he 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. And she
is not responsible for her flabby moral muscles. Behind the
story is an absolutely fatalistic philosophy; given a certain
environment, any woman (especially if assisted a bit by her
ancestors) will go to hell,--such seems the lesson. Now there is
nothing just like this in Balzac, We hear in it a new note, the
latter-day note of quiescence, and despair. And if we compare
Flaubert's indifference to his heroine's fate with the
tenderness of Dumas fils, or of Daudet, or the English Reade and
Dickens--we shall realize that we have here a mixture of a
personal and a coming general interpretation: Flaubert having by
nature a kind of aloof determinism, yet feeling, like the first
puffs of a cold chilling wind, the oncoming of an age of Doubt.

III.

These three French writers then, Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert,
molded the Novel before 1860 into such a shape as to make it
plastic to the hand of Zola a decade later. Zola's influence
upon our present generation of English fiction has been great,
as it has upon all novel-making since 1870. Before explaining
this further, it will be best to return to the