patient, laborious, and sober treatment of his material he presented a
complete contrast to his great predecessor. These latter qualities make
Flaubert the pre-eminent representative of his age. The critical sense
possessed him more absolutely and with more striking results than all
the rest of his contemporaries. His watchfulness over his own work was
almost infinite. There has never been a writer who took his art with
such a passionate seriousness, who struggled so incessantly towards
perfection, and who suffered so acutely from the difficulties, the
disappointments, the desperate, furious efforts of an unremitting toil.
His style alone cost him boundless labour. He would often spend an
entire day over the elaboration and perfection of a single sentence,
which, perhaps, would be altogether obliterated before the publication
of the book. He worked in an apoplectic fervour over every detail of his
craft--eliminating repetitions, balancing rhythms, discovering the
precise word for every shade of meaning, with an extraordinary, an
almost superhuman, persistence. And in the treatment of his matter his
conscientiousness was equally great. He prepared for his historical
novels by profound researches in the original authorities of the period,
and by personal visits to the localities he intended to describe. When
he treated of modern life he was no less scrupulously exact. One of his
scenes was to pass in a cabbage-garden by moonlight. But what did a
cabbage-garden by moonlight really look like? Flaubert waited long for
a propitious night, and then went out, notebook in hand, to take down
the precise details of what he saw. Thus it was that his books were
written very slowly, and his production comparatively small. He spent
six years over the first and most famous of his works--_Madame Bovary_;
and he devoted no less than thirteen to his encyclopedic _Bouvard et
Pécuchet_, which was still unfinished when he died.

The most abiding impression produced by the novels of Flaubert is that