Editing Gustave Flaubert (section)

==Perfectionist style==
Flaubert famously avoided the inexact, the abstract and the vaguely inapt expression, and scrupulously eschewed the [[cliché]].<ref name="Gosse1911"/> In a letter to [[George Sand]] he said that he spent his time "trying to write harmonious sentences, avoiding [[assonance]]s".<ref>[https://archive.org/details/lettersofgustave0001flau/page/89 The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1857–1880 By Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller] p. 89</ref><ref>Angraj Chaudhary (1991) [https://books.google.com/books?id=3k_kAAAAMAAJ ''Comparative aesthetics, East and West''] p. 157</ref>

Flaubert believed in and pursued the principle of finding "''le mot juste''" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key means to achieve high quality in literary art.<ref name=" Chandler1958p17"/> He worked in sullen solitude, sometimes occupying a week in the completion of one page, never satisfied with what he had composed.<ref name=EB1911/> In Flaubert's correspondence he intimates this, explaining correct prose did not flow out of him and that his style was achieved through work and revision.<ref name="Gosse1911">{{Cite EB1911|wstitle=Flaubert, Gustave}}</ref> Flaubert said he wished to forge a style "that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind." He famously said that "an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Flaubert |first=Gustave |title=The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857 |translator-last=Steegmuller |translator-first=Francis}}</ref>

This painstaking style of writing is also evident when one compares Flaubert's output over a lifetime to that of his peers (for example [[Honoré de Balzac|Balzac]] or [[Émile Zola|Zola]]). Flaubert published much less prolifically than was the norm for his time and never got near the pace of a novel a year, as his peers often achieved during their peaks of activity.  [[Walter Pater]] famously called Flaubert the "martyr of style".<ref name="Chandler1958p17">{{citation | last = Chandler | first = Edmund | year = 1958 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=cDJbAAAAMAAJ | title = Pater on style: an examination of the essay on "Style" and the textual history of "Marius the Epicurean" | pages = 17 | quote = Pater then digress into a discussion of Flaubert and the monumental labours that have earned him the title of the 'martyr' of style. Pater quotes a French critic describing Flaubert's principle of 'le mot juste', which, he believed, was the means to the quality of the literary art (that is, 'truth') that lies beyond incidental and ornamental beauty. Flaubert's obsession with the thought that there exists the precise word or phrase for everything to be expressed shows, Pater suggests, the influence of a philosophical idea—those exact correlations between the world of ideas and the world of words can be found. }}</ref><ref>{{citation | first = Louis | last = Menand | year = 2007 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=tL8LAQAAMAAJ | title = Discovering modernism: T.S. Eliot and his context | pages = 59 | publisher = Oxford University Press, USA | quote = This difficult virtue of "restraint" Pater thought exemplified by Flaubert, whom he made not the hero (for style has no heroes) but the martyr of style. | isbn = 9780195159929 }}</ref><ref>Conlon, John J. "The Martyr of Style: Gustave Flaubert," in Walter Pater and the French Tradition, 1982</ref><ref>{{citation | first = Frank Northen | last = Magill | year = 1987 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=9_tYAAAAMAAJ | title = Critical survey of literary theory |volume=3 | pages = 1089 | publisher = Salem Press | quote = in a discussion of style in which he glorifies Gustave Flaubert as "the martyr of style," he extols Flaubert's workmanship as a model for all writers, including English. | isbn = 9780893563936 }}</ref>