g of it, and by that counterpoise of a
commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric
in his rendering of it.

In writing _Salammbo_ Flaubert set himself to renew the historical
novel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted,
doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible,
by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of the
reality of the things about us, only able to translate them
approximately into any form of art. How much is left over, in the
closest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a passing
steamer, of one's next-door neighbour, of the point of view of a
foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind, moment
by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble Arch? Think,
then, of the attempt to reconstruct no matter what period of the past,
to distinguish the difference in the aspect of a world perhaps bossed
with castles and ridged with ramparts, to two individualities encased
within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his antiquity wisely: a period of
which we know too little to confuse us, a city of which no stone is left
on another, the minds of Barbarians who have left us no psychological
documents. 'Be sure I have made no fantastic Carthage,' he says proudly,
pointing to his documents; Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him
with 'the _exact_ form of a door'; the Bible and Theophrastus, from
which he obtains his perfumes and his precious stones; Gresenius, from
whom he gets his Punic names; the _Memoires de l'Academie des
Inscriptions_. 'As for the temple of Tanit, I am sure of having
reconstructed it as it was, with the treatise of the Syrian Goddess,
with the medals of the Duc de Luynes, with what is known of the temple
at Jerusalem, with a passage of St. Jerome, quoted by Seldon (_De Diis
Syriis_), with the plan of the temple of Gozzo, which is quite
Carthaginian, and best of all, with the ruins of the temple of Thugga,
which I have seen myself, with my own eyes, and of which no traveller or
antiquarian, so far as I know, has ever spoken.' But that, after all, as
he admits (when, that is, he has proved point by point his minute
accuracy to all that is known of ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to
every indication which can serve for his guidance, his patience in
grouping rather than his daring in the invention of action and details),
that is not the question. 'I care little e