Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/217

 most comparable with Main Street is Mr. Bennett—in The Old Wives' Tale and Clayhanger. But the book from which, I should say, Mr. Lewis, without losing a particle of his own idiom or the independence of his American vision, has learned his most valuable "secrets," is Madame Bovary.

Both Main Street and Madame Bovary are mordantly critical representations of contemporary civilizations. In each case, the criticism is intensely focused upon the bourgeois society of a representative provincial town. In each case, the "hero" is a country doctor, who is, thanks to an insensitive æsthetic organization, sufficiently content with his lot and in love with his young wife. In each case, the "heroine" has been touched by literature and contact with the city to revolt against the Philistinism of her husband and the restrictions of her life, in behalf of romantic ideals of which she is unable to find any worthy incarnations. In each case the searching criticism which plays over the scene and the actors is delivered indirectly by an intricate system of contrasts and the cross lighting and reflected lighting of subordinate characters. I will add an observation which many readers fail to make: Flaubert was in love with Emma and Mr. Lewis is in love with Carol; and both authors analyze and expose the object of their affection with a merciless rigor which no woman can either understand or pardon—she can understand the rigor but not the love which inflicts it and survives it. Their heroes they treat with similar austerity—with the difference