Sentimental Education

Henry James, an early and passionate admirer of Flaubert,

 considered the book a large step down from its famous predecessor.

 "Here the form and method are the same as in "Madame Bovary"; the studied skill, the science, the accumulation of material, are even more striking; but the book is in a single word a dead one. "Madame Bovary" was spontaneous and sincere; but to read its successor is,

 to the finer sense, like masticating ashes and sawdust.

 Sentimental Education is elaborately and massively dreary.

 That a novel should have a certain charm seems to us the most rudimentary of principles, and there is no more charm in this laborious monument to a treacherous ideal than there is interest in a heap of gravel."

I agree one hundred percent with Henry James.