DECLINE OF NATURALISM
491
modern literature. The traditionalist critics judge it much too
one-si.dedly in professing to see in its rise nothing but spiritual
loss-an invasion of the arcanum of art by uncouth scientific ideas.
The point is that this scientific bias of naturalism was historically
productive of contradictory results. Its effect was certainly de–
pressive insofar as it brought mechanistic notions and procedures
into writing. But it should be kept in mind that it also enlivened
and, in fact, revolutionized writing by liquidating the last assets
of "romance" in fiction and by purging it once and for all of the
idealism of the "beautiful lie"-of the long-standing inhibitions
against dealing with the underside of life, with those inescapable
day-by-day actualities traditionally regarded as too "sordid" and
"ugly" for inclusion within an esthetic framework.
If
it were
not for the service thus rendered in vastly increas.ing the store of
literary material, it is doubtful whether such works as
Ulysses
and even
Remembrance of Things Past
could have been written.
This is not clearly understood in the English speaking countries,
where naturalism, never quite forming itself into a
"~ovement,"
was at most only an extreme emphasis in the general onset of
realistic fiction and drama. One must study, rather, the Continental
writers of the last quarter of the 19th Century in order to grasp
its historical role. In discussing the German naturalist school of
the 1880's, the historian Hans Naumann has this to say, for
instance:
Generally it can be said that to its early exponents the doctrine
of naturalism held quite as many diverse and confusing meanings
as the doctrine of expressionism seemed to hold in the period just
past. Imaginative writers who at bottom were pure idealists
united with the dry-as-dust advocates of a philistine natural–
scientific program on the one hand and with the shameless ex–
ploiters of erotic themes on the other. All met under, the banner
of naturalism-friends today and enemies tomorrow.... But
there was an element of historical necessity in all this. The fact
is that the time had come for an assault, executed with glowing
enthusiasm, against the epigones ... that it was finally possible
to fling aside with disdain and anger the pretty falsehoods of life
and art
(Die Deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart,
Stuttgart, 1930,
p.
144).
And he adds that the naturalism of certain writers consisted simply
