rd result of a "not guilty, but please don't do anything
of the kind again" judgment. This, however, belongs mostly--not (_v.
inf._) entirely--to the biographical part of the matter, with which we
have little or nothing to do.[392] The book itself is, beyond all
question, a great novel--if it had a greater subject[393] it would have
been one of the greatest of novels. The immense influence of _Manon
Lescaut_ appears once more in it; but Emma Bovary, with far more than
all the bad points of Manon, has none of her good ones. Nor has she the
half-redeeming greatness in evil of her somewhat younger sister Iza in
_Affaire Clemenceau_. Except her physical beauty (of which we do not
hear much), there is not one attractive point in her. She sins, not out
of passion, but because she thinks a married woman ought to have lovers.
She ruins her husband, not for any intrinsic and genuine love of
splendour, luxury, or beauty, but because other women have things and
she ought to have them. She has a taste _for_ men, but none _in_ them.
Yet her creator has made her absolutely "real," and, scum of womanhood
as she is, has actually evolved something very like tragedy out of her
worthlessness, and has saved her from being detestable, because she is
such a very woman. He has, indeed, subjected her to a _kenosis_, an
evisceration, exantlation--or, in plain English, "emptying out"--of
everything positively good (she has the negative but necessary salve of
not being absolutely ill-natured) that can be added to an abstract
pretty girl; and no more. I have paid a little attention to the heroines
of the greater fiction; but she is the only one of all the _mille e tre_
I know whom the author has managed to present as acceptable, without its
being in the least possible to fall in love with her, and at the same
time without its being necessary to detest her.

This defiant and victorious naturalness--not "naturalism"--pervades the
book: from the other main characters--the luckless, brainless,
tasteless, harmless husband; the vulgar Don Juans of lovers; the
apothecary Homais[394]--one of the most original and firmly drawn
characters in fiction--from all, down to the merest "supers." It floods
the scene-painting (admirable in itself) with a light of common day--not
too cheerful, but absolutely real. It animates the conversation, though
Flaubert is not exactly prodigal of this;[395] and it presides over the
weaving of the story as such in a fashion very