LITERARY IMPRESSIONISTS.

IN writing last week of the very great difficulty of observing and recording what passes before the eyes in travel, we spoke of a literary impressionist as of the most rare as well as the most useful of travellers, for through his eyes non- travelling readers really get what it is most difficult of all to get,—a view as in a mirror of the most interesting elements of the scenes which passed before the traveller's eyes. But "literary impressionism " is not limited to records of travel or of observation of any kind. No one can read the literature of the day without seeing how much larger a surface year by year, even of the region of poetry and of creative fiction, the impressionist school takes up. By the impressionist school in literature, we mean the school which tries to constitute the poem or the tale as nearly as possible of the living impressions of susceptible human beings,—to tell its story in a linked series of pictures, such as a few pairs of penetrating and sensitive eyes, with eager and lively hearts to make them at once observant and retentive of all the characteristic elements of human life, would be able to register. The impressionist school in English poetry dates back at least as far as Alexander Smith. Tennyson himself, though all his greater poems are much more than linked beads of personal impression, has contributed more to its popu- larity, probably, than any other great poet. "A Dream of Fair Women " is very much more than a richly embossed string of poetical impressions; but it is that too. But in poems of much less magnificence than " A Dream of Fair Women," in such poems as " The Gardener's Daughter," for instance, to which Tennyson gives the second name of "The Pictures,"—not referring solely, we imagine, to the pictures of Juliet and the gardener's daughter, which are nominally the occasions of the poem, but also to the fact that he had consciously linked together in it as many vivid impressions as he could of the loveliness of spring and youth,—yon see the pure "impres- sionist " school at its highest and best : — " Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.

News from the humming city comes to it In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;

And sitting muffled in dark leaves you hear

The windy clanging of the minster clock; Although between it and the garden lies

A league of grass washed by a slow broad stream,

That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar, Waves all its lazy lilies and creeps on Barge-laden to three arches of a bridge Crowned with the minster towers.

The fields between Are dewy fresh, browsed by doep-uddered kine, And all about the large lime feathers low, The lime a summer home of murmurous wings.

All the land in flowery squares, Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind, Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud Drew downward ; but all else of heaven was pare Up to the sun, and May from verge to verge, And May with me from head to heel. And now As tho' twere yesterday, as tho' it were The hour just flown, that morn with all its sound (For those old Mays bad thrice the life of these) Rings in mine ears. The steer forgot to graze, And, where the hedgerow cuts the pathway, stood Leaning his horns into the neighbour field And lowing to his fellows. From the woods Came voices of the well-contented doves. The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy, But shook his song together as he near'd That happy home the ground. To left and right The cuckoo told his name to all the hills; The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm ; The redcap whistled, and the nightingale Sang loud as tho' he were the bird of day."

Purely impressionist poetry can hardly go higher than that. Tennyson, who is far more than an impressionist, often rime much higher ; but here you have the impressionist school at its best and richest. You have in it all the " atmosphere " of

feeling, all the subtle complexity of perception and impression, which impressionist poets so dearly love. If we had to illus- trate the influence of the same school in fiction again at its beat, we should go to Miss Thackeray. Take this, for instance, from "The Village on the Cliff :"—

" Courseulles, where the oysters are preserved, and where the estab- lishment is situated of which poor Fontaine spoke with so much enthu- siasm, is a dreary little tumble-down village of odds and ends; of broken barrels, torn garments, oyster-heaps, and swinging shutters, standing upon the border of a great mud-marsh, which at low water reaches out for a mile or more to meet a grey and turbid sea. The

oysters are sorted out in long tanks, according to size, and fatten un- disturbed, and in their places, round a little counting-house which stands in the middle of these ()aim and melancholy waters. The shatters swing, in the village a child or two turns over the oyster- heaps, the ragged garments flutter in the wind. It is not a place likely to attract mere pleasure-seekers, and yet, as Dominique, the day after that little conversation at Richmond, comes leading the horse out of the stable of the inn at Coarsenlles, he meets a gentle- man who has ridden over from Petitport upon M. de Tracy's bay mare, and who quietly asks him to see to the horse, and to tell him where Mademoiselle Chr6tien is to be found. Mademoiselle is in the counting-house,' says Dominique, staring and grinning, and showing his great red gums ; and Richard, for it is Richard of course, makes his way across the desolate waste between the inn and the oyster- tanks, and opens a gate for himself, and walks along a narrow, raised pathway leading to the little counting-house. Before Butler could reach the door it opened, and Refine came oat and stood for an instant looking at the great waste where the dredgers were at work, and where a dirty red gleam of sunset was glaring upon the mud. She sighed, and then she turned suddenly, feeling, as people do, that some one was watching her. Some one ! She turned and looked with a quick, sudden motion, and then, although she stood quite still, all her heart seemed to go oat to welcome the one person in the whole world she moat wearied for, and least thought she should see ever again. She did not speak, bat somehow she was in his arms, and her wondering, tender, passionate eyes were recounting silently all the story of the long sad months through which she had waited ; and as Dick looked at her, when he saw her sweet face once more, the dreary marshes, the falling houses, seemed to be touched with some brightest and most sudden brilliance. Everything was plain to them both."

There, again, you have the whole " atmosphere " of feeling at its vividest, all its little ripples and eddies of association, all that fine framework for emotion which few observe and fewer retain, and which nevertheless constitutes so large a part of its freshness and vivacity.

But essential as the plastic mind of the impressionist is to many kinds of poetry and to the emotional side of fiction, we do not hesitate to say that, partly from one cause and partly from another, the impressionists are affecting very injuriously the literature of the day. With all her skill, Miss Thackeray has undoubtedly sacrificed too much to her delicate feeling for moral atmosphere in some of her later works,—not certainly in " The Village on the Cliff," bat in " Old Kensington," and other later productions. The consequence of the excess of this impressionist element in fiction is that we do not see distinctly the narrative, nor even the characters from whose lives and actions the narrative ought to spring. As in some landscapes in which effects of cloud prevail over all other effects, the total impression left upon the mind is vague, shadowy, or perhaps prismatic, but one without that depth of shadow and sharpness of outline, which are necessary in order that either poetry or fiction or any kind of imaginative literature, except perhaps the literature in which pictorial effects alone are wanted, may really take a strong hold of the sympathies and stimulate them into higher and nobler activity. We have noticed in another place one of the most recent efforts of the impressionist school in fiction, Mr. Sherburne Hardy's " Wind of Destiny," a story in which there is certainly a spark of genius, but in which that spark of genius is almost lost in the rapid and almost incoherent succession of waves of vague intellectual, moral, and sensuous impression. Yet Mr. Sherburne Hardy is, we believe, a dis- tinguished Transatlantic mathematician with a keenly scientific mind, who, when he plunges into the world of fiction, though

he takes for himself a philosophical thread for his story, indulges so lavishly in the luxury of stringing together reveries of personal feeling, that he only just succeeds in bringing here and there out of the troubled mist two or three vivid faces, with two or three vivid expressions chasing each other over those faces.

One great cause of the prevalence of the impressionist school is the loss of distinct standards of thought and judgment. This makes it very difficult to tell a story well, so as to excite the higher sympathies of the reader. In the modern wealth of

moral analogies, the modern uncertainty of moral aim, and the modern vacillation as to moral ideal, which mark the present day, the subtler writers of fiction hardly venture to hold up any character to scorn on the one hand, or to reverence on the other. They have not made up their own minds as to what they

• shall admire, what they shall detest, what they shall excuse, and what they shall commiserate. So they take refuge in conveying only the mixed impressions made on some one plastic fancy by what takes place, that one being usually so selected that it does not help the reader at all to a due discrimination of what is, noble and ignoble in the action of the story. This is not, we think, a fortunate condition of things for the higher efforts either of the poet or the novelist. In the highest imaginative efforts, fixed standards are almost essential to success. Even George

Eliot suffered by the deep vacillation in her own mind as to the degree in which she could regard her characters as responsible for what they did. You see in the super-subtleties of " Daniel Deronda," and in a less degree even in those of " Middlemarch," nay, in the rather wearisome analysis with which many of the most powerful chapters in "Adam Bede" and in " Romola " open, how that great imaginative writer was bewildered by the uncertainty of her own philosophy. Sir Walter Scott and Miss Austen, who never troubled themselves to analyse the conven- tional ideals of their days, traced the action of character on character with a far firmer and stronger hand, than almost any of our modern novelists, not excluding even Thackeray him- self. For the impressionist school has grown in importance almost Tani passe with the growth of moral doubt, and with the disposition to attenuate the guilt of everything that is evil under the influence of a theory which reduces to a minimum, or wholly exhales the significance of moral responsibility. And so, too, the difficulty in attaining intellectual truth has led men, as it leads Mr. Sherburne Hardy, to treat all forms of human intellect as affording only quite untrustworthy glimpses of the infinite ocean of creative force. Of course, writers with such views, though they may portray certain aspects of mind and character deftly and vividly enough, cannot furnish coherent conceptions of the true power of either intellectual or moral character. " Impressionism " is one of the many results of the agnosticism, or pantheism, or positivism, of the age,—that is, the natural reflection in literature of the general collapse of dog- matic and moral and spiritual conviction. If you can interest men by telling them, with great picturesqueness, how somebody felt on a particular occasion, without committing yourself to any sort of judgment on his feeling, then that is the natural resource of a literary man who is not at all sure how he ought to have felt, or how far he could have helped feeling exactly as he did.