumes of travel notes reveal a new sil houette of this rare mentality. It lacks the glow, the colour, the light and shade of the humorous, affectionate, enthusiastic, and choleric letters, but is continuously expressive like a good outline. Never before have I so well understood his likes and dislikes. Character in harmony with itself, whether imprinted by domineering circumstance or achieved by loyalty to mental conceptions, is for him beautiful; while any that results from the attempt to deceive a public is confounded, bourgeois, ridiculous. The admired figure may be monstrous, horrible, pernicious like a serpent or a devil; the despised may be civilised, harmless, pitiable. Flaubert detests shame for things beyond control, which conceals, not facts like a thief, but sentiment or thought like a clergyman-clothes not worn to bedeck or comfort but to disguise nature-ideas adopted to cloak desire or instinct. The brazen scamp who greets every man as a peer may be more honest and innocent than he who, thinking everybody his better, yet seeks to pass like a bad penny. Health is full realisation of the body, its faculties and relations, but also of their defects; complete self-acceptance and self-employment. Man, halt, maim, blind, leper and criminal, may still have integrity and beauty, while the prosperous snob lacks both. From innate gift, rather than of set purpose, Flaubert tried every human act and creation by this test, and was ever ready to welcome cynicism as honesty re-born. He derided the Protestant worship at Jerusalem as clumsy and inæsthetic, compared with the gaudy bad taste of other sects. You think it strange to appraise a wretched use of means as better than neglect of them? A girl is more beautiful in tights and tinsel than in the charity uniform she dislikes and resents; so is the soul. To follow the thread of these ideas like a clue is the only way of making Flaubert's travel notes readable to-day. In the three dense volumes of tales and novels we find them bunched, tangled, and ravelled as on the wrong side of a tapestry. Here is a happy huntingground for the psycho-literary professor, where fanciful genealogies of ideas and tendencies may run wild. From the human side, they form a terrible comment on the incapacity of modern civilisation to provide a tolerable initiation to mental and sexual activity. Schools drone their inept routines, while a smuggled book, some companion whom ill-luck has dipped in the sewer, some debauched serving-girl or the prostitute, captures the pupil's attention and introduces him to life. In France, fathers and teachers wink and jest; in England, they draw long faces or pretend to ignore. Réné Descharmes is convinced that Alfred le Poittevin, whose gifts Flaubert rated higher than his own, succumbed to this ordeal; and that his friend probably owed to it the nervous malady whose seizures haunted him through life. M. Descharmes does not, however, convince me that Flaubert lied* when he boasted under date of August 7, 1846: 'J'en ai aimé une depuis quatorze ans jusqu'à vingt sans le lui dire, sans la toucher; et j'ai été près de trois ans ensuite sans sentir mon sexe. J'ai cru un moment que je mourrais ainsi, j'en remerciais le Ciel.' † He discredits this assertion on evidence contained in unpublished, unquoted letters of Alfred le Poittevin. The use of the word 'ensuite' may be misleading; and the three years run from 1843 to 1846 instead of from '41 to '44. A month later Flaubert writes: 'Voilà pourquoi j'ai pendant plusieurs années fui systématiquement la société des femmes. Je ne voulais pas d'entrave au développement de mon principe natif, pas de joug, pas d'influence, j'avais fini par n'en plus désirer du tout, je vivais sans les palpitations de la chair et du cœur, et sans m'apercevoir seulement de mon sexe. Tu as réveillé en moi tout ce qui y sommeillait. * Réné Descharmes: Flaubert, p. 371. |