Next, it appeared that those who wanted to withdraw from vulgar actuality were making of art with a capital A an independent region of thought and feeling into which to escape, by which to reduce the pain of living. Steady contemplation of “the beautiful” created a “truer” world than the one accepted by ordinary people as real. Walter Pater, a critic writing from the shelter of Oxford, gave eloquent expression to this conception of life, in which every possible minute must be charged with fine and rare sensation. His brilliant disciple Oscar Wilde made the doctrine so clear and persuasive that it generated a characteristic atmosphere, now known as Aestheticism, or more simply as “the Nineties.”
This creed of self-redemption through art is related to the movements known as Symbolism and Impressionism. It is noteworthy that the Impressionist painters were able to take as subjects some of the sights that most depressed their fellow man and by recomposing them in brilliant, shimmering colour to create a refreshing world of new sensation. Subject once again mercifully disappeared. As Monet said: “The principal subject in a painting is light.”
The Symbolists in literature had a more difficult task than the painters, because their medium, words, must be shared with all those who speak the language for ordinary purposes. To disinfect grammar and vocabulary for poetry and “art prose” required severe measures. All set phrases had to be broken up, unusual words revived or common ones used in archaic or etymological senses; syntax had to be bent to permit fresh juxtapositions from which new meanings might emerge; above all, the familiar rhetoric and rhythms had to be avoided, until the literary work, poetry or prose, created the desired “new world.” It is a world difficult to access but worth exploring, all its tangible parts being the symbols of a radiant reality beyond—in short, the antithesis of a newspaper editorial.
In music there was no need of any indirect device to establish the mood of Impressionism. It was already to be found here and there in the great Romantics, and when the new generation began to compose on themes drawn from contemporary literature, the hints and opportunities needed only a delicate genius to develop them into a style. Debussy was that genius, soon followed by Ravel, Delius, Hugo Wolf, and others. Alike, yet independently of one another, they replaced eloquence, melodic clarity, and harmonic consecutiveness by capricious melodic contour and pointillist chord progressions to produce the shimmer and mystery of musical Impressionism. Aestheticism
To those who dedicated their lives to Symbolist literature and criticism the name of aesthetes is often given, for it was at this time, from 1870 to the end of the century, that questions of aesthetics became the intense concern of artists, critics, and a portion of the public. The phrase “art for art’s sake,” which the Romanticists had toyed with, was revived and made the hallmark of high art. Whatever claimed the attention of the intellectual elite must receive this authentication, which guaranteed that no ulterior motive, such as propaganda, and no appeal to the middlebrow audience was discernible in the poem, painting, or musical composition. Common subject matter, ease of understanding, accessibility were signs of compromise with vulgar taste. Having cut loose from evil society, art repudiated its former role of moral teacher and even of communicator; it was—or was to be—completely “autonomous,” else it could not serve its devotees as a refuge from intolerable workaday existence.
Yet Aestheticism was by no means as languid and fatalistic as it tried to appear. Writers such as Oscar Wilde, George Moore, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Edmond and Jules Goncourt, though promoting the idea of art as spiritual shelter, took an active part in current affairs. Moore wrote naturalistic novels; Mallarmé gave interviews to the press and wrote advertisements for perfume and other luxuries; and Wilde, whom it is easy, because of his notoriety on many counts, to dismiss as colourful but ephemeral, was an effective propagandist in the assault on the Victorian ethos. He was not a symptom but the representative man. His book reviewing and critical essays, his story The Picture of Dorian Gray, his great Ballad of Reading Gaol, the autobiographical De Profundis, and the greatest farce in the language, The Importance of Being Earnest, together form a kind of sourcebook for the period and have also lasted as literature. What Wilde accomplished through these works was the liberation of English literature from ancestral (and not merely Victorian) preconceptions. He reconnected England with the Continent artistically by phrasing with finality their different assumptions. He showed that art could be morally responsible only by discarding moralism. In a word, he played again in 1890 the role Gautier had played in France in 1835 with his anti-bourgeois diatribe in Mademoiselle de Maupin. Whoever, starting with Wilde or Gautier, wishes to follow the historical sequence and recapture the atmosphere in which this activity went on will find no better source than the Journal of the Goncourts, who were the inventors of a mannered “art prose,” of contemporary lives, characters, and gossip.
The reader of their voluminous pages will also find there references to the movement called Naturalism, which does not merely parallel but also intermingles with Symbolism and Impressionism. The Goncourts themselves wrote a number of Naturalistic novels; their friend Zola was the theorist and greatest master of the genre; another novelist, Joris-Karl Huysmans, passed from Naturalism to Symbolism, as did several other writers. In the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, as later in the Irish Yeats, the elements of the two tendencies alternated or mixed. Naturalism
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.