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- Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.
FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side
from ‘Thyrsis’
Arthur Symons
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
Edited with an introduction byMatthew Creasy
Contents
Acknowledgements
For permission to reproduce Symons’ writings, thanks are due to Brian Read on behalf of the Literary Estate of Arthur Symons. Thanks for help and assistance are also due to staff at Glasgow University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Moody and Jones Libraries at Baylor University and the British Library. I’m grateful to the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow for a period of research leave in 2012 to complete this project. Gratitude is also due to Helen Tookey at Carcanet for editorial support and tolerance. Thanks also go to my wife and children for their love and patience while I was working on this volume.
Introduction
Some books change your life. In December 1908, while still an undergraduate in his junior year at Harvard, T.S. Eliot took down a new volume from the shelves of the Harvard Union. The Symbolist Movement in Literature by Arthur Symons contained eight essays on individual nineteenth-century French writers, from Gérard de Nerval to the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. Although Eliot was already studying French literature under Irving Babbitt, Symons’ book was, he later recalled, ‘a revelation’:
But if we can recall the time when we were ignorant of the French symbolists, and met with The Symbolist Movement in Literature, we remember that book as an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a revelation. After we have read Verlaine and Laforgue and Rimbaud and return to Mr. Symons’ book, we may find that our own impressions dissent from his. The book has not, perhaps, a permanent value for the one reader, but it has led to results of permanent importance for him.1
Eliot’s use of ‘we’ here is most likely editorial, but he was speaking for his peers too. For The Symbolist Movement was Symons’ most popular book: Mary Colum describes how undergraduates in Dublin ‘devoured’ it,2 amongst them James Joyce, whose biographer suggests that it set him reading and translating Paul Verlaine and packed him off to Paris at the end of 1902 in search of literary exile.3 Mallarmé too was to prove a lifelong interest for Joyce because of The Symbolist Movement, and Ezra Pound would describe Symons as one of his ‘gods’ (along with Plato, Dante, Longinus and others) in 1911.4
Eliot’s criticisms of Symons, however, may also be representative. Although Joyce became indebted to Symons for aid in publishing his first collection of poems, Chamber Music, he expressed doubts about him privately. Eliot’s sense of obligation was strong enough for him to credit Symons on a number of occasions, both in public and privately: he even made a point of expressing his ‘his peculiar debt of gratitude’ directly, while corresponding with Symons as editor of the Criterion.5 But on each occasion that he acknowledged Symons’ influence in print, Eliot qualified his praise, noting that ‘it was a very good book for its time’, but expressing the hope that Peter Quennel’s Baudelaire and the Symbolists would render it obsolete;6 remarking subsequently: ‘as criticism I cannot say that Symons’ book stands the test of time’.7 Eliot was scrupulous on these occasions to credit Symons with stimulating his desire to read more about the writers discussed in The Symbolist Movement (‘it did make the reader want to read the poets Mr. Symons wrote about’), but also to point out the limits of Symons’ study, observing the absence of Tristan Corbière from the book and querying the inclusion of Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Maeterlinck.8
Eliot’s critical response to The Symbolist Movement both confirms its importance and sheds some light on the relative neglect of Symons’ work in the twentieth century. While scholars are aware of his work, Symons’ writings have generally languished after their brief period of popularity at the start of the twentieth century. His prose has found a small amount of space in anthologies, but otherwise remained out of print: this volume is the first new print edition of The Symbolist Movement in over 50 years and the only version to pay much attention to the accuracy of the text since Symons first published it. This may be attributed to the kinds of fault identified by Eliot: it may stem from the adverse effects upon Symons’ reputation after the mental breakdown he experienced in 1908, or it may be because Symons’ status as a critic and poet of the fin de siècle fits poorly with some critical models of Modernist writing as a decisive break with its immediate precursors – models which are now being scrutinised and questioned.9
Dwelling retrospectively on his reservations, Eliot gives only limited credit to the intensity of his response to Symons’ book when he first read it.10 As they are preserved in the notebook known as Inventions of the March Hare, Eliot’s early poems bristle with allusions to Jules Laforgue, the strongest immediate poetic influence upon Eliot at the time. But other poets discussed by Symons stimulated allusions, echoes and poetic re-workings too. And these allusions and influences converge: written in November 1909 and first published in the Harvard Advocate on 12 January 1910, the opening line of Eliot’s early poem ‘Humouresque’ (‘One of my marionettes is dead’) borrows directly from the first line of the second stanza of ‘Locutions des Pierrots’ (‘encore un de mes pierrots morts’), which Symons had quoted in full in The Symbolist Movement. But, as Christopher Ricks observes, Eliot’s substitution of ‘marionettes’ for ‘pierrots’ is also indebted to Symons’ discussion of Maeterlinck’s use of masks and puppets in his Symbolist plays.11 The confluence suggests the way in which Symons lies behind Eliot’s encounter with both writers.
‘Humouresque’ is subtitled ‘After J. Laforgue’ and Eliot remained clear throughout his life about Laforgue’s role in his discovery of a poetic voice at this formative period in his artistic career, noting that he ‘was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’.12 But he gives little credit to Symons for shaping his understanding of Laforgue’s distinctive poetic vocabulary, which Symons described as
a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious. It is really vers libre, but at the same time correct verse, before vers libre had been invented. (p. 54)
This might also be a description of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, with its shifting registers and vocabulary and the varying rhythms and line-lengths that embody the tortured self-consciousness of the speaker. Even the terms of Eliot’s sense of ‘revelation’ at his first encounter with Laforgue through The Symbolist Movement may owe something to Symons, who describes Laforgue’s prose as a ‘discovery’ (p. 56).
The influence runs deep: Symons’ description of ‘this art of Laforgue’ as ‘an art of the nerves […] it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys’ (p. 57) helps provide Prufrock with a memorable image (‘as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen’), but also suggests a fragile sensibility that would echo in Eliot’s other mature verse (‘my nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad’) and sketches a restless urban impulse that informs the opening to ‘Prufrock’ (‘Let us go then, you and I’) and beyond. As Barry Faulk has argued, in teaching Eliot to read Laforgue, Symons may also have taught him how to read life in the modern metropolis.13
Eliot is undoubtedly right that Symons’ book has its weaknesses: even Frank Kermode describes it as ‘scrappy’ and ‘often disagreeably imprecise’, while crediting Symons with a key role in the development of the Symbolist ‘Image’ in modern poetry.14The Symbolist Movement has a resonance within the twentieth century that includes Symons’ role in prompting major figures such as Joyce and Eliot to read nineteenth-century poetry and form their own judgements, but its significance also extends beyond this. Murray Pittock, for example, has claimed that Symons’ influence is not to be found in ‘explicit endorsements, but in the amount of critical writing which agrees with its theoretic assumptions’.15The Symbolist Movement, then, does not simply mediate between French literature and English speakers; it mediates between the fin de siècle and Modernism.
***
Eliot is unlikely to have been ignorant of The Symbolist Movement before he read it. Although it was the first version published in the United States, the copy he picked up in the Harvard Union was not the first edition, which had been published in London eight years earlier. What’s more, by the end of the nineteenth century, its author had a reputation as a Decadent poet as well as a critic. In 1895, reviewing Symons’ second collection of poems, London Nights, an anonymous critic in the Pall Mall Gazette had dismissed him as ‘a very dirty-minded man’ who recorded his ‘squalid and inexpensive amours’ in verse.16 His poem ‘Stella Amaris’, which purports to recall a one-night stand with a prostitute in terms invoking comparisons with the Virgin Mary, came in for particular censure.
His reputation in the 1890s as a Decadent writer may seem a long way from Symons’ roots as the son of a dissenting Wesleyan minister and his first literary obsession with the works of Robert Browning. Encouraged in his literary pursuits early by a young schoolteacher, Charles Churchill Osbourne, Symons joined the Browning Society aged 16 and published an essay on ‘Robert Browning as a Religious Poet’ in the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine aged 18. Through his new connections to the scholarly founder of the Browning Society, Frederick J. Furnivall, Symons then found editorial work, writing introductions to Shakespeare’s plays and longer poems. This led to further editorial work with Havelock Ellis on the Mermaid Series of Elizabethan plays and a slow but steady succession of commissions to write reviews for literary periodicals in London then followed.
Although Symons’ first book of published criticism was a study of Browning, a crucial and formative influence upon him at this time was the Oxford aesthete, Walter Pater, whose style was a conscious ‘model’ for Symons’ own.17 As he found increasing amounts of work writing for publications such as the National Review, so he obtained increasing access to literary circles. In June 1887 Symons reviewed Pater’s Imaginary Portraits for the Athenaeum; the next year they began corresponding and met in person. Having read his review of Pater, Oscar Wilde contacted Symons, suggesting he contribute to Woman’s World; Symons sent in poems and published his first essay on French literature there in 1889, an enthusiastic profile of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (although Wilde was no longer editor by that point). Pater played an important role here too, as an exponent of European literature. Having written about eighteenth-century French art in Imaginary Portraits, Pater took an increasing interest in more recent French writers, encouraging Symons’ own interests, and telling him that ‘the present age’ was ‘an unfavourable one to poets, at least in England’.18
The year after he met Pater, in September 1889, Symons made his first journey to Paris in the company of Havelock Ellis. This short trip was followed by a longer visit the next year from March to June 1890, during which the two men met with major French writers including Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and J.-K. Huysmans, who were all to feature prominently in Symons’ critical writings.
At about this time, Symons was encouraged to join the Rhymers’ Club, a group of contemporary poets including W.B. Yeats, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson that met at the Cheshire Cheese pub in London. Having published his first collection of poetry, Days and Nights, in 1889, he published Silhouettes in 1892, revising it in 1896 to add a selection of his own translations from Verlaine. Through such social and literary connections and his ongoing journalistic activities Symons began to make a name for himself, alongside George Moore and Edmund Gosse, as an exponent of French literary styles and influences in his own right. As French décadence caught the imagination of English writers, Symons contributed to the Yellow Book, and published his essay ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ in an American periodical, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine during June 1893.19 When the publishers of the Yellow Book fired Aubrey Beardsley for his risqué illustrations, in the wake of Wilde’s prosecution for ‘gross indecency’ in 1895, Symons contrived with Beardsley and his publisher, Leonard Smithers, to start their own periodical, the Savoy. Although short-lived (only six issues appeared between January and December 1896), Symons managed to pack the Savoy with work by Ellis, Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm and Joseph Conrad (among others), as well as publishing his own essays, poetry and translations from Verlaine and Mallarmé. The final issue included an advertisement for a book-length critical study by Symons, The Decadent Movement in Literature. Scheduled for publication in 1897, this would not appear for three years and under a different title: although the title page says 1899, The Symbolist Movement in Literature was actually published on 5 March 1900, alongside another collection of poetry, Images of Good and Evil.
***
Symons’ change of title is remarkable given that he had explicitly argued at the start of ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ that both Impressionism and Symbolism were subordinate to ‘that new kind of literature which is perhaps more broadly characterised by the word Decadence’ (p. 169). In contrast, The Symbolist Movement begins with a disparaging reference to ‘something which is vaguely called Decadence’ (p. 7) and the observation that ‘no doubt perversity of form and perversity of matter are often found together’ (p. 7). Symons does not merely fail to acknowledge his previous essay, he reverses his position. When the anonymous reviewer attacked London Nights four years previously in the Pall Mall Gazette, Symons had considered legal redress, then opted to answer his critic by writing a preface to the second edition in which he defended his right to depict any subject matter he chose. He attacked critics who had condemned the ‘bad morality’ of his poems, asserting ‘the liberty of art’:
I deny that morals have any right of jurisdiction over it. Art may be served by morality, it can never be its servant. For the principles of art are eternal, while the principles of morality fluctuate with the spiritual ebb and flow of the ages.20
Although lacking Wilde’s poise and wit, this defence of aesthetic over moral considerations recalls the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) (‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’), offering a hint of paradox in the insistence that it is morality that is relative and fluctuating rather than the ‘principles of art’.
This was not a simple appeal for artistic freedom. In The Symbolist Movement he remarks dismissively that the term ‘Decadence’ is ‘rarely used with any precise meaning’ and is ‘usually either hurled as a reproach or hurled back as a defiance’ (p. 7). He might have been describing his own earlier self: as Denis Denisoff remarks, publishing ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ in 1893 had established Symons as ‘the individual most devoted to explaining the workings of decadence to the English audience’.21 In this context, his famous description of Decadence as ‘a new and beautiful and interesting disease’ may itself be construed as an act of ‘defiance’ in response to Richard Le Gallienne’s dismissal of decadence as ‘limited thinking, often insane thinking’.22 Symons’ rhythm and syntax suggest a conscious attempt to shock here, trotting out the word ‘disease’ as a kind of punch-line.
Even the adoption of the term ‘Decadence’ itself implies a reaction of some kind – a determination to turn a negative trait (decline) into an affirmation. This is clear from the immediate context of Symons’ claim:
[…] it has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence: 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 to-day, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful and interesting disease. (p. 169)
Having alluded to the formal characteristics of Decadence (‘refinement’), Symons evokes a debate about the relative merits of classicism against romanticism, one that Modernists such as T.E. Hulme would revive twenty years later. His description of Decadence as a disease is offered, then, as an affirmation of its positive qualities against the model of ‘the classic’ as he describes it, indicating that his essay was reactive and defensive in precisely the manner he would later disparage.
This reactive quality is, however, part of the importance of Symons’ earlier essay, which should not simply be seen as superseded by The Symbolist Movement. For behind a debate about literary terms, Symons is attempting what Nietzsche would call a transvaluation of values. Nietzsche’s assault on what he perceived as the tyranny of false values imposed on society by Christianity is strongly rooted in an understanding that language and customary forms of speech play a significant role in imposing those values. This is clear from his famous description of ‘truth’ as ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms’:
[…] truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.23
In comparison, when Symons subordinates Impressionism and Symbolism to Decadence, he argues that what they have in common is their ‘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’ (pp. 170–71). Symons claims Impressionism achieves this through a fidelity to the immediacy of the senses and experience, whereas Symbolism accesses through symbols intuitions of those aspects of experience which escape direct expression through language. Decadence, for Nietzsche, meant cultural decline: at best, the work of French Decadents offered diagnosis of this.24 In contrast, Symons presents it as a capacity (uniting Symbolism and Impressionism) within art to resist decline through a resistance to verbal lassitude. In this respect, he confirms Linda Dowling’s argument in Language and Decadence in the Fin de Siècle (1986) that the shocking power of Decadence lies within language itself. The disquiet expressed by critics of Decadence about the morals of its practitioners becomes an unease about the effect of its linguistic transformations upon the ‘traditional forms’ of moral expression.
***
Had Symons sustained this robust level of argument, he might be more clearly seen as anticipating Modernist attitudes towards language and cliché in the writings of, say, Bergson and Hulme. But the reversal in The Symbolist Movement is complete and Decadence is relegated to an ‘interlude – half a mock-interlude’:
It pleased some young men in various countries to call themselves Decadents, with all the thrill of unsatisfied virtue masquerading as uncomprehended vice. As a matter of fact, the term is in its place only when applied to style; to that ingenious deformation of the language, in Mallarmé for instance, which can be compared with what we are accustomed to call the Greek and Latin of the Decadence. No doubt perversity of form and perversity of matter are often found together, and, among the lesser men especially, experiment was carried far, not only in the direction of style. (p. 7)
Where Symons had previously positioned ‘Decadence’ as an over-arching term, its range here is severely curtailed, not simply to ‘style’, but to a highly specific form of style associated with Mallarméan obscurities. Symons drops any pretention that Decadence might shatter convention, falling back upon conventional moral language himself (‘virtue… vice’) and insinuating that departure from moral conventions might be weakness (‘lesser men’). Little wonder, then, that some critics have understood Symons’ rejection of Decadence in favour of Symbolism as a pragmatic response to Wilde’s persecution for his sexuality in 1895 and a retreat from his previous defence of liberty in his choice of subject matter. On this reading Decadence was too dangerous to espouse, too open to censorship.25
There are points of continuity, though, between Symons’ writings. His denunciation of ‘lesser’ writers for example echoes his previous disdain for ‘separate cliques, noisy, brainsick young people who haunt the brasseries of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and exhaust their ingenuities in theorising over the works they cannot write’ (p. 169).26 Accordingly, it’s important to realise that Symons’ critical writings have limited value as literary history. For, beyond the accounts he gives of individual authors, his reference to the existence of le décadence and le symbolisme in France are confined to disparaging remarks about ‘busy little littérateurs who are founding new revues every other week in Paris’:
These people have nothing to say, but they are resolved to say something, and to say it in the newest mode. They are Impressionists because it is the fashion, Symbolists because it is the vogue, Decadents because Decadence is in the very air of the cafés. (p. 177)
Jean Moréas, author of the manifesto ‘Le Symbolisme’, is mentioned only to belittle his poetic vanity for pursuing excessive line lengths; Gustave Kahn features only in passing references; and none of the contemporary journals associated with these movements receives any detailed treatment. Symons’ understanding of the term ‘movement’, then, is ideal and largely retrospective: of the writers he discusses: only Maeterlinck and Huysmans were alive when the first edition of The Symbolist Movement was published and Huysmans died shortly before the second edition appeared in 1908.
In bibliographical notes at the end of the book, Symons identifies his concern with ‘ideas rather than with facts’; each essay, he suggested, ‘is a study of a problem, only in part a literary one, in which I have endeavoured to consider writers as personalities under the action of spiritual forces, or as themselves so many forces’ (p. 218). This reference to ‘spiritual forces’ indicates the most significant shift between ‘The Decadent Movement’ and The Symbolist Movement. Previously, he had described Symbolism as a matter of ‘intuition’: ‘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’ (p. 170). Subsequently his terms changed:
It is all an attempt to spiritualise literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority. Description is banished that beautiful things may be evoked, magically; the regular beat of verse is broken in order that words may fly, upon subtler wings. (p. 8)
This passage from Symons’ introduction to The Symbolist Movement crystallises several of its central concerns and draws from the terms he uses elsewhere in the book to describe his chosen writers. The reference to ‘rhetoric’ in this passage preserves the vestiges of Symons’ previous argument about ‘the ready-made of language’, but it now reverberates with his own description of Verlaine’s formal revolution and mastery of vers impairs elsewhere in the volume. Before Verlaine, Symons observes, French verse was an admirable vehicle for ‘a really fine, a really poetical, kind of rhetoric’ (p. 45). The word ‘exteriority’ has a similar resonance, recalling Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s rejection of positivism and materialist philosophies as ‘that old exteriority’ in favour of idealism, quoted by Symons from Axël.
On this reading, Symbolism no longer ‘flashes’ intuitions, it ‘evokes’ – a curiously intransitive term at times for Symons, associated with Mallarmé, whose gift was, he suggests, ‘to evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of language’ (p. 68). However, where he had previously referred to ‘the deeper meaning of things evident’, in The Symbolist Movement Symons refers repeatedly to ‘the spiritual world’ or ‘the spiritual universe’. Hence Tom Gibbons’ description of Symons’ appeal to these ‘spiritual forces’ as ‘amongst others things a public declaration of conversion’ to a new faith in mysticism.27
Symons was explicit about this new direction (‘I speak often in this book of Mysticism’), in dedicating the volume to Yeats, whom he anticipates as a ‘perfectly sympathetic reader’ (p. 4). The two men met in 1890 through the Rhymers’ Club and ended up sharing lodgings during 1895 at Symons’ apartments in Fountain Court within Temple, the legal district of London. During 1896 they travelled together, to Ireland and to Paris, where they attended a performance of Alfred Jarry’s controversial play, Ubu roi. Yeats had very poor skills in the French language and, reflecting on their friendship twenty-five years later, acknowledged his debt to Symons for reading and translating Verlaine and Mallarmé to him.28
In return, Yeats shared his own reading in mysticism with Symons: he had taken a keen interest in Spiritualism and Theosophy since helping to found the Dublin Hermetic Order in 1885 and in 1890 became an active member of the mystical organisation, the Order of the Golden Dawn, under the charismatic leadership of MacGregor Mathers (author of The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887)).29 Indeed, on their trip to Ireland, the two men came to believe during a stay at Tillyra Castle in August 1896 that Yeats’ attempts to invoke ‘lunar forces’ had inspired Symons with his own visionary dream of a female figure, related to the Goddess Diana.30 Yeats’ correspondence confirms his role in Symons’ burgeoning interest in mysticism. On 10 December 1897, he wrote to George Russell that
Symons is becoming more & more of a mystical writer. He is writing now about a French Mystic who ‘lost the whole world & gained his own soul’ or in other words went mad. He is living almost a strict life too.31
This ‘French Mystic’ is Gérard de Nerval, subject of the first essay in The Symbolist Movement, originally published in the Fortnightly Review in 1898 and quoted here. Yeats’ letter is suggestive about Symons’ decision to place the essay on Nerval at the start of the book, both establishing Nerval’s historical role as a Romantic precursor to the Symbolist Movement and providing an immediate connection with the importance of mystical concerns to the collection as a whole.
The timing of Yeats’ letter provides some perspective on the process of Symons’ interest in mysticism. But his increasing interest in related topics is also witnessed by the particular aspects of his chosen writers that Symons singles out. For example, where Symons had discussed Maeterlinck’s drama in ‘The Decadent Movement’, his essay ‘Maeterlinck as a Mystic’ in The Symbolist Movement addresses the Belgian author’s prose writings, specifically Le Trésor des humbles. In The Symbolist Movement, Symons memorably describes À Rebours as ‘the breviary of the decadence’ (p. 73), consolidating a comparison he had first made in an article from 1892, where he describes Des Esseintes, Huysmans’ protagonist, as
[…] a type rather than a man: he is the offspring of the Decadent art that he adores, and this book a sort of breviary for its worshippers. It has a place of its own in the literature of the day, for it sums up, not only a talent, but a spiritual epoch.32
In contrast, The Symbolist Movement examines those novels written after À Rebours (some of which had admittedly not been published in 1892), detailing Huysmans’ return to Catholicism. Symons concentrates in particular upon La Cathédrale and Huysmans’ fascination with the cathedral at Chartres as place of worship, art object and symbol.
The sequence of Symons’ writings confirms Yeats’ understanding of his interest in mystical questions as ongoing. This shift in perspective even affects the resonance of Walter Pater. Previously, ‘The Decadent Movement’ had compared Pater and W.E. Henley with their French contemporaries, but The Symbolist Movement does not discuss any writers in English. Pater’s influence is, however, felt throughout the volume through passing allusions (Symons is fond of citing passages cited fondly by Pater) and within its rhythmic, repetitive prose style, particularly in Symons’ conclusion to the volume, which begins:
Our only chance, in this world, of a complete happiness, lies in the measure of our success in shutting the eyes of the mind, and deadening its sense of hearing, and dulling the keenness of its apprehension of the unknown. (p. 88)
This clearly echoes Pater’s declaration in his ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance that, given the brevity of human life, ‘our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time’. The answer for Pater lies in ‘the love of art for art’s sake’ which promises ‘frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass’.33 As Patricia Clements points out, Symons owes a clear ‘formal debt’ to Pater, both in terms of style and in terms of his preoccupation with mortality and the consequences of humanity’s awareness of its mortality. But, as Clements observes, these echoes also serve to emphasise the difference between their conclusions.34 Pater advocates a sensual indulgence in ‘pulsations’ and values art as a means of amplifying pleasure and thus lengthening lived experience. But Symons values Symbolism in art as a source of ex-stasis: instead of amplifying sensation or pleasure, it aids us to ‘realise the infinite insignificance of action, its immense distance from the current of life […] On this theory alone does all life become worth living, all art worth making, all worship worth offering’ (p. 90). Given Symons’ previous reputation as a poet and critical advocate of Decadence, the unfolding of the latter sentence must have surprised some readers, as it moves from ‘life’ to ‘art’ to ‘worship’. The distance from Pater, his mentor and stylistic model, is pronounced and his newfound interest in mysticism given prominence.
***
The reference to Symons’ essay on Nerval in Yeats’ letter provides a reminder of the volume’s origins in his prolific career as a literary journalist. During 1898, for example, he published 45 contributions to journals and periodicals, a pamphlet on Aubrey Beardsley and a translation of L’Aube by Émile Verhaeren. All of the essays in The Symbolist Movement, except for the introduction and conclusion, had been published previously in periodicals, as Symons’ changing response to Huysmans confirms. Where Symons lauds À Rebours in ‘The Decadent Movement’, his focus on La Cathédrale in The Symbolist Movement can partly be attributed to the fact that considerable portions of the text derive from his review of that novel, in the Saturday Review on 12 February 1898. The title of this article, ‘M. Huysmans’ New Novel’, betrays its responsive nature, pointing to the role that occasion and external events may have played in the shaping of Symons’ book.
The influence of occasion upon Symons’ criticism includes the outlets available to him for journalistic publication. He wrote another twenty articles and reviews for the Saturday Review in 1898 and had published three other pieces on Huysmans in previous years, including the account of À Rebours in ‘The Decadent Movement’ and a previous article on ‘M. Huysmans as Mystic’ for the Saturday Review in 1895. So it is possible that the eventual shape of his essay on Huysmans in The Symbolist Movement was determined by the commissioning editor at the Saturday Review who asked Symons to cover Huymans’s latest book, as a regular contributor with a reputation for writing about French topics.
The Saturday Review played an important role here more generally, for the essays on Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Laforgue were also first published there or contain material that appeared there. At first glance, this may seem surprising, for the Saturday Review had been established in 1855 by Alexander James Beresford Beresford Hope, MP, to cover important political, social and cultural issues exclusively in reviews and leading articles. It appeared weekly in order to offer a more regular, responsive alternative to older, established monthly periodicals such as the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review. Remarkably successful, by 1868 its weekly circulation exceeded 10,000, becoming ‘an index of leading critical opinion and […] an influence upon literary taste’, according to Merle Bevington.35 This conservative vessel for ‘the voice of the educated upper middle class’ does not sound like an ideal venue for a writer, such as Symons, associated with an advanced, transgressive and foreign movement such as Decadence or Symbolism.36
In 1894, however, the magazine was bought by charismatic, Irish-born American editor and journalist Frank Harris for £560.37 Prior to this, in the 1880s, the Saturday Review had become moribund, sustained only by the remnants of its reputation from the 1860s. The period of Walter Herries Pollock’s editorship from 1883 to 1894 had been one of ‘steady decline’.38 But Symons’ first contributions to the Saturday Review coincide exactly with the arrival of Harris: he may even have been deliberately brought in to help with the magazine’s renewal, as part of a team of young, bright journalistic contributors that included H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm.
Laurel Brake has described Harris’s instrumental role in publishing work by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde previously in The Fortnightly Review, pointing out that Wilde first published ‘The Truth of Masks’ and ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison’ there under Harris’s editorship. He was, Brake suggests, open to ‘Wilde’s libertine, provocative and light-hearted defence of the aesthetic perfection of the life of a murderer and forger’.39 More generally, his liberalism as editor was amenable to French literature. The period of his editorship at the Saturday Review, then, gave Symons an outlet for his own material of this kind.
Confronted with a literary text in the singular form of a book, it can be easy to overlook the diverse factors of this kind which went into its making. This is a general truth that book historians and genetic critics have been unpicking for decades now, by exploring the fluid textual processes that lead from an author’s creative decisions to the production of a book and all the agents that may intervene and shape those processes, from publishers to printers and even prospective readers. As Laurel Brake has shown, however, these considerations are heightened when it comes to the genre to which The Symbolist Movement belongs:
[…] the production process whereby writing is translated from the ephemeral of the periodical essay into the permanence of the book engineers the obscuring of the ephemeral characteristics and, most important, origins, even to the original readers of the book.40
The history of the Saturday Review, however, suggests that – in this case, at least – some knowledge of the pre-history of the essays in The Symbolist Movement sheds light on the conditions that made it possible as a book. As a jobbing writer, Symons clearly needed the income from his journalistic activities, but the Saturday Review seems also to have provided a useful ideological and aesthetic outlet for the development of his response to contemporary French writers.
Brake is motivated, though, by the way that such transformations lie at the heart of key critical texts from the nineteenth century: both Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1877) began life as articles or essays published in periodicals. Brake’s concern is that book publication may ‘obscure’ the fractured origins of these apparent monoliths of Victorian critical thinking. But this seems to have been precisely Symons’ intention: his previous volume of criticism, Studies in TwoLiteratures, included an explicit acknowledgement that its contents originated in periodical essays and reviews.41 No such acknowledgement is found in The Symbolist Movement, even though its origins are diverse: the essays on Rimbaud, Laforgue, Huysmans, Verlaine and Mallarmé all derive from material that appeared in the Saturday Review, but Symons’ essays appeared there at intervals over four years. The essay on Huysmans, for example, knits together material from the Saturday Review published in March 1895 and February 1898 and the essay on Mallarmé yokes material published on separate occasions, January 1897 and November 1898, in different publications – the Saturday Review and Fortnightly Review respectively.
The coherence of The Symbolist Movement as a volume rests on the period during 1898 and 1899 when Symons began compiling and revising his material. As the project neared completion and Symons received proofs from his publisher, William Heinemann, he wrote to Yeats in June 1899:
I have rewritten the Laforgue essay, and am in all haste to start on the Rimbaud; and I am even contemplating a new essay on Huysmans – besides the Introduction, and some enlarging of the Villiers. And the book should appear in September!42
His work on Laforgue mostly involved moving bibliographical information from the body of the essay to the notes at the back of the volume, and adding the extensive direct quotations from Laforgue that appealed so strongly to Eliot’s imagination. But elsewhere, Symons clearly took steps to smooth out traces of the journalistic occasions for his original articles. His essay on Verlaine derived largely from an obituary article published on 11 January 1896, three days after the poet’s death. For The Symbolist Movement, Symons altered a phrase which began ‘two years ago’ so that it referred in less relative fashion to 1894, eradicating these ‘ephemeral characteristics’.
Other changes speak to the general themes of the book. In 1898, Symons had generalised about the ‘visionary’ insights granted by Nerval’s experience of mental illness: ‘with the approach of night, even the most sordid and short-sighted of us becomes a little visionary’.43 A year later, his ‘visionary’ terms had shifted subtly: ‘with the approach of night, is not every one a little readier to believe in the mystery lurking behind the world?’ (pp. 12–13). It can be seen from this that the essay where Yeats found the beginnings of Symons’ interests in mysticism is, in its publication history, a palimpsest of his increasing receptivity to ‘mystery’. Symons is not simply smoothing away the origins of his material here, but attempting to work out his central claim for the occult status of Symbolism as an aesthetic and a movement.
***
Laurel Brake’s work on Pater and Arnold helps to confirm that Symons is embedded in nineteenth-century critical practice – both in his activities as a journalist and his attempt to preserve his criticism in the less ‘ephemeral’ form of a book. The journalistic origins of The Symbolist Movement in Literature, then, are inseparable from its status as a work that mediates both between French and English writings and between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They help to connect the contents of Symons’ work with the historical and cultural conditions under which it was produced.
This is one of the reasons that Symons’ book remains important to readers today. Read and absorbed by Eliot and his contemporaries, The Symbolist Movement remains a key source for our understanding of the influence of nineteenth-century French writers upon Modernism, but it is also valuable in its own right as an intervention in late nineteenth-century debates about the value and nature of Symbolism and Decadence, and it is an important witness to critical practice in that period too.
Of course it is not without faults: Symons may not have been wholly successful in forging coherence out of his materials; his understanding of Symbolism is highly individual; and his intimations of mystic truths can be very ambiguous. Upon its publication in 1900, an anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum began by praising The Symbolist Movement for being ‘charmingly written’, but then confessed to experiencing difficulties: ‘We have been unable to extract from what he has written any very lucid or consistent account of what symbolism is supposed to be, or of how it is related to mysticism’.44 Even Yeats found it ‘curiously vague in its philosophy’, although he praised it as ‘really very fine criticism’.45 Symons’ publisher was also cautious, printing a first run of only 750 copies (his first book, An Introduction to the Study of Browning, had a print run of 2000 copies).46
And yet the book sold 250 copies in less than three weeks, bringing Symons temporary celebrity (Mary Colum describes it as the topic of a public debate at University College, Dublin). This popularity spread across the globe: the second edition published in 1908 by Archibald Constable was simultaneously printed in America by E.P. Dutton. There was sufficient demand for the book in America to merit a reprint only two years later. By this time, however, Symons was in a poor condition to benefit: he experienced a mental breakdown while on holiday in Italy during 1908 and although he made an eventual recovery, his career and reputation did not. Other factors no doubt played their role, but it is hard to exclude the stigma associated with mental illness from the general neglect of Symons’ works that followed; and the publication of this volume is in part an invitation to see and reassess his criticism in the original contexts outlined here. The Symbolist Movement in Literature will always be remembered as the book which influenced T.S. Eliot, but its engagement with French writing of the nineteenth century, its place within late nineteenth-century critical practice and its exploration of Symbol and revolutionary poetic forms all repay closer scrutiny.
1 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Perfect Critic’, in The Sacred Wood (London: Faber, 1920), p. 5.
2 Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966), p. 52.
3 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1982), p. 76.
4 See David Hayman, Joyce et Mallarmé: Stylistique de la suggestion, 2 vols. (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1956), pp. 28–32; G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Two Early Letters of Ezra Pound’, American Literature 34:1 (1962), p. 118.
5 T.S. Eliot to Arthur Symons, 14 November 1923, in The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 2. 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (Yale: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 275. The first part of the letter rejects two short stories by Symons for publication in the Criterion.
6 T.S. Eliot, ‘Review of Peter Quennell Baudelaire and the Symbolists’, Criterion 9 (January 1930), p. 357.
7 T.S. Eliot, ‘Foreword’, in Joseph Chiari, Contemporary French Poetry (1952), quoted in Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber, 1997), p. 402.
8 Eliot, ‘Baudelaire and the Symbolists’, p. 357.
9 See, for example, the brisk treatment Meredith Martin gives to clichéd accounts of Modernism’s break with the nineteenth century in The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 2–5.
10 He took immediate action, travelling into Boston in search of a bookshop selling foreign texts, obtaining a copy of Adolphe van Bever and Paul Léautaud’s anthology Les Poètes d’aujourd’hui (1908) and ordering the complete works of Jules Laforgue (he was, he reckoned afterwards, the first person in America to import them).
11 See Ricks’ note to ‘Conversation Galante’, another of Eliot’s poems invoking ‘marionettes’: Inventions of the March Hare, p. 103.
12 T.S. Eliot, ‘What Dante Means to Me’, in To Criticise the Critic (London: Faber, 1965), p. 126.
13 Barry Faulk, ‘T.S. Eliot and the Symbolist City’, in A Companion to T.S. Eliot, ed. David E. Chinitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 31–32.
14 Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957; repr. 2002), pp. 127; 128–29.
15 Murray G.H. Pittock, Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 70.
16 Quoted in Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 118.
17 Symons to Churchill Osborne, 7 May 1885, in Selected Letters, ed. Karl Beckson and John M. Munro (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 16.
18 Arthur Symons, ‘Walter Pater’, in Figures from Several Centuries (London: Constable, 1916), p. 327. This essay was originally published in the Monthly Review in 1906 and subsequently reprinted as an introduction to Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1919. See also John J. Conlon, Walter Pater and the French Tradition (East Brunswick: Associated University Press, 1982), which describes how Pater’s objectives as ‘a public critic’ included ‘the propagation of knowledge about French thought and culture’ (p. 10).
19 Reproduced here in Appendix 1.
20 Arthur Symons, London Nights (London: Leonard Smithers, 2nd edn, 1897), pp. xiii–xiv.
21 Dennis Denisoff, ‘Decadence and Aestheticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 38.
22 Quoted in Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 95.
23 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 146.
24 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Gods, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. xx–xxi.
25 See, for example, R.K.R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), p. 34; Pittock, Spectrum of Decadence, pp. 70–71; and Joseph Bristow, ‘“Sterile Ecstasies”: The Perversity of the Decadent Movement’, in The Ends of Epochs: Essays and Studies 1995 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 65–88.
26 Symons discerns a similar resistance to ‘schools’ within ‘Crise de vers’ in his essay on Mallarmé (p. 69).
27 Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas 1880–1920 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973), p. 68.
28 W.B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (1922), in Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 319–22.
29 See Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life. The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 89–111.
30 ‘Biographical and Historical Appendix’, in The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats: Volume 2 1896–1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly and Deidre Toomey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 658–63.
31 Yeats, CollectedLetters 2, p. 154.
32 Arthur Symons, ‘J.K. Huysmans’, Fortnightly Review 51:303 (March 1892), p. 412. Symons added this essay to The Symbolist Movement in 1919 and it is included here in Section II.
33 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 120–21.
34 Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 203–205.
35 Merle Mowbray Bevington, The Saturday Review 1855–1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. vii.
36 Francesca Benatti, ‘The Saturday Review’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (London: British Library, 2009), p. 558.
37 Philippa Pullar, Frank Harris: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), p. 170.
38 Bevington, The Saturday Review, p. 323.
39 Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 67–68.
40 Brake, Subjugated Knowledges, p. 66.
41 Arthur Symons, Studies in Two Literatures (London: Leonard Smithers, 1897), p. x.
42 To W.B. Yeats, mid-June 1899 (Selected Letters, pp. 130–31).
43 Arthur Symons, ‘The Problem of Gérard de Nerval’, Fortnightly Review 63 (January 1898), p. 84.
44 [Unsigned] ‘Poetry and Mysticism’, Athenaeum (24 March 1900), pp. 360–61.
45 To Lady Gregory, 29 March 1900 (Letters, II, p. 506).
46 Beckson, A Life, p. 193.
A Note on the Text and Annotations
Section I of this edition reprints the text of the second edition of The Symbolist Movement in Literature, published by Constable in 1908. This is substantially the same as the text of the first edition published by Leonard Smithers in 1899, except that it incorporates some minor corrections and one major change: Symons added considerable material to his essay on Huysmans and changed its title from ‘Huysmans as a Symbolist’ to ‘The Later Huysmans’ to reflect, as his endnote records, the emphasis upon that particular phase of Huysmans’ career.
The 1908 text has been chosen as a text corrected by Symons and because it formed the basis of the first American edition of The Symbolist Movement published by E.P. Dutton in the same year; hence the historical value of that edition as the book that T.S. Eliot encountered in the library of the Harvard Union in 1908.
I have supplied translations to French phrases and texts where the sense may not be obvious from the context. Prose translations of poems are my own unless otherwise noted.
Section II supplies the essays that Symons added to The Symbolist Movement in Literature for the 1919 edition. Original publication information is provided in the notes at the back of the book.
Appendix 1 reproduces the text of Symons’ essay ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ as it first appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine during 1893.
Appendix 2 supplies the translations from Mallarmé and Verlaine that Symons added to the 1919 edition.
The Notes section includes Symons’ original endnotes, which contain reference to contemporary translations of his chosen writers, followed by my own annotations providing detail about sources quoted by Symons and unfamiliar points of reference.
The glossary provides information about writers cited by Symons and expands on some key terms relevant to the essays in this book.
The bibliography includes details of English translations of the Symbolist writers as well as works on Symons and general suggestions for further reading.
The Life of Arthur Symons
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
Section I
Essays Included in the 1908 Edition
To W.B. Yeats1
May I dedicate to you this book on the Symbolist movement in literature, both as an expression of a deep personal friendship and because you, more than any one else, will sympathise with what I say in it, being yourself the chief representative of that movement in our country? France is the country of movements, and it is naturally in France that I have studied the development of a principle which is spreading throughout other countries, perhaps not less effectually, if with less definite outlines. Your own Irish literary movement is one of its expressions; your own poetry and A.E.’s poetry belong to it in the most intimate sense.2 In Germany it seems to be permeating the whole of literature, its spirit is that which is deepest in Ibsen, it has absorbed the one new force in Italy, Gabriele d’Annunzio. I am told of a group of Symbolists in Russian Literature,3 there is another in Dutch literature,4 in Portugal it has a little school of its own under Eugenio de Castro;5 I even saw some faint strivings that way in Spain, and the aged Spanish poet Campoamor has always fought on behalf of a ‘transcendental’ art in which we should recognise much of what is most essential in the doctrine of Symbolism.6 How often have you and I discussed all these questions, rarely arguing about them, for we rarely had an essential difference of opinion, but bringing them more and more clearly into light, turning our instincts into logic, digging until we reached the bases of our convictions. And all the while we were working as well as thinking out a philosophy of art; you, at all events, creating beautiful things, as beautiful, it seems to me, as anything that is being done in our time.
And we talked of other things besides art, and there are other sympathies, besides purely artistic ones, between us. I speak often in this book of Mysticism, and that I, of all people, should venture to speak, not quite as an outsider, of such things, will probably be a surprise to many. It will be no surprise to you, for you have seen me gradually finding my way, uncertainly but inevitably, in that direction which has always been to you your natural direction. Still, as I am, so meshed about with the variable and too clinging appearances of things, so weak before the delightfulness of earthly circumstance, I hesitate sometimes in saying what I have in my mind, lest I should seem to be saying more than I have any personal right to say. But what, after all, is one’s personal right? How insignificant a matter to any one but oneself, a matter how deliberately to be disregarded in that surely impersonal utterance which comes to one in one’s most intimate thinking about beauty and truth and the deeper issues of things!
It is almost worth writing a book to have one perfectly sympathetic reader, who will understand everything that one has said, and more than one has said, who will think one’s own thought whenever one has said exactly the right thing, who will complete what is imperfect in reading it, and be too generous to think that it is imperfect. I feel that I shall have that reader in you; so here is my book in token of that assurance.
Arthur Symons London, June 1899
Notes
Further information about names or concepts in bold can be found in the Glossary. Editorial annotations are given after Symons’ own bibliographical notes. He prefaced these with the announcement:
