It is this point that I should like to bring out in this Introduction,--where we need not speak of his Norman origin, or (as his friend Ducamp has written in his _Literary Souvenirs_ with a disagreeable persistence, and so uselessly!) of his nervousness and epilepsy; of his loves or his friendships, but solely of his work. We know, in fact, to-day, that if all such details are made clear in the biography of a great writer, in no way do they explain his work. The author of _Gil Blas_, Alain René Lesage, was a Breton, like the author of _Atala_; the Corneille brothers had almost nothing in common. Of all our great writers, the one nearest, perhaps, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who died a victim to delirium from persecution, was Madame Sand, who had, without doubt, the sanest and best balanced temperament.
Other writers have sought,--for instance, our great classical authors, Pascal, Bossuet and perhaps Corneille,--to influence the thought of their time; some, like Molière, La Fontaine, and La Bruyère, to correct customs. Others still,--such as our romantic writers, Hugo or De Musset,--desired only to express their personal conception of the world and of life. And then Balzac, whose object,--almost scientific,--was to make a "natural history," a study and description, of the social species, as an animal or vegetable species is described in zoology or botany. Gustave Flaubert attempted only to work out his art, for and through the love of art. Very early in life, as we clearly see from his correspondence, his consideration for art was not even that of a social but of a _sacred_ function, in which the artist was the priest. We hear sometimes, in metaphor and not without irony, of the "priesthood" of the artist and the "worship" of art. These expressions must be taken literally in Flaubert's case. He was cloistered in his art as a monk in his convent or by his discipline; and he truly lived only in meditation upon that art, as a Mystic in contemplation of the perfections of his God. Nothing outside of art truly interested him, neither science, nor things political or religious, nor men, nor women, nor anything in the world; and if, sometimes, it was his duty to occupy himself with them, it was never in a degree greater than could benefit his art. "The accidents of the world"--this is his own expression--appeared to him only as things permitted _for the sake of description_, so much so that his own existence, even, seemed to him to have no other excuse.
