DECLINE OF NATURALISM
489
single novelist of any importance wearing the badge of naturalism
who is all of a piece, who fails to compensate in some way for
what we miss in his fundamental conception. Let us call the roll
of the leading names amQng the French and American naturalists
and see wherein each is saved.
The Goncourts, it is true, come off rather badly, but even so,
to quote a French critic, they manage "to escape from the crude
painting of the naked truth by their impressionistic mobility" and,
one might add, by their mobile intelligence. Zola's case does not
rest solely on our judgment of his naturalist dogmas. There are
entire volumes by him-the best, I think, is
Germinal-and
parts
of volumes besides, in which his naturalism, fed by an epic imagi–
nation, takes on a mythic cast. Thomas Mann associates him with
Wagner in a common drive toward an epic mythicism:
They belong together. The kinship of spirit, method, and aims is
most striking. This lies not only in the ambition to achieve size,
the propensity to the grandiose and the lavish; nor is it the Homeric
leitmotiv alone that is common to them; it is first and foremost a
special kind of naturalism, which develops into the mythical. . . .
In Zola's epic ... the characters themselves are raised up to a plane
above that of every day. And is that Astarte of the Second Empire,
called Nana, not symbol and myth?"
(The Sufferings and Greatness
of Richard Wagner).
Zola's prose, though not controlled by an artistic conscience, over–
comes our resistance through sheer positiveness and expressive
energy-qualities engendered by his novelistic ardor and avidity
for recreating life in all its multiple forms.* As for Huysmans,
even in his naturalist period he was more concerned with style
than with subject-matter. Maupassant is a naturalist mainly by
alliance, i.e. by virtue of his official membership in the School of
Medan; actually he follows a line of his own, which takes off
from naturalism never to return to it. There are few militant
naturalists among latter-day French writers. Jules Romains is
sometimes spoken of as one, but the truth is that he is an epigone
of all literary doctrines, including his own. Dreiser is still
un–
surpassed
so
far as American naturalism goes, though just at
present he may well be the least readable. He has traits that
make for survival-a Balzacian grip on the machinery of money
• Moreover, it should be evident that lola's many faults are not rectified but
merely ,inverted in fi!Uch of the writing-so languidly allusive anti decorative-{){ the
literary generations that turned their backs on him.
