VI INTRODUCTION

Flaubert detested realism, loved romanticism, and yet, by pure effort of the will, produced in Madame Bovary the greatest example of the realistic novel. Zola, 1 who, on the contrary, execrated romanticism and preached a strictly scientific realism, has left a large mass of writings the bulk of which must be classed as distinctly romantic. "On séparera le critique du romancier," Zola had said, conscious of his temperamental inability to exécute his own théories. The most notable quality of his character was an illimitable imagination, which magnified and distorted the real. He had the poet's gift of infusing life, often fan tas tic life, into inanimate objects, and of symboluing his characters, who are frequently but grandiose types of this or that quality or social status. In his descriptions of large crowds and teeming human life his manner rises to the truly epic. By many critics Zola has been termed a pessimist, owing to his materialism, his frank portrayal of what some hâve chosen to call the baser instincts of man, and to the persistent subjection of his characters to their vital needs and environment. Yet there can be nothing more évident than Zola's inhérent optimisai, an optimism which becomes more and more apparent in his work, until he is a conf essed- reformer, a prophet, a utopian, confident in his faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth.

Alphonse Daudet 8 was unable to suppress in his work the

1 Emile Zola (i 840-1 902). In 1869, after several years of journalistic and random literaiy work, Zola began his Rougon-Macquart séries of twenty volumes, in which he undertook to write a physiological history of a f amily under the Second Empire. The last number of the séries, le Docteur Pascal. was finished in 1893. Zola also published a trilogy, les Trois villes: Lourdes, Rome, and Paris. At the time of his death, caused by an accidentai suffocation by gas, he was completing the last novel of a third séries, les Quatre Evangiles: Fécondité, Travail, Vérité, Justice. He also wrote several volumes of literary criticism. From 1898 till his death, Zola was using a large part of his énergies in defending Dreyfus, the young Jewish officer accused of delivering French military secrets to the German government.

* Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), was born at Nîmes. He began his literary career soon after his arrivai at Paris in 1857. From 1861 to 1865 he was seo

INTRODUCTION Vil

ail pervading charm of his personality. It is chiefly for this ill concealed subjectivity that récent critics seem inclined to exclude him from the naturalistic group. Still he followed the usual procédés of the school, filling his calepins with notes taken sur le vif, finding plots for his novels in the latest scandai, and at least striving for the naturalisas impassibility. He attained a high degree of perfection in his noting and rendering of momentary impressions, and in his imparti ng color, movement, and lif e to his milieux, adhering always to his guiding motto : " d'après nature."

Guy de Maupassant, 1 a naturalist by tempérament, was content to describe nature with perfect and impartial fidelity. It is true, however, that many of his plots suggest the old French fabliau or farce, and that toward the end of his life, when his faculties had become more or less unbalanced, his stories assumed a quality of fantastic unreality. Not dual in his tendencies like Flaubert, differing from Zola in his freedom from literary théories, and, unlike Daudet in his absolute impersonality of style, Maupassant conforms most closely to the principles of naturalistic writing. 2

retary to the Duc de Morny, the minister of state, traveling meanwhile in Algeria, Corsica, and Sardinia. Besides his poems and plays, his principal works are: le Petit Chose, 1868; Lettres de mon moulin, 1869; Tartarin de Tarascon, 1872, and its sequels, Tartarin sur les Alpes, 1886, and Port Tarascon, 1890; Contes du lundi, 1873; Froment jeune et Risler aîné, 1874 ; Jack, 1876 ; le Nabab, 1877 ; Us Rois en exil, 1879 î Numa Roumestan, 188.:; PEvangéliste, 1883; Sapho, \%%\-,V Immortel, 1888.

1 Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), was educated at Yvetot and Rouen in his native Normandy. After serving in the mioistry of marine as clerk, and as soldier in the Franco-Prussian war, he came under the mastership of Flaubert with whom he learned the art of story-telling. He wrote several long novels, but his chief title to famé rests on his short stories, nearly two hundred in number, dealing with the most diverse subjects of contemporary French life, Parisian and provincial.

* For a complète bibliography of the works of Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, and Maupassant, and for books and articles relating to thèse writers, see Thieme H. P., Guide bibliographique delà littérature française de 1800 à içoô. Paris, Welter, 1907.