George Moore. From his novels, both in passages of direct
statement and in the light of his practice, it is possible to gather
together the materials of a manifesto of the English Naturalistic
school. The naturalists complained that English fiction lacked
construction in the strictest sense; they found in the English novel a
remarkable absence of organic wholeness; it did not fulfil their first
and broadest canon of subject-matter--by which a novel has to deal in
the first place with a single and rhythmical series of events; it was
too discursive. They made this charge against English fiction; they also
retorted the charge brought by native writers and their readers against
the French of foulness, sordidness and pessimism in their view of life.
"We do not," says a novelist in one of Mr. Moore's books, "we do not
always choose what you call unpleasant subjects, but we do try to get to
the roots of things; and the basis of life being material and not
spiritual, the analyst sooner or later finds himself invariably handling
what this sentimental age calls coarse." "The novel," says the same
character, "if it be anything is contemporary history, an exact and
complete reproduction of the social surroundings of the age we live in.
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