In the first third of the nineteenth century English fiction stood at the parting of the ways.  Should it follow Scott and the romance, or Jane Austen and the Novel of everyday life?  Should it adopt that form of story-making which puts stress on action and plot and is objective in its method, roaming all lands and times for its material; or, dealing with the familiar average of contemporary society, should it emphasize character analysis and choose the subjective realm of psychology for its peculiar domain?  The pen dropped from the stricken hand of Scott in 1832; in that year a young parliamentary reporter in London was already writing certain lively, closely observed sketches of the town, and four years later they were to be collected and published under the title of “Sketches by Boz,” while the next year that incomparable extravaganza, “The Pickwick Papers,” was to go to an eager public.  English fiction had decided:  the Novel was to conquer the romance for nearly a century.  It was a victory which to the present day has been a dominant influence in story-making; establishing a tendency which, until Stevenson a few years since, with the gaiety of the inveterate boy, cried up Romance once more, bade fair to sweep all before it.

Before tracing this vigorous development of the Novel of Reality with Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot (to name three great leaders), it is important to get an idea of the growth on French soil which was so deeply influential upon English as well as upon other modern fiction.  Nothing is more certain in literary evolution than the fact that the French Novel in the nineteenth century has molded and defined modern fiction, thus repaying an earlier debt owed the English pioneers, Richardson and Fielding.  English fiction of our own generation may be described as a native variation on a French model:  in fact, the fictionists of Europe and the English-speaking lands, with whatever divergencies personal or national, have derived in large measure from the Gaul the technique, the point of view and the choice of theme which characterizes the French Novel from Stendhal to Balzac, from Zola to Guy de Maupassant.

I

The name of Henri Beyle, known to literature under the sobriquet of Stendhal, has a meaning in the development of the modern type of fiction out of proportion to the intrinsic value of his stories.

He was, of course, far surpassed by mightier followers like Balzac, Flaubert and Zola; yet his significance lies in the very fact that they were followers.  His is all the merit pertaining to the feat of introducing the Novel of psychic analysis:  of that persistent and increasingly unpleasant bearing-down upon the darker facts of personality.  Hence his “Rouge et Noir,” dated 1830 and typical of his aim and method, is in a sense an epoch-making book.

Balzac was at the same time producing the earlier studies to culminate in that Human Comedy which was to stand as the chief accomplishment of his nation in the literature of fiction.  But Stendhal, sixteen years older, began to print first and to him falls the glory of innovation.  Balzac gives full praise to his predecessor in his essay on Beyle, and his letters contain frequent references to the debt he owed that curious bundle of fatuities, inconsistencies and brilliancies, the author of “The Chartreuse de Parme.”  Later, Zola calls him “the father of us all,” meaning of the naturalistic school of which Zola himself was High Priest.  Beyle’s business was the analysis of soul states:  an occupation familiar enough in these times of Hardy, Meredith and Henry James.  He held several posts of importance under Napoleon, worshiped that leader, loved Italy as his birthplace, loved England too, and tried to show in his novels the result of the inactive Restoration upon a generation trained by Napoleon to action, violence, ambition and passion.

Read to-day, “Le Rouge et Noir,” which it is sufficient to consider for our purposes, seems somewhat slow in movement, struggling in construction, meticulous in manner.  At times, its interminability recalls “Clarissa Harlowe,” but it possesses the traits’ which were to mark the coming school of novel-writing in France and hence in the modern world:  to wit, freedom in dealing with love in its irregular relation, the tendency towards tragedy, and that subtlety of handling which makes the main interest to depend upon motive and thought rather than upon the external action itself.  “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,” ­that might be the motto.  The young quasi-hero is Julian, an ambitious worldling of no family, and his use of the Church as a means of promotion, his amours with several women and his death because of his love for one of them, are traced with a kind of tortuous revelation of the inner workings of the human heart which in its way declares genius in the writer:  and which certainly makes a work disillusioning of human nature.  Its more external aspect of a study of the politic Church and State, of the rivalry between the reds and the blacks of the state religion, is entirely secondary to this greater purpose and result:  here, for the first time at full length, a writer shows the possibility of that realistic portrayal sternly carried through, no matter how destructive of romantic preconceptions of men and women.  It is the method of Richardson flowering in a time of greater freedom and more cynical questioning of the gods.

II

But giving Stendhal his full mint and cummin of praise, he yet was but the forerunner of a mightier man.  Undoubtedly, he prepared the soil and was a necessary link in the chain of development wherewith fiction was to forge itself an unbreakable sequence of strength.  Balzac was to put out his lesser light, as indeed the refulgence of his genius was to overshine all French fiction, before and since.  It would be an exaggeration to say that the major English novelists of the middle nineteenth century were consciously disciples of Balzac ­for something greater even than he moved them; the spirit of the Time.  But it is quite within bounds to say that of all modern fiction he is the leader and shaper.  Without him, his greatest native follower, Zola, is inconceivable.  He gathers up into himself and expresses at its fullest all that was latent in the striking modern growth whose banner-cry was Truth, and whose method was that of the social scientist.  Here was a man who, early in his career, for the first time in the history of the Novel, deliberately planned to constitute himself the social historian of his epoch and race:  and who, in upwards of a hundred remarkable pieces of fiction in Novel form executed that plan in such fulness that his completed work stands not only as a monument of industry, but as perhaps the most inspiring example of literary synthesis in the history of letters.  In bigness of conception and of construction ­let alone the way in which the work was performed ­the Human Comedy is awe-begetting; it drives one to Shakspere for like largeness of scale.  Such a performance, ordered and directed to a foreseen end, is unique in literature.

As Balzac thus gave birth, with a fiery fecundity of invention, to book after book of the long list of Novels that make up his story of life, there took shape in his mind a definite intention:  to become the Secretary of an Age of which he declared society to be the historian.  He wished to exhibit man in his species as he was to be seen in the France of the novelist’s era, just as a naturalist aims to study beast-kind, segregating them into classes for zoological investigation.  Later, Balzac’s great successor (as we shall see) applied this analogy with more rigid insistence upon the scientific method which should obtain in all literary study.  The survey proposed covered a period of about half a century and included the Republic, the Empire and the Restoration:  it ranged through all classes and conditions of men with no appearance of prejudice, preference or parti-pris (this is one of the marvels of Balzac), thus gaining the immense advantage of an apparently complete and catholic comprehension of the human show.  Of all modern novelists, Balzac is the one whose work seems like life instead of an opinion of life; he has the objectivity of Shakspere.  Even a Tolstoy set beside him seems limited.

This idea of a plan was not crystallized into the famous title given to his collective works ­La Comedie Humaine ­until 1842, when but eight years of life remained to him.  But four years earlier it had been mentioned in a letter, and when Balzac was only a little over thirty, at a time when his better-known books were just beginning to appear, he had signified his sense of an inclusive scheme by giving such a running title to a group of his stories as the familiar “Scenes from Private Life” ­to which, in due course, were added other designations for the various parts of the great plan.  The encyclopedic survey was never fully completed, but enough was done to justify all the laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation of an almost incredible amount of human data.  As for finishing the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects its place in literature.  Neither Spenser’s “Faery Queen” nor Wordsworth’s “The Excursion” was completed, and, per contra, it were as well for Browning if “The Ring and the Book” had not been.  In all such cases of so-called incompletion, one recognizes Hercules from the feet.  Had this mighty story-teller and student of humanity carried out his full intention there would have been nearly 150 pieces of fiction; of the plan-on-paper he actually completed ninety-seven, two-thirds of the whole, and enough to illustrate the conception.  And it must be remembered that Balzac died at fifty.  One result of the incompletion, as Brunetiere has pointed out, is to give disproportionate treatment to certain phases of life, to the military, for instance, for which Balzac has twenty-four stories on his list, whereas only two, “The Chouans” and “A Passion in the Desert,” were executed.  But surely, sufficient was done, looking to the comedy as a whole, to force us to describe the execution as well as the conception as gigantic.  Had the work been more mechanically pushed to its end for the exact plan’s sake, the perfection of scheme might have been attained at the expense of vitality and inspiration.  Ninety-seven pieces of fiction, the majority of them elaborate novels, the whole involving several thousand characters, would be impressive in any case, but when they come from an author who marvelously reproduces his time and country, creating his scenes in a way to afford us a sense of the complexity of life ­its depth and height, its beauty, terror and mystery ­we can but hail him as Master.

And in spite of the range and variety in Balzac’s unique product, it has an effect of unity based upon a sense of social solidarity.  He conceives it his duty to present the unity of society in his day, whatever its apparent class and other divergencies.  He would show that men and women are members of the one body social, interacting upon each other in manifold relations and so producing the dramas of earth; each story plays its part in this general aim, illustrating the social laws and reactions, even as the human beings themselves play their parts in the world.  In this way Balzac’s Human Comedy is an organism, however much it may fall short of symmetry and completion.

In the outline of the plan we find him separating his studies into three groups or classes:  The Studies of Manners, the Philosophical Studies, and the Analytic Studies.  In the first division were placed the related groups of scenes of Private life, Provincial life, Parisian life, Political life, Military life and Country life.  It was his desire, as he says in a letter to Madame Hanska, to have the group of studies of Manners “represent all social effects”; in the philosophic studies the causes of those effects:  the one exhibits individualities typified, the other, types individualized:  and in the Analytic Studies he searches for the principles.  “Manners are the performance; the causes are the wings and the machinery.  The principles ­they are the author....  Thus man, society and humanity will be described, judged, analyzed without repetition and in a work which will be, as it were, ’The Thousand and One Nights’ of the west.”

The scheme thus categorically laid down sounds rather dry and formal, nor is it too easy to understand.  But all trouble vanishes when once the Human Comedy itself, in any example of it, is taken up; you launch upon the great swollen tide of life and are carried irresistibly along.

It is plain that with an author of Balzac’s productive powers, any attempt to convey an idea of his quality must perforce confine itself to a few representative specimens.  A few of them, rightly chosen, give a fair notion of his general interpretation.  What then are some illustrative creations?

In the case of most novelists, although of first rank, it is not as a rule difficult to define their class and name their tendency:  their temperaments and beliefs are so-and-so, and they readily fall under the designation of realist or romanticist, pessimist, or optimist, student of character or maker of plots.  This is, in a sense, impossible with Balzac.  The more he be read, the harder to detect his bias:  he seems, one is almost tempted to say, more like a natural force than a human mind.  Persons read two or three ­perhaps half a dozen of his books ­and then prate glibly of his dark view, his predilection for the base in mankind; when fifty fictions have been assimilated, it will be realized that but a phase of Balzac had been seen.

When the passion of creation, the birth-throes of a novel were on him, he became so immersed in the aspect of life he was depicting that he saw, felt, knew naught else:  externally this obsession was expressed by his way of life and work while the story was growing under his hand:  his recluse habits, his monkish abstention from worldly indulgences, the abnormal night hours of activity, the loss of flesh, so that the robust man who went into the guarded chamber came out at the end of six weeks the shadow of himself.

As a consequence of the consecration to the particular task (as if it embraced the one view of existence), the reader perhaps experiences a shock of surprise in passing from “The Country Doctor” to “Pere Goriot.”  But the former is just as truly part of his interpretation as the latter.  A dozen fictions can be drawn from the body of his production which portray humanity in its more beautiful, idealistic manifestations.  Books like “The Country Doctor” and “Eugenic Grandet” are not alone in the list.  And how beautiful both are!  “The Country Doctor” has all the idyllic charm of setting which a poetic interpretation of life in a rural community can give.  Not alone Nature, but human nature is hymned.  The kindly old physician, whose model is the great Physician himself, is like Chaucer’s good parson, an unforgettable vision of the higher potentialities of the race.  Such a novel deserves to be called quite as truly romance and prose poem, save that Balzac’s vraisemblance, his gift for photographic detail and the contemporaneousness of the setting, make it modern.  And thus with “Eugenie Grandet” the same method applied in “The Country Doctor” to the study of a noble profession in a rural atmosphere, is here used for the portrait of a good woman whose entourage is again that of simple, natural conditions.  There is more of light and shade in the revelation of character because Eugenie’s father, the miser ­a masterly sketch ­furnishes a dark background for her radiant personality.  But the same effect is produced, that of throwing into bold relief the sweet, noble, high and pure in our common humanity.  And in this case it is a girl of humble station far removed from the shams and shameful passions of the town.  The conventional contrast would be to present in another novel some woman of the city as foul as this daughter of Grandet is fair.  Not so Balzac.  He is too broad an observer of humanity, and as artist too much the master for such cheap effects of chiaroscuro.  In “The Duchess De Langeais” e sets his central character amidst the frivolities of fashion and behold, yet another beautiful type of the sex!  As Richardson drew his Pamela and Clarissa, so Balzac his Eugenie and the Duchess:  and let us not refrain from carrying out the comparison, and add, how feeble seems the Englishman in creation when one thinks of the half a hundred other female figures, good and bad, high and low, distinctly etched upon the memory by the mordant pen of the Frenchman!

Then if we turn to that great tragedy of family, “Pere Goriot,” the change is complete.  Now are we plunged into an atmosphere of greed, jealousy, uncleanliness and hate, all steeped in the bourgeois street air of Paris.  In this tale of thankless daughters and their piteous old father, all the hideousness possible to the ties of kin is uncovered to our frightened yet fascinated eye.  The plot holds us in a vise; to recall Madame Vautrin’s boarding house is to shudder at the sights and smells!  Compare it with Dickens’ Mrs. Todgers, and once and for all you have the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genius.

Suppose, now, the purpose be to reveal not a group or community, but one human soul, a woman’s this time:  read “A Woman of Thirty” and see how the novelist, ­for the first time ­and one is inclined to add, for all time, ­has pierced through the integuments and reached the very quick of psychologic exposure.  It is often said that he has created the type of young-old, or old-young woman:  meaning that before him, novelists overlooked the fact that a woman of this age, maturer in experience and still ripe in physical charms, is really of intense social attraction, richly worth study.  But this is because Balzac knows that all souls are interesting, if only we go beneath the surface.  The only work of modern fiction which seems to me so nakedly to lay open the recesses of the human spirit as does “A Woman of Thirty” is Meredith’s “The Egoist”; and, of course, master against master, Balzac is easily the superior, since the English author’s wonderful book is so mannered and grotesque.  Utter sympathy is shown in these studies of femininity, whether the subject be a harlot, a saint or a patrician of the Grande Monde.

If the quest be for the handling of mankind en masse, with big effects of dark and light:  broad brush-work on a canvas suited to heroical, even epic, themes, ­a sort of fiction the later Zola was to excel in ­Balzac will not fail us.  His work here is as noteworthy as it is in the fine detailed manner of his most realistical modern studies ­or in the searching analysis of the human spirit.  “The Chouans” may stand for this class:  it has all the fire, the color, the elan that emanate from the army and the call of country.  We have flashed before us one of those reactionary movements, after the French Revolution, which take on a magic romanticism because they culminate in the name of Napoleon.  While one reads, one thinks war, breathes war ­it is the only life for the moment.  Just ahead a step, one feels, is the “imminent deadly breach”; the social or business or Bohemian doings of later Paris are as if they did not exist.  And this particular novel will achieve such a result with the reader, even although it is not by any means one of Balzac’s supreme achievements, being in truth, a little aside from his metier, since it is historical and suggests in spots the manner of Scott.  But this power of envisaging war (which will be farther realized if such slighter works as “A Dark Affair” and “An Episode Under the Terror” be also perused), is only a single manifestation of a general gift.  Suppose there is desired a picture very common in our present civilization ­most common it may be in America, ­that of the country boy going up to the city to become ­what?  Perhaps a captain of commerce, or a leader of fashion:  perhaps a great writer or artist; or a politician who shall rule the capitol.  It is a venture packed full of realistic experience but equally full of romance, drama, poetry ­of an epic suggestiveness.  In two such volumes as “A Great Provincial Man in Paris” and “Lost Illusions,” all this, with its dire chances of evil as well as its roseate promise of success, has been wonderfully expressed.  So cogently modern a motive had never been so used before.

Sometimes in a brace of books Balzac shows us the front and back-side of some certain section of life:  as in “Cousin Pons” and “Cousine Bette.” ­The corner of Paris where artists, courtesans and poor students most do congregate, where Art capitalized is a sacred word, and the odd estrays of humanity, picturesque, humorous, and tragic, display all the chances of mankind, ­this he paints so that we do not so much look on as move amidst the throng.  In the first-named novel, assuredly a very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one of fiction’s superlative successes:  to know him is to love him in all his weakness.  In the second book, Bette is a female vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is heart-warming and sweet.  And you know that both are true, true as they would not have been apart:  “helpless each without the other.”

Again, how much of the gambling activities of modern business are emblazoned in another of the acknowledged masterpieces, “Cæsar Birotteau.”  We can see in it the prototype of much that comes later in French fiction:  Daudet’s “Risler Aine et Froment Jeune” and Zola’s “L’Argent,” to name but two.  Such a story sums up the practical, material side of a reign or an epoch.

Nor should it be forgotten that this close student of human nature, whose work appears so often severely mundane, and most strong when its roots go down into the earth, sometimes seeming to prefer the rankness and slime of human growths, ­can on occasion soar into the empyrean, into the mystic region of dreams and ideals and all manner of subtle imaginings.  Witness such fiction as “The Magic Skin,” “Seraphita,” and “The Quest of the Absolute.”  It is hard to believe that the author of such creations is he of “Pere Goriot” or “Cousine Bette.”  But it is Balzac’s wisdom to see that such pictures are quite as truly part of the Human Comedy:  because they represent man giving play to his soul ­exercising his highest faculties.  Nor does the realistic novelist in such efforts have the air of one who has left his true business in order to disport himself for once in an alien element.  On the contrary, he seems absolutely at home:  for the time, this is his only affair, his natural interest.

And so with illustrations practically inexhaustible, which the long list prodigally offers.  But the scope and variety have been already suggested; the best rule with Balzac is, each one to his taste, always remembering that in a writer so catholic, there is a peculiar advantage in an extended study.  Nor can from twenty to twenty-five of his best books be read without a growing conviction that here is a man of genius who has done a unique thing.

It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the French, indeed, of modern fiction.  Strictly, he is not the first in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of verity, came a generation before.  But, as always when a compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century:  more than this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half.  In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac’s recipe.  English fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence.  We shall see in dealing with Dickens how definitely the English writer adopted the Balzac method as suited to the era and sympathetic to Dickens’ own nature.

As to the accuracy with which he gave a representation of contemporary life ­thus deserving the name realist ­considerable may be said in the way of qualification.  Much of it applies with similar force to Zola, later to be hailed as a king among modern realists in the naturalistic extreme to which he pushed the movement.  Balzac, through his remarkable instinct for detail and particularity, did introduce into nineteenth century fiction an effect of greater truth in the depiction of life.  Nobody perhaps had ­nobody has since ­presented mis-en-scene as did he.  He builds up an impression by hundreds of strokes, each seemingly insignificant, but adding to a totality that becomes impressive.  Moreover, again and again in his psychologic analysis there are home-thrusts which bring the blood to the face of any honest person.  His detail is thus quite as much subjective as external.  It were a great mistake to regard Balzac as merely a writer who photographed things outside in the world; he is intensely interested in the things within ­and if objectivity meant realism exclusively, he would be no realist at all.

But farther than this; with all his care for minute touches and his broad and painstaking observation, it is not so much life, after all, as a vision of life which he gives.  This contradicts what was said early in the present chapter:  but the two statements stand for the change likely to come to any student of Balzac:  his objective personality at last resolves itself into a vividly personal interpretation.  His breadth blinds one for a while, that is all.  Hence Balzac may be called an incurable romantic, an impressionist, as much as realist.  Like all first-class art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better instruction.  He said in the Preface to “Pere Goriot” that the novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but “a possibly better world.”  He has done so.  The most untrue thing in a novel may be the fact lifted over unchanged from life?  Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but great fiction is truer than truth.  Balzac understood this, remembered it in his heart.  He is too big as man and artist to be confined within the narrow realistic formula.  While, as we have seen, he does not take sides on moral issues, nor allow himself to be a special pleader for this or that view, his work strikes a moral balance in that it shows universal humanity ­not humanity tranced in metaphysics, or pathologic in analysis, or enmeshed in sensualism.  In this sense, Balzac is a great realist.  There is no danger of any novelist ­any painter of life ­doing harm, if he but gives us the whole.  It is the story-teller who rolls some prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him:  he who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his audience.  Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed any other responsibility than that of doing good work, of representing things as they are.  But this matters not, if only a writer’s nature be large and vigorous enough to report of humanity in a trustworthy way.  Balzac was much too well endowed in mind and soul and had touched life far too widely, not to look forth upon it with full comprehension of its spiritual meaning.

In spite, too, of his alleged realism, he believed that the duty of the social historian was more than to give a statement of present conditions ­the social documents of the moment, ­variable as they might be for purposes of deduction.  He insisted that the coming, ­perhaps seemingly impossible things, should be prophesied; ­those future améliorations, whether individual or collective, which keep hope alive in the human breast.  Let me again quote those words, extraordinary as coming from the man who is called arch-realist of his day:  “The novelist should depict the world not alone as it is, but a possibly better world.”  In the very novel where he said it ("Pere Goriot”) he may seem to have violated the principle:  but taking his fiction in its whole extent, he has acted upon it, the pronunciamento exemplifies his practice.

Balzac’s work has a Shaksperian universality, because it is so distinctly French, ­a familiar paradox in literature.  He was French in his feeling for the social unit, in his keen receptivity to ideas, in his belief in Church and State as the social organisms through which man could best work out his salvation.  We find him teaching that humanity, in terms of Gallic temperament, and in time limits between the Revolution and the Second Republic, is on the whole best served by living under a constitutional monarchy and in vital touch with Mother Church, ­that form of religion which is a racial inheritance from the Past.  In a sense, then, he was a man with the limitations of his place and time, as, in truth, was Shakspere.  But the study of literature instructs us that it is exactly those who most vitally grasp and voice their own land and period, who are apt to give a comprehensive view of humanity at large; to present man sub specie aeternitatis.  This is so because, thoroughly to present any particular part of mankind, is to portray all mankind.  It is all tarred by the same stick, after all.  It is only in the superficials that unlikenesses lie.

Balzac was intensely modern.  Had he lived today, he might have been foremost in championing the separation of Church and State and looked on serenely at the sequestration of the religious houses.  But writing his main fiction from 1830 to 1850, his attitude was an enlightened one, that of a thoughtful patriot.

His influence upon nineteenth century English fiction was both direct and indirect.  It was direct in its effect upon several of the major novelists, as will be noted in studying them; the indirect influence is perhaps still more important, because it was so all-pervasive, like an emanation that expressed the Time.  It became impossible, after Balzac had lived and wrought, for any artist who took his art seriously to write fiction as if the great Frenchman had not come first.  He set his seal upon that form of literature, as Ibsen, a generation later, was to set his seal upon the drama, revolutionizing its technique.  To the student therefore he is a factor of potent power in explaining the modern fictional development.  Nor should he be a negligible quantity to the cultivated reader seeking to come genially into acquaintance with the best that European letters has accomplished.  While upon the lover of the Novel as a form of literature ­which means the mass of all readers to-day ­Balzac cannot fail to exercise a personal fascination. ­Life widens before us at his touch, and that glamour which is the imperishable gift of great art, returns again as one turns the pages of the little library of yellow books which contain the Human Comedy.

Balzac died in 1850, when in the prime of his powers.  Seven years later was published the “Madame Bovary” of Flaubert, one of the most remarkable novels of the nineteenth century and the most unrelenting depiction of the devolution of a woman’s soul in all fiction:  certainly it deserved that description up to the hour of its appearance, if not now, when so much has been done in the realm of female pathology.  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.  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 study of the mid-century English novelists who were too early to be affected by him to any perceptible degree.