of foulness, sordidness and pessimism in their view of life.  “We do not,” says a novelist in one of Mr. Moore’s books, “we do not always choose what you call unpleasant subjects, but we do try to get to the roots of things; and the basis of life being material and not spiritual, the analyst sooner or later finds himself invariably handling what this sentimental age calls coarse.”  “The novel,” says the same character, “if it be anything is contemporary history, an exact and complete reproduction of the social surroundings of the age we live in.”  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.  The heroine sinks into the miserable squalor of a dipsomaniac and dies from a drunkard’s disease, but her end is shown as the ineluctable consequence of her life, its early greyness and monotony, the sudden shock of a new and strange environment and the resultant weakness of will which a morbid excitability inevitably brought about.  The novel, that is to say, deals with a “rhythmical series of events and follows them to their conclusion”; it gets at the roots of things; it tells us of something which we know to be true in life whether we care to read it in fiction or not.  There is nothing in it of sordidness for sordidness’ sake nor have the realists any philosophy of an unhappy ending.  In this case the ending is unhappy because the sequence of events admitted of no other solution; in others the ending is happy or merely neutral as the preceding