on one side what they are destroying on the other.”  Flaubert, who thinks that he has no “illusions” about peasants or the “average man,” brings forward his own specific of a quite different nature:  “Do you think that if France, instead of being governed on the whole by the crowd, were in the power of the mandarins, we should be where we are now?  If, instead of having wished to enlighten the lower classes, we had busied ourselves with instructing the higher, we should not have seen M. de Keratry proposing the pillage of the duchy of Baden.”

In the great war of our own time with the same foes, our professional advocates of “preparedness,” our cheerful chemists, our scientific “intellectuals”—­all our materialistic thinkers hard-shell and soft-shell,—­took the position of Flaubert, just presented; reproached us bitterly for our slack, sentimental pacificism; and urged us with all speed to emulate the scientific spirit of our enemy.  There is nothing more instructive in this correspondence than to observe how this last fond illusion falls away from Flaubert under the impact of an experience which demonstrated to his tortured senses the truth of the old Rabelaisian utterance, that “science without conscience is the ruin of the soul.”

“What use, pray,” he cries in the last disillusion, “is science, since this people abounding in scholars commits abominations worthy of the Huns and worse than theirs, because they are systematic, cold-blooded, voluntary, and have for an excuse, neither passion nor hunger?” And a few months later, he is still in mad anguish of desolation: 

“I had some illusions!  What barbarity!  What a slump!  I am wrathful at my contemporaries for having given me the feelings of a brute of the twelfth century!  I’m stifling in gall!  These officers who break mirrors with white gloves on, who know Sanskrit, and who fling themselves on the champagne; who steal your watch and then send you their visiting card, this war for money, these civilized savages give me more horror than cannibals.  And all the world is going to imitate them, is going to be a soldier!  Russia has now four millions of them.  All Europe will wear a uniform.  If we take our revenge, it will be ferocious in the last degree; and, mark my word, we are going to think only of that, of avenging ourselves on Germany.”

Under the imminence of the siege of Paris, Flaubert had drilled men, with an out-flashing of the savage fighting spirit of his ancestors, of which he was more than half ashamed.  But at heart he is more dismayed, more demoralized, more thoroughly prostrated than George Sand.  He has not fortitude actually to face the degree of depravity which he has always imputed to the human race, the baseness with which his imagination has long been easily and cynically familiar.  As if his pessimism had been only a literary pigment, a resource of the studio, he shudders to find Paris painted in his own ebony colors, and his own purely “artistic” hatred of the