In a review of an 1888 French translation of Anna Karenina, Matthew Arnold compared Tolstoy's novel to Madame Bovary. He is quite swept away by Anna Karenina, even allowing that its irrelevant scenes take on a relevance of their own because "the author saw it all happening so — saw it, and therefore relates it; and what his novel in this way loses in art it gains in reality." For Arnold, "the truth is we are not to take ‘Anna Karenin' as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life." Arnold remarks of Anna that, through all her travail, whatever her "failures, errors, and miseries, still the impression of her large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature, never leaves us — keeps our sympathy, keeps even, I had almost said, our respect."

Arnold then turns to examine Madame Bovary, a novel with the same subject as Anna Karenina: an adulterous woman who comes to grief. He judges Flaubert's novel tainted, "a work of petrified feeling", he calls it in italics, over which "hangs an atmosphere of bitterness, irony, impotence; not a personage in the book to rejoice in or console us; the springs of freshness and feeling are not there to create such personages." 

Flaubert's cruelty to his wretched heroine, is, Arnold holds, "the cruelty of petrified feeling [...] he is harder upon her himself than any reader ever, I think, will be inclined to be." The reason for this is that, while the best of literature turns facts into ideas, in Madame Bovary, Flaubert began with an idea, a deeply flawed one — a hatred of the bourgeoisie that was apparently bottomless — and let this inadequate idea select his facts for him. 

George Sand, criticising her friend's artistic credo, informs Flaubert that his writing, "by dint of striving after form [...] underrates content. It addresses itself to a literary audience. But that audience doesn't really exist, as such. We are human beings before we are anything else." What even the candid Sand cannot bring herself to say, though it is implied, is that Flaubert writes with a shrivelled heart, which no stress on form or emphasis on style can hope to enlarge. 

Henry James, who knew Flaubert from his own early days in Paris, had many of the same reservations. As for Flaubert's quest for perfect style, James, a writer not himself altogether inattentive to it, wrote that "style itself moreover, with all respect to Flaubert, never totally beguiles; since even when we are so queerly constituted as to be ninety-nine parts literary we are still a hundredth part something else." James concludes that Flaubert is best spoken of "as the novelist's novelist." And so his cultists are pleased, even proud, to have him. Yet, how much better to be the reader's novelist.