nough for archaeology! If the
colour is not uniform, if the details are out of keeping, if the manners
do not spring from the religion and the actions from the passions, if
the characters are not consistent, if the costumes are not appropriate
to the habits and the architecture to the climate, if, in a word, there
is not harmony, I am in error. If not, no.'

And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can give
a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time a definition
of the merit which sets _Salammbo_ above all other historical novels.
Everything in the book is strange, some of it might easily be
bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony. The harmony is like
that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying its charm, or even the
secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a monotony coiling
perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its own. Or rather, it is
like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite colours, firmly
detached from a background of burning sky; a procession of Barbarians,
each in the costume of his country, passes across the wall; there are
battles, in which elephants fight with men; an army besieges a great
city, or rots to death in a defile between mountains; the ground is
paved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living burden, stand
against the sky; a few figures of men and women appear again and again,
expressing by their gestures the soul of the story.

Flaubert himself has pointed, with his unerring self-criticism, to the
main defect of his book: 'The pedestal is too large for the statue.'
There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more about Salammbo.
He declares: 'There is not in my book an isolated or gratuitous
description; all are useful to my characters, and have an influence,
near or remote, on the action.' This is true, and yet, all the same, the
pedestal is too large for the statue. Salammbo, 'always surrounded with
grave and exquisite things,' has something of the somnambulism which
enters into the heroism of Judith; she has a hieratic beauty, and a
consciousness as pale and vague as the moon whom she worships. She
passes before us, 'her body saturated with perfumes,' encrusted with
jewels like an idol, her head turreted with violet hair, the gold chain
tinkling between her ankles; and is hardly more than an attitude, a
fixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom one sees passing, with
oblique eyes and mouths painted into s