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Updated: June 17, 2025
As one considers the excessive naturalism of the young realists and asks just why they find it necessary to be so excessively, so effusively realistic, the conviction is inborn that they are not realists at all as Hardy, Howells, even James were realists; they are romanticists of a deep, if not the deepest, dye, even the heartiest lover of sordid incident among them all.
The attacks that have been made by naturalism upon the independence and freedom of the spiritual are so familiar to every one—even from school days—through books of the type of Büchner’s “Kraft und Stoff,” and Haeckel’s “The Riddle of the Universe,” and other half or wholly materialistic popular dogmatics, that it is unnecessary to enter into any detail.
And the conviction that this can be done is the only true naturalism. Naturalism of this type is fundamentally different in mood and character from the naïve and poetic form, and is, indeed, in sharp contrast to it. It is working against the very motives which are most vital to the latter—namely, reverence for and deification of nature.
In actual achievement he did not quite fulfill the promise of his early books, and cannot be set high among his craft. He was an inferior artist; and though he achieved naturalism of matter, he clung to the theatrical artificiality of style which was in vogue.
There is no doubt that an apologetic which interests itself in such matters would find abundant opportunity for work, and could find a powerful argument against a too hasty naturalism in the differences between animal and human psychical capacities, which have been recognised much more sanely and clearly through recent investigation than they usually were in earlier times.
The first of the series was given at the opening of the Architectural Museum at South Kensington, January 13th, 1858, entitled "The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations;" in which he showed that naturalism, as opposed to meaningless pattern-making, was always a sign of life.
But to whatever relative height the moral nobility of single advocates of ethical naturalism may rise, it is not able, at least not from its own principles, to produce thoroughly moral and truly cultivated characters; such are only produced where that which forms the character, flows out of a spring of life whose origin is above nature and its series of causes.
The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality of materialism; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue, but the meanness of a Frith not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a coloured photograph.
There is a moment at which the spirit begins to crave for Truth and Nature, for naturalism and verisimilitude; in the history of art it is known as the early decadence.
He does not know his own mind. He declares that Christ "combined" in his own person and teaching "the intense spirituality of the Hebrew, the impassioned self-annihilation of the Hindoo, the joyous naturalism of the Greek."
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