"I carry with me the melancholy of the barbaric races, with their instincts of migration, and their innate distaste of life, which forced them to quit their homes in order to escape from themselves. They loved the sun, all those barbarians who came to die in Italy; they had a frenzied aspiration toward the light, toward the blue skies, toward an ardent existence.... Think that perhaps I will never see China, will never be rocked to sleep by the cadenced footsteps of camels ... will never see the shine of a tiger's eyes in the forest.... You can treat all this as little worthy of pity, but I suffer so much when I think of it ... as of something lamentable and irremediable."
This is the nostalgia for the strange, for the unaccustomed, that all born wanderers know. Fate arranges it for many of them that their lives shall be uneventful, passed in dull, provincial narrowness; but behind these bars the clipped wings of their spirit are always flutteringly spread for flight. They know not what they seek, what desire drives them, but a sense of "the great adventure" unachieved keeps them restless until they die. It is such as these, these _voyageurs empassionés_, when condemned by fortune to a static existence--who find their outlet in mental wanderings amid the unusual, the grotesque, and the monstrous. Hearn and Flaubert both were at heart nomads, seekers of the unaccustomed; stretching toward immensities of space and time, toward the ghostly, the hidden, the unrealized. Like that wild fantastic _Chimera_ of the "Temptation" each such soul declares "_je cherche des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus large, des plaisirs inéprouvés._"
Flaubert was but twenty-six when the first suggestion of his masterpiece came to him. For _La Tentation de St. Antoine_, it is coming to be understood, is his masterpiece; is one of the greatest literary achievements of the French mind. _Madame Bovary_ is more widely famous and popular, but Flaubert himself always deeply resented this preference, and was always astonished at the comparative indifference of the world to the "Temptation." He, too, found it difficult to realize how hardly the average mind is awakened to an interest in the incorporeal; how surely cosmic generalizations escape the grasp of the commonplace intelligence.