Flaubert’s Sentimental Education exhibits a perfection of language and a skill in every detail of the execution that underlines the rift between the wealth of artistic means and the poverty of the human material. The “best” writers of Flaubert’s century and of our own (Joyce, Eliot, et cetera) tell us that beauty continues to be made but that the obstacles to its making are very great and that the makers—and their small and shrinking public—are surrounded by a deepening nihilistic darkness.
