is contemporary life in Paris and the provinces, and because in them
Flaubert indulges his hatred for mediocrity--for the humdrum
existence of the country doctor, the apothecary, the insipid clerk,
the vapid sentimental woman, and the charlatans of science. But as a
matter of fact, ALL his books are essentially constructed on the
same theory: all are just as "realistic" as Flaubert could make
them.

Henry James called Madame Bovary a brilliantly successful
application of Flaubert's theory; he pronounced L'Education
Sentimentale "elaborately and massively dreary"; and he briefly
dismissed Salammbo as an accomplished work of erudition. Salammbo is
indeed a work of erudition; years were spent in getting up its
archaeological details. But Madame Bovary is also a work of
erudition, and Bouvard and Pecuchet is a work of enormous erudition;
a thousand volumes were read for the notes of the first volume and
Flaubert is said to have killed himself by the labor of his
unfinished investigations. There is no important distinction to be
made between the method or the thoroughness with which he collected
his facts in the one case or the other; and the story of the war of
the mercenaries against the Carthaginians is evolved with the same
alternation of picture and dramatic spectacle and the same hard
merciless externality that distinguish the evolution of Emma
Bovary's history.

We may go still farther than that towards wiping out the distinction
between Flaubert's "romantic" and his "realistic" works; and by the
same stroke what is illusory in the pretensions of the realists,
namely, their aspiration to an "impersonal art."