We have thus seen that Flaubert's attempt to reach a compromise with regard to the preponderating tendency of the age did not succeed; of his views respecting the structure of society, the only true one is his insight into the lower classes of the people. "However well you may feed the animal man, however thickly you gild his stable, even though you give him the softest and most luxurious litter, still he will ever remain a beast. The only progress upon which one can count is the effort to make the beast less of a cannibal. But as to raising the level of his ideas, or inspiring the masses with a broader conception of God, I seriously doubt whether this can ever be achieved."

In another letter he frankly admits that he has no faith, no principles of morality, no political ideals, and in this admission, wrung from the depths of his heart, the note of despair is already struck: "In the present day there seems to be as little possibility of establishing any new belief as of obtaining respect for the old faith. And so I seek and fail to find that one idea upon which all the rest should depend." These few words throw a clearer light on the attitude of Flaubert during the latter years of his life than anything else. Formerly he had found this idea in his art, while now he assumes that there is another and higher basis, upon which art itself must rest; but to find this principle is beyond his power. He seeks forgetfulness in work, but work only brings exhaustion, and he is still more dissatisfied. He realises his singularity, and it draws him out of his objective attitude into that incomprehensible existence, the very conception of which he himself denies.

The real tragedy of his position lies in the fact that he is alone in the midst of a strange and unknown world. And little by little his despair reaches its utmost limits: "Whenever I am without a book in my hand, or whenever I am not writing, such anguish seizes on me that I simply find myself on the verge of tears." So he writes in a letter to Georges Sand. "It seems to me that I have literally turned into a fossil, and that I am deprived of all connection with the universe around me." "A feeling of universal destruction and agony possesses me, and I am deathly sad." "When I am tired out from my work, I grow anxious about myself. No one remembers me, I belong to another sphere. My professional friends are so little friendly to me." "I pass whole weeks without exchanging a word with a single human creature, and at the end of the week I find it hard to recall any special day or any particular event during the course of that time. On Sundays I see my mother and niece, and that is all. A gathering of rats in the attic, that is my whole society. They make an infernal noise over my head, when the rain is not roaring, and the wind is not howling. The nights are blacker than coal, and a silence is all around me, infinite as in the desert. One's senses are terribly sharpened in such surroundings, and my heart starts beating at the slightest sound." "I am losing myself in the reminiscences of my youth, like an old man. Of life I ask nothing more, save a few sheets of paper that I may scratch ink upon. I feel as though I were wandering through an endless desert, wandering, not knowing whither; and that at one and the same time, I am the wanderer, and the camel, and the desert." "One hope alone sustains me, that soon I shall be parted from life, and that I shall surely find no other existence that might be still more painful.... No, no! Enough of misery!"

All his letters to Georges Sand are one weary restless martyr's confession of the "disease of genius." Sometimes a simple plaint bursts from him, and in it, through the impenetrable pride of the fighter, can be detected something soft and broken, as in the voice of a man who is over-tired. The fury of his enemies, the calumnies of his friends, the lack of understanding of his critics, no longer wounded his self-pride; he merely hated them. "All this avalanche of folly neither disturbs nor grieves me. Only one would prefer to inspire one's fellow men with pleasant feelings."

Then finally, even his last consolation—his art—deserts him. "In vain I gather my strength; the work will not come, will not come. Everything disturbs and upsets me. In the presence of others I can still control myself, but when I am alone I often burst into such senseless, spasmodic tears that I think I am going to die from them." In his declining years, when he can no longer turn to the past, and no longer correct his life, he asks himself the question: what if even that beauty, in the name of which he has destroyed his faith in God, in life, and in humanity, is as visionary and delusive as all else? What if his art, for the sake of which he had given up his life, his youth, and happiness, and love, should have abandoned him on the very edge of the grave?

"The Shadow is enveloping me," he says, as he realises that the end is at hand. This exclamation is as the cry of eternal anguish uttered before his death by another artist, Michael Angelo, the brother of Flaubert in his ideals and aims and genius:

Death struck him down at his work-table, quite suddenly, like a thunder-bolt. Dropping his pen from his hand, he sank down lifeless, killed by his one great, single passion, the love of his art.

Plato in one of his myths relates how the souls of men travel in chariots on winged steeds along the heavenly way; to some of whom it is given after a short time to approach that spot whence is visible the domain of Ideas; with yearning do they gaze aloft, and a few stray rays of light fall deep down among them. Then, when these souls are re-incarnated, to return and suffer on earth, all that is best in the human heart appeals to them and touches them, as a reflection of some eternal light, as a confused remembrance of another world, into which it was granted them to peep for the space of a single moment.

Surely there must have fallen upon the soul of Flaubert in the glorious sphere of the imagination a ray of beauty that was perhaps too bright.