It was precisely the epoch when the generation born between 1820 and 1830 was assuming the mastery in literature, and revealing its physiognomic type by an analysis of real life, executed with harsh hands. The new generation turned from philosophic idealism, and from all that pertained to romance, and wielded the dissecting-knife with genuine enthusiasm. In the same year in which "Madame Bovary" appeared, Taine, in his work "Les philosophes français du 19e siècle," dissected the prevailing spiritualistic doctrines, annihilated Cousin as a thinker, and declared, with the utmost nonchalance, and without entering into any controversy with the romantic school, that Victor Hugo and Lamartine were already classic writers, who were read by young people rather from curiosity than from sympathy, and who were as far removed from them as Shakespeare and Racine. They were "admirable and worthy remains of a period which had been great, but which no longer existed." His friend, Sarcey, wrote, not much later, in "Figaro," that article which was so often quoted and so much derided by Banville, the disciple of the great romantic school, and which culminated in the words: "Forward, my friends! Down with romance! Voltaire and the Normal School forever!"[2] In dramatic poetry, opposition to the romantic school appeared to have been frustrated by the unfruitful little _École de bon sens._ Ponsard and those who were intellectually allied to him had not been able to maintain long what people had once expected of them; but the more modern realistic dramatic writers at this juncture combined with them. Augier, who had dedicated his first poetry to Ponsard, and who had at first followed the sentimental, _bourgeois_ tendency of the latter, entered on a new career, in 1855, devoted to drastic description of the immediate past. The way had just been pointed out to him by the bolder, hardier Dumas, with whom, in spite of all his respect for the generation to which his father belonged, had commenced the direct and pertinent derision of the romantic ideal; this can be seen in the _rôles_ of Nanjac, in "Le Demimonde" and of Montègre, in "L'ami des femmes." The answer that Montègre, bewildered by the superiority of Ryon, makes the latter, _"Vous êtes un physiologiste, monsieur_," was in reality the sole reply that the elder generation could offer to the critic of the younger. Augier was born in 1820, Dumas in 1824, Sarcey and Taine in 1828. The author of "Madame Bovary," who first saw the light in 1821, evidently had kindred spirits among his contemporaries. He differed from them in his secret, unshaken fidelity to the ideals of the past generation; but he united with them so unhesitatingly in their attacks on the caricatures of these ideals that, without further ceremony, he must be classed in the group of these anti-romantic writers.