ABSTRACT
The achievements and failures of a literary movement cannot be weighed up, like those of a business enterprise, in a tidy balance-sheet. Naturalism is an extremist movement. It represents an attempt to extend mimetic realism to its furthermost logical limits and it thereby casts the artist into the role of a photo-phonographic recorder of reality. The portrait of reality which the Naturalists purported to give soon proves on examination to be a vision of reality. The theories of Naturalism, if taken literally, amount in fact to a formidable anti-aesthetics in their deliberate exclusion of the creative power of the artist’s individual imagination. The view of man was too limited and the conception of the artistic process too profoundly erroneous to be conducive to lasting works of art. In contrast and in opposition to the Aestheticism of the late nineteenth century, Naturalism did make an attempt to bridge the gap between life and art.
