The opinion, then, which our enemies have of this literary movement, seems to be the following: that it is a "school," that it is called "the realist school," that Mr Zola invented it on a fine day in Paris, that its object is to paint obscene pictures with great minutia, and, finally, that it has its own special rhetoric, abstruse, tortured, refulgent, grammarless and deprived of vernacularity!

I do not like to affect the tones of the pedagogue, or to give an authoritarian denial to such affirmations from esteemed people.

But the truth is that naturalism was never invented by Monsieur Zola, that it does not consist in a fastidious description of obscenity, that it has no particular rhetoric, and above all that it is not a School!

In Portugal we have always had a steady tendency to subdivide art into schools — as is amply demonstrated by a literature of grammarians and rhetoricians. So did we manage to invent all manners of literary schools — in greater numbers certainly than primary schools! We have had the school of Lisbon, the school of Coimbra, the school of Mr. Castilho… all things that appear to us now as ancient as the rape of Helen or the heroics of impetuous Ajax. We still maintain, however, the great schools: classical, romantic, satanic, elegiac, and all sorts of literate brotherhoods, isolated in boxes and cells, separated by solid walls: Boileau's box, Lamartine's box, Byron's box, Petrarch's box. Even the subtle and delicate Baudelaire has his own box! And those hostile groups, baring their teeth at each other, one wearing the periwig of Racine, another the helmet of Percival, another the horns of Satan, and yet another the shepherd's flute of Semedo, live there buried in their rival prosodies, walling themselves inside them, as the Chinese dwarf in his jar of porcelain.

And now, we have the realist school!

No. Forgive me. There is no realist school. A school is the systematic imitation of a master's proceedings. It supposes an individual origin, consecrated rhetoric or manner. Now naturalism did not arise from the peculiar aesthetics of any one artist; it is a general movement of art, at a certain time of its evolution. Its manner is not consecrated, because each individual temperament has its own manner. Daudet is as different from Flaubert as Zola is from Dickens. To say "realist school" is as grotesque as to say "republican school." Naturalism is the scientific form taken by art, as Republic is the political form taken by democracy, as positivism is the experimental form taken by philosophy.