How came it that modern man, scarcely out of childhood, found himself already so old? For surely one must be old to take such exclusive interest in one’s sensations, to observe and dissect them, to pursue them through their causes, accidents and effects. — Modern man aged himself by reaction. Once the Romantic spirit had sung itself hoarse, he was stricken with shame. He felt compelled to seize upon something solid, to fathom the truth of matters about which he had discoursed so airily in utter ignorance. — This bedrock of human existence he believed he had discovered in the physical laws of life and forthwith entered the laboratory and the anatomy theatre. — What a volte-face! Only yesterday the talk was all of cloak and dagger, of towering passions and heinous crimes, with everyone setting forth to seek adventure and exotic vistas. Today we keep to our hearths, speak only of trifling natural phenomena, and confine ourselves, by choice, within the bounds of the familiar. Once we yearned for grandeur, for the sublime, even the colossal; now the infinitesimal holds us in its thrall, though moderately so. We were far-sighted and mad; now we are myopic and sane.
Mark well that the Naturalist movement is quintessentially French—wholly unlike Romanticism. The Classical movement was likewise French, albeit with borrowings from antiquity and roots reaching deep into the Middle Ages. Naturalism springs unbidden from our native soil. What secured its triumph, truth be told, was that beneath its mask of cold brutality it pandered to bourgeois common sense by trafficking only in the solid and palpable. Those sweeping Romantic gestures were Spanish, English, German. A tidy example presented by the Naturalist suits our blinkered vision and has this further merit: one might almost mistake it (were one not to scrutinise too closely, for nothing is more dismal and pedantic at bottom) for a jest in the old Gallic vein, though scarcely in the French.
Romanticism took Shakespeare for its lodestar and turned to Goethe’s works. Naturalism swears by Balzac and Claude Bernard.
This last name betrays both the proximate source and the essential character of the movement. — It rides the tide of scientific physiology and confines itself, quite deliberately, to explaining life’s mysteries through the laws of physical phenomena. Deliberately, I insist, for there is something forced and calculated here, a reaction against recent flights of fancy, a lamentable resolve to banish all idealism, all pursuit of Beauty, all human agency, and to reduce the teeming variety of passionate experience—whether personal or social—to a handful of iron necessities.
Herein lies the principal quality found in Naturalism: it belittles, contracts, dwarfs both man and nature. As for the Almighty, He goes quite unmentioned, and the Naturalists pronounce the word “Mystic” only with sardonic relish—as a term of abuse.
Let this not pass unnoticed! They champion Balzac, they lionise Flaubert, yet how capriciously they cherry-pick from these Masters’ œuvres!—more capriciously still than the Romantics with Goethe. What becomes of Balzac’s Œuvres Philosophiques? Louis Lambert—how does it fare? What of Séraphîta39? They swoon before Madame Bovary and Un cœur simple. L’Education sentimentale pleases them rather less, Bouvard et Pécuchet less again, whilst Salammbô, La Tentation and the two remaining Contes represent “the lesser portion of Flaubert’s achievement.”
The Naturalist movement need not detain us as long as its forerunners. Not that it lacks definition, but rather that it lacks staying power. Think of it as the modern spirit’s sop to conscience, taking on scientific ballast before attempting the great synthesis, nothing more. One need only observe the telling fact that it has failed to produce a single poet—a poet in verse, I mean. Several have aspired to become the Naturalist bard whom M. Zola so eagerly awaited. M. Zola himself has versified: the results are Romantic; M. Guy de Maupassant has versified: the results are execrable; M. Daudet has versified: …! One poet alone seemed to warrant Naturalist approval, yet M. François Coppée springs from Parnassian stock. He is an intimist and modernist who is no more Naturalist than was Gautier.
A further symptom—were one needed—that the wind has gone out of Naturalism is the endless train of camp-followers it already trails in its wake—a source of shame it nonetheless retains, since at least they swell the ranks. Naturalism already pants for breath (to reverse the metaphor) though barely thirty years of age! Inevitably so. Nothing is simpler than churning out novels to this prescription, and every hack has rushed to try. Small wonder we soon found ourselves mired in sheer pornography. Here neither talent nor observation obtains, only filth—and the dreariness thereof! This muck, moreover, clings to the movement’s luminaries. They bear responsibility, having wilfully lowered and narrowed their sights. They outlawed imagination—in theory—whilst prepared to deploy it as needed, witness M. Zola, who remains as much a Romantic as a Naturalist. But the acolytes took their mentors at their word. The order of the day was to invent nothing, to bring no idealistic preconceptions to studying nature, to shrink from nothing, indeed, to grub by preference in the depths and dregs, for therein “lies the pearl.” There they have sought it; I do believe some wretches seek it still.
Yet naturalistic ambitions extend far beyond what I have suggested, and I no doubt do it a disservice by confining it to Sensation alone. It claims to see something more in Balzac, and the formula, A corner of nature seen through a temperament, encompasses the whole of life. But let’s set Balzac aside for now: he is the founding father. There is indeed more than sensation in his work, for he contains everything. Better to examine Flaubert: Madame Bovary is undeniably a work of Naturalism. What principally sets this novel apart from those of Sand, Sandeau, Alphonse Karr and the rest? Three defining features: the novelist steps back from his material, never once intruding in his own person—herein lies objectivity; nothing strains credulity, everything flows from Emma’s temperament—in this we see logic; Emma’s temperament is wholly physical, wholly sensual, and the tale of her affairs amounts to nothing more than a chronicle of sensations—here is a work of sensation, of physiology, and everything in the book follows this same sensational, physiological pattern.
To capture a George Sand character, André, let’s say, we would call him weak-willed, a dreamer, groping for nebulous terms of moral import. To capture a Victor Hugo character, Jean Valjean, we would reach for equally nebulous terms of social import, calling him an honest convict, and so forth. With André and Jean Valjean we register only gesture, dress, bearing, and must summon up their dialogue to fix them in memory. But to capture Charles Bovary and his wife, we could only say: here is a lymphatic constitution, there is a hysteric, and this without recalling a word they have spoken, for we see their faces: the husband’s pallor and lifeless eyes, his tentative gait; his wife’s different pallor, feverish and warm, her gleaming eyes, that sensual mouth, her rapid movements, hands that swiftly clasp and unclasp… To say nothing of the poisoning! We have witnessed death in classical theatre: souls wafting away. In Romantic works, it’s a marionette forever breaking apart, for any reason, for no reason, to open or close the scene, always with a graceful flourish. But Emma! She dies as we all must die, when nothing remains but the flickering life of the senses, when consciousness has drawn its veil, when the eyes betray only animal suffering, the organism, racked with physical despair as it convulses before subsiding into permanent stillness. Emma has scarcely possessed a soul; she can lose only the life she has had; yet reading this poisoning scene infects us with its nausea.
What have we found, then, in Madame Bovary? An objective and logical work—so much for the technique; a sensational and physiological work—here we have the substance. Is this exceptional? But what else do we find in those other novels the School acknowledges as naturalist? What do we find perpetually, predominantly, perhaps exclusively? How do the characters strike us in Germinie Lacerteux, Madame Gervaisais, Le Ventre de Paris, L’Assommoir, Nana, in Les Sœurs Vatard, Boule-de-suif, Une Belle Journée, in Le Nommé Perreux? What drives them to act? What occupies their thoughts? What inner life do they possess? They possess none, they think of nothing. Their motives spring from bile or nerves. They harbour no dreams, know no joy. They are melancholy, achingly melancholy—though theirs is a melancholy of the flesh only. We track them with our gaze, these pallid or florid faces, wracked by disease, neurosis or anaemia, goaded by hunger, drink, lust, bound together or driven apart by shared or conflicting appetites—figures, the lot of them, crushed beneath the Doom of physical corruption or hereditary madness.
Doom! The Naturalists have resurrected Doom, made blacker yet, more merciless, more hideous, more oppressive than the ancient variety, though lacking its grandeur and beauty. Orestes at least can cherish the consoling delusion that he might outrun the Eumenides, might put leagues between himself and them; he flees to Apollo’s sanctuary crying for refuge, and the god shields him from the Furies. But Germinie Lacerteux, Coupeau—how can they escape their Furies? The Furies dwell within! Their names are Drunkenness and Hysteria; they rage through the blood, they seize upon the nerves. This parallel between ancient and modern doom presses itself upon us so insistently that the new school’s most official representative (though his standing derives more, perhaps, from self-appointment than peer recognition, and rests chiefly on his promotional genius, the most prodigious this century has witnessed since Victor Hugo) himself invokes it in one of his most celebrated novels. The chosen theme is incest40. M. Zola, never lacking in imagination, has ventured every boldness here. His book courts perilous comparisons: its title recalls Chateaubriand, its subject echoes Phèdre. For all its schematic quality, La Curée displays remarkable gifts. It may well be its author’s finest achievement and certainly ranks among those works deemed distinguished in the period. M. Zola’s shortcomings, when measured against the illustrious predecessors he challenges, ought nevertheless to be offset by his considerable advantage: he knows their mistakes, which stem primarily from their artistic creeds, and treating the same material, might have sidestepped them. Yet he has not!
Phèdre possesses neither the semblance of external life nor sensual existence. She has only impassioned thoughts, or rather, she is only a soul locked in combat with Passion. René perhaps captures something of Passion’s ideal reality, but lacks sensual life, possessing little beyond motion and sentiment. Renée, however, knows nothing whatsoever of this ideal reality. She has no soul, and if she preserves some vestige of gesture and outward feeling, it’s only because the Naturalists have been reading the Romantics. Her sole authentic life, however, resides in her sensations. She is a well-bred animal. I overstated the failings of Racine when I claimed he had silenced Phèdre’s senses and emotions. I had forgotten that sublime verse:
Oh! que ne suis-je assise à l’ombre des forêts!
[Oh! why am I not seated in the forest shade!]
Racine—and Chateaubriand likewise—understand nature’s sway over lovers’ spirits. They grasp that truth a lesser though delightful poet would later articulate: “a landscape is a state of soul41.” M. Zola, if he suspects as much, betrays no sign. Time and again he finds himself abstracting sensation from the character experiencing it, the better to dissect it, and when he realises this threatens his character’s overall coherence, he hurriedly plunges them—in thoroughly Romantic fashion—into action. René may ring falser, concerning itself more with effects than causes; yet Phèdre contains more truth than Renée, for psychological causes run deeper and matter more than physiological ones.
The Naturalists vehemently insist otherwise, and for these myopes, man amounts to nothing but his organs. In their sincere moments, they recoil from their own conclusions with a secret revulsion that betrays the reassertion of that Spirit which dwells within and resists all handling. “Can the physical being constitute the man?” they ask, “And are our moral and spiritual faculties — a thought most wretched! — merely the workings of some organ in its diseased condition42?” Even within what they would like to consider the purely physical realm, they occasionally detect phenomena that defy physical explanation, like that “atmosphere of the June Days of 1848 that sent all Bicêtre’s madmen into frenzy43,” and countless other impalpable, subterranean sympathies that inevitably elude their analysis. Woman especially, with her ingeniously subtle complexities, her seeming illogic, the unpredictable, the sudden recoil of her hidden mechanisms, the inseparable tangle of her virtues and vices, the meanness in her nobility, the tenderness in her cruelty, the harsh undertones of her mercy—woman in all her femininity toys with naturalist analysis and invariably defeats it. Four or five lines of Racine reveal more on this score than all the latest school’s novels combined. Even M. de Goncourt—surely the most refined, most acute, and best-informed precisely on this feminine enigma—admits his inadequacy: “Woman cannot be read as man is read; she is wrapped, sealed, often opaque to herself.” Yet most proceed with disturbing confidence. Something farcical lurks within. Has Science truly reached such categorical, such irrevocable conclusions that one may answer every why—every last one—with a smug “Here is your because“?
Madame Bovary and Germinie Lacerteux alone might have sufficed to vindicate the naturalist formula, had it not been required to capture something beyond individual sensations, namely, the sensations of society itself.
Here lay the Naturalists’ most crucial undertaking, and here they failed most spectacularly. Yet they seem to have grasped precisely what they were after. Take Zola, for instance. He repeatedly sets himself the express aim of depicting the masses: the throng in the streets, the workshop floor, the department store, the mining folk. His temperament positively drives him there, for in such territory he is unlikely to stumble upon those individual problems—those deep, mysterious tangles—which he dismisses as already solved, holding psychology in a contempt one can only find amusing. When he ventures down this path, he generally succeeds: nobody has ever matched his gift for choreographing crowds. Here, indeed, he has touched greatness. Small wonder: crowds are pure physicality when they act as one; thought reaches them, in the heat of action, only as raw sensation and fleeting image; they feel the crush of bodies, the mounting heat their very numbers generate; they dissolve the individual into one voice amongst a hundred thousand; they become a synthesis of churning impressions. The gift that the naturalist formula has for capturing the physical, wedded to Zola’s lingering Romantic inheritance, thus equipped him supremely to become the crowds’ most brilliant chronicler. Yet beneath the social sensation—beneath that climactic roar and gesture stirred by the multitude—lies something else entirely. That explosive moment merely marks the final convulsion of a crisis. What matters more than the crisis is its gestation: the slow, hidden crystallisation of collective thought, the secret yet potent life of the people’s soul. This life Zola never captured, nor could any Naturalist capture it, for it demands a synthesis of the three literary modes we have traced: Classical passion, Romantic sentiment, and Naturalist sensation44.
Of these three wellsprings, Naturalism most glaringly lacks the first. Let me be precise: it cannot seemingly do without moral beings; it must present us with characters intelligent or thick, pure or dissolute, honest or false, proud or humble, and so on; yet neither its true interest nor its governing perspective holds steady in this moral and psychological realm. For the Naturalist, thought carries no essential weight in human action: he records and renders only material consequences.
He works in pictures, not photographs—or, in his preferred term, he is “objective.”
This lofty claim to aesthetic objectivity amounts to a fleeting delusion. If the term simply meant that writers should never “editorialise” about their subject matter, fair enough—though what of it? Masterworks by Balzac and Barbey d’Aurevilly suffer from the author’s intrusions, appearing like some faceless dramatis persona or Greek Chorus. But if it meant to ban writers from colouring the passions and landscapes they evoke with the hues of their own souls, that’s pure nonsense. The Naturalists have striven, wherever possible, to accomplish this nonsense, inventing what we call the “descriptive style.” Take a landscape. Naturalist description means rendering it in prose exactly as everyone sees it, in its “external truth.” These last two words share only one flaw—they cannot coexist. Art knows no external truth. The photographic surface of things, besides being factually false, merely serves as raw material for art; art proper begins where surfaces end, in what lies beyond them, and that beyond dwells in that soul which moves the artist. What art consists in is the significance Corot and Cazin extract from landscape, following certain shared principles of how light behaves, principles they nonetheless apply with sovereign freedom, according to their distinct sensibilities. Should Corot and Cazin “copy” the same landscape, their versions won’t resemble each other, nor will either much resemble the photograph. Strictly speaking, exact description is impossible. Not only do no two pairs of eyes see identically, but faithful reproduction of nature would be both sinful and pointless: sinful because it would duplicate creation, pointless because nature already exists, and Art seeks only the New, the beyond, the heightened. The only novelty lies in the artist’s response, his personal encounter with the universe. Art is therefore fundamentally subjective. The appearances of things are but symbols awaiting artistic interpretation. They possess truth only through artist, only interior truth. The Naturalists’ blinkered perspective, which could grasp only material effects, drove them to this objective, descriptive style. Put differently, they sought to abolish Style altogether. Those hoary definitions, smooth-worn by endless citation, rather embarrass one to repeat. Yet they hold, Style makes the man, but man is first and foremost his soul. A man’s style shows in his characteristic bearing, his vocal timbre, his manner of looking, walking, sitting, wearing his clothes, even in how those clothes eventually crease and fold—for the body merely gives form to the soul—quite as much as in his prose. Having proclaimed man soulless, the Naturalists attempted to write without style, whilst paradoxically hoping to capture, in this style-less prose, life’s own style! Perhaps this very contradiction saved them from utter ruin. Life’s style preserved something of prose style, though not entirely, and one must acknowledge that since Flaubert, who brought French literary form to perfection (pulling this off because he transcended mere Naturalism), those who claim his mantle have sadly blunted and bent the magnificent instrument he left them. I refer here not to Goncourt and Huysmans, who possess genuinely remarkable writerly gifts. I mean Zola, Maupassant, and their epigones. Their language isn’t literary, being graceless, inexact, characterless, leaden, commonplace—it’s journalism. Zola must be prodigiously gifted to wring even occasional grandeur from such a medium! The feeling he more often produces, alas, is tedium, with those endless, pointless descriptions, stillborn from this obsession with external truth. When he claims to express the whole truth and names himself Balzac’s heir, how can one not retort: but Balzac was a visionary! Balzac believed in the inner reality of the world he created: he didn’t copy, he created! He observed this world through imagination more than life, which is precisely why it rings truer than your world transcribed line by line, word by word. Balzac and Stendhal—like Dickens and Thackeray—whom the Naturalists claim as forebears, were imaginative writers whose creations ring true precisely because they are imagined, for “imagination is the soul’s eye45,” “truth’s sovereign46,” “the faculty through which we apprehend the divine47.” To achieve their colossal task of synthesising the world churning around them, they never made the naturalist blunder of trusting solely to personal experience and physical sight. Personal experience might mislead. They tested it against universal human experience, against ageless tradition and the verdict of that faultless judge dwelling in every breast, untouched by the grievances of personal experience. They shut their physical eyes, which might equally mislead, to sharpen and unleash the soul’s vision. Perhaps, save Balzac who was omniscient, they undervalued the physical springs of human action. The Naturalists deserve credit for spotting the physical motive; their error was giving it pride of place. They have thereby diminished humanity in equal measure.
I understand their desire to convince us that their work is something other than what it is. The meagreness of the result only magnifies their pretensions. Faced with such results, how can one bear them? How can one possibly be satisfied? And indeed, most Naturalists do overshoot the mark—some through ambition, harking back to the past, like Zola who has set himself up as the Victor Hugo of the movement; others through intuition, reaching towards the future, like Goncourt and Huysmans.
But the rump exceeds nothing. The imitators cleave more faithfully to the Formula than the Masters themselves. The young Naturalists—already quite long in the tooth!—copy nature with all the patience of the blind. These are the true believers. No soul whatsoever, and not the slightest back door through which Dream might steal in. Laboratory and Document! What a dreary existence these poor young men must lead. No doubt they only write when ill-tempered. Certainly, if they ever experience “poetic moments”, they are squandering them at the card table or in a cloud of cigar smoke.
From their work and their masters’ seeps an all-pervading tedium. This is no longer the despair we get from the Classics, in which the Romantics took such extravagant pride. It’s simply a dull, brutish boredom, a queasiness, a revulsion… Perhaps this disgust springs from the excessive physical outlay involved in writing documented novels. Omne animal post coitum triste (TN)… And as we shall see, the psychological novel—though partly a reaction against the naturalist novel—will inherit this melancholy whilst continuing to mine its source.
But let us sum up.
TN: Latin proverb meaning “Every animal is sad after intercourse” or “All animals are sad after coitus.” A classical expression reflecting on the melancholy or emptiness that can follow sexual satisfaction.
Léon Hennique Novel 