The name Naturalism suggests the philosophy of science, and the connection is genuine. Zola thought that in his great series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, he was studying the “natural and social history” of a family during the time of Napoleon III. The claim was bolstered by the method Zola used of gathering data like a scientist—every material fact could be proved by reference to actuality or statistics. Naturalism would thus appear to be an intensification of Realism, as indeed it was—more “research.” It differed markedly in spirit, however. Realism professed to be depiction of the commonplace in a mood of stoicism or indifference—a photographic plate from a camera held almost at random in front of unselected mediocrity; it was, as Flaubert was the first to say, a refusal to share previous Romanticist hopes and interests. Naturalism, on the contrary, readmitted purpose and selectivity. Each novel was a “study” designed to exhibit and denounce the dismal truths of social existence, for which purpose the worst are the best. Zola’s novels throb with a passionate love of life, a life which he showed as tortured and twisted by character and condition. In the end he defined his scientific or “experimental” novel as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament.” The aim of the Naturalists was not only to show but to show up; they meant to teach the great prosperous middle class how those beneath them lived and even beyond that to disgust the sensitive with the human condition, whatever its social embodiment. In this effort it shares with the aesthetes the animus of denunciation.
In the plastic arts, a plausible counterpart of Naturalism is the work of those known as Postimpressionists, notably Cézanne and van Gogh in painting, Rodin and Maillol in sculpture. Their various styles and aims had a common result in restoring solidity and “weight” to the visual object after the fluidity and lightness of Impressionism.
Musical naturalism was, by contrast, an attempt at dramatic literalness. Richard Strauss boasted that he could render a soup spoon. Actually, he could not and did not. The noises of his Sinfonia Domestica are standard orchestral sounds fitted with a preliminary explanation, like the libretto or synopsis of a Wagnerian or other opera. When the sheep bleat in Strauss’s Don Quixote, the clarinets play notes that are decorative on their own account and do not in the least suggest wool. It is rather the thickness of Strauss’s orchestration and chromatic harmony that connect him with naturalist doctrine—the headlong embrace with matter. And so it is also in the operas of Bruneau or Charpentier or in the verismo of Puccini and the late Italian school generally. Music remains atmospheric; never, except in Wagner’s system, denotative.
This definition of Naturalism, coupled with the aesthetic, or “art for art’s sake,” impetus in Symbolism and with the Impressionists’ transmutation of concreteness into light, justifies the name of Neoromanticism that has been given to the cultural temper with which the 19th century ended. After the glum self-repression of the middle period, it was an outburst of vehement self-assertion, whether directed inward or outward. “Art for art’s sake” and Naturalism are indeed but twin branches of one doctrine: art for life’s sake.