INTRODUCTION V

comprehend the application of the exact methods of science to sociology, politics, morals, even to art and literature.

Interpreting too narrowly Taine's suggested application of scientific methods to art, Zola, as the theorist of naturalisai, developed the idea of the roman expérimental* For Zola there is a sufficient guide to the novelist in Claude Bernard's Introduction à la médecine expérimentale. One needs only, he says, substitute romancier for médecin, and roman for médecine. In other words, besides the objectivity of his predecessors, their close observation of actual life, and the importance attached by them to physiology and even to pathology, Zola insisted on the rigid application of inductive science to the novel, even to the extent of regarding his characters as subjects for scientific expérimentation.

Gustave Flaubert, 1 the first in point of time of the so-called naturalistic novelists, is characterized by Faguet in a statement admirable for its condensed truth: "On peut dire de Flaubert que l'imagination était sa muse et la réalité sa conscience." A chronological study of Flaubert's work, in its pendulum-like alternation of the realistic and the romantic, strikingly reveals his life-long struggle between thèse two tendencies in his nature. He shared the antipathies of the romanticists to the bourgeois, to the flatness and mediocrity of modem life; and he had also their exalted imagination, with their enthusiasm for form, which through inconceivable labor, he developed to a degree of perfection unequaled by his predecessors or folio wers. In spite of his romantic enthusiasms and his aversion to things as they are, Flaubert had the patience and persévérance to describe reality with the impassibility of a scientist, and never ceased to put into practice his doctrine that the worst subject matter was deserving of artistic treatment.

1 Gustave Flaubert (i 821-1880), son of a successful surgeon, was bom at Rouen. The greater part of his life he passed at Croisset near his native city. His important works were published in the following order: Madame Bovary, 1856 ; Salammbô, 1862 ; P Éducation sentimentale, 1870 ; la Tentation de saint Antoine, 1874; Trois contes, 1877 ; Bouvard et Pécuchet, 1881 (unhmshed).