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 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 Salammbô as an accomplished work of erudition. Salammbô is indeed a work of erudition; years were spent in getting up its archæological details. But Madame Bovary is also a work of erudition, and Bouvard and Pécuchet 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
