ABSTRACT
Hegel, writing long before the emergence of a Naturalist movement in Germany, or any other country, has provided a basis for much of the criticism of German Naturalism, so his words provide a suitable starting point for this concluding chapter. The purpose of the chapter is to consider two separate aspects of this criticism; that is to consider the charge that the concentration by the German Naturalist dramatists on precise realistic detail has the effect of restricting the scope of their work by lending it the appearance of the purely individual casehistory; and, secondly, to consider the further objection, that the characters in a drama of this kind-and particularly the characters in Hauptmann’s dramas-lack that awareness of their own predicament which, according to the strictest Hegelians, is a necessary precondition of representative stature. Such criticism has come from widely divergent sources. On the one hand, Wilhelm Dilthey is critical of the association of art and science in Naturalism.2 Truth, he agrees, should be the object of literature, but the revelation of truth consists in finding a central point of vantage from which life can be comprehended in its totality. Thus the base and the ugly can only figure in art if they are shown in relation to the beautiful and the valuable. Memory is still the mother of the muses, but we come nearer to the artistic act when we cease to try and recall the single, particular impressions of one isolated moment, and use the memory creatively to produce images which represent objects in all their perceivable aspects.3
