From the magazine

From Balfour to Zola: the many faces of ‘naturalism’

Dot Wordsworth
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 04 January 2025
issue 04 January 2025

My husband said ‘A.J. Balfour played the concertina’, which is perfectly true, though he did other things, even as prime minister. The concertina was inessential to what I thought was a neat way of sorting out the meanings of naturalism. The word is used quite a bit these days, with four main meanings.

My mnemonic for the meanings are Balfour, Bolingbroke, Zola and Caravaggio. When ‘The Hay Wain’ went on show in 1824, the Telegraph explained, ‘its naturalism and heroic scale were hailed as a revelation’. That naturalism may be labelled Caravaggio after an observation in 1950 by E.H. Gombrich in The Story of Art about ‘Caravaggio’s “naturalism”, that is, his intention to copy nature faithfully’.

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That visual realism is paralleled by naturalism in literature, theatre or cinema, especially ‘a style of novel in which reality was presented without moral judgment’, such as ‘that unnecessarily faithful portrayal of offensive incidents for which M. Zola has found the new name of “Naturalism”,’ as the Daily News saw it in 1881.

The two oldest senses of naturalism are found less in newspapers than in books. One has been popular among the new atheists, that ‘only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world’. Richard Hurd, the Bishop of Worcester, remarked in 1772 that ‘Lord Bolingbroke was of that sect, which, to avoid a more odious name, chuses to distinguish itself by that of Naturalism’. The original meaning refers to ‘a system of morality or religion derived only from human reason and having no basis in revelation’. Balfour’s belief, according to Dean Inge in 1933, was that ‘what makes naturalism ultimately untenable is that the higher values cannot be maintained in a naturalistic setting’ – as perhaps he gave his concertina a squeeze.

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