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Five times the great axe gleaming, crashed down through a

Danish skull,

Then a sword found a joint in his armor-he swayed, and

with clankings dull

Sank down on the heap of his fallen. Wroth at the death he had doled,

They trampled upon him and spurned him, then fell to the loot of the gold.

Nor marked they the tiny flame-points, that were dancing about

the mast,

Till the oil-drenched sail was ablaze. Then panic gripped them fast;

Vainly they strove with the grapnels, while the mad flames roared to the skies

And the night was filled with their curses, and craven prayers and cries.

Thus died Sigurd Viking, in the midst of his fallen foes,

With a smile of peace on his lips. And his war-fain spirit rose, And was welcomed as well-proved comrade, by those who in Asgard abide,

One who lived as befitted a Viking, and as fitteth a Viking, died. Donald Bruce.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

N his "Literary Movement in France in the Nineteenth Century," Pellissier says, "During the second half of the century Gustave Flaubert was the master

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that school which engages in the personal observation of things, in study based upon nature other words, Flaubert was the inspiration of the naturalists, of the foremost school in France, of the great Gallic writers of to-day. He seems a stranger to most of us, but shining through the pages of Guy de Maupassant, of Zola, of Daudet, of the great writers of modern France we have encountered him often. To this school his word was law and a quotation from Emma Bovary (some knew it by heart) indubitably settled a mooted question.

If it had not been for his favorite niece, little would have been known about him, for like Shakespeare, he believed in a rigidly impersonal treatment of his characters. "May I be skinned alive before I ever turn my private feelings to personal account," was his sentiment expressed in one of those same letters which have brought the minutest details of his private life into the full glare of publicity. From these we learn that from the study of medicine, by the example of his father, a famous physician of his time, through the influence of an older brother, also a doctor, came that analytical faculty that so distinguishes his work. Sainte Beuve has said of him, “il tient la plume comme d'autres le scalpel." By its side in direct contradiction to such a craving for the exact truth, there dwelt a passion for romanticism and brilliant imagery. In one of his letters he mentions his schoolboy days. "One of my bosom friends wished to become a renegade and serve under Abd-el-Kadr not only troubadours, orientalists and revolutionists; we were above all artists we carried daggers in our

we were

pockets like Antony. Nay, some of us went ever further. Weary of the life they loathed Bar.

blew out his

brains with a pistol. How we respected the great masters, how we worshipped Victor Hugo." Even as a boy romanticism satisfied his imagination, his sense of color and form and his love for words used as signs and images. This perpetual conflict between a romantic temperament and a scientific instinct increased the gloom that settled over him when he discovered that he was an epileptic. Tall, of gigantic physique, healthy in body, his mind was never free from that strange oppression which at once drove him away from society yet made him sensible to its advantages. Melancholy marked him for her own and his exaggerated pessimism sprang largely from the fear and shame of his infirmity. He exclaims, "I would have bitterness in everything, an eternal hiss in the midst of our triumphs and desolation even in our enthusiasm." The "hermit of Croisset" he has been called. This melancholy, this constant strife between life and art, did not make his mind a place of peace, he strove to forget himself in work.

Flaubert devoted himself to the pursuit of literature, not the best of him, but all, body, soul and mind. His first letter to a school friend, written at the age of nine, begins, "If you wish to enter into a literary partnership, I will write the comedies and you shall set forth your dreams." His last, "I had hoped that the first volume of Bouvard and Pecuchet would have been finished this month. I have work

on my hands to last until the end of the year." Forty years of literary effort lies between. This was everything to him, all else, society, the great national questions of the day, politics,—nothing. In 1870, while at the height of his glory, he attended a meeting of a great political society, only to return disgusted. "The evening was filled with platitudes of nonsense. Those people actually talked of nothing else but M. de Bismark and the Luxemburg." The natural result in most writers would have been a long shelf given up to their works, probably mediocre, perhaps worse, but dissatisfaction with his work caused by this dualism in his character kept his production down to five books. "The

Temptation of St. Anthony" was under his scathing criticism thirty-five years before he surrendered it to the more tender hands of the critic. The result of this eternal revision was a tremendous vocabulary-"il a dans la tête tout le dictionnaire français et probablement d'autres encore," a dictionarymaker said of him-with which he could draw those wonderful pen pictures for which he is so famous. As M. Scherer writes, "M. Flaubert d'un mot jette sur un homme ou une situation la cynique lumière dans laquelle il se complaît." His advice to Guy de Maupassant that you should describe a cab and cab horse not only so that the reader should know what it was, but so he could recognize it individually among all the cabs and horses thronging the crowded streets of Paris, is indicative of the ambition he set before him. Thus, thrown back on his literature for his joys and his sorrows, he made it his ideal in life to cultivate a "manner" of storytelling that would ever stand as a monument of beauty and

exactness.

The novels that he gave to the world through the medium of this grand style naturally class themselves in two divisions. "Madame Bovary," "l'Education Sentimental" as illustrating the middle class life of his time, in which he "investigates and penetrates the truth as far as he is able" and interests himself in the character development; "Salammbo" and "St. Anthony" where he lets his imagination run riot, reveling in dreams of older generations. "Les Trois Contes" is an appendage, two of the tales belong to one division, one to the other. "Madame Bovary" is not only his first and best work, but that on which his reputation is based. Some say it ranks as the masterpiece of contemporary novels. It teaches a terrible lesson of the dangers of romantic imagination and aspiration carried into every-day life. With cruel accuracy he shows the gradual moral decline and final death of a bourgeoise, the wife of a country doctor. Not a detail is omitted of her sickly sentimental attachment to her two lovers, of her silly craving for luxury, and an intellectual life she could not appreciate. No glamour of

romance is thrown over her adultery, no effort to make it attractive; it is the recital of one dreary failure after another. Still her final death is one of the most wonderful passages in French literature of the century. The poisoned woman lying on the disordered bed, surrounded by her so-called friends. The grief-stricken husband, the apothecary and priest fighting over their philosophical notions or joking over their wine as they watch the corpse,—all faithfully show the meanness, pettiness, and futility of the lives of the "bourgeois," or Philistines as Ruskin called them. It is hard to understand how Flaubert ever conceived such a story, how he ever wrote it, but when we know that although "when I wrote the poisoning of Emma Bovary I felt so thoroughly the taste of arsenic in my mouth that I inflicted on myself two very real indigestions, one after the other," that although he felt his characters, he hated them, our respect for him increases. It was only a sense of a literary formula that kept his imagination within such mean bounds. The "work of an acrobat," he calls it. He writes to Madame Roger de Gennitte, "Shall I shock people? Let us hope so I beg of you not to judge me by it. The Bovary has been for me the working out of a theme. All that I love is absent from it." His hopes were realized; this book which he forced himself to write in which he told the naked truth and struck "false realism" in the face called forth expressions of virtuous wrath. On its account he was prosecuted for immorality by the French government —yet Henry James, with his tender New England conscience, has advocated using it as a Sunday School tract. The latter seems the more reasonable. You read the book and exclaim "Pray God I may avoid a life so futile!"

"Salammbo," a novel of his other type, came out four years after "Madame Bovary" and was more after his own heart. Not that it pleased him, for his critical sense was ever too keen for that, but the representation of Carthage during the times of Hamilcar gave free scope to the imaginative side that delighted in picturing barbaric cruelty, oriental

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