"
That succinctly is the naturalistic theory of the novel as a work of
science--that as the history of a nation lies hidden often in social
wrongs and in domestic grief as much as in the movements of parties or
dynasties, the novelist must do for the former what the historian does
for the latter. It is his business in the scheme of knowledge of his
time.
But the naturalists believed quite as profoundly in the novel as a work
of art. They claimed for their careful pictures of the grey and sad and
sordid an artistic worth, varying in proportion to the intensity of the
emotion in which the picture was composed and according to the picture's
truth, but in its essence just as real and permanent as the artistic
worth of romance. "Seen from afar," writes Mr. Moore, "all things in
nature are of equal worth; and the meanest things, when viewed with the
eyes of God, are raised to heights of tragic awe which conventionality
would limit to the deaths of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory
they built their treatment and their style. It is a mistake to suppose
that the realist school deliberately cultivates the sordid or shocking.
Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's _Mummer's Wife_, our greatest
English realist novel, and for the matter of that one of the supreme
things in English fiction, and you will see that the scrupulous fidelity
of the author's method, though it denies him those concessions to a
sentimentalist or romantic view of life which are the common implements
of fiction, denies him no less the extremities of horror or
loathsomeness.
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