the adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty?
Well! I tell you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the
one thing 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 forever 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, 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 half-dozen works which Flaubert beat out on his "anvil," with an
average expenditure of half-a-dozen years to each, were composed on
a theory of which the prime distinguishing feature was the great
doctrine of "impersonality." George Sand's fluent improvisations
ordinarily originated, as we have noted, in an impulse of her
lyrical idealism; she began with an aspiration of her heart, to
execute which she invented characters and plot so that she is always