beard, his enormous eyes, green like the sea, hidden under black eye-brows: with his trumpet-like voice, his extravagant gestures and his noisy laugh, he was like one of the young Gaulish chiefs who fought against the Roman armies." Like all the other members of Du Camp's small circle, Flaubert, in whose extraordinary novel Madame Bovary French realism, to quote Mr. James, has said its last word, was at this time a Romanticist of the purest water. He had been formed on Chateaubriand and Hugo, and he was consumed at once with that passion for the past and that insatiable curiosity as to the intimities of actual life and thought, which have made the Romanticism of 1830-40 the source of such divergent streams, of French historical science on the one hand and of the naturalist school of novelists on the other. A few words may be allowed us later on as to his gifts and character, for M. du Camp's book is more than anything else a study of Flaubert. But at present we are more especially concerned with his effect upon Du Camp's development, which was great. For a time, indeed, Flaubert was reserved as to his own literary occupations, and Du Camp could only gauge his new friend by the talk which day after day carried himself and Flaubert, Louis de Cormenin, and a friend of Flaubert's, Alfred de Poitevin, backward and forward over the great field of literary speculation. At last, however, Flaubert broke silence, and read a manuscript novel to Maxime. Thenceforward they were brothers-in-arms. Each poured Each poured out his heart to the other, and as each project was revealed in the golden confidence of twenty-one, "We cried to each other, It will be superb!' It was decided that we should be together as much as possible, and we laid down our mode of life." The plan which the two friends drew up was a remarkable one, and may be recommended to those, who like that bold German observer, Karl Hillebrand, think that there is no serious ness in the French literary character! They were twenty-one; nine years were to be spent in acquiring all knowledge; at thirty, production was to begin, and to be carried on uninterruptedly till forty at forty they agreed man is used up; memory is possible, creation is no more to be thought of; letters, as such, must be abandoned, and all that can be done is to seek some useful occupation which may add to the knowledge though not to the pleasure of mankind, and lead the labourer peacefully to his quiet grave. Flaubert thought that some investigation of the philological connections of the Romance languages would probably meet the necessities of the case, and the two gravely occupied themselves with the details of the work which would, they calcu lated, be employing them at sixty. "Ten years in which to learn everything!" exclaims Maxime du Camp. we were born insatiable. Gustave Flaubert was so till the end, and I feel that I am so still." Just before 1848, Du Camp and Flaubert took a tour together in Brittany. They prepared for it as one might for the exploration of an unknown land. "Gustave reserved for himself the historical part, and found at the Rouen Library such books as he wanted. I took charge of all that concerned the geography and ethnology, the manner and archæology. In our letters we talked of nothing but Brittany. I would say to him : Work up your war of succession between Jean de Montfort and Charles de Blois !' and he would answer, 'Look well to your menhirs and your cromlechs ! we Thus equipped, the two friends set forth through a country which was almost as strange and as little known to a Frenchman of that day as Hungary or Poland. One great strategical road running across the district, in preparation for any future Vendéean rising; and for the rest, rough lanes and sandy tracks, leading across boundless commons of heath and gorse; in place of French, the Keltic Breton, in place of cathedrals those strange mysterious monuments of man's remotest past with which the soil of Brittany is strewn; in fact "the 'Gallia Comata' of the time of Julius Cæsar." But the imagination of the two friends clothed everything in sunlight and charm, and the highest moment of all was reached when " stood before the Château of Combourg and placed our feet on the stone steps leading up to Chateaubriand's old house. Instinctively we had taken off our hats as though in a sacred place, and when we entered the little room where he had grown up, where he had dreamed, where he had struggled against that terrible love of which he scarcely dares to speak in his memoirs, Flaubert with wet eyes leant over the table as if he would gladly draw within himself something of that great spirit." A year later, while France was in full revolution, Chateaubriand passed away from a world which the Catholic idea had not been able to save; and his body was borne to that last resting place prepared for it in the little island off the coast of Brittany, so finely described in these lines of Flaubert: "The island is uninhabited, and covered with scanty grass, mingled with great nettles and a small purple flower. At the top there is a dismantled fort with a court of crumbling walls. Below this ruin, half-way to the shore, a space of some ten feet square has been cut out of the slope; in the midst rises a tomb surmounted by a Latin cross. The tomb is made of three pieces-one for the base, one for the slab, one for the cross. He will sleep beneath it, his head turned towards the sea; and in this grave, built upon a reef, his immortality will pass as his life has passed, deserted by his fellow-men, and environed by storms. The waves will murmur century after century around this grand memory. In tempest they will leap to his very feet; in the summer dawns, so long and sweet, when the white sails swing out, and the swallow returns to us from beyond the seas, they will bring to him the voluptuous melancholy of the distance, and the caress of the sweeping breezes ; and as from day to day the flow of his native tide sways backwards and forwards between his cradle and his grave, the heart of Réné, grown cold, will slowly, slowly fall into nothingness, to the endless rhythm of an eternal music." "The Revolution of February, 1848," says Du Camp, 66 was a surprise, and as it led France to the empire, it missed the goal at which it aimed, and became ridiculous,' 22 Elsewhere, in an independent book, he has given us his views of the situation and his remembrances of the time. In the present volume, however, he makes it frankly clear to us that in spite of all the turmoil around him, he was, even in the years of 1848 and 1849, far more deeply interested in books than in presidents and parliaments. A sort of rage came across him as he saw one friend after another touched by the political fever. Louis de Cormenin was a candidate for the Chamber; another literary friend of his and Flaubert's, Louis Bouilhet, had taken the same irrational course, and even Flaubert himself was dreaming of some impossible office which might take him at his country's expense to Athens and Constantinople. Upon Flaubert at least his friend's angry admonitions had some effect, and the penitent novelist, once more convinced of the inalienable mission and supreme dignity of the man of letters, confessed, "You are right and I am a wretch; be magnanimous and pardon me a moment of folly!" There is a touch of comedy in such zeal at such a time for the exclusive rights of Apollo and the Muses. The Du Camp however, of later life, is perfectly prepared to defend the views of his earlier self. What, he asks, have the children of letters ever gained from contact with the world of affairs? Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, is it not true that when you touch their political side, you touch what is weakest in them, and what posterity will forget if it can? He quotes Renan's saying that "in our heavy modern races, it takes at least the drainage of thirty or forty millions of men to produce a great poet, a genius of the first order;" and when the world has at last got such a being, how absurd to squander him in affairs which any man of ordinary brains can do-and do better. "At the touch of politics a poet deteriorates," and not only the poet, but the historian and the man of letters. The typical instance of this truth, as he believes it to be, M. du Camp finds in the career of PrévostParadol. In him, he maintains, literature lost a son who would have done her infinite credit, and politics gained a discontented and ineffective recruit. At the same moment, when Flaubert was disturbing his friend's evenings with denunciations of the war-conversation of Paris in 1870, not because he had any opinion about the war, but because none but bourgeois ought to concern themselves with matters which were not "fine verse or "sonorous prose "-at that time, Prévost Paradol was expressing to Du Camp the contempt which the practical man so often feels towards the maker of books. One day, in a walk, Du Camp' had suggested to him the composition of a History of Parliamentary Ideas. He answered me with a benevolence which showed his faith in himself: "How happy you are, still A to be able to believe in books, in phrases, and to amuse yourself with these useless toys which are the pastime of the idle!' After a moment's silence he resumed, 'There is nothing real but power! To lead men, to direct their destinies, to bring them to greatness by roads unknown to them, to prepare facts, to command events, to force the obedience of fortune there is the goal, which is worth aiming at, and which is reached only by strong wills and lofty intelligences.' We were in the great centre of the alley of the Tuileries, from which the palace is visible. I said to him, 'Tell me, what is your dream?' He stopped and pointing to the Clock Pavilion, he replied with a sort of exaltation I had never seen in him before: The master of France is there; well, I should like to be the master of that master.'" Du Camp's reply was a laughing request to be allowed to work in the archives of the Court of Appeal when the new Richelieu should come into power. few weeks later, Prévost-Paradol was on his way to Washington. "He seemed to me melancholy, and spoke of the distance of Washington. 'Bah!' I replied, you will soon come back, and in two years you will be a minister.' He answered me by a question: And you, what are you going to do?' 'I shall go on with my book on Paris-that is all.' With a sad intonation he replied, 'You are perhaps in the right of it.'" It is an old quarrel this between the party of thought and the party of action. Is it really possible to deny that in most. respects, the more the two classes merge in one another, the better it is for mankind? But the poets at any rate are better out of the mêlée. may safely prophesy that Victor Hugo's politics will have grown a little ridiculous even in the eyes of Frenchmen, long before his verse has lost a fraction of its savour for posterity. And Goethe was perhaps better advised than the author of the Châtiments when he spoke of that high region of 6 One cosmopolitan sympathies, above the strife of parties, above even the individual interest of nations into which the true man of letters should seek to enter. The years 1849 and 1850 were mostly filled up for Du Camp and Flaubert by a long Eastern journey. Before they set out, Flaubert formally invoked the opinion of his two friends, Bouilhet and Du Camp, upon a book which had occupied him for several years, and the conclusion of which had been expected with feverish curiosity by his little circle. This was the Temptation of St. Antony, a modified form of which he published towards the end of his life. The scene in which the two friends sit in judgment on it is a remarkable page in literary history. One sees the French character at its best; its capacity for friendship, for delicate sincerity, its tact and its finesse. "I have just finished St. Antony," wrote Flaubert; "come." The two friends took the next train and went, and for two or three days, Flaubert read aloud incessantly. Before the last reading, Bouillet and Du Camp held anxious conference. Their impression of the long expected book was wholly unfavourable. They thought it diffuse, extravagant, little more in fact than a collection of fine phrases, and they bravely determined that they would say so to Flaubert without the smallest reserve. "It was a question of a literary future in which we had an absolute faith. Flaubert must be stopped from pursuing a road in which he was wasting his finest qualities." In the evening accordingly, after the last page, "towards midnight, Flaubert, striking the table, said to us Now then, tell me frankly what think.' Bouillet was timid, but no one could show himself more decided than he in the expression of a thought when he had once determined to make it known. He answered: We think that you had better throw all that into the fire and never speak of it again.' Flau you an bert sprang up with a cry of horror! Then there began one of those talks at once severe and strengthening, such as can only occur among those who trust each other completely, and are bound together by a genuine affection." The talk, indeed, as Du Camp gives it, is a fine piece of literary criticism. "Flaubert drew out his poor phrases which his mind had nursed so long and tenderly, held them up before his friends, protesting, as he rolled them out, That surely is good.' 'Yes,' we answered, it is good, but its goodness has nothing to do with the value of the book. You have been confounding style and rhetoric; remember the precept of La Bruyère: if you want to say, it rains, say, it rains. When Chateaubriand, whom you quote so readily, writes: "I have never perceived a shepherd's movable hut at the corner of a wood without thinking that with you it would suffice me amply. More blessed than those Scythians of which the Druids discoursed to me, we would carry our dwelling from solitude to solitude, and our home would have no more to do with the earth than our life "—there you have style. When he writes: "These horsemen encase their limbs in blackened hide, the spoil of the wild buffalo," there you have rhetoric. Now in the Temptation of St. Antony you have nothing but such horsemen and such spoils of the wild buffalo. There are excellent passages in it, there are echoes of antiquity which are exquisite, but it is all lost in the inflation of the language; you meant to make music and you have only made a noise.' Hard counsels! but well deserved, for the book was and is an extraordinary performancetwo volumes of dialogues, through which defile the Sphinx, the Chimera, the Queen of Saba, Simon the Magician, Apollonius of Tyana, Origen, Basilides, Montanus, Manes, Hermogenes, and every heretical sect. Flaubert had given full rein to the roving spirit of romanticism, and the result. in the opinion of his friends, was mere lost time. What was to be done? The three talked from midnight till ten o'clock in the morning, and the next day saw the endless debate resumed. The issue of it was the famous novel of Madame Bovary. In view of Flaubert's rooted "lyrism" they urged him to choose a subject "where lyrism would be so ridiculous that you would, perforce, have to control yourself and give it up. Take a common theme -one of those incidents of which middle-class life is full-something like La Cousin Bette, or Le Cousin Pons of Balzac, and force yourself to treat it in a natural, almost familiar tone, rejecting all episodes and digressions, however fine in themselves, which are useless to the development of your conception and tedious to the reader." Flaubert, rather conquered than convinced, replied, "It will be hard enough, but I will try." Before the meeting separated the subject even of Madame Bovary had been suggested to him by Bouilhet, and during the long eastern ramble on which he and Du Camp started almost immediately afterwards, the novel was simmering in Flaubert's mind, to the considerable detriment, sometimes, of his powers of enjoying the scene before him. Poor Flaubert indeed could from no point of view be regarded as a desirable fellow-traveller. He took no interest in Egypt, and was only fatigued by Palestine and Syria. At Beyrout he cleverly managed to persuade Du Camp to give up his previous plan of visiting Mesopotamia and Persia, and the two friends started homeward through Greece and Italy, countries in which Flaubert's literary sensibility did at last stir him into something like admiration. Italy, when they passed through her, was almost at the end of her long night, and the dawn was near. "At one end, towards the north-west, there was a ray of wavering light, always, it seemed, on the point of dying out. That light floated over Piedmont-Was it a beacon just lit? Was it a grave-lamp just expiring? No. 284-VOL. XLVIII. Who could tell? But there was there also, a little man of forty years, shortsighted, ironical, curt, stout, and perspicacious. It was Camille Cavour, who was beginning his political career, guided by that historical mot of a Prince of the House of Savoy. 'Italy is an artichoke which one must eat leaf by leaf.' Seventeen years after Novara, Piedmont was at Milan, at Naples, and Venice." Upon his return home in 1851, Du Camp plunged at once into professional literature, in connection with the resuscitated Revue de Paris. He, Arsène Houssaye, Théophile Gautier, and Louis de Cormenin, became joint editors and proprietors of the Review. Their intention was to make it specially a means of expression to young authors of talent, to maintain, in fact, towards the Revue des deux Mondes, with its staff of established and well known contributors, the same sort of position which the Odéon holds, towards the Comédie Française. The Review lived for seven years, and may be said to have died of the Orsini bombs, in company with a good many other journals suppressed at the same time and for the same reasons. But while it lived it did good service to the cause of letters, and Du Camp and De Cormenin were able by its means to secure a hearing and vantage ground to the friends in whom they believed. The second number contained a poem of three thousand lines, by Bouilhet. The experienced prophesied ill for a magazine which could make its début with such an imprudence. But the magazine notwithstanding made its way, and that it should have been the means of introducing Flaubert to the world is, in M. du Camp's eyes, a lasting justification for its existence. The chapter on "Ghosts" is filled with a number of miscellaneous literary memories, with stories of that strangest of men and poets, Charles Baudelaire; of Philoxène Boyer, of Charles Barbara, of Gerard de Nerval, and of men like Etienne Eggis, or Emile Lamé, who had scarcely M |