The Symbolist Movement in Literature

Arthur Symons, Matthew Creasy

• Publisher: Fyfield Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781847771254
• eBook ISBN: 9781847775450
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1899, The Symbolist Movement in Literature was a highly influential work of criticism, and served to introduce the French Symbolists to an Anglophone readership. Symons' interest in writers such as Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé puts him at the heart of contemporary debates about Decadence and Symbolism in fin-de-siècle literature; but his work was also a formative influence on modernist writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, helping to shape the role of the Image in modernist writing. This new critical edition makes available a key text that has been out of print for over 50 years, and includes the essays that Symons added to the expanded edition of his book in 1919. It also includes an introduction, chronology and notes, together with appendices presenting the full text of Symons' essay The Decadent Movement in Literature' and a selection of his translations of poems by Verlaine and Mallarmé.

Appendix 1

The Decadent Movement in Literature

The latest movement in European literature has been called by many names, none of them quite exact or comprehensive – Decadence, Symbolism, Impressionism, for instance. It is easy to dispute over words, and we shall find that Verlaine objects to being called a Decadent, Maeterlinck to being called a Symbolist, Huysmans to being called an Impressionist. These terms, as it happens, have been adopted as the badge of little separate cliques, noisy, brainsick young people who haunt the brasseries of the Boulevard Saint-Michel,1 and exhaust their ingenuities in theorising over the works they cannot write. But, taken frankly as epithets which express their own meaning, both Impressionism and Symbolism convey some notion of that new kind of literature which is perhaps more broadly characterised by the word Decadence. The most representative literature of the day – the writing which appeals to, which has done so much to form, the younger generation – is certainly not classic, nor has it any relation with that old antithesis of the Classic, the Romantic. After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence:2 an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilising refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity. If what we call the classic is indeed the supreme art – those qualities of perfect simplicity, perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the supreme qualities – then this representative literature of today, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful and interesting disease.

Healthy we cannot call it, and healthy it does not wish to be considered. The Goncourts, in their prefaces, in their Journal, are always insisting on their own pet malady, la névrose [nervous disease]. It is in their work, too, that Huysmans notes with delight, ‘le style tacheté et faisandé’ – high-flavoured and spotted with corruption – which he himself possesses in the highest degree. ‘Having desire without light, curiosity without wisdom, seeking God by strange ways, by ways traced by the hands of men; offering rash incense upon the high places to an unknown God, who is the God of darkness’ – that is how Ernest Hello, in one of his apocalyptic moments, characterises the nineteenth century.3 And this unreason of the soul – of which Hello himself is so curious a victim – this unstable equilibrium, which has overbalanced so many brilliant intelligences into one form or another of spiritual confusion, is but another form of the maladie fin de siècle. For its very disease of form, this literature is certainly typical of a civilisation grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct. It reflects all the moods, all the manners, of a sophisticated society; its very artificiality is a way of being true to nature: simplicity, sanity, proportion – the classic qualities – how much do we possess them in our life, our surroundings, that we should look to find them in our literature – so evidently the literature of a decadence?

Taking the word Decadence, then, as most precisely expressing the general sense of the newest movement in literature, we find that the terms Impressionism and Symbolism define correctly enough the two main branches of that movement. Now Impressionist and Symbolist have more in common than either supposes; both are really working on the same hypothesis, applied in different directions. What both seek is not general truth merely, but la vérité vraie, the very essence of truth – the truth of appearances to the senses, of the visible world to the eyes that see it; and the truth of spiritual things to the spiritual vision. The Impressionist, in literature as in painting, would flash upon you in a new, sudden way so exact an image of what you have just seen, just as you have seen it, that you may say, as a young American sculptor, a pupil of Rodin, said to me on seeing for the first time a picture of Whistler’s, ‘Whistler seems to think his picture upon canvas – and there it is!’ Or you may find, with Sainte-Beuve, writing of Goncourt, the ‘soul of landscape’ – the soul of whatever corner of the visible world has to be realised.4 The Symbolist, in this new, sudden way, would flash upon you the ‘soul’ of that which can be apprehended only by the soul – the finer sense of things unseen, the deeper meanings of things evident. And naturally, necessarily, this endeavour after a perfect truth to one’s impression, to one’s intuition – perhaps an impossible endeavour – has brought with it, in its revolt from ready-made impressions and conclusions, a revolt from the ready-made of language, from the bondage of traditional form, of a form become rigid. In France, where this movement began and has mainly flourished, it is Goncourt who was the first to invent a style in prose really new, impressionistic, a style which was itself almost sensation. It is Verlaine who has invented such another new style in verse.

The work of the brothers De Goncourt – twelve novels, eleven or twelve studies in the history of the eighteenth century, six or seven books about art, the art mainly of the eighteenth century and of Japan, two plays, some volumes of letters and of fragments, and a Journal in six volumes – is perhaps, in its intention and its consequences, the most revolutionary of the century. No one has ever tried so deliberately to do something new as the Goncourts; and the final word in the summing up which the survivor has placed at the head of the Préfaces et Manifestes is a word which speaks of

tentatives, enfin, où les deux frères ont cherchés à faire du neuf, ont fait leurs efforts pour doter les diverses branches de la littérature de quelque chose que n’avaient point songé à trouver leurs prédécesseurs.*

And in the preface to Chérie, in that pathetic passage which tells of the two brothers (one mortally stricken, and within a few months of death) taking their daily walk in the Bois de Boulogne, there is a definite demand on posterity. ‘The search after reality in literature, the resurrection of eighteenth-century art, the triumph of Japonisme – are not these,’ said Jules, ‘the three great literary and artistic movements of the second half of the nineteenth century? And it is we who brought them about, these three movements. Well, when one has done that, it is difficult indeed not to be somebody in the future.’ Nor, even, is this all. What the Goncourts have done is to specialise vision, so to speak, and to subtilise language to the point of rendering every detail in just the form and colour of the actual impression. M. Edmond de Goncourt once said to me – varying, if I remember rightly, an expression he had put into the Journal – ‘My brother and I have invented an opera-glass: the young people nowadays are taking it out of our hands.’

An opera-glass – a special, unique way of seeing things – that is what the Goncourts have brought to bear upon the common things about us; and it is here that they have done the ‘something new,’ here more than anywhere. They have never sought ‘to see life steadily and see it whole’:5 their vision has always been somewhat feverish, with the diseased sharpness of over-excited nerves. ‘We do not hide from ourselves that we have been passionate, nervous creatures, unhealthily impressionable,’ confesses the Journal. But it is this morbid intensity in seeing and seizing things that has helped to form that marvellous style – ‘a style perhaps too ambitious of impossibilities,’ as they admit – a style which inherits some of its colour from Gautier, some of its fine outline from Flaubert, but which has brought light and shadow into the colour, which has softened outline in the magic of atmosphere. With them words are not merely colour and sound, they live. That search after ‘l’image peinte,’ [the painted image] ‘l’épithète rare,’ [the uncommon epithet] is not (as with Flaubert) a search after harmony of phrase for its own sake; it is a desperate endeavour to give sensation, to flash the impression of the moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life. And so, in analysis as in description, they have found out a way of noting the fine shades; they have broken the outline of the conventional novel in chapters with its continuous story, in order to indicate – sometimes in a chapter of half a page – this and that revealing moment, this or that significant attitude or accident or sensation. For the placid traditions of French prose they have had but little respect; their aim has been but one, that of having (as M. Edmond de Goncourt tells us in the preface to Chérie):

une langue rendant nos idées, nos sensations, nos figurations des hommes et des choses, d’une façon distincte de celui-ci ou de celui-là, une langue personnelle, une langue portant notre signature.†

What Goncourt has done in prose – inventing absolutely a new way of saying things, to correspond with that new way of seeing things which he has found – Verlaine has done in verse. In a famous poem, ‘Art Poétique,’ he has himself defined his own ideal of the poetic art:

Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,

Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance!

Oh! la Nuance seule fiance

Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!‡

Music first of all and before all, he insists; and then, not colour, but la nuance, the last fine shade. Poetry is to be something vague, intangible, evanescent, a winged soul in flight ‘toward other skies and other loves.’ To express the inexpressible he speaks of beautiful eyes behind a veil, of the palpitating sunlight of noon, of the blue swarm of clear stars in a cool autumn sky; and the verse in which he makes this confession of faith has the exquisite troubled beauty – ‘sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose’ [‘with nothing in it that poses or poises’] – which he commends as the essential quality of verse. In a later poem of poetical counsel he tells us that art should, first of all, be absolutely clear, absolutely sincere: ‘L’art, mes enfants, c’est d’être absolument soi-même.’ [‘The art, my children, is to be absolutely oneself.’] The two poems, with their seven years’ interval – an interval which means so much in the life of a man like Verlaine – give us all that there is of theory in the work of the least theoretical, the most really instinctive, of poetic innovators. Verlaine’s poetry has varied with his life; always in excess – now furiously sensual, now feverishly devout – he has been constant only to himself, to his own self-contradictions. For, with all the violence, turmoil, and disorder of a life which is almost the life of a modern Villon, Paul Verlaine has always retained that childlike simplicity, and, in his verse, which has been his confessional, that fine sincerity, of which Villon may be thought to have set the example in literature.

Beginning his career as a Parnassian with the Poèmes Saturniens, Verlaine becomes himself, in his exquisite first manner, in the Fêtes Galantes, caprices after Watteau, followed, a year later, by La Bonne Chanson, a happy record of too confident a lover’s happiness. Romances sans Paroles, in which the poetry of Impressionism reaches its very highest point, is more tourmenté, goes deeper, becomes more poignantly personal. It is the poetry of sensation, of evocation; poetry which paints as well as sings, and which paints as Whistler paints, seeming to think the colours and outlines upon the canvas, to think them only, and they are there. The mere magic of words – words which evoke pictures, which recall sensations – can go no further; and in his next book, Sagesse, published after seven years’ wanderings and sufferings, there is a graver manner of more deeply personal confession – that ‘sincerity, and the impression of the moment followed to the letter,’ which he has defined in a prose criticism on himself as his main preference in regard to style.6 ‘Sincerity, and the impression of the moment followed to the letter,’ mark the rest of Verlaine’s work, whether the sentiment be that of passionate friendship, as in Amour; of love, human and divine, as in Bonheur; of the mere lust of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A Note on the Text and Annotations
• The Life of Arthur Symons
• Section I: Essays Included in the 1908 Edition
• Section II: Essays Added to the 1919 Edition
• Appendix 1: The Decadent Movement in Literature
• Appendix 2: Translations Added to the 1919 Edition
• Glossary
• Bibliography and Further Reading
• About the Author
• Copyright