In any age, the significant individuals tend to be those who invent or seize upon a new means, a new medium, a new method, a fresh voice or device, and embody or exercise or exploit it to the fullest. Those favored few become emblematic of their time, while countless others are forgotten—not only the mediocre or talentless but also people of real ability whose work is less boldly new or, in being original, less masterful; who may, even as they go down to obscurity, console themselves with the belief that they are keeping up standards, forming a bulwark against the flood tide of gross modernity. Too staid or too myopic, they already have their reward, which is not to have been misunderstood. They have failed to define the age. Gustave Flaubert—herald of modernism, obsessive word-hound, and austere champion of l’art pour l’art—was the other, rarer sort: the sort that, having broken new ground and redefined a field, belongs to posterity.
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