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A TRIUMPH OF NATURALISM.

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burnt to the ground before our eyes. The ninth and last was a perfect copy of a room at the Grand Hótel, in which Nana lay dying of confluent small-pox. Yes, there she lay, "un tas d'humeur et de sang, une pelletée de chair corrompue; and the thrill of horror which ran through the house bore witness to the fidelity with which the "marchands de maquillage," aided by the doctors of the theatre, had imitated the ravages of the dire disease. Such was the realistic representation of the harlot's progress wherewith our eyes were feasted. The dialogue, judiciously adapted from the pages of M. Zola's fiction, was a fitting accompaniment to it. Of course nothing savouring of imagination was uttered by any of the dramatis persona. "Reality" was the great law which the playwright proposed to follow, and it is not exactly imagination that seasons the talk of the lupanar. "On s'ennuyait à crever," observes M. Zola, in his account of a famous supper given by his heroine. M. Busnach, in this respect, as in others, had kept faithfully to his original. seemed to me, indeed, that both the master and the disciple had here somewhat overshot their mark. I thought of Dr. Johnson's account of Thomas Sheridan : "Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull. But it must have taken him a great deal of pains to have become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in nature." The utter inanity of the piece was

It

relieved only by a few cynical speeches-" mots raides" they are called in the jargon of the dayput for the most part, if my memory is not at fault, into the mouth of Nana's bonne. This is one of them which may serve as a specimen of the rest. "Elle n'est donc plus au théâtre, Nana?" some one asks her. And she replies, "Non, le théâtre, c'est bon quand on commence; après, ça fait perdre trop de temps.

M. Zola, who, I believe, regards Nana as his masterpiece, has expressed, in most emphatic language, his unbounded admiration of his friend's dramatic version. "Ce rôle de Nana," he writes, "est superbe, car il tient tout le clavier humain." I do not propose just now to discuss the value of this estimate. I wish rather to consider what is the significance of the Naturalism of which Nana, whether in the original form of a novel or in M. Busnach's theatrical adaptation, may be taken as a type. And, as M. Zola is confessedly its great luminary, it will be well in the first instance to consider the account of it which that master has provided in his volume Le Roman Expérimental. I shall be obliged to compress into few words what he has said in many, but he would, I feel sure, allow that my exposition does him no injustice. M. Zola holds, then, that the time in which we are living is essentially a New Age. Its spirit is "scientific." Now a civilisation is all of a piece (tout se tient dans une civilisation). The great

v.]

AN APOLOGY FOR NATURALISM.

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movement of the last century was a vast inquiry- · often nothing more than a groping-after reality; its effect being to state afresh the problems of human life and human society. Everywhere there has been a return to nature, to reality. In politics it has assumed the form of Democracy; in metaphysics of Positivism; in art of Naturalism. You may call it generally the Naturalistic Evolution.* It means everywhere the banishment of imagination, of empirical doctrines, of poetic idealism; the recognition of facts cognisable by the senses, which are the only facts; and the adoption of the experimental method. Analysis and experience, the study of environment and mechanism-such is everywhere the course to be followed. The new democratic society is merely a collection of organised beings existing upon earth in certain conditions-of bétes humaines, who have given up the futile vanity of regarding themselves as the end and aim of creation, who know that they are human beasts, and do not pretend to be anything else, who are well aware that the old religious conceptions which regarded them as something else are cunningly devised fables. The republic, as it happily exists in France, is the best type of human government— le gouvernement humain par excellence—resting, as it does, upon universal suffrage, determined by the majority of facts, and so corresponding with

66

* So Mr. John Morley accounts of the Revolution as a great revival of Naturalism." Rousseau, vol. ii. p. 200.

the observed and analysed wants of the bétes humaines, who make up the nation. Now every definite aud stable government must have a literature. And Naturalism supplies the fitting literature for this government, since it is the expression, in the intellectual domain, of the causes of which the Third Republic is the political and social outcome.

The great aim and object of Naturalism, according to M. Zola, is a return to nature. The novelist, the dramatist, he says, ought to be the photographers of phenomena. Their business is to study the world; to observe, to analyse humanity as they find it.* But this is best done in its most vulgar types. The human animal-"la bête humaine," a phrase which our author employs with

*It may be worth while to subjoin the following passage from L'Euvre, in which M. Zola expounds his view of "the progressive formula" through the mouth of Sandoz :

"Hein? étudier l'homme tel qu'il est, non plus leur pantin métaphysique, mais l'homme physiologique, déterminé par le milieu, agissant sous le jeu de tous ses organes. N'est-ce pas une farce cette étude continue et exclusive de la fonction du cerveau, que sous prétexte que le cerveau est l'organe noble? . . . La pensée, la pensée, eh! tonnerre de Dieu! la pensée est le produit du corps entier. Faites donc penser un cerveau tout seul, voyez donc ce que devient la noblesse du cerveau quand le ventre est malade? . . . Non c'est imbécile; la philosophie n'y est plus, la science n'y est plus; nous sommes des positivistes, des évolutionnistes, et nous garderions le mannequin littéraire des temps classiques, et nous continuerions à dévider les cheveux emmêlés de la raison pure! Qui dit psychologue dit traître à la vérité. D'ailleurs, physiologie, psychologie, cela ne signifie rien: l'une a pénétré l'autre, toutes deux ne sont qu'une aujourd'hui, le mécanisme de l'homme aboutissant à la somme totale de ses fonctions. . . . Ah! la formule

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"UN NOUVEL ART."

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damnable iteration-is the same in all social varieties and conditions. Look at the revelations which "sensational" trials occasionally make of the highest classes, showing how little they, in truth, differ in their ethos from the lowest. Everywhere at the bottom there is filth (l'ordure). Those proceedings in the courts of justice which from time to time bring it to the surface-like an abscess--are merely an experimental novel unfolding itself, chapter after chapter, before the public. Now the business of the novelist or the dramatist is to do scientifically what is there done fortuitously. He should display the real mechanism of life. A simple monograph, a page of existence, the story of a single fact, such is what the novel and the play are more and more becoming. The artist in experimental fiction is, apart from questions of style and form, merely a specialist, a savant who employs the same instruments as other savants, observation and analysis. His domain is that of the physiologist. Only it is more vast. To be master of the mechanism of human phenomena, to exhibit the machinery (les rouages) of intellectual and sensual manifestations, as physiology shall explain them, under the influences of heredity and environment, then to show the living est là; notre révolution moderne n'a pas d'autre base; c'est la mort fatale de l'antique société, c'est la naissance d'une société nouvelle, et c'est nécessairement la poussée d'un nouvel art, dans ce.nouveau terrain. . . . Oui, on verra la littérature qui va germer pour le prochain siècle de science et de la démocratie!" Such is the fruitful doctrine which M. Zola opposes to what Mr. Morley calls "sterile transcendentalism." Diderot, vol. i. p. 8.