Modernism

Impressionism became a visible and contentious movement in the 1870s when a group of young French painters, including Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and Jean Renoir, gave several controversial exhibitions in Paris. Their break with academic painting and their commitment to everyday life followed Courbet, but they went further in the attempt to render the visible world as they experienced it subjectively: unstable, evanescent, and elusive. As significant as the new pictorial style was the collective aspect of Impressionism. Like the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that had appeared in London in the 1850s, Impressionism generated hostility in part because the alliance among artists suggested a viable alternative to cultural orthodoxy.

A second French movement, more significant and sustained, was symbolism, which emerged in the 1880s. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) and Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) were presiding figures, and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) was the legendary seer who had disappeared from France. The symbolists looked back to Baudelaire and resisted the dominance of realism, especially in its more extreme manifestation in the naturalist novels of Émile Zola (1844–1896) and the Goncourts (Edmond [1822–1896] and Jules [1830–1870]). Symbolism offered the rituals of the poetic enigma: evocative music, not descriptive reference. "To name the object," wrote Mallarmé, "is to destroy three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem" (p. 869). The poetic Symbol could be a sound, a scent, or a memory incarnating the invisible meanings of the world or intimating a mystery beyond the senses. Much symbolist polemic was a refusal of modernization (science, urbanism, mass politics, and the dislocations of individual experience). Apart from the success of individual poems, such as Mallarmé's L'Après-midi d'un faune or Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre, the importance of symbolism was that it offered an aesthetic counterworld. It was at once an artistic program and a social formation.

In Britain a critical lineage stretching from John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold to Walter Pater brought the idea of "culture" close to the symbolist vision of an alternative universe of value. A disciple of Pater, Arthur Symons (1865–1945) helped to introduce symbolism to the English-speaking world, presenting it as a fulfillment of literature's highest responsibilities: "for in speaking to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, it becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual" (p. 9). He introduced Mallarmé to W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), who also imagined a literature imbued with the force of religion and resistant to a mechanized social world and materialist philosophy. Yeats looked to magic and the occult, as well to the folklore and fairy tales of Ireland. His responsiveness to such a range of countertraditions suggests the extent of the division between the new literary movements and the modernizing social world around them.

Nineteenth-century cultural movements emerged within the broader context of modernity: in particular, the recognition of class conflict in postrevolutionary Europe. The Europeanwide revolutions of 1848 established modern society as a struggle between competing groups. It is often noted that the term avant-garde began with political and military meanings and only transferred its reference to the arts in the nineteenth century. Many artists had joined the revolutionary struggles, not only in 1848 but also in the Paris Commune of 1871. The turn away from politics is a striking feature of much late-century culture, with symbolism as a defining example; yet the political struggle generated possibilities for historical change that affected even those artists who refused the call of politics.