ench 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
the most interesting collections of letters in the language--shows that,
so far as his personal character was concerned, irregular vitality was
precisely one of his dominating qualities. But in his fiction he
suppressed this side of himself in the interests, as he believed, of
art. It was his theory that a complete detachment was a necessary
condition for all great writing; and he did his best to put this theory
into practice. But there was one respect in which he did not succeed in
his endeavour. His hatred and scorn of the mass of humanity, his
conception of them as a stupid, ignorant, and vulgar herd, appears
throughout his work, and in his unfinished _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ reaches
almost to the proportion of a monomania. The book is an infinitely
elaborate and an infinitely bitter attack on the ordinary man. There is
something tragic in the spectacle of this lonely, noble, and potent
genius wearing out his life at last over such a task--in a mingled agony
of unconscious frenzied self-expression and deliberate misguided
self-immolation.

In poetry, the reaction against Romanticism had begun with the _Emaux et
Camees_ of THEOPHILE GAUTIER--himself in his youth one of the leaders
of the Romantic School; and it was carried further in the work of a
group of writers known as the _Parnassiens_--the most important of whom
were LECONTE DE LISLE, SULLY PRUDHOMME,