REALISM AND THE NOVEL
201
class, the
bourgeoisie.
Such material was called "domestic" and "bour–
geois" before it was called "realistic," and the connections are clear. In
literature the domestic drama and, above all, the novel, both devel–
oping in early eighteenth-century England with the rise of an inde–
pendent middle class, have been the main vehicles of this new
consciousness. Yet, when the "realist" description arrived, a further
development was taking place, both in content and in attitudes to it.
A common adjective used with "realism" was "startling," and, within
the mainstream of "ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality" a
particular current of attention to the unpleasant, the poor, and the
sordid could be distinguished. Realism thus appeared as in part a re–
volt against the ordinary bourgeois view of the world; the realists
were making a further selection of ordinary material which the ma–
jority of bourgeois artists preferred to ignore. Thus "realism," as a
watchword, passed over to the progressive and revolutionary move–
ments.
This history is paralleled in the development of "naturalism,"
which again had a simple technical sense, to describe a particular
method of art, but which underwent the characteristic broadening
to "ordinary, everyday reality" and then, in particular relation to
Zola, became the banner of a revolutionary school - what the
Daily
News
in 1881 called "that unnecessarily faithful portrayed of offen–
sive incidents."
Thus, entwined with technical descriptions, there were in the
nineteenth-century meanings doctrinal affiliations. The most positive
was Strindberg's definition of naturalism as the exclusion of God:
naturalism as opposed to supernaturalism, according to the philoso–
phical precedents. Already, however, before the end of the century,
and with the increasing clarity in our own, "realism" and "natural–
ism" were separated: naturalism in art was reserved to the simple
technical reference, while realism, though retaining elements of this,
was used to describe subjects and attitudes to subjects.
The main twentieth-century development has been curious. In
the West, alongside the received uses, a use of "realism" in the sense
of "fidelity to psychological reality" has been widely evident, the
point being made that we can be convinced of the reality of an ex-
,.
perience, of its essential realism, by many different kinds of artistic
method, and with no necessary restriction of subject-matter to the
ordinary, the contemporary, and the everyday.
