TOWARD AN EXPERIMENTAL SYMBOLISM
Some nineteenth-century readers understood Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine as a masterpiece of positivist philosophy. Others, such as Elme Marie Caro, read it as an encouraging sign of science’s impending rapprochement with spiritualist views.1 These divergent readings centered on the role that Bernard had assigned in the Introduction to the a priori idea. Tracing the remarkable persistence of the experimental idea in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, this chapter reveals how experimentalism could be held up across a range of belief systems and aesthetic positions, including symbolism, as a modern epistemological ideal. From Émile Zola’s controversial theory of the experimental novel to lone voices in impressionist criticism, from the impressionist-symbolist aesthetics of Jules Laforgue to Émile Hennequin’s “esthopsychologie,” from Gustave Kahn’s psychophysical symbolism to fin-de-siècle esotericisms—the authority of the experimental method remained virtually unquestioned, even as debates over the bankruptcy of science and critiques of positivism grew louder.2 Members of vanguard literary and artistic circles of the 1880s and 1890s ascribed a surprisingly consistent authority to Bernard, insisting, in an almost monotonous refrain, on experimentalism as the most advanced mode of knowledge production, a methodological panacea for transforming a priori ideas into scientific truths. As for impressionism, that artistic practice so often characterized in art histories of modernism as experimental, this chapter argues that the discursive conjunction of impressionism, experimentation, and vanguardism arose, especially in the criticism of Edmond Duranty, but that it was co-opted and used more extensively in discourses around symbolism. As a way of describing artistic practices, “experimental” would, for the most part, have to wait until after the emergence of symbolism in the second half of the 1880s, when French experimental psychology found itself, with the aid of nature’s experiments, on surer institutional ground.
Bernard, Zola, and “The Experimental Novel”
In the same year that his Introduction appeared, Bernard argued that the heart, and in particular the heart’s relationship to the mind, should come under the investigative purview of physiology. In doing so, he addressed those critics who might be tempted to believe that positivism instituted a mechanistic view of mankind and could thus have no truck with matters of the heart, including artistic inspiration. Pleading with his readers to endure physiology’s growing pains, Bernard implored them to look toward a future when “the poet, the philosopher, and the physiologist will all understand each other,” and to unite in a common search for truth under the ultimate synthesis of experimental method.3 In 1879, a year after Bernard’s death, Zola probably thought he was heeding that call when he published “The Experimental Novel,” which appeared in France simultaneously with Zola’s follow-up to L’assommoir, the novel Nana (fig. 13).4 One might expect the essay to have instituted, or at least to have smoothed the way for, an art understood as experimental, but at least initially, it did not. Thoroughly misconstrued, virulently attacked by Zola’s detractors, the essay was greeted largely with silence from even his most loyal supporters.
| 13 | Advertisement for Émile Zola, Nana and “Le roman expérimental,” Le Voltaire, no. 467 (15 October 1879): 4. Bibliothèque nationale de France. |
The contemporary novelist, Zola claimed at the outset of the essay, needed only to replace the word doctor with novelist in order to apply Bernard’s method to the naturalist novel. Zola situated the experimental novel both as the next step in the ongoing evolution of human thought, which had most recently given rise to experimental physiology, and as the most appropriate literature for a new scientific age. He characterized its emergence as part of an inevitable process of detaching the pursuit of knowledge and truth from belief in the irrational and the supernatural, an evolution that was in turn part of a larger movement from the unknown to the known and from the indeterminate to the determinate. Naturalism, Zola maintained, was superior to idealist forms of writing, above all because it provided for more truthful representations of human beings. Recently established as the model for investigating all organic phenomena, including the most complex, experimentalism thus provided a ready-made and up-to-date method for naturalist forms of truth making.
In establishing experimental physiology as the basis for experimental medicine, Bernard had hoped not just to obtain causal knowledge but to become a master of causes so that disease could be treated, a goal that underpinned Bernard’s reliance on the pathological method. Similarly, Zola stressed that the experimental novelist was not simply an author-creator but a “moralist-experimenter,” determining the root causes of humanity’s diseased intellectual and passionate life with a view to rendering it healthier.5 In his novels, so often concerned with the physiological, psychological, and social effects of hereditary degeneration, Zola claimed to reveal the underlying causes of individual and social pathologies, accomplishing that first step in knowing and mastering those causes before undertaking treatment.6
The immediate responses to “The Experimental Novel” set the terms for its uncertain place in literary history and for nearly a century of disquiet about the essay’s intentions and effects. Avowed critics of Zola’s naturalism roundly condemned it for crudely applying the methods of positivist science to the subtle art of the novel. Ferdinand Brunetière denounced what he saw as Zola’s mechanistic and fatalistic view of humanity, and accused him of stripping the novel of one of its key elements, characters who could exercise their own wills. In his view, Zola’s theory rivaled his novels in vulgarity. Worse yet, Brunetière accused the novelist of failing even to understand what it meant to experiment. Otherwise, the critic wrote, Zola would have known that “the novelist, like the poet . . . can only experiment on the self, not on others.”7 Another critic willingly admitted that all novels were experimental in the sense that they were experiential, but judged the conjunction of the “filthy” naturalist novel with the “pure renown” of Bernard an act of “vanity” and “self-infatuation.”8 Bernard’s acolytes joined this chorus, accusing Zola of so grossly misusing the theories set forth in the Introduction that they felt the need to defend their master from this opportunistic appeal to his authority, all the more offensive in appearing so soon after his death. One called the essay a “monstrous promiscuity,” wondered if it was not some kind of “fantastic hallucination,” and judged Zola’s implied assimilation of the experimental practice of vivisection to a stylistic procedure to be nothing less than a symptom of mental illness.9 But critics chafed above all at the text’s seeming promotion of a scientific literature for a scientific age, bristling at what they saw as the resulting discounting of the roles of genius, imagination, and even, it seemed, temperament in the creative process. Brunetière, who had long castigated naturalism, pointed gleefully to inflammatory citations from the essay that apparently evidenced Zola’s pessimistic view of humanity, and he found ample grist for his mill. “Here we find the practical utility,” Zola had written, “and the high morality of our naturalist works . . . that take apart and put back together piece by piece the human machine, in order to make it function under the influence of different environments.”10
Few if any of Zola’s supporters spoke out publicly in support of the text, and a number expressed their criticisms privately, albeit pointedly.11 Henry Céard, who later claimed to have lent Zola the Introduction, reproached his friend for extending Bernard’s method into the psychological realm of the novel.12 The day after the last installment of the essay appeared, Gustave Flaubert, who admired Bernard enormously, complained to Guy de Maupassant of Zola’s vapid theorizing: “Do not talk to me about realism, naturalism, or the experimental! . . . What empty nonsense!”13 The dearth of positive critical reception among Zola’s near and dear probably stems in part from the waning influence of naturalism as a collective movement in and around 1880.14 But perhaps critics and allies alike were also conserving their energies for either vigorous attacks on or forceful defenses of Nana, published at exactly the same time. In the face of predictable critiques from the likes of Brunetière, and, much worse, the silence of his supporters, Zola refrained from pursuing the argument in subsequent writings and would thereafter shy away from public theorizing.15
But structuralist analyses have set aside the charges of opportunism and naïveté to interrogate the inordinate role of Bernard’s a priori idea in “The Experimental Novel,” and the discursive force of Zola’s appeal, not so much to the prestige of science as to the scientific gaze of the experimenter.16 In channeling Bernard, sometimes nearly to the point of silencing his own voice, Zola, the reader begins to suspect, was trying to reiterate something that Bernard had said that Zola felt had gone unheard. More than a decade earlier, in his art criticism, Zola had mitigated naturalism’s unavoidable scientism by ascribing a crucial role to man’s imagination, derived from his temperament. In his review of the 1866 Salon, Zola had rejected the mantle of the doctrinaire positivist in order to insist upon the primacy of individual temperament despite a “spirit of the age” that he claimed inevitably drove artists toward positivism and a minute study of reality.17
“The Experimental Novel” in fact used Bernard’s Introduction to reinforce the notion that the idea, construed as both a product of an individual temperament and a generating force for experiment, remained paramount in Zola’s theory of naturalism, as it did in Bernard’s text. “In order to show the mechanism of events,” Zola insisted, “it is necessary that we produce and direct phenomena; there is our part in invention, the genius in the work. . . . An experiment . . . is always based on an idea.” To provide the ultimate approbation, Zola quoted from Bernard directly: “The appearance of the experimental idea . . . is entirely spontaneous, and its nature is entirely individual; it is a particular feeling [sentiment], a quid proprium, that constitutes the originality, the invention or the genius of each experiment.”18 Spontaneity, individuality, feeling, originality, invention, and genius: clearly, the experimenter was also an artist.
Both Bernard and Zola emphasized that, after the a priori idea sets an experiment in motion, the experimentalist must maintain a stance of nescience regarding the experiment’s outcome, continuing to doubt the root causes of the given phenomenon under investigation. This stance would provoke the exhaustive process of testing that would eventually lead to an objective determination of causes. Far from being a constraint, the doubt of the experimenting novelist, Zola made clear, allowed him to realize the full powers of his creative and rational faculties, both his subjectivity and his objectivity. The originating idea would in the end become more meaningful and more universally significant when proved objectively true: “What becomes of genius for the experimental novelist? It remains genius, the a priori idea, only it is controlled by experiment. Naturally, experiment cannot destroy genius. On the contrary, it confirms it. Take a poet, for instance; is it necessary for him to possess genius, that his feeling, his a priori idea is false? No, clearly, because a man’s genius will be even greater once experiment has further proven the truth of his personal idea.”19 Far from “subjectifying the objective,” then, which would stand as Kahn’s pithy version of Zola’s familiar definition “art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament,” experimental method, in my reading, would in fact serve to “objectify the subjective.”20 And far from governing the uses of experimentalism within impressionist discourses, “The Experimental Novel” might better be understood as prefiguring, possibly licensing, and certainly, in one instance—the case of August Strindberg discussed in chapter 4—determining the uses of experiment within discursive formations of symbolism.
There is, then, an extraordinary irony in the critical and scholarly reception of Zola’s essay.21 Well before 1879, naturalism had been derided as too scientific, too photographic, too mechanistic, critiques all explicitly referenced in “The Experimental Novel.” But Zola seems to have tried to use Bernard’s Introduction to respond to such critiques, above all choosing passages from the text that proclaimed the importance of the idea in experimental method. “The Experimental Novel” thus tried to reintroduce the imagination into a discussion of the naturalist novel via Bernard’s text, attempting but ultimately failing to refute readings of both naturalism and experimentalism as overly scientific, to the detriment of inspiration. Bernard was not to be held up as a doctrinaire positivist but as the philosophical author of the “Study on the Physiology of the Heart,” the humble man of science who judged inspiration to be eternal and simply aided, at the current stage of human development, by experimental method. And Zola, it appears, hoped that he would be judged similarly. As he put it, performing modesty and genius at the same time, “the method is only a tool; it is the idea that the worker provides that makes the masterpiece.”22
I offer one final point about “The Experimental Novel” before turning to the historiography and criticism of impressionism. Zola must have known that he was deluding himself in setting up the experimental novel as the next step in a natural evolution of the sciences that had most recently given rise to experimental physiology. By the late 1870s, when he published the essay, experimental psychology had a much better claim to that territory, particularly through the efforts of Hippolyte Taine and Théodule Ribot, of which Zola was certainly aware. Even allowing for a more or less feigned naïveté, the fact that Zola could assert the experimental novel in 1879 as, in his words, “a kind of scientific psychology,” without mentioning the actual emergence of the field, signals, if nothing else, the still embryonic state of the discipline. A decade later, however, with Ribot ensconced as chair of “experimental and comparative psychology” at the Collège de France, experimental psychology, rather than the experimental novel, had finally arrived.
Impressionism, Experimentalism, and Art History
In 1898, a series of scathing and at times anti-Semitic caricatures, each representing one of Zola’s works, attempted to capitalize on the author’s notoriety at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. Under the title The Experimental Novel, a typically scatological illustration pictured the author standing in front of an easel flinging fecal matter from a chamber pot onto a canvas (fig. 1). Other images in the series had a more obvious relationship to the text depicted. Doctor Pascal showed Zola as both himself and his eponymous character, hunched over his manuscript at a desk on which appeared a jar with a preserved fetus and popularizing books with titles such as Science for All (fig. 14).23 But what was the rationale for representing the author of “The Experimental Novel” as a painter? Zola’s work as an art critic and erstwhile defender of the impressionists was certainly well known, as was his distancing from impressionism around 1880 and what was often seen as his betrayal of impressionism with the publication of the novel The Masterpiece in 1886. But precisely what connection did the image assert between painting and Zola’s infamous co-optation of Bernard’s Introduction? Depicting an act of haphazardly flinging material onto a canvas undoubtedly mocked impressionism, calling to mind, for instance, Louis Leroy’s satirical review of the First Impressionist Exhibition, in which a Monsieur Vincent, standing in front of Claude Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (fig. 15), exclaims, “But these spots were done with the same method used for whitewashing stone: Pif! paf! v’li! v’lan.”24 Lebourgeois’s illustration, it seems, was meant to ridicule both “The Experimental Novel” and impressionist painting for their lack of skill and method, for being overly materialist and frankly crude.
| 14 | H. Lebourgeois, Doctor Pascal, from L’oeuvre de Zola, 1899–1902. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. |
| 15 | Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873. Oil on canvas, 61 × 80 cm. Pushkin Museum, Moscow. |
Art-historical discourse generally affirms impressionism as experimental, privileged for having been new in its time, radical, and vanguard.25 But scholars have asserted that impressionism was experimental not only in this transhistorical sense but also in the historical sense, experimental insofar as it purportedly aimed to produce knowledge through an engagement with the natural world comparable to, or even directly influenced by, nineteenth-century scientific experimentation.26 Given Zola’s close relationships with Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, and his critical support for impressionism, “The Experimental Novel” would appear to reinforce that claim, although its near-complete absence from the art-historical literature signals, perhaps, that it does so only nominally.27 While a view of impressionism as straightforwardly objective and/or scientific has long been discounted,28 many historians refer to impressionism as experimental for good reasons, while also bracketing out, more or less, the scientific connotations of the term. But it also seems useful to distinguish between nineteenth-century meanings of experiment and our own. In other words, it is useful to be clear when we are talking of experimentalism, as in the experimental method, when we are talking about the influence on impressionism of specific experimental sciences such as physics and chemistry,29 and when we are speaking more generally of heuristics.
In 1978, Ernst Gombrich outlined a history of experimentation in the arts in which he traced the heuristic processes of “negative feedback” that enabled artists to “objectively test” the success of any attempt at naturalistic representation. Gombrich deemed Apelles, Leonardo da Vinci, and John Constable experimenters par excellence, artists who used experiment as an instrument to aid their creative processes. Constable, with his well-documented interest in meteorology, provides a particularly salient example. “Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of Nature,” the British landscapist wrote. “Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?”30 As Gombrich well knew, by 1836, when Constable set down those words, he was swimming against the tide in a Europe in which painting and science were increasingly assigned to separate domains rather than united under the umbrella of natural philosophy.31 In Gombrich’s view, the subsequent history of artistic experimentation was largely and lamentably one of co-opting experimentation as a value, vitiating its heuristic function as self-criticism by appropriating science’s prestige and connotations of progress in a mad pursuit of alternatives to traditional (read: naturalistic or illusionistic) artistic modes. Gombrich concluded that while experimentation and artistic creation had frequently had a cozy, instrumental relationship early in the nineteenth century, modern understandings of artistic experimentation, in thrall to the allure of scientific progress rather than to science itself, generally impoverished our understanding of the creative process.32
Zola’s “Experimental Novel” proves extremely awkward for Gombrich’s narrative. He no sooner mentions it than ushers it off stage to refer obliquely to impressionist “experiments in art,” and to discuss Claude Lantier’s musings on science in The Masterpiece, concluding only that Zola’s writing as a whole indexes the contemporary authority of science. Impressionism then becomes a tipping point, still putatively scientific, but heralding the avant-garde’s dismantling of the instrumental relationship between art and experiment. Gombrich’s is a curiously split text, divided between wanting to establish experimentation as a trans-historical value and wanting to tie the processes of “negative feedback” to specific scientific cultures, seeing “true” artistic experimentation only at those specific moments when artists took an avid interest in the science of their day. The view that impressionism constituted a moment of profound artistic experimentation, in the sense of being in the vanguard, and that this artistic experimentation was somehow allied with or related to the scientific cultures, and specifically to the experimentalism, of mid-nineteenth-century France, was commonplace for much of the twentieth century. But the awkward assimilation of Zola’s essay into Gombrich’s attempt to trace the history of artistic experimentation reveals a fundamental incoherence.33
The Anglo-American formalist tradition is especially rife with the heroic, value-laden language of experiment, rhetoric that long served to insert impressionism smoothly into a masculinizing narrative of modernist abstraction.34 As early as 1894, Roger Fry, albeit in a text that went unpublished at the time, made both “experience” and an experimental approach to nature central to his understanding of impressionism.35 Later, Fry would implore his readers to think of the works on display at the Grafton Gallery, including those of Cézanne, as “serious experiments— . . . not always successful experiments—but still serious experiments made in perfectly good faith towards . . . discovery.”36 More recently, an exhibition invited audiences to participate in an “experiment in looking,” to set aside the easy to digest and “pretty” aspects of impressionism in order to attend first and foremost to the radical nature of the impressionist surface, so as to grasp it still as “contingent, experimental, and risky.”37
The will to experiment seems to be corroborated by numerous contemporary documents that ostensibly confirm the discursive conjunction of impressionism, experimentalism, vanguardism, and, at times by implication or association, science. Edgar Degas apparently exhibited a number of his prints at the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition as “experiments and plates in different states.”38 Edmond Duranty supposedly claimed that artists were, in 1870, “experimenting with the knife and would try out the spoon if it seemed promising.”39 Cézanne, thanking the critic Gustave Geffroy in 1894, allegedly wrote, “I read the long article you devoted to shedding light on the experiments I have been making in painting.”40 Cézanne also apparently assured the dealer Ambroise Vollard, “I am continuing my experiments and I will inform you of the final result as soon as my study has yielded some satisfaction.”41 In 1891, the symbolist critic Adolphe Retté supposedly argued that in “[Émile] Bernard we find an experimenter.”42
In each of these cases, however, it is English translation that has rendered the relationship between experiment and impressionism seemingly natural, whereas the original French belies such ease and reflects rather the period’s shifting understandings of expérience analyzed in my introduction. Degas, in fact, exhibited “Essais et états de planches.”43 Duranty wrote that up-and-coming artists “essaient du couteau, ils essaieraient de la cuillère si elle s’y prêtait.”44 Cézanne thanked Geffroy for “mettre en lumière les tentatives que j’ai faites en peinture,”45 and assured Vollard that “Je poursuis donc mes recherches et vous ferai part du résultat acquis.”46 Retté in fact spoke of Bernard as a “chercheur.”47 Essais, tentatives, recherches: all three words abut contemporary understandings of avant-garde experimentation and appear frequently in the Anglo-American literature translated as “experiment.” But their meanings for French speakers of the nineteenth century nevertheless remained somewhat different from the range of meanings available at the time for expérience.
Indeed, impressionist criticism reveals a remarkable discursive lack of expérience with either scientific or avant-garde connotations, although this should be less surprising after the etymological analysis offered in my introduction, in which I demonstrated the extent to which the denotations and connotations of expérience were in flux in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the criticism surrounding the eight impressionist exhibitions, we find an entire vocabulary that relates to our own understanding of artistic experimentation—essais, tentatives, recherches. These words are used over and over again to illuminate, in both a positive and a negative light, the impressionists’ striving for a painting that was “vrai,” or, less often, “juste.” And certainly, such “recherches” were in dialogue with scientific advances in optics, chemistry, color theory, and, increasingly, psychology. But just as Zola’s “Experimental Novel” failed at first to find many sympathetic readers, it appears that critics could call such research “experimental” only with some difficulty.
The word tentative, in both singular and plural forms, appears more than twice as often as expérience and its cognates.48 Nearly two-thirds of these latter instances relate to the more workaday definition of expérience as “knowledge of things, acquired through use over a long period” (the second definition of both the French Academy’s and Littré’s dictionaries, in use at the time), connoting expertise or skill. More often, critics were remarking upon a lack thereof. Elie de Mont wrote of Henri Rouart, “His paintings indicate a remarkable inexperience [inexpérience], I would almost say a remarkable clumsiness in the use of color.”49 Four reviews, including Stéphane Mallarmé’s article of 1876, published in English, tie experience much more closely to an involuntary subjectivity, as in Paul Adam’s 1886 reference to “the always uncertain data of experience.”50 Three begin to link ideas of vanguardism with a generalized notion of experiment as new and progressive, although usually in a negative sense, as in Philippe Burty’s assessment of 1879: “Today the experiment is over and we can now judge it more severely.” This leaves only six separate instances of expérience with scientific connotations, more than half of them from 1879 or 1880, around the time that “The Experimental Novel” appeared. Joris-Karl Huysmans referred in 1880 to specific experiments done by Jean-Martin Charcot on the perception of color. Henry Fouquier recoiled in horror at Degas’s dancers, which he likened to corpses submitted to electricity experiments, while Émile Blavet, in 1876, wrote positively of the new “realists,” who needed “great freedom to experiment and a laboratory of their own.”51
But it was the criticism of Duranty that most closely linked impressionist painting as a new, progressive, and tentative form of art making with scientific notions of experiment. Duranty’s 1876 pamphlet The New Painting had used the language of science to propose a physiological basis for impressionist “discoveries,” but there Duranty had avoided the term expérience in favor of tentative.52 In an April 1879 review, however, Duranty cautiously likened impressionist painting not only to tentatives and essais but also to the experiments of chemists and physicists, those exemplary modes of experimentation generally cited prior to Bernard’s Introduction: “If one has followed painting for quite some time, has been associated with people who are seeking new outcomes in art, the attempts [tentatives] of this group are interesting in a way that they cannot be for those who, wanting to have immediate and near-certain values shown in their galleries, concern themselves only with definitive results and are more inclined to scoff than to welcome laborious attempts [essais] that resemble the experiments of the chemist or the physicist.”53 Duranty’s review, however, fell on fallow ground, at least in France.54 Henry Havard found Duranty’s analogy between attempts in painting and scientific experiments novel and enticing, but he was uncertain whether such essais (Havard himself eschewed the term expériences) should be exhibited.55 Duranty, who was undoubtedly drawing upon his conversations with Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Zola for this novel understanding of impressionism as both new and acutely experimental, had little opportunity to pursue this line of argument before his sudden death in April 1880. And in the criticism surrounding the 1881, 1882, and 1886 impressionist exhibitions, there are just three instances of the term expérience, and only one, that of Émile Hennequin, that connotes either vanguardism or science.
Duranty wrote at a moment when the connection between the naturalist novel and impressionism, between Zola and the “Zolas of oil,” seemed tightest.56 More often than not, however, as Lebourgeois’s caricature suggests, the comparison was mobilized for the purpose of heaping scorn on both. Already in a review of 1877, a critic had called both impressionism and L’assommoir forms of “premeditated cynicism.”57 And in November 1879, in a cunning move, Brunetière attempted to co-opt impressionism for the novel, likening Alphonse Daudet to an impressionist painter and attempting to shunt Zola off to the side of both naturalist and impressionist aesthetics.58 But the ties that bound naturalism and impressionism together had already begun to loosen even before “The Experimental Novel” appeared. Zola’s own review of the 1879 impressionist exhibition caused a stir among the artists Zola had previously professed to support. Acknowledging their role as pioneers, he nevertheless criticized the group, singling out Monet, for being all too easily satisfied with middling efforts.59 After 1879, with the exception of a short article in 1884, Zola ceased to take up his pen in strong support of his impressionist friends. Some, Cézanne perhaps among them, saw the 1886 novel The Masterpiece as Zola’s final statement on the impressionists’ inability to achieve tableaux.60
While impressionism was no doubt experimental in many senses of the term, and artists were surely thinking experimentally without actually articulating their practices as such, the discursive conjunction of impressionism, experimentation, and vanguardism is less a product of nineteenth-century art criticism than a strategy of twentieth-century Anglo-American art history. Although Duranty, and to a lesser extent Blavet, conceived of impressionist paintings as something like scientific experiments, this novel idea, despite Zola’s essay (or, more probably, because of it), failed to take hold in contemporary writing, a hypothesis confirmed by the complete absence of the adjective expérimental in the criticism of the eight impressionist exhibitions. Certainly, positivist science was at the height of its authority in the first two decades of the Third Republic, but it would take the experimental human sciences, and above all experimental psychology, as it was taken up in emerging theories of symbolism, to solidify the discursive conjunction between modern forms of art making and experimentalism.
Experimental Idealism: The Impressionist-Symbolist Aesthetics of Jules Laforgue
Zola’s insistent emphasis on the central roles of idea, inspiration, and genius in Bernard’s experimental method initially failed to find many sympathetic readers in France. However, among the juvenilia of the poet and aesthetic theorist Jules Laforgue (fig. 16), a series of short articles for the Toulouse-based journal La guêpe conveys Laforgue’s deep admiration for Zola’s work and especially for the much derided essay. Less than two weeks after “The Experimental Novel” appeared in France, the nineteen-year-old Laforgue carefully summarized Zola’s theory for his provincial audience, and defended it as a “beautiful and noble dream.”61 What might be dismissed as teenage adulation is significant, however, because in his more mature writings, Laforgue put experimentalism at the center of his idealist aesthetics. Most of his texts, including his 1883 notes on impressionism, remained unpublished during his short lifetime but became available within symbolist circles—a number were published in La revue blanche—via Laforgue’s friendships with Gustave Kahn, Félix Fénéon, and Téodor de Wyzewa. Laforgue’s aesthetics significantly expanded upon Duranty’s physiological justifications of impressionism, picked up on Zola’s promotion of Bernard’s a priori idea as a means to temper a view of both naturalism and positivism as vulgarly materialist, and presented experimentalism and the pathological method as fundamental for both aesthetic theory and artistic practice.
| 16 | Félix Vallotton, Jules Laforgue, in Remy de Gourmont, Le livre des masques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896), 204. Bibliothèque nationale de France. |
Laforgue’s draft notes on impressionism, intended for a German audience, propose a theory of impressionist painting informed by recent research in the fields of psychology, philosophy, physics, and aesthetics, especially the work of Taine, Eduard von Hartmann, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Charles Henry, the latter a mutual friend of Laforgue’s and Kahn’s.62 Laforgue wrote jokingly to Henry that the German public, after reading what he had to say about impressionism, would surely believe that “impressionism—with its madness—was born in Germany out of Fechner’s law.”63 Indeed, Laforgue linked his theory of impressionism directly to psychophysical experiments on how the eye responds to the stimulation of light in order to produce a physiological sensation of color.64 In Laforgue’s view, the impressionist painter was a supranormal personality with an eye physiologically capable of seeing “naturally” or “primitively.” The “impressionist eye,” however, was to be understood not as atavistic but as more highly evolved than the “academic eye,” because it worked in concert with a mind and a hand able to forget any previous artistic training, able to slough off “childish” conventions such as modeling, perspective, light, and chiaroscuro in order to paint “naïvely.” Participating in an inevitable evolution toward increasingly modern forms of painting, the more highly evolved eye would also be most at home in its own body, most in tune with its own temperament. When the individual eye reigned, Laforgue concluded, there would be no need for schools, juries, medals, or state patronage, and art would exist in the context and be the product of individual liberty, “nihilistic dilettantism,” and indeed anarchism.65 Laforgue’s radically individualist stance led him to posit the Hartmannian unconscious (Hartmann had insisted on capitalizing the word), seat of the individual, as his core aesthetic principle.66 Hartmann had argued that the unconscious, made up of illogical will checked by reason (or idea), was, when actualized, the fundamental generative force of all life.67 In notes on aesthetics published posthumously in La revue blanche in 1896, Laforgue explicitly aligned Hartmann’s unconscious with genius, instinct, and, most important for the purposes of this study, “sacred hypothesis, fertile mother of all determinism,” emphasizing their mutually reinforcing roles in both scientific and artistic pursuits.68
The notion of an evolutionary drive toward an ever more physiologically perfect eye derived largely from Laforgue’s readings of Herbert Spencer, which he would have known in Ribot’s French translation.69 Laforgue’s evolved eye had achieved a high degree of specialization by repeatedly performing the same tasks. It had perfected itself in order to work more efficiently with the other organs, including the mind and the hand, contributing to an ever more improved human organism, which in turn produced ever more improved cultures and societies. At the end point of this increasing specialization and improvement lay an ideal state of equilibrium, in which all parts (of the body, of society, etc.) corresponded to one another harmoniously.70 Uniting Spencerian laws of progress with Hartmann’s unconscious, Laforgue presented art as but one indicator of the unconscious’s part in the drive toward this future ideal state. Sketching the relationship between art, the ideal of any given moment, and that ultimate state, which he called the capital-I “Ideal,” Laforgue wrote, “This ideal must order the Ideal that is the object of research in Aesthetics (my article): The ideal in art—increasing specialization of the organ used—and as for choice—it happens by itself—through the natural selection of the Unconscious.”71
Laforgue’s idealism was not, therefore, based on static or unchanging notions of tradition or classicism but on an analysis of how specialized the relevant organs that produced a certain art had become, how far along the pathway of progress they had traveled. Lowercase ideals, in other words, were to be found not in the artwork produced but primarily in the mind and body of its creator. This aesthetics would thus need to base itself on psychological and physiological investigations. In a letter to his former employer and friend Charles Ephrussi, written in late 1883, Laforgue explained that he had been rereading different aesthetic theories and had begun to write his own, which “accords with Hartmann’s Unconscious, Darwin’s transformism, the works of Helmholtz.” “In any case,” he went on, “it is very new, and touches on the latest problems of human thought and is not in disagreement with either the modern physiology of optics, or the most advanced psychology.”72
This drive toward both ideals and the Ideal, Laforgue reminded his readers, occurred not just in art but in all domains of human activity, including science, where scientists had just as much recourse as artists did to the unconscious: “In science, as in all human paths toward the Ideal, there is instinct and thought [réflexion], the Unconscious and knowledge. As if Claude Bernard . . . had nothing to do with instinct, with the Unconscious!”73 Against Ernest Renan’s argument that art, like science, would become more and more dependent on thought, Laforgue mobilized Bernard, in whose laboratory his good friend Henry had once worked as an assistant, to argue that instinct and reason were always united, whether in art or in science, by way of the unconscious. They were not the basis of successive states, as Auguste Comte had asserted, but existed simultaneously, as Bernard had emphasized. As in the case of Zola’s “Experimental Novel,” Bernard was again called upon to play the part of a unifying figure who underlined the important role of instinct in experimental method, just as in all strivings toward the Ideal.74 Laforgue similarly enlisted Leonardo da Vinci, later held up by Joséphin Péladan as the preeminent practitioner of “experimental idealism,” in the positivist-idealist cause.75
Laforgue presented his own emerging ideas on aesthetics as a corrective to Taine, whose work, he argued, contained internal contradictions. Although Taine, whose lectures Laforgue had attended at the École des beaux-arts in 1880–81, claimed to be working toward a positivist analysis of cultural production solely as a product of race, environment, and moment, he had nevertheless continued to uphold traditional notions of classical ideals, arguing that classicism remained the highest and healthiest form of artistic practice. But if, as Laforgue held, the Hartmannian unconscious was the sine qua non of all human activity, then it simply was; it could be judged neither healthy nor diseased. And this, Laforgue reasoned, would shatter the link between health and beauty to which Taine had clung. Laforgue tied this part of his argument directly to individualist artistic practices; decadence, as an aesthetic, could therefore in no meaningful way be criticized as pathological.76
Although Laforgue argued that impressionism was an ideal of its time, it had not yet attained the Ideal. Indeed, Laforgue anticipated and hoped for further evolution. His clearest statements on aesthetics appeared posthumously in La revue blanche in 1895. There, Laforgue explained carefully that his aesthetics was an attempt to unify positivism and idealism and to bring the results of an “experimental metaphysics” to bear on an aesthetics that would both define and show the way to the Ideal. Expressing absolute fealty to experimentalism, Laforgue argued that the “inductive metaphysics of the experimental life sciences” had demonstrated the unconscious as an essential law, “the unique, constant, guiding force forever evolving toward pure consciousness through the inevitable selection produced by the flux of conflicting desiring forces of love, religion, language, sciences, arts, social apostolate, new mysticism, etc.”77 Although he still took issue with Taine, it was thanks to Taine’s insistence on a pathological approach that experimentalism had revealed the underlying law of aesthetics to be the unconscious. Elsewhere, Laforgue echoed Taine even more closely, revealing that the pathological method had a specific place in this new aesthetics. In making aesthetic judgments, he wrote, “the ordinary naked eye has no more authority than ordinary consciousness in the old psychology. . . . As is done today for the cerebral center . . . there is a series of specialized sciences that need to be organized, a psychology of the eye, psychology of the ear, of the palate, of the olfactory nerve, and from an artistic point of view—a psychology of artistic insanity [aliénation].”78
In notes related to these aesthetic principles, Laforgue went even further, suggesting not only that experimentalism had furnished his aesthetics with its underlying principles but also that the elusive Ideal groped its way toward an objective understanding of itself through “experimental” art making: “We sense above us an Ideal. . . . It objectifies itself dynamically, floundering around with withering genres and with contradictory works that go from one excess to another. Its disillusionments and its new glimmers, however, give birth to geniuses. The Ideal inevitably continues making its experiments according to an obscure law that says to itself: you were wrong last century, let us take another path.” By bringing the truths discovered through experimental method to bear on his approach, and by aligning experimentalism with the progressive march of the Ideal, Laforgue envisioned a “radiant and certain” aesthetics that would “respond to both Platonists and empiricists.” In a letter to Kahn, he added “determinists” and “pure Hegelians” to the list of those whose aesthetics he was superseding: “Yes, idealists, we are idealists as well.”79
Like the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, who had argued that the factor common to “positivist science” and “idealist science” was none other than experimental method,80 like spiritualists such as Caro, who had seen Bernard’s experimentalism as a potential helpmate for approaching metaphysical questions, and indeed like Zola, who had mobilized Bernard’s a priori idea to counter the view of naturalism as overly positivist, Laforgue placed his unswerving faith in experiment. He believed in its power to reveal fundamental laws, above all the foundational principle of the unconscious; he envisioned its bringing humankind to an ideal state of equilibrium; and he emphasized experimentalism’s almost alchemical power to yoke together seemingly incompatible beliefs.
Toward an Experimental Symbolism: “Esthopsychologie,” Psychophysical Aesthetics, and Experimental Spiritualism
Until his premature death in 1887, Laforgue maintained close ties with neoimpressionist painters, especially with Georges Seurat, who was among the few mourners at Laforgue’s funeral; with the critics who initially championed neoimpressionism, especially Kahn and Fénéon; and with Henry, the idiosyncratic devotee of psychophysics championed by a number of neoimpressionists, whom one art historian has called a “scientific dilettante.”81 Many scholars, over the past twenty years, have productively countered the view of neoimpressionism as simplistically scientific, and have demonstrated the shifting and at times contradictory engagements with scientific and pseudoscientific theories, practices, and rhetoric among neoimpressionist artists and the critics who championed them.82 More recent analyses of neoimpressionism emphasize that certain artists and critics subscribed to a vision of science as a kind of modern ideal that might point the way toward universal modes of communication, a view not at all incompatible with idealist pursuits, even Wagnerian aesthetics.83 Science was a tool to be used at times in the manner of utopic fantasy, as in Seurat’s interest in Henry’s theories of dynamogeny, and at times in a more allegorical fashion, as in Fénéon’s scientist rhetoric.84 To these critical accounts I would simply add that neither science writ large nor any particular scientific field could confidently and indisputably claim to be a modern ideal. Experimental method, however, could. Scientists, writers, critics, and artists alike might have questioned the motivations of different scientific practitioners, their more or less materialist or spiritualist biases, or their choices of objects for research, but experimentalism reigned supreme as a modern methodological ideal for producing truth.
In the year after Laforgue’s sparsely attended funeral, Kahn would mourn another victim of an early death, the critic Émile Hennequin, who had sought to apply experimental methods to art and literary criticism in an attempt to create a field of research he called “esthopsychologie.” In 1882, Hennequin had approached impressionism through the lens of the positivist aesthetics of Eugène Véron, and in 1885 had considered Wagnerianism from a Spencerian perspective.85 But his volume Scientific Criticism (La critique scientifique), published just before his death in 1888, outlined his scientific methods of criticism in the most comprehensive terms. Highlighting Hennequin’s absolute rigor in applying only the experimental method to his criticism, Kahn expressed his appreciation for how Hennequin had tried to counter the usual critical methods by rejecting those overly concerned with traditionalism, hagiography, and the relative age of an idea. By contrast, Kahn emphasized that Hennequin’s approach was admirably experimental, comparative, and based on the pathological method, proceeding as it did from “slight aberrations that approach abnormality.”86
Kahn (fig. 17), who had promoted psychophysical research as a crucial tool for the symbolist search for universal modes of communication, and who, unlike Hennequin, had viewed neoimpressionism as compatible with symbolist theory, had himself demonstrated that the “rational principle of polychromy” would form the basis for a future aesthetics. For this, he had cited the work of Henry, which “proved . . . experimentally” the physiological effects of both color and linear direction. “Pathological observations,” Kahn wrote, were especially revealing, demonstrating, by comparison, that normal individuals were naturally more stimulated by different colors and linear shapes.87 In his September 1886 manifesto, the “Response of the Symbolists,” Kahn reiterated not only that Henry’s scientific aesthetic principles offered guidelines for symbolist practice, but that experimentalism and idealism could be conjoined to produce symbolist forms of representation.88
| 17 | Félix Vallotton, Gustave Kahn, in Remy de Gourmont, Le livre des masques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896), 242. Bibliothèque nationale de France. |
The anarchist Kahn would continue to hold up science as the great hope for society’s improvement. Once liberated from bourgeois state institutions, science would be free, he argued, to manage its own discoveries for the social good.89 Responding to Jules Huret’s questions in 1891 about the “future of positivism in literature,” Kahn argued that science had finally moved beyond positivism, replacing “little positivist experimentations” with a grander form of experimentation guided by the “theoretical intuition” of “new scientists” such as Henry. That even some “positivist scientists” were now basing their experimentation on the work of such “intuitives” was, Kahn implied, to be especially noted by the symbolist generation.90
While the overall prestige of positivist science had begun to wane by the late 1880s, Bernard’s alleged idealism, along with the kinds of pathological subjects studied by experimental psychology, enabled experimentalism to retain its authority easily throughout the 1890s, perhaps most intriguingly in those domains that might have seemed most inhospitable to positivism, namely, spiritualism and spiritism. Many observers saw the great promise of the fin de siècle as the reintegration of science and religion, a new relationship between nature and art, and a new unity of the spiritual and the material. Among many writers, critics, and artists there remained an overwhelming faith and confidence in scientific methods, and above all in experimentalism, which, in its application to psychology, now seemed poised to fulfill the hopes of positivists and spiritualists alike. The institutional success of experimental psychology indicated to some that an all too restrictive Comtean positivism had finally been superseded by a new generation of thinkers who would willingly join with philosophers and poets to fulfill the dreams of Bernard.
Bernard continued to be enlisted in spiritualist and idealist causes in the 1890s, often in the proliferating symbolist journals. Between 1890 and 1892, René Caillié, a follower of the occultist Eliphas Levi, published a series of articles in the esoteric journal L’étoile. Under the title “Spiritualisme expérimental,” the articles provided a history of spiritism to the present, expressing a sincere and overriding optimism about the ongoing reorientation of science away from an “atheistic Materialism” and toward a study of spiritism, which Caillié argued would in turn reinvigorate spiritualism as a philosophic endeavor.91 In the pages of L’étoile, Caillié quoted Bernard at length, in a citation “proving” that this “high authority” was far from a straightforward materialist:
The human body is composed of matter that is constantly being renewed. Each day you lose a part of your physical being, and you replace what you have lost with food, so efficiently that, in the space of eight years, your flesh and bones are replaced by new flesh and bones. . . . Your skull is no longer occupied by the same cerebral matter as it was eight years ago. But . . . how is it possible that you perfectly remember things that you heard, or learned eight years ago? If these things are lodged, as some physiologists argue, in the lobes of your brain, how is it possible that they survive the complete disappearance of those lobes? . . . It must be that there is something immaterial, permanent, always present, independent of matter. This something else is the soul.92
Caillié followed this long passage from Bernard with an admonition to those who had ignored the metaphysical side of the great physiologist, almost apologizing for having to enlist such a big name to support his claim: “Certainly, these words come from the mouth of an authority, a high authority. But none are so deaf as those who refuse to hear, nor none so blind as those who refuse to see.” The pleading and defensive tone was not altogether different from Zola’s in “The Experimental Novel.”
An 1892 open letter to the psychologist and occultist Jules Bois, published in another short-lived symbolist journal called Le chimère, provided its readers with a similarly nuanced view of the latest developments in positivism. Its author, Pierre Dévoluy, criticized the narrow presentation of positivism in the recent work of Charles Richet, who would himself go on to seek a unity of science and spiritualism, performing extensive experiments with mediums under the banner of what he called metapsychics (la métapsychique). Positivism, Dévoluy argued, should not be conflated with materialism, nor should it be simplistically opposed to idealism: “Positivism is sometimes purposely confused with materialism: but this is the crudest of errors (one that naturalism bumps up against, for example). But they are like day and night. . . . To oppose idealism to positivism is another great heresy. I fervently believe that the youth of tomorrow will be positivist in this larger sense of the word.”93 Naturalism may at times have confused positivism with materialism, but the greatest positivists (Dévoluy cited Bacon, Descartes, and Darwin alongside Comte, Strada, and Spencer), he insisted, were scientists of subjectivity, faith, and the unknown.
Édouard Schuré’s The Great Initiates, published in 1889, dramatically demonstrates the continuing currency of idealist strains of positivism at the fin de siècle, and it reflects the ongoing hagiographic role ascribed to Bernard on the basis of his experimental method, in particular its recent application to psychology via the pathological method. Schuré’s book, widely read by the Nabis and owned by both August Strindberg and Edvard Munch, describes how the “great initiates” throughout history, including Rama, Isis, Moses, Plato, and Jesus, sought to understand the universal truths of humankind.94 Schuré introduced his text by deploring a tragic lack of spiritual understanding in contemporary society. He lamented the fractured relationships among religion, science, and philosophy. Religion had enclosed itself in dogma and become powerless in the face of the impressive advances made by science, while science had become arrogant in the wake of its recent successes. Philosophy, for its part, had relinquished its responsibility of mediating between religion and science and had retreated into skepticism. The only way forward, in Schuré’s view, was the reconciliation of religion and science, with philosophy as helpmate.
At the outset of his text, Schuré offered an epigraph from Bernard that will by now be familiar to the reader: “I am persuaded that a day will come, when the physiologist, the poet, and the philosopher will all speak the same language and will all understand each other.”95 Mobilizing Bernard once again, not just as an authority but as the authority to guide this imminent reconciliation, Schuré put his text under the sign of experimental method. The epigraph set the stage for Schuré’s avowal of experimental science as a “great intellectual force” that nevertheless had been so “dazzled” by its power in the physical realm that it had lost sight of the “psychic and intellectual worlds.” Fortunately, though, Schuré sensed a growing tendency to associate matter with the idea of a force, which, just as Caillié also hoped, would lead to a renewal of spiritualism. Schuré further argued that experimental psychology, the most promising of the new experimental sciences, supported this shift in human consciousness. An outgrowth of physiology, the new psychology, despite its initial injunction against metaphysics, was thus poised to provide knowledge of another world, that of the soul. Its investigations of somnambulism, automatism, and hypnosis, in particular, had already dealt a severe blow to vulgar materialism. Schuré made clear that science’s methods were entirely sound; science simply needed to follow the lead of experimental psychology by continuing to widen its scope.
In his introduction, Schuré spoke directly to contemporary artists, encouraging them to see themselves as playing a role in this development. Viewing the impending transition as a conversion of base naturalism into an exalted new relationship with “Nature,” Schuré heralded the “sanctification” of nature of which Maurice Denis would write in his “Définition du néo-traditionnisme” the following year. While both realism and decadence had debased nature, Schuré argued, “systematically negating the soul and the intellect,” he predicted that a new generation of artists would soon return to an “unconscious esotericism.”96 Schuré’s text is one of the most useful guides to understanding how an artist, seeking to produce work to be read as symbolist, could simultaneously adhere to positivism, certain strains of naturalism, and even a form of materialism, as well as idealism, spiritualism, spiritism, and esotericism. It was a complex and often contradictory cocktail of belief systems held together by a seemingly unshakeable belief in the expediency and efficacy of experimental method. What greater proof of experimentalism as a fundamental good, as an essentially right way to reach something called the truth, than Bernard’s own hopes for a future reconciliation between physiologists, philosophers, and poets?
Obviously, the antipositivist position of G.-Albert Aurier laid out in my introduction should not be taken to indicate a wholesale antipositivism among symbolists.97 But even Aurier’s position was not nearly as dogmatic as is often assumed. His most polemical text, the 1892 article “The Symbolists,” is a little too insistent on oversimplified oppositions between art that is “exclusively materialist, experimental, and immediate” and a “new, idealist, and mystical art.” In the same essay, Aurier implied that his views were less strident than they might at first seem, when he referred to “false science,” in the clear implication that there might actually be a “true science.”98 In another text, Aurier gave a sense of what that “true science” might be—a science based, paradoxically, on nescience: “the cherished naïveté of the Primitives who translated, as far as they were capable, with such a touching ignorance . . . that I call THE TRUE SCIENCE, so many great and deep-seated psychologies.”99 Aurier was not about to embrace experimental psychology or an “experimental art,” but the terms under which he could imagine a “true science” included unexpected echoes of the language with which experimental psychology would be approached by other artists and critics active within symbolist circles.
Indeed, much is made, in symbolist theory and criticism, of “false science,” “banal and petty naturalism,” “worn-out positivism,” and “vulgar materialism.”100 But such qualifiers leave much room for these concepts and constructions to be reappropriated and regenerated. The problem was not science, or even necessarily positivism, but how science and positivism had been used, the kinds of questions their adherents had asked, and the kinds of problems to which they had been applied. The tools of science, however, such as experimentalism and the pathological method, remained authoritative and available for higher moral and aesthetic purposes. Although Zola had opposed naturalism to idealism in literature, he had nevertheless held the experimental method up as a new modern ideal, a method capable of verifying and objectifying individual ideas to the point of universal truths. Experimental method converted ideas into knowledge. It weeded out the untruthful ideas and transformed the best ideas of geniuses into indisputable scientific facts. The allure of this idealizing view of experiment, and the concomitant idealization of experimentalism for critical and aesthetic discourse, intensified with the institutionalization of experimental psychology. In the writings of Laforgue, Kahn, and Hennequin, as well as in the spiritualist, idealist, and esoteric discourses exemplified by Caillié, Dévoluy, and Schuré, experimentalism provided an unassailable way forward toward new aesthetic goals, including those of the emerging symbolist avant-gardes.
Experimentalism, as incarnated by Bernard, is less a red thread winding its way through my narrative and more of an arrow. For the writers, critics, and theorists discussed, its aim was true. Its authority as a method for determining human truths virtually unquestioned from the time of the Introduction, it guided late nineteenth-century writers of different aesthetic positions toward an imagined destiny, the discovery and determination of universal truths about humankind. Its authority in relation to both aesthetics and art making was established by the second half of the 1880s, not as a metaphor for the new, or as an allegorical appeal to the allure of science, but as a real, workable approach to “objectifying the subjective,” modeled above all on experimental psychology and nature’s experiments.