IV INTRODUCTION

The word réalisme was first made popular through Courbet, 1 the head of a new school of painting characterized by its frank aiid brutal treatment of subjects. From painting it passed into literature with Courbe t's admirer Champfleury, who was the leader of the so-called école réaliste of French novelists. But owing to Champfleury's narrow conception of realism as a scrupulously exact but indiscriminate and inartistic reproduction of the grossness and trivialities of life among the lower classes, realism became a term of opprobrium. Flaubert, in particular, always repudiated its application to himself.

Romanticism did not, however, profit by the temporary discrédit of realism. The génération of 1 850, that of Littré, Renan, and Taine, was determined to abandon ideals, vague aspirations, and generous illusions for facts scientifically ascertained. ««In this conception of things," says Taine, speaking of the extended employment of science, " there is a new art, a new morality, a new polity, a new religion, and it is in the présent time our task to discover them." It was this " employment of science " that became known, chiefly through Taine, as naturalism. The word was not a new one. Zola, to whom it owed a little later its immense vogue, asserted that it was used by Montaigne in the very sensé which Taine attached to it, 2 and that it had been similarly employed in Russian literature since the middle of the nineteenth century. In France it existed as a term of art as early as the seventeenth century, in the sensé of a "naïve imitation of nature." Applied to metaphysics, it was commonly used as a synonym of materialism; applied to religion, as a synonym of pantheism; applied to theology, as the doctrine which dénies divine intervention in human salvation; and applied to history, as the doctrine which dénies divine intervention in the progress of events. The novelty of the word as used by Taine, consiste in the further extension of its meaning so as to

1 Salon of 1850-1851.

* The word naturalisme does not occur in Montaigne. He uses naturaliste, however, in a sensé approaching our modem term " scientist."