[In the following excerpt, Levin outlines the historical contexts of Realism and discusses its predominance in the French literary tradition.]

We are dealing with a general tendency, and not a specific doctrine. Since no hard and fast definition of realism will cover all the manifestations occurring under its name, we must examine them for its pertinent meaning in each case. "'Realism,'" says Karl Mannheim, "means different things in different contexts." The same word, Benedetto Croce points out, is applied by some critics in praise and by others in blame. Zola's meat was Brunetière's poison. "Men and women as they are," as they are for Howells, barely exist for his successors. Jane Eyre, which preserves a school-girlish innocence for us, so shocked its reviewers that they could not believe it had been written by a respectable woman. Charlotte Brontë, for her part, found Jane Austen's fiction "more real than true." Diderot praised Richardson for achieving "toute la réalité possible." Fielding would not have agreed. The history of taste, by lending its comparative standards, may resolve these conflicts of opinion. It suggests a sense in which Racine, though we do not ordinarily classify him as a realist, could be more realistic than Corneille. But, as between two contemporaries, one refining the analysis and the other broadening the scope of literature, which is the realist? Is it Trollope, with his accurate notations of provincial or parliamentary life, or Dickens, with his exaggerated efforts to delve in dust heaps which Trollope so quietly ignored? Is the penetrating self-portrait of Adolphe less realistic than the panoramic irreality of Les Misérables? Some novelists, evidently, go as far as they can within a restricted sphere; others, in enlarging those restrictions, overstep the borderline of romance. Every novel is realistic in some respects and unrealistic in others. Criticism can but try to estimate the proportions by comparing what the writer endeavors to show with what the reader is able to see.

When realism appeals neither to ontological argument nor to scientific experiment but to human experience, philosophers consider it "naïve." This is the kind of everyday realism that interests us most, but it would be naïve indeed if we expected reality to be the same for everyone. And we should be disappointed, like the princess in the fairy tale, if we supposed that nature could be perfectly reproduced by any artifice. Even the purely visual reproduction of the painter or the sculptor is admittedly angled, heightened, foreshortened. The brand of realism that has had the widest application in recent years is the politician's, which, instead of committing itself to a set of principles, rather implies the rejection of principle. The political objective of bourgcois society, freedom, seems to be undefinable in positive terms. "Freedom from what?" is the question that liberalism undertakes to answer, and its answers constitute a negative catalogue of our age's problems. Absolute liberty is as meaningless as realism in a vacuum. Both are relative terms, referring us back to a definite series of restraints from which we have managed to secure some degree of release. When we call a book realistic, we mean that it is relatively free from bookish artificialities; it convinces us, where more conventional books do not. It offers us realiora, if not realia, as Eugene Zamyatin succinctly put it: not quite the real things, but things that seem more real than those offered by others. By rereading those other books too and reconstructing their conventions, we can relate them to our comparatively realistic book and specify its new departures more precisely. We can define realism by its context.

Our excuse for studying literary history is that the mediocre works help us to place the masterpieces. By establishing the rules we learn to recognize the exceptions. It is the exceptional writer who changes the context of literature, and who—from generation to generation—readjusts it to the vicissitudes of life. Among such writers, Rabelais is doubly exceptional, one of the most original of originals, and he should be saluted in passing as a realist by any criterion, historical or otherwise. Though he preached a naturalistic ethic, he adorned it with an extravagant learning which could scarcely have belonged to a child of nature. Such an attitude is never primordial or spontaneous; it is always a stringent revision of more complicated views. When Schiller ascribed Realism—his word was not Realismus—to the Greeks, he meant that their outlook was not as idealistic as that of himself and his romantic contemporaries; but this was premised upon his nostalgic contrast between the self-consciousness of the moderns and the simplicity of the ancients. It remained for the twentieth century to perceive, with Léon-Paul Fargue: "There is no genuine simplicity; there are only simplifications. The natural in literature presupposes the utmost effort, or else mannerism." Insofar as realism presupposes an idealism to be corrected, a convention to be superseded, or an orthodoxy to be criticized, George Moore is right: "No more literary school than the realists has ever existed." No writers have been more intensely conscious of what was already written. We can measure their contributions by a sliding scale which moves from literature toward life, but which likewise gravitates in the opposite direction under the counter-influence of romance.

Any work of imagination is likely to exhibit both tendencies, romantic and realistic; they are by no means confined to those historical movements which we respectively associate with the première of Hernani in 1830 and the prosecution of Madame Bovary in 1857. "Realism had existed long before this great controversy," Baudelaire had written in 1846, under the caption "What is Romanticism?" Nor can we assume, without considerable qualification, that romanticism and realism are historically opposed. "Romanticism is the most recent, the most up-to-date expression of the beautiful . . . To say romanticism is to say modern art." In their eagerness to garner local color, to tackle forbidding subjects, and to break down classical genres, the romanticists anticipated the realists; while the realists, we must bear in mind, took over a considerable residue of romance. These intermixtures are strikingly evident in the romantic realism of Dickens, the "fantastic" realism of Dostoevsky, and the "poetic" realism of Otto Ludwig and Adalbert Stifter. In France there was Victor Hugo; but, on the whole, the transition was more homogeneous. Yet, when Georges Pellissier stressed the continuities in a suggestive study, Le Réalisme du romantisme, Emile Faguet repeated the usual textbook distinctions by way of review. Mario Praz does not avoid this verbal impasse by applying the term Biedermeier to the bourgeois romanticism of the mid-Victorians or by illustrating from Dutch genre-paintings. More precise definition should clarify both the extent to which the elder generation paved the way for the younger and the extent to which the younger generation reacted against the elder.

Of the successive generations that have been shaken by literary revolution, only one—the middle generation of the nineteenth century—claims the explicit label of realism. Like most critical categories, the term comes after the fact, and comes later to other languages than to French. English seems to have borrowed it, in 1853, through an article on Balzac in the Westminster Review. The first independently relevant instance cited by the New English Dictionary came in 1857, when Ruskin criticized the "base grotesque" of Bronzino, the attempt to compensate for lack of imagination by "startling realism." The context here, as in so many early instances, refers to painting and expresses hostility. The previous year Emerson had employed the adjective "realistic," as a synonym for "materialistic" and an antonym for "idealistic," in characterizing Swift. Here the word betrays its ultimately philosophical origin, and its long association with the dualistic arguments of the metaphysicians. In France, though Littré still classifies réalisme as a neologism in 1872, the word had been utilized by literary criticism as early as 1826. Through the 'thirties it was used occasionally to designate some of the same things that romanticism stood for; it was consistently attacked, in the Revue des deux mondes and other conservative periodicals, as an artistic symptom of the growing radicalism of the epoch. It was usually mentioned in a disparaging sense, until some of the younger bohemians, protesting against the outmoded pomp of the academic tradition, began to pride themselves on the designation. Arsène Houssaye's history of Flemish painting, published in 1846, proved that there was also a realistic tradition. Théophile Gautier and other friendly critics defended the new esthetic by invoking the ancient concept of the imitation of nature.

It was "the landscape-painter of humanity," as Gustave Courbet was known to his admirers, who first proclaimed himself a realist—or rather, accepted the epithet thrust upon him. When the Salons objected to his literal treatment of peasants and laborers and the middle classes, he retorted by issuing manifestoes in the name of realism. When the Paris exposition of 1855 refused to hang his pictures, he erected his own Pavillon du Réalisme, and began to publicize the movement on an international scale. Later years brought out the socialistic and anticlerical implications of his work, and he was finally exiled for the part he had taken in the Commune. Whenever his critics complained that he had caricatured his models, he would insist, as Balzac did: "Les bourgeois sont ainsi!" Meanwhile realism was being widely popularized by the quasi-photographic genre-painting of the Barbizon school. The technique of photography, which had been invented by Niepce de Saint-Victor in 1824 and subsequently developed by Jacques Daguerre, had been acquired by the state and divulged to the public in 1839. Neither painters nor writers welcomed the new invention, for it drew them into a competition which they were both destined to lose. Nothing short of the Comédie humaine could compete with the daguerreotype; Balzac's ingenuity and facility, in reproducing characters and exhibiting scenes, was hardly less inventive; and Daguerre's other novelty, the diorama, echoes across the dinner-table in Le Père Goriot. Once perfected, photography served to demonstrate the difference between artistic means and mechanical processes of reproduction. Its ultimate effect was to discourage photographic realism. Painters became impressionists, writers rediscovered the personality of the observer, and even photographers called art to the aid of technology.

Though Balzac won retrospective recognition as the arch-realist, chronologically he belonged to the romantic generation. And though Madame Bovary was the most notable and the most notorious book of the realistic generation, Flaubert cultivated an aloofness from his contemporaries. The fanfares were sounded by a pair of journalists whose own novels stirred up less excitement than their articles on contemporary art and literature. Jules Fleury-Husson, under the pseudonym of Champfleury, collected some of his criticism into a volume, Le Réalisme, which came out in 1857. Edmond Duranty edited seven numbers of a little magazine, Réalisme, at monthly intervals between November 1856 and May 1857. Both men were acute enough to sense that the trend, which they followed rather than led, was far too fundamental to be identified with the special program of a single group. "That terrible word 'realism' is the reverse of the word 'school,'" announced Duranty. "To say 'realistic school' is nonsense. Realism signifies the frank and complete expression of individualities; it is actually an attack upon convention, imitation, every sort of school." More affirmatively, he went on to describe the envisaged result as "the exact, complete, sincere reproduction of the social milieu and the epoch in which one lives." But this was merely to make the description vary with the individual consciousness of one's place and time. As the slogan of a school, announced Champfleury, realism was only "a transitional term which will last no longer than thirty years."

While it lasted, Balzac and Courbet were avenging gods, and Champfleury was their publicist and prophet. He was also the historian of French caricature, which was even then reaching its height and leaving its incisive mark upon fiction. In an embittered tale of bohemian life, Chien-Caillou, he schematized the formula of Cervantes by printing side by side in parallel columns the idealistic expectations of his readers and the disappointments that reality would hold for them. His own laconic definition of realism, "sincerity in art," was based upon one of the most elusive words in the critical vocabulary; but it meant something against a context of artistic affectation, and against the constant enthymeme that the lower classes were more rewarding than upper-class subjects because they were more sincere. Here critical logic is overtaken by revolutionary zeal. Champfleury reminds us that realism is the insurrection of a minority, one of those "religions in -ism" like socialism that gained headway with the Revolution of 1848. Even then, while Marx and Engels were framing The Communist Manifesto, Champfleury and Baudelaire were conducting a republican paper. Champfleury's distrust of form, and his attempt to judge works of art by their content, foreshadowed the Marxist critics. Disliking poetry, he distinguished the friends and enemies of realism as sincéristes and formistes—a distinction which left little room for the ironic interplay of Baudelaire or of Flaubert. Political expression, submerged with the failure of the socialist Republic, came to the surface in controversies over realism. Both Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal were prosecuted by the imperial regime.

Literature was taking stranger and more sensational shapes, artists were making private gestures of opposition to the Empire, while the realists were expressing, in Champfleury's terms, "a latent and unconscious aspiration toward democracy." These impulses converge in the rejected picture, L'Atelier du peintre: allégorie réelle, where Courbet has depicted himself, his easel and canvas, a number of cast-off romantic properties, a nude woman, a group of working-class models, and several friends, including Champfleury, Baudelaire, the folk-poet Büchon, and the socialist Proudhon. Here the real allegory is that of the self-portraying artist, whose world is the studio and whose studio is the world, whose symbols are actualities and whose ideology is his art. Even more paradoxically, the distance between Flaubert's material and his style illustrates the ambivalence of realism, as a characteristic product of middle-class society and an unsparing commentary upon it. "As an expression of manners and social conditions, the school seems to correspond in art with the bourgeois element that has become predominant in the new society, reproducing its spirit and image as the novel does in literature," wrote a hostile critic, Louis Peisse, in 1851, the year that witnessed the enthronement of Napoleon III. In 1857, M. Prudhomme himself, succumbing to the vogue, subscribed a letter with assurances of his "distinguished consideration and realism."

With the predominance of the bourgeoisie, with the grandeur and decadence of Birotteau, it was certainly time to explore fresh fields. In 1864, the year of Claude Bernard's Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale, the Goncourts prefaced their Germinie Lacerteux with the usual declaration outdating all previous fiction: "The public likes false novels; this is a true novel." They were now proposing a further extension of the literary franchise, le droit au roman: "Living in the nineteenth century, in a time of universal suffrage, of democracy, of liberalism, we have asked ourselves whether those we call 'the lower classes' have not their right to the novel." French literature, in all its critical awareness and circumstantial candor, was ready to investigate the servant problem. "Today, when the novel undertakes the investigations and obligations of science, it may also claim the privileges and freedoms." Realism had fully crystallized by 1858, when Taine's essay on Balzac appeared. After the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species in the following year, every mode of interpreting human experience had to be gradually revised. A younger generation, children of the realists and grandchildren of the romanticists, demanded still another readjustment. During the 'seventies Zola sought to consolidate Taine's critical position with Bernard's experimental method, within the widening—or was it the narrowing?—orientation of Darwin's naturalism.

Heretofore "naturalism" had occasionally figured in the critical vocabulary; on occasion it was loosely synonymous with impressionism; but it had never been sharply differentiated from the connotations of realism, the more inclusive term. Zola, the literary executor of Duranty, sought to reinvigorate the realistic novel by substituting a naturalistic slogan. Just as the realists had adopted Balzac, so the naturalists adopted Flaubert, though Flaubert had never accepted the label, and Zola admitted in cynical moments that it was mere publicity. In serious moments, his naturalism looked beyond Flaubert's hatred of the bourgeoisie to an interest in the proletariat, and beyond the conventions of art to the investigations of science. A novel, though it might be impeded by political barriers, was free to lose itself in the uncharted contexts of nature. But the naturalistic novel also involved certain deterministic premises that realism ignored, that inhibited freedom of action and relieved the characters from responsibility for the degrading condition in which the novelist found them. The novelist himself was now a passive observer, a rigorous compiler of what Edmond de Goncourt first termed "human documents." Observation, it was presumed, would eliminate imagination and convert the art of fiction into a branch of scientific research. For Zola the realism of the Empire had been "too exclusively bourgeois." He in turn, with greater success than his forerunners, founded a school. He virtually established naturalism as an official doctrine of the Third Republic, a hardening orthodoxy from which the divergent movements of the twentieth century still take their departure.

Neither Stendhal nor Balzac nor Flaubert nor Zola nor Proust belonged to the French Academy—a sequence of omissions which throws light on the relationship of the novel to the establishment. Novelists less distinguished have been admitted, since the immortalization of the bland Octave Feuillet in 1863. Through one of the most carefully managed ironies of literary history, plus a bequest from Edmond de Goncourt, naturalism established its own academy in 1903. The issue is internationally reflected in the terms by which the Nobel Prize has been awarded, from 1901, to an author of idealistic tendency. Nonetheless most of its laureates, like the winners of the Prix Goncourt, have written in what became the naturalistic tradition. Now that the naturalists, the realists, and the romanticists are venerated alike by literary historians, we must not forget how often—during the nineteenth century—they were damned by critics, ignored by professors, turned down by publishers, opposed by the academies and the Salons, and censored and suppressed by the state. Whatever creed of realism they professed, their work was regarded as a form of subversion, and all the forces of convention were arrayed against them. While art propagandized against the middle class, the middle class invoked morality as a weapon against art. Literature had come too close to life for comfort. Brunetière, who led the counter-attack against the naturalists, accused them of overstressing the grosser aspects of reality, and pleaded for a revival of idealism. The naturalists hinted, by way of reply, that the traditionalists preferred the timeless to the timely because they were out of touch with their own time.

We have something to learn from their objections to specific details; traditionalism, however, objected in principle to the use of detail, and predisposed its critics to find realism tedious or trivial, ugly or obscene, decadent or improbable. On the other hand, the realists, in their revolt against tradition, felt impelled to exaggerate "the true in the horrible and the horrible in the true." Jules Janin's horrendous parody, L'Ane mort et la femme guillotinée, is worth remembering, if only because it proves that the popular novelists of le bas romantisme had scarcely been less sensational than Zola. Incidentally, it characterizes the bourgeois idealist who prefers romance to realism as "a Don Quixote in a cotton nightcap," surmounting his shop with battlements and surrounding it with a moat. Thus realism, as Georg Lukács puts it, moves in cycles. Proust, who used the word pejoratively, put his finger on the impetus: "From age to age a certain realism is reborn, by way of reaction against the art that has been theretofore admired." Consequently Erich Auerbach could range across many ages, cultures, and languages, from the Odyssey to Virginia Woolf, in order to show us "the representation of reality in western literature." His Mimesis is a magistral explication of a rich and eclectic series of texts. It illustrates the stylistic interplay between the grandiose and the plain-spoken, demonstrates the way symbolic conceptions yield to more materialistic approaches, and indicates the realistic component in the formal artistry of Dante and Shakespeare. A fortiori the weight of authority must. be accorded to Auerbach's considered opinion that historic realism, fully conscious of socio-politico-economic circumstance, is a strictly modern phenomenon beginning with Stendhal.

Not every age, unfortunately, can be a great age of poetry; and a flourishing drama seems to require a rare conjunction of time and place. If any literary form has flourished in the modern epoch of the western world, it has been prose fiction. And surely, if this form has any nucleus of tradition, it has been the parallel and interconnected development of the novel in England and France. The Occidental novel harks back to brilliant beginnings in Italy and Spain; perhaps it registers its highest degree of imaginative intensity in Russia and America; and it has some interesting later offshoots in the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere. But it was England which led the way in the eighteenth century, and France in the nineteenth century seems to have taken the lead. The fact that Germany has had so few novelists of distinction is clarified by a remark of André Gide's: "The fatherlands of the novel are the lands of individualism." Admitting that German fiction lacks European significance, a sociological study has concluded that it identified itself too uncritically with the interests of the middle class. No land has been more self-critical or more individualistic than France, and no literature has spoken for all of Europe with more authority. Recognizing this authority, Tolstoy advised Maxim Gorky to read the French realists;

Henry James wrote Howells that they were the only contemporaries whose work he respected; and George Moore never ceased to tell English novelists how much they could learn from Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. "Yes, when I read a novel I mostly read a French one," says one of James's heroines, "for I seem with it to get hold of more of the real thing—to get more life for my money."

Circulating in foreign translations or between its original yellow covers, the French novel has acquired an international notoriety, which is based not merely on its pioneer frankness in the matter of sex but on its intransigent refusal to take any human relationship for granted. Its abiding preoccupation might be summed up in the single word moeurs, which must be translated by two different English words, "manners" and "morals," but which retains the impersonality of the Latin mores. In English literature, ever since the debate between Congreve and Collier, there seems to have been a gradual divorce between manners and morals. Novels of manners, like Meredith's, have been rather eccentric and superficial; novels of morals, like George Eliot's, have been more earnest and didactic. There has been an irresistible temptation, indelibly exemplified in the happy endings of Dickens, to sacrifice the real to the ideal. Too often, when the novelist has not arranged for the triumph of virtue, or modified the conduct of his characters to suit the ethical prepossessions of his readers, they have held him responsible for immoralities which he has simply attempted to describe. Mrs. Grundy equated "realistic" with "pornographic." Guizot, who was an Anglophile as well as an official spokesman for middle-class morality, publicly regretted that French novels were not as respectable as The Heir of Redclyffe. Brunetière—that exponent of universality—preferred George Eliot, and even Rhoda Broughton, to Flaubert and Zola. For Flaubert and Zola there could be no compromise with domesticated taste. Morals were the criteria of manners, and manners the test of morals; and, where the practice failed to live up to the theory, nothing less than an uncompromising realism could deal with the situation.

"French novelists are very lucky in having the French to write about," Stephen Spender has remarked. Supremely articulate and gesticulative, their consistent reactions to concrete situations invite such aphoristic remakrs; but an almost proverbial example may prove more illuminating, particularly when it is borrowed from Molière. The very title of his comedy, L 'Amour médecin, characteristically inclines toward a clinical view of an emotional theme. Sganarelle's daughter, having secretly fallen in love, displays symptoms of melancholia, and the father consults his neighbors in the opening scene. M. Josse recommends some gift to cheer her spirits, a diamond necklace or some piece of jewelry, and the others make various other recommendations. Sganarelle listens patiently until they all have spoken, and then tells them off one by one, pointing out that M. Josse happens to be a jeweler—who would profit by the occasion to sell his wares—and that the advice of the others is no more disinterested. "Vous êtes orfêvre, M. Josse!" The line is more than a gag; it is a flash of revelation. Another writer, taken in by the show of pathos and benevolence, might have taken M. Josse at his neighborly word; or, having detected the ulterior economic motive, might have cried out in righteous indignation. Molière, in a mood which is seldom too far from detached amusement, sees through the characters, grasps the situation, and lays bare the moeurs. Now there is nothing about a lovesick girl or a worried parent or a merchant with his eye on the main chance that could not be encountered anywhere else. What is characteristic is not the pattern of behavior but the exposure of motivation: the dissembled emotions and calculations of the personalities, the conflicting interests and responsibilities of the group.

French literature has been preoccupied, not so much with the individual in isolation or with society in the mass, as with the problem of keeping the balance between them. Psychology and sociology have contributed in equal measure to whet the analysis. Long before those twin sciences in -ology had been professionally exploited, their potentialities had been explored by the self-knowledge of Montaigne and the introspection of Pascal, by the maxims of La Rochefoucauld and the memoirs of Saint-Simon. The method of Descartes had located the ego against its context. La Bruyère had subtitled his character-sketches Les Moeurs de ce siècle. Voltaire had condensed the history of civilization into an Essai sur les moeurs. Even Rousseau, in probing the subjective, had retained a quantum of objectivity. We often hear that the French language is better accommodated to prose than to poetry, that the Gallic genius rises to greater heights in comedy than in tragedy, or that the most creative achievements of this particular culture are the most critical. Though these generalizations are far too sweeping to pass unqualified, they are borne out by the achievements of French fiction. The comparatively short distance between fiction and criticism is due, in Harold Laski's phrase, to "the great French tradition of making criticism a commentary on life." In other countries literature and society are two distinct things, said Renan. "In our country . . . they interpenetrate." Hence the novelist is ex officio a social critic. Theory without practice or practice without theory might subsist elsewhere, fostered by German metaphysics or British empiricism. French philosophy, under the aspect of Cartesian dualism, has insisted upon a clear-cut distinction and a running parallel between material reality and the realm of ideas. Realism, as we define it, is therefore implicit in the traditional structure of French thought.

An incomparable control of the instruments of culture has made France's experience available to the rest of the world, but it is the experience itself that has made France, and has made it the second fatherland of educated foreigners. Its explicative talents have reinforced its diagrammatic position. Geographically and historically France has played the typical role of l'homme sensuel moyen, as Matthew Arnold was so acutely aware, for Arnold faced the thankless task of upholding a critical tradition in a more decentralized culture. The centrality of France among nations strengthened the centripetal position of Paris among cities, making it the geographical and historical capital of bourgeois democracy. "France is at the heart, and is the heart, of Europe; if it beats too hard or too fast, fever and disorder may spread through the whole body," warned Bonald, fearful lest cultural continuities had been destroyed by the Revolution of 1789. The Revolution of 1830 brought to Michelet, at the other extreme of political opinion, a sense of France's mission: to reveal the social Word, as Judea and Greece had revealed the moral Word. "All social and intellectual solutions are fruitless for Europe until France has interpreted, translated, and popularized them." Bonald's organic metaphor differs significantly from Michelet's conception of the French people, piloting the ship of humanity. "But today this ship is navigating in a hurricane; it goes so fast, so fast that dizziness overcomes the sturdiest, and every breast is troubled. What can I do in this beautiful and terrible movement? One thing—understand it. I shall try, at least."

Why should French writers, with such unflinching effort, have dedicated themselves to that comprehensive task? The reason is the salient circumstance of modern history. It was revolution that inspired both the reactionary Bonald and the radical Michelet. Not less than ten times during the hundred and fifty years that divide the ancien régime from the Vichy government, Frenchmen were called upon to overthrow their leaders and to establish a new order. Alas, these overturns have since continued, and Michelet's trepidations would be even stronger today. The record, repeating itself with cumulative emphasis, testifies to a high degree of social consciousness, and to an equally high degree of individualism. Revolutionary movements end in Napoleonic careers, and the cult of Napoleon ends in the Commune.

Napoleon introduces the need for success, unbridled emulation, unscrupulous ambition—crass egoism, in short, primarily his own egoism—as the central motive and the universal spring. This spring breaks, stretched too far, and ruins his machine. After him, under his successors, the same mechanism will operate in the same way, and will break down in the same way after a more or less protected period. Up to the present day, the longest of these periods has lasted less than twenty years.

When Taine was writing this passage in 1889, just a century after the first revolution, he was expecting another man on horseback, General Boulanger, to trample down the Third Republic. But the democratic regime, having already lasted nineteen years, and having proved more durable than its predecessors, was to live fifty years longer. The statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, its gift to a sister republic, retains an undimmed image in a poem by Marianne Moore, written upon the dark days of collapse and capitulation under Marshal Pétain:

. . . we with reenforced Bartholdi's
Liberty holding up her
torch beside the port, hear France
demand, "Tell me the truth,
especially when it is
unpleasant." And we
cannot but reply,
"The word France means
enfranchisement . . ."

Enfranchisement prompted mingled reverberations of despair and hope in 1941. "French writers, the freest in the universe"—so began a pamphlet published that year by Kléber Haedens, Paradoxe sur le roman, which terminated with the imprimatur of the Vichy censorship. The calculated irony was a bid for independence in the very teeth of disheartening odds.

Fanny Burney, who as Madame d'Arblay had lived under the Napoleonic Empire, declared upon her return to England that it would henceforth be impossible to delineate "any picture of actual human life without reference to the French Revolution." Yet it never occurred to Jane Austen that the young officers, who figure as dancing partners for the heroines of her novels, were on furlough from Trafalgar and Waterloo. One had then to breathe the air of France to be fully conscious of the difference between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The new issues were quite as urgent in England, but not so desperately clear; the French were tearing down and building up institutions, while the English were preserving and adapting them. The English novel was free to go its own way, if it chose, and to be content with domestic life; the French novel, for lack of answerable government, assumed certain quasi-public obligations. In the absence of regular institutions, literature became one, whose leadership was conceded in Europe, if not in France. Since the breakdown of the old Latin republic of letters, French books had kept up a kind of International among the intellectuals. Elsewhere, when modern ideas penetrated, they were recognized and ticketed as overtly French. It was the French Revolution of July 1830, according to the historian of materialism, Friedrich Lange, that subverted German idealism. "It was toward France—'realistic' France—that men loved to look even from a political point of view. But what so specially endeared the July Monarchy and French constitutionalism to the men who now gave the tone in Germany was their relation to the material interests of the moneyed classes."

Revolution secured, not the realization of its own slogans, but the enthronement of the middle class. Writers thereafter could only express their doubts and disappointments, and hope for another revolution. The hopes of the first revolutionists had been dashed by the Terror; the grand illusion of Napoleon's Empire had been lost at Waterloo. The monumental past, with its legend of conquest and its rhetoric of freedom, could only reduce the present to mock-heroic dimensions. Alfred de Musset, in his Confession d'un enfant du siècle, gave a first-hand diagnosis of the disillusioned state of mind that was inciting his contemporaries to realism. "All the sickness of the present century comes from two causes: the people who have gone through '93 and 1814 bear two wounds in their hearts. Everything that was is no more; everything that will be is not yet. Look no farther for the secret of our troubles." Though the nobleman had been deprived of his prerogatives, it was not the common man who profited. M. Prudhomme, rushing into the breach, was the man of the hour. Eulogizing himself, he parodied Musset. "No matter what you do or say, everything today is bourgeois. Aristocracy exists no more, democracy does not yet exist, there is nothing but bourgeoisie. Your ideas, your opinions, your manners [moeurs], your literature, your arts, your instincts are transitional; then hail to Joseph Prudhomme, the man of transition—that is to say, of the bourgeoisie!" Perhaps Musset, as he himself had confessed, had been born too late. Stendhal, who was old enough to be a child of the previous century, liked to think that he had been born too early. But Prudhomme, emerging between revolutions, was the personification of self-conscious modernity, immune to the disenchantments and undeceptions of the maladie du siècle.

When the Goncourts portrayed the generic man of letters in Charles Demailly, they confronted him with the generic theme. His novel, La Bourgeoisie, would apparently have been a French equivalent of The Way of All Flesh or Buddenbrooks. But, since it was French, it would also have been a "social synthesis"; it would have traced, through three generations of a single family, the evolution of society and behavior (moeurs); it would have depicted "the plutocracy of the nineteenth century in its full expansion." The grandfather would have been "the incarnation of the sense of property," the son an ardent believer in "the religions of human and national solidarity," and the grandson a degenerate embodiment of "all the practical skepticisms of modern youth." And, since Charles Demailly depended on observation rather than imagination, like a dutiful disciple of the Goncourts, his characterizations would have been historically sound. At any rate, other observers confirm the story. They show how, through political agitation and dynastic change, the bourgeois dynasties continued to enrich themselves; how the French nation as a whole enacted, in the ambivalent phrase of the intellectual historian, Bernhard Groethuysen, "a virtual epos of the bourgeoisie." The development of capitalism has been divided by the economic historian, Werner Sombart, into two phases. During the first phase, from the Renaissance to the latter part of the eighteenth century, manners and morals were restricted by the sanctions of orthodox Christianity. The second phase, the period of individual competition in a dynamic society, has been unrestricted and expansive. If we accept Sombart's criteria, the presence or the absence of restrictions, it requires no prophet to point out that, since the second World War, this phase has been moving toward a cyclical ending.

This period of bourgeois capitalism, roughly from 1789 to 1939, happens by no accident to be the heyday of the realistic novel. With due allowance for lag and experiment, we are concerned with exactly a hundred years—from Stendhal's first novel, Armance, published in 1827, to Proust's last volume, Le Temps retrouvé, published in 1927. Our five novelists, posted at intervals, chronicle the intervening century and bear witness for their interconnected generations. Thus in 1842, when Stendhal died and Flaubert came of age, the foreword to the Comédie humàine marked Balzac's prime, and Zola's birth had just occurred. If we consider the symbolist overtones of Proust as an epilogue and the classical origins of Stendhal as a prologue, there is a consistent and continuous tendency from romanticism through realism proper to naturalism, which we can follow through the work of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. All five, realists according to their respective lights, explicitly render an account of their day, and address themselves directly to posterity—a title which seems for the moment to have devolved upon ourselves. Looking back upon the total configuration of their work, we can hardly fail to notice its chronological links with politics, and with comparable revolutions in the advancing sciences and the plastic arts. We notice that their respective accounts are soon corroborated: Mérimée refines upon Stendhal, Charles de Bernard emulates Balzac, Maupassant sits at the feet of Flaubert, Zola's disciples from the school of Médan, and the influence of Proust is still with us. The imitators lead us back to the innovators. They are the dynasts of realism, and their authority has outlasted the Bourbons and the Bonapartes. Their books, not less than Vigny's, may be read as successive cantos in an epic poem of disillusionment.

By a series of approximations, we arrive at our subject. Novels are such bulky, opaque, and many-faceted items, so easy to conjure with and so much harder to analyze. We have not analyzed a novel until we have discovered its place in the mind of the novelist, in the movement of the age, and in the tradition of literature. Every great novelist has his own solutions to the technical and historical problems that I have been too summarily reviewing. In touching upon some ancestors of the French realists, some of their rivals in English and other literatures, and some of the efforts to formulate their genre, I have tried to test the generality of certain definitions before applying them to these specific examples. The question remains . . . whether I have chosen the best examples. It can only be hoped that the choice of this sequence of novelists is not arbitrary, but would agree with the consensus of readers and critics and other novelists over the years. The reasons for literary survival, depending as they do upon a peculiar combination of powers and circumstances, are never single or simple. If popular appeal were our criterion, we should have to discuss Eugène Sue and Georges Ohnet. If every author lived up to his literary pretensions, none would be greater than Edmond de Goncourt or Anatole France. If we wanted skillful story-tellers, and did not want them to tell us very much more, we should find them in Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant. If we rated authors by their humanitarian sympathies, rather than by their comprehension of human beings, we should rate George Sand and Victor Hugo above the authors on our list.

If all books belonged to their period like furniture and bric-a-brac, Octave Feuillet would be the novelist of the Second Empire. His novels fit as neatly into Louis Bonaparte's world as the boulevards of Haussmann, the opera-house of Garnier, the music of Offenbach, the drama of Meilhac and Halévy, or the painting of Meissonier and Winterhalter. But that world, though self-satisfied, was not self-sustaining. The Salon des Refusés opened more spacious vistas with the art of Manet and Pissarro; the suppressed poems of Baudelaire uncovered gulfs beneath the very pavements of Paris; and the exile of Hugo held out to later writers the alternatives of intransigence and conformity. Convention dried up Mérimée's inspiration and weakened Daudet's talents, but realism stiffened Flaubert's opposition. Where Feuillet belonged, Flaubert detached himself; and Madame Bovary is still alive, where Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre is as dead as the Empress Eugénie. But Flaubert's detachment, which has kept his work from fading into the debris of his period, is not to be confused with indifference, nor is it an empty gesture; rather it indicates broken attachments, and asserts stronger allegiances to higher standards of integrity. No lack of conviction but too many convictions troubled him, he told George Sand. To conclude that Flaubert and [the] other realists were misanthropic and negativistic would be to accept the short-sighted view of their contemporaries. Taking advantage of an enlarged perspective, we shall see them—without exception—as men of generous enthusiasms, positive values, and fruitful ideas. They belong, as I would interpret them, to that world which is inhabited by the greatest writers of all time; for all great writers, in so far as they are committed to a searching and scrupulous critique of life as they know it, may be reckoned among the realists.