of solidity. This is particularly the case with his historical books.
The bric-à-brac and fustian of the Romantics has disappeared, to be
replaced by a clear, detailed, profound presentment of the life of the
past. In _Salammbô_, ancient Carthage rises up before us, no crazy
vision of a picturesque and disordered imagination, but in all the
solidity of truth; coloured, not with the glaring contrasts of rhetoric,
but with the real blaze of an eastern sun; strange, not with an imported
fantastic strangeness manufactured in nineteenth-century Paris, but with
the strangeness--so much more mysterious and significant--of the actual,
barbaric Past.

The same characteristics appear in Flaubert's modern novels. _Madame
Bovary_ gives us a picture of life in a French provincial town in the
middle of the last century--a picture which, with its unemphatic tones,
its strong, sensitive, and accurate drawing, its masterly design,
produces an effect of absolutely convincing veracity. The character and
the fate of the wretched woman who forms the central figure of the story
come upon us, amid the grim tepidity of their surroundings, with
extraordinary force. Flaubert's genius does not act in sudden flashes,
but by the method of gradual accumulation. The effects which it
produces are not of the kind that overwhelm and astonish, but of the
more subtle sort that creep into the mind by means of a thousand
details, an infinitude of elaborated fibres, and which, once there, are
there for ever.

The solidity of Flaubert's work, however, was not unaccompanied with
drawbacks. His writing lacks fire; there is often a sense of effort in
it; and, as one reads his careful, faultless, sculpturesque sentences,
it is difficult not to long, at times, for some of the irregular
vitality of Balzac. Singularly enough, Flaubert's correspondence--one of