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.