on the inside of her story. According to Flaubert's theory, the
novel should originate in a desire to present a certain segment of
observed life. The author is to take and rigorously maintain a
position outside his work. The organ with which he collects his
materials is not his heart but his eyes, supplemented by the other
senses. Life, so far as the scientific observer can be sure of it,
and so far as the artist can control it for representation, is a
picture or series of pictures, a dramatic scene or a concatenation
of dramatic scenes. Let the novelist first, therefore, with
scrupulous fidelity and with minute regard for the possible
significance of every observable detail, fill his notebooks, amass
his materials, master his subject. After Flaubert, a first-rate
sociological investigator is three-fourths of a novelist. The rest
of the task is to arrange and set forth these facts so that they
shall tell the truth about life impressively, in scene and dramatic
spectacle, the meaning of which shall be implicit in the plot and
shall reach the reader's consciousness through his senses.

Critics have spent much time in discussing the conflict of
"romantic" and "realistic" tendencies in Flaubert's works. And it is
obviously easy, so far as subject-matter is concerned, to group his
books in two divisions: on the one hand, The Temptation of St.
Anthony, Salammbo, and two of the Trois Contes; on the other hand,
Madame Bovary, L'Education Sentimentale, and the incomplete Bouvard
and Pecuchet. We may call the tales in the first group romantic,
because the subject-matter is remote in time and place, and because
in them Flaubert indulges his passion for splendor--for oriental
scenery, for barbaric characters, the pomp of savage war and more
savage religion, events strange, terrible, atrocious. We may call
the stories in the other group realistic, because the subject-matter