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LITERATURE AND 19th CENTURY MUSIC:

The desire on the part of writers to come to terms with their own world rather than to explore the avenues of escape was responsible for the literary movements known as realism and naturalism. In some cases, writers cultivated a kinship with the scientific materialism that dominated the thought of the period following the February Revolution of 1848. In others, notably with Zola and Ibsen, they allied themselves with sociology and wrote their novels and plays much as a social worker might handle a case history. Somewhat earlier, Balzac had proved himself far too sophisticated a writer to see much in the medieval period beyond ignorance, poverty, and rustic village life and was able to write glowingly of the beauty of factories and big cities. The subject matter of his novels was drawn from the complex moral and psychological trials of middle-class life in the large urban centers that he knew. This did not imply complete acceptance of the bourgeois image of man; on the contrary, it often meant violent opposition to his accepted values. Attitudes toward their writing varied with the temperaments of individual writers. Flaubert, for one, felt compelled to withdraw from life in order to describe it with the necessary objectivity; and lie was convinced that such scientific detachment alone qualified the artist as well as the scientist. Zola, on the other hand, could not write without a passionate self-identification with the oppressed subjects of his novels. In the spirit of a reformer, he found it a necessity to bring social sores out into the sunlight of public exposure to effect a cure. With him, the novelist becomes a social research worker, and the novel a documentary case history.

The art of the symbolist is one of the fleeting moment; everything rushes past in an accelerated panorama. With the metaphor as a starting point, a symbolist prose poem flows by in a sequence of images that sweeps the reader along on a swift current of words with a minimum of slowing down to ponder on their meaning. Like the impressionistic painters, the symbolists reveled in sense data, and, like the realistic novelists, they looked for their material among the seemingly inconsequential occurrences of daily life. But in their endeavor to endow such happenings with profundity, and in their effort to attach to them a deeper symbolic significance, they went one step beyond their colleagues. While the painters had found a new world in the physics of light, and the novelists another new world in the social sciences, the symbolists looked to the new discoveries in psychology. By purposely leaving their poetry in an inconclusive and fragmentary state, they were making use of the psychological mechanism of reasoning from part to whole. Since the poets did not define the whole, the reader's imagination was allowed the full scope of its interpretive power.

Just as the impressionist painters had left the mixing of color to the eye of the observer, and the relationship of the subject matter to the viewer's mind, so Mallarme and the symbolists left the connection, order, and form of their verbal still lifes to be completed by the reader. They also found a new world to explore in 'listening" to colors, "looking" at sounds, "savoring" perfumes, and in all such mixtures of separate sensations known to psychology as synaesthesia. By developing a hypersensitive tonal palette, Claude Debussy, like his symbolist colleagues, was able to sound a gamut of images from volatile perfumes (Sounds and Perfumes on the Evening Air), fluid architecture (Engulfed Cathedral), sparkling seascapes (La Mer), exotic festivities (Iberia, Fetes) to gaudy fireworks (Feux dArtifice). The symbolists pushed outward to the threshold limits of perception in order to develop more delicate sensibilities and stimulate the capacities for new and peripheral experiences. They moved about in a twilight zone where sensation ends and ideation begins. The very word symbolism, however, implies the images are revelations of something surpassing sense data. And it is here that they parted company with the objectivity of the realists and impressionists, who were largely content with careful description.

Maurice Maeterlinck made an interesting attempt to translate the aims of the symbolist poets into dramatic form. His Pelleas et Maisande, a play first performed in 1892, effects a synthesis of the material world and the world of the imagination. In it, he denies the importance of external events and explores the quiet vibrations of the soul. His symbols function as links between the visible and invisible, the momentary and the eternal. The tangible fragments of common experience, the seemingly trivial everyday occurrences, however, furnish clues to the more decisive stuff of life. "Beneath all human thoughts, volitions, passions, actions," he writes in one of his essays, "there lies the vast ocean of the Unconscious, the unknown source of all that is good, true and beautiful. All that we know, think, feel, see and will are but bubbles on the surface of this vast sea." This sea, then, is the symbol of the absolute toward which all life is reaching, but which can never quite be grasped. What is heard is only the ripples on the surface.

In his drama, the sea, the forest, the fountain, the abyss are the dramatis personae in a profounder sense than the human characters, who are but shadowy reflections of real people. In spite of the settings in which they appear, Maeterlinck's characters belong neither to the past nor to the future but hover in an extended now. They seem to have no spatial extension, no volume, but exist more as creatures of duration. So little is externalized that the progress of what plot there is seems to unfold within the characters.