the difficulties, the disappointments, the desperate, furious efforts of an unremitting toil.  His style alone cost him boundless labour.  He would often spend an entire day over the elaboration and perfection of a single sentence, which, perhaps, would be altogether obliterated before the publication of the book.  He worked in an apoplectic fervour over every detail of his craft—­eliminating repetitions, balancing rhythms, discovering the precise word for every shade of meaning, with an extraordinary, an almost superhuman, persistence.  And in the treatment of his matter his conscientiousness was equally great.  He prepared for his historical novels by profound researches in the original authorities of the period, and by personal visits to the localities he intended to describe.  When he treated of modern life he was no less scrupulously exact.  One of his scenes was to pass in a cabbage-garden by moonlight.  But what did a cabbage-garden by moonlight really look like?  Flaubert waited long for a propitious night, and then went out, notebook in hand, to take down the precise details of what he saw.  Thus it was that his books were written very slowly, and his production comparatively small.  He spent six years over the first and most famous of his works—­Madame Bovary; and he devoted no less than thirteen to his encyclopedic Bouvard et Pecuchet, which was still unfinished when he died.

The most abiding impression produced by the novels of Flaubert is that of solidity.  This is particularly the case with his historical books.  The bric-a-brac and fustian of the Romantics has disappeared, to be replaced by a clear, detailed, profound presentment of the life of the past.  In Salammbo, ancient Carthage rises up before us, no crazy vision of a picturesque and disordered imagination, but in all the solidity of truth; coloured, not with the glaring contrasts of rhetoric, but with the real blaze of an eastern sun; strange, not with an imported fantastic strangeness manufactured in nineteenth-century Paris, but with the strangeness—­so much more mysterious and significant—­of the actual, barbaric Past.

The same characteristics appear in Flaubert’s modern novels. Madame Bovary gives us a picture of life in a French 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.