It is hard not to resent Flaubert for making fictional prose stylish—for making style a problem for the first time in fiction. After Flaubert, and in particular after Flaubert’s letters, style is always mirrored, always self-conscious, always a trapped decision. Style became religious with Flaubert, at the same moment that religion became a kind of literary style, a poetry, with Renan. Flaubert himself admired Rabelais, Cervantes, and Molière as if they were beasts of mere instinct: ‘they are great… because they have no techniques.’ Such writers ‘achieve their effects, regardless of Art,’ he wrote to his lover Louise Colet in 1853. But Flaubert could not be free as those writers: ‘One achieves style only by atrocious labour, a fanatic and dedicated stubbornness.’ He was imprisoned in scruple, and he imprisoned his successors in scruple. He is the novelist from whom the Modern, with all its narrow freedoms, flows.