How is this? Mr Pater ascribes Flaubert's efforts (which, from his own account, amounted to agony) to a boundless love of art. But they are surely capable of another explanation. Neither Shakespeare nor Scott troubled themselves greatly to find the one word to express their thought, because they wrote out of full minds on subjects of general imaginative interest. Flaubert's aim, on the other hand, like that of so many modern artists, was to discover the imaginative secret underlying commonplace objects, and actions, while he was obliged to use as his instrument of expression a language built up by men who judged of such objects and actions by the light of common sense. Putting aside all moral considerations, Flaubert, in an artistic sense, 'considered too curiously'. For instance, in 'Madame Bovary' he takes eight lines to describe, in the most refined words, the action of a woman drinking a glass of liqueur. No wonder that he was oppressed by a feeling of artistic impotence:

1 Subj ect of one of Lamb's 'Essays of Elia' (1823). 2 A character described by Addison in the 'Spectator'. 3 He whose choice has made him master of his subject

neither fluent diction nor clear arrangement will forsake him. 'Ars Poetica', 11. 40-1.