Take again the influence of science in the realm of art. From the close of the eighteenth century external nature began to play a rôle in the arts that it had never played before and the prominence of landscape in painting was as notable as natural description in literature. But during the first half of the nineteenth century this natural influence was romantic, imaginative, emotional. With the middle years the scientific tendency made itself felt, and art became more closely and intensely realistic. This is perhaps most generally obvious in the literary world, and the great novelists of France from Balzac on embody the scientific movement of which Darwin is so eminently representative. Most significant of all in this regard is the great epic of Zola, the history of the Rougon-Macquart family, in twenty solid volumes. I am not for a moment vouching for the solidity of Zola’s science, which may be quite as fantastic in its way as the romance of Dumas. The point is that Zola believed himself to be typifying and illustrating scientific tendencies, and that the popularly accepted notion of the struggle for existence, with all its blind and bitter cruelty, its pitiful tragedy of the warfare and merciless destruction of the animal world, was transferred to humanity in the endless pages, as gloomy as they are powerful, of the great French imaginative drama. And it is interesting, as we come right down to the present day, to find a thoughtful critic attributing the ugly and realistic tendencies of current American fiction not to any passing upheaval caused by the World-War, but to just this gradual influence of scientific thought making itself felt everywhere: ‘What we are looking at is not the product of a decade or an episode, even so supreme an episode as battle, but the fructifying of scientific doctrines that for several decades have been seeping into society. What we are witnessing is the yielding of the romantic view of life to the scientific.’[181]