Flaubert, as Saintsbury justly points out, occupied “a very singular middle position between romanticism and naturalism, between the theory of literary art, which places the idealizing of merely observed facts first of all, and is sometimes not too careful about the theory which places the observation first if not also last, and is sometimes ostentatiously careless of any idealizing whatsoever.” His was a realism of a vastly superior sort to that of his disciples. The profound philosophic bias of his mind enabled him to pierce behind appearances, and while his surfaces are extraordinary in finish, exactitude, and detail, the aura of things and persons is never wanting. His visualizing power has never been excelled, not even by Balzac,—a stroke or two and a man or woman peers out from behind the types. He ambushed himself in the impersonal, and thus his criticism of life seems hard, cold, and cruel to those readers who look for the occasional amiable fillip of Gautier, Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens. This frigid withdrawal of self behind the screen of his art gave him all the more freedom to set moving his puppets; it is this quality that caused him to be the only naturalist to receive mercy from Brunetière’s remorseless pen. Those who mortise the cracks in their imagination with current romanticism, Flaubert will never captivate. He seems too remote; he regards his characters too dispassionately. This objectivity is carried to dangerous lengths in Sentimental Education, for the book is minor in tone, without much exciting incident—exciting in the Dumas or Stevenson sense—and is inordinately long. Five hundred pages seem too much by half to be devoted to a young man who does not know his own mind. Yet Frédéric Moreau is a man you are sure to meet on your way home. He is born in great numbers and in every land, and his middle name is Mediocrity. Only the golden mean of his gifts has not brought him happiness. He has some money, and was born of middle-class parents in the provinces. His mother’s hope, he is sent to Paris to the schools, and has just taken his bachelor degree when the book begins. On the steamboat bound for Nogent-sur-Seine, Frédéric meets Arnoux, the art dealer,—an admirably drawn personality,—and falls in love with Madame Arnoux. That love—the leading motive of the work—proves his ruin, and it is his one pure love; a sample of Flaubert’s irony, who refuses to be satisfied with the conventional minor moralities and our conventional disposition of events. Frédéric goes home, but cannot forget Madame Arnoux. He is romantic, rather silly, good-hearted, and hopelessly weak. Like the sound of a firm, clanging chord his character is indicated at the outset and there is little later development. As the flow of some sluggish river through flat lands, oozing banks, and neat embankments, Frédéric’s life canalizes in leisurely fashion. He loses his fortune, he inherits another, he