portrayed only subjectively because of the artificiality of a society which prevented its outlet in action, he turned to the peasantry because with them conduct is the direct expression of the inner life.  Character could be shown working, therefore, not subjectively but in the act, if you chose a peasant subject.  His philosophy, expressed in this medium, is sombre.  In his novels you can trace a gradual realization of the defects of natural laws and the quandary men are put to by their operation.  Chance, an irritating and trifling series of coincidences, plays the part of fate.  Nature seems to enter with the hopelessness of man’s mood.  Finally the novelist turns against life itself.  “Birth,” he says, speaking of Tess, “seemed to her an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify and at best could only palliate.”  It is strange to find pessimism in a romantic setting; strange, too, to find a paganism which is so little capable of light or joy.

(4)

The characteristic form of English fiction, that in which the requisite illusion of the complexity and variety of life is rendered by discursiveness, by an author’s licence to digress, to double back on himself, to start may be in the middle of a story and work subsequently to the beginning and the end; in short by his power to do whatever is most expressive of his individuality, found a rival in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century in the French Naturalistic or Realist school, in which the illusion of life is got by a studied and sober veracity of statement, and by the minute accumulation of detail.  To the French Naturalists a novel approached in importance the work of a man of science, and they believed it ought to be based on documentary evidence, as a scientific work would be.  Above all it ought not to allow itself to be coloured by the least gloss of imagination or idealism; it ought never to shrink from a confrontation of the naked fact.  On the contrary it was its business to carry it to the dissecting table and there minutely examine everything that lay beneath its surface.

The school first became an English possession in the early translations of the work of Zola; its methods were transplanted into English fiction by Mr. George Moore.  From his novels, both in passages of direct statement and in the light of his practice, it is possible to gather together the materials of a manifesto of the English Naturalistic school.  The naturalists complained that English fiction lacked construction in the strictest sense; they found in the English novel a remarkable absence of organic wholeness; it did not fulfil their first and broadest canon of subject-matter—­by which a novel has to deal in the first place with a single and rhythmical series of events; it was too discursive.  They made this charge against English fiction; they also retorted the charge brought by native writers and their readers against the French