DECLINE OF NATURALISM
493
only a myth could "lend shape or meaning to a slice of life so
broad and banal." And from a social-historical point of view this
much can be said, that naturalism cannot hope to survive the world
of 19th century science and industry of which it is the product.
For what is the crisis of reality in contemporary art if not at
bottom the crisis of the dissolution of this familiar world? Natur–
alism, which exhausted itself in taking an inventory of this world
while it was still relatively stable, cannot possibly do justice to
the phenomena of its disruption.
One must protest, however, against the easy assumption of
some avant-gardist writers that to finish with naturalism is the
same as finishing with the principle of realism generally.
It
is
one thing to dissect the real, to penetrate beneath its faceless
surface and transpose it into terms of symbol and image; but the
attempt to be done with it altogether is sheer regression or escape.
Of the principle of realism it can be said that it is the most valuable
acquisition of the modern mind. It has taught literature how to
take in, how to grasp and encompass, the ordinary facts of human
existence; and I mean this in the simplest sense conceivable. Least
of all can the novelist dispense with it, as his medium knows
of no other principle of coherence. In Gide's
Les Faux-Mon–
nayeurs
·there is a famous passage in which the novelist Edouard
enumerates the faults of the naturalist school. "The great
defect of that school is that it always cuts a slice of life in
the same direction: in time, lengthwise. Why not in breadth?
Or in depth? As for me, I should like not to cut at all. Please
understand: I should like to put everything into my .novel." "But
I thought," · his interlocutor remarks, "that you want to abandon
reality." Yes, replies Edouard, "my novelist wants to abanaon
it; but I shall continually bring him back to it. In fact that will
be the subject; the struggle between the facts presented by reality
and the ideal reality."
