Flaubert is the most
noteworthy intermediate figure between Balzac and Zola. He seems
personally of our own day, for, living to be an old man, he was
friend and fellow-worker with the brothers Goncourt (whom we
associate with Zola) and extended a fatherly hand to the young
Maupassant at the beginning of the latter's career,--so
brilliant, brief, tragic. The influence of this one novel
(overlooking that of "Salambo," in its way also of influence in
the modern growth) has been especially great upon a kind of
fiction most characteristic of the present generation: in which,
in fact, it has assumed a "bad preeminence." I mean the Novel of
sexual relations in their irregular aspects. The stormy artist
of the Goncourt dinners has much to answer for, if we regard him
only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary. Many
later books were to surpass this in license, in coarseness, or
in the effect of evoking a libidinous taste; but none in its
unrelenting gloom, the cold detachment of the artist-scientist
obsessed with the idea of truthfully reflecting certain sinister
facets of the many-faced gem called life! It is hardly too much
to say, in the light of the facts, that "Madame Bovary" was
epochal. It paved the way for Zola. It justified a new aim for
the modern fiction of so-called unflinching realism. The saddest
thing about the book is its lack of pity, of love. Emma Bovary
is a weak woman, not a bad woman; she goes downhill through the
force of circumstances coupled with a want of backbone.
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