Naturalism

Lilian R. Furst, Peter N. Skrine

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138242784
• eBook ISBN: 9781351630771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1971, this book examines the literary style of Naturalism. After introducing the reader to the term itself, including its history and its relationship to Realism, it goes on to trace the origins of the Naturalist movement as well as particular groups which adhered to Naturalism and the theories they espoused. It also provides a summary of the key Naturalist literary works and concludes which a brief reflection on the movement as a whole.

This book will be of interest to those studying nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature.

I

The Term ‘Naturalism’

ITS USAGES AND HISTORY

Naturalism, with its twin adjectives ‘naturalist’ and ‘naturalistic’, is a deceptive term. It immediately evokes associations with ‘nature’ and ‘naturalness’ so that we tend to assume too easily and too vaguely that we know, if not its precise meaning, at least its area of reference. But the more examples of it we come across, the more we become aware of its wide range and its complex undertones. Nor is it a term of rarified scholarly criticism only. Within less than a month early in 1970 it cropped up four times in my casual reading of newspapers: Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat was described as ‘a book of ideas and images and not a naturalistic work’; Ronald Firbank was classed as ‘an aesthete, not a naturalist’ (a phrase that might well lead one to visualize him as a collector of paintings rather than of plants!); John Updike’s Couples was dismissed in a German paper as a piece of ‘flat naturalism’, while the editor of the French Jardin des Modes ‘admires tremendously the bold naturalism of English girls, but cannot understand the success of the bottom-skimming miniskirt’.

These random recent examples might suggest two things: that ‘naturalism’ occurs chiefly in literary criticism and that it is a popular term of our time. Neither of these conclusions would in fact be correct. ‘Naturalism’ has a very long history and it was not introduced into the literary arena until relatively late. In this respect it is similar to the term ‘romantic’ which also denoted an attitude before it described an artistic tendency. And just as Romantic ideas and styles existed before, and persisted after, the specifically Romantic period of the early nineteenth century, likewise Naturalism can be found well before and after the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century movement of that name. ‘Entre la fin du Moyen-Age et la fin du XVIIIième siècle, les naturalistes sont nombreux’ (‘between the end of the Middle Ages and the end of the eighteenth century there were many naturalists’), including Velasquez, Caravaggio, Raphael and Shakespeare, according to this critic (A. David-Sauvageot, Le réalisme et le naturalisme, Paris, 1889, p. 95); to another historian the early Naturalists were Socrates, Euripides, Virgil, Rutebeuf, Villon, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne, Racine, Molière, Descartes, Bossuet, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, La Fontaine, Charles Sorel, Fontenelle, Bayle, Marivaux, Lesage, Prevost, Laclos, Rousseau, Diderot, Rétif de la Bretonne, etc. (C. Beuchat, Histoire du naturalisme français, Paris, 1949, i, pp. 21–32). Elsewhere we read that Rabelais was ‘a realist’ who ‘preached a naturalistic ethic’ (H. Levin, The Gates of Horn, Oxford, 1966, p. 66), or that ‘Diderot pushed naturalism as literal deception to astonishing extremes’ (R. Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, New Haven, 1963, p. 224). Brandes’ volume on Naturalism in England is about Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Scott, while in Germany Goethe’s lyric poems have been acclaimed as ‘naturalistisch’. There is no need to multiply these examples any further to show firstly, that as a term ‘Naturalism’ is not readily comprehensible, and secondly, that as a phenomenon it is not confined to the late nineteenth century.

Originally ‘Naturalism’ was used in ancient philosophy to denote materialism, epicureanism or any secularism. For long this was the primary meaning of the word. Eighteenth-century Naturalism, as elaborated by the thinker Holbach, was a philosophical system that saw man living solely in a world of perceived phenomena, a kind of cosmic machine which determined his life as it did nature, in short, a universe devoid of transcendental, metaphysical or divine forces. That this was the chief meaning of ‘Naturalism’ well into the nineteenth century is shown by a large number of statements as well as by the dictionary definitions of the time. Ambroise Pare, for instance, a famous sixteenth-century surgeon, regarded it as the doctrine of epicurean atheists. Diderot wrote of the Naturalists as those who do not admit God but who believe instead in material substance. Sainte-Beuve in 1839 bracketed Naturalism with materialism or pantheism as though they were quite interchangeable, and even some half a century later, in 1882, the philosopher Caro contrasted Naturalism with spiritualism. The predominance of this philosophical sense of the term is brought out by the definition in Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française (1875): ‘système de ceux qui attribuent tout à la nature comme premier principe’ (‘the system of those who find all primary causes in nature’). Here the omission is as revealing as the definition itself; Littre, compiling his dictionary in 1875, makes no mention whatsoever of any literary connotation. Current English dictionaries also still place the philosophical and theological meaning before the artistic. So even though the earliest equation of Naturalism with materialism has in the last hundred years or so been overlaid with various elaborations, this first sense of the term has by no means died out, nor is it irrelevant to an artistic movement that attached the greatest importance to the tangible objects of the visible world.

In all the older usages I have quoted the Naturalist is portrayed as a man with an overriding interest in the material substance of this world, in its natural manifestations and physical laws. From this it was a small and obvious step to the association of ‘Naturalism’ with ‘naturalist’ in the sense ‘he who studies external nature’. In the early nineteenth century the Romantics’ cult of naturalness and spontaneity and the poets’ tremendous delight in nature gave a powerful new impetus to the study of nature. The world was conceived as a unified living organism of creatures, plants, stars and stones, all participating in the life of the universe. Fanciful though this notion may in itself seem, it indirectly fostered the nascent sciences by encouraging men actually to observe and analyse physical phenomena in an attempt to fathom their workings. With the prodigious development of the natural sciences in the early nineteenth century, notably in the work of Lamarck (1744–1829) and Cuvier (1769–1832), the terms ‘naturalism’ and ‘naturalist’ lost some of their earlier pejorative colouring of epicurean atheism and gained a new respectability from the link with serious research.

Alongside the philosophical and the scientific, and connected with them, there was another usage of the word ‘naturalist’: in the fine arts. From the seventeenth century onwards a naturalist painter was one who depicted not historico-mythological or allegorical subjects, but sought to give on canvas as exact an imitation as possible of the real forms of nature. In this sense the word occurred frequently in nineteenth-century art criticism, specially in France in the writings of Baudelaire and Castagnary who maintained in his Salon de 1863 that ‘L’école naturaliste affirme que l’art est l’expression de la vie sous tous ses modes et à tous ses degrés, et que son but unique est de reproduire la nature en l’amenant a son maximum de puissance et d’intensité’ (‘the naturalist school asserts that art is the expression of life in all its forms and degrees, and that its sole aim is to reproduce nature at the height of its force and intensity’). This ideal is clearly based on a mimetic realism (‘reproduire la nature’), but there is an added ingredient in the final phrase (‘en l’amenant à son maximum de puissance et d’intensité’) which gives some leeway to the artist’s contribution, whether in his choice of the moment of portrayal or the manner. Castagnary’s text is – perhaps deliberately – imprecise, but the possibility is certainly left open. In its very ambivalence Castagnary’s definition is important for, and characteristic of, Naturalism in the arts.

It was from the fine arts that the term was finally imported into literary criticism, almost certainly by Zola in the preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1867). In the 1860s, through his school-friend Cezanne, Zola had been introduced to many of the Impressionist painters and had taken up the cudgels on their behalf with his customary energy and enthusiasm. At that time the Impressionists were very much the outsiders, engaged in a bitter struggle against the artistic Establishment of the Academie des Beaux-Arts which favoured dark and dull historico-mythological pictures and repeatedly rejected the Impressionists’ brilliantly coloured, subtle studies of the town and country scenes around them. The young painters chose everyday subjects from contemporary reality because they were interested above all in observing the changing play of colour and light. These new ideals, as well as the courage that inspired them, were immensely exciting to Zola, and although he may not fully have understood the Impressionists’ intentions, he published a series of flamboyantly daring reviews of their exhibitions. In these articles Zola used the words ‘impressionist’, ‘realist’, ‘actualist’ and ‘naturalist’ freely and synonymously. There can be little doubt that this was the source of its literary currency.

ITS RELATIONSHIP TO ‘REALISM’

‘Naturalism’ thus came on to the literary scene already loaded with meanings derived from philosophy, the sciences and the fine arts. What is more, it arrived at the hey-day of Realism and somehow in its wake. It was tied to the apron-strings of ‘Realism’ from its first appearance, from Zola’s tacit assumption in his art criticism that the terms were virtually identical. He made no attempt at a clear distinction in his various Salons nor, as far as I can ascertain, in any of his subsequent literary criticism. The overlapping of ‘Naturalism’ with ‘Realism’ is indeed a great, perhaps the greatest, bug-bear of this topic.

Almost without exception critics have been in the habit of grouping the two terms together or at least of writing about both, irrespective of whether their work was supposed to be about Realism or about Naturalism. Many have even categorically expressed their conviction that ‘le réalisme et le naturalisme ne sont qu’une seule et meme chose’ (‘Realism and Naturalism are merely one and the same thing’) (C. Beuchat, Histoire du naturalisme française, i, p. 11). Some are even more generous by throwing ‘Impressionism’ into the stew as well. This is the practice of Brunetiere whose Le Roman naturaliste devotes much attention to Flaubert, George Eliot, Dickens and Tolstoy, novelists whom we should probably call realists (or romantic realists if we wanted to be precise). That Brunetiere envisaged no difference between ‘realistic’ and ‘naturalistic’ becomes plain from his praise of Madame Bovary which is hailed in one place (p. 30) as ‘le chef-d’oeuvre peut-être du roman réaliste’ (‘perhaps the masterpiece of the realistic novel’), while later in the same book (p. 302) Flaubert is called ‘le vrai héraut du naturalisme, comme il est bien probable que Madame Bovary en demeurera le chef-d’oeuvre’ (‘the true harbinger of Naturalism, just as Madame Bovary will probably remain its masterpiece’). Whether Madame Bovary in fact belongs to Realism or to Naturalism is irrelevant at this stage; the point is that to so eminent a critic the two terms appear to have been synonymous.

It would, however, be wrong in this case to ascribe the confusion to the critics. The exponents of Naturalism were themselves guilty of a good deal of muddled thinking which is reflected in their word-usage. The fact that the acknowledged high-priest of Naturalism, Zola, made no clear distinction may well have been influential. Of his immediate disciples Huysmans constantly spoke of’le réalisme ou le naturalisme’ throughout his impassioned defence of Zola’s practices in Emile Zola et ‘L’Assommoir . This might have been deliberate, an attempt to make Naturalism acceptable under the guise of Realism, as it undoubtedly was in the case of Zola’s La Terre which was presented in the 1889 English edition as ‘The Soil, a realistic novel’. With Huysmans and many of his contemporaries the confusion more likely stems from a genuine inability to distinguish between the two. One of the difficulties lay, of course, in the lack of a definition of ‘Realism’ in the mid-nineteenth century, let alone a coherent artistic theory. Much of the writing on the subject was of an ad hoc nature, centred on one specific work rather than tackling the whole problem. No wonder that Arthur Morrison in an article entitled ‘What is a Realist?’ in the New Review of March 1897 complained that ‘realist’ was being used ‘with no unanimity of intent’ and ‘with so loose an application’ that it was not easy ‘to make a guess at its real meaning’. In America in the 1890s ‘Realism’ and ‘Naturalism’ were applied with disconcerting looseness, and Garland’s term ‘Veritism’ (perhaps indebted to the Italian verismo) merely added to the unmerry fray. As for Germany here are the synonyms for ‘Naturalism’ listed by Leo Berg in Der Naturalismus (1892): ‘Natürlichkeit’, ‘Naturerkenntnis’, ‘Naturkraft’, ‘Natursinn’, ‘Naturgefüh’, ‘Naturwahrheit’, ‘Naturgemässheit’, ‘Naturempfindung’, ‘Rückkehr zur Natur’, ‘Annäherung an die Natur’, ‘Liebe zur Natur’, ‘Naturfreiheit’, ‘Natureinfachheit’, ‘Natureinheit’, ‘Naturschönheit’, ‘Naturwirklichkeit’, ‘Naturwissenschaft’, ‘Naturfreude’, ‘Kampf gegen Unnatur’. It is a list which in its subtlety as well as its monotony defies translation, but it gives support to the suggestion made as long ago as 1884 by Desprez in L’Évolution naturaliste that one could with the term ‘Naturalism’ rival Musset’s brilliant satire on the meanings and interpretations of ‘Romanticism’ in Les Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet. More soberly, the present situation is well summarized by Becker in his introduction to Documents of Modern Literary Realism:

Though the words realism and naturalism are freely, even rashly, used, there is no general agreement as to what they mean. For many they have come to be merely convenient pejoratives, especially when qualified as stark, raw, unimaginative, superficial, atheistic, and more recently socialist. (p. 3)

Is it then just part of our modern urge for greater linguistic precision that we should seek to differentiate between the two terms that have for long co-existed, even if not very happily? Or is ‘Naturalism’ radically separate from ‘Realism’? Paradoxically, the answer to both these questions would seem to be: no. Naturalism does differ from Realism but is not independent of it. The most appropriate image to convey the relationship might be that of Siamese twins, who have separate limbs while sharing certain organs. What the Realists and the Naturalists have in common is the fundamental belief that art is in essence a mimetic, objective representation of outer reality (in contrast to the imaginative, subjective transfiguration practised by the Romantics). This led them to choose for their subject matter the ordinary, the close-to-hand, and also to extol the ideal of impersonality in technique. In this sense, as Harry Levin has pointed out in The Gates of Horn, Realism is ‘a general tendency’ in so far as every work of art ‘is realistic in some respects and unrealistic in others’ (pp. 64–5). It was out of this general tendency to mimetic Realism that Naturalism grew. In many ways it was an intensification of Realism; as L. Deffoux has fittingly put it (Le Naturalisme, Paris, 1929, p. 9),...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• 1 THE TERM ‘NATURAL ISM’
• 2 THE SHAPING FACTORS
• 3 GROUPS AND THEORIES
• 4 THE CREATIVE WORKS
• 5 CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX