George Sand. He inherited the tastes and imagination of the great
romantic generation; but he inherited none of its social and
political enthusiasm. He was disciplined by the romantic writers;
yet his reaction to the literary culture of his youth is not ethical
but aesthetic; he finds his inspiration less in Rousseau than in
Chateaubriand. He is bred to an admiration of eloquence, the poetic
phrase, the splendid picture, life in the grand style; with
increasing disgust he finds himself entering a society which, he
feels, neither understands nor values any of these things, and which
threatens their destruction. Consequently, we find him actuated as a
writer by two complementary passions--the love of splendor and the
hatred of mediocrity--two passions, of which the second sometimes
alternates with the first, sometimes inseparably fuses with it, and
ultimately almost extinguishes it.

The son of an eminent surgeon of Rouen, Gustave Flaubert may have
acquired from his father something of that scientific precision of
observation and that cutting accuracy of expression, by which he
gained his place at the head of modern French realism and won the
discipleship of the Goncourts, Daudet, Zola, and Maupassant and the
applause of such connoisseurs of technique as Walter Pater and Henry
James. From his mother's Norman ancestry he inherited the physique
of a giant, tainted with epilepsy; a Viking countenance, strong-
featured with leonine moustaches; and a barbaric temper, habitually
somewhat lethargic but irritable, and, when roused, violent and
intolerant of opposition. He had a private education at Rouen, with
wide desultory reading; went to Paris, which he hated, to study law,
which he also hated; frequented the theatres and studios; travelled
in Corsica, the Pyrenees, and the East, which he adored, seeing
Egypt, Palestine, Constantinople, and Greece; and he had one, and