IMPRESSIONISTIC STORIES
The value of a literary term lies in the comprehensive and precise picture which it calls up in the mind of him who reads it. So we must seek to limit, as well as seize upon, the meaning of this word “impressionistic.”
The first purpose in telling a story would seem to be the pleasure or the profit of the hearer—if we exclude the bore who tells a yarn chiefly to please himself. But a closer scrutiny of certain stories discloses other objects of the narrator, and these may be either subordinate or paramount to considerations of benefit or entertainment. The most important of these artistic purposes is to reproduce in the hearer the full effect which a certain mood, theme, character, situation, incident, or chain of incidents, originally made upon the story-teller himself. When he succeeds in reproducing in others his own feeling, by such means as we shall presently study, he does so by impressionistic means.
Poe, writing in Graham’s Magazine, May, 1842, says: “A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events—as may best aid him in establishing the preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preëstablished design.”
It does not seem probable that Poe meant to speak of impressionism as constituting so much a distinct type of story as to point out its importance as a method in all story-telling; and we must not overlook its usefulness in this respect. Indeed, nearly all good short-stories begin, in the mind of the author, and end, in the spirit of the reader, with a more or less clear and unified impression. Still, certain little fictions are, alike in theme and treatment, so decidedly conceived and told with the purpose of leaving the reader under the spell of a mood, a feeling, a character, or a situation, that they are IMPRESSIONISTIC stories, rather than impressionistic STORIES.
The natural tendency for the impressionistic writer is to subordinate incident and plot to tone—in a word, to emphasize a picture, whether internal or external, rather than a set of happenings, which in dealing with fiction we call the action. So an impressionistic narrative may really tell a story of situation, crisis, and denouement, or, as is more likely to be the case, it may tend decidedly toward the sketch. All depends upon the nature of the theme. Thus, the beauty of sacrifice demands an action to illustrate that abnegation, and all the accessories must serve as high-lights and shadows to bring out this motive in strong relief; but the tone of gloom may be conveyed without even the semblance of a plot.
Now a story may produce a gloomy effect without deliberately picturing an atmosphere of gloom—it may leave the reader with a vague, pessimistic distaste for joy, and yet present no such picture. Or it may marvellously delineate loneliness, without leaving that as the final impression of the story. This is not impressionism, though it may be very good story-telling. Impressionism is conscious art, art prepense, and, as will be seen in the two stories presented as examples in this section, subordinates everything to tonal effect; in other words, the impressionistic story symbolizes in human action some human mood or condition. For this reason such stories are often called stories of symbolism.