5. Musical and Literary Impressionism. Musical and
literary impressionism constitute a fifth and sixth mani-
festation of the style. They consist in representing the
transitory nature of phenomena other than visual ones,
especially in music and poetry. As often happens in
the history of a style, the name “impressionist” was
applied more and more broadly in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. It was differently under-
stood by artists working in different media. Artists and
critics discerned analogous effects in various arts and
in those aspects of the outside world perceptible
through different senses. Baudelaire had pointed out
what he called Correspondances between the various
senses. Some composers felt that certain keys in music
resembled certain colors. Individuals differed on just
what these associations were, but the discussion stimu-
lated active efforts to produce in music and poetry
effects like those of impressionist painting. For these
they used rich, dissonant chords and unusual rhythmic
and harmonic effects, as well as exotic instrumental
timbers.
There was a real psychological ground for these
efforts in that music and literature, being time arts,
are inherently adapted for suggesting change and
movement. This is not a question of any fixed limits
for pictura and poesis, or of what they ought to do,
but of what is relatively easy and natural for them.
Music, moreover, is usually hampered by its own self-
imposed limitations which are derived from trying to
imitate natural sounds exactly, but it can and does try
to suggest in its own way moods, actions, and ideas
analogous to those conveyed in other arts. Impressionist
music broke up the traditional “correct” harmonic and
melodic progressions and reorganized the elements into
more free, impulsive, irregular forms.
In the late nineteenth century, program music was
much in vogue, partly through the influence of Richard
Wagner. Afterwards, Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy,
and Maurice Ravel continued to compose in this way,
often with explicit hints of impressionist painting.
Debussy gave to several of his compositions titles sug-
gesting visual imagery, such as Reflections in the Water,
Goldfish, Fireworks, and Gardens in the Rain. The
impressionist painters had used musical titles, such as
Nocturne. As if to reinforce this connection between
various arts and various senses, Debussy sometimes
quoted a line or two of poetry in a musical score, so
that a similar mood or image was conveyed: for exam-
ple, Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir
(“Sounds and perfumes turn in the evening air”).
Tastes and odors are, of course, among the most eva-
nescent of phenomena, and poetry of the time is full
of references to them. It was Joris-Karl Huysmans, in
his novel A Rebours, who imagined symphonies of
tastes and perfumes.
Poetry has advantages and limitations, unlike those
of other arts, and these affected its attempts to emulate
impressionist painting. But Verlaine, Rimbaud, and
Mallarmé in France, and later the “imagist” poets such
as Amy Lowell in America, all showed the influence
of impressionist painting and music. In prose, Henry
James in America, Marcel Proust in France, and James
Joyce in Ireland and England, developed this approach
at length. To be sure, the use of words to describe
fleeting images and to call up vague hints of their
emotional overtones, was not a new creation of modern
French or English poetry. Nature poetry and prose had
helped to show the impressionist painters where to
look. But the close personal association of leaders in
all these arts, in café and studio conversations, resulted
in much cross-fertilization of the arts themselves. Ac-
tive friendship with painters of the avant-garde helped
to enrich the content of poetry and music. Even where
definite imitation was prevented by the nature of the
medium, each pioneer experiment in one art was a
challenge for those in other arts.
One way in which poetry showed this influence was
in the heightened emphasis on sensory images with
vague emotional associations, at the expense of clear-
cut, rationalistic thinking. Some poets, notably Mal-
larmé, specialized on the obscure “symbolic” associa-
tions of rare words and exotic images; also on
composing by the free association of words, without
advance planning of the work as a whole. Such reliance
on impulse and subrational association is a late stage
in the romantic movement. “Symbolism,” in this sense,
does not imply a systematic use of established religious
or metaphysical meanings, as in medieval art. Some
of these poets were mystics and supernaturalists, but
they were also strongly individualistic and determined
to preserve their artistic independence. As the century
drew near its close, both poetry and visual art took
on an air of conscious decadence, dwelling on strange
sins, perversions, neuroses, and insanity, along with
expressions of satiety and world-weariness, often ac-
companied by thoughts of suicide or of return to the
Church. These trends drew the symbolists away from
the pictorial naturalism of Courbet and the impres-
sionists, and from the literary naturalism of Émile Zola,
which aspired toward scientific truth.
Literary, impressionism in general involves a tend-
ency of the writer to report his observations and his
feelings toward outer objects in detail but rather casu-
ally; without any definite, prearranged plan or system.
At times it leads to a series of miscellaneous memoirs
and away from any definite plot or conceptual frame-
work.
