The Symbolist Movement

in the Literature of European Languages

ThIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF

michel bÉNAMOU
ROLAND GRASS
PHILIPPE JULLIAN
VLADIMIR PADWA
IRMA RANTAVAARA
 A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
SPONSORED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION
HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES
SOUS LES AUSPICES DE L’ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE

Coordinating Committee for

A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages
Comité de Coordination de
l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes
2007
President/Président
Randolph Pope (University of Virginia)
Vice-President/Vice-Président
Daniel F. Chamberlain (Queen’s University, Kingston)
Secretary/Secrétaire
Margaret Higonnet (University of Connecticut)
Treasurer/Trésorier
Vivian Liska (University of Antwerp)
Members/Membres assesseurs
Jean Bessière, Inôcencia Mata,
Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Marcel Cornis-Pope,
Elrud Ibsch, Eva Kushner,
Fridrun Rinner, Laura Calvacante Padilha,
Franca Sinopoli, Steven Sondrup,
Svend Eric Larsen, Cynthia Skenazi

Volume II
The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages
Edited by Anna Balakian
The Symbolist Movement
in the Literature
of European Languages
Edited by

Anna Balakian

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Symbolist movement in the literature of European languages / edited by Anna Balakian.
   p.   cm. -- (Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des
littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 2)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Symbolism (Literary movement). 2. Literature, Modern--19th century--History and criticism. 3. Litera-
ture, Modern--20th century--History and criticism.
PN761 .S95   1982
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ISBN 978 963 05 3895 4 (alk. paper) CIP
© 2008 - John Benjamins B.V. / Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée
Published 1982 by Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest
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 G E N E R A L P R E F A C E TO ALL VOLUMES P U B L I S H E D AS P A R T
OF T H E "COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF L I T E R A T U R E S "

This is one of a series of volumes in the "Comparative History of Literatures in European

Languages" (hereafter: "Comparative History") sponsored by the International Com­
parative Literature Association. The "Comparative History" is under the editorial
supervision of a "Coordinating Committee" consisting at present of sixteen scholars
from various countries. The Committee appoints the directors of the particular re­
search projects, issues general guidelines to them, monitors the genesis of the manu­
script, and gives final approval before publication.
The "Comparative History" was launched by the International Comparative Liter­
ature Association in 1967. I t is based,on two fundamental premises: one, t h a t the
writing of literary histories confined to specific nations, peoples or languages must be
complemented by the writing of literary history t h a t coordinates related or compara­
ble phenomena from an international point of view: two, t h a t it is not possible for indi­
vidual scholars to write such comprehensive histories b u t t h a t we must now rely on
structured teamwork drawing collaborators from different nations.
We have tried to select periods or movements in which the transformation of
forms and ideas is lively and promotes an understanding of the historical process in
literature. We have chosen epochs or currents which display a correlation of stylistic
expression, where the fruitfulness of the international give and take (as opposed to the
idea of national preeminence) can be demonstrated, and, through the comparative ap­
proach, significant analogies and contrasts pointed out.
Within these principles and criteria, the scholars entrusted with each project are
given the latitude needed to p u t together the best possible volume under the circum­
stances. Writing a comparative literary history by way of international teamwork is a
revolutionary procedure in literary historiography. Few scholars can claim ability to
cover the entire range of literature relevant to the phenomenon under study. Hence the
need for partial syntheses, upon which more and more truly international syntheses will
be built as our project progresses.
The "Comparative History" will consist of volumes composed in either French
or English. Most contributions will be written in these two languages, some will be
translated into them from other languages. B u t we are anxious t o emphasize t h a t
this in no sense reflects a hierarchy of values. To be sure, the broad and deep penetra­
tion of English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish literature must be re­
cognized, b u t the literary specificities of every nation or cultural entity, large or small,
acclaimed or neglected, will be valued. As a matter of fact, no discipline is as apt to do
justice t o the literatures of smaller diffusion as Comparative Literature.
The charge of the Coordinating Committee is limited to the consideration of litera­
tures in European languages. We are keenly aware of the inherent worth of literatures
outside the European language orbit and are strongly supporting the newly created re­
search and publication committees of the International Comparative Literature As­
sociation which are expected to chart the course for new projects t h a t will include liter­
atures of Africa, Asia, and the Americas composed in non-European languages. But
the task of coordinating the historiography of literatures written in European languages
is already a formidable one, and by including African and Latin American literature
created in these languages we are at least entering hitherto unexplored or neglected areas
of literary activity whose present or future contribution to world literature is enormous.
We realize t h a t volumes dependent on the collaboration of many scholars from
different countries and cultures will not always be evenly balanced in topic, approach, or
merit. Nor is it always possible to recruit scholars for all important aspects of a par­
ticular topic. Some collaborators are unable to finish their assignments, and on occa­
sions all efforts to replace them within a reasonable time fail. The task we are under­
taking is a tremendously difficult one, but it must be pursued with patience and courage
because the writing of literary history, in its effort to fulfil the mission entrusted to it
by society, must arrive at conclusions, results, and syntheses in order to give literary
scholarship significant leverage in the evolution of the Humanities.
As the current President of the Coordinating Committee, entrusted with the task
of continuing and expanding the "Comparative History" launched by my predecessor,
Professor Jacques Voisine of the Sorbonne, and the Secretary, Professor György M.
Vajda of the Institute for Literary Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and
the University of Szeged, I want to pay tribute not only to their pioneering vision but
also to the project directors and volume editors who have taken on, unselfishly and
undauntedly, an awesome challenge on behalf of historical literary studies. Whatever
the shortcomings of this or any other volume in our series, they and their collabora­
tors deserve the warmest thanks of all men and women of good will throughout the
world dedicated t o vital humanistic scholarship.
Henry H. H. Remak
President, Coordinating Committee

6
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Anna Balakian (N. Y. U.) 9

Part I. The Delimitation of Symbolism as a Literary Movement 15

1. What is Symbolism? by René Wellek (Yale) 17
2. The Structure of the Symbolist Movement by György M. Vajda (Budapest) 29
3. Presence and Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé: International Reputation and Intellectual
Impact by Lloyd James Austin (Cambridge) 43

Part II. The French Cénacle

1. The Background of French Symbolism by Robert Jouanny (Rouen) 67
2. The Language of Symbolism by Claude Abastado (Paris) 85
3. Symbolist Imagery by Louis Forestier (Paris) 101
4. The Fate of Symbolism by Michel Décaudin (Paris) 119

Part III. The Emergence of the International Symbolist Movement

Section A: Catalysts and Intermediaries
1. The Liberated Verse of the English Translators of French Symbolism by Clive Scott
(Norwich) 127
2. German Poets in the Proximity of Baudelaire and the Symbolists by Kurt Wais
(Tübingen) 145
3. A Graver Decadence: Reactions to Symbolism in Spain by Gordon Brotherston
(Essex) 157
4. The Translation and Refraction of Symbolism: A Survey of the Hungarian Example
by André Karátson (Lille) 165
Section B: Diffusion and Symbiosis
1. On the Spread of Symbolism by Miklós Szabolcsi (Budapest) 183
2. Models for Symbolism and Expressionism: Stefan George and Herwarth Walden by
Manfred Durzak (Kiel) 191
3. Symbolism and Modernism by Ricardo Gullón (Texas) 213
4. The Symbolist Mode in the Spanish American Modernista Novel, 1885-1924 by
Roland Grasst (Western Illinois) 229

Part IV. The Consolidation and Metamorphosis of the Symbolist Imprint

1. Expectation and Resignation: Stefan George's Place in German and in European
Symbolist Literature by Manfred Gsteiger (Lausanne) 255
2. Valéry and his International Reputation by James Lawler (Halifax/Chicagoi 269
3. Yeats: The Question of Symbolism by Denis Donoghue (Dublin/N.Y.U.) 279
4. Eliot: An English Symbolist by Ruth Z. Temple (New York) 295
5. D'Annunzio and International Symbolism by Ezio Raimondi (Bologna) 311
6. Juan Ramón Jiménez and the Heritage of Symbolism in Hispanic Poetry by Bernard
Gicovate (Stanford) 335
7. Jorge Guillén and the Symbolist Imprint on the Generation of the 1920's by André
Debicki (Kansas) 347
8. The Symbolist Turn in Endre Ady's Poetry by Péter Pór (Siegen) 361
9. Andrey Bely and the Symbolist Movement in Russia by Boris Christa (Queensland) 381
Part V. Typological Studies
l . T h e "Beyond" and the "Within": The Place and Function of Myths in Symbolist
Literature by Pierre Brunei (Paris) 399
2. Symbolist Theater by Hartmut Köhler (Freiburg) 413
3. The Symbol in the Austrian Literature of the Turn of the Century: Problems and
Attempted Solutions by Manfred Hoppe (Chicago) 425
4. Contribution to a Typology of Symbolist Painting by Lajos Németh (Budapest) 437
5. Displacements of Parental Space: American Poetry and French Symbolism by
Michel Bénamou† (Wisconsin) 455

Part VI. The Symbolist Impact on Music and Art

1. Symbolist Music by Marcel Schneider (Paris) 471
2. Musical Settings of Symbolist Poems by Elaine Brody (New York) 483
3. Symbolism in Alexander Scriabin's Music by Vladimir Padwa† (New York) 493
4. The Spread and Evolution of Symbolist Ideals in Art by Edouard Roditi (Paris) 499
5. The Other Symbolist Inheritance in Painting by Dore Ashton (Cooper Union) 519
6. The Esthetics of Symbolism in French and Belgian Art by Philippe Jullianf (Paris) 529

Part VII. Some National Perspectives

1. Symbolism in Portuguese Literature by Jacinto Prado-Coelho (Lisbon) 549
2. The Symbolist Movement in Belgium by Elizabeth Hess (Dartmouth) 565
3. Early Scandinavian Symbolism by Lief Sjóberg (Stony Brook)
and N. L. Jensen (Aarhus) 575
4. Symbolism in Denmark by Lief Sjóberg (Stony Brook) and N . L. Jensen (Aarhus) 587
5. Symbolism and Finnish Literature by Irma Rantavaara† (Helsinki) 595
6. Symbolism in Baltic Literatures by Vitautas Kubilis (Vilnus) 603
7. Polish Symbolism by Michal Glowinski (Warsaw) 609
8. Czech Symbolist Poetry by Alena Hájková (Prague) 617
9. Symbolist Elements in Serbian Poetry by Vladeta R. Kosutic (Belgrade) 627
10. Symbolism in Bulgarian Literature by Georgi Dimov (Sophia) 641
11. Symbolism in Greece by Robert Jouanny (Rouen) 647
12. Aspects of Symbolist Poetry in the United States by Haskell M. Block (SUNY,
Binghamton) 653

Part VIII. Symbolism in Other Contexts

1. Symbolic Statement: A Psychological View by Leon Edel (Hawaii) 661
2. Darío and Rodó: Two Versions of the Symbolist Dream in Spanish American Letters
by Emir Rodrìguez Monegal (Yale) 669
Conclusion by Anna Balakian 681
Bibliography compiled by Ulrich Weisstein (Indiana) 699
Index 718

8
 INTRODUCTION

In an age of analysis, we have undertaken the brave or perhaps brash task of essaying
a synthesis of a literary movement of which a universally acceptable definition is yet
to be found, but which is perhaps the most global of all literary movements to date.
In fact, Pierre Brunei in his essay on the Symbolist use of myth quotes Etiemble's
reference to the scope of the Symbolist movement: "For the first time and until now
for the only time in the universal history of literature, a literary school propagates its
influence upon the entire planet". In using the label "symbolist" in the classification
of certain works, we have proceeded on the assumption stated by René Wellek in his
essay, "Symbolism in Literary History", that despite ambiguities "a term has fulfilled
its function as a tool of historiography if it has made us think not only about individual
works and authors but also about schools, trends, and movements and their inter­
national expansion". 1
The purpose of this volume, distinguishing it from the existing books on Symbolism,
is not to trace the literary fortunes of French Symbolism and its influence on other
literatures, but to deal with the flow and development of the movement and its
transmutations and transformations, simultaneous in some cases, sequential in others,
in the literatures written in the European languages. Symbolism, though cosmopolitan,
had its impetus in Paris and within the context of the development of French poetics.
When it spread to other countries it did not become a foreign literary mode but was
amalgamated with native trends and local propensities: it catalyzed inherent attitudes.
The Symbolist movement paid back with interest the elements of foreign heritages
previously borrowed by French literature. This is indeed what is involved in the case
of German Romanticism and French Symbolism. A History of the movement has to
function on two levels. First, it has to conform with and observe the general trends it
crystallized in the Europe of the waning years of the nineteenth century, as well as
their effect on the development of an international poetic expression. If indeed its
first language was French, its theoreticians were non-national in their concern with
the relation between the evanescence of human life and its surviving imprint through
the permanence of an art form; to this end, they agreed on a certain notion of the
Beautiful, devised a linguistic code consisting of special uses of metaphor and myth,
understandable on a superlinguistic basis, somewhat like a musical notation, recogniz-

1 René Wellek, Discriminations (New Haven, 1970), p. 121.

9
able on the metaphorical and mythological plane, viable on various soils and in various
languages, and containing a thematic context of universal signification.
On the second level, the volume discerns native originalities in form and content
as the general Symbolist trend appropriates the heritage of a particular literature and
relates to the historical moment of the individual country or zone. These national
flowerings occurred at specific points in time, often triggered by the high productivity
of a chef d'école, by a zealous editor of a literary journal, or under the aegis of an aca­
demic codification. As István Sőtér points out, trends in literature, moving from one
region to another, may well retain a homogeneity of form but convey a changed atti­
tude according to the historical movement: "The conception that a group of authors
may have of the world can fundamentally modify the function, the objective of a
literary tendency." 2 So it is that a basically non-national kind of literature evolves in
some countries into a distinctly national one.
Furthermore, if in terms of genre Symbolism had its primary blossoming in poetry,
it became clear that a delimitation by genre in our History would be artificial since
the symbolist performer would be a poet in point of view whatever medium of literary
expression he chose, and endow with a poetics all domains of literature. In addition
there was also a permeation by Symbolism of the other arts: i.e. of art, music and the
theater, and these related manifestations could not be overlooked.
From non-national to multinational as the direction was, and from poetry to
other literary genres and to the other arts, Symbolism went into an ultimate phase of
stylization in language and in the plastic and musical structures; the mode became
homogeneous again in its decline as it struggled between the demon of analogy and
capitulation to philosophical discourse.3
As the teamwork entailed a distribution of sections of research we had to keep in
mind two very important considerations: the volume had to be internationally as
inclusive as possible in terms of the primary sources studied, and it was to be inter­
nationally representative in terms of scholarship as well. The participation of scholars
had to reflect both basic considerations; and the problems this selection entailed were
multiple.
In the course óf deliberations, some fundamental paradoxes emerged in the
concepts of literary history and of scholarship. In this age of science, it is natural that
we should aspire to use scientific methods to reach literary classifications. This at­
titude posed two major difficulties: the giants of creative literature are elusive of
classification, and eminent scholars (giants in their own way) do not work by pre­
scription. Yet, had we left out the giants involved but partially with Symbolism, and
distributed the work among researches (chercheurs), apprentices, and collated their
findings with the anonymity of most manuals of history, we might have produced a very
unified and structured manuscript, but without the sparkle of the personalities in-
2
István Sôtér, Acta Litteraria Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Tom. X, p. 11: "La
méthode du symbolisme a suscité, dans la poésie française, une école totalement éloignée de la
politique, tandis que chez le Hongrois Endre Ady ou le Russe Alexandre Blok, elle a fourni la
possibilité même d'une poésie révolutionnaire".
3
This in spite of Jean Moréas' admonishment that "the essential character of symbolic art is
never to go all the way to the conception of the idea itself". Figaro littéraire, 18/2/86.

10
 volved. Most of the first-line collaborators agreed that the precious time we would be
spending on this book was not to be expended on the production of a dull systematic
unit of reportage.
Some scholars, more accustomed to performing in committee and team research,
had misgivings concerning the autonomous critic and his personal choice of focus.
They also viewed with apprehension the highlighting of individual writers included
under the label of "Symbolism". Monographic studies were suspect. It is true that the
giants of literature transcend literary movements, and enter literary coteries only as
path blazers. They are the demons of literary historians, impeding the scientific or­
ganization of literature, interfering with the collective classification of traits, often
tempting the classifier to exclude them entirely. Sainte-Beuve realized the problem in
talking about Chateaubriand: "Very great individuals rise beyond a group. They them­
selves make a center, and gather others to them. But it is the group, the association,
the alliance and active exchange of ideas that gives to the man of talent all his partici­
pation in what is outside himself, all his maturing and value. There are talents that
participate in several groups and which do not cease to move through different en­
vironments, either perfecting, transforming or deforming themselves".4
In our instance, certain writers highlighted the Symbolist mode and drew around
them clusters of adherents or spiritual followers. Such were the cases of Mallarmé to
begin with, Stefan George, Rubén Darío, Hofmannsthal, Endre Ady, Blok, etc. Without
pursuing monographic studies of the total capacities of these internationally famous
writers, we agreed to draw attention to the Symbolist slice of their careers. If it is true
that secondary writers best illustrate the general characteristics and conventions of
a literary style, it is the writer of first rank who sets the conventions even if he soon
tires of them and goes on to other things. Actually, this is a crucial philosophical
problem pondered by historians since the beginning of the writing of history: does the
hero create events or do events create heroes ? The historians have not solved the prob­
lem; as literary historians we chose to be eclectic in the wielding of individual versus
collective factors that govern the shape and destiny of literature.
Another concern revolved around the study of the less familiar literatures, erro­
neously labeled "minor" literatures. If studies were to be done of these literatures in the
general framework of Symbolism, they were not to be treated in isolation but drawn
whenever possible into the general referential spectrum making the previously un­
familiar become part of the collective body of universal literature. Many of the scholars
dealing with general problems of Symbolist stylization and attitudes, and social or
cultural climates, were able to achieve this objective. In fact, the investigation of
Symbolist qualities in terms of the larger perspective tended to bring about a new at­
titude toward regionalism; many scholars were able to avoid the strictly parochial in
the effort to introduce the particular into the international frame of reference.
The final paradox is that of the notion of unity. We can outline a logically struc­
tured project for coUaborrative study but since our collaborators come from different

4
Sainte-Beuve, "Chateaubriand", Nouveaux Lundis, Paris, no date, Vol. III, p. 23 (The trans-
lation is mine).

11
backgrounds and bring to their study varying frames of reference, we might say t h a t
they view the Symbolist Movement from different windows and therefore, have differ­
ent perspectives. Our contributors do not derive their observations and conclusions
from a single and same reading list nor can they adhere to a single definition and con­
form t o a standard, preestablished scale of values. To have reduced their various per­
spectives to a single vision would have been to impose a preconceived hypothesis. I n
our "history" of literature we made every effort to avoid the pitfalls of history books
t h a t originate from a single vantage point and which see events from a single angle. As
our colleague Roland Grass quotes from José Martí in his section on the Symbolist
mode in Latin American literature: "To know diverse literatures is the only way to be
liberated from the tyranny of the several".
By allowing the various perspectives of our collaborators to be juxtaposed we
have given the readers of our work a free field of appraisal of the range and variations
of Symbolism, and an opportunity for speculation. The volume, though not aiming at
a unity of view, has sought a unity of structure, balancing all the parts and aspects
of International Symbolism. Its impartiality does not stem from the objectivity of
each study but from the plurality of views through which we hope to open up paths
of truth. As a result, many of the writers included in the study of Symbolism are evoked
and analyzed by more than one scholar and in more than one context.
One of the most prevailing symbols of the Symbolist Movement is the Tree, and
indeed the Tree is the truest metaphor of this History of Symbolism and the model for
the structure of this work. The most obvious visual presence of a tree is its trunk,
which we might liken to the French Symbolist Cénacle and its immediate repercussions
suggestive of a certain collective, monolithic appearance. But the sap fed into t h a t
bark comes from a proliferation of roots—rich and diverse sources of influence—feeding
into the body of the structure. A tree also has branches spreading in various directions
and flourishing under the same sun, b u t hit from different angles by the same sun. In
terms of Symbolism, the roots lead us back into various stratas of philosophical soil and
many literary nutrients, some so pristine as to make it possible for one scholar, Angelo
Bertocci, to have written a book called From Symbolism to Baudelaire. Its trunk gives us
the collective esthetic values and linguistic code, whereas the branches consist of the
variances and transformations of the Symbolist imprint in various national literatures.
The plan of the work follows the general tree structure. An introductory section
deals with the problem of definition and overviews of Symbolism, its international
roots a n d plurivalent sources. The Second P a r t is an historical narrative centering
upon the Paris Cénacle between 1885—1890, a "Place de l'Etoile" of Symbolism where
the main trunk emerged. This p a r t contains studies of the techniques, poetic and lin­
guistic, created by the Symbolists in Paris, the emergence of certain images and sym­
bols later to be recognized throughout the world. This part was apportioned and written
by specialists of French literature under the direction of Professor Michel Décaudin.
The Third P a r t deals with the spread, diffusion, impact, and doxology of the
Symbolist esthetics and ethic t h a t burgeoned out of the Paris School. This part, strictly
comparatist in perspective, presents various and possibly conflicting views on the
impact and ramifications of Symbolism. I t attempts to throw light also on some of

12
the frontiers between literary movements contiguous with Symbolism, such as Modern­
ism, Hermeticism, Estheticism, and Expressionism. Much of the ramification is ob­
served through the work of such intermediaries and catalysts as Stefan George, Rubén
Darío, Maurice Maeterlinck, Arthur Symons and a number of others.
The Fourth Part is strictly "International Symbolism", and is concerned with
what is individualistic and original in the symbolism of certain giants of national
literatures; the golden leaves of the branches, particularly in the first two decades of
the twentieth century. It is this era that produced Yeats' The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919), Federico Garcia Lorca's Libro de poemas (1921), Ugo Betti's Re Pensieroso
(1922), T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Paul Valéry's Le Cimetière Marin (1922) as
well as his earlier Fragments de Narcisse and La Jeune Parque, Juan Ramón Jiménez'
Segunda antología poetica (1922), Rainer Maria Rilke's Duineser Elegien and Sonette an
Orpheus (1923) and Wallace Stevens' Harmonium (1923). This section includes studies
of the Symbolist slice in the writing of Yeats, Eliot, Bely, Valéry, Jiménez, Hofmann-
sthal, D'Annunzio, Ady and others.
The Fifth Part of the work consists of a synchronic approach to the "problemat­
ics" of Symbolism through Comparative Literature, a metholodogy that aims at
"horizontal perspectives". This part contains syntheses, overviews, and typological
considerations of Symbolist conventions and their survivals: utilization of myths
and folklore, changes in prosody, the permeation of Symbolism in the drama, the
mutations and transformations appearing in Symbolist esthetics in its association of
the poetic image with the dramatic and the plastic. This is the domain which C. M.
Bowra has called "the heritage of Symbolism".
The Sixth Part deals with the impact of Symbolism on Music and Art; it consists
mainly of the work of Marcel Schneider in Music and of Philippe Jullian and Edouard
Roditi in Art, all professional critics stationed in Paris and using descriptive and
historical methodologies. They were ably assisted by Elaine Brody, Dore Ashton
and Wladimir Padwa of New York.
The Final Part consists essentially of the work of literary historians of national
literatures. Viewing the international paradigms, archetypes, and tropes from the
point of view of national optics they determined the point and degree of Symbolist
effects on the development of the various literatures in European languages. These
studies deal with parallel periods of literature and the diachronic changes manifested by
the Symbolist factor. This last part is far from being comprehensive. Some national
literatures are missing because their Symbolist context has been covered in earlier parts
of the volume. Others are not yet fully researched. This part will remain open-ended so
that future editions of the work or scholiastic supplements will continue to document
the study of the global impact of the Symbolist phenomenon.
Although many scholars and graduate students have collaborated in the trans­
lation of those texts that were not originally written in English, the major burden of
translation fell upon Edouard Roditi and his professional team. We received consider­
able financial support in the preparation of this volume from a National Endowment
for the Humanities Grant of the USA, and in paying the cost of translation we were
also aided by the Kirk Edward Long Foundation.

13
 The National Endowment also provided funding for the compilation of a major
bibliographical work as a supplement to the History of the Symbolist Movement. An
additional grant from the American Council of Learned Societies brought about the
meeting of some of the principal collaborators in mid-stream at New York University
in the spring of 1973 to work out problems of both a theoretical and a practical nature.
Two travel grants from the International Research Exchange made it possible for me
to go twice to Budapest to confer with collaborators there, primarily with my associate
editor, Miklós Szabolcsi, who procured and evaluated most of the contributions from
Central European scholars.
Upon termination of his monumental work, Message du Symbolisme, Guy Michaud
said that perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the Symbolist movement was its
influence on the world at large. He concluded that to trace this diffusion would entail
the collective work of a large team. In the absence of such a team he felt that he had to
leave in abeyance questions of technique and of repercussions on the other art forms.
We have had such a team whose objective went far beyond the tracing of the impact
of French Symbolism in the world at large. Instead, it researched a literary and onto-
logical phenomenon which emerged simultaneously and sometimes sporadically within
the context of many literatures, the common sources enriched with numerous varia­
bles. Although our work, which took six years to come to fruition, will not exhaust the
subject, it reflects into the record of a multifaceted literary expression the response
of our own moment in history.
New York, July, 1976
ANNA BALAKIAN
Editor-in-Chief of the Volume

14
 PART I
THE DELIMITATION OF SYMBOLISM
AS A LITERARY MOVEMENT
 RENÉ WELLEK

WHAT IS SYMBOLISM?

In asking this question we must decide what kind of answer we can expect to give to i t
Obviously, we shall not be concerned with symbolism in general, with the symbols
t h a t pervade all the religions and the plastic arts, not to speak of symbolism as we
use the term in mathematics or logic. We are speaking only of symbolism in literature,
but must immediately admit that the symbols in literature overlap with those in
religion and iconography and often are embedded in the very language itself and its
metaphors. We must agree with Ernest Jones t h a t "if the word 'symbolism' is taken
in its widest sense the subject is seen to comprise almost the whole development of
civilization". 1 I t is better to focus, rather, on the meaning of symbolism as a literary
trend or movement or possibly period-term at a specific time in history. Even after
providing some answer to this question we shall, however, be confronted again with
the general question of what a literary symbol is, for defining symbolism without some
clear idea of the symbol seems a rather futile exercise. But what is meant by definition ?
Is it at all possible to define a term for a movement or a trend or a period ? Is it possible
to give a "real" definition of symbolism in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle
required t h a t a real definition reveal the internal causes of the things to be defined ?
Is there an essence of symbolism ? We have, I think, to give up such an attempt: it
always turns out an arbitrary model unrelated to the variety of history. We have to
be content with the more modest ambition of modern logicians and linguists. We
must try to give an explanation of how the word is or has been used and to give an
account of the phenomena designated by this use and finally admit t h a t all definition
will contain some kind of prescription or at least recommendation for its future use.
John Stuart Mill, in his System of Logic (1843), found the formula long ago: "The
simplest and most correct notion of a Definition is a Proposition declaratory of the
meaning of a word, namely either the meaning which it bears in common acceptation,
or that which the speaker or writer . . . intends to annex to it". 2
But such a clarification is only the first step, for in literary scholarship we are con­
fronted with the difficulties connected with the multiple meanings of such concepts
as trend, movement, and period. I have argued as far back as 19363 for a meaning of

1
"The Theory of Symbolism", in Papers on Psychoanalysis (London, 1948), p. 87.
2
3
London, 10th ed., p. 86.
In "Theory of Literary History", Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, 6, (1936), pp.
173-91. A later version in "Periods and Movements in Literary History", English Institute Annual,
1940, New York, 1940, pp. 73 — 9.3, and in Theory of Literature (New York, 1949).

2 Balakian 17
the concept of period which would avoid the kind of nominalism t h a t treats such
terms as mere linguistic labels, wittily formulated by Paul Valéry when he claims about
terms such as ''romanticism" and "classicism" t h a t you cannot get drunk on the labels
of bottles, (gome people, one could argue, do.) On the other hand, I also rejected the
view t h a t period is an entity whose essence has to be intuited, as the German Geistes-
geschichte or the American variations, with their Baroque or Puritan minds, assume.
Rather, a period, I argued, is a time-section dominated by a set of norms (conventions,
genres, ideals of versification, standards of characters, etc.) whose introduction, integ­
ration, decay, and disappearance can be traced. These norms have to be extracted
from history itself: we have to discover them in the observable literary process. Sym­
bolism thus is not a unitary quality which spreads like an infection or a plague, nor is it
a mere verbal label: it is rather a historical category, or, to use a Kantian term, a
"regulative idea" (or, rather, set of ideas) with the help of which we can interpret the
historical process.
In discussing the concept of symbolism it seems obivous t h a t we can distinguish
meanings t h a t widen almost like concentric circles. The most narrow is t h a t of a coterie,
a group, or possibly a school in Paris in the eighteen-eighties and -nineties. More widely,
Symbolism represents a trend in French poetry which we can trace back at least as far
as Nerval and Lautréamont and follow at least as far as Claudel and Valéry. I t s meaning
was soon extended to prose and drama, and then, more broadly, we can speak of
Symbolism as a European movement (and its offshoots in the Americas), and finally,
though I wish to discourage such a use, we can think of symbolism as a recurring type
of art spread all over the history of literature.
Obviously the fashion for the term is due to the coterie of poets who called them­
selves b y t h a t name in Paris in 1886. The story has been told many times, in great
detail, by Barre, Raynaud, Michaud, Kenneth Cornell, 4 and others and bears repetition
only as far as we need it for our purposes. Jean Moréas (the pseudonym of Joannes
Papadiamantopoulos 1856—1910), the French poet of Greek extraction, was disturbed
by a contention of Paul Bourde's which classified him with Mallarmé among the deca­
dents. In Le XIXe Siècle of August 11, 1885, Moréas protested t h a t the decadents
sought the pure concept and the eternal symbol in their art. "Les poètes décadents —
la critique, puisque sa manie d'étiquetage est incurable, pourrait les appeler plus juste­
ment des symbolistes — que M. Bourde a estrapadés d'une main courtoise sont: MM.
Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Laurent Tailhade, Charles Vignier, Charles Morice
et le signataire de cet article". 5 Moréas, together with Gustave K a h n , founded a little
magazine, Le Symboliste, of which the first number appeared on October 7, 1886. Its
leading article, by Paul Adam, again protested against the malicious confusion bet­
ween Decadents and Symbolists. "Malicieusement, on confondit ces œuvres [of the

4
A. Barre, Le Symbolisme: Essai historique (Paris, 1911); E. Raynaud, La Melée symboliste,
3 vols. (Paris, 1920 — 23); G. Michaud, Message poétique du symbolisme, 3 vols. (Paris, 1947); quoted
as "Message"; K. Cornell, The Symbolist Movement (New Haven, Conn. 1952).
5
Michaud, Message, Vol. 2. p. 331.

18
decadents] avec celle des réelles personnalités du mouvement symboliste". 6 In the
Figaro Littéraire of September 18, 1886,7 Moréas published his famous manifesto.
As the manifesto shows, Moréas was perfectly aware t h a t the coterie had ante­
cedents reaching far back into history and t h a t its creed was various and undefined
or rather defined mainly in opposition to preceding trends: to didacticism, declamation,
and objective description. Declamation presumably alludes to Hugo and "objective
description" to the Parnassians. The new freedom of diction, supposedly modeled on
the freedom of sixteenth-century French, and the freedom of verse, which included free
verse, and a defense of obscurity made up the main argument. On the question of
symbol, which after all gave the name to the group, More???s is much vaguer. He reduced
it to the old Hegelian idea of a sensuous appearance of the Idea, where the sense of
Idea and even "primordial I d e a " remains unclear.
Moréas obviously did not invent the term: by lucky chance or combination of
circumstances he hit on a designation which had been bandied about long before.
Elsewhere, 8 I have traced the history of the term in its literary use back to K a n t and
Goethe and the German romantics, particularly Schelling. There is a growing literature
devoted to details of this history: 9 it can be shown t h a t Winckelmann, Lessing, and
Herder did not distinguish between symbol and allegory, while Goethe established the
distinction, which was then taken over b y Schelling and from there b y Coleridge,
Emerson, and Carlyle. B u t there were more immediate sources at hand: in France the term
was used b y Madame de Staël, by Alexandre Vinet, by Pierre-Simon Ballanche, by
Théodore Jouffroy, by Charles Magnin, 10 and particularly by Pierre Leroux, the Utopian
socialist, who exalted poetry as a language of symbols, as a system of correspondences,
a network of "vibrations". Leroux elsewhere recognizes t h a t "metaphor, symbol,
myth are different degrees of allegory" and calls symbol "an intermediary form be­
tween comparison and allegory properly speaking. I t is truly an emblem, the metaphor
of an idea". 1 1 Thus the term shifts from a rhetorical category to an element in a mystical
view of nature. Oddly enough, a little-known critic, Paulin Limayrac, concluded t h a t
"symbolic poetry has no future in France, and socialism, by monopolizing the term, has
dealt symbolism a hard blow". 12 B u t Limayrac's prophecy proved to be quite wrong.
Undoubtedly, Baudelaire's poem Correspondances, which speaks of the "forest of
symbols", proved the most influential text suggesting the term, though Baudelaire's

6
Ibid., Vol. 2.-, p . 346.
'Reprinted in G. Michaud, La Doctrine symboliste (Documents), (Paris, 1947), pp. 23 — 26;
quoted8
as "Doctrine".
In "Symbol and Symbolism in Literature", in Dictionary of the History of 1deas, ed. Philip P .
Wiener,
9
New York, 1973, Vol. 4. pp. 3 3 7 - 3 4 5 .
See Curt Müller, Die geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen des Symbolbegriffes in Goethes Kunst-
anschauung, (Berlin, 1937), Maurice Marache, Le Symbole dans la pensée et l'Œuvre de Goethe, (Paris,
1960); Bengt Algot Sörensen, Allegorie und Symbol : Texte zur Theorie des dichterischen Bildes im 18.
und fruhen
10
19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1972).
See my History of Modern Criticism, Vol. 3. (1965), passim. Also Margaret Gilman, The Idea
of Poetry in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1958); Angelo F . Bertocci, From Symbolism to Baudelaire
(Carbondale, 111. 1964); Pierre Moreau, "Le Symbolisme de Baudelaire", in Ames et visages romanti­
ques (Paris, 1965), pp. 231 — 245; Pierre Moreau, "De la symbolique religieuse à la poesie symboliste",
in Comparative Literature Studies, 9, (1967), 5—16.
"Œuvres,
12
Vol. pp. 3 3 0 - 3 1 .
"La Poésie symboliste et socialiste", Revue des Deux Mondes, N. S. 5, 1844, pp. 669 — 682.

2* 19
esthetics centers rather on creative imagination than on the symbol. I n Baudelaire
"symbol" occurs rather casually in the context òf the theory of correspondences and
universal analogy and is interchangeable with allegory, cipher, hieroglyphics, and even
emblem. B u t Mallarmé, apparently well before Moréas' manifesto, orally expounded a
doctrine which was labeled symbolist. Thus Anatole Bajou in Le Décadent, April 10,
1886, refers to Mallarmé as "le maître qui a formulé le premier la doctrine symboli­
que". 1 3 However, in Mallarmé's printed writings (certainly before 1886) the term sym­
bol is used only very sparingly. Mallarmé does not use the term in the "Avant-Dire" to
René Ghil's Traité du Verbe (1886), while Ghil speaks of the poet as composing the only
worthy vision: "Le réel et Suggestif Symbole d'où, palpitante pour le rêve, en son
intégrité nue se lèvera l'Idée prime et dernière, ou Vérité". 1 4
Teodor de Wyzewa (actually Wyzewski), the critic of Polish origin, who at t h a t time
had begun to contribute to the Revue Wagnérienne, formulated a theory of Symbolism
two month before Moréas' manifesto in an article on Mallarmé in La Vogue in which
he ascribes to the poet the idea of monadology. "Tout est symbole, toute molécule est
grosse des univers: toute image est le microcosme de la nature entière." ". . . E t l'art,
expression de tous les symboles, doit être un drame idéal,résumant et annulant ces
représentations naturelles qui ont trouvé leur pleine connaissance dans l'âme du
poète. . . . Ainsi M. Mallarmé a cherché les intimes correlations des choses. Peut-être
n'a-t-il point vu, dans sa curiosité, que le nombre des symboles était indéfini, qu'il
avait en lui le pouvoir de les renouveler sans cesse, et qu'il s'épuiserait vainement à les
vouloir tous saisir?" 1 5 Wyzewa violently disapproved of Ghil, whom he considered a
parodist of Mallarmé, while Ghil proclaimed the founding of a new group, "le groupe
Symbolique et Instrumentaliste". I t was expressly p u t under the aegis of Mallarmé
and grouped Stuart Merrill, Henri de Régnier, and Francis Vielé-Griffin around Ghil.
They professed a grandiose goal: "chercher, induisant de Symbole en Symbole, la
raison de la Nature et de la Vie". 16 B u t the very first expounders of the idea of sym­
bolism soon abandoned it. Wyzewa, in the Revue Indépendante of February 1887, saw
t h a t the symbol has a puzzling multitude of meanings. I t is simply the replacement of
one object b y another. "On peut donc être symboliste lorsqu'on emploie des signes
pour exprimer sa pensée," but then all art is symbolic. The symbol is also simply com­
parison: the representation of a complex idea b y a simple, easily comprehensible one.
B u t such a symbol cannot interest our "young symbolist poets", who do not want to
make their thinking more accessible. Finally Wyzewa doubts the importance of the
symbol in Mallarmé's poetry. " J e sais que mon maître M. Mallarmé tente, avec une
exemplaire constance, cette création d'un art enfin symbolique. Mais son œuvre devra
sans doute à la vie qu'il y créera, à la noble hauteur des pensées et à l'expressive har­
monie des syllabes, non à l'usage du symbole, son charme précieux". 17 Edouard Dujar-
din ousted Wyzewa from the Revue Indépendante in December 1887, and Wyzewa left

13
14
Michaud, Message, Vol. 2. p. 335; also Doctrine, p. 47.
15
Michaud, Doctrine, p. 28.
Ibid., p. 64.
16
17
Michaud, Message,
Vol. 2. p. 350.
Delsemme, Teodor de Wyzewa (Brussels, 1967), p. 147.

20
 the polemical battles about poetry. Also, Moréas deserted his own brainchild. On
September 14, 1891, in another number of Figaro, he blandly announced that "sym­
bolisme" was dead. He founded a new school which he called l'école romane.18
In spite of these dissensions and the perplexities to which they gave rise, the term
"Symbolism" established itself after all, in ways which deserve to be traced in detail,
though one should note that one of the main theorists of the time, Charles Morice, in
his La Littérature de tout à l'heure (1889) speaks rather of synthesis and dismisses the
term "symbolisme" as applicable to all literature,19 and that others thought of sym­
bolism as a label designating "les poètes idéalistes de notre génération".20 But as
early as 1894 Saint Antoine (pseudonym for Henri Mazel) prophesied that symbolism
"est sans doute l'étiquette sous laquelle notre période sera classée dans l'histoire de la
littérature française".21 Yet many poets repudiated the term for themselves. Verlaine, for
example, said in 1891 that there are as many symbolists as there are different symbols and
that symbol is simply metaphor and thus poetry itself.22 He called the term an "alle-
mandisme" and wrote even a little rhymed squib beginning "à bas le symbolisme mythe
et termite". 23 Similarly, Vielé-Griffin complained about the many senses of symbolism.24
Possibly only Gustave Kahn preserved a loyalty for both the doctrine and the term.
In the preface to his Symbolistes et décadents (1900) he avers that he has never tried to
"enfermer le symbolisme dans une trop étroite définition" and boasts that "je suis
resté à peu prés le seul symboliste. C'est que j'étais un des rares qui l'êtaient vraiment
de fond".25
Any number of times Symbolism was declared defunct. Thus Jules Lemaître in
a condescending article dimissed the symbol as simply a new word for "the allegory
of our fathers" and concluded: "Je crains que la race des Symbolistes ne soit aux trois
quarts éteinte".26 Also René Doumic decided that "FEcole symboliste se présente ainsi
à nous comme une école qui a accompli sa tâche et qui a fait son temps". 27 But in 1905
a new review, Vers et Prose, was founded, in which its main critic, Robert de Souza,
in a series of articles entitled "Où nous sommes" ridiculed the many attempts to bury
symbolism and proudly claimed that Gustave Kahn, Paul Verhaeren, Francis Vielé-
Griffin, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Henri de Régnier were then as active as ever.28
By 1911, a thesis, Le Symbolisme by André Barre, looked back on symbolism as
a past movement and could describe its vicissitudes with some precision: and slowly,
I am not sure exactly by what means, the concept of a symbolist period in French
literature extending far beyond the group of the original Symbolists became com-

18
19
See M. Décaudin, La Crise des valeurs symbolistes (Toulouse, 1960), p. 22.
20
Ibid., p . 296.
21
Adolphe Retté in La Plume, 15 February, 1892, reprinted in Michaud, Doctrine, p . 7.
22
Quoted by Décaudin, from L'Ermitage, June, 1894.
23
Michaud, Message, Vol. 2. p . 394.
24
In Invectives, (1896V See Barre, pp. 160 — 161.
25
In Entretiens II, March, 1891, pp. 65 — 66.
26
Reprinted as Les Origines du symbolisme (1936), p. 69.
27
In Revue Bleue, January 7, 1888.
In Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1900.
28
In Vers et Prose, 1 (March-April-May, 1905), p. 79. De Souza's articles were also published
separately (1906).

21
monplace. For example, Rémy de Gourmont, in Promenades littéraires,29 refers to the
"symbolist period" without qualms, and especially after the First World War, when
surrealism had definitely broken with the Symbolist past (whatever its continuities
with it), Symbolism was seen as a mighty movement stretching from Baudelaire or
even Nerval through Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé to the actual Symbolist group
of 1886 and beyond it into the twentieth century, to Péguy, Claudel, and Valéry. The
main codification of this view is Guy Michaud's three-volume monograph, Message
poétique du symbolisme (1947), but the general conception was established much earlier.
I t is sufficient to look into a book such as John Charpentier's Le Symbolisme (1927) to
see an attempt to trace its history into the distant past and to select a wide range of
poets beginning with Lautréamont and to include the novel and the drama. Not only
did the extension to the novel claim Edouard Dujardin's stream-of-consciousness
novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887), and the novels of Rémy de Gourmont, b u t soon
Proust was added by Valéry Larbaud in the preface to Emeric Fiser's L'Esthétique de
Marcel Proust (1933). The argument t h a t the theory expounded in Le Temps retrouvé
is a symbolist esthetics seems convincing, though Proust disliked Péguy and Claudel
and in 1896 wrote an essay condemning obscurity and even composed a pastiche of
Henri de Régnier, a mock-solemn description of a head cold. 30 The penetration of sym­
bolism on the stage was largely due to the enormous success of Maurice Maeterlinck.
Le Théâtre d'art, founded by Paul Fort in 1890, staged L'Intruse and Les Aveugles
in 1891. The Théâtre de l'Œuvre, directed by Lugné-Poe, produced Pelléas et Meli-
sande in 1893. But one should not forget t h a t Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axel was
printed in part in La Renaissance in 1872 and in Vie Artistique in 1882 long before the
symbolist manifesto, and t h a t it was presented at the Théâtre de la Gaité in 1894.
Maeterlinck said: "Everything I have done I owe to Villiers". 31
On the whole this conception of a large French movement extending from Baude­
laire to Valéry seems a reasonable solution to the problem of periodization and is not
refuted by Valéry's own highly nominalist dismissals of the question of the existence
of symbolism as a myth, especially since at other times he gives a simple definition
of symbolism. "Ce qui fut baptisé: le Symbolisme, se résume très simplement dans
l'intention commune à plusieurs familles de poètes (d'ailleurs ennemies entre elles) de
'reprendre à Musique leur bien'. Le secret de ce mouvement n'est pas a u t r e ' ' 3 2 Though
on several occasions Váléry denied t h a t symbolism has an esthetic, 33 Existence du
Symbolisme (1938) gives really a fairly detailed account of its heroes such as Poe and
Wagner, of its antecedents and preoccupations, as do several other of his essays on
Mallarmé.
We can delimit or at least describe a movement by setting it off from its ante­
cedents and successors. There cannot be any difficulty in seeing the Symbolist move-

29
Cinquième série, 1913, p. 152.
30
"Contre l'obscurité", in Revue blanche, July 15, 1896; reprinted in Chroniques. More in
Walter
31
A. Strauss, Proust and Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 191 — 193, 204.
Dorothy Knowles, La Réaction idéaliste au théâtre (Paris, 1934). — Jacques Robichez, Le
Symbolisme au théâtre (Paris, 1957).
32
P . Valéry, Œuvres, ed. J. Hytier, (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), Vol. 1. p. 1272.
33
Ibid., Vol. 1. pp. 1738, 1766.

22
ment as a reaction to Realism and Naturalism, flourishing at the same time. The break
with the Parnassians is also obvious enough. The Symbolists wanted words not merely
to state b u t to suggest: they wanted their versé to be musical, i.e. in practice, to break
with the oratorical tradition of the French alexandrine and, in some cases, to break
completely with rhyme. Free verse, the invention of which is usually ascribed to
Gustave K a h n , outlasted the movement. K a h n himself summed up the doctrine simply
as "antinaturalism, antiprosaism in poetry, a search for freedom in the efforts in art,
in reaction against the regimentation of the Parnasse and the naturalists". 3 4 I t is more
difficult to draw a clear dividing line with regard to Romanticism, particularly if we
conceive Romanticism widely, so widely t h a t Symbolism will appear a descendant. B u t
again the philosophical difference between Symbolism and French Romanticism is ob­
vious : the Romantics were Rousseauists while the Symbolists believed in the fall of man,
or, if they did not use this religious phrasing, knew t h a t man is limited and is in conflict
with nature. They distrust the exaltation of the ego of the Romantics, their reliance
on inspiration and mere effusion of personal emotions. Clearly, they have more affin­
ities with the the German romantic movement, b u t these affinities should not be
overrated to the point of assuming any direct contacts. There is an article by J e a n
Thorel (1891), "Les romantiques allemands et les symbolistes français,"35 which draws
attention to Friedrich Creuzer's erudite investigations of symbolism in religion and
mentions Fouqué's Undine. Even before, Teodor de Wyzewa had somewhat absurdly
called Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Mallarmé "presque de purs fichtéens" and had him­
self apparently embraced a solipsism for which he quoted as authorities Plato, Berkeley,
K a n t , Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann quite indiscriminately. 36 B u t no
real knowledge of German philosophy was needed to arrive at a feeling for the illusive-
ness of reality, for the sense t h a t "life is a dream", or even t h a t only I exist, or to
succumb to a general pessimism, to the mood of decadence, fin de siècle, Götterdam-
merung, or the death of God prophesied by Nietzsche. Many young or not so young men
had lost their religion — a phenomenon so widespread in the later nineteenth century
t h a t we need not search for sources. Still, there were some direct contacts. Novalis
came late: Maeterlinck wrote an article on him (1894) and compiled a little anthology
in translation (1896).37 But Heine, a romantique défroqué as he called himself, was a
well-known figure in Paris, and his account of the German romantic school, ironic and
hostile as it is, played its part in informing the French and certainly supplying Baude­
laire with the phrase "surnaturalisme". 3 8 E.T.A. Hoffmann had been widely trans­
lated and was known in France. Baudelaire quotes him on synaesthesia and discusses
several stories. 39 There was, of course, Wagner, whose influence was so widespread
among writers, at least since Baudelaire's piece on Tannhäuser (1861), t h a t the Revue

34
La Société nouvelle, April 1894, quoted by Décaudin, p . 15.
35
In Entretiens politiques et littéraires, September, 1891, 2, pp. 95—109.
36
37
Delsemme, pp. 128 ff.
In La Nouvelle Revue, 1894; Les Disciples à Saïs, suivi de fragments (Brussels, 1895). The
article38 on Novalis is included in Le Trésor des humbles, (1896).
39
Kurt Weinberg, Henri Heine : Héraut du symbolisme français (New Haven, 1954).
See Jean Pommier, "Baudelaire et E.T.A. Hoffmann", in Dans les chemins de Baudelaire
(Paris, 1945), pp. 297-321.

23
 Wagnérienne can be described as a symbolist organ. 40 Mallarmé's attitude to Wagner,
while admiring of the music, was tinged with irony for Wagner's subject-matter, 4 1 b u t
Mallarmé is an exception among the general enthusiasts of Wagner's myths. The Revue
Wagnérienne contained accounts by Wyzewa of Wagner's theoretical writing and even
a partial translation of the piece on Beethoven. 42
B u t the indirect sources flowed even more abundantly: Carlyle's chapter on symbol­
ism in Sartor Resartus, also known through Taine's History of English Literature, and his
essay on Novalis; Coleridge, from whom, through another intermediary, Mrs. Catherine
Crowe, Baudelaire drew his concept of "constructive imagination"; 4 3 and Emerson,
who had expounded a highly symbolist esthetic, and been translated b y Edgar Quinet.
Edgar Allan Poe, whose enormous influence in France is something of a puzzle
to Americans, also drew on Coleridge and A. W. Schlegel. 44 B u t his case most clearly
demonstrates the difference between French Symbolism and Romanticism. Poe has
been described as an "angel in a machine"; he combines a faith in technique and even
technology, a distrust of inspiration, a rationalistic eighteenth-century mind with a
vague occult belief in "supernal" beauty. Baudelaire quoted him as if he were Poe
himself, sometimes dropping all quotation marks. Mallarmé translated the poems.
Valéry wrote admiringly even about the cosmological fantasy Eureka, All the French
writers accepted The Philosophy of Composition and The Poetic Principle almost as
gospel. There could not be anything less romantic t h a n the elaborate hoax describing
the supposed stages in which Poe composed The Raven. French Symbolism differs
from Romanticism —- if we mean by it the exaltation of imagination and the worship
of an organic nature — precisely in its admiration for Poe.
French Symbolism was exported abroad and caused an international movement,
which, as Anna Balakian has argued persuasively, was the first movement in which
" a r t ceased in t r u t h to be national and assumed the collective premises of Western
culture. Its overwhelming concern was the non-temporal, non-sectarian, non-geo­
graphic, and non-national problem of the human condition". 45 In the Paris of the 1890's,
poets lost their national identity. Francis Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill were native
Americans. Foreigners flocked to Paris: Arthur Symons, George Moore, and W. B .
Yeats, Stefan George, Ruben Darío and the Machado brothers, Hofmannsthal and
Rilke all receivéd decisive stimuli from their stays in Paris. But we must draw dis­
tinctions. We must ask what reports about the French movement were heard abroad.
They have been studied often and in great detail. 46 They may not mean more than

40
The basic book is still K. Jäckel, Richard Wagner in der französischen Literatur, 2 vols.,
(Breslau,
41
1931-1932).
Œuvres complètes, ed. H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris
1945),42pp. 541-546.
43
May 8 and August 8, 1885, Delsemme, p . 127.
Curiosités esthétiques, ed. Conard (Paris, 1923), p. 279. Quoted in English from The Night
Side of Nature (London, 1848), pp. 320-321. See also G. T. Clapton, "Baudelaire and Catherine
Crowe",
44
Modem Language Review, 25, 1930, pp. 286-305.
45
See discussion in my History of Modern Criticism, Vol. 3. pp. 158, 162.
46
The Symbolist Movement (New York, 1967), p. 10.
Georgette Donchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague, 1958);
René Taupin, L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine de 1910 à 1920 (Paris,
1921); Enid L. Duthie, L'Influence du symbolism efrançais dans le renouveau poétique de l'Allemagne

24
cultural reporting, may reflect no more than curiosity about goings-on in the literary
marketplace in Paris. Then, there are the translations, which were sometimes done by
mere rhymesters and sometimes by the greatest poets themselves, such as George's
versions of Mallarmé or Rilke's of Valéry, and then there is the question of actual influence
on the poets abroad. I have tried to sketch these questions in an earlier article: 47
only an expert in a specific national literature can say whether this or t h a t writer can
be called a symbolist, b u t one can investigate the consensus and examine literary
critics and historians as to whether and when they spoke of a Symbolist movement
in their country and whom they called a symbolist. I was struck by the enormous
differences among the main countries in their reaction to the term. I showed t h a t the
term was immensely successful in Russia, in the United States, and in Bohemia. I t was
less so in England and Spain (where they preferred the wider modernismo) and hardly
at all in Italy and Germany. In Germany there was a long tradition of discussion on
symbolism from Goethe to F . T. Vischer, but in spite of t h a t Germans rarely spoke of
a Symbolist movement and preferred Neuromantik or the neutral Moderne. I t must
have been a deliberate decision of Stefan George to avoid identification with the French
Movement which kept the term from receiving wide acceptance in Germany. I n Italy
ermetismo was successful rather than simbolismo. One must, I think, assign a large role
to chance or to personal predilections. Every student of an individual literature can no
doubt align his native poets with the French at that time and account for specific con­
tacts, b u t it takes a trained ear and prolonged meditation to decide which poet was
a real symbolist. To give examples from literatures not discussed in my earlier piece,
was Ola Hansson (1860—1925) in Sweden a symbolist poet, was Olaf Bull (1883—1933)
in Norway, was Sophus Claussen (1865—1931) in Denmark, or, to shift to the Baltic
countries, was the ???tvian Raines (1865—1929), the Lithuanian Jurgis Baltrušaitis
(1873—1944), or the Estonian Marie Under (born in 1883) a genuine symbolist poet?
How about Ivan Krasko (1876—1958) in Slovakia, and what shall we say if we read
in a reputable literary history t h a t Ivo Vojnović (1858 — 1929) belongs to "realistic
symbolism"? 4 8 There are many problems. I t is dangerous to engage in mere termino­
logical quibbles but we must also refrain from dismissing them, for there was an un­
doubted radiation of the French movement all over Europe and the Americas, and
a constant struggle to translate the French achievement into new settings which at
times strongly modified the original impetus.
We simply cannot get around the central question. What do we mean by a symbol
if it is to characterize symbolism and allow us to apply some kind of norm identifying'
a symbolist in different countries ? Here the confusions and difficulties pile u p . Some
modern theorists use symbol extremely widely. Thus Northrop Frye in the Anatomy
of Criticism (1957) is content to call symbol "any unit of any work of literature which
can be isolated for critical attention. In general usage restricted to the smaller units,

(Paris, 1933); Ruth Z. Temple, The Critic's Alchemy : A Study of the Introduction of French Sym­
bolism47 into England (New York, 1953).
"The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History", in Discriminations (New Haven,
1970),48pp. 9 0 - 1 2 1 .
Gerhard Gesemann, Geschichte der südslavischenLiteratu???en(1930), p. 41.

25
such as words, phrases, images, e t c ' ' 4 9 B u t this usage leaves us completely u p in the
air. We cannot make any distinctions between theme, motif, image, and so forth.
More widespread is the view voiced by Paul Verlaine in 1891 t h a t "le symbole, c'est
la métaphore, c'est la poésie même". 5 0 Frank Kermode narrows this definition only
slightly when he identifies the symbol of the French "with the Romantic Image writ
large and given more elaborate and magical support". 5 1 One can also t r y to define
symbolism by its highest unattainable aspiration, as Geoffrey Brereton does when he
says t h a t "symbolism abolished the separation between subject and object, the internal
and external worlds", 52 something the Romantics also hoped to do and did not achieve,
as, in fact, nobody ever has, literally. All this does not set off symbol in the Symbolist
movement from most of the poetic devices used throughout the history of literature.
One can t r y historical definitions as I have tried in setting symbolism off from
other trends, b u t one ends largely with negatives, as does A. C. Lehmann when he
speaks of "the refusal to be attracted by social, propagandist, and other extraliterary
interests" and says, quite correctly, t h a t "in 1895 symbolism attached to a writer's
name signifies little more than friendship and reverence for Mallarmé". 53 One can
return t o the standard definition in Goethe or Coleridge which aims at the distinction
between symbol and allegory and in practice consider allegory a one-to-one relation­
ship, while symbol points toward something essentially mysterious, ineffable: as
"plurisignation", as Philip Wheelwright would say. 54 I n my and Austin Warren's
Theory of Literature, symbol is differentiated from allegory and metaphor by insisting on
its recurrence and persistence. Warren is thinking of the symbolic systems of Yeats or
Blake, or the traditional, natural symbolism used by Robert Frost when he speaks
of " t h e road not t a k e n " or of "miles to go before I sleep". 55 B u t all of this applies to an
enormous variety of literature far beyond the confines of the Symbolist movement.
We must try to find a definition of the symbol which limits it to its use by the
Symbolists. There seems to me a fairly clear convergence of opinions on this score by stu­
dents in very different traditions. J a n Mukařovskỳ, the leading theorist of the Prague
Linguistic Circle, in discussing a Czech Symbolist poet, Karel Hlaváček, found a simple
formula by saying t h a t in the Symbolist metaphor, the relation between the " t h i n g "
and the "image" (or in the terms familiarized b y I. A. Richards, the " t e n o r " and the
"vehicle") is reversed. 56 One could develop this by saying t h a t in most older poetry the
" t h i n g " was the theme and the "image" illustrated it, while in Symbolism the image as­
sumes materiality and the thing is merely its accompaniment. Grammatically, Symbolist
poetry could be called poetry of the predicate. I t speaks of something or somebody, b u t
the subject, the person or the thing, remains hidden. Symbolist poetry thus tries to
distance the language utterance from the extra-linguistic situation. I t plays down the

49
50
Princeton, 1957.
51
In Figaro, quoted by Michaud, Message, Vol. 2., p. 394.
52
The Romantic Image (London, 1957), p. 5.
53
In Cassells Encyclopedia of World Literature, Second ed. (1973).
54
The Symbolist Aesthetic in France (Oxford, 1950), pp. 14, 16.
55
The Burning Fountain (Bloomington, Ind.), 1954, pp. 112 ff.
56
New York, 1949, pp. 193-195.
Kapitoly z ceské poetiky (Prague, 194r8), Vol. 2., p 220.

26
"here" and "there", the socially concrete situation; the characteristic Anna Balakian
emphasized in her book, and earlier in her Literary Origins of Surrealism, where she
speaks of the spiritual crisis exemplified by the work of Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and
Mallarmé as a "tendency to disregard the natural phenomenon . . . by divesting it of
the concepts of time, space, and movement; a tendency toward dehumanization
through a detachment from human emotions".57
Bernard Weinberg, using different terminology, says the same as Jan Mukarovsky,
whose work he could not have known, in his Limits of Symbolism. "A symbolist poem",
he says, "was one in which a half-metaphor served as the basis of the structure; that is,
the object or the person represented throughout the poem was one which, in a meta­
phorical structure, would have been analogical to another object or person . . . Only,
that other object or person was nowhere specifically identified". The symbol appears as
''a truncated metaphor", i.e., as in Mukarovsky, the vehicle has become the tenor and the
original tenor is suppressed or rather is merely hinted at. Or, as Weinberg says, we have
"a true symbol only where there is the suppression of one of the ratios in a proportion­
al metaphor". 58 We should realize that such a definition excludes many poems which
are ordinarily called symbolist. For example, L'Après-midi d'un faune is a narrative
with metaphors, but does not suppress the tenor at all. But here a plausible definition
is found which agrees with the formula proposed by Henri de Régnier in 1900: "Un
symbole est, en effet, une comparaison et une identité de l'abstrait au concret, com­
paraison dont Tun des termes reste sous-entendu".59 It is what Christine Brooke-Rose
in her Grammar of Metaphor calls Simple Replacement: "the proper term is replaced
altogether by the metaphor, without being mentioned at all". 60 But the proper term
or the thing or the tenor must somehow be hinted at or understood from the context,
for otherwise the poem will be incomprehensible (as some Symbolist poems are) or so
ambiguous as to lend itself to the most divergent interpretations. But simple replace­
ment is, of course, a device much older and more widespread than French Symbolism.
On this analysis, even a proverb such as "a rolling stone gathers no moss" would be
a symbol. This clearly will not do. We have to limit "simple replacement". The hidden
tenor cannot be simply "man" or, in the case of this proverb, "the footloose man, the
wanderer", but it must be some internal event or experience that hints at something
transcendent and, with many symbolists, at something supernatural or even occult.
The thing, any thing, as in Rilke's Dinggedicht, can become the vehicle, but it will
always suggest the concealed tenor: the mystery of life and the world. We are back at
a definition of the world-view of the Symbolists, but we have returned to it via a stylis­
tic requirement: the structure of the symbol. The Symbolist symbol has its special
character: simple replacement and the suggestion of the mystery.
This may be a narrow definition of Symbolism. It does contain, as I admitted
earlier, a prescriptive meaning, but it allows us to distinguish Symbolism as we know

57
1947; new ed. 1965, p. 97.
58
Bernard Weinberg, The Limits of Symbolism. Studies of Five Modern French Poets (Chicago,
66).
59
"Poètes d'aujourd'hui et poésie de demain", in Mercure de France, 35, 1900, p. 342.
60
London, 1958, p . 24.

27
it from about the time of Baudelaire to Valéry and Rilke from t h a t all-pervasive sym­
bolism which would include half of the world's literature. In this widest sense, the term
loses all usefulness for the student of literature. Of the four concentric circles we have
distinguished: t h e coterie in Paris in the eighteen-eighties and -nineties; the French
movement from Baudelaire to Valéry; the international movement t h a t spans the con­
tinents and includes all or almost all literatures between 1880 and 1920; and the sym­
bolism of all ages and places. The third meaning, the concept of the international
movement, is clearly the one most relevant to our concerns as comparatists.

28
 GYÖBGY M. VAJDA

THE STRUCTURE OP THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT

"O Beauté, dur fléau des âmes . . . "

(Baudelaire: Causerie)

Symbolism's contribution to the development of modern literature and art on an

international scale has yet to be evaluated. There is one point, however, about which
we can be certain: throughout its history, Symbolism was never an isolated movement
in European literature. In the literatures of all the European languages, we find a
number of other movements flourishing contemporaneously with it.
It is its structure which differentiated the Symbolist movement from those con­
current and contiguous with it. This structure can be said to consist of a peculiar layer
of ideological nature (the philosophical background) a methodology, i.e. a poetics; and
a stylistic layer, the sum total of formal devices. Instances of some or all of these
elements can be discovered in every Symbolist work.
Every movement has its own philosophical layer, its own methodology, and its
own style. It is the content of each of these layers which varies from movement to
movement. We are able to place a work within a movement if it possesses the features
most characteristic of each of these layers. The first step in such an identification is the
delineation of the structural layers of a given movement. The intention of this study
is precisely to attempt to give such a characterization of Symbolism.1
For all their historical concreteness, literary and artistic movements are but
''working hypotheses". They are primarily a means for us to find our bearings in the
flux which characterizes the history of literature and the arts. This history is inextri­
cably intertwined with that of society, of morals, of philosophy, and of ideas — that
of the history of an entire culture. Yet, in the final analysis, qua specialized literary
or art history, it consists of the interrelationship of a series of works.
Rarely can the entire lifework of a writer or an artist be considered as belonging
to a given movement. Works rather than personalities, writers, painters, sculptors, or
poets belong to movements. An argument over whether all of Balzac's works are realistic,
or whether all of Zola's are naturalistic, would be a fruitless one indeed. Strindberg, too,
wrote naturalistic, realistic, symbolistic or, more precisely, modern style pieces. Maeter­
linck's works are not all uniformly Symbolist. And yet it is far from indifferent whether
or not we think of works as belonging to clearly identifiable movements. On the one
hand, we need to see clearly the structure of literary and artistic movements, to de­
scribe the various layers of this structure in order to be able to determine more precisely
1
Though in this study I have not quoted from Michel Décaudin's masterly book, La Crise des
valeurs symbolistes (Toulouse, 1966), I feel obliged to confess that I have been most inspired by it,
both to assent and to disagree.

29
the place occupied by a written work of art within the process of literary and art history.
On the other, a structural analysis of movements, based as it is on the analysis of in­
dividual works, also contributes to a more precise understanding of the works them­
selves.

1. THE PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND OF THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT:

The uppermost content layer of the structure of Symbolism is comprised of philosoph­

ical principles, ideological elements, and value systems. It is these that we must
first consider. However, since in no movement can the layers be completely separated
from each other, in discussing this element we shall at times have to refer to the method,
the poetics, of Symbolism as well as to some of its stylistic elements.
1.a) The "philosophy" of Symbolism presents a peculiar picture. Perhaps never
before in the history of literature and the arts has there been a movement in whose
ideology and value system Beauty was given such an eminent position. The fact that
Symbolism was contemporaneous with Naturalism served to emphasize this peculiarity.
1.b) Symbolism was as much a product of the scientific age as was Naturalism.
Naturalism was indeed, as Zola claimed, the prose engendered by the scientific age;
but Symbolism was just as unequivoćally the age's own peculiar poetry. The Symbol­
ists produced a poetry of utmost refinement, a very language within a language, "un
langage dans un langage", as Valéry put it in a lecture on the relationship of poetry
and abstract thought. ("Poésie et pensée abstraite", 1939). Naturalistic prose used
everyday language to convey its own truths. Symbolist poetry, on the other hand,
deliberately endowed its linguistic signs with an esthetic function, thus helping modern
students of language and style to better understand the peculiarities of the language
of poetry. Valéry frequently speaks of the peculiar function of poetic language. He lived
at a time when twentieth-century symbolic logic and linguistic structuralism were
already taking shape; he had at his disposal the results of formalistic stylistic analysis.
Has interpretation of Symbolism is thus partially conceived in terms of the concept
of "symbol as a linguistic sign," which — as a sign for a meaning — is theoretically
related to mathematical symbols. Finally, mention should be made of the Symbolist
René Ghil, who, while Mallarmé was writing "poésie symboliste," was writing his own
"poésie scientifique, partant des données de la science, et pour la pensée directrice et
pour la technique". 2
Natural science takes nature, reality, matter for the object of its studies. Mathemat­
ics — though in the final analysis it, too, is rooted in reality — takes numerical rela­
tions and interrelationships. Even without attempting to give an ontological definition
of mathematical "existence", we can assert with certainty that, of all the sciences,
mathematics — and logic — represent the highest level of abstraction from reality.
Abstraction is a methodological element of artistic composition. Nevertheless, we
shall discuss it briefly at this place of our study in order to clarify its relationship to
Symbolist ideals.

2
René Ghil, De la poésie scientifique (Paris, 1909), p. 19.

30
 At least two kinds of poetic attitudes are typical of works within the Symbolist
movement. In the first, it is the intellect which dominates, and — in our opinion —
this is Symbolism par excellence. Works by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry and Babits
represent this stream. In the second, it is the emotional-sentimental-moody element
which is preeminent. These works display a remarkable sensitivity to impressions; the
poems "swim" and ''float". Verlaine, Rimbaud, Samain already wrote poems of this
kind. In the German poetic tradition, George is closer to the first, Rilke to the second
type. "Type", I say, for the expression "type" by no means presumes to strictly define
the artist and his work. The ideal of Beauty, however, is the primum movens of the
philosophy and esthetics as much of the intellectual, as of the emotional type of Sym­
bolism.
Abstraction is a means of mentally stepping out of reality; it involves the creation
of concepts, of general principles, and of universals. Whereas some Symbolists arrived
at mathematical abstractions of reality, i.e., at symbols, others—the emotional-senti­
mental-moody Symbolists— expressed atmospheric effects, shades of feeling, and a
general indecisiveness in their melodious lines. Fundamentally, however, this latter
method was simply a variety of abstraction. The continuation and transposition of the
former method in the fine arts can be seen in the Cubism of the beginning of the twen­
tieth century, which reduced the natural shapes of the body to geometric forms. The
equivalent in the fine arts of the emotional-sentimental-moody Symbolist trend was
Impressionist painting and sculpture; its subsequent development was abstract paint­
ing based on color effects, a style which Kandinsky initiated even before the First
World War. Abstraction, therefore, is a combination of both Symbolist trends; it is
a necessary element in any treatment of Symbolism in the history of modern literature
and art. The very utilization of symbols, from which the movement received its name,
is itself a classical form of artistic abstraction.
1.c) But let us return to the ideational-content layer of Symbolism, to the descrip­
tion of its philosophy. The Symbolists' language, unlike that of the Naturalists, was
not meant to "copy" the world; its purpose was to create another, poetic world. This
other world derived its meaning from, and was grounded in, a conscious or semicon­
scious philosophical position. The ideational content (Ideengehalt) of the Symbolist
movement did not imply the existence of the real world, whatever the personal con­
victions of the individual Symbolist poets might have been in this regard. In this,
it differed radically from Naturalism, which aimed at the enumeration of the facts and
documents of a reality which it presupposed as a given fact. Drawing this contrast is
not tantamount to saying that no Symbolist poem ever reflected the real world. Mallar­
mé and Valéry did, indeed, perfect a poésie pure, a "bodyless" linguistic music. But
others—Baudelaire, the early Rimbaud, and, later, more intensively, Verhaeren, Blok,
and Ady—wrote a type of poetry geared toward reality, replete with social, national,
and, on occasion, even revolutionary elements.
In the poetics of Symbolism, however, the main goal was never to present a faithful
depiction of reality. While the Naturalists derived their inspiration from men preoc­
cupied with the natural sciences, the Symbolists turned to their favorite philosophers:
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Eduard von Hartmann, Kierkegaard, Bergson. The com-

31
poser they most admired, Richard Wagner, primarily treated topics which, though
full of subtle psychological detail, were essentially devoid of factors relating to concrete
reality. Such, indeed, was the Niebelung tetralogy first performed in 1876; the com­
position of the second half of the opera series coincided with the productive years of
Zola, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.
1.d) Along with Beauty, mysticism was also incorporated into the Symbolist view
of the world.
J e me mire et me vois ange, et je meurs, et j'aime
— Que la vitre soit l'art, soit la mysticité —
A renaître, portant mon rêve en diadème,
Au ciel antérieur où fleurit la Beauté !
(Mallarmé: "Les Fenêtres")

Beauty, art, and mysticism: these elements were as integral to the intellectual,
mathematical t y p e of Symbolism as they were to its emotional-intuitive stream.
By way of substantiation, we might refer to Hugo Friedrich, 3 who alludes to the
numerology to be found in Baudelaire's poetic cycles; and perhaps it is not inappro­
priate to note, in this same regard, the three-word titles Ady gave to his poems.
Thus, while t h e trend toward Realism and Naturalism in literature and the arts
built upon the philosophic realism of Diderot and Lessing—or at least upon the tradi­
tions of rational thought—the Romanticism and Symbolism contemporaneous with
it also drew upon the traditions of the "shady side". 4
1.e) Decadence marked the spiritual mood (Lebensgefühl) of poetry at the end of the
nineteenth century; it was the attitude which fin-de-siècle—and perhaps even earlier
—poets adopted toward existence. For although it was only in 1883 t h a t Verlaine wrote
his famous lines: " J e suis l'Empire à la fin de la décadence"; and not until 1885 t h a t
the concept of decadence, i.e., of decline as applied to literature, gained popularity
through Gabriel Vicaire's and Henri Beauclaire's satire, Les Déliquescences d'Adoré
Floupette; and although it was only in 1886 t h a t Anatole Baju started his journal,
Décadent, which Verlaine's "sponsorship" kept alive for three years; and only in 1884
t h a t J . K. Huysmans, the "renegade naturalist", published the novel whose hero, Duc
Jean des Esseintes, was to become the very incarnation of decadence—nevertheless,
the concept, the Lebensgefühl, the "pose", the attitude of decadence was a much earlier
phenomenon. The parallel Verlaine drew between the decline of modern man and of
the modern age, on the one hand, and the decadence of the Roman Empire on t h e
other was, in fact, a thought t h a t had come into vogue precisely one hundred years
earlier (1776—1786) with the appearance of the six volumes of Edward Gibbon's The

3
H u g o Friedrich, Die Struktur der modemen Lyrik, sixth edn. (Hamburg, 1962).
4
One of the m o s t recent works in this connection is Alain Mercier's, Les Sources ésotériques et
occultes de la poésie symboliste (Paris, 1969), who examines in detail the ideological and personal
ties of the Symbolists to the m y s t i c s , occultists, heretics, and satanists of their own, as well as of
previous ages. H e traces the preoccupation with mysticism and the occult throughout the nine-
teenth century, convincingly demonstrating t h a t the so-called "dark side" (versant obscur) oí the
Enlightenment—that represented b y the mystics, spiritualists, and demonists w h o flourished in the
eighteenth century—stretched in an unbroken line throughout the previous century.

32
 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The historical prototype of deca­
dence was, therefore, a discovery of the eighteenth century. As a Romantic " a t t i t u d e " ,
however, it developed after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. First
psychological considerations, then, increasingly, societal considerations were mar­
shalled to justify it. As examples, we might mention Sénancour's Obermann, Constant's
Adolphe, Byron's Don Juan, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Lermontov's Pechorin, Gon-
charov's Oblomov, to name just a few. I n the Russian literary tradition, it is Dobrolyu-
bov who gives us the social and psychological histories of impotent decadent figures.
Not only the Romantics, b u t also the masters of Realism—Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert,
Turgenev, and Tolstoy—evoke for our inspection the long columns of "declining"
characters. Thomas Mann's novel of a family's decline, Buddenbrooks, written at the
turn of the century, is also a p a r t of this tradition. So are his subsequent novellas in
which, however, the psychological and social analyses already display features of
modern artistic decadence. As we can thus see, decadence, in both its subjective and
objective manifestations, appears as the subject of literary examples throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The decadents of modern times, however, them­
selves became examples of decadence; they made it their life-style.
The modern concept of decadence was therefore enlarged. I t still implied the
a t t e m p t to escape from workaday triviality of an ordered bourgeois existence, b u t it
sought this escape in a peculiar and refined estheticism, in the cult of the extra­
ordinary, of the exceptional, and in pessimism and morbidity. The method and style
of Symbolism were particularly suited to the expression of the essence of this kind
of decadence. The new trend broke away from t h e Realists' objective illustration of
decadence and exaggerated the Romantics' " a t t i t u d e " . Already in 1891, Hermann
Bahr called the new efforts of the fin de siècle "a nervous Romanticism" (nervose
Romantik) and noted that, with the passing of Naturalism, the quest for t r u t h had
again been replaced by the quest for "poetry": "Es verbreitete sich am E n d e der
langen Wanderung nach der ewig flüchtigen Wahrheit wieder das alte Gefühl des
Petöfischen Liedes: 'Die Traume, Mutter, lügen nimmer'; und wieder wurde die
Kunst, die eine Weilé die Markthalle der Wirklichkeit gewesen, der 'Tempel des
Traumes', wie Maurice Maeterlinck sie genannt hat". 5 And it was likewise t o a
feature of the Romantics' creative method t h a t Bahr traced what is perhaps t h e main
characteristic of the method of poetic decadence: "Sie wollen keine Abschrift der
äusseren Natur. Sie wollen modeler notre univers intérieur. Darin sind sie wie neue
Romantiker . . ."6
In some way or other—as attitude, as illustration, or as the object of criticism—the
concept and subject of decadence has become p a r t of the mainstream of modern litera­
ture. Thus, even if, with Gustave K a h n (Symbolistes et Décadents, 1902), we apply the
name "decadent" only to the precursors of the Symbolists, or to a group, or to a faction
within the movement, it is, in fact, to an attitude characteristic of the entire movement
t h a t we have alluded. An estheticizing decadence is evident in the method and style

5
Hermann Bahr, Die Überwindung des Naturalismus (Dresden and Leipzig, 1891), p . 153.
6
Hermann Bahr, "Die Décadence", Studien zur Kritik der Moderne (Frankfurt/M., 1894), p . 21.

3 Balakian 33
(both words could be used in the plural) of the Symbolist movement; it is a decadence
that is most compatible with its uses of a mathematical model, its grounding in idealist
philosophy, and its fascination with the mystic and the occult.

2. THE METHOD OF SYMBOLISM

2.a) The method involved in the creation and use of symbols is a direct result of
the very nature of the Symbolist movement. This method, as we have seen, is a prime
example of abstraction. Susanne K. Langer gives the following general definition of a
symbol: "A symbol is any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction."7 This
definition considers a symbol as a shorthand sign for a wider and more pregnant
meaning; it is, in fact, a kind of ''condensation", an abstraction of a concrete thing.
A poetic symbol is particularly rich in shades of meaning. Rimbaud's Bateau ivre not
only managed to paint a novel and arresting series of pictures by means of the metaphor
of a ship—used and abused from the Greek lyricists to the Parnassian school—it also
succeeded on another level as a prophetic illustration of the poet's own inner situation. 8
We can even see the metaphor of the drifting, aimlessly tossed wreckage as a general
symbol of human life. This sole symbol involuntarily leads us to the realization that
Rimbaud's Symbolist poetry reflects an attitude that is fundamentally akin to the
existentialist experience of living.9
2.b) Symbol, the key-word of Symbolism as a movement, has different meanings
in different periods of literature.
"Das ist die wahre Symbolik, wo das Besondere das Allgemeine repräsentiert,
nicht als Traum und Schatten, sondern als lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung des
Unerforschlichen".10
Goethe thus sees the particular case as the symbol expressing a general law.
Werther's personal fate is a symbol of the precariousness of the life of a man of talent
in an absolutely ruled principality; Faust is a symbol of man at the beginning of the
nineteenth century or, more generally, of the active, searching, creative man. In the
esthetics of both Romanticism and Realism, such a symbol is called the "type," i.e.,
the particular case representative of an entire group, class, or community. Stendhal's
hero, Julien Sorel, is the symbol of the Romantics' adventurous and career-minded
youth. Gorky's figure of the Mother is an individual and, as such, is a "sign"; but, in
a general way, she "signifies", or symbolizes an entire class.
This interpretation of "symbolism" leads us to the fundamental question of artistic
depiction, and especially of realistic artistic representation. The above, however, is
not the sense in which "symbolic" applies to the method of the Symbolists. Jean
Moréas's 1886 manifesto suggested the name Symbolism for the movement because its
members wrote poetry which aimed "à vêtir l'Idée d'une forme sensible". Such poetry
7
Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a
New Key (London, 1953), p. xi.
8
Cf. Pierre Brunei, Rimbaud. Thema—Anthologie (Paris, 1973), p. 53.
• Cf. Paul Henri Paillou, Arthur Rimbaud, père de l'Existentialisme (Paris, 1947).
10
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 18, ed. by
Siegfried Seidel (Berlin and Weimar, 1972), p. 520.

34
was not an end in itself, b u t was totally dedicated to the expression of the ideal, totally
subordinate t o t h e ideal. As Guy Michaud observed, 11 Moréas gave no precise definition
of the nature of t h e ideal hidden behind the sensible form. B u t Mallarmé expected the
perceptible words themselves to disclose "the pure essence of t h i n g s ' ' I n 1886, he
wrote: " U n désir indéniable à mon temps est de séparer comme en vue d'attributions
différentes le double état de la parole, brut ou immédiat ici, là essentiel". 12
From these comments and statements we can conclude t h a t the Symbolist move­
ment which evolved in the 1880's saw as its task the creation of a poetry which, through
the instrumentality of sensible forms, i.e., words, pictures, metaphors, etc., expressed
something non-sensible. W h a t we can sense is the sign; what the sign expresses is its
meaning. The signs used in poetry—the instruments of symbolization in its most
general sense — are words. The meaning which the word-symbol expresses is the Idea,
the sign's "symbolic reference". 13
The "symbolic reference", i.e., the way in which a symbol relates to its meaning,
is not the same in every case of symbolization. There is here, in fact, as we have already
seen, a fundamental dichotomy. For the reference of one kind of symbol admits of
rational, discursive, unambiguous apprehension; while the reference of the other admits
only of intuitive discovery: the meaning of these symbols is a matter of conjecture,
they can be b u t "felt". The former is usually true of the symbols of the sciences, the
latter of the symbols in the arts. (Susanne K. Langer's quoted book suggests this
distinction.) We used the qualifier "usually" because what Goethe, for example, meant
by an artistic symbol must be rationally understood. The poetic method of the Sym­
bolists, however, relies on the use of symbols of the latter kind, i.e., of the intuitively
comprehended symbols.
In this respect, there is no difference between the intellectual and the emotional-
intuitive-impressionist streams in Symbolism; for, besides the use of symbols, the
basic component of the poetic method of all Symbolist poets was their reliance upon
intuition. The intellectual stream expected to arrive at an intrinsic understanding of
the ideal, of the essence of things. They expected t h e same intuitive ability of their
readership as well, and brushed aside the charges of unintelligibility raised against
their works b y conservative literary critics with this same appeal to intuition.
I t would appear, therefore, t h a t any distinction drawn between the artistic and
scientific uses of symbols is, at best, ambiguous. For although understanding in science
is generally a step-by-step process—discursive and thus rational—there is also such
a thing as intuition in science, immediate insight, and self-evident truth. I t is precisely
the scientific model used by the Symbolists, i.e., mathematics, which is based on self-
evident truths, on axioms which need no discursive proof. On the other hand, we see
t h a t intuitive recognition or understanding in art is not. necessarily non-intellectual
in nature. We come to recognize in Brecht's Galileo the symbol of the inevitable down­
fall of the scientist too weak or too corruptible to speak the t r u t h through an immediate,
11
Guy Michaud, "La Doctrine Symboliste", Message poétique du Symbolisme Documents
(Paris, 1961), p. 726.
12
13
Traité du verbe de Bené Ghil. Quoted by Michaud, op. cit., p. 726.
Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, "Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect", Alfred North Whitehead:
An Anthology (Cambridge, 1953), p. 536.

3* 35
but by no means a non-intellectual insight. The understanding of an artistic symbol
used in a realistic work of art is, in fact, a rational act, although we recognize its sym­
bolic reference directly. From the epistemological point of view, therefore, a symbol
in realistic art is not unlike a scientific symbol: both refer to one and the same "reality.''
The symbols used by the Symbolists are of another nature. They are uncertain
and ambiguous in meaning; they are expected to be understood not rationally b u t
through an emotional-intuitive approach.
2.c) I t is from the nature of Symbolist intuition t h a t the third decisive element
of the movement's method, namely, impressionism, logically follows. For impressionism
is not, in fact, an independent artistic and literary trend, b u t an artistic method, with
its own characteristic stylistic elements. I n painting, these are motion, brilliance, and
a multitude of shades melting into each other. In sculpture, it is smooth flowing sur­
faces (Rodin); in music, the extraordinarily subtle, light, and graceful expression of
shades of emotion, and an intermeshing of musical themes (Debussy, Ravel); in poetry
and literature, it is tonal painting, musicality, synesthesia, and the modern stylistic
means for illustrating the fine shades of psychological states: interior monologue,
stream of consciousness, style indirect libre, to name just a few. An impressionist school
of international significance we find only in painting, namely, the French school which
flourished during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and which, if we regard
its beginnings, can be said to have coincided with Naturalism and Symbolism in litera­
ture. The Impressionist painters turned against the academicism of the conservatives
who worked in ateliers illuminated by artificial light. They returned to the great sun­
drenched outdoors, rediscovered the landscape, and filled their canvases with fresh
colors; they intermingled colors and shades to create a motley effect and delighted in
capturing the motion of large crowds at leisure. Beyond a doubt, their painting was
more natural and more realistic than t h a t of their academic forbears. I n fact, it was
in the name of Naturalism t h a t Zola espoused their cause; from t h a t time on, not a few
art critics have regarded Impressionism as a variety of Naturalism. The Impressionists
were "naturalistic" in their ability to capture the moment, in their concentration on
its exterior appearance rather than on providing information about the object depicted.
B u t it was precisely this devotion to appearances and to the moment which led the
Impressionist painters beyond Naturalism and placed them in the risky position of
giving back b u t pure impressions, "clusters of sensations" as a substitute for visible
and perceptible nature. Ernst Mach's subjectivist-sensualist philosophy, which saw
the world as being but bundles of sensations which each man must interpret for him­
self, would have served as the theoretical basis for Impressionist painting. Hermann
Bahr had already noted this. The ideology or the philosophical basis of the Impressionist
painters was thus, in this respect, very similar to t h a t of the Symbolist poets. I t is for
this reason t h a t the Impressionist method could become the method of Symbolism in
poetry, prose, and drama.
2.d) Bringing to the surface the subconscious world, giving free play to the imagi­
nation, and recording the stream of consciousness are all "techniques". The theoretical
foundation and background common to them all is modern psychology, which, trans­
cending associational sense psychology, probed into t h e deeper layers of the psyche.

36
Jean Martin Charcot, Freud's French master, was a contemporary of the first generation
of Symbolists; the second generation already had Bergson, Nietzsche, and Sigmund
Freud to learn from. The Symbolist self extended beyond the conscious self to the sub­
conscious, and thus expanded to embrace—along with the known world—the b u t
barely and obscurely known inner world: its ancestral heritage, the instincts, and even
the unconscious world beyond the subconscious. René Ghil had already noted this
mysterious extension of t h e self, ''prolongements obscurs de notre Moi": and of the
"more than the All" of which man thus becomes aware: " E t comme il (i.e., Moi) est, tout
entier, et conscient et inconscient, en communion avec le Tout, davantage du Tout
sera donc en même temps porté à notre connaissance". 14 We cannot understand the
poetry of Rimbaud or Mallarmé, nor even of the early Ady, without this characteris­
tically Symbolist "self-extension". This theory of the expansion of the world of the
self was largely derived from modern psychology and psychoanalysis; but the already-
mentioned occult-mystical sources also played their part.
2.e) Finally, we must mention an element of the Symbolist method characteristic
of the work of many poets of the movement: lyrical "impersonality". The lyrical self
does not speak in the first person, but rather yields its place to a suggestive and imper­
sonal lyrical object. Hugo Friedrich 15 tells the story t h a t when Rimbaud read his
Bateau ivre to Théodore de Banville, the latter asked him why the poet did not start
the poem with the the declaration t h a t he himself was the wandering ship. Friedrich
seems to me to be correct in singling out this element of impersonal, "objective" lyri­
cism as the main difference between Romantic and Symbolist lyric poetry. This objective
lyricism, whose parallel we find not in Romantic lyric poetry, b u t rather in the poetry
of medieval hymns, often makes a sort of "monodrama" of the poem constructed
around the symbol—this, in fact, is true of Le Bateau ivre—and, at the same time, gives
us the clue to Symbolism's adaptability to drama. For Symbolist drama is typically an
instance of the impersonal lyric poem where the poet cannot appear in the first person,
though he is present in the objective dramatic structure of the work.
Impersonal lyric poetry possesses a unique and dominant stylistic device, the
"absolute metaphor". In the latter, one half of the comparison is left out and the other
half assumes the function of a total simile. "The great secret of symbolism", wrote
Gyula Illyés in 1936, "is t h a t the poets have publicly slain one word: the word 'like".

3. T H E CHARACTERISTICS OF SYMBOLIST STYLE

This is an area t h a t has been explored and déscribed b y many critics. By the
nature of things, critics' comments and poets' self-analyses apply mostly t o style.
This is all the more natural in t h a t it was only through the instrumentality of style
t h a t the Symbolist ideal of Beauty, t h a t " h a r d scourge" {dur fléau) of souls, could be
realized. Looking back over the past hundred years, we cannot fail to see t h a t the
stylistic standards demanded by the Symbolists raised European poetry to a new height.

14
Traité du verbe. .. Quoted by Michaud, op. cit., p . 39.
15
Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modemen Lyrik, p. 55.

37
I t is their standards and their achievements t h a t at least two or three subsequent
generations of poets have tried to emulate or disprove. Their enduring preeminence is
due not to their philosophy or their poetics (i.e. method), but rather to their style.
3.a) I t was Verlaine's famous Art poétique which gave rise to the view t h a t Sym­
bolism's primary esthetic ideal is musicality. "De la musique avant toute chose".
Without a doubt, a major reason for the enormous influence of French Symbolist
poetry on literatures throughout the world was its musical form — both internal and
external — the music of its language and the musicality of its composition. We can
find this latter feature even in some of the prose of the writers.
I t was, no doubt, from Romanticism t h a t Symbolist esthetics inherited the con­
cept of music as the "culmination", the "model" of all art, possibly through the
mediation of Schopenhauer, who was becoming better known b y the middle of the
century. Schopenhauer held t h a t the aim of every other art was to render more or less
explicit "the objectification of the will" (die Objektivation des Willens), in other words,
to illustrate ideas through the depiction of individual objects; music, however, had an­
other goal. For music "transcends" (übergeht) ideas, and individual objects as well;
it is independent of the perceptible world: ". . . da sie die Ideen übergeht, (ist) auch
von der erscheinenden Welt ganz unabhängig, ignoriert sie schlechthin, könnte gewisser-
massen, auch wenn die Welt gar nicht ware, doch bestehen: was von den anderen
Künsten sich nicht sagen lässt". 1 6 This idea, t h a t the more independent an a r t is of t h e
objective world the "higher" it is, well illustrates the hierarchy into which idealist
esthetics placed the arts. Romanticism—especially German Romanticism —- accepted
this esthetic theory, as indeed did Symbolism.
Thus we must not regard the Symbolists' ideal of "musicality" as an accidental or
contingent principle, b u t rather as one which logically follows from the very nature
of their philosophy and their esthetics. Considered from another angle, this is t a n t a ­
mount to saying t h a t Symbolism demanded musicality from poetry not as " a n end in
itself", but rather in order t h a t it might, through its own media, approximate the most
closely the art of "the highest order", music, and thus Beauty, of which music was the
realization and which "could exist to some degree even if there were no world a t all".
The ideal of musicality belongs to the stylistic layer of Symbolism, for music in
literature is a function of language, of style. I t is the stylistic element which is the most
deeply rooted in the esthetics and value-hierarchy of the Symbolist movement, and one
which graphically illustrates the interrelatedness of ideas and of style, and the possibil­
ity of expressing ideas through the medium of art.
3.b) We shall make no a t t e m p t systematically or exhaustively to enumerate Sym­
bolist stylistic devices, for style, as the framework of each individual piece, appears in
innumerable variations. We shall, however, attempt to list some of the devices charac­
teristic of Symbolism, as well as those which follow directly from the principles of the
Symbolist method. The second among these must be pictorialness. The symbol itself is
a picture, and so are the similes. The "absolute metaphors" are all the more pictures

16
Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Book III, § 52, in Sämtliche
Werke, ed. by I. Frauenstädt (Leipzig, 1891), vol. II, p. 304.

38
in that, by definition, only their pictorial part remains. The allegories and the metaphors
are all pictures. Never in the history of European poetry has there been such a plethora
of pictures as in the poems of the Symbolists. The pictures are in living color—yellows,
blues and greens—-though their function is often to create an atmosphere, as is that of
the mood adjectives frequently used for "padding". It is again Rimbaud's Bateau ivre
which provides us with a fitting example:
J'ai rêvé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies,
Baiser montant aux yeux des mers avec lenteurs,
La circulation des sèves inouïes
Et l'éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores chanteurs !
Glaciers, soleils d'argent, flots nacreux, cieux de braises !
Échouages hideux au fond des golfes bruns
Où les serpents géants dévorés des punaises
Choient, des arbres tordus, avec des noirs parfums !

3.c) If we add to the pictorial a sense of musicality, a quality which heightens the
expressive power of the latter, we begin to detect in the union of the Symbolists'
stylistic devices an attempt to achieve a kind of total art. Richard Wagner's Gesamt-
kunstwerk comes to mind as having perhaps inspired such an attempt. For Wagner
intended this work to be the fusion of the devices employed by every art, in order that
it might simultaneously affect all man's senses, and through his senses, his emotions,
his intellect, and his will. He wanted, in short, to confront man with the world in all
its totality; with that which is rational and sensible in the world as well as with that
which appears only in the guise of the faintly suspected, the subconscious, the "sup­
pressed" element of mythology. "It is the All that I wish to put into my verse," wrote
the Hungarian Symbolist Mihály Babits, succinctly characterizing the above-mentioned
attitude. Symbolist poetry wished to realize through the sole instrumentality of words,
through onomatopoeia and pictures, all that Wagner wanted to achieve in his musical
dramas through the fusion of lyrics, music, scenery, and motion. And the Symbolists
hoped to capture in the synesthetic experience the same magic, the same enchantment,
and the same suggestiveness that they sought in obscurity and mystery, in the har­
monious music of all the senses, or like Yeats or Ady, in the pictures and symbols of
ancient folklore.
Just as Wagner, in his Gesamtkunstwerk, made the linguistic element, the dramatic
script, the essential vehicle and repository of the totality of the work, so the Symbolist
poets strove to express the unity and the totality of the world of impressions through
poetry. It is Lichtenberger, the famous French Wagnerian, who first noted this:
". . . dans l'union des deux arts, la poésie représente, selon Wagner, l'élément mâle,
la semence fécondante qui contient en germe le drame tout entier". 17
3.d) It is thus the language of poetry which must contain and conjure up all the
magic which Symbolist poetry aims at: the blurred or glaring impressions, the dreams,

17
Henri Lichtenberger, Richard Wagner poète et penseur, (Paris, 1898), p. 2. Quoted by Michaud,
op. cit., p. 209.

39
the atmosphere, the enchantment. The greatest contribution of French, Russian, South
American Spanish (modernismo), German, Austrian, Czech, Croat, Polish, or Hungar­
ian Symbolism to literature is t h a t it renewed or recreated the language of poetry.
The basic Symbolist tenet of the identity, in poetic language, of the expression, and
of the thing expressed—or, in other words, of the sign (signifiant) and of its signifi­
cance (signifié)—was consonant with Bergson's or Croce's esthetic theories, as well as
with Symbolism's own philosophical background, which Rémy de Gourmont expressed
in the following neo-Kantian terms in 1896: "Nous ne connaissons que des phénomènes,
nous ne raisonnons que sur des apparences; toute vérité en soi nous échappe; l'essence
est inattaquable". 1 8 What remains, therefore, is language, the "system of signs", as
Ferdinand de Saussure p u t it. There remains a system of evocative poetic signs. Saus­
sure was a contemporary of the Symbolists and certainly knew of their stylistic theories;
Rémy de Gourmont was among the first critics to discuss the latter in Le problème du
style of 1902.
The school of stylistic analysis which was reborn at the turn of the century no
doubt paralleled the stylistic problems of the Symbolists. Charles Bally's two-volume
work on style, Traité de stylistique française, which appeared in 1909, already contained
a clear differentiation between the rational and affective elements of language. Although
they had no explicitly esthetic orientation, his theories laid the groundwork for the
philosophy of the Formalist linguistic and literary analysts who associated with the
Russian Symbolist poets; they also served as the basis for the system built by the
Prague Circle of linguists, who, in turn, had ties with the Czech modernists. 19
Language as esthetic expression, as the expression of the beautiful, was the poet's
autonomous creation; the Symbolist's poetic language could not be fettered by the
rules of centuries of poetic tradition. The Symbolists replaced traditional lines with
free verse, which was to become one of Symbolism's most significant stylistic innova­
tions. I t gave to the changed world, to the scientific age, the new forms of expression
by means of which it could convey its own message.
The Symbolists—especially the French Symbolists, who broke with the heretofore
strictly formalized poetic style—saw the liberation of verse and of r h y t h m as one of
their moral victories. To attain it, they used the intellectual weapons of experimental
science—much as Zola had used them to create his naturalistic experimental novels.
The concepts of "experimental" and "scientific" were by no means foreign to the Sym­
bolists' vocabulary, and it is a fascinating, though dialectically necessary fact t h a t
their most important contribution to world poetry, viz. free verse, was intimately
connected with the experimental scientific outlook, and was, in fact, the fruit of its
literary-stylistic equivalent.
Francis Vielé-Griffin's reflections of 1907, published under the title Une Conquête
morale, deal with this question at length:

18
19
Rémy de Gourmont, Preface Livre de Masques. Quoted by Michaud, op. cit., p. 723.
cf. Wolfgang Kavser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk, sixth edn., (Bern und München, 1960),
pp. 273-274.

40
 C'est en conséquence de leur conception très haute
de Fart du poète que les meilleurs symbolistes, en
même temps qu'ils édifient une philosophie de la
vie et une éthique intellectuelle, interrogeaient
critiquement les ressources mêmes du langage et
abordaient expérimentalement l'étude de ces
possibilités musicales. Cette recherche expérimentale
d'une base réelle et logique à l'expression rythmée
de la pensée fut générale . . . L'esprit scientifique
aidant, le Symbolisme accentue ses traditions et
débute, comme un Lavoisier, par des expériences qui
ne furent pas toujours concluantes.20

Translated by Èva Pálmai

20
Quoted by Michaud, op. cit., pp. 783-784.

41
 LLOYD JAMES AUSTIN

PRESENCE AND POETRY OF STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ:

INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION AND INTELLECTUAL IMPACT*

Mallarmé's fame, as Paul Valéry once wrote, is the supreme paradox of the history of
the mind. It is as if, thanks to a devoted few (of whom Valéry himself was one of the
most active and effective), the Grand Œuvre, the supreme Book which Mallarmé had
meditated writing all his life which was by definition impossible to realize, had indeed
been realized and recognized as such. 1 When Mallarmé died in 1898, at the age of
fifty-six, he had indeed not completed the major work he had planned; but he left a
body of critical writings on the nature of poetry, and a collection of poems, small in
bulk but of incomparable density and evocative power, which have gradually come to
be recognized as of fundamental importance in the history of poetry. The progressive
revelation of his extensive posthumous works, and the gradual publication of his
letters, have little by little convinced an at first somewhat sceptical posterity that
Mallarmé had not usurped the central position in the literary and artistic life of Paris
in which, during his lifetime, his friends and disciples had unhesitatingly placed him
as the ideal incarnation of the Poet.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (an excellent judge
of poetry) had been able to say that French was "wholly unfit for poetry" because of
the very quality which made the French language so admirable in prose: its clarity. 2
By the end of the nineteenth century, no one could have said such a thing without
immediate contradiction. French poetry was no longer criticized by its enemies nor
extolled by its friends for having the clarity of prose. Hostile critics abused it for the
new vice of obscurity. Mallarmé rejected the charge and claimed that he and his fellow
poets had restored one of the most vital values of poetry: the sense of mystery.
Easy communication is excellent in itself, Mallarmé held, but it is not beyond
questioning. What, first of all, is communicated? In a sense, immediate understanding
is possible only on a superficial level: where one man tells another what he, as it were,
already knows. Much ordinary conversation consists precisely of references to what is
immediately recognized and therefore imparts nothing new. Ordinary communication
is, in fact, based on the existence of a common stock of concepts or notions which can
be referred to without further ado. For all practical matters this is excellent: 'tis
words that make the world go round. But how can one convey new experience?
* This article was written in 1973. Much important work has appeared since then. It has been
possible to add only a few references. L. J. A., October, 1981.
1
Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris, 1957), I. p. 1737.
2
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. K. Coburn, (London, 1957), I. Entry No. 383
(not paginated).

43
I t cannot be referred to, for as yet it exists only for one. I t cannot be named, for as
yet it has no name. Clearly, language can here no longer be used as a means of ex­
change, a form of barter. I t has to recover what Mallarmé called its "virtuality", its
original creative force, its power to find a name for all things visible and invisible.
Language has to become poetry. That was the problem t h a t faced the poets of nine­
teenth-century France. Many poets and theorists contributed to a solution. None
perhaps saw more deeply into its essence nor brought a more decisive contribution,
both by precept and example, than Mallarmé.
For Mallarmé, poetry was the supreme value. "With Mallarmé, from the start,
the questions, What is life?, and, What is poetry?, were one". 3 In his poetic career, he
lived through the three main phases of French poetry in the nineteenth century. He
began as a schoolboy by the eager imitation of the Romantic poets; he created, in his
Hérodiade, a masterpiece of his own from certain tendencies inherent in what was
called "Parnassian" poetry; and, adopting and developing the theories and practice
of Edgar Allan Poe and of Baudelaire, he emerged as the leader of what was called
French Symbolism. But, like any great poet, he transcends all "schools" and defies
classification.
Although he did not possess the precocity of Rimbaud, Mallarmé began writing
poetry early. In 1859 — 1860, while a seventeen-year-old boarder a t the provincial
lycée de Sens which now bears his name, he clandestinely filled four notebooks, one
with his own poetry, under the title Entre quatre murs, and three with the poetry of
other writers. 4 The original poems amount to nearly two thousand lines, more t h a n
the total of his canonical works. They constitute an epitome of Romantic themes and
techniques derived from Lamartine, 5 Alfred de Musset, André Chénier, Béranger and,
above all, Victor Hugo, imitating especially the recently published Contemplations and
La Légende des siècles. The boy seeks and finds in his favorite poets echoes of his own
adolescent emotions, which he expresses, in his turn, in elegiac laments, bacchio boast­
ings, erotic reveries, religious musings, pantheistic effusions, or outbursts of truculent
blasphemy. Certain details foreshadow his later poems. The line:

Les nymphes en riant fuient un faune lascif6

looks ahead to L'Après-midi d'un faune; and the interrogation: " [ . - . .] qu'est la
terre?" 7 will recur in the climax of Toast funèbre, where this same question is p u t to
the inarticulate dead:

Souvenirs d'horizons, qu'est-ce, ô toi, que la Terre ?

3
The Prose of Christopher Brennan, ed. A. R. Chisholm and J. J. Quinn (Sydney, 1962), p. 137.
4
. See Henri Mondor, Mallarmé lycéen (Paris, 1954), pp. 121—225; L. J. Austin, '''Les
Années d'apprentissage de Stéphane Mallarmé", ÉHLF, LXVI (1956), pp. 65-84; and Austin
Gill, The Early Mallarmé, Vol. 1 (Oxford, 1979), passim.
5
See Luigi de Nardis, "L'influence de Lamartine sur les poèmes de jeunesse de Mallarmé",
Actes du Congrès des Secondes Journées Lamartiniennes (Mâcon, 1965), pp. 35-43,
6
7
Mallarmé lycéen, p. 152.
Ibid., p. 182.

44
Many other key words and images are already present. B u t Mallarmé had not yet
found his real self nor his real style. With characteristic lucidity he realized this; and
in a poem dated November, 1859, he disarmingly cries: "Ces vers sont bien mauvais.'' 8
In 1860, after this salutary self-criticism, he wrote only two short poems, but he filled
three notebooks with extracts chosen from many poets: some eight thousand lines in
all. Among them were nine poems of Edgar Allan Poe and twenty-nine poems by
Baudelaire. With the help of these two poets and their new conception of poetry,
Mallarmé was to find himself and to lead French poetry onto new paths.
Mallarmé may have overestimated the value of Poe's poetry, which he later trans­
lated. 9 B u t he found above all in Poe a new poetics based on the quest of calculated
effects, of lucid control in composition, and of "pure poetry", reducing to a minimum
narrative, descriptive, and didactic elements. In Baudelaire he found at this stage
Romanticism pushed to extreme intensity: he significantly omitted many poems which
he must later have regarded as of importance, including the sonnet Correspondances.1®
But in 1861 he immediately acquired the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mal and the
rest of his career reveals t h a t he had understood the deepest levels of Baudelaire's
poetry and had carried Baudelaire's theory of correspondences and universal analogy
beyond its logical conclusion in the poetry of Symbolism into the imaginative con­
ception of the supreme Book.
Poetry as Baudelaire and Mallarmé preached and practiced it was truly a way
of life, the perpetual quest of an ideal harmony reconciling the dissonances of life.
Baudelaire had based his poetry on the sharp sense of these dissonances and had provid­
ed his own bitter but triumphant resolution. The eleven poems t h a t Mallarmé sent to
the first series of the Parnasse Contemporain in 1866 (he was 24) are a powerful restate­
ment of Baudelairean themes and a fruitful application of the Baudelairean technique
of correspondences, which involves essentially the "deliberate use of images taken from
the external world for the perfect expression of the inner". 1 1 At the heart of these
poems is a revulsion from crass reality and an ardent aspiration towards a finer life. The
poet denounces with searing scorn the revolting happiness of those gross appetites t h a t
are so easily satisfied. H e evokes the vision of a realm of anterior and paradisal beauty,
discerned through the windows of art or of mysticism. Deep discouragement is the
explicit theme of these poems, b u t it is belied by the tone, by the vigour of the invective
in the denunciation of mindless, purely animal existence, and by the subtly splendid
evocation of the ideal world behind its crystal barrier. And already the poet knows
t h a t this realm is accessible even in the midst of life. As always with Mallarmé, his
poetry was in advance of his conscious thought. Soon he was to describe in his corre­
spondence the imaginary death and resurrection he had undergone; and this was to
become one of the central themes of his mature work. Death to t h e world of contingency
and resurrection in the realm of art is hailed in the poem Les Fenêtres, which Mallarmé
8
Ibid., p. 198.
9
See P . Mansell Jones, "Poe, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé: A Problem of Literary Judgement",
The Background of Modern French Poetry (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 38-58, and Eleonore M. Zimmer-
mann,10 "Mallarmé et Poe: précisions et aperçus", CL, VI (1954), pp. 304 — 315.
11
See Austin, "Les Années d'apprentissage . . . ", pp. 79-80.
The Prose of Christopher Brennan, p . 53.

45
placed at the beginning of the series of poems for the Parnasse Contemporain: it is
evoked as the last remaining hope in the final poem. With beautiful appropriateness,
Mallarmé placed as an Épilogue to these poems of conflict and distress the evocation
of this new possibility. Weary of his idleness and even wearier of his desperate struggle
with the tyrannical demands of the voracious art of a cruel country where the artist
is supposed to be prolific, he will choose death in life, the idea of the sage, and achieve
serenity by imitating the limpid, delicate art of the Chinese porcelain painter for whom
one simple theme can provide a lifetime's inspiration; the poem ends with a lovely
evocation of a landscape by the tiniest, subtlest touches of the brush: a lake, a crescent
moon, a cloud, and three great emerald eyelashes for reeds.12
By the time these poems appeared in the first Parnasse Contemporain (1866),
Mallarmé had already moved beyond the conception of poetry that they tellingly illus­
trated. They had been conceived, he explained to his friend Henri Cazalis (the poet
Jean Lahor), as "so many intuitive revelations of [his] temperament, and of the note
it would give"; "none of them had been conceived in view of Beauty". 13 They still
belonged to the tradition of personal lyricism; but Mallarmé was moving on to a new
conception of the necessary impersonality of the artist. He was reliving in his own
way the central experience of Flaubert, just twenty years before.
In October, 1864, Mallarmé had begun work on his greatest poem, Hérodiade; and
the very effort of creation was soon to lead him to a crisis from which he emerged
radically transformed. His old beliefs were gone; but, although his intellectual crisis
brought with it years of mental stress and physical illness, he rapidly achieved a new,
unshakeable faith in the power of poetry to create a new beauty and a new significance
from an apparently or really absurd and fortuitous universe.
Hérodiade was first conceived as a tragedy in three acts, which Mallarmé hoped
to offer to the Comédie Française. He first completed the dialogue between Hérodiade
and her old nurse, which was to become his contribution to the second series of the
Parnasse Contemporain of 1869—1871. The young princess is a fusion of the two biblical
figures of Herodias and Salome; but Mallarmé stressed that she was a purely independent
figure, one utterly separate from history.14 The untamed virgin, with her massive
tresses of golden hair, her great mirror, and her fierce, inviolable purity, is shown
withdrawn into herself in contemplation of her own beauty. The language of the poem
is of incomparable harmony and splendor, dominated by images of jewels and precious
metals, of ice and snow and chill, glittering stars to which Hérodiade feels akin.
The stately, hieratic alexandrines move with subtle variations of rhythm, soon to be
carried much further in L'Après-midi d'un faune; and the sustained development of
some of the sinuous periods slowly built up over many lines already shows Mallarmé's
masterly control of the poetic resources of syntax. The dialogue illuminates Hérodiade's

18
For a detailed discussion of these poems, see L. J. Austin, "Mallarmé disciple de Baudelaire:
Le Parnasse contemporain", RHLF, LXVII. (1967), pp. 437-449.
18
Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, I. (1862-1871), ed. H . Mondor and J . P . Richard
(Paris, 1959), p. 215 ("bien qu'aucun de ces poèmes n'ait été en réalité conçu en vue de la
Beauté, mais plutôt comme autant d'intuitives révélations de mon tempérament, et de la note qu'il
donnerait...").
"Corr. I . p . 154.

46
mind and aspirations by contrasting them with the down-to-earth humanity of the
nurse, who arouses Hérodiade's horror and indignation by her well-meaning but clumsy
remarks about the possibility of marriage and a husband. And the nurse makes three
symbolical gestures: she tries to embrace Hérodiade; she offers her perfumes; and she
tries to touch her hair. Hérodiade feels in these words and gestures an obscure threat
and omen of the end of her jealously guarded isolation.
Here Mallarmé halted, not then really knowing, as he admitted later, how to
continue. What he had consciously put into the poem was the symbol of his own
temptation to withdraw from life. But poetic creation was for Mallarmé a means of
self-discovery. He realized only gradually the significance of his subject in itself and
for himself.15 Soon he was to see that the symbol of Hérodiade was of much more than
personal significance, and that his proud, virginal princess, as he had portrayed her,
could be the incarnation of the idea of Beauty in the first phase of a triadic develop-
ment: from innocence through experience to an ultimate serenity fusing the two in
a higher synthesis. This was to involve a mystical marriage between Hérodiade and
the severed head of St. John the Baptist. The poem was to be called Les Noces d'Hérodi-
ade. Mystère.16 Mallarmé worked on it at intervals throughout his life; it was nearing
completion when he died. His last virtually completed poem may well have been
the magnificent Cantique de saint Jean, in which the saint, at the very moment of his
beheading, proclaims the triumphant reconciliation of his mind and body in death.17
But even before Mallarmé had completed the dialogue scene from Hérodiade, a
totally different symbolic figure had fired his imagination. He spent the summer
months of 1865 writing the first of three known versions of his most famous poem,
L'Après-midi d'un faune. Églogue. Here a faun awakes from sleep and recalls, or
thinks he recalls, that he had captured two nymphs the previous afternoon beside a
Sicilian marsh beneath the slopes of Mount Etna. One was fair, blue-eyed and chaste,
the other, dark and sensual. The faun is not sure whether they were real or only a
dream vision conjured up by the sound of his flute. This ambiguity between dream
and memory is admirably created and sustained. It is because of this doubt that the
faun turns to the creative imagination, which achieves the synthesis of reality and
dream. He evokes this "magical and synthetic power"18 in a lovely image. When he
has sucked the bright pulp from grapes, he holds up the empty bunch to the sky and,
blowing into the luminous, transparent skins, he looks through them until evening
falls. Even so, he now seeks to recreate his memories of the nymphs. He evokes in
lines of ardent sensuality his capture of them, their escape, and his boastful dream
of seizing Venus herself. He then sinks down, overcome, not by the thunderbolt of an
avenging deity, but by the oppressive heat of the afternoon. He will dream of the
nymphs once more. The poem exemplifies, in verse of extreme musicality, the power

15
Corr., J. p. 221: "Hérodiade, ou je m'étais mis tout entier sans le savoir".
16
Ed. Gardner Davies (Paris, 1959). Dr. Davies has subsequently published a series of exe-
getical studies of the various parts of this work, collected in Mallarmé et le rêve d'Hérodiade (Paris,
1978),17 303 pp.
In addition to Gardner Davies' article, see L. J. Austin, "Le Cantique de saint Jean de
Stéphane
18
Mallarmé", AUMLA, no. 10 (1959), pp. 46-59.
The expression is Coleridge's. See his Biographia Literaria, ch. XVI.

47
of art to evoke, by means of sublimated reminiscences, the ideal essence of fleeting
phenomena. One of the central tenets of Mallarmé's mature poetics was t h a t poetry
has the d u t y of recreating reality in an ideal form, using memories as the raw material.
Not until the world has been transformed in this way by the mind of man is it a fitting
dwelling place for him. Only then do we know t h a t we really are where we should be. 19
Mallarmé had intended the Monologue d'un faune to be declaimed by Constant
Coquelin a t the Comedie Française, just as he had originally intended Hérodiade to be
submitted to t h a t theatre. B u t his monologue was refused on the grounds t h a t it lacked
the indispensable anecdotal interest. Mallarmé therefore laid it aside for t h e moment.
H e later revised it radically and offered it in 1875 to the editors of the third Parnasse
Contemporain. They rejected it and Mallarmé published it separately in 1876 in a
sumptuous rare edition illustrated by Edouard Manet (who had illustrated Mallarmé's
translation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, published the previous year). 2 0
Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1865, Mallarmé, temporarily abandoning his theatri­
cal ambitions, had taken up Hérodiade again, no longer as a tragedy, b u t as a poem,
he would thus, he said, gain "attitude, costumes, setting, furniture, not t o mention
mystery". 2 1 H e spent the winter of 1865—1866 working on the poem. I n April, 1866,
he announced t h a t he had completed a draft of what he called the "musical overture",
which he (rightly) believed to be far superior to anything he had yet achieved: " I can
say without presumptuousness t h a t it will make an unprecedented impression and t h a t
the dramatic scene you know, compared with these lines, is simply what a vulgar
colorprint is to a canvas by Leonardo da Vinci". 22 And indeed this Overture (first pub­
lished posthumously in 1996)23 represents a new kind of poetry. Here fugai patterns
of initially unelucidated images, each taken from a different sensuous realm of ref­
erence, are gradually woven into a significance.
The Overture is in four parts, linked together by certain themes or images which
return in accordance with a kind of quasi-musical structure. The setting and atmo­
sphere are those of a dreamlike Middle Ages rather than of biblical antiquity: what
Lefébure called "le noir château seigneurial d'Hérqdiade", 2 4 with references to Christian
liturgy and Cisalpine military campaigns involving Hérodiade's father, unknown to
history. The nurse evokes the sinister dawn of a day charged with foreboding ; Hérodiade's
room, adorned with weapons of faded gold, the pearly sheen of an old tapestry on its
walls, and a ghostly aroma slowly traced to its origin in faded flowers; a mysterious

19
See Stéphane Mallarmé, "Villiers de l'Isle-Adam", Œuvres complètes (OC), ed. H. Mondpr
and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, 1956), p . 482; " ( . . . ) quelque devoir de tout recréer, avec des rémi­
niscences, pour avérer qu'on est bien là où l'on doit être". For a detailed study of the poem, see L. J.
Austin, "L'Après-midi d'un faune — essai d'explication", in Synthèses (Bruxelles) décembre 1967
janvier
20
1968, pp. 2 4 - 3 5 .
I have not seen T. Munro, "The Afternoon of a Faun and the Interrelation of the Arts",
JAAG,21 10 (1951), pp. 95-111, and Revue d'Esthétique, 5 (1952).
Gorr. I. p. 174. ("Je gagne ainsi l'attitude, les vêtements, le décor, et l'ameublement, sans
parler22du mystère").
Corr. I. p. 207. ("Je peux dire sans présomption qu'elle sera d'un efret inouï, et que la scène
dramatique que tu connais n'est auprès de ces vers que ce qu'est une vulgaire image d'Épinal
comparée
23
à une toile de Léonard de Vinci").
By Dr Bonniot, "Hommage à Stéphane Mallarmé", NRF (1er novembre 1926), pp. 513-516.
24
Gorr. I. p . 214, n.l.

48
 voice singing of the glorious past, suggested by the most subtle and sumptuous imagery,
a voice t h a t rises and falls; and above all, Hérodiade herself, with her strange aspira­
tions, symbolized b y the pure diamantine light of a star t h a t never shone: Beauty in
its state of pure virtuality, as a yet unrealized idea ("antérieure").
The Overture is an incantation, interweaving sensations into a metaphorical tex­
ture of extraordinary richness and subtlety, a moving texture of magically rhythmical
and evocative lines, slow and solemn, hieratical and processional in effect. Mallarmé
could justifiably feel t h a t he could glimpse "real splendors". 25 Nevertheless, in April
1866, as he completed t h e first draft of the Overture, he had reached a crisis in his
thought and art. Hitherto his religious revolt had not shaken a lingering residual belief.
Now he came to feel t h e impact of total scepticism. By delving so deeply into poetic
expression he had reached the abyss of Nothingness and had momentarily lost faith
in his own poetry. B u t only for a moment. Immediately he seeks and finds an answer
to his own despair: "Yes, I know, we are but vain forms of matter, b u t so sublime for
having invented God and our soul. So sublime, my friend ! t h a t I want t o give myself
this spectacle of matter, conscious of existing and, nevertheless, plunging with frenetic
determination into t h e Dream it knows does not exist, singing of the Soul and all similar
divine impressions t h a t have gathered within us from earliest time, and proclaiming,
before the Nothing t h a t is the truth, these glorious lies ! Such is the plan of my volume
of lyric poetry and such will perhaps be its title, La Gloire du Mensonge or Le Glorieux
Mensonge. I shall sing as one in despair'' 2 6
Characteristically, the first thought of a poet in the presence of a new truth,
however desperate it may seem, is to find in it new inspiration. We are here a t t h e very
heart of Mallarmé's definitive philosophy of life and poetry. Mallarmé is of exemplary
significance because he was one of the first major poets of modern times to face the
problem of the possible absurdity of the universe outside man. Long before Jean-Paul
Sartre, Mallarmé proclaimed t h a t human life begins on the other side of despair. 27 Here
we have the expression of his faith in the glory of the creative imagination of man,
a glory set against t h e clear consciousness of limitations and illusions, a triumphant
and self-sufficient glory. Within a month, Mallarmé was laying the foundations of a
book on the Beautiful and claiming t h a t his mind was moving in Eternity, 2 8 in July,
1866, he summed up the implications of his first intuition in the victorious affirmation:
"After finding the Void, I have found Beauty". 2 9 B y Beauty, as we can deduce from
25
26
Corr. I, p. 207 ("de vraies splendeurs").
Corr. I, pp. 207-208. ("Oui, je le sais, nous ne sommes que de vaines formes de la matière,
mais bien sublimes pour avoir inventé Dieu et notre âme. Si sublimes, mon ami ! que je veux me
donner ce spectacle de la matière, ayant conscience d'être et, cependant, s'élançant forcenément
dans le Rêve qu'elle sait n'être pas, chantant l'Ame et toutes les divines impressions pareilles qui se
sont amassées en nous depuis les premiers âges, et proclamant, devant le Rien qui est la vérité, ces
glorieux mensonges ! Tel est le plan de mon volume lyrique et tel sera peut-être son titre, La Gloire
du mensonge ou Le Glorieux Mensonge. J e chanterai en désespéré !").
27
See the introduction by J.-P. Sartre to the edition of Mallarmé's Poésies in the collection
"Poésie" (Paris, Gallimard, 1966). Sartre's text was first published in the series Écrivains célèbres
(Lucien Mazenod, 1952). See also Rhiannon Goldthorpe, "Mallarmé: Sartre's committed poet", in
the forthcoming Festschrift, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, new essays in honour of Lloyd Austin,
edited by Malcolm Bowie, Alison Fairlie, and Alison Finch (Cambridge, 1982), p p . 222-24. I am
grateful to the editors for drawing my attention to this book and enabling me to refer to it.
28
29
Gorr. I, p . 216.
Gorr. I, p. 220 ("après avoir trouvé le Néant, j'ai trouvé le Beau").

4 Balakian 49
his later writings, he meant a system of self-sufficient, satisfying relationships, relation­
ships which are a pure creation of the human mind, no absolute, a n d all t h e greater
for t h a t . On this basis, after several further years of intense concentration marked by
alternations of extreme exaltation and black depression, Mallarmé was t o achieve a
serenity t h a t merely deepened with the passage of time. 3 0
H e now drew up his plans for his life's work, which he estimated it would take
him twenty years to complete. In strange, magnificent metaphors he tried to convey
to his admiring or baffled friends the experiences he had undergone and t h e discov­
eries he had made. H e had "died and risen again with the jewelled k e y " of the ulti­
mate treasure-chest of his mind. 3 1 He had found the "center of [him]self, where", he
said (using an image Keats had once employed in his letters), he stood "like a sacred
spider, on the main threads t h a t [had] already emerged from [his] mind, with the
help of which he would weave at the points of intersection marvellous pieces of lace-
work [. . .]". 3 2 The culmination came in May, 1867, when Mallarmé related in Hegelian
terms how, after a terrible struggle with "ce vieux et méchant plumage, terrassé,
heureusement, Dieu", 3 3 he had eliminated the last remnants of his old religion and
replaced it by a new faith. His "thought had thought itself"; he was now "living in
E t e r n i t y " ; he had died as a person and identified himself with the absolute Spirit;
he was now "impersonal, and no longer the Stéphane [his friends] had known, b u t an
aptitude the Spiritual Universe possessed of seeing itself and developing through what
had once been [himself], until at last it recovered its identity within [his] mind". I n
"the hour of Synthesis," he had planned the work t h a t would be " t h e image of this
development": "Three poems in verse, of which Hérodiade is the Overture [. . .] And
four poems in prose, on the spiritual conception of Nothingness". 3 4
We have here a poet's variation on a Hegelian theme. Mallarmé had in fact grasped
the very center of Hegel's sytem, which develops the Aristotelian "conception of God
as pure thought thinking itself" and the "central importance of mind's knowledge of
itself as mind". For Hegel, "what makes the universe intelligible is to see it as the
eternal cyclical process whereby absolute spirit comes to knowledge of itself as spirit
(1) through its own thinking; (?) through nature; (3) through finite spirits and their
self-expression in history and their self-discovery in art, in religion and philosophy, as
one with the absolute spirit itself". 35 For Mallarmé, as for most if not all poets, poetry
was the highest means of self-disco very. W h a t he had reached through poetry, finding
30
See Paul Valéry's letter to Henri Mondor (16/2/41), in P . Valéry, Œuvres, I. pp. 1734-1735
("Comment et d'où naquit cette étrange et inébranlable certitude sur laquelle Mallarmé a pu fonder
toute sa vie . . . ?").
31
Corr. I, p. 222 ("Je suis mort, et ressuscité avec la clef de pierreries de ma dernière cassette
spirituelle").
32
Gorr. I, p . 225 ("centre de moi-même, où je me tiens comme «une araignée sacrée, sur les
principaux fils déjà sortis de mon esprit, et à l'aide desquels je tisserai aux points de rencontre de
merveilleuses dentelles . . . " ) .
33
34
Corr. I, p. 241.
Corr. I, p . 240 ("ma pensée s'est pensée"); p. 242 ("je suis maintenant impersonnel et non
plus Stéphane que tu as connu, — mais une aptitude qu'a l'Univers spirituel à se voir et à se déve­
lopper, à travers ce qui fut moi ( . . . ) Ainsi je viens, à l'heure de la Synthèse, de délimiter l'œuvre
qui sera l'image de ce développement. Trois poèmes en vers, dont Hérodiade est l'Ouverture
( . . . ) 35 E t quatre poèmes en prose, sur la conception spirituelle du Néant.").
Encyclopaedia Britannica, (14th edn.(1960 rev.) 381 s.v. "Hegel".

50
in philosophy merely a commentary on this discovery, was something akin to what
his fellow poet K e a t s had called "the Principle of Beauty in all things". For Hegel,
the philosopher, philosophy is the goal. For Renan, the historian of religion, the goal
was the emergence of God. But for Mallarmé, the culmination of the evolution of the
Universe towards total self-consciousness would be, not a philosophical treatise, nor
an emergent Deity, b u t a hymn. "Everything in the world exists in order to result in
a book [. . . ] t h e h y m n [. . .] of the relations between all things". 3 6
T h a t definition was made nearly thirty years later, in 1895, when Mallarmé in
full maturity had realized t h a t such a book could be the work only of an inconceivable
genius, a quality he modestly disclaimed for himself. But in 1867, Mallarmé at twenty-
five really hoped to complete a work symbolizing this development: " I t would not be
without real anguish t h a t I should enter the supreme Disappearance if I had not finish­
ed my work, which is The Work, the Great Work [the Philosophers' Stone], as the
alchemists, our ancestors, would say". 3 7
W h a t the precise subject of this Work might originally have been we may plausibly
conjecture. We know t h a t Hérodiade was to be its Overture, and t h a t the real subject
of t h a t poem, as Mallarmé himself had only gradually realized, was in fact Beauty;
the apparent subject was simply a pretext for approaching Her. 3 8 If we p u t together
this and various other hints, it seems clear t h a t what Mallarmé had in mind in 1867
was a series of poems evoking in symbolic form the ideal evolution of Beauty from the
initial virtuality of Nothingness to absolute self-consciousness. I n the same letter of
May, 1867, he writes: " I have made a long enough descent into Nothingness to be
able to speak with certainty. Beauty alone exists—and it has only one perfect ex­
pression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie—except for those who live b y the body, love, and
t h a t love of the mind, friendship". 39 Poetry, love, and friendship: those were the values
Mallarmé was to uphold, by precept and example, throughout his life.
Mallarmé's mature conception of poetry was elaborated in letters, articles, and
lectures during the last two decades of his life. When asked in 1884 b y Léo d'Orfer,
a young poet and journalist, to define poetry, Mallarmé humorously replied t h a t this
question was like a punch in the eye, dazzling him for a moment, and asked for an
apology for this act of violence. B u t he gave his definition, in terms of gnomic, sugges­
tive brevity: "Poetry is the expression, by human language reduced to its essential
rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of t h e aspects of existence: it thereby makes us
truly at home in this world and constitutes the sole task for t h e mind". 4 0
36
OC. p. 378 ("( . . . ) tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre ( . . . ) l'hymne ( . . . ) des
relations entre tout".). See L. J. Austin, "Mallarmé et le rêve du "Livre". MF (January, 1953),
pp. 81-108.
37
For J . Scherer's book on "Le Livre", see below, note 133.
Gorr., I, pp. 243-244 ( " ( . . . ) ce ne serait pas sans un serrement de cœur réel que j'entrerais
dans la Disparition suprême, si je n'avais pas fini mon œuvre, qui est L'Œuvre, le Grand 'Œuvre,
comme 38
disaient les alchimistes, nos ancêtres".).
Corr. I, p . 193 ("En un mot, le sujet de mon œuvre est la Beauté, et le sujet apparent n'est
qu'un39prétexte pour aller vers Elle".).
Gorr. I, p . 243 ("J'ai fait une assez longue descente au Néant pour pouvoir parler avec
certitude. Il n'y a que la Beauté — et elle n'a qu'une expression parfaite, la Poésie. Tout le reste est
mensonge — excepté pour ceux qui vivent du corps, l'amour, et cet amour de l'esprit, l'amitié".).
40
Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance I I (1871-1885) éd. H . Mondor and L. J . Austin
(Paris, 1965). p . 266: "La Poésie est l'expression, par le langage humain ramené à son

4*
51
 A whole philosophy of life is implicit in this brief definition. B u t it is the philosophy
of a poet, an artist in words, and the analysis of language and its different functions
lies at the base of Mallarmé's poetics; it is perhaps his most distinctive contribution
to poetic theory. H e himself modestly p u t forward his views as being those of his time,
but his own p a r t was of decisive importance. H e gave theoretical formulation to a new
trend in French poetry, which had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century in
the works of Baudelaire and Nerval. I n this new trend, suggestion rather than state­
ment became t h e primary aim of poetry. Obviously all poetry relies on suggestion to
a greater or lesser degree. But also obviously, it is difficult and not necessarily desirable
to eliminate statement altogether from poetry. Nevertheless, the broad distinction
exists. Before this turning point, the poet proceeds from an idea, an emotion, a picture,
clearly present to his own mind, and his poem is designed to communicate to the mind
of the reader as closely as possible what was in his own mind. This is "Latin clarity",
as recommended by Boileau in his well-known line:

Ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement.

The poem is here the means of offering the reader something on a plate, as it were,
something which may indeed be excellent, b u t which is to be absorbed as it is, and
which passes with comparatively little effort from the mind of the poet to the mind
of the reader. In the poetry of suggestion, however, t h e poet is concerned not with
communicating a clear-cut conception, clearly explained and clearly defined, b u t with
starting trains of activity in the reader's own mind: the poem forces intellect, sensibil­
ity, and sensations to follow up hints, fill in connecting links, and work on resonances.
The reader is not meant to absorb in a passive way, but, through all the resources of
his personality (intellect, sensibility, sensation), to recreate, or0 indeed to create. The
poem is no longer primarily the record of a past experience, b u t the means towards
a new experience. I t no longer simply refers back to an existing reality of which it is
a more or less accurate copy, but becomes the means of creating a new reality, a
self-sufficient world of harmonious relationships, evoked by the subtle use of all the
properties of words.
I n this new trend, Mallarmé played a decisive part, in theory no less t h a n in
practice. For him, language has two main functions: reporting and creating. Narrative,
didactic, and descriptive writing he regarded as a kind of reporting, and argued t h a t
if you are simply referring to what already exists, you might as well silently place
a counter or coin in your hearer's hand: the counter is a purely conventional sign of
a reality existing outside itself and has no intrinsic value in its own right. B u t in poetry,
language recovers its intrinsic value, what Mallarmé called its "virtualité", its sugges-

rythme essentiel, du sens mystérieux des aspects de l'existence: elle doue ainsi d'authenticité
notre séjour et constitue la seule tâche spirituelle". — Marshall McLuhan makes this comment on
the idea of the Book: "This is a matter of metaphysical fact, t h a t all existence cries out to be raised
to the level of scientific or poetic intelligibility. In this sense, 'the book' confers on things and per­
sons another mode of existence which helps to perfect them". ("Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press",
Sewannee Review, L X I I (1954), p. 49.).

52
 tive potentiality as the instrument of the creative imagination. 41 This distinction fore­
shadows t h a t between t h e referential and emotive functions of language later drawn
by Ogden and Richards; b u t Mallarmé gives higher status to poetic language t h a n did
Richards in his early period at least. The real "jewels of m a n " are "moods, gleams of
[. . .] absolute purity", and these are the source and subject of poetry. 42 Not things,
but "the image arising from the reveries they arouse", 4 3 are the proper source of
poetry. In his view, whereas the Parnassian poets took things bodily and displayed
them, and were lacking in the sense of mystery, the poet should avoid naming objects;
he should simply allude to them, suggest them, evoke them, set the reader's mind to
work, making him divine the meaning little by little, and thereby share in the creative
process. "Symbolism" is based on " t h e perfect use of this mystery." 4 4 The poet may
either evoke an object little by little in order to reveal a mood, or else he may choose
a given object and bring out a mood from it by a series of decipherings or interpreta­
tions. 45
Our inner experience tends to be falsified by the conventional nomenclatures and
stock categories of everyday speech. The means of suggesting the quality of our inner
experience is essentially metaphor, whereby the poet can depict, "not the object, b u t
the effect it produces." 4 6 Mallarmé placed metaphor at the center of his poetic theory;
and he carried the quest of metaphor to an extraordinary degree of subtlety and
refinement. 4 ' For him the essential task of the poet is the transmutation of reality into
a subtle web of interconnected sensations, emotions, and ideas. Music was of exemplary
value to him because he saw in it essentially a rhythmic system of interrelated patterns. 4 8
The poet's object is to "institute an exact relationship between images" from which
should "emerge a third aspect, fusible and clear, offered up to the [reader's] divina­
tion". 4 9 By this process objects are volatilized and only their abstract point of resem­
blance remains. "Therein lies all mystery: to establish secret identities by a pairing
which eats away and wears down objects in the name of a central purity". 5 0 Poetry
41
OC, pp. 368, 857-858 ("Avant-dire au Traité du Verbe" de René Ghil (1886) ).
42
OC, p. 870 ("La poésie consistant à créer, il faut prendre dans l'âme humaine des étais, des
lueurs d'une pureté si absolue que, bien chantés et bien mis en lumière, cela constitue en effet les
joyaux43
de l'homme").
44
OC, p . 869 ("l'image s'envolant des rêveries suscitées par eux").
Ibid. (" . . . les Parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose entièrement et la montrent: par là ils
manquent de mystère; ils retirent aux esprits cette joie délicieuse de croire qu'ils créent. Nommer un
objet c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite de deviner peu à peu:
le suggérer, voilà le rêve. C'est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le symbole"). See L. J.
Austin, "The Mystery of a Name", L'Esprit créateur, I, 3 (Fall, 1961), 130-138, where the interplay
between evocation and designation in Mallarmé's poetry is examined.
45
Ibid. (" . . . évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d'âme, ou, inversement,
choisir46
un objet et en dégager un état d'âme, par une série de déchiffrements".).
47
Corr. I, p. 137 ("Peindre, non la chose, mais l'effet qu'elle produit").
See Deborah A. K. Aish, La Métaphore dans l'Œuvre de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris, 1938).
48
Mallarmé defined music in these terms: "Employez Musique dans le sens grec, au fond signi­
fiant Idée ou rythme entre des rapports . . . " (Letter to Edmund Gosse, 10/1/93, published by
Roger Lhombreaud, RLC, XXV (1951), pp. 357-358; Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, VI (Jan­
vier 1893-Juillet 1894), ed. H. Mondor and L. J. Austin (Paris, 1981), p. 26.
49
OC, p. 365 ("Instituer une relation entre les images exacte, et que s'en détache un tiers
aspect,50
fusible et clair présenté à la divination".).
Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, IV (1890-1891) éd. H. Mondor and L. J. Austin
(Paris, 1973), p. 293 ("Tout le mystère est là: établir les identités secrètes par un deux à deux qui
ronge et use les objets au nom d'une centrale pureté").

53
lies in "the unspoken part of discourse" as a kind of "air or song running beneath
the text," or a mysterious shimmering beneath the surface.51 Poetry is silent music;
and the Muse of Mallarmé was his own Saint Cecilia, whom he celebrated in one of his
most beautiful poems as the "musician of silence".52
"The mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence" lay for Mallarmé primarily
in the harmony the poet establishes, by his conscious fiat, between the beauty of the
outer world of nature and the beauty of the inner world of the human mind. I t is this
kind of symbolism that underlies the poems Mallarmé wrote as a prelude, or as foot­
notes, to the Great Work. The Imagination, he said, "seeks satisfaction in the symbol
manifest in all that can be seen in the world, and tries to establish a link between
these sights and the words charged with expressing them". 53 This dual quest, that of
the symbolic significance of nature and that of the language appropriate to express
this significance, underlies two works which Mallarmé deprecatingly described as
potboilers, but which prove to be close to his central preoccupations as a poet: a treatise
on mythology and a study of the vocabulary of English. His book Les Dieux antiques
(1880), translated and adapted from W. G. Cox's books on mythology,54 is based on
the conviction that "myths [. . .] all possess a symbolic element, a reading of the drama
of nature in terms of man".55 His manual on the formation of English words, Les Mots
anglais (1877), seeks evidence for the law of correspondences in language: "The for­
mation of word groups shows an original correspondence between the sound and the
idea".56 This latter problem exemplifies the basic pattern of Mallarmé's thinking, which
involves longing for the Absolute, recognition of the necessary limits of mankind, and
an imaginative creation of a patterned solution. For Mallarmé here begins with the
hankering after a primeval "mystical" language in which sound and sense might have
been perfectly related; moves on to the realization that existing languages give glimpses
of an only occasional relation of this kind and more often than not have contra­
dictory sound and sense; but finally affirms that in the line of poetry, or in words in
combination, this feeling of unity between sound and sense can be restored. The line
of poetry is thus a kind of "new, total and as it were incantatory word," possessing
properties which no single real word can ever have.57
As for mythology, Mallarmé gave his own interpretation to the theory which saw
in all myths variations of an essential pattern of solar mythology.58 Many of his most

61
OC, p . 386 ("ce qui ne se dit'pas du discours"); p . 387 ("l'air ou chant sous le texte");
p . 382 ("je ne sais quel miroitement, en dessous").
52
53
OC, p . 54 ("Musicienne du silence").
OC, p . 921 ("l'Imagination désireuse, non seulement de se satisfaire par le symbole éclatant
dans les spectacles du monde, mais d'établir un lien entre ceux-ci et la parole chargée de les ex­
primer").
54
Apart from transforming a catechism by question and answer into a continuous narrative,
Mallarmé followed Cox so closely that his own original contribution is small but significant. And he
seems to have explicity endorsed Cox's views. See Jean Seznec, "Les Dieux antiques de Mallarmé",
in the55 Festschrift quoted in n. 27 above, p p . 259-282.
The Prose of Christopher Brennan, p . 144.
56
Ibid. See also Edouard Gaède, "Le problème du langage chez Mallarmé", RHLF, L X V I I I
(1968),
57
pp. 45-65.
58
OC, pp. 368, 858.
See Pierre Renauld, "Mallarmé et le mythe", RHLF, L X X I I I (1973), pp. 48-68.

54
important sonnets involve imagery derived from the setting sun. 59 Mallarmé discerned
in the daily and annual cycle of the sun one vast, ever repeated play of incomparable
grandeur and purity, ''The Tragedy of Nature". 6 0 In the funeral pyre of sunset or of
autumn, reality is consumed and transformed into pure light. This for Mallarmé was
intimately related to the poet's task. In a half-frivolous, half-serious little sonnet, he
compares the fleeting, dissolving images of poetry, in which the whole of the poet's
soul is summed up, with the smoke rings produced by a smoker whose cigar will burn
properly only if the ash is carefully shaken off from the bright fiery kiss of its burning
tip. Even so the pure flame of poetry will burn brightly only if it shakes off the ashes
of the world it has purified by its refining fire. 61
Directly or indirectly, a large part of Mallarmé's poetry is concerned with the life
and destiny of the poet, the artist, or other heroes of the mind. Sihylline sonnots com­
memorate Edgar Allan Poe, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Wagner, Puvis de Chavannes, and
Vasco da Gama. 62 I n the "Toast funèbre", Théophile Gautier is seen as the emblem
of human happiness. When man dies, he dies utterly; b u t the words of the poet remain.
His gaze, resting on earthly flowers, removes them from contingency into the realm
of the pure Idea. Poetry has the power to recreate Eden. 6 3 I n one of his strangest and
most beautiful poems, the mysterious Prose pour des Esseintes, Mallarmé evokes a
magical vision of ideal flowers which arose before his youthful eyes and filled him with
exaltation as he became aware of his new duty as a poet. 64
T h a t d u t y Mallarmé performed throughout his life with exemplary fidelity. His
poetic output was small in bulk b u t vast in its range and in its implications. There is
a sense of cosmic immensity in his finest poems, as when he sees in the tomb of Edgar
Allan Poe a meteorite fallen to rest on earth from some obscure disaster in the skies, 65
or when he imagines in another sonnet the E a r t h blazing with the sudden splendor of
awakened human genius and casting the unwonted mystery of this great burst of light
across the darkness of the nocturnal sky. 66 The adamantine brilliance of such poems
contrasts with the exquisite delicacy of his occasional verse, as in the lines inscribed
on the fans belonging to his wife and daughter, 67 or the playful wit in the octosyllabic
59
See Gardner Davies, Mallarmé et le drame solaire (Paris, 1959); revised by L. J. Austin,
"Two Mallarmé Studies", RR, LI (1960), pp. 124-129.
60
OC, p . 1169 ("La Tragédie de la Nature"). Mallarmé specifies: "Note particulière à la
Traduction".
61
OC, p . 73 ("Toute l'âme résumée . . . " ) . See L. J. Austin, "Mallarmé et le réel", Modem
Miscellany presented to Eugène Vinaver, ed. T. E. Lawrenson, F . E. Sutcliffe and G. F . A. Gadoffre
(Manchester
62
and New York, 1969), pp. 12-24.
See Gardner Davies, Les "Tombeaux" de Mallarmé (Paris, 1950); for the Vasco da Gama
sonnet, see L. J. Austin, "The Mystery of a Name", pp. 135-138, for "Le Tombeau de Baudelaire",
see L. J. Austin, "Le Tombeau de Baudelaire by Stéphane Mallarmé: Satire or Homage?", Hom­
mage à W. T. Bandy, Études Baudélairiennes III (Neuchâtel, 1973), pp. 185-200.
63
See L. J. Austin, "Mallarmé and Gautier: New Light on 'Toast funèbre", Balzac and the
Nineteenth Century. Studies presented to Herbert J. Hunt, ed. D. G. Charlton, J. Gaudon, and
Anthony
64
R. Pugh (Leicester, 1972), pp. 335-351.
See L. J. Austin, "Mallarmé, Huysmans et la 'Prose pour des Esseintes'", RHLF, LIV
(1954), pp. 145-183; "Du nouveau sur la 'Prose pour des Esseintes' ", MF (January, 1955),
pp. 84-104; "Mallarmé and the 'Prose pour des Esseintes' '' FMLS, I I (1966), pp. 197-213.
65
66
OC, p . 70.
OC, p. 67 ("Quand l'ombre menaça de la fatale loi . . . " ) ; see L. J . Austin, "The Indubitable
Wing",67
in Mélanges de littérature française moderne offerts à Garnet Rees (Paris, 1980), pp. 1 —14.
OC, pp. 57, 58. Of the latter poem, Valéry wrote: " . . . poème d'une perfection, d'une

55
quatrains he used to address his letters to his friends. 68 Love, restrained but fervent,
is subtly and finely expressed in several sonnets to Méry Laurent. 6 9 In 1961 J e a n -
Pierre Richard, whose book, L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé, is the finest study of
the poet t h a t has yet appeared, published Mallarmé's notes (fragmentary but most
moving) for a commemorative work about his son Anatole, who died in 1879. 70 B u t it
is the last, enigmatic sonnets that come nearest to Mallarmé's conception of poetry as
the ''revels"' (ébat) of language: 71 here the poem really ceases to be a discourse and
becomes (in Mallarme's own image) like a dimly lit grotto encrusted with a mosaic
of precious stones, illuminating each other by the interplay of their reflected gleams
as they are kindled and extinguished. 72 His poems nearly always have a musical per­
fection which makes them immediately and enduringly memorable, while their magic
density constitutes a challenge to find meanings worthy of their form, a condition
often overlooked by his commentators. 73
Mallarmé's prose itself is a form of poetry: he himself called his essays critical
poems. They were collected the year before his death in the volume called Divagations.
"They were written apropos of many things'", wrote Christopher Brennan, " [ . . .] b u t
wherever Mallarmé might begin, the next step always led him into t h a t perfect and
coherent sphere of thought into which he transformed the universe. Poems these
essays certainly are: his astounding power for perceiving analogy plays here more
freely and unrestrainedly than within the severe limits of his verse; here too is room
for his gay fancy and his subtle humor". 7 4 To these must be added his noble and moving
funeral oration on his friend Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, given in Belgium in 1890, and his
lecture on " L a Musique et les Lettres", given in Oxford and Cambridge in 1894, and
containing his fullest statement of his theory of poetry. 75
Meanwhile, however, Mallarmé was working stubbornly at his secret ambition. B u t
he had come to realize t h a t no one person could write the Great Work he had conceived,
and he spoke of it increasingly as if the Book were the symbol of universal literature,
in which humanity seeks to penetrate the meaning of the Universe, " t h e mystery
whose grandeur we are here to contemplate". 7 6 For him (as for George Meredith),
the "Orphic" or poetic explanation of the E a r t h was the sole d u t y of the poet and the
"jeu littéraire par excellence".77 All he hoped now to achieve personally was some com-

musique et d'un charme si rares que ce serait le chef-d'œuvre de Mallarmé, s'il y en avait u n "
(Œuvres,
68
I, p. 1733).
69
Vers de circonstance (Paris, 1920); OC, pp. 81-186.
70
0(7, pp. 58, 60, 61.
Pour un Tombeau d'Anatole (Paris, 1961). Reviewed by L . J . Austin, RR, LIV (1963),
pp. 144-147.
71
72
OC, p. 386 ("La Langue, dont voici l'ébat").
Ibid. ("Les mots, d'eux-mêmes, s'exaltent à mainte facette reconnue la plus rare ( . . . )
projetés,
73
en parois de grotte ( . . . ) prompts tous, avant extinction, à une réciprocité de feux ( . . .)").
Œuvres, I, p. 646 ("Vouloir leur donner un sens qui ne fût pas indigne de leur forme ad­
mirable
74
...").
75
Christopher Brennan, p. 149.
76
OC, pp. 4 8 1 - 5 1 0 ; 6 3 5 - 6 5 7 .
OC, p. 314 ("/ . . . ) le mystère dont on est au monde pour envisager la grandeur").
77
OC, p. 663 ("L'explication orphique de la Terre, qui est le seul devoir du poète et le jeu
littéraire par excellence"). See L. J. Austin, "Mallarmé et le mythe d'Orphée", CAlEF, 22 (1970),
pp. 169-180.

56
pieted fragment wherein the glorious authenticity of the Book would scintillate in one
place, hinting at the whole for which one life would not suffice.78 H e was not destined
to complete even t h a t ''fragment", which was most probably Hérodiade. B u t his exist­
ing work contains poetry unique in its magic and mysterious evocative power.
Perhaps the finest example of such poetry is the sonnet beginning "Ses purs ongles
très-haut dédiant leur onyx . . ." In this poem, described by Mallarmé as a "sonnet
allegorical of itself', the "meaning [. . .] is evoked by an inner mirage of the words
themselves". 7 9 Here, in an empty room at midnight, in an atmosphere of darkness and
of dread made up of absence and questioning, when one by one the last vestiges of the
light of day and of life itself have died away, suddenly, in the oblivion of a mirror on
the wall, seven scintillating points of light are caught in the silent music of a septet
of the stars: the constellation of the Great Bear.
The image of the constellation is of central importance to Mallarmé. A constellation,
first of all, is sheer shining, blazing beauty, instinctively seen as valid in itself and for
itself, unexplained and self-contained, autonomous. But, more important, a constella­
tion is a pattern created entirely by the shaping imagination of man, who weaves the
magnificent chaos of glimmers of the night sky into significant combinations. Finally,
time and time again in human m y t h and legend, the constellation is the consecration
and commemoration of the apotheosis of the hero, one of them, specially dear to
Mallarmé, being Orpheus with his lyre. The evocation of the Great Bear through a
musical metaphor as a "septet of scintillations":

De scintillations sitôt le septuor

conveys the double notion of the sparkling brilliance of the stars and of their pattern­
ing, for in music, too, the individual note or instrument means nothing in itself, b u t
the relationships are the essential, and the patterned creation resulting from them.
The same image of the constellation recurs in Mallarmé's boldest experiment, Un
Coup de dés. Here, with a full use of the resources of typography, including space and
placing on the page, interlocking themes are set in type of different size and kind.
Here, a device used for effects of virtuosity or sensuous delight by poets in the Alexan­
drian period, by those of the Renaissance, b y the English Metaphysicals, and by Guillau­
me Apollinaire, becomes a means towards intellectual understanding as well as ideo­
graphic representation. 8 0 The complex, tightly knit argument is developed on two
planes: one of clear-cut abstract reasoning in explicit philosophic propositions, the
other, of highly imaginative symbolism, evocative of a hypothetical illustrative action.
More important than what is said is what is implied by the structure of the poem. On

78
Ibid, ("à en montrer un fragment d'exécuté, à en faire scintiller par une place l'authenticité
glorieuse, en indiquant le reste tout entier auquel ne suffit pas une vie").
79
0(7, p. 1488 ("Sonnet allégorique de lui-même"), Corr. I. p. 279 ("le sens . . . est évoqué
par un80
mirage interne des mots mêmes").
See Gardner Davies, Vers une explication rationnelle du "Coup de Dés" (Paris, 1953). See
reviews by L. J. Austin of this book, RHLF, LV (1955), pp. 243-246, and of Claude Roulet, Traité de
poétique supérieure (Neuchatel, 1956), RHLF, LIX (1959), pp. 244-246. See, also, S. Bernard, "Le
'Coup de dés' replacé dans la perspective historique", RHLF, LI (1951), pp. 181-195; Malcolm
Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge, 1978), and the edition of the poem by
Mitson Ronat (Paris, 1980).

57
the abstract level, Mallarmé proclaims inexorably t h a t nothing man can do can alter
the radical contingency of the universe. Vainly he tries to abolish Chance. H e is doomed
to inevitable shipwreck; and when he is gone it will be as if nothing had ever taken
place. B u t the imagery of the poem belies this explicit pessimism. For, just when
despair seems total, a miracle occurs. Across the empty sky a new constellation slowly
emerges, star by star and comes to rest in a point of ultimate, royal splendor.
Un Coup de dés is, in some ways, the epitome of Mallarmé's thought and art.
In 1894 he had defined to his Oxford and Cambridge audiences the status of literature
as being in a sense man's supreme reality. Man creates from the very sense of the in­
adequacy of reality his own frail and splendid refutations of contingency. Comparing
literature to a fireworks display, where rockets are drawn up as by a vacuum into the
empty sky and explode there, scattering their patterns of brilliant stars, Mallarmé
exclaims: "Mais, je vénère comment, par une supercherie, on projette, à quelque éléva­
tion défendue et de foudre, le conscient manque chez nous de ce qui là-haut éclate". 8 1
And so, although Mallarmé died with his supreme ambition unfulfilled, "his work,
as it stands, possesses completeness, as the suggestion of something perhaps unachiev­
able". 8 2 And his existing work stands in its own right as a miraculous achievement,
a unique and self-sufficient expression of man's longing for the Absolute, his recognition
of his limitations, and his conquest, by the imagination, of one of the highest and most
satisfying forms of activity possible to man, a triumphantly patterned creation.
The international reputation and intellectual impact of Mallarmé are consider­
able. A vast amount of preliminary work of a delicate and subtle kind remains to be
done before it will be possible to delimit in detail and with any rigor the threefold
problem involved in tracing "la fortune littéraire de Mallarmé en France et dans la
République des lettres": his personal relations with poets and critics, the impact of
his work on his contemporaries and successors, and the critical response to it both in
his lifetime and since his death, in France and in the world. Only a few brief indications
can be given here. 83
For his personal relations with poets and critics in France and abroad, the richest
source of information is Mallarmé's correspondence, supplemented by the published
personal reminiscences of some of his disciples and friends. 84 I t would be impossible
to list the hundreds of names involved, at least as far as France is concerned, names
which include some of the most illustrious and some of the humblest poets among
Mallarmé's predecessors, contemporaries, and disciples. 85 During the last two decades
81
0 0 , p. 647 ("But I revere how, by a subterfuge, we project into some forbidden height where
lightning
82
flashes, the conscious lack within us of what bursts into splendor in the sky").
83
The Prose of Christopher Brennan, p. 154.
For a brief outline of the development of criticism of Mallarmé, see my article in the Di­
zionario critico della letteratura francese, ed. Franco Simone (Turin, 1972). See also the unpublished
thesis by John Foulkes, Mallarmé Judged by his Contemporaries (Cambridge, 1978), and D. Hampton
Morris,
84
Stéphane Mallarmé, Twentieth Century Criticism (1901-1971) (Mississippi, 1977).
Six volumes of the Correspondance have appeared; four more are to appear in 1982 and 1983,
covering the last five years of Mallarmé's life. The principal personal reminiscences of Mallarmé are
those by Paul Claudel, Léopold Dauphin, Edouard Dujardin, André Fontainas, André Gide, René
Ghil, Gustave Kahn, Pierre Louys, Camille Mauclair, Henri de Régnier, Francis Vielé-Griffin, and
above all, Paul Valéry.
85
See the table of contents and lists of correspondents in the various volumes of the Cor­
respondance, the final volume will contain a comprehensive index.

58
of his life, Mallarmé received an unending flow of books, novels, plays, and volumes
of verse or slender plaquettes which, while often reflecting his own work in clumsy
imitations, sometimes revealed a subtler assimilation of his themes, imagery, and
technique. Mallarmé replied to virtually all of these gifts, and his comments, brief or
more developed according to the relative value and importance of the works received,
form a remarkable collection of aphorisms on the nature of poetry, expressed with wit,
grace, elegance, and extraordinarily suggestive brevity. 86
From the start, Mallarme's circle of friends and literary acquaintances extended
beyond the boundaries of France. Projected lecture tours in Denmark and in Holland
were discussed with S. P r a h l and Hein Boeken, respectively. 87 A number of Portuguese
poets moved in literary circles in Paris and attended Mallarmé's mardis: Xavier de
Carvalho, Antonio de Oliviera-Soares, and above all, Eugenio de Castro. 88 Mallarmé
had episodic relations with the Peruvian poet Nicanor Della Rocca de Vergalo 89 and
the. Argentinian poet Leopoldo Diaz. 9 0 He corresponded extensively with the minor
Italian novelist Luigi Gualdo 9 1 and the active critic Vittorio Pica of Naples, who did
much to make Mallarmé known in Italy. 9 2 I n Germany, Stefan George and t h e whole
movement of Die Blätter für die Kunst looked to Mallarmé as an exemplary figure.
Stefan George himself appeared at the mardis, exchanged letters with Mallarmé, and
produced fine translations of some of his poems. 93 Mallarmé naturally had friends in
French-speaking Switzerland 94 and, especially, in Belgium, where some of the major
and minor "symbolist" poets emerged: 95 Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, Mockel, Elskamp,
Fontainas, Valére Gille, Arnold Goffin, Albert Giraud, and others; Mallarmé was

86
A preliminary selection of these was published by H. Mondor under the title Stéphane
Mallarmé, Propos sur la Poésie (Monaco, 1945; rev. ed. 1952). See Alison Fairlie, "'Entre les lignes':
Mallarmé's art of allusion in his thank-you letters", in the Festschrift quoted in n. 27 above, pp.
181-201.
87
Details will be found in the relevant volumes of the Correspondance.
88
See Denyse Chast, "Eugenio de Castro et Stéphane Mallarmé", RLC, X X I (1947), pp. 243-
253. Denyse Chast names Fernando Pessoa as a contemporary Portuguese poet influenced by
Mallarmé
89
(p. 253). See, also, Corr. IV, p . 228, n.l and 2, p. 229, n . l , and p.238, n. 2.
90
Gorr. II, p . 195 and n. 1, IV, p . 470, n. 2.
See Leopoldo Diaz, "La Silva de los sueños", Rivista de America 2 (September, 1913), p. 1,
and John Inglekirk, Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature (New York, 1934), which reproduces a
letter 91from Mallarmé to Diaz, 17 August 1898. (Information kindly supplied by W. T. Bandy).
See Correspondance, passim, and C. P . Barbier, Documents Stéphane Mallarmé, I (Paris,
1968), pp. 99-107.
92
Corr. I I I , p. 73 and n. 1, p. 83; IV, p . 206, n. 4. See Olga Ragusa, Mallarmé in Italy. Literary
Influence
93
and Critical Response (New York, 1957), pp. 58-77.
Gorr. IV, pp. 203-204. and notes; VI, pp. 44, n. 3. Mallarmé's correspondence with Stefan
George has been published in full by Robert Boehringer, Mein Bild von Stefan George (Düsseldorf,
1967), pp. 202-206. See, above all, Enid Lowrie Duthie, L'Influence du Symbolisme français dans
le renouveau poétique de l'Allemagne. Les Blatter für die Kunst de 1892 à 1900 (Paris, 1933).
94
See Philippe M. Monnier, "Mallarmé et ses amis genevois", RHLF, LXVIII (1968),
pp. 36-44 who publishes letters from Mallarmé to Mathias Morhardt, Daniel Baud-Bovy, Louis
Duchosal, and William Vogt. The letters are reproduced and annotated in Gorr. IV and following
volumes95
(see tables).
See Herman Braet, L'Accueil fait au Symbolisme en Belgique 1985-1900 (Brussels, 1967).
This is, of course, mainly concerned with critical responses. See, also, Actes du second congrès national
de la Société française de Littérature comparée : Les Flandres dans les mouvements romantique et
symboliste (Paris, 1958); Le mouvement symboliste en littérature, Actes du Colloque international tenu à
Bruxelles les 3,4 et 5 mai 1973, Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1974/3-4.

59
invited by Octave Maus and Edmond Picard of the ''Cercle des X X " to lecture in
1890 on Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. 9 6
But it was with the English-speaking world that Mallarmé felt the greatest affini­
ties and had the most extensive relations. His passion for Edgar Allan Poe brought
him into contact with John Ingram, the English Poe scholar and editor, and with Poe
circles in America, which included Sarah Helen Whitman, Louise Chandler Moulton,
and Sara Sigourney Rice. 97 He later corresponded with the eccentric Germano-Japanese
American writer and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann, with Richard Hovey, and with
Harrison Rhodes, editor of the avant-garde periodical The Chap Book; Mallarmé
published his first postal quatrains in this magazine under the title Les Loisirs de la
poste, as well as his remarkable letter on Rimbaud. 9 8 Mallarmé exchanged letters with
a number of English poets, including Richard Hengist Horne, J o h n Payne, Arthur
O'Shaughnessy and, above all, Swinburne, who held him in high regard. 99 H e had an
extensive correspondence with the picturesque figure, the Chavelier de Chatelain,
exiled in England, to whom Mallarmé revealed Baudelaire's translation of Edgar Allan
Poe's tales and who sent Baudelaire his translations of two of Poe's poems. 1 0 0 Mallarmé
was in contact with Edmund Gosse, 101 with George Moore, 102 and with Oscar Wilde. 103
He collaborated anonymously with the London Athenœum during the winter of 1875-
1876, sending a number of brief notes on literature, drama, and painting, which were
translated and abridged for insertion by O'Shaughnessy. 104 Later, in 1892-1893,
Mallarmé (through the good offices of the painter J . McNeill Whistler and the critic
Charles Whibley) published a series of articles in French in William Ernest Henley's
journal The National Observer.105 The culmination of Mallarmé's relations with England
came in 1894, when he delivered, first in Oxford, then in Cambridge, his lecture on

96
See Corr, ITI, IV, and later volumes for details of Mallarmé's relations with the Belgian
poets. For the lecture-tour, see Corr. IV, p p . 25, 34, 36, 42, 4 4 - 4 5 , 4 7 - 6 2 , and notes.
97
See Corr. II, III, IV and later volumes.
98
See OC, pp. 512-519, 1503, 1587. The Sadakichi Hartmann Newsletter, published by Harry
Lawton and George K n o x since 1970, has thrown much light on this curious figure. L a w t o n and
K n o x published his three "prophetic plays'', Buddha, Confucius, Christ (New York, 1971), with a
useful introduction. See, also, Elizabeth S. Blake, " U n correspondant américain de Mallarmé",
RHLF, L X V I I I (1968), pp. 2 6 - 3 5 .
99
Mallarmé's letters, t o Horne, O'Shaughnessy, and Swinburne are in Corr. I I . Letters t o
P a y n e are in Corr. II, I I I , I V and later volumes. See, also, Mariana R y a n , "John P a y n e et Mallar-
mé", RLC, X X X I I (1958), p p . 3 7 7 - 3 8 9 . I n 1892, Swinburne praised Mallarmé in an interview with
Gabriel Mourey ("C'est le plus admirable artiste que je connaisse . . . ").
100
See Corr. I, p. 114; Corr. I V , passim. See, also, Lettres à Charles Baudelaire, publiées par
Claude Puchois avec la collaboration de Vincenette Pichois (Neuchâtel, 1973), p p . 9 0 - 9 6 .
101
See Roger Lhombreaud, " D e u x lettres de Mallarmé à E d m u n d Gosse", RLC, X X V (1951),
p p . 355-362; "Une lettre inédite de Mallarmé en anglais", RLC, X X V I (1952), p p . 2 4 9 - 2 5 4 ; for
Gosse's reply, see Mariana R y a n , "John P a y n e et Mallarmé", p . 380. See, also, Corr. I I , p. 69 and
n. 1; Corr. V, and R u t h Temple, The Critic's Alchemy (New York, 1953), p p . 185-228 (an admirably
balanced judgment on Gosse as a critic of French Symbolism).
102
N o letters have been recovered; b u t see Jean Noel, "George Moore et Mallarmé", RLC,
X X X I I (1958), p p . 3 6 3 - 7 6 ; G.-P. Collet, George Moore et la France (Genève, 1957); and, again,
R u t h Temple, The Critic's Alchemy, p p . 2 3 1 - 2 7 1 .
103
See Corr. IV, p p . 2 0 2 - 2 0 3 , 323, n. 2, p p . 327-328. (Mallarmé's letter concerning The Picture
of Dorian Gray), p . 355, n. 1; V I , p. 60 (on Salomé).
104
See Les "gossips" de Mallarmé, "Athenœum", 1875-1876, ed. H . Mondor and L. J. Austin
(Paris, 1962); also, Corr. I I , passim.
105
See the original t e x t s in N o r m a n P a x t o n , The Development of Mallarmé's Prose Style
(Genève, 1968), p p . .137-165.

60
" L a Musique et les Lettres". 1 0 6 Another journey to England was planned for 1896 but
did not t a k e place.
The impact of Mallarmé's work on his contemporaries and successors in France
a n d abroad cannot yet be assessed. Many writers of importance have acknowledged a
sense of obligation to his work, his ideas, and above all, his example. This kind of hom­
age has been paid to Mallarmé b y Gide, Proust, Claudel, and especially by P a u l Valé­
ry. 1 0 7 T h e leading English poets of t h e earlier half of t h e twentieth century, T. S. Eliot
(who knew French) a n d W. B . Yeats (who knew none), both directly and through
intermediaries such as Arthur Symons, came to know and esteem Mallarmé's work,
and underwent his influence to an as yet undefined extent. 1 0 8 J a m e s Joyce carried
experiments with language to extremes undreamt of b y Mallarmé himself. 109 The first
poet of t h e English-speaking world to have a profound knowledge of Mallarmé's work
and to be deeply influenced b y it was t h e Australian poet Christopher Brennan. 1 1 0
Much work remains to be done on Mallarmé's impact on Spanish and Portuguese
literature in the Peninsula and in Latin America. 111 Useful monographs have been
devoted to t h e influence of French Symbolism in Germany, 1 1 2 in the United States, 1 1 3
and in Russia; 1 1 4 they naturally give prominence to the role of Mallarmé. B u t no

l06
Corr. V contains the annotated correspondence relating this visit, pp. 226—241.
107
See Gorr. IV, p . 152, n. 3 (Valéry), p . 174, n. 1 (Claudel), p . 191, n. 1 (Gide): for Proust, see
R. G. Cohn, "Proust and Mallarmé", FS, X X I V (1970), pp. 262-275, and L. J. Austin, "Proust et
la poétique de la réminiscence", Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de
Combray, no. 22 (1972), pp. 1338-1345.
108
It is doubtful whether either poet was deeply influenced by Mallarmé. Eliot owed far more
to Laforgue and to Baudelaire, although a few echoes from Mallarmé occur. Yeats called at Mal-
larmé's flat in Paris in February, 1894, when Mallarmé was in England, Geneviève Mallarmé
described to her father the comic efforts she and her mother had to make in order to convey this
fact in sign language to Yeats (see Yeats' letter to Mallarmé, published by Eileen Souffrin, TL8,
26 November 1954, and Genevieve's letter to Mallarmé of 26 February, 1894, in C. P . Barbier, Do-
cuments Stéphane Mallarmé, I I I , p. 235, but with no indication that the passage concerns Yeats).
These texts appear with commentaries in Corr. VI, p . 223, n. 3. See, also, R. Lhombreaud. "Arthur
Symons Renderings of Mallarmé", The Princeton University Library Chronicle,XX (1959), pp. 89-102.
See the well-known passage by Yeats on Symons and Mallarmé in Autobiographies (London, 1955),
pp. 320-321.
109
See Marshall McLuhan, "Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press" (n. 40, above). See, also David
Hay man, Joyce et Mallarmé, I : Stylistique de la suggestion ; I I . Les éléments mailarméens dans l'œuvre
de Joyce (Paris, 1956).
110
See Corr. VI, p . 203, n. 1 and A. R. Chisholm, A Study of Christopher Brennan's "The Forest
of Night" (Melbourne, 1970) and many earlier writings listed in "A. R. Chisholm: A Short Bibliogra­
phy", Studies in Honour of A.B. Chisholm, ed. Wallace Kirsop (Melbourne, 1969); special number of
Australian Journal of French Studies. VI, nos. 2-3, which also includes "New Light on Brennan and
Mallarmé", by L. J . Austin). The text of a letter from Mallarmé to Brennan (16 September 1897)
was discovered and published in Southerly, X X X I (1971), pp. 131-132, by Robin B. Marsden, See,
also, Meanjin Quarterly, X X I X , 1970, which contains articles by A. R. Chisholm, "Brennan, poet
and scholar. A centenary assessment", pp. 277-280, and Wallace Kirsop, " 'Thegreatest renewal,
the greatest revelation. Brennan's commentary on Mallarmé", pp. 303-311, Quadrant (Sydney),
November, 1977; above all, John Foulkes, "Mallarmé and Brennan", French Studies, X X X I I (1978),
pp. 34-45. See, also, n. 3. above.
111
See, inter alia, Alfonso Reyes, Mallarmé entre nosotros (Mexico, 1955, new edn.),'and French
version in BLC, X I I (1932), pp. 546-568 (translated by Mathilde Pomès). See, in this volume,
chapters by Claudio Guillén.
112
113
See Enid Lowrie Duthie, n. 93 above.
See René Taupin, L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine (de 1910 à
1920) 114
(Paris, 1929).
See Georgette Douchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Bussian Poetry (The Hague,
1958).

61
detailed study has been devoted to Mallarmé's impact on any country (including
France) except Italy. 1 1 5 From this example, it seems reasonable to assume t h a t future
studies will furnish further evidence of widespread interest if not of verifiable influence.
If properly conducted, such studies would also produce evidence of the extreme diffi­
culties of interpretation, which may give rise t o many misunderstandings, ones t h a t
are perhaps creative, b u t misunderstandings none the less.
The same comment would apply to the history of critical response t o Mallarmé
in France and abroad, both in his lifetime and since his death. Here again the
fundamental work remains to be done. A "Mallarmé devant ses contemporains" would
be the obvious starting point, followed by a "Mallarmé devant le postérité". A significant
fact already apparent is that, while from the start, as is right, French critics such as
Albert Thibaudet 1 1 6 and biographers such as Henri Mondor 117 have done fundamental
work, Mallarmé has also attracted much critical attention outside France. His first
biographer was the Belgian Albert Mockel. 118 The first really penetrating study of his
work as a whole was written in 1904 by the Australian poet Christopher Brennan, 1 1 9 whom
I have quoted frequently in this paper. The first large-scale account of Mallarmé's
life and work was published in 1938 by a German, K u r t Wais 1 2 0 (who had had distin­
guished precursors in the study of Mallarmé among his compatriots, including Franz
Rauhut, 1 2 1 Franz Nobiling 122 and Walter Naumann). 1 2 3 The first comprehensive (and
highly illuminating) thesis in French on Mallarmé's poetry was published in 1940 b y
a Belgian, Emilie Noulet. 124 Meanwhile, a disciple of Christopher Brennan, A. R. Chis­
holm, h a d been lecturing on Mallarmé for many years in Melbourne; and his Towards
Hérodiade, published in 1934, was the first of many books and articles on Mallarmé
written b y A. R. Chisholm or by his pupils. 125 Mallarmé has had a number of fervent
115
See n. 92 above. For England, see G. Ross Roy, "A Bibliography of French Symbolism in
English-language publications to 1910", RLC, X X X I V (1960), pp. 645-659. See, also, R u t h Temple,
The Critic's Alchemy (quoted n. 101, above), and her excellent article, "Aldous Huxley et la littéra­
ture française", RLC, X I X (1939), pp. 65-110.
116
La Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris, 1912; new edn. 1926).
117
Vie de Mallarmé (Paris, 1941-1942); H. Mondor published some fifteen other books on
Mallarmé, each including new documents.
118
Stéphane Mallarmé, un héros (Paris, 1899), reprinted in Albert Mockel, Esthétique du Syrn-
bolisme, ed. Michel Otten (Brussels, 1962).
119
120
See n. 3 and n. 110, above.
Mallarmé. Ein Dichter des Jahrhundert-Endes (Munich, 1938); Mallarmé. Dichtung. Weisheit.
Haltung (Munich, 1952). See L. J. Austin, "Mallarmé et son critique allemand", RHLF, LIV (1954),
pp. 184-194. K u r t Wais has also published many separate studies, collected in two volumes;
Franösische Marksteine and An den Grenzen der National-Literaturen (Berlin, 1958).
121
122
Das Romantische und Musikalische in der Lyrik Stéphane Mallarmés (Marburg, 1926).
Franz Nobiling published a series of translations and commentaries on Mallarmé's poems
in various German periodicals between 1929 and 1933, and a collected volume of translations in
1938. There have been, of course, numerous other translations of Mallarmé into German. See Ulrich
K. Goldsmith,
123
"On translating Mallarmé into German", RLC, X X X V (1961), pp. 474-486.
Der Sprachgebrauch Mallarmés (Marburg, 1936). A valuable recent study in German is t h a t
of Gerhard
124
Regn, Konflikt der Interpretationen (Munich, 1978; Romanica Monacensia, 13).
L'Œuvre poétique de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris, 1940). A selection of exegeses from this
excellent study was published under the title Dix poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (Lille-Geneva, 1948),
as well as an enlarged edition, Vingt poèmes, . . . (Paris-Geneva, 1967).
125
A. R. Chisholm, Mallarmé's "L'Après-midi d'un faune" (Melbourne, 1958); Mallarmé's
"Grand Œuvre" (Manchester, 1961); numerous articles in AUMLA, AJFS, EFL, RLG, and FS.
For Gardner Davies, see notes 16, 59, 62, 80, above. See, also James R. Lawler, The Language of
French Symbolism (Princeton, 1969). I. am myself proud to be considered a disciple of A. R.
Chisholm, who initiated me into Mallarmé's work nearly fifty years ago.

62
commentators in the United States, notably H. A. Grubbs,126 Wallace Fowlie127 and
R.G.Cohn; 128 in Great Britain, his critics include Austin Gill,129 C. A. Chadwick,130
C.-P. Barbier,131 M. M. Bowie,132 and Eileen Souffrin—Le Breton;133 in Italy, he has
been studied by de Nardis and others.134 There have', no doubt, been studies in other
countries not mentioned here. The field is vast. In France itself, after im­
portant studies by scholars such as J. Scherer135 and Léon Cellier,136 Mallarmé
received immediate official recognition by the university and illumination by
new critical methods in Jean-Pierre Richard's thesis of 1961, L'Univers ima­
ginaire de Mallarmé.137 In the last decade, whether on the basis of real insights
or contresens créateurs, Mallarmé is increasingly invoked as the patron saint of the
most recent schools of criticism, whose attention, if not always comprehension, he
commands.138 In the field of creative writing, a recent anthology entitled New French
Poetry affirms: "It can no longer be said that the most important part of contemporary
French poetry is Baudelairian. The 'lignes de force'... have changed; and the fertilizing
influence of Les Fleurs du mal has been replaced by Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés and
Divagations".139 It is perhaps significant that Mallarmé's poems are not mentioned
here. We may be sure that if poetry as such survives the present age, Mallarmé's
poems will once more come into their own.

126
See his "Mallarmé's P t y x Sonnet: An Analytical and Critical Study", PMLA (1950),
pp. 75-89.
127
128
Mallarmé (Chicago, 1953).
L'Œuvre de Mallarmé. Un coup de dés (Paris, 1951); Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Berke-
ley and Lós Angeles, 1965); Mallarmé's Masterwork. New Findings (The Hague, 1966), the latter
two reviewed by L. J. Austin, FS, X X I I I (1969), pp. 194-197.
189
Numerous articles from 1955 onwards, dealing with many aspects of Mallarmé's poetry
and thought;
130
monograph on Mallarmé's Poem "La chevelure vol d'une flamme . . . " (Glasgow, 1971).
131
Mallarmé, sa pensée dans sa poésie (Paris, 1962), and several articles.
Edition of Correspondance Mallarmé-Whistler (Paris, 1964), and Documents Stéphane
Mallarmé (4 vols, to date, Paris 1968-1973).
132
See n. 80. above,
133
Numerous articles, a forthcoming monograph on Mallarmé, and edition of the Poésies for
the Athlone Poets series (London).
134
Impressionismo di Mallarmé (Caltanissetta-Roma, 1957); L'Ironia di Mallarmé (ibid., 1962,
containing
135
(pp. 243-290) a bibliography of Mallarmé studies in Italy from 1885-1961 (363 items).
L'Expression littéraire dans l'œuvre de Mallarmé (Paris, 1947); Le "Livre" de Mallarmé
(Paris, 1957), reviewed by L. J. Austin, RHLF, L I X (1959), pp. 409-412.
136
Mallarmé et la morte qui parle (Paris, 1959), reviewed by L. J. Austin, "Two Mallarmé
Studies"
137
(see n. 59 above).
Paris, 1961. Reviewed by L. J . Austin, RHLF, L X I I I (1963), pp. 493-497. See, specially,
Gérard Genette, "Bonheur de Mallarmé", Figures (Paris, 1966), pp. 91-100. J . P . Richard's book
contains an admirably comprehensive bibliography, and the notes to the chapters discuss, in detail,
earlier138works.
139
A much-quoted example is Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris, 1974).
C. A. Hackett, New French Poetry (Oxford, 1973), p . X X I I I ; cf. P . X X X ; "The course has
been changed, and the essential bearings are being taken from Mallarmé"; See also C. A. Hackett's
article, "Mallarmé and modern French poetry", in the Festschrift quoted in n. 27 above, pp. 242-
258.

63
 PART II
THE FRENCH CÉNACLE
 R O B E R T JOUANNY

T H E BACKGROUND OF F R E N C H SYMBOLISM

Accounting for French Symbolism historically poses many problems, and the dates
generally accepted are largely arbitrary. The records left by the many obliging chroni­
clers of la mêlée symboliste and the reviews, manifestos and lampoons t h a t blossomed
towards 1880, if not major works, encouraged historians to place the movement rough­
ly between 1880 and 1900. B u t French Symbolism fails to match the historians' facts,
even so. By 1880, the chief work had been done; Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Villiers de l'lsle-
Adam and even Verlaine had all published or at least written the works now regarded
as their most significant. And at the latter end, roundabout or just after the t u r n of
the century, the most representative works of another generation of men, Claudel,
Valéry, Milosz and Saint-Pol-Roux, had begun to appear, after a patient and often
frustrating wait. The over-simplified view may be convenient for histories of literature,
even if it is something of a caricature, b u t I feel it would be more accurate to say that,
between these two extremes, French Symbolism went through two separate stages,
both equally disappointing.
From 1880 to 1890, the younger generation showed a growing consciousness of a
specific poetics after its initial groping and an often contradictory search for the ideal
it wanted to reach expressed mainly through hopes, idle endeavours and hazarded
theories.
Then 1891 introduced a period of disillusionment during which the inconsistencies
and limitations of t h e movement became very glaring. Symbolism was made to fit all
claims and ambitions, yet no one wished to recognize t h a t it had reached a crisis,
t h a t early hopes had proved short-lived and each writer was resuming his old road
in search of an identity and of a real world too long forgotten.
Between these two periods of conscription and demobilization, so to speak, one
event stood out as a turning-point: the celebration on February 2,1891 which assembled
"toute une jeunesse aurorale et quelques ancêtres" — Mallarmé's toast — round
J e a n Moréas, one might almost have said in answer to Gauguin's exhortation in the
famous J a n u a r y edition of La Plume (1891) devoted to the "symbolisme de J e a n
Moréas": "Soyez symboliste". The occasion proved ineffectual because t h e illusion
of triumph was followed almost immediately b y doubt as to the importance of the
particular work praised and the questioning of Symbolism as such by its late zealots,
the hero of yesterday's feast at their head.
Suggesting t h a t French Symbolism had no more t h a n one luminous day of life,
like a May-fly, and after its slow birth came the beginning of slow decay, however, would

5* 67
be denying the movement all meaning. Obviously, such a straightforward p a t t e r n can
provide only a superficial approach. I t would not explain the ferment of ideas and
events, coincident and conflicting, t h a t lent a unity of tone t o these two decades,
making it legitimate to speak of a collective enterprise, however, hard to define. I shall
consequently take the chronology, context and general climate of the period in turn,
in an a t t e m p t to convey more of its vivid reality.

1) LES DATES ET LES ŒUVRES

I n Les Dates et les Œuvres, written in 1923, René Ghil, both as a witness and
participant, gives t h e beginning of the history of the movement as roundabout 1883
or 1884. Not going back to Baudelaire and Gautier, as one should, I would nevertheless
be tempted to set the early subterranean murmurings of t h e protohistory closer to
1875 when the signs of the new awareness were beginning to t a k e shape. I t was in 1873,
after all, that Rimbaud published Une Saison en Enfer, in 1874 t h a t the first Impressi­
onist exhibition was held, in 1875 t h a t Verlaine and Mallarmé failed t o be included in
the third Parnasse contemporain and in 1877 t h a t Mallarmé brought out his Poésies
complètes. Parnassus had obviously had its day. Though Banville, Leconte de Lisle,
Mendès and Coppée had kept their reputation owing t o their personal merit and their
helpfulness to some rather t h a n their literary achievement the success of newcomers
like Richepin and Rollinat pointed to a renewal of poetic forms and ideals. At t h e same
time, the style of literary circles began t o change, with cabarets tending t o replace the
fashionable salons. The founding of the Hydropathes circle in 1878 can be regarded as a
literary event in this respect, because the artful Goudeau, with his Fleurs de Bitume,
had taken advantage of the new mal de siècle, shortly to be qualified as decadent:

Tous mes rêves d'azur s'en sont allés au gouffre

J e sais qu'il faut blaguer à Paris et je souffre
D'avoir tué mes dieux naturalistement.
(All my azure dreams have gone to the abyss
In Paris you must joke, I know, b u t I sorrow
For having killed m y gods naturalistically.)

The spread of juvenile literary circles in the next few years was a more significant
phenomenon than the fugitive fashions noisily professed by one or other of the small
groups in the cabarets on the Left Bank. The Zutistes, Jemenfoutistes and Hirsutes, all
"regulars" a t the "Chat Noir", would have deserved no more mention in anecdotes
than as signs of the new effervescence if, while they intoxicated a few young enthusiasts
from the provinces with dreams of fame — and spirits — they had not allowed one or
two ephemeral publications to see the day. The Chat Noir (1882-1897), during the early
years of its over-long life, combined t h e poetic yearnings of a handful of young people
with the interests of the poet café-owner, R. Salis. And it was not long before a more
important review, the Nouvelle Rive Gauche, founded in 188*2, b u t renamed Lutèce in
1883, left its initial political and social concerns behind for specifically literary aimsi
This journal must be credited with having gathered together a number of writers who,

68
though they were still unkown at the time, were shortly to acquire a fair reputation
(Caze, Moréas, Tailhade, Vignier, Ajalbert, Raynaud, Vielé-Griffin, Régnier and others),
with instilling a group consciousness with a sometimes deliberately mystifying solem­
nity — wanting t o be 'fumiste' (fraudulent) — and with bringing out works which were
t o leave their mark: Verlaine's Poètes Maudits (1883), most of Les Syrtes (Moréas) and
the Complaintes of Laforgue.
Alongside these fairly spontaneous collective publications, some writings of another
kind also helped to crystallize uncertain ambitions and hasten the new sense of pur­
pose. I t would be hard t o say which of these contributions had the greatest effect: the
Poètes Maudits in which Verlaine, making a skillful literary rentrée (come-back), linked
his favorites b y an adjective, apparently offering an example to a great many young
writers who had not yet found their true way; the Essais de Psychologie contemporaine1
where Bourget gave a new dimension to contemporary unease by associating it with
a literary and psychological tradition, finding material for théorie in décadence; or the
Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette, poète décadent (1885) which let Beauclair and Vicaire
have some fun, gave m a n y naive journalists cause for indignations and allowed poets
on the look-out for decadence to find, if not solace, at least an outlet in literature, even
at the price of a hoax. Lastly, there was Huysmans's novel, A Rebours (1884), where
Des Esseintes, a character perhaps conceived as a caricature, concentrated the longings,
disenchantment and world-weariness of the generation he in a sense guaranteed.
Towards 1885, literature progressed from random uninhibitedness t o would-be
doctrines as if the death of Victor Hugo — enfin! — made it possible to conceive of
a new art which might be more t h a n just degenerate Romanticism, amendcd b y
Baudelaire, Parnassus and even Naturalism. The reproving interest the press dis­
played in the hoaxes and excesses of a few no doubt had something to do with the
urge of young writers to define their movement or perhaps simply t o take themselves
seriously. I t was true t h a t there was a new note. Some believed t h a t if a word were
found to designate their aims, it could be relied upon to engender a doctrine; they gave
pride of place to Véternel Symbole and its dérivâtes. Moréas was among this number,
offering a few considerations on the search for a pure concept and "le Beau — seul
domaine légitime de la Poésie" and other such commonplaces in an article published
on August 11, 1885 in the XIXème siècle.2 His "Manifeste", which appeared in the
Figaro on September 18, 1886, was couched in the same vein and he seemed incapable
of setting out rules t h a t were not ones he would use himself. A mere poet, his thought
was singularly lacking in breadth and he remained content with remarks on free verse,
language, and the symbolist novel to come. The expatiations and flourishes of a man
like Baju were just as highsounding b u t less significant. A Bard of Decadence and
author of manifestos and lampoons of this order his activity alone justified Verlaine's
caution in flatly refusing to become involved in the puerile squabbles between Sym­
bolists and Decadents.
1
Published between 1881 and 1883 in La ??? Revue. Collected in book form in 1883 and
1885.2
In this connection, see the excellent critical edition of the "Premières armes du Symbolisme*'
(ed. M. Pakenham, Textes littéraires, VIII, University of Exeter, 1973) p. 120 for Moréas's theoretical
writings.

69
 The contributions from a few theorists of the new esthetic were more original, but
often fragmentary. Wyzewa, for instance, wished to base art on suggestion, linking
poetry with initiatory mysticism and, with Valbert, attempting a Symbolist novel
(1881). Dujardin helped to spread the thesis of total art, uniting poetry, music and
dance a d returning to myth as the universal mode of expression, in the Revue Wagné-
rienne (1885-1888). Fénéon, who published the Illuminations in 1886, discovered Sym­
bolism gradually with the Revue Indépendante (1884-1885), writing art criticism which
brought out the Correspondences between painting and poetry (Les Impressionnistes,
1886).3 Charles Henry wrote an "'Introduction à une Esthétique scientifique" in the
Revue Contemporaine in 1885 with which it is legitimate to associate René Ghil's theories
on poesie scientifique. Then there was Ghil's Traité du Verbe (1886), a genuine though
premature manifeste du Symbolisme, championed by Mallarmé's remarkable "Avant-
dire." In 1889 Vanor's Art symboliste came out, then Charles Moneen La Littérature de
tout à I'heure, already showing signs of impatience with the evident sterility of the new
school. Lastly, there was Moréas's letter to Vanier in Les Premières Armes du Sym­
bolisme. The battles Kahn fought to popularize free verse and the work of Laforgue
must also be mentioned, the writings of Aurier, who discovered Gauguin and Van Gogh,
the first novels of the Culte du Moi (Sous Vœil des barbares, 1888; Un homme libre, 1889)
which made Barrés a brief marginal theorist of Symbolist idealism, coming after Les
Taches d'encre (1884-1885), and even the Petit glossaire pour servir à Vintelligence des
auteurs décadents et symbolistes (1888) where Jacques Plowert (alias Paul Adam), aided
and abetted by Fénéon, Kahn and Moréas, went beyond a mere inventory of words
to glimpse the real value of symbolist writing.
The teachings professed by Mallarmé at the mardis, rue de Rome, provided a sort
of common denominator for the welter of interests attracting these theorists. Since
1885, Mallarmé had been a true mentor, whose prestige far outshone Verlaine's, with
his facile allurements, and Villiers (who died in 1889), while the works of Rimbaud,
Laforgue (who died in 1887) and of Lautréamont were almost unknown. Just a few
foreign names were acknowledged, Wagner first, then Schopenhauer, Carlyle, the Pre-
Raphaelites, Swinburne, Whitman and so on, but their actual influence remained
slight, confined rather to providing a backdrop for the movement. The question was
whether anyone could be regarded as a serious rival to these representatives from anoth­
er generation, and as capable of bridging the gap. Certainly not Moréas with his
Cantilenes (1887), Kahn with his Palais Nomades (1887), Vielé-Griffin with Cueille
d'avril (1886), Merill with Gammes (1887), nor Maeterlinck with Serres chaudes (1889).
The other beginners, Quillard, Retté, Dujardin, Fontaine and Raynaud, to mention
the least obscure, are scarcely remembered today. Works were not lacking, but none
stood out. It is significant that nowadays we have begun to look for the essentials of
Symbolism in the host of minor reviews (which I shall return to later) rather than in
individual productions. It was a sign of a collective quest, but also displayed the

8
For Fénéon, whose role is still insufficiently known today, see Œuvres plus que complètes,
texts collected and introduced by Joan U. Halperin, 2 vols, (Geneva-Paris, 1970); for the Revue
Indépendante, see the thesis by J. Monférier (Sorbonne, 1972) still unpublished.

70
 sterilizing discontent of writers who were sufficiently aware of artistic realities to see
that the cxotic boudoirs, unattainable princesses, sensual exacerbations and moral
intricacies, all artifices handed down from Baudelaire through the hyperbole of deca­
dence whereby some critics wished to hamstring the contributions of the younger gener­
ation, were no more than literary tricks, unfit to convey the true nature of the move­
ment. For want of a clear workable framework for their esthetic creed, writers used the
reviews as a means of investigation, perhaps vaguely hoping they might acquire a
knowledge pf Symbolism through practice.
The diverse attitudes toward art fostered by these reviews answered a conscious
need to open up new paths in literature. The same spirit was expressed more coherently
in a number of attempts to repudiate the outside world, to escape the laws of the
present through a peregrination in time and space, and to arrive at eternal truths.
There was the novel, uninspired and unsuccessful, in which writers attempted an
ironical coming to terms with naturalism (P. Adam and J. Moréas, Les Demoiselles
Goubert, 1886); there was language, which had donned medieval adornments well
before the extravagances of the Ecole romane; and there was the theatre, which redis­
covered puppets (Bouchor, 1888) in its ponderings over dramatic art, the timeless
ritual of Shakespeare and Wagner (Maeterlinck, La Princesse Maleine, 1889), and
tragic mystery with Axel by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. (1890).
The pace quickened after 1891, though the banquet held in honor of Moréas was
obviously not the immediate cause of likely developments. But the attempt to annex
and reshape Symbolism along the lines which best suited the poet and had been implicit
in his earlier writings may have helped to strengthen position which till then had been
somewhat vague. It was enough to see how vehemently Verlaine reacted to this skil­
fully orchestrated profession of faith.4 The next months proved propitious for adopting
attitudes to emphasize splits and hasten new ventures. The inquiry made by Jules
Huret, the journalist, in the Echo de Paris (March 3 — July 5, 1891 and reprinted in
book form almost at once) acted as a kind of signal. New names emerged. Gide published
his Traité de Narcisse and the Cahiers d'André Walter; between 1890 and 1893, Claudel
wrote Tête d'Or, La Ville and La Jeune Fille Violaine, and in March 1891 Valéry publish­
ed "Narcisse parle". Paul Fort had founded the Théâtre d'Art in 1890, staging Maeter­
linck's L'Intruse, then Verlaine, with Les Uns et les Autres in May, 1891. In July of the
same year, while the one-time upholders of Symbolism were after one another's blood,
Maurras attacked the movement from a new angle, setting the Mediterranean tradition
against Anglo-Saxon barbarity. There were quarrels between Ghil and Moréas, then
Moréas broke with Verlaine and Mallarmé in the name of the romane ideal proclaimed
in 1891. The Revue Indépendante resumed its naturalist socializing tradition while
Saint-Pol-Roux advocated his magnificisme (1893). Even the apparent allegiance of
the Mercure de France and La Plume to at least the externals of Symbolism proved
powerless to stem the vernal infidelity. It is scarcely surprising that from that moment
on, so many young poets should have turned their backs on the fauns and boudoirs
of the day before and tried to open windows on to the world of real life. Gide's itinerary

4
See my "Jean Moréas, écrivain français," Lettres modernes (Paris, 1969).

71
was one of the most significant. Having found out the futility of the Narcissan sym-
bol he turned to raihery in 1892, Le Voyage d'Urien suggesting a voyage which
led only to introverted happiness in closed isolated regions, a semblance of joy
in a world of appearances. The explosion of Les Nourritures terrestres sprang mainly
from Gide's personal conflict, but it was no less symptomatic of the crisis, at first
latent, then finally acknowledged; as indeed was the appearance within a short
space of time, of Maurice Le Blond's Naturisme (1895), Paul Fort's Ballades (from 1895),
Verhaeren's Heures claires (1896), the first poems by Jammes (Vers, 1894; De l'Angélus
de l'Aube à l'Angélus du Soir, 1898) and of all those who — though only on the very
intellectual plane of manifestes -— wanted to join Bouhélier in proclaiming "la mort de
Narcisse" (1895) and the advent of life.
From 1895 onwards, though there was still some skirmishing by a few sharp-
shooters, Symbolism was commonly accepted as having triumphed, yet the label as
such seemed to have no more meaning. "Mettons que symbolisme ait surtout voulu
dire à un certain moment antinaturalisme, antiprosaïsme de la poésie, recherche de la
liberté dans les efforts d'art, en réaction contre l'enrégimentation parnassienne et
naturaliste" (let us say there was a moment when Symbolism above all meant anti-
naturalism, anti-prosaism in poetry and a search for freedom in artistic striving, as
a reaction to Parnassian and Naturalist regimentation), admitted G. Kahn. 5 Dreams
of timelessness and hazy yearnings for a life where sensibility often outweighed a taste
for action were found side by side, and sometimes in the work of the same poet. The
titles bearing witness to this somewhat faded plethora scarcely need quoting. On the
one hand, there were Les Jeux rustiques et divins (1897) and Les Médailles d'argile
(1900) by Régnier, TláXal (1894) by Vielé-Griffin, Aux flancs du vase (1898) by Samain,
Eriphyle (1894) by Moréas, Mimes (1894) by Schwob and Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894)
by Pierre Louys, which pointed to a Greek and especially Alexandrine revival, on the
other, we find Les Villes tentaculaires (1895) by Verhaeren, LaClartéde Vie (1897) by Vielé-
Griffin, La Chanson des Hommes (1898), and La Louange de la Vie (1898) by Eiskamp,
La Beauté de vivre (1900) by Gregh and, in a different spirit, Stances (1899-1901) by
Moréas and Le Cœur Solitaire (1898) by Charles Guérin. Together, they show that
moral and purely emotional interests, in their veiled Romanticism, tended to steal a
march on the esthetic, philosophical and linguistic investigation that had given Sym-
bolism its originality. As early as 1891, vociferating against "l'esprit vain ( . . . . )
l'ostentation", Verlaine proposed a form of art that would allow the poet "d'être
absolument soi-même". 6 The evolution of poetry in the following years made this
injunction seem like a premonition, though, for the aging faun that Verlaine had
become, it was actually hard to distinguish from the lure of facility. Asking no more
of the movement henceforth than the justification of their personal preferences, in the
last years of the century, writers found themselves paying attention to the most varied
conceptions of art and thought. Neo-classicism with Parnassian overtones, tame Ro-
manticism, unyielding individualism, compliant estheticism, openhearted socialism

* "La Société nouvelle", April 1894. Quoted by M. Décaudin, La Crise des Valeurs symbolistes
(Toulouse, 1960), p. 15.
• Bonheur, XVIII, "J'ai dit â l'esprit vain . . . "

72
ignorant of true social problems, provincialism claiming to be "décentralisateur", and
"le glorieux entêtement qui nous fit chercher la beauté en cent voies diverses" (the
glorious obstinacy t h a t made us seek beauty along a hundred different paths) which
R e t t é praised so highly 7 made up the embarrassed eclecticism of a generation t h a t had
found no more t h a n fleeting inspiration in Symbolism.
Another feature of these years was the disappearance of the leading actors, all at
about the same time, as if t o make room for an esprit nouveau', Verlaine died in 1896,
and Mallarmé, who might have slowed up the necessary evolution, in 1898. A large
number of seconds rôles were also removed: by death (Rodenbach in 1898, Samain,
Signoret in 1900); b y solitude or voluntary estrangement (Moréas, Gourmont, Jammes,
Kahn, Saint-Pol-Roux) ; or by interests, political (the Dreyfus Affair), spiritual or
merely wordly (Dujardin, Fénéon, Retté, Wyzewa, Barrés, Régnier, and so on). Others
again, like Valéry, chose silence. Roundabout 1900, the field was more or less clear.
There was nothing t o indicate the future impact of the works Claudel, Péguy, J a r r y ,
Proust, Gi le, and then Apollinaire brought out or were preparing, yet in varying
degrees and b y divergent paths, all derived from Symbolism, illustrating it, at a dis­
tance, in different keys.

2) T H E CONTEXT

The next question t o consider is to what extent the peculiar situation of Symbolism
a t the end of the nineteenth century was responsible for its elusive, composite nature
and the comparative failure of its works. I t could certainly be seen as t h e completion
of one stage and the beginning of a transition period. The complexity of t h e movement
and the fact it was marking time, so to speak, would then be explained b y its being
a focus for converging sensibilities, as typical as they were various, complementary
and yet conflicting t o the point of destroying one another and provoking a state of
muddled negativeness. I t was not idly t h a t Italo Siciliano and R a y m o n d Pouilliart
decided to t u r n fin-de-siècle literature into the prolongation of Romanticism; 8 nor
should we forget t h a t Parnassus lingered on at its most romantic in Mallarmé and
Verlaine and the artistic consciousness of the school t h a t followed. B u t literary con­
tinuity and successive modes are not enough to account for the originality of the
phenomenon, let alone for the self-awareness which gave a moral unity t o these twenty
years, one which was almost independent of t h e works: "le sentiment d'appartenir à une
communauté triomphante", to quote Michel Décaudin's pleasing expression. 9 Once
the principle of a Romantic legacy handed down through Parnassus and Baudelaire
is admitted (and how could it not be?), it becomes perfectly plain t h a t an acquain­
tance with Symbolism must be based on more t h a n an analysis of its literary sources.
Sociological, ideological and moral factors must also be noted, because their confluence
or their crossing more often t h a n not within a specific literary context helped to produce

7
Quoted by R. Pouilliart, Le Romantisme III (Paris, 1968), p . 176 (judgement made in 1896).
8
9
Pouilliart, op. cit.; Italo Siciliano, Romanticismo francese (La Goliardica, Venice, 1955).
Op. cit., p. 17.

73
 the outlook and way of behaving that was peculiarly Symbolist. But as these aspects
were by no means limited to the movement and sometimes failed altogether to affect
it doctrinally, overlapping, rather, into areas npt directly connected with art, they
naturally increased the ambiguousness of the intellectual trends as a whole.
Rejecting the world was one of the features. Twenty years separated Mallarmé's
"Ici-bas a une odeur de cuisine" and the "O ne pas vivre" by Moréas. The examples
of Schopenhauer, of Hartmann in the Philosophie de l'inconscient, the experience of the
1870 war and the Commune, and the undisguised opportunism of the new ruling classes
urged most artists to deny in theory all compromise with a society in which they were
outsiders. They felt close to Flaubert, whom they rejected, Maupassant, whom they
despised, and Zola, whom they could not help admiring, and went on in every possible
fashion to assert their desire to be other than what they were, to live otherwise, in
other places and at other times.
The Dandyism of Des Esseintes, Du Plessys, Fénéon, Tailhade and Barres, Ver-
laine's self-advertisement, Gourmont's shyness, the recourse to alcohol by many and
to drugs by a few were all part of the same need.
Resorting to dreams also belonged to the quest, and though Jules Tellier — so
hostile to the Symbolists while being so close to them in his heightened sensibility —
warned: "qui se donne au rève (est) perdu pour la vie", most of his contemporaries,
on the contrary, saw this as the only means of turning their backs on a reality that had
become too harsh. Reconciliation with the world was accomplished in a beyond, which
was generally more of an escape than an intellectual edifice, as in Mallarmé. There was
a return to a story-book Middle Ages that found its immediate fountain in the heavy
humour of R. Salis and the renewal of medieval studies; to Byzantine orientalism
(Verlaine's l'Empire à la fin de la Decadence), which was also expressed in the art of
Gustave Moreau; and there was definitely unexpected return to Hellenism, and the
calling up of Nordic mists and legends under the influence of the Belgian poets and
so on. Anticipation, on the other hand, was rarely thought of (L'Eve future, 1886, by
Villiers was an exception) or was used for comic and satirical purposes (Allais, Jarry),
as if by adhering to scientism and the illusion of progress, it implied the acceptance of
nineteenth-century myths. The escape was preferably to be made into the remote,
comforting past. The attitude explains the poetry of the Ecole romane and more gener­
ally, the importance attached to historical and political subjects, in Laforgue's Morali­
tés légendaires (1887), Paul Fort's Ballades françaises, and the paradoxical predomi­
nance of archaisms over neologisms in contemporary language.
Revolt was another way of rejecting the world as such, first of all through verbal
provocation, endowing language with coruscating brilliance ('coruscant' was the adjec­
tive in fashion); in the form of lavish sarcasm in Laforgue, of heavy insistence in the
later Verlaine, of outrage in Tailhade and Retté and of absconces pages (Fénéon) in the
great majority. At another level, revolt became readily political and social, but amount­
ed to a temperamental rather than objective reaction to social, political and conse­
quently, economic facts. The encounter between genuine anarchist militants (Zo d'Axa,
with En dehors, was perhaps one of the best known) and sympathizers like Mirbeau,
Fénéon and Tailhade brought a kind of literary recuperation to the movement. Even

74
the moderate Plume made an attempt to be sociale in 1892, devoting a special number
to the Anarchistes, while Darien, Hermant, Descaves (whose work could scarcely have
been more removed from Symbolist interests), Gourmont and the rest levelled violent
diatribes a t the army or the joujou patriotisme. 10
Occultism, finally, held an important place in the spiritual life of the period,
borrowing from Wagnerianism and a certain spirit of religious revival. I t can also be
regarded as answering the desire to reject the world as much as the satisfaction of
knowledge. The names of Guaita, who modernized the Rosicrucians, V. E . Michelet,
Sâr Péladan and Papus were not unknown outside the circle of their disciples, and the
wider success of Schuré's book, Les Grands Initiés (1889) is significant. For a long time,
Mallarmé had been influenced by the Kabbala and a large number of writers, including
Saint-Pol-Roux, Signoret (Saint Graal), and Huysmans (in Là-bas, 1891) were attracted
by the irrational. Fashion played its part in reviving Baudelairean ostensoirs (mon­
strance); Tailhade dreamed of the Church of the Lower Empire, Gourmont of the Latin
mystique (1892), Huysmans of black masses, Saint-Pol-Roux of primitive rites, Dujar-
din of Christian exegesis, while others, Claudel, Le Cardonell and R e t t é were in the
process of becoming truly converted.
Idealism was also a common denominator for a generation which owed it a philos
ophy and a number of practical rules for life.
As a philosophical system, it offered the substance of the symbolist doctrine,
which I do not wish to discuss here, and at the same time provided a basis for the
theme of rejecting the world. One way of escaping from the real, after all, was to deny
its reality and postulate t h a t 'l'objectif n'est que pur semblant, qu'apparence vaine
qu'il dépend de moi de varier, de transmuer et d'anéantir à mon gré', (what is objective
is nothing b u t semblance, vain appearance which it is up to me to vary, transmute and
destroy as I wish). 11 This outlook implied the conviction t h a t an ideal world did exist
and t h a t it was the poet's task or duty to attain it and make it known.
The intellectual approach of Symbolism was thus closely linked with this philosoph­
ical belief. I t was a quest for knowledge. Mallarmé, who seems never to have fully
given up his project for a 'Livre' t h a t would have been a description of the stages on
the road to ultimate knowledge, was not so far removed from Ghil, a theorist of scien­
tific poetry, or, in a neighboring field, from Seurat with his experiments in color and
his work with Signac on 'la signification symbolique des lignes'. H e was also close to
the articles Charles Henry published in the Revue Indépendante m-1888 and everything
in this mathematical flowering which, paradoxically, helped to reinstate science in circles
t h a t were anti-science. 12
The new paths opened t o artistic investigation were less abstract t h a n those of le
pur concept. Recourse to myth was thus more t h a n just a tribute to Wagnerianism. I t s

10
Article published by Gourmont in Mercure de France, April 1, 1891, Reprinted, under the
same title, with a very full introduction by J. P. Rioux in vol. 53 of Collection Libertés, J. J. Pauvert,
publ. 11(Paris, 1967).
12
Moréas, Le Symboliste, October 14, 1886.
"Rapporteur esthétique et sensation de forme", "Cercle chromatique et sensation de cou-
leur", "Harmonies de couleurs", and so on. Charles Henry attempted to apply scientific methods
systematically to esthetic and poetic problems.

75
timelessness and its involvement in historical time made people regard it as a genuine
means of bridging two worlds. The same applied to the diachronic games which
pushed Moréas, in his Pélerin passionné (1891), like so many others, to seek "la com­
munion du Moyen-Age Français et de la Renaissance Française, fondus et transfigurés
en le principe ( . . . . ) de l'Ame moderne". The verbal quest, on the other hand, was
based on confidence in the revelatory power of words, whether they were given un
sens plus pur amidst Mallarmé's tribu or because of their uncommon alien character,
which gave them the provocative quality of the images the Surrealists were to use.
Mallarmé yearned for a primeval language with words "qui se trouveraient, par une
frappe unique, elles-mêmes matériellement la vérité", 1 3 b u t there was also a linguistic
eclecticism (slang, archaism, neologisms, artistic writing) vaguely sensed as able to
guarantee "une illumination délibérée du sujet tout entier". 1 4 Both attitudes were
moving towards the same goal; by naming rather than describing, there was a greater
chance of attaining the essence of things:

Car j'installe par la science

L'hymne des cœurs spirituels
En l'œuvre de ma patience. 15

(Through knowledge, I enshrine

The purest hymns,
In the patience of m y work.)

The implicit acceptance of the inadequacy of ordinary thought and language at the
same time opened up new fields for those persevering in experiment, ones likely t o
bring forth other forms of knowledge. Eccentricity was a means of discovering the
self and, indirectly, the world; it could take t h e form of subjectivity, of analyzing t h e
fine nuances of sensibility, of paying attention sometimes to the subconscious, more
frequently to the rare, marginal sensations, or of a sensual curiosity which made even
Mendés, Silvestre, or jokes in very bad taste tolerable. B u t all these original elements
of Symbolist psychologie were not only symptoms of distress. They corresponded to
a series of questions about the mind and its multiple facets which writers were trying to
grasp in a constant play of mirrors. "Il faut sentir le plus possible en analysant le plus
possible": Barrés's precept sufficed to show t h a t Le Culte du Moi — where he was
"morcelé en un grand nombre d'âmes" with t h e factual world limited to brief "con­
cordances" (Sous l'œil des barbares) — demonstrated Symbolist idealism, and also
provided a "manuel d'égotisme".

13
"Crise de vers" (1895), Variations sur un sujet.
14
Moréas, warning from the Pelerin passionné, 1891.
16
Mallarmé, "Prose pour Des Esseintes". Cf. the problem stated by Gide: "Il y a un grand
plaisir, Nathanaël, à déjà tout simplement affirmer: le fruit du palmier s'appelle date". (There is
alreadv a great pleasure, Nathanaël, in simply stating t h a t the fruit of the palm-tree is called date)
(Nourritures terrestres, II). 'Je voudrais être né dans un temps où n'avoir à chanter, poète, que,
simplement en les dénombrant, toutes les choses'. (I should like to have been born in a time where
the poet had not to praise, but simply name all things), (ibid. VI).

76
 Though it sprang from the initial idealism, the determination to approach knowl­
edge by all ways and means ironically brought with it a conduct that seemed to con­
tradict the philosophical assumption. The fact that reality was based on the perception
had of it, to the point of being arbitrary, revived the need to resort to a view of existence
as an association between Idea and Feeling (or sensation). Moréas was aware of this
in 1891; "Rechercher, en cet ouvrage, une Idée se voulant son but à elle-même,
un Sentiment répercuté dans son sens immédiat, — c'est mésestimer de l'Art en sa
totalité, et du mien-ci en son essence" (To seek an idea as an aim in itself or a feeling
reflected in its immediate meaning in this work would be to underestimate art in its
wholeness and mine in its essence).16 In eluding the individual, discarding the trivial
restrictive side of self-reference, artists claimed to find a means of transcending the real
(but ended by coming to terms with it). Their dream, in Morice's words, lay 'hors du
monde mais point hors de l'humanité ni de la nature' 17 and Stuart Merrill, in L'Ermitage
in April 1893, gave a closer definition of the poet's role: "le poète doit être celui qui
rappelle aux hommes l'Idée éternelle de la Beauté dissimulée sous les formes transitoires
de la Vie imparfaite Des formes de la Vie imparfaite, il doit recréer la Vie par­
faite", (the poet must be the one to remind men of the everlasting idea of beauty dissi­
mulated beneath the transient forms of imperfect life. From imperfect life, he must create
perfection.) This may have been a sign that Symbolism was returning to life. As the failure
of a conceptual rather than concrete art became more obvious, such an attitude certainly
seemed to be taking shape. But we must not forget that the desire to preserve per­
manent contact between artistic construction and life was plain from the very beginning
in Mallarmé's sensuousness, in Moréas's determination to adorn the Idea "des somp-
tueusses simarres des analogies extérieures", in Laforgue's mocking sneer at the in­
sufficient resources surrounding him which he did his utmost not to forget, in Ajalbert,
Merrill, Saint-Pol-Roux and Morice's hopes of "la littérature de tout à l'heure". It was
also part of the wish to unshackle verse from what was regarded as arbitrary prosody
and taste in order to make room for personal rhythms obeying inner impulses. The
Claudelian verset (couplet), the litanies of Saint-Pol-Roux, Paul Fort's broad sweep and
very soon the powerful beat of Charles Péguy all demonstrated the urge to convey a
deeper sense of life. Wishing to grasp the real world in its entirety consequently did not
imply a systematic rejection of surroundings, but rather a careful selection of the
phenomena existing in the everyday universe. The fact that, with rare exceptions, the
works failed to come up to expectations was due to deficiencies in the artists and not,
s anti-symbolist criticism has too often encouraged people to think, to the rejection
of a doctrine.
Perplexity and distress were the third set of factors in the symbolist outlook I am
trying to define. Moral and intellectual considerations, and actual experience of life,
in addition to the historical, political and social reasons which need not be stressed
here but played a decisive role in fostering the general feeling, helped to make the
writers and artists of the period more conscious of what might be called their defeatist

16
17
Warning from the Pelerin passionné (L Auteur au Lecteur').
Morice, La littérature de tout à l'heure (Paris, 1889), p. 373.

77
psychosis, something hard to reconcile with the constructive energy they certainly did
possess.
The feeling of decadence was not only a literary theme, a pretext for moral varia­
tions. Fin-de-siècle sensibility, apart from any literary or philosophical school, quite
often sprang from the conviction that man was fundamentally incapable of escaping
from his finite self. This incapacity was all the more painful to the artist who felt that
he was the only one still clearsighted among fellow men, who were becoming increas­
ingly mundane. His sense of isolation became more and more acute. The romantic
poet's sense of mission, his lofty, Parnassian disdain would no longer do. It was the
constraint of the unfinished that carried the day, with no recourse, not even Baude­
laire's metaphysics, in sight. The only fulfillment that could be expected at the end
of this itinerary, pathetic in its lucidity, was a void, a void not accepted but sensed
in anguish. Though an apparent cheerfulness, a kind of strained gaiety and exacerbated
sensuality may have masked the tragedy, the younger generation, proceeding from
cabaret to amorous adventure, from duel to proclamation, and from recantation to
fervor was only playing at life. The notion of being as an abyss — an experience that
has not always been properly understood — created a disconcerting affinity between
Moréas and Gide, Bloy and Montesquiou This was the tragi-comedy of dandyism.
The futility of creating could not fail to strike the artist. Whether or not the phenomenon
was due to the historical evolution of decadence or to a fundamental incapacity was
of little consequence. During these years, artists struggled to support a cause which
it was ultimately more important to define (or even describe) than to help towards an
impossible truth. Expectation melted away into the dream of ever-delayed achieve­
ment. Perhaps after all, the history of the Symbolist Movement and its great expec­
tations is best characterized by this symptom of impotence. The actors were mustered,
each more or less in command of his part, but the show never began.
A kind of esthetic syncretism was both cause and consequence of this disarray.
Unconcerned by possible contradictions, writers drew on all sources, followed up every
path. Cosmopolitanism was not only the well-known position of protagonists such as
Moréas, Wyzewa, Merill, Vielé-Griffin, the Belgians and the Swiss, but was also found
among visitors and critics who were attracted by the new generation's apparent readi­
ness to welcome them. There were the studies by Pica and Byvanck, the avowed
fascination of Gomez Carrillo, Darío, and Nervo. The list of foreign writers who trust­
ingly and sometimes ingenuously played the part of the chorus was neverending. The
influences received were also cosmolopitan: Wagner, the Russian novel, German philos­
ophy, the English Pre-Raphaelites, the Scandinavian theatre, Poe, Whitman . . , all
in turn, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes contradictorily, arousing curiosity
and exciting faith. A kind of network of connections spread out between Paris and the
provinces (which already meant to play a role in a decentralized France, thanks to
the energies of a few individuals and small reviews) between France and the rest of the
world, but the system lacked the backbone that would give it true meaning. Provincials
foreigners wanting to be a success tended tó overdo their parisianisme (as Salmon said
of Moréas) jeopardizing their sincerity, while true Parisians looked elsewhere, hoping
that Ibsen, Schopenhauer and Jammes would allow them, if not actually to solve, at

78
least to state their problems clearly at last. The disappointing interplay soon led to the
bitter à quoi bon of Moréas's Stances, and the melancholy fervor of Darío. It is signif­
icant, furthermore, that partly due to the political context, the ebb of anti-Symbolism
should have been associated with uncompromising nationalism in Maurras and Barrès.
Linguistic and national splits were not the only ones to be brought into question;
the current of exchange among the different forms of art grew stronger than ever.
Taking only the debts of Symbolism to Impressionism, there were the valuable con-
tributions critics like Fénéon and Aurier made towards laying down common esthetic
codes, and the extent to which Symbolist painters, the early Gustave Moreau, Lévy-
Dhurmer, Mucha, and Khnopff reflected the fictive nature and final failure of the
movement. Perhaps the wholeness of art had never seemed so close — the dreams of
Wagner and Mallarmé — and there was anxiety at the thought of its being achieved;
Redon's evolution is a case in point.
The impassioned uncertainty which was no doubt one of the causes of the com­
parative failure of Symbolism could also be explained by the fact that most of the
participants were very young. In 1890, Ghil, Wyzewa, Le Cardonnel, Barrés, Rette,
Vielé-Griffin, Régnier, Mockel, Jammes, Fontainas and Gide and many others were
still under thirty and Valéry, Signoret, Fort, Guérin and Bouhélier under twenty. The
Symbolist fray was obviously a battle of young men easily roused and eager to dictate,
though perhaps wavering in intention and unsure of their possibilities. Many dis­
appeared from the literary front after 1900 because they had given too much of them­
selves to an enterprise which had not really brought what they expected. The ineffec­
tual drive conveyed by the movement may have been the ardor of an idealistic younger
generation that had not found its way.

3) THE SYMBOLIST CLIMATE

The last observation in connection with the age of the writers should remind us
that Symbolism was first and foremost an affair of individuals, who were far more
conditioned by their personal situations and group consciousness than any obedience
to a doctrine. Nor can it have been by accident that literary history chose to refer to
Symbolism as a movement rather than a school, with all that the term "Symbolism"
implies in diversity, flexibility and collective action. An understanding of the Sym­
bolist social scene certainly makes it easier to place it in its historical context and to
appreciate the empirical evolution and even the contradictions of the period.
From 1880 onwards, a few very young men with more or less the same social
background, even if they were from foreign countries, were brought together by chance,
a common love of literature, common ambitions and a great many illusions. They
belonged to the ordinary middle-classes, the rich bourgeoisie and occasionally the
provincial aristocracy. The fictional Des Esseintes and the real Montesquiou were
exceptions and it was the following generation that included men such as Péguy from
the working-classes, Apollinaire, an uprooted foreigner, Golberg, a wretched Polish
emigré, and so on . . . . Even if they had temporarily broken with their families and
their usual circles, their place in society was secure; they may have decided to make

79
literature a means of social betterment (Dujardin, for example) or self-assertion (Du
Pies VS); Baju, the inspired starving schoolmaster was a special case and remained on
the fringe. A great many of them had met at school (where they had already founded
potache reviews) or at the university, or in the cabarets in the Quartier Latin. Friend­
ships, rivalry, ingenuous ambitions, and the neverending conversations of eternal
students not only provided general literary material for contemporary novels (le
Boul' Mich, 1884, by Caraguel or the second edition of Déliquescences, la vie d'Adoré
Floupette by "Marius Tapora, pharmacien de 2ème classe") but belonged to the student
life which gave symbolism part of its strength; Barrès's correspondence, Le Départ
pour la Vie, published in 1961, is a vivid illustration. The importance of the canular3
the pastiches passed off as originals, fantastic pseudonyms,18 improvisations, super­
ficial reactions, slaps in the face and duels19 in Symbolist anecdotes can be partly
explained against this background. These were the sort of outbursts typical of young
people who did not usually have very serious personal problems or a prodding social
conscience (and who subsequently never became true revolutionaries) but who, with
fleeting sincerity of youth, pretended to take themselves seriously.
Proper literary Symbolism was also influenced by its twofold nature, social and
juvenile. Today, of course, the phenomenon is a trite one; everyone has known for
a long time that works are not the only factors that help a career. The sway of private
connections or a friendship was sometimes the simple explanation for the appearance
of a name in the contents of a review, where a chef de file — Fénéon, Dujardin, Kahn,
Ghil, d'Orfer — quickly attracted a small group of friends; vetoes, révolutions de
palais followed in rapid succession on editorial committees, according to wounded
vanities, or even unhappy love-affairs. For reasons that are not always easy to discover,
secret wars were waged behind the façades. D'Orfer's Scapin was distincly scathing
about Moréas: Le Symboliste "étant tombé après le No. 4", Décadence, (its rival),
'n'avait plus de raison d'être et elle mourut au No. 4 aussi'.20 The Revue Indépendante
was eclectic with Fénéon (1884-1885), Symbolist with Dujardin (1886-1888), and from
1889 onwards, was exceedingly hostile to Moréas under the influence of Kahn and
Ghil, then, from 1891 on, to Symbolism itself. After 1890, minds seemed to grow
wiser and the intrigues and emotional encounters dwindled. Each important review
continued to be associated with a pressure group, however, Mercure de France figuring
as a kind of leader, La Plume more and more ready to welcome the dissenters of the
Ecole romane, while the Revue Blanche soon drew attention to its esthetic and social
leanings. Smaller publications voiced the opinion of a group, sometimes even of one
person. The Entretiens politiques et littéraires thus reflected the anarchist views of Vielé-
Griffin; the Ecrits pour l'Art, Ghil's doctrinal dogmatism; La Conque displayed the
noble eclecticism of Pierre Louys; the Saint-Graal the grandiloquent mysticism of

18
E. g. Mostrailles, composition by Morice, Trezenik and possibly Rall. Trézenik, pseudonym
of Epinette, alias Trémora, alias Infernal; see, in this connection, N. Richard, A l'Aube du Symbol-
isme (Paris, 1961).
19
Ferréus, alias Dujardin, published an Annuaire du duel (Perrin, 1891), full of details on the
innumerable
20
encounters between men of letters.
Letter from Ghil to Verhaeren, December 9,1886 (Fonds Verhaeren, Royal Library, Brussels)

80
Signoret; L'Effort Magre's socialism, and so on. Banquets, tributes, poetry a n d drama
evenings went on at t h e same time, giving the movement an apparent coherence. The
"literary" cafés played a more important role than the salons. Only the rue de Rome,
where Mallarmé had been celebrating an immutable rite since 1884, found favor with the
purs (who were hard on all fashionable drawing-rooms) as did the improvised salons
where Verlaine performed — 'tam-tam et réclame' — his hospitals, Le Vachette, L a
Source, and the now legendary hovels. Cafés, on the other hand, and occasionally t h e
popular bouillons or t h e Bal Bullier brought the uninhibited atmosphere, the cheerful
public and t h e friendliness the young idealists needed. The Plume evenings attended
b y a motley throng were held at the Soleil d'Or, Boulevard Saint-Michel, as a distant
continuation of Lutèce. Poets from the provinces or rhetoric classes boastful maîtres,
female companions who were not over-shy . . . . b u t never alone (it was the rule), and
foreigners avid for the new literature eagerly signed the register, questioned the slightly
unsteady Verlaine, watched Moréas go by escorted by the fifty archers Anatole France
h a d generously provided, and listened with half an ear t o poetry and songs having
little to do with the Symbolist esthetic. I n Les Déracinés (1897) Barrés gave a fairly
faithful, though perhaps not very kind portrait of this period, the intellectual inebri­
ation, overweening hopes, abortive enterprises and perpetual fruitless movement.
I t would be too much and anachronistic to speak of collective creativeness with
regard t o these individualists. But, in relation to their public, or rather in their need
of a public, they nevertheless fitted into a common context. Verlaine's storms of
abuse, Moréas's blustering, and the cutting remarks proffered by each and everyone
in Jules Huret's Enquete sur l'évolution littéraire (1891) were not only obvious literary
histrionics and signs of personal rivalry. For this generation inclined to esoterism,
winning a public was, after all, a less paradoxical need t h a n might have seemed at
first sight. The desire to exchange ideas, assert and define oneself, the tendency to
apportion the contributions of others sometimes indirectly, 21 questioning means of
communication (writing, the theatre, mixed genres) in their different ways all demon­
strated profound uncertainty and the need t o lean on others — on Verlaine, Mallarmé,
Ronsard, Wagner, la littérature de tout à l'heure, the diversification of collective aware­
ness. A few meneurs de jeu who found themselves in a strong position, either b y chance
or due to their talent, cleverly fostered t h e desire t o dominate the public and helped t o
proliferate lampoons and ephemeral reviews. This was the case of Vanier, "éditeur des
modernes", Fénéon, Dujardin, 22 a little later Deschamps at La Plume, Vallette who
soon gave up literature to direct Mercure de France and t h e Natanson brothers a t the
Revue Blanche. The names of one or two publishers, fortunate and unfortunate, Giraud,
Savine, Stock and so on, also deserve mention in a history of Symbolism. The popularity
of some of their collections was not only a question of the economy. Publishing in the
Bibliothèque du Mercure de France under Vanier's gray or beige cover, or in La Plume's
21
Such as the variations on the "sonnet des voyelles", especially the very serious one by Ghil
and the endless discussions as to who (Marie Krysinska, Kahn, Moréas, Dujardin . . . ) had been the
inventeur
22
of free verse.
In a letter to his parents, Dujardin explained t h a t he had regarded the Revue Wagnérienne
as a means of learning his trade as the director of a magazine; now with the Revue Indépendante, he
could entertain every hope of fame and fortune.

81
6 Balakian
Bibliothèque artistique et littéraire counted as an initiation and a consecration, just as
the sponsorship of Lemerre had for the previous generation, and for a few Symbolists
behind the times, and just as, then, the white cover of Gallimard was to. It was a club
rather than a clique.
No human enterprise is without achievement. That of Symbolism perhaps lay in its
means of communication and the way they were distributed. Literature, or rather
poetry, became part of everyday journalistic life. The sudden development of the
informative press alongside the press of opinion in the last twenty years of the century
is well known. Its political and moral, economic and technical causes cannot be analyzed
here. One historical fact remains, however: after the fall of the Second Empire, the press
was called upon to play the role ascribed to it by Emile de Girardin, guaranteeing the
public success of the Symbolists — as well as Zola's — through scandals and misun­
derstandings as much as by praise. The coincidence was purely chronological, of course,
and Symbolism would possibly not have the impact it did (independently of value
judgements) had the freedom of the press not allowed so many artistic and literary
weeklies to flourish, and had the great strides made by printing not virtually provoked
an additional need for "copy" and aroused new interest in literature and art. The
spread of small short-lived reviews is consequently less significant in this respect than
the permanence of Lutèce, Le Chat Noir, the Revue Indépendante and La Plume, to say
nothing of Mercure de France. Significant again were the — sometimes published —
lists of provincial subscribers, and depositaries and the readers* letters, which were
often genuine. Though the publications were ostensibly intended for small circles, the
geographical distribution was actually very vast and would deserve sociological study.
It cannot be put down solely to connections and press copies.
With fashion playing its part, naive sleeping partners agreed to support reviews
that had no hope of a future, and welcomed grandiloquent expatiations that had little
connection with the initial objective. For a few months, this was the well-known case
of La Cravache parisienne, a financial journal to which the well-meaning literary editor,
Georges Lecomte, admitted the younger generation. The daily press also intervened
and, finally, to keep up, every newspaper had to have its literary chronicle or échos.
There were thus thousands of openings for unassuming beginners — d'Orfer began in
Le Petit Caporal, a Bonapartist daily, believing that it was the gateway to fame. These
were the days of the "grand homme de province à Paris" on a scale which Balzac would
never have imagined. Once public curiosity had been aroused, influential critics and
important reviews found themselves obliged to be informed and to inform. The role
some people's naïveté played in the success of the highly inoffensive Déliquescences-,
Bourdet's lack of understanding of the genesis of the very notion of Symbolism and
Anatole France's article on the repercussions of the Pelerin passionné are well known.
Then there was the case of the all-powerful Jules Lemaitre, whose article on Verlaine
in the Revue Blanche in January, 1888 was written as a concession to the taste of the
day and under pressure from his informateur Jules Tellier. His contribution could
scarcely have been less conspicuous, yet it amounted to a consecration, while Tellier
himself, in Nos Poètes (1888), cautiously tried to win a voice for the avant-garde in the
concert of established poets. This also explains the hospitality displayed towards

82
manifestos and demonstrations of every order by most of the big newspapers, the Figaro,
the Temps, the Echo de Paris, the XlXeme siècle, the Evénement and so on. Literary
life was certainly in the news and the election of a 'prince des poètes' ranked as a social
event.
Unfortunately, the basic contradiction in the Symbolist movement also became
more clear cut. Partly due to the ardor of youth, Mallarmé's meditation gave way to
"la foire sur la place" to quote Romain Rolland, to strident declarations of war, gestures
that would provide topics for comment, ostentation Verlaine made a show of condemn-
ing, in a word, inauthenticity. Symbolism had fallen a victim to its need of a public,
and to its doubtful success, and had been stifled by its luxuriant growth into a "move-
ment", the collective expression of an essentially personal quest. It is hard to see how
this could have been otherwise in that historical context, given the facilities obtained
and the curiosity aroused. Its history and perhaps its comparative failure were ultimate-
ly due to a dualism which opposed spiritual exigencies and all too obvious temporal
concessions.
There is no doubt that literary activity with intellectual and social overtones
marked the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, independently of the dictates
of faulty doctrines. One group of the younger generation of writers claimed to hold
an ideal conception of art and man. On the intellectual rather than personal or artistic
level, they stood in opposition to those whose concern was allegedly a genuine tran-
scription of the real world.
The historical justification of Symbolism — its modernity — lies far more in this
eternal conflict where man remains divided between fantasy and circumstance, rather
than in some vain esthetic value.
Translated from the French by Edouard Roditi

6*
83
 CLAUDE ABASTADO

THE LANGUAGE OF SYMBOLISM

MIMESIS IN CRISIS

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the relationship between inspiration
and work, within the process of artistic creation, was brought into question. The ensuing
debate culminated with Symbolism. Lucidity and effort became literary values. Esthe­
tics incorporated ethics.1
The Romantics, of course, were not unaware of "wrestling with the angel". They
knew that "the paths of art are rocky", but they considered the labor involved in
writing to be a necessity, not a virtue, and they rarely even mentioned it. After 1845,
however, reference was often made, in the works themselves and by their commen­
tators, to the sacrifices of the artist, to the sleepless nights spent in contemplation of
"the blank and forbidding page". Writing became an actual practice of asceticism and
mortification: a painful journey through which the mind becomes dead to the world,
transforms itself, and rises anew in a superior state. Literature became a religion in
which "The Work" took the place of God.
The "horrible worker", the "schoolboy", the "alchemist", the "literary galley-
slave" were all metaphors for the writer. Labor became, if not the primary ingredient
of a masterpiece, at least an indispensable "plus-value". Facility fell into disrepute.
Sterility was viewed as a necessary experience. The "modern muse of impotence" was
invoked. The writer affected difficulty in writing arcane works and took pride in never
reaching satisfaction.
The privilege of reading had to be earned, as well. The Symbolists scorned the
general public, and ignored established critics. They were of the opinion that the esthe­
tic emotion experienced by the reader had to proceed from an effort identical in kind
to the creator's. Poetry, according to Wyzewa, "is a haughty temple, closed to artistic
cowards, translucent to those of good will". Moréas ridiculed "readers at break-neck
speed"; Mallarmé declared, "to avoid work is to cheat. . .".2 One is struck by the
frequency with which terms from the vocabulary of ethics are used to characterize
reading and the act of writing.
Effort and premeditation had to be apparent in the finished work, in its facture,
(to use a term which likens writing to a craft). There was no great preoccupation with
the "message" to be delivered. The "form", on which hinges the entire value of the

1
Baudelaire's article, "Conseil aux Jeunes Littérateurs" dates from 1846.
2
La Vogue, July 6, 1886; Manifeste, in Les Premières Armes du Symbolisme, (Vanier, 1889),
p. 34; in answer to Huret.

85
work, was opposed to the "content" — with all the ambiguities implicit in such a
dichotomy. Flaubert had already dreamt of writing a "book about nothing" . . .
The privileged position held by the signifier at the expense of the signified heralded
the end of literary typologies. The classification of works into "genres" is based on the
identity of form and content. The Romantics had challenged classical divisions, but not
the very notion of "genres"; they limited themselves to promoting a "mixture". The
Symbolists, through their indifference to content, upset the balance and denied the
very principle of typology — and they did this just as Brunetière was choosing as the
topic of his study history and the evolution of literary genres.
At the same time, while research into the prose poem and free verse was progressing,
the "verse/prose" dichotomy lost its meaning. During the classical period, the term
"poem" was used to designate any literary form from tragedy to the madrigal; poetry
was defined as "an ornate prose", obeying rules which varied according to genre;
writers of "poetry" were not aware of prose works. By the nineteenth century, however,
prose had reached a dominant position in literature; versification was no longer a
condition of "the literary". It was Mallarmé who redefined literary writing by identi­
fying, in the "Avant-dire" of Ghil's Traité du Verbe, a "dual condition of speech".
He had pursued this idea for more than twenty years, ever since beginning Hérodiade
in 1864, when he wrote to Cazalis: "I am inventing a language . . ." We must reread
this essential text, thrice recopied and published by the author:
An undeniable wish of my time is to separate, in view of differing attributions,
the dual condition of speech, raw or immediate here, there essential.
The. dichotomy of discourse is no longer formal; it is structural: the two "con­
ditions" of speech correspond to two "attributions". The adjectives "raw" and "essen­
tial" suggest a hierarchy, but this point is secondary; the important idea is that of
two functions, of two destinations for discourse. Mallarmé sets "literature" in opposition
to the rest of what is written (and said), to "universal reporting": "the elementary use
of discourse caters to universal reporting from which derives, with the exception of
literature, every type of contemporary writing".
The "elementary use" of discourse plays a part in daily life. It is the language of
information and communication. Mallarmé likens it — and the comparison is not
indifferent — to another instrument of social exchange, money: "For many it would
perhaps suffice, in order to exchange human thought, to silently take from, or to put
into, the hand of another a coin". He also mentions a "facile and representational
nummary function". "Raw and immediate" speech disburses information and orders,
assures their exchange in the same way that money serves to pass along goods from one
to another. Mallarmé does not say here, although he suggests it elsewhere, that specu­
lation concerning this social speech could be an aspect of political economics, and
could benefit from its concepts.8 Being oriented towards esthetics, he is more con­
cerned with "essential" speech.
8
" . . . there are only two paths left open to mental research . . . esthetics and also political
economics . . . ", Mallarmé, Œuvres, (Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard), p. 399. Around the same time as
Mallarmé, F. de Saussure elaborated a science of language with concepts borrowed from political
economics: sign, value, exchange, permutation, etc. (See Cours de Linguistique Générale, part II,
Chapter 4 and passim).

86
 This "essential" aspect of speech is "literature", characterized not by ornamen­
tation, but rather by divergence: implementation of the virtual properties of language,
extension of its laws. This implies a language no longer in the service of social exchange,
but an "isolated" language attentive only to itself. Mallarmé, in seeking to characterize
it, comes to call "verse" any discourse of a reflective type: "Verse . . . brings to com­
pletion this isolation of speech"; "There is verse in language wherever there is rhythm";
"Whenever there is effort in the style, there is versification". To the journalist who
questioned him, he replied with a paradox: "To tell the truth, there is no prose:
there is the alphabet, and then there are verses; more or less compact, more or less
diffuse". This distinction does not exhaust his thought on the subject; to an audience
of Londoners, he added: "Verse is everything as soon as one writes. Style is versifi­
cation, as long as there is cadence . . ." 4 With Mallarmé and Symbolism, the "essence"
of literature became a sort of native purity, a plenary exercise in language.
Such a conception altered the realm of literature. The "Avant-dire" traces new
frontiers: it includes in "universal reporting" not only didactic discourse, "teaching",
but also the acts of "narrating" and "describing", functions traditionally attributed
to the novel, the theatre, and even certain types of poetry.
Historically, Symbolism contested the Parnasse and Naturalism, two esthetics of
representation. Concerning the Parnassians, Mallarmé said to Huret: "(They) still
treat their subjects in the style of the old philosophers and the old declaimers . . . They
seize the whole thing and show it: in so doing they lack mystery". He reproached Zola
as follows: "In making as little use of literary elements as possible, what he produced
was not so much real literature as evocative art; he used words, that is true, but that
is all . . ." "Literature", adds Mallarmé, "has something more intellectual than that".
Mallarmé conceded that the principle of "evocative" art, "presenting objects
directly", might produce masterpieces.5 He professed "a great admiration" for Zola.
But he felt that exhibiting things "as wares", and "showcasing banality", was "estheti-
cally wrong", "an undertaking which does not count, literarily". Against the back­
ground of such practices, the new attention given to the substance of words and to
their rhythmic organization had the effect of a tidal wave: "Music, its time come, has
swept away all that". 6
The esthetic principle which Mallarmé considered erroneous and rejected was none
other than mimesis. By the end of the nineteenth century, literature was about to
renounce its secular duty of reproducing reality, of creating reality's double, whether
"exact" or idealized, whether classical "imitation", romantic naturel, "realism",
"Naturalism", or even "evocative witchraft".
To be more precise, mimesis, in its various forms, designates a relationship be­
tween writing (literary) and the truth of the world; it is the idea of a reproduction of
reality and meaning. Only today, in the light of Surrealism, Nouveau Roman and
modern poetry are we able to discover among the later articles of Mallarmé, in his
penultimate poems, in the Coup de dés, a negation of that principle which has informed
4
5
"Avant-dire"; in
answer to Huret; La Musique et les Lettres.
6
Crise de vers, op.
cit., p. 365.
Le Mystère dans les Lettres, op. cit., p. 384.

87
all of western literature since antiquity, and the idea t h a t meaning does not exist
outside the words which express it.
Through their definition of the symbol, authors like Wyzewa, Ghil, Morice, and
Vanor presupposed that, behind appearances, things had hidden meanings; they
believed t h a t poetry was a path to mystery. The art of "suggestion" aims t o go beyond
language. Symbolism did not, therefore, preclude the idea of a self-contained truth,
independent of the words which expressed it; it simply placed this t r u t h in t h e domain
of the absolute, out of reach; it aspired to a representation of the absolute, of the in­
effable. In so doing, however, Symbolism was doomed to failure; it remained thought
in terms of representation. I t was the ultimate avatar of mimesis.
Mallarmé, on the other hand, as an atheistic thinker, rigorously rejected the idea
of a transcendent truth. He believed t h a t the Logos originates in language, t h a t litera­
ture is an act which gives meaning to experience: ". . . this insane game of writing is
to arrogate, b y virtue of a doubt, . . . some duty to recreate all'' ". . . Everything in
the world exists to lead to a book". "Literature exists, if you will, alone, t o the ex­
clusion of all else'? The function of literature, he felt, is to show language producing
meaning and establishing truths: poetic writing represents no more t h a n its own
functioning and operations.
This crisis of mimesis illustrates, in an exemplary manner, the phenomenon of
ideological "deconstruction". The importance given to the substance and form of the
verbal signifier — to the "music" of the words — reversed a traditional hierarchy;
it upset the balance, within the work, between content and expression. Simultaneously,
new values — labor, premeditation — were incorporated into the esthetic, they affected
literature. The writer, no longer worried about communicating, wrote for his peers,
or for himself. The work no longer delivered a "message"; instead, its message became
intransitive. Clarity and transparency were no longer valued; meaning, and t h e litera­
ture of representation, came to an end. A new practice became imperative: autotelic
writing, which produced polysemic text whose only meaning lay in the change of
meaning.
THE POWERS OF SPEECH

A literary esthetic cannot avoid exploring the nature and powers of speech. The
Symbolists, unavoidably trapped in the ideology of their time, recycled certain theses
belonging to the traditional metaphysics of language and to grammatical history.
Nevertheless, under this cover, they inaugurated a brand new speculation on the
relationship between symbol and linguibtic sign. Only now does the importance of their
speculation emerge — in light of concepts which were originated b y Saussure, and
exploited by J . Lacan and CI. Lévi-Strauss, in order to interpret sets of cultural sym­
bols and the workings of the unconscious.
The idea t h a t a relationship exists between significations and elementary sounds
is a constant of the philosophy of language. Something of the being of t h e world is

7
Lecture on Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, op. cit., p. 481; Le Livre, instrument spirituel, op. cit.,
p. 378; La Musique et les Lettres, op. cit., p. 646.

88
thought to exist in the being of words; this is an ontology. Ghil discovers herein evi­
dence of "verbal instrumentation". An obscure passage of En Méthode à l'Œuvre begins:
" I n the sixteenth century we find the following notations . ..." (here follows a series
of equivalences between sounds and meanings) 8 it is an unequivocal allusion to works
of the etymologists. H e later refers to Socrates and Lucretius, and speaks of a "natural
dependency" between words and ideas; this is the argument of the Cratylus, a work
which was translated a n d commented upon during the nineteenth century with a
notorious lack of critical distance. In this "Dialogue", Socrates, against the Sophist
Hermogenes, develops t h e idea that, for language to lead to a knowledge of beings,
names must be paintings of objects and letters must be imitative: "If it is true
t h a t the name must resemble the thing, then a natural resemblance to things must
belong to the elementary sounds which make up primitive names." 9 Socrates plays
the part of a delirious etymologist; but the irony of the wily dialectician, in his replies,
went unnoticed — the work has always been taken seriously, most notably by the Stoics.
The theses of the Cratylus were "Christianized" by the grammarians of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance; they survived during the Classical Period and, in the eighteenth
century experienced a rebirth among the theosophists and illuminists. We find elements
of them in Swedenborg, Court de Gebelin, Saint-Martin, Fabre d'Olivet, Œgger . . .;
and the influence of these authors, on the Romantics and Symbolists, is well known. 1 0
Etymology, the study of ê'rvfiov, the essentials of language, claimed to identify
the "virtues" of letters, syllables and words. I t defined syntax — "word building" —
as a group of affinities and repulsions among lexical elements, an "agreement and
mutual communion" of their "properties". This exegetic procedure endowed language
with a cosmic rather t h a n social makeup, rendering it a thing among things, in a bond
of correspondance and influence with other categories of reality.
Seeking the " v i r t u e s " of letters and syllables, and the affinities among words,
is precisely what occupied Ghil and, before him, the Mallarmé of the "Mots anglais".
"Etymology", however, encounters one difficulty: languages are many, whereas
the world is one. Babelism contradicts the very idea of the ervfiov of language. Unless,
that is, one makes t h e claim t h a t languages are imperfect, and t h a t the philosopher's
duty is to recover the original language in all its purity. We know t h a t this question
played an important p a r t in reflections on language in the eighteenth century, when
the idea of historical evolution was foremost in the minds of philosophers: the degra­
dation of language was ascribed to historical evolution or to divine will; it was thought

8
En Méthode à l'Œuvre. (Paris, Messein, 1904), p. 52.
9
10
Plato, Le Cratyle. (Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard), T. I., p . 680.
E. Swedenborg, Glavis hieroglyphica arcanorum naturaliurn et spiritualium per viam represen-
tationum et correspondantiarum, (Londini, Hindmarsh, 1784); Œgger, Dictionnaire de la langue de la
nature, 1832 (direct disciple of Swedenborg); Cl. de Saint-Martin, Des Erreurs et de la Vérité ou les
Hommes rappelés au principe universel de la Science par un Ph . •. . inc . . . , (Edimbourg (Lyon),
1775); Court de Gebelin, Le Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, consideré dans
l'histoire naturelle de la parole ou Origine du langage et de l'écriture, (Paris, 1775); Bonald, Recherches
philosophiques, (1818); A. Fabre d'Olivet, "Dissertation introductive sur l'origine de la parole",
in La Langue hébraïque restituee, (Paris, Barrois, Eberhart and l'Auteur, 1815). — Cf. L. Cellier,
Fabre d'Olivet, contribution à l'étude des aspects religieux du Romantisme (Paris, Nizet, 1953).

89
to result from either a divine punishment or mankind's straying away from primitive
virtues. 11
An interesting and significant aspect of ideological continuity is that comparative
grammar claimed, in the nineteenth century, to parenthesize any and all metaphysics
of language, and adopted the same pessimistic attitude toward history as had certain
philosophers of the previous century; it spoke of "the decline of languages" which it
envisioned as a geographical erosion. During the prehistoric period, it was said, language
was an end; thought tried to represent itself within it; men shaped it as they would
a work of art. Then, during the historical period, they viewed language as nothing
more than a means of communication; usage became usure; divested of their most
delicate nuances, languages eroded. Phonetic and morphological transformations
were explained by the laws of profit and least effort (two economic laws). Rediscovery
was sought, no longer of some divine original order, but of humanity's historical
memory. Indo-European was seen as a somewhat mythical language, belonging to the
"Aryan" populations whose purity and virtues were praised in the Revue Wagnérienne;
there was even thought of reviving it. This dream of a lost linguistic paradise persisted
until the Saussurian revolution; and, even into the twentieth century, linguists have
had to combat it.12
The Symbolists were in no way unaware of these developments. Ghil, an impulsive
and self-styled savant, accepted them as self-evident truths. "Verbal instrumentation",
he asserted, lays claim to the "reintegration" of language's phonetic value; through
words which have "regained their total and original meaning", he felt we would reach
a "restored" music-language: "We find it unnecessary to insist on the emotional origin
of the articulated sound". (Again, this is a thesis of eighteenth century natural philos­
ophy.) He expressly quotes from Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues; he refers
to the "poems of India . . . source of all Feeling", in which he claims to discover "in
a superior art of secret and intense beauties . . . the correspondence of sounds and
ideas". (Certain comparativists thought Sanskrit the language closest to the original
ideal.)13
Mallarmé is more critical. His reflections are personal, but, having decided, in
1870, to write a doctoral thesis on language, he acquired a linguistic "library". Lefebure
complimented him on his "intellectual renewal": "You have done well to choose lin­
guistics which is the science of the future .. . " u While he never wrote the thesis, Mallarmé
continued to meditate on the subject of writing, both as a linguist and a poet: "Lan-
guag s [are] imperfect in that, because there are several, the supreme one is lacking";
"The diversity of idioms on this earth prevents anyone from proffering words which,
otherwise, would reveal, in a single stroke, material truth itself". As a linguist, Mallarmé
11
G. Vico, La Scienza nuova, Michelet's translation, (Renouard, 1827); Warburton, Essai sur
les Hiéroglyphes des Egyptiens, trans, by des Malpernes (Guerin, 1744); Condillac, Essai sur l'origine
des langues (circa 1753); De Brosses, Traité de la formation mécanique des langues et principes physi-
ques de l'etymologie (Paris, Saillant, 1765); Herder, Essai sur l'origine du langage (Berlin, 1771).
12
Bopp, in Vocalismus (1832) compares himself to an archeologist among ruins; Humbolt is
just about the only one to challenge the decline of languages.—Also, see J. Vendryes, Le Langage,
introduction linguistique à l'histoire, A. Michel.
13
R. Ghil, op. cit., p. 53.
14
Mallarmé, Correspondance, (Gallimard, op. cit., T. I.), pp. 318-320.

90
deplores the degradation of languages: ". . . My sense regrets that discourse fails to
express objects by strokes of corresponding hue or aspect. . . Next to shadow (ombre),
opaque, darkness (ténèbres) darkens little; how disappointing is that perversity which
confers upon day (jour) as upon night (nuit), contradictorily, dark timbres here, light
ones there". As a poet, however, he rejoices in these "imperfections" because he finds
in them a justification for his "effort in style", a measure of legitimacy for the writer:
"Only, let us realize verse would not exist: verse, philosophically paying off the deficit
of languages, [is] the superior complement".15 To overcome "chance", "word by word",
"abolish" it, to deny it "in one sovereign stroke", such is the function of the poet,
guided in his theory and his practice by the hypotheses of linguistics.
Between linguist and poet, however, there exists an irreconcilable difference:
the one analyzes an abstract system, while the other is preoccupied with creating a
discourse. The one defines a global structure and reconstructs a history; the other
addresses a specific work and a single "state" of the language of his time. The one
discovers general functional laws; the other founds a practice. In Saussurian terms, it
is these differences which constitute the entire distance separating the two fundamental
aspects of language: language (langue) and speech (parole).
The poet dreams of reconquering "lost powers", he speaks of the "randomness"
of usage. The linguist speaks of its "arbitrariness". And the two terms are not synony­
mous. "Arbitrariness" proceeds from a social pact; an implicit convention binds words
to their meanings; one could call it "Hermogenism" as opposed to "Cratylism". "Ran­
domness" consists in the absence of causal relationships; but it implies, here, the loss
of ancient laws which need to be reinstated. Herein lies the concept of that "dual
condition of speech": daily speech is random; the poetic utterance rediscovers the
natural link, between sounds and sonorities; it thereby attains a "purer meaning",
a more essential truth, a more authentic expression of experience.
The desire to "pay off the deficit of languages" generated the debate on the sym­
bol. Very quickly the term acquired a polemical and magical value; it was used without
being defined, or given contradictory definitions; it became impossible to understand
just what the term meant: "I must say that I do not yet quite understand what a
symbol is; or rather, confronted with the multiplicity of meanings pinned on this
word, I have ceased to understand it". "Who has ever successfully defined Symbolism ?"
"The term symbol has been so abused of late; the least schoolboy, if he is not a Deca­
dent, fancies himself a Symbolist; everywhere there are discussions pertaining to the
origins of the word, its value and especially its discovery[. . . ] " "There are as many
Symbolists as there are different symbols".16 One is tempted to venture no further
than this state of general uncertainty.
It is interesting, however, and worthwhile, to recapitulate the actual definitions of
symbol. According to Moréas, in his reply to Bourde in XIXe Siècle of August 11, 1885,
and in his "Manifesto" in Le Figaro of September 18, 1886, the symbol had become

15
Crise de vers, op. cit., pp. 363 and 364.
16
Wyzewa in La Revue indépendante, February 1887; Verhaeren, 1887, reprinted in Impressions
III (Mercure de France), p . 113$ Kahn in La Revue Indépendante, June 1888, p. 155; Verlaine in Le
Figaro, 1891.

91
the mark of young poetry: "These so-called Decadents seek above all in their art the
pure Concept and the eternal Symbol. . . ." "We have already proposed the term
Symbolism as the only one reasonably able to designate the contemporary tendency of
the creative spirit in a r t . . . ,"17
By 1884, however, Barres had insisted on the inspirational role of Baudelaire's
Correspondances and Rimbaud's Voyelles; the intuition of correspondences, writes
Barrès, "furnishes surprising comparisons which truly reveal the inexplicable". Mallar­
mé, he adds, takes it one step further and "abolishes . . . the very expression of the
comparison which, henceforth, exists solely in the mind of the reader as soons as he
has penetrated the symbol".18 From the etymological meaning of the term — a "split
object" whose two parts correspond — Barrès implicitly deduced that the symbol
could be analyzed on two levels of comprehension: rhetorical and philosophical.
In effect, one can then define the symbol by simply referring to a treatise on
rhetoric or to an ancient ars poetica. Here, the symbol is a trope of the most classical
type, related to the allegory; one can then infer that the symbol has always existed
and that the Symbolists have invented nothing. Lemaitre explains, with satisfaction:
"A SYMBOL is simply a prolonged comparison of which only the second part is reveal­
ed; it is a system of drawn-out metaphors. In short, the symbol is none other than
old allegory used by our ancestors", Saint-Antoine cites his sources, Littré and Mar-
montel: "The symbol . . . is the figure or image used as a sign of a thing . . . More
specifically, in literature, the symbol is a trope akin to the metonymy. . . .".19 This
rhetorical approach is formal and reductive; it considers the symbol a play on words
and an ornament of discourse.
Philosophical definitions, on the other hand, claim to perceive the function of the
symbol. But they are often confused; the problem is that they imply, without always
stating it, a psychology and a metaphysics. Certain authors simply declare that the
symbol is the essence of poetry; and this is a tautology. " I allow [Symbolism] in
poetry, but nowhere else. Poetry, in fact, should never have been anything else; the
symbol is its definitive, and practically primordial, form" . . . "I am a Symbolist. . .
because I put some symbol into my verse . . . I take it as an indisputable fact that
there is a great rush of artistic minds toward a purely symbolist a r t . . . ." 20
The symbol is sometimes viewed as a technique of "suggestion", a way of represent­
ing emotions evoked by things, an art of approximation and dream: "To symbolize
is to evoke, not to say or narrate or p a i n t . . . . [It is] to make the dream predominate
through the Symbol". "The Symbol . . . is a sublimate of perceptions and sensations;
it is suggestive rather than demonstrative". ". . . Suggest [a thing], and you have a
dream. Such is the perfect use of that mystery we call the symbol . . . ."21
"There is no confusion", Verhaeren states, "between Symbolism and allegory,
even less between Symbolism and Synthesis". But the assimilation is made by several
17
18
Reprinted in Les Premières Armes du Symbolisme, pp. 27 -and 33.
Tâches d'Encre, No. 1., November 5, 1884.
19
20
Revue Bleue, January 7, 1888, "Qu'est-ce que le Symbolisme" ?, in VErmitage of June 1894.
A. Baju in Le Décadent, 1886; H. de Régnier to J. Huret, 1891.
21
R. Ghil, "Notre Ecole", in La Décadence . . . , October 1, 1886; Verhaeren, Impressions III
op. cit., p. 115; Mallarmé to J. Huret, op. cit., p. 869.

92
authors: 'The symbol", says Vielé-Griffin, "which can only exist in correlation to the
symbolized object, is the synthesis of a series which hypothetically precedes that
object . . ." According to Kahn, this interpretation of the term can be attributed to
Mallarmé: "It was Mallarmé, in particular, who spoke of the symbol, seeing it as equiv-
alent to the term 'synthesis', . . . as an ornate and living synthesis unburdened by
critical commentary". The term synthesis was fashionable; the first serious transla-
tions of Hegel had revealed dialectical idealism to the French. For the Symbolists,
however, synthesis had no relation to the third phase of a dialectic; it was simply the
admixture and fusion of composite elements: "As for the symbol, it is a mélange,
within a fiction, of objects which have awakened our feelings and our soul", 22
Most authors, however, view the symbol in terms of analogical thought. They
regard it as a means of correspondence between sensory and spiritual worlds, between
man (the microcosm) and the macrocosm, between the Creation and God. The symbol is
seen as a passage, an invitation, an access to an always more essential truth.
In 1887, Wyzewa confined the correspondence to a synthetic relationship: ". . . for
these poets, symbolism is the simple substitution of one idea for another. Thus, if I
wish to express the fragrance of a flower . . . I refer to it, symbolically, as pearl grey".
During this period, Symbolism stood for a literature rather than a world view; Wyzewa
could still believe that, "[the Symbolist School] neglects philosophical subjects and
abstract doctrines". And Raynaud, in 1888, defined the symbol as "a figure, an image
which expresses a purely moral thing". 23
On the other hand, beginning in 1889, and probably starting with Vanor, the idea
of the spirituality of the symbol was developed: "The task of the Symbolist poet seems
to be to discover the idea through its representation; to grasp the connections between
the visible, tangible things of this world and the intelligible essence of which they
partake". 24 Vanor retraces "the history of the symbol through the ages"; he situates
i t s "origins" in "the speculations of Zoroastrian priests". The very choice of a dia-
chronic perspective allows him, without questioning the legitimacy of his procedure, to
assimilate the poetic symbol to the mystical symbol. Morice says that "suggestion",
by means of symbols, expresses "the hidden, the unexplained and the inexpressible
aspects of things". Thorel subordinates the use of the symbol in art to the idea that
"all the phenomena of psychical and spiritual life are but different manifestations
of a single principle, [and that] each of these phenomena could be invoked to suggest
this superior state of existence". For Mockel, "the symbol presupposes the INTUITIVE
SEARCH for the diverse ideal elements scattered among Forms". 25
The direct corollary of this theory of the symbol is that poetry is a form of knowl-
edge; through specific processes — those of intuition, comparable to, but distinct from,
those of reason or faith — it equals science and religion. Authors like Morice, Vanor f

22
Vielé-Griffin, "Qu'est-ce que c'est?", in Entretiens politiques et littéraires, 1891; Ù. Kahn,
Symbolistes
23
et Décadents, (Messein, 1902), p . 51; Morice to Huret in Enquête, op. cit., p. 85.
La Révue Indépendante, February 1887; Le Décadent, March 1, 1888.
24
25
G. Vanor, L'Art symboliste, (Vanier, 1889), p . 38.
Morice, La Littérature de tout à l'heure, (Perrin, 1889), p . 378; Thorel, "Les Romantiques
allemands et les Symbolistes Français", in Entretiens politiques et littéraires, 1891 ; Mockel, Propos de
littérature (Librairie de l'Art indépendant, 1894), p . 25.

93
Schuré and Aurier clearly agree: "We seek Truth in the harmonious laws of Beauty,
deducing any metaphysic from them . . . . " ; " . . . one day [the Poet] will tell men the
word of God and the secret of life". " We intuit that Art, by definition, is no less than the
representative materialization of all that is greatest and truly divine in the world . . ."26
Thus we arrive at a philosophical paradox: the definition of the symbol postu­
lates a spiritualism — and this was far from a unanimous conviction among the Sym­
bolists. It prompted this brutal but justified remark of Péladan to Huret: " I do not
understand the use of this term [Symbolist] which would have us designate as poet
someone who possesses neither belief nor metaphysic !"27
Definitions of the symbol, after this preliminary inventory, are disappointing:
". . . This poor word Symbol", states Valéry ironically, "only contains that which one
wishes it to contain; if one is going to attribute his own hopes to the Symbol, he is
bound to rediscover them there". "The very term Symbolism is already an enigma to
many people. It seems to have been created in order to torment human minds . . . ," 28
The situation is different, however, if, instead of revolving around the term "sym­
bol", and retracing the history of its diverse applications, we locate the term in a
system, and situate it within the parameters of a well-defined praxis: poetic com­
position (écriture poétique). A concept has no meaning in and of itself; it is only "under­
stood" in its relation—whether of exclusion or combination—to other concepts. And
the poetic symbol appears most precisely as the ultimate phase of a process: symboliza-
tion, or the function of a mind which creates symbols.
In order to comprehend and interpret the experience which led the poets of
1885-90 to speak of the "symbol", we must separate linguistics from poetics, sign from
symbol, the process of signification from the function of symbolization.
To reiterate: the object of linguistics is language; that of poetics is a concrete
utterance. Language is an institution, a formal system which constitutes, for the hypo­
thetical speaker, a "competence"; it is a virtual object.29 Speech (the poetic utterance,
for our purposes) is an individual act which formulates a concrete discourse; it is a
"performance".
When Saussure elaborated the concepts of structural linguistics, his reflections
were based on the notion of "sign". He defined the "signifier" and the "signified",
described "articulation" and the "linear" concatenation of signs, studied the relation
of signifier to signified ("signification"), and the relationships between signs ("value").
He stressed the "arbitrary" nature of signs and, in doing so, excluded the "symbol"
from that category: "It is inconvenient to include i t . . . . A characteristic of the symbol
is that it is never completely arbitrary; it is not empty; it possesses the rudiment of
a natural link between signifier and signified . . . ." 30

26
Morice, La Littérature de tout à l'heure, op. cit., p. 65; Vanor, L'Art symboliste, op. cit., p. 42;
Schuré, Preface of Grands Initiés (Perrin, 1889); Aurier, "Le Symbolisme en peinture", in Le
Mercure de France, March, 1891.
27
28
Huret, Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire, op. cit., p. 37.
"Avant-Propos" to La Connaissance de la déesse and "L'Existence du Symbolisme", in
Œuvres, (Pléiade, Gallimard, T. 1), pp. 1272 and 686.
29
F. de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique générale, (Payot), pp. 23-27.
30
F. de Saussure, op. cit., p. 101.

94
 Saussure dealt with language and its signs; the Symbolists, who were interested
in a concrete utterance, coined the symbol. As for the passage quoted above, it suggests
an illusory symmetry between sign and symbol; in fact, the symbol is not the object
of Saussure's study.
In the sign, an "unmotivated" link ties a signifier to a signified. The "acoustic
image" possesses none of the attributes of the "concept": the word "dog" does not
bite; the word "fire" does not burn (onomatopoeia and exclamations do not alter this
general rule). Also, the relation of signifier to signified —- signification — is fixed; it
does not depend on the speaker's choice: "The individual does not have the power to
change any aspect of the sign once it becomes established in a linguistic group." 31
The symbol, on the other hand, (to retain Saussurian terminology), unites a sig-
nifier to several signifieds. In the symbolism of fire, for example, the ideas of "youthful
ardor", of "the fires of love", of "destructive", "purifying" and "sacrificial" fires, etc.,
are associated with a representation of flames. The symbol does not have a dual struc-
ture (one signifier-one signified); its structure is multiple (one signifier-several signifi-
eds).
At this point, two remarks are warranted: the "motivated" relationship in the
verbal symbol, the "natural link", does not tie (as Saussure claims) the signifier to
the signifieds; it ties signifieds to each other, each of which functions on a different
level of meaning: material, moral, spiritual. These levels of meaning structure
experience, render it intelligible; their correspondence is subordinated to the analogical
perception of reality. The simple "signifier-signified" relationship is thus enriched with
harmonic resonances. Whereas the sign is univocal, the symbol is polysemic. The mind
simultaneously perceives several processes of signification — from the signifier to
each signified —- and, at the same time, correspondences among signifieds: relation-
ships which are "motivated" to the extent that each signified seems to contain attri-
butes found in the others. These correspondences are not fixed; at least they do not
possess the rigor of the lexical "signifier-signified" relationship that is found in the
sign. Without actually resulting from a concerted choice on the part of the subject,
they do depend on his sensitivity, his personality structure and the world view he
shares with a cultural group not necessarily belonging to his own linguistic community.
The mind is relatively free to accept or reject these correspondences.
In addition, a symbol is an "utterance" (une parole). The polysemy of imagery
does not manifest itself in the isolated word; it unfolds in the discursive chain. Unlike
the sign, which is a discrete unit of language, the symbol expresses, through an inter-
play of differences and oppositions, continuity and unity. Symbolization functions only
within the complex structure of syntagmatic relations. And the symbol is an "open"
utterance, always capable of other meanings, signifying beyond what is conventionally
said and represented.
Isolated images are therefore not, in essence, symbols. While some representations,
more than others, are charged with symbolic potential (fire, water and earth; light arai
darkness, etc.), and while individual and collective affectivity is easily invested in

31
Ibid.

95
these representations, a means of effecting this investment must still exist. What is
essential is the process, whether concerted or not, the process of which the symbol is
the means and the end; the symbol, formulated as such, reflects a thought process.
From this perspective — at once dynamic and functional — one can compare the results
of logical or mathematical operations, with those of "ana-logical" thought, and legiti-
mately term them "symbols". "The symbolic function is formally one", observes
Ortigues. "Symbols, whether methodological or traditional, mathematical or un-
conscious, all obey the same general signifying conditions, which are laws of permu-
tation and structure. Symbols differ from "words" in that, as far as their value is con-
cerned, their form cannot be separated from their meaning. The mathematical symbol
has no other meaning than to obey a certain syntactic form; the traditional symbol, on
the other hand, is also defined by its structural efficiency." 32 Whether affectivity or
intellectuality is involved, a symbol is an agent of structure.
Sr
Henceforth, the Saussurian sigla — - , applied to the symbol, requires interpreta-
Sd
tion. "Sr" no longer represents an acoustic image but the signifying chain itself; "Sd"
represents the plurality of superimposed and analogically related signifieds. The sigla
Sr
——, as a representation of the sign, designates a discrete unit whose elements are joined
Sd
in a fixed relation. As a representation of the symbol, however, it expresses an inter-
play and shifting of signifieds beneath the continuous signifying chain. Today, anthro-
pology is the discipline best equipped to interpret the laws of these displacements
(condensation, substitution, transfer; metaphorical and metonymicai relations). Thus,
the Saussurian sigla can now be understood as a logarithm of which "Sr" is the self-
contained discourse, and "Sd" the totality of experience, the global sense of reality
or truth.
To describe the symbol using concepts designed to characterize the linguistic
sign is not a gratuitous game. Apart from the communicative function of language,
"the facile and representative nummary function", the above-mentioned transposition
allows us to account for that other function of language, which Mallarmé termed
"essential": the function of symbolization. We are unable, here, to expound J. Lacan's
and CI. Lévi-Strauss' theories of individual and cultural symbolic systems; let us
simply recall those of their propositions which reveal the import of the Symbolist's
speculations.
In "L'Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient", 33 J. Lacan uses the Saussurian
o
sigla which he writes — . He interprets it, implicitly, as a formula for the symbol and as
s
a metaphor of the functioning of the unconscious, rather than as a limited represen-
tation of the sign: " . . . the logarithm —, if we were to retain only the notion of the
parallelism of its terms . . . would yet remain the enigmatic sign of a total mystery"
32
E. Ortigues, Le Discours et le Symbole (Paris, Montaigne, 1962), p. 67.
33
J. Lacan, Ecrits (Seuil), "Points", T. 1, pp. 249-289.

96
 He stresses the ''incessant shifting of the signified beneath the signifier", and rejects
the idea of a fixed univocal relationship between the "segments" of the signified and
those of the signifier: "One can say t h a t it is within the chain of the signifier t h a t the
meaning insists, b u t t h a t none of the elements of this chain consists in the signification
of which they are capable at that moment". H e uses the concept of "linearity", b u t
modifies it, transforming the individual utterance into a chora: ". . . T h e linearity
which F . de Saussure holds to be a constituent of the discursive chain, b y virtue of
its emission by a single voice, and the horizontality it achieves in our writing is, while
necessary, not sufficient . . .; one need only listen to poetry, as F . de Saussure certainly
did, in order to detect a polyphony, and to notice t h a t any such discourse aligns itself
with the several scales of a variation". Note here, the explicit reference to poetry.
This diagram enables Lacan to interpret concrete utterances (performances). B u t
his analysis is not pertinent to all utterances; it only attains its full meaning where
discourses comparable to the poetic utterance are concerned: the oneiric story, day­
dreams, and the discourse of the analyzed. J . Lacan reinterprets the notion of "articu­
lation" and enriches its meaning: ". . . T h e structure of the signifier stems, as with
language, from the fact t h a t it is articulated. This means that, whatever starting point
we choose in tracing their reciprocal encroachments and growing éncompassments, its
units submit to the dual condition of reduction to terminal differential units, and com­
position according to the laws of a closed system". Lacan perceives, in the "links of t h e
signifier", (that is to say in its syntactical and rhetorical elements), the key to " t h e
genesis of the signified".
I n other words (having superimposed two conceptual grids, linguistics and psycho­
analysis) the utterance is a "symptom"., a "substitute", the metaphor for something
seeking expression in vain. The signified is the abyss, the unconscious, which con­
stitutes the t r u t h of the utterance. The discourse does not reveal the unconscious, which
q
by its very nature cannot become manifest, b u t it signifies it. I n the sigla —, J . Lacan
s
endows the line with the value of a barrier; it stands for the repressed. The links be­
tween the signifier and the repressed are of a verbal nature. They pass through " t h e
work of the signifier"; a signifier replaces another forbidden signifier: "The symptom
is a return of Truth. I t can only be interpreted in terms of the signifier, and only has
meaning through its relation to another signifier". 34 Thus t h e laws which structure
the signifying chain are homologous to the laws of the functioning of the unconscious:
'The unconscious is structured like a language".
For J . Lacan, "the Symbolic" designates the function which gives meaning t o
existence, as well as the setting for this operation: Language. I t is a mediating function
which invests meaning with feeling and, at the same time, faced with the raw material
of affectivity, triggers a deflection; it is the passage from a stage of speculation to a
stage of individual consciousness. 35 In the condensations, substitutions and transfers
of the signifier, in the interplay of metaphor, metonymy and ellipsis, sense is informed

34
Lacan, Ecrits, "Du Sujet enfin en question".
85
See Ecrits, "Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je".

7 Balakian 97
by nonsense. A gap is created between an " I " of enunciation and an "ego" which
clings to immediate experience: the "re-splitting" of the subject. Mediation, distanc­
ing, cutting: these operations take stock of experience in order to deny it without
abolishing it; they create a gap, an emptiness.
Death inhabits the underside of words. The symbolic function is a power of negativ­
ity; in the interplay of presence and absence, the impossibility of reaching Reality
is tested and manifested. A symbol is the structure of a deficiency, and of a desire in
which the subject attains realization. The frame of reference of this deficiency can
vary; it is the Primal drive and the Forbidden, or God and the Beyond, or Death.
This frame of reference implies a philosophy. But the symbol always signals and Ab­
sence in the discourse, and, conversely, a representation of the absolute other.
In. the exercise of the symbolic function, psychoanalysis addresses itself to the
formulation of the subject, the passage from the individual to the person, the first
person singular. Ethnology and sociology address the constitution of a collective
identity — the first person plural.
"The social aspect, as such, is always symbolic."36 This proposition generalizes an
affirmation which the first sociologists had limited to "primitive" societies. Structural
sociology refuses to contrast a symbolist, or "primitive" mentality with an evolved,
rationalist mentality.37 This avoids, in explaining events, the affective categories
defined by Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl and Jung: the supernatural, the participation
which might tie the collective unconscious directly to objects (emblems, totems).
These objects are promoted to the rank of "archetypal" images — acting without the
mediation of discourse, blocking rational thought, mixing sign and overturning hier­
archies. This mode of interpretation, observes CI. Lévi-Strauss, only aggravates the
obscurity of phenomena; "Since affectivity is the darkest side of man", he writes,
"there has been a constant tendency to resort to it, forgetting that what has defied
explanation is not fit to serve as an explanation". 38
Structural sociology, inspired by linguistics, interprets social practices as efforts
of the same function which underlies language. The various symbolic systems of a
society are not only comparable to each other; they are homologous to the language
they share. More specifically, language determines the elaboration of the other sys­
tems. Objects have no inherent meaning. They exist; they have uses; but they only
signify through the utterance which institutes the social compact, with its prescrip­
tions and proscriptions. "Symbolic function is inseparable from discourse in that it
always implies imperatives, social rules, prohibitions, promises, beliefs or loyalties."39
Certain practices and images favor cathexes; symbolic function is intensified and
exacerbated in proximity to basic social situations: family, paternity and parent­
hood, birth and death, heroism and guilt, exchanges and debts. But language
always mediates relationships in the collectivity. Far from being an institution among

36
37
E. Ortigues, op. cit., p. 190.
Concerning this debate, see Cl. Lévi-Strauss, Le Totémisme aujourd'hui (P.U.F., 1962),
especially
38
page 99.
39
Cl. Lévi-Strauss, op. cit., p. 106.
E. Ortigues, op. cit., p. 196.

98
others, it is a structural model and the form of forms. Thus psychoanalysis and sociol­
ogy agree t h a t individual and collective life find meaning through the symbolizing
function of language, which asserts itself in any enterprise through which humanity
develops its possibilities.
With the benefit of historic hindsight, it appears t h a t psychoanalysis and sociol­
ogy, thanks to analytical concepts borrowed from linguistics, are now developing, in
all their consequences, ideas which the Symbolists first intuited as they questioned
poetic writing.
We should cease to exhume as a reproach, or to defend at all price, collections of
poetry, narrations and t h e theatre of the l'Symbolist school" strido sensu, dated works
which are best forgotten. We should understand the sarcasm and the ironic com­
mentaries of critics, as the reaction of a circumscribed social group — the "intellec­
t u a l s " — whose tastes and mental habits were offended: Lemaitre, France, Sarcey.
We should overlook irritating tics in the writing. I n the history of ideas, Symbolism
can be viewed as the initial phase of a mutation in modern thought — t h e infancy of
the theories of language which now rule our interpretation of reality.
Symbolism heralded a new consciousness of the nature and " a t t r i b u t i o n s " of
language — t h a t of an opposition between a function of communication and a function
of symbolization. Literature then assumed a new responsibility, t h a t of exercising t h e
symbolic function and observing the production of meaning. Work on the signifier
reveals the work of the signifier. If the generation of 1885 had neither the time nor
the inclination required t o engage in a truly novel poetic practice, if it limited itself t o
a negation of mimesis, it nevertheless created the intellectual context in which Mallarmé
pursued his theories, and in which the research of Gide, Claudel and especially Valéry
was generated. I t laid t h e groundwork for the Surrealist efforts aimed a t transforming
writing.
The symbolic function of language does not, however, limit its efforts to the
esthetic domain. The symbolic utterance is an act which constitutes individual and
collective identity. I t structures the " I " of the cogito and determines t h e role of the
subject in enunciation; it mediates intersubjective relations and shapes social-institu­
tions; it furnishes thought with a degree of independence. I t seems t h a t language has
become, for contemporary anthropology, a principle of interpretation, a "philosoph­
ical topos" analogous to the notion of " h u m a n n a t u r e " during t h e classical period.
As the system of classical thought fell apart, the Symbolists enunciated the axioms
of a new episteme.

Translated from the French b y Jacques Houis

7* 99
 Louis FORESTIER

SYMBOLIST IMAGERY

An inventory of Symbolist imagery comes up against at least three difficulties. The

first consists in setting the historical limits within which any such investigation is
likely to find the broadest and most adequate range of its material. I think we
can delimit our study to the decade beginning with Paul Bourde's article on the
Decadents 1 and Jean Moréas' article on Symbolism,2 and ending with the "Naturiste"
manifesto of Saint-Georges de Bouhélier (1897) that was preceded by Verlaine's death
in 1896 and followed by that of Mallarmé in 1898. Within these limits, we would do
better to take into account, in the choice of works, influences and trends rather than
rigid dates. Thus, to examine two extreme examples, we can no more omit Paul Valéry
who was twenty in 1891 and did not publish his first volume until 1895,3 but who con­
tributed actively to several Symbolist periodicals, including La Revue Indépendante,
Chimère, La Syriax and La Wallonie, than we can exclude Rimbaud, whose Illumina­
tions, as we know, were greatly in fashion in 1886.
The second difficulty that confronts us is more serious and perhaps one which
in extreme cases cannot be solved; it definitely cannot be in certain cases.-Essentially,
it has to do with the fact that a very tenuous interval separates what is advisedly
called the Decadent Period and that which was to become Symbolism, particularly
in the first years of the decade under consideration. The one emerged from the other;
their poetic content is often the same. Two more examples will suffice: the writings of
Jules Laforgue or Charles Cros are typically transitional and justify Pierre-Olivier
Walzer's having included these two poets among the seven who fomented, according
to him, the 'poetic revolution.4 From another point of view, Guy Michaud thinks that
Maeterlinck's Serres chaudes (1889), generally considered Symbolist, are "still decadent"
poems.5 To simplify the task, we could, of course, employ François Sarcey's dis­
tinctions: "When I understand a few phrases here and there, I tell myself: this is a
Decadent poet. When I understand practically nothing, I say to myself this must
be a Symbolist" !6
It remains to determine what exactly characterizes Symbolism in an imagery that
would strike a superficial observer as traditional. First, we have to remember that
1
Le Temps, August 6, 1886.
2
Le Figaro, September 18, 1886.
3
Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (1895) (Gallimard, 1919).
4
La Révolution des sept (Neuchâtel, 1970).
5
Message poétique du symbolisme, second ed., (Nizet, 2nd éd. 1961).
6 e
Le XIX siècle, February 20, 1891.

101
writers of both prose and poetry, who considered themselves members of this move­
ment, no longer viewed the image as an explanation of the idea or as an ornament of
the phrase. They rose up against "the error of local color in history, myth shrivelled
up by pseudophilological interpretation, the idea without the perception of analogy".7
In just this way, Moréas moved from strict comparison characterized by like, same, as,
thus toward the intuitive and suggestive image.8
Symbolist imagery attempts to reveal hidden analogies and what is beyond the
real: it is, therefore, active and often inadequate since it says more — and sometimes
something entirely different — than what is expressed by the strict sense of the word.
Hence, any inventory of images must attempt to rediscover the ideology that provoked
them in the first place.
It is at this point that the third and gravest difficulty arises. A group of images
cannot (in theory) be anything but an individual representation, a constantly ques­
tioned personal connection between the creator and the universe. A specific body of
imagery tells us what unknown face the world assumes in the eyes of a given poet.
At the outside, there are as many sets of images as there are creations and it would
be a vain task to make a standard catalogue of the images for which a given group or
literary movement had a predilection. This is not a false affirmation, as studies such
as that of Charles Mauron have shown. There are archetypal structures and sociological
pressures that modify individual creations in such a way as to give them a certain
"look of the times". Adolphe Retté must have felt this when he advocated the idea of
a new poetics, generally perceiving Symbolist creations as "catacombs in which phan­
toms wander about muffled in mystery". 9 This could be as good a guide as any other
to penetrate the world of Symbolist images.
A certain number of characteristic elements: flora, colors, sounds, fauna, femininity,
the architecture of the deep and of the closed emerge, along with the two dominant
images of Symbolism, the diamond and the mirror. I propose to show, by means of
two or three examples, that these images exist only as reciprocal affinities or, if one
prefers, in networks. And lastly, these networks themselves give rise to veritable
mythical figures the meanings of which are peculiar to Symbolism.

COLORS, SOUNDS, FLORA

The Symbolist imagination was colorful. Perhaps it owed this quality to the
interest scientists and painters had been showing for some years in the perception of
colors and their reciprocal interferences. It is certain that the research of Chevreul, and
the achievements of impressionism conditioned a certain view of the world. Moréas,
perhaps mistakenly, did not hesitate to identify the Symbolist novel with the impression­
ist one, the purpose of which was "subjective deformation".10 This was the technique

7
J. Moréas, in Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire, ed. by Jules Huret (1891), p. 76.
8
Robert A. Jouanny, "Jean Moréas, écrivain français", Lettres Modernes (1969), p. 202.
9
Quoted by Michel Décaudin, La Grise des valeurs symbolistes (Toulouse, Didier-Privet, 1960),
p. 31.
10
"Le Symbolisme", in Le Figaro, September 18, 1886.

102
 used, for instance, by Huysmans to suggest the riot of color in the exhibition of Gustave
Moreau's works in 1886: "immense skies on fire; the crushed spheres of bleeding suns,
hemorrhaging stars flowing in purple cataracts on a cluster of tumbled clouds". 11 It
is a kind of tour de force to speak of colors almost without naming any.
Here are two of the most typical examples of the kind of games Symbolist vision
enjoys. Moréas tells us that a head of hair "is as blue as crows" (Les Syrtes), and Germain
Nouveau speaks of a blue shadow.12 This latter example reminds one of Cézanne; the
first, surprising in form, resulted from educated perception: black, strictly speaking,
no longer existed. Manet's young women with their opulent bluish hair had convinced
the public of this, and Baudelaire had already spoken of "blue hair" (La Chevelure.)
What the poet generally sought to do was to render the vibrating and flowing
quality of light: "It was a little valley sparking with rays".
In all the cases we have just examined, the creator remained dependent upon a
pictorial technique. Even more characteristic are the images in which color lost its
descriptive value in favor of suggestion: thus, for instance, "the purple of deep mourn­
ing" of Jules Laforgue or, even better, "the violet tone of consoling voices" Gustave
Kahn speaks of in Les Palais nomades (Intermède, TV) and the "blue like my soul"
of Rémy de Gourmont (Couleurs). The procedure is not entirely new: Baudelaire
suggested it in his article on Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser (1861): "What would
really be surprising would be if sound could not suggest color, if colors could not con­
vey the idea of melody and if sound and color were incapable of translating ideas".
But it was Symbolism's achievement to have properly systematized such possibilities
by making the image the source of a relationship that both concealed and revealed.
No one explained it better than Mallarmé in his "Lettre sur la poésie" of 1891 : "All the
mystery lies in this: to establish the secret identities by a two-to-two relationship
that gnaws at and wears out objects in the name of a central purity". The play of colors,
on the face of it a simple game, becomes, progressively, a more ambitious under­
taking in Symbolism.
Nevertheless, color also exists for its own sake and one can speculate on the
dominant shade of Symbolism. It would seem to be blue. It appears everywhere, and
not only in the most expected images, such as that of the spinning girl "slated [. . .] in
the blue of the window" (Valéry), or the "slow and blue linen" under the moon (Maeter­
linck) and, again ia the latter, "the bell of blue crystal", "the blue depths" of ancient
hours. When des Esseintes decorates his property in Fontenay-aux-Roses, he rejects
blue as his dominant color but combines it abundantly with chrome tones, with nastur­
tium red: "he had the wainscoting painted in dark indigo, (. . .) and the ceiling (. . .)
opened (...) a heavenly circle of royal blue silk". Montesquiou spoke of "enigmatic"
blue hydrangeas and of the "pale plumage" of the peacock diffusing a "blue light".
Even Paul Fort goes so far as speak of blue frogs, "a real sapphire with legs" ! We find
that the Impressionists and their precursors had the same taste, as Monet's. Water-
lilies or Gustave Moreau's Sirens show. The latter picture, by means of the depth of its

11
Certains, coll. 10/18, (1976), p. 289.
12
Ch. Cros, Œuvres complètes, (Bibl. de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1970), p . 397.

103
fantastic cliffs and clefts through which the sea can be seen helps us understand all
that this color denoted to the Symbolist imagination. "Navy blue", the sapphire
crests of the waves (. . .) melting "With tenderness", the iridescence of "caressing
water" (Marie Krysinska), all suggests the image of woman. But it is also the expression
of another form of temptation: the temptation to search for the infinite. Huysmans
does not capriciously make des Esseintes say that "the eye of him (writer or artist)
who dreams of the ideal, who demands illusions, and invents veils in sunsets, is gener­
ally caressed by blue and its dérivâtes". Blue ? a summons to the phantasmagoric, the
unreal. Color or element, it is the ironic and deep sign of aspirations and utopias in the
face of which the poet cries: "I am haunted, the blue ! the blue ! the blue !"
With this ideal place represented by blue, one can associate the search for an ideal
time, a sort of eternal instant the existence of which is revealed by certain sonorities
when they make the present moment a link in an immemorial and infinite chain. It
is "the unique hour", according to Pierre Louys, "in which the gods bestow /Upon
the bowed head and trembling shoulder,/ The pure spirit of life that flees with time".
These "vibrant dream voices" (A. Fontainas) are characterized by their fragility
and evanescence. The minor tones of Verlaine never cease scattering their last chords
throughout the whole of Symbolism. Here is the "frail and sonorous voice" (Fontainas),
the "(. . .) voice/ Sweet as regret" (Jean Lorrain), the "lazy voices" (Grégoire Le Roy).
The latter summarizes thus the collective aspiration:

A little colorless music

To render the evening eternal.

The ideal sonority toward which poets aspire is perhaps the absence of any scale,
as suggested in the absolute by Mallarmé's Saint, "Musician of Silence".
This search for eternity arouses a whole series of sensory echoes:

Her voice is the sweetness of innocent dreams,

The breath of iris, cinnamon and incense,
An intoxication of harmony and vision.
(A. Fontainas) 13

Symbolism did not disdain a certain heaviness when it came to flowers and per­
fume. André Fontainas and André Gide echoed each other. The latter deplored the
absence of "light flowers" (in'the Poésies of André Walter) and the former sings about
"the heavy flowers of the sad garden": tulips, peonies, gladioli. Perhaps we should
see in this the last heritage of the floral décor of the Second Empire. It is even more
fascinating to note that the flower is sometimes a black one, connected with the idea
of evil and death (like poppies). Thus, in the following verse of Pierre Quillard:

13
Je Jang des fleurs, (Bruxelles, 1889) trans. E. Roditi. Subsequent translations by Roditi.

104
 On the edge of what sinister lakes filled with heavy and somber water
O gloomy flowers more vast than death,
Do the silent gods of evening and the frigid gods of the north
Weave your robe of shadows ?
O black flowers . . . .

Little by little, flowers became associated with the idea of aquatic vegetation,
marshy and disquieting, as in the work of the engraver Bresdin and in certain settings
in the paintings of Gustave Moreau (in Hercule chez les filles de Thespius, for example).
This image was to bloom in the obsessive Fleur du marécage of Odilon Redon, who
coupled water flowers with the Pierrot myth we will encounter later. Pierre Louys
also willingly evoked "the greenish marsh", "the putrid pond", "the swampy iris",
"erect flowers" and "the great waterlilies" (Astarté). These varieties — lilies and iris
— are the flowers par excellence of Symbolism. They are omnipresent in the work of
painters (to name only the Fleur mystique of Moreau, and Cézanne's Vase bleu) in the
drawings, for instance, of Georges Auriol, in the engravings of Félicien Rops and pro-
fusely in the work of the writers. Towards the end of the period we are concerned with,
their stiff rigidity yields a little, anticipating the arabesques of the style nouille or Art
Nouveau; in the posters of Mucha, in Eckmann (who has a martagon lily twined around
the downstroke of the ornamental letter D in the magazine Pan) or in the poet Robert
de Souza, whose Fumerolles sings of "The scrolls of grasses on the slopes of prairies".
Symbolism satisfied its taste for the complex that goes as far as artifice not only with
the iris, but found purity and the ideal in the lily, as well as the fragility described so
beautifully by Mallarmé in Fleurs and by Maeterlinck:

Lilies always scattered

And dead with blooming.

The rose is a very significant flower in Symbolist poetry. In Litanies de la rose by

Rémy de Gourmont, it is a
Hypocritical flower.
Flower of silence.

John-Antoine Nau treated the rose in much the same manner, speaking of its
"turbid song" and "false languors".
This is not the rose of triumphant perfection that Claudel and Aragon would
later praise. It is the autumn flower (without being "more exquisite than another") or
even the winter flower so pleasing to the sick, or, last of all, it is paradoxically the
flower "of ruin". Louis Mandin summarized the general image when he spoke of "roses
of shadow and shadows of roses". Sickly and evanescent in G. d'Houville and Maeter-
linck, it conveyed the century's predilection for the faded — a taste which was perhaps
more Decadent than Symbolist, so that one finds it in Jean Lorrain, but also in Mallar-
mé. To it we should add all the innumerable images of the end of the day, of autumn
(considered in relation to winter and not to summer's crowned abundance that was
nevertheless celebrated by André Fontainas). Grégoire Le Roy affirms the Symbolist
credo with:

105
 I love all that comes to an end,
All that fails and falls.

BESTIARY

It would be out of the question to review here the entire Symbolist bestiary. It
would be of no special interest and, furthermore, would resemble an inventory of Noah's
Ark. Three animals are among the most characteristic — two of them real, the third
imaginary.
The swan was the bird beloved of the poets. In its favor was the fact that Baude­
laire had already celebrated it in the admirable poem everyone knows, and which
decisively oriented the meaning of the image. But, among the infinite evocations of the
Swan there are two particularly striking ones. Villiers de l'Isle—Adam, in the Tueur
de cygnes, shows us Tribulat Bonnhomet busy killing these birds under the pretext
that they sing so beautifully when they die. This suggests the idea of artistic creation
destroyed by the incomprehension of the mob. Mallarmé used the image in exactly
this way in his famous sonnet Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui. The swan, impris­
oned in water turned to ice (the image is a common one to the Symbolists), is reduced
to impotence. It is unable to sing that which has been revealed to it, nor can it
possibly escape, and whiteness becomes synonymous with sterility. This image makes
clear the situation of the creative person confronted with ordinary people and face to
face with the ineffable. Now can the key to this barely glimpsed mystery be given
and to whom ? Often the poet "alone possesses the key to this savage parade".
The peacock is, to a certain extent, the swan's counterpart. It possesses neither
the swan's purity, nor its sleekness. This highly-colored bird, the plumage of which is
frequently associated with the theme of eyes, suggests decorative effects, first of all;
its plumage plays a large part in the ornamentation Stuart Merrill imagined for a love-
nest. Peacock feathers are also in the background of Renoir's portrait of Madame
Charpentier and her Children (1878) of which Proust speaks in Le Temps retrouvé, and
Robert de Montesquiou ended the evocation of a Japanese curio with this touch:

A mere nothing would set off its other face,

A pine needle or a peacock feather.

Peacock feathers are found in the illustrations Aubrey Beardsley designed for
Oscar Wilde's Salome. In one of these, the heroine is dressed in a peacock skirt. Maeter­
linck used this bird as a symbol of indolence, and the image thus became easily associ­
ated with that of woman. Pierre Louys furnishes us with the loveliest example in his
poem entitled La Femme aux paons, in which the role traditionally attributed to the
swan in the fable of Leda is taken over by peacocks. The substitution is interesting
once we have noted the whiteness and purity suggested by the swan (even when
Gustave Moreau deals with the subject of Leda, he lends this divine mating a totally
disembodied character).14
14
See catalogues to expositions: "Centenary of Symbolism" (Paris, 1974), and "Symbolism
in Europe" (Paris, Rotterdam, Bruxelles, Baden-Baden, 1976).

106
 The Chimera is the fantastic member of the Symbolist bestiary. It is a common
image in Gustave Moreau's work; he used it in engravings (for the frontispiece of a
novel by Ernest Chesneau), as well as in watercolors and painting. Jean Lorrain (L'Om-
bre ardente) and Albert Samain (Le Chariot d'or) both evoked the fabulous animal.
Samain adds another element: the lure that had already been developed in Les Syrtes
by Moréas ("Chimaera"). The Chimera is the false imagination that fools the creative
artist. Others saw nothing disparaging in this "village idiot girl" and baptized period-
icals Chimère. At the opposite pole of the Chimera is the image of the Unicorn, one that
was less common but was nevertheless used by Rémy de Gourmont and Moreau, an
image which remains essential for the whole Symbolist period. The importance of
these animal symbols is less in the images themselves than in the play of contraries
in which they are associated: the peacock with the swan, the Chimera with the Unicorn,
like two irreconcilable of one and the same reality, perhaps representing a kind of rent
in the fabric of Symbolism, especially when they are in association with the image of
woman.

WOMAN, TEMPTATIONS AND DANGERS OF THE FLESH

The ambivalence of the image is clear. Rimbaud illustrated it in the poem Fairy,
in which various elements of the world conspire to organize themselves in honor of an
imaginary Helen as symbol of beauty. But who was this woman? Another death-
bearing Herodias, as some believe? A deadly Salome? A heroine of artifice? Or an
"anti-Herodias, bearer of life and not of death", — according to Pierre Brunei? 15 She
for whom the universe seeks and finds balance and order? The answer is never given,
yet the dramatic truth of a whole period lies in this ambivalence.
According to the oldest poetic tradition, woman is the object of mystical venera-
tion. She remains, for certain writers, the mediator between man and the ideal. She is
harmony incarnate, as suggested by the following transpositions of Charles Cros:

Je voudrais, en groupant des souvenirs divers,

Imiter le concert de vos grâces mystiques.
J'y vois par un soir d'or ou valsent les moustiques,
La libellule bleue effleurant les joncs verts;

J'y vois la brune amie à qui rêvait en vers

Celui qui fit le doux cantique des cantiques;
J'y vois ces yeux qui, dans les tableaux encaustiques,
Sont, depuis Cléopâtre, encore grands ouverts. 16

Woman is, apparently, bound to this "elsewhere" which the Symbolists foresaw
and sought: feminine figures appear in this manner in the work of Barrés, Gourmont,
Maeterlinck and Régnier.

15
Rimbaud (Paris, 1974).
16
Ch. Cros, op. cit.

107
 Of woman's appearance, Symbolism seems to be particularly involved with eyes
and hair. These are a rich source of images: lakes, seas, glaciers, mirrors. In general,
they are characterized as signs of the infinite. Rodenbach depicts them thus in Les
Vies encloses :

Les yeux des femmes sont des Mediterranéos

Faites d'azur et de l'écume des années
Où l'âme s'aventure en sa jeune saison. ( . . . )
En quel golfe atterrir au fond bleu des prunelles?
L'infini s'y recule en un roulis berceur.

Their pupils attract those who stare at them; but inversely, they are the threshold
through which the real world communicates with that of clairvoyance; Symbolism
expresses this idea by using the image of a blind person with supernatural powers,
such as Tatiana in Elémir Bourges, or the ancestor and the blind people in Maeterlinck
(L'Intruse, Les Aveugles),
Hair had long been associated with sensual responses. Baudelaire and Mallarmé
richly affirmed this tradition, but hair, be it blonde or dark, has also the power io
reflect or gleam — sun or coal, light or shadow, revelation or occultation. Mallarmé
substitutes it triumphantly for sunsets ("Victorieusement fui. . ."). For Baudelaire it
might be a "pavilion of shadows spread out".
Involuntarily or not, woman is associated with the idea of cruelty and destruction,
hence a number of very commonly used images in this period. The sphinx-woman we
find in Gustave Moreau is one of these; her claws are sunk into the breast of Oedi???
The two are involved in a struggle whose outcome remains unpredictable. The
mythological anecdote is told at the moment when the forces are in equilibrium. For
this very reason, the specific nature of the legend is transcended to give a more gener-
al truth: man in the grips of an eternal enemy. More often and more simply, woman is
identified with felines. Here are some examples taken from the Coffret de santal : the
poet Charles Cros says that woman is "soft to the touch like a panther" or that she has
the "strange suppleness/of tigresses and jaguars". Or again that her hair

en ces odeurs
Fines et chaudes qu'elle exhale
Fait rêver aux tigres rodeurs
D'une clairière tropicale.

And lastly, woman is associated with images of death. Charles Cros echoed Baudelaire
when he wrote:

La mort, l'amour, la mer,

Me noyer dans l'oubli complet.
Femme ! femme ! cercueil de chair !17

17
Ch. Cros, op. cit.

108
and Baudelaire wrote:
L'amoureux pantelant, incliné sur sa belle
A Fair d'un moribond caressant son tombeau.18

Woman mediates between man and a barely glimpsed ideal in his recourse to a lost
unity that prepares us for the myth of the androgyne; at the same time, she is an essential
obstacle to attaining it. Here we have an insurmountable and painful contradiction
expressed by the same images: hair both lulls and submerges; eyes are lakes and
bottomless pits. Are there any other paths that lead to the ideal ?

MIDDLE AGES AND OBSOLETE PROPS

The medieval atmosphere made so fashionable by Wagner and Maeterlinck is

sometimes mistaken for the essential Symbolist imagery. The scenic effects of Wagner's
tetralogy are found in Gourmont, Herold, Kahn, Lorrain, Mallarmé and Mandin. One
could go on indefinitely enumerating the castles, manors, and churches in which a
whole world of old lived:
les seigneurs blancs couchés dans leurs corsets de marbre,
( . . . ) les évêques de cire à la mitre de cuivre.

The Symbolists attempted flight into their own inner depths by their intrusion
into the Dark Ages Jean Lorrain said just this:
Comme un envoûté des gothiques magies,
En proie aux vains regrets des vaines nostalgies,
Je suis un triste et fol amant d'anciens portraits.19

Some images are marked by a particularly strong religiosity, in several poems of

the Cœur solitaire of Charles Guérin or in Verlaine's Liturgies intimes :
Le soleil lui faisant un nimbe mordoré,
Le vieux saint du village est tout transfiguré.
Ça sent bon. On dirait que des fleurs très anciennes
S'exhalent, lentes, dans le latin des antiennes.20

Added to all this was a taste for antique instruments: the mandola in Mallarmé's
case and others in the poem of André Fontainas:
Je retrouve en sa voix des inflexions molles
Ame des vieux rebecs, esprit des clavecins,
Baisers épanouis en rapides larcins,
Confidences d'amour des anciennes violes.21

18
19
Les Fleurs du Mal, "Hymne à la beauté."
20
L'Ombre, ardente (Paris, 1897).
21
Liturgies intimes (Paris, 1892).
Le Sang des fleurs (Bruxelles, 1889).

109
 We get a deep sense of this return to the past. It was as if, by bringing back to
life the whole medieval tradition, legend and popular mythology, a path were made to
the collective unconscious, to the permanent, to the universal heritage. When Louis
Mandin evokes "un vieux château des preux", he is attempting in Barrès-like terms to
rediscover another age, rich in meaning:

Il est celui que les siècles ont couronné

Et qu'on a vu toujours, depuis les Temps, sur la colline,
Il est le grand passé qui, s'enfonçant dans ses racines,
Regarde à ses pieds fuir le moderné Déraciné.

All this bric-à-brac, so different from that of the Parnassians', played a mediating
role in the movement toward idealism, as Gustave Kahn said in the Palais nomades
(Intermède. V). Dispersed images became organized, converged and took on their sym­
bolic meaning. The soul resided like a "princesse lointaine", in the depths of the forests
and castles; the swan, again a symbol of the soul, is enamoured of the ideal, while
gold, precious stones, the secret depths of the universe, all represent Ideas. This imag­
ery, which might be regarded with condescending amusement, goes to the very heart
of the Symbolist poetics.

ARCHITECTURE OF DEPTH

Medieval imagery represented a kind of search and flight that was also expressed
in other forms. A feeling of departure constantly haunted the Symbolists. Anywhere out
of the world, as both Baudelaire and Barrés said; "to fly beyond, if only to flee", Mallar­
mé wrote. Clearly, this flight had, as its aim, to attain "something else". As Jean
Lorrain puts it:
Vous quittez sans regret la terre,
Pour l'île errante du Mystère
Et le doux pays de l'espoir.

The trouble was that these departures led into nothingness, as in one of the Chan­
sons d'amant of Gustave Kahn ("Des chevaliers qui sont partis . . ."); or again ended
at the Gare Saint-Lazare, with des Esseintes waiting to go to London ! In another
instance, in André Castagnou's Shakespeare (Les Quatre saisons) the traveller took
the wrong way. All trips that are planned are then missed or diverted from their goal
— in brief, imaginary trips. Jules Laforgue exclaims, not without humor but with true
philosophic spirit:

Oh ! qu'ils sont chers les trains manqués

Où j'ai passé ma vie à faillir m'embarquer ! . . .

They were then forced to seek other escapes. Maeterlinck, in Serre chaudes, not
without reason asked the apparently unusual question: "En qui faut-il fuir aujour­
d'hui?"

110
 The departures that determined such imagery were flights into an inner world
represented architecturally: windows, towers, palaces; or else prisons and labyrinths
— the negative and evil forms of the same images.
Windows are privileged places: they delimit, reflect and offer an opening or
passage. In Valéry, we have the garden "qui se dodeline" in the opening of the window
where the maiden sits spinning, and this recess is the mysterious threshold where one
comes to drink in the blue and unwind one's dreams. In Mallarmé we often find the
image of the window welcoming the dawn after a night of work, or concealing musical
and highly-colored harmonies as in Sainte (contrary to the Sonnet en -yx where it is
"vacant to the north" as a tragic symbol of nothingness). More clearly, the poem Les
Fenêtres shows the way in which this play of the imagination develops; the dying man
in the poem:
Voit des galères d'or, belles comme des cygnes,
Sur un fleuve de pourpre et de parfums dormir
En berçant l'éclair fauve et riche de leurs lignes
Dans un grand nonchaloir chargé de souvenirs. 22

We recognize in this poem a number of images, some of which are familiar. When
we have disentangled its symbolic significance, we understand the poet's cry:

Je fuis et je m'accroche à toutes les croisées

D'où l'on tourne l'épaule à la vie.

The window, washed with "eternal dews", is that which opens upon the fecund
depths of the unreal; it is through this window that one glimpses and will capture all
that is concealed by life.
Towers (or similar places) may symbolize the descent into oneself, or possibly the
discovery of meditation. The image may undergo metamorphoses, it is always subject
to the double idea of enclosures and verticality (as opposed to windows which reveal
horizontal depth, i.e. perspective), and again we have the attic of the Poètes de sept ans
or Rimbaud's hideaway in Enfance V. We also know that the Chanson de la plus haute
tour signifies an "adieu au monde", forgetfulness, and at the same time appeals for
a "temps dont on s'éprenne".
Symbolist imagery goes even farther in building imaginary palaces and cities,
constructing fantastic architecture. Again, it was Rimbaud who set the example:
"Sur quelques points des passerelles de cuivre, des plates-formes, des escaliers qui con-
tournent les halles et les piliers, j'ai cru pouvoir juger la profondeur de la ville"* (Illu-
minations, Villes II). Here again, the image emphasizes depth and verticality like a
Piranesi drawing; concerted chaos that abolishes real distance and discovers a "new
harmony". Henri de Régnier also constructed a fantastic city filled with arborescence

21
Mallarmé, Poésies, Les Fenêtres.
* At some points along the foot-bridges of copper, where there were platforms and stairway»
climbing around the pillared halls, I thought I could ascertain the depth of the city.

111
welcoming strangers (Tel qu'en Songe, Exergue) ; this architecture is discovered at the
end of forest paths, in the midst of thick vegetation; it connects the desire for departure
with the image of the secret castle in the heart of the forest so beloved of medieval
legend and restored to honor by Wagner.
Such imagery is common among painters, especially Gustave Moreau. His tortured
architecture piled up in strange distances can be seen in the Chimères and the Triomphe
d'Alexandre-le-Grand. Moreau spoke in connection with them of "temples aux faîtes
fantastiques, (des) idoles terribles, (des) lacs sacrés, (des) souterrains pleins de mystères
et de terreurs",* and he concluded by clearly making of these places "régions inexplo-
rées du rêve et du mystère".
We find the same symbolic meaning in Jupiter et Sémélé:

Au centre d'architectures aériennes, colossales, sans bases ni faîtes, couvertes

de végétations abimées et frémissantes, flore sacrée se découpant sur les sombres
azurs des voûtes étoilées, le Dieu, tant de fois invoqué, se manifeste ( . . . ) . C'est
une montée vers le Divin.**

These palaces that enclose a part of the secret of the universe are evanescent and
mysterious as in La Princesse Maleine or in Pelléas et Mélisande. In some cases, i.e.
in the poetry of André-Ferdinand Hérold, a case in point, such palaces are associated
with the image of a deep, secret and mysterious grotto.
What is hidden in the depths of these palaces is the secret of the self, the depths of
the subconscious. This is surely the case with Emile Verhaeren or Cros who compared
the riches of the soul to the treasures amassed in an old dwelling:

J'ai senti la stupeur d'un possesseur avide

Qui trouve, en s'éveillant, sa maison nue et vide
J'ai cherché mes trésors. Tous volés ou brisés !23

Or better yet, Albert Samain's meaningful image: "Mon âme est un manoir" . . .
If we admit that the ambivalence of the images illustrates the contradictions that
tear Symbolism asunder, we will not be surprised to find in prisons and labyrinths the
antitheses of mysterious castles.
The prison image is especially important in Maeterlinck's Serres chaudes which
I shall use as an example. It can be detected in everything that isolates or cuts off from
the exterior. Thus, the hothouse with its "portes à jamais closes" is a variant of the
image; in the same way, the diving bell is a device through which the imagination
perceives a strange world with which all communication is impossible:

* Temples with fantastic summits, terrible idols, sacred lakes and subterranean passages full
of terror and mystery . . . unexplored regions of dream and mystery.
** The oft invoked God manifested himself in the midst of colossal aerial edifices with neither
foundations nor summits, covered by wilted vegetation all atremble, the sacred flora opening onto
the deep blue of the starry vaults . . . rising to the Divine.
13
Ch. Cros, op. cit.

112
 ... t a n t d'êtres étranges à travers les parois !
E t t o u t attouchement à jamais interdit !

The poet characterizes even more clearly the desires of the diver enclosed in his bell.
The closed universe evoked by this first group of images produces a negative
reaction: ennui, passivity, numbness of the conscience. This would represent the
Decadent side of Maeterlinck's oeuvre; on the other hand, the Symbolist side would
consist in knowing t h a t one can expect something from the outside, t h a t there were
discoveries t o be made there and that, in order to make them, the walls of the prison
had to be broken.
Particularly in Maeterlinck's theatre, attempts to break down the barriers are
obvious. Princess Maleine, imprisoned in a tower, orders her nurse to loosen its stones.
As they are parted, the young girl is "dazzled" by images t h a t represent the mystery
of t h e beyond: the azure skies, the forest (which, later on, are transformed into threaten­
ing signs). Sometimes, human effort is impotent to break down doors, especially
when the threat of death is hovering: "il y a une porte effrayante", Ygraine complains
in the wonderful fifth act of Xa Mort de Tintagiles.
There is a place, apparently open, in which man can evolve freely and indefinitely;
yet which acts as a t r a p and prison: this is t h e labyrinth. This image has been studied
by P . Santarcangeli 2 4 and it dominates the work of such prose writers as Kafka, Borges
and, more recently, Robbe-Grillet. During the Symbolist period, one writer who es­
pecially had recourse to this image was Henri de Régnier, as Mario Maurin has shown: 25
as a theme, it is almost omnipresent in his novels. I t is also very much in evidence in
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's La Torture par l'espérance in which a prisoner trying to escape
follows a labyrinthine course; in Isis, the Fabriani palace "was a superb labyrinth
with meanderings t h a t concealed some learned order . . ."..We find, therefore, a true
architecture of circumvolution, a sinuous and secret p a t h t h a t illustrates t h e intricate
creative process of Mallarmé, or the Symbolist taste for the arabesque t h a t finally
became t h e "style nouille". The image of t h e labyrinth can illustrate the avatars of
creation and a certain kind of writing, b u t goes even further. The labyrinth is t h e
odyssey of the lost conscience. I n Régnier, this search ends most often before a mirror
or in a central chamber with mirrored walls. Significantly, after its wanderings, t h e
lost conscience must face itself. The labyrinth is, of course, a prison b u t one is only
lost in it the better to find oneself. Isn't the self image in another form, as the center of
an unpredictable arabesque, a theme dear t o Mallarmé, and the theme of the Miroin
de Venise?
Obliquely, these images of the castle, the prison and the labyrinth, all of them
expressions of being closed in upon oneself a n d of descending into the depths of one­
self, lead us to a Symbolist myth par excellence, t h a t of Narcissus, as well as to an
image of capital importance, t h a t of mirrors, inseparable from the imagery of diamonds.

24
Il libro dei labirinti (Florence, 1967).
25
Henri de Régnier, Le Labyrinthe et le double (Montréal, 1972).

8 Balakian 113
 DIAMONDS

In May, 1890, the Mercure de France, reviewing the Poèmes anciens et romanesques
by Henri de Régnier, wrote: "An incredible display of jewels bedecks beings and
things, even abstractions, in the midst of which the chivalrous melancholy of the poet
delights". Several years earlier in Le Symboliste of October 7,1886, anyone "unadorned
(. . .) with jewelry" was considered decadent in the disparaging sense of the word.
One could go on forever enumerating, from Baudelaire on, all the representatives
of this mineral dream-world, which include Mallarmé's Sonnet en -yx or specific frag-
ments of Hérodiade, Rimbaud and his "pieces of yellow gold strewn on agate", or the
"slender ruby stems surrounding the water rose" of Huysmans whose hero, in A
Rebours (Against the Grain) indulges his fancy by setting precious stones in the shell
of his tortoise. For Moréas: "les lézards (...) scintillant (...) comme de fins joyaux
de jaspe et d'émeraude".26 Such poets as André Fontainas imitate them: "Les gemmes
et les ivoires./ Et les clairs chrysoberils" are the "Fleurs lourdes du jardin triste".
It is clear that diamonds, which come from the depths of the earth, but are cut
and polished by man, symbolize writing in a marvelously appropriate manner —
writing which is both subjective and skilfully complex — a direction chosen by many
of the Symbolists. "Many a work", wrote Mallarmé in Crise de vers, "will align its own
sparkle under a curtain of glass beads"; and later, evoking the analogies upon which
poetry is based, he said that words "light each other up with reciprocal reflections
virtually like a train of fires on precious stones", a very important sentence indeed,
for it explains the role of the diamond in Symbolist imagery. Like the imagery, the
diamond is a species of reflection, for the world does not exist as a reality but only as a
representation.
Diamonds are associated with reflections but also with liquidity — another aspect
of the theme of the hard and the fluid. They frequently are used in connection with
the "description" of submarine depths. Here is an example taken from Monsieur de
Phocas by Jean Lorrain: "Have you had your fill of celebrating this goldsmith's flora !
. . . Have you understood sufficiently the aspects of madrepores and submarine jewels,
yes, submarine, for, flowering with beryls, peridots, opals and pale sapphires, the color
of seaweed and waves, of an almost cerulean enamel, they look like gems that have
long remained at the bottom of the sea".
Such imagery enriches the diamond's poetic significance; it is both deep and trans-
parent, hidden and luminous, translucid and brilliant, though concealed in the heart
of matter; it is the symbol of dazzling secrets and establishes the link between evident
clarity and obscure depths.
Precious stones contain secrets. Rimbaud had said this with the utmost certainty
in the Illuminations: "precious stones concealing themselves" in Après le déluge is a
mystery that escapes man just as he is on the point of discovering it. The same idea is
even more clearly expressed by Victor-Emile Michelet, whose Initiation (1894) contains
a long passage devoted to the secrets of precious stones". One reads there sentences

28
Les Syrtes, Paris, 1884.

114
such as this: "Within these stones, the slow and mysterious labors of gnomes, spirits
of the earth, have concentrated the splendors with which universal life inebriates the
eye that knows how to see". The diamond manifestly reveals and transforms. Maeter-
linck brings a symbolic illustration of this to the stage in L'Oiseau bleu when he shows
us the metamorphosis of the woodcutter's cabin in which the two young heroes live:
"Tyltyl had hardly turned the Diamond when a sudden and prodigious change took
place in everything. The Old Fairy suddenly becomes a marvelously beautiful princess;
the stones of which the walls of the cabin are built become illuminated and shine as
blue as sapphires, transparent, sparkling, as brilliant as the most precious stones".

MIRRORS

These objects occupy in symbolist imagery a place that Guy Michaud has shown
to be essential. The theme appears again and again and under the most various guises.
Of course, one encounters frequently the familiar mirror in Mallarmé or in Cros, who
uses it as a substitute for the lover and entrusts reproaches and admissions to it. Henri
de Régnier, in the prelude to Poèmes anciens et romanesques, wrote:

A nos miroirs menteurs s'enchevêtre et se tord

Un cadre de guirlande où survit une rose,
Et dans la floraison de la torsade éclose
Un pur cristal, qui fut onde, songe et dort.

Here we recognize that Venetian mirror whose arabesques and scrolls were, as we said
before, so pleasing to the taste of the period, and, at the same time, were a sort of
labyrinth in the center of which there was a hidden secret to discover. Furthermore,
these lines of Henry de Régnier also suggest one of the many metamorphoses the image
of the mirror may undergo. It may be a window-pane, as in Les Fenêtres of Mallarmé.
A mirror permits one to contemplate oneself. It works a veritable seduction.
What the subject is going to find in the mirror is, obviously, his own personality,
his face, but also his deepest self. The mirror is another image of this desire to encounter
oneself, of the descent into oneself expressed also by labyrinths and castles lost in
the heart of a forest. Thus, the Andromeda of Jules Laforgue seeks, in the fountain
whicn she uses as a mirror, "to read the secret of her eyes". Thus also the narcissistic
character that Régnier presented in Tel qu'en songe tries to see through himself and is
surprised at the image revealed to him:

O face en sang où je m'apparus au miroir

De cette eau-là parmi le sable !

The mirror can actually be a dangerous instrument. Introspection is not enough;

one must also accept its results. Some are seduced by their own reflexion, others can-
not bear the truth they see written there. This is the essence of the title story of a
collection by Marcel Schwob: Le Roi au masque d'or. A king who had always lived
behind a mask one day felt a desire to know his true face. Looking at himself in the

8* 115
river, he discovered that his face was horribly scarred by leprosy. He who looks at
himself in the mirror must throw away his mask and come out of himself; but the
attempt may prove dangerous.
There are other risks involved in such contemplation. Narcissus knew them well.
In the long run, he who is prisoner of his own image is as if he were paralyzed, an­
nihilated. Verlaine illustrates on Romances sans paroles this process of annihilation:
L'ombre des arbres, dans la rivière embrumée,
Meurt comme de la fumée.
Combien, o voyageur, ce paysage blême
Te mira blême toi-même.

He is dealing with one of those plays of mirrors whose importance has already been
emphasized. The landscape is colorless and almost nonexistant. To hold as an image
nothing but this landscape which is totally lacking in consistency must lead one to
admit the void of one's being and one's own unreality. We find once more this game
of contraries (let us begin to refer to them as equilibria) with which we have already
become familiar from the preceding analyses: a mirror may be a place where someone
can discover himself and it can also be that in which he loses himself. Here is another
example taken from Henri de Régnier in which the heroine, Hertulie (in the story of
the same name), finds herself in a room lined with mirrors: "Hertulie saw herself every­
where even in the depths of a dream in which she lost all sense of having produced so
many phantoms identical to her own pallor; she felt herself dispersed forever and
[. . .] she was so fragmented that she dissolved in her own reflexions, [. . .] her knees
gave way so that she collapsed gently on the floor". We see how easily a person can
become alienated in this game of reflections put before him (and we glimpse a possible
road, unimportant for us, in the direction of the fantastic). If mirrors mean dissolution,
they also lead to self-knowledge.
The first step towards such discoveries is to avoid the mirror's evil spell of petrify­
ing and dissolving the self. The ideal would be to stand in front of the mirror and
succeed in not seeing oneself anymore, to come out of oneself, forget oneself sufficiently
to be able to perceive nothing but a plane and empty surface. This is the asceticism
which Mallarmé's Herodias imposed upon herself (and which the poet imposed upon
himself). "I appeared in you like a distant shadow", the young girl said. Progressive
distancing from oneself is going to make another discovery possible, which she sets
forth immediately:

Mais, horreur! des miroirs dans ta sévère fontaine

J'ai de mon rêve épars connu la nudité !

The nudity and emptiness of the mirror, its nothingness! Herodias' cry of terror is
understandable.
The last stage of knowledge will consist in witnessing in the mirror the appearance
of latent images whose existence Adolphe Retté recognized in a stanza of Cloches en la
nuit (1889):

116
 Il se penche sur la vasque ( . . . )
L'eau miroite d'éclairs ( . . . )
E t au fond irradiant leurs splendeurs hermétiques
Deux yeux sont ouverts qui se gèlent vers lui.

These apparitions were the price paid for the intellectual exercises to which Mallar-
mé dedicated himself at great length. The end of the Sonnet en -yx triumphantly cele-
brates the rising of new constellations in the place of a "nude element in the mirror":

dans l'oubli fermé par le cadre, se fixe

De scintillations sitôt le septuor.

Mirrors, therefore, reveal the secret of a hidden reality that would otherwise be
invisible to the human eye. Interceding between man and the cosmos, they allow us to
"read the reflexion of eternal Forms'', as Guy Michaud so felicitously put it. They are
the very image of a Symbolist philosophy according to which the world is nothing but
reflexion or representation of a reality hidden behind the medium through which it is
barely glimpsed. Georges Vanor (in L'Art symboliste, 1888) indicated subtly that all
creation resolved itself into the play of mirrors and reflexions, or — in other words —
in correspondences and analogies. "The relationship existing between the physical and
the moral worlds will be established between the moral and the supernatural worlds;
man's spirit, that is, the intelligible world, will be like a transparent glass screen be-
tween these two mirrors".
In conclusion it must be pointed out that the image did not represent the same
thing for the Symbolists as it did for previous poets. The first difference has to do with
the dynamism and the mobility of the image. It is no longer a matter of recognizing
ephemeral similarities by means of traditional comparison. The evolutions and progress
of the Idea must now be grasped beneath all appearances. An example taken from
Sixtine of Rémy de Gourmont might serve to enlighten us. To express the ascendancy
of voluptuous woman over man, the poet metamorphoses the enervating dampness of
the hothouse, where a flower-woman is blossoming in ether emanations in the midst
of which the patient loses consciousness.
The second essential element is the play of analogies used by such poets as Albert
Mockel and Mallarmé. From one image to another, natural and intrinsic connections
are established, not external or artificial ones. Analogy requires, of course, vast net-
works of images which are only connected in depth, at the level of the Ideas them-
selves, in other words, in the abstract.
The important thing is that the images should not be studied independently of
each other. On the contrary, one must discover the constellations they form and which
compose, out of each varied figure, a vaster one that is closer to profound reality.
This new poetic fact is essential if we are to understand Symbolism, for the game of
analogies has reference to a specific reading of, or writing about, the world. It is the
gravest and most disquieting of games: a wager or a throw of the dice.
Throughout these images, there are antagonisms and balances, nor is it unusual to
see these going hand in hand. The sun and the moon, water and fire, have long been

117
associated: Symbolism follows in this tradition by virtue of its conviction that there
exists a secret in things that can be revealed by the magic powers of the World and of
images. This opposing of opposites — Herodias is pure and impure at the same time,
lilies are spotted with blood and shadows are pierced by brilliant spots of light, etc.
— in fact defines the solar and heroic structure of Symbolist make-believe.
The images observed develop into a metal landscape, a universe of thickness:
forests asking to be penetrated, water (and mirrors) having secret depths — the universe
of arabesques and metamorphosis; water flows and the labyrinth meanders. But both
lead somewhere. In its glistening flight, water captures reflexions of reality; in the
heart of the labyrinth, the play of mirrors reveals the existence of primal images. The
images that the poet brings back are like hieroglyphs: secret, sacred signs of the Cosmos.

Translated from the French by Edouard Roditi

118
 MICHEL DÉCAUDIN

THE FATE OF SYMBOLISM

Certain statements made in the 1890's inevitably appear surprising. So, Charles Morice,
whose La Littérature de tout à l'heure had been greeted in 1889 as a cardinal critical text
for the youthful Symbolism, responded two years later to Jules Huret's inquiry: "The
Symbolist school? To start with, one would have had to exist. As for me, I don't know
of any". Or likewise, as lucid and informed a witness as Henry Mazel writes in L'Ermi­
tage of June, 1894, under the pseudonym Saint-Antoine: "Symbolism; such is no doubt
the label under which our period will be classified in French literary history. Let us
then be resigned to it, since all protest would be vain; and more especially as the
designation has at least one merit, its very meaninglessness". A meaninglessness which
in turn Rémy de Gourmont calls attention to in 1896 in his preface to the Livre des
masques wherein he is content to define Symbolism as individualism in art. Yet no one
had contributed more than he, in his essay entitled L'Idéalisme (1893), to the establish­
ment of an integrated theory of Symbolism founded on an historical and metaphysical
point of view.
We could go right on giving quotations of this type. What they add up to is not
an evasion of the recent past, but rather a feeling of the great distance separating the
ambitions of Symbolism on the one hand, and the poetic profusion which lays claim
to being it, on the other. Poetry had become a means toward intuitive knowledge, an
awareness deeper than scientific knowledge; the function that had been assigned to it
was that of enriching the world and life with authenticity; it had sought, according to
Saint-Pol-Roux' formula, "to gaze into the absolute"; it had wished to make poetic
language the seat of the ineffable and to present it with music as its model. Only the
Dream and the Idea were to be sworn by. Still, was not the balance-sheet of Symbolism
conspicuously the process of being withdrawn ?
The quest for Knowledge and Unity was more often than not lost in occultism
and the esoteric; subjectivism, instead of leading to the Idea, expanded into an elegiac
effusion; but the appeal to the Dream remained more a protest against Positivism and
Naturalism than a submersion into the dark zones of oneirology. As to the researches
into language, they have certainly recorded a decisive moment in the history of poetry,
with the establishment of free verse, the unstiffening of classical prosody and the
elaboration of a specific expression; yet we should note that the Symbolists were
relatively timid in this, or turned to formalism with René Ghil and his followers. And
the symbol itself, keystone of an Orphic interpretation of the world, was frequently
reduced to allegorical imagery.

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 All this took place as though the theorization about Symbolism, which h a d been
asserting itself from the confused manifesto of Moréas to the enlightening articles of
Aurier or de Gourmont, had served as reference rather t h a n impetus to a poetic creation
imbued with multiple assumptions. However radiant may have been the utterance
and the works of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and of Mallarmé, they may be seen as more of
a fascination t h a n an inspiration to the Symbolist generation.
Further, it should not astonish us t h a t paths rapidly diverged. The first t o depart,
Moréas, in 1891, asserted t h a t Symbolism, "phenomenon of transition", was dead, and
reproached his former friends with their indifference regarding old French tradition,
Greco-Latin culture and the Middle Ages. At year's end, he participated with D u
Plessys, L a Tailhède, Maurras and R a y n a u d in the establishment of t h e Ecole Ro­
mane and declared himself in favor of " a free, vigorous and new poetry, brought back,
in a word, to the purity and dignity of its ancestry", a school from which he quickly
withdrew, presenting, in t h e six books of Stances (1899-1901), a perfectly controlled
poetry in which confidence and experience expand into a universal wisdom. Stuart
Merrill writes, in his "Credo poétique" published in April, 1893 in L'Ermitage, t h a t
Poetry, "being at once Word and Music, is marvellously suited to t h a t suggestion of
an infinite which is often no more t h a n t h e indefinite": a formula of t h e purest Sym­
bolism. B u t in t h e same period he is preparing his Petits Poèmes d'automne (1895) in
which he sings of nature and life with a melancholy tenderness. And Les Quatre saisons,
in 1900, confirms his evolution towards a lyricism of the heart and of emotion. His final
collection, marked b y his admiration for Whitman, Une voix dans la foule (1909),
burgeons with exaltation and universal joy, proclaiming the "pride of living a t last
without tyrants or gods". Henri de Régnier, while dedicating each p a r t of Aréthuse
(1895) t o Mallarmé, Heredia and Vielé-Griffin, left the door ajar for t h e possible syn­
thesis of the Parnassian school with t h e varied forms of Symbolism. I t is in this direc­
tion t h a t his works will develop, starting in 1897 with Les Jeux rustiques et divins, then
Les Médailles d'argile which he dedicates t o André Chénier, and La Cité des eaux, so as
to achieve, with. La Sandale ailée (1906) and Le Miroir des heures (1910), a "classicism"
recognized in him b y the critics of his time, who yet insisted on his Symbolist ties. His
election t o t h e French Academy in 1911 has sometimes been seen as the traditionalists'
recognition of Symbolist achievement; i t is above all the sign of t h e transformation
which, in about a twelve year period, brought Henri de Régnier to a poetry of con­
ciliation and of moderation. As for Vielé-Griffin, he has occupied a special place in
Symbolism from the start through his lyricism of the joy of life and light, summarized
in the title La Clarté de vie (1897). Moreover, the upshot of his poetry, with La Lu­
mière de Grèce (1912), was a celebration of pagan humanism, with Domaine royal
(1923), an exercise of devotion t o t h e Renaissance.
Let us also consider R e t t é , who, having first numbered himself among the disciples
of Mallarmé, undertook, in 1895 a violent campaign against him and turned his back
on the mists of Thule to sing of nature (L'Archipel en fleurs, La Forêt bruissante) ; Gustave
Kahn, whose poetic inspiration seemed exhausted after Le Livre d'images (1897);
and A. Ferdinand Herold, whose Au hasard des chemins (1900) combined melancholy
themes with confidence in life and t h e modern world.

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 Among those in whom some have often wished to see a second Symbolist genera-
tion — in the twenty years after 1890 — the movement is still more characteristic.
The youthful creator of the Théâtre d'Art, Paul Fort, starting in 1895, shaped the
formula of his prose ballad with the tonalities of popular song. Gide, whose first work
signed with his own name is that "theory of the symbol" which Le Traité du Narcisse
presents, was not long in setting himself on the road to a moral and esthetic liberation
which was to be asserted in Les Nourritures terrestres, and which was antipodal to the
Symbolist ideal. Francis Jammes, after his first brochures that attracted the attention
of Mallarmé, Régnier and Gide, directed himself towards a sprightliness fashioned in
the natural and in simplicity (De Vangelus de l'aube à l'angelus du soir, 1897). And
we know how Valéry, for complex reasons in which the feeling of the uselessness of
poetry played not a negligible role, renounced in 1892 his pursuit of a work that had
already seemed rich in promise; when he resumed it with La Jeune Parque, he was
inclined toward perspectives which, though tributaries of Symbolism (notably in the
matter of poetic language), were to expand in other directions.
We have not yet spoken of Belgian Symbolism. If one considers the Propos de
littérature of Albert Mockel (1894) as one of the chief critical and theoretical texts of
Symbolism, his work, as it is summarized in Clartés (1902), reveals an evolution analo-
gous to that of the French: a transition, as he himself observes in the preface, leading
from poems of a purely Symbolist inspiration to a "Song of the first of May" and to
social themes. Quite different was Maeterlinck who, having produced a theater wherein
all Symbolism took cognizance of itself, moved toward the elaboration of a wisdom
based upon the life of the soul and world unity. But, if Van Lerberghe gives us, with
La Chanson d'Eve (1904), one of the purest Symbolist poems, it is Verhaeren who best
illustrates the Belgian region. Freeing himself from the painful pessimism and halluci-
natory anguish of his first collections, and less sensitive to the appeals of idealism than
the French poets, he began an expansion, with Les Apparus dans mes chemins (1891),
to an optimistic confidence in life, and soon he sang of the modem world and the Ideas
that guide Society, the destiny of man who is capable of changing the world while
still remaining integrated in its order. He thus accomplished, at a time when French
Symbolism was dispersing and subject to the attacks of the young Naturalists, the
reconciliation of the poet with his century.
It would certainly seem, then, that all this was actually taking place as though
Symbolism were presenting us with two quite different faces, depending on whether
we look at its philosophy and the reflections that result from it on the nature of poetry,
or at the works of those who laid claim to practicing it. And taking only the latter into
account, one is tempted to agree with those who would reject any profound meaning
in the phenomenon, since there was such a divergence of manners. Still, at the moment
when its death was being proclaimed, when the very people who called themselves
"faithful Symbolists", like Stuart Merrill, were in fact more faithful to a memory than
to a living fountainhead, it was then that the great synthesis of Symbolism in fact
occurred.
We borrow the following phrase from Guy Michaud, who quite rightly observes
that "if in 1896 symptoms of decline could be noted in Symbolism, by 1905 the Sym-

121
bolist age was generally conceded to have run its term"; still, he adds, "it is precisely
in 1905 that the impetus for the true burgeoning of the Symbolist movement is to be
experienced". We shall not follow him, however, in the analysis he makes of all the
aspects of this "burgeoning". He in fact discovers the influence of Symbolism on
Romain Rolland, on Gide, although the latter gradually withdrew from it, on Proust
and Péguy, "whether they like it or not" — and even on Surrealism. It is, of course,
evident that every period is a tributary of those that preceded it and that the mark
of Symbolism is perceptible in the esthetic thought and creation of 1910, whether the
artists and writers realize it or not. But it is not this phenomenon of innutrition,
a constant phenomenon in history, that will delineate for us the accomplishments of
Symbolism; at best it will inform us, by its extension, of the degree of Symbolism's
penetration.
It is quite a different thing to state that at the very moment when it would appear
to be sinking into the past, Symbolism reaches its full fruition.
In any case, such fulfilment did not occur with resurgence around 1905. In that
period, Robert de Souza, in Où nous ensommes (1906), attacked the adversaries of Sym-
bolism, accusing them of impotence and the inability to recognize valid poetry beyond
that born in the movement twenty years earlier. Tancrède de Visan established for the
first time a rapprochement between Bergsonism and Symbolist thought in Essai sur le
Symbolisme (1904) and attempted to define a common "lyrical attitude" that would
explain not merely the dispersion, but also the contradictions of Symbolist poets.
Simultaneously, Jean Royère founded La Phalange and asserted that "symbolist
poetry alone is original, alive". Subscribing to the ideal of the absolute and the purity
of Mallarmé, he published his collection Sœur de Narcisse nue (1906). But the atmo-
sphere was not quite set for such a renewal. We see this in the success of the review Vers
et Prose, started in 1905 by Paul Fort on the idea of a becoming and of a continuity of
poetry not in, but since Symbolism; and we see it in the fact that in 1911, the year
when Régnier was received into the Academy, the first doctoral thesis dedicated to
Symbolism appeared under the signature of André Barre.
Neither may we understand by "accomplishment" the incorporation of Symbolism
into the poetic development of the twentieth century, such as numerous writers en-
visage it in 1913—1914. It was Saint-Pol-Roux, for example, who, in the Mercure de
France of June 1, 1913, explained that, in 1900, an "ideorealist" generation directed
towards nature and life had succeeded the "idealist", absolute-loving, Symbolist
generation, and that we were now expecting the advent of the preferred son, the
"Benjamin", who would embody "examination of conscience, coordination, apothe-
osis", who "would achieve the masterpiece" in the "grandiose unity" of an art that
"is totalized". A moderate like Michel Puy, an avant-garde poet like Apollinaire sub-
mitted themselves in an analogous way to this dialectic of three generations.
Still more perspicacious was Edouard Dujardin when, supported by the inquiry
that appeared the previous year in Le Disque Vert (Has Symbolism uttered its
final word?), he outlined in the Mercure de France of July 1, 1924 what he termed
"the living continuity of Symbolism". He began, to be sure, by paying homage to the
common notion that Symbolism was at the mainspring of modern poetry, and that

122
through it everything passed. But he also observed that French Symbolist poets had
been "drowned in the unreal", incarcerated in a legendary world, disinterested in life.
A comeback was needed: its craftsmen were to be, according to Dujardin, André Spire
and Claudel. We may leave aside the case of André Spire whose poetic career has noth­
ing to do with Symbolism. On the other hand, and digressing from the theoretical
debates that brought into opposition the adherents of the Ideal and those of Life, it is
assuredly with Claudel that Symbolism attains its fulfilment. Over and above the des­
tinies of the group called Symbolist, the metaphysical and esthetic quest of Mallarmé
to attain the Orphic explanation of Earth, and the catholic song of Claudel meet. The
obsession with nothingness on the part of the former and the cosmic jubilation of the
latter answer each other. The symbolic structure of the universe, the spiritual signifi­
cation of the material world are illuminated by the poet's faith. The latter, in the image
of the creative Word of God, gives existence to things by naming them; he submits
them to the coherent harmony of language. Poetry is thus in harmony with the universe
both through its material state and through its form which is the very rhythm of life,
its breathing. The Symbolist experiment is totalized. Physical life and spiritual life
correspond; the world, "inexhaustible and inscrutable", is "the immense octave of
(divine) Creation". The dream of Mallarmé has taken on form and meaning: the act
of the directing and creative intelligence has its image in the respiratory function
which produces it, just as God has His in the poet, and the universe in the poem:
"the world has become a poem; it has a meaning; it has an order".
Here we may recall the outcry of Coppée, in his response to the inquiry by Georges
Le Cardonnel and Charles Vellay in 1905: "Have we given enough credit to the Sym­
bolists ! A long-term credit, by God ! And we're still waiting for the book that will
conquer the world . . .". That same year, Claudel published Les Muses, the first if his
Cinq Grandes Odes, and gave to a defunct Symbolism that long awaited work.

Translated from the French by Richard J. Glynn

123
 PART III
THE EMERGENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL
SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT
 CLIVE SCOTT

THE LIBERATED VERSE

OF THE ENGLISH TRANSLATORS
OF FRENCH SYMBOLISM

I
It is usual, and justified, to trace the sources of the English free verse of the twentieth
century to the French Symbolist verslibristes. What, indeed, is remarkable about the
period is the way in which French and English versifications moved towards each
other. Among other things, the French began to think of the line not as the basic
rhythmic unit defining a range of rhythmic potentialities within itself, but as the almost
incidental result of the combination of smaller measures. Kahn's fraction organique1
is a building brick which can interlock with any other brick of any size, or stand on
its own, as long as the overall strophic structure is stable. The measure acquires a
new self-sufficiency; a measure of three syllables in an alexandrine is of exactly the
same nature as a measure of three syllables in an octosyllable, that is to say, it is no
longer made significant by the measures with which it is combined, nor by its being
one of a number of units all having the same rhythmic reference or perspective (the
line); rather, its significance is likely to be translinear, that of a leitmotif representing
the irreducible nucleus of an inimitable experience. One finds a similar trend towards
a prosody of the strophe among the Imagist poets, towards a dispersed leitmotif, a
kind of vestige of metric regularity, a "spaced'' regularity with room for descents from
ritualized utterance into the no man's land of flat speech and random stress. But most
important perhaps, the English introduced into their prosodic thinking the concept
of "cadence", that is, of a prosody based on the changing intonation patterns of the
speaking voice, on the varying length of syntactical groups, rather than on a word's
accentual constitution: D. H. Lawrence indicates this change succinctly in a letter to
Edward Marsh dated November 19, 1913: "I think I read my poetry more by length
than by stress—as a matter of movements in space than footsteps hitting the earth". 2
Pound returns to the term from time to time, but the most consistent promoter of
"cadence" as the new prosodic principle is Amy Lowell. "Cadence" means several
things to Lowell, but primarily it refers to a French-style phrasal system of prosody,
a verse constitution relating to prose read expressively, and to a strophic rhythm retro-
spectively perceived.
The real quarrel of the English verslibristes was with a prosodie system in which
habits of foot scansion had begotten habits of foot composition, which had tied the

1
See Gustave Kahn, "Préface sur le vers libre", Premiers poèmes (Paris, Mercure de France,
1897.), PP. 3-38.
2
Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Beal (London, Heinemann, 1956), p. 79.

127
poet to a series of short-winded and uniform measures. Pound was hard on the iamb, 3
but as the representative foot it had to be assaulted. The possible alternatives were
manifold. One could create a verse using longer, more complex feet, like the underlying
choriambic ('vw) in these lines from Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking:

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,

Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
leaving his bed wandered alone, bareheaded, barefoot

where the foot corresponds roughly to the syntactic group; or like the recurrent Ionics
(w//) of Eliot's Gerontion, where the correspondence is complete "in a dry month",
"at the hot gates", "in the warm rain", "in the salt marsh", "I an old man", "in de-
praved May". Alternatively, the poet could turn to those English prosodies — the
pure stress and the syllabic — in which the foot has no official existence. Or the poet
could adapt a French prosodic mode and look to cadence. Often, in practice, these
solutions all amount to the same thing.
While nobody doubts that the English verslibristes owed much to their French
counterparts, it is also customary to relate English free verse to an English tradition,
which sometimes begins as far back as Milton and Dryden, but usually starts with
Arnold and moves through Patmore and Thompson to Henley, referring to Hopkins
en route. But to think of this as a tradition is a mistake; the evidence would seem to
suggest that poets and critics were not alive to the implications of these passing free-
doms, or thought of them simply as eccentric, deriving from forms which make a
virtue of eccentricity (the ode), or belonging to poets otherwise eccentric (Catholics).4
Attitudes oscillate between two points: on the one hand, a sublime unawareness of
what was at stake — there is nothing unusual about Henley's offhand explanation
of his choice of a predominantly dactylic free verse for his collection, In Hospital. He
writes, in the "Advertisement" (1897) to his Poems, of "those unrhyming rhythms in
which I had tried to quintessentialise, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme, my
impressions of the Old Edinburgh Infirmary". Henley treats free verse as an occasional
form, with a very specific function, and concentrates his attention on what, to us, seems
the least controversial point, the absence of rhyme, rather than on the heterosyllabic
and heterostrophic aspects. 5
The other attitude is one of complacency. It is an attitude that informs Arthur
Symons's reply to Marinetti's inquiry into the state of European free verse. Symons's
view is that English verse is already so free, especially in relation to French versifica-
tion, that it hardly needs to stir its stumps to remain abreast of the times: "Dans un

3
"Re metre: what they call 'metre' in English means for the most part 'iambic'", The Letters
of Ezra
4
Pound 1907-1941, ed. Paige (London, Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 129.
J. C. Reid, for example, in his Francis Thompson : Man and Poet (London, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 159, writes: "When New Poems came out in 1897, it met with a response so
hostile as to provoke the suspicion of anti-Catholic prejudice".
5
Oddly enough, it is upon the question of rhyme that Arthur Symons also dwells in his "Mo-
dernity in Verse—Mr. W. È. Henley," he writes: "The experiment of doing without rhyme has
been made by Heine, by Matthew Arnold, and undoubtedly with a certain measure of success. But
to do without rhyme is to do without one of the beauties of poetry, I should say one of the inherent
beauties". Studies in Two Literatures (London, Leonard Smithers, 1897), p. 202.

128
 certain sens tous les vers anglais sont des vers libres . . . ce qui est plus important dans
le vers libre français, c.à.d. [sic] l'affranchissement du rythme hors d'une quantité
fixe et limitée de syllabes, est à peu près l'acceptation de ce qui a toujours été la loi
dans la versification anglaise".6 This is, of course, true enough; the important thing
is that it does not make English regular verse equivalent to French vers libre. Symons's
remark is quite without force for the English prosodic liberator and is hard to square
with his own careful unsettling of English prosodic habits, as we shall presently see.
The other customary view which is relevant to our purpose is that the first task
of liberators like Pound and Eliot, if they were to set English verse on a revitalized
course, was to extirpate all traces of the nineties. This may have been true of diction
and imagery. But in prosodie matters, Pound and Eliot owed debts to Decadent poets
greater, I would like to argue, than has hitherto been acknowledged. Two classic ex­
pressions of this debt occur in Pound's article on Symons in the Athenaeum (1920) and
in a letter of Eliot's to the Times Literary Supplement (Jan. 10, 1935). Pound, con­
sidering some of Symons's translations, writes: ''Symons in his translations shows him­
self a master of cadence, and cadence is not dexterity, it is the emotional man. And
what we do not know in this country is the value of a new kind of cadence, or a new
modus in the sequence of words"; 7 and Eliot, expressing gratitude to Ernest Dowson
on a specific score — the poem in question is Non Sum Qualis Eram — ascribes his
interest in Dowson to, among other things, the following factor: ". . . because I
regard Dowson as a poet whose technical innovations have been underestimated". 8
Symons and Dowson will provide the principal evidence in the case, and it will be
maintained that efforts in translation were influential in the liberation of English
versification, not only by providing direct models which the translators took over in
their original work — this is ultimately to argue that the encounter with French
prosody, pure and simple, was more decisive than the encounter with the French
verslibristes — but also by stimulating English poets to create an English equivalent
of vers libéré, a stage of development which is not usually associated with the evolution
of English verse. In order to prove this point some general remarks about English
metrics must precede this in-depth discussion.

II

Standard syllable-stress verse is hardly adequate to convey the effects of any verse
built on the varying lengths of grammatical groups. It is perhaps worth reminding
ourselves how antagonistic the syllable-stress and cadence-centered prosodies are by
looking at one of the unhappier translations of the nineties, Lord Alfred Douglas's
account (1898 or 1899) of Baudelaire's Harmonie du soir. The English version has its
peculiar formal virtues: it begins to iron out the irregularities of Baudelaire's pantoum

6
F. T. Marinetti, Enquête internationale sur le vers libre et manifeste du Futurisme (Milan,
Éditions
7
de "Poesia", 1909), p . 75.
8
"Arthur Symons", The Athenaeum. 94 (1920), p . 664.
George Saintsbury, Historical Manual of English Prosody (London, Macmillan, 1910), p. 129.

9 Balakian 129
by ''restoring" alternating rhymes — in place of the enclosed rhymes of the original —
and by diversifying the rhymes — Baudelaire uses only two — while minimizing this
change with assonance (three of Lord Alfred's five rhymes contain a long e). But the
translation is rhythmically characterless. Inevitably, Lord Alfred has resorted to the
iambic pentameter, but without incorporating those foot substitutions that might
have allowed him, with so many lines repeated, to capture something of the subtlety
of Baudelaire's rhythmic variations. Indeed, Lord Alfred's metrical sensitivity is dull
enough to accept a disyllabic "flower": "Each flower, like a censer, sheds its sweet".
In its broad outline, Baudelaire's poem presents us with a gradual evening out of
rhythmic asperities so that, in the course of the final two stanzas, a 3 + 3 hemistich
begins to dominate, thanks largely to the repeated lines: "Un cœur tendre qui hait le
néant vaste et noir" and "Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige". But the final
line is wonderfully full of its liberation from this stabilization or congealment and
releases, with the very length of its measures, the expanding light of memory, an­
chored in the intensity of a single syllable: "Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un osten­
soir" (4 + 2 + 1 +5). This rhythmic structure casts us back in two ways: first, to the other
lines with a 1 + 5 hemistich which, in a different, more sensual realm of experience,
express the same expansion, but an expansion having its source in movement rather
than light: "Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir" ( 2 + 4 + 1 + 5 ) and
"Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige" (1 + 5 + 4 + 2 ) ; and secondly, the final 1 + 5
hemistich relates back to the other hemistichs containing similes, which themselves
have undergone a development towards a 3 + 3 dominance from "ainsi qu'un encensoir"
to "comme un cœur qu'on afflige" and "comme un grand reposoir" and which have not
within them the impetus of an initial verb: both "ainsi qu'un encensoir" and "comme un
cœur qu'on afflige" are preceded by verbs at the caesura, verbs of an evanescent,
rather than a concentrating, nature ("s'évapore" and "frémit").
Had Lord Alfred used some kind of foot substitution, he might have gone some
way towards reproducing Baudelairean effects, but it is unlikely that, working within
the limits of the foot, he would ever have achieved any of the sense of elasticity, of
curve and crest, that there is in the French line.
Many modern prosodists who have wished to revitalize syllable-stress meter have
done so by arguing for the relativity of stress (a word that carries the main metrical
stress in one context, because its partner is accentually weaker, may be metrically un­
stressed in another context where its partner is stronger; words are not simply stressed
or unstressed; they are stressed simply to a greater or lesser degree). This has enriched
our sense of stress variation and has shown how diverse a word's metrical guise can be.
But it has also consolidated foot thinking and has, in fact, diminished the number of
alternative or substitute feet: with relativity of stress, it becomes difficult to envisage
a pure spondee or a pure pyrrhic foot. And besides, the relativity of stress really con­
cerns only syllable-stress meters; in pure-stress and syllabic meters, the value of
stressed or unstressed syllables is not of great interest, while their number in relation
to one another is. And it is noticeable that free verse liberates itself from the foot,
creates its dramatic contrasts, and organizes its meanings by setting clusters of un­
stressed syllables against clusters of stressed ones.

130
 The English foot is basically disyllabic or trisyllabic. And even though word/foot
correspondences are rare, because avoided, there is some truth in the simplified state­
ment that English versification deals most easily with disyllables and trisyllables. In
fact, it would be fairer to put this negatively; English versification is most troubled
by what lies at either side of the disyllable and trisyllable, the monosyllable and longer
polysyllable. Strings of monosyllables can be metrically disorientating in the variety
of readings they allow, and polysyllables can be metrically embarassing with their
even surface unless we admit some gauche Tonbeugung.
There is evidence in Dowson and Symons of a will to undermine the sedate foot
with monosyllables and polysyllables. Dowson uses the monosyllable with a metrically
disorientating effect, particularly in his long-line poems (Impenitentia Ultima, The Sea
Change and Breton Afternoon). From The SeaChange, for example, one might quote lines
like "I have ever loved thee so, I have ever done thee wrong" or "That which when
once a man has heard, he heeds not over long" or "All that I know in all my mind
shall no more have a place". Where there is no repeated syntax — as there is in the
first of these lines — to give a clue, it is difficult enough to know how to scan them.
And this is due not only to the fact of consecutive stressable monosyllables, but to
the length of the lines as well, which naturally reduces rhythmic intensity and admits
the low-key movement of ordinary speech, as it encourages the reader to make his
points of rhythmic reference broader, syntactic rather than metric, in order to be able
to encompass the line in simplified outline. Stress and non-stress, foreground and back­
ground, move towards a common center, an area of indeterminacy, a kind of linguistic
somnambulance, as Dowson gropes his way through the peculiarly bodyless world of
his own hopes.
There can be little doubt that Symons's exploitation of the polysyllable, particu­
larly the polysyllabic adverb, derives from Verlaine's practice, though Symons rarely
uses it with the same wryness, the same feel for ironic hyperbole, that Verlaine is
master of. Nonetheless, Symons does use the adverb for its undertones, its metrical
unchartedness, its rather sinister refusal to bend to the transparencies of disyllabic
feet. To a Dancer (London Nights) opens with the lines "Intoxicatingly) Her eyes
across the footlights gleam", and the first three lines of the third stanza run "Subtly,
deliciously, J A quickening fire within me, beat | The rhythms of her poising feet".
How imperceptibly the dancer insinuates herself through these adverbs veiled in their
very monotony! These stanzas propose, with their first lines, a kind of metrical vacuum,
before the rhythm of the dance and the iambic ground-rhythm establish themselves.
These are introductions in which the spell is cast. The iambic never becomes insistent,
but cedes constantly to the syncopations of the dance and the renewals of mystery.
The metrical uncertainty created by the polysyllable is even more apparent in Javanese
Dancers (Silhouettes), where they are thicker on the ground. Of such polysyllables in
the rhyme position we shall have more to say later.
But it is easy to forget that syllable-stress meter has no prior claims in a poem;
it has to establish itself. It is easy to forget, too, just how closely allied the different
English meters can be under certain circumstances. Poems can arouse prolonged
metrical doubt, and free verse exists as much by the refusal to opt for a set of con-

9* 131
ventions as by t h e manifest breaking of conventions. Short-lined poems are often
ambiguous, a n d are made more so when there is a French original t o refer to which
pushes us away from insular habit.
With a short line, a meter has not really sufficient room to install itself as a meter,
and needs t h e support of t h e accompanying lines. But short-lined stanzas, which find
it so easy to use rhyme as the essential point de repère, also find it easy t o vary meter
from line to line, thus exacerbating the problem of the individual line. Besides, with
the line being so short, we m a y feel happier treating the whole line, rather t h a n the
individual foot, as the metric measure, particularly where different feet are in com­
petition, and more particularly where whole lines are related to each other by a high
degree of repetition, as they are in Dowson's translation of Verlaine's Ariettes oubliées
III (Romances sans paroles).
As we look a t Dowson's version of Verlaine (Décorations), we may have difficulty
in ascribing it to any of the meters. I n t h e second stanza, for instance:

O sweet fall of the rain

Upon the earth and roofs !
U n t o an heart in pain,
O music of the rain !

I t would perhaps not be hard to dig out an iambic skeleton, b u t the second line
is the only unequivocally iambic line. Significantly, if we look upon this translation
as syllable-stress, we shall find t h a t the most adequately iambic lines are the second,
unrhyming, lines of the stanzas (see stanzas 1,2, and 4), t h a t is, lines t h a t are never
more than subordinate, circumstantial, except in the non-conforming third stanza
characterized by lassitude and matter-of-factness. B u t it would not be difficult, if we
lessened our need for recurrent stress and looked more for stress peaks corresponding
to grammatical grouping, to see this second stanza as pure-stress verse, with two
stresses to the line, giving, in French scansional terms, a p a t t e r n of 3 + 3 / 4 +2/4 + 2 /
2 + 4 . Of course, Verlaine's six-syllable lines equally provide a two-accent pattern,
although, one hastens to add, it does not correspond with Dowson's — it is, in this
second stanza, 3 +3/2 + 4 / 3 + 3 / 3 + 3 . B u t Dowson's verse does have a system of terminal
accents corresponding with the prosody of the original, and this means t h a t , as in
French, the rhythmic groups are defined not only by accent, b u t b y the junctures
created by a culminating stress; in short, pause is an integral p a r t of the prosody.
Obviously, in this scheme of things, juncture must occur after t h e word, so t h a t the
trochaic word creates a phenomenon similar to the French coupe lyrique, as in "O
music of the rain !" And even in the idiosyncratic third stanza, where three of the
lines begin with a strong stress, we find t h a t in fact these are one-word grammatical
units and thus the stress is still terminal, e.g.:

Tears t h a t have no reason

Fall in my sorry heart

132
Equally, though, we might want to call this verse syllabic and thus leave the stress-
scansion completely undefined, metrically immaterial.
We can perhaps measure the prosodic change, the shift towards cadence, wrought
by some nineties poets, by comparing two translations of the same passage, i.e., the
final stanza of Baudelaire's Le Balcon, the first by Lord Alfred Douglas (1899) and the
second by Arthur Symons (1925):

10 These vows, these scents, these kisses infinite,

10 Will they like young suns climbing u p the skies
10 Rise up from some unfathomable pit,
10 Washed in the sea from all impurities?
10 O vows, O scents, O kisses infinite!

12 These oaths, these perfumes, these kisses, mad, ferocious,

12 Shall these arise from a great gulf j interdicted ?

11 Some deep abyss, sombre, sunless, atrocious,

15 The depths ¡ of the illimitable seas by our Sins ] predicted?
12 — 0 oaths ! O perfume! O kisses, mad, ferocious !

Lord Alfred's version is much more accurate. Where does Symons get his authority
for "mad, ferocious", for the repetitive insistence of his third and fourth lines, which
completely disregard the equivalent lines in the original? Baudelaire has " u n gouffre
interdit à nos sondes"; Symons's unqualified "interdicted" is senseless. "O o a t h s " is
acoustically most u n h a p p y and "oaths", moreover, has much less to say for it t h a n
"vows". B u t if we can manage to disregard Symons's erroneous and melodramatic
diction for a moment, we shall find t h a t his version is rhythmically more powerful and
closer to the movement of the original than Lord Alfred's, though Baudelaire's final
stanza is rhythmically quiet /3 + 3 + 3 +3/4 + 2 + 3 + 3 / 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 / 3 + 3 + 2 + 4 / 3 + 3 + 3 +
+ 3 / . Lord Alfred's solemn and strict iambic pentameters — with first-foot inversion
in the third line and spondaic substitution in the third foot of the second line — make
an uncomfortable five distinct syllables of "unfathomable" and emphasize t h e dis­
tortion necessary to make better rhymes of "infinite/pit" and "skies/ impurities". At
the risk of doggerel perhaps, Symons ensures t h a t his feminine endings remain feminine;
and his longer line, with its syllabic and metrical volatility, means t h a t we move about
within the line with more freedom and with more feel for the syntactic disposition
and for the irregular intensifications and apathies of prose, consonant with the way­
wardness of temperament; "illimitable" will not be read as five syllables, but, after
the stress on the second syllable, as a sequence of sounds of diminishing definition, as
an increasing slur. I t is difficult to know w h a t Pound means when he says t h a t cadence
is " t h e emotional man", but here, where the verse is more happily read in terms of
phrase, stress, and juncture, we feel t h e verse as a sequence of impetuses of longer or
shorter duration and of lesser or greater intensity. I n such verse, we may have a more
direct intimation of the hubbub of the inner man t h a n in t h e more stylized and controlled

133
syllable-stress. Lord Alfred's rhythm, for all the syntactic dislocation of enumera­
tion and invocation, strikes one as a continuous and self-sustaining motor, with inter­
mittent hesitations. Symons's rhythm, even where the syntax is continuous, derives
from a series of efforts of the voice around the grammatical units, succeeded by pauses
of varying nature and degree. This example is drawn from Symons's later work, but
this cadence-inspired rhythm is characteristic of many of his poems published in the
nineties, e.g., Morbidezza (Silhouettes) whose first stanza runs:

White girl, | your flesh is lilies

Under a frozen moon,
So still is !
The rapture j of your swoon
Of whiteness, snow or lilies.

or At Dieppe: II. On the Beach (Silhouettes), which has as its first stanza:

Night, a grey sky, | a ghostly sea,

The soft beginning ¡of the rain;
Black j on the horizon, sails that wane
Into the distance j mistily.

One can see how the brief and often discontinuous notations of Symons's impres­
sionism necessitate and underline a phrasal reading.
Dowson's Non Sum Qualis Eram (Verses) is a further example of a poem whose
rhythmic organization benefits from a Gallic, phrasal reading. Saintsbury has no
trouble with this poem—"At any rate, once more, it has no difficulties for foot-scan­
sion"—and gives an iambic reading, presumably with substitution where necessary.
But, even so, Saintsbury's solution looks absurd: "I have/been faith/ful to/thee, Cy/nara,
in/my fashion". What is striking is the complete impertinence of foot-scansion to a
phrase as troubled and meandering as Dowson's. Eliot was obviously unsettled by
this poem, and D. H. Lawrence, in the same letter to Edward Marsh from which we
have already quoted, takes issue with his correspondent on potential readings of the
third stanza of Dowson's poem. Lawrence speaks of a "double method" of scanning
verse,9 and first gives this account of the stanza:

9
What Lawrence means here is presumably that one can scan verse in a standard syllable-
stress manner or by word group. This is different from describing poetry as the tension between
poetic meter and prose rhythms because in this description prose rhythms are not a governing
prosodie principle and do not actually dictate rhythmic structure. Lawrence is, in fact, saying that
any poem has two different meters. His own cadence reading would not have been a possibility
without prior schooling in the wavering rhythms of the nineties. Later analysts have taken a more
extreme view than Lawrence, claiming not that two potential scansions coexist, but that the ca-

134
 I have forgot much, Cynara ! gone with the wind,

Flung roses roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing to put thy pale, lost li lies out of mind;

But Ì was de solate, and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara ! in my fashion.
He then goes on:
"Would you scan like that? I hate an on-foot method of reading. I should go:
_ — [sic]
_ [sic]

_[sic]
It all depends on the pause — the natural pause, the natural lingering of the
voice according to the feeling — it is the hidden emotional pattern that makes
poetry, not obvious form.

I have forgot much, Cynara, gone with the wind.

It is the lapse of the feeling, something as indefinite as expression in the voice
carrying emotion.,,1()
What Lawrence is presenting is evidently an approach to poetry based on cadence.
But if we look at his scansion, then we might be inclined to say that Dowson had merely
rediscovered pure-stress meter, (four stresses to the line). This might be so, were it not
for the fact that Dowson also keeps strict account of line length, albeit allowing him-
self the usual licence of feminine endings. This is to say that Dowson's prosody falls
somewhere between syllable-stress and pure-stress, and that it is not a prosody of
the foot, but of the measure, the number and combinations of which are governed,
indirectly perhaps, by the line length. Certainly for Dowson, the alexandrine here is
not a pentameter with an extra iamb, but a tetrametric structure very reminiscent
of its French counterpart.
But how, after all, do we scan this verse? That is a moot point. Certainly by the
rhythmic-syntactic phrase, but whether by the phrase's syllabic or its accentual con*
dence scansion is the only true one, and not only that, but that it should be applied retrospectively
to all English verse—as John Nist puts it: "The word groups, then, are the basic building blocks of
English rhythm." ("The Word-Group Cadence: Basis of English Metrics", Linguistica, 6 (1964),
p. 76. Perhaps Lawrence's more conciliatory attitude is the more rewarding. But it is likely that the
individual poem will encourage one reading (syllable-stress or cadence) at the expense of the other
by the indications it gives. What ÌB SO puzzling about the verse of Symons and Dowson is that it
encourages now one kind of reading and now the other, so that one is continually jolted, from poem
to poem,
10
out of late Victorian mechanics into Francophile novelty and back again.
Selected Literary Criticism, pp. 79-80.

135
stitution is open to question. Our tradition will incline us to the latter. But the problem
still remains as to how we relate the rhythmic phrases. Do we look to patterns of recur-
rence, and create a leitmotif prosody, of the kind we find in Eliot's Gerontion — and,
after all, can we distinguish between an extended foot and a phrasal measure? Or do
we relate measures to an immediate context of variations, as we might in the Whitman
lines cited earlier? This may depend on two principal factors, namely, how much con-
sistency there is in the measures and how long the poem is, assuming that in the long
poem the variation will be greater and that the reader will thus read by points de repère,
rather than by continually qualifying one measure by the measure that succeeds it.
In Dowson's Breton Afternoon (Decorations), for instance, the recurring group of three
stressed syllables, usually preceded by two unstressed syllables, locates us in this
chosen landscape outside time and acts as a pledge of elemental durability "through
the sun-stained air", "On a steep hill-side", "I have lain hours long", "Only the faint
breeze pass", "On the lone hill-side", "in the gold sunshine", "In a perfumed dream-
land set", "while the clouds fly by", "May sleep deep down", "and red, red earth",
"till the rose-white angelus". In the short Symons examples, on the other hand, we
o
profit most by relating the similar and the dissimilar. In Morbidezza, the phrase "your

flesh is lilies" reduces by internal rhyme to the short repeated amphibrachic phrase in

"So still is"," The rapture", "Of whiteness", and at the end of the stanza, "lilies" is

>part of a trochaic rather than iambic group:"snow or lilies". And in At Dieppe: II.
On the Beach, the measures in the first line expand and lighten as more of the scene is

encompassed and more light is let in, while "Black" echoes "Night" and "Into the

distance" answers "on the horizon".

So much for purely rhythmic matters, where French prosodie modes, aided no
doubt by Impressionism and by an increasing recourse to unwrought or low-key speech,
seem to have filtered into English versification. About rhyme it is hard to be sure. Are
there English equivalents of the liberties taken with rhyme by Verlaine, Rimbaud,
Laforgue and other Symbolists, liberties like the disregarding of the rule of alternation,
rhyming singulars with plurals, masculines with feminines, assonance, and so on?
Obviously the English, with their poverty of rhymes—the French have the great
advantage of accentuable inflexions—and their diet of monosyllables, have not been
as concerned with the properties and proprieties of rhyme as the French have. Never
have the English been in the position of seeing rhyme as an essential rhythmic factor.
One could hardly expect, therefore, any marked similarity between French and English
rhyming practice. However, two tendencies bear mentioning, the one towards half-
rhyme, the other towards heterostrophic habits, something like free-rhyming. What
distinguishes half-rhyme from poor rhyme is the fact that one is conscious in the latter
of an unsuccesful attempt to make a full rhyme, whereas in the former one is not.
Half-rhyme actually makes capital of its so-called imperfection. The last century has
seen the upgrading of what previously had been poor rhymes to positive half-rhymes

136
— this involves not only eye-rhymes (love/prove), but rhymes of stressed and unstressed
syllables (certainties/eyes) and of feminine endings (lover/master). At what point in
prosodic history this upgrading took place it would be difficult to determine. But I
would like to suggest that it really began in the nineties and that contacts with France
had something to do with it.
If one looks forward to Symons's translations of Baudelaire (1925), one finds no
attempt to prevent the intrusion of oblique rhymes; Symons is determined to handle
French polysyllables, adverbs, and abstract nouns in the rhyme position. This leads
to conjunctions like "rhythmically/articulately" (La Muse malade), "furiously/sky"
(La Muse vénale), and "sensuality/Luxury" (La Vie antérieure). But there are also
more conventional assonant pairs such as "marshes/parches" (Le Guignon) and
"abysses/riches" (L'Homme et la mer). If we move back to his earlier, original collec-
tions, we find the same inclination, though perhaps to a less marked degree. Dowson,
too, is not averse to the vague disquiet of rhyme-sounds that only graze each other. The
stanza of his Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration (Verses) provides an interesting example:
A vowed patrol, in silent companies,
Life-long they keep before the living Christ:
In the dim church, their prayers and penances
Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.

It might come as a surprise to learn that in the other stanzas of the poem, the first
and third lines rhyme. "Companies/ penances" is hardly more than a rhyme of plural
forms, but it captures, as do the other oblique rhymes in this poem, the withdrawnness,
the reticence, of the nuns, and the impenetrability of their way of life. Such practice
as this reminds one both of the assonances of the French poets and, indirectly, of those
rhymes made approximate by the conjunction of a singular and a plural or of a mascu-
line and a feminine.
Another equivalent, if not borrowed, liberty in rhyme is the beginning of free-rhym-
ing within standard stanzas. Baudelaire's Voyage à Cythère is a poem of fifteen stanzas
in enclosed rhymes. John Gray's fourteen-stanza account in Silverpoints (1893)—the
tenth stanza is omitted—makes use not only of enclosed rhyme, but of alternating
rhyme and couplets as well. The enclosed rhymes congregate towards the end to convey
that process of inturning, so characteristic of Baudelairean conclusions, so that the
poet can fully exploit the finality of the final a of an abba scheme and the exasperat-
ing solidity of that scheme.11 The alternating rhyme covers the earlier, narrative sections
of the poem, while the single instance of couplets occurs when the hanging carcass most
repels and most fascinates, acting as a brake and registering near-mesmerized atten-
tiveness:
The eyes, two caves; and from the rotten paunch,
Its freight, too heavy, streamed along the haunch.
Hang for these harpies' hideous delight,
Poor rag of flesh, torn of thy sex and sight !
11
Gray uses an enclosed scheme in the final stanza of his translation of Baudelaire's Femmes
damnées, despite the alternating rhymes of the original and of the preceding stanzas of his own
version.

137
 Gray's version of Verlaine's Clair de lune is, if anything, stranger. Verlaine's three
quatrains in alternating rhyme have become a group of eleven lines followed by a.
typographycally separated couplet, rhyming abcdadececb(?)ff.12 Gray's version, in a
sense, makes pointless those repetitions in Verlaine that bind together the last two
stanzas, repetitions in which the object is, at its second appearance, decked out with
anteposed and postposed adjectives of a poignantly paradoxical nature; and indeed,
Gray studiously avoids any repetition: "moonbeams" reappear as "pallid rays",
"jets" reappear as "fountains". Instead, Gray has emphasized, by his final couplet,
that element of immobility, of resistance to the fluid dream and to the persuasions of
moonlight, birds, and fountains, that element which reveals all as decoration and which
is merely implied in Verlaine's "parmi les marbres"; Gray's final couplet runs: 'The
fountains tall that leap upon the lawns /Amid the garden gods, the marble fauns".
But against this, it can be argued that Gray's more intricate and unpredictable rhyme-
scheme in the first eleven lines captures only too well not only the pattern of Ver­
laine's stanzas—the self-sufficiency of Verlaine's first stanza being conveyed by the
temporary blankness of Gray's first four lines—but also, and more intimately, the
wayward way that dancers, songs, moon, birds, and fountains fuse toghether in ever-
changing patterns. Symons' translation of the same poem (1906) is formally much closer
to the original, but it is also rhythmically closer. Gray's scrupulous iambics look heavy
beside the characteristic rhythmic suppleness of Symons's phrasal arrangements:

O ' j U U i * U i U f » !

Your soul j is a sealed garden, | and there go ¡

V * \ V » U U ¡ » * U U \

With masque j and bergamasque j fair companies }

' U U / I 1/ / u j u f f J
Playing on lutes | and dancing | and as though j
/ U U U U r U * U U \\

Sad j under their fantastic fripperies. ||

But Symons himself is not a stranger to the heterostrophic poem. For example,
Gypsy Love (Silhouettes) is a compound of abab and xaoca quatrains, the rhyme scheme
of the last stanza of Souvenir (Silhouettes) deviates from that of the preceding stanzas,
and Décor de Théâtre. I: Behind the Scenes: Empire (London Nights) works out as follows :
aba/cbc/dee/dee. These tercets cast one back to the slightly more off-balance tercets of
Gray's Les Demoiselles de Sauve: aba/cde/fff/edc/aab. Such excursions remind one of
similar freedoms to be found in Rimbaud's 1872 poems, though it is impossible to know
how much of Rimbaud the English poets had picked up through Verlaine; but as an
equivalent prosodie venture, the parallel is still instructive.
But more remarkable in Symons's verse than his heterostrophic poems, are his
experiments with heterosyllabic lines. This area of English verse is difficult to discuss
for three reasons: first, it is dangerous to make any assumptions about the English
ear's sensitivity to syllabic variation; certainly it will not be predisposed to hear dif-
15
The final 6 is questioned simply because it is a plural—"jets''—while the first b is a singular —
"minuet". This is a peculiarly French rhyming freedom.

138
ferences between pair and impair lines as crucial—one has only to look at Symons's
translation of Baudelaire's La Musique to find a typical disregard for niceties like this:
the five-syllable lines are variously translated as hexasyllabic, heptasyllabic, and
octosyllabic. Secondly, where loose iambic pentameters begin and strict ones end is
impossible to tell, since we have no system that relates pronunciation to prosody, no
prosody based on pronunciation,13 as the French have, and therefore no binding con­
ventions for dealing with elision, synaeresis, and diaeresis. Thirdly, where we do find
syllabic variation, it is not easy to tell whether it is a nonchalant enjoyment of one of
the freedoms inhering in English verse or a quite conscious effort to exploit the expres­
sive potentialities inhering in syllabic variation. Much of Symons's work conforms to
the former category; but in much there is also an evident desire to establish syllabic
consciousness, part of the process necessary to the establishment of syllabic meter prop­
er, the English meter closest to French versification. Let us look at Symons's City
Nights I. In the Train (Silhouettes):

The train through the night of the town,

Through a blackness broken in twain
By the sudden finger of streets;
Lights, red, yellow, and brown,
From curtain and window-pane,
The flashing eyes of the streets.

Night, and the rush of the train,

A cloud of smoke through the town,
Scaring the life of the streets;
And the leap of the heart again,
Out into the night, and down
The dazzling vista of streets !

What is at first striking about this poem is its rigorous patterning and symmetry.
In the lines with repeated rhymes (i. e., 3, 6, 9, 12), there is a chiastic pattern of inclu­
sion and omission of the definite article: "of streets — of the streets — of the streets —
of streets"; lines 3 and 6 contain physical metaphors — "fingers" and "eyes" — while
lines 9 and 12 move into abstract and generalized — "life" and "vista"; lines 6 and
12 have the same basic syntax of noun group, the same participial adjective, while
lines 3 and 9 are both phrases, one adverbial, the other adjectival. The order of the
other rhymes of the first stanza — "town-twain-brown-pane"—is reversed in the second
stanza. The order of concepts in the first line of the poem—"train-through-night-
town"—is changed in the first two lines of the second stanza—"Night-train-through-
town". All this leads one to expect a similar rigor in syllabic count, particularly as
the lines are short and as there are no feminine endings. But the syllabic pattern runs
888677/777877. And we can account for these variations. The six-syllable line is an
abrupt, speeded-up enumeration of color sensations. The octosyllable in the second

13
This is what has made it so difficult to get syllabic meter, in which exactness of syllable
number is so crucial, off the ground and to suggest that it can be a disciplined metric.

139
stanza is a recovery of the rhythmic and emotional élan of the first three lines of the
poem, experienced inside the train; while the heptasyllables at the beginning of the
second stanza are more like a notational recapitulation of the initial octosyllables
from outside the train. We can point to elements of regularity that help control these
variations: the meter of line 5 (u/uuw) corresponds to the meter of line 11, and the
meter of line 6 (www) corresponds to that of line 12, but the overall effect is still
one of exquisite imbalance, precisely as in Gray's Les Demoiselles de Sauve, where the
perfect symmetry of the tercets around the monorhymed fulcrum of the third stanza
is put slightly out of true by the deviant final tercet.
Effects like these are totally characteristic of vers libéré, of the careful and refined
outrages on order committed by Verlaine and Rimbaud and those who succeeded them.
They are a connoisseur's view of freedom, stimulating the palate rather than rendering
drunk, enough to set the nerves on edge, "des accords/ Harmonieusement dissonants"
as Verlaine has it in Nuit du Walpurgis classique (Poèmes saturniens). Symons is, I
think, pushing through to a sense of the significance of syllable-number and how it
can create and control metrical possibilities, how it can suggest fractions of itself and
relationships with lines of a different length. Such a sense must be the basis of syllabic
meter. Symons asks us to see syllable-number not as the accidental result of a meter,
but as an active counterforce to meter.
One further example must suffice to show how deeply imbued Symons's work is
with the conventions of vers libéré, of precise and intricately organized forms of dis­
equilibrium. In the first stanza of Nora on the Pavement (London Nights)
7 As Nora on the pavement
10 Dances, and she entrances the grey hour
10 Into the laughing circle of her power,
9 The magic circle of her glances,
11 As Nora dances on the midnight pavement

the heterosyllabic structure seems to trace the gradual lengthening of an impair line
(always with feminine ending), a growth obstructed, even opposed, by a decasyllabic
couplet (with masculine endings). The superiority of the decasyllable seems to be under­
lined by the fact that it is the only line which properly rhymes; the first and last lines
of the stanza have the same rhyme-word, and the fourth line does not rhyme at all.
But this last fact, which makes the fourth line logically the weakest, is an illusion,
because the fourth line has two internal rhymes in the second line—the internal rhyme
in the fifth line is peculiar to this first stanza and not a principle of the stanzaic struc­
ture; in other words, the fourth line rhymes more than any of the others, and does so
with the complicity of one of its enemies, the first decasyllable. This fourth line is
responsible in another way, retrospectively, for disturbing the even complacency of
the decasyllables; because the fourth line has a feminine rhyme-word, and because
this rhyme-word occurs at the beginning of the second line, it means that the first
decasyllable must always begin with an inverted foot, thus upsetting the iambic
rhythm installed by the first line, a rhythm which one might have expected the deca­
syllables, with their other regularities, to have strictly maintained. I have described

140
this stanza in terms of an involved verse "strategy", as a conflict between pair and
impair, because I think this is how Symons may have imagined it, and it does seem t o
me t o demonstrate an awareness of the essential differences of " a t t i t u d e ' ' or "spirit''
in the pair and impair which is indispensable to an understanding of French vers
libéré.
We have supposed t h a t the English ear listens little to syllables, and t h a t it listens
even less the longer t h e line becomes. B u t the poet can engender syallable-sensitivity
by a careful and marked use of the caesura, which in much English verse is indeed a
rhythmic resource, but which is rarely seen as organizing the r h y t h m within the single
line, or as creating, within the single line, syllabic, and thus metrical, variations. This
is what Gray does in his translation of Verlaine's Bon chevalier masqué (Sagesse).
Gray's alexandrines are in fact printed in two separate parts. How far this printing
is a typographer's whim or necessity—given t h a t Silverpoints was produced as a fine
book and t h a t its pages are both long and narrow—and how far the layout is consonant
with the poet's intentions is impossible to say, but it produces a most telling effect.
I quote Gray's version of the last three distichs: 14

Trembling, incredulous
I sat; b u t ill at ease,
As one who, in a holy trance,
strange visions sees.
While the good cavalier,
remounted on his horse,
Left me a parting nod
as he retook his course,
And shouted to me
(still I hear his cries):
"Once only can the miracle
avail. — Be wise !"

For the most part, Gray divides his line in the middle, b u t here we have not only
a pentameter, b u t also, as elsewhere in the translation, divisions occuring eccentrically
and occasionally involving a kind of césure enjambante of the kind to be found, on
occasion, in the original—the only other deviation from "correctness" in the original
being the trimetres in the last three lines. The eccentricities usually bring with them
metrical changes (e.g., second line here: u//uo/uf\//u*) and the syncopations of structure
alert us to momentary intensifications of awe or of the drama of the narrative; t h e
final hemistich, for example, abruptly juxtaposes the brevity of transience and the
brevity of urgency, and expresses the immediacy with which divine help must be su­
perseded b y self-help. The disposition of these lines and its effect takes us forward to
Pound's resourceful use of different margins and signals a recovery, by English poets,
of the prosodic versatility of the caesura, won with the help of the French example.

14
Gray has omitted the fifth distich of the original in his translation.

141
 But do we, after all, need to hold off from the logical and concluding revelation—
that free-verse poems are to be found in Symons's work? From his Violet cycle (Lon­
don Nights) I quote the final strophe of the eighth poem, At the Stage-door:
Steadily, fade after face,
Cheeks with the blush of the paint yet lingering, eyes
Still with their circle of black . . .
But hers, but hers ?
Rose-leaf cheeks, and flower-soft lips, and the grace
Of the vanishing Spring come back,
And a child's heart blithe in the sudden and sweet surprise,
Subtly expectant, that stirs
In the smile of her heart to my heart, of her eyes to my eyes.
The whole poem is vividly heterosyllabic, heterostrophic and free-rhymed. And
as we see in this final stanza, Symons breaks the two-rhyme barrier (i. e., more than
two rhymes are active at a given time, interwoven), so that the overall scheme cannot
be reduced to familiar "regular" fractions (couplets, enclosed quatrains, alternating
quatrains); the strophe is, in fact, constantly straining towards a stichic existence in
which rhymes are no longer parts of preordained schemes, but improvised connections,
registering the tempo of emotion, the changing levels of consciousness at which memory
takes place, as the poet ventures hesitantly into his own poem.
Roughly speaking, this poem is composed of alternating long (between 10 and 15)
and short (between 6 and 8) syllables, as Symons's impressions lose and gain in focus,
proximity, and urgency. The only exceptions to this "rule" are to be found in the first
and last stanzas. The second and third lines of the poem are both long:
Here at the edge of the pavement I wait, and my feet
Paw at the ground like the horses' hoofs in the street.

The poet situates himself from the outside, presents his position as cold fact; and the
impression in the second of these lines is a rationally created literary one, a simile.
This point of view will give way, in the second stanza, to a world experienced from
within, as a process of consciousness, where impressions are not fashioned but assault
the sensory facuities in confusion and with speed, causing not a fine literary superior-
ty but a curious existential anxiety. The second exception occurs in the final stanza,
where two short lines are found together:
Still with their circle of black . . .
But hers, but hers?
Here the general existential anxiety becomes a specific anxiety about a specific
individual, given pathos by the rather macabre overtones of the first of the lines.
This sudden obstinacy of the short line encodes the effort of the mind to hoist itself
out of the continuing web of enveloping sensation, like the cry of a drowning man who
suddenly comes to a realization of his predicament. After this momentary and acute
concern, the flow of impressions is relieved of all anxiety and assumes a benign and
purely decorative nature. Threading their way through this overall structure are the

142
two dominant kinds of short line, the hexasyllable and the heptasyllable. The hexa-
syllable is confined to the second stanza, where it appears four times, and is a relatively
unstable metric structure, part of the environmental threat. The heptasyllabic line,
on the other hand, appears in all stanzas (six times in all) and is a much more reliable
metric structure (in all but one instance having a ^w/w/ pattern), a leitmotif of reas­
surance, occuring once in the first stanza, twice in the second, and three times in the
third, where the crisis is confronted and resolved.
To all intents and purposes, this is a free-verse poem, but like vers libéré it is a
curious mixture of transgression and fastidious formality, of nonchalance and deco­
rum. And in some cases, the distinction between liberated verse and free verse must
be made on the basis of the informing attitude; verse formally free may really be no
more than elasticated formality.
Though examples of free verse are rare among the nineties poets, our conclusion
must be that their poetry engineered an almost complete evolution of prosodic prin­
ciples, concentrating mainly in the middle ground between the regular and the free.
And the continuity of this evolution is pointed to by the fact that the nineties poets
were not only liberators of verse, but also participated in that revival of medieval
romance fixed forms which occured towards the end of the nineteenth century and
which we normally associate with Dobson, Gosse, and Lang; Henley is perhaps the
epitome of this strange combination. This perhaps indicates that fixed forms and
free verse are more akin than is usually thought; but, above all, it does demonstrate
the enormous prosodic range of the nineties poets. Some of this range—the discovery
of cadence, the importance of syllabic variation, surreptitious incursions of half-rhyme,
a willingness to countenance heterostrophic arrangements, some recovery in the area
of the caesura—may owe much to contemporary French practice. At all events, we
must suppose that translations from French poets brought the English translators
face to face with French prosody and encouraged them to adapt its idiosyncracies.
Translations are a form of poetic licence inasmuch as they have a built-in excuse for
approximations to correctness and rhythmic looseness; and like licentious verse comedy,
they have perhaps contributed more than we suspect to the extension of the limits of
respectable prosody.
But the prosodie inventiveness and versatility of the period are somewhat marred
by two factors. First, the versatility often presents itself as confusion. The poets os­
cillate between a rigor of the most mindless kind and a variability and indeterminacy
that are subtle and suggestive; their innovations take place sometimes against a regu­
larly metric background, and sometimes involve the eradication of metrical thinking;
it is never easy to make sense of the development of verse technique in this period as
a development. Secondly, the poets themselves seem to have had little critical awareness
of what they were doing. One does not ask for a program of reform, but one might
expect some comment on the implications of change, some discussion of the problems
posed by the hypertrophy of Victorian conventions. Presumably these two factors are
connected, and the second goes a long way towards explaining the apparent lacuna in
English prosodie development in the area of liberated verse, and the consequent
overestimation of the originality of the Pound—Eliot generation.

143
 KURT WAIS

GERMAN POETS IN THE PROXIMITY OF BAUDELAIRE

AND THE SYMBOLISTS

Germany was not without a successor to Mallarmé—namely, Stefan George. But the
artistic foreground was occupied by two big names, Richard Wagner's and the young
Friedrich Nietzsche's, the latter one of the important rediscoverers of Aeschylus as a
counterpart to the rationalist Euripides. While Gerhart Hauptmann (in The Weavers)
established Zola's plebeian naturalism and Thomas Mann explored bourgeois natural­
ism, the external preconditions of a symbolistic-poetic stage were created by Wagner's
writings on the reform of the theater, and by the patronage of German princes. Over­
laden ceiling paintings, theatrical staircases, and loge cupids in the Second Empire
style were renounced, and the completely darkened theater was adopted by Gordon
Craig for the 1909 staging of Vsevolod Meyerhold's Tristan, in which the correspondence
between the music and the movements of the performers and of the chorus carried
over into the decorations,
The innovation from France was greeted as an alliance against the realists. Her­
man Bahr gave the Viennese a definition of decadence which had been used since 1890
and which implied a synaesthetic art according to Charles Morice and René Ghil; to
the latter's Traité du verbe, containing Mallarmé's short foreword, Bahr added: "I
believe, therefore, that naturalism will be overcome by a nervous romanticism; or,
rather, I should like to say that it. will be overcome through a romanticism of the
nerves." The term neo-Romanticism was, in fact, preferred by literary critics to the de­
signation Symbolism. Nietzsche creeps in one way or the other. A polemicist does not go
unpunished. "Du hättest singen sollen, oh ! meine Seele." His antipathy to Baudelaire
barred him access to verses such as those from Bénédiction: "Soyez béni, mon Dieu,
qui donnez la souffrance". What casually emerged with the late Huysmans was never
noticed by the Berlin Nietzsche circle.
All of this helps to explain why the first significant echo to French Symbolism
produced in world literature took the form of a certain reverence for Verlaine and for
Maeterlinck. In the first case, German readers found a welcome confirmation of a fa­
miliar form: the musicality recalling the Volkslied was found in endearing delicacy,
refined and secretive, and at the same time, it was straightforward in its language
and accompanied by an intriguing personal legend. Verlaine was embraced for a long
time along with Jacobsen and Chekhov, and the uniquely beautiful eulogy of Mallar­
mé's Tombeau for Verlaine shows that this admiration could be free of sentimentality.
When, parallel to France, taste changed abroad, Valéry warned, in a short essay, of
the danger of underrating Verlaine's conscious quest for form. The young Hofmann-

10 Balakian 145
sthal's stage plays, modelled on the example of Alfred de Musset, capture t h e most as­
tonishing reminiscence—in their lament over dissipated youth and early intimations
of death—and offer an alternative viewpoint to a recent assertion b y Manfred Gsteiger
t h a t none of the countless German imitations of Verlaine are really satisfactory.
The invasion of undefinable presentiments in the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck,
more permeating t h a n Ibsen's symbols of ghosts, temporarily found broad literary
support thanks t o the handsomely subsidized theatrical settings of the German theater.
I n Ghent, the young Charles van Lerberghe attempted a bold theatrical work entitled
Les Flaireurs. Immediately afterwards Maeterlinck, a fellow student of the author
of Les Flaireurs, caused a sensation by creating a number of stage plays in a similar
spirit. The first of these was his unperformable dramatization of the fairy tale Princess
Maleen, by the Brothers Grimm. Maeterlinck's imagination was also sparked, as was
t h a t of many others, by Huysmans' novel A Rebours. In 1884, the year of its publica­
tion, he snatched u p the reference in the novel to the old Netherlandish texts of the
mystic Ruysbroek and translated two of them into French. Mallarmé and an admiring
spokesman, Mirbeau, sponsored him. With additional sarcasm Rudolph Kassner named
the dramatist Hermann Bahr as the responsible transmitter, since he was "Wiens
Verfechter alles Modernen von Paris, wohin er sich zuweilen begeben h a t t e , zur Orien-
tierung in geistigen Dingen, gleich der Inhaberin eines Modesalons K u n d e holend,
was im Frühjahr getragen werde, von Maurice Maeterlinck, der im Figaro von dem
obén genannten Octave Mirbeau schon mit Shakespeare verglichen worden war, in
die Zeitung brachte, er sei alles in allem ein Mystiker, der Bier t r i n k t " . 1 Although a
visit with Maeterlinck left him with a favorable impression, Kassner retained his
ironic position about the hasty discovery of the new trend.
Ruysbroek's influence as well as t h a t of Mallarmé's circle, which he, soon felt he
had outgrown, was a phase Maeterlinck soon abandoned in his drama Pelléas et Meli-
sande. Although he was to gain a measure of immortality through Debussy's opera
version, he was not pleased with it. Yet German literary history is hard to imagine
without him. The last repercussions of his influence extend to Robert Musil, and per­
haps even to Franz Kafka. 2
More important is the fact t h a t Maeterlinck was one of the many Tuesday guests
who more or less nimbly passed on as their own Mallarmé's utterances on the esthet­
ics of art and poetry to a wide circle of readers. André Gide's Traité du Narcisse, p u b
lished in 1891, provides a good example; it was a kind of epilogue t o Prose pour dei
Esseintes ("Chaste Eden: Jardin des Idées . . . Tout était parfait comme un nombre")

1
"Vienna's champion of everything modem from Paris, which he had on occasion visited ir
order to obtain orientation in spiritual matters from Maurice Maeterlinck, just as the owner of e
fashion salon fetches tidings of what will be worn in the spring. Maeterlinck had already beer
compared to Shakespeare in Figaro by the above-mentioned Octave Mirbeau, and Bahr publishet
in the newspaper that, everything taken together, Maeterlinck was a beer-drinking mystic.'
Rudolph Kassner, Buch der Érinnerung (Leipzig, 1938), p. 107 (second éd., Zurich, 1954, p. 89)
I am grateful to my colleague and friend, Ernst Zinn, for this reference.
2
For a detailed study of Maeterlinck's influence on German poets, see my article, "Maurici
Maeterlinck, initiateur de poètes allemands", Synthèses, 17 (1952), pp. 129 ff. My article was un
fortunately published without footnotes and not without translation errors. (In fact, there nevei
was a personal meeting between Maeterlinck and Musil.)

146
 and Skandieren, against whose normality Mallarmé's Igitur had rebelled ("le temps
est n é " for the destroyer of the "Livre immémorial"). "Silencieux" it is called, "ls
Poète pieux . . . se penche sur les symboles"; one thing "lui suffit, symbole, pour révé­
ler son archétype . . . De telles œuvres ne se cristallisent que dans le silence." Nothing
else can be read in t h e compendium in which Maeterlinck collected his essays, Le Trésor
des humbles. I t hardly contains an idea which Mallarmé had not already expressed,
b u t the readers did not know this. The early essays of Rilke, which only recently have
come to light, show how reverentially he regarded this vade mecum as an authority.
Hofmannsthal, too, in his interpretation of George's Das Jahr der Seele and Hebbel's
poems (in Das Gespräch über Gedichte) approaches the question of similes and symbols
in the same spirit: "Oh, vielmehr, es gibt nichts als das, nichts anderes". B u t enthu­
siasm is soon overcome b y reaction to slogans: "Wie gern wollte ich dir das Wort
'Symbol' zugestehen, ware es nicht schal geworden, daß michs ekelt. Man müBte ein
Gespräch wie dieses mit Kindern, mit Frommen oder mit Dichtern führen können.
Dem Kind ist alles ein Symbol, dem Frommen ist Symbol das einzig Wirkliche und
der Dichter vermag nichts anderes zu erblicken". 3 T h a t was believed then, 4 even in
thoughts about the writings of Novalis-Hardenberg which had never been quite for­
gotten, whose Jünglinge von Sais Maeterlinck translated, and in the general assertion,
which Heinrich Heine evidently regarded as something new—namely, t h a t nature does
not suffice as material for the artist's symbols, "sondern daB ihm die bedeutendsten
Typen, als eingeborene Symbolik eingeborener Ideen, gleichsam in der Seele geoffen-
bart werden". 5 For this reason he said of himself, " I n der K u n s t bin ich Supernatura-
list", 8 a catchphrase retained from Baudelaire's salon prose and from the writings of
Nerval.
The affection for Verlaine as well as the overrating of Maeterlinck lead t o the con­
clusion t h a t the pleasure principle was a decisive gauge of literary value for the Ger­
man reader. The latter paid no attention to the fact t h a t Maeterlinck's translations of
the Flemish mystic Ruysbroek were prompted by the references of his countryman,
Joris-Karl Huysmans; t h a t he subsequently became a rediscoverer of the painter
Grünewald; and t h a t he, together with his friends, the polemicist Leon Blay and the
painter Georges Rouault, arrived at a new brotherhood via the downtrodden charac­
ters of t h e gutter, the "scum" of the Fleurs du Mal. Disciples of Nietzsche or Marx
considered the route easy, monkish, and maintained t h a t it exalted suffering. The

3
"How gladly I would have used the word 'symbol' for you had it not become empty, which
disgusts me. I t should be possible to carry on a conversation such as this with children, with be­
lievers, or with poets. To the child everything is a symbol; to the believer, the symbol is the only
thing Which is real; and the poet cannot perceive anything else". "Das Gespråch über Gedichte",
Oesammelte Werke in Einzetausgaben, Prosa I I , ed. Herbert Stainer, (Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart,
1959);4 pp. 84. 87.
The symbolic narrative technique of Theodor Fontane provides an example, as do poems
such as the Nachtgerausche of C. F . Meyer. For the latter, see H . Henk, The Poetry of Conrad Ferdi­
nand Meyer (Madison, Wis., 1954) and S. Sandberg-Bruan, Wege zum Symbolismus. Zur Entste-
hungsgeschichte
5
dreier Gedichte C. F . Meyers (Freiburg, 1969).
"But rather the most meaningful types, as the innate symbol of innate ideas, are, as it were,
disclosed
6
to the artist in the soul . . . "
" I n art, I am a supernaturalist". "Französische Künstler", 1831 Såmtliche Schriften, 3rd
edn., ed. K. Briegleb (Darmstadt, 1971). p . 46.

10* 147
conception of Mallarmé has remained too narrow to trust his inner dialogue with his
fellow man, with the everyday worker whose utter seriousness is set forth in Confron­
tation and Conflict.
The year 1889 is significant for the literary historian because it was at this moment
t h a t Stefan George, a name important for the future of German literary style, came
into contact with the French poets. The twenty-one year old philology student inter­
rupted his extensive journeys to go to Paris for the spring and summer months, followed
by a visit to Spain and a stay among the English Pre-Raphaelites. At t h a t time, W. B .
Yeats had placed Mallarmé's words over a p a r t of his autobiographies (Epilogue,
1887/91) to convey the idea t h a t the whole era was permeated b y the trembling of
the veil. I t is known t h a t George brought back from his Darmstadt high school years
an Italian poetic ideal, t h a t he had early contact with t h e verses of Petrarch and Tasso,
and t h a t he used the constructions of an arbitrary language to echo the Romance
Languages. An allowable assumption is t h a t his impressions during his first Paris
visit almost resembled a dream of form, one which was simultaneously superstitiously
cramped and controlled. A fortunate coincidence gained him, as is well known, the
friendship of the poet Albert Saint-Paul, who arranged with Albert Mockel to secure
Mallarmé's permission for a chair to be kept free for den jungen Goethe on Tuesday
evenings. Saint-Paul had shown him the drunken Verlaine; more important, he had
introduced him to the Fleurs du Mal, and an adaptation of a selection of these poems
remained important in George's development. Like Baudelaire, George pretended
to have only pursued his pleasure in forms, b u t it was more t h a n t h a t ; it was a step
toward the haute symphonie which Mallarmé recommended to the young Valéry ("gar­
dez ce ton r a r e " , a letter of May 5, 1891). These were not the forms of an imitator, for
George managed his own language and French as well all too imperiously and arbitrar­
ily. W h a t can be done in German has its limits, and it remains, after all, impossible
to form Läste as a plural of Last in order to have it rhyme with Äste. George's inde­
pendent poems of t h a t period are still cramped, despite their genuine promise of beauty
and the auspicious tension in the solemnity of word and verse. Their symbolic element
remained for a considerable period trapped in an artificiality which does not fail to
emerge, and is often mistaken for a pose. His precipitous stylization doubtless corre­
sponds to a tendency of the time whose emblem, "Die I n s e l ' , was used b y an authori­
tative journal and publishing group. (Die Insel was founded in 1899 b y the Bremen
Hanseatics, Alfred Walter Heymel and the later imitator of Valéry, Rudolf Alexander
Schröder, and published works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the first issue. The house
journal was still called Das Inselschiff during the years 1919 to 1942.) Of this a t t e m p t
at disengagement and the later mockery of the concept of Vart pour l'art, the latter
manner emerged as the stronger.
George carefully sought to sharpen his eye for things visible; to this end he wrote de­
scriptions of paintings almost as if he were doing a school exercise, and went through
an apprenticeship of the wealth of gestures in the Divina Commedia. W h a t he thought
desirable for German poetry, as he once told Saint-Paul, was to pass through just one
phase like t h a t of the Parnasse. W h a t magnetized him poetically at times was the under­
world in its stony petrifaction, as in the esthetically heavy volume Les Stalactites of

148
Banville. If George created sudden miracle flowers in his Algabal poems, they seem to
be of the same species as Mallarmé's L'absente de tous bouquets. The general festivity
and solemnity of George's verses, apart from the short apex of the volume, Das Jahr
der Seele, imbued the symbols with few revelations of his own ego.
George was not content to imitate Mallarmé's permissive, undogmatic manner in
his dealings with his own circle of friends which formed around the Blätter fur die
Kunst, founded in 1892. Memories of Catholic ceremonies from his childhood, the
affiliations of the ancient Greeks, and Nietzsche's dream of an elite effected a climate
of a quasi-sacred solemnity, created the vision of a youth dedicated to service in public
life, in science, and in political action. The wish was fulfilled—politically at the cost
of human life, artistically through the rediscovery of Hölderlin and J e a n Paul. George
knew t h a t the Tuesday guests at Mallarmé's would turn into the coryphaei of the
next generation. The first book t h a t George presented to Hugo von Hofmannstahl
during his stay in Vienna in 1891 was one b y Mallarmé. From a reading of George's
statement of gratitude in "Mallarmé" (now available in Tage und Taten), no one can
fail to comprehend the significance of the salutation as explained by one of the admir­
ers: "Meister, weil du am wenigsten nachgeahmt werden kannst und doch so grosses
über sie vermochtest," "weil du für sie immer noch ein geheimnis bewahrst und uns
den glauben lässest an jenes schöne eden, das alleni ewig ist" 7 (a reference to the con­
flict with Mallarmé which Ghil had wanted). Probably it was first of all the fruit of
maturation in George whose poem " F r a n k e n " expressed gratitude for the secretly shield­
ed "Held und Sanger", quoting Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, then Verlaine, "und für sein
denkbild blutend: Mallarmé".
The new lyrical domain of Rainer Maria Rilke is far more extensive than t h a t of
George, and for a while he assimilated many of the artistic innovations made by the
French writers. Using an image borrowed from the revered book on bees by Maeterlinck
(1901), he compared himself to a bee which gathers honey here and there. He was in­
satiable in his quest for encounters which might be helpful to him in effecting new
transformations; but he never intended to tarry, believing himself to be someone "der
nicht geliebt zu werden wünschte", a notion provoked perhaps by the confluence of
languages in his country. He would have liked to comprehend the painterly attitude
In the picture poems of Gautier, for example, b u t his own Buch der Bilder became on
ihe contrary an inner quest for the "Aussichtheit" of foreign knowledge. H e imparted
ove to the entrapped pictures. The volume was an expression of "Herzwerk". From
tLes Fleurs du Mal he learned more about his fellow man t h a n did George. I t was Rilke
who elucidated for German letters the darker aspects of the Fleurs du Mal—the stifled
and enslaved of mankind, the excluded, the ones who suffer from their own muteness,
the drinkers, lovers, and artists. Not everything of a symbolic nature t h a t Rilke drew
out of Baudelaire's work is necessarily valid. H e moved toward a more tender stance,
even to more effeminate transitions in his quest for the flow of life's festivities than
his French encounters afforded him, and it seems he felt t h a t he was reaching his goal

7
"Because you can be so little imitated and yet can influence so strongly", "because you
always keep a secret for them and permit us to believe in beautiful Eden, which alone is eternal".

149
only when during the summer of 1914 he came in close contact with the biologist
Jakob von Uxküll. Nor did he conceal the fact that the foreign features of Baudelaire
posed difficulties for him.
Three turning points from abroad between the beginning of the century and the
outbreak of war led German poetry to new innovations. Although in his lyrical type-
case play F. T. Marinetti could actually be associated with Mallarmé, particularly
in his dice-throwing typography, what he offered was the purest expression of anti-
symbolism. The alleged symbiosis with the paintings of the Futurists that were dis­
played in the forests by the Berlin gallery man, Walden, would in reality have remained
poetic figments without the element of humor that developed in Palazzoschi or in the
ensuing Symbolist lyricism of Alexandre Blok or Apollinaire. The reader of the period
also had available the materialistic poetics of Arno Holz, or of August Stramm, whose
wish it was to express his unfilled desires in symbolist plays written for the journal,
Der Sturm.
As a counterpart to the Symbolistes, a second wave of writings appeared under the
label, Expressionism. The term was actually a misunderstanding related to the prestige
of Maeterlinck's name in Germany. His early poems, Serres chaudes, had never found
a readership, and had already been disowned by the author. Imitators followed in his
wake in the representation of a senselessly frenzied world. The nihilistically grotesque
verses that emerged in Berlin about the future destruction of the world (Hans David­
son, called Jacob van Hoddis) were inspired by Maeterlinck as was the "Dadaistic"
manner of the playful Anna Blume (1919) by Kurt Schwitters. These were preceded
by the grotesque humorists, who were found almost exclusively in Germany, and
were introduced by the still popular, nonsensical Galgenlieder by Christian Morgen­
stern in 1905. Their followers included Klabund, Ringelnatz, and others, marginally
also the painterly capers of the young Feininger or those of Paul Klee and Max Ernst.
With the wisdom of hindsight, one must inevitably separate what has just been
mentioned from a third aspect of the literary scene. With Rimbaud (1906), Karl Klam­
mer, a lieutenant in a Ruthenian border garrison, continued what he had begun with
the translations of Verlaine's work for the journal Pan. Later, he was to become wealthy
through the restitution payments made to him; Brecht plagiarized some of the lyrics
of the Dreigroschenoper from Klammer's Villon. Klammer and others, especially W.
Küchler, rendered more than just the remarkable Bateau ivre. Klammer had real­
istically realized what the "expressionistic" imitators of the overadaptations of the
assimilators had not understood regarding the Trunkene Schiff8 that no further addi­
tions of high-powered vocabulary could improve upon what already differentiated the
monologue of Rimbaud's rudderless ship from that of its likely source, the Vieux
Solitaire of Dierx. The frequently unrestrained audacity evident in most of the later
attempts to assimilate Rimbaud's poetry spoils the pleasure derived from many of the
successful translations of symbols or from the inventions of their equivalents. In dozens
and dozens of literal correspondences the encounter with Rimbaud is convincingly
conveyed, reflecting the melancholy of his verses, which together with Hölderlin's

8
Th. Dâubler, 1910; P. Zech, 1927; A. Wolfenstein, 1930, among others.

150
 writings influenced Trakl. The subsequent impact of Rimbaud can be evidenced in
the dynamic qualities he provoked in Paul Claudel, bringing about Symbolistic inter­
polations and reiterations in Claudel's work. Hence in this instance also Rimbaud's
influence was ambivalent but all the same it yielded the basis for the beginning of the
stageplay, Le Soulier de satin. Whoever considers the arduous self-assertion of Claudel
on the stage knows what courage Jakob Hegner showed in Hellerau when he intro­
duced and performed plays of Claudel in pre-1914 Germany. It was also an important
landmark after the ruinous effects of the later stages of Maeterlinck's theatre.
The end of the first World War, with its years of starvation, suppression, and pov­
erty was not calculated to contend with the fragile revival of Symbolist verse by
Valéry, where Mallarmé's vocabulary was relived—the Hérodiade as La Jeune Parque,
the Nénúfar blanc in the poetologically interpretable poem, Les Pas. Precisely through
the medium of the symbol in his work, the repelling power of what was only physical
became more threatening (Skizze einer Schlange). The comfortable atmosphere of the
Mediterranean homeland became more intoxicating (the swimmer on the coast of the
sea-cemetery, the columns, the palms). The image of lovers, as the essence of integrally
complete forces, was carried to the limits of allegory.
Forms of spirituality, even to the extent of fanaticism, abounded in the meantime
in Germany, and entered into competition with what art had newly created. Some
took refuge in churches and universities, others came from powerful organizations
supported in part by funds from abroad, as for example the Anthroposophists of Ru­
dolf Steiner, who had been performing his initiation dramas since 1910, and who in
1913 began the construction of the "Goetheanum" in Basel. Before the movement
narrowed to prehistoric and anthropological hypotheses, there were "ekstatische Kon­
fessionen" (M. Buber), chiliastic-pneumatic quests for God, and research into the trans­
cendental by Kafka. Whatever was symbolic was brought from China, Iceland, and
Africa in a gigantic series of texts from the publisher, Eugen Diederich; the Hassidic
symbolic tradition was passed on through Martin Buber's Ich und Du to Paul Celan,
who translated Rimbaud and Valéry's La Jeune Parque into German. Among the few
contacts with France during that time of the Ruhr occupation were the studies of
Ernst Robert Curtius and those of the Catholic circle promoting Paul Claudel. The
philologist E. R. Curtius, the author of Literarische Wegbereiter des modernen Frank­
reich, was, according to later admissions, disappointed in his expectations. In one
respect, however, he reached his goal: through translations and meaningful interpre­
tations he had transmitted an acquaintance with Paul Valéry which was more precise
and strong than that to be gained through the efforts of Hermann von Keyserling.
Curtius confirms, in reliance on a type of poeta doctus and without the astonishment of
Rudolf Kassner (Hommage volume for Valéry, 1927), that the mathematical thinking
of Valéry "did not hinder his poetry". Through the courageous and, in the best sense
of the word, cosmopolitan initiative of a few people, German—French discussions took
place in Pontigny (Valéry, Gide, Schlumberger, Curtius, Kassner, Du Bos). There
were many reasons, including shyness, for Rilke's rejection of André Gide's invitation
to attend. Nothing occurred which could compare with the effect created earlier by the
volume containing the translations of Rimbaud, because the continuing mortification

151
of Europe, the feeling of being shamed and of putting others to shame led to an in­
creased counter-activity among many people in Germany and so accentuated polem­
ical hate t h a t they suspected furtive selfishness even in sincere artistic desires, and
were coldly indifferent to the serious character of human affinities.
During the postwar years Rilke had the opportunity of completing the Duineser
Elegien. His Fünf Gesänge of August 1914 showed renunciation a t breaking off the
apprenticeship he had served across the border, "denn zu begreifen, denn zu lernen
und vieles in Ehren innen zu halten, auch Fremdes, war euch gefühlter Beruf". 9
His possessions in Paris were seized, and in 1919 Swiss friends took him away from
the misery of his homeland. When Paul Valéry interrupted his journey from Paris
to the Vittoriale of Gabriele D'Annunzio in order for Rilke to show him the ruins of
Muzot he was horrified by the poet's extreme loneliness. Each of them felt "douceur"
upon meeting t h e other. Valéry represented the crowning of an indestructible tradi­
tion t h a t was the most important event since Baudelaire, the "Lyriker des koperni-
kanischen Systems" (Ernst Jünger).
Rilke felt strengthened in his resolve to foster the triumphs of French poetry,
which were by no means yet exhausted, when he discovered in February 1921 a poem,
Le Cimetière marin, t h a t had appeared a few months earlier as a result of Valéry's
recent return to writing poetry. "Valéry est venu chez moi comme un autre moi-
même". His entire future creativity seemed to direct him to the task of rethinking
this divine writing to be able to render it in German.
Instead of the complete agreement which Rilke hoped to get from Valéry, there
remained an absence of "vrais rapports". Rilke had hoped t h a t no other affinity would
supercede his relationship with Valéry. Valéry was by no means unfriendly, b u t he is
reported to have said a few years after Rilke's death t h a t he felt this poet t o be too
little "pudique". Upon receiving the book of translations, "cette somme de consente­
ment, d'obéissance, et d'activité parallèle" (Rilke's dedication), Valéry came to doubt,
because of the inclusion of some French poems by Rilke, whether he was dealing
"with a really great poet". The French editions of Rilke are said to have remained
unopened in his library, the pages uncut, b u t he left behind Reconnaissance à Rilke
(Rilke volume of N R F ) and an admiring word about the Duineser Elegien and referred
to the "grand poète", "un des plus glorieux au sens noble". In 1924, he paid homage to
the Mediterranean and to D'Annunzio, whom he honored in 1933: " D u hast mir das
Erlebnis vermittelt, in dir den absoluten T y p des Poeten verkörpert zu sehen: ein
Wesen, das gegen die Zeit lebt". Valéry's responsibilities diverted him during the
days of Rilke's last visit to Paris in 1925, although Rilke had had high expectations
of seeing him; Valéry was sorry about the missed opportunity after Rilke's death.
Rilke was not the last poet who was convinced t h a t a poem such as Aurore would,
with its utter magic, be effective in German (letter to Kippenberg, Nov. 28, 1925).
The critical prose of Valéry had, in the meantime, gained a German readership who
appreciated precisely its seventy and abruptness. His old friend Gide, who found

9
"For to comprehend, to learn, and keep much in honor even what was alien was a heartfelt
profession for you".

152
La Jeune Parque simply boring (L'Arche, Oct. 1945) and too derivative of Mallarmé
{Journal, 7. 3. 1927), was inclined to accord more enduring importance to Valéry's
prose than to his lyrical works.
Henri de Régnier's essay on Mallarmé had just appeared in German in the journal
of the naturalists, Die Gesellschaft (1898, 4, p. 22 ff), and Rilke agreed: "Oh, zu sagen
so, wie selber die Dinge niemals/innig meinten zu sein". 1 0 Mallarmé became for Rilke
"der sublimste, der 'dichteste' Dichter unserer Zeit". 1 1 (To Bodlander, March 23, 1922).
The most important German response to the Symbolistes was manifested in a
second turning to Arthur Rimbaud in the 1920 , s, adecade after Georg Trakl. I t consisted
of a venture of Bertolt Brecht's during the period of his first plays, quite different
from his later Lehrstücke and the futile expression of hopelessness they convey. These
earlier works show an appreciation of the breath of nature in the manner of Trakl, and
they express readiness for and affirmation of destruction. B u t Trakl seemed too tired
for the frenzied dynamism of the poem. The legacy of Baudelaire, the confident re­
sonance of the verse, never achieved a comparable effect. Corpses floating in the water
—in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner they float between greenish ice floes, in the Bateau
ivre in the green snow night—are again present.
As the girl vanishing in the river in Trakl's work, the imagery of the young Brecht
reflected the solemn greatness of the French tradition, an indicator of reserves of strength
announcing a restless diligence. "Als sie ertrunken war und schwamm hinunter . . . "
Nonetheless, Brecht had no difficulty in harking back to the example of Rimbaud's
language, even to the extent of its crassness, its stridency, its sustained explicitness.
In the masterful strength of how he overcame all obstacles, the young Brecht more
closely approached the greatness of Le Bateau ivre than anyone else a t the time.
In Berlin during the 1920's an attack was prepared which later reflected on the
Paris of the 1860's and on the "unmasking" of Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mallarmé
by Jean-Paul Sartre. The Berlin radicals of the 1920's derided the art of the "Inner-
weltlichen", and categorized it as being "nothing other t h a n " the creation of an out­
moded social class. They thought there might be a chance for the triumph of an aggres­
sively militant art, since the cultivation of the "ritual" in art had been lost and its
" a u r a " damaged.
Wearied b y the quiescence of nihilism, the unstable were among those likely to
express jealousy and suspicion of art. W h a t Bertold Brecht mockingly observed in
1927 about "Vierhundert junge Lyriker" went against an alleged overrating of poetry
altogether. According to him, poetry was overrated, a p a r t from "some exceptions".
Brecht unmasked through caricature and spoke of lazy owners who, as an ornament
to other pleasures in life, nipped at verses about Hamlet. Even if Brecht had missed
the enormous tension in Baudelaire and his successors outside of France, he should
nonetheless have named the "exceptions".

10
"Oh, to say what even the things themselves never thought themselves to be. , ,
11
"the most sublime, the most "dense" poet of our time". (Translator's note: "dense" in the
positive sense in which a fugue may be dense. But dichteste is also Rilke's wordplay on Dichter,
which literally means poet, to suggest that Mallarmé was the most poetic poet).

153
 In a radio broadcast in 1925, Gottfried Benn freely drew on the potential inherent
in the symbolic concepts of art for antiphilistine and antipolitical provocation when
he said t h a t he did not count as poets those writers who felt the world realistically
and believed it to be formed of matter, "doch der Dichter prinzipiell eine andere Art
von Erfahrung besitzt und andere Zusammenfassungen anstrebt als praktisch wirk-
same und dem sogenannten Aufstieg dienende", hence did not "eine Ethik propagiert,
die das P r i m a t des Durchschnitts sichert", who remained aloof from the "Glücks-
verheißungen der politischen Parteien" and from a "lukrativen" concept of truth. 1 2
" E s ist der Zug in sich versunkener Gestalten, schweigsamer und vertiefter Bilder" 1 3
—thus the new paraphrase of the "symbolistic" by Benn. "Der Dichter sieht zu in
der vor keinem Tod zu verleugnenden Überzeugung, daß er allein die Substanz besitzt,
das Grauen zu bannen und die Opfer zu versühnen: so sinke, ruft er ihnen zu, so sinke
denn, aber ich könnte auch sagen: steige". 14 The influence of Nietzsche m a y be felt in
the use of such a passage from Goethe's Faust—unfortunately in a limiting sense, as
well as in his joyful dogmatism about form. Characteristically Benn refers to Flaubert's
letters and to a monomaniacal severity. Form, style, arrangement, and lawfulness are
subordinated, as with Nietzsche, often with a merciless disregard for the riddle of the
utterly human, which fell victim to a pride in knowledge and in having discovered the
workings of necessity. The "hohe K o t h u r n " (Benn, Saison) in German literature often
turned t o the West to sustain its artistic ideal.
I n the 1930's there emerged a more widespread understanding of Baudelaire and
of Valéry, a fact which E r n s t Robert Curtius had worked for as an antidote to t h e
anti-emotional esthetics of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. I n addition, the precious
early letters of Mallarmé as well as important manuscripts found among the papers
he had left behind came to light. Much of the loosely impressionistic, comprehensive
portrayal undertaken by Albert Thibaudet was now no longer tenable; his insistence
on impuissance, absence, and an allegedly nihilistically oriented concept of purity had
influenced Valéry, and had contributed to Claudel's misunderstanding of the Igitur
fragments with their new interpretation of the familiar mirror symbol in the Hérodiade,
The Romanist, Theophil Spoerri, stated at t h a t time t h a t Rimbaud's poems eclipsed
everything new and t h a t Rimbaud's discovery of his own limitations suggested an
analogy with Hölderlin. After the blind subjectivity in the interpretation of t h e obscure
poems of Mallarmé, there began a t last a fruitful collaboration with critical readers.
At the end of the 1930's, there were revived the a t t e m p t s t o interpret poetic
works through ideas from extra-literary domains, to take these into consideration and,
if possible, to accept them. The encouragement of this approach resulted in regarding
the work narrowly as a mere document, and led to the glorification of opinion. I n the

12
"Since the poet possesses essentially a different kind of experience and strives for other
contexts than those which are practically effective and which serve so-called progress", and who
hence "propagate and ethic which assures the primacy of the average".
13
14
It is the train of forms sunk into themselves, of silent and deepened images".
"In the fact of death, the poet looks on in the undeniable conviction that he alone possesses
the substance for banishing the horror and reconciling the sacrifice: so sink, he calls to them, so sink.
but I could also say: ascend."

154
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung of 1938—39, attention was focussed on Baudelaire.
The rather singular manner in which he considered the Revolution of 1848 as the con­
firmation of his own desire for repentance, restraint, destruction, and death is well
known. Can national revolutionary planning be seriously taken into account in inter­
preting Baudelaire's work as anything more than the attitude of what Marx called an
inadequate Parisian Bohemian ? Or did the fact t h a t the poet of Les Foules enjoyed
identifying himself with the struggle to boost his Ego render his expression, "sacrée
prostitution", social criticism? Does the flaneur, the onlooker, arise as the by-product
of a declining social class? Walter Benjamin perhaps rightly refers to suicide as the
understandable answer t o despair for those who exercise professions t h a t are no longer
viable; however, the context of what Baudelaire created eluded him.
Too little importance has been attributed to the impact of the changing power
structures, namely t h a t the inevitable collapse of much t h a t seemed inalterable could
also p u t an end to disillusionment, and t h a t as a result new dimensions of the self and
its unknown levels could be revealed. Readers of Ernst Jünger's Auf den Marmorklip­
pen may be grateful to him for bringing to light in 1939 the beginnings of an inner
revolution in a narrative work's symbolic force. Other books performed a similar ser­
vice, making the reader attuned to the symbolic meanings in the works of Eliot, Mon­
tale, Lorca, Faulkner, W. H, Auden. Symbols consolidated concepts even as they
demanded from the writer a rigorous discipline in his search for t r u t h .
The introductory book on modern lyricism by the Romanist, Hugo Friedrich,
Die Struktur der modemen Lyrik, which appeared in 1956, was strongly influenced b y
valéry as well as b y Benn. The poetological symbolism of many of Valéry's verses pro-
Vides the basis for the establishment of the slogan, "poésie p u r e " for the kind of poetry
which still made itself available in contexts other than t h a t of poeta doctus. Not every­
one will recognize the predominance of fantasy, of pure subjectivity, and a tendency
toward dehumanization as the hallmarks of modernity. Friedrich was guided b y Valéry
in separating Rilke by omitting mentioning him; nor did he want to compare George
and Hofmannsthal as "Spätklassiker" to Benn. A later generation 15 would accord a
decisive perspective such as t h a t of Friedrich more respect, b u t he received little cred­
it for having shown the new fortification of t h e linguistic work of art, and for having
disclosed something about which Berthold Brecht, in his mockery of "Vierhundert
junge Lyriker", simply had no knowledge. J u s t as Brecht a t the time believed himself
able to see Inhalt consisting only "aus hübschen Bildern und aromatischen Wörtern",
differences in artistic rank are now ascribed to what is often irksome, namely, to what
is now suspiciously called "the cult of genius in literary history". B u t precision such
as t h a t of the meteor symbol in Mallarmé's poem about Poe is indispensable, just as
are the symbolic crisscrossings between temple and sewer in Baudelaire's posthumous
fame.

15
The accompanying quote is taken from an essay by H. Kreuzer, Zur Periodisierung der
'modernen' deutschen Literatur in R. Grimm/J. Hermand (eds.), Basis, Jahrbuch für deutsche Oegen-
wartslit. 2 (Frankfurt a. M. 1971), pp. 7 ff. Compare also Helia Thiedemann-Bartels, Versuch über das
artistische Gedicht (Munich, 1971).

155
 It may be presumed that among the periods of German poetry the Symbolist era
was a weak one, despite the world-wide reputation of Rilke. Be that as it may, the art
of speaking darkly strengthened the German receptivity to foreign languages. The
lyricist who gave the song its stamp, Goethe in Harzreise im Winter and Marienbader
Elegie becomes the rule now in literature in which until then brilliance of the representa­
tive had seemed indispensable. But only rarely has the twentieth century achieved such
a fortunate synthesis of the salute to darkness (Wagner's Tristan) and a keen clarity of
recognition as that which once existed in the circle of Baudelaire; if at that time verse
retained its beauty through syntax, the successors often initiated only a mere substi­
tute, replacing their confidence in the individual word by belief in its explosive force.
Has the disciplined, cryptic tradition of speech been replaced by an open acceptance
of the merely tragic utterance? The hyperbolic element in Rimbaud has, in truth,
been echoed more than the magically polite and admirable greatness of Mallarme's
verses. Benn heard, along with the resourceful or "culinary", as one calls it today,
a concept of civilization, the vanishing point, "Ethos nur als Regelung sozialer Bedin-
gungen zu sehen." Reservations aside, richness in works of art such as those of the
Symbolistes is unfortunately appreciated less than it deserves.

Translated from the German by Martha Humphreys, Seymour Flaxman, Fredrick

Ulfers and Doris Guilloton.

156
 GORDON BBOTHERSTON

A GRAVER DECADENCE: REACTIONS TO SYMBOLISM IN SPAIN

The effect of the French Symbolists on Spanish literature was both sporadic and pro­
longed. From the mid-1890's, when the bohemian Alejandro Sawa reportedly recited
Verlaine in the streets of Madrid1 up to the Spanish Civil War, the French movement,
complicated enough in itself, provoked quite varied responses among Spanish writers,
both directly and indirectly. The first impact of the Symbolists came during the period
of Modernism, the literary movement which spread to Spain from Spanish America
at the turn of the century. Some years later, after the First World War, a new (and
quieter) interest developed among the members of the "Generation of 1927", named
after the Góngora tercentenary celebrations of that year. As a group, these poets of
the twenties read more French than the Modernists, but unlike them they were not
passionately concerned to quicken Spanish by foreign examples. They turned less to
Verlaine and to coterie Symbolists à la lettre like Moréas than to Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
and Mallarmé, as well as to their near-contemporary, Valéry. Two clear examples of
contact were Rafael Alberti's tortured echoes of Rimbaud in Sobre los ángeles (1928),
and Cernuda's involvement with Baudelaire in his poems and in a characteristically
perceptive essay. Some points remain uncertain: Jorge Guillén's indebtedness, or lack
of it, to Valéry and the notion of pure poetry in Cántico; whether Cernuda went straight
to Mallarmé, or via Guillén and Valéry, in Perfil del aire (1927); whether Lorca's sym­
bols are Symbolist or derived from Andalusian folklore and the Spanish Golden Age.
Overall, however, this later period is tolerably well documented;2 surviving debates
tend to be concerned with detail. The same cannot really be said of the earlier Modernist
period, where basic historical interpretations are still in dispute.
The clearest version of certain recurrent Spanish attitudes toward the whole
notion of Symbolism can be found in the Nationalist propaganda of the Civil War.
There, French Symbolism is rejected as decadent, degenerate (Max Nordau's word
"degeneracy" being given yet another run), and alien. The charge is too preposterous
even to consider; but it does rely on a certain resentment felt apparently by even
wholly serious poets and critics. One example would be Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, who, in
his Modernismo frente a noventa y ocho,3 divided the literary activity of the turn of
1
See Manuel Machado, La Guerra Literaria, 1898-1914 (Madrid, 1913).
2
A good introduction is C. B. Morris, A Generation of Spanish Poets, 1920-1936 (Cambridge
University Press, 1969).
3
Madrid, 1951. For other interpretations, see P. Salinas, Literatura española, siglo X X ,
(Mexico, 1949); F. de Onís, Antológia de la poesia española e hispanoamericana (Madrid, 1934);
R. Gullón, Direcciones del modernismo (Madrid, 1963).

157
the century into two camps: one, the "'98V' (Unamuno, Antonio Machado, Pío Baroja,
Azorín), spurred by the defeat of Spain by the United States in 1898, wanted to regener­
ate the national soul; the other, the Modernists (Rubén Darío, Juan Ramón Jiménez,
Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Manuel Machado), paid too much attention to France and
escaped into a cultural dream world. There is, no doubt, some truth in this division
if one chooses to see it from Díaz—Plaja's point of view. But distinctions of this kind,
with their strong moral imperative, have tended to distort accounts of the first
impact of Symbolism in Spain; in any case, they have generally been made with scant
regard for the nature and function of poetry and of literature generally.4
A further complicating factor has been the relationship, in this sense, not just of
Spanish and French literature, but of Spanish and Spanish-American literature. For
Rubén Darío, the undisputed leader of the Modernists and the great transmitter of
French literature in the late nineteenth century, was a Nicaraguan: an ex-colonial and
an American who, culturally, owed little to Spain. Few would object to the proposition
that he had as marked an effect on poetry in Spanish as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
had on poetry in English. The difference in diction and tone between, say, Dowson's
translations of Verlaine and.Mallarmé on the one hand, and Prufrock on the other, is
quite comparable to that between peninsular Spanish responses to the Symbolists
before and after Darío became widely known. He created a new sensitivity. Yet even
after decades of solid recognition, from E. K. Mapes's studies on the twenties to Octavio
Paz's recent brilliant essay,5 Darío has often been treated in Spain as historically almost
dispensable. The beginnings of this hesitancy are etched in the essays of Juan Ramón
Jiménez,6 Darío's fervent though finally ambiguous admirer: his account of Modernism
and its importance for himself and contemporaries like Manuel and Antonio Machado,
Valle-Inclán, and Villaespesa is the most tortuous, informed, and sharp appreciation,
by a Spaniard, of Darío and all that he represented.
When Jiménez came to Madrid from Andalusia in 1900, he did so on the strength
of a postcard invitation from Darío (who had not been there long himself) and Francisco
Villaespesa. Villaespesa (1877-1936) was undoubtedly crucial in promoting Modernism
as a movement is Spain. He was in touch with a large number of Spanish-American
poetic innovators (Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, Leopoldo Lugones, Amado Nervo) and a
Portuguese poet, (Eugenio de Castro), and often would be the only one in Spain to
have copies of their works. This year marked the culmination of the high-spirited
bohemianism in the Madrid of the 1890's, a time of grand pronouncements and indis­
criminate enthusiasm. The work Jiménez himself wrote during this first visit to the
capital he later forgot or severely altered. As a Spanish Modernist, Jiménez was not
helped by the fact that, energetic and prolific though he was, Villaespesa was not a good
poet (any more than such "precursors'' as the proverbial Alejandro Sawa were). Villa­
espesa was known as a Symbolist and had a wide knowledge of modern poetry. But
4
G. Díaz-Plaja's more recent study of the Modernist Valle-Inclán (Las estéticas de Valle-
Inclán,
5
Madrid, 1965), is highly perceptive and less open to this charge.
O.Paz, "El caracol y la sirena: Rubén- Darío, Cuadrivio . . . " (Mexico, 1965), pp. 11-65;
E. K.6 Mapes, L'Influence française dans l'œuvre de Rubén Dario (Paris, 1925).
Some are collected in La corriente infinita. Crítica y evocación (Madrid, 1961); see, also, El
Modernismo. Notas de un curso (Mexico, 1962).

158
even in the presence of Darío, he remained a writer of easy effects, of a gross con­
fessional or theatrical mood poetry. He was probably closer to Maeterlinck than any
other French-speaking Symbolist. No one has yet succeeded in revaluating his work, or
even in taking it seriously for all the importance it once clearly had.
By 1902 things had changed to the extent that a more pointed and productive
interest was being taken in French Symbolism, especially in matters of verse form and
poetics. This was the year of Manuel Machado's Alma, his finest collection; his brother
Antonio's Soledades; Valle-Inclán's Sonata de otoño (the first of four seasonal sonatas
in prose), and Jiménez's Rimas, several poems of which survive in his scrupulously
edited later anthologies. Darío had remained as a tutelary presence, notably over the
new review Helios, founded by Jiménez and others. But knowledge gained from Darío's
poetry was, in a few cases, now being supplemented by direct knowledge of French
poets conveyed by the Machados and Jiménez after their visits to Paris in the years
1900 and 1901. This was the high point of Symbolist influence and of articulate critical
discussion. In the essays which the Machados and Jiménez wrote on their own and
each others' work, and in Modernist writing generally, we find a developed concern-
much of it couched in the terms of the Symbolists — with the nature of literature and
with Spanish as a language for literature, especially poetry.
Of course, it would still be wrong to speak of a "Symbolist" movement in Spain
at this (or, for that matter, at any other) stage. The way that Spanish had evolved
throughout most of the nineteenth century left the Modernists with the feeling that
they had to catch up, not just with the Symbolists, but with the Parnassians and even
with some of the Romantics from non-Spanish Europe. This means, for example, that
a poet like Verlaine was appreciated as much for his Poèmes saturniens as for his Fêtes
galantes and the Romances sans paroles, (Manuel Maehado's famous verse portrait of
Philip IV being clear testimony to this), and that, via Darío, the steamier Leconte de
Lisle and even Hugo himself were forces to be reckoned with. For Darío was a "major"
poet in the sense opposite to "minor" in Verlaine's phrase "tout en chantant sur le
mode mineur". Despite the allegations of some of his critics, he was intimately opposed
to all that could be thought decadent in Symbolism, being an irreducibly New World
poet. To disentangle fully the various strands from nineteenth century French and
other literatures which make up Modernism is a fascinating but lengthy exercise. Here
we can at best trace that of Symbolism in Spanish Modernism by concentrating on two
of the characteristics defined by Jean Moréas in his much-referred-to essay (1886) in
Le Figaro: the breaking of the "cruel bonds of versification" and the search for trans­
cendental reality.
In the writings of the Modernists at the turn of the century, there is a persistent
desire not so much to shatter all metrical norms, as Rimbaud had done in his Illumina-
tions, as to make the Spanish language itself a suppler, more pliant vehicle for verse.
It was a case of two things happening at once: the lightening of Spanish poetic language
by the example of French (for which there were several precedents historically, from
the eighteenth century onwards), and, within that process, the taking advantage speci­
fically of the metrical innovations of the Symbolists. For this reason Verlaine stood
as the great model, the author of a poetry light and ethereal beyond belief, yet one

159
who remained engaged in the intricacies of prosody as such, thereby suggesting ways
in which the massive formal heritage of Spanish might be refined.
These refinements were, in fact, first made (in most cases) by Darío. Alexandrines
(of 14 syllables) with syncopated secondary accents against the caesura, and finally
the shifting of the caesura; alexandrines with assonantal rhyme, in the style of the
medieval Gonzalo de Berceo; sonnets of varying line lengths — even a sonnet of 13
lines; lines of five and of nine (after "De la musique avant toute chose") syllables,
traditionally spurned by Castilian academicians; rhythmic groupings of syllabic units
instead of the normal metric division, as in the trisyllabic Marcha triunfal (1885):
these are some of Dario's formal innovations.7 Of course, Verlaine was not the only
source, nor Darío the only transmitter: the Colombian José Asunción Suva's use of
tetrasyllabic units, in his Nocturno, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, is an example of an
important independent experiment. But for Spain Darío was the technician who
showed what might be done, and only in the case of a few poets (perhaps only Jiménez
and Manuel Machado) can we speak of strictly peninsular innovations. Jiménez's early
efforts to write Spanish as if it were French, to achieve half-rhyme and alliterative
effects more delicate than Darío's have been well analyzed by Carlo Bo, 8 among others.
In Machado's Alma and Caprichos (1905) we find a lightness of touch which was quite
new in Spanish; a poem like Pierrot y Arlequín (first published in Helios in 1903), has
a clear antecedent in Verlaine's Columbine:

Pierrot y Arlequín
mirándose sin
rencores,
después de cenar
pusiéronse a hablar
de amores.
Y dijo Pierrot:
— ¿ Qué buscas tú ?
-¿Yo?...
i placeres !
— Entonces no más
disputas por las
mujeres.

By placing an accent on monosyllables like "sin" and "las" (for which he was
censured by Unamuno), and, by the same token, reducing the stress on " t ú " in a quick
conversational exchange within one stepped line, he achieves an extraordinary agility.
This poem is decidedly more funambulesque than any of Dario's, in whose commedia
dell'arte pieces the weightier example of Banville or even Hugo is often palpable. There
is a similar difference between his Figulinas,9 with its unconventional trochaics, and
7
A good guide to this subject is M. Henriquez Ureña, Breve historia del modernismo, second
ed. (Mexico,
8
1962).
9
Juan Ramón Jiménez (Madrid, 1958).
See J. Chabás, Vuelo y estilo. Estudios de literatura contemporánea (Madrid, 1934), and Dámaso
Alonso's fundamental essay, ''Ligereza y gravedad en la poesía de Manuel Machado", Poetas es-
pañoles contemporáneos, third, rev. ed. (Madrid, 1965).

160
 Darío's Marcha triunfal. Machado was also perhaps the first poet in Spanish to exploit
the ugliness of hackneyed rhyme ("la rima consabida ,, ), and of 9 and 5 syllable lines,
as in El mal poema (1909), which we shall refer to later. He also distinguished himself
in the creation of mood poetry by free association of images separated by rows of dots,
often against expected prosodic patterns: a good example is the sonnet Domingo, which
Gerhard Lepiorz drew attention to in his study of Symbolism in Spain. 10
If in metrics Darío appeared to the Spanish Modernists as a readily acknowledged
master and guide, in the broader field of poetics he proved less dominant. This is partly
due to the fact t h a t he was an American with a different set of priorities and ambitions.
His Divagación, written in a Buenos Aires hotel in 1894 and one of the best poems of
Prosas profanas, can fairly be understood as an attempt to gain the cultural space
which the French Symbolists could take for granted. The ideal woman in the poem
who accompanies him and then, in a variety of cultural guises, is addressed b y him,
though ephemeral and evanescent, is finally held in the time and movement of the
poem, which in t u r n is not pushed out of reality as a transcendental alternative to it.
If we turn to the Spaniards, to a poem like Manuel Machado's Eleusis, which is ob­
viously derived from Divagación, we find an essentially different situation. The evanes­
cent, golden-haired woman in Eleusis carries the poet out of his own place a n d time
back into the past. He, too, moves through a succession of "cultural locations", b u t
always to somewhere more remote historically (the German Iron Age, classical Greece,
the Celtic Golden Age) to "the dark forests of the dream", where, like Baudelaire in
Les Correspondances, he can again operate with pre-rational intuition. Eleusis is the
most succinct statement of the cultural consequences of Symbolism in Spain, the
nearest thing to the voyage poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Yet his crossing over
to another reality is ultimately less confident and less sustained t h a n theirs: there is
only a thin echo of Baudelaire's "langoureuse Asie" or Rimbaud's "incredible Florides".
The Spaniards, even at the height of the Symbolist influence, can be said to have
lacked the specifically metropolitan consciousness t h a t is so important to t h e French,
the ambiguous awareness t h a t reality has been gained and diminished b y Europe's
godless imperialism ("Je regrette l'Europe aux anciens parapets !"). For example,
they shrink from invoking the cultural idealism of Wagner (Lohengrin and the swan),
which holds a central position in Symbolism in Darío's works; when they do mention
him, it is almost self-consciously. I t was as if a certain cultural vocabulary, a certain
range of reference, a certain gallantry in the fullest sense, could simply not work in the
Madrid of the time, however powerful the private conviction of the poet. This is why it
has been so easy for hostile critics to pick out the "excesses" of the Spanish Modernists
and scornfully list their "affectations": roses, swans, champagne, stars, peacocks,
malachite, princesses, pearls and marchionesses, to quote the sober Cernuda. 1 1 I t is
also why the Modernists, sooner t h a n follow the p a t h t h a t leads from the Parnassians
to Mallarmé, re-naturalized themselves, each in his own way, and to t h a t extent ceased
to be Symbolists.

10
Themen und Ausdrucksformen des spanischen Symbolismus (Düsseldorf, 1938); see, also, my
Manuel Machado : A Revaluation (Cambridge University Press, 1968).
11 Quoted by Morris, A Generation, p. 4.

11 Balakian 161
 Already by late 1903 both Antonio Machado and Jiménez were beginning to think
of poetry in terms of outer and inner beauty, a division which could fairly be associated
with the lack of metropolitan confidence we have alluded to. This, of course, does not
for one moment mean that they were worse or better poets; they simply stopped deal­
ing in the poetics of Symbolism or considering the complex function of "object" in
Baudelaire or Mallarmé. I n rewriting his early poems for his successive anthologies,
Jiménez eliminated everything which implied more t h a n a close world of intimate
emotion. Words like epitalàmico, whose sound exceeded any sense he felt he could
justify, were removed; and the last echo of the city as a cultural complex was lost in
the pastoral. H e reflected on this process in the poem "Vino primero pura / vestida de
inocencia", and recounted how his poetry had then been dressed up in "no sé qué
ropajes", so t h a t he grew to hate it as showy and pretentious. For his p a r t Antonio
Machado, at first deeply indebted to Darío and the Symbolists as Jiménez was always
pleased to demonstrate, 1 2 announced his distrust of "the word for its phonetic value",
of color and line, and of "complexes of sensations", preferring what he called " a deep
palpitation of the spirit". This change led him deep into himself, into the provincial
countryside of Spain. In Campos de Castilla (1912), his parks reverted t o fields and his
fountains regressed to (or recovered) their natural source among Wordsworthian
rocks. 13
With Manuel Machado and Valle-Inclán the change was more dramatic and ex­
plicit. In El mal poema we discover a massive exasperation with a state too decadent
socially and culturally to support even the illusion of art, where the transcendental
ideals of Symbolism (themselves decadent or not, as the case may be) appear grotesque­
ly inappropriate. Those elegant parks and glimpses of a resplendent Versailles (for
Voltaire the epitome of the fourth age of the world), t h a t elusive feminine beauty whose
biographical source was Villaespesa's exquisite wife Elisa (who played Schumann and
Mendelssohn, and died young), all vanish for good.
The Modernist who held on longest was Valle-Inclán, author of four seasonal sonatas
which tell of the elegant loves of the Marqués de Bradomín in a series of equally
elegant settings. Valle-Inclán came from Galicia and much has been made of his Celtic
atavism; Jiménez, for example, compared him with Yeats and Synge. The point of
this would be t h a t his ideal world could draw on "hidden springs" unavailable to
other Modernists. Whatever the t r u t h of t h a t comparison may be, Valle-Inclán like­
wise recanted precisely by incorporating all this earlier work into the barren na­
tional state of Spain, to find it grotesque, even if one part of him did not renounce
it. His play Luces de Bohemia is a superb document of the Modernist period in Madrid.
The absurd quality which certain Symbolist tenets acquired there is relentlessly ex­
posed in a process of grotesque mirroring which received its own name: esperpento.
One Modernist greets another with a "saludo versallesco y grotesco", and speaks the
sophisticated language of their earlier poetry. B u t with inexorable black humor
they are reduced by the reality around them, which claims as its central victim
12
G. W. Ribbans, "La influencia de Verlaine en Antonio Machado", Cuadernos hispano­
americanos
13
(Madrid, 1957), pp. 91-92, 180-201, deals critically with the subject.
See A. Terry's sensitive study, Antonio Machado : Campos de Castilla (London, 1973).

162
 Max Estrella, the bohemian Alejandro Sawa who had brought news of Verlaine from
Paris, and who starved to death in 1909. As a counterpoint in the play, Darío is
introduced in person. In a Madrilenean café reminiscent of the heyday of Modernism,
he is joined by the Marqués de Bradomín, and in a last excess they together revive
an earlier spirit, displaced and unreal as they abandon Spanish for French:
He raises his glass, and savoring the aroma of the absinthe, he sighs and evokes the
distant sky of Paris . . . After drinking, the three exiles mingle their voices speak­
ing in French. They remember and imagine the lights of the festival, both divine
and mortal. Paris ! Cabarets ! The dream ! And in the rhythm of their sentences.
there slips by, with his lame foot, Papá Verlaine.

11* 163
 ANDRÉ KARÁTSON

THE TRANSLATION AND REFRACTION OF SYMBOLISM:

A SURVEY OF THE HUNGARIAN EXAMPLE
"But what is a poet (I use the word in its
widest sense), if he is not a translator, a decipherer?"
(Baudelaire: Victor Hugo)

Tracing the outlines of Symbolism, spotting the manifestations of its appreciably and,
moreover, often assertively coherent poetics, is a fairly easy task, provided one re­
stricts oneself to French Symbolism. Comparative Symbolism, however, i. e., the pro­
cess of discovering this same coherence in manifestations of the Symbolist movement
outside its country of origin, presents a real difficulty. Can one ever legitimately
speak of Symbolism in Ireland, Spain, Austria, or Russia? Is the same phenomenon
always apparent behind the different masks? The purists have their reservations.
Nevertheless, like rivers which always have the same name although they may flow
away from their sources, the international fortune of Symbolism derives directly from
its "archetype"; it deserves to be fully recognized and, owing to its profusion, it even
merits particular appreciation. As Guy Michaud remarks in his highly authoritative
work on French Symbolism: " . . . the most important achievement of Symbolism is
perhaps its influence".1
The derivatives, of course, reveal many noticeable differences when compared
to the original model; a family resemblance exists rather than a school. The cause of
these differences is generally attributed to the variety of historical situations, poetical
orientations, national characteristics, and individual sensibilities that flourished wher­
ever the influence of Symbolism was prevalent. But too little attention has been be­
stowed upon the fundamental rôle played by the Variety of linguistic structures.
Undoubtedly, Symbolism won its adherents owing to that aspiration towards ideal
purity of which it became the conscious messenger; but it is undeniable that its enor­
mous impact was due, above all, to the revolution it accomplished in the field of lan­
guage: rupture with linear discourse, suggestive orchestration of verbs, the refusal
to be explicit, and the massive recourse to polysemy. And this new model of style was,
it must be emphasized, a product of French poetry . . . , and consequently, of the
French language. To begin with, French was the language which the Symbolist poems
illustrated, while the theoretical texts encouraged writers to exploit its latent proper­
ties. Of what other Dire (speech)could Mallarmé have wished, let alone been able, to
find again the virtualité ? On what other verbe could René Ghil have made his persistent
exercises of instrumentation? In what other language could Moréas have sought his
impollués vocables (unsullied vocables) ? Is it because of his Greek origins — a question

1
Guy Michaud, Message poétique du Symbolisme (Paris, 1947), Vol. 1, p. 12. All prose quotations
from books not in English translated by Edouard Roditi.

166
which he himself did not clearly answer — that the latter judged it expedient to specify
that he had turned to "the good, nimble and luxuriant French language of the times
before such men as Vaugelas and Boileau-Despréaux" ?2
It follows, therefore, that the international diffusion of Symbolism raises anew
the theory of communication; moreover, because bilingualism is involved, that is to
say, the contact between two languages, it poses, in particular, the problem of trans­
lation. It is essential to investigate this field in order to shed light on the genesis of
Symbolism, describe its ramifications, and trace its various transformations in non-
French-speaking countries. Despite the numerous studies devoted to the theories
and experiments of different epochs and individuals, this particular terrain has
remained fallow. Yet an art which did not intend to "reach the conception of the
Idea in itself"3, which strove to recover the primitive function of words and to
assign chromatic values to sounds; a language which set out to discover its esoteric
essence, and made it understandable through etymological allusions, grammatical
sophistications; that whole tendency, in short, towards subtlety and hermeticism, in
what language other than French could it have been achieved ? Parallel with the indi­
vidualist fashion in art, poetic creation became linked, more than ever before, to the
irreducible properties of the idiom which it used for its expression. It is, therefore,
essential to examine the consequences of this difficulty in the actual practice of trans­
lators; for, despite the theoretical impossibility, the practice, as we all know, cer­
tainly existed.
At present, it is not possible to realize a synthesis; one can only contribute towards
its elaboration by exploring one aspect or another of the subject. It is our belief, then,
that in this more modest perspective the birth of Hungarian Symbolism under the
French influence will furnish an interesting example. Hungarian is, in fact, a Finno-
Ugric agglutinative language; it does not lend itself to the same level of perceptive
statement that can be made in French, which is an analytical language. With regard
to Hungarian society, its evolution at the beginning of the twentieth century was con­
siderably behind that of other European societies, where the middle class was domi­
nant. In this different linguistic, intellectual, and social environment, the buds of Sym­
bolism bloomed relatively late (1906—1914); but the flowering was spectacular and
beautiful thanks to a generation that was gifted to the point pf genius. Moreover;
a great deal of translation was done, and it was of an exemplary standard, especially
when it was practiced by the country's most important poets, who thereby worked
out their own personal poetics. During this simultaneous experiment, no distinction
was made between intermediaries and receivers; the double works of these poet-trans­
lators can therefore help us answer two questions: What effect did translation have
upon Symbolism? What effect did the Symbolist spirit have upon translation?
First of all, however, we should glance at the general situation in Hungary. Under
the Dual Monarchy which was set up in 1867 when peace was established with Austria,
Hungary did not feel sufficiently emancipated. Nationalism and patriotism, with their

2
Jean Moréas, "Manifeste du Symbolisme", Le Figaro, 18 September, 1886.
3
Ibid.

166
moral undertones, became a religion; they served to justify ideologies which were
quite incompatible. In these circumstances there were numerous crises, for Hungarian
society was subject to constant changes. The new capitalism turned to the old feudalism
for support, but at the same time it attempted to remain independent of it. Reduced
to dire misery, the agrarian and industrial proletariat suffered violent repression
whenever they attempted to assert themselves. While many liberals looked upon
middle-class democracy as a flimsy dream, the claims of socialism grew urgent. More­
over, in the name of Hungarian tradition, the provinces accused the capital of cosmo­
politan treason. Conscious of its abruptly enlarged dimensions, however, and proud
of its forty newspapers and periodicals, Budapest retaliated by affirming its ambition
to be henceforth the center of a Hungarian culture which would be more authentic
because it was open to the modern European spirit.
Inspired by this idea, the periodical Nyugat was founded in 1908 ; the name (" West")
indicates the ambitious orientation of the editors' plans. Indeed, their program was
more than ambitious, it was spectacular, for it challenged the whole of Hungarian
civilization, not just one or another particular esthetic tendency. And it was precisely
this sense of a mission to renew a civilization which attracted the intelligentsia, partic­
ularly the most brilliant poets of the young generation, for they were only too eager
to break away from provincialism.4 During the first decade of the century, Paris meant
Europe for these poets, while Symbolism represented, on the whole, the innovation
that most appealed to them. It was undoubtedly a fashion, and it held a certain snob
value; but it was also more than a fashion, for Paris offered them the model of a vaster
horizon, of a greater freedom, and a more evolved social and artistic life, while Symbol­
ism stood for a sensibility and a language which were more appropriate for the ex­
pression of the "modern soul" than the Hungarian poetics bequeathed by their pre­
decessors. The fashion was, therefore, marked by distinctly liberating forces, and the
Hungarian poets set out to exploit them for the good of the common cause as well
as for their own personal development.
Their first objective was diffusion; the best way to achieve it was to make the texts
available in Hungarian. Many took upon themselves the rôle of interpreter. Four poets
in particular undertook this task of translation: the most prolific was Dezsö Koszto-
lányi (1885-^-1936), next came Mihály Babits (1883—1941), then Árpád Tóth (1886—
1928-) and finally Endre Ady (1877—1919). They each followed their own particular
evolution, for they drew their inspiration from different sources, and their personal­
ities were distinctly different; nor did they practice the art of translation with the
same degree of assiduity and ambition. However, beyond the fact they all belonged
to the westernizing movement, they also shared another point in common: they were
all adapters of Baudelaire and Verlaine. The point of convergence, then, was not so
much on the side of the actual Symbolist tendency as on the side of its forerunners.
What writers were, in fact, translated?

4
For more complete information on the Hungarian situation and the westernizing movement,
the following works should be consulted: A. Karátson, Le Symbolisme en Hongrie (Paris, Presses
Universitaires de France, 1969); Edgar Allan Poe et le groupe des écrivains du "Nyugat" en Honqrie,
(Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1971).

167
 Modem Poets, an anthology published in 1913 by Kosztolányi5, reveals a very
wide range. In the preface, Kosztolányi drew an outline of their development: "I
worked for ten years on my book . . . These years, during which the poems dressed
up in Hungarian clothes have become a consequential volume, correspond to a period
of war in our new literature . . . At the time when the Magyar territory was still desti­
tute of modern lyricism, we made a collection of very hallowed foreign poems, by way
of argument, in order to level the ground ahead of u s ' ' In its orientation, the selection
favored French poets and, in a general manner, Symbolism, as a list of the authors
represented reveals: Jammes, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Baudelaire, Gautier, Samain, Ver­
laine, Signoret, Rivoire, Barbusse, de Régnier, Mauclair, Mercier, Paté, Gregh, Bataille,
Fort, Merrill, Moréas, de Heredia, Prudhomme, Rostand, Lemaître, de Maupassant,
Richepin, Leconte de Lisle, Raynaud, Cazalis, Tailhade. There were also Belgian poets:
Maeterlinck, Rodenbach, van Lerberghe, Verhaeren, Gilkin. Nevertheless, there were
numerous "outsiders", names which we associate only with their epoch; the Par­
nassians were also strongly represented. We should add that this was an international
anthology: it included American poets, (Poe, Longfellow, Whitman, Lowell), a wide
range of English poets (Shelley, Keats, Symons, Swinburne), and German and Italian
poets, with Symbolists and post-Symbolists alongside Romantics, Decadents, and even
Expressionists and Futurists. The anthology included, moreover, Russian, Scandina­
vian, Chinese, and Japanese poets. Kosztolányi specified, in fact, that he had not at­
tempted to arrange them according to schools: "This book is the mouthpiece of the
new poetry . . . What is the new poetry ? We can feel the answer better than we can
know it. In this anthology there are poets who have been dead for two hundred
years, while others, whose poems have won them a dazzling success, are not repre­
sented. Readers will realize that the poets gathered together in my book are all un­
doubtedly brothers . . . They are united because they participate in what we call the
'modern sour'."
Characterized by the subjective feeling of disquiet, this "modern sour' is inevi­
tably eclectic; and, although the Symbolist component is very preponderant, it is
nevertheless restricted in scope, for it involves only the tonality of the picture. Like­
wise, while Kosztolányi's great friend Mihály Babits, who was the most persistent
among Kosztolányi's equals in his attempt to relate theoretical reflection to the
pursuit of the ineffable, willingly translated texts of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Poe, Swin­
burne, and Wilde, these poets, along with many others, did not have an exclusive
monopoly on his sympathies, and it is difficult to pin them down to a particular
school. They were only some of the major stages in that comprehensive literary quest
by which the westernizing generation attempted to promote the renewal of Hungari­
an poetry. Babits sang of the beginning of this quest with feigned artlessness:

5
Modern költök, (Budapest, Révai, 1913).

168
 When I was a child,
sad and modest,
I found myself, one day,
in a big library;
my desire awoken, I cried;
My mind has embarked !
O my finite soul thirsts
for you, infinite world !6

Attempting to conquer the whole of Western poetry, Árpád Tóth entitled his
anthology Eternal Flowers,1 He concluded his preface as follows: "If the precious per­
fume of the Eternal Flowers, which has plunged me into enchanting reveries, pene­
trates a few sensitive souls, I will have rendered the culture of my country a useful
service". He began his anthology, in fact, with the Middle Ages; its unity was guaran­
teed by an elegiac tone and a ''decadent" nostalgia, of which the translator was partic­
ularly fond. The main part of the book, however, was devoted to the nineteenth cen­
tury, with Baudelaire heading the list. Árpád Tóth matched him with Gautier, Musset,
Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Samain, Jammes, Wilde, and Rilke. While remaining
fairly vague in outline, the domain which concerns us was thereby represented in a
consummate manner. No exclusivity was given to Symbolism, but enlarged by its
forerunners, sympathizers and followers, its international family was allotted first
place. If one combined in one volume the texts which follow this tendency, it would
be possible to make quite a representative selection of its major themes and linguistic
characteristics.
In fact, only the selection from Les Fleurs du Mal was translated 8 and presented
in full in its rôle as the "Bible" of modern poetry. It was in 1923 that Mihály Babits,
Árpád Tóth and Lőrinc Szabó paid this homage to Baudelaire; it consummated the
attempt at diffusion undertaken by the westernizing generation and, at the same time,
it constituted the somewhat solemn recognition of the extent to which they were in­
debted to the great "ancestor". As the preface affirmed: "The new Hungarian litera­
ture owes this book to the spirit of Baudelaire. We have all been subjected to his liber­
ating, encouraging, and instructive influence. This poet of a hundred years ago, who
was the first to show how the most depraved ennui of modern city life could constitute
the material for the greatest art. has revealed to us the possibility and the duty which

6
Mikor még gyermek voltam
szomorú és szerény
egy nagy könyvesszobába
kerültem egyszer én
s kiálték vágyra kelten:
Elmém hajóra hág !
Mily szomju véges lelkem
rád, végtelen világ i
Egy dal amilyet a fraudàle chansonnak
neveznek (A song which the French call chanson)
7
Ǒrök virágok (Budapest, Genius, 1923).
8
Charles Baudelaire, A romlás virágai (Budapest, Genius, 1921-22).

169
our poetry principally required: the possibility of the most audacious idea and the duty
of the noblest form."
The actual birth, in fact, of the new Hungarian poetry was explicitly indebted
to the French model. The major event took place' in 1906, when Endre Ady, stimulated
by his travels in France, published his New Poems9, a collection in which he principally
demonstrated the contrast between what he saw as the Hungarian "desert", "a ce­
metery of souls" and Paris, the "holy city" of love, beauty, and inspiration. It was
a declaration of political war; it was also a program of poetics illustrated by a personal
art which at once provoked controversy, and by poems of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and
Jehan Rictus, 10 translations of whose poems were inserted by the inflammatory poet in
the chapter that had Paris as its principal theme. Encouraged by Ady's example, Árpád
Tóth published his first collection, Aubade,11 in 1913; his own poems were accompanied
by Retraite, taken from Samain's Chariot d'or. Several poets announced their affinity,
and, paradoxically, did so in order to emphasize their own originality. For each
member of that generation worshipped the emblem of individualism which Rémy de
Gourmont attributed to Symbolism when he stated that "The only excuse a man has
for writing is that he is writing of himself, disclosing to others the sort of world which
is reflected in his individual mirror; his only excuse is to be original" 12 Kosztolányi
adapted this idea in the following phrase: "We do not deny the part that these poets
have played in our formation, they have taught us a truth, that of being loyal to our­
selves".13 How are we to interpret this remark?
To the extent that the poets whom we are considering made their work progress
towards an increasing authenticity, the assertion is accurate but banal. A disturbing
problem, however, stems from the fact that the determination to be loyal to oneself
became fixed at the time of youthful experiments when the poets proved themselves
to be most susceptible to foreign influences. In fact, between 1906 and 1914, the
collections which heralded the renewal of Hungarian poetry, and which also marked
the progress of personal creations, employed themes taken from the material translated.
"On familiar terms with death", Ady sang of the Baudelairean torments of the flesh
and the "subtle thrills" that characterized Verlaine. Satanism and malediction, weari­
ness with life, morbid gratification, spleen et idéal, impotent nostalgia, a taste for the
bizarre, torpor and languor—all these commonplaces of a belated Romanticism, as
decadent as one Would have it, nourished in equal abundance the inspiration of other
westernizers. Ivory towers were duly erected. Kosztolányi entitled his first collection
of poems Between Four Walls (1907).14 Two years later, Babits opened his collection15
with an invocation of the Odi profanum vulgus. In his aristocratic isolation, the poet
is at once a worshipper of Beauty, a musician of silence, and a goldsmith of the rare
word. Many imitated the poses of Des Esseintes:
9
10
Uj Versek
Baudelaire, La Destruction, La Gloche fêlée, Causerie, Verlaine, Mon réve familier; Jehan
Rictus, Les soliloques du pauvre
11
12
Hajnali szerenád
13
"Préface" du Livre des Masques (Paris, 1896).
"Preface" to the first edition of Modern költők, 19I3.
14
15
Négy fal között.
Levelek frisz koszorújából, (Budapest, 1909), (Leaves from Iris' wreath).

170
 Crafty, ill, seeking pleasure, I already
Often prepare for the sad hour of my pains,
So that subtle and refined artifice will make
My melancholy exciting and voluptuous . . . 16
(A. Tóth)

In Babits, the soul is in exile, recumbent and pale, symbol of the poet's sterility:

On a big four-poster bed,

On a big black bed
Strewn with white roses
Sleeping Beauty sleeps
Rose among roses
Wrapped in dreams
The years fly past
The years pass by
The lazy centuries
Black mourning curtains
Burst into white bloom
Weeping roses of time !17

There were innumerable personifications of the heart and the soul; dreams animated
them from within, but the harmony of the outside world also made them vibrate, for
landscape itself was a state of mind. Ady praised Verlaine: "a man apart, dreadfully
sincere . . . who learned to know the world . . . during fearful spiritual hours, con-
fronted by his profound individuality".18 The complexity of this individuality was
discovered with wonder, the vertigo of the ego was proclaimed, its secrets were hinted
at, attempts were made to purify it in the freshness of sensations. It was in the world
of first reveries that Kosztolányi, yielding at an early date to the solicitations of Freud-
ianism proposed the alliance of the quotidian and its spiritual dimension. The voice
of his lyric double, which was to be heard in his second collection, The Complaint of a
16
Már gyakran, ravaszúl s élvezve s betegen
Ügyelek, hogy gyötrelmim bùs órája ugy essék,
Hogy valamely finom, mesterkedô ügyesség
Bujává s izgatóvá tegye búmat nekem . . .
Sóhaj
17
Nagy tornyos nyoszolyában
fekete nyoszolyában
fehér rózsák között,
úgy alszik Csipkerózsa
rózsak között a rózsa
álomba rejtózött.
Az évek arra szállnak,
Az évek arra járnak
a lusta századok:
fekete gyászu kárpit
fehérrel kivirágzik
s nagy rózsákat zokog.
Csipkerózsa
18
"Költók", Budapesti Napló, 18 December, 1906.

171
Poor Little Child (1910),19represented the complaint of the Symbolist poet. The same
theme, however, had been previously explicated in French poetry, by Bataille (La
Chambre Blanche, 1895), Gregh (La Maison de l'enfance, 1897), Verhaeren (Tendresses
premières, 1904), Jammes (Souvenirs d'enfance, 1907), not to mention other well-
known texts redolent of nostalgia for "the innocent paradise full of furtive pleasures".
As the attitude of a latecomer appears to be hereby confirmed, is it legitimate to
speak of loyalty to oneself? The question becomes even more perplexing when we take
into acount the fact that the westernizing Hungarian poets had been preceded, in
the second half of the nineteenth century, by a generation, termed "cosmopolitan",
of isolated, tormented, and sick poets (János Vajda, 1827—1897; Gyula Reviczky,
1855—1889; Jenő Komjáthy, 1861 — 1895) who had already thoroughly exploited
the "lyric virtues" of solitude, destructive passions, nervous hypersensitivity, and the
destinies of the "damned". In 1906, Ady, speaking of himself, used the paraphrase
that Rémy de Gourmont had applied to one of Schopenhauer's maxims: "The world
is the representation of the ego. The only thing that really exists is what the subject
sees".20 He had been anticipated, however, about twenty years previously, by Reviczky,
who had written the following lines in a poem with the significant title About Myself.

Tell yourself, when you look at man,

That this universe where we are
Is neither bad nor altogether good,
It is instead your own reflection.
One complains, the other has fun.
The world is but a state of mind.21

Komjáthy, for his part, was the first to weave fragile connections between his ego,
"this focus of the mirror of the world", and the visible world. This entire fin-de-siècle
generation based its program on dream visions. The verb "to see" took on the sense of
"to know", "to understand", "to penetrate fully", "to bring into the light of day",
and these were all attributes of the seer. Symbolism was already potentially present,
but it showed itself as yet incapable of taking on life, of transforming itself from an
abstract theme into a creative process.22 In fact, with regard to expression, the "cos­
mopolitans" failed. In progressively rejecting the essentially civic inspiration, the
"objective" vision of Petőfi and János Arany, as well as the school known as the
"national-peasant" movement which was founded around the exemplary work of
these two great masters, the "cosmopolitans" also rejected their abundant, rich, and

19
A szegény kisgyermek panaszai.
20
"A belgák", Budapesti Napló, 16 August 1906.
21
Úgy tekints az emberekre,
Hogy a föld se jó se ferde;
Se gyönyör, se bú tanyája,
Csak magadnak képe, masa.
Ki sóhajtoz, ki mulat.
A világ csak hangulat.
Magamról
28
Cf. G. Béla Németh, A magyar szimbolizmus kezdeteinek kérdéséhez (Nyelvi és stílus-
problémak) in Mû és személyiség, (Budapest, Magvetó, 1970), pp. 542-582.

172
plastic idiom, which was marvellously suited for moral analysis and the evocation of
reality. The break proved profitable to the innovators only where sensibility was in­
volved; otherwise it had a disastrous consequence: a distinct impoverishment of the
language. From then on there were long-winded discussions on subjectivity, but no
one could incarnate it. As a result of the break, they suffered cruelly from a lack of the
color and image which constitute the fundamentally concrete basis of the Hungarian
language. The remedy came from outside, with the go-between function of translations
in a new style: "We have polished our language on foreign poems", Kosztolányi noted,
"in order to express our complex sentiments in a form which has richness, competence,
solidity, and nobility". 23
Through its contact with Symbolism, Hungarian poetry renewed its connections
with a concrete world from which the ego was not excluded. It was the end of a period
of alienation; the language, liberated, celebrated the new alliance, as in this poem by
Ady.

They have fastened my soul to the stake,

For the fire of a colt pranced in it,
For in vain I whipped it,
In vain I chased it, pursued it.
If you see a bloody, foaming colt
Tied up on the Hungarian Field,
Cut off its tether immediately,
For it is a soul, a sad Hungarian soul.24

In the perspective of a verbal alchemy which is founded on the intuition of secret

affinities, the paradoxical remark of Kosztolányi is explained and justified. Learning
to be loyal to oneself signified, in the context of the influences at work, finding again
the plenitude of the Hungarian language; and this proved possible thanks to the me­
taphorical vision of the correspondences and the polysemous, allusive, and musical
style which the followers of Baudelaire often used and abused. Rightly enough, this
entire generation had the impression that it was discovering itself through the themes
which were transmitted by the translations; and it abandoned itself to the joy of saying
so, of telling how it was being Western in the Hungarian manner. In these circumstan­
ces, however, the acceptance of the Symbolist esthetic also led to an ideological posi-

23
24
"Preface" to the first edition of Modern koltők, 1913.
Kipányvázták a lelkemet,
Mert ficánkolt csikói tűzben,
Mert hiába korbácsoltam,
Hiába ûztem, hiába űztem.
Ha láttok a magyar Mezőn
Véres, tajtékos, pányvás ménet:
Vágjátok el a kötelét,
Mert lélek az, bús magyar lélek.
Lelkek a pányván ( Új versek)

173
tion: war was simultaneously waged against the poetry of the past, which was congealed
in academicism, and against feudal, provincial, and conservative Hungary. Undoub-
tedly, the truth of art was pursued, but only partially in the world of essences, and more
fully in the intellectual, spiritual, and even social reality of the epoch. The absolute
was repeatedly broken up in the relative, Symbolism tolerated Impressionism, and
pure poetry, in the style of Mallarmé, remained a temptation to which even Babits,
to whom the cerebral dimension of language appealed most, yielded only on occasion.
In order to demonstrate the difference between this poetry and its model, in order
to find a formula which can be called the Hungarian coloration of Symbolism, it is
best to compare the respective nature of the suggestions: in the French model there was
a privileged relation with the mystery of absence, while Hungarian poetry often sound-
ed an eager entreaty for the presence of the mystery. Without any doubt, historical
and sociological factors motivated this difference of attitude (in Hungary the middle
class was still preparing its revolution; it experienced, at the beginning of the century,
a period of dynamic agitation), but where poetry was concerned, the difference between
the French and Hungarian approaches appears to be just as decisive, if not more so.
We can form an approximate idea of these differences by examining the work of the
poet-translators.25
First of all, however, a word about the tradition that the westernizers attempted
to illustrate in their own manner, while keeping to their fundamental principles. The
first point —- and it was without a doubt the actual basis for all the others — was that
any poem translated from a foreign language should be able to enrich the national
culture. It was, therefore, indispensable that, once adapted—and in order that it be
adopted by the readers—the text should, in fact, read as poetry, that is to say, that
it transmit the maximum of its virtualities, those of its content as well as those of
its form. The only versions which were offered to the public were those which re-
spected the meter of the original; and it so happens that in the great majority of cases
it was possible to copy the meter thanks to the particular flexibility of the Hungarian
language. In short, one had to be a poet oneself in order to translate poems; so much
so, in fact, that the idea of poetry more than once surpassed in importance that of the
actual translation. There was a double servitude; Kosztolányi described the operation
as "a dance which must be executed with one's hands and feet tied".20 It is, therefore,
understandable that, given these circumstances, it was impossible, to avoid treason
of one degree or another, and that the result, acknowledged or not, was only too often
beautiful but unfaithful.
While prolonging the tradition, the westernizers boldly acknowledged their in-
fidelity. It was the only notable difference with regard to the past, but the consequences
were nevertheless considerable, for the humility required by the craft was soon
superseded by a possessive, conquering attitude. In the preface to his adaptations,
which bore the significant title Peacock Feathers,27 Babits prematurely repudiated all

25
26
It should be stressed that they all translated directly from the French.
27
A Holló (Válaaz Elek Arturnak), (Budapest, Nyugat, 1913), pp. 591-693.
Pávatollak, (Budapest, 1920).

174
 critical examination: "I write these poems for myself, I have tested the effect that one
tone or another would produce in Hungarian. It was the Hungarian poem that mattered
to me, not the French or English one. It was my poem that mattered, not that of the
foreign poet." In his own more modest or more timid way, Árpád Tóth also empha­
sized the personal factor: "At times by chance, one beautiful foreign poem or another
impressed me so much that I could not free myself of its music until I proved able to
put it, stammering or singing, into my own language, always conforming, however,
to the momentary requirements of my taste, my affinity, and my technical capacity". 28
As for Kosztolányi, the most independent of them all, rhetorical precaution alone made
him begin the statement of his principles thus: "My ideal is to remain completely
faithful both to the content and to the form, and to respect absolute beauty". He
immediately added: "But when art required a compromise of me, it was not beauty
that I sacrificed". He did more than admit that he had stamped his translations with
his own personality; when one of his colleagues, more deferential than himself towards
philological niceties, attacked the version he had made of Poe's The Raven, Kosztolányi
retorted: "My work is the natural synthesis of English and Hungarian, of Poe's per­
sonality and my own. The poem published in Nyugat bears both Poe's signature and
my own". 29
It is not surprising, therefore, that there were as many translations of Baudelaire,
Verlaine, and Rimbaud as there were Hungarian translators. With regard to the tone
of the four main translators: Ady has a rough, contracted, prophesying harshness;
Babits an ironically voluptuous, and desperate intellectuality; Kosztolányi a nervous,
juvenile pitch; while Árpád Tóth, by contrast, sounds a deliberately weary, plaintive,
and torpid note. However, precisely because of its unanimously declared individualism,
its collective cult of beauty, musicality, and the productive content of meaning, the
generation which concerns us had its own Baudelaire, its own Verlaine, its own Rimbaud.
It was the innovating attitude to language of the poets translated which made them
seem to converge towards what resembled a common denominator. Kosztolányi clearly
indicated the model: "The new poetry has not only lifted from the poet the obligation
of servilely copying reality . . . it has also liberated the translator; he, too, now has
the means to dispose over the poem, material of his inspiration, as freely as the poet
disposes over the material of his life". 30 Kosztolányi undoubtedly adopted an extrem­
ist position, but during their "years of apprenticeship" the other translators also
followed a course which resembled the one defined in his formula: "The relationship
between my translations and the originals is not the one that exists between the pic­
ture and the copy, but rather the one which connects the picture to the object which it
represents. Painting seems to me to be more loyal and more honest than photography." 31
But in the circumstances, the art of the "painters", that is to say, the translators,
evolved through contact with the model which did not fail to influence it. We are,
therefore, watching a play of mirrors which contains, at least theoretically, the possi-

28
29
"Preface" to Őrök virúgok.
A holló, quoted above.
30
31
"Preface" to the second enlarged edition of Modem költók, 192I.
"Preface" to the 1913 edition of Modem költők.

175
bility of an ideal solution. For was not the best guarantee of loyalty the Symbolist
texts shown by translating them in the Symbolist manner? This would be true if the
manner were simply transposed and not transformed into a personal style, which was
determined, in turn, by the tendencies of the language whose richness it was to illus-
trate. To understand clearly what had occurred, one must study in detail a number of
examples taken from the work of the four translators.
An important characteristic of the Symbolist mystery for Ady proceeded from
the anguish of mist, interior or exterior mist, a kind of haunted zone on the frontier
between life and death. At the hour of religious inspiration, looming up from the distant
past, God will appear "through a dawn that is blind and damp with autumn":

He hit the mist, he beat it

And he chimed matins. 32

This image appears as an "archetype" in the sonnet by Baudelaire 33 which Ady

integrated into his New Poems (1906). The first verse evokes the feelings which are
born when one listens to

Les souvenirs lointains lentement s'élever

Au bruit des carillons qui chantent dans la brume.

(The distant memories slowly rise

To the sound of the chimes which sing in the mist.)

With regard to the meaning, the version of Ady is, on the whole, exact:

Miként száll, száll föl a multaknak árnya,

Míg a harangok búgnak kint a ködben.

As literally as possible:

How it rises up, the shadow of things past

While the bells toll outside in the mist . . .

When we notice that the adverb "slowly" is rendered by repetition of the verb "to
rise, to fly", which had an adverbial function when it was related to the proverb föl
(towards the top), one could presume that the translator had not adopted the exact
equivalent lassati emelkedni because it was too long. Everything changes, however,
if one observes the other modifications. Instead of "memories", we have "multak"
in the plural, (things past, "pasts") which introduces the hazy note characteristic of the
Impressionist style. Moreover, instead of the abstract "memories" we see a "shadow"
a more sensory term, while the discreet personification "sing" is amplified in the verb
with an onomatopoeic value which Hungarian generally reserves in order to charac-

32
Paskolta, verte a ködöt,
Rorátéra harangozott.
33
A Sion-Hegy alatt
La cloche fêlée.

176
terize the sound of the horn or the organ. The cutting up process of száll, száll föl at
once acquires a precise motivation by following the same tendency.'Classic here in his
semantics with regard to the importof the individual words,Baudelaire entrusts the "sor­
cellerie évocatoire" to the synesthesia of the associations and the musicality of the verse.
Ady translates it by following the rules established by Verlaine; he makes more intense
the alliance between the explicit and the implicit; moreover, in accordance with his
Symbolist vision, he adds a dramatic, even an animist note to the emotional content
of the poem. In Ady's translation Verlaine himself becomes a "seer", for his "rêve
étrange et pénétrant" becomes: "Forró és különös, áldott, nagy Látomás", which
means: "Burning and strange, blessed, great Vision". As other synesthesiae also serve to
"enrich" the translation, this "vision" makes the rôle of life in death more important
than it is in the original.
What, then, could happen to texts where the theme illustrated directly the magic
of emotion ? Using the rhythm of a popular song, Babits composes two stanzas in which
the artlessness of the tone creates a subtle counterpoint with the decadent artifice
of the images:
My heart is a small perfumed bag,
my soul a fragrant house:
so many mixed perfumes
hold me in their charms.34

This is also a deliberate "quotation" from Parfum by Baudelaire:

Reader, have you sometimes inhaled

with giddiness and stealthy greed
that wisp of incense that fills a church,
or the inveterate musk from a sachet?*

The Hungarian version by Babits gives us:

Szittál-e néha halkan terjedő

tömjént, mely dómokon remegve száll át
vagy régi zacskó ó-levenduláját,
szimattól inyenc élvre gerjedő ?

Tt is an elegant and clever translation, more or less faithful to the main idea; but
the attempt to reproduce it in English literally poses insurmountable problems.

* Trans, note: this is my own translation. The verse by Baudelaire referred to reads:
"Lecteur, as-tu quelquefois respiré /Avec ivresse et lente gourmandise / Ce grain d'encens qui
remplit une église/, Ou d'un sachet le musc invétéré.
34
Szívem most illatzacskó,
lelkem illatház:
ez a sok illat engem
hogy megbabonáz . . .
Egy 8zegény magára maradott

12 Balakian 177
 Have you at times breathed a silently spreading
incense which, vibrating on domes floats on
or an old sachet of ancient lavender,
at the scent to a refined voluptuousness rising ?

The two main causes of the difficulty are thus strikingly clear. Babits dislocates the
logical progression of the French phrase by introducing the run-on line and by post­
poning until the fourth line the reader's qualifications; he thereby achieves an arran­
gement of syntax which was cherished by those Symbolists who had been influenced
by Mallarmé. As for the present participles in rhyming position, they confer upon the
feelings which Baudelaire evokes greater actuality and a living density. The message
of the second stanza, "dans le présent le passé restauré" is already contained in the first
one, where it is restored both by the meaning and the form of the argument. By virtue
of its position at the end of the verse, preceded by the object, the subject (which is no
longer, moreover, a reader, a being [être}, but one who undergoes the process of being
[étant}) is so impregnated with feelings that it mingles with them. The translator's
language asserts itself here as a means of knowledge.
Once priority had been given to personal language, it was time to indulge in games
of virtuosity, which included, for the Hungarian adapters, feats of prosody. A militant
esthete, Kosztolányi constructed a complete Symbolist theory of rhyme and inscribed
on his flag the motto of the Art poétique of Verlaine. But when he translated the text,
only the musicality of the rhymes remained, while the intellectual message was lost
in atmosphere. Chosen not "without error", the wording makes the instructions felt
but it does not specify what they are.

De la musique avant toute chose,

Et pour cela préfère l'Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.
(Music before everything else,
And therefore prefer the Uneven,
It is more vague, more soluble in the air,
Without anything in it which weighs or settles.)

Zenét minékünk, csak zenét,

ezért a versed lebegőben
ragadd meg a lágy levegőben,
amint cikázik szerteszét.

Translating Kosztolányi's version into English, we obtain:

Music for us, only music

therefore your poem in flight
seize it in the gentle air
as it zigzags in every direction.

178
 This is not Verlaine's intention, and, as has been expertly shown,85 parts of what
follow actually contradict the words of the original; but this is Kosztolányi's intention,
as his more nervous rhythm, his more immediate and more plastic images make quite
clear throughout the poem. Thus the relationship between the two poems is not estab­
lished on the basis of the formulas which are developed, but on that of an actual in­
spiration whose origin is a certain conception of music.
In subjects dealing with vocalizations on a state of mind, Árpád Tóth obtained
more convincing results by paying attention to the prosodical diagram and by respect­
ing the emotional value of the sounds. His translation of Chanson d'automne by Verlaine
is a sonorous tour de force.

Les sanglots longs Ősz húrja zsong

Des violons jajong, busong
De l'automne a tájon
Blessent mon cœur s ont monoton
D'une langueur but konokon
Monotone. es fájón.

(The Verlaine text we might give in English as follows: The long sobs of the violins
of autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor.)
Even if the "couleur des voyelles" carries a more sombre nuance in the Hungarian
text, the same torpid song is still heard, which corresponds to the effect sought by
Verlaine. However, only a very approximate notion of the original meaning remains
in the translation, which, when rendered into English becomes: "The string of autumn
hums, / complains, grows sad / on the landscape / and sheds a monotonous / sorrow
obstinately / and painfully." Here is a clear case of an extreme attempt to make the
forms coincide. Nevertheless, the attempt is significant and has a context, for at the
beginning, in particular, the westernizing generation tended to convey the connotation
before the denotation. As a result, the reader — reaching through the musicality, the
voluptuous play of the rhymes, the symbolism of the sounds, the suggestive imagery —
can comprehend easily enough the emotional unity of the poems; but, at the same time,
these qualities often form a screen which makes access to the meaning difficult. For
example, although the total meaning of Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre is but obscurely
revealed, we do know exactly what happened to the haleurs (boat-towers) of the first
verse:
Des Peaux-Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles,
Les ayant cloués nus aux poteaux de couleurs.
(Clamorous Red Indians had taken them for targets,
Having nailed them naked to the colored posts.)

The version given by Árpád Tóth makes the reader work at guessing the details of
the event:

35
GyŐrgy Rába, A 8zép hűtlenek (Babite, Kosztolányi, Tóth Árpád versforditami) (Budapest,
1969), pp. 276-277.

12* 179
 lármás rézborű raj közt céltáblául sziszegtek
bepingált póznasorhoz nyilazva meztelen
(Targets for clamorous Red Indian swarm, they wheezed
fixed with arrows to a row of painted posts, naked.)

This rapid examination of the personal manner of the poet-translators allows us to

make two remarks. First of all, it is to be noted that the differences which we have
pointed out hardly go beyond the framework of the procedures which are evident in
the French texts themselves. Within this general perspective, however, unexpected
graftings occur. The voice of Baudelaire can be heard in a register which we rightly
associate with Verlaine; the stress of Mallarmé is reproduced in a poem whose author
is Rimbaud. A particular alchemy takes place here, resulting in a standard style which
offers a synthesis of the lessons of Impressionism and Symbolism, which are both
derived from Baudelaire's poetics. Everything takes place, then, as if during their
experiments — or "studio studies", to quote the image they willingly used — these
innovators decided that it sufficed to remain close to the general tone of an epoch in
order not to betray the spirit of its particular products. However, while it derives
from the conception which* holds that the spiritual relates to the material, is this
attitude exclusively indebted to Symbolism ?
The reply lies in the remark we made about the Hungarian language; it became
considerably regenerated through its encounter with French poetry. In fact, in the
majority of the examples quoted, the differences are all characterized by their ten­
dency towards an increased plasticity, by the emphasizing of images and sensory
suggestion. Operating as an "expletive", the contingent supplants the essence; the
word-sign gives in to the descriptive word.36 Herein lies an obedience to the imperatives
of the Hungarian language which gives advantage to concrete aspect and "seizes the
signification of a phrase by paying attention to the formal elements of the words which
compose it rather than by analyzing the concepts which they carry". 37 If this synthetic
vision is quite contrary to the analytical nature of the French language, it is not, on
the other hand, at variance with the Symbolist refusal to be explicit, that is to say,
to apprehend the universe by means of Cartesian discourse. But when Symbolism gives
in to the solicitation of the French language and sets out in quest of pure essences,
then the differences appear. The westernizing generation avoided translating Mallarmé,
except for his poem Fenêtres, adapted by Árpád Tóth. They preferred texts that
suggested the spiritual dimension of things rather than those in which the subject, far
from denying itself, could fully prove itself. "It is by what they must express, and not
by what they can express, that languages essentially differ".88 This statement by
Roman Jakobson can also be accurately applied to poetry.

36
Cf. Georges Kassai, Stylistique comparée du français et du hongrois, doctoral diss., (Paris,
Sorbonne,
37
1974).
38
Aurélien Sauvageot, Esquisse de la langue hongroise (Paris, Klincksieck, 1951), p. 331.
Roman Jakobson, "Aspects linguistiques de la traduction", Essais de linguistique générale
(Paris, 1970), p. 84.

180
 At this point there was a lot of grafting. Freely taking hold of the French texts,
the translator-poets also gained a firm grasp of their mother tongue. It was because
of the common agreement which they reached about the general attitude to be adopted
with regard to poetic language that the approximation by tone, by musical form,.
seemed to them to guarantee adherence to the spirit. And in a remarkable manner,
this misunderstanding became creative; it stimulated the full bloom of their personal
works and assured them a quality which still remains evident.
On the other hand, the translation suffered, because, after all, fidelity to the
original must be considered one of the measures by which the quality and validity of
a translation is judged. Nevertheless, does not the very nature of the Symbolist texts
make treason inevitable a priori ? Having examined a particular example, the problem
can be set in a larger perspective by studying the irreconcilable manner in which the
traditional relation of that which signifies and that which is signified is challenged.
Among the many testimonies, let us quote the very precise one by Albert Mockel:

The poet should seek less to draw a conclusion than to give food for thought.
Collaborating, thereby, through what he conjectures, the reader concludes the
written words. The various forms which compose the work are directed like a col­
lection of lines which, without ever reaching the exact meeting point, at least
indicate where it is through their common tendency, and thereby project into
space the sign of their right to be and of their unity. This point, toward which
all the ideas included in the various verses would head, exists in the spirit itself
which communicates with the work.39

In other words, from its extra-linguistic position which "mimesis" confers upon it, that
which is signified glides towards a relative and uncertain position, to the extent that
it becomes a tributary of the reader's subjectivity. Is this not tantamount to saying
that Symbolism openly favours connotation, if by this term one may understand "a
relation between each sign and each reader, an unstable relation with regard to each
reader, and different with regard to different readers" 40 . So, when a translator confronts
a Symbolist text, he is authorized to behave like a reader with all the subjectivity
required for the ideal practice of his function. Thus, when he replaces the connotations
of the original with those of his own language, the manner remains safe, while the
"meaning" and the sensibility are modified. It is because of this unavoidably deform­
ing operation that we have the diversity of Symbolism on the international scale.
Under these conditions, its unity can be sought only by adopting an attitude similar
to that of the poets themselves with regard to language.
However, the Symbolist attitude of the creative poet with regard to his language
and the Symbolist attitude of the translator with regard to the foreign Symbolist text
are two quite different matters. Despite appearances, as we have seen, the Symbolist
manner hardly contributes to establishing satisfying equivalents; it only allows one

39
Propos de littérature, 1894, quoted by G. Michaud, La doctrine symboliste (Paris, Nizet, 1947),
p. 91.
40
Georges Mounin, Les problèmes théoriques et pratiques de la traduction (Paris, 1963), p. 167.

181
to measure the extent of the influence exerted by the style of the original. Nevertheless,
the procedure of our authors becomes fully significant if we admit that their attempt
to individualize their adaptations marks one of the great steps taken to change the
status of the translator by conferring upon his work — ambiguously, it is true, and in
a very relative manner — some of the dignity that is contained in the creative act.
As Kosztolányi said: "No more than a pun can a poem be rendered with the fidelity
of a sworn translator. It is necessary to create a new poem in its place, another one
which will be identical to it in soul, in music, in form; a false one which will be true." 41
But if Baudelaire could write that the poet was a translator, it would surely not be
rash to affirm, within the terms of this survey, that Symbolism had in fact the virtue
of transforming the translator into a poet.

Translated from the French by Edouard Roditi

41
A holló, quoted above.

182
 MIKLÓS SZABOLCSI

ON THE SPREAD OF SYMBOLISM

In any discussion of Symbolism outside of France, we must first ask: What chronological
period of these arts and literatures can we call Symbolist, and on the basis of what
criteria? Is there, in fact, a true Symbolist movement in other countries? For what we
call the Symbolist school in France was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather part
of an extraordinarily complex network of trends and theories. This is even more true
outside of France. Comparatists are used to finding various streams and trends, origi­
nating in diverse countries at a variety of times, all reaching a given country at the
same moment, and merging to exert there their simultaneous influences.
The Parnassian and the symbolic trend, Naturalism and Symbolism, for example,
reached a great many countries together, working not against each other but rather
to reinforce one another. For this reason, in most literatures it is from a whole spectrum
of complex trend-fragments, from an entire series of phenomena that we must try to
isolate whàt is truly symbolist, or of symbolist inspiration. It is just as difficult at
times to distinguish Symbolism from the many other contemporaneously appearing
trends: the Impressionism, the Jugendstil, and a certain neoclassicism of the years
between 1895 and 1910. To which trend, for instance, should we attribute the pre­
occupation with the exotic, "orientalism", the love of decor? Are we to attribute the
discovery of scenery, of cities and of oceans, the discovery of color in painting and in
music to Symbolism, too, or to Symbolism alone ?
Symbolism in literature can appear as a deliberate program, as a self-conscious,
premeditated trend; but it can also appear unself-consciously, as the unity of the various
tendencies that are in the air. As such, it appears as the tone coloring and affecting the
works of an entire epoch.
It is, therefore, only with the greatest circumspection that we can ever speak of
Symbolism outside of France. It is better merely to examine how certain elements of
the program of the French Symbolist school, certain of its philosophical tenets, and
certain of its stylistic methods, components, and even clichés appeared in other coun­
tries — alone, or all together; as a single influence, or as one of many other trends. 1 It
is a Symbolist effect, a Symbolist influence that we have whenever a work or its parts
create the symbols of a deeper reality — where they have a "veiled" meaning; wherever

1
A. Balakian sees as the three constant elements: ambiugity of indirect communication;
affiliation with music; the 'decadent' spirit". See The Symbolist Movement : A Critical Appraisal
(New York, 1967).

183
these signs or symbols are derived from historical events or legends ; wherever the author's
psychological state, his "soul" appears under the guise of the symbols; wherever the
signs or symbols are essentially esoteric; and wherever the author is constantly search­
ing for the essence of things.
Symbolism's active life was much more protracted outside of France. There is a
wave of Symbolist influence in the 1890's; another one around 1905, and there were
a number of countries where Symbolism was a creative force as late as the 1920's.
In France, too, of course, the popular idiom of the poetry of the 1920's was of a Sym­
bolist nature; at the high noon of Surrealism, it was the Symbolist and post-Symbolist
poetry of the Mercure de France which was the most popular and best known, and we
find an analogous situation in, for example, Romania. Symbolism undoubtedly existed
as a European literary trend during all of the half-century between 1880 and 1930.
Yet, through all of this period, Symbolism was never the sole trend, and it is but
very seldom that it becomes the dominant one. Perhaps in Russian literature, for a few
years, and in that of the Austrian Germans. But in most cases, and in most countries,
we find Symbolism coexisting with certain neoromantic, even neoclassicist trends —
trends which had turned against each other in their common cradle, France.
The poetic attitude and the stylistic devices peculiar to Symbolism satisfied needs
which had arisen in the course of the internal development of a particular literature or
art. For example, in many East-Central European countries, as in Poland and in Czecho­
slovakia, nationalist Romanticism had outlived itself by the end of the nineteenth
century. The popular national idiom had become hollow imitation; it was the official
jargon in contrast to which Symbolism appeared as the expression of a new purpose.
The new sensitivity, the relaxation of formalism, the emphasis on the poet's personality,
the Symbolic mode of presentation all meant a liberation, a return to a larger spectrum.
The work of the Romanian A. Macedonski who spent many years in France, and was
one of the earliest East-European followers of French Symbolism, well illustrates this
fact. For Symbolism was a weapon with which to strike a blow at conservatism and
traditionalism in poetry and in society alike. From the moment of its inception, Symbol­
ism had functions other than the purely esthetic. The solitary artist became the
leader, the potential transformer of society.
The second reason for the spread of Symbolism ties in with the above: it was an
artistic solution to the problems besetting a number of nations in the course of the
peculiar societal, national and political developments they were just then undergoing.
For in Western as well as Eastern Europe, the advent of a strong bourgeoisie, industri­
alization, mechanization, and the ever more minute division of labor were making
modern life, the modern world seem intolerably grey and monotonous. Almost every­
where, rebellion against this dreariness took the form of a return in art and literature
to a kind of mysticism and irrationalism, to the search for some primordial past —
both of one's society and one's own psyche. Symbolism, one expression of this quest,
provided an arsenal of obvious, accessible, adaptable, and easily imitable artistic
literary devices. In some countries, Romania, Hungary, Symbolism became the artistic
equivalent of protest against the remnants of feudalism in society; its very sensitivity
was a novel protest against an ossified, bureaucratic world.

184
 There are traces of this feature even in German Symbolism. We can thus speak —
paradoxical though it might seem — of a social Symbolism in East-Central Europe
(e.g. in Czechoslovakia), and even in the Spanish-speaking areas. Let us add, that in
the countries where the working class and the socialist parties were stronger, Symbolism
was shaped in part by the fear and uncertainty that accompanied their rise. The dis­
illusionment and exhaustion perceptible in the art of the period just after the 1905
Russian revolution was but a more intense form of Symbolism.
In its second wave, therefore, around 1905, Symbolism suddenly became the
stream most typically expressive of the age. It was through Symbolism that a number
of the great patriotic and socially conscious writers and poets of the period realized
their artistic potential. As the studies in this volume convincingly argue, this was
true, for example, of the Russians Blok, Bal'mont and Bryusov. Symbolism became
the determinant element of Spanish modernismo, and also of the work of the Hungarian
poet, Endre Ady. We can observe the same development in the Austrian German-
language literature. Here, Symbolism became one of the means through which an
apparently secure but in fact disharmonious and uncertain society and state gave
expression to its thoughts and fears. A sense of insecurity, a world of symbols, the
externalization of one's inner life, a history that was but props and decor, all this
was typical of one major trend in Austrian literature, and greatly contributed to the
climate in which Kafka and Rilke, but even more Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Werfel
evolved their own styles. The greatest achievements of this trend inspired by Austrian-
German Symbolism are, without doubt, Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge; Hofmannsthal's
dramas, and Trakl's early poems. Its most pleasant "consumer" products, on the other
hand, are the libretti of Richard Strauss' operas, through which Austrian Symbolism
penetrated to every corner of the world.
One of the most significant aspects of Symbolism's transformed after-life was its
"folklorization". The term is certainly not the most felicitous one, nor its reference
sufficiently specific. We use it but as a shorthand for the fact that Symbolism was often
used as a means of reaching out to the distant national past, and later, of plumbing
the most profound depths of the folk poetry of a particular people. Symbolist poetry
utilized folklore, revaluated it, and made it appear in a new light.
Finally, and most importantly, the symbols, trappings and props of French Sym­
bolism could be most happily wedded to the traditional and national elements of a
variety of literatures and cultures. Symbolism became either the direct continuation
of a national romanticism; or the stimulus toward a greater sensitivity to popular
folklore. Paradoxically, then, Symbolism became both the embodiment of opposition
to the hackneyed popular-national idiom, and the poetic means to strengthen the
sense of a national continuity, the sense of tradition.
The recourse to folklore at the end of the nineteenth century was motivated by
a search for enrichment. At first, it was used as setting; later, however, there was a
more profound identification. Folklore permeated symbolist art: it gave it new colors,
new solutions, a new outlook on life.
The. history of Russian Symbolism provides us with examples of this evolution.
Russian ballet and opera at the beginning of this century demonstrate it: up to 1914,

186
Diaghilev annually brought to Paris works in which one can trace the many tempers
and tongues which went to make up the 'World of Art': the classical revival favored by
Benoit; Roerich and Stravinsky's evocation of remote pagan cultures; the Hellenistic
Revival reflected in Bakst's design, such as in L'Après-midi d'uh faune, mingled with
the influence of Persian interiors; the ornamental-decorative Impressionism of Golovin
in the tradition of Wrubel, and in the early designs by Larionov and Goncharova which
not only reach back in their brilliant color and formal motifs to the revival of folk-art
by the Abramtevo artists, but forward to the Futurist movement of which they are
the Russian pioneers.
The trend is evident in Stravinsky's Petrushka; and also in the artistic trend of
the 1910's modelled on the Russian primitives and in some works of Larionov and
Goncharova.
At a later stage, at around 1909-10, preoccupation with the folkish grows into
the cult of the barbarian, of the Eastern, of the aboriginal in the quest of a panacea
to counteract the influence of the decadent West. Barbarism as an esthetic ideal was
to characterize the second and third waves of Symbolism.
The Hungarian who best exemplified the artistic utilization of folk elements was
Béla Balázs. He is known particularly as the librettist of a number of Bartók's operas.
The evolution of his work from a mere ornamental use of symbolism to a profound
appreciation of folklore is extraordinarily typical.
His first works are prose essays: he builds an esthetic system, a philosophy. His
Esthetics of Death, which first appeared in 1908 as On Self-Consciousness, was written
under the influence of the irrationalist subjective idealist philosophies of the turn
the century, and was a series of personal and witty reflections. A great number of the
favorite truisms of the age are to be found in it. He starts from the assumption that
"Art is the manifestation of a metaphysical instinct, and is of transcendent signifi­
cance . . ."2, and consistently considers intuition, "the consciousness of the limits of
our existence", of the utmost importance. The dreadful consciousness of death is ever
imminent. Reality, in this esthetic system, is pushed very much into the background:
Balázs gives a step by step "proof" that genuine reality is, in fact, immanent. The
external world is but a dream; nature is but a passing illusion. It is thus that drama —
that fable — becomes the core of his esthetics: drama, where there are no solutions,
and where all rights are equal; and fable, wherein the "world" becomes an "ephemeral"
painted curtain: fable, which is "the most vital expression of the metaphysical instinct".
At this point, his esthetics merges into an ill-defined neoreligiousness, a kind of pan­
theism: "It is pantheism -— conscious or unconscious — a religious feeling which
gives rise to true a r t . . ."3 In his Esthetic Fragments written a little later, and published
in Nyugat (West) in 1909 he goes even further: here, art is already a form of life, a state
of self-consciousness that can be achieved without artistic creation. We have here the
adumbration of art as a religion. Such is the systematic program in which the young
Béla Balázs expounds to Hungary the esthetic and philosophical doctrines popular at
2
Camilla Gray: The Great Experiment. Russian Literature 1868-1922 (New York, Warney and
Abrams),
3
pp. 48-49.
"On Self-Consciusness", Egyetemes Philológiai Közlöny, Budapest, 1908.

186
the beginning of the century. His ideas can be traced back to Dilthey; to his professor,
Georg Simmel, and to the influential writers of the period: to Paul Ernst and Rudolf
Kassner, for example.
His poems appeared first in the two Tomorrow anthologies, and then in Nyugat.
His first collection, published in 1911, was The Wanderer Sings. It contains a noteworthy
summary of his esthetic principles:
The curtain of our eyes is up,
Where's the stage ? Inside or out
Ladies and Gentlemen?
He weeps and he sings
These are noteworthy things.
Full of war's the world outside
But it's not of that that we die.

It is the mournful complaint of the solitary artist that we hear in the young Béla
Balázs' poems. At times, his message appears too cerebral; at others, it moves with
its deep sincerity. Life is a mystery; we are all the bearers of mysteries.
All secrets remain a secret,
For all is a way, and all is endless,
"For all is a way."

The dominant mood in all these poems is renunciation, sorrow; yet they are strongly
erotic in tone, for Balázs sees but one respite from solitary existence: love. In some of
his poems, for example, Night, we find the lonely bourgeois world, and find in them,
too, a presentiment of its disintegration — a feeling not unusual for poets living in
the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy of the time.
Balázs's is Symbolist poetry; it has much in common with the French Symbolists,
with the dramas of Maeterlinck, and with the Austrian poets. All external phenomena,
and all aspects of man's own psyche appear as symbols: the world is a mysterious and
unique expérience; phenomena are veils concealing the only true, deeper, primordial
reality. And yet, man's experiences of the world reveal the laws of the sole true reality,
thus, the symbols referring to them must, of necessity, be primordially simple. It is
thus that Béla Balázs arrives at using the treasury of Hungarian folk ballads to express
the most profound human experiences in the most ancient and most simple words.
He wants to give expression to his "most differentiated", most complex sentiments
in the ancient words of the Sekler and Magyar folk ballads. It is a goal not altogether
independent of that of Ady, nor of his friendship with Bartók and Kodály. Nevertheless,
it was he who first undertook the task that was to become so popular among Hungar-
ian poets, such as József Erdélyi, István Sinka, and Pál Gulyás, namely, that of at-
tempting a synthesis of the ancient and modern: the Hungarian folk ballad» and the
new thoughts of a new age.
He expressed the problems which beset him in lyric, epic, and critical works.
His later poems, On Tristan's Ship, 1916, also show him to have been a Symbolist.

187
His sorrow and his loneliness are yet more profound. He is "crushed" by the weight
of his "flag of sorrow" his exhaustion and his isolation are yet more complete. His
loneliness is so burdensome, he hints at waiting to be freed of it:

I don't know who you people are

That I have to die for you here . . .

His Mysteries, 1912, are also an attempt to fuse modern content and popular-
mystical form. In Bluebeard's Castle, written in 1910, was to become the most famous
of these pieces. Set to music by Béla Bartók, it has become a world-renowned master­
piece of modern opera. It was Maeterlinck's Ariane et barbe bleu, which started the rev­
ival of Charles Perrault's popular fable. Balázs, however, went back to the original
text, and wove from it — admixed with the stuff of his tragic personal experiences
— the tangled web of solitary Man and Woman.
In Béla Balázs's works, the drama of Man and Woman is an eternal, predestined
tragedy. It is not only his personal experiences that are reflected here, but also the
artistic problem of the age: how can the relationship between man and woman become
a genuine communion? Purely erotic ties trap one in the cage of his own individuality,
precisely in that from which one is trying to escape; but in truth escape is fatally im­
possible. Bluebeard appears to be a romantic problem, but, as György Kroó convin­
cingly argues, " . . . The romantic problem, too, is but a sign, a symbol for a more pro­
found problem: that of society",4 and it is this that makes the work so tragically
powerful.
Bluebeard is a remarkably happy meeting of content, passion and form. The object
of the Sekler ballads acquires at once a universal and Hungarian interest; setting and
color combine to support the action. "Béla Balázs wrote a drama throbbing with the
mysterious world of the ballads, and wrote in it the ancient Magyar ottava rima — the
form in which the Hungarian version of the Bluebeard legend, the ballad of Anna
Molnár had appeared . . . The diction, which is built on the rhythm of the thoughts,
the correspondence of the lines repeated, and the enumerations reminiscent of folk­
tales lend the stylistic authenticity of the folkish form".5 Balázs himself wrote to
Endre Ady: "The fluidity of the Sekler ballad expanded to a Hungarian dramatic
style . . . could become as significant as the Alexandrine has become for the French."
Later,- he writes: " I wanted to paint a modern soul with the ancient colors of the folk
ballad . . . for only what is simple can be true, and only what is simple can be truly
new" 6
In the next phase of its development, about five years later, symbolism is already
organically united with folklore, or, more precisely, with the artistic style that had
been created from folkloristic elements. Later, it was a symbolism modeled on folklore
which became dominant, when the most popular folkloristic phrases and symbols be-

4
Gy. Kroó, Bartók szmpadi művei (Bartók's Works for the Stage) (Budapest, 1962).
5
László Bóka, "Utószó" (Postscript) in Béla Bartók, A Kékszakállú herceg vára (In Blubeard's
Castle)
6
(Budapest, 1960).
Bécsi Magyar Újság, May 21, 1922.

188
came the raw material of a Symbolist-oriented poetry. In Hungarian literature, it was
József Erdélyi, a peasant by origin, who was an advocate of this style in the 1920's;
and István Sinka in the 1930's. Here, Symbolism surpassed itself; it lost a number of
its original elements, and appeared in a new form.
Polish literature, too, used Symbolist devices, but used them with a passionate
social concern. It generalized and used the symbols of Polish folklore, of Polish classical
literature, and not least of all, the symbols taken by Polish romanticism from popular
superstition, beliefs, and practices.
The outstanding representative is Wyspiński (1869—1907), the great Polish dras
matist, who made use of everything that European Symbolism and its predecessor-
had achieved. With Wagner and Nietzsche as his models, he wrote his great dramas
in which the chief protagonists were the customs, symbols, manners, and legacies of
Polish folklore and of the Polish nation. For him, as for his contemporaries (Zeromski,
Reymont) symbolism is the artistic equivalent of the "young-Polish" movement.
We can observe similar phenomena in the case of Bielorussian literature (J. Ku-
pala, J. Kolasz): and even more in the work of the Lithuanian Jan Rainis whose dra­
mas of the 1910's represent the unity of Symbolist and popular-historical motifs.
Romanian literature presents another example of their harmonious unification. The
Romanian language itself was probably conducive to the "naturalization" of Symbol­
ist techniques, which have continued to dominate Romanian literature practically
tp this day. The poetry of the Romanian Arghezi was inspired by the European Sym­
bolists, and is an original synthesis in which the rich material of Romanian folklore is
put in a new context to appear in colors more brilliant than ever before. It is no longer
the poetry of existential uncertainty and escapism; Arghezi's poems ring out with the
affirmation and love of life. It is, of course, debatable whether this is still Symbolism,
or, rather another trend containing certain Symbolist elements but proceeding from
a revival of aboriginal folklore toward a redefined and ''national" symbolism.

Translated from the Hungarian by Éva Pálmai

189
 MANFRED DUBZAK

MODELS FOR SYMBOLISM AND EXPRESSIONISM: STEFAN GEORGE

AND HERWARTH WALDEN

Most critics have usually tended to see German poetry from George, through Hofmanns-
thal to Rilke as a Symbolist pendant to Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Valéry.1
Others have on occasion tried to look upon Rilke as an Expressionist.2 Indeed, even
the young George of the Hängenden Gärten is similarly placed among the Expres-
sionists.8
Against such a background, it seems almost redundant to want to show the struc-
tural similarities and the relationships between Symbolism and Expressionism, or
the effects or influences each had on the other. It is not so much that the esthetic
categories concerning their reception resist conceptual demarcations,4 but rather that
two styles are being juxtaposed which can be described even in isolation only with
the greatest difficulty. The problems involved in a precise conceptual description of
Expressionism, documented by Richard Brinkmann in the Introduction to his Ex-
pressionism research-report,5 are the same, though on a different level, for Symbolism.
Gottfried Benn's ironic comment on the label Expressionism, "What is Expressionism
then? A conglomeration, a serpent, the Loch Ness monster, a sort of Ku Klux Klan ?",6
could just as easily be applied to Symbolism. On closer examination of the literary
situation in Germany between 1890 and 1900, the movement does indeed seem very
much like a conglomeration.
Although the label Expressionism does have a certain terminological value, as is
indicated by the frequency, if not precision, of its application, the term Symbolism is
from the very outset somewhat dubious. René Wellek who defended the usefulness
of the term "as a general designation for all western literature following the demise of

1
The nearest equivalent in German to the founder of French Symbolism, Baudelaire, would be
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer or, perhaps, Platen. See Heinrich Henel, "Epigonenlyrik: Rückert und
Platen", Euphorion, 55/3, (1961), 260-278.
2
See the anthology by Clemens Heselhaus, Die Lyrik des Expressionismus, Voraussetzungen,
Ergebnisse und Grenzen, Nachwirkungen, (Tübingen, 1956), which includes several of Rilke's most
important poems—along with others by Lasker-Schüler, Heym, Trakl, Stadier, Werfel and Benn
as Expressionist poems, pp. 34 ff.
3
Rasch, p. 224.
4
See, among others, the chapters " 'Einfluß' und 'Nachahmung'" and "'Rezeption' und
'Wirkung'" in Ulrich Weisstein, Êinführung in die vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (Stuttgart,
1968), pp. 88-118.
5
Richard Brinkmann, Expressionismus, Forschungsprobleme, 1952-1960 (Stuttgart, 1961).
6
Gottfried Benn. "Einleitung", Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts. Von den Wegbereitem
bis zum Dada (Munich, 1962), p. 9.

191
Realism and Naturalism in the nineteenth century",7 nevertheless found it necessary
to concede with regard to Germany: "There is no doubt that the term has not caught
on in German literary criticism . . . " (p. 74). Perhaps the terminological artificiality
present in the very word Symbolism in its German context precludes, from the outset,
any comparison of the two phenomena.8 But then, on the other hand, it may well be
asked what is the exact nature of the phenomenon in question ?
The methodological difficulties hinted at in this case may be dealt with in various
ways. It would be possible to describe, in some abstract scheme, a kind of ideal Ex-
pressionist or Symbolist style and then attempt to make the tremendously varied
literature fit the ideal model, or to point out the structural similarities. Critics have,
indeed, defined Expressionism deductively in this way, thereby obscuring a whole
host of historical nuances, just as Gottfried Benn does when he says: "Expressionism
expressed no more than the poets of other times and styles: its relationship to nature,
its love, its sadness, its thoughts about God. Expressionism was absolutely natural
inasmuch as art and style are ever natural. . . "9 Such contextual characteristics could
be expanded at will: one need only cast a glance at the Expressionists' desire to improve
the world, at their "O-Mensch" moralizing, or their appealing arias to the "new man".
One could equally well proceed from a formal basis and describe formal disintegration,
verbal concentration, or the "unleashing of metaphor"10 as defining characteristics.
In the same way, esthetic hermeticism, absolute form, the worship of beauty,
a tendency towards ornamentation, and the negation of the social could all be described
as the characteristic qualities of Symbolism. Such a deductive process, however, could
be varied at will, according to both the attitude of the observer and the selection of
the evaluated material. One could scarcely arrive at a reliable basis in this way, however.
Such methodological difficulties are nothing new. Every attempt at a portrayal
of any style is faced with them. The question, accordingly, arises as to whether the pre-
requisite of terminological plausibility is not a chimera which one vainly strives for
with one's scheme for a universally applicable ideal. Would it not be more convincing
to conclude from this that period labels like Expressionism or Symbolism are generally
code names which are defined through their usage, and usually attain validity as
binding concepts only in retrospect? Against such a background, it is not the ab-
stractly defined meaning of such terms that is decisive but the concrete historical value
hidden behind the word. But this points to the necessity of an inductive approach.
For the concrete, historical value can only be ascertained, in the case of Symbolism,
if one evaluates the literary scene in Germany between 1890 and 1900 in all its as-
pects and, in the case of Expressionism, if one examines the first two decades of the
twentieth century exhaustively.
7
René Wellek, "Das Wort und der Begriff 'Symbolismus' in der Literaturgeschichte", Qrenz-
ziehungen.
8
Beiträge zur Lìteraturkritik. (Stuttgart, 1972), p. 64.
An example of the arbitrary use of terminology is the use of the term in the chapter entitled
"Symbolismus" in Richard Hamann and Jost Hermand's Stilkunst um 1900 (Munich, 1973),
pp. 289-304. Here Symbolism is understood to be an indefinable mixture "of mysteriously mythical,
psychoanalytically symbolic and spiritually occult elements", and is specifically distinguished from
what
9
is understood by Symbolism in French literature" (p. 289).
Benn, p. 9.
10
Rasch, p. 225.

192
 But, keeping to the example of Symbolism for the moment, what are the demon­
strable, concrete, historical facts? Can even the term Symbolism, let alone a program
formulated by one of its representatives, be found in Germany? The many literati
and critics who took part in the complex discussions as to the tasks, goals, and revital-
ization tendencies in German lyric poetry at the end of the century only rarely used
the term. It was, therefore, not only the later literary historians, as Wellek stresses,11
who seldom if ever used the term Symbolism, but also those observers of the literary
scene in Germany who actually lived through the events as they happened. The Vien­
nese critic Hermann Bahr, who followed the literary events in neighboring France
attentively, was one of the few who occasionally used the term and who applied it,
as he did in his essay "Symbolisten,"12 to the poems of the young Hofmannsthal.
When, in 1891, Bahr announced the imminent demise of Naturalism and the birth of
a new literary movement, he used the most varied terms for it synonymously: Neo-
Romanticism, Neo-Idealism, Decadence and, most often, Impressionism.13 Julius Hart,
an influential theorist of Naturalism, published an essay entitled "Die Entwicklung
der Neueren Lyrik in Deutschland" in the magazine Pan in 1896,14 and did not, by
any means, dwell on Symbolism as the most important new direction in the lyric.
Rather, Symbolism is mentioned incidentally, in connection with the young Hof­
mannsthal, whose "close affinities with the French Symbolists" are stressed, (p. 15)
The term also crops up when he mentions the influence which the "decadent and Sym­
bolist poetry of Verlaine, Mallarmé and Maeterlinck" (p. 13) had exerted on minor
poets like Robert Hamerling and Eduard Griesebach, members of the so-called "Mu­
nich School of Poets", (p. 13) The name Stefan George is not mentioned once. The
so-called "City Poetry" (p. 7), as represented by Arno Holz in particular, the poetry
of "Germanic Directness' (p. 10), with its representatives Gustav Falke, Casar Flaisch-
len, and Otto Friedrich Hartleben, or the "Poetry of Sexuality" (p. 14) as exemplified
by the poems of Otto Julius Bierbaum, Wilhelm Arent, and Felix Dörmami (whom
he ironically calls a "Baudelaire disciple" [p. 14]), are clearly much more important
to him than certain initial trends towards a symbolistic poetry. It is, accordingly, no
great surprise that it is the almost forgotten Detlef von Liliencron who is for him the
most substantial and most important poet: "Liliencron is the only one of the younger
poets who stands before us fully developed...." (p. 10) It is only to Richard Dehmel,
who was vastly overrated at that time, that he assigns a position of comparable im­
portance.15 At the time Hart took stock of the situation, George's periodical Blätter
für die Kunst, in which many of his own poems first appeared, was already in its fourth
year of publication. Furthermore, George's early volumes of poetry, which are most
akin to Symbolism, had already been published: Hymnen (1890), Pilgerfahrten (1891),
Algahal (1892). Die Bücher der Hirten- und Preisgédichte der Sagen und Sänge und der

11
12
Wellek, p . 74.
In Hermann Bahr, Zur Überwindung des Naturalismus, ed. Gotthard Wunberg (Stuttgart,
1968),13pp. 111-15.
See, also, "Einführung" in Literarische Manifeste der Jahrhundertwende, 1890-1910, ed.
Erich 14Ruprecht and Dieter Bänsch (Stuttgart, 1970), p . X X I V . ff.
15
Pan, IV/l, 1896, pp. 33-40, quoted here from Ruprecht, p p . 5-17.
Ruprecht. p . 15.

193
13 Balakian
Hängenden Garten (1895). His Das Jahr der Seele, the cycle which was t o make the
greatest impression on George's contemporaries, was published the following year.
With this appraisal of the situation, Hart, a well-informed and perceptive critic, shows
only too well t h a t George's early achievements in literature had been private rather
t h a n public and t h a t his name in literary circles in the nineties was as yet unknown.
To be sure, George's delayed arrival on the literary scene can be shown to be
p a r t of the program of voluntary isolation which he had chosen for himself and his
disciples. I n no uncertain terms his periodical bears on the first page of t h e first issue
the following programmatic declaration: "The periodical has a closed circle of readers,
invited b y the members." 1 6 This proud gesture of esthetic autarchy has two differing
aspects to it: one is t h a t of an author striving for self-vindication, the other concerns
the prerequisites of the circumstances of George's literary debut. As for t h e latter,
the letters which Carl August Klein, George's copublisher of the Blatter, exchangec
with Hofmannsthal, who together with George was the most important collaborator
in the early days, are illuminating. I n a letter of October, 1892, Hofmannsthal had
written: "The financial side of our venture is incomprehensible to me; in what way
can I do something in its support ? Should I look for intelligent subscribers, or purchas­
ers for single issues? . . . . Or is the edition really meant only for the contributors?" 1 '
Klein answered him quite ingenuously: "Certainly—the more [suitable] readers you
find the better I shall be pleased. The number of subscribers recruited b y our members
in the months up to the new year determines the continuation of the enterprise . .
I n the meantime each contributor should produce one issue a t his own expense.'
(p. 47) Behind the proudly proclaimed aloofness from the literary market of the day
the laws of literary economics can still be seen as the true guiding factor. The economic
barriers, which a t first formed obstacles which could be overcome only with difficulty
are intensified in the pathos of self-satisfaction. Furthermore, it should not be over
looked t h a t the firm publishing Blätter für die Kunst, a private concern which had to
make do without the economic advantages of the usually efficient distribution systen
of the German book trade, greatly intensified this literary isolation in the early days
of its existence.
This situation did not substantially change until 1898, when George found ir
the person and publishing house of Georg Bondi someone who took a solicitous anc
most effective interest in the publishing of his works and those of his circle. I t is signif
icant t h a t Bondi brought out in one year, 1899, no less t h a n four volumes of George's
work: one volume of extracts from the early numbers of the Blätter für die Kuns
covering the period 1892—98, and three volumes of George's poems. Almost all of then
ran through seven or eight editions in the period following their publication, a success
surpassed only by the Jahr der Seele, which appeared in an eleventh edition, no less
in 1922.

16
Quoted from the cover page of the first issue. Citations from this journal are from the six
volume
17
reprint ed. Robert Boehringer (Düsseldorf-Munich, 1967), hereafter cited as B 1-6.
Briefwechael zwischen George und Hofmannsthal, second ed., ed. Robert Boehringer (Munich
Düsseldorf, 1953), pp. 45-46.

194
 These references to the reception of George's works indicate a somewhat para­
doxical state of affairs. George's early Symbolist poetry not only began to have its
effect extremely late, but it did so at a time when George had already left this phase
of his poetic development behind him. At the end of the century he no longer identified
himself with the point of view he had taken in Algabal, or even in the Jahr der Seele.
His conception of the task of lyric poetry, together with his own esthetic position,
was beginning to change rapidly. Now, when it was, in fact, possible for him to find
an ear amongst his contemporaries and exert an influence, he withdrew from his
earlier position favoring autonomous poetry, poetry which had no goal apart from
itself, in which the artistic process would clearly exclude empirical reality, and which
attempted to justify the poet's ambivalent flight from reality esthetically. The
doctrine which George had announced long before in the "Merksprüche"18 of the Blätter
für die Kunst was no longer valid.
In the first issue of the Blätter it had been stated: "The very name of the publica­
tion conveys to some extent the intention behind it: it is to serve art, and in particular
poetry and writing, excluding all matters of state or society. It desires Spiritual Art
according to the new emotional trends and formal goals—an art for art's sake." (p. 7)
If Mallarméesque poetry demands that the symbol, the verbal image, should always
remain beyond the empirical world as the evocation of an ultimately untranslatable
absolute idea, then for George it is reintegrated, step by step, into empirical reality.
The verbal image no longer denotes itself alone, but is the bearer of a certain message.
With the publication in 1890,of the volume of poems Der Teppich des Lebens und die
Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel, George's lyric poetry begins to renounce
its former claim to absolutism and esthetic autonomy. The word is now endowed
with a didactic function, which the angel from the "Prologue" paraphrases with the
words: "From Life where beauty rules, I come to you / As herald." 19 The theoretical
counterpart to this doctrine of the "Life where beauty rules" was formulated in 1901
in the fifth volume of the Blätter für die Kunst as follows: "Gradually we see from our
small circle developing in our German centers . . . a spiritual and artistic society
which feels united in quite definite repudiations and affirmations: in a special feeling
for life." (p. 28) In another maxim entitled "New Dreams", George anticipated the
next stage of the development which was to come in the future: "The young people
we see before us allow us to believe in an imminent future with a higher concept of
life, a nobler leadership and a more heartfelt need of beauty." (p. 31)
George's poetic vision of an idealized youth in whom the esthetic dreams of his
poetry would be fulfilled was later to be embodied by Maximin, the young man he idol­
ized as the perfect human being. Maximin's poetic apotheosis became the bridge be­
tween poetry and life: he was the concrete manifestation of the symbol of which
George's poetry dreamed. The barrier between poetry and life, previously considered

18
The "Merksprüche" axe hereafter cited in the main from Einleitungen und Merksprüche der
Blatter für die Kunst, ed. Georg Peter Landman (Düsseldorf-Munich, 1964)
19
I, p. 172. Citations from George's poems are from the two-volume edition of George's works
(Munich—Düsseldorf, 1968) Translators note: the English translation used is that of Caroline
Valhope and Ernst Morwitz, Poems by Stefan George (New York, 1943), p. 910.

13* 195
insurmountable, had been crossed, and George's poetic vision changed into a mythically
envisioned reality. Maximin takes the place of the poetic symbol. The veil, which
symbolizes artistic form in many of George's poems, is no longer necessary. In a poem
from George's later volume, Der Stern des Bundes, there are the significant lines: "The
Deed in earthly joy has upward surged,/The Image free and naked rears in light."
(I, p. 367; Valhope and Morwitz, p. 201) The didactic goals George now imposes on his
poetry — and which Maximin represents — are conveyed even more clearly in another
poem from the same cycle: "Where you appeared as one without a veil / As heart of
the circle as birth as image / Y o u spirit of our people's holy youth !" (I, p. 353) The
introduction to the tenth volume of the Blätter für die Kunst, which appeared in 1910,
contains an analogous passage: "They [the Blätter] are intended to show that, in an
age of powerful unity, poetry is not mere occasional verse or trifling but the innermost
soul of the people." (p. 56)
If, at this stage, one casts a glance back to George's point of departure in the
Blätter für die Kunst, when, in the first "Merksprüche" of the first issue, he proclaimed
an art for art's sake divorced from all political and social objectives, it becomes clear
that George's position has become reversed. After 1900, it could be said, George goes
his own way, a way which can be made to correspond with that of Symbolism only
with great difficulty.
Nevertheless, this situation is linked to the paradoxical fact that his early poetry,
which may be termed Symbolist, had only recently begun to exert an influence. The
historical effect of George's early work and the effect and aims he was now advocating
for poetry in his program are therefore found to overlap. The contradictory nature of
their reception has still more ramifications. Whereas the poems of the Jahr der Seele
aroused the admiration of many critics and readers, the poetic enthronement of Max-
imin was construed by the majority as an incomprehensible provocation and confusion,
and was accordingly repudiated.
The reception of George's poetry, representing a special case, takes in aspects
which do not normally play a role in the history of poetic influence. George's impact is
scarcely comparable with that of other poets of the time. Others were influential inas-
much as their published works were influential. George's influence was greater because
between him and his works there were agents, the so-called George Circle, which
began to play its dominant role at the beginning of the century. This kind of esthetic
influence draws attention to a situation not too often encountered and which one could
describe by the term "controlled influence".
It is unnecessary to list here the kind of prestigious positions at German univer-
sities that came the way of the George Circle, with its pedagogic-esthetic doctrines, at
the beginning of the century, or how George managed to spread his influence in the
most varied disciplines through gifted and famous disciples, or how this influence
went far beyond that of a purely poetic nature. Understandably enough, literary crit-
icism, shaped by George and spread by people like Gundolf and Kommerell, for exam-
pie, played a particularly important role. Gundolf remained George's closest and most
intimate supporter for decades, not breaking with the master until relatively late.
When he did so, it was for private and incidental reasons, and shortly thereafter he

196
died in Heidelberg. It would be no exaggeration to see in Gundolf perhaps the most
famuos literary historian in the Germany of the twenties. Kommerell was his equal
in rank if not in fame. He, too, alarmed and alienated by the manipulations of the
district governor Wolters, severed connections with George, but his later works cannot
deny their debt to the master. Apart from Gundolf and Kommerell, there is a whole
host of other names that should be mentioned—Ernst Kantorowicz, Heinrich Friede-
mann, Kurt Singer and many others—people who, for some of the time at least, shared
George's belief in the spiritual rebirth of Germany through its youth's conversion
to estheticism.
It is not simply that, as George's impact grew after 1900, the influence of his
early Symbolist poetry and that of his later esthetic and doctrinaire poetry clashed,
but also that it is difficult to distinguish between the effect of George the poet and
George the educator. Upon comparing his influence with that of Hofmannsthal or
Rilke, it will be seen that the prerequisites are fundamentally different. The poems
of the young Loris, viewed in their Symbolist context, have nothing like the effect of
the later dramas, let alone that of the libretti written for Richard Strauss.20 And as
for Rilke's tremendous influence, which produced a veritable Rilke cult in the postwar
years, this did not really begin until several decades later. The Symbolist components
of his work, which one could already discern in the "Ding" poems of the Neue Gedichte,
but which then became more substantial through his contact with Valéry, may be said
to have unfolded as part of the rear guard of the Symbolist movement.21 Only George,
in his poetic works up to the Jahr der Seele, stands out as a Symbolist poet of any con­
sequence, and only he had great influence as a poet. But this influence, as already
indicated, has the most diverse aspects.
Gottfried Benn, who, for very varied and complex reasons, became by far the most
influential and representative poet in West Germany in the fifties, and who admitted
George's great impact on him in his George speech and his now famous Marburg mani­
festo Probleme der Lyrik, emphasized, not without justification, that: "George was
the most phenomenal instance of radiating influence located at the crossroads of intel­
lectual history that Germany has ever seen."22 But that is simply a summary descrip­
tion of a very many-sided and complicated state of affairs whose various facets can be
observed and described in isolation only with great difficulty.
The dilemma which confronts this examination may now be summed up as follows:
at the time when George's early — and what may be called Symbolist — poems
were written, his influence was almost nil. As the literary public began to take an inter­
est in him, and as he, indeed, became a considerable power in the artistic and cultural
life of Germany, the effect of his poetry was closely linked with the influence of his

20
For Hofmannsthal's influence, see the collection Hofmannsthal im Urteil seiner Kritiker, ed.
Gotthard Wunberg (Frankfurt/Main, 1972).
21
See Beda Allemann's study, "Rilke und Mallarmé: Entwicklung einer Grundfrage der
symbolistischen Poetik", Rilke in neuer Sicht, ed. K ä t e Hamburger (Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 63-82.
what is seen in European Symbolism as a whole as the effective, innate appreciation of poetry".
(p. 63).
22
Gottfried Benn, "Rede auf Stefan George", in Gesammelte Werke, 4 : Reden und Vorträge,
(Wiesbaden, 1968), p. 1030.

197
esthetic credo and the organized mediation of important members of his circle. His
Symbolist poetry—and this really means principally the successful cycle Das Jahr der
Seele—is only one aspect of his influence. Indeed, George was even interested in repu­
diating as false the "image" applied to him in the very beginning, the image of the
Symbolist poet cut off from society, living his religion of art, one whose life was totally
absorbed by his art. It is no mere accident that this notion was sharply attacked in
the first of the "Zeitgedichte" in the Siebenter Bing, which appeared in 1907:

When you with clamoring vulgar greed for life

And rudely pointing ran with heavy tread
Yon took me for some solved and drunken prince
Who gently rocking counted out his beat
In slender grace or coolest dignity.
Withdrawn from earth in wan solemnity.
Of youthful und unfinished works
You never guessed of torment in the storm . . . .
(I, p. 227)

When the literary public began to pay attention to his early Symbolist poetry, George
guided this attention and induced the interpretations given of his poetry to follow
his own.
At all events, it does seem as if the delayed reception of George's early Symbolist
poetry could at first sight lend support to the notion of a possible reciprocal effect
between Symbolism and Expressionism. In this case, we might think of the response
which his poetry called forth in various Expressionist authors. The chronology itself
would appear to speak for this view. Expressionism dates, approximately, from the
beginning of the second decade of this century. After the First World War, Expression­
ism became the dominant artistic movement—and not least of all in literature. The
growing strength of this movement more or less parallels the rise in the curve of George's
popularity.
And, indeed, there were some points of contact between George and some noted
Expressionist writers. Ernst Stadier, Georg Heym, Carl Sternheim,Gottfried Benn,
Reinhard Goering, Fritz von Unruh and Georg Kaiser, who are generally grouped
together under the abstract heading of Expressionism, all show definite traces of George's
influence in parts of their works.23 By virtue of their early collections of poems, Prä-
ludien (1904) and Fanale! (1901), which betray George's influence, neither Ernst
Stadler nor Carl Sternheim could be called Expressionists. For Sternheim, however,
this excursion into lyric poetry remained a minor episode in his literary career. The
plays in his cycle Aus einem bürgerlichen Heldenleben, on which his fame as a drama­
tist is based, hardly bear witness to his initial admiration for Stefan George. Georg
Heym, for his part, showed nothing but contempt for George's esthetic position from

28
See my study ,"Nachwirkungen Stefan Georges im Expressionismus", German Quarterly,
XLII/3 (1969), 393-417.

198
the very outset, and called him, in his diary, a "clumsy, boorish hierophant, an extra­
vagant inventor of small print, and à laurel bearer eo ipso."2 But many formal details
of his poems clearly betray their origins in George's poetry.
If one examines Gottfried Benn in this connection, however, the situation is to
some extent reversed. The early Expressionist Benn, the poet of the cycle Morgue
(1912), Söhne (1914) and Fleisch (1917), portrayed in his later poems a destructive,
inhuman world which had nothing in common with George's esthetic vision. The
later Benn, on the other hand, the post-Symbolist author of the Statische Gedichte
(1948), revives the Symbolist doctrine of the early George anew and integrates it at
the same time into a supranational context by drawing attention to parallels with Paul
Valéry and T. S. Eliot. The Expressionist poet who was perhaps most closely related
to George in his development was Ernst Blass. He was clearly the least talented and
is nowadays as good as forgotten.
George's influence on the three Expressionist dramatists mentioned above has
nothing to do with his Symbolist poetry and little with his literary theories. It concerns
instead his concept of life. In his essay Wandlung des Künstlers,25 Reinhard Goering
praised, significantly, the transformation of life into art as George's outstanding
achievement. This is evidently a reference to what Robert Boehringer, one of George's
close friends (who is still alive today), described in his half documentary report on the
relationship between the master and his disciples as an "Eternal Moment",26 a Utopian
here-and-now divorced from all time, the experience of an epiphany. The conversation
between the first and fifth sailors in Goering's drama Seeschlacht may be seen as an
elucidation of the Georgean concept of life. Fritz von Unruh treated George's pedagog­
ical attitude in a similar fashion in the figure of Count Stefan in his play Stürme,
which dates from the years 1913—22. Likewise, Georg Kaiser is merely giving a the­
matic treatment of George's own ethos in the elitist ethics of Eustache de Saint Pierre
in his play Die Bürger von Calais (1914). He can hardly be said to demonstrate an
affinity in language or poetic form.
But in spite of this plenitude of examples showing the productive influence of
George on a number of the most significant Expressionist authors, the main impulse
to George's reception by no means stems primarily from his early Symbolist poetry.
If one concentrates on the question of the continued development of George's Symbolist
beginnings, one finds that Gottfried* Benn, in his later period, is the only one who re­
vives and develops George's Symbolist position. However, Benn not only called atten­
tion to the supranational context of that position, tracing the connections to Poe,
Pound, Eliot and Valéry; he also belonged to a specific literary context which stood
out clearly in the German situation after 1945.27 One can, accordingly, speak of a spe­
cifically post-Symbolist movement in German postwar poetry when one casts an eye

24
Georg Heym, Dichtungen und ¿Schriften. Band 3. Tagebücher, Träume und Briefe (Hamburg,
1960), p. 139.
25
26
Reinhard Goering, Prosa, Dramen, Verse (Munich, 1961), pp. 89-91.
Robert Boehringer, Ewiger Augenblick, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf—Munich, 1965)
27
See the documentary investigation of Benn's influence, Benn— Wirkung wider Willen, ed.
Peter Uwe Hohendahl (Frankfurt/Main, 1971)

199
on such authors as Paul Celan and Stefan Hermlin. Similarities in imagery, thematic
analogies, and corresponding esthetic reflections, even though they may be to some
extent involuntary, have more in common with the Symbolist poem initiated by Geor­
ge28 than George's poetry does with Expessionism. It is no mere coincidence that Benn,
whose rise to the position of West Germany's most eminent poet of the fifties was so
meteoric, should have played such a central role as a mediator in this connection.
If, therefore, one understands George's first phase from a Symbolist position and
then looks for possible influences on Expressionist poets, the results are less than satis­
factory.29 No true measure of George's impact can be taken, because the Symbolist
echoes are only one aspect of the true reception. It would appear to be advisable, within
the framework of this examination, to renounce the hypothesis of any possible direct
influence and, instead, to concentrate on the structural analogies which exist between
George's esthetic position, as documented in the Blätter für die Kunst, and that of
the Expressionist authors who were writing at the same time and who also defined
their theoretical positions.
In a survey of Symbolism, it was recently stated that George transplanted Sym­
bolism from France to Germany and thereby initiated a new era of German poetry. 30
Such usage of the term Symbolism in connection with George is based on the generally
known evidence of biographical facts. George travelled to Paris for the first time in
March, 1889, and there he met Albert Saint-Paul, who introduced him to the new
French poetry. 31 He was invited to join the Mallarmé circle and met Gide, de Ré­
gnier, Merrill, Moréas, Vielé-Griffin, and other young French authors. George put to­
gether his own anthology of his favorite French poems by copying out in longhand
what he considered the most beautiful poems, so that a sheaf of some 365 manuscript
pages resulted.39 He translated Baudelaire and Mallarmé. His own poems, written soon
after, clearly bear witness to the close proximity of their French models in the use
of motifs and images. All this has been thoroughly investigated,33 and there does,

28
See Hans Dieter Schäfer, "Zur Spätphase des hermetischen Gedichts", Die deutsche Literatur
der Gegenwart, 2nd edn., ed. Manfred Durzak (Stuttgart, 1973), pp. 148-69.
29
Similar problems are involved in Horst Fritz's comparison of German Art Nouveau and
Expressionism, which uses Richard Dehmel's poetry as an example: Literarischer Jugendstil und
Expressionismus. Zur Kunsttheorie, Dichtung und Wirkung Richard Dehmels (Stuttgart, 1969). This
can be seen from his analogy, which he bases on content factors, and which runs: " I n attempting
to design a world in which quasi-religious traits combine with the pathetic design of an elevated
humanity, the early Expressionists are continuing the Utopian design for the life of Art Nouveau.
We recognize characteristics which Dehmel's poetry had long since demonstrated. The urge for in­
tensification and transfiguration, whose motifs may be discerned in the striving for light and the
cosmos, as well as the embellishment of existence by means of a subjectively designed worldly
religion and the presentation of a festively dominated life: these specifically Art Nouveau attitudes
can be taken as a geometric location, to which a great deal "of Expressionist poetry refers".
(p. 237).
30
Bernhard Boeschenstein, "Symbolismus", Literatur II ( = Fischer Lexikon), ed. Wolf-
H a r t m u t Friedrich & Walter Killy (Frankfurt/Main, 1965), p . 546. See, on the other hand, Manfred
Gesteiger: "George does not appear as the prime German representative of French Symbolism, but
simply as one writer and translator among many". Französische Symbolisten in der deutschen Lite-
ratur der Jahrhundertwende, 1896-1914 (Berne, 1971), p. 6.
31
For the intricate piecing together of all the biographical details see the compilation Stefan
George: Leben und Werk. Eine Zeittafel, comp. H . - J . Seekamp. R. C. Ockenden, & M. Kelson,
(Amsterdam,
32
1972), pp. 10 — 12.
See Robert Boehringer, Mein Bild von Stefan George, 2nd ed. (Munich-Düsseldorf, 1967),
pp. 209-16.

200
indeed, seem to be little reason why George should not be called a Symbolist in this
early period: "There is scarcely a single German poet of his generation whose begin-
nings are so steeped in t h e spirit of French Symbolism" 3 4
B u t does such a conclusion not point to the end of the analogy? Could one not
argue t h a t the term Symbolism is simply transferred to George as a historical category
of French poetry and with a meaning predetermined by it ? Should one not first of all
explain in detail what t h e term Symbolism means for the French prototypes, and to
what extent its characteristics dominate George's early poetry ? The dilemma described
in the above introduction—one which results from the use of such stylistic formulae
often enough—would thus be merely shifted to apply to French poetry alone; there,
too, the term would be found to be an abstract category, a stylistic phantom. I t there-
fore seems sensible to choose a different point of departure.
How did George himself view his own close relationship to French poetry ? Was he
prepared to accept the term "symbolist" for his own work? And to what extent did he
derive the definition of the term from his French models? In other words, the question
has to be posed: W h a t is George's theoretical position as reflected in the "Merksprüche"
of the Blätter fürdie Kunst, where theoretical reflection and its poetic demonstration are
presented side by side? Firstly, it may be ascertained t h a t George was at pains t o
limit his dependence on French poetry as far as possible. As early as 1892, he h a d his
coeditor of the Blatter, Carl August Klein, publish an essay in this periodical entitled,
characteristically. "Über Stefan George, Eine Neue Kunst". 3 5 In this essay, Klein ad-
dressed himself to remarks which Albert Saint-Paul had published shortly before in t h e
periodicalL'Ermitage in October, 1891. 36 Whereas Saint-Paul stressed George's depen-
dency on French poetry, Klein p u t it as follows:
Whoever examines the works and the development of our poet carefully will
become aware of his originality. The fundamental difference between his approach
and t h a t of the French (in particular Baudelaire) lies primarily in the absence of
all reflection and rhetoric.Contrary to the latest poets, who break u p their forms,
he keeps his strictly regular, and he never omits good sense and comprehensive
restraint. — If the German feels drawn to the young writers of Belgium, France
and England the reason is t h a t he is as aware as you are where the essence of mod­
ern poetry lies: to snatch the word from its normal everyday surroundings and
raise it to shining relm. Each attempts this according to the structure and laws
of his language.
(I/II, pp. 46—47)

Klein is here speaking for George himself. Saint-Paul's thesis concerning George's
apprenticeship with the French Symbolists is reversed when Klein stresses: "Moreover,
the origins of the 'Nouvelle Poésie' lie in Germany, in German Romanticism.
33
See my comments in Der junge Stefan George. Kunsttheorie und Dichtung (Munich, 1968)
p. 58 34ff.
35
Gsteiger, p. 73.
36
Erste Folge. I I . Band (1892), cited here from B 1, pp. 45-50.
See the introduction to the translation "Deux Poèmes de Stefan George", Ly Ermitage II/lO
(1891), pp. 585-89.

201
One need only think of Hardenberg's clairvoyant sayings." (p. 47) Indeed, it is above
all the Novalis quotations, perhaps most importantly "All poetic depiction must be
symbolic or moving . . ." (p. 47) — t h a t are most suited to lend some kind of pertinent
justification to Klein's (or George's) argumentation, one t h a t goes beyond a mere
gesture of self-defence. The new poetics which he alludes to at the end of his essay
could, indeed, be taken as a possible theoretical equivalent of George's poems; this
could be the point of departure for an answer to the question as to how to p o r t r a y and
evaluate George's poetry and position within the literary context of his time. The per­
manent dialogue between theoretical reflection and poetic creation, the close alliance
of poetry and poetics, could provide a plausible basis for a comparison between Sym­
bolist and Expressionist aims in the realm of poetry. This theoretical element takes
into account a development which has been characterized as follows:

As a movement, Symbolism has been especially adept at referring to the theories

of its greatest masters. The theories correspond to their authors' works only to a
partial degree, but as testimony to the conclusive nature of Symbolism . . . they
take precedence over the works. 37

The situation with Expressionism is seen to be analogous if, for example, one
casts an eye on the dialogue which developed in the course of the Expressionism dis­
cussion 38 carried on in the Moscow exile periodical Das Wort by, among others, E r n s t
Bloch and Georg Lukács. Bloch 39 had criticized Lukács' verdict, i.e., t h a t Expression­
ism was, quite simply, a spiritual movement headed for Fascism, and wrote as follows:
"But what is the material on which Lukács bases his conception of Expressionism?
I t consists in the forewords and epilogues of anthologies, 'Introductions' . . . , articles
in periodicals . . . and such like. I t is emphatically not the material itself with its con­
crete effects there and then . . . " (p. 182) Lukács 4 0 replied to this reproach, not without
some justification: " I do not believe t h a t the theoretical foundations of artistic trends
are unimportant—even though they express something which is theoretically incorrect.
I t is precisely in such cases t h a t they express 'secrets' in the trend which would other-
wise remain carefully hidden." (pp. 194—95)
I n neither case can the theory be separated from the concrete manifestations.
As an indication of the intention behind the artistic production, it may, in retrospect,
be found to be more important than the tangible work of art itself. As opposed to an
abstract typology which contrasts speculatively determined characteristics with one
another-—in the comparison of Symbolism with Expressionism, for instance, the urge
for an absolute is seen to confront the notion of social revolution, t h e disavowal of
history a deep-seated interest in political problems, to name just two sets of

37
Boeschenstein, p. 540.
38
The documentation to this discussion (without, however Lukacs' important essay of 1934
entitled " 'Gröfie und Verfall' des Expressionismus" may be found in the volume Die Expressionis-
musdebatte. McUericUien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schmitt
(Frankfurt/Main,
39
1973).
40
Ernst Bloch, "Diskussion über Expressionismus", in Die Expressionismiisdebatte, pp. 180—91.
Georg Lukacs, "Es geht um den Realismus", in Die Expressionismicsdebatte, pp. 192—230.

202
differences—in theoretical utterances the differentiating characteristics are gained
from the author himself. What is lost in theoretical uniformity is balanced by the
gains in historical authenticity.
For these reasons, the Symbolism-Expressionism juxtaposition is to be depicted
by means of exemplary models. The peculiarity of both movements, namely, the close
fusion of theoretical utterances and artistic demonstration, will determine the per-
spective of the examination. George's point of view is to be shown through his own
theoretical statements in the Blatter für die Kunst. The same will be done for his liter-
ary counterpart, Herwarth Walden,41 who was closely associated with the development
of Expressionism, and is to be held up for comparison, as is the poetry and poetics
represented by him and his close friend Lothar Schreyer42 in the influential periodical
Der Sturm.
If one calls to mind the literary situation in Germany between 1890 and 1900 and
in the two decades following, it is apparent that George was by no means the only one
who was trying to renew lyrical poetry in Germany. The poet whose theories, at least,
achieved by far the greatest renown was not George but Arno Holz, whose Revolution
der Lyrik of 1899 was described as "the most significant literary program of the day." 43
Holz's theory of natural rhythm, his repudiation of conventional formal elements
like rhyme, meter, and strophic patterns in the lyric, the theory of the "central axis"
which he introduced and which was supposed to give his naturally rhythmic poems a
new visible structure, were all intensively discussed. Rudolf Steiner, who was to emerge
as the founder of Anthroposophism, came out in 1900 in an essay44 on Holz's book in
the Magazin für Literatur with the significant words: "Holz's logic is . . . so clear
that a hundred full professors and their hundred associate professors could hold fifty
conferences and still not find a flaw." (p. 66)
Holz, who attacked George on several occasions and parodied him in his "Bleeh-
schmiede,"45 may be seen as a counterpart to George, just as Walden was to become
later. Holz, too, collected a circle of poets around him in the nineties46 one which was
strikingly similar to the George Circle despite a great natural tendency to self-parody
"in the inner structure of dependency".47 Richard Dehmel, whom George himself saw
as his negative counterpart, called Holz "Stefan George's counter-satellite."48
41
Regarding Walden, see. Lothar Schreyer, "Herwarth Waldens Werk", in Der Sturm. Ein
Erinnerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und die Künstler aus dem Sturmkreis, ed. Nell Walden and
Lothar Schreyer (Baden-Baden, 1954), pp. 9-63; see, also, Nell Walden, Herwarth Walden (Berlin-
Mainz, 1963). Walden's leading role in Expressionism has scarcely been examined until now.To rank
him as "the official representative of the Futurists in Germany" and the recipient of Marinetti's
commands, as Armin Arnold suggests, is an unacceptable oversimplification. See his book Die
Literatur des Expressionismus. Sprachliche und thematische Quellen (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 30.
42
Regarding Schreyer, cf. Nell Walden's description: " . . . who was Herwarth Walden's best
friend43. . . " Herwarth Walden, p. 54.
44
Ruprecht, p. X X X I I .
Rudolf Steiner, "Arno Holz' 'Revolution der Lyrik' ", in Literarische Manifeste der Jahr-
hundertwende
45
9 pp. 66-75.
See Erwin Rotermund, "George-Parodien," in Stefan Oeorge Kólloquium, ed. Eckard
Heftrich
46
et al (Cologne, 1971), pp. 213-25.
See Helmut Scheuer's remarks in the chapter "Dichterkreis als Verehrergemeinde",
p. 223 ff., in his dissertation Arno Holz im literarischen Leben des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts
(Munich,
47
1971)
48
Scheuer, p. 227.
In Dichtungen-Briefe-Dokumente (Hamburg, 1963), p. 183.

203
 Herwarth Walden, who, in turn, was himself in contact with Holz,49 and who
viewed George as a poetic antipode, represents a similar phenomenon with his own
Sturm Circle. The analogy with George may be taken still further, for here, too, there
is a periodical involved: the Sturm. This periodical, which first appeared in 1910, rep-
resented a forum where the esthetic theories of Walden and the artists and writers
connected with him were expounded, defended, and, at the same time, exemplified
through creative works. The Expressionist periodical which, in retrospect, has attracted
the most attention is Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion; it stood out, especially at the end
of the War, as the most politically engaged organ, one which, from the very beginning,
viewed literature within its varied social context.50
Walden took the opposite stand with his periodical Sturm and was closer to George
in this respect. George explicitly excluded political and social goals from poetry in the
first years of publication of the Blätter für die Kunst) Nell Walden reports that Walden's
intentions and those of his periodical were analogous: :"Since we in the Sturm, however,
were not at all interested in politics—for us all that mattered was the struggle to carry
on the new art movement—we did not see the threatening clouds. Art and politics
have nothing in common, as Herwarth Walden decreed, and we all lived and worked
according to this surely perfectly correct principle."51 Walden, who, like Franz Pfem-
fert, was converted to Marxism in the late twenties, later tried to give a new inter-
pretation to this unpolitical phase of his periodical and artistic theory; he wrote in the
Wort in 1938: "The word Expressionism is a battle cry . . . . lts meaning is: revolu-
tionize art. Find the artistic means of expression to bring the socialist realism of
life to sensually formed composition. With the political freedom of the spiritual, unsym-
bolic, direct utterance, with the application of the highest technical knowledge and
recognition of the present." 52
There is no talk of the "cooperative will of progressive humanity" or of "socialist
realism" in the theoretical artistic proclamations contained in the Sturm in its first
years of publication. Walden, who is here defending himself against charges that
Expressionism cleared the way for Fascism, is, no doubt, attempting to salvage some
honor by restyling his unpolitical Saul period from the Paul perspective of his later
years. Nell Walden's explanation is more accurate.
49
"The philological theoreticians of the Sturm Circle took over certain elements of rhythmic
theory from Holz. Herwarth Walden quoted an extract from the preface of 'Ignorabimus' in the
Sturm of 1913" Hartwig Schultz, Vom Rhythmus der modernen Lyrik (diss., Munich, 1970), p . 127.
Schultz's notion of a direct dependence is misleading, however: "Walden takes over the vague for-
mulations from Holz Walden did not understand Holz's demands . . . " (p. 127).
50
See Lothar Peter, Literarische Intelligenz und Klassenkampf. "Die Aktion", 1911-1932
(Cologne, 1972).
" Nell Walden, "Aus meinen Erinnerungen an Herwarth Walden und die 'Sturmzeit' ",
Der Sturm. Ein Erinnerungsbuch, p . 61. Nell Walden's remarks are confirmed by Döblin, who was,
at the beginning of his career closely connected with Walden and his journal, in which many of
Döblin's early works appeared. Only when Döblin's social and political interests became so vast,
beginning with his Drei Sprünge des Wang-lun, was this close relationship shattered. I n his sketch
"Epilog", Döblin writes: " I gave the Sturm my earlier Novellen, which I later collected in the volume
Die Ermordung einer Butterblume. The Sturm people relished these things. They seemed Expression­
ist' t o them. But when I raised my visor and drew my sword in Wang-lun, t h a t was t h e end of t h a t
—although now I was really only just beginning. Not a word was said about the novel by Walden
or anyone else from the orthodox Sturm Circle". Aufsatze zur Literatur (Olten, 1963) p . 386.
M
"Vulgar-Expressionismus", Die Expressionismusdebatte, p p . 75-90.

204
 I n his important essays on artistic theory in the Sturm, Walden, just as George
h a d done in his periodical, concentrated on elaborating the t y p e of literature and a r t
he had in mind. As regards artistic receptivity, however, he was far ahead of George,
who limited himself strictly to poetry, repudiated music for the most part, and had
scarcely any contact with the art of his time apart from t h a t of classicists like Böcklin,
Klinger and Lenbach. Walden, a trained pianist and composer, was not only very much
interested in the music of his time, but also had the closest contacts with Expressionist
painting, which he exhibited in the so-called " Sturm Exhibitions" and in whose break -
through he played a part. 5 3
Walden, like Arno Holz, repudiated George and attacked him repeatedly. Despite
this fact, however, there is often an echo of George in his theoretical writings, even
to the extent of a corresponding use of words. This is demonstrated by the following
examples, which juxtapose statements b y Walden drawn from his study "Kritik der
vorexpressionistischen Dichtung", 5 4 published serially beginning in 1920 in the Sturm,
with statements by George in the "Merksprüche" of the Blatter für die Kunst, whose
central theoretical maxims George incorporated in his volume of prose, Tage und
Taten, under the title "Über Dichtung". 5 5
For Walden as for George, the description of reality had nothing to do with art.
Walden: " F o r this reason, descriptions have nothing in common with art, even though
they are descriptions of the soul, even though the language is so beautiful and noble,
as one puts i t . " (XI, p . 100) George: "We do not want invented stories, b u t the repro-
duction of moods, no observation but portrayal, no entertainment but impression."
(p. 10)
Like George, Walden repudiates all the rational, logical expediencies to which
poetry is subject. Walden: "One looks for something alien to art in poetry. The transfer
of thoughts, for example." (XI, p . 100) And in the lecture "Einblick in die Kunst" 5 6 :
" E v e r y word states something, not by statement, however, b u t by the artistically
logical image This artistic logic has nothing to do with the logic of the intellect,
however." (VI, p . 123) George: " R h y m e is just a game with words unless there is an
inner link between the words connected b y the r h y m e . " (I, p . 530)
Despite their disassociation of art from all rational connections, both writers
advocate the notion of a functional and inevitable form for the individual work of
art. Walden: "The combination of words, their composition, is the work of poetic
a r t . " (XI, p . 100) George: "The combination, the relationship of the individual parts to
one another, the inevitable sequence of the one out of the other alone characterize
elevated poetry." (I, p . 530) Both saw the effect of poetry to lie in rhythm and in the

53 "The n e w m o v e m e n t in art originated almost simultaneously in all countries, w i t h o u t t h e

artists having come t o a n y agreement. T h e y first learned of one another through the founding-of t h e
Sturm, which organized t h e m and brought t h e pictures of t h e n e w art together for a collective first
showing at the great International E x h i b i t i o n of 1913 in Berlin". Herwarth Walden, "Expressio-
nismus", in Der Sturm, X V I I , (1926) p . 10.
54
This study appeared in five installments up to 1922; cited hereafter (as, indeed, are the other
writings
55
by Walden or Schreyer in the Sturm) according to the volume number.
55
Werke, I, pp. 630-31.
Der Sturm, VI, (1916), pp. 122-24.

206
condition of outer and inner excitement induced by it. Walden: " I t is the inexplicable
effect of a work of art to move both physically and s p i r i t u a l l y . . . . T h e essence of every
work of art is therefore its r h y t h m . " (XI, p . 100) George: "The appreciation of art may
be found only where a work of art as a unit moves and is moved (rhythmically)."
(I, p . 24)
I n his apologia for Expressionism, written in 1938, Walden mockingly said:
"Then there were totally different 'Expressionists'. Max Klinger, for example. Goethe,
Stefan G e o r g e . . . . " 5 7 Against the background of such parallels, illustrated b y the above
captions, Walden's intentional irony takes on an extra meaning, the opposite of what
he clearly meant. For Walden—there can be no doubt— repeatedlyand bitterly attacked
George as his artistic adversary and tried to overcome him. This can be seen from
Walden's essay of 1918entitled "Das Begriffliche in der Dichtung", 5 8 where he mock­
ingly places George among the "champion wrestlers of German poetry", (p. 66) a n d
deliberately taunts the members of his Circle, the "defenders of the words of masterly
a r t " , (p. 66) By taking one strophe from the first of the "Sange eines fahrenden Spiel-
manns" 5 9 in George's Das Buch der Sagen und Sänge, together with metrically identical
strophes from Heine and Goethe, and then compiling a new "poem", he a t t e m p t s
to prove t h a t George is just another of the poets who replace rhythm by metrical regu-
larity and thereby p u t formal convention before linguistic composition. I n his essay
of 1924 entitled "Über allen Gipfeln", 60 which deals polemically with contemporary
poetry and poets — people like Dauthendey, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, b u t also Expres-
sionists like Werfel, R. Becher, Hasenclever, and Georg Kaiser —George is again
quoted. This time Walden takes a strophe from the poem "Südlicher Strand: T a n z e r "
from Der Siebente Ring61 as a negative example of " t h e primitive alogical element of
impressionistic poetry," and goes on to say: "The impressionistic poets have a thing
about sound. The instrument from which they produce the sounds is the barrel or-
gan They write a metrical accompaniment and look upon this as a rhythmic com­
position. They think they are removing thought when they thoughtlessly p u n c t u a t e . "
(XV, p . 56)
Looked at objectively, Walden is quite paradoxical in t h a t he constantly repu-
diates George-esque poetry, and, at the same time, shows a remarkable affinity for
George in the basic aspects of his artistic theory. H a n d in hand with this contradiction
goes another: namely, the obvious discrepancy between his theoretical convictions
and his own artistic practice, 62 as can be seen from numerous poems b y Walden in t h e
Sturm. This discrepancy may also be observed in the poems of August Stramm, whom
Walden was proud to have discovered, and about whom he somewhat extravagantly
wrote: "August Stramm is the decisive and greatest artist in words of our time. Since
Heinrich von Kleist there has been none more significant in Germany." (XIV, p . 150)

57
58
"Vulgar-Expressionismus", p. 78.
Der Sturm, IX (1918/19), pp. 66-67.
59
60
See Werke, I, p. 93.
61
Der Sturm, XV (1924), pp. 49-69.
See Werke, I, p. 314.
62
This cannot be dealt with in detail here. See Schultz, pp. 127-29.

206
 But since, in both Symbolism and Expressionism, the theoretical reflections on
the origins of artistic endeavor provide the true link between the various positions held
by the artists, one is justified in attempting to elucidate the contrasts between the
two movements in terms of the fixed theoretical stands taken by George and Walden.
What, precisely, is Walden's theory of the art of words? Walden explained it
best in polemical writings such as the lengthy essay entitled "Kritik der vorexpressioni-
stischen Dichtung", which appeared in installments in the Sturm between 1920 and
1922, and which dealt with the criteria of the lyrical tradition in Germany. Not only
the lyrical epigones of the nineteenth century from Uhland to Geibel were repudiated
in this essay, but also such sacrosanct poets of Romanticism and Classicism as Eichen-
dorff and Goethe. But Walden expended by far the greatest amount of energy in un-
niasking the poet who, apart from Goethe, was the most popular German poet at that
time: Heinrich Heine. In the essay which follows in 1924, "Über allen Gipfeln. Die
metergroBen Dichter der Gegenwart", Walden completes his survey of literature
focussed on the greats of literary history whom he squeezes through his polemical fil­
ter. Walden's critical objections, which always culminate in his notion that metrical
convention ruins the rhythmical shape of the poems, presuppose, to be sure, a theory
of poetry which is never fully developed in any of either his or Schreyer's writings.
It can be determined only from numerous scattered explanations.
The same applies to George, who also left only a fragmentary theory of his poetry
in the "Merksprüche" of the Blatter für die Kunst and in statements passed on to his
disciples. Walden's purpose, as was George's in the Blatter, was from the very begin­
ning to free art from the popular misconceptions of the public: "Art should be able
to accomplish all manner of things. It should liberate the public by oppressing it. It
should provide it with thoughts. And it should cheer the majority. Art should do all
this." (VI, p. 122) With a radicality comparable to that of the early George, the division
between art and life is fixed, but the normal order of importance is reversed: "Creative
activity is absolutely primary. It comes from the unconscious. All consciousness is
always secondary." (VI, p. 122) In the third series of the Blatter für die Kunst this
state of affairs is described thus: "It simply lies there, what we partly attained by en­
deavor and partly fixed for all time: an art free from all service: above life after it has
penetrated life." (p. 13)
This is expressed still more sharply in an essay by Lothar Schreyer in the Sturm
of 1919—20 which, significantly, bears the title "Die neue Kunst". 63 In 1892, George
attacked Naturalism, announcing in the Blatter that poetry and writing had to exclude
"everything political and social". (p. 7) Schreyer puts it in a similar fashion: "The
artist does not wish to reveal his face to anyone when he creates. He does not wish
to serve any idea or cause with his work of art. There is no ethical art. There is no
political art. Ethics and politics are principles according to which man shapes his
active life. The poem, however, is the renunciation of the active life." (X, p. 67) What
is this, if not a circumlocution of the phrase "art for art's sake" as applied to Symbolism

68
Der Sturm, X (1919/20), pp. 66-70.

207
and George, an art which is absolute and not subject to any kind of superimposed
purpose ?
The moment of irrationality, too, which belongs to the process of artistic creation,
yields a link with George. For Walden, the creative act sterns from the unconscious:
"The rite of artistic creation is the rite of the solitary". (VI, p. 122) "Art conceives of
the inconceivable but not the conceptual." (IX, p. 66) Schreyer puts it similarly:
''Even the artist is unable to unravel the secret of art for u s . ' (X, p. 66) But this aura
of the irrational, which derives from the very source of the work of art and from its
denial of rational set purposes, does not, as far as Walden and Schreyer are concerned,
by any means lead to a redundant and therefore unproductive opposition of the con-
scious and the unconscious. Both as a reflection of the individual stages of the artistic
creative process and with reference to the inevitable form of the work of art, the logic
of the discursive intellect is opposed by another logic: the logic of form.
George does not differ verymuch in his position. It is said of him "that inspira-
tion, which determines the basic rhythm and content of a poem, is a matter of the spir­
it and cannot be called up artificially . . . . " 64 However, the act of forming and shaping
is inconceivable without the poet's understanding of art and his conscious control.
Correspondingly, in the Blatter one reads:65 "We know nothing of the conception of the
work of art in the artist", (p. 85) but the necessity of a "new way of feeling and fabri-
cation" (p. 7) is likewise proclaimed. This formal logic is succinctly and curtly described
by Walden as follows: "The stuff of poetry is the word. The form of poetry is the
rhythm . . . . The binding of art, however, is its movement.The rhythm/' (IX, pp. 66 —
67) Rhythm is thus distinguished both from all metrical conventions and from the
syntactic structure, or in other words, from the grammatical coordination. It becomes
a quality of each individual word: "The sentences are arranged in paragraphs and the
rhythm is complete. But even that is not rhythm . . . . Each word has its own movement
within it. It becomes visible through its movement." (IX, p. 67) Rhythm accordingly
means the sensually corporeal quality of the word. The word is therefore no longer
the bearer of meaning. Indeed, its semantic quality becomes secondary. The word is
meaning.
Rhythm may be described as Walden's central poetical category. His numerous
attacks on the lyrical patterns of literary tradition and the poems of his contempo-
rarieshave both their origins and their ultimate goal in one factor: to prove that the
rhythmic life of the word is stifled by metrical constraint and that instead of organic
composition, merely the fulfillment of metrical patterns is involved. Walden accordingly
reintroduces a category into the esthetic discussion which had already played a great
role in the work of Arno Holz, for in Walden's demand for a rhythmically inevitable

64
Ernst Morwitz, Kommentar zu dem WerkStefanOeorges (Munich-Düsseldorf, 1960), p . 22 ff.
66
The "Betrachtungen über K u n s t " quoted here (in Blatter 4. Folge, I I I . Band, 1899, B 2,
pp. 85-86) are those signed with WolfskehPs name. As a rule, the "Merksprüche" stemming from
George and Wolfskehl were published anonymously. Regarding their authorship, Georg Peter Land-
mann writes: "George and Wolfskehl both declared later t h a t they could no longer extract their
own contributions from the whole". Einleitungen und Merksprüche, p . 5.

208
 composition can be seen Holz's postulation of natural rhythm as the only possible
r h y t h m in poetry. 66
I n the formal element of rhythm 6 7 which is of central importance for George, too,
there runs a subterranean poetological thread which reaches back to Poe's famous de-
finition of the poem as the "rhythmic creation of beauty". 6 8 I t cannot be said of Walden
t h a t his idea is an epigonal adaptation of Holz's category; nor can a direct link between
George a n d Poe be postulated. Here, it is more a matter of poetological affinities
which draw attention to parallel structural patterns. An analogous poetological rela-
tionship m a y be seen between George and Walden.
George likewise contended t h a t " a work of art as an organic composition moves
and is moved (rhythmically)." (p. 24) His description of inevitable form also culmi-
nates in rhythm, which is subdivided into the formal aspects of choice, measure, and
sound: "The Poem is the highest, the final expression of an event: not the reproduction
of a thought, b u t of a mood. That which has an effect in painting is distribution, line,
and color; in poetry: choice, measure, and sound." (p. 10) And, elsewhere, form, which
alone determines the value of poetry, is described along absolutely parallel lines as
"positively nothing superficial, but t h a t deeply exciting element in measure and sound
whereby at all times, the originals, the masters, have differed from the descendants,
the second-rate artists". (I, p . 530)
This corresponds precisely to Walden's attitude— if one overlooks the fact t h a t
he sees George, in his works, as one of the second-rate artists. The analogy with paint­
ing, mentioned b y George, which was intended t o clarify the artistic effect of r h y t h m
in poetry, m a y likewise be found in Schreyer, who writes: "The r h y t h m of a work of
art is a motion, a compelling and inevitable motion." (X, p . 34) This means, in terms
of graphic compositon: "The color rhythm sterns from the slight diffrences of the colors
and the extent of the surface covered by each individual color." (X, p . 34) And, sim-
ilarly, with regard to poetry: "Each word-work has its rhythmical law. The r h y t h m
moves words." (X, p . 119) Or, defined more precisely: "The logic of r h y t h m is the re-
lationship in which space and speed of movement stand to one another." (X, p . 34)
George, with his conception of the poem as the rhythmical creation of beauty in
an inevitable form, nevertheless had objections to the so-called "free r h y t h m " as a
contradiction in terms. As he p u t it: "To say free rhythms is like saying white black-
ness. Let him who cannot move well rhythmically stride along unbridled." (I, p . 530)
Walden, too, eschews free rhythms: " . . . so the gentlemen of the free German r h y t h m s
concern themselves at best, büt by no means always, with external stress, b u t never
with the internal stress." (VI, p . 123) His abstract definition of t h e artistic composi­
tion accomplished in the poem is as follows: "The composition of a poem would be to
bring these images rhythmically, unexceptionally into artistically logical sequence."
(VI, p . 123) W h a t he means b y this, in concrete terms, he once tried to make clear
66
See my Der junge Stefan George, p. 144 ff. See, also, Schultz, Vom Rhythmus der modernen
Lyrik, p. 119 ff.
67
See my "Die kunsttheoretische Ausgangsposition Stefan Georges. Zur Wirkung Edgar
Allan68Poes", in Arcadia, IV/2 (1969), pp. 164-78.
This formulation is derived from Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition", quoted from
Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Edward H. Davidson (Boston, 1956), p. 470.

. 14 Balakian 209
by using the Stramm line as an example:69 "Durch die Büsche winden Sterne." He
writes: "Rhythmically, this line sensually conveys the idea of winding." (VI, p. 124)
The poem is therefore not an elucidative representation, not a linguistic demonstration,
but a sensual event. In other words, it is what it says; form and meaning are identical.
This would seem to point towards the same phenomenon as George had already
defined (in the second series of the Blatter) in a "Merkspruch" that is clearly related
to a Symbolist context: "The Image (symbol) is as old as language and poetry itself.
There are the symbols of the individual words, the individual parts, and of the total
content of an artistic creation. The last named is also called the deeper meaning that
resides within every significant work." (p. 10) The poem therefore constitutes, in all
aspects of its form, its own reality, which is to be understood symbolically: as rhythmi­
cally vitalized imagery. Walden draws attention to the same notion by differentiating
between image and simile. Image, in this case, corresponds to George's usage of the
word symbol. It does not allude to something else, but stands quite concretely for some-
thing. Walden writes:

The simile is set down instead of having the image stand. Instead of seeing, these
poets consider. They report the supersensual nonsensually instead of making
the supersensual visible to the senses... The objective in poetry is always the
image and should never be the simile. The simile depends on whoever makes the
comparison, and is therefore personally limited. The image, however, is impersonal
and unlimited. It becomes visible only through its inner limitations.
(IX, pp. 66-67)

This means, in the individual case, the composition of the work of art or, in othei
words, its rhythm. Schreyer puts it more clearly: "The poet of the non-artistic age does
not write. He diffuses images and facts, in that he decorates facts with images The
images do not represent reality for him, but a means to art. He does not have the inner
vision, but the outer view. Images are therefore similes for him." (X, p. 120)
Just how central the rhythmic vitality of the poem as a scale of artistic value is
for George is borne out by the unique method, initiated by George himself, of reciting
his poems so that they come to life in the rhythmic way of reading.70 Por George, it
was not the interpretative comprehension of his poems that indicated true understand-
ing, but the way they were read. Schreyer had a similar notion: "The rhythm of the
word-sequence as a means of expression, connected with the rhythm of the intonation,
forms the rhythmic composition of the word tone poem." (X, pp. 121—22)
There is, in another context, an astonishing structural similarity between George's
and Walden's theoretical positions. George may be more closely connected with Poe
than with the French Symbolists in one important aspect of his poetics, namely, in
his claim of the revelation of Platonic ideas in the rhythmically enlivened imagery of

69
Heine's Lorelei poen? and Stramm's "Traum" (see August Stramm, Das Oesamtwerk Wies-
baden, 1963 p. 21) are compared in detail in Walden's lecture "Einblick in die Kunst", in Der
Sturm,70 VI (1915), pp. 122-24).
See Robert Boehringer's fundamental explanations in "Über Hersagen von Gedichten",
in Jahrbuch für die Qeistige Bewegung, II, Berlin, 1911, pp. 77-88.

210
 the poem.71 In the Blatter für die Kunst attention is often drawn to the Platonic asso-
ciation of image and idea, of subject and object. A statement central to George's work
reads as follows: "That the work of art — in words, sounds, colors— communicates
to us intelligibly and seems to be a reflection of our experience does not dispute its own
essential truth. Each thing can be recognized only inasmuch as it is essentially related
to whoever recognizes it." (B 2, p. 85)72 In George's aphoriöm "Kunst und menschli-
ches Urbild" there is the following passage: "Our flow of life (rhythm) demands, apart
from ourselves, the archetype which often finds its individual traits — and sometimes,
by approximation, its embodiment — in the many human figures." (I, p. 532)
This Platonic association of art is expressed most clearly by Schreyer in his study
"Anschauung und Gleichnis: Die Gegenwart der Kunst" 73 :
Every work of art has a higher, invisible prototype. The image is formed according
to it. But contained within it is the gleam of the inconceivable archetype ....
Whoever looks for a copy of some manifestation of the exterior world in a work of
art, which is an image of the inner world, will neither find this copy nor recognize
the inner world The work of art, the image, disappears. The visible, the pic­
ture that is called up by the image persists even without the image.
(XIV, pp. 84, 86)

Do the parallels demonstrated so far justify the conclusion that Walden approaches
Symbolism, at least in theory, or that George, on the other hand, is closely con-
nected with Expressionism ? It was not only in 1938 that Walden distinguished between
his own Expressionism and the popular Expressionism of the time (which he charac-
terized as "vulgar Expressionism"), repudiating writers like Gottfried Benn, Kurt
Hiller, and even Georg Heym74 as unartistic. Already in 192475 he had done the same,
castigating Franz Werfel and Johannes R. Becher. Even those quintessentially Ex­
pressionist dramas Die Koralle and Der Sohn, by Georg Kaiser and Walter Hasenclever,
strengthen his view that "professors and other specialists see every kind of nonsense
as Expressionism. This trashy treatment of the Christian idea is taken as a new code of
ethics, the idle rhetoric as new art The great humanity of these poets consists in
the fact that they consider themselves great humans and want to convince others to
believe in their greatness." (pp. 66, 68)
So once again Walden stresses quite bitterly his aloofness from what have been
termed the great themes of Expressionism: the invocation to the new man, vital ac-
tion, the appeal for change through the reform of the individual, the emotional criti-
cism of contemporary society, the overweening pathos of revival. All these contextual
determinations have no meaning for George. The decisive factor is the poetological de-
finition of Expressionism as a new verbal art: "What one calls Expressionism has no­
thing to do with these things and these poets. Expressionism is art. Nothing else. But
71
72
See M. Durzak, "Die ktinstlerische Ausgangsposition Stefan Georges", p. 177.
This statement is again taken from the "Betrachtungen über Kunst" signed with Wolfskehl's
name.73
Der Sturm, XIV (1923), pp. 83-93.
74
75
See "Vulgar-Expressionismus", p. 75 ff.
Sèe "Über allen Gipféln", p. 68 ff.

14* 211
art is the sensual composition of optical or accoustical phenomena." (p. 69) I t would
be pointless to want to decide which definition of Expressionism is more appropriate.
The code word Expressionism has a specific meaning for Walden which by no means
agrees with the conventionally accepted definition of the term.
Just as Walden repudiated Symbolism as primitive Impressionistic poetry, so
George, in turn, poured scorn on the babbling of the "monosyllabists". But, as has
been shown, George also turned away from Symbolism. This did not happen simply
with regard to his dependence on French Symbolism, which was stressed in the early
essay by Klein, but is also specifically emphasized in various "Merksprüche" in the
Blatter. Already in the first issue, he takes a position against those categorical catch-
words "which have already appeard here, too, and are designed to confuse", (p. 7)
Among these catchwords, he specifically mentions: "Symbolism, Decadence, Occult­
isme (p. 7)
The same aloofness is again expressed in 1904 in the introduction to the seventh
series of the Blatter: "When we started out about twelve years ago, the whole of what
we considered to be the important European poetry of the time (it was later called
alternately, neo-Romanticism and Symbolism by the day laborers of the pen) was an
unknown area for the Germans. Gradually we introduced the English, French, Dutch,
and Belgians in translation and then limited ourselves more and more to the poets of
our own country who were creating the new poetic thought or helping to spread it
abroad." (p. 33)
Although the European context of George's own poetry is not denied, the notion
of a Symbolist debt is nevertheless played down and the originality of his own pioneer-
ing beginnings is stressed. Although Expressionism and Symbolism have little in com-
mon when viewed through the examples of George and Walden, it must also be ad-
mitted that the individual positions of George and Walden have equally little in
common with what are normally described as Symbolism and Expressionism. And yet
the poetological proximity of the artistic theories of the two men cannot be doubted.
The rapidly changing literary scène in Germany between 1880 and 1920 shows a
closely enmeshed confusion of styles: Naturalism, Impressionism, neo-Romanticism,
Art Nouveau, Decadence, Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and New Objectivity,
which, for the most part, appear concurrently but resist every attempt to bring order
and unity to the confusing picture according to principal or characteristic lines.
But as can, for example, be proved from the theoretical discussion of rhythm, which
stretches from Poe to George, Holz and Walden, there are subterranean linking threads
and common structural qualities which resist all the changes and innovations which
are forever being introduced. Behind the confusing surface structure, one can discover
something which may be described as the primal structure. It would be a rewarding
task, indeed, to examine in detail just how this primal structure relates to the code
descriptions usually used to define literary epochs.

Translated from the German by David A. Scarse

212
 RlCARDO GULLÓN

SYMBOLISM AND MODERNISM

The best poetry written by Hispanic Modernists shows a Symbolist tendency; it is

influenced, on the one hand, by the nineteenth century Prench Symbolists and, on the
other, by traditional symbolism, that is to say, by the need to express an order of
realities different from those that are tangible, realities which — as St. John of the
Cross states in the prologue to Cdntico espiritual — can be portrayed only in "strange
figures and similarities". St. John recognized the existence of the ineffable and the
impossibility of capturing in words certain feelings and movements of the soul. If the
Holy Ghost — he argued — did not find ordinary terms adequate "for conveying the
wealth of his meaning", they could hardly be adequate for man, who, with his in­
herent verbal limitations, must use signs to suggest an equivalent for those shadowy,
illegible impulses.
More than a school, Symbolism is a kind of creation characterized by suggestivity,
or, at times, hermeticism. With Symbolism, poetry becomes a means of penetrating
those dark zones which the Modernists (like the Romantics before them) found in the
night, dreams, delirium, chance, andeven the flesh (voluptuousness came to be a method
of learning). Viewed as an exploration, poetry implies ascents and descents — a vision
of peaks and a wandering through galleries, labyrinths, and the underground. As ex-
perience, the poetry of this period is related to certain occultist and esoteric doctrines.
Indeed, vision itself became one of the Modernists' creative tools.
A poet aims to express, through an adequate verbal code, the analogies and corre-
spondences he has intuited in the universe. Insofar as it exists, he recognizes a soul,
perhaps in a natural state, in trees or water, and he listens for its voice (or voices),
giving i t a body perhaps, as Leopoldo Lugones does when one of his characters finds
such a soul in a mirror which seems to contain love and death. Translating the ineffable
and creating a system of signs for it are the purpose of the Modernist poet. Ruben
Darío grasped this better than anyone else; to suggest what he wanted to say, he
brought myths and legends into his system of images and symbols.
Mythical figures display their grace in the pages of the Modernists: mermaids
and fauns, virgins and centaurs. Salome and Lorelei are symbols, and so are Versailles
and Rome. Later, we shall examine the exact meanings attributed to parks, fountains,
birds and flowers, shadows and mist.
Perceiving mystery as urgent reality, these poets felt a strong impulse to penetrate
it, and their commonly held view that the world only represents reality lured them on
into the realms of the intangible. Schopenhauer and Victor Hugo collaborated un-

213
knowingly in the arousal of this impulse, as did Wagner and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
the former with music conducive to daydreaming and the latter with paintings (and
poetry) whose esthetic mysticism presented figures transcending reality, becoming
emblematic signs of rare, ideal worlds.
Because of its proximity to a world beyond the senses, symbolism is perhaps the
most oblique of the Modernists' protests against positivism and all scientific schools
of thought, against the dogmas imposed by society and the widespread insistence on
an explanation for everything. This protest characterizes the Latin American as well
as the Spanish Modernists. Rubén Dario considered himself a high priest of an eternal
religion, Beauty, and Juan Ramón Jiménez retired from worldy life to confine himself
within the magie space of poetic creation. Ethics and esthetics, for him, are two sides
of the same coin: the beautiful is good because of its beauty, and the good is beautiful
in itself.
The extreme hermeticism in which Mallarmé and Rimbaud luxuriated is hardly
traceable in Hispanic Modernism. Mystery, as Ruben Dario and Antonio Machado
showed, can be expressed in nearly transparent forms; a fountain, a beehive, and the
sun suffice to suggest the presence, or even yearning, for God in a destitute heart.
Machado had learned from Saint Theresa that symbols can allude to the irrational
through rational terms, and that the difficulty in naming something can be overcome
without resorting to the use of vague language.
The general accessibility of Modernist symbols (except for poems by Herrera y
Reissig, the later Juan Ramón Jiménez and even Antonio Machado) is due to the fact
that all the Hispanic Modernists made common use of a repertoire of literary figures,
including their variants, additions and residues. Their community of single systerns
was possible because of their coinciding ideologies, and it is reflected in the similarity
of their stylistic devices.
The swan and the old park, for example, proliferate, and are consequences öf the
Modernists' need to dissent from traditional customs. When these poets exalt beauty
and exhibit nostalgia — even if it is not clear what they are nostalgie for — they are
indirectly rejecting a deplorable present. An image of the past (the old park) frames
the center, Beauty (the swan). And underlying their equation of ethics with esthetics
is their persuasion that the laws of society are based on ugliness and injustice, which
they considered their moral duty to condemn.
In a text written about 1900, Manuel de Montolid referred to the "power of trans-
forming the individual into the universal and knowing how to see the sublime (i.e.,
"the great secret", as Goethe said) in the heart of the most insignificant thing ,, J ("Pre-
faci" to La Vita Nova, 1903). Montoliü is referring to the vision and transformation
of a symbolism which he himself called natural and necessary. Dario and José Asunción
Silva utilized the stylistic possibilities of the nocturne with great subtlety, recording
in symbols sensations and situations in which the real and the hallucinatory coexist.
As in the paintings of Redon and Moreau, an amorphous common denominator floats
in the poem, establishing an unreal harmony.
The Modernist novel also made frequent use of the symbol. As in lyric poetry, the
symbol tended to add a dimension to the narration, projecting theme and character

214
beyond the literal, to possible readings usually ignored by the creators of Realist
novels. (Here, the exception would be certain works by Galdós.) The Modernists did
not consider themselves obliged to see things "as they were" because they did not
believe that the limits of truth coineided with those of reality, as the Realists did.
Starting with Amistad funesta by José Marti, things began to change; in La gloria de
don Bamiro, by Enrique Larreta, and in Sangre patricia, by Manuel Diaz Rodriguez,
the change is complete; although the characters move in a clearly drawn, concrete
world, their actions displace them to another space where they attain transcendental
meaning. At times, as in Diaz Rodriguez's novel, hallucination becomes part of the
character; at other times, as in Larreta's novel, eroticism and magie practices uncover
beneath the literal level a symbolic dimension where things acquire what would other-
wise be lost.
Analyzing Sangre patricia, we observe that the central figure is presented as a
goddess and seen throughout the narrative as a flower or a mermaid. The image varies,
but the substance does not; it is intentionally hazy and out of esthetic necessity,
mysterious. Showing her different avatars within the death-shadow in which she exists
(and we may speak of existence in such an atmosphere) causes her to become unreal;
we are witnessing a symbolic representation of elemental impulses of what was just
beginning to be known as "the unconscious". In stories by Clemente Palma and Horacio
Quiroga, dark forces emerge, representing evil, death or simply destiny. They may
strike us as truculent, but in their truculence there are allusions to realities beyond the
literality of the text.

FLOWERS

Turning now to the most characteristic symbols of Hispanic Modernism, which

as I have indicated, are drawn from a common fund of symbols that served to group
their users in a literary school, I would like to recall that the most widely used and
noted symbol is the swan. The swan and the color blue prompted important studies
that clarified epochal and personal tendencies. Versailles, the old park, the galleries
of the soul, the rosé and the water lily, mist appear and reappear, from the 1880's up
until the recent past, weaving into the texture of the era figures that are signs of recog-
nition, signals of coincidences. Outliving Romanticism, the angel and the mermaid
became forms of the eternal female; José Asunción Silva in De sobremesa shows them
in irreconcilable opposition, whereas Sangre patricia depicts the goddess transformed
into a mermaid. In Amistad funesta, women are flowers (as they are in Efrén Rebolledo's
works), and their particular color an emblem of their character. (They bring to mind
the women-flowers cared for byKlingsor, the eunuch-magician in Parsifal.) In Dario,
woman is a "princess", dreamy and expectant, or at other times, in keeping with the
decadence of the era, a "flower of hysteria", another of the feminine archetypes of
Modernism. Writers of other schools, then and later, associated the Modernists with
hysteria and sometimes with drug addiction, too.
If the Modernists conceived of woman in floral terms, it was for esthetic or esthetiz-
ing reasons, just as in describing her they viewed her anatomy from an angle that

215
 offered new perceptions of the female figure. The Romantics had not missed this angle
(remember the "cut lily", Bécquer's image for a pensive woman), but it was the turn-
of-the-century writers who systematized this vision: the neck is a lily, the breasts roses,
and the genital parts a magnolia . . . Every woman a garden, like Valle-Incl&n's sad
Concha in Sonata de otoňo. If a woman is ill, as in this novelette of Martí's, the precari-
ous nature of her condition is likened even more to a flower, with its fleeting life, and
the "demon of perversity" makes her more desirable. When the floral genre gives way
to others, a more complex female type emerges, leaving behind the basically Romantic
archetype of the woman-flower. Manuel Machado summed up the enticing contradic­
tions which may be said to characterize the Modernists' woman: blonde, fragile, vice-
ridden and mystical, a Pre-Raphaelite virgin and a femme fatale (from Alma parisien,
in El amor y la muerte, Madrid, 1913, p. 31). And this is how she appears in stories that
blend sentimentality and perversion; the mutations make something else of her and
yet she does not cease to be what she was. Contaminated by realism ? I would say not;
type and symbol are still superimposed on the individual marked by both.
Machado alludes to the Pre-Raphaelites, and it is only natural; the influence of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his school on the Modernists was more intense than is
usually conceded. Elizabeth Siddal, transfigured by death into an ideal sort of languid
and incorruptible beauty which Rossetti and the legend invented for her, became the
image of indestructible beauty-Eros triumphing over Thanatos. The fact that Elizabeth
was very different when she was alive (a poor soul whose bouts with schizophrenia and
hysteria finally ended in suicide), is irrelevant when it comes to measuring her prestige
among the Modernists. Instituted as The Muse, the incarnation of pure, eternal love, she
appears with changing faces in their novels and lyric poetry. I shall quote two exam-
ples. The first, a story by the Mexican, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera; the second, Silva's
novel. Pia di Tolomea is a story based on a certain enigmatic woman whom the narrator
has seen somewhere. The narrator finally remembers that in the corridor of a convent,
next to a painting of the Annunciation, he saw another painting that depicted
Mary, and that on the back of it he saw this sign: "Ista fuit illa Pia, nobilis Do-
mine de Tholomeis de Senis". And Pia attracted Rossetti, who portrayed her in
a sitting position, showing her long black hair and her hands crossed over her legs.
(A reproduction may be found in C. Y. Lang, ed., The Pre-Raphadites and Their Circley
Boston, 1968.)
De sobremesa, a novel with a complex structure, has as its protagonist an artist
hero who is very representative of the contradictions of the epoch. He is partly a result
of the tastes of the Pre-Raphaelites who influenced Silva: he collects their paintings,
reads Rossetti and quotes him, emphasizing how Rossetti's paintings and poetry trans­
port him to a climate of "ethereal delicacies and supernatural and delicious feelings".
Hunt, Burne Jones, and Christina Rossetti are his favorites. Together with Wagner,
they shape his tastes, determining even the novel itself by making it turn on the axis
of a slightly sadistic sensualism and an angelic idealism. In love with a girl whom he
has hardly seen and remembers as if from a dream, the hero exists only to find her;
and she is Helen, Diotima, Beatrice, "uncontaminated by an earthly atmosphere, un-
sexual and radiant, like Milton's cherubim".

216
 S i v a ' s character, like Gutiérrez Nájera's narrator, has seen a canvas painted by
Siddal, an artist who is introduced as a relative of Elizabeth, Rossetti's wife, and t h a t
vision, blurred b y time, persists in his unconscious memory. So it is a feminine figure,
in this Rossettian version, which attracts him. At the end, we discover t h a t both the
real Helen and t h e dreamed Beatrice are dead when the hero searches for them. Their
physical absence stresses the impossibility of the pursued ideal, which inhabits an
inaccessible paradise.
The transfiguration is mental and operates in all directions: the woman in whom
sensuality is incarnated, a beautiful courtesan surrounded b y luxury, is exalted to an
archetypal level when the protagonist sees her as Diana, goddess of the hunt, an un­
real, undine apparition, a nymph "coming out of the black and mysterious depths of a
thicket". When the " d e p t h s " are illuminated, the figure is degraded: a rather sordid
episode reveals her true consistency, necessarily opposed to the purity of Helen, remote
and ascendent.
The Romantics exalted Don J u a n as a symbol of the singular blend of the erotic
and the satanic t h a t has such great power over women. The Modernists studied him
from another angle, subjecting him to a process t h a t converted the demonic beauty
which Byron, Espronceda, and later Zorrilla saw in him, into an ambiguous t y p e —
"Catholic, ugly,and sentimental", in Valle-Inclán's words. He became a type character­
ized by latent homosexual tendencies in Ramón Pérez de Ayala (whose image reflects
the biological theories popular at the time) ; and Unamuno's version of him (perhaps
more degrading still) is t h a t of a poor fellow with no initiative or appetites, an invention
of the women who fight over him, attracted by the aura they fancy surrounds him.
Eventually, he was practically dismissed when two lesser playwrights dared to call him
" a good person".
There is no Modernist Don J u a n more prestigious t h a n Valle-Inclán's Bradomin.
Slightly religious, his Catholicism and his traditionalism are more properly esthetic,
and his satanism has more modest proportions; he is vaguely sadistic, in a cerebral
way, and has a propensity to incestuous acts; his skepticism is tolerable, the kind an
eighteenth century abbé would have permitted. This Don J u a n played the role of
Modernist hero as well as he could, as well as his pale substance allowed.

TOWERS

An ironic and anachronistic hero, the poet (or artist in general), with or without
demonology, was the one who in his confrontation with society hoped t o control and
redeem it, or, like the protagonist of Idolos rotos (by Diaz Rodriguez), who adopted
a "heroic" attitude, hoped to serve and transform it.
Dario forged the image which, because of its reiteration (in variable formulations),
became the symbol of the eponymic hero of Modernism: poets as "towers of God",
vicars and delegates of excellence, convoked to resist philistine attacks; towers like
cliffs, resisting the onslaught of mediocrity and vulgarity, of t h e obtuse and aggressive
burgeois. José Fernández, in De sobremesa, envisions himself as a dictator and renovator
of the country. His thoughts can be related to what Ortega said years later: " I am myself

217
and my circumstances, and if I do not save them, I will not save myself", all of which
explains their will to combat actively rather than merely resist.
But above and before all, the poet is the revealer, the secret voice of the universe
through whom enigmas speak out, sometimes cryptically and sometimes transparently;
Juan Ramón Jiménez felt that he was a "somnambulist medium" transmitting forces
he umconsciously recognized. It is not easy to pinpoint what those ''forces" are. Dario
spoke of people who "auscultate" the heart of night. The metaphor refers to things
that are inheréntly vague, forms of mystery, and also dreams and desires. What is
auscultated (and the verb could not be more appropriate) in the night is one's own heart.
Standing erect in the storms of ignorance, violence, and barbarity, the mental
aristocracy of these poets is reflected in images that are irrepressibly elevated: not only
"towers of God" but "celestial lightning rods", "the breakwater of eternities". At the
battle front, waging war against positivism and the scientific spirit, they envisioned
themselves as caretakers of a culture that included the reality of mystery. Whether
magician or bulwark, the symbol was a necessary weapon, an instrument for penetrat-
ing the shadowy zones seething with myths, fables, and esoteric visions. The imagina-
tion, freed in a vision from the chains of logic, is justified, then exalted, by its own
movement as it advances far beyond the intellect's reach, finding language that recog-
nizes the light and shadows of intuition.
Poetry is a new religion, a substitute for others that have perished, and poets are
the priests of this demanding cult of self-involvement and consecration, their faith
compensating for the hostility they sense in a bourgeois society whose philosophy is
positivism and whose religion is materialism. "Poetic lines are holy receptacles",
wrote Silva. Later, Jiménez equated artist and hero, and Manuel Altolaguirre named
a magazine devoted to the liberating impulse of poetry Héroe.
If space permitted, it would be possible to show that the emergence of the poet as
the eponymic hero of Modernism postulated the appearance of a figure with the oppo-
site symbolic function, and that this latter figure, because of its negative attitude
toward mystery, because of its "demonic" curiosity, was related to the scientist. The
poet is the integrator, the one who accepts the unknown as a substantial part of reality,
whereas the scientist is the disintegrator, the one who reduces mystery to a "problem",
theréby denying its sacred nature. Rubén Darío's Fray Pedro, who attempts to x-ray
the consecrated Host in order to unveil the mystery of the Eucharist, is the prototype
of the investigator moved by a satanic urge to gain knowledge of the forbidden. Leo-
poldo Lugones treated the theme assiduously — in no fewer than six of the tales in
Las fuerzas extrañas. Lugones, like Darío, sanctions the scientist as he sees fit: with
death or its substitutes, madness and blindness. The polarity of poet (artist)-scientist
resounded in social and religious realms, suggesting a malignity which recent events
have confirmed.
God's designs can be explored in and by poetry, for it discovers occult connections
between things not normally linked. Such discovery is the work of a spiritual force
that places its exploratory activity on another level, differentiating it from the rational
attitude of the scientist who, objectively speaking (regardless of what motives he claims
to have), is an ally of Caliban, the incarnation of the crudest materialism.

218
 I n relation t o the poet (and man in general), José Maria Eguren veers off the main
track, depicting the poet as a pilgrim in the "doomed kingdoms" where blood — in-
cluding his own — stains everything. Closer to modern sensibilities (Lorca, for example)
than to his eontemporaries, he presents the poet in La sangre as a man pursuing " r e d
signals" across space and time. Clearly enigmatic, the intuitions in the poem insinuate
a cruel reality, fate as suffering (which the poet recognizes to be his own and, more so,
an innate p a r t of the h u m a n condition):

The sad man, step by step,

sees it in the sleeping city, white
next t o the scaffolds
and at the death of blind heights.

W h a t he sees is blood. One step more and he would have discovered it — as Fede-
rico Garcia Lorca did in New York — "underneath the multiplications"; b u t w h a t is
already there, and clearly so, is his awareness of an aberration in the "cursed king­
d o m s " of society where the poet is forced to live. The poet is no longer a tower or a bul-
wark; he is a witness, destined to see and report what he has seen, b u t incapable of
stopping the blood which makes (and is) the poem. From now on, the poet will not feel
t h a t he has a mission; he will not be proud to be different; he will see and call himself
"the sad m a n " , a man among millions of men, all obeying the same laws. His godly
voice is gone, and he is "overwhelmed", "shaken" by what he sees and intuits.
As late as Luces de Bohemia, b y Valle-Inclán, we find the ultimate degradation
of the poet. His name is Máximo Estrella ("Star"), b u t he is blind, and to those around
him, he seems very unheroic; they consider him a grotesque figure, redeemed only
perhaps by his misery and death, which is as sad as his life. The circle closes: Estrella
has run out of illusions and his "genius" is taken as a joke.
I t was no coincidence t h a t the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó chose Caliban as
a political and cultural symbol; nor was it mere chance t h a t Dario envisioned t h e in-
satiable bourgeois as a cannibal, a term which in Spanish differs from the name Caliban
only in the reverse order of two consonants (1 and n: canibal — Caliban). Since Ariel
and Caliban are a synthesis of two attitudes toward life, use of these characters implies
an allegorical, Manichean treatment of reality. Poetic experience is often associated
with mystical experience, and the approximation is tolerable if one bears in mind t h e
differences between their modes and purposes. Their coincidental acceptance of sym-
bolic forms is emphasized when t h e mystic searches for a way to express himself in
poetry. I t is then t h a t he resorts to symbols, because — as I recalled a t t h e outset —
"not finding ordinary terms of everyday language adequate, he discovers mysteries in
strange figures and similarities". These words from St. J o h n of the Cross remind one
of the obscurities which symbols sometimes present; their ambiguity derives precisely
from their strangeness or singularity.

219
 SWANS

When Darío calls poets "towers of God", he is formulating a thought about himself
which is nearly transcendent, and he is implicitly defending certain values he considers
supreme when opposed to the invading materialism: the excellent resist the "cannibal
or predatory instincts", he says. Projected onto another level, this thought evokes the
image of the swan, which Baudelaire had already used to symbolize the destiny of the
poet, condemned to humiliation and forced to drag his splendid plumage through the
dust of the city ("baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre"), grieving for the
loss of the lake where he was born and his exile to the inhospitable, ugly surroundings
that contrast with the beauty of the waters he longs for. And the poet associates the
spectacle with his own feelings, taking the swan as an emblem of his condemned exis-
tence among vulgar types who make him feel both "ridiculous and sublime", like the
magnificent bird in the jumbled space of evocation. A Romantic poet, Enrique Gil, had
defined himself in the first half of the nineteenth century as "a swan without a lake",
likening himself to the legendary bird whose prestige would be so high half a century
later.
If the swan strikes one as the most revealing symbol of the epoch, it is because
the swan offers an image of the poet which could hardly be duplicated. Naturally, the
plural meaning of the symbol is obvious and imposes itself on any connoisseur of
Modernist poetry; while it is perhaps the most precise expression of the poet, it is also
other things. The swan cuts through the Modernists' poetic lakes with various mytholog-
ical reminiscences in its wake: Leda in her ecstasy, Lohengrin in search of the Grail . . .
Specific places become lyric spaces in these poems: the gardens of Versailles and Aran-
juez, evening parks, lakes more clearly dreamed than seen—and all work symbolically.
In José Juan Tablada, "The swan glides triumphantly over a dark lake" (in Variaciones
sobre un tema, in Florilegio), and it seems quite natural to equate swan with singer,
lake with soul, and triumphs with erotic games, such as those which the swan engages
in with Leda.
Like the albatross, although less ominously, the swan is a sublimated figure in
whom the poet would like to find himself. Far from sociohistorical contingencies, the
swan in his lonelinéss suggests isolation. He is also a complementary symbol of poetry
and poets when he represents beauty — the sort of beauty that, not without a certain
insolence, exhibits itself — and love as it was interpreted by the conventions of the
times: as sensual and equivocal. This enumeration does not exhaust the possibilities
of the symbol; the swan also stands for loneliness and mystery, the enigmas which its
"curved neck" (as Darío said) proposed.
The poet's eye discovers meaning simply by attributing it to something, by creat-
ing it in experience, which is the poem, and in moments of uncertainty and change like
those the Modernists experienced, the phenomenon is clear. The meanings a poet
attributes to something may shock most people, for they do not share his intuitions or
ability to see something a particular way. If the swan was enigmatic to readers then,
it is because whoever had seen one in its natural surroundings was not usually prepared
to consider it an icon, or attribute religious value to it, thus linking it to poorly defined

220
cults which, for a rationalist reader, implied a regression to the occult. And whoever
reacted this way was essentially right; occultism attracted the Modernists, and more
than once seduced them. Furthermore, symbolism is anti-intellectual; its approach
does not exclude the possibility of applying "magie" religious knowledge which the
poet possesses and is able to communicate. With the aid of symbols, the imagination
can establish revealing connections ("correspondences") between objects, or between
objects and sensations, which in reality are on different levels.
For Alfonsina Storni, swans are flowers and their soul is feminine. Reiterating
Darío's intuitions, she sees them as living enigmas:

Question marks, their necks are like symbols

Of t h e soul they have embodied, and gently gliding by,
They ask of Mystery what insoluble mystery is . . .

A diamond, a rose, a water lily . . . whatever it is called, the swan seems t o live
an incessant metamorphosis, a permanent readiness for whatever transfiguration the
poem demands. If the symbol is an agent of communication with mystery, few have
made t h a t function so transparently clear as Storni, who, in another poem, presents
it in a yet more unusual way, emphasized by the ambiguous prestige of illness. I n The
Sick Swan, the soul of the bird continues to seem feminine ("sensitiva," the adjective
applied, is feminine), and it is characterized by its blend of love and pain. I n this poem,
the Eucharistic animal is a symbol for the Poet (in the abstract), and perhaps, too, for
the poet who wrote the poem.
Another floral version of the swan comes from Delmira Augustini. From the con­
crete she moves to the abstract: from lily and rose to sadness and pride, with the almost
inevitable allusion to upsetting secrets, obviously erotic ones. Delmira-Leda feels the
mythological oaress; the swan is a lover, and the woman, a vase. I n a curious reversal
of the roles which Dario assigned to the swan and the poet, it is not the swan who in-
terrogates, but rather the poet or poetess. Out of sheer pleasure at the beauty of the
lines in question, they deserve quotation at length:

On the shore of the clear lake

I interrogate him in silence . . .
this silence, which is a rose
on his beak of fire . . .
But in his flesh he speaks t o me
and I, in my flesh, understand.

Love is symbolized here; it is a " r e d " swan of passion who will find a reply in a
prose piece by Efrén Rebolledo entitled If I Were Zeus. Delmira's poem could easily
have been called If I Were Leda. I n her version the swan is red, whereas Rebolledo
imagines a black swan whose blackness covers his lover, her "startled and throbbing
whiteness" Contrasting with the whiteness of the feminine body, the b i r d ' s plumage
is black, and these variations in color have symbolic meaning.
Leopoldo Lugones' swans are also black, b u t only metaphorically. The real and
solitary swan in the second to last line of a lengthypoem glides toward three reflections

221
in the water. Mystery is embodied neither in the swan nor the words; it filters into
both, crystallizing the atmosphere, and in itself is the poem. A shining figure and
shadowy reflections: together they symbolize a charm definable only by reference to
the ineffable which they express.
In the novel, Dionysos, by Pedro César Dominici, the swan is not only a symbolic
receptacle; his acts as a divine emissary (when challenged by the protagonist of the
narration) are symbolic. "Naughty . . . with a hostile look", this swan snatches with
one predatory peck the cameo worn by the girl to protect herself from Dionysius'
vengeance; and bereft of her talisman, she soon dies, "possessed" by the god. The act
of this dissonant swan (whose dissonance differs from that of Lugones' black swans,
for they involuntarily break a poetic rule, whereas this swan breaks a natural rule)
is exceptional, unexpected, but still open to interpretation: the violence may be
judged as an erotic gesture, parallel, though opposite, to the swan Darío imagines
stretching "his luminous neck . . . Slant into the white thighs of Leda".
Possessing Leda was the culminating moment of a mythological destiny; the rest
is melancholy, nostalgia for an unrepeatable time when the bird, masked in olympic
divinity, fused with woman, becoming a symbol, as Pedro Salinas said, of "the fulfill-
ment of a possessive erotic yearning". The silence, impassivity, and daydreaming with
which poets adorn swans are signs of a pensive passion and nostalgia, somehow syn-
thesized by the contemplating eye in the enigmatic "divine neck" of the swan. Darío
addressed the sphinx with this question mark, searching for an answer to questions
about the future of the Hispanic world, threatened then (as now) by the "fierce bar-
barians" from the North.
When swan and sphinx are associated, mythology gives way to philosophy. An
erotic symbol becomes metaphysical, and its meaning becomes a prefiguration of its
destiny, personal or collective. Knowledge of the future and its secrets is hidden behind
the whiteness that had seemed like blank beauty. And there is no reason for opposing
the swan to Minerva's owl; the surprising wisdom it stores from its experience is shown
in its revelatory declarations. In the last stanza of the first poem of the series dedicated
to swans, in Cantos de vida y esperanza, its utterances lead the poet to conclude on an
optimistic note. It is they who are loyal at the crucial moment, in 1898, when the defeat
of Spain made desolate images besiege Darfo.
As witnesses, the swans saw the politician and poet Rafael Núñez (friend and
protector of Darfo) "sink in the mist of Mystery lake", and it was the swans who, if
not as a convoy, at least as tangible presences, saw Núñez cross the lake of death. For
a moment, they participate in Darío's theological ceremony, held to consecrate friend-
ship, poets, and good men everywhere. The meaning of the swans' presence is ambiguous
perhaps because making it more precise would have pushed the poem toward the ratio-
nalism of allegories. It seems preferable to leave these swans as figures of a dark con-
stellation, symbolically rather than literally comprehensible.
Regarding swans as emblems requires a generalization, a system, for together with
the swan, other figures impose themselves as symbols of the poet (and poets in general).
Herrera y Reissig imagined that system, justifying it with these words:

222
 All poets have a symbol. Genius may be described emblematically, with a litur-
gical form depicting its inner nature: a goddess, an object, a monster, an animal.
lts coat of arms shows myth—dreaming, singing, moving, soaring, predicting,
raving, howling, entertaining, sinning, spitting, corroding, repelling, committing
suicide, poisoning, enraging, splashing, convoluting, exploiting, horrifying, terri-
fying. All verbs, all virtues, all Sins.
(Introduction to Palideces y púrpuras, by Carlos López Rocha)

Herrera picks the swan as an emblem for St. Theresa, Lamartine, Petrarch; the
nightingale is associated with Tibullus, Catullus, Heine, etc. All poetry and poets are
seen symbolically, each poet being shown by the figure which best reveals his nature,
and the figures contrast with and complement each other. Poe is a raven; Verlaine,
a faun; Bécquer, a swallow; and Quevedo, a mocking bird. A clever game of associa-
tion, yes, but not an entirely whimsical one, for the equations point to an underlying
truth.
In one of the most representative books of the period, the orphic and winged Los
senderos ocultos, Enrique González Martínez decreed the death of the swan, alleging
that it was insensitive and superficial. He continued to view it as a symbol, but as a
symbol of the deception which its beauty engenders. An "empty form", he said, aloof
from the world whose lakes it inhabits; and he wanted to exchange it for the owl, the
indefatigable contemplator of mystery and constant interpreter of the silences of night.
Perhaps the word nocturne is the key to the change: the owl, Minerva's creature, sym-
bolizes wisdom deciphering enigmas in the night, a listening to the soul of things in
silence.
When González Martinez later wrote another book and exalted his encounter with
a universal soul, the force he sensed in forests, flowers, and beehives; when he identified
with nature and, hearing her concert, was stirred to dream, he gave his poems a title
that emphasized what he had said earlier: he called his book The Death of the Swan.

COLOR

The utilization of color for its symbolic value, not merely as a decorative element,
but as a visible representation of sensations and imaginings, is, in the Modernists, a
constant stylistic feature, not to say method. From the Parnassians and Symbolists,
the Modernists learned that words have color which is visible to the imagination, and
which can "paint" — as Marti said — because of this. When he talked about "blue
days" (an expression which does not connote depression in Spanish), he was well aware
that he was evoking a distance, a nostalgia for something transparent and immaculate,
like the sky of childhood. Blue, for him, is optimistic and pleasurable; it tints months
and even years, contrasting with the black of sad hours. "Eternal blue", as he foretold,
"is not of this earth"; it is a figure of speech for unattainable desires.
Blue is the Modernist color par excellence. It impregnates Martí's entire work, as
Ivan Schulmann has shown; it serves as the title to Darío's first book (that is, the lirst
worthy of his signature); it spreads into Gutiérrez Nájera's literary magazine, Revista
Azul in Mexico; it reappears in Juan Ramón's native Moguer, coloring the image of

223
divinity ("God is blue"), a jubilant reaffirmation of Marti's image of 'Vast, blue
religion"; and it even vibrates in the last line written by Antonio Machado: "those
days of blue and that sun of childhood".
In addition to the climate, men and various kinds of space are seen under a bluish
hue. So absolute is the blue of woman that she recedes into the sky and becomes a star
(Lugones: Ballad of Cold Love). Marti spoke of "blue countries" in Amistad funesta
(1885), and Dario referred over and over again to the "blue country", a zone of great
illusions that stimulated the growth of fragile, ideal creatures who, transplanted to
prosaic worlds, could not survive. Blue is the country of art and of artists who, because
they are dreamers, make their home there. Edgar Allen Poe, Stuart Merrill, and James
Whistier are the "blue trinity" for Dario. Illusion, whether erotic or artistic, is a blue-
bird — or a prince, if the creator is a woman. The color of dreamers, it spills from dreams
into tangible forms, and it is more easily understood if we accept it, in all its meta-
phorical variety, as an imaginative thrust to (or from) objects on a real level, a thrust
of unexpected perceptions.
Manuel Machado declares in a style reminiscent of Góngora, that woman is "night
(disguised) in a clear blue day . . .". He thus resolves, in three extremely short lines,
the light-shadow duality. But the equivalence of blue-gaze (eyes) and, a bit later,
clarity-luminosity, does not preclude seeing woman as an incarnation of the nocturnal
side of life. In a compact succession of metonymies, the poet conducts us from "night"
to "death-passion-voluptuousness-Night = Woman," dressed and imbued, despite all,
with the radiant blue which she is: Blue = Woman.
Twilight states (to use the term preferred by some psychologists in referring to the
transition between sleeping and waking) required other hues, shades less vibrant than
the radiant splendor of sky blue. Nostalgia and melancholy are states of mind whose
origins are often difficult to pinpoint; one may feel nostalgic without knowing exactly
why; the Portuguese, with the untranslatable word saudade, express solitude, temporal
awareness, a yearning for the past, and much more. Twilight can be symbolized by
the colors that fill the horizon when the sun sets—purple, violet, lavender—colors which
evoke the flowers of these shades.
When the sunset is linked with the death of day, it is easy to extend the compari-
son, making "sunset" stand for the fatality of aging and the nearness of an end burdened
with heavy shadows; in Lugones, the "subtle purple decoration" insinuates an atmo-
sphere of love sensing its death (Delectación morosa). The "roads in the afternoon"
that Machado's poetic self envisions are also the roads of time and space, as is suggested
by the phonic and semantic associations in the poem. Souls are violet in one of Juan
Ramón's adolescent books, and this association, making violet emblematic, endured
until the end of his life. One of his brief lyrics sums up his delight in the countryside
with an intensely personal adjectival use of color, too fragile to translate:

A caballo va el poeta.
Qué tranquilidad violeta.*

* Literally, "The poet goes on horseback. What violet tranquillity".

224
 Gray paths turn lilac in Ecstasy, by Lugones, and in Sadly, very Sadly . . ., by
Dario; the poetic voice dissolves its emotion in the atmosphere of the afternoon:

. . . And into the gentle amethyst of the sunset

the tear of a mysterious artist dissolved.

Since it evokes a precious stone, the color adds further estheticism to the image
of the sunset; in addition, the beauty of the amethyst has a certain religious cpnnotation
derived from its episcopal use. The "mysterious artist" is — we later discover — the
grieving poet and also, implicitly, someone who, without ceasing to be the poet, is also
the soul of the universe.
Like any visual symbol, these suggest a relation between an image and an idea,
and their meaning is enforced by the metonymical chain they set in motion: purple-
sunset-nostalgia-melancholy, and whatever else enters the image marginally. Naturally,
the Modernists' use of color is not always symbolic; sometimes it is used for contrast,
and appears more impressionistic:

The embers of a purple sunset

smoke behind the black cypress grove.

Usually, though, it traces the hazy frontiers of emotion. In El libro de horas, by

Fernán Félix de Amador, "imperceptible and unanimous whitenesses" are mentioned,
and the adjectives announce the figures to come ("unanimous swans in the lake of
blue", Dario had said); "vagabond pigeons, chaste swans, /subtle twilight themes".
Following the rules of symbolism, what is painted is not so much the thing as the effect
— as Mallarmé had recommended and practiced. Contradicting a widely published
sentence of his to Degas, he once asserted that in order to transmit an effect, poetry
"should not, then, be composed of words, but of intentions, and all words should blue
in the presence of sensation". (Fragment of a letter quoted by E. Noulet in L'CEuvre
Poétique de Stéphane Mallarmé, p. 91.)
Jiménez maintained that the Symbolists' poetry was based on the conjunction of
a precise form and a subjective imprecision, and that the patron of this norm was
Verlaine. The vagueness of poetic music is recommendable because of the indefinite
effect it produces. In fusing the imaginary with the real, a certain vagueness results,
stimulating one's fantasy and creating a climate of mystery which is favorably affected
by such stylistic devices as synesthesia, which establish unusual associations among
perceptions by any of the five senses. "Violet souls" is valid in this context, as are the
birds so beautifully transfigured by Herrera y Reissig:

And violet pigeons fly out like memories

from the dark and old and wrinkled walls.

Not only the color, but the image itself is symbolic here. And everything is in
Lied II by Eguren, where melodies by Schumann echo in the twilight as a crow (the
bird of omens and emblem of death) acts as a guide "in a violet navigation" to the

15 Balakian 225
"nacreous virgin" who is fated to die. This poem, from the series entitled Simbólicas,
is a good example of the correlation between poetry and mystery and in any case, of
the symbolic use of color, for violet is the color of emaciation and death. Eguren man-
ages to create an experience that is a pure succession of emotions. His piece describes
a drowning and a death, but it is actually more than that; he at once stirs up the ex­
perience and keeps it secret, thus making it more intense and transcendent by leaving
unsaid part of what he feels.

PARKS, LABYRINTHS

Only rarely do Darío's gardens — Versaillesque and exotic, ruled by the triumph
of peacocks and smiling with frivolous beautiful marchionesses -— serve as a refuge
for melancholy. There are statues, or mythological forms that evoke sensuality more
than nostalgia, and the ornaments are adequate for the scenes and characters in his
poetry. Where Darío finds Eulalia, Lugones finds history; Juan Ramón, sadness;
Herrera y Reissig, deception; and Antonio Machado, silence. So, at the end of the
scale, night and space merge; the park becomes a labyrinth where man, now pure
soul, wanders, lost in himself or in a cavern, where he runs into himself.
A previously quoted poem suggests Dario's presence in the old park Machado
visited. Sadly, very sadly . . . oblivious to exoticism, delivers the confidential tone of
a voice crying into the water of the fountain. Amado Nervo went even further — his
parks were immense (having summerhouses, ponds, castles, and, of course, princesses),
although woven only of daydreams; his gardens, also interior and set in the twilight,
were strangely infused with ghostly essences. And Julián del Casal's park shared this
dreaminess; in the middle of the garden and of the afternoon, among predictable com-
ponents (pond, swan, lilies, peacocks), he places "a young dreamer" whose sadness is
caused by the sunset, the fugacity of beauty, and the impact of time ("Vespertina").
González Martínez's variation on this theme comes as no surprise. In the old park,
caught in a synesthetic harmony of fragrances and silence, two figures ascend to ec­
stasy. The poem is very aptly entitled The Ecstasy of Silence, and the poetic space in
it is charged with infinity.
The old park is always a last outpost of nature preserved in the city, resisting the
persistent attack of forces which will eventually destroy it with their "constructions".
And its imminent ruin is detectable in its age, decadence, and abandon, which make
of the park a symbol of paradise lost: spirituality threatened by "progress". Whatever
is fated to extinction — the day or life itself, ways of life and attitudes — is expressed
by the park. The literary tradition of twilight (melancholy, indefinite emotions) had
a remote exponent in Virgil, appeared in Romanticism (and then in new shapes), and
reappeared in Modernism, where it exalts nostalgia above all, thus lending prestige
to this emotion.
Los crepúsculos del jardín, by Lugones, refers, from the very beginning, to a con-
junction which in other works is less explicitly declared. These gardens are, by their
nature and subdued light, gardens of the late afternoon. The one reflected in Delectación
morosa indicates "in its chrysoberyl tint /asubtle purple decoration", the color of the

226
dress that Lugones' heroine Tuberosa wears. In Black Swans, park, fountain (with a
pond this time, as in Nervo) and statue join again, enveloped in shadow.
Another significant title is The Abandoned Parks by Herrera y Reissig (a section
of his book Los peregrinos de piedra); it contains a series of sonnets that are predomin-
antly erotic. Orchards of love, these are parks where the moon, like a woman's heart,
may be light. The scene might occur as follows:

The afternoon in the bower became imbued

with your soft handkerchief of violet.

Lilacs, heliotropes, violets, and the poppies of sundown in their final radiance
The signs accumulate with a certain reiteration: lilac circles under the eyes, lilac pigeons,
a wind perfumed by lilacs . . . A whole world scented and tinted with the "dreamy
shades" of lilac. And the "dreaminess" leads us, not to abstractions, but to the human-
ized space created by the poetic speaker who imagines himself there.
Herrera populated his parks with neurotic figures whose resemblance to his person-
al obsessions is perhaps too strong, but whose conception and function is symbolic.
He explains how he created them, and his words are marked by an eloquence which
a critic could not attain:

Rising. Groping. Feeling dizzy. Everything resounds. We evoke, and everything

responds. A hundred eyes open in the shadow. Everything hums, everything is
asking in this sacred place, asking as we advance up the open steps and glide
through its complex halls. Sounds are ideas. Ideas are echoes of other ideas.
Everything meshes. Everything is unreal, everything is impermanent. ("Sylla­
bus", in Poesias completas, Madrid, 1963. p. 710.)

The embrace becomes Pythagorean; woman, nirvana; the idyll, spectral; and from
the park we have slid imperceptibly into ''complex'' interiors.
Antagonistic symbols, the city (which Unamuno opposed to the country in Paz
en la guerra, giving it a distincly political meaning: liberalism versus conservatism,
change versus tradition) and the garden condense fears and yearnings of the poetic
self. The city is an inferno, or, more modestly, a labyrinth or jungle. Jiménez (as we
have already recalled) discovered Eurydice in a New York subway car (La negra y la
rosa); and when Modernism was yielding to newer trends, Lorca saw the city as a
jungle. Contemporary society, grounded in the dehumanizing greed of a middle class
that subordinates everything to economic benefits, is destroying —- or is about to
destroy — nature, and with it civilization.
The garden, whether orchard of love or old park, is a refuge for dreamers. In
Modernist poetry, a thousand doors open into gardens where there is almost always
a fountain whose flowing language the poet understands. Gardens . . . dreamed of,
perhaps, for creatures out of dreams, like the one Antonio Machado invented for
his love,

15* 227
 I dreamed of you in a garden,
high, Guiomar, near a stream;
in a garden time has closed
with iron bars of cold . . .

or lifeless gardens, condemned to loneliness, like the Gray Garden imagined by his
brother, Manuel Machado, who, in another poem, expresses his reaction to an involun-
tary confinement:
Alone
in the park they have left me
forgotten
. . . and they have closed it.

These lines probably synthesize an intuition shared by more than a few poets,
then and later: they have not retreated to an ivory tower by choice, but have been
left in a rather lonely, unvisited place, among trees and flowers, destined to be scorned
and forgotten. Solitude is imposed by the mediocre as much as it is chosen. Surrounded
by the hustle and bustle of the city, which does not penetrate the cloistered air of the
park, the silence and calm of their solitude can also be taken as signs not of rest but
of death. Decay, dryness, and darkness gradually replace freshness, fertility, and light.
Melancholy grows like a huge tree whose vast shade has perhaps been crossed by the
fleeting shadow of love.
And, together with the old park, responding to related needs in a more novel way,
the galleries, labyrinths, and underground realms visited by the poet express, in a
similarly symbolic fashion, his withdrawal into his inner self, where, in exploring his
nostalgia, he discovers his need to know himself better. Machado's "galleries" are in-
terior ones; they are not objectified memories, but an area of consciousness which he
penetrates in his search for truth. And his labyrinths are mental; they are images
of the soul groping in the shadows of one's inner self, attracted by friendly voices
or, perhaps, terrified by the "stirrings of caged beasts" coming from dark corners. As
he wanders through these galleries, he opens himself to mysteries, letting them possess
him rather than trying to possess them; truth can be an enigma, and accepting this
can be a way to reach the truth.
Translated from the Spanish by Agnes M. Gullón.

228
 ROLAND GRASS

THE SYMBOLIST MODE IN THE SPANISH AMERICAN MODERNISTA

NOVEL, 1885-1924
I.
OVERVIEW

The present study examines selected novels that have been associated with modernïsmo
in Spanish American literature in order to reveal their particular characteristics and
to show their relationship to the Symbolist novel elsewhere. Before proceeding with
an analysis of the novels, however, it is necessary to establish some limits and defini-
tions. This is true, in part, because of the tendency of Spanish American modernïsmo
to encompass a variety of literary trends. But is it also true because the criticism of
Symbolism, particularly with respect to the novel, has been clouded by inexact and
overlapping terminology.
A case in point involves the terms Symbolist and Decadent. There is ample evidence,
that when Symbolism first became recognized as a movement in France (around the
year 1886), the writers concerned were known as "Decadents". This being the case,
attempts to view "Symbolists" and "Decadents" as separate groups with separate
eharacteristics have led to confusion. In the present study, then, we follow Anna
Balakian, who has stated most clearly and most forcefully the equivalence of the two
terms. " 'Symbolist and Decadent V Too often histories of literature suggest that the
famous 'and' is really an 'or'. But the 'and' is truer than the 'or', and any suggestion
of a duality is, in truth, a fallacy".1
To see these terms used in an Hispanic context, we might note briefly Rafael
Alberto Arrieta's account of Rubén Darío's transferral from Buenos Aires to Córdoba,
in 1896, when Dario was acting as Colombian consul in Argentina. The local newspapers
announced the arrival of the "jefe de la escuela llamada decadente", and in a celebra-
tion at the local Atheneum ayoung man named Carlos Romagosa read an address on
"la última evolución literaria llamada por sus adversarios decadente y llamada por sus
iniciadores simbolista".2
Later that same year, Darío published his Prosas profanas (which contains those
of his poems which are most clearly related to the Symbolist movement) and Los raros,
his collection of critical essays previously published (for the most part) in La Nación
(Buenos Aires). In the prologue to the second edition of Los raros (Paris, 1905), Dario
wrote:

1
A . Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York, Random House,
1967), pp. 81-82.
2
A. Arrieta, Introducción al modernismo literario, second ed., (Buenos Aires, Columba, 1961),
pp. 46-46.

229
 Fuera de las notas sobre Mauclair y Adam, todo lo contenido en este libro fue
escrito hace doce años, en Buenos Aires, cuando en Francia estaba el simbolismo
en pleno desarrollo. Me tocó dar a conocer en América este movimiento, y por
ello, y por mis versos de entonces, fuí atacado y calificado con la inevitable palabra
'decadente'.
Dario did not, as a matter of fact, introduce Symbolism to Spanish America;
others (notably Marti, whose novel we shall discuss here) used Symbolist techniques
before he did. But we are interested here in the way the words were used at the time.
It is clear that Darío was not aware of the term Symbolism before he visited Paris in
1893 on his return to America from Spain. In his Historia de mis libros (1909), he wrote
of his first important publication, Azul (1888):
El origen de la novedad fue mi reciente conocimiento de autores franceses del
Parnaso, pues a la sazón la lucha simbolista apenas comenzaba en Francia y
no era conocida en el extranjero, y menos en nuestra America.3
A second pair of terms involves a distinction between symbol and allegory. In this
case the distinction is legitimate and reasonably clear but not wholly appropriate for
the present study. Basically, the distinction (which has been made since the time of
Goethe and Coleridge) treats allegory as a relatively simple analogy between an ab-
straction and a concrete referent that resembles it in some superficial way; while a
symbol is an element taken from the real world, one that reveals in a complex, vague,
but rewarding manner a "higher" reality which cannot be expressed in other terms.
If a writer refers to the "Slough of Despond", he is using an obvious allegory, but a
Symbolist writer might refer to the sea in order to communicate something about
"anguish of spirit" 4 or "the unconscious depths of the mind".
Fascinating as this distinction is, it would not be appropriate, for the purposes
of this study, to classify a Symbolist novel as one that employs symbols only in clear
contradistinction to allegory and other devices of indirect communication. This is true
because the writers identified with the Symbolist movement in literature did not con-
sistently make such a fine distinction. William York Tindall has observed: "Neither
Baudelaire nor his semblables drew fine distinctions between symbol, emblem, allegory,
sign, and image, all of which meant symbol". 5 Perhaps more to the point for the present
study, neither J-K. Huysmans nor Gabriele D'Annunzio (both associated with the
development of the Symbolist novel) made a clear distinction between symbol and
allegory. This fact is evident from Huysmans' terminology as he discusses Gustave
Moreau's painting of Salome and has Des Esseintes admire:
ses hiératiques et sinistres allégories aiguisées par les inquiètes perspicuités d'un
nervosisme tout moderne . . . il restait a jamais douloureux, hanté par les sym-
boles des perversités et des amours surhumaines, des stupres divins consommés
sans abandons et sans espoirs (emphasis added).6
3
R. Dario, Obras completas, ed. M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez (Madrid, Afrodisio Aguado, 1950),
I. pp.4 195-196.
5
Cf. Kenneth Cornell, The Symbolist Movement (New Haven, Yale XJniv. Press, 1951), p . 86.
W. Y. Tindall, The Literary Symbol (New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1955), p . 47.
6
J . K. Huysmans, A Rebours (Paris, Fasquelle, 1972), p . 91. Hereafter, page references will
be given in the text.

230
Using a somewhat similar terminology, D'Annunzio says of Giorgio Aurispa:
Egli possedeva tutte le qualita dell' ascetico: — lo spirito contemplativo, il gusto
dei simboli e delle allegorie, la virtu d'astrarre, l'estrema sensibilitá alla sugges-
tióne visuale e verbale, la tendenza organica alle imagini dominanti e alle allu-
cinazioni (emphasis added).7

In short, rather than insist on a definition of a literary symbol that the novelists
with whom we shall be dealing would certainly have found too restrictive, we shall
adopt the more flexible definition provided by Tindall:
The literary symbol, an analogy for something unstated, consists of an articulation
of verbal elements that, going beyond reference and the limits of discourse, era-
bodies and offers a complex of feeling and thought. Not necessarily an image, this
analogical embodiment may also be a rhythm, a juxtaposition, an action, a pro-
ppsition, a structure, or a poem. One half of this peculiar analogy embodies the
other, and the symbol is what it symbolizes.8

Tindall himself refers to this definition as "hopelessly general". But like Tindall,
we are here concerned with novels "distinguished by the deliberate or conscious ex-
ploitation of symbolic possibilities".9 There is little chance that we would be led astray
either by a Naturalistic novel or by an allegorical romance.
The Symbolist novel, as we are concerned with it here, is characterized primarily
by two attributes, one of which has to do with method and the other with attitude,
both related to our preceding discussion. These attributes are general enough that the
novel can share them in common with Symbolist poetry, drama, and short fiction.
The method is characterized by indirect communication through literary symbols as
defined by Tindall, including images, figures of speech, allusions, actions, juxtapositions,
rhythms, structures, and so forth. Since music is the means of indirect communica­
tion par excellence, this kind of novel typically reveals a concern with music, which
may include an attempt to adapt the techniques of musical composition to the com-
position of prose. The attitude is characterized by a decadent spirit, defined by Balakian
in relation to symbolism in general as
the state of mind of the poet who is haunted by the cruelty of Father Time and
the imminence of death. It is an engrossment with self and with the mysteries of
an inner fixation on the incomprehensible limits of life and death; it is the deli-
cacies of the oversensitive.10

In some ways the novel reveals the decadent spirit of the Symbolist movement
more clearly than other genres since the Symbolist novel produced a wide-ranging

7
D'Annunzio, Trionfo della morte, ed. Giansiro Ferrata (Verona, Mondadori, 1971), p . 262.
Hereafter, page references will be given in the text.
8
W. Y. Tindall, op. cit., pp. 12-13.
9
10
Ibid., p . 68.
A. Balakian, The Symbolist Movement, p p . 69-70.

231
procession of protagonists that bear some resemblance to Huysmans' creation, the Duc
Jean Floressas des Esseintes. With respect to the Spanish American novel, Luis Alberto
Sánchez has referred to "esa serie de abülicos, imbuidos de 'decadentismo' y 'paraísos
artificiales'" and "individuos pálidos, neurasténicos, exquisitos, enamorados de Europa,
malquistos con el terruno. . . ."11
In reducing the characteristics of the Symbolist novel to two, we are, of course,
deliberately oversimplifying. These characteristics, i.e., indirect communication and
a decadent spirit, are in fact intimately bound together and result from a series of
reactions of the Symbolist writer against his time: on the artistic level, the Symbolist
novelist reacts against literary Naturalism as practiced by Zo5la; on the social level, he
reacts against the dominant materialism, scientism, and industrialism of his time; on
the personal level, he reacts with intuition and subjectivity against logic and objectiv-
ity. In extreme cases, he may use words hermetically and catachrestically in an at-
tempt to express a "reality" which words were not made to express. His rebellion
against society manifests itself in perversity, artificiality, elitism, egoism, and hedo-
nism. Voluptuousness may be viewed as an inverted mysticism. Abnormal acuteness of
the senses may lead the elegant protagonist, like a jewelled insect walking a Möbius strip,
to anguish, and anguish to abnormal acuteness of the senses. Complications of this sort
will, of course, be revealed in the course of our discussion.
The novels to be analyzed here, as we said at the outset, have been associated with
modernismo in the history of Spanish American literature. But modernismo, as it is
used with reference to literature in Spanish America, is both vague and vast. We shall
retain the Spanish term in the present context so as not to confuse it with the English
term "modernism".
With reference to the novel in particular, modernismo may be used in contradistinc-
tion to Naturalism and Realism, even though it is not always easy to keep the move-
ments .apart. Naturalism and Realism developed parallel to modernismo in Spanish
America. Indeed, if the coexistence of literary trends that elsewhere are successive and
antagonistic is a characteristic of the Spanish American literary scene in general, one
of the characteristics of modernismo is its receptiveness to divergent tendencies toward
renovation — such as Parnassianism and Symbolism — at the same time. One of the
poets associated with modernismo has viewed the situation in these confused terms:

Suma de coincidencias en una disconformidad cohesiva, el modernismo reunió

a románticos y realistas, a católicos y ateos, a conservadores y acratas. Era el
repudio al lugar común, la emancipación del cauce rutinario. Mezcló la plasticidad
parnasiana, el sentimiento romántieo, la musiealidad y la alusión del simbolismo.
La sensibilidad elaboró sus imágenes en la gruta encantada de las 'corresponden-
cias' sensoriales; el cosmopolitismo abarcó todos los exotismos en una divagación
universal.12

11
L. A. Sanchez, Procéso y contenido de la novela hispano-americana, second ed. (Madrid,
Gredos,
12
1968), pp. 526-527.
A. Arrieta, p . 53.

232
In view of such a statement, it should surprise no one that the criticism of Spanish
American modernismo is filled with contradictions; it would be inappropriate for our
purposes, however, to review that copious criticism here.
There is some virtue in thinking of modernismo as an epoch rather as a literary
school or movement. In order to get some idea of the limits of this epoch, we might
refer briefly to José Juan Arrom's schema, which divides the history of Spanish Ameri­
can literature into generations, each encompassing thirty years of influence. Viewing
the development of Spanish American modernismo in this schema, we see that it in­
volved writers of two generations: those born between 1834 and 1864 and active be­
tween 1864 and 1894 (characterized as a second Romantic generation and representing
a transition to modernismo) and those born between 1864 and 1894 and active between
1894 and 1924 (modernistas and posmodernistas).13
The period of transition from Romanticism to modernismo (beginning around 1880)
saw the emergence of some of the finest writers, particularly poets, that Spanish Ameri­
ca has known. Writers like Manuel González Prada (1848-1918), Salvador Diaz
Mirón (1853-1928), Juan Zorrila de San Martin (1855-1931), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera
(1859-1895), Julián del Casal (1863-1893), José Asunción Silva (1865-1896), and, most
particularly, José Marti (1853-1895) justify, to some extent, Federico de Onis' claim,
that:
la primera fase de creación de la poesia modernista fue un proceso de transforma-
ción y avance autóctono y original en lo esencial, que nació espontáneamente de la
propia insatisfacción y necesidad interna de renovación, y se desarrolló coetánea-
mente con el simbolismo franc es y los demás movimientos independientes y seme-
jantes que brotaron en diversos puntos del mundo y se fecundaron mutuamente. 14

Fundamentally, Onis' point may be a recognition that Symbolism was a truly

international literary movement.15 In any case, Ruben Dario, who for the first time
organized a unified modernista movement in Buenos Aires in 1894, was clearly aware
of the international character of Symbolism (although he was still somewhat hesitant
about the name). In an address on Eugenio de Castro read at the Atheneum of Buenos
Aires, he referred to "la moderna literatura cosmopolita", and said:

Pues existe hoy ese grupo de pensadores y de hombres de arte, que en distintos
climas y bajo distintos cielos, van guiados por una misma estrella a la morada de
su ideal; que trabajan mudos y alentados por una misma misteriosa y potente voz,
en lenguas distintas, con un impulso único. Simbolistas ? Decadentes ? j Oh, ya
ha pasado el tiempo, felizmente, de la lucha por sutiles clasificaciones !16

13
J. J . Arrom, Esquema generacional de las letras hispanoamericanas: ensayo de un método
(Bogota,
14
Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1963), p . 19.
F . de Onfs, Antologia de la poesia espanola e hispanoamericana (1882-1932), second ed.
(New York: Las Américas, 1961 (first pub. 1934), p . XVI. Onfs develops this point further in " L a
poesfa15hispanoamericana", Cuadernos (Paris), no. 21 (1956), pp. 16-17.
Cf. A. Balakian, The Symbolist Movement, pp. 101-102; idem, "The International Character
of Symbolism", Mosaic, 2, no. IV (1969), p p . 1-8.
16
R. Darfo, Los raros, 2 second ed. (Buenos Aires, Espasa-Calpe, 1953), p . 212.

233
 Returning to Arrom's generational schema, we see t h a t the apogee of modernismo
was reached between 1894 and 1909 (by writers b o m between 1864 and 1879). 17 Some
critics refer to this period as rubendarismo. The term is awkward, b u t it has the virtue
of recognizing the guiding light of the period and of separating this movement from
the rest of the modernista epoch. The younger members of this generation (born be­
tween 1879 and 1894, and flourishing between 1909 and 1924) 18 are frequently referred
to as posmodernistas.
The problem of influence and affinities in modernismo is enormous. The modernista
writers deliberately sought out influences outside the Spanish-speaking world. Ruben
Darío and Leopoldo Lugones are frequently cited in this regard. Thus, Dario wrote:
Yo hacia todo el daño que me era posible al dogmatismo hispano . . . , y ponia a
mis raros de Francia, de Italia, de Inglaterra, de Rusia, de Escandinavia, de
Bélgica y aun de Holanda y de Portugal, sobre mi cabeza.

And Lugones wrote:

Sufrimos de ver anquilótica a la sintaxis castellana, t a n bien vertebrada y t a n
flexible, y la pobreza de adjetivación que caracteriza a los escritores peninsulares
nos hace el efecto de una densidad gris en que todo color naufraga. Quisiéramos
mas variedad de ritmo, mayor precisión calificativa, mas libertad en ese estilo.
Francia nos la da, y he aqui por qué estamos con Francia. 1 9

B u t José Marti had expressed a similar attitude much earlier. I n an article on Oscar
Wilde written in 1882, he was highly critical of contemporary Spanish literature,
stating:
Ni la huella que en Núñez de Arce ha dejado Byron,
ni la que los poetas alemanes imprimieron en Campoamor
y Bécquer, ni una que otra traduccion pálida de alguna
obra alemana o inglesa, bastan a darnos idea de la
literatura de los eslavos, germanos y sajones, cuyos
poemas tienen a la vez del cisne niveo, de los castillos
derruidos, de las robustas mozas que se asoman a su
balcón lleno de flores, y de la luz plácida y mística
de las auroras boreales. Conocer diversas literaturas
es el medio mejor de libertarse de la tirania de algunas de ellas. 20

A survey of the criticism of modernista prose reveals the following as possible in­
fluences, listed here (as nearly as we can determine) in ascending order of importance:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Barbey D'Aurevilly, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, R é m y de Gourmont,
Catulle Mendès, Oscar Wilde, Pierre Loti, Anatole France, Paul Bourget, Maurice
Barrès, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pierre Louys, and Gabriele D'Annunzio. This is admit-
tedly a mixed bag; we include it here not because we claim great accuracy for t h e list
b u t to illustrate how confused the question of influence remains. If we think only in
17
Arrom, pp. 172-176.
18
Ibid., pp. 186-193.
19
Quoted by Arrieta, pp. 52-53.
10
J . Martí, Obras comptetas, XV (Havanna, Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1964), p . 361.

234
terms of the novel, however, there is one influence t h a t can be pointed to with great
certainty: Gabriele D'Annunzio's Trionfo della morte. The sweeping influence of this
novel after its publication in 1894 may have been due, in part, as Luis Alberto Sánehez
suggests, to t h e fact t h a t José Asunción Silva had a copy of it on his bedside table
when he committed suïcide in 1896.21 (As a matter of fact, on the same table were
a copy of Trois stations de psychothérapie by Maurice Barrès and an issue of the trilin-
gual London journal CosmópoUs.) But, whatever the cause, D'Annunzio's Trionfo della
morte became a pervasive influence among the novelists writing at the height of modern-
ismo; and we shall use it in discussing the novels of t h a t period for purposes of com-
parison.
Actually, the novel was the least cultivated form in modernismo. This is true,
perhaps, because the intensity of expression t h a t the modernistas cultivated is difficult
to maintain throughout an extended prose work. Although the earliest signs of modern-
ismo in Spanish America were seen in prose, the movement soon became identified
with poetry. This has some important implications for the novel. The modernista novel
tends to be rather short; it rarely exceeds three hundred pages in length. The modernista
novel typically incorporates some of the pervading interests of the times t h a t have
no clear relationship to Symbolism, including a residue of Naturalism and an interest
in psychology, particularly abnormal psychology.
This combination of literary trends and tendencies in the novel is not limited to
Spanish America. Both Huysmans and D'Annunzio had their beginnings in Naturalism,
and the influence of environment and heredity remains a serious concern in the devel-
opment of such novels as A Rebours and Trionfo della morte. As Tindall has shown,
the reverse is also true; Zola makes symbolic use of the great machine in L'Assommoir
and of the coal mine in Germinal. 22 And it is worth recalling, in this regard, t h a t J e a n
Moréas, in his Symbolist manifesto of 1886, was able to see the beginning of Symbolism
in t h e prose of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Edmond de Goncourt. 23
The present study is "informed" by a reading of some thirty-five novels by
fourteen authors. The authors selected include: José Marti (Cuba, 1853 — 1895); José
Maria Rivas Groot (Colombia, 1864—1923); Carlos Reyles (Uruguay, 1868 — 1938);
Manuel Diaz Rodriguez (Venezuela, 1868 — 1927); Amado Nervo (México, 1870 — 1919);
Pedro César Dominici (Venezuela, 1872—1954); Enrique Gómez Carrillo (Guatemala,
1875 — 1927); Leopoldo Lugones (Argentina, 1874—1938); Enrique Larreta (Argentina,
1875—1961); Rubén M. Campos (México, 1876—1945); Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay,
1878 — 1937); Augusto D'Halmar (Chile, 1882—1950); Rafael Arévalo Martínez (Guate­
mala, 1884— ); and Pedro Prado (Chile, 1886—1952). Obviously, this study would
be too diffuse were we to discuss all these authors and their selected novels here. We
must, therefore, necessarily make a stringent selection. Although other authors and
their works may be referred to as the occasion warrants, we shall concentrate primarily
on selected novels by five excellent and representative authors: José Marti, Manuel
Diaz Rodriguez, Leopoldo Lugones, Enrique Larreta, and P e d r o P r a d o .

21
22
Sanchez, p .527.
23
W. Tindall, op. cit., p . 70.
See Cornell, p . 73.

235
 II.
ASPECTS OF THE ESTHETIC NOVEL: JOSÉ MARTÏ

"Antes que nadie, Martí hizo admirar el secreto de las fuentes luminosas". So
wrote Rubén Dario, in frank recognition of the place t h a t Marti held in modemista
literature, when t h e latter died in battle in 1895 while fighting for the independence
of Cuba from Spanish rule: "Nunca la lengua nuestra tuvo mejores tintas, caprichos
y bizarrias". 2 4 Dario knew Marti's prose from the many communiqués t h a t Marti sent
to La Nación. H e knew his poetry from two fine collections t h a t had appeared in book
form in 1882 and 1891. I t is not likely t h a t Dario knew Marti's only novel, Amistad
funesta, for this was published (or, more accurately, buried) in 1885 under the pseud-
onym Adelaida R a l in several issues of El Latino Americano (New York). I t did not
appear under Marti's name until 1911 when it was published in Leipzig as the tenth
volume of Marti's works under the editorship of Gonzalo de Quesada. During his life-
time, Marti was known and admired as a journalist, an essayist, an orator, and a poet.
We are interested in him here chiefly as a novelist. B u t in the case of Marti, the genre
is of little importance; the indirect expression t h a t characterizes his works — the com-
munication through tone, rhythm, figures of speech, and clear symbols — permeates
his essays and speeches as well as his poetry and his novel.
How did Marti develop this style of communication ? Everyone who has written
on Marti has commented on his vast culture. Anyone who has reviewed his writing on
literature, painting, music, and the theater must be impressed b y his knowledge of
artistic trends in Europe, the United States, and Spanish America. Yet when one is
faced with the problem of ascribing influence in his works, one is likely tp say t h a t
Marti is a product of the Zeitgeist combined with a rich reservoir of personal genius.
Enrique Anderson Imbert, in an article on Marti's novel, indicates t h a t Marti was
familiar with, and cited in his own essays, the works of Fénelon, Montesquieu, Ossian,
Volney, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Heine, Gautier, Poe, Baudelaire, Théodore de Ban-
ville, Thoreau, Flaubert, Bécquer, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Alphonse Daudet, the
Goncourt brothers, Catulle Mendès, Paul de St. Victor, Francois Coppée, and Arsenee
Houssaye. B u t Anderson Imbert concludes: "No creemos que fueran sus 'fuentes'!" 2 5
Ivan A. Schulman, who has minutely analyzed Marti's use of symbols in his works
(including Amistad funesta), has suggested t h a t Martí may have been influenced
by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his concept of natural phenomena as being symbols
of spiritual phenomena. 26 There is little doubt t h a t Marti found in Emerson a kindred
spirit, b u t Marti's language is much richer than Emerson's in t h e use of symbols
and other means of indirect communication.
In fact, Marti was aware of his tendency to think in terms of concrete images.
In a letter to a friend, on the subject of his first book of poetry (1882) he wrote:

24
R. Darfo, Los ratos, pp. 193-194.
25
Anderson Imbert, "Comienzos del modernismo en la novela", Nueva Revista de Füologia
Hispánica,
26
7 (1953), p. 517.
1 . A. Schulman, Simbolo y color en la obradeJosé Marti (Madrid: Gredos, 1960), p . 36, et
passim.

236
 He visto esas alas, esos chacales, esas copas vacias, esos ejércitos. Mi mente ha
sido escenario, y en él han sido actores todas esas visiones. Mi trabajo ha sido
copiar. . . . No hay alli una sola línea mental. Pues, ? cómo he de ser responsable
de las imagenes que vienen a mi sin que yo las solicite ? Yo no he hecho mas que
poner en versos mis visiones. Tan vivamente me hirieron esas escenas que aun voy
a todas partes rodeado de ellas, y como si tuviera delante de mi un gran espacio
oscuro, en que volaron grandes aves blancas.27

Another kindred spirit was Oscar Wilde. When Wilde visited New York, in 1882,
Marti was there, directing the Cuban independence movement which he always con-
siderèd his most important work. Marti reported at length on Wilde's activities, first
in El Almendares (Havana) and later in La Nación. He concentrated on Wilde as the
leader of the British Esthetic Movement and quoted from one of his lectures on the
subjectives of the movement:

A eso venimos los estetas: a mostrar a los hombres la utilidad de amar la belleza,
a excitar al estudio de los que la han cultivado, a avivar el gusto, por lo perfecto,
y el aborrecimiento do toda fealdad; a poner de nuevo en boga la admiración, el
conocimiento y la practica de todo lo que los hombres han admirado como her-
moso.28

These words he attributes to Wilde. On another page Marti claims:

en nuestras tierras luminosas y fragantes tenemos como verdades transcenden-

tales esas que ahora se predican a los sajones como reformas sorprendentes y
atrevidas. . . . El amor al arte aquilata al alma y la enaltece: un bello cuadro,
una limpida estatua, un juguete artistico, una modesta flor en lindo vaso, pone
sonrisas en los labios donde morian tal vez, pocos momentos ha, las lagrimas.
Sobre el placer de conocer lo hermoso, que mejora y fortifica, esta el placer de
poseer lo hermoso, que nos deja contentos de nosotros mismos. Alhajar la casa,
colgar de cuadros las paredes, gustar de ellos, estimar sus méritos, platicar de sus
bellezas, son goces nobles que dan valía a la vida, distración a la mente y alto
empleo al espiritu.29

Now, compare this with a passage in Amistad funesta, published three years later.
Marti describes at length (and in symbolic detail) the elegant sitting room of the
protagonist's house and then makes the following observation:

Mejora y alivia el contacto constante de lo bello. Todo en la tierra, en estos tiem-

pos negros, tiende a rebajar el alma, todo, libros y cuadros, negocios y afectos,
i aun en nuestros paises azules! Conviene tener siempre delante de los ojos, alre-
dedor, ornando las paredes, animando los rincones donde se refugia la sombra,
objetos bellos, que la coloreen y la disipen.30

27
28
Quoted by Schulman, p . 27.
29
J . Marti, Obras completas, XV, 365.
30
Ibid., p . 367.
J . Marti, Amistad funesta, Obras completas, X V I I I (Havana, Editorial Nacional de Cuba,
1964), p. 205. Hereafter, page references will be given in the text.

237
 The story line of the novel is of relatively little interest. If we disregard some sub­
plots — the gradual death of a lovely young woman named Ana; the decline of a
family brought to ruin by the death of the male members of the family; an attempt
to swindle the Indians out of their land in the unnamed Spanish American country
where the action takes place — the central theme of the novel emerges as the unfounded
jealousy of the protagonist, Lucia Jerez, which leads to the death, at the hands of
Lucía, of a completely innocent but strikingly beautiful young woman named Sol del
Valle. The reader will recognize the prevailing interest in abnormal psychology, a
characteristic of the period in which the novel was written. As a matter of fact, the
characters are convincingly motivated from a psychological point of view.
Of considerably greater interest is the way in which this story is told. Marti's
method of indirect communication has been summarized by Schulman as follows; "En
la novela modernista, Amistad funesta, existe un copioso simbolismo que se manifiesta
no sólo en las imágenes, sino también en los actos de los personajes, en el escenario de
los capítulos,en el ritmo de la acción y en los mas minimos pormenores novelisticos".31
A complete analysis of Martí's symbolic method would require more space than we
have available here, but an insight into his method might bè gained if we observe the
development of some of the female characters through the use of various symbols associ-
ated with them.
The novel opens with a paragraph that describes a large magnolia tree with large
white blossoms that shades Lucia Jerez' house. Marti comments on the great need the
human soul has for whiteness, consistently in Marti a symbol of innocence and purity. 32
The second paragraph gives this description of three friends:

Eran hermosas de ver, en aquel domingo, en el cielo fulgente, la luz azul, y por
entre los corredores de columnas de mármol, la magnolia elegante, entre las ramas
verdes, las grandes flores blancas y en sus mecedoras de mimbre, adornadas con
lazos de cinta, aquellas tres amigas, en sus vestidos de mayo: Adela, delgada y
locuaz, con un ramo de rosas Jacqueminot al lado izquierdo de su traje de seda
crema; Ana, ya próxima a morir, prendida sobre el corazón enfermo, en su ves-
tido de muselina blanca, una flor azul sujeta con unas hebras de trigo; y Lucia,
robusta y profunda, que no llevaba flores en su vestido de seda carmesi, "porque
no se conocia aün en los jardines la flor que a ella Ie gustaba: i la flor negra!
(p. 193)

Every element in this description functions on a symbolic level. These are true
symbols in that they form a natural part of normal reality and, at the same time,
suggest, in Marti's complex but perfectly consistent language of symbols, what Marti
would doubtless have considered a higher reality. The day chosen (i.e., the Lord's
Day), the brilliant sky, the blue light, the marble columns, the magnolia tree, the green
branches, the white flowers — each of these elements can be analyzed deparately in
Martf s symbolic system (they are analyzed thus in Schulman's book as they appear
in Marti's complete works). Together they provide an atmosphere where sweetness,

31
1. A. Schulman, op. cit., p . 242.
32
Ibid., p p . 240, 260-61, 480-481.

238
innocence, youth, and love should prevail. The personality of each girl (perfectly con­
sistent with her behavior throughout the novel) is suggested by what she wears; flowers,
colors, and fabrics are all important. Ana, the dying girl, wears a blue flower tied with
wheat (wheat associated with the harvest—hence, death). Together these elements
identify Ana with both beauty and death. The dress she wears (of white muslin) in both
color and texture suggests simplicity, purity, and innocence. Lucia wears a dress of
crimson silk. Her dress, in both color and texture, is almost the exact opposite of Ana's.
The girl who wears this dress is capable of sudden and violent passion. She wears no
flower, but the only one that would suit her would be black. The third girl has a per­
sonality that falls somewhere between these extremes. Adela wears Géneral Jacque-
minot roses, which are bright red in color and of an intense fragrance. These roses are
the color of the blood of life, not the purplish red of dried blood, (as in Lucia's dress).
This suggests passion of a less tragic sort. Adela's dress is cream colored, not quite
white. She is, in fact, naughty and a flirt.
A person reading Martí for the first time would most likely not be aware of his
symbolic method this early in the book. One of the beauties of Marti's symbolism is
that it rarely seems contrived. But as one continues reading, one is bound to observe
the relationship between character development and symbolic imagery and action.
The girls' bats, when not being worn, say something about their personalities. "! Dice
mucho, y cosas muy traviesas," Marti points out, "un sombrero que ha estado una hora
en la cabeza de una senorita!" And he continues:

El sombrero de Adela era ligero y un tanto extravagante, como de niiia que ee

capaz de enamorarse de un tenor de opera: el de Lucia era un sombrero arrogants
y amenazador: se salian por el borde del costurero las cintas carmesies, enroscadas
sobre el sombrero de Adela como una boa sobre una tórtola: del fondo de seda
negro, por los reflejos de un rayo de sol que filtraba oscilando por una rama de la
magnolia, parecian salir Harnas, (pp. 194—95)

Even the movement (or lack of it) of the girls' rocking chairs conveys something
about the girls' characters: Ana's chair is motionless; Adela's rocks actively back and
forth; and Lucia's tends to lean forward and change direction suddenly. (p. 195) When
Lucia is arnnoyed because her fiancé. has not arrived on time for an appointment, she
picks a white camellia and bites its petals. (p. 195) Adela is attracted to the local play­
boy, Pedro Real. On one occasion, while standing near him, she lowered her head and,
"a este movimiento, se desprendió de ella la rosa encarnada, que cayó deshaciéndose
a los pies de Pedro". (p. 204) When the girls (and at this point in the novel, some of
the male characters) are served chocolate, they receive coconut-shell cups decorated in
silver with American birds and animals that fit their personalities. Adela is served
a chocolate cup decorated with playful squirrels. Ana's cup is decorated with quetzales:
"i el quetzal noble, que cuando cae cautivo o ve rota la pluma larga de su cola, muere i"
(p. 206) Lucia's cup is decorated with pumas, and "descansaba sobre tres garras de
puma, el león americano". (p. 207) Later in the novel, Pedro Real, who likes to hunt,
captures some rabbits and gives them to the girls; each has a symbolic color and
behavior:

239
 muy manso el uno, de un color de humo, que fue para Ana . . . y a Lucia trajo
otro, que parecia un rey cautivo, de un castaño muy duro, y de unos ojos fieros
que nunca se cerraban, tanto que a los dias, en que no quiso corner, bajó, por pri-
mera vez las orejas que habia tenido enhiestas, mordió la cadenilla que lo sujetaba,
y con ella en los dientes quedó muerto. (pp. 258—59)

In the last passage quoted, we omitted a reference to Sol del Valle. This girl, a
paragon of beauty and innocence, arouses Lucia's jealousy and, although blameless,
dies violently at the end of the novel. She receives a white rabbit and puts a blue
ribbon around its neck (Marti's consistent color combination for purity and beauty).
But there is a series of symbols used in relation to Sol. Interesting as these symbols
are, it would be redundant to examine them here since the main features of Marti's
symbolic method have already been illustrated.
Anderson Imbert has pointed out that Marti received his literary education in
Romanticism. He observes, for example, that in Amistad funesta Ana's illness more
nearly resembles that of the Romantic character rather than that of the "personajes
mórbidos, neuróticos, sutiles, elegantes y pervertidos" of the writers whom we refer
to in the present study as Symbolists or Decadents and that Anderson Imbert calls
impresionistas.33 But the distinction between the Romantic moribund character and
the Decadent moribund character is not always easy to make. There is something
romantic, as Anderson Imbert says, in Martfs "concepción de las mujeres como sera-
fines". But there is more than a little of the decadent spirit in Martfs description of
Ana's face ("rostro") as "iluminado ya por aquella luz de muerte que atrae a las almas
superiores y aterra a las almas vulgares". (p. 202) In any case, Anderson Imbert also
recognizes that Amistad funesta "es el primer ambiente de artistas, de sofisticación,
de esnobismo, de molicie y preciosismo intelectual en nuestra literatura hispano-
americana".34
The decadent spirits, as it exists in Amistad funesta, tends to lack the perversity
that we associate with novelists like Huysmans and D'Annunzio. To gain a proper
perspective in time, we should keep in mind that Martís novel was published one year
after Huysmans' A Rebours, four years before D'Annunzio's first novel, Il piacere, and
six years before Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion
of Wilde's epigrammatic style in statements like the following from Amistad funesta:
(in relation to Pédro Real) "Hay cierto espiritu de independencia en el pecado, que lo
hace simpático cuando no es excesivo" (p. 207); (in relation to the music of a Hungarian
pianist named Keleffy)

" ique es la música sino la companera y guia del espiritu en su viaje por los espa-
cios ? Los que tienen ojos en el alma, han visto eso que hacian ver las fantasias
que en el mar improvisaba Keleffy: otros hay que no ven, por lo que niegan muy
orondos que lo que ellos no han visto, otros lo vean. Es seguro que un topo no ha
podido jamás concebir un águila". (p. 231)

33
Anderson Imbert, op. cit., p. 519.
34
Ibid., p. 621.

240
 There are some significant discussions of painting in Amistad funesta, in some
ways resembling the esthetic discussions in Huysmans' A Rebours. Ana is a painter;
her paintings are allegorical and "parecen música". (p. 209) We might conclude this
discussion of Martí's novel, however, by reproducing the attempt to verbalize Keleffy's
musical composition that gave occasion to the remarks on music quoted at the end of
the preceding paragraph. This passage is one of two passages in Amistad funesta that
might be regarded as paradigms of the many attempts to create music with words and
images (including a suggestion of sound and color synesthesia35) that occur in later
Spanish American novels had Martí's novel been known to other Spanish American
writers. Personal troubles had disturbed Keleffy to the point that he could no longer
play the piano, until a sympathetic friend came to his aid:

Y lo llevó a un bosque, y lo trajo luego al mar, cuyas músicas se le entraron por el

alma medio muerta, se quedaron en ella, sentadas y con la cabeza alta, como
leones que husmean el desierto, y salieron al fin de nuevo al mundo en unas fanta-
sias arrebatadas que en el barco que lo Uevaba por los mares improvisaba Keleffy,
las que eran tales, que si se cerraban los ojos cuando se las oia, parecia que se le-
vantaban por el aire, agrandandose conforme subian, unas estrellas muy radiosas,
sobre un cielo de un negro hondo y temible, y otras veces, como que en las nubes
de colo res ligeros iban dibujándose unas como guirnaldas de flores silvestres, de
un azul muy puro, de que colgaban unos cestos de luz. (p. 231)

III.
THE DEPTHS OF DECADENCE: MANUEL DIAZ RODRIGUEZ

After Marti, and working independently in various parts of the Spanish-speaking

world, the early practitioners of the Symbolist-Decadent novel in Spanish America
were Amado Nervo, Carlos Reyles, and Enrique Gómez Carrillo.36 However, this kind
of novel deyeloped rapidly after the turn of the century. In the two years following
the publication of Reyles' Raza de Gain, Manuel Diaz Rodríguez published two novels
that should be recognized as masterpieces of the Decadent novel in Spanish America:
Idolos rotos (1901) and Sangre patricia (1902). Diaz Rodriguez had previously published
some poetic travel notes, Sensaciones de viaje (1896) and De mis romerias (1898), in
which he had shown a great admiration for Italy. He had also published a collection
of confessions under the title Confidencias de Psiquis (1897) as well as a collection of
nine stories (each based on a different color) entitled Guentos de color (1899), which
included what one critic has referred to as "un relato de incierto simbolismo".37
Idolos rotos, as a note at the conclusion of the text indicates, was written in Caracas
and Paris from 1899 to 1900. It was published in Paris in 1901 by Garnier, a house that
35
Schulman discusses Marti's interest in synesthesia at length (pp. 444 ff.) and shows that
Marti
36
knew, e.g., Rimbaud's sonnet Voyelles. (p. 449).
See my "Amado Nervo y los comienzos de la novela modernista", Homenaje a Andrés
Iduarte
37
(Clear Creek, Ind., The American Hispanist, Inc., 1975).
Dillwyn, F. Ratcliff, La prosa de ficcion en Venezuela, trans. Rafael di Prisco (Caracas:
Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1966), p. 166. Cf. Lowell Duham, ManueL Diaz Rodriguez: vida
y óbra (Mexico City: Ediciones de Andrea, 1959), p. 29.

16 Balakian 241
effectively distributed the works of several Spanish American modenistas. Basically,
Idolos rotos is the story of Alberto Soria, a young man who goes to Paris to study
engineering (according to the dictates of this father) but subsequently turns to art
under the influence of the bohemian way of life. Although Alberto Soria was not the
first representative of the type (he was preceded by Reyles' Guzmán), he has become
recognized as the prototype of the Spanish American educated abroad and out of
place in his home environment.
Diaz Rodrfguez' countrymen tended to confuse the novelist with his protagonist;
they consequently treated him as an unfriendly critic of Venezuela. Apart from the
obvious fact that writers should not be identified with their fictional characters, Dfaz
Rodríguez' countrymen did him an injustice since he recognized in the novel the pitfalls
of a common situation:

tal vez el mayor de los daños de Cosmópolis, o de Paris . . . , era el dano hecho a
los intelectuales, hombres de ciencia y artistas. En ellos, casi fatalmente, con el
nivel intelectual crecia el desapego al terruno. 38

In a broader sense, this novel develops the theme of barbarism versus civilization, one
that has been, perhaps, the most important theme running through Spanish American
literature since Domingo Faustino Sarmiento introduced it with the publication of his
Facundo in 1845. In Dfaz Rodriguez' novel, civilization is seen in the European ideal
represented by Paris ("París . . . el más acabado resumen de cuantas delicias y primores
abarca el Universo" (p. 238) while barbarism is seen in the Spanish American pro-
pensity for the violent overthrow of unstable governments.
Idolos rotos is a massive novel about an artist distracted by his environment (fami-
lial as well as political) and of his attempt to escape from his surroundings through
an adulterous affair with a singularly voluptuous woman. But the most important
aspect of the novel, at least for our purposes in the present study, is the extent to which
the author communicates through the devices of suggestion. For the most part, these
devices are used without comment by the author: a black butterfly associated with
the femme fatale early in the novel; the sea associated with death and spiritual anguish;
thirst associated with desire and water with sensuality, and so forth. But at one point
in the novel Diaz Rodriguez refers explicitly to his use of symbol and, in so doing,
reveals something of this method. Alberto is forced into hiding by the revolutionary
activities of his brother. As he is running away, he observes the clearing of land with
fire on the slopes of Mount Avila (a mountain that recurs in the imagery of Diaz Rod­
riguez):

Mientras Alberto admiraba el incendio de la roza, en su espíritu se abria la flor de

un simbolo. Y en el simbolo creyó ver la explicación de la última época de su vida,
creyó ver la explicación de la vida alborotada de las gentes de su pais y creyó
penetrar el secreto del alma de aquellas comarcas, triste, ardorosa y enferma. Las

38
M. Diaz Rodrfguez, Idolos rotos (Paris, Imprenta Espanola de Garnier Hermanos, 1901),
p. 204. Hereafter, page references will be given in the text.

242
 purpúreas coronas de Harnas de la roza eran las únicas dignas del dios de aquellas
comarcas, un dios indigena, semibarbaro y guerrero, cruel y voluptuoso, un dios
que fuera al mismo tiempo el dios de la Voluptuosidad, la Codicia y la Sangre.
(p. 318)

Sangre patricia, totalling 150 pages, is less than half the length of Idolos rotos; and
it is correspondingly more densely lyrical. For this reason, perhaps, Sangre patricia has
been the Spanish American novel most consistently identified with the Symbolist
movement. Arturo Torres-Rioseco was one of the first critics to make this observation:

Esta novela constituye uno de los primeros ensayos americanos de la literatura

del subconsciente, destinada a abrirse en rica floración veinticinco años más tarde.
Tiene también la obsesión de la muerte, que caracteriza a la escuela flamenca y
que sintetiza admirablemente en Britges la morte de Rodenbach. La correlación
de sensaciones tan cara a Rimbaud, Ghil y Kahn, encuentra eco en Sangre pa-
tricia, especialmente en lo que se refiere a la influencia de los colores en los estados
cerebrales del individuo. Podría asegurarse que el leitmotiv de toda la obra es el
color verde, que parece tener una extrana relación con ciertos estados animicos
anunciadores de la locura. Por esto y por ciertas manifestaciones estilisticas hay
que insistir en el valor artistico de la novela que nos ocupa y considerar a Diaz
Rodriguez como un verdadero simbolista y precursor de maneras estéticas con-
temporaneas.39

The main plot of Sangre patricia is uncluttered. Belén, an exceedingly beautiful

young woman, dies and is buried at sea while en route from Caracas to Paris, where
her husband, a frustrated revolutionary whom she married by proxy, lives in exile.
Tulio Arcos, the husband, already ridden by feelings of guilt for not having lived up to
the traditions of his patrician ancestors, sees the death as a punishment:

Tal vez con aquella muerte, la mar y sus dioses vengaban antiguas pero inolvi-
dables injurias. . . . Aquella muerte bien podia ser la venganza que tomaban de
él Tulio sus propios antepasados.

The symptoms of his failure are those that become widely associated with the Decadent
protagonist:

i Qué había hecho en el destierro sino viajar y adornarse el espiritu como una
mujer sus carnes? iQué habia hecho sino entregarse, en alma y cuerpo a una
estéril cultura del yo, afeminada y egoista?40

Sangre patricia is, however, complicated by several subplots, each of which is

developed around a minor character in the novel. One of these concerns a musican
named Alejandro Marti, a subplot that Miguel de Unamuno preferred to the main
story line:
39
A. Torres-Rioseco, Grandes novelistas de la América Hispana, I I (Berkeley, Univ. of Cali-
fornia4 0Press, 1943), p . 78.
M. Diaz Rodriguez, Sangre patricia (Caracas: Nueva Cadiz, n.d.), p p . 54-55. Hereafter,
page references will be given in the text.

16* 243
 Grustándome mucho esa historia central y estimándola delicadfsima y m u y tierna,
prefiero a ella en Sangre patricia el hermosisimo relato de la vida, ideales y andan-
zas del mistico y músico Alejandro Marti. 41

Alejandro Marti is, in fact, considerably different from the typical Decadent artist of
the period under consideration here. He is a whole person, happily married, with loving
daughters, fulfilled b y his music and by his family life. Although he has known suffering,
he is basically at peace with his place in society.
I n this novel it is Tulio Arcos, the political activist manqué, who has become neuras­
thenic. B u t the story of Alejandro Marti is important in the development of the novel
because of its connection with music in both theme and technique. W h e n a florist
delivers a veritable ocean of flowers intended to celebrate Belén's arrival, t h e flowers
are described from Tulio's point of view in terms of a rich synesthesia involving colors,
odors, and music:

Unas y otras abundaban en fragancia, triunfal aspiración del zumo de la tierra;

y unas y otras abundaban en música, en la rica música de las rimas que abril
acababa de componer en sus coralas. Y todas llegaban, prevenidas también a
deshacerse, a los pies de la novia, en epitalamios de perfume. (p. 51)

About this same time, Tulio begins to use ether and morphine t o calm his nerves.
While under the influence of these drugs, Tulio has hallucinations involving Belén and
flowers in an undersea world. Later these hallucinations recur under various stimuli,
particularly the piano music of Schumann. At one point in the novel, Alejandro Marti
plays Schumann's Träumerei, which is described a t length in terms of water imagery.
Unamuno quotes this passage in its entirety, with the observation:

"Lease . . . la impresión de un trozo de müsica que ejecuta Marti al piano, y

se vera pasaje realmente bello y de veras poético". 42

Jesús Semprum, Diaz Rodrfguez' fellow countryman, was also probably thinking
primarily of this passage when he wrote:

Ciertas paginas de Sangre patricia . . . . nos causan la impresión de meras sin-

fonias en que las palabras pierden su significación meramente intrinseca, para
asumir una inespereda, prodigiosa y musical potestad de evocación: el literato se
convierte en músico: las palabras cantan. 4 3

Apart from the affinities t h a t Diaz Rodrfguez' Sangre patricia has with t h e works
of several writers mentioned b y Torres-Rioseco in the passage just quoted, one would
only have to read D'Annunzio's Trionfo della morte in order to appreciate t h e degree
to which Diaz Rodrfguez was in step with the times. Without being a slavish imitation
of D'Annunzio's work, Sangre patricia reveals a rich abundance of water imagery

41
Unamuno, "Sangre patricia", El Cojo Ilustrado, 12 (1903), p . 373.
42
43
Ibid., p . 375.
Quoted by Ratcliff, p . 173.

244
(specifically with reference to the sea) also found in Trionfo della morte. Likewise, some
of the attempts to adapt the techniques of music to prose composition that we see in
D'Annunzio's work may also be observed in Sangre patricia.
In several extended passages of Trionfo della morte, D'Annunzio mentions at
regular intervals images that function much like Wagnerian leitmotifs. Whenever
Giorgio Aurispa recalls his first meeting with his mistress Ippolita, the images of in-
cense and violets are repeated. D'Annunzio himself draws attention to the musical
qualities of these repeated images:
Tenato della lieve torpidezza, egli indugiava su certi imagini vaghe che prende-
vano nel suo spirito quasi un fascino musicale. 'Qualche granello d'inceso . . . un
mazzolino di violette . . .'. (p. 78)

Whenever Giorgio recalls his farewell to Ippolita for a brief separation, the image of a
kiss and a black veil falling over the young woman's face is repeated. In another chapter
devoted to religious fanaticism in Italy, the theme of "mystery and rhythm as essential
elements in all cults" is stated and repeated with variations: "Il misterio e il ritmo, i due
elementi essenziali d'ogni culto, erano per ovunque sparsi". (p. 244 et passim) In this
chapter, several noncontiguous paragraphs begin with essentially the same words but
with slight variations in the order of the words. In addition, these paragraphs contain
images that themselves suggest mystery and rhythm: the breathing sea, the cadences
of the waves, flashes of lightning, and so forth.
In the second chapter of Sangre patricia, a refrain closely related to the main
theme of the novel is stated and repeated with slight variations. The elements of this
refrain are that Tulio Arcos (i.e., a member of the patrician Arcos family) coukLnot
be a victim of abulia (which Tulio, of course, is):

Un Tulio Arcos no podia quedarse viendo correr la vida, como se queda viendo
pasar el agua del torrente un sonador o un idiota. (p. 15; cf. pp. 19 and 22)

In the last chapter of the novel, another refrain is established and repeated with varia­
tions. In this case, the endless sea laughs and frolics with a continual lapping of the
waves ("Hasta perderse de vista, el mar reia y retozaba conun continuo cabrilleo"
(p. 125; cf. pp. 132,140,145), a rather ironic image if we recall the fact that the protag­
onist soon leaps to his death in the sea. In this case, too, the paragraphs which begin
with the refrain repeat certain images: white foam like an infinite flock of sheep in blue
meadows; a flock of gulls that form a smooth white curve against the sky, and so
forth.

IV.
LOOKING BACK: LEOPOLDO LUGONES AND ENRIQUE LARRETA

Near the end of A Rebours, wnen Des Esseíntes' worsening nervous condition
increases desire to withdraw more and more from the society of his day, he turns to
works by some of his favorite writers dealing with past epochs. Huysmans makes the

245
following observation: "En effet, lorsque l'époque oú un homme de talent est obligé
de vivre est plate et bête, l'artiste est, a son insu même, hanté par la nostalgie d'un
autre siècle", (p. 224) This can take the form of yearning for what one imagines to
be the "good old days". But other possibilities also exist:

Chez les uns, c'est un retour aux ages consommés, aux civilisations disparues,
aux temps morts; chez les autres, c'est un élancement vers le fantastique et vers
le rêve, c'est une vision plus ou moins intense d'un temps a éclore dont l'image
reproduit, sans qu'il le sache, par un effet d'atavisme, celle des époques révolues.

(p. 224) If Huysmans intended this as a description of the type of literature that
existed in his day, it can also be taken as a fair description of developments in the
Spanish American novel around the turn of the century.
There is, however, a further purpose discernible in some of the Spanish American
novels belonging to this period. The introspection of such novels as Reyles' Raza de
Gain, Diaz Rodriguez' Idolos rotos and Sangre patricia, and Campos' Glaudio Oronoz
is directed at an analysis of the problems of Spanish America viewed in an historical
perspective.44 The attitude here is clearly related to one expressed by D'Annunzio in
some of his works. He has Giorgio Aurispa ask, for example, in Trionfo della morte:
"Non debbo io pormi a contatto immediato con la razza da cui sono uscito?" (p. 245)
The search for roots in an historical perspective is seen even more clearly in Le vergini
delle rocce, where the narrator, Claudio states:

io mi posi all'opera con la sperenza di riuscire a determinar per un contorno pre-

ciso e forte quella effigie di me alla cui attualita avevan concorso tante cause
remote, operanti da tempo immemorabile a traverso un' infinita serie di genera-
zioni.45

Similarly, it appears that several of the Spanish American novels that we are con-
cerned with here search for roots either in the national past, in the Spanish past, or
more generally in Mother Europe. The latter type of novel may be observed in José
Maria Rivas Groot's Resurección (1901) or in Pedro César Dominici's El triumfo del
ideal (1901).
For a glimpse at a work that deals with the national past, let us turn briefly to a
prose work by a major poet of modernismo, We refer to La yuerra gaucha (1905) by
Leopoldo Lugones. The work does not fit perfectly in our study because, although
critics and historians of Spanish American literature have tended to treat it as a novel,
it is actually a collection of loosely related episodes dealing with the battles between
Argentine gaucho troops and Spanish forces in upper Peru and northwestern Argentina
between 1814 and 1818. Lugones himself regarded his work as a mixture of history
and fiction, but he consciously rejected the novel from: "Quedaba, es cierto, el recurso
de la novela y éste fue quiza el primer proyecto; pero dados el material narrativo y el

44
See my "El Claudio Oronoz de Ruben M. Campos y el valor social del modernismo", Ho-
menaje
45
a Sherman H. Eoff (Madrid, Castalia, 1970), pp. 117-36.
G. D'Annunzio, Le vergini delle rocce (Milan, Mondadori 1957), p . 25.

246
numero de los personajes, aquello habria exigido tomos".46 Both in its episodic form
and in the use of a martial theme, the work bears a superficial resemblance to Georges
d'Esparbes' stories of the Napoleonic wars in La Légende de l'Aigle, a work that Lugones
knew at least indirectly since his close friend Ruben Dario discussed it at length in
Los raros.
For reasons that we shall discuss shortly, La guerra gaucha has never been widely
read. It is nevertheless an important work in that it represents the first serious attempt
to apply modernista prose technique to the significant gaucho literature that originated
in the folklore of the River Plate region and forms a trajectory from the Romantic
movement, through modemismo, to the South American literature of today. The
gaucho theme became important in the Spanish American novel bearing definite Sym­
bolist overtones after 1924, the chronological limit that we have imposed for the
present study. The best known of these works is Ricardo Güiraldes' Don Segundo
Sombra (1926).
We are interested here in the gaucho theme as a way of looking back. This has
been an important aspect of the theme since it became an element of the Romantic
movement in the River Plate. If the Romantic writers tended to treat the gaucho as
an idealized figure (with the exception of Sarmiento, who treated him as a representa-
tive of barbarism), Lugones makes a fine distinction between the gaucho as an "ideal"
and the gaucho as a "type". In the first chapter of La guerra gaucha, Lugones describes
at length the unique behavior of gaucho soldiers, concluding: "No realizaban por
cierto un ideal de hombre sino un tipo de varón". (p. 14) He consciously treats charac-
ters throughout the work as nameless members of a collective group. Only at the con-
clusion of the work does he identify a single gaucho caudillo, recognizing in the preface
the symbolic function of this one figure: "Luego, el hombre de la guerra gaucha, su
numen simbólico por decirlo asi, es Güemes, a quien esta destinado el capitulo final
en una sintética glorificación". (p. 10)
The chief difference, however, between Lugones' handling of the gaucho theme
and that of the Romantics is in the use of language. We reier not to the use of gaucho
dialect, which the Romantic poets used more extensively than Lugones does, but to
the use of a language that Lugones invented to serve his purposes. On the subject of
this language, Jorge Luis Borges has written:
En 1905, el barroquismo de Lugones llega a sus últimas consecuencias tanto en el
verso de Los crepúsculos del jardin como en la prosa de La guerra gaucha. El farra-
goso léxico, la sintaxis a veces inextricable y el abuso de los pronombres demo-
strativos, que con frecuencia obligan al lector a retroceder, entorpecen la lectura
seguida. El tema . . . desaparece bajo la frondosidad del estilo.47
Borges also found it interesting that a recent Argentine edition of La guerra gaucha
included a "minucioso vocabulario de 1257 palabras, indispensable para la buena
inteligencia del libro". 48
46
L. Lugones, "Dos palabras", La guerra gaucha, second ed. (Buenos Aires, M. Glaizer, 1926),
p . 9. Hereafter, page references to this work will be given in the text.
47
J . L. Borges, Leopoldo Lugones, second ed. (Buenos Aires, Pleamar, 1965), p . 69.
48
Ibid., p . 70.

247
 It is chiefly as a result of its language that this work has attracted neither many
readers nor many imitators. "La guerra gaucha, intento sobresaliente de narrativa
nacional", Juan Carlos Ghiano concludes,

"surgió lastrado por las dificultades de un idioma que limitó la adhesión de los
lectores de entonces y continüa rechazando a los actuales. El alarde del vocabu-
lario neológico no fue reiterado por Lugones, ni por ninguno de sus muchos imi-
tadores". 49

Ghiano, however, is able to find a justification for the invented language: "Pare-
ciera que Lugones hubiese creado una lengua especial dentro del espanol, alardeando
de una actitud revolucionaria acorde con el contenido que el texto celebra: el triunfo
de los americanos sobre los godos".50 This observation would not, of course, explain
the tortured syntax of Los crepúsculos del jardin, published in the same year. It is
significant for our study, however, that this book of poems reveals a conscious attempt
to employ Symbolist techniques, thus encouraging us to look for a similar intention
in the prose. The following paragraph opens a chapter entitled "Alerta," in which a
five-year-old boy is killed by the Spaniards when he attempts to alert the gaucho
troops to the presence of the Spanish army:

El aguacero amenazaba del norte. Una nube empequenecia el firmamento, borraba

las lineas del paisaje — arboledas, cumbres — en su esfumación. Labeaba al
Poniente obscuro el sol ya cubierto. Un perfume de humedad serenaba el aire.
Tulfaradas de calor agravaban con pesadez de asfixia el meditabundo decaimiento
de las hojas. Abrumaban el cénit membranas telarañas sobre las cuales el
nubarrón desbordabase como un derrumbe de arena. Al opuesto lado el cielo se
profundizaba en una acuosa claridad. Desde allá oreaba a intervalos una brisa
perezosa entre murmullos de follaje. (p. 25)

We have selected a passage which, although not overly burdened with invented
language, does show Lugones' method of setting the scene by establishing a mood,
somewhat in the manner of a musical composition. His awareness of the musicality
of language is confirmed by the opening sentence of the next paragraph, where the
sound of thunder can be heard in the alliteration of several consonants, particularly
liquids and nasals: "La tormenta rezongaba y sus rezongos rebullian brutalmente
atragantándose en retumbos".
This inventive use of language also suggest another objective of the Symbolist
writers. This objective, frequently associated with Valéry, was expounded to the His-
panic world by, among others, Alfonso Reyes:

Los estilísticos dicen que el lenguaje no esta acabado de hacer. No lo estará nunca.
En este sentido,. afirma Valéry que la poesia intenta crear un lenguaje dentro del
lenguaje. En este sentido, la poesia es un combate contra el lenguaje. De aqui su

49
J . C. Ghiano, Análisis de "La guerra gaucha" (Buenos Aires, Centro Editor de la America
Latina, 1967), p . 62.
50
.Ibid., p . 18.

248
 procedimiento esencial, la catacresis, que es un mentar con las palabras lo que no
tiene palabras ya hechas para ser mentado.51

Another work that is remarkable for its language is La gloria de don Ramiro (1908)
by Enrique Larreta. Writing of this work, Unamuno seemed to particularly admire
its language, which, "siendo del siglo XX, es también del siglo XVI". 52 In this case,
however, we are dealing with a long, elaborate, and unified historical novel that has
provided the basis for a book-length stylistic study.53
The chronological period of this novel, i.e., the Spain of Philip II, precisely be-
tween the years 1570 (when the protagonist is born) and 1605 (when he dies), gives
Larreta the opportunity to make use of the rich allegorical variety of symbolism
associated with the zodiac, heraldry, medieval myths, the Christian religion in general,
and Spanish mysticism in particular. The influence of D'Annunzio is not as obvious in
this novel as it is, for example, in the works of Diaz Rodriguez and Campos. It is
interesting to observe, however, that D'Annunzio also made use of this allegorical kind
of symbolism, particularly in Le vergini della rocce.
Whether narrative or descriptive, Larreta's language is always enriched by images
that appeal to all the senses (Amado Alonso devotes seventeen pages to an analysis
of images of odors alone); the processes of indirect communication are as revealing as
the objective statement. The following description of Ramiro's flight from the city of
Avila at the conclusion of Part II gives some idea of Larreta's method:

Cuando hubo llegado (Ramiro) a las primeras colinas del naciente, detuvo su
cabalgadura. El claro camino corria hacia el porvenir, en la coloración deliciosa
de la manana. Seguirlo era ir en pos de vida nueva. A uno y otro lado, los rayos
rastreros del sol hacian brillar los tomillares cubiertos de rocio. Volvió el rostro.
La ciudad le llamaba con una voz de tedio y perfidia, y la fiera murralla, toda
roja en el amanecer, hizole pensar en el encarnado capucho del verdugo. (p. 213)

Of equal importance in this historical novel, however, is the way in which it looks
back to the past. By setting the time of his novel in a decadent period of Spanish
history, Larreta has identified some of the sources of decay in Spanish America. By
concentrating on the tensions between Christians and Moriscos in sixteenth-century
Spain, he has provided a parallel with similar tensions in mestizo America. Zum Felde,
a critic particularly sensitive to the social implications of literature, has drawn atten-
tion to similar historical analogies:

Herencia de Ramiro y sus iguales son muchos de los caracteres de esta America
hispana, y la historia de éstas repüblicas, hasta el presente, se explica en mucho
por los fermentos ancestrales del coloniaje que en si llevan. Si de su sangre son
51
A. Reyes, 'Apolo o de la literatura", Obras completas de Alfonso Reyes, X I V (Mexico City,
Fondo62 de Cultura Económica, 1962), p . 86.
M. de Unamuno, "Prólogo (to La gloria de don Ramiro: una vida en tiempos de Felipe II) in
Enrique Larreta, Obras completas (Madrid, Plenitud, 1958), p . 27. Hereofter page references to the
novel will be given in the text.
53
Amado Alonso, El modemismo en "La gloria de don Ramiro" (Buenos Aires, Univ. de Buenos
Aires, 1942).

249
 los caudillos y los tiranos que han puesto el sello a las paginas más dramâticas de
esa historia, si Bolivar, San Martin, Artigas, libertadores; Rosas, Francia, Garcia
Moreno, los tiranos, son frutos del mismo árbol plantado por la Conquista y nu-
trido con jugos de estas tierras, detrás de ejlos no está la casta de los Ramiros,
caballeros de Avila . . . , o de los Ramiros que no eran caballeros sino plebeyos,
como Pizarro, pero tenian sus mismos vicios y virtudes, y tanto les acosaba el
diablo de la codicia como sabian morir besando la cruz trazada en el suelo con
su sangre . . . ?54

V.
THE LEGACY OF INDIRECT COMMUNICATION: PEDRO PRADO

In spite of its perverse aspects, the Decadent spirit had its positive values. It is
the Symbolist technique of indirect communication, however, that has been of most
enduring value in Spanish American literature, as it has in the literatures of other
geographical regions. Although the Decadent spirit lingers on in the novels of the
posmodernista writers (born in the 1880's), we note a tendency to move away from
the perverse aspects of Decadence and an intensification of interest in the techniques
of indirect communication.
The most representative novelist of Spanish American posmodernismo is Pedro
Prado, the founder of "Los Diez" in Chile, a group to which Augusto D'Halmar also
belonged along with other writers, painters, and musicians. Prado began his publishing
career with a book of poems, Flores de cardo (1908). He continued to write poetry as
well as essays throughout his life. We are primarily interested here in his three novels,
all of which are germane to our study: La reina de Rapa Nui (1914), Alsino (1920), and
Un juez rural ( 1924).
Before turning to his novels, however, we should briefly mention a key prose
work that reveals some characteristics which will allow us to simplify our discussion
of Prado novels: La casa abandonada (1912), which bears the subtitle Parábolas y
ensayos. Although Prado's technique of indirect communication is complex, we greatly
increase our understanding of his method if we realize that it is based, first and foremost,
on the parable. The book in question contains a parable that introduces one of Prado's
fundamental themes. This parable, entitled "Donde comienza a florecer la rosa", has
been praised by Arturo Torres-Rioseco as "digna de la más selecta antologia" 55 Reduced
to its central symbolic action, the parable describes how a beautiful young woman
asks an old gardener for one of his roses. The old gardener replies that he would gladly
give her a rose but that he doesn't know where to cut the flower because he has never
learned where the rose begins or ends.
With full awareness of the fact that we are greatly oversimplifying, we shall
discuss Prado's novels with reference to two basic concepts that at first glance appear
to be mutually contradictory: the concept of the interrelationship of all things and
beings, expressed as a kind of pantheism; and the concept of anarchy. Both of these
concepts were frequently treated by the Spanish American modernistas.
54
Ibid., p . 393.
55
A. Torres-Rfoseco, op. cit., I I , p . 170.

260
 In La reina de Rapa Nui, Prado develops his particular view of anarehy. In this
fantasy about the native population of the Chilean island of Pascua (Easter Island,
which Prado had never visited), he describes a topsy-turvy civilization where the con­
cept of private property does not exist, where no clear distinction can be made between
love and war, and where death is celebrated with a joyful fiesta. In this civilization,
anarchy works presisely because of the interrelationship of all beings. In a paradise
where all beings are mutually dependent, where there is no theft because nothing is
owned, there is no need for a code of laws. In the closing passage of the novel, the
queen of Rapa Nui has died and the narrator, a modern-day Gulliver, departs from
the island:

i Oh ! isla de los higos llenos de miel y de los platanos finos y olorosos; tú guardas
los restos de la pequena y amada Coemata Etú, que ahora duerme entre sus súb-
ditos ingenuos y desnudos.
La noche que llega borra tu imagen; pero no tu recuerdo, y en medio de tus
peces voladores mi pensamiento vuelve hacia ti, seguro de encontrarte al extremo
de la estela fosforescente que va trazando en la negrura de las aguas el barco
que me lleva a pueblos tristes y atormentados.
Feliz la vida de tus hijos que viven lejos de la fiebre y de la ambición de los
hombres nuevos. Feliz y sabia la existencia llevada entre fiestas de amor y de
abundancia y ünicamente sujeta a las aguas del cielo.56

Unlike La reina de Bapa Nui, which is pure fantasy, Un juez rural is a realistic
novel, strongly autobiographical in its narrative details. Indirect communication is as
important here as it was in the first work. The central theme of the novel, i.e., the
interrrelationship of all things and all beings, is revealed through images and actions.
It is also directly stated in a passage of the novel wherein the protagonist submits his
letter of resignation;for, after realizing that it is impossible to punish an individual, he
wishes to be relieved of his duties as a rural judge:

Mas, como no hay hombres aislados, el castigo de cualquier individuo, culpable

o no, trae una repercusión sobre infinidad de seres que le rodean; sus padres, sus
hijos, sus parientes, amigos, conocidos; y aun simples compatriotas, y hasta seres
distantes y desconocidos que no tienen noticia de lo sucedido, reciben, tarde o
temprano, debilitado o no, en alguna forma, el consecuencial encadenado. Como
una campana que se golpea en un solo punto y toda ella vibra, más o menos ocurre
lo mismo con los hombres.57

We have saved for last Prado's best work, Alsino, a novel that has been described
in superlatives (perhaps with some sense of hyperbole) as "one of the most exquisite
and effective works of imagination to come out of Spanish American literature". 58
This novel is typically referred to as an allegory. Baül Silva Castro, for example, has

56
57
Prado, La reina de Rapa Nui, third ed. (Santiago, Chile, Nascimento, 1962), p p . 168-69.
58
Prado, Un juez rural, sixth ed. (Santiago, Chile, Nascimento, 1968), p . 144.
John E. Englekirk et ai., An Outline History of Spanish American Literature, third ed. (New
York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965), p . 201.

251
written that it is "una vasta alegoría basada en un grupo muy amplio de simbolos".59
Those critics who make a careful distinction between allegory and symbol will find
this statement a contradiction in terms. We noted at the outset of this study, however,
that an insistence on a careful distinction between allegory and symbol would place
an unnecessary burden on our discussion. It should suffice to say that the variety of
interpretations of the "allegory" of Alsino lends support to Tindall's important con-
clusion that "a symbolist work has no certain meaning".60
Without, then, insisting on a single allegorical interpretation, we might observe
that this novel about a boy who is so intent upon flying that he actually grows wings
is basically a carefully orchestrated (the novel was four years in the writing) hymn to
freedom. The dominant themes in this orchestration have already been mentioned:
anarchy and the interdependence of all things and beings. What we are presented
with in this novel—and which is not apparent in Prado's other two novels—is a tour
through society and nature (here represented by the Chilean rural community and
landscape) that permits the reader to examine the relationship of the individual to the
pantheistic whole, thus introducing the question of free will.
Equal in importance to the concepts explored in Alsino is the language used to
describe them. There is no single passage that fully illustrates the ideas and verbal
techniques of this novel; Prado's style depends on a slow development through an
extended structure. Some idea of his curious sense of antithetical correspondences,
however, can be gained from the following sentence, taken from a description of Alsino's
sensations when he first learned how to fly: "En su semi consciencia, Alsino sentia
el vértigo del abismo, del cielo hacia el cual, elevándose, caía". 61 Compare this with
Alsino's sense of his relationship to his surroundings at the end of the same chapter:

Cuando iba caminando sobre tí, bien sabia quién era el que se movia, mas ahora
cuando vuelo, confuso veo que la tierra, las nubes y todas las cosas se acercan o
se alejan de mi, vienen o van, mientras yo permanezco fijo e inmóvil, y vislumbro
que todas ellas buscan referirse a mi ser, y me están ligadas y dependientes, como
si yo fuese el centro del universo. (p. 60)

This is a good note on which to conclude, i.e., with man at the center of the uni-
verse, for it is precisely where the Symbolists wished to place him. Perhaps more than
anything else, Symbolism is an affirmation of the central importance of man's spirit.
The enduring contribution of Symbolism is a concentration on the art of indirect com-
munication. In Spanish America, as elsewhere, novelists of the last fifty years may
have leaned toward a mechanistic view of reality. But no novel of significance published
since 1924 has failed to make use of the many-faceted literary symbol to express its
doubts.

59
R. Silva Castro, Pedro Prado, 1886-1952 (Santiago, Chile, Editorial Andrés Bello, 1965),
p . 84.60
W. Y. Tindall, op. cit., p . 267.
61
Prado, Alsino, tenth ed. (Santiago, Chile, Nascimento, 1970), p . 69. Hereafter, page ref-
erences will be given in the text.

262
 PART IV
THE CONSOLIDATION AND METAMORPHOSIS
OF THE SYMBOLIST IMPRINT
 MANFRBD GSTEIGEB

EXPECTATION A N D RESIGNATION: STEFAN GEORGE'S PLACE

I N GERMAN A N D I N E U R O P E A N SYMBOLIST L I T E R A T U R E

I n 1899 the renowned Viennese journal Die Zeit published an article b y the twenty-
three-year-old art historian and writer Hermanri Ubell entitled "Stefan George u n d
die BlMter für die Kunst". Without much ado Ubell praises the German poet for having
brought about the "rebirth of a lyric poetry, one going beyond the German models of
the immediate past like Goethe, Platen, Novalis, Hölderlin, and C. F . Meyer and taking
its inspiration from the complicated techniques of the Greek, Roman, and medieval
poets". Among George's predecessors, Ubell mentions Nietzsche as the only other poet
"possessing such a purely poetic cultural background". Of George's contemporaries,
Ubell finds Hofmannsthal alone worthy to be in his company. I n contrast t o t h e
merely sporadic manifestations of the new poetry in Germany and Austria, t h e new
style had elsewhere "become generally accepted". The critic continues: "Swinburne
and Rossetti, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and their followers, Gabriele D'Annunzio, a n d others
had purified poetic language in their respective countries and without their illustrious
example young German poets would have had difficulty in forging ahead so quickly.
Even Stefan George, in the first period of his writing, seems to have developed his
style by imitating French models". 1
The comments óf the young Austrian Ubell are remarkable both because of t h e
time at which they were made—a time when many considered George merely ah
eccentric and a performer 2 —and because of the clarity with which the critic placed t h e
Blatter für die Kunst within its European context. To be able to do this, however, it
was above all necessary to be interested and to have read widely in relatively small,
unknown publications. B y 1899 the first volumes of the Blatter had appeared, with their
programmatic, poetological texts on the "new way of feeling and composing" poetry
in the spirit of Kunst für die Kunst (the German equivalent of l'art pour l'art), a n d with
most of the translations of poems by Mallarmé, Verlaine, Moréas, de Régnier, Vielé-
Griffin, Merrill, Saint-Paul, Swinburne, Rossetti, and D'Annunzio. 3 The collections of
poems which best show the signs of George's symbolist affinities—Hymnen, Pilger-

1
Die Zeit (Vienna), pp. 19-20, April—Sept. 1899, p p . 122-124. Translator's translation.
2
I n 1898 Ludwig Jacobowski wrote t h a t George's nice little things" were merely "polished
performer's acts intended for a handful of coffee house friends". Cf. m y book Französische Sym-
bolisten in der deutschen Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (1869-1914) (Bern & Munich, Francke,
1971), p . 75.
3
A few of the adaptations (Moréas, Merrill, Saint-Paul, Vielé-Griffin) are not George's work
alone and were therefore not included in Zeitgenössische Dichter. Cf. the reprint of Blätter für die
Kunst (Düsseldorf-Munich, Küpper-Bondi, 1968).

265
fahrten, Algabal, Die Bücher der Hirten- und Preisgedichte, der Sagen und Sange und
der hängenden Garten—had also appeared but they were hardly known. With Georg
Bondi as publisher, these poems were just beginning to emerge from the sphere of
private printing for an élite. Zeitgenössische Dichter, which was to become so influential,
only came out in 1905. Das Jahr der Seele, the peak of George's strictly Symbolist
period and at the same time "the swan song of the poet's early work", 4 was printed in
1899 in a so-called public edition. In order to place George, as Ubell tried to do, it
was not enough to have gained access to his more or less esoteric writings. It was also
necessary to have a knowledge and an understanding of European traditions and
literary movements as well as that unbiased cosmopolitanism which, at the turn of the
century, was still alive in countries such as Austria. The George criticism which later
emerged from the George-Kreis was above all panegyric and hagiographic. It saw the
poet as a unique and peerless figure.5 Reich German criticism, on the other hand,
increasingly interpreted his work in a nationalistic spirit. In both cases the European
and historical aspects, which would have placed George's work in the right perspective,
were neglected. It seems that the critics foliowed George's footsteps in his own develop-
ment from a modernism inspired by the French to his later period (Der Stern des
Bundes and Das neue Reich)* The poet's Symbolist beginnings were not, however,
merely an episode; they form the basis for his whole writing and are the key to an
understanding of his work.
The significance of young George's encounter with Les Fleurs du Mal and his
meeting in 1899 with Mallarmé and the Symbolists in Paris have frequently been the
subject of discussion.6 The poet tried to adapt the poetological and stylistic patterns of
the modern Western European poets to German poetry, and he chose the same means—
he formed a group along the lines of the Parisian Cénades and founded a periodical
comparable to existing Symbolist periodicals. In those years George was, thus, a link
in the Symbolist "International". This "International" gave expression in various
languages and under various conditions to the aspirations of a new generation with
identical or at least very similar anti-naturalist aims. It was conscious not only of
national literary dimensions but also of European and American dimensions. At the
same time, it postulated a return to the hidden sources of genuine poetry. I t was a
movement whose representatives, on the whole, were not very numerous; they
certainly did not dominate the literary scene, but they saw themselves as the spiritual
élite of the time. Set in this belief, they had, at first, only a small, select audience,
which was gradually to grow. For international Symbolism, the representative and

* In the original German text, the author had shortened the titles to " B u n d " and "Reich",
thus referring
4
back to the "Kreis" (a sort of Bund) and "Reich" of the sentences preceding.
5
Joachim W. Storck, Kindiers Literatur Lexikon (Zürich, Kindier, 1967), I I I , column 2805.
This is particularly strong in the subtitle of Friedrich Wolters' presentation Stefan George
und die Blótter für die Kunst, the official statement as it were, which appeared in 1930; the History
of the German Mind since 1890! Friedrich Gundolf (see fn. 9 below) had the same ahistorical,
uncritical approach, only on a higher level.
• Cf. the work of E. L. Duthie, Curt von Faber du Faur, Claude David, Robert Boehrihger,
Jean-Edouard Spenlé, Freya Hobohm, Marie-Luise Sior, Gerd Michels, Salo Weindling. The critical
works which appeared to 1960 are listed in: Georg Peter Landmann, Stefan Oeorge und sein Kreis:
Eine Bibliograpnie (Hamburg, Hauswedell, 1960).

256
 innovative Paris School was, of course, decisive (together with the outsiders and the
"anti"-groups of the nouvelle vague, as Jules Huret called them for a wider public in
his Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire of 1891). Both in the light of literary history and in
the eyes of the poets themselves, however, French Symbolism was from the very be­
ginning part of an international trend: witness, for example, the Anglo-American,
connections (Poe and the Victorian poets) or the affinities with German Romantieism,
as J e a n Thorel a n d others have pointed out. I n such a context, determined b y numerous
historical and biographical relations de faits, George, as the German equivalent of the
Symbolists he translated (from Mallarmé to D'Annunzio), is much less ambiguous and
more convincing, particularly in his early work, than the other more or less comparable
German-speaking representatives of the literary fin de siècle (Richard Dehmel, Max
Bruns, Franz Evers, E r n s t H a r d t , Richard Schaukal, e t c ) , except, of course, the more
complex cases like Hofmannsthal and Rilke, and the still unclarified symbolism of
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. 7
Das Jahr der Seele was printed privately in 1897 and, as mentioned earlier, b y a
publisher two years later. For the sake of comparison, volumes of poems b y Gustave
Kahn, Stuart Merrill, Francis Vielé-Griffin, and Henri de Régnier also appeared in
1897; Mallarmé's Un coup de dés was printed in the journal Cosmopolis; in Italy the
first edition of Pascoli's Primi poemetti, in Russia Bryusov's volume Me meum esse,
in Germany Rilke's early collection Traumgelcrönt, and in France Gide's Les Nourritures
terrestres all came out in t h e same year. With their characteristic concentration on the
genres of poetry and poetic prose, these are the names and works which made European
Symbolism and the decadence of the fin de siècle, and George's volume has its place among
them. The listing of such names and works is not simply intended to present a collection
of individual artistic realizations; it also illustrates the style of the time, the "expressive
compulsion" of an epoch, and, to varying degrees, a fashion, a manner, a more or less
easily reproducible and reproduced pattern. This Symbolism is b y no means a unified
phenomenon: it is rather marked b y the personalities, languages, nations, and classes
involved; esthetically speaking, it is also far from having the unité de doctrine essential
for artistic form. In addition, both Mallarmé and Gide, in the works mentioned above,
show much more evidence of overcoming orthodox Symbolism t h a n expressing Sym­
bolism itself. Un coup de dés goes far beyond the contemporary manner and fashion,
reaching into the concrete and graphic poetry of the twentieth century, and, in his preface
of 1927, Gide considers his book a reaction against a Symbolist literature which "sen-
tait furieusement et factice et le renferme". Further points of comparison are Zola's
Paris, which appeared in 1897, and which cannot simply be labeled with the tag of
Symbolism alone, and Wells's The Invisible Man of the same year—science fiction and
social criticism to be sure, b u t certainly not poetic introspection (even though Wells's
skepticism—of a different form and with a different intention—is undoubtedly rem-
iniscent of certain Symbolist motifs).

7
For C. F . Meyer's symbolism cf. Beatrice S a n d b e r g - r a u n , Wege zum Symbolismus: Zur
Entstehung dreier Gedichte C. F. Meyers, Zürcher Beitrage zur deutschen Literatur- und Geistes-
geschichte, ed. E. Staiger, (Zürich: Atlantis, 1969); Marianne Burkhart, "Zeit und R a u m im Werk
C. F . Meyers", German Quarterly, 44 (May 1971), p p . 331-340.

17 Balakian 257
 From such purely chronologieal comparisons it can clearly be seen that, at the
moment of publication and from a strictly German point of view, the poems in Das Jahr
der Seele must have been a novelty, even a literary event. Seen, however, in a European
context, their common feature emerges more clearly. They are typical and valid for
the time and for that very reason they are regressive and conservative. Apart from
a few poems by Hofmannsthal, German literature had nothing comparable to offer;
the "Symbolist" poetry of Dehmel, in spite of its fame at the time, was pale in com-
parison, and so were the hardly known juvenilia of Rilke, whose volume of poems in
the mentioned list of publications for 1897 was the least important from an artistic
point of view. George's modernity in Das Jahr der Seele was German, not European,
In the literary development of the last decade of the nineteenth century, Symbolism
was still a strong catchword, but it was merely one of many, and hardly one of the
most important for the changes to come.
Seen in the context of literary history, and in the light of the incontestable lag
evident in the German movement and of the constant development of poetic expression,
this observation has nothing to do with an esthetic assessment of George. The artistic
achievement of the Symbolist George lies not in the fact that he "discovered" this
European style for Germany—others did that before, at the same time, and after him—
but that through the best of his poems and adaptations he made it fruitful for German
literature—something which cannot be said for Dehmel, for example.8 A comparative
reading of George's poems does not intend to subordinate the individual importance oi
George to the general Symbolist style of the time; it will also avoid placing the individ­
ual above the general. The aim is to find the appropriate (and admittedly precarious]
balance between the two.
Das Jahr der Seele opens with one of the most famous of George's poems:

Komm in den totgesagten park und schau:

Der schimmer ferner lachelnder gestade,
Der reinen wolken unverhofftes blau
Erhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade.
Dort nimm das tiefe gelb, das weiche grau
Von birken und von buchs, der wind ist lau,
Die spaten rosen welkten noch nicht ganz,
Erlese küsse sie und flicht den kranz,
Vergiss auch diese letzten astern nicht,
Den purpur um die ranken wilder reben,
Und auch was übrig blieb von grünem leben
Verwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht.

It is a poem about autumn, the first in the section Nach der Lese. It is neither a purely
sself-contained description of nature nor a merely allegorical poetizing of autumn. It is
much more a landscape of the soul, conceived and composed in the spirit of Symbolism

8
Cf. Hubert Arbogast, Die Emeuerung der deutschen Dichtersprache in den Frühwerken Stefar
Georges (Köln-Graz, Böhlau, 1967).

258
(Quite overrating George's originality—in a European context, it was by no means
particularly new—Gundolf stresses: " . . . not inspired landscapes or landscape ex-
perience, b u t a soul which through landscape realizes its existence and its destiny . . .
which appears as nature". 9 ) The almost programmatic correspondence, already ex-
pressed in the title of the còllection, between the season and the landscape on the one
hand, and between emotion and thought on the other, rests here on the parallel motif
of nature declining towards death and yet in the last revival of its beauty glowing with
life (the "totgesagt" b u t in fact still intensely alive park) and the resigned gentle mel-
ancholy of the wanderer, the motif of an " I " expressing itself in imperatives, moving
toward a " y o u " and a sense of the unexpected treasures of autumn. I n spite of, or per-
haps because of, the fact t h a t the " I " and "you", and together with them, nature, are
in t h e end a psychological unity, a didactic attitude can be felt in this imperative, in-
structive means of expression; it is a discreet didacticism which becomes explicit, if not
all too explicit, in George's later works. The ' I ' does not face the " y o u " in a dialogue;
it replaces it, subjects it. Moreover, it becomes clear from such details as "Der reinen
wolken unverhofftes b l a u " how unrealistic the description of nature is, and intends t o
be, since it is obviously not the clouds b u t the patches of sky between the clouds t h a t
are blue. The notion of blue clouds could be considered artificial, even decorative. The
word "artificiar" prcbably hints a t the essential characteristic of this description of
nature. We are not just anywhere; we are in a park, t h a t is, in a sphere of nature shaped
b y man and cut off from the outside world (in the fourth poem of Das Jahr der Seele
the separation is very clearly made: the alley in the park leads t o a gateway which is
cut off from "aussen", from the "feld" b y a locked iron gate). The motif points to the
exclusive, élitist nature of this idea, and since the landscape is the soul and the soul the
landscape, it also refers to the psychological sphere. Expressed in extreme terms,
emotion is as much a luxury (in a period of political and economie expansion and latent
social tension, which was the case in the latter p a r t of the nineteenth century) as the
closed-in park is a piece of "luxury n a t u r e " . George attempts a synthesis of the outer
and inner worlds in the poem (a synthesis which was a central postulate of t h e poetics of
Romanticism).
I n George's poetic imagination, t h a t is, in the succession and combination of t h e
images, one can, on closer examination, distinguish not just two (image a n d meaning)
but three levels of structure: firstly, t h a t of the concrete landscape; secondly, t h a t of
the still concrete b u t at the same time abstract, even allegorical autumnal wreath of
colorful leaves and late flowers; and finally, t h a t of the abstract, psyehological sphere.
The relatively large world of the park is reflected in the microcosm of the wreath a n d
both also repose in the psyehological, which makes them concrete, tangible. One can
surely speak of a symbolic—-and not just Symbolist—style when the interdependence
of the spheres is so small t h a t distinctions are virtually non-existent; signifiant and
signifié coincide and the one can no longer be simply "explained" b y means of the other.
George is unmistakably striving for such a totality of the soul and the senses, b u t I
believe t h a t the Symbolism of his poem is in fact t o a large degree allegorical even if it

9
Friedrich Gundolf, George (Berlin, Bondi, 1920), p . 130. Translator's translation.

17* 259
is an extremely sensitive and original allegory. The interdependence mentioned above
is both consciously and intentionally planned and earried through. The three levels or
spheres correspond to the three stanzas of the poem. The description seems at first to
concentrate on observing the park and the sky, idealizing them but by no means un-
realistically. In the second stanza this landscape veduta is combined with the image of
the autumnal wreath: the "tiefe gelb" and "weiche grau" of the leaves and the "spaten
rosen" belong to both, a cleverly calculated ambiguity of incorporated elements. The
third stanza at first adds a few more elements to these ("astern", "reben"). Then there
is a switch to the personal realm, to the soul, which in retrospect places everything
already said in a new light, into a more complicated frame of reference, as it were.
The key words are "grünem leben", both the metaphorical term for the still green
branches and the figurative implication of declining, resigned consciousness, still "alive".
filled with hope and the will to live. "Herbstlichen gesicht", the vision of nature,
implies both the outer and the inner world. The parallelism developed in the twelve
lines is measured and natural in its effect; it is in no way rhetorically forced, and yet it
still seems to the reader to be an artistically designed and realized one, and not an
automatic, unconscious chance product. For this reason, with all due regard for the
artistic achievement, one can speak of the unmistakably artificial and literary traits
of this landscape of the soul, of a more will fully Symbolist than unconsciously symbolic
manner of expression. This artistry corresponds exactly with that which the poem
and, through the poem, George's poetics of l'art pour l'art intends: beauty as a refuge,
as a garden of Innerlichkeit* set against an outside world which can no longer be
mastered and therefore becomes insecure, profoundly dubious, and threatened by
grief and melancholy.
The feeling of decline(Verla,me's Je suis l'empire á la de la décadence, expressed
by George in the form of the late Roman, Heliogabalus), and autumnal nature as the
mirror of the soul (Verlaine's Chanson d'automne, Mallarmé's Plainte d' automne—early
autumn as the "saison favorite" whereas summer, Tristesse d'été, is called sad, and
spring "maladif") are well-known and central themes of European symbolism. George's
affinity becomes all the clearer if one takes a look at Vielé-Griffin and not Verlaine or
Mallarmé:
Va, nos âmes sont encore sceurs
Des heures de l'automne grises,
Dont la pénombre dans nos coeurs
Estompait les vieilles méprises
Et nous ne voyions plus nos pleurs. 10

Another example is in the poem Octobre by the same poet, where autumn is personified
as " Automne aux yeux pensifs":

* A word which cannot be satisfactorily translated because of its many implications: intro-
spection,
10
sensitivity, soulfulness, inner depth.
Ges heures-Ui from Joies (1889), quoted from Ad. van Bever and Paul Léautaud, Poètes
d'aujourd'hui: Morceaux choisis (rpt. Paris, Mercure de France, 1947), I I I , p . 378.

260
 Si de la gaieté claire de ses guirlandes
J'ai fait comme un refrain au rêve de la vie,
La sente du verger ou Ie sentier des landes
Ondule au rythme égal de ma mélancolie . . . 11

The motif of autumn is here combined with a decorative device from the applied arts
similar to George's; similarly too, the seasonal melancholy of the soul pervades the
landscape and works itself into a resigned composure. There are nevertheless distinct
stylistic differenees, which in my opinion also make for differences in quality. In Vielé-
Griffin's poem everything is more explicit, written for the sake of symbolic allegory
(the word "comme", in exemplary manner, is used to combine and contrast "guirlandes"
and "refrain"). The images often do not follow one another cogently but are placed
not very organically next to one another or become entangled (in the first quotation,
"ames" are at first the personified sisters of the autumnal hours, but do not appear
later as persons, in accordance with the initial image, but rather as the "heures grises"
assigned to the shadows of the heart). It is all wordier, more emotional, more vague;
it lacks the precise contours, the clear references which distinguish George's poem. The
rhythmic ease of the French vers libres (which matches the undulation of melancholy)
confirms this impression, whereas in George's poem the Symbolist correspondences are
evenly balanced by the strict meter. The classical Parnassian view of art comes to the
fore here. What George experienced in modern French poetry was not merely its sym­
bolism but also its shaping force, a force he had already feit in Les Fleurs du Mal, and
one he consciously created and even overemphasized in his adaptations. That George
could combine the heritage of the Parnasse with what he had learned from the contem-
porary French Symbolists into a personal neoclassical symbolism makes him more than
a mere imitator of a literary fashion. The simplicity and exactness of the outward form
and the unpretentious naturalness of some, though not all, of the images make the first
poem in Das Jahr der Seele a very different one from the lines by Vielé-Griffin; it is
much more like Verlaine's Heure du berger from Poèmes saturniens, a Symbolist poem
avant la lettre which has frequently been commented on for its Parnassian spirit and
which was purposely translated rather late by George and published in Zeitgenössische
Dichter.12 The unintentionally graphic presentation of the landscape, which is clearly a
spatial figure of the soul is, of course, more fully realized in Verlaine's than in George's
poem, Verlaine's last stanza is as follows:
Les chats-huants s'éveillent, et sans bruit
Rament Fair noir avec leurs ailes lourdes,
Et le zénith s'emplit de lueurs sourdes.
Blanche, Vénus émerge, et c'est la Nuit.
The identity of sense impressions in an expression such as "lueurs sourdes" ("lueurs"
having the visual and "sourdes" the acoustic effect) seems incidental, but for that very

11
La clarté de vie (1897), quoted from van Bever and Léautaud, p . 383.
12
Cf. notes by Jacques Robichez in Paul Verlaine, CEuvres poétiques (Paris, Garnier, 1969),
pp. 522 ff. George's translation was probably made after 1900.

261
reason it is forceful. The interchangeability of the visual and the acoustic points to a
third, the spiritual, which is not even explicitly named but present in the tone and
atmosphère. Thus, "white Venus" appears as a star as well as a woman's body and,
without openly stating it, hints at something more general, at a feeling which rises
from the vast darkness of the unconscious, becomes conscious, and can thus be artic-
ulated.
At this point, reference could be made to several poems translated by George from
Les Fleurs du Mal in which the abundanee of Symbolist and pre-Symbolist references
is combined with formal discipline. (It would, then, become clear that George's meta-
phorical and allegoric manner of expression is often nearer to Baudelaire than to the
characteristically Symbolist works of Verlaine.) Reference could also be made to several
of Rossetti's and Swinburne's poems with their soul and dream landscapes (for example
in A Forsaken Garden or A Ballad of Dreamland by Swinburne), that nameless realm
of the unconscious psyche which George translates into:

Vom grünen land das ein zauber umgreifet

Schrieb niemals den namen ein wanderer auf
Und süssere frucht als auf baumen dort reifet
Kam nietnals auf einem markte zu kauf.

The evocative verbal music of rhyme and rhythm, of repetition and assonance—that
"de la musique avant toute chose" of Verlaine's (and not only Verlaine's) poetic credo—
generally speaking and in the light of French poetry, is, without doubt, one of the great-
est achievements of Symbolist poetry. George's artistic temperament tends much
rather towards distinct contours than dissolving half-tones and it is thus not sur-
prising that his adaptation of Verlaine's Chanson d'automne is unsatisfactory. One is
tempted to ask whether, in this matter, the "Parnassian" George did not take up a
position so remote from the genuinely symbolist style that the fundamentally Sym­
bolist nature of his poetry could be questioned. There are two comments to be made on
this. The early George was by no means insensitive to the music of Symbolism and, in a
few cases, he was able to put some of it across in his poems, as in the following stanza
of a poem published in Pilgerfahrten in 1891, which evokes with the underlying threat-
ening atmosphere the picture of a winter heath on the shore of a frozen lake:

Kam ein pfiff dem grund entlang?

Alle lampen flackern bang.
War es nicht als ob es riefe ?
Es empfingen ihre braute
Schwarze knaben aus der tiefe . . .
Glocke laute glocke laute !

Of much greater importance, however, is the second argument. Whereas the musicality
and song-like quality of Verlaine's poetry and the onomatopoeia and vers-librisme of the
Symbolists in general were a genuine innovation for French poetry, a liberation, a de-
parture from the traditional constraints of poetry, there was and still is a long tradition

262
of romantic song in German literature which produeed excellent "modern" verse long
before the Symbolists:

Flöss flehend, du Flötengeflüster,

Mir Himmel und Heimat ans Herz,
Leucht lieblich und lispele düster,
Und fachle, dass lachle im Schlummer der Schmerz. 13

B y George's time, this tradition had become rather shallow and trivial, even degenerate
(in this connection, one need only mention the superficial sound effects in songs by,
say, Otto Julius Bierbaum) b u t it was still alive. One could even say t h a t the onomato-
poetic manner of Liliencron (e.g. in the poem Die Musik kommt) produeed some very
fine results. In any case, German poetry at the time had little to learn from the French
Symbolists in matters of impressionism, b u t all the more in matters of esthetic dis­
cipline. And it was in this sphere t h a t George was a decisive mediator. I t was not from
Verlaine b u t from Mallarmé t h a t he gained his most effective stimuli. Not "de la musi-
que avant toute chose "was his motto but eine Kunst für die Kunst (as canbe found in t h e
first number of the Blätter). Often enough he emphasized the priority of form over
experience and thought, and in matters of form he placed meter before sound. 14
George 's European Symbolism here turns out to be different from and more t h a n just a
replica of the movement which emanated from France; as a distinctive phenomenon
it takes up a position in and for German literature which can be called unique. The
other German-speaking "Symbolists" (again with the exception of Hofmannsthal and
C.F. Meyer) merely accelerated the inflation of lyric poetry through the watered-down
song imitations of their late or neoromantic products and feit themselves supported in
this b y Verlaine, who, from the beginning of the 1890's, was world famous b u t widely
misunderstood, or at least only one-sidedly understood b y them. George, on t h e other
hand, led the way to a reassessment of the word and the poetic image and therefore
also to a new attitude toward poetic language.
George's élitist, authoritarian attitude and even the ritual of the George-Kreis,
which has long been feit to be embarrassing and affected, can thus be seen in a somewhat
different light. They are still the expression of the self-stylization which almost all
European Symbolists carried to an extreme, and of their love for the theatrical, for
disguise, and for pathos. Over and beyond t h a t , however, they gain meaning as factors
of exclusiveness and discipline of an essentially artistic nature; to achieve this was
surely impossible in any other than a radical form—at least in German neoromanti-
cism—without disloyalty to their own intentions. Moreover, the desire for formal
discipline was by no means only an attack against the verbal inflation of neoromanti-
cism b u t also against contemporary naturalism, which in drama and narrative prose still
dominated the scène. (In his "dramatic fantasy" Hannéles Himmelfahrt, 1893, Gerhart
Hauptmann tried to combine this naturalism with the new Symbolism, which, through

18
Clemens Brentano, Am Abend, quoted from Ausgewählte Werke, ed. C. Hohoff (Munich
Hanser,
14
n.d.), p. 27.
"Über Dichtung", Tage und Taten, quoted from Stefan George, Werke (2 vols.) (Munich-
Düsseldorf, Küpper-Bondi, 1968), I, p. 530.

263
Maeterlinck, had suddenly become the rage in the theater.) The studied and stilted
elements, frequently inherent in George's aristocratie style, are proof of the effort
needed for a third movement to prevail upon neoromanticism and naturalism. Through
these efforts George was able to give the poetic word a new aura of the particular, the
valuable, the essential, even the prophetic; he was able to fall back on both classical as
well as specifically German romantic notions. (The German middle class, after initial
resistance, recognized his recourse to the image of the poeta vates, which largely corre-
sponded to its own understanding of literature.) However, it should not be forgotten
that, apart from a reading public with a classical background, there were always
critical, deprecatory voices as well, not only from the aging naturalists but also from
"progressive" young poets. In 1928, on the occasion of an interview, Bertolt Brecht
calls George a pillar saint and caustically remarks: "He certainly read hundreds of
books but only if they were beautifully bound, and he associated only with people who
lived on their private incomes. Thus he gave the impression of being an idler rather
than the observer he wished to appear to be". 15 Georg Lukacs is more impartial in his
judgement of George although he is basically just as critical of him. Nevertheless, he
recognizes George's literary achievement (which Brecht in fact questions). For him,
George's "uncompromisingly aristocratic world" is a consequence of "the German shade
of romantic antieapitalism". He calls the late George a spiritual forerunner of Fascism.
On the other hand, he considers his Das Jahr der Seele and Der Teppich des Lebens his
"poetically most accomplished works" which contain all "that poetry could possibly
have in the form of pure interiorization of spiritual values". 16 Lukacs describes George's
early poetry as "an island of outward protection with no shore of middle class prose in
sight". Whether it is justified to speak of protection here when it is rather a painful
attempt to create a new order within a small area—an attempt constantly threatened
by failure—may be open to doubt but the comparison of this esthetic order with an
island is undoubtedly justified. It is reminiscent of the garden motif, which more than
any other motif sums up the world of Symbolism in a nutshell. The topos itself- is, of
course, very old, starting with the biblical Garden of Paradise and the locus amcenus
of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. However, the fact that it appears in artistic form
again in the anti-bourgeois literature of the fin de siècle points to the deeper meaning
which it must have. Those nuances which differ from the traditional topos are the very
ones which are interesting, namely, the stress on the "made", the artificial, and thus
also the unnatural, even lifeless—iron gate, steps, arranged perspectives, gravel paths,
fountains, statues—the particularly characteristic contrasts of art to the pietures of
reality which man sees. In this form, the motif seems to me to express two essential
traits of Symbolism: the desire for representation, for the theatrical, for grand style,
for the valid presentation of the whole world, on the one hand; and the necessity of
retreat, of restriction, of resistance, of alienation and Innerlichkeit, on the other
hand. In other words, an uneasy alliance of expectation and resignation.
15
Die literarische Welt, 1928, quoted from W. Haas, ed., Zeitgemäβes aus der "Literarischen
Welt" von 1925-1932 (Stuttgart, Cotta, l963), p . 195. Transiators translation.
16
"Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter des Imperialismus", quoted from Georg Lukacs, Schriften
zur Literatursoziologie, ed. Peter Ludz, Soziologische Texte, 9 (Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1961),
pp. 471 ff. Translator's translation.

264
 Hortus conclusus is the title of a poem by Gabriele D'Annunzio in his collection
Poema paradisiaco (1893):

Giardini chiusi, appena intraveduti,

o contemplati a lungo pe' cancelli
che mai nessuna mano al viandante
smarrito apri come in un sogno! Muti
giardini, cimiteri senza avelli,
ove erra forse qualche spirto amante
dietro l'ombre de' suoi beni perduti!

Here again we have the melancholy parks of memories shut off by an iron gate. D'An-
nunzio calls them cemeteries without gravestones. The allegorical references and cultural
reminiscences are much more explicit than in George's poem, more explicit, too, than in
Verlaine's Fêtes galantes, where mythology and cultural history are used solely to create
the atmosphere and mood. The title of D'Annunzio's poem itself contains an unmis-
takable allusion to the metaphor of the closed garden in the Song of Solomon. This
establishes from the very beginning a specific meaning, which the poet stresses again
at the end of the poem:
Voi, signora,
siete per me come un giardino chiuso.

In the eight stanzas in between (the first was quoted above), D'Annunzio presents a
richly allegorical and mythological display. The garden of memories is pronounced to
be Paradise; marble statues and stone benches are arranged as though for a theater
performance, the concilio degli ultimi poeti; the pond with the swan evokes the imiage of
Leda (l'antica Tindaride). D'Annunzio tries to give his garden vision an aura of un-
speakable mystery (he uses words like "triplice mistero" and "sogno non sognato mai")
but basically the display remains rhetorical and picturesque; the Symbolist intention
peters out into a simple, erotic metaphor. George as well as Mallarmé has greater ex-
pectations: the word is not used merely to evoke the world of experience but, it is
hoped, to create a new reality. That is why the resignation is all the greater:

. . . weinen dass die bilder immer fliehen

Die in schöner finsternis gediehen-
Wann der kalte klare morgen droht.
(Das Buch der hängenden Gärten)

Poetry is "intensified language. It is full of images and symbols. It places one thing
for another", says Clemens in Hofmannsthal's Gespräch über Gedichte, which begins
with a reading of the first poem in Das Jahr der Seele.17 Gabriel counters him: "Poetry
never replaces one thing with another for it is poetry which restlessly strives to present

17
In Die Nette Rundschau, 1904, quoted from Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Prosa II, ed. H .
Steiner, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben (Frankfurt, S. Fischer, 1951), p p . 94-112.

266
the thing itself with completely different energy from flat everyday speech, with
completely different magic power from the weak terminology of scholarship". At t h e
end of the discussion he expresses what he considers to be the most consummate poem:
"compilations of words . . . from which emerge landscapes of the soul like sparks from
a dark stone, landscapes which are as unfathomable as the starry heavens". Poetry is
the mysterious mirror of Innerlichkeit, not a parable to be interpreted b u t an ambiguous
allusion to complex psychological states. This can also be found in Mallarmé when he
expresses his opinion to Jules Huret t h a t it is not naming things b u t suggesting them
t h a t is important. " I t is the perfect use of this mystery t h a t makes the symbol what it
is: it is a question of gradually evoking an object to demonstrate a state of mind, or
inversely of choosing an object to reveal a state of mind . . . . " 1 8 The tone Mallarmé uses
is, of course, very different from Hofmannsthal's intense, elevated style. I n spite of the
seriousness of the advice, there is a touch of self-irony in it. Unlike Hofmannsthal,
Mallarmé is aware of the eminently esthetic nature of his efforts, of the isolation and
social inefficacy of t h e Symbolist artist when he says t h a t the poet is "en grève devant
la société". The literature of individualistic Innerlichkeit is the final refuge for beauty
which can no longer exist in " r e a l " life. George soon realized this tragedy of esthetic
idealism and, recollecting his encounters in Paris, wrote in t h e poem Franken: " U n d
für sein denkbild blutend: Mallarmé". 1 9 George, too, bled for his ideal b u t in a different
way from Mallarmé, who, with his typically profound nimbleness of spirit, said to
Huret: "Basically . . . the world was made to end in a beautiful book". George tried
to overcome resignation b y constantly raising new expectations and hopes.
Symbolism is an esthetic experience; as a way of life, it cannot exist, a t least not
permanently. (No one was able to make this more convincingly clear t h a n J . - K . Huys-
mans in his A Rebours, 1884). Resignation as a practical attitude toward life corresponds
to absolute estheticism as a world view, for social reality must needs lag behind the un
questioning ideal. George, like all important representatives of Symbolism, felt this
incompatibility and tackled it. Later his p a t h led him away from t h e sphere of the soul
and pure beauty, away from the "landscapes . . . which are as unfathomable as the
starry heavens" to new spheres. "Ich muss mein schönes land gebeugt b e t r a u e r n " can
already be found in Das Buch der hdngenden Gdrten. The land meant here is t h a t place
where the actions of one's dreams are successful and where t h e poet cultivates "gentle
manners". More t h a n t h i r t y years later, in the light of Das neue Reich, the poet-
singer's concern was to take care "in trauer-lauften/Dass nicht das mark verfault, der
keim erstickt" (Der Dichter in Zeiten der Wirren). The inflexible, affected prophetic
mission of George's didactic poetry produced no new man, no new society, no new era.
However, as a poet and a translator, George introduced the essential achievements of
European Symbolism to German literature and gave German poetic tradition new life.

18
"C'est Ie parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitüe le symbole: évoquer petit a petit un
objet pour montrer un état d'âme, ou, inversement, choisir un objet et en dégager un état d'âme . . . "
Quoted from Stéphane Mallarmé, (Euvres complètes, ed. H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade (Paris, Gallimard, 1945) p . 869.
19
Der siebente Ring, Werke, I, p . 235.

266
In the guise of the visionary and the master, on an ideological level as it were, he repeats
the exclusive and excluding gesture of Vart pour Vart.
His work thus becomes the culmination and at the same time the end of Sym-
bolism and of literature as an art, a point where beauty no longer wants to be the figure
of truth but usurps truth itself. It is the hubris of art. All that is left at this point is
moderation and conversion.
Translated from the German by Sonja Bahn-Coblans

267
 JAMES LAWLER

VALÉRY AND HIS INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION

It was Monsieur Teste, the archcynic, who well knew that "chaque esprit qu'on trouve
puissant commence par la faute qui le fait connaïtre" ("Every mind considered power-
ful begins with the fault that makes it known"). Valéry's own ambition at twenty, as
at forty, was to avoid this error, to safeguard his secrets, to choose anonymity. He was
the bourgeois from the provinces leading in Paris a life without events, conforming in
external things to the general face of his age. Not for him the voyages to the East, the
"frenetic wanderings" of a Claudel or a Gide. At the same time, he sought to build an
island of the spirit of which he was the Robinson, a domain his alone that he could
codify and control. "J'ai voulu une vie aussi simple et une pensee aussi complexe que
possible" ("My desire was for life as simple and for thought as complex as possible");
again: "Les événements sont l'écume des choses, mais c'est la mer qui m'intéresse"
("Events are the froth of things but it is the sea I am interested in").
One hardly need recall the sudden shift of his position during the First World
War; how, by a singular concourse of circumstances—Gide's insistence, his revision
of his early verse, his rediscovery of Racine—he became engrossed in the composition
of a poem which he originally intended to be thirty to forty lines in length but which
grew into the five hundred and twelve lines of La Jeune Parque. Its publication in April,
1917, when he was forty-five, marked the end of his so-called silence: not a period when
he abandoned writing—far from it—but one in which he eschewed publication, and was
appreciated by only a handful of readers as the erstwhile poet, by fewer still as the
author of Monsieur Teste and the essay on Leonardo da Vinci. Yet, almost from La
Jeune Parque on, he became a public institution; he went into print in several genres,
pronounced himself on any number of issues, and was recognized as a kind of spokesman
for the French intelligentsia. He accepted prominence with surprise and much good
grace, although he was ever ready to express his weariness to friends, whom he asked
to inscribe on his grave: "Ci-gît moi, tué par les autres" ("Here lie I, done in by my
fellow men").
Quite early, he was the subject of many studies in France and abroad, being pro-
moted, as Claudel wryly put it, to the rank of "idole des professeurs". It was inevitable
that his audience should be first of all among the intellectuals, despite attacks by Benda
and others — which make curious reading today—on his supposed byzantinism. But
we know, of course, that his fame was not restricted to academic circles and that for
many, the first reading of his work was a major discovery. In France there were several
such cases, not the least touching of which concerns the banker Julien P. Monod who,

269
seeing the newly published La Jeune Parque displayed in Gallimard's bookshop, pro-
cured a copy, and became shortly thereafter an intimate friend and honorary secretary
— "ministre de la plume", "ombre", "conscience"—loyal to a relationship that lasted
until Valéry's death. Abroad, kindred attachments to his work were formed: thus, one
thinks of Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote: "I was alone, I was waiting, my whole heart
was waiting. One day, I read Valéry. I knew my waiting was over". He was drawn by
what he termed the "composure" and "finality" of Valéry's language, its "unique and
inimitable movement", its "constant triumph"; and he subsequently devoted himself
without stinting to his translations of Charmes and the dialogues, which offer, no
doubt, a Rilkean Valéry, but one nonetheless admirable.
There are other signal examples of Valéry's influence. Whereas in France the most
active currents of poetry were firmly set—Breton and Eluard published a cheekily
reworded version of Littérature (for instance, Valéry's "Un poème doit être une fête
de l'intellect" became "Un poème doit être la débâcle de l'intellect")—foreign poets
were not so much caught up in personal jealousies and the quarrels of schools. Several
of the more prominent poets greeted the work with an enthusiasm equal to Rilke's:
Eliot, Ungaretti, Stevens, Guillén. The 1956 exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale
assembled a surprising array of translation done in the twenties and thirties, ranging
from a 1931 version of Narcisse in Chinese to a Czech translation dated 1930 of Aurore.
The man who had lived what we would consider to be a homely existence, in no way
comparable to the globe-trotting of Claudel or even Gide, had received early and wide
recognition. But then of course, we remember that a particular sort of humanism had
been his life-long ambition, the strategy of his mind, and that, eagerly, obstinately, he
had sought to echo Leonardo's words: "E facil cosa farsi universale".
Yet, notwithstanding this acclaim, Valéry was rarely well understóod. In thig
respect, the reception given to La Jeune Parque may be taken as particularly instructive.
On its appearance, the critics of the day quickly assessed its manner and kind: it was a
Symbolist poem that recalled—for some only too well—Valéry's apprenticeship te
Mallarmé. At a time when Alcoóls had made an impression, and Cendrars and Reverdy
were publishing, it seemed a relic, the late testimony of a school dead if not forgotten
If we look back today to the major critical studies that foliowed, we find, I think, a
remarkable consistency of interpretation. Approached with greater or less subtlety
in words of disparagement or praise, Valéry was seen essentially in the perspective al-
ready established: that is, he was considered by and large in Mallarméan terms, and
inscribed as a late epigone of Symbolism.
But we now realize that he had long been considering poetry in a different light
analyzing from a rigorous viewpoint its elements and designs, even when to the casua
observer, and according to a myth he willingly fostered, he was most hostile to all such
preoccupations. His attitude, tirelessly put during the years of "silence", is that the
poetic state—the state in which poetry would become, as it were, the natural language
of its creator—can be isolated from other states with which it is too often confused
and that, by way of the close definition of this idea, particular applications, or poems
can be deduced. He seeks, then, to move from the general to the particular, from notior
to object, "par voie francaise"—in accordance with a procedure typically French

270
"Poetry until now", he writes, "has thought of itself as an accident. The subject or a
certain detail is given—and this lights a match . . . People have believed that this
capricious lighting was essential to vision. But I believe the contrary". Such a point of
view displaces the Symbolist cult of art for art, the quest for the single supreme work—
sonnet or book—and postulates instead a resource that would involve all poems both
accomplished and potential. Thus Valéry writes among the earliest jottings in his
notebooks: "It is not one image that I seek, but the marvelous group of all possible
images".
To envisage more clearly the idea of poetry reduced to its essence, from which
everything alien has been expunged, he calls on certain key metaphors: the exactness of
mathematics, the purity of chemistry; but he also makes much of the comparison to the
sexual act, the organicism of the tree, the freedom of the dance, the richness of music,
especially Wagner. Behind these analogies, however, we find a pivotal reference to the
poetry of Mallarmé—on the occasion of whose death he wrote, in a remarkable homage
intended for himself alone:

J'ai de ton pur esprit bu le feu le

plus beau
(Of your pure spirit I have drunk the fairest fire)
and again:
Je serai la tombe de ton ombre pensive
(I shall be the tomb of your pensive shade)

Yet these lines, moving as they are, contain a manifest pride, an egocentricity.
For if the relationship with Mallarmé is patently established, it is not a simple one,
but partakes of the complexity of a filial struggle in which the unlike emerges from a
fascinated exploration of the unlike. The artist becomes, not an imitator or a follower,
but a rival, an intimate enemy; and it is this struggle with a phantom that Valéry's
Cahiers trace out with unique detail as he strives again and again to distance and define
the qualities of the other, coming regularly to his own personal terms with them. "I
adored that extraordinary man", he. wrote, "at the very same time as I considered his
head to be the only one—a head beyond price !—to cut off so as to decapitate Rome".
Throughout his reflexions, one basic criticism prevaila: Mallarmé was not ruthless
enough for he continued to worship the clay idol of poetry, drew from it a concejption
of the world, turned his sonnets into a kind of "marivaudage with the absolute". Valéry
could admire the rigor and the subtlety, the self-discipline and the devotion to a view
of language wholly opposed to the ends of prose, but not the religion of art, the only
reality of which, as he never stopped repeating, is art itself, nothing more: "Le seul
réel de Tart, c'est Tart". This was his adolescent criticism of Mallarmé, a vital and liber-
ating one, as we now recognize, which allowed him in 1892 or shortly thereafter to
grasp as never before his own identity. Via Mallarmé he made the discovery of "lulti-
mum violent, ce derrière quoi il ne peut plus y avoir de conscience": a focus of thought,
pure difference, an ultimate violence decanted by way of this most fervent of meetings.

271
Realizing that he must slough off poetry as a goal in itself, he concentrated his true
concern on mental functioning and, in poetry, on the creative act. He had drunk the
potion that induced a necessary raction: "I loved [Mallarmé], hated him, and looked
in myself to find something else". This same thóught was put in many forms but no-
where more strikingly than in a notation pencilled on a page bearing the date 1906:
"Avoir connu Mallarmé c'est l'honneur de mon hasard—de l'avoir combattu, Jacob
de cet ange, c'est l'honneur de ma loi". ("To have known Mallarmé is the honor of my
chance—to have fought him, Jacob matched with the angel, is the honor of my law.")
By the soul's resistance, a chance encounter was made into a rule of life, and he emerged
a man fortified.
Fortified, and not weakened. His loyalty to Mallarmé is the loyalty of one who
scrutinizes from another vantage point, in a new frame. He, too, like others of his
generation, speaks of Symbolism in the past tense: "Ce qui fut baptisé Symbolisme . . . ",
"Le Symbolisme eut d'autres ennemis . . . " , "Le Symbolisme fut. . . " Indeed, it is
this very pastness by which he defines it: "The word Symbolism", he writes, "is the
verbal symbol for the intellectual qualities and conditions most opposed to those which
reign, and even govern, today". His ownambition was different, his observances changes.
Henceforth the poetry of the past, including that of Mallarmé, was an instrument
whose achievements he could adopt and fashion, but which was clearly not his own.
" I could not", he said, "ignore Mallarmé's technique. If my verse at times recalls it,
that honors me, but you don't think of reproaching the musicians who came after
Bach for having studied the fugue".
The real test of such a transformation lies, of course, not in what Valéry said of it
himself, but in what his poems reveal, above all La Jeune Parque, around which his
other verse is gatheredas around a single feature commanding a landscape, as Mallarmé's
verse is gathered around the core that is Hérodiade. He had long been developing the
theme of Agathe, that pre-Parque begun in 1898; he had also referred to and described
the haunting idea of a musical continuity, a deeply moving contralto that suggested an
ideal—"the real, necessary, absolute thing", he wrote— to which his life and language
aspired. On the one hand, a recitative, a warm solo sung by a woman; on the other, the
cycle of transformations within a mind. By virtue of these two elements, he held, un-
wittingly, the nub of his future poem.
We know the fictional character he finally created, a heroine that recalls several
Mediterranean myths, although unidentified with any. She is Eve and Psyche, Helen
and Pandora who, at a tragic. conjuncture of the forces of her nature, struggles with the
inherent mystery of the mortal self. A true sister of Hérodiade, she hears at her side
the promptings of the forces of love, but this also, she well knows, implies death. She
weeps, she would wish to die—and so succumbs to sleep. Her song begins again as
dawn breaks. Beyond death, yet in full awareness of it, she offers herself to the fires
of the sun. In fifteen main sections, she sings of her destiny, her reeitatives composing
in their variety and continuity a kind of opera.
Yet Valéry's originality becomes much more manifest, and decidedly un-Mallar-
méan, when we look further than the line of discourse. The poem, we realize, is not just
a vignette, however, nobly evocative, but the portrayal of a sensibility. We are offered

272
a sequence of psychological states, from the first prick of sorrow and the stirring of
consciousness through a cycle of sensations, memories, and aspirations. Each section
could bear an abstract subtitle such as grief, pleasure, nostalgia, desire—emotions,
movements, b u t not ideas like those we find as the basis of L'Après-midi d'un faune
or Hérodiade, Mallarmé's splendid mise-en-scène of his esthetics. Here Valéry is not so
much presenting a philosophy b u t a way of being t h a t we decipher from the imagery,
the language of particularity. The poem is therefore not symbolic, except insofar as the
Parque's drama is t h a t of us all. Its difficulty—and it is a difficult poem—results from
our need to learn how to read the system of images which are preeminently images of
the body, and not an idiosyncratic meaning hidden in or behind the text.
The procedure would require illustrations drawn from the poem, b u t space limi-
tations make this difficult. For brevity's sake, we may take as an example a few lines
from one of t h e manuscripts. Referring to the passage t h a t will evoke the Parque's
confrontation with the Serpent ("Quel repli de désirs, sa t r a î n e ! . . . Quel désordre/
De trésors s'arrachant a mon avidité/Et quelle sombre soif de la limpidité !"), Valéry
writes: " I must paint a t this point of the poem a death modulated b y insensible, pain-
less substitutions—as a musical change, as a passage from double to single, a subter-
ranean retreat—by an irreversible process. So t h a t one cannot say to oneself a t any
moment t h a t s o m e t h i n g h a s changed. Sensations become images, t h e present merges
with the past [. . . ], knowledge gives way to existence, the other gives way to the self,
and this is d e a t h " . Then he immediately takes up once again t h e whole question:
"How can I give this substance and detail? I need to go back from what I have just
written to V h a t I thought in the rough, between each one of the thoughts I noted down".
Here we have, not poetry, b u t a manner of preparing for poetry, after which will come
a cluster of images translating, as he says, thought in the rough; then lists of rhymes,
sounds, rhythmical patterns, sometimes even accompanied b y a stave bearing crotchets
and minims. We thüs find analysis together with music, psychological description with
imagination. And from these greatly disparate beginnings at far remove from the poem,
a continuity is gradually achieved.
The originality of project and procedure is evident. B u t one of the most interesting
aspects of La Jeune Parque is Valéry's conscious use of a poetic tradition. H e enumerates
in a note the authors who had been his familiar spirits when writing it: Mallarmé, of
course, b u t also Euripides, Virgil, Petrarch, Racine, Chénier, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rim-
baud, Claudel: poets lyrical, tragic, elegiac, visionary. The list m a y appear self-contra-
dictory; nevertheless, Valéry associated each of his authors with certain effects, a specific
language and r h y t h m t h a t he himself could employ as a model within the structure of
his poem. Thus Racine was to play a vital role in proposing what Valéry calls a mimet-
ism, the intimate correlation of body and mind, as well as a particular elevation of tone.
The Parque becomes Phaedra:

J e n'attendais pas moins de mes riches déserts

Qu'un tel enfantement de fureur et de tresse:
Leurs fonds passionnés brillent de sécheresse
Si loin que je m'avance et m'altère pour voir
De mes enfers pensifs les confins sans espoir.

273
18 Balakian
But there is also t h e recognizable echo of Baudelaire, warm and bitter ("Souvenir, ĉ
bûcher dont le v e n t d'or m'affronte . . . " ) , of Chénier in the elegiac passages of nostalgia
("O paupières qu'opprime une nuit de trésor, J e priais a tatons dans vos ténèbres d'or !")
as well as of other poets. And present is Mallarmé, his work occasionally begetting au
awkward phrase, a patent calque, b u t predominantly lending strength transformed intc
an uncomipromising elevation of thought and language:

L'ennui, Ie clair ennui de mirer leur nuance

Me donnait sur ma vie une funeste avance:
L'aube me dévoilait tout le jour ennemi.

Mallarmé's is a voice among several t h a t helps t o compose t h e Parque's individua

drama: voices which did not insinuate themselves in spite of the author, for they were
his conscious means of informing the poem, of making us aware of a living tradition ir
a manner entirely different from, b u t in a spirit not dissimilar to, Eliot's five years latei
in The Waste Land, a style of composing a poem t h a t has t h e fullness of m a n y registerg
but the controlling mode, the particular self-awareness of its author.
Valéry was rather too soon set in a mould b y his early critics; his poetry can be
understood today as an integral p a r t of his central project of analysis; moreover, he
accomplished his masterpiece in his forties, when he could look back on Symbolisrr
and bend it to his ends. He appropriated what he needed, b u t rejected the dogma. His-
work is an art practiced at a time when he no longer entertained a belief in the absolute
of art, b u t only in the lucidity with which his creation was plied and which his theme
and method illustrate.
To a work already esteemed to be among the most i m p o r t a n t in French literature
a volume of work of much vaster dimensions was added ten to fifteen years after his
death. The twenty-seven thousand pages of his Cahiers were published in facsimile by
the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique between 1957 and 1961. They were
as we understand today, the mainspring of his creative life. Begun in 1894 on the mode
of Leonardo's notebooks (and not at all as a private diary), they were written each daj
in the early morning hours over a period of fifty years. H e saw them as the record o:
his mental exercises, a personal log-book compiled in the name of self-discipline, the
disport of his faculties of detachment, clarity, and precision. F o r him they were a wholly
personal enterprise—which he yet acknowledged to have been prepared b y his appren
ticeship as an adolescent Symbolist poet—since literary creation h a d shown him th<
intimate connection between verbal maneuver and thought. H e concluded indeed t h a t
thought was a question of form, and t h a t he would concentrate his attention on analyz
ing its various modes and not its content. I n Baudelaire, a n d especially in Mallarmé
he discovered an a r t pursued as the lucid arrangement of symmetries, correspondences
and contrasts: it is this, he concludes, which composes the pattern, adduces t h e thought
Thus, in analyzing Mallarmé's work, he sees it in terms of a scientific experiment
witness these words written in the 1890's:

Pour la première fois, le travail purement littéraire avait été précédé d'une série
d'opérations, dont les plus profondes étaient de nature psychologique, et les plui
importantes de nature abstraite.

274
 (For the first time a purely literary undertaking had been preceded by a series
of operations, t h e deepest of which were psychological in nature, and t h e most
important abstract.)

Again:
Pour la première fois depuis qu'il y a littérature on a usé de la littérature comme
d'une chose abstraite, maniable en elle-même, indépendamment presque des
choses signifiées.
(For t h e very first time literature has been treated as an abstract thing which
can be handled separately, in almost complete independence from t h e things it
signifies.)

From these two sentences it is evident t h a t Valéry conceived of a literary idea as re-
ducible to a formal sequence, to the relative positions of words, their permutations,
and t h a t his ideal Mallarmé—not the real one, whose esthetic and philosophical views
he could not share, b u t the one he himself imagined and would seek to become—knew
and used the psychological nature of verbal groupings, whose variations showed the
possibilities of language, t h a t is, of the mind. Thus, his so-called rejection of poetry was
nothing of the sort: the making of poems led him, as it were of necessity, to analysis;
linguistic structures led t o the structures of thought. "Toute la littérature est contenue
dans la courbe de mots. Tachez d'en voir le plus possible, d'épuiser le plus possible"
("All literature is contained in the curve of words. Try to see, t r y to exhaust the greatest
possible number of them".) T h a t was the lesson he read into Mallarmé; b u t in his
Cahiers he applied it to t h e curvature of mental functioning. For, unlike his master in
poetry who saw as his end the artifact, he centered his quest on the prospection of
thought—a distinction which he formulated succinctly in these terms: " P o u r lui,
l'ceuvre; pour moi, Ie m o i " ("For him, the work; for me, the self''). We should mention
the introductions written to translations of Valéry's works b y critics from several
countries: Octave N a d a l ' to the prose poems; Fergusson's t o the plays, Stevens to
the dialogues, Auden's to the Analects; and, most valuable of all, I think, T. S. Eliot's
to the a r t of poetry. Eliot's essay is the last of five in which he attempted to come to
grips with his contemporary. As early as 1920, he had taken issue with a statement b y
Valéry concerning philosophical poetry as it was formulated in the "Avant-propos a la
Connaissance de la Déesse". Four years later, in 1924, he wrote his "Brief Introduction
to the Method of Paul Valéry" which, then, in highly appreciative fashion, looked at
the interrelationship of tradition and individual talent in Valéry's own work, seeing him
as the "completion" and "explanation" of Symbolism. I n 1946, a year after the French
poet's death, he composed an homage entitled " L a Lecon de Valéry", his tribute to an
intelligence which, despite what Eliot terms its "profoundly destructive, even nihilistic"
climate, continued to create b y way of a "desperate heroism which is a triumph of
character". Then, in 1948, his " F r o m Poe to Valéry" discussed " t h e most interesting
development of poetic consciousness anywhere" over the previous hundred years,
which culminated, he says, in " t h e extreme awareness of and concern for language
which we find in Valéry". Finally, the comments of 1958 in t h e Collected Works show
the will to take Valéry's measure one last time. They praise him as the epitome of t h e

18* 275
European poet of his age: ''Valéry will remain for posterity", he writes, " t h e represen-
tative poet, the symbol of the poet of the first half of the twentieth century — not Yeats,
not Rilke, not anyone else". Eliot does not, however, refrain from critieism, warning
against the dangers inherent in the sharp distinction between poetry and prose, dancing
and walking, which involved Valéry in the dilemma of separating the idiom of poetry
from t h a t of ordinary speech. Even more central is a reference to the fact t h a t Valéry
never offers in his theoretical writings any criterion of seriousness, any response to t h e
question of how the poem "is related to the rest of life in such a way as t o give t h e
reader the shock of feeling t h a t the poem has been to him, not merely an experience,
b u t a serious experience", an event t h a t "has entered into and been fused with a
multitude of other experiences in the formation of the person t h a t the reader is devel-
oping i n t o " . The objection is a crucial one Valéry might have answered bluntly b y
saying t h a t the reader's experience is essentially a matter of digestion, for he profits
in respect to his alimentary needs, his capacity to do justice to what is set before him;
ór he might have referred to the essential complexity of a good poem, which calls on t h e
whole reader—intellect, emotion, sensuousness—in order to state a complete thought,
a rounded apprehension. Yet, though such answers fail to satisfy, Eliot observes,
we can in no way impute a lack of seriousness to Valéry's poetic achievements.
With the Cahiers in hand, plus the published writings, we have the exceptional
testimony of a poet and thinker who was formed b y Symbolism yet impolled to make
of it an explanation and a rule; to spell out for himself, in all its consequences, his m y t h
of " p u r i t y " . One is reminded of Gide's early statement: "If the world is not as you
dream, you must dream it according to your desire". An examination of the system of
the mind articulated in the Cahiers will show more clearly the drama of this sensibility,
this pathos t h a t is not merely cultivated in a Symbolist mode, b u t is deeply feit a n d
finely stated. Valéry published, in 1939, a poem conceived and sketched out in 1892
or thereabouts, worked at again in 1908, revised in 1917, and placed it in Mélange
alongside fragments written fifty years later: Sinistre, a visionary ballad t h a t depicts
the despair incurred b y the loss of faith against which the rest of his work is, I think,
clearly a reaction. I t begins with naming an hour of crisis:

Quelle heure cogne aux membres de la coque

Ce grand coup d'ombre où craque notre sort?
Quelle puissance impalpable entre-choque
Dans nos agrès des ossements de mort?

The Valéry who had been an avid reader of Bateau ivre adapts certain elements of
Rimbaud's imagery to an experience of tempest, Satanic revolt, shipwreck, the deca-
syllables insistently faithful to a sense of foreboding. The last lines, however, end on
a vision worthy of Baudelaire: the figure of Christ is seen in a dance of death, taking
with him a whole familiar world as he disappears:

J e vois le Christ amarré sur la vergue;

Il crie a mort, sombrant avec les siens,
Son ceil sanglant m'éclaire cet exergue
U n grand navire a péri corps et biens!

276
 Let me recall that we find in the first notebook a few words without further ex-
planation: "Pour avoir frólé une fois bêtement les abîmes de l'esprit . . . " ("For having
onee skirted like a fool the abysses of the mind"); and that Valéry's Apollo compares
his granting of the gift of poetry to the implacable way a thunderbolt strikes a mountain
— "comme une cime est choise de la foudre". Valéry did touch the abysses, and ex-
perience the lightning, of which his Cahiers and poetry bear the oblique trace. Formalist
he sought to be, and so he was in noble, if poignant, fashion, in order to escape an
agitation too much with him. We see him, then, as the uniquely intense locus of his
own divisions, in whom we value more and more, against the background of an initial
cleavage within the self, a dimension and a relevance that are, indeed, not of one
country or of one time.

277
 DENIS DONOGHUE

YEATS: THE QUESTION OF SYMBOLISM

It is to be assumed, to begin with, that Yeats was slow in attending to the sounds
emanating from France. In comparison with Joyee, Pound, and Eliot, he was provincial
in that respect; he was so busy consulting his own feelings that he had little time or
energy to spare for other objects of interest. So far as other literatures were concerned,
he was neither precocious in seeking them nor omnivorous in receiving them. There is
no evidence that he heard with any excitement the good news brought from Paris, at
least until about 1895, when it could no longer be ignored or taken for granted. If he
had feit inclined to keep his ear close to the ground of France, he could have done so
without any great strain upon his linguistic competence. English translations and
imitations of the French poets were readily available. I mention only the following as
indications that a young Irishman unskilled in the foreign languages might yet have
caught at least a few echoes of the modern poetry of France: from George Moore's
Flowers of Passion (1878) and the Confessions of a Young Man (1888), in which Moore
gave an account of Mallarmé's salon and a translation of the Frisson d'hiver: T. Sturge
Moore's translation from Rimbaud in The Dial (1892); Arthur Symons's translations
from Verlaine in Silhouettes (1892); John Gray's translations from Rimbaud in Silver-
points (1893). Perhaps it would have been too much to expect that a young poet trying
to find his way in the world should have spent much spirit in attending to Charles
Ricketts and pursuing the messages which Ricketts received from Félix Fenéon and
others. 1 Such messages appear significant in retrospect, but a poet with much on his
mind cannot easily distinguish between news that is likely to stay news and rumor that
will be dispelled by tomorrow's rumor. A general consideration is that Yeats was
notably sluggish in his reception of the French poets, and that he would hardly have
made the effort at all but for the stimulation afforded by Symons's company. His mind
was not, in fact, experimental; it knew only too well what it liked and was not disposed
toward novelties of perception. Besides, it spoke English with an Irish accent, so it had
to go through the long, embittered process of coming to terms with Ireland; then, as
now, an unanswered question. The burdens of feeling which, for brevity's sake, we can
identify as Sligo, Dublin, and London, were already heavy enough to be going on with.
Yeats had more on his mind than the stimulation of a few weeks in Paris: his problems
could not be solved in Dieppe. If Symons is important in Yeats's story, it is mainly
1
For the material in this paragraph I am indebted to an exceptionally informative dissertation
by M. Jerusha McCormack, The Person in Question: John Gray: A Biographical and Critical Study
(Brandeis University, 1973).

279
because he introduced into Yeats's sensibility at a crucial moment a certain intonation,
not the pure French of Paris, not even pure Mallarmé, b u t reverberations congenially
impure; mistranslations, if one insists upon saying so, b u t mistranslations perhaps more
stimulating to an Irish poet than the real thing.
F r o m the a u t u m n of 1895 to the following spring, W. B . Yeats shared with Arthur
Symons a flat at No. 1 Fountain Court, in the Middle Temple, London. Their conver-
sations have not been recorded, except in snatches. I t is known t h a t t h e y discussed
Maud Gonne and the relation between passion and poetry. One assumes, they talked
of the trial of Oscar Wilde and the difference it would make to the already difficult
relation between artists and their audience. Yeats found in Symons an ideal conver-
sationalist—meaning an impassioned listener. " H e had the sympathetic intelligence of
a woman", he reported many years later, " a n d was the best listener I have ever met". 2
Symons returned this handsome compliment in dedicating to Yeats The Symbolist
Movement in Literaturè, first published in 1899 b u t already forming itself in Symons's
mind in 1895. I t was a Parisian book, not only because Paris was, as Walter Benjamin
called it, the capital of the nineteenth century, b u t because Symons's mind was ani-
mated b y the impressions of the city, its music halls, the anecdotes of Verhaeren and
Maeterlinck which Symons brought back from Paris as gifts for Yeats. 3 "Whatever I
came to know of Continental literature I learned of him", 4 Yeats acknowledged, another
compliment returned when Symons, speaking of the French Symbolists in his dedication,
described Yeats as " t h e chief representative of t h a t movement in our country". 5
I t is generally agreed t h a t what Yeats learned of Continental literature, either from
Symons or anyone else, was slight; he was a poor linguist. B u t it could be argued t h a t
he had very little to learn; he was already half-way toward Symbolist procedures b y
instinct, as the early poems show. He was writing, from desire, poems not very different
from those the Symbolists were writing to a program. Conversations with Symons
confirmed him in his feeling t h a t those early poems, however fragile they might even-
tually appear, were notations in the spirit of the age, so far as t h a t spirit was Parisian.
Symons described Symbolism as " a literature in which the visible world is no longer a
reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream". 6 The poets were attempting " t o
spiritualize literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of ex-
teriority". 7 Mallarmé's principle, according to Symons, was: " t o name is to destroy, to
suggest is to create". 8
And the most subtle instrument of suggestion was r h y t h m , "which is the executive
soul". 9 Bringing Yeats through the translation of Mallarmé, therefore, Symons sustained
him in the belief t h a t he was not alone in the world, t h a t he, too, would witness t h e
trembling of the veil. For the moment, then, it was enough. When Yeats spoke of sym-

2
3
W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London, Macmillan, 1972), p . 36; cf. ibid., p . 87.
W. B . Yeats, Autobiographies (London, Macmillan, 1961), p . 193.
4
5
Memoirs, p . 36.
Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London, Constable, 1911), p . 5.
6
Ibid., p . 4.
7
Ibid., p . 8.
8
9
Ibid., p . 128.
Ibid., p . 129.

280
 bols, he had French authority to associate them with the condition of trance, t h e ulti-
mate liberation of mind from the pressure of will, a sense of timelessness, and the corre-
sponding rhythms. I n " T h e Symbolism of Poetry", asking "what change should one
look for in the manner of our poetry", if readers were to accept the theory " t h a t
poetry moves us because of its symbolism", Yeats answered t h a t in such a change
the new poetry would cast out "descriptions of nature for the sake of n a t u r e " , as
well as vehemence, opinion, the moral law, and "energetic r h y t h m s " . " W e would
seek out", he said, "those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are t h e
embodiment of the imagination, t h a t neither desires nor hates, because it has done
with time, and only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty". 1 0 I t is
permissible to think t h a t the poet in this spirit is more concerned with the sensation
of gazing t h a n with t h e beauty or the reality upon which he gazes. Reality a n d
beauty, in t h a t formulation, are b u t the occasions of the gaze; or, if t h a t is too
severe, alternative names for the condition of trance to which the gazing soul
aspires. At any rate, t h e gazing is not for the sake of anything gazed upon; t h e
act is internal, its value is measured b y internal consequences, the concentration of
consciousness as a value in itself. Reality is likely to be compromised b y the attention
which it ostensibly attracts: the mind is not really directed upon its official object.
Sartre has argued in his preface to Mallarmé's Poésies t h a t Mallarmé's devotion to t h e
imaginary arises from his resentment of reality, and the poems written in t h a t mood
are symbolic acts of revenge: the poet's words are designed to undo the work of t h e
first Creation, the poem being a second and higher version. Yeats's early poems do not
propose to destroy reality, unless we find such a desire in their determination to escape
from the given world to islands of elsewhere. Their happiness is always sought in another
country, where the Muse's law is the only writ t h a t runs. Hugh Kenner has remarked of
Yeats's early poem, He Remembers Forgotten Beauty, t h a t the language proceeds, like
Mallarmé's in many poems, by systematic digression from the poem's formal structure. 1 1
The formal structure, the sentence upon which the poem appears to depend, can indeed
be disentangled from the net of subordinate clauses, b u t only b y an effort alien to the
spirit of the poem. The poem asks to be read in a more accommodating fashion; we are
discouraged from inquiring how the grammar works, or what verb goes with w h a t
noun; the reader is to allow himself to be entangled, and to submit to a language in
which the digressions are richer t h a n the formal business, the sentence. The conclusion,
then, is t h a t the sentence stands for the reality principle, a n d t h a t to Yeats it is a t best
a necessary evil, a ball-and-chain, tolerable only to t h e extent t o which its force is
thwarted. The digressions, the subordinate clauses, are insubordinate, a n d t h e y have
the effect of depriving language of the nominative power in which empiricists delight;
they t u r n the poem into a place of shadow and suggestion. The empirical world, sus-
tained in its exorbitance by the naming power of language, the strict application.of name
to thing, is now made to appear blurred, rich only in the atmosphere which qualifies it;
it is not allowed to assert itself. The result of reading the poem as it asks to be read is
10
W. B . Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London, Macmillan, 1961), p . 163.
11
Hugh Kenner, "Some Post-Symbolist Structures", in Literary Theory and Structure, eds
Frank Brody, John Palmer, and Martin Price (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1973), p . 388.

281
that beguiling phrases stay in the reader's mind, but the sentence is forgotten; the
pleasure principle is dominant in the form of reverie, and reality must do the best it
can for itself, with little acknowledgment from the poet.
This theme has been highlighted only to emphasize Yeats's first notion of Sym-
bolism, that it effects a blessed release from time, from the "malady of the quotidian",
that it enables a poet to emigrate to happier lands, fictive places responsive to desire
and imagination.
Reality exists, like sentences and names, only to be circumvented. A symbol may
be a noun, but it imposes little or no restriction upon the suggestible mind which re-
ceives it. "Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World !" is mostly a line of nouns, but the
nouns are valued only for the latitude of their associations; the one privilege they are
not allowed to claim is that of setting up strict categories or demarcations to which the
reader's mind is forced to confine its attention. So even if symbols continue to be con-
sidered as nouns, Symbolism becomes a verb, a rival act of creation which subverts the
original one. That is, Symbolism is comprehended, for the moment, in the terms in
which Symons and Yeats recited it.
It is more congenial to think of symbols as natural forms or events which have
acquired special significance, a special aura, from the ancestral feelings gathered around
them. Symbols can be recognized as certain unconscious commonplaces, significances to
which one recurs because of long association or because of kinship of feeling between one
situation and another. The symbolic aura is assumed to be the result of many genera-
tions, consanguinities of feeling which enact themselves by a law entirely natural; the
reader hopes to share in those ancestral feelings, but does not presume to invent them.
It is only by courtesy and somewhat unwillingly that the poet is allowed to engage in a
similar enterprise from his own resources, and he may be accused of pretentiousness, as
Eliot accused Blake and Yeats, if his efforts have an air of calculation or insistence.
Still, we admit that a poet may do some of the work by himself; he may resort to certain
words which begin as images but which acquire a certain radiance from the largesse
with which the poet uses them; as Yeats resorted to Sato's sword in Meditations in Time
of Civil War, and to the tower in several poems. With luck, these images become sym­
bols, and they are read on the page as if they were written in italics. Perhaps one can
describe the process, except for its luck, by saying that an image becomes a symbol on
being touched by value or significance not attributable to its own set. For example: an
event in narrative may be viewed as a moment or a position along a line, straight or
crooked, and then become crossed by another line of value from another source. Each
line is a set, a paradigm. But the event which occurs at the point of intersection between
two sets is an image in both; its duplicity constitutes its symbolic force. Interpreted in
one set, it declares itself unrestrained by that interpretation; it is part of the other set
as well. When the image is in the process of becoming a symbol, it assumes a double
potency; its allegiance expands, as if answerable to both idioms, ready to participate
in both sets of relations. This marks its freedom and its suggestiveness; we have a sense
in attending to it that there is no point at which its force can be said with certainty
to have come to an end. There is an analogy here with other occasions, too: identification
of a particular person, and then discovery of a type of personality which he embodies

282
without exhausting; when there is an assumption of chance or contingency, and then
there emerges a sense of the participation of a seemingly arbitrary event in a pattern
or rhythm of recurrenee, so that it reverberates in time and appears fateful in its
character; or the seemingly natural event reveals the traces of human intervention in
the form of consciousness. In these instances there is a point of intersection where the
individual event expands to fulfill several obligations of meaning, far beyond the call
of a single duty in that respect.
This makes again something like the old-fashioned distinction between allegory
and symbolism, where allegory is thought to proceed by parallel lines which never meet
and can only be translated from one idiom into another; while the symbolic event
presumably enfolds its meaning and cannot be translated into any other terms. White-
head's account of Symbolism is for this reason not entirely satisfactory. "The human
mind is functioning symbolically", he says, "when some components of its experience
elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its
experience. The former set of components are the 'symbols', and the latter set consti-
tute the 'meaning' of the symbols. The organic functioning whereby there is transition
from the symbol to the meaning is called 'symbolic reference'".12 To make this a more
satisfactory account, one should interpret the eliciting process in such a way as to blur
the otherwise too sharp distinction between a symbol and its meaning; if, for instance,
one spoke of the symbol not as a thing, foliowed by its meaning, but as an act barely
séparable from its consequence. The symbolic act is unitary, it does not divide itself
or set limits to its force; only by a retrospective and somewhat mechanical process can
one presume to say where the act ends and its consequence begins, and even in saying
so much one knows that the act is injured by the imposition of alien categories.
It would be preferable to speak of Symbolism in terms of action, because the con­
cept of meaning can be considered as dissociated from time, but action is helplessly
temporal; and this is as it should be. One should not conspire too readily with a literary
theory which has purity in mind. Symbolism plans presumably to evade reality, and
most particularly the reality of time, the inescapable Mondays and Tuesdays, but the
plan acknowledges time as the governing dimension and only seeks to elude it. Indeed,
thinking of Symbolism, one must hold in mind simultaneously two desires which, if
taken bluntly, may appear to contradict each other. When the presence or the activity
of asymbol is registered, it marks a moment in time in which the world of objects is
reconciled to the desires of the spirit: object and subject are folded in a single party, and
this is happiness. It is true that in such a moment the subject is first among two forces
only ostensibly equal, but this does not destroy the happiness of the reconciliation.
The second desire must also be registered, however, the desire that such reconciliations
be prolonged, that they never end, though we know they are merely momentary and
cannot be prolonged. There is no structure, according to the Symbolist esthetic, within
which they could be retained. If Symbolism appears today a peculiarly vulnerable form
Qf art—and beautiful for that reason—the main consideration is that it exhibits a

12
Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1928), p. 9.

283
radical disaffection from time as from an alien element or an alien action. Reconciliation
with time, according to such a prescription, can only be a momentary release, a stolen
kiss, because such moments are surrounded b y a void on each side.
The Symbolist finds nothing but void in the latitude of time; it is as much as he
can do to catch an instant in which an event in his imaginary set is touched b y an event
in the historical set, and the two events coalesce, becoming one. The "dissociation of
sensibility" described by Eliot, upon a hint by Rémy de Gourmont, is a condition in
which the mind's reconciliation with time cannot be looked for or counted on except in
glimpses; as a general felicity, it has become impossible, according to Eliot's thesis.
Hence the moral justification of living according to the imagination for all it is worth: if
imagination a n d reality happen to join hands from time to time, t h a t is good fortune
beyond the reach of prediction.
B u t one must take the matter somewhat more strictly, to consider what is meant
when it is said t h a t Yeats started out as a Symbolist and ended as something else.
Specifically, there were scruples which prevented him from making his entire art with
Symons and the Symbolists; the scruple was present, more often t h a n not, right from
the start, even though it was suppressed, in the early years. So one ought to proceed
more consecutively and see what happened.
I n "The.Symbolism of Poetry", Yeats says t h a t "all sounds, all colours, all forms,
either because of their preordained energies or because of long association, evoke in-
definable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain
disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions". 1 3 And in
"The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry", he speaks of t h e Great Memory as " a dwelling-
house of symbols, of images t h a t are living souls". 14 The aura associated with the symbol
marks for Yeats the presence of the supernatural in the natural; if he believed in any-
thing, he believed in reincarnation. The souls of the dead were understood as inhabiting
places.sacred because of t h a t residence, mountains "along whose sides the peasant still
sees enchanted fires". 15 Yeats's evidence for these fancies is not a theory of the occult,
it is the fact t h a t certain images and certain places have long been "steeped in emotion",
and sacred for t h a t reason. I n the essay on magie he writes t h a t "whatever t h e passions
of men have gathered about becomes a symbol in the Great Memory, and in t h e hands
of him who has the secret it is a worker of wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils". 1 6
The poet is therefore a mage, an adept in secret b u t traditional knowledge: Yeats is
hoping to establish between subjectivity and inherited symbols the kind of relation
which Eliot proposed between the individual talent and tradition, a relation of discipline
in the sense t h a t if you want tradition you must work for it, if you want symbols you
must attend to them.
The poet must become an alchemist of the word if he is t o escape from t h e tautology
of himself. Symbols, inherited rather t h a n invented, mediate between the individual
consciousness, which would otherwise be solipsist, and the given world, which would
13
Essays and Introductions, pp. 156-157. Some of the following paragraphs draw upon material
published
14
in another form in my W. B. Yeats (New York, Viking Press, 1972).
15
Ibid., p . 79.
16
Ibid.,p. 114.
Ibid., p. 50.

284
otherwise be, for all time, alien. Symbols are a t once given and created; given, b u t given
b y creative souls not unlike our own. A race is a communion of such souls. Yeats speaks
of the Symbolist poet as we might more naturally speak of the mage: "The poet of
essences a n d pure ideas", he says, "must seek in the halflights t h a t glimmer from symbol
to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all t h a t the epic and dramatic poet finds of
mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstances of life". 17 The Symbolist fills our
minds "with the essences of things, and not with things": his instrument is r h y t h m ,
presumably because h u m a n feeling, which seeks release in words and is outraged b y the
poor release it finds, sways to rhythm as to music. " I n art, r h y t h m is everything",
Symons wrote in 1898, a pardonable exaggeration in a critic of Mallarméan persuasion.
W i t h Yeats in mind, therefore, and especially the early Yeats under Symons's
rhetoric, it is well for us to understand t h a t Symbolism is the poet's form of magie, ex-
cept t h a t what the mage does consciously the poet does half consciously and half b y
instinct.
The ancient secret is common to both disciplines. A mage believes he can do what
a Symbolist does, but deliberately. Their activities are so congenial, one to the other,
that their double presence in the poets of "the tragic generation" is entirely n a t u r a l ;
two forms of the same impulse, to command a spiritual power, like an ancient a r t not
quite lost. Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia was one of Yeats's sacred books,
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound another; their joint presence in his mind was a choice,
not an aberration. Magic was congenial to Yeats's mind for many reasons, b u t especially
because it exerted the heuristic power of language, the common grammar of mage and
poet. There is a passage in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms where Cassirer says t h a t
"all word-magic and name-magic are based on the assumption t h a t the world of things
and the world of names form a single undifferentiated chain of causality and hence a
single reality". 1 8 But the names are evocations, not labels affixed peremptorily to
objects. This goes some way to account for the incantatory note in Yeats's hieratic
style, where his lines are more readily acceptable if we take them as rituals, prescrip-
tions, or interdictions than as secular utterances delivered from a high horse. The basic
assumption is t h a t souls do not die and therefore may be evoked: "The dead living in
their memories are, I am persuaded", Yeats says, "the source of all t h a t we call instinct,
and it is their love and their desire, all unknowing, t h a t make us drive beyond our reason,
or in defiance of our interest, it may be". 1 9 Correspondingly, the anima mundi is not
merely a store of images and symbols, it is what a race dreams and remembers. The
great soul may be evoked b y symbols, b u t spirits are not mere functions of ourselves;
they have their own native personalities, or so Yeats thought. The natives of the rain
are rainy men. So the best reading of the anima mundi is t h a t it is the subjective cor-
relative of history, a nation's life in symbols; it is not our invention, b u t it may respond
to our call, if like the mage we speak the right words. Yeats found in Blake's Milton a
figure or an action to represent the process b y which these symbols are engendered:

17
18
Ibid., p . 87.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven,
Yale 19
University Press, 1953), Vol. I. p . 118.
W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (London, Macmillan, 1962), p . 359.

285
 When on the highest lift of his light pinions he arrives
At t h a t bright Gate, another Lark meets him and back to back
They touch their pinions, tip tip, and each descend
To their respective Earths and there all night consult with Angels
Of Providence and with the Eyes of God all night in slumbers
Inspired, and at the dawn of day send out another Lark
Into another Heaven to carry news upon his wings. 20

This figure Yeats interpreted as meaning t h a t man gains spiritual influence in like
fashion: " H e must go on perfecting earthly power and perception until t h e y are so
subtilized t h a t divine power and divine perception descend to meet them, a n d the song
of earth and the song of heaven mingle together". 2 1
True, these songs are agreeably vague, and perhaps they are both Songs of Myself.
In the Symbolist tradition, as in the Idealist tradition for similar reasons, the exemplary
act is the contemplation of one's own mind, like Mallarmé watching himself in a mirror
in order t o think. I n Yeats, contemplation registers the mind moving within its own
circle, gathering its strength in a symbolic act, purged of every impurity. Dance is its
embodiment, its truce with earth and time. The subtle language within a language
corresponds to the self-delighting, self-appeasing gestures of the dancer, a sensuous
metaphysic within the physical body. The emblem for this is Mallarmé's Hérodiade,
gathering everything into the artifice of the dance, annihilating the world for t h e sake
of her own image. To quote it in Symons's version, which Yeats recited and praised in
The Tragic Generation:
And all about me lives b u t in mine own
Image, the idolatrous mirror of my pride,
Mirroring this Herodiade diamond-eyed.

Mallarmé's virgin is crucial in the mythology of Yeats's dance-plays, and especially

his Salomé play, A Full Moon in Match. Quoting Symons's translation, Yeats said,
"Yet I am certain t h a t there was something in myself compelling me to a t t e m p t creation
of an a r t as separate from everything heterogeneous and casual, from all character a n d
eircumstance, as some Herodiade of our theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow
moving luminous circle". 22 There is here an almost complete esthetic for a Symbolist
theatre: the dancer, like the mind, moves b y her own sweet will, and in the climax of
the play disengages her force from character and circumstance; the stage becomes a
luminous circle answerable to the mind, and everything is transfigured in the dance.
Yeats gave another version of this condition in A Vision, the perfection of subjectivity:

The being has selected, moulded and remoulded, narrowed its circle of living,
been more and more the artist, grown more and more "distinguished" in all pref-
erence. Now contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where
every beloved image has bodily form, and every bodily form is loved. 23

20
William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, (London/New York, Oxford Uni-
versity
21
Press, 1966.) p. 526.
22
W. B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, vol. I, ed. John P . Frayne (London, Macmillan, 1970), p . 394.
23
Autobiographies, p . 321.
W. B. Yeats, A Vision, 2nd rev. edn. (London, Macmillan, 1962), p p . 135-136.

286
 But Yeats has moved surreptitiously here from Mallarmé to Dante, remembering
the "perfectly proportioned human body", and the admission of body and bodily
motives qualifies the otherwise pure Symbolism of his theatre. The qualification is
extreme in The Death of Guchulain. But for the moment, it is enough if one recognizes
t h a t Yeats 's symbolism, which owes much to Shelley, is turned toward the theatre b y
Mallarmé. Mallarmé's theatre is not Nietzsche's, and the Japanese Noh theatre differs
from each, b u t for t h e moment Mallarmé is enough. The program outlined in "Crise
de vers" established the procedures of Symbolism, so far as one needs them in reading
the early Yeats. Mallarmé is describing the modern motive—to retain nothing b u t
suggestion—and he tells how this may be done:

Instituer une relation entre les images exacte, et que s'en détache un tiers aspect
fusible et clair présenté a la divination. 24

In this context, the chief characteristic of a Symbolist poem is t h a t the third aspect
disables interpretation except insofar as the interpreter aspires to divination; since
the images live b y action rather than by knowledge, they refuse to be translated. This
refusal gives them their esoteric aura, as of a secret life they live; they attract the at-
tention of the interpreter while repelling any attempt he might make to explicate them.
The poet's imagination establishes these images and the relation between them, then
keeps its secret, casting out everything t h a t is not itself. The process is described in the
elegy In Memory of Major Robert Oregory as "our secret discipline/Wherein the gazing
heart doubles her might". T h a t is to say, the Symbolist sees not with the eye b u t with
the mind's eye, narrowing the luminous circle for greater intensity. At a late stage in this
process, the imagination is ready to transfigure the world in its own image. "Gazing"
is therefore a technical term in Yeats because its visual force is internal and subjective.
Yeats distinguishes between the gaze and the glance: the glance is objective, adminis-
trative, as when the eyes of a civil servant look upon a world to be controlled or possessed,
a world in which subject and object are sharply distinguished and names are attached,
with undue confidence, to things; the gaze is internal and secret, as in Yeats's reference
to "vague Grecian eyes gazing at nothing". To gaze is to set one's mind dancing in its
own circle until reverie passes into trance.
When one speaks of Yeats as a Symbolist, then, one speaks of him in association
with Symons, Mallarmé, Shelley, Pater, and other writers for whom the mind, in its
exemplary moment, hovers on the outer edge of consciousness, swaying to a r h y t h m
which leads it toward the condition of trance. B u t Yeats retained a certain scruple and
much misgiving even while he worked, b y instinct or design, to an ostensibly Symbolist
program. He was presumably discontented with an esthetic which h a d no hope of
prolönging the reconciliation between symbol and time, between consciousness and
experience. He wanted the latitude of allegory with the radiance of symbol; or t h a t
is one way of putting it. The symbol was valued for its depth, its ancient lore, its end-

24
Mallarmé, CEuvres complètes, p . 365; Mallarmé, trans. Anthony Hartley (Harmondsworth,
Penguin Books, 1965), p . 169.

287
lessness, as if b o t h above and below the finite condition. B u t it was not enough: one
still had to live in the ordinary world among confusions of time and feeling. W h a t
Yeats sought was a dynamic relation between time and timelessness and it is generally
agreed t h a t the majesty of such poems as Sailing to Byzantium and Among School
Children depends upon the achievement of a just relation between those dimensions;
between " t h e young in one another's a r m s " and the "artifice of eternity". The imagi-
nation mediates between the two worlds because it has the rights of a citizen in each.
This is not strictly in the Symbolist program, but it is crucial in the enterprise of Yeats 's
art; he could not transcend the limitations of Symbolism until he had registered, with
fuil commitment, the extent of the imagination's reach, its self-possession in both
worlds. Still, the accommodation of time and eternity was not achieved in a day.
There is a middle term between the Symbolist Yeats, at one extreme, and, at the other,
the Yeats who made his a r t from the roughage of daily experience, chance, choice, and
history. The middle term is legend, which Yeats sometimes called m y t h ; one may think
of it as situated between the unseen world of Symbolism and the indisputable world
of fact and time.
The text needed for this middle term is a passage in "The Trembling of the Veil",
where Yeats explains t h a t he was not content with "an international art, picking stories
and symbols where it pleased":

"If Chaucer's personages," he says, had "disengaged themselves from Chaucer's

crowd, forgot their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications
became each in t u r n the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had after split
into their elements and so given birth to romantic poetry, must I reverse t h e
cinematograph? I thought t h a t the general movement of literature must be such
a reversal, men being there displayed in casual, temporary contact as a t t h e Tabard
door. I had lately read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and though t h a t where his theo-
retical capacity had not awakened there was such a turning back: b u t a nation
or an individual with great emotional intensity might follow t h e pilgrims, as it
were, to some unknown shrine, and give to all those separated elements, and to
all t h a t abstract love and melancholy, a symbolical, a mythological coherence".
"Might I n o t , " Yeats asks, "create some new Prometheus Unbound; Patrick or
Columcille, Oisin or Finn, in Prometheus' stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-
Patrick or Ben-Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology
t h a t marries them to rock and hill?" Finally, he says t h a t "nations, races, and
individual men are unified by an image, or bundie of related images, symbolical
or evocative of the state of mind which is, of all states of mind not impossible,
the most difficult to t h a t man, race, or nation; because only t h e greatest obstacle
t h a t can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity." 2 5

These sentences are quoted to show t h a t before Yeats could incorporate in his art
the rough worlds of O'Connell, Parnell, Kevin O'Higgins, " t h e a t r e business, manage­
ment of men", he had to s t a r t at the beginning, with a sense of those images upon which
mythological coherence is based, even if most of the images were oniy half-remem-

25
Autobiographies, pp. 193-194.

288
bered, if remembered at all. He could not go in a rush from the imaginary to t h e real;
he needed a mediating term. The Celtic legends which he recited and dramatized were
invoked to enforce an elaborate net of associations and fidelities, corresponding to what
Burke called "prejudice", the instinctual responses of a race; what Whitehead called
"our vast system of inherited symbolism".
The trouble is t h a t it is not vast enough, and t h a t it is falling away. I t is probably
true t h a t we can never have enough symbols, if what we want in our lives is density
and range of feeling. W. H . Auden has reflected upon the impoverishment of our
symbols as one of the ehief forms of our penury. So, while it is easy to say t h a t Yeats's
recourse to Celtic legend as the subject of his early art was misguided, an indulgence of
nostalgiaanddream—sincemostof his audience had forgotten those legendary figures,
if they had ever received them—still, in such matters one never knows, there is no way
of knowing for sure t h a t a symbol is dead or t h a t someone's spirit cannot be roused to a
sense of what it shares with others by a passing cadence or a dimly remembered name.
Yeats proposed to set before Irishmen not an international art but " a n Irish literature
which, though made b y many minds, would seem the work of a single mind, and t u r n
our places of beauty or legendary association into holy symbols". 26 I n poems, plays,
and stories, he p u t his circus animals on show: Conchubar, Cuchulain, Fergus, Caoelte,
Oisin, the Fooi, and the Blind Man. Such figures were congenial to him for many rea­
sons, congenial especially to his Symbolist affiliation, because their legends were
suggestive b u t not overbearing. Legends present themselves for an interest largely
intrinsic, b u t they do not claim to compel the reader, as fact and time compel him;
they offer themselves to his feeling, but they do not make demands upon his belief; no
one has ever feit himself intimidated by a legend, as he has feit himself intimidated b y
a fact. The stories which Yeats recited, partly received from Standish O'Grady and the
nineteenth century translators, were therefore easy on his spirit; they let his mind
dance while he attended to them; they did not browbeat him, they beguiled his mind as
the lore of neo-Platonism and Swedenborg beguiled it, b u t they did not press hard upon
it. In fact, the legends allowed him to apply them to his own poor case, so t h a t when he
wrote of Oisin "led by the nose through three enchanted islands", he wrote of himself
and his own enslavement. In The Circus Animals' Desertion, he confesses as much,
saying of Oisin:

B u t what cared I t h a t set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride? 27

And in the next stanza the experience of writing The Countess Cathleen is intertwined
with Yeats's longing for Maud Gonne, as he watched her tearing herself a p a r t in fanati-
cism and hate. I am saying, then, t h a t the legends which allowed Yeats's mind t o move
freely and suggestively along their margins also allowed him to find their analogies in
his own life; they gave him a terminology which he was free to apply and, applying it,
to move from legend into history, his own history, b u t history nonetheless. I n t h a t

26
Ibid., p . 254.
27
W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London, Macmillan, 1962) reprint edn., p . 391.

19 Balakian 289
sense, a mythology reflects not only its region, as Stevens said, but the experience of
the mind t h a t receives it.
This is consistent with the beliefs Yeats expressed when magic was his theme. " I
believe in three doctrines", he says, "(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting,
and t h a t many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single
mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and t h a t
our memories are a p a r t of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. (3) T h a t
this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols". 2 8 Clearly, the great mind
and the great memory are subjective equivalents of history; they are loyal to individual
feeling as history is loyal to the calendar. So E d m u n d Wilson was right when he said,
in AxeVs Castle, t h a t Yeats was intent upon discovering symbols which would stand for
"the elements of his own n a t u r e " or which would seem to possess "some universal
significance". 29 I would say and rather than or, because the symbols which appealed to
Yeats were those which issued from a sense of his own experience and, after much wan-
dering, flowed back into t h a t experience. The difference between a symbol and a fact is
t h a t the symbol is willing to be surrounded by an aura of personal feeling, different for
each mind t h a t contemplates it; the fact tries to insist t h a t it be taken on its own severe
terms, and remains impervious to any but the most fictive act of the mind t h a t receives
it. There is a famous passage in Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance which
appears to teil against this distinction, where he says t h a t external objects dissolve in
our reflection and analysis until they become nothing more than "impressions, un-
stable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness
of them". 3 0 B u t even if this were true, it would require the force of reflection and anal­
ysis, the gemlike flame, to make those sensations possible, and the external objects
would resist t h a t flame, waiting for it to die. B u t symbols do not resist the mind; they
are willing to be dispersed and re-formed; they are hospitable to our feeling, they know
t h a t they have had many lives and are not yet exhausted, they die only when there is
no longer a personal feeling to receive them. This explains why Yeats hoped, as he said,
to find everything in the symbol. I think he hoped also to lose himself there, committing
his feelings to their verbal fate. He was willing to live in a state of becoming, b u t only
t h a t he might, in the poem, achieve his being, his perfection.
I have quoted from The Circus Animals Desertion because it is the poem in which
Yeats confesses to a vulnerable relation between symbol and his own experience. I t is to
besupposed t h a t he began with his own feeling—where else could he begin?—and t h a t
he sought to resolve its conflicts b y recourse to some of the classic legends of Irish
mythology; in doing so he devised certain "masterful images" which, he says, "grew
in pure mind". Their origin makes little difference; he comes back to t h a t question in the
last stanza. B u t before reaching t h a t point, he confesses t h a t he was enchanted b y the
dream itself. One assumes t h a t the dream means desire, so far as it has established itself
in the symbolic world to which it aspires. Or perhaps it means t h a t desire has been

28
Essays and Introductions, p . 28.
29
30
Edmund Wilson, AxeVs Castle (New York, Scribner's, 1936), p . 48.
Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (New York, 1919), p . 194.

290
transformed, that it has been given permanenee and inexhaustibility in the form of
art:
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.31

This is not to be taken as final, but may be associated with the "secret discipline"
of In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, where the gazing heart doubles her might by
bringing to bear upon her experience such concentration, purely internal, that the ex-
ternal object is indeed virtually dissolved, and feeling is exhilarated by a sense of its
own power.
It is well known that this indulgence is a scandal to writers of a different persuasion;
it is the character of Symbolism which even now constitutes an outrage, especially for
writers who feel that life is tolerable only if we live, with whatever difficulty, among
facts deemed indissoluble. This is what Ezra Pound had in mind in Canto 83 when he
asserted against Baudelaire and Yeats that paradise is not artificial, that Baudelaire's
hymn to the hieroglyphics of dream and symbol is perverse. If paradise exists, Pound
appears to say, it exists in fragments of fact, such as excellent sausage, the smell of
mint, and Ladro, the night cat. Pound would not deny that it exists in our sense of
these facts, but he would insist that the facts come first and stay indisputable to the end.
And then he teases Yeats:

And Uncle William dawdling around Notre Dame

in search of whatever, paused to admire the symbol with Notre Dame
standing inside it.32

The point is well taken, so far as it smiles upon Yeats's tendency to dissolve the
external object in favor of his Symbolist imagination, the enchanting dream: "in search
of whatever", since this effect is possible only by vacancy, gazing, taking one's eye off
the object. Pound is asserting that the given world, such as it appears even to common
imaginations, is more durable than the artificial bronzes of Symbolism, it stands forth
in its own right, bodied against the golden bird and the hieroglyphic dream of "Byzan-
tium". Pound's position is clear: we should lay aside our dreaming and try to make
sense, preferably historical sense, of the given world; we should put our house in order,
rather than replace it by a castle in the Symbolist air. Perhaps this explains why. Pound,
hostile to Symbolism because of its collusion with subjectivity, endorsed Imagism in
its stead, grateful for its ostensible objectivity, The image is newly invented, while

31
Collected Poema, p . 392.
32
Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London, Faber and Faber, 1954), p . 563.

19* 291
the symbol, being old, is too tired to resist. The image, in Imagism, represents the poet's
self-denial, his refusal of ancestral.resonance; the image is hard, the symbol soft. This is
substantially the critique which D. H . Lawrence, too, directed against Yeats. "We are
such egoistic fools", he wrote. "We see only the symbol as a subjective expression: as an
expression of ourselves. T h a t makes us so sickly when we deal with t h e old symbols:
like Yeats". 3 3 Lawrence's position is given even more specifically near the end of Women
in Love, when Ursula intervenes in the obnoxious discussion of art between Gudrun
and the sculptor Loerke, denouncing their assumption t h a t the world of a r t is inde­
pendent of the real world. "The world of art is only the t r u t h about the real world,
that's all—but you are too far gone to see it". 3 4
The same esthetic is implicit in the Lincoln Cathedral chapter of The Eainbow;
t h a t the cathedral, however, intensely it is seen and registered, is not to be dissolved
into a sequence of impressions or treated as a mere expression of ourselves. Cathedrals
which have weathered so much ought to be able to withstand Walter P a t e r ' s attention.
Stephen Dedalus knew as much, reading the "signatures of all things". "Then he was
aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against
them . . . Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? . . . See
now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end". 3 5 Finally,
I quote a few lines from Charles Tomlinson' ssequence "Antecedents, his meditation
upon the joys and sorrows of Symbolism":

The white mind holds

An insufficiency, a style
To contain a solitude
And nothing more. 36

I quote these diverse passages to register variant readings of experience, in one

degree or another hostile to Yeats's reading, so far as t h a t latter reading m a y be de-
scribed as Symbolist. Hostility to Symbolism often takes a benign form, a regret t h a t
it could not succeed, reality being there all the time without you, waiting for you t o
tire of your excess. To Tomlinson and other poets, Symbolism in its French forms was a
cul de sac, and the only way out was back. I t is a familiar argument. B u t it would be
wrong to present Yeats as if he were Mallarmé's pupil in all things, or merely a more
robust Symons. Very few of Yeats's poems are written from a purely Symbolist mind,
t h a t mind which sets consciousness to devour the world, filling t h e void with itself.
There are very few poems in which Yeats is willing to let mere life die so t h a t conscious­
ness may reincarnate itself in the poems. One comes back to his doublé motive: on the
one hand, to give consciousness every privilege; on the other, to respect every value in
life which is not attributable to consciousness. The Symbolist cannot forever escape
the fear t h a t life for him is a tautological circle, t h a t the seer merely sees himself in

33
D. H. Lawrence, Gollected Letters, ed. Harry T. Moore. (London, Heinemann, 1962), Vol. I,
p . 302.
34
35
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969), p . 485.
36
James Joyce, Ulysses (London, Bodley Head, 1947 reprint edn.), p . 34.
Charles Tomlinson, Seeing is Believing (New York, McDowell, Obolensky, 1958), p . 49.

292
everything he sees, t h a t everything dissolves in the flow of his consciousness. The true
Symbolist is content with that, but Yeats is not. There are moments in which he is
satisfied with whatever the subjective will chooses to do, however, destructive the result;
but there are other moments in which he is satisfied with nothing short of the t r u t h ,
even if it asserts itself as independent of his will.
These rival allegiances are brought into a dynamic relation by the theatrical force
of his imagination, its delight in conflict for the energy it creates, and there is good
reason to think his poetry was saved by t h a t pleasure.
Against symbol, therefore, one should place history, meaning b y this ambiguous
term, for the moment, whatever the imagination recognizes as distinct from itself and
finally indissoluble. History in that old-fashioned sense means not only the past as
more or less successfully resisting our sense of it, but the usual, whatever comes from
the chance of things and not from the imagination's choice; in A Dialogue of Self and
Soul Yeats calls it simply "life", and the rhetoric of t h a t poem favours it, at the end.
I t may be thought t h a t at this stage he has reneged on Symbolism entirely, forgotten
his French. In 1937 he wrote to Dorothy Wellesley of these matters, saying of Mallarmé
that he "escapes from hijstory", while "you and I are in history", though he means
"the history of the mind". Roger Fry's translation of Mallarmé, Yeats said, "shows me
the road I and others of my time went for certain furlongs . . . I t is not the road I go
now, but one of the legitimate roads". 3 7 But even this is not the whole story. Yeats
was never willing to allow history to press upon him as a dead weight: his mind would
wrestle with fact, as the dialogues and plays show, but only with live fact, still open to
change and greater life. In his Diary of 1930, he says t h a t "History is necessity until
it takes fire in someone's head and becomes freedom or virtue". 3 8 This seems the right
note on which to leave the question; nothing of the poet's old allegiance is disavowed,
but old motives are incorporated in a stronger esthetic, animated by the idiom of
conflict and theatre. Yeats is attending to time, "the cracked tune t h a t Chronos sings",
as well as to the ethereal music of consciousness.

37
W. B. Yeats, Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (London, Oxford
University Press, 1940), p . 135. Letter of May 4, 1937.
38
W. B. Yeats, Explorations (London, Macmillan, 1962), p . 336.

293
 R U T H Z. T E M P L E

E L I O T : AN ENGLISH SYMBOLIST?

Eliot as a Symbolist can best be approached through his French sources. Here t h e
groundwork has been laid in a meticulous French thesis by Edward J . H . Greehe en-
titled, T. S. Eliot et la France. This was published late enough (1951) to take account
of Eliot's whole poetic oeuvre, 1 early enough for the author to consult the poet. The only
other vue d'ensemble is Taupin's pioneer and still valuable study L'Influence du Sym-
bolisme francais sur la poésie américaine de 1910 à 1920 (1929). A few articles on special
topics add something and will be mentioned where relevant, b u t more helpful are t h e
perceptive remarks found in the best Eliot studies (e. g. Matthiessen, Gardner, Eliza-
beth Schneider). 2 Every Eliot scholar is immeasurably indebted to Donald Gallup for
his impeccable bibliography and, no less, for his two essays on the indispensable facts. 3
Believing, as Eliot did from the first, t h a t the poet should exert his individuality
through tradition, he has acknowledged his poetic masters graciously and often. H e has
set himself to understand, through his own situation, the nature of poetic influence and,
prodded by interviewers, he has dealt with special cases. We must, therefore, start with
what he said. In 1950 (his poetic work, as we now know, finished), speaking before an
audience at the Italian Institute, Eliot developed the whole question of how a poet
learns his craft, using himself as exemplary.
The passage of Laforgue is crucial:

Of Jules Laforgue, for instance, I can say t h a t he was the first to teach me t h e
poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech. Such early influences, the influences,
which, so to speak, first introduce one to oneself, are, I think, due to an impression
which is, in one aspect, the recognition of a temperament akin t o one's own, and,
in another aspect, the discovery of a form of expression which gives a clue t o t h e
discovery of one's own form. These are not two things b u t two aspects of t h e
same thing. B u t the poet who can do this for a young writer, is unlikely to be one
of the great masters.

The next poet named is Baudelaire: what Eliot says should deter us from claiming
too much for a Baudelaire influence:

1
I am not including the last two plays, for obvious reasons.
2
Schneider's article deserves much more notice than it has received. "Prufrock and After:
The Theme
3
of Change", PMLA, 87, 5 (October 1972), pp. 1103-1118.
Donald Gallup, "The 'Lost' Manuscripts of T. S. Eliot", TLS, November 7, 1968, pp. 1238-
1240, (repr.: Bulletin of New York Public Library, 72 (December 1968), pp. 641-672, and T. S.
Eliot and Ezra Pound: Gollaborators in Letters (New Haven, Wenning/Stonehill, 1970).

296
 I think t h a t from Baudelaire I learned, first, a precedent for t h e poetical possibi-
lities, never developed by any poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid
aspects of the modern metropolis, of the possibility of fusion between t h e sordidly
realistic and t h e phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of t h e matter-
of-fact and the fantastic.

Besides this lesson—"That, in fact, the business of the poet was to make poetry
out of the unexplored resources of the unpoetical"—Baudelaire gave him "half a dozen
lines out of the whole of Fleurs du Mal"; and . . . "his significance for me is summed
u p in the lines: Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rèves, / Où le spectre en plein jour
raccroche le passant . . . "
Finally, there are the major poets, to grow up to whom is a lifetime's task — Shake-
speare, Dante, Homer and Virgil. And this, of course, brings Eliot to the heart of his
discourse, i. e. his many debts to Dante, the most permanently operative of all poetic
influences on him. 4
T h a t these are the poets named as masters—and no others—should give some
direction to the pursuit of Eliot as Symbolist. To Baudelaire, of course, the Symbolists
owed many elements of their esthetics.
Those elements t h a t derived from Poe and first captivated Baudelaire, then Mal-
larmé, and lastly Valéry were analyzed by Eliot (in a lecture first given in France and
repeated in America in 1948) in a spirit ranging from incredulity to detachment. 5 At no
time did Eliot profess adherence to any article of Symbolist theory as such, and very
rarely does he use the term Symbolist. 6 On the subject of Baudelaire's poetry, Eliot is
both confused and confusing. As early as 1921, writing on a topic he recurrently pur-
sued, (i.e. the "lesson" of some writer or other), he found Baudelaire's lesson to be t h a t
"All first-rate poetry is occupiedwith morality . . . "7 What interests Eliot is not t h e
poetry b u t the beliefs; in the third essay on Baudelaire (1930), these are measured b y
the standard of Dante and found wanting. Baudelaire is a later and more limited
Goethe. 8 (Goethe, we know, was not one of Eliot's heroes). B u t the significance Bau­
delaire had for The Waste Land is far from negligible. I t is what Eliot is pointing to in
the paragraph just quoted and it reinforces the far more important "lesson" of Laforgue:
the necessity of making poetry out of the unpoetical.
Immature poets imitate, said Eliot, 9 yet he also said t h a t to Laforgue he owed
"more than to any one poet in any language". 1 0 Laforgue taught him to liberate his

4
Eliot, "Talk on Dante", (delivered at Italian Institute), Adelphi, 27 (1951), pp. 106-114.
(repr.: To Criticize the Critic, London: Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 125-135.
5
Lecture held at the Library of Congress, November 19, 1948; subsequently published in
The Hudson Review. 2, I I I (Autumn, 1949), pp. 347-352. Although this is a late essay, the earlier
ones are not different in tone.
6
Eliot took pains, at various times,-to dissociate himself from the notion of art for art's sake,
which is, of course, fundamental to Symbolism. Cf. Eliot, "Baudelaire" (1930), Selected Essays:
1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932). Subsequent references to this collection will be
given in abbreviated form (SE).
7
Tyro, 1 (Spring, 1921), p. 4. Quoted in Greene, T. S. Eliot et la France (Paris, Boivin, 1951),
p. 108.8
9
"Baudelaire" (1930), SE, pp. 336-337.
"Philip Massinger" (1920), SE, p . 182.
10
Title essay of To Griticize the Gritic (1961), p . 22.

296
verse from conventional patterns. From Laforgue he took themes, rhythms, language
level, mood, and individual lines. As he learned his craft, prompted by Laforgue's
example, he worked out his poetic theory, and for that, too, he was deeply indebted to
the French poet. Thus, if Laforgue may be called a Symbolist, it follows t h a t Eliot must
be one, at least for t h a t stage of his oeuvre which was Laforguean. Laforgue was his
first master. Eliot's earliest college poems let us see why he needed help and why he
later had so little good t o say of Swinburne and the nineties. Who can bear to be re-
minded of his outgrown errors? From the bouquet: "Fresh flowers, withered flowers,
flowers of dawn, . . . t h e flowers t h a t no man knows. /Their petals are fanged and
red . . . Have you no brighter tropic flowers/With scarlet life, for me"? arises an au-
thentic period aroma. 1 1 This is what nineties minor verse is taken (with some injustice)
to be. A relapse into the Salomé-nineties manner (though with rather more audacious
imagery—from "decadent" French?) occurs even after the encounter with Laforgue,
echoing the latter's liberated rhythms. l t s diagnostic title is The Death of Saint Nar-
cissus.
On a Portrait shows promise. Published in 1909, it postdates Eliot's discovery of
Laforgue; yet it, too, might be a Symons or, perhaps a J o h n Gray poem, for it has
elements (not usually conceded to nineties verse) borrowed from the French, whom,
after all, the nineties poets had discovered before Eliot. Indeed, they must have re-
vealed these poets to Eliot: the wavering rhythm of Verlaine, the modern city scene
(Baudelaire), the mixture of dream and reality, the understated drama, the precise and
arresting diction. Eliot did not learn these novelties from the nineties poets, b u t one of
them did point the way to France. Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(1899, rev. 1908) described the new current of influence running from France to England
to sweep away the stuffy remnants of Victorianism well before Pound and Eliot began
their better-known borrowing.

I myself owe Mr. Symons a great debt [wrote Eliot.] B u t for having read his book
I should not, in t h e year 1908, have heard of Laforgue and Rimbaud: I should
probably not have begun to read Verlaine, and but for reading Verlaine, I should
not have heard of Corbière. So the Symons book is one of those which have affected
the course of my life. 12

The results can begin to be detected in such lines as: "Beyond the circle of our
thought she stands. | The parrot on his bar, a silent spy, | Regards her with a patient
curious eye".
The portrait entitled Woman with Parrot is a thing seen, and the poem is a preface
to Portrait of a Lady, which is said to be a portrait of the lady in whose Boston drawing
room hung the Manet painting. 1 3 With Nocturne begins the group of three poems model-

11
These lines are taken from "Before Morning", "Circe's Palace", and "Song", respectively in
Poems Written in Early Youth (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), pp. 19, 20, 22, resp.
The poems which follow are also in this collection.
12
Review of Baudelaire and the Symbolists by Peter Quennel, Griterion, 6 (January 1930),
p. 357.
13
Conrad Aiken, Ushant: An Essay (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1952), p . 186.

297
led after Jules Laforgue (the second, so subtitled, is an adaptation). Here there is the
cluster of effects t h a t had stirred Eliot to imitation: a rather facile irony of tone and
situation, literary allusion, somewhat dislocated rhythm, rhyme contrived for comic
effect. Spleen is a preface to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; had it been seen thusly,
we might have been spared some of the more off-center commentary on t h a t poem.
The following is the last stanza:

And Life, a little bald and gray,

Languid, fastidious, and bland,
Waits, h a t and gloves in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute.

T h a t Prufrock is a mask for Eliot as he sees himself is confirmed b y the recollections

of his friends: "A . . . rather dapper young man, with a somewhat Lamian smile . . . "
writes Conrad Aiken; he adds t h a t although Eliot was shy, he frequented Boston de­
butant parties as a discipline. 14 Many Laforguean echoes in Prufrock have been pointed
out (and some have been invented). The first image, t h a t of the evening sky, is very
possibly suggested b y the mood of Couchant d'hiver, created through words and meta-
phors of sickness and of pallor. 15 The Hamlet passage, which P o u n d wanted dropped
out, b u t Eliot rightly insisted on including, is enriched by Laforgue's Hamlet (Les
Moralités légendaires) and his recurrent clown or (wise) fool. Prufrock disclaims any
resemblance to Hamlet only, of course, to assert it. He is no extrovert courtier, no
Polonius, but the indecisive Prince who can decide to play the Fool for his own ends,
conscious of his role and of himself playing it. Hamlet-Prufrock is the dreamer who can
create the fog conceit and who has heard the mermaids singing.
Matthiessen considers Prufrock Eliot's most Laforguean poem: Greene believes
t h a t it gathers u p all the Laforguean influence and gets rid of it. 16 Greene is surely
wrong. The ironic mode—achieved by means of a juxtaposition of disparate images,
and a use of the persona as deliberate disguise-—had become so much Eliot's own t h a t
these two methods would dominate his art a t least until he found a new attitude toward
reality (i.e. well after The Waste Land) and would, moreover, give him concepts for
his early and influential criticism.
Portrait of a Lady, written, like Prufrock in 1911 and also published in 1915, is
less Laforguean and announces Eliot's abiding interest in the drama. I t is not a por­
trait b u t a social comedy. Although derived from Laforgue's Autre complainte de Lord
Pierrot, which Eliot could have read in Symons, it differs from its source instructively.
The theme, i.e. the failure of communication is shared, as are the elements of character.
Laforgue's dialogue, however, simply contrasts two roles (the romantic girFs and t h e
sceptical man's) and poses a final irony:
14
Conrad Aiken, "Kling Bolo and Others", T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, comp. Richard March
and M.15
J. Tambimuttu (Chicago, Regnery, 1949), p . 20.
Laforgue, Le Sanglot de la Terre, in GEuvres complètes: Poésies I (Paris, Mercure de France,
n. d.), p. 38.
16
Greene, p . 47.

298
 Enfin, si, p a r un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,
Douce, feignant de n'en pas croire encore mes yeux,
J'aurais u n : "Ah — ga, mais nous avions D E QUOI vivre F
"C'était donc sérieux? , ,
(Les Complaintes)

Eliot has introduced t h e element of time and thus created a developing relationship;
he has painted in decor and gesture (which characterize); with extreme economy of
means he has created two persuasive individuals and has so drawn us into the "situ-
ation" t h a t engaged critics take sides for man or woman. Eliot's reading of Elizabethan
plays has begun to echo in the spoken lines. Although the poet of The Waste Land is
sharpening his linguistic a n d psychological tools, he is still Laforgue's (and perhaps
Browning's) pupil.
The poems of the slim 1917 volume, (containing Prufrock and Portrait), like those
of the 1920 collection, are relatively short, each has the unity of a portrait (or self-
portrait), a mini-drama, or an impression. There are three poems in French, composed,
Eliot said, when his poetic vein had momentarily dried up. (As we shall see, he was
always rather at the mercy of inspiration). Writing in French somehow renewed it.
These poems show, along with traces of Laforgue and Corbière, a degree of ingenuity
and a good ear — but, except perhaps for Dans le Restaurant, they read like English
(accentual) poems. The skillful imitation of Gautier is here, too; The Hippopotamus
was written, Eliot said, to discipline the excesses of vers libre.
Laforgue had furnished the corrective for Swinburne and the Swinburne strain in
the nineties. Exploiting romantic sentiment, he turned it to ridicule, yet still preserved
a nostalgic overtone—he mourns his dead marionettes—thus making the best of both
worlds.
And he showed how the prosaic, boring, urban or suburban scene—the dailiness of
life —could be made the stuff of poetry. This was the lesson of Baudelaire, too, whom
Eliot had begun to read at about the same time. From both poets he derived the cour­
age to write his own urban world into his poems—St. Louis, Boston, Paris, London—and
to declare (though much later) t h a t Matthew Arnold had been wrong: " . . . the essential
advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able
to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, a n d the
glory" 1 7 The poet who speaks here nas undergone a conversion and, one may suppose,
has come back to Baudelaire, with his vision sharpened for the horror and the glory,
These he did not find in Laforgue, or, on first reading, in Baudelaire; they are not, I
think, in The Waste Land, though the boredom is. Baudelaire has made a contribution,
b u t Laforgue is still essentially Eliot's master for t h a t poem.
The transition between Prufrock and The Waste Land is supplied by Gerontion.
How close in spirit the latter is to the longer poem is indicated by Eliot's intention to
use it as a preface. (Pound objected to this use on the basis of length.) Gerontion must
have been written no earlier than 1919, by then Eliot had his "long p o e m " a t least in

17
"Matthew Arnold", The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Charles Eliot Norton Lec-
tures) (London, Faber and Faber, 1933), p . 106.

299
mind. 1 8 The persona of Gerontion is Prufrock grown old. He has remained detached,
preoccupied with t h e loss of passion, but even more with the fragmentation of modern
society, the puzzles of history. The personal has receded in favour of the general-—the
content of his consciousness is more arresting t h a n its quality. Though The Waste Land
progresses further in this direction, Gerontion is its epitome: had the latter actually been
used as p a r t of the long poem, we might have been spared some of the irrelevant com-
mentary on those further "Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season".
At this point, some of the materials are available for a reconsideration of The
Waste Land in the stream of Eliot's developing work, though the final account of the
poem as process is still to come. Judging from the manuscript published in facsimile,
it appears t h a t the long poem Eliot spoke of was to be carved out of what Helen Gardner
calls "working materials of very varied kinds" and even "drafts of unpublished poems
and unfinished fragments . . . ". She rightly warns against calling this mass the Ur-
Waste Land. 1 9 (I shall call it the Waste Land matrix.) In t h a t early material no Tarot-
Grail pattern was discernible—if indeed one is discernible even in the finished poem.
We can only deplore with Eliot the fact t h a t the notes he supplied ("that remarkable
exposition of bogus s'cholarship") to eke out a slender volume should have led so many
critics off into a mythological wilderness or on " a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and
the Holy Grail." 2 0 Quite another pattern was discernible in the matrix and, though
somewhat obscured by excisions, it is still central to the poem; indeed, it is far more
structurally central than any Grail quest.
The clue to t h a t pattern is the epigraph from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which
Eliot had selected despite Pound's objections. (Eliot substituted the Sybil's words—thus
further stimulating mythologizers.) The Conrad passage contains Marlowe'a reflection
on the hero-villain's death:

Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during
t h a t supreme moment of complete knowledge? H e cried in a whisper a t some
image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry t h a t was no more t h a n a breath
— "The horror! the horror!"

The persona of The Waste Land, like Prufrock, walks about the streets; he is the
City man, creature of past and present, living his life again, tracing his daily itinerary—-
(Robert D a y has documented this as Eliot's own) 21 —mixing memory, desire, boredom,
and even a glimpse of glory (St. Magnus Martyr). Some scenes are observed while others
are imagined in the waste land of contemporary London, b u t in this fourmillante cité
the passerby may accost a spectre (Stetson—- "You who were with me in the ships a t
Mylae !") and the persona is given an identity which makes him an appropriate witness
of ancient as well as modern history. Tiresias, however, as Pound knew, was Eliot;
18
See Gallup, Eliot and Pound, p . 15.
19
Helen Gardner, "The Waste Land: Paris, 1922", in Eliot in His Time, ed. A. Walton Litz
(Princeton,
20
N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p . 68.
"The Frontiers of Criticism", On Poetry and Poets (New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy,
1957),21pp. 121-122.
Robert Adams Day, "The 'City Man' in The Waste Land: The Geography of Reminiscence , , ,
PMLA, 80 : 3 (June, 1965), pp. 285-291.

300
when a verb in the conditional is used to characterize the typist's behaviour, P o u n d
writes in the margin: " m a k e up yr mind you Tiresias if you know damn well or else
you dont". 2 2 As a poem of London, locus of the modern, disoriented citizen, The Waste
Land just hangs together. Pound has rightly been accused of creating unnecessary
obscurity by omitting essential connective tissue, though usually in the interest of
poetic excellence. An instance of such tampering occurs in the passage which foliowed
Mr. Eugenides in the manuscript. (Some of the lines were cancelled by Eliot himself,
but the whole is crossed out by Pound).

London, the swarming life you kill and breed,

Huddled between the concrete and the sky;
Responsive to the momentary need,
Vibrates unconscious to its formal destiny.
London, your people is bound upon the wheel !23

The structural element which Pound's excisions most seriously diminished in-
volved London life a t various times and levels in "period" styles. The matrix included
a contemporary night on the town (the town was, in fact, Boston, b u t the substance
remains universally urban), and the levée of Fresca-Belinda in couplets modelled on
Pope. There was also a shipwreck account in nineteenth-century style, prefaced b y a
short characterization of a sailor at home on shore leave who is somehow better off t h a n
the average waste-land dweller. Eliot had a fondness for the sea; the "fishmen" in
The Fire Sermon are t h e only citizens enjoying themselves agreeably. This sea story
ended with the Phlebas passage—which thus had its place in the scheme of juxtaposed
past and present. I t was P o u n d who, saving only this passage, saw it as catching u p the
drowned Phoenician sailor whose card is mentioned b y Madame Sosostris. 24 The excised
sections would have formed a series of parodies of the classical literary tradition not
unlike the "Oxen of the S u n " passage in Ulysses—passages possibly suggested t o Eliot
by his reading of t h a t book as it appeared in chapters. 25 W h a t Eliot did not need to
learn from Joyce—he had learned it from Laforgue and had been doing it himself
since Rhapsody on a Windy Night—was the interior monologue of the modern m a n
observing the modern city and himself in it. 26 Nor, I think, did Eliot pick u p from
Ulysses the notion of m y t h as organizing element for his poem, since t h a t element is
not persuasively there—though for his notes, which were addenda, he m a y very well
have done so. But even if unifying elements can be detected in The Waste Land, it is
still not a long poem. Eliot himself called it structureless. 27
22
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript. . . ed. with an introd. by Valerie
Eliot 23(New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), section I I I , p . 47.
24
Ibid., p. 31.
See Pound's reply to Eliot's letters, January, 1922, The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. P . D.
Paige25(New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p . 170.
26
Gardner, "The Waste Land", p . 93.
Oddly enough, between Ulysses and The Waste Land—the novel and the poem were pub-
lished in the same year, and both remain key pieces in modernism—the connecting link is La­
forgue. I t is one of the curiosities of literature t h a t Joyce claims to have learned the interior mono­
logue—so essential an element in Eliot's poem—from a novel published the same year as La-
forgue's posthumous collection of verse, Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupes.
27
In an interview with Donald Hall published in the Paris Review, 21 (Spring-Summer, 1959),
p. 54.

301
 The relevance of these matters to my inquiry is their bearing on Eliot's develop-
ment as poet. At this stage, I do not think he had got beyond the poetic manner, tone,
content and, most important, the poetic theory which he had constructed from La-
forgue and the Metaphysicals (with some help from Baudelaire). The long poem was no
p a r t of t h a t theory or practice. Baudelaire, indeed, endorsed or adopted Poe's stricture
(following Coleridge) against the long poem, a decision which was subsequently echoed
by Mallarmé and Valéry. 28
Eliot begins to work out a rationale for the long poem after the composition of
Burnt Norton, when he has begun to plan his Four Quartets. At t h a t point we recognize
t h a t , however, much he may wish to diverge from Symbolist theory, in this respect he
does not manage t o do so. The Four Quartets are even more artificially assembled t h a n
are the parts of earlier poems. Eliot's poetic inspiration does not run to long poems.
To the Paris Review interviewer who asked whether any minor poems were actually
sections carved out of longer works (e.g. The Hollow Men), Eliot replied:

Eliot: Oh, those were the preliminary sketches. Those things were earlier.
Interviewer: You, seem often to have written poems in sections. Did they
begin as separate poems ? I am thinking of Ash Wednesday, in particular.
Eliot: Yes, like The Hollow Men, it originated out of separate poems. As I
recall, one or two early drafts of Ash Wednesday appeared in Commerce and else-
where. Then, gradually, I came to see it as a sequence. That's one way in which
my mind does seem t o have worked throughout the years, poetically—doing
things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering
them, and making a kind of whole of them . . . But I couldn't apply t h e word
"intention" positively to any of my poems. Or to any poem. 29

That it seemed a puzzle to solve, fragmentary, and left its author's " i n t e n t i o n "
unclear no doubt helped The Waste Land to achieve a certain degree of fame. I t
introduced to the English-speaking world the difficult modern poem: it omitted the
connective tissue of narrative and moral exposition; ironically juxtaposed past and
present, high and low, lyric and colloquial language; broke the bondage of strict meter
and the regular pattern of rhyme; introduced the sordid city landscape a n d the un-
poetic occurrence, and enriched a contemporary context with tags from songs and lines
borrowed from other poems—ever in foreign languages. All these, of course, were
Symbolist procedures, and were thus not new. B u t in England, where Symbolism, de-
spite the efforts of George Moore, Yeats, and Symons, had remained largely unknown,
they first created a sensation and then a movement. This occurred in 1922. Two years
earlier, Eliot had published his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood ; this event
had attracted even more attention in some quarters. 3 0

I am aware tnat my position on this matter is unorthodox. The case for structural and other
debts to Ulysses has been ably argued by Robert A. Day, Joyce's Waste Land and Eliot's Unknown
God, Literary Monographs, Vol. 4, ed. Eric Rothstein (Madison, Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1971)
(published
28
for the Dept. of English at the Univ. of Wisconsin).
Whether or not Mallarmé or Valéry practiced the long poem is another matter, discussion of
which29is not to my purpose here.
30
Interview, Paris Review, pp. 54 58,.
F . R. Leavis claims (in an essay in his collection Anna Karenina and Other Essays), t h a t
Eliot's poetry won his attention for the criticism; to which F . W. Bateson objects: "Well, it may

302
 No one has thus far satisfaetorily accounted for Eliot's considerable influence as a
critic. H e h a d no systematic program, as Pound had for Imagism and Gourmont or
Moréas had for Symbolism. The Sacred Wood in no way resembles a manifesto and has
no apparent unity of theme or subject. The topics of the essays give no hint of moder-
nity, ranging as they do from Euripides through Dante and some Elizabethans to
Swinburne. The "Imperfect Critics" are an extraordinary galère comprised of Swin-
burne, George Wyndham, Charles Whibley, Babbitt, and P a u l Elmer More. I n one
essay Eliot takes issue, rather feebly, with Valéry on an orthodox Symbolist position
(viz. philosophy has one goal, poetry another) b u t does so to the express end of ex-
alting Dante. Only three essays give promise of being theoretical, one of these, " T h e
Perfect Critic", largely betrays its promise. Even the author, writing a preface to the
1928 edition, finds in the book only one unifying focus, i.e. the problem of the integrity
of poetry, which is scarcely a new problem; and his own position on that, as he defines
it (well after the event), does not take us very far, though it is sound Symbolist doctrine:
" . . . when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not
another thing".
Why, one may well ask, was The Sacred Wood such an epoch-making collection of
essays ? Toward the end of his career, Eliot professed a certain degree of bafflement a t
finding himself regarded as one of the professed ancestors of modern criticism. 31 W h a t
seems to have happened is t h a t certain key phrases incidental to the essays caught on.
Perhaps not unassisted by the vagueness of their presentation, b u t also and notably b y
their evident application to Eliot's poetic method, 32 they became cruxes of modern
critical thought and have subsequently provoked endless debate. They include: the
relation of originality to tradition; the dissociation of sensibility; the objective correl-
ative; and poetic impersonality. The last two are ingredients of Symbolist theory and
none are original with Eliot (though this is not to say t h a t Eliot knew he was borrowing
them). All four terms are essentially staples of Eliot's poetic method and are congenial
to his poetic temperament. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), rich, un-
organized, and confusing, contains the heart of the matter. In their beginnings all
poets borrow, but Eliot made borrowing a poetic principle, and this essay provides its
rationale. At an impressionable stage Eliot had come upon Laforgue and the English
Metaphysical poets (through Grierson's edition of Donne of 1912, and his Metaphysical
Poets33) and had begun to read Elizabethan plays. Much later, Eliot generalized t h a t for

have been so at Cambridge". At Oxford, however, where Bateson was an undergraduate, the critic
was discovered first; according to Bateson, "The Sacred Wood was almost our sacred book".
Bateson, "T. S. Eliot: 'Impersonality' Fifty Years After", Southern Review, 3, n. s. (Summer, 1969)
pp. 630-639.
31
32
"The Frontiers of Criticism ,, (1956), On Poetry and Poets, p. 117.
The latter, together with the urgency of the advocate, is the explanation Eliot gave in his
1961 review of his critical career. He also observes there —and this should be borne in mind by
commentators hot for theoretical certainties—that "what I wish to suggest . . . is t h a t these phrases
may be accounted for as being conceptual symbols for emotional preferences". Title essay (1961)
of To 33Griticize the Critic, pp. 16, 19. This essay was delivered as a lecture in America in 1961.
Ibid., pp. 21-22. Here Eliot also mentions having studied Donne's poetry at Harvard.
I t has been pointed out that Donne was "revived" in America long before Eliot's essays directed
attention to him in England.

303
an English or American poet in 1908 "the only recourse was to poetry of another age
and to poetry of another language". 3 4 He had accomplished both: practice had pre-
ceded theory. Having found "masters" so important in his own search for novelty,
and inclining b y temperament and training (Babbitt at college, fortified b y Benda and
Maurras) to classicism, he readily enjoined upon other poets the necessity of shaping
themselves to a tradition. Thus, he had provided for both novelty and continuity, the
original talent and tradition. In this early essay there are prophetic phrases for his
whole oeuvre: " . . . we shall often find t h a t not only the best, but the most individual
parts of [the poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert
their immortality most vigorously". (When Eliot adds t h a t a poet must be set "for
contrast and comparison, among the dead", T m afraid we hear the voice of Matthew
Arnold, t h a t irrepressible ancestor who speaks through Eliot at his least h a p p y mo-
ments). Here, too, is the famous (or by now infamous) dictum: "The progress of an
artist is a-continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality". 3 5 The issue
issimple: how does the poet compose and with what? Eliot goes on to cloud it through
the use of an imprecise term: " . . . the poet has not a "personality" to express,
but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which
impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways". 3 6 Some critics
have taken " m e d i u m " to mean what it should mean here: the material the poet
uses—words. Professor Bateson believes t h a t Eliot means literary modes like poetry
or the novel. 37 B u t the context precludes such an interpretation. Eliot is awkwardly
trying to state what he has very much at heart, namely, the way he composes poetry.
For light on this we must turn to "The Metaphysical P o e t s " (1921):

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalga-
mating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular,
fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences
have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell
of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new
wholes. 38
The fragments coalesce in a "medium", the mind, or as he might better have said,
the creative imagination of the poet. There is nothing especially new here—Coleridge
had said t h a t all other men's worlds were the poet's chaos—except for the examples
chosen: disparate (unpoetic) experience from the modern world, t h a t world which was
revealed to Eliot as poetically viable by Baudelaire and Laforgue. B u t these fragments

34
" E z r a Pound", Poetry (Chicago), 68 (Sept. 1946), p . 326. (repr.: An Examination of Ezra
Pound,35
ed. Peter Russel (New York, 1950).
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), SE, p p . 4, 6-7. (Orig. publ. in The Sacred
Wood (1920). My references are to the Selected Essays. The similarity of the central idea of this
essay to t h a t expressed in J. L. Lowes's Convention and Revolt in Poetry (1919) is intriguing. Lowes
came to Harvard too late to have been Eliot's teacher, but Eliot may nevertheless have read the work
in question — as weknow he read and commented on Lowes's The Bood to Xanadu (1927). Where-
as the poet's essay has had wide currency, the scholar's book has only had a limited readership.
36
37
I b i d . , p . 9.
Bateson, Southern Review, loc. cit., p. 633. A few sentences further on, he translates "me­
dium"38 into "persona", but his interpretation of the latter is not the one I offer.
SE, p . 247.

304
 are represented as impinging upon the poet's mind; how is this mind to be separated
from the poet's personality? Laforgue had shown how this might be accomplished
through the creation of a persona, a device happily conceived to lift from poetry the
intolerable romantic burden of personal confession: the detestable moi. (Parnassian
and Imagist poets found other ways of banishing personality.) The persona conveniently
permitted confession without self-revelation through the use of anti-romantic irony.
Much later Eliot—who h a d condemned the irony of Anatole France and Gide, both
of whom he disliked—found a way to rescue Laforgue's irony, used, he said, " t o ex­
press a dédoublement of t h e personality against which the subject struggles". 3 9
I t would seem t h a t t h e distancing of the real subject from the poem through the
creation of an intermediate term, such as a persona, might be the substance of t h a t other
controversial term, the objective correlative:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective
correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula of t h a t particular emotion; such t h a t when the external facts
which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immedi­
ately evoked.

This definition, from the essay "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919), 40 has analogues
a good deal less cumbersome in the essays of Gourmont, Pound, and Mallarmé ("pein­
dre non la chose mais l'effet qu'elle produit"). 4 1 I t is a Symbolist concept (though
they would have avoided the word "emotion") one t h a t Eliot had discovered or verified
in poetic practice, especially Laforgue's.
The last of the key terms is the dissociation of sensibility. The question as to wheth­
er and how intellect is united to sensibility in the poet seems to arise in Eliot's mind as a
by-product of his description of the poetic process.
I n the "Metaphysical P o e t s " essay, it serves to identify the originality of those
poets he has singled out for praise. To see what he means by it we shall have to connect
it with his use of the term metaphysical. I n his essay on Marvell (1921), Eliot finds t h a t
poet to be a product of Latin culture (by his wit: "tough reasonableness beneath the
slight lyric grace"). Through a very perceptive analysis, Eliot places the poetry there

39
40
"A London Letter", Criterion, 12, no. 48. (April 1933), p . 469.
SE, p. 124. The difficulties with this term and Eliot's explanation of it are analyzed by
Eliseo Vivas, who leaves no doubt that Eliot's assertion of emotion as the stimulus to poetry, and
of emotion as that which poetry communicates marks him as a Romantic—despite his consistent
advocacy of classicism. "The Objective Correlative of T. S. Eliot" (1944), Creation and Discovery
(New41York, Noonday Press, 1955), pp. 175-189.
I t has been suggested several times—starting, I think, with Mario Praz (1950) and most
recently, as if it were a new discovery by Nathalie Wright ("A Source for T. S. Eliot's 'Objective
Correlative', "American Literature, 41 (1970), 589-591) that Eliot's source was Washington All-
sten's Lectures on Art (1850). Even Professor Wellek accepts this attribution ("The Criticism of
T. S. Eliot", Sewanee Review, (1956), pp. 398-443. I think it is doubtful. Allston's definition in­
volved the correspondance sort of symbol, i.e., a preexisting idea in the mind which can only be
experienced when the corresponding object is present and one which causes a pleasurable emotion.
This is a passive experience; Eliot's term describes the artist's active process. But the origin matters
less than the analogies, which abound before and around 1919. As Eliot's definition is far from clear,
it is difficult to say which other formula most closely corresponds to what he had in mind; but the
essence of the matter is surely a Symbolist sort of evocation and indirection.

20 Balakian 305
citing Horace and Catullus among Marvell's ancestors and, among his progeny, Gautier,
Baudelaire, and Laforgue. 42 I t has been objected t h a t Eliot incorrectly termed these
French poets metaphysical, 43 b u t the fact remains t h a t in this essay he simply attrib­
utes to them a combination of levity and seriousness—elsewhere Eliot calls it irony—
which he finds in the lineage of Marvell (and not in the English Romantics). This com­
bination they do, indeed, possess—even Mallarmé. B y identifying it, Eliot started
New Criticism on its way to isolating this trait as the indispensable ingredient of all
respectable poetry. (When Eliot contrasts "precise" Marvell with " d a y - d r e a m y "
Morris, he suggests why Mallarmé did not excite his interest while Laforgue did). 44
"The Metaphysical P o e t s " is an unmistakable case of special pleading; Eliot is trying
to find persuasive reasons for preferring these poets to their Romantic successors,
whom he abhors: " . . . the former were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find
the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling". 45
I t might be objected t h a t all poets must, of course, do precisely t h a t , b u t Eliot
seems to mean not what he says here, but rather transmuting ideas into sensations;
he thus finds Laforgue and Corbière closer to the "school of D o n n e " t h a n was any later
English poet. 46 (Not, in 1921, a particularly helpful comment, b u t true).
H a d Eliot gone no further t h a n this, he might have been allowed t h e uncon­
ventional transfer of the epithet. B u t in a contribution to a special issue of t h e Nouvelle
Revue Française ("Hommage à Stéphane Mallarmé" (1926), he seems, to change the
meaning of the label. (It is worth pointing out, by the way, t h a t the tone and content
of this essay support my contention t h a t Mallarmé was neither an important influence
on Eliot nor a congenial poet, though as an exercise in the " h o m a g e " genre—what
Eliot called dropping a grain of incense—it is more sympathetic to Mallarmé t h a n was
Eliot's custom.) Eliot begins (in the translation of Ramon Fernandez): " I l est téméraire
à moi d'écrire sur Mallarmé. Sa poésie compte beaucoup d'admirateurs et même de
fanatiques, hors de France, et particulièrement en Angleterre, qui sont mieux qualifiés
pour prendre la parole. Il me faut donc chercher une excuse". 47 His "excuse" is an
exercise in comparative literature, an a t t e m p t to consider Poe and Mallarmé in the
light of the term "metaphysical". Why he does so is clear: he says he is engaged in
writing a series of studies to define metaphysical poetry. 4 8 Thus, when called upon for a
Mallarmé piece, he will t r y to fit Mallarmé in.

42
"Andrew Marvell" (1921), SE, pp. 252, 254.
43
See, especially, the rich and well-documented essay by Haskell Block, "The Alleged Parallel
of Metaphysical and Symbolist Poetry". GLS, 4. I - I I (1967), pp. 145-159. Professor Block rests
his case on a concept of Symbolism derived from the theory and practice of Mallarmé, thus disal­
lowing44
Laforgue.
45
"Andrew Marvell", SE, pp. 258-259.
46
"The Metaphysical Poets", SE, p . 248.
47
Ibid., p . 249.
"Note sur Mallarmé et Poe", (trans. Ramon Fernandez), Nouvelle Bévue Française, 14, no.
58. (1 novembre 1926), pp. 524-526. The English text was not published. This is the only essay in
which Eliot seems to approach a perception of Mallarmé's verse. He groups Donne, Baudelaire,
Mallarmé, and Poe as poets dealing with the real world, while Blake and Rimbaud are poets who
do not.
48
(pp. 525-526).
These are, not, of course, identical with the group of essays written as reviews for periodicals
and partially collected in The Sacre l Wood. They appear to have been the Clark lectures, which

306
 Since this essay sheds light on how far Eliot understood Symbolism, it is worth
examining in greater detail. Eliot begins by admitting t h a t the term metaphysical
(which he places within quotation marks) is not fortunate, including, as it does, ba­
roque. B u t we must use the words we have and t r y to sharpen them. The sharpening
Eliot provides is a function of two immediate concerns: Dante, and the relation of
poetry to belief. Eliot's baptism and confirmation are not far off. Here he is trying, as
usual, to provide for the poets he admires even though they obviously differ. H e there­
fore introduces the term philosophical to oppose the term metaphysical and confers it
on such poets as D a n t e and Lucretius, who have a ready-made system of intellectual
beliefs on which to base their poetry, reserving metaphysical for the sceptics who use
ideas but are not committed to any particular set. Metaphysical poetry, he conjectures,
precedes or follows philosophical poetry. (Is Eliot thinking of the historical situation or,
as is so often, the case of himself as poet?) Plainly, metaphysical as used here has no
correspondence to the sense in which the term has normally been used to identify a
poetic technique. Oddly enough, the nod to baroque—as an extension of metaphysical
—was Eliot's best way out of his dilemma (had he known it) for it is easy to place Ba­
roque and Symbolist poets in the same frame of reference.
What some critics have seen as the distinction separating metaphysical from
Symbolist poetry is the former's appeal to reason; in other words, the metaphysical
poets make poetic statements as propositions whereas the Symbolists rely on nouns
and verbals (not verbs) and on evocation and indirection. There is some substance to
this distinction—but not much. Both metaphysical and Symbolist poets write obliquely,
the manner countering or shifting the interpretation of the matter; both use meta­
phor extensively, including conceit; both call upon the resources of a rich and strange
poetic vocabulary and sometimes use colloquial diction; both exploit the connotations
(sometimes in conjunction with the sound) of words; both use synesthesia and, as Eliot
says (he did not say all of the above) —both unite disparate ideas or merge ideas
with sensations to frustrate the stock response and to ensure t h a t the poem will not
" m e a n " but " b e " . I t is, of course, true t h a t not all of these techniques fit all Symbolist
or metaphysical poets. The fact is t h a t neither term is satisfactory nor, indeed, is any
group label, for poets are diverse.
By 1928, Eliot's creative involvement in the theory of poetry was over—the period
when his ideas about how the poet should work and what the results should be had
borne some resemblance to Symbolist theory. I n the "Preface" (1928) to the second
edition of The Sacred Wood, he saw the unity of the book residing in its concern with
poetry as poetry—under the aegis of Rémy de Gourmont: " I acknowledge t h a t influ­
ence and am grateful for it; and I by no means disown it b y having passed on to another
problem not touched upon in this book: t h a t of the relation of poetry to the spiritual
and social life of its time and other times." That relation he proceeded to explore, often
under the aegis of Matthew Arnold, and in a manner aptly characterized b y Richard

were delivered but never published. They are presently housed in the Houghton Library of Harvard
University and, according to Eliot's somewhat "Catch 22" stipulation, may be read, without ex­
press permission, only by someone not working on Eliot (an indication perhaps, that he was not
entirely pleased with them).

20* 307
Wollheim: " . . . Eliot, in the pursuit of a certain kind of security or reassurance t h a t
we are in no position to define, was progressively led to substitute, in his mind, on the
one hand, ideas of less content for ideas of more content, and, on the other, poorer or
softer ideas for better and stronger ideas". 49
There is an especially revealing passage in the 1928 preface, one of those parallels
between Eliot's poetic and his poetry t h a t tell us so much about how the poet faces his
art. Having explored various definitions of poetry and found them wanting, he settles
on "excellent words in excellent arrangement and excellent m e t r e " (which is fairly
close to Coleridge's "the best words in the best order" B u t this is unsatisfactory, too,
and he is forced t o conclude: "We can only say t h a t a poem, in some sense, has its
own life; t h a t its parts form something quite different from a body of neatly ordered
biographical d a t a ; t h a t the feeling, or emotion, or vision, resulting from the poem is
something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet". 5 0
The early essays had placed a certain distance between poet and poem through
the use of a persona. What is heard in the meditations of Ash Wednesday, however, can
only be the voice of the poet, since no character is given the speaker except the role of
penitent. A helpful analogy—to keep poet and poem separate in the mind of the reader
—will be the Vita Nuova. There, too, the poet's voice is heard and his subject seems to
be the experience of love:

I find in it an account of a particular kind of experience: t h a t is, of something

which had actual experience (the experience of t h e "confession" in t h e modern
sense) and intellectual and imaginative experience (the experience of thought and
the experience of dream) as its materials; and which became a third kind. I t seems
to me of importance to grasp the simple fact t h a t the Vita Nuova is neither a
"confession" nor an "indiscretion" in the modern sense, nor is it a piece of Pre-
Raphaelite tapestry. If you have t h a t sense of intellectual and spiritual realities
t h a t Dante had, then a form of expression like t h e Vita Nuova cannot be classed
either as " t r u t h " or "fiction". 51

Does this not describe Ash Wednesday, both in its matter and in its manner ? I t is
the confession of actual experience and of its intellectual and imaginative accompani­
ment so conveyed (through dream), as to become something quite other —a poem. And
when Eliot says, " B u t to me it appears t h a t the Vita Nuova could only have been
written around a personal experience", he is saying what most readers of Ash Wednesday
must have thought about t h a t poem. He then directs this inescapable inference into
the proper channels:

49
Richard Wollheim, "Eliot and F . H. Bradley: An account", in Eliot in Perspective : A Sym-
posium, ed. Graham Martin (London, Methuen, ] 970), p . 190.I should like to comment on the partic­
ular distinction of this essay. Written, though not published, at about the same time, and on the
same topic, as J. Hillis Miller's Poets of Reality (Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard
Univ. Press, 1966), it illuminates the superiority of the conventional scholarly-historical method,
i.e., chronological, documented, clear, to the structuralist approach, which takes no account of
chronology (on which Eliot always insisted), is insufficiently documented, and casually mistakes
Eliot's exposition of Bradley for Eliot's own views—thus producing a blur.
50
This is an advance on Eliot's earlier assumption t h a t whatever emotion the poet has will
be the51 reader's. See note 43.
" D a n t e " (1929), SE, p . 233.

308
 . . . the Vita Nuova, besides being a sequence of beautiful poems connected by a
curious vision-literature prose, is, I believe, a very sound psychological treatise
on something related t o what is now called "sublimation". There is also a prac­
tical sense of realities behind it, which is antiromantic : not to expect more from
life than it can give or more from human beings than they can give; to look to
death for what life cannot give. The Vita Nuova belongs to "vision literature";
but its philosophy is the Catholic philosophy of disillusion. 52

If the difficulties of his personal life were, as Eliot said, the subject of The Waste
Land, a further stage of these difficulties and an altogether new acceptance of them is
the subject of Ash Wednesday. Now a confirmed Christian, he has incurred the obli­
gation to face life in a new way. His reading of Dante, which began, he tells us, a long
while before, will have taken on a new direction, too, and made accessible the new po­
etic manner adopted from Dante, and not unknown to Symbolism: the dream vision.
Ash Wednesday, like the Vita Nuova or the Purgatorio, is the episodic account of a
spiritual pilgrimage and not, as some have said, while pondering its inconclusive end,
the simple story of a conversion. Its speaker is no longer twentieth-century man b u t
any man of any age who undertakes t h a t pilgrimage. The title signifies the advent of a
time of contrition, culminating in the Resurrection—but the alleluias are still a long
way off. They do occur in Eliot's poetry (in Little Gidding), and Ash Wednesday is
poetically as well as spiritually the turning point on the way to t h a t conclusion.
As the poet's attitude toward life has changed, so have his sources. No longer the
poet of the modern Waste Land, with its meaningless secular history, Eliot, as he re­
cords the making of his soul, turns back not only to Dante but to documents reflecting
the same enterprise, the devotional poetry and prose of seventeenth-century English
literature: St. J o h n of the Cross, the Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible.
Sermon and liturgical chant are echoed in the pattern of Ash Wednesday as they will
later be echoed in Four Quartets. Eliot is still revivifying tradition; b u t it is a narrower
tradition, given coherence by content rather than form.
Mallarmé has been named as an influence from this point onwards, b u t I think
there are no arguable grounds for such an assumption. Neither in texture nor in struc­
ture, nor indeed in the use of images, do the poems which make up Ash Wednesday re­
semble any poems by Mallarmé. Eliot's early and late poems are never shrouded in t h e
I eculiar Mallarméan ambiguity; indeed, they are always far less obscure t h a n Mallar-
mé's poems and become increasingly accessible to the same degree t h a t Mallarmé's
become increasingly arcane. At no time do they exhibit the "techniques of strangeness"
t h a t James L. Kugel has so ably delineated as essential to Mallarméan Symbolism. 53
Eliot is still using interior monologue to create a psychological and dramatic effect as
Mallarmé does not (even in Hérodiade or L'Après-midi d'un faune), he is still debating
with himself as to how one should live. If Eliot's verse is now incantatory, well, the fact
t h a t the music of verse should contribute to its meaning is no more special to Mallarmé

52
53
Ibid., p . 235.
James L. Kugel, The Techniques of Strangeness in Symbolist Poetry (New Haven, Yale Univ.
Press, 1971).

309
t h a n to George Herbert. Only one poem by Eliot seems to me to approach the poetic
organization, though not the opacity, of a Mallarmé poem. I t is also Eliot's closest
approach to pure poetry and his only spontaneously joyful poetic statement. Marina
(1930) is a dream vision, taking its imagery from the remembered scenes of Eliot's
Eastern seaboard America, a region always invested with intense and nostalgic hap­
piness in his poetry. The image is central here, elevated through its recurrent use in
Eliot's poetry to the status of a symbol: "Whispers and small laughter between leaves
and hurrying feet/ Under sleep, where all the waters meet". One of the poem's admi­
rers 54 finds fault with the repetitive passage on death. I am inclined to agree t h a t it is
a blemish, a concession to rational prose structure (the grim reality of death is trans­
cended by the vision) and possibly even a piece of self-indulgence—this kind of thing
came easily to the poet of dramatic choruses (e.g. The Rock or even Murder in the
Cathedral). Because Eliot's critics have never taken to heart his reiterated lesson t h a t to
understand is not to explicate, they have argued as to the referent of the pronoun this
("I made this, I have forgotten"); is it the speaker's ship or his daughter? Readers of
Mallarmé would know t h a t the poem is really about the ecstasy of creation. I n all pro­
bability the dream vision conveys the poet's experience, which Eliot found on the hu­
man level to approximate the mystic's vision of God, the complete selflessness of poetic
inspiration. Thus, in Marina the thing given or lent is the poem itself.
Although Eliot's devoted readers will find and admire the authentic voice in Four
Quartets, the work is surely not his masterpiece, nor is it part of Eliot's claim to being
the poet of modernism.
A few years after the publication of Four Quartets, the war just over, Valéry died.
Eliot, who was called upon to cast the grain of incense, concluded his homage with the
emphatic declaration t h a t Valéry—not Yeats, nor Rilke, nor any other figure —had
been the representative poet of the age. 55 Of course, he knew he was a contestant for the
title. If he has won it, it is because for a brief and fruitful moment Eliot, through his
poetry and criticism, effected a modulation of Symbolist into ''modern". While Valéry
continued into the twentieth century the symbolist tradition from Poe to Mallarmé
through Baudelaire, it was Laforgue who showed Eliot the way to a new movement.

54
Schneider, "Prufrock and A f t e r . . . " PMLA 87 : 5 p. 1116. The literary genesis of the vision,
namely, the recognition scene in Pericles, is described—in terms which account for its importance
to Eliot though not, of course, for the success of the poem —in a passage in Eliot's unpublished lecture
entitled, "Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist", given for the first time at Edinburgh University in
1937 (and twice repeated): "The scene becomes a ritual, the poetic drama developed to its highest
point turns back towards liturgy: and the scene could end in no other way than by the vision of
Diana". This passage is quoted by G. Wilson Knight, "Appendix", Neglected Powers (London,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 489. Knight believes that the poem is concerned with the
making of a poem and dates it by reference to his own book, which he thinks provoked Eliot to
write "a perfect commentary on those Shakespearian meanings which I had unveiled". ("T. S.
Eliot", Neglected Powers, p. 385).
56
"La Leçon de Valéry" (trans. Henri Fluchère), Cahiers du Sud (1946), pp. 75-81. (repr.:
"Paul Valéry", Quarterly Review of Literature, 3, iii (1947), pp. 212-214.) Eliot's curious relation to
Valéry (obviously not one of influence) remains to be fully studied. A good beginning has beeri
made in Francis Scarfe's excellent book, The Art of Paul Valéry (London, Heinemann, 1956), to
which little but implausible conjecture has been added by James S. Torrens in his article, "T. S.
Eliot and the Austere Poetics of Valéry", C varative Literature, 23 (Winter 1971), pp. 1-17.

310
 E z I o RAIMONDI

D ' A N N U N Z I O AND INTERNATIONAL SYMBOLISM

In The Symbolist Movement in Literature, a work t h a t played an important p a r t in

twentieth-century English poetry from Yeats to Eliot, Arthur Symons, fin-de-siècle
poet-critic and a product of estheticism, addressing Yeats and repeating what the
latter had written several years earlier in his essay The Celtic Element in Literature,
presents D'Annunzio as t h e Italian protagonist of Symbolism—of a poetics which, ac­
cording to Symons, aims a t "spiritualizing literature" and rediscovering " t h e soul of
things" in the musical a n d troubled mirror of the inner life. B u t the judgment of Symons
and Yeats, despite its undeniable value as the testimony of militants in the Symbolist
cause, has had no following in D'Annunzio criticism. Instead, D'Annunzio scholars have
thought it more reasonable and correct to speak of Decadentism with Symbolist in­
gredients of a decorative t y p e . But then there are those, like Noferi, Anceschi, and
now Luti, who have discerned in D'Annunzio's encounter with the poetics of the symbol
something more t h a n a passing flirtation. Tosi, in turn, has viewed D'Annunzio's fascina­
tion with Symbolism in t h e years 1890—1893 as a positive event, conditioned only b y
the limitations of the author's extrovert temperament. Even P r a z , in discussing Binni's
contentions regarding Alcyone, has remarked t h a t the disappearance of t h e dead weight
t h a t characterizes the most subtle Decadentism should be termed Symbolism; and
something analogous could already have been suggested by Cecchi's sinuous and sen­
sitive language, predicated on Taste, in Esplorazione d'ombra. B u t the assumption t h a t
the persistent Symbolist content of D'Annunzio's poetics is dominant, and the presup­
position t h a t in the literature of the Décadence what counts is t h e formulation of a new
system of expression, the idea and awareness of Symbolism, can lead to a more global
understanding of D'Annunzio, as Contini rightly advises. This focus would tend to min­
imize the fáctor of narcissism and the mythography of theatricality and eloquence
generally attributed to D'Annunzio.
Among early letters to Nencioni, written a t the time of Canto novo (New Song),
there is a curious allusion t o "Nature's t h o u g h t s " (pensieri della Natura) which t h e poet
states he has "studied" (studiato) for his "lyric p o e m " (poema lirico). The statement
dates from October 1881, when D'Annunzio was a t the height of a poetic activity domi­
nated by the immediacy of sensations, by the joy of a visual realism which, as Debene-
detti has observed, is a movement, an impulse t h a t moves toward t h e outer world. B u t
D'Annunzio's statement in no way accords with the logic of successful pictorial mimesis;
on the contrary, it indicates a moment of transcendence and crisis, and introduces a
complex notion of subject and object which can definitely be linked to t h e magic world

311
of Novalis and his "nature-thoughts" (Naturgedanken), The emblematic significance
D'Annunzio associates with this notion can be deduced from the writings of his R o m a n
period, when the interest of the critic and journalist focused on basic problems of inter­
pretation regarding landscape, atmosphere, and pictorial and literary realism. "Nature's
thoughts" reappear as such in a La Tribuna article (4 May, 1888), in a query: "Where is
the impression of w h a t a poet has boldly called nature's thoughts?" (Dov'è l'impressione
di quel che un poeta audacemente ha chiamato i pensieri della natura?). The query is
coupled with a demand for a "'living', true, and deep impression of a place, moment,
season, and hour" (impressione viva e vera e profonda del luogo, del momento, della stagione,
dell'ora) which would not sacrifice the "sense of mystery" b u t would express t h e "pen­
etration of the h u m a n soul into the soul of things" (penetrazione dell'anima umana
nell'anima delie cose), as desired by "a decrepit civilization's passionate tendency to­
ward an empathetic comprehension of things" (l'appassionata tendenza di una civiltà
decrepita alla comprensione simpatica delle cose). Besides the remarks of D'Annunzio the
journalist, there are the lines of D'Annunzio the poet in Poema paradisiaco, in a stanza
of the ode Nell'estate dei Morti, where the author invites his female companion to "look
a t " and to " r e a d " the " t h o u g h t s " of " e a r t h " because "never did she (the earth) express
deeper thoughts through her visible forms" (mai per le sue forme/visibili ella espresse più
profondi pensieri). There emerges a musical poetics of correspondences, of sensations
which memory reshapes into "an endless, continuous melody t h a t is almost rhythmless"
(una melodia infinita, continua, che sia senza numero quasi).
Returning to texts of criticism, there is the 1892 pen-portrait of Palizzi, 1 for whom
"the poetry of real things" suffices in t h a t "he does not seek beyond", in the "hidden
power of dreams" and of "mystery". The same is true for Pascoli, who "lacks mystery",
the "inner vision beyond the natural landscape", the evocation of what Amiel defined as
the "invisible clusters". With the inclusion of Amiel, who adds depth to t h e Neo-
Romantic line of D'Annunzio's lyrical-speculative autobiography, the concept of a
thinking acquires clearer definition. I t appears also in passages concerning t h e art of
Francesco Paolo Michetti, to whom D'Annunzio attributes precisely the ability to
capture the "invisible clusters" to " p u t within the exact lines of a form an infinity of
indistinct and hidden sensations", to depict "the obscured thought of n a t u r e " , and to
"express with energy and lucidity what she (i.e., nature) expresses in vague fashion"—
the ability of his own "physical sight" to become a "profound and continuous vision"
The person to whom D'Annunzio is really speaking is once again the author himself, as
when he portrays himself in the guise of Andrea Sperelli, whose "sight was gradually
transformed into a profound and continuous vision" while " t h e tree branches above his
head seemed to him to lift up the sky, broaden the blue, glow like the crowns of immortal
poets, and he contemplated and listened, breathing with t h e sea and the earth, calm
like a god" (i rami degli alberi sul suo capo gliparevano sollevare il cielo,ampliare l'azzurro,
risplendere come corone d'immortali poeti ed egli contemplava ed ascoltava, respirando col
mare e con la terra, placido come un dio). The image of the visionary poet, moreover,

1
See Pagine disperse. Gronache mondäne. Letterature-Arte di Gabriele D'Annunzio, coordinate
e annotate de Alighiero Gastelli (Roma, 1913), p p . 537 — 538.

312
matches that of Giorgio Aurispa when "he looked ahead and around, with an ever alert
curiosity, almost with a deliberate attentiveness, as if wanting to apprehend some
obscure thought expressed b y mere appearances or seize hold of some elusive secret".
The theme of thinking-nature expands between 1881 and 1895, in ways t h a t cannot
be characterized merely as clichés or mannerism; what is implicit in the letter of 1881
(prior to the time of D'Annunzio's Roman expériments) might be called the per­
ception of a dialectic relationship with things, a dialogue with nature not reducible to a
flow of naturalistic images. I n Canto novo2 this perception does not go beyond statements
such as the "immense poem of all things", the "immense sphinx" of " N a t u r e " and its
"sacred languages" which speak to the "pure monad, in the immense flux of matter
t h a t never dies", instinctively making use of Parnassian modes of expression in which
is crystallized a summertime diary disguised as an exotic adventure within an imaginary
forest of animals and animal-like gestures. The sensuality of Canto novo cannot, however,
be exhausted in impressionism because this sensuality requires a fantasy-filled aura
t h a t can transform it "into the sea of dreams", amid "wings of tired songs and "dreamt
silences", or a "sea of murmurs and shudders" with the "fascination of the blue".
But the Romantic appeal of dreams and distance, suggesting an obscure " m y s t e r y "
(mistero), does not envelop only t h e object. I t comes to life within the selfsame sen­
sation, in the recollection t h a t transcribes and distills the sensation like a diary entry
relived after time has passed,* in an immediacy rediscovered in figures created b y the
imagination. I n this way are produced the color impressions t h a t verge on explosion,
ranging from the abstraction of "arid yellowness", exchangeable with "yellow aridity",
to the "green n o t e " t h a t " a beautiful lemon tree in blossom sings . . . " and all with a
chromatic abundance which already conceals a presentiment of more secret harmoni­
zations, analogous indistinct vibrations, encapsulated in an impressionistic kind of writ­
ing. In Terra vergine (Virgin Earth), a work of lyrical-narrative prose, comparable to
Canto novo, this physical quality of optic responses tends more t h a n ever toward a
process of musical stratification, of emotive story-telling, and can lead to descriptions
such as: a "varied and powerful symphony of colors and scents" or a "stupendous
symphony of color"; " a pure lethargy of light"; the "opaline virginity of the sea"; the
"sonorous gushes" of light in the "morning brightness"; the "edges of distant and
luminous worlds" patterned in an unhealthy mind—a "tangle of colors, something
immense, boundless, mysterious". Communication between object and subject is es­
tablished in the landscape or setting, matter t h a t becomes rhythm, a cadence of the
gaze t h a t contemplates and remembers: "Already the reds and odors of evening poured
forth in slow waves, overwhelming all, in the pure softness of the afternoon. On the sea
the blue became pale with the greenish transparency of beryl, out in the deep it soft­
ened to an even hue of slate, it disappeared above Montecorno in a dusty wavering of
gold". 3 B u t as already indicated, the tension of the visual language does not go beyond
a compromise with Parnassian Naturalism. The "ideal phantasm of a sensation t h a t is
multiple and diffuse, rarer and loftier" which Giorgio Aurispa claims as his own discov-

2
Canto novo (Milano, 1908), pp. 129 ff. This and all following translations are the author's.
3
Terra vergini (Milano, 1908), pp. 245, 257, 267, 271.

313
ery in "composing the unknown from the known" still requires a long and unevenly
pieced-together search, although it is the necessary point of arrival for the lyrical
density of Canto novo and Terra vergine, with its content of vital humors t h a t can only
be reborn, after youth's short-lived enchantment, in the symbol and arabesque of a
musical thought, in the rarefaction of a sensuality become a metaphor of the intellect
and its state of reverie.
W h a t D'Annunzio's literary experimentation, with its intricate web of 'borrow­
ings' and 'rediscoveries' or stylistic calques continually updated by an attentive and
receptive genius, might examine, is evident in a typical page of Il libro dette vergini:
the morbid garden of Flavola sentimentale, which mirrors Galatea's shadowy and crepus­
cular soul. This fragment, which Ricciardi also has recently analyzed, discovering therein
the involute course of realism in D'Annunzio's prose, has the feverish softness of the Fin
de Siècle, the saturated and artificial atmosphere of a decaying hothouse: "Behind the
villa, in a plot of land, sickly, corpulent vegetation drowsed in the shade; there were
large, fleshy leaves of a brown bordering on purple, with a scattering of down, as if mil­
dewed; there were dwarflike networks of branches, stripped bare, similar to dead rep­
tiles and huge worms; there were flat, palegreen, swordlike blades, white-striped and
spotted like the backs of frogs. Large purple flowers were opening up cup-shaped, arising
from the earth on long tubes, without foliage; calyxes pink like human flesh were swelling
on twisted stems; deep-scarlet mouths stuck out stamina resembling tiny yellowish
tongues. The petals seemed to be coated with the stickiness of mushrooms, the involu­
cres dotted with holes were wax honeycombs. A few tulips were lazily opening u p in a
sunbeam; peonias dominated with their broad flowers laden with carmine; and round
about, in the autumn, the clematis seemed like clumps of furry spiders or clusters of
grayish feathers". 4
Il piacere is a work where archetypes of D'Annunzio's memory surface—such as
the "indistinct visions" aroused by the "voices" and "odors of the moist e a r t h " in the
midst of which "certain vague remembrances of early infancy" bloom, from the "lilies"
of " a J u n e evening" to a "cluster of nests" of swallows, while a "pink flash" followed by
the efflorescence of " a magical pink forest" lights up "through the living tissue of one's
eyelids". The convalescent's walk leads to the discovery of the abandoned garden, in
a "supernatural" light which reminds the narrator of Shelley's verse on the "paradise
of thick shades, illuminated by the flowers' glances" and suddenly reveals to him t h a t
the chrysanthemums, too, are looking at him and communicating " a n immense com­
passion and an immense sadness". Even if not developed (as it will be in Alcyone a n d
Le favilie), the theme of the eyé of things framing a still life, based explicitly on a sug­
gestion of Shelley's, is a priceless indication t h a t should be emphasized, not only be­
cause it is linked to the other essay appearing in August 1887, Nel cimitero inglese, p a r t
of which is later inserted in Il piacere, and to its garland of quotations from Shelley,
b u t especially because this theme anticipates the visionary interpretation ("something
ranging between sensation and thought") t h a t D'Annunzio will give some years later in

4
Il libro delie vergini (Milano, 1908), p. 349. See also M. Ricciardi, Coscienza e struttura nella
prosa di D'Annunzio (Torino, 1970), pp. 22-23.

314
 his Commemorazione di Percy Shelley. In the Commemoration, the English poet becomes
the "seer" who perceives "behind appearances" "what they (i.e., the appearances)
disclose" and " w h a t they conceal". Shelley is able to uncover " t h a t obscure feeling
that generates an aspiration and exertion in all things"; "he feels and reveals the hidden
life of things", " t h e soul and its mystery", in a "pantheistic penetration of the Uni­
verse". And if Shelley's poetic images derive from and illuminate one another "with
an ascendant gradation of brilliant lights", "symbols bloom in the ethereal realm of
dreams while rooted in the bowels of life". 5 The eloquence of the eulogy t h a t sets t h e
tone for the discourse does not distort the basic critical judgment, which is rather much
like Yeats' in substance a n d is particularly linked to a poetics of "vision"—a poetics of
the hidden language of "appearances" in which the attentive reader may even catch
an echo of Carlyle and Sartor Resartus.
I t is well known t h a t in his adventuresome critical explorations as reviewer and
journalist, D'Annunzio unhesitatingly combines the most diverse and heterogeneous
elements with the eclectic ease of a 'collector' who assumes possession of whatever
suits him, as long as it be fashionable and French. So he does even when speaking of
Carducci, in the well-known La Tribuna article of 9 April, 1888, where the passage,
"Words are symbols without any possibility of synonymy, symbols which yield their
splendor intact only to the artificer who can pry into their origins", is b u t a carbon copy
of one of Poictevin's thoughts in Songes ( . . . words were symbols without any possibility
of synonymy, which require t h a t their origins be pried into in order to release all of their
brilliance; in the common mouth they become encrusted with t a r t a r — a statement
Fénéon later inserted into his stupendous article on Poictevin in the Revue Indépen-
dante, November 1884-April 1885). That D'Annunzio attributes to Carducci's prose a
quality which in Poictevin denotes the style of a "chemical sensibility" (sensibilité
chimique)—at the farthest limits, as Fénéon observed, of "literature in the Goncourt
manner"—shows t h a t D'Annunzio's pastiches, however, vitiated by his delight in
superimpositions and impromptu hybridizations, always have as point of departure a
literary motive, a profound sense of his own art which measures itself against modern
authors and adapts them to itself, making them vehicles of his hidden uneasiness.
D'Annunzio the essayist carries on a dialogue with himself as well as with t h e reader.
Alongside the self-image he creates from time to time, as required by the poet's role in
a middle-class market where products become outdated and change according t o t h e
laws of fashion, he shapes another self-image t h a t escapes his control and stands as a
total sum of possibilities or intuitions, a framework of tendencies or mental structures.
For example, the review of Un poeta d'autunno (An Autumn Poet) in an 1887 issue of
La Tribuna sketches a panorama of the English lyric from Keats to Swinburne a n d the
Pre-Raphaelites, stressing the "precision and musicality" of the " r h y t h m s " (ritmi),
t h e "richness of colors and firmness of design" and the "plastic and musical" language
freed from "moralizing" and the "syllogistic format of the dissertation". The most
important fact to emerge from the critical assessment of the great Romantics contained
in this review is D'Annunzio's diffidence or deafness toward metaphysical poetry—an

5
Pagine sperse, pp. 337 ff.

315
attitude t h a t spares Shelley alone—and his implicit Positivism which is inserted into
the Pre-Raphaelite program of "strict observation of n a t u r e " . If the dream is a poetic
figure, it must show itself in the concreteness of objects and take root "in the bowels
of life" as we read in the discourse on Shelley—with " t h a t kind of deep, acute, almost
supernatural life which sometimes evokes in our spirit certain long and lovingly con­
templated images" 6 —a kind of life of which a "lyric painter" like Botticelli seems to
possess the secret.
I t is obvious t h a t the D'Annunzio of 1887 who extols the "impeccable lucidity" of
style, the "delicate and mysterious" laws of "musical sense" is above all a Parnassian,
the poet of Isaotta Guttadauro, a follower of Gautier. He has read Banville and Heredia,
Mendes and Lorrain, Baudelaire and Verlaine, as well as Flaubert, the Goncourt broth­
ers, Zola, Maupassant, and perhaps also Walter Pater. Viewed externally, this is a
constellation t h a t should not surprise us, for it is altogether in keeping with the para­
digms of estheticism behind the floriated bric-à-brac of Humbertine Rome. B u t a closer
look a t the writings of the journalist so ready to set down personal experience and hu­
mors, unusual occurrences and hypotheses, reveals t h a t in 1887 he had already discov­
ered Mallarmé's Notes sur le théâtre, a work which strikes him as an example of "pan­
ting and hiccuping style" but also of "singular" criticism, and for the first time he comes
under the spell of both the Fleurs du Mal and Spleen de Paris of Baudelaire. Aside from
an article of 10 J u n e , 1885, where Baudelaire's name is joined with Félicien Rops's
because of his "profound modernity" as a "Decadent", in a capitolo of 24 May, 1886,
D'Annunzio quotes La Chevelure: " L a langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique, / Tout un
monde lointain, absent, presque défunt, / V i t dans les profondeurs, forêt aromatique !"
—with a selection of other characteristic phrases like "mer d'ébène, noir océan, pavilion
de tenèbres tendues"; in another article (21 J a n u a r y , 1887), he recalls Le Serpent qui
danse: "A la voir marcher en cadence, / Belle d'abandon, / On dirait un serpent qui
d a n s e / Au bout d'un bâton"—and in the prosa d'arte article of 11 August, 1887, he
translates the entire poem, Les Projets, which appears along his own equally melodic
and airy narrative sequence in which Shelley reemerges. B u t perhaps the most symptom­
atic reference to Baudelaire is the one in the article of 28 J u n e , 1886, tucked away in
the 'folds' of a sentence t h a t delineates a modern kind of prose suitable to be set to
music: " a fluid, poetic prose, rhythmless, rhymeless and so nimble as to yield to all the
infinitely varied movements of music". 7 This statement, in fact, merely reproduces
(with only Baudelaire's concluding remarks omitted) what Baudelaire most desired for
his own "poèmes" and the young Debussy found so appealing, " a poetic prose t h a t is
musical, rhythmless and rhymeless, flexible and abrupt enough to be a d a p t e d to the
soul's lyrical movements, reverie's undulations, the somersaults of consciousness". 8
Reread in its entirety (including the last part, which D'Annunzio omitted, reserving it
perhaps for his own internal, secret monologues), Baudelaire's proposal of a modern kind
of writing is a way of transcending Parnassian elegance and establishing a model or
hypothesis to resolve the Naturalist impasse and recover the lyrical syntax of "rêverie"

6
Ibid., pp. 355 ff.
7
8
Ibid., p . 200.
See Le Spleen de Paris (Paris, 1946), p . 16.

316
and "conscience". This is also D'Annunzio's own aspiration as implied in his experiments
with music and his quest for a rhythm that could prolong—as Yeats said—the moment
of contemplation or fluidity of being. No wonder, then, t h a t Huysmans' Des Esseintes,
who is a mystical admirer of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, delights most in the genre of
the short prose poem.
A Bebours suggests another correlation with D'Annunzio: specifically D'Annunzio's
statement penned in 1892 which, as already noted, asks of poetry and painting t h a t they
seek "beyond" (di là) appearances, in the "mystery which only the hidden power of
music engenders around poetic phantasms". 9 I n fact, D'Annunzio's response to the
language of mimesis of objects turns out to be similar to the response of H u y s m a n s '
hero when he, vis-à-vis Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, criticizes Gautier because
the latter does not go beyond the image reflected in his extremely sensitive retina, with
the result t h a t Gautier 's prodigious mirror captures neither the " d r e a m " nor the "hier­
oglyphics of the soul"—an experience that, instead, occurs for a painter like Moreau.
However, one must add t h a t A Rebours foreshadows the Symbolists" stance toward the
Parnassians, as set down in the Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire, Jules Huret's inquiry
which appeared serially in 1891. Since d'Annunzio cannot have been unaware of such
an important literary event, one is tempted to think that, given his unfailing sense of
the timely, his critical position in 1892 reflects the experience of the French debate—
and t h a t this experience gave him essentially a pattern of development appropriate to
the motivating factors of the poetry of the Poema paradisiaco. I t is not fortuitous, there­
fore, t h a t D'Annunzk/s Neapolitan article on Pascoli begins with remarks on the Par­
nassians of France and Italy: " J u s t as the Parnassians of France derived their rich
resources of language, variety of meters, and wealth of rhymes from Pierre de Ronsard
and other sixteenth-century poets, so too these few (i.e., the Italian Parnassians) have
wanted to continue and renew traditional Italian forms linking themselves to the poets
of the stil novo and Lorenzo il Magnifico's day, b u t very rarely succeeding in infusing
modern feeling into antique verse and, besides, very rarely succeeding in obtaining from
t h a t poetry the tenuous and mysterious music which is the unknowable magic of certain
ballads and primitive sonnets wherein the symbol is hidden or enveloped in the thickest
of veils. Their labor, however, has not been useless for they have been able to instill
into poetic language something of the freshness of those pure founts". 1 0
D'Annunzio's critical writings between 1892 and 1893 can be read in the light of a
change in taste and thinking which also marks the end of Naturalism. In line with the
contentions of the new critics of the Symbolist generation—from Wyzéwa to Morice—
the reasons are as follows: the crisis of the Zolaesque novel; the postulate of a modern
art t h a t would capture "the most tenuous and fleeting waves of feeling, of thought,
and even of incoherent dreams" and rival " t h e great Wagnerian orchestra in sug­
gesting what music alone can suggest to the deep soul"; the need to "transcend the
boundaries of present reality" in the "forest of dreams, symbols, and mysteries" behind
the "shudder of the unknown". Deriving from these attitudes are: the tendency to

9
Pagine disperse, p. 552.
10
Ibid., p . 650.

317
"symbolize and therefore idealize"; the demand for a "simple and vigorous w o r d " which,
by absorbing and surmounting evolutionist Positivism, could explore the "shadows of
the u n k n o w n " in the "great flood of new ideas, sensations, and feelings t h a t tosses
about a t the threshold of the new world" and, finally, the certainty t h a t "in the ex­
ploration of the renewed world art must precede science and must offer hypotheses and
furnish indications of still hidden truths to science, which coordinates t r u t h arrived a t
experimentally". 1 1 Even the direct encounter with Wagner occurs in a Symbolist
climate, in the spirit Wyzéwa termed "the symphonic a r t " (l'art symphonique) of the
"total emotion" (emotion totale). I t is quite true t h a t D'Annunzio can quickly detach
himself from the fashionable elements of the Wagner cult; accordingly, he does not
support the "metaphysical verbosity" of the "well-meaning exegetes" t h a t "swarm in
F r a n c e " and to whom he prefers the logic of an Amiel, according to whom Wagner's
music "is depersonalized music, Neo-Hegelian music". I n other words, a t the very
moment he aligns himself with Wagnerian and Symbolist taste, D'Annunzio reacts
with a measure of concreteness which is not only a limitation of conceptual power—for
by criticizing Nietzsche's interpretation of music as "theater rhetoric" and by main­
taining, instead, music's "high and pure value as an a r t independent of the laborious
machinery of the theater and of superimposed symbolic meaning", he ends u p in the
company of Mallarmé. All things considered, this same Nietzschean ingredient now
introduced into D'Annunzio's ideological discourse, or eloquence become both political
action and estheticizing of politics is a way of linking Symbolism, however vaguely,
with a poetics of vitality, with the body become musical matter, a flow of organic
metamorphoses. Meanwhile, in this Neo-Romantic atmosphere of revelation of t h e
deep-seated 'Self', Wagner can be assimilated as the poet of the inner life's "metaphysical
need" and "hidden p a r t " , as the maker of music t h a t alone has the power " t o express
the dreams born in the depths of modern melancholy" (esprimere i sogni che nascono
nella profondità delia malinconia moderna) within the tradition running from Chateau­
briand and Senancour to Amiel.
D'Annunzio's conversion to what might be called a biological and anti-Platonic
symbolism, characterized by a "rêverie" instilled in the body and its skein of sensations,
is not a sudden, unexpected occurrence. The conversion already figures in Il piacere, the
novel representative of D'Annunzio's estheticizing moment and Parnassian decora-
tiveness. Here, the key signature of Naturalism is transposed into the scene-setting and
sentimental diary of Humbertine decadence, like an "erotic tale of Hoffmann" as Andrea
Sperelli would have it, "written with the plastic precision of a Flaubert". One of t h e
most obvious features of D'Annunzio's novels—practically a constant t h a t unifies the
various narrative formulas and their patterns of dramatic conflict—is the figure of the
leading character, who is always some kind of artist, a sensitive, self-analytical man of
refinement who feels his relation to things with extraordinary acuteness and takes
pleasure in analyzing this rapport, pursuing it in the labyrinth of memory. Nature, too,
is usually seen through his eyes—as a projection, a mask of the author himself. As a
result, every novel can be read as a kind of poetics or meditation on the inner processes

11
Ibid., p . 565 passim.

318
of sensibility, though quite obviously the poetics is dramatized and objectified—that is,
translated into a language of eloquence which, as such, aims to exalt a creative mood
and have the reader share in it. Turning to Il piacere, we find, from the outset, t h a t
the protagonist's introspective game becomes a poetics of correspondences, an emotional
mirroring t h a t involves object and subject: "Minds honed by habits of imaginative
contemplation and poetic dreaming endow things with a soul sensitive and mutable
like the human soul; in all things—forms, colors, sounds and scents—they read a trans­
parent symbol, the emblem of a feeling or a thought; and in every phenomenon, or
combination of phenomena, they think they divine a psychic state, a moral meaning.
Occasionally, the vision is so lucid t h a t it generates anguish in such minds". 1 2 I t is
unnecessary to point out t h a t colors, sounds, and scents constitute the triad of Corre-
spondances, so evident is the echo of t h a t work here; it is likewise evident t h a t the end
result of what D'Annunzio has to say is limited to an associative "rêverie", which is
closer, if at all, to the Chambre double—to cite Baudelaire once again. There is a copious
presence of Symbolist motif throughout the novel: from the "landscape" surrounding
Sperelli, which "became for him a symbol, an emblem, a sign, a companion t h a t guided
him through his inner labyrinth" to the "secret affinities" t h a t "he discovered between
the apparent life of things and the innermost life of his desires and memories" ; from the
"correspondence" t h a t transfigures reality into a "dreamt image of the concretely real
scene" and the shadow of a "life before" to the "harmony of perfumes Autumn has
caused to languish" which seems "like the spirit and feeling of t h a t afternoon spec­
tacle" or to the "vision" of an "ideal light, like one of those dreamt landscapes wherein
things appear visible from afar because of an irradiation extending from their forms". 1 3
There is, moreover, a "fluidity of feeling into which flow every movement, every incli­
nation, every shape of external events, like an ethereal vapor resulting from chang s
in the atmosphere"; 1 4 the dream t h a t "the appearances of things suggested", the chi­
merical irradiation", the "symbolic forest t h a t unceasingly blossoms and bears fruit by
contemplating the Infinite"; the "magnetic sensation" of a "neuter element in our
being"; the "hallucination" of the "soul's unreal and fleeting movement"; the "torpor,
prophetically farseeing, as it were" of a "diaphanous, light fluid creature permeated
with an immaterial element of the purest sort"; the "clusters of sensations" similar to
"great phantasmagorias in a darkness"; the "fascination" with what is " u n r e a l " and
"out of the world". As we cansee from D'Annunzio's choice of words, the suggestive
orchestration of Il piacere points ahead to Poema paradisiaco and the music of the
"hidden symbol"—the soul t h a t "responds to things" and is "in every t h i n g " (in ogni
cosa) the "forest of memories" and "far-off appearances" in "dream's deep empire".
During D'Annunzio's analytical period of Giovanni Episcopo and L'innocente (The
Innocent One), the theme of correspondences is necessarily reduced. On the other hand,
there is added a neurotic ingredient, a more bitter and more physical attraction to

12
13
Il piacere (Milano, 1951), pp. 269, 23.
14
Ibid., pp. 153, 240, 236, 13.
Ibid., pp. 30 and 338, 337, 365, 294, 104, 94, 229. See also in Poema paradisiaco (Bologna,
1959) O ras!, pp. 37-38; La statua, pp. 9-10; L'ora, pp. 65-66; Invito alla fedeltà, p p . 71-72 and 88;
Vas mysterii, pp. 66-67.

319
hallucination. As a result, a "hallucinatory vibration" accompanies the "fascination of
symbolic things", and the "fragments of past life" break up into a "discontinuity of
images", while " a t t e n t i o n " reaches a "state of malaise" in the effort to "regrasp the
true meaning of things" and their recurrent "symbol". I t is a "stupefying s t a t e " as t h e
protagonist of L'innocente finds out, discovering "the desperate sincerity of the words:
Anywhere, out of the world"—Baudelaire once again, the Baudelaire of Anywhere Out
of the World dear to Huysmans. Still, it is Trionfo delia morte which achieves D'Annun-
zio's musical novel of Symbolist exquisiteness with its ambitious program for a "plastic
and symphonic prose, rich in images and different kinds of music", in which " t h e pre­
cision of science" alternates with "the seductions of dreams", "not in order to imitate
but in order to continue Nature", and in which the "suggestive and emotive power" of
syllables as they combine into "ordered sounds" is renewed. I n the preceding novels it is
a question of Symbolism as a mental affinity rather than a cultural awareness on
D'Annunzio's part. But with Trionfo delia morte, in which so much of the critical think­
ing of 1892-93 reoccurs, Symbolism becomes a solid perspective. There is naturally
the risk of this Symbolism crystalizing into a literary code-writing adapted to a solidly
middle-class public and of thus becoming a device of suggestiveness, a process of
stimulation and involvement, as Anceschi says, directed at the reader, who is caught
up into the magic circle of words t h a t exalt themselves by defining themselves as
symbol and rite.
In Trionfo delia morte, all the key words of Symbolist culture come to the fore, with
a tonality t h a t reveals the ferment of more personal creative relationships. I t is not so
much the "forest of symbols" (selva di simboli) and the "heaven of pure abstractions"
(cielo di pure astrazioni), which in effect serve only to describe a "religious soul oriented
toward mystery" (anima religiosa, inclinata al mistero), as expressions such as: "em­
p a t h y " (simpatia) with things; the "ease" for "communicating with all forms of natural
life and for finding endless analogies between human experiences and features of the
most varied things" the extension of one's " a t t e n t i o n " in order to "find some living
resemblance between one's being and surrounding n a t u r e " ; the "signs a n d emblems of
another life" beneath the "opaque surface" of consciousness; the "visible fragment of an
allegorical world conceived b y a god-magician". No less representative are the expres­
sions: the "silent suggestion" of things in the "flow of sensations"; the "expectation"
of a n "apparition"; the search "inside the soul's inner universe" for the "real essence of
things"; the shadow of "inexistence"; the "unintentional" image of a "temporary
madness" with an "effect similar to t h a t of certain substances which intensify feelings
and ideas to the point of hallucinations, like opium and hashish". D'Annunzio's sym­
biosis with Wagnerian art, on which initiation into the " r h y t h m " and " m y s t e r y " of an
ancient chthonic ritual also depends, broadens the analogical correspondences of "cre­
puscular symphonies", "concealed essences", and "immaterial symbols" where light is
music and music light, where "colors" and "scents" float amid sounds. I t hones the
confused shudder of perceptions at the threshold of a "chimerical" universe inside man.
Moving from "the odor and pallor of some disinterred springtime—to quote the Poema
paradisiaco—we come to the "breath of spring" exhaled by "two clusters of violets"
and t h e "shrill yet soft scent" of a young person's skin. All this happens, D'Annunzio

320
explains, because "onto t h e diffused base of physical sensitiveness, already illuminated
by the five senses," are added "other, intermediate senses" whose "very subtle per­
ceptions" disclose an "unknown world" of strange and rare "associations". Conse­
quently, "everyday occurrences" acquire "an exact meaning, independent of appear­
ances" ; the most insignificant sensation invades the memory with "the infrequent voices
of passers-by in the street, the ticking of a wall clock, the tolling of a distant bell, the
pawing of a horse, a whistle, the noise of a slammed door", and these otherwise in­
significant occurences rouse the "imaginative life", the hallucinated "fable" of a "seer"
immersed in a "daze encompassing all his senses".
The motifs of "intermediate senses" have been apparent and "everyday occur­
rences" not only because t h e y are so pointed and modern, b u t also because they figure,
stated in the same words, in the 1895 interview with Ojetti—as if to confirm the im­
plicit or masked poetics of D'Annunzio's novel, which points back from the fictional
character to the author. Criticism has for some time noted the exceptional import of the
Ojetti interview; here it is significant because of certain ideological ties linked to the
Symbolist controversy, its association with Charles Morice's La Littérature de tout h
l'heure, which D'Annunzio seems to echo, though in his own way, when he examines the
role of art and science in the contemporary world and assigns to the soul the "rein­
tegration of unity", t h e "synthesis" of the new man. Moreover, if Ojetti took H u r e t ' s
Enquête as model for his own reportage, and if he built his work around d'Annunzio and
the literary "idealism" displayed in Trionfo delia morte, then all the more reason to
presuppose t h a t D'Annunzio had the French prototype in mind and so gauged his
comments in view of the problems treated in the Enquête—that is, with an eye to the
fortunes of literature within the context of Symbolism. If the interview is read in this
light, D'Annunzio appears to assume a Symbolist stance, at least with regard t o basic
terms, since he declares t h a t "the universe acquires the look of a living face on which
the liveliness of thought casts its lights and shades and over which the slightest reflec­
tions of the inner life pass", adding t h a t "never has the human soul h a d deeper com­
munions with the soul of things". As "symbols of our feelings", things "help us to
discover" our " m y s t e r y " ; they return to us a "spiritualized anthropomorphism" in an
"obscure tangle of newly sprouting seeds" in touch with " t h e brightest spheres of
consciousness". For this reason and perhaps paralleling Conti who, as far back as 1887,
in a review of Isaotta Guttadauro, had singled out Poe for defining a modern form of
art integrated with science, D'Annunzio recognizes in "sickness" an instrument of
"knowledge" through which the writer regains the "wondrous" within a completely
new area of "analogies" and "inner phenomena" which he is t o reveal in their "hidden
relations, by disassembling the elements to piece together new forms and b y giving t h e
result all the intensity of reality". 1 5 Within the confines of the novel, which he thinks
the most vital and solid genre, D'Annunzio suggests the possibility of a Symbolist ex­
planation of the world without, however, attaining Novalis' magic realism and vision
of a sick microcosm—the latter feature will one day partly characterize D'Annunzio,
but only after he has discovered not only t h a t the universe has a living face b u t t h a t

15
U. Ojetti, Alla scoperta dei letterati (Firenze, 1946), pp. 357-358.

21 Balakian 321
sickness is a "musical problem" experienced in one's own body and not in the fictitious
body of a novel's persona. Instead, for the theorist of the interview, to whom the idea
of the "representative-man" is especially appealing, it suffices to repeat that style is
"inviolable like life" and that art must be "the natural transfiguration of persons and
things restored to their fullness", "man's harmony with a wholly revealed and under­
stood universe". The revival of "oratorical art", the myth of the hero and the masses,
appears behind the long-standing objective "to continue Nature, adding to Her loftier
souls and nobler forms".16
Thus it happens that, while the Symbolist lyrical experience frees itself from the
language of oratory and the fetish of "grand verse", D'Annunzio identifies and updates
himself in the evocative poetry of communion and correspondence with things, but
adding to it, contemporaneously, the ritual of eloquence, the ambition of the word-
gesture, and Dionysiac irrationality become oratorical theater, or artifice of the "en­
chanters—ingredients consecrated and thus legitimized by Nietzsche. The narcissist
makeup of D'Annunzio's libido and aggressiveness requires eloquence as an instrument
of its own hedonistic rationalization, as the amplifying vehicle of an ego desirous of
converting its fiction into a message of truth, while unifying art and life in the living
myth of the body. Hence Maia, the poem as an Alexandrian monument of the 'Self'
and its "imperial seal". Narcissism and eloquence are complementary categories in
D'Annunzio, and this fact explains his inability to neutralize the excess of the word
that contemplates itself and delights in its own praise except when the deep melody of
the body—the brief rhythm of its night-time breathing—guides the mind to the "spiri-
tualization of the flesh". So, too, narcissism and eloquence explain why the new
novels of the Übermensch, Le vergini dette rocce (The Virgins of the Rocks) and Il fuoco
(Fire), represent a deepening of musical sensibility, by now intrinsic to D'Annunzio's
writing, at the same time as there are expanded the histrionic role of oratory and—to
cite Il fuoco—the hyperbole of the "clangor of imperial trumpets" which seems to
submerge the voice of things, the spell of sensations. Yet it is precisely these sensations
that emerge.
D'Annunzio indicates the continuity of the poetics of Symbolist transfiguration
common to the two novels when he repeats in Il fuoco an "illumination" of Le vergini
dette rocce—a "conquest" he calls it: " . . . at every moment, by offering harmonious
material to -my sensibility and imagination, the accord of things set my spirit in an
ideal state, one that approached the state of dreams and foreknowledge but without
attaining it. And within myself, I witnessed the continuous birth of a higher life in
which all appearances were transfigured as if in virtue of a magic mirror". 17 Thus, in
the quality of a prose that slows down narrative time and occasionally comes close to
poetry and in which the characters are tantamount to "suggested ideas" as Fénéon
wrote regarding Poictevin, there reappears the theme of myth and self-deification,
foreshadowed in Canto novo but here pervaded with the idea of a mystery, an initiation
into a metamorphosis that reverberates from the imaginary onto the world of nature

16
Ibid., p p . 364-366. See also Trionfo delia morte, p . 9.
17
Il fuoco (Milano, 1951), p . 17.

322
and onto nature's forms in a constant state of becoming. In Le vergini delie rocce we
read: "Sometimes there arose from them so new and beautiful a music that I seemed on
the verge of being transfigured, and I thought my desire to be a god was about to
materialize . . . In this way, I sometimes thought I was living in a myth I myself had
fashioned in the likeness of the myths that the youth of the human soul brought forth
under Hellenic skies".18 Around this primary structure of mythic self-fabulation, D'An-
nunzio again constructs a poetic theory of analogies and correspondences, with lexical
prevalence of the former over the latter—a fact quite important from the critic's
standpoint. "Discovering secret analogies" means attempting "the mystery of a work
of magic, as it were", self-abandonment to an "enchantment" that can be a "delirium"
as well, entering a "divinatory atmosphere like the one in which mystics breathe",
"relating" the "most varied things to one's own being" and to one's "inexplicable
affinities" and "hidden powers" in order to be able to read the "language of appear­
ances" and its "meanings" up to the very limit of "non existence", in the "flow" of an
inner vision that gushes forth, however, from an "infinite distance". As flowers conceal
"innumerable writings", comparable to the "strange images that arise from clumps of
lichen, peeling trunks, the arrangement of flint rock", so the universe contains "frag­
ments of an unknown writing", "incomprehensible enigmas of Life and Death" in which
objects become "signs" or phantasms of a "divine thought", similar to the "gestures of
perfected sacred images". Keeping differences in mind, we may say that the funeral
and hallucinatory aura of Le vergini dette rocce comes close to lifting D'Annunzio's
mannerism to the "language of flowers and silent things".
The dream of myth, linked with the dream of theater, dominates Il fuoco as well,
but it shifts the axis to the "immaterial" symbols that circle about musically in this
novel-poem toward the "Dionysiac sense of the creating principle" and toward the
"analogies" of a "primitive bestiality". There is an "ideal correspondence" between the
subject and "any earthly thing, so that the latter, gradually filling itself with our es­
sence and magnifying itself in our illusion, appears to us practically representative of
our unknown fates and assumes almost a shape of mystery". 19 D'Annunzio now con­
nects with the "instinctive need to animate everything that touches one's senses" and
"to let oneself flow into the natural phenomenon", relying on one's "attention" as a
"seer".20 This 'attention' transforms the word into a reality and the object into a sign—
more or less like the graphic movement of a writing that blends the "music" of things
and the "voice of the elements" in the "obscure language" of silence. The "pure po­
etry" discussed at length in Il fuoco aspires to an "epiphany" of "canceled" time and
to the "power of dreams" transposed into the "waking hours", in which it is essential
that "the entire fabric of our exístence be unwoven" so that another, "shinier and more
unusual", made of concealed truths, analogies, and remoter meanings might be fashion­
ed. Meanwhile, in the old matrix of symbolic affinities develops the magical notion of
poetry as a "practical metaphysics" whose rhythm, as in music, lies "in the silence

18
19
Le vergini delie rocce (Milano, 1957), pp. 130-131.
20
Ibid., pp. 16, 80, 105, 129, 82, 111, 73, 85, 180, 133, 198.
Il fuoco, pp. 181, 85, 55, 20, 150, 161.

21* 323
preceding sounds and in the silence following them""—that is, in the "musical silence""
of a "living and mysterious atmosphere"". And from the rarefaction of Wagnerian drama,
released from "performances unrelated"" to its original concept, on t h e borders of
"absence"" and of t h e "remote forest where the Beautiful One awaits us from time im­
memorial buried in Her mystical hair"", there finally arises the figure of the dance
inscribed within the confines of "the proscenium as if within the confines of a strophe"",
while poetry traces its "strophe in the manner of a frame, inside the lines of which
occurs a series of corporeal movements, an expressive dance figure, which the melody
animates with its perfect life"".21 So too, the word attains the abstract condition of the
form, the sign t h a t becomes a vestigial track, a musical ordering of the sonorous matter
"revealed in a succession of expressive appearances"".
The relationship between poetry and the dance which is a theme in Il fuoco-—
where it is still submerged in the Kitsch of the "mystical aura"" and heroic rite b u t al­
ready subtly foreshadowing Alcyone—inevitably recalls Mallarme"s observations con­
cerning the dance in "Notes sur le théâtre"", which did not escape D"Annunzio"s notice,
as we saw, and in "Divagations"": "corporeal writing"", "divination mixed with animal­
ism"", visual embodiment of the ideal"", "giddiness of a soul as if set in the air b y arti­
fice"", " a properly corresponding metamorphosis of images"" which "visually multiplies
their strophe"". We are no longer dealing with the Decadent motif of A rebours ; rather
we have here an archetype of the Symbolist imagination, which was so fascinated b y the
mystery of the female dancer, as Frank Kermode has superbly shown in The Romantic
Image. B u t a parallel of this type is not fortuitous since Il fuoco contains some vital
nuclei of D"Annunzio"s new musical symbolism, which is largely influenced b y Angelo
Conti "s Beata riva (Blessed Shore). I n the novel, Conti"s ideas appear in Daniele Glauro"s
dialogues; these ideas are in fact the source for the thoughts on music and silence,
"practical metaphysics"" and the "voice of things"" and on the "dance"" as a "celebration
of the perfect esthetic cult"". For its part, Beata riva mirrors and discusses d"Annunzio"s
literary stances, from La citta morta (The Dead City) to the first "laudi"" of Maia, re­
producing in the dialogues the poet"s views on intuitive knowledge and Nietzschean
vitalism in answer to Schopenhauer"s philosophy. As in his earlier essay on Giorgione,
Çonti"s estheticism starts from Pater"s idea t h a t "all the arts strive to reach t h e con­
dition of music"" and reformulates it in a lyrical-speculative manner taken from K a n t
and Schopenhauer, with the additional ingredient of the awe of a celebrant of sacred
mysteries. "Apocalypse of nature"", a r t is for Conti the epiphany of the "idea"" in t h e
light generated b y "style"", the "vision"" of a "soul t h a t renews itself each d a y in t h e
presence of the perpetual youth of things"" and rediscovers the "wonder"" of infancy,
the "mystery"" outside us t h a t "speaks to the mystery inside us"", the "rhythm"", t h e
"voice of silence"" t h a t is heard in the "great breath of things"" when this breath be­
comes the "song of remembered things"" a n d the "presence of will in universal life"".22
A European provincial like D"Annunzio, Conti is a late-Romantic Platonist, b u t with
a sensibility open to the "vibrations"" of things, which makes him travel ane.w an ideo­
logical road like t h a t of Symbolist poetics.
21
Ibid., pp. 137, 221, 108, 234, 261, 155, 284, 61, 98, 151.
22
La beata riva (Milano, 1900), pp. 14, 228, 55, 26, 235, 231-232.

324
 I n Beatariva, Schopenhauer accompanies Walter Pater, Wagner, and Carlyle—the
authors read and assimilated by the French Symbolists in their thinking on the nature
of the symbol. Conti is indebted to Schopenhauer and especially to the Carlyle of
Sartor Resartus, from whom he learns t h a t the symbol "reveals and conceals", as
Symons also says in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and t h a t "in the immense
theater of Appearances" a r t "allows us, at times, to rip apart the weft of Maia's veil
and look at the eternal through the mutable", to remove "vision" from the "sphere of
ignorant h a b i t " and indifference when confronted with the "miracle" of nature. D'An-
nunzio assimilates the pre-Symbolist Carlyle, for whom "to see deeply" means " t o
see musically". 23 However, though Conti cites "the beautiful page of Gitta morta on
the passage of t i m e " to show its agreement with the ideas of the "great English mystic",
at the core of D'Annunzio's language the metaphysics of Sartor Resartus becomes an
esthetic of visionary sensations and fuses with other stimuli and impulses to which,
perhaps, it opens the door. But, then, we must always require a writer to understand
what can become his own, not what is alien to him. Anamorphoses, too, serve creativity.
Carlyle's concept of the symbol is recognizable, after the first hint of it in D'Annun-
zio's discourse on Shelley, in the passage, "everything was hidden and everything was
manifest" from Leda, and in the passages, "flutter of an eyelash t h a t veils and unveils
the enigma's gaze" and, negatively phrased, "signs t h a t do not reveal and do not
conceal", from Libro segreto. Meanwhile, there emerges the principle of a habit opposed
to "astonishment" combined with the dialectically contrary principle of " a t t e n t i o n " in
all D'Annunzio's prose works f r o m / / fuoco on. We go from the "way of h a b i t " which
succeeds to a "magic sense of life", in Leda, to the epigram of Forse che sì forse che no
(Perhaps Yes, Perhaps No) in which, "scorner of every habit, he kept the one of silence
and attention"; from the statement, again in Leda, t h a t " a n extraordinary amount of
attention was necessary to pierce through the obtuseness of habit and to arrive at
perceiving the hidden r h y t h m of a life alien to oneself" to the statements in Libro
segreto on the "incessant struggle against habit" and the "incessant a t t e n t i o n " t h a t
guides in interpreting "the language, nature, and r h y t h m of things, not from the outside
but from the inside". The notion of attention is the subject of a ohapter (entitled "DelF
Attenzione") of Il venturiero senza ventura (The Adventureless Adventurer) written in
1899. Here, D'Annunzio conjures up, together, the mysterious state of "being lost in
rêverie" and the inner eye "intent on looking a t " its own "hallucinative flashes of light"
on the borderline of a chimerical reality t h a t makes the seer like a "rootless island",
" a solitude filled with apparitions and marvels". By virtue of " a t t e n t i o n " the "vision"
is " a kind of practical magic operating on the most common objects", with "unexpected
associations of appearances and essences" in the midst of things t h a t are "full of signs"
when one knows how to read their "sibylline g a m e " of "hieroglyphics" or arabesques. 24

23
24
Ibid., pp. 242, 30, 208-209, 211.
See Commemorazione di Percy Shelley, in Prose scelte di Gabriele D'Annunzio (Milano, 1909),
p. 36; and La Leda senza cigno (Milano, 1919), p . 138; Cento e cento e cento e cento pagine del libro
segreto di Gabriele d'Annunzio tentato di morire (Milano, 1952), pp. 35, 147; La Leda senza cigno,
p. 81; Forse che si forse che no (Milano, 1952), p . 89; La Leda senza cigno, p . 35; Libro segreto,
p. 293; Le favilie del maglio. I. Il venturiero senza Ventura (Milano, 1924), p p . 57-74.

325
 The theme of " a t t e n t i o n " and its genesis or rediscovery (since it is already present
in the 1890 novels, though only as a generic notion), draws on Novalis and perhaps Poe,
more t h a n on Carlyle. The presence of Novalis' and Poe's analogical world in a theme
t h a t is a pilaster of D'Annunzio's most authentic poetry is highly significant, especially
since this presence is not reducible to an isolated occurrence, b u t rather is accompanied
by other assonances t h a t form a kind of constellation—it, too, very expressive—a
diachronic constant branching out into different works. Thus, the "state of rêverie"
t h a t later becomes "dreaming about dreaming" and "living in the act of living" points
to Poe and may also contain implicitly Novalis. D'Annunzio turns t o what Conti called
the nocturnal character of poetry and music; it is in fact Novalis—as studied b y Carlyle
and translated by Maeterlinck, in 1895—who suggested a new "acoustics of t h e soul" t o
D'Annunzio and confirmed his perception of a magical process and a metamorphosis
of the 'Self', the "deepest and most inexhaustible 'Self', in the fleeting b u t very sensitive
mirrors of nature.
In one of the Beata riva dialogues between Ariele and Gabriele, the latter, agreeing
with Schopenhauer's esthetics at least once, longs for a state of innocence capable of
"expressing, through the symbols of art, the awarenet s a dolphin has of water, a lion
of forests, a cicada of light, a lark of air" because " t h e life of animals which inhabit the
forests entirely corresponds to the life of the large trees, bushes, and growths t h a t
entwine themselves on lofty trunks, and their voice is the dominant and revealing note
in the expansive and grandiose murmur, as well as the intent silence, of the woods". 25
Here too, Novalis immediately comes to mind, particularly when he writes, prior to
Franz Marc in Der blaue Reiter, t h a t a child can understand animals and t h a t each of
us becomes one with a river as we gaze at its waters. B u t what most comes t o mind is
the new poetry of Alcyone—the melodic score of its myths and terrestrial fables, the
rediscovered diary of a happy, unforgettable summer with its autumnal languor of
youth restored. When D'Annunzio finishes Alcyone, the flourishing years of Symbolism
are over and French poetry now reflects a new taste, based on Nietzsche and t h e cult of
life—or, as Rivière has said, "more violent and livelier pleasures" t h a t cannot be satis­
fied with an "abstract, entirely pure emotion t h a t has neither cause nor root, an im­
pression detached from its origin" where what is made visible is not so much t h e object
as " t h e commotion" t h a t communicates "with our soul" in a kind of "conversation of
feelings". Emotion in D'Annunzio, however, retains an unimpaired physical quality,
organic roots, and an almost visceral bond with matter. Now that, beyond de Régnier,
D'Annunzio discovers Rimbaud and can attribute his perception of t h e encounter
between object and subject to the body's music-a flexible and precious movement-this
perception becomes both more rarefied and more distinct,a voice of the memory t h a t
descends into the fluid weft of images and correspondences which give the sinuous grace
of a dance to a nearly incorporeal sensuality. The transfiguring body generates myth,
and myth is the gesture t h a t takes shape as r h y t h m and as a game of appearances and
analogical enchantments—ephemeral and sagacious associations abiding in t h e sonorous
crystal of the word t h a t is heard, in the lucidity of the poetic act t h a t is self-contem-

25
La beata riva, pp. 40-41.

326
plating and drunk with its own praise. Thus, the wave whose vibration, breaking ca­
dences, and "shattered melodies" (mélodies brisées)-— to cite Mallarmé—are transcribed
is also the movement of t h e strophe, the circular figure of the rhythm, abstractions, and
relationships t h a t D'Annunzio patterns within the mimetic fiction and the physical
suggestiveness of the sounds:
Sciacqua, sciaborda,
scroscia, schiocca, schianta,
romba, ride, canta,
accorda, discorda,
t u t t e accoglie e fonde
le dissonanze acute
nelle sue volute
profonde,
libera e bella,
numerosa e folle,
possente e molle,
creatura viva
che gode
del suo mistero
fugace.

("Living creature delighting in its fleeting mystery, free and beauteous, rhythmic a n d
madcap, strong and soft, wets, laps, roars, smacks, crashes, rumbles, laughs, sings,
harmonizes, disharmonizes, gathers together and blends all shrill dissonances in its
deep spirals".) 26
I n taking shape as a dance and rêverie of the fantasy transposed onto the body a n d
its vegetative fertility, sensation becomes knowledge, not of the unknown a n d new
which demands descent into the lowest depths, b u t of the mystery t h a t lies hidden in
the "dream of things", the "enigma made visible" at the moment " t h e soul becomes a
sea in the act of remembering", "infancy far-off" and lost which interrogates e a r t h a n d
speaks with water. What remains is mere innocence; it is the illusion of " h a r m o n y " ,
ecstatic "earthliness", the music of nature where even the present is recollection a n d
tremor, and silence within which "the image of heaven" neither laughs nor smiles, / b u t
gazes fixedly from the depths". I t is indeed the dream vision in which, according t o
Valéry, the things we see see us as we see them, as if in a magical equation. The musical
sorcery of the body gives birth to a kind of objective writing, a language of " s i g n s "
like the ones the wind writes in the "docile s a n d " with "wing feathers", in the shining
limbus of summer. The m y t h of Undulna transmutes itself into the m y t h of writing—a
fugue of signs, chords, and pauses within the sequences of things, an imitative fasci­
nation with analogies into which flows the shudder of matter, the contrived delirium of
the fable:
Scerno con orecchia tranquilla
i toni dell'onda che viene,
indago con chiara pupilla
più oltre ogni segno più lene;
26
See, in Alcyone, L'onda, pp. 63-77.

327
 cosi che la musica traccia
m'è suono, e ne' righi leggeri,
mentre oggi odo ansar la bonaccia,
leggo la tempesta di ieri.
Luccica la valva polita,
la morta medusa, la lisca.
In ogni sostanza si tace
la luce e il silenzio risplende.
("I discern with calm ear the tones of the oncoming wave, I search with clear eye far
béyond all the most fragile signs; as a result the musical score is sound for me, and in
the weightless staves, while today I hear the dead calm pant, I read yesterday's storm.
The polished clam shell, the dead jellyfish, the fishbone glisten. In every substance light
becomes silent and silence shines forth".) 27
According to De Robertis, Alcyone is the point of departure for d'Annunzio's
newest prose, with its light, aerial and magical qualities in which art seems weightless.
In effect, the experience of song and clear, musical recitative paves the way for the
'recovery' of the short prose poem. One woven of free and airy rhythms, no longer
mediated through the objective structure of the novel or play b u t instead reflecting
the flow of the inner memory—the diary of self-knowledge. The assumptions t h a t
underlay the poetic marvel Alcyone are now assimiliated in to the color of the word and
the "fleshiness of thought"' and flow in the broken and inconstant measure of a prose
t h a t continously creates its own duration in time. There can be no doubt t h a t the pro­
cess indicated above reflects a search not confined to literary expression b u t sensitive
as well to developments in a changing culture.
The poetics of correspondences—the object of statements serving characterization,
in D'Annunzio's novels—returns to its lyrical origins through the tabular illuminations
of Alcyone, and transmutes into an adventure of the 'Self' t h a t wholly lives in the word,
in t h a t "space of t i m e " which is "the very fluidity of the inner life", as D'Annunzio
says in Le favilie (Sparks). In a 1912 notebook—later incorporated into the Libro se-
greto and dedicated to the "language of things", to the " a t t e n t i o n " for which "every­
thing speaks"—the following could almost be read as an epilogue: "Life's r e f u s e -
fragments of utensils, dross, a piece of iron, a twisted nail, a splinter, a shaving, a
piece of rope, an empty tin container. Everything speaks, everything is a sign for who­
ever can read. Everything contains a will to reveal. B u t no one is inclined and open to
receive the revelation. The lines formed by the casual arrangement of objects are a
writing. An old woman, all bones, wears a kind of bonnet t h a t casts a shadow over
her face. On her ravaged face two weird gray eyes—extraordinary eyes like those of a
supernatural creature—a look t h a t issues from the depths of a legend . . . Thus looked
at, life is a perpetual succession of emotion. Nothing is indifferent"28 As for the reworked
version of Libro segreto, the most noteworthy revision (aside from stylistic ones, always
erudite and oriented toward realistic figuration) involves the image of writing, its
27
In Alcyone, Undulna, pp. 49-56 and 83-86.
28
Taccuini, a cura di E. Bianchetti e R. Forcella (Milano, 1965), pp. 617-620; and Libro
segreto, p . 299.

328
creative and hermetic moment: "the lines expressed by the chance coming together
of objects create a hermetic writing". Therefore, if objects are signs, the world appears
an aggregate of things t o be deciphered, a labyrinth of "emblems" and "allegories",
"hieroglyphics", "enigmas", and "mysteries" t h a t want to be revealed and interpreted.
According to the Libro segreto, these objects no longer produce " a forest of figures and
symbols"; instead, t h e y generate " a thicket of shaped truths and unexpressed divi­
nations" in which are magnified and sharpened the emotion, the state of " g r a c e " of
sensibility and the latter's readiness for the miracle of correspondences—not for the
meaning but for the music of epiphanies, for the dream-induced inebriation of the
animistic illusion of self-identification with the object and its life force.
Interpreting the world's writing thus equates with an act of "divination" and
an exercise in "prophetic vision". I t is a "magic work", a "contrived madness", a
"hallucination" between " t h e soul's roots" and "the nerve endings", a "secret commu­
nication" with "unknown demons" which it conjures up from the flesh's depths on
the "miraculous boundary of another life unknowable except occasionally and vaguely,
through certain lightning flashes of remembrance or blinding glares of anxiety". The
"nocturnal" D'Annunzio's insistence on the magic power of words, on the "alchemy"
t h a t unites the modern use of "sorcery" and "spell-casting" to the mystery of the
writer's craft reveals in particular his determination to restore to the object a lost
aura—a cultist trait, Benjamin would say—reimmersing it in an emblematic sacred-
ness, or continuous rite of esthetic emotion which redeems the dark vortex of life, the
shock of vulgarity in the beauty of remembrance and which abolishes the control
exercised by "our habitual consciousness", putting in its place—to cite the poem to
La vita di Cola di Rienzo—"a singular virtue, vigilant and ready b u t also enveloped
in some sort of dream, some sort of fantastic glare—what sort I do not know—as if
one had drunk some stupendous mixture". Every "form" then becomes " a divining
faith", an "illuminating incarnation" of style, a metamorphosis of the imagination real­
ized in the "precise r h y t h m of similes". We are here reminded of a passage from Il
venturiero senza ventura about the spirit in flower and about the living book, with its
weft of symmetries and repetitions suggestive of an incantation: "Now all t h a t
happens only between the tree and me, only between the grass and me, only be­
tween the sod and me. I have eyes to see, and I see. I have ears to hear, and I hear.
I feel buoyant like a tree-top in the air; I feel deep like a root in the ground. I breathe
not in myself alone b u t in all creatures; I think not inside myself alone b u t inside all
creatures. I t seems to me t h a t my forehead emits, halo-like, a weak glow, as if my
thought shone there like phosphorus. Now and then the flowering tree shivers and
whitens with something of the rippling a light breeze arouses in the sea-calm; and
look ! the thought in my head, the blood in my shadowy veins shivers, whitens, as at
the beginning of a change. Am I changing ? Am I becoming transfigured ? Now I am
illuminated, certainly. Now I discover the features of this joyful and painful anxiety
of mine. This loss of my limits is now manifest to me. Now, while it subsides, while it
languishes, while it grows cold, I recognize this great fever of mine . . . " 2 9

29
Il venturiero senza ventura, pp. 116-117.

329
 Inasmuch as creative energy, "mental generation," resides in "sensuality illumi­
nated by divination", which unifies the seer with the things he sees and makes him
"like" the things he touches, the analogical language of signs always refers to the re­
ceptive plasticity of the body—its need to transcend and multiply itself in a "mix­
t u r e " of sensations so as to be able to "apprehend matter", which is also the "ideality
of the world", and possess it by virtue of a "mysterious rennet". As Gottfried Benn
was to say, the body is the hieroglyph in which everything finds its form; it is style
and knowledge, a dark animal depth t h a t dreams dreams. So too, within the circle of
the eternal return t h a t is the death of God, where the Übermensch encounters the form-
generating violence of nothingness, the D'Annunzio of the esoteric writings seeks the
secret of "self-deification" and "'self-trans-humanization'" in the body. This he does
through an act of '"self-bestialization"' in a "rapid succession of incarnations, anima­
tions, unions, contaminations, and hallucinations", obeying t h a t "carnal instinct purified
and exalted by the white fire of intelligence" which is its language, the most potent of
the instincts. 30 B u t D'Annunzio lacks the sense of revolt in his creating a "glorious
body", to cite Rivière. His transgression leaves intact, between Eros a n d Thanatos
t h e figure of Narcissus, who has to write midst his sumptuous tapestries in order to
"reveal himself", t o "walk toward the unknown along the pathways of the e a r t h " ,
t o "discern some light" of his own most secret t r u t h in its "fleeting and changeable
features", to renew the "astonishment of the child and god" in the "inimitable g a m e "
of the words t h a t give rhythm to the mystery of the flesh. The nocturnal adventure is
consummated in the theater of the soul, amid sproutings a n d appearances of an imag­
inary cosmogony, while it plumbs the "musical relationships" or the "inner distances"
of this cosmogony and explores the very brittle nexus of sounds and lights on the edges
of a silence where the slightest breeze ripples the shadows of things—shadows dissolved
in the instability of matter t h a t continually takes shape and disintegrates, a vibration
of remembrance and presentiment, what Kandinsky calls the refinement of the soul
through the accumulation of particular complexes of vibrations. The sharpened senses
within a body "more fragile than a vial misted by a condensing and sweating w a t e r "
evoke what sleeps beneath the "light" of consciousness and become magic means t o
communicate with the sensory world and the "vague u n k n o w n " which is the very
basis of life. Sickness, then, refines these senses in a kind of transcendence—with
spectral resonances of an indescribable acuity, t h a t flash lightning-like in the unreal
atmosphere of a motionless and dividing stupor. B u t the sorcery of apparitions always
seems to have something of a sickness or delirium regulated b y the laws of creativity
and word-magic.
More than in utterances and thematic crystalizations—however much these are
now drawn into the suggestive rite of style, the living p a r t of the rhythmic impulse—
the processes of analogy become clear, and are imbued with fervor in the movement
of the phrase, in the docility of matter echoing the shudder of sensations a n d t h e cho­
reography of the body t h a t appears to rediscover the original unity of the perceptive
life, of pure adherence to being. The seer's role sets into motion the associative faculty
30
I l venturiero senza Ventura, pp. 310-311 and 410-411. See also La vita di Cola di Rienzo,
passim.

330
and the mechanism of correspondences; it transforms the "demon of color" into the
"demon of rhythm"-—just as, practically at the threshold of "audition colorée", the
specter of light irradiates from sound, and thought receives a tactile and olfactory
sensitivity. If a silence can become "damp like the silence of a covered rain barrel"
and one can smell "an odor of fermenting slime in every thought" or "the greenish odor
of a dank tomb", hearing, in turn, "floats on sleepiness", and the croak of tree frogs can
reach "the highest tone of green" or continue "that sonorous fragility and greenness"
in the same way as the "shuttling flights of swallows weave melancholy's violet veil". 31
Thus, to go on, musical notes change to chromatic visions, epiphanies of brittle but
certain presences: "The hours pass. The music is like the dream of silence. I do not
sleep, and yet life slowly recedes in me, like the tide. My pulse is weak. My hand on
my chest does not feel the heart. The music fades and then returns, changing colors
like flood waters beneath a changeful twilight. Green, purple, and deep blue are the
colors of this night. Suddenly I see the stars, the stars of the Equinox as wide as their
reflection on the water. Then I feel dawn at the windowsill, leaning on the sill with
her two elbows, with her eyes lengthened to where the hair is attached to the temples". 32
As the sensations follow one another, the "like" of the simile becomes a mere
graphic sign, an indicator, which, even as one reads, almost seems to disappear from
the analogical process in its nascent state. When the "like" does disappear within a
phrase, there occurs a lightning-like illumination in the stressed cadence of epigraphic
prose: "whenever I awaken, I lose a promised land", "of the sky there remains in me
only the desert of ashes", "the sky and the lagoon are two icy softnesses", " I was a
musical mystery, with the taste of the world in my mouth", "silence and the white
dawn are a single funereal feeling", "shadows have the bleakness of abandonment",
"the room is filled with a violet twilight". Underpinning D'Annunzio's allusions there
is always the correspondence of object and subject, a flow that runs from one to the
other, the prelogical and oneiric faculty to which Baudelaire appealed in Confiteor de
l'artiste and in virtue of which even things think, and think in musical terms: " . . . every­
thing thinks through me, or I through them (for in the grandeur of dreaming, the Self
is quickly lost!); things think, I repeat, but in a musical and pictorial way, without
subtleties, without syllogisms, without deductive reasoning". What, after all, is the
passage in Leda on the house that awaits, if not a fragment of a prose poem, embodied
in the flesh of a nocturnal "rêverie" ? "There are hours in the solitary life during which
the body's sensitivity seems to expand to the house walls, in the same way that, lifting
an arm, we sometimes feel our heart beating right to the finger tips, and beyond.
The whole house seemed to ready itself to receive something unknown. A silent event
could enter through every door. The attention of the walls was altogether turned to
the night. No room kept its feeling of intimacy; each room listened to what was about
to happen outside and neglected to keep back the heat and to harmonize the thoughts
of the things gathered and arranged in it."
This connection with things, perceived "from inside", gives the being of things a
mysterious clarity, an emblematic and abstract quality that emanates from the very
31
La Leda senza cigno, p . 26.
32
Notturno (Milano, 1921), p . 243.

331
act of naming them. It is enough to utter, their name, stripped of every verb tense,
in order for the aura of the "unknown", the taste of the world, to show itself: "Behold
the stone's silence; a deserted way, with no exit; a leaden shadow between tall, lifeless
houses; a dead space; something of a canal sucked dry by the low tide; and me like
scattered debris, an empty bottle, a shapeless shoe of a shipwreck victim". 33 In the
starkness of the accompanying gesture, the enumerative structure of a noun-centered
style leaves to the word the initiative and impulse to generate its own rhythm, to draw
from the sonorous image of the evoked object the music of the phrase and its orchestra­
tion of pauses that break off and resume. In the Notturno, it is a music of presences—no
longer of impressions—which are inscribed in the air as on a blank page, until it becomes
a voice that speaks, suspended in the refrain of an answerless question, as if to mark
mysteriously a fugue of assonances and musical arabesques—pure lines of rhythm:
"I listen. Lapping on the shore left by a passing boat. The wave's hollow thuds against
encrusted rock. The seagulls' raucous cries, their clucking outpour, their strident squab­
bles, their floating pauses. Put-put of a boat motor. The blackbird's silly whistling.
Lugubrious droning of a fly that arises and alights. Ticking of the pendulum that ties
together all intervals. Drop that falls into a bathtub. Groan of an oar in a rowlock.
Human voices in the ferry. Rake on pebbles in a garden. Crying of an uncomforted
child. Incomprehensible voice of a woman who is speaking. Another woman's voice,
saying: At what time? At what time?'' The epiphany of objects—what makes them
emblems or "revelatory objects'', signs of signs—is the waiting and sense of time, the
opening up of a being that, simultaneously, conceals itself in the vibrations of a dis­
continuous space, as happens to the butterfly of Libro segreto—"A large butterfly's
wings, sulphur color and speckled with black, beat like the pages of that open book
which are moved by the breezes entering through the window into my green room". 34
But if objects are signs, signs are objects as well. What is discovered in the explo­
ration of reality is simply an aggregate of "ways of saying, musical notes, and the obli­
que language of lines", precisely as in the landscape of Licenza, which dances "on
nothingness", suspended in an "astonished dispersion", a "wonderstruck oblitera­
tion". Amid the bursts of flame and liturgies of humanistic self-exaltation, the suspi­
cion that there is no "harmony" between the "true hidden life" and the "high-wrought
word", between the "black vortex of the blood" and "material signs", occasionally
obsesses D'Annunzio in his last works. He declares he understands "how some artists
aware of this need—to abolish utterly what is customary in literature—have begun
to subvert grammatical rules, particularly those regarding construction which impose
on words an unreal dependence, sequence, and agreement". On the other hand, he
again repeats that "the most arcane unions of the soul with things cannot be grasped,
so far, except in pauses—the word of silence".35 The old Symbolist vocation has not
dried up; it is reborn in the dream of an art that changes "through some inexplicable,
powerful and naive roughness", through a return to the "primitive" which could also

33
34
Ibid., p . 198.
35
Notturno, p . 221; Libro segreto, p . 8 (and see again Notturno, p . 197).
Libro segreto, pp. 158-159.

332
be the unconscious or the world of the shaman. And so changed, a r t comes to "express
the original actions and reactions of one's soul mingled with the elements of the uni­
verse", "giving to words an unforeseen destiny and to analogies an unexpected reve­
latory power" and showing "how our spirit is born, grows, perpetuates itself, and trans­
forms, continually, through innumerable contacts with other spirits and with the sur­
rounding mystery". 3 6 I n all this there is something reminiscent of HofmannsthaFs
Lord Chandos for whom numbers unveil every form and lead him to a new magical
relationship with existence, until they dissolve in the dizziness of "rational" words
t h a t can no longer recount, and retain only the ability to describe exactly the inner
movement of the vital organs or engorgements of blood. The order of signs cannot
break down inasmuch as in a universe devoid of sense, in the evil endlessness of the
arabesque, survives the illusion of beauty and the mystical quality of the significans,
the "mystery of writing a n d of the written sign" which leads back t o itself, t h e rite
of the body t h a t bends over the paper and perceives the faint sound of the paper's
crackle—while renewing in the hieroglyphic of its own flesh the glassy stupor of the
"Egyptian scribe". "When, at night, I bend over my page in this workshop—worker,
artisan, artist; a whole a n d entire will to create and express; pure like the night air
before dawn; with, inside myself, some inexplicable, continuous trembling t h a t is close
to me like the beating of m y heart, and distant like the twinkling of the stars—some­
times I p u t down my pen and listen, without turning my head toward the windows.
I listen but do not 'prick u p my ears': I possess the sense of hearing in my entire body,
which no longer has weight or memory of its frailty and wretchedness. The edge of niy
table is delicately light like the contour of my suspended thought, like the border of
my unfinished image, like the lashes of my lowered eyelids. I listen". 3 7
The m y t h of Narcissus is thus reproduced in the m y t h of literature, at the center
of a cosmos where the only existing t r u t h is t h a t of the 'Self—object and subject of
the spirit's odyssey, a solitary body become sublime in its fleshless sensuality and re­
jection of a commonplace existence, of everyday things, in which is displayed the living
t r u t h of man, his creation of the future.

Translated from the Italian b y J o n C. Cherubini

36
37
Ibid.,pp. 169-160.
Ibid., pp. 5-6.

333
 BERNARD GICOVATE

JUAN RAMÓN JIMENEZ AND THE HERITAGE OF SYMBOLISM

IN HISPANIC POETRY

I
In the Spanish world, a ceremonious dependence on the established norms of French
literature and thought has been a clear point of departure since the early eighteenth
century. La Rodoguna is an early translation by Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo in Peru,
and Voltaire and Jean-Jacques become tutors of revolutionaries shortly afterwards.
From the first half of the nineteenth century on for a few decades, the Romantics
dazzle the imagination of the young in the New World. Chateaubriand unveiled the
literary possibilities of the native Indian and Victor Hugo mesmerized young writers
with the exuberance of his technical skills. From Corneille to Mallarmé, we could trace
the fortunes of every French master in Spain or Spanish America, and we would be
none the wiser unless we paused to consider the significance of the early interest in
French literature in the New World, one anticipating rather than following events in
Spain.
Without exhausting every angle and every possible view of the problem, we can
assert immediately the positive aspect of this trend: the newly established centers of
culture in America are eagerly proceeding to assimilate the tenets and norms of Euro­
pean literature. There was also a negative counterpart to this positive development:
there was already dissatisfaction, or, at least, a malaise, an alienation from the liter­
ature of the inherited language. It would be easy to summarize the historical changes
in Spanish America with the simple and erroneous theory that dependence on Spain
is transferred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a new dependence on France.
But, in the first place, there was then no dependence on Spain; there never was. We
are witnessing the continuation of a culture transplanted to a new soil, not the assimi­
lation of Spanish culture by a foreign people. Unless we emphasize this aspect, we run
the risk of missing the whole phenomenon, the arresting and violent beauty that is the
birth of a new tradition in spite of old directives; as indeed we may also miss the origi­
nality of a response to French literature that may begin with imitation, but then pas­
ses very rapidly through misinterpretation to be a new and distinctive force.
With the reading of new voices, the young at all times in history acquire a manner,
almost a mannerism, of thinking that becomes the stamp of the age, as it were. Yet
their own originality and the vigor of their environment must break through the shell
of superimposed fashions if they are to bring to new and hungry generations the
message of the past. In the Romantic assimilation of French patterns, Spanish Ameri­
cans, and later Spaniards, learned to think in terms of the dichotomies then in vogue:
"classic and romantic", "foreign and native", "civilization and barbarism", and many

335
others, and they tried to explain themselves away in the unthinking clichés of the mo­
ment. The end product — a hodgepodge of sociological analysis, historical account,
and biographical portrait—was not, however, a pale reflection of Romantic common­
places, b u t the creation of a semi-legendary figure of Shakespearean proportions in
Facundo. I t s author, Domingo F . Sarmiento, had indeed succumbed to the idolatry of
the b a r d a n d had learned all the new contempt for neoclassic reverences. His youthful
rebellion was, nevertheless, nurtured in the traditional vigor of his own rural language,
and brought to the word the discovery of his own self. The barbaric grandeur of a raw
land was in his prose, only vaguely illuminated b y the rapidly learned lessons of a new
movement.
The need of explaining to themselves—and to a curious world—their own emerging
nationalities creates a new type of Spanish-American journalist, not the tradesman
peddling sensationalism, b u t the thinker addressing and instructing his countrymen.
In this atmosphere, independent of Spain, the poets of the New World began the read­
ing of the French Symbolists. They were forced b y the imperative of their immediate
past bo try, paradoxically, to explain the novelties from abroad in the daily press, and
the Sunday literary supplement became, in their hands, the vehicle for the absorption
of an antibourgeois decadence t h a t ill-suited this money-making era of national orga­
nization.
Among the manifestos which followed the first attempts at writing a different t y p e
of poetry, " E l cruzamiento en literatura" shows to us how consciously aware of the
need of foreign influences the youth of the period was. The theories of the Mexican poet
Manuel Gutiérrez Nâjera seem to us like the reverse of the carpet of Comparative
Literature, although from his point of view, our studies may well appear as the reverse
of his carpet. Without the conception expounded in his article more clearly perhaps
than anywhere else, there would not have been the impetuous renovation of the old
tradition gained from foreign reading. At the same time as Gutiérrez Nájera translated,
created, and showed the way, the young in other countries were popularizing the names
and the books brought from Paris. Julián del Casal, who had never visited France,
wrote in La Habana Elegante about Maupassant and even about Huysmans. José
Marti, the national hero of the new republic of Cuba, was a travelling teacher and
journalist in whose works both French and English literatures were revealed to an
eager and eclectic public, while his poetry gained maturity and depth both from his
foreign readings and his recollection of popular rhythms.
Every writer is always both poet and critic, b u t seldom has there been a genera­
tion committed to the task of popularization while trying to perform its own creative
act. The ivory tower may have characterized the Symbolist or Decadent in France and
England; the Spanish American modernista, while he voiced his disdain for the bour­
geois, had to perform the tasks historically assigned to the writer in his country.
Gutiérrez Nâjera, Casal, Martí, and the Colombian José Asuncion Silva are the
major figures of this initial moment of renovation and discovery. They set the stage for
the advent of Rubén Dario, who carried to completion both tasks: the critical trans­
mission of a foreign culture, and the creation of a new body of imaginative work for
every young man to dream of while waiting for his own call to accomplishment or de-

336
 spair. In Ruben Dario, Spanish America finds its representative man. And his work,
exuberant in its assimilation of the new, carries the persistence of a tradition he had
memorized in childhood back to the shores whence it had been carried across the
Atlantic.
The writers of Spanish America were trying to synthesize the messages from France.
They thought they could unravel a theory, while they were really following a doctrine. 1
And a very eonfused doctrine it was. Parnassians, Decadents, and especially Symbolists
had endlessly discussed the meaning of their faith in symbols, until the concept had
become an idolatrous flag to fight and die by. I n their writings on problems of esthet­
ics, they resorted constantly and confusedly to the term "symbol", which served to
explain away many of their fears. The term itself, not their worship of the sounds
and the mystery of the word, has survived, together with its ambiguity.
Symbolists and Decadents, the poets of one group or another, followed the Ro­
mantics in their revolt against reason. Because it tries to avoid logical discourse, their
poetry, much more than the poetry of the first half of the century, depend heavily
on the uses of sensory representations. To transmit an emotional state, or even their
understanding of nature, the Symbolists resorted to images. Since the image itself
was for them the component which had the power to transmit the poetic experience,
we must assume t h a t it was for them the primary constituent of the symbol. The
task of deciphering their poetry is an inquiry into the peculiar circumstances t h a t
transform the image into a symbol. Evidently, this transformation can happen only
within a poem and is in some way related to the fusion of one individual image with
the whole poem—a fusion effected through its power of suggestion, which relates it to
the other images within a context.
The Symbolists and their successors resorted to the use of synesthesia frequently
in their desire to suggest the realm of the absent. They used the identification of two
sensations each of a different order as an allusion to the existence of a third possibility.
The synesthetic image became for them a signpost of dérèglement and also a gateway
to the absent life. And it seemed to them that, because of its very complexity, a synes­
thetic image was more appropriate to the creation of the symbol.
From far off, the writers of Spanish America viewed the experiments of these
decades in quite another light. For them, their readings brought enthusiasm and novelty,
and, a t times, even brought a strange energy, difficult as it is to believe t h a t enthu­
siasm and energy could go with preaching pessimism à la Leopardi and Schopenhauer.
There were conflicting models: the bohemianism and artistic inebriation of a few, the
playful Satanism or revolutionary socialism of another small group, b u t there was a
general obsession with melancholy and symbols. Even when they had only a confused
and vague notion of what the new poetry was trying to do, they saw themselves as
more up-to-date t h a n the generations they had come to replace. And when their

1
"Car c'est bien une doctrine, et non une théorie", Guy Michaud, La Doctrine symboliste
(Documents) (Paris, 1947), p. 9:

337
22 Balakian
opponents hurled the stigma of a denomination, modernistas, at them, they were more
than willing to take up the challenge and wear the new label most proudly. 2
The mournful words of the older generations complaining about these novelties
have a strangely familiar ring. The novelties invaded the most traditional citadels oi
Spain, and one writer called the young "los tétricos de la negación y de la duda que son
los melenudos de a h o r a " 3 This opposition was, of course, a clear sign of the beginning
of a movement, and helps to place it in history. More difficult t h a n establishing the
dates of a revolution, however, is defining the novelty or the gain it has brought. In
Spain and Spanish America the most evident gain during this period seems to have
been the paradoxical liberation of thought from its dependence on French sources by
the strange procedure of saturation with the French literature of the fin de siècle
After saturation, there was no other way open b u t to t r y other sources. Indeed, the
French writers themselves were pointing the way to the study of the recent Germar
and Russian masters, and to the assimilation of the exotic. This phenomenon came tc
be called "cosmopolitanism" and is undoubtedly a major trait of the movement
Cosmopolitismo was, in fact, a debilitating diet, and in t r u t h the most successful writers
were those who knew instinctively t h a t they had to p u t an end to their apprenticeship
and to begin to illuminate their vision of their own lands with a return to the self
Modernismo was a poetic movement, even in its prose. The personal essay, because
of its lyrical qualities, was cultivated with affection, and even the novel became sug
gestive and evocative. But the masterpieces were slow in coming, especially in prose
The very late Visión de Anáhuac (1917) belongs almost to another era; in it Alfonsc
Reyes took the sterility of Mallarmé's conceptions to the landscape of the valley o:
Mexico. The exquisite artistry learned from French models was instrumental in the
evocation of a very native history t h a t made the valley of Mexico a promise of a revi
talized past. I n the same way, the Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905) were the poet'
answer to the unfair criticism t h a t his work was not the expression of America. I n thii
masterpiece of modemismo, the spiritual autobiography of Ruben Dario is orchestratec
as the representative life of Spanish America. Before 1905, the successive stages o
Dario's response to French literature had determined the course of the moderniste
movement. The successful assimilation of the Parnasse had been achieved in the frag
ments published between 1886 and 1888 and brought together in the slim volume o
Azul. . . (1888). After this initial success, the writers of la mêlée symboliste were studiee
and imitated in Spanish America under Dario's own direction. His articles were widen
ing literary horizons and were collected in Los raros (1896), while his poetry appealec
to every imagination when his Prosas profanas came out the same year. These two book
spread the influence of the French Decadents in the Spanish world. Paul Verlain<
became Dario's acknowledged model, and the dictates of his Art poétique were hailec
and sometimes even understood. Verlaine had already declared his opposition to the

2
For the history of this term, see Max Henríquez Ureña, "Historia de un nombre", in Brev
historia
3
del modemismo (Mexico, Buenos Aires, 1954), pp. 156-169.
Cited by Azorin, from José Maria de Pereda's speech to the Spanish Academy in " L
generación de 1898", Clásicos y modemos (Buenos Aires, 1939), p . 186.

338
 Symbolist group, 4 and the distinction between the esoteric search for the sens plus pur
indefatigably pursued by Mallarmé, and the worship of la musique avant toute chose
by Verlaine's followers had become clear.
Darío's affinities with Verlaine prevented him from adhering to Mallarmé's group:
"Si soy verleniano no puedo ser moreista o mallarmista, pues son maneras distintas,"
he declared (Obras completas, vol. XVII, p . 123). He knew, however, the values to be
found in Mallarmé's poetry and wrote a penetrating discussion of his work for El Mer-
curio de América in 1898. But it was not in his nature to indulge in the maner a de Mal-
larmé as one of his disciples in the River Plate region was to do in a tour de force t h a t
plays with the sound " u " as "Le Pitre châtié" had with the sounds " é , " " a i , " " a , " etc.
Of all the followers of Darío, it is perhaps the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig—
author of the youthful "Solo verde-amarillo para flauta, Have de u " with the marvel­
lous epigraph, "Virgilio es amarillo y P r a y Luis verde. (Manera de Mallarmé)"—who
explored the depth of Symbolist esthetics with the most relish and perseverance.
On the other hand, the use of symbols in the poetry of Dario is more in the manner of
the traditional allegory than it is in accord with Symbolist conceptions. His poetry
was, however, the means of conquering the remaining centers of culture in Spain, and
the poets of the Generation of '98 learned from his example to renew their language
and to search for inspiration far and wide, in their own forgotten medieval sources
as well as in the innovations of foreign literatures.

II
By the beginning of the century, the poets of Spain had joined to their interest
in French novelties an almost unanimous admiration for Rubén Dario. " H e is the
greatest of all poets writing in our language today", 5 wrote J u a n Ramon Jiménez,
only twenty one years old at the time, prefacing his assertion with the affirmation
t h a t it was undebatable. By this time, Darío had p u t his poetry at the service of social
aims. The Spanish-American War had reminded him of his duties as the standard-
bearer of a continent, and, obviously, the indefatigable pursuit of shade and tone had
become secondary in his work. The exquisiteness of his language and the powerful,
evocative value of his images were still to be heard, though. All the passion of youth
could be rekindled in old age, walking in a Verlainian park, when Dario remembered
Botticelli's Venus and longed for her beauty: "Cuando mi pensamiento va hacia ti,
se perfuma." 6 The Symbolist apprentice had matured, and the intensity of the line,
almost synesthetic in its novelty of assigning perfume to abstract thought, assures us
t h a t the lesson had been well assimilated. I t is not used here simply as another fashion­
able device, but is the expression of the experience and its haunting reality through a
new means.

4
Jules Huret, Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire (Paris, 1894), p . 67, previously published in
L'Echo de Paris, 1891.
5
" E s indiscutable que Rubén Dario es el poeta más grande de los que actualmente escriben en
castellano",
6
Helios, Madrid, I (1903), p. 116.
"Versos de otoño", published in El canto errante (1907), previously published in Blanco y
negro (Madrid) in 1905.

22*
339.
 Experimentation of this kind was not far from even the most philosophical poets:
at times, we find it hidden in the ideological verse of Miguel de Unamuno, at times
erupting with subdued force in the nostalgic evenness of a melancholy youth in Anto-
nio Machado: " H a y ecos de luz en los balcones". 7 B u t neither Dario nor Antonio Ma-
chado devoted their efforts to the chasing of images in patterns of progressive diffi­
culty. Both of them were preoccupied with other thoughts and felt called to other
destinies. Yet, for a glorious moment at the turn of the century, the life of sensations
had replaced the life of thought.
Of all the followers of the new doctrines in the Spanish world, the Uruguayan
Herrera y Reissig was probably the poet who most clearly and faithfully adhered to
the creed of Symbolism and Decadence brought to his country b y the example of Dario
and the early importation of a few volumes of Albert Samain. After his initial discov­
ery, Herrera y Reissig became obsessed for a decade—he died in 1910—with technical
novelties, while trying to create out of the Uruguayan countryside a new world of pastoral
tranquility, his own Arcadia.
In transposing the phenomenal world, Herrera y Reissig resorts most frequently
to the kinetic sense. The texture of his lines is, however, extremely varied, with m a n y
passages changing from one sense to another with scintillating rapidity:

Cien fugas de agua viva rezan a la discreta

Ventura de los campos sin lábaro y sin tronos.
El incienso sulfurico que arde por los abonos
se hermana a los salobres yodos de la caleta . . . 8

Here, the poet presents a painting without the benefit of a logical statement of its
significance. Colors are spread all over the canvas, rather t h a n being restricted to a
shape or an object; movement and feelings are projected into objects and animals.
His is an animistic nature, personified in vivid pictures. Even abstract qualities can
acquire movement and life: " L a inocencia del dia se lava en la fontana". 9
The exuberance and complexity of the natural world are paralleled in Herrera y
Reissig's poetry by his use of images of different orders: olfactory, gustative, thermic,
tactile, kinetic, and kinesthetic. From this wealth of varied sensorial impressions, com­
plexes of a synesthetic quality develop frequently. Their function in the poems is close­
ly related to the author's conception of an animistic nature. And they are based on
the psychological phenomenon called synesthesia, which may occur as an experience
of normal life, b u t is likely to be much more frequent under the influence of narcotics.
Certainly, the phenomenon itself has no esthetic value, nor is there any value inherent
in the combined evocation t h a t may be created by producing two or three different
sensations with one single stimulus. The interest of the period in synesthesia led to

7
Poesias completas, poem XV. For French influences in the poetry of Antonio Machado, see
Geoffrey Ribbans, "La influencia de Verlaine en Antonio Machado", Cuademos hispanoamericanos,
Numeros
8
91-92 (1957), pp. 180-201.
Julio Herrera y Reissig, Poesias completas (Buenos Aires, 1942), p. 184.
9
Ibid., p . 147.

340
eccentricities now forgotten: the alcoholic symphonies of Des Esseintes, or René Ghil's
theories and tables of the exact relationship of sounds, perfumes, colors and feelings
are the exaggerations of the trend. Nevertheless, the serious efforts which followed
Baudelaire's programmatic sonnet Les Correspondances were basic to the development
of modern poetry in France and elsewhere.
The esthetic effect produced by this phenomenon is frequently combined in Sym­
bolist poetry with a hypallactic adjective. Hypallages of a simple kind, in which an
adjective logically related to one term is transferred to another in the same sentence,
are quite common. At times, elliptic hypallages—in which the real term of reference
is not expressed—create unnamed entities of much greater suggestiveness. The com­
bination of a hypallage and a reference to a double sensation constitutes a special case
of the synesthetic image. Symbolist poets created lines of rare beauty by means of
this figure, sometimes known as "ethical color" as in Mallarmé's Salut: "Le blanc
souci de notre toile", and in his Uruguayan follower: "Tu collar de rojos saerilegios". 10
Rubén Darío's mature thought, in its almost synesthetic expression, and the echoes
of light in Antonio Machado seem now to fit into a pattern of preoccupations to which
no poet at the turn of the century could be alien. Although devoted to the restoration
of the tradition and the glories of Old Spain, the members of the Generation of '98
were immersed in the poetic atmosphere of the times. 1 1 As we have seen, the youngest
among them, J u a n Ramon Jiménez, had hailed the greatness of Ruben Dario at the
beginning of his own career.
Ill

When, in 1900, J u a n Ramón Jiménez joined a small group of enthusiastic and poor
young writers in Madrid, he had already read with careful attention both popular and
medieval poetry, as well as the Romantic poets José de Espronceda, José Zorrilla,
and, of course, Bécquer. Of Rubén Dario he had read only a few recent poems which
had made a deep impression on him, especially on the metrical patterns of his early
attempts. A short stay in Bordeaux and a long acquaintance with the French language,
together with a warm friendship with Rubén Dario, transformed him into probably
the most devoted Symbolist writer of his generation. As early as 1904, Jiménez listed
among his favorite poets the names of Verlaine, Samain, Alfred de Musset, Moréas,
Paul Fort, Jules Laforgue, and Francis Jammes. The presence of the bucolic Jammes
and Samain is as revealing of the young man's sensibility as is the absence of both
Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Obviously, his selection was still guided b y the reputation
the French poets enjoyed outside France. Soon Jiménez was to learn the true hierarchy
of artistic ability in the use of the French language.
Echoes in many of Jiménez's lines and in some of his published translations make
clear t h a t his youthful poetry was indebted to Verlaine's to the extent t h a t he read

10
Ibid., p . 277. For a study of Herrera y Reissig's role in the movement and his relationship
to French
11
poetry, see my Julio Herrera y Reissig and the Symbolists (Berkeley, California, 1957).
See, for instance, Gordon Brotherston's Manuel Machado : A Revaluation (Cambridge, 1968)
as a study of one of the poets of the Generation of '98 and his debt to French literature, especially
Chapter 9, pp. 99-106.

341
in other French poets mostly what they had inherited from their master. One aspect
of his earty activity reveals the depth of this influence better t h a n the many details-
that have been pointed out. 12 I n many of his early books, an epigraph in French indi­
cates either the source of his poem, or his admiration for a poet. The excerpts from
Samain are frequently imitations of Verlainian landscapes in autumn melancholy,
such as the lines " E t chaque feuille d'or tombe l'heure venue/ainsi qu'un souvenir,
lente, sur le gazon". 1 3
An epigraph, we must admit, is placed by the author as a conscious tribute of his
admiration, and at times even as an acknowledgement of dependence. B u t such an
acknowledgement also presupposes the clear notion of a distinct personality capable of
incorporating the foreign thought. If we reflect, then, we may conclude t h a t an epigraph
indicates t h a t the point of independence has been reached; the poet may very well be
disclaiming the p a r t of his personality which is a literary addition to his own self
rather than a natural development of his sensibility.
To emphasize this point, let us examine an incident in one of the earliest books
of Jiménez. In Arias tristes (1903), the lines " L a otra tarde, se ha llevado / e l viento
más hojas secas" are the beginning of a vision of melancholy in autumn. The young
poet did not quite see the relationship of these lines to Verlaine, or at least he did
not feel the need to call our attention to his dependence. Yet, when he selected this
poem for inclusion in the Segunda antologia poética, in 1919, he added as an epigraph
the line from Verlaine, "Le vent de l'autre nuit a jeté bas l'Amour". Jiménez became
aware of the fact t h a t his poem was an echo of a moment in Verlaine, and decided to
acknowledge this, and make clear the distance t h a t separated the adolescent reader
of Verlaine from the mature anthologist. Yet the words do not follow the source so
closely. Jiménez must be pointing out a different relationship, probably one of pro­
cedure or technique, in which the descriptive words are not explained b u t left to sug­
gest a mood. This use of a favorite Symbolist technique in Spanish poetry is very closely
allied to a trait of the traditional romance. The form itself, depending on a continuous
assonance in every other line ending, had in its origins, a quality of fragmentarisrmo14
very close in its incompleteness t o the desire for suggestiveness of the fin de siècle. The
young Jiménez inherited the revival of the traditional versification attempted b y the
regional poets of the late nineteenth century independently of any knowledge of French
Symbolism, which he combined with the novelties he was learning. Suggestion in Sym­
bolist doctrine, in the same way as the mysterious incompleteness of the romance,
aims at awakening in the reader an emotional response; t h a t is, the communication
has to be accomplished on a plane prior to any intellectual analysis.
After his first youthful years in Madrid, the young master decided to retire to his
native Moguer, where he spent seven years of seclusion devoted to the study a n d prac­
tice of his art. The detailed account of his reading and assimilation of the French and,
12
For a study of Jiménez's debt to Symbolism, see the chapters " E n el simbolismo francés"
and "Lecturas inglesas y norteamericanas" in my La poesia de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Obra en
marcha13
(Barcelona, 1973), pp. 67-147.
14
Segunda antologia poética (Madrid, 1922), poem 82.
Ramón Menéndez Pidal, "Proemio", Flor nueva de romances viejos (Buenos Aires, 1938),
p. 7.

342
later, the English poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be of
interest only as a background for the understanding of Jiménez's evolution as a poet.
The impact of the French Decadence can be summarized, however, without resorting
to the prolixity of documenting every source.
As in the case of most poets of this period, the reliance on sensory representation
and the interest in synesthetic images are to be found in Jiménez's work. A stanza of
his Marinas de ensueno shows his adroitness in the use of recent technical discoveries:

El cielo de tormenta, pesado y retumbante,

se raja en el ocaso. U n agudo cuchillo
de luz agria y equivoca, orna el medroso instante,
de u n extrano esplendor, délirante y amarillo. 15

The disorder of sense impressions culminates in the next line with a double synesthetic
reading of the event: "Lo que hiere la luz, como un grito, se inflama".
Together with this general influence on the poet's technique, we can see a reaffir­
mation of his faith in the importance of his art, often expressed in words reminiscent
of J e a n Moréas, from whom he translated the poem " J e ne me plaindrai pas, qu'im­
porte l'Aquilon." Evidently, "the first and most striking feature of the symbolist
esthetic . . . its attempt to establish art as an autonomous branch of human activity" 1 6
had found a receptive ground in Spanish letters, and Jiménez was following to its logical
conclusion the lesson of the Symbolists.
I n this process, the deciding factor was the general atmophere of the late nineteenth
century, intent on rescuing the purity of art from the bourgeois and the philistine.
The clearest expression of this pride of artistry and contempt for the affairs of the world
was to be found in the work of Baudelaire, to which the apprenticeship of Jimenez
had inevitably to lead. From Albert Samain, whose sentimental muse was always
more popular in the Spanish world t h a n in France, from Verlaine and even from Mal­
larmé, in a retracing of steps, the Spanish master turned to the poetry of Baudelaire to
find not only the theoretical foundations of his art, b u t also the technical guidance
t h a t would be instrumental in his attainment of maturity.
The use of symbols and the reliance on sensations was a technique well absorbed
by many poets, and also, early on, b y Jiménez. Few ever saw, however, t h a t these
resources had to be p u t at the service of an aim, a t the evocation of a total mood. 17
Clearly, this had been Baudelaire's intuitive goal; through his sensory imagination,
passionately fond of perfumes, he brought to the life of the printed page his recollec­
tions of exotic lands:

Guidé par ton odeur vers de charmants climats,

J e vois un port rempli de voiles et de mâts
Encore tout fatigués p a r la vague marine,

15
16
Primeros libros de poesia (Madrid, 1957), p . 1137.
A. G. Lehman, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885-1895 (Oxford, 1950), p . 30.
17
"Le symbole proprement dit n'a été qu'un élément de l'évocation, but essentiel de cette
poésie", René Lalou, Histoire de la littérature française contemporaine (Paris, 1923), p . 167.

343
 Pendant que le parfum de verts tamariniers,
Qui circule dans l'air et m'enfle la narine,
Se mêle dans mon âme au chant des mariniers.

Parfum exotique or La Chevelure brought to the attentive reader this peculiarity

of Baudelaire's imagination, [t was easy to follow him in this, b u t not so easy to repeat
the experience of evocation in another life, starting from the sensations of jasmins or
carnations in Andalusia, and evoking through them with no less intense a passion, the
women of a youthful adventure or dream:

Clavel

Cierro los ojos, y hundo mi vida cálida

en el clavel rosado, embriagador y fresco;
y, en un vano delirio de anhelos y de esencias,
me parece, mujer, que es que t e estoy oliendo. 18

In the passionate intensity of the comparison the leaves of the flower acquire a burning
presence and slowly there emerges in the room the actual presence of a memory:

Por las hojas, rizadas como bucles de carne,

yerran, dolientemente, yo no sé qué misterios
de sabor que me diste, de color que te vi,
sabor de amor en llama, color de crudo fuego.

i Si, toda t u retornas a la estancia callada,

y, desnuda, infinita, te acercas un momento;
yo, cerrados los ojos, salida el alma toda,
como llegando al cielo último, huelo, huelo, huelo ! . . .

Después, el olor ya no huele más, se aspira

el revés del olor, hecho ya yermo aquello,
. . . y es como un marchitarse de pétalos brumosos,
cuando, tras el clavel, te vas desvaneciendo . . .

One further step, a consequence of Jiménez's patient and continuous devotion

to his art rather than the product of literary apprenticeship, is clearly seen in the last,
key line of the poem. The movement of the fantastic presence, coming into the room
and leaving again, is reproduced in the play of sounds t h a t come and go as they repeat
in their arrangement the visual evocation of the poem: " t e vas desvanecierido." Jiménez
had indeed developed the most exacting skill. The suggestions of sounds, colors, or
perfumes are used repeatedly to evoke the experience of a past treasured in the selec­
tion of our memory. The techniques—even the aims—were no doubt inherited from
Symbolism; the technical skill, we must agree, is Jiménez's own accomplishment. B u t
beyond his progress in technique, aim, or skill, there is in these years of the second
18
Segunda antologia poética, poem 226, ascribed here to t h e unpublished collection, Libros de
amor, dated 1911-1912.

344
decade of the century a n intellectual leap from the concept of suggestion to t h e use of
evocation, and from here t o a new grasp and understanding of the nature of poetry.
At this moment, Jiménez becomes the leading force of poetic activity in his language,
when reflection on the failure of words to totally capture the past evoked in sensory
richness leads him to a final definition of his art:

Sur

Nostalgia aguda, infinita,

terrible, de lo que tengo. 19

In the stark presence of these few words—almost unintelligible in their simplicity—

the cruel reality of his failure—and of his dream—can be defined as nostalgia for his
own past. Dreaming is the only case in which we may possess the reality we are nos­
talgic for; and the poet defines it as a cardinal point, the opposite of norte, figuratively
the destination of our voyage. "Sur", then, is what is left behind, and all the possibil­
ities of infinite evocations are summarized in it. Sensation is no longer the realm of
creation; poetry becomes a conceptual and linguistic activity. This final revelation,
intimated in Mallarmé, h a d been hidden by the fashionable interest in images and sen­
sations, and could be revealed only after an exacting search for symbolic expression.
The enriched meaning of the word "sur"—obtained through suggestion—defines our
experience of living, our acquisition of a past, and becomes the paradigm of evocation.
Throughout the whole history of this search, from 1898 to his death in 1958, J u a n
Ramon Jiménez pursued his solitary dreams, paying constant attention to the masters
of his youth and the youthful movements of his maturity. As we have seen, his early
poetry had a Verlainean tone. He went through all the obsessions with images and the
derangement of the senses. H e conquered the technique of evocation and came to
discover the conceptual._and_ linguistic-function of his art. Through all these changes,
in every response to the world of experience or of literature, his poetry was always a
continuation of a tradition t h a t included medieval and popular lyricism, Garcilaso
and San J u a n de la Cruz, Góngora and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Reading a new source
acted only as an awakening of the old power to give another tone to the same voice.
A poem of maturity is, then, the convergence in a moment of luminous intuition
of an experience long cherished in its traditional expression, and its renewal when the
magic of someone else's words reawaken the senses or the spirit. No doubt, the shadowy
region of misty imaginings, the fearful dreams of death explored b y Maeterlinck had
frightened the sleepless nights of Jiménez in his youth. And traces of such fear are found
in poem after poem.
The genesis of a poem, Symbolist in origin, traditional in theme, subtly original
in expression, can in this case be ascertained since Jiménez himself marked this frag­
ment and dated his reading of it in 1919. This poem, bearing no title, was published
in Espana On the 9th of October, ] 920:

19
Poesía (Madrid, 1923), p. 97.

345
 No me mirarân diciendo:
"i Que eres ?";
sino sin curiosidad
y dulcemente.

Porque yo seré también de

los quietos;
y ya no tendre dificiles
los pensamientos.

Mis ojos serán, serenos,

los suyos;
los miraré sin preguntas,
uno en lo uno.

The triumphant serenity of these lines, as we imagine ourselves in a world of life

and truth beyond every possibility of thought and belief, marks the culmination of
two decades of the poet's active search. The influence of Pascal on the thinking pro­
cess, the influence of Maeterlinck on the attitude and mood, and the more recent tra­
dition of Symbolist suggestion and subtlety are brought together to express an age-
old longing, a preoccupation that the poet has inherited and that, in spite of all debts,
or because of them, defines most completely the poetic experience of Juan Ramon
Jimenez.

346
 ANDRÉ DEBICKI

JORGE GUILLEN AND THE SYMBOLIST IMPRINT

ON THE GENERATION OF THE 1920'S

Like many other writers of the twentieth century, certain Spanish poets have carried
forward the Symbolist vision of the uniqueness of poetry, offering a good example of
its importance and pervasiveness. But these poets have also modified this vision,
giving it an emphasis that might well have surprised Baudelaire or Mallarmé. For the
Symbolist writer the poem embodied an experience which was in some way already
present before its composition; for the Spanish poets, however, the experience is not
fully created, fully existent, until it is expressed in the language of the poem. Jorge
Guillén makes this point on several occasions:

And form, the revélation of content, is something more than revelation. Form
discovers — and remakes, creates.1

If the origin of expression, an experience that was lived, furnishes the basis of
the work . . . complete expression lises to the height of creation, more opulent
than its source. That is what makes it creation. T. S. Eliot makes it clear: 'When
the poem has been made, something new has happened, something that cannot
be wholly explained by anything that went before . . .' Creation establishes a
totality that was not in the experience, the raw materials of which have been
transformed, surpassed. 2

Pedros Salinas and Federico Garcia Lorca also stress the ways in which a poem's
composition involves the transformation of reality, and hence the making of a new
experience in their respective comments on Garcilaso and on Góngora:

What Garcilaso does instead is to transform this world — which is originally

ours and everyone else's — into another world, with the most magic simplicity...
And his attitude toward reality is perhaps the most poetic, the most essentially
poetic of all. For in Garcilaso's procedure, we perceive the most pure and limpid
of poetic operations: life, impure, in reality, is converted into pure poetry. 3

Góngora, who loves reality so m u c h . . . suppresses it, destroys it. To what end ?
In order to give us another reality, poetically created with true reality.4

1
Jorge Guillén, Language and Poetry ; Some Poets of Spain (Cambridge, Mass. 1961), p . 161.
2
Ibid., pp. 183-184.
3
Salinas, Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry (Baltimore 1940), p . 93.
4
Ibid., p . 145.

347
 We have seen how the poet [Góngora] transforms everything t h a t he touches with
his hands. His sublime theogonic feeling gives personality to the forces of Nature.
And his sentiment of love for woman . . makes him stylize his gallantry and
eroticism t o an inviolate height. 5

The stress placed by Spanish poets on the creation of meaning in poetry is perhaps
the logical development, the next logical step of Symbolist theory. By making poetry
the objectification or symbolization of unexplainable experiences, the Symbolists were
giving it a unique value and starting to articulate the distinction between it and logical
discourse. The Symbolist poems strive, again and again, to embody experiences in
correspondences and in symbols. In certain respects, some of them succeed very well
in capturing untranslatable meanings; yet even when they do, they often remain
anchored in seemingly arbitrary connections or in the feelings of the individual speakers.
This is apparent even in Voyelles:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,

J e dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

Golfes d'ombre; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,

Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles;

While the speaker's (or poet's) attitudes and impressions to each vowel are objecti­
fied b y means of the colors and the evocations he attributes to them, the reader might
well consider them arbitrary or purely personal, and contemplate them rather t h a n
share them. If this occurs, the poem evokes a previous experience rather t h a n creating
a new one for the reader. The Symbolist vision of poetry is, then, the communication
of previously existent but untranslatable meanings.
The process evident in Voyelles can be compared and contrasted to t h a t pro­
duced by Guillen's Perfectión:

Queda curvo el firmamento,

Compacto azul, sobre el dia.
Es el redondeamiento
Del esplendor: mediodia.
Todo es cúpula. Reposa,
Central sin querer, la rosa,
A un sol en cenit sujeta.
Y t a n t o se da el presente
Que el pie caminante siente
L a integridad del planeta. 6

5
Lorca, "La imagen poëtica en Don Luis de Góngora", Obras completas, (Madrid 1957), p . 83.
6
Guillén, Aire nuestro (Milano 1968), p. 250. [The poem is from Gântico, the first of Guillén's
three major books of poetry, all of which are included in Aire nuestro.] English translations of this
poem and all other Spanish poems quoted in this paper are included in the Appendix.

348
As in the case of Voyelles, there is the objectification of an experience. Guillén does not
offer us a realistic landscape, nor does he explain why this scene is perfect; instead,
he chooses words so as to embody the feelings of wholeness, of perfection. The nouns
and adjectives of the first lines—curvo, compacte, redondeamiento, cúpula—conjure
up a geometric, spherical scheme, which we instinctively (perhaps archety pally) deem
exact and perfect. The visual picture evoked also creates a perfect balance: the semi­
circle of the sky above, the sun in the middle, the rose directly below. Another balance
emerges in the order of presentation: the sky above is mentioned first, the land below
last, the rose in the middle in between.There is no action to speak of in most of the poem:
the verbs, all in the present, point to stasis rather than movement (queda, es, reposa).
Every detail in the description is linked with perfection, either by being p a r t of the geo­
metric scheme, or by connoting beauty (the rose), or by evoking a climactic moment
(noon).
The whole scene therefore fulfills the role Mallarmé ascribed to symbol: it offers
an embodiment of all the subjective nuances and implications of the experience of
perfection. (Up to this point, it parallels Voyelles.) But it also does more: it creates
anew within the reader himself this experience. The words and patterns discussed do
not evoke the speaker and his attitude, but rather produce in the reader an attitude
toward the scene and its implications. (The correspondences seem archetypal, not
arbitrary; the speaker avoids talking about himself; the impressions emerge from the
choice of vocabulary and form.) B y introducing the "walking foot" in the last p a r t and
evoking an almost sensual link between man and planet, Guillén forges even more
concretely the experience of life's wholeness.
J u s t as Guillén's idea of poetry as the embodiment and creation of experience rep­
resents a further development of a Symbolist vision, so Perfección marks a step
beyond Voyelles: by creating the reader's experience through its very words, it goes
one step beyond the objectification of the speaker's experience in Rimbaud's poem.
This distinction can well be related to the contrasts Claude Vigée has discovered
between the poetry of Guillén and t h a t of the Symbolists; Vigée has pointed out how
Guillén's Cántico is always centered on the concretization of real experience, on the
embodiment of basic human feelings and basic natural patterns, on the transcendence
of a personal or narcissistic " I " . 7 All of this connects with the stress placed on poetry
as making as well as embodying and communicating.
Another concept of great importance in the Symbolists' vision of poetry is t h a t
of the transcendent nature of poetic expression. Although this concept evidently goes
back to the Romantics and to even earlier poets, it is more developed in Symbolist
writings than ever before. The view of the poet as seer, evident in Bau lelaire's work
and much repeated afterwards, emphasizes poetry's role in capturing universal mys­
teries and meanings. 8 (Unlike the Romantics, the Symbolists indicated t h a t this func-

7
Vigée, "Jorge Guillén et les poètes symbolistes français", Révolte et louanges (Paris 1962),
pp. 139-197.
8
See Balakian, El movimiento simbolista, (Madrid, Quatamara Press, 1969) pp. 65-67. (This
volume is a translation of The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal, published in New York
in 1967).

349
tion was achieved through the language and the form of the work.) It is again Mal­
larmé, however, who defends most forcefully the transcendent value of poetry:
La poésie est l'expression par le langage humain ramené à son rythme essentiel,
du sens mystérieux des aspects de l'existence: elle doue ainsi d'authenticité notre
séjour et constitue la seule tâche spirituelle.9

Although this concept may seem dated in the rhetorical form in which Mallarmé
expressed it, it does in fact underlie much of twentieth century poetic theory. As
Anna Balakian has pointed out, a belief in the transcendent nature of poetry leads to
a view of poetic art as a means of overcoming the limitations of ordinary life, of time,
of death. 10 In the critical writings of the Spanish poets of the 1920's, references to
poetry's-universal and transcendent value occur time and again. The belief in such a
value, in fact, justifies the stress placed on poetic language and poetic form; these are
important not for their own sake, but because if they are used correctly, they will
embody essential values in a unique way.11
The critical writings of Jorge Guillén make very clear his belief in poetry's trans­
cendence:
Finding one's expression becomes something like climbing a mountain top . . .
Maximum vitality finds its expression in maximal language.12

Poetry as an art of poetry: the form of an incarnation. We could write this word
with a capital I: the mystery of the Incarnation. The spirit becomes form incar­
nate mysteriously, with something which cannot be reduced to the intelligence,
in this marriage of idea and music.13

Salinas has outlined in this fashion the value of poetry:

Poetry is always an answer to the eternal questions which come to our souls with
the light of morning or with the evening darkness of the existence of things. 14

While Lorca avoided such pronouncements as to the function of poetry, the bulk of
his own work is centered on the theme of death and on the efforts to transcend human
limitations through poetic art. 15 All the members of this generation, in fact, emphasized
the embodiment of basic human themes in their poetry, as Guillén has indicated in his
discussion of his contemporaries: "The major themes of human existence—love,
nature, life, death—filled the lyric and dramatic works of this generation".16

9
Mallarmé 's answer to an interview, quoted by Guy Michaud in Mallarmé; l'komme et l'œuvre
(Paris101968), p . 114.
11
Balakian,p. 204.
See my Estudios sobre poesia espanola contemporánea (Madrid 1968); p p . 33-36. On the
poetics of the Spanish "Generation of the 1920's", see also Biruté Ciplijauskaite's excellent El poeta
y la poesia
12
ch. VI, (Madrid 1966).
13
Guillén, "Federico en persona", in Garcia Lorca, Obras complétas, p . lxviii. [My translation.]
14
Guillén, Language and Poetry, p . 205.
15
Ensayos de literatura hispánica, 2d. ed. (Madrid 1961), p . 371. [My translation.]
16
See Debicki, Estudios . . . , ch. V I I I .
Language and Poetry, p . 210.

350
 The Spanish poets of the 1920's are indeed inheritors of a vision which comes to
them from the Symbolists, and which ascribes great universal value to poetic expression,
rejecting more pragmatic roles for poetry. Yet at the same time, there is at least one
very important contrast between the Symbolist formulations of this attitude and those
of the Spaniards. The view of the poet as magus found very little support among the
Spanish poets. Garcia Lorca, it is true, stressed the mystery of the poet's task in his
discussion of the duende, a spirit of the earth that inspires the poet17. But when asked
to define his poetics, he spoke more pragmatically:

If it is true that I am a poet by the grace of God — or of the devil — it is also

true that I am a poet by the grace of techniques and of effort, and of realizing
perfectly well what a poem is like.18

There is not the slightest echo of the seer in Guillén's view of poetry: the accent is placed
on the poem as a linguistic object which concretely embodies experience. Poetry is
transcendent not in any vaguely mysterious way, but because it captures through its
language the basic themes of life.
Guillén's way of making poetry express transcendent meanings is well exempli­
fied by Perfectión. But this theme emerges from a very concrete scene, evoked through
ordinary words, devoid of any exoticism. The poet has forged a wider vision by an artis­
tic manipulation of a concrete reality and a normal vocabulary.
The fashioning of a transcendent vision out of an ordinary reality is even more
apparent in the poem Naturalem viva :

i Tablero de la mesa
Que, tan exactamente
Raso nivel, mantiene
Resuelto en una idea

Su plano: puro, sabio,

Mental para los ojos
Mentales ! Un aplomo,
Mientras, requiere al tacto,

Que palpa y reconoce

Cómo el plano gravita
Con pesadumbre rica
De leña, tronco, bosque

De nogal, i El nogal
Confiado a sus nudos
Y vetas, a su mucho
Tiempo de potestad

17
"Teoría y juego del duende", Obras completas, pp. 36-48.
18
Garcia Lorca, "Poëtica", in Gerardo Diego, Poesía espafiola contempordnea ; antologia,
new edition (Madrid 1959), p . 423.

361
 Reconcentrada en este
Vigor inmóvil, hecho
Materia de tablero
Siempre, siempre silvestre !19

The poem is based on a dual perception of the table surface. The latter is on the
one hand, a specific object, seen and touched by the speaker; b u t it is also, on the other,
a means of evoking a wider vision of a natural substance, wood, a n d its survival in
the object a t hand. The poem is remarkable in its ability to make a single experience
out of this double perception; the concrete object and the wider p a t t e r n are parts of
one vivid experience. The table and the wood as here presented are an irreplaceable
symbol, in t h e Mallarméan sense, of a reality a t once immediate and essential.
The poem achieves all this by intertwining sensations and conceptual insights.
On the one hand, the first line focuses on the specific object, and the third stresses t h e
physical sensation of smoothness; on the other, the second line points to the idea of
exactness, while t h e fifth and sixth interpret the table's flatness as an example of reso­
lution and order. The two kinds of insight come together in lines 4 — 7: the speaker's
physical awareness of a plane is also a wider perception of form. (Guillén fuses the two
levels in one image: ojos mentales makes the perception both sensorial and conceptual.)
A similar intertwining takes place in lines 7 — 13. Stress is first placed on the sen­
sation of touch, and hence on the table and on wood as concrete realities. B u t t h e
awareness produced goes beyond the physical perception of these objects, extending
into a vision of wood in its various transformations, and moving backward to the image
of the original living form in which the table originated. The last two stanzas of t h e
poem then expand this vision, combining specific perceptions of the table surface with
wider evocations of the properties of wood. The sensations produced b y the wood
grain connect with the concept of wood's durability and transformations; wood's
physical hardness merges with the idea of its lasting and enduring in this table (we
get both from vigor inmóvil). The last two lines refer to survival both in a physical a n d
in a wider, conceptual sense: in the literal sense we see the " s u r v i v a l " of wood in t h e
table, while in a wider sense we witness the preservation of certain basic patterns—
smoothness, evenness, a design attesting to life.
Guillén has focused on a common object and sensation and, without abandoning
the physical plane, has linked it to a wider vision. The theme of the persistency and sur­
vival of natural matter, which so easily could have become unreal and abstract, has
been conveyed as p a r t and as extension of the matter-of-fact action of feeling a table
surface, making us really experience a naturaleza viva.20 The way in which he has done
so exemplifies very well his tendency, and t h a t of his fellow poets, of making poetry
discover universal values amidst ordinary reality by means of the exact and skillful
use of language and form. While sharing the Symbolists' search for transcendent mean­
ings in his poetry, Guillén has avoided any temptation to remove this poetry from the

19
Guillén, Aire nuestro, p. 50. See the Appendix for an English translation.
20
The title means "Living Nature", but also suggests a play on Naturaleza Muerta ("Still
Life").

352
realm of tangible reality, just as he avoided any temptation to define the poetic quest
as a mystic endeavor and the poet as a magus.
The way in which a wider vision emerges out of a common reality is also apparent
in this poem of Pedro Salinas:

Arena: hoy dormida en la playa

y manana cobijada
en los senos del mar:
hoy del sol y manana del agua.
A la mano que te oprime
le cedes blanda
y te vas con el primer viento
galán que pasa.
Arena pura y casquivana,
novia versâtil y clara, te quise por mía
y te estreché contra el pecho y el alma.
Pero con olas y brisas y soles te fuiste
y me quedé sin amada,
con la frente dada al viento que me la robaba,
y la vista al mar lejano donde ella tenia
verdes amores en verde posada.21

Unlike Naturaleza viva, this poem is based upon a very unusual metaphorical relation­
ship. By linking elements as different as a girl and sand, this metaphor takes us beyond
any purely literal perspective, and focuses on the one characteristic shared by both
sand and girl, their elusiveness. It is, therefore, a means of extracting from a common
reality a more absolute perception, that of the evasiveness of things. (The poem, in
fact, is mot about a girl, or sand, or even the speaker's particular experience, but rather
about the perception of this evasiveness.) This wider perception emerges through a
careful manipulation of a specific scene, of specific sensations, of ordinary words, and
of a whimsical tone and perspective.
Though seemingly quite different, the concepts I have dealt with so far relate
quite well'to each other: both imply the same general attitude to poetic creation and
poetic meaning. By stressing that poetry on the one hand, embodies a unique kind of
meaning, and on the other, communicates values of a transcendent nature, the Symbolists
were asserting the uniqueness of their discipline, and resisting any tendency to subor­
dinate it to others. One could see the Symbolists' effort as the reaction against a re­
current tendency to reduce the function of poetry to that of offering a sugar-coated
pill, a pleasing way of conveying ideas. The Symbolists' stress on the poem as an inde­
pendent entity of great value also stands against a confessional view of literature.
The Symbolists, from this point of view, were starting (or at least, were emphasiz­
ing for the first time in centuries) an attitude and a tendency which was to become
crucial in the twentieth century. The Spanish poets of the 1920's, just like T. S. Eliot
in England and like the so-called "New Critics" in the United States, continued both

21
Salinas, Poesias completas (Madrid 1955), p . 25. The poem comes from Presagios (1923).

353
23 Balakian
in their criticism and in their verse the vision of poetry as independent, transcendent
and uniquely meaningful. But they also modified and extended the Symbolists' outlook
by stressing that a poem creates new meanings, they further extended its uniqueness
by avoiding the mystique of a magus, they made poetry's transcendence somethin
less esoteric, more immediate, more related to daily human life.
There is finally the question of "poetry as music", which connects with the one
discussed previously. Although Guillén does not comment directly on the concept o
"poetry as music", his ideas on poetry connect with Mallarmé's formulation. Hi;
belief in poetry as a way of embodying experiences in form, language, and structur«
is the same as what underlies Mallarmé's association of poetry and music. In addition
Guillén uses musical terms to assert his belief in the relationship between poetic forn
and poetic meaning. Not only does he entitle his first book Cántico, but he also de
scribes it as follows:

And the canticle resolves itself into a form whose sound and sense are inseparable
Thought and feeling, image and cadence establish a unity, and only in that uniti
can exist that which is sought: poetry.22

Like Mallarmé, Guillén uses a musical term to stress the inextricable links betweer
language, form, and meaning in poetry, and the consequent embodiment of an ex
perience at once unique and essential.
Again without comparing explicitly a poem and a musical composition, Garcfc
Lorca makes clear in one of his lectures that he sees both poetry and music as way:
of giving form to clusive feelings.23 His early poetry includes a book called Canciones
which in turn contains a poem entitled Verlaine whose speaker dreams of an elusive
song which would capture the essence of things.24 And in another book of poems, Lora
uses his subject, the Andalusian cante jondo, to portray song and artistic expressioi
in general as ways of capturing basic human meanings in effective form.25
Although one could probably establish a set of parallels between Verlaine anc
Lorca on the one hand, and Mallarmé and Guillén on the other, it seems more importan
to draw a general conclusion: both Spanish poets follow the Symbolists in using the
image and the concept of music as a way of stressing the artistic properties as well a
the transcendent value of poetic expression. Like the Symbolists, they tend to genera
rather than technical comparisons, and view music more as a metaphor for their visioi
than as a discipline to be examined with precision.
More interestingly perhaps, both poets have written poems which refer to a mu
sical experience in order to achieve in practice the goals which I have noted. In Guil
lén's Música, sólo mûsica, music offers a speaker a transcendent experience; and th<

22
El argumente de la obra (Milan 1961), the quotation is, however, from.the English trans
lation by Julian Palley in Guillén, Affirmation; A Bilingual Anthology (Norman, Okla. 1968)
p . 24.
23
24
See his lecture, "Arquitectura del cante jondo", in Obras completas, pp. 1514-31.
25
Obras completas, p . 311.
See Poema del "ante jondo (1921), in Obras completas, pp. 221-270, and Debicki, Estudios . . .
p p . 202-211.

354
poem is constructed in such a way that its form embodies a step-by-step progression
in the speaker's feelings, and in this fashion conveys to us perfectly the work's theme:
Por los violines
Ascienden promesas.
i Me raptan? Se entregan.
Todo va a cumplirse. 4

Implacable empeño
De metal y cuerda.
Un mundo se crea
Donde nunca hay muertos. 8

Hermoso destino
Se ajusta a su temple
Todoestcácumpliéndose
Pleno en el sonido. 12

Se desliza un mundo
Triunfante y su gracia
Da forma a mi aima.
i Llego a un absoluto ? 16

Invade el espiritu,
Las glorias se habitan.
Inmortal la vida.
Todo esta cumplido.26 20

The parallelism between lines 4, 11, and 20 underlines three steps in the speaker's
progression; the poem takes us from his expectation of a transcendent experience
(todo va a cumplirse), to the experience itself (todo esta cumpliéndose), to the realization
that it has been fulfilled {todo esta cumplido). The progression is also embodied in the
images and the word choice. At the outset, musical sounds are promises, personified
as lovers in line 3; music is seen as something vague, beautiful, desired by the speaker.
In lines 5 and 6 we see a shift: now the focus is on the concrete act of violin playing.
Music has become an actual experience, and one which holds a higher meaning—it is
perfect and immortal (lines 7 and 8). This meaning is stressed in the third stanza, when
the harmony of the music embodies fulfillment. We note that Guillén uses a musical
term, temple (tempering), which calls our attention to the specific experience being
described, at the same time as he is linking this experience with an absolute vision.
In stanzas two and three, then, as he focuses on the musical event, Guillén simultaneous­
ly calls attention to the concrete reality and makes it represent something more essen­
tial. Then, in the last two stanzas, he stresses exclusively the latter. There are no further
allusions to the violins or to the performance; only the general effect of the music on
the speaker is described, which becomes a means of creating a perfect reality and the
feeling of a timeless existence.
26
Guillén, Aire nuestro, p . 102.

355
23*
 The theme of this poem, the transcendent and elevating value of a musical ex­
perience, fits very well within the perspective of Cántico, which focuses on certain
basic experiences that overcome human limitations. The structure of the poem is essen­
tial to communicating this theme. The progression I have noted makes us follow the
speaker's path, from the expectation of the experience, to the way in which the speci­
fic experience affects him and gradually acquires more absolute value for him, and
finally to his perception of a fulfillment at the end.
Lorca's Poema del cante jondo contains a work entitled Las seis cuerdas, which in
a quite different way also deals with the transcendent value of a musical event:

La guitarra
hace llorar a los sueños.
El sollozo de las almas
perdidas
se escapa por su boca
redonda.

Y como la tarántula
teje una gran estrella
para cazar suspiros,
que flotan en su negro
aljibe de madera.27

The guitar expresses emotive meanings which otherwise would have remained hidden.
Through its music it converts these into whimpering and crying, into expressed
feelings. The image of the guitar as a well and the allusion to "lost souls" underline
the intangible nature of the unexpressed feelings, while the personification of the guitar
stresses its active role as a vehicle which gives form to these feelings.
In lines seven and eight, the guitarist's hand is a tarantula; this image erases the
picture of a realistic guitarist from the scene, and places the stress on the guitar itself
as a vital being. The image of the star woven by the tarantula suggests the creation of
something beautiful and ideal as a result of the music.
The three concepts used in this paper are clearly interrelated; all of them illustrate
ways in which the Symbolists attempted to define poetry as a unique process of convert­
ing wider visions into concrete experiences. They mark the start of an attitude which
stresses that poetry is a way of seeing and saying, an independent and very precise
discipline which cannot be replaced or defined by any other. This attitude was picked
up and developed by the Spanish poets of the "Generation of the 1920's" By stressing
the creative as well as the concretizing nature of the poetic act, Guillén, Salinas, and
Lorca make even more evident its unique value; by avoiding any mystique of the poet
as magus and by focusing on concrete reality, they make poetry's universality more
credible.

27
Garcia Lorca, Obras completas, pp. 241-242.

356
 APPENDIX

English translations of the Spanish poems quoted

"Perfection" (Perfection)
Jorge Guillén

Curved, the firmament remains

compact, blue, above the day.
I t is the rounding out
of splendor: noon.
All is a dome. Quietly,
there in the center rests the rose
subject to the noonday sun.
And the present gives of itself so freely
that the walking foot feels
the wholeness of the planet.
(Translation by Julian Palley, in
Affirmation, A Bilingual Anthology,
1919—1966, by Jorge Guillén [Norman,
Oklahoma 1968], p. 63.)

'Unstill Life" (Naturalem viva)

Jorge Guillén

Surface of a table
which, so nicely, smoothly
level, fixes its levelness

in an idea: pure, wise,

mental for mental eyes !
Certainty, meanwhile,
depends on touch

which presses, discovers

how the surface weighs
with its rich heaviness
of wood, trunk, walnut

forest. The walnut confides

in its knots and grain,
in its long span of power,

concentrated in this
motionless vigor, become
this tabletop, surface,
forever the forest.
(Translation by Palley, in Affirmation, p. 37)

367
 Pedro Salinas

(Arena: hoy dormida . . .)

Sand: today sleeping on the beach

and tomorrow caressed
in the bosom of the sea:
the sun's today, water's prize tomorrow.
Softly you yield
to the hand that presses you
and go away with the first
courting wind that appears.
Pure and fickle sand,
changing and clear beloved, I wanted you for my own,
and held you against my chest and soul.
But with waves and wind and sun you went off,
and I remained without a beloved,
with my face turned to the wind which robbed her,
and my eyes to the far off sea in which she had
green loves in a green shelter.
(translation by Debicki)

'Music, music alone" (Música, solo música)

Jorge Guillén

Promises ascend
by the violins.
Do they capture me? They give themselves.
All will be fulfilled.
Implacable effort
of metal and string.
A world is created
where there is never any death.
Beautiful destiny
adjusts itself to its tempering.
All is being fulfilled
complete, in the sound.
There slides by a "world
triumphant, and its grace
gives form to my soul.
Do I reach an absolute ?
The spirit invades,
Glories become inhabited.
Life is immortal.
All is fulfilled.
(translation by Debicki)

358
"The Six Strings" (Las seis cuerdas)
Federico Garcia Lorca

The guitar
makes dreams cry.
The sobbing of lost souls
escapes through its round mouth.
And like the tarantula
it weaves a great star
to catch sighs
which float in its black
wooden well.
(translation by Debicki)

359
 PÉTER PÓR

T H E SYMBOLIST T U R N I N E N D R E ADY'S P O E T R Y

1. PRECONDITIONS AND INSPIRATIONS

His appearance brought about the most spectacular, and probably most radical, turn
in Hungarian poetry. His third volume appeared in the same year (1906) and under
the same distinctly provocative title, Üj Versek (New Poems), as t h a t other great
Symbolist breakthrough in the poetry of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Rilke's
collection Neue Gedichte. From this time on his person, his career, and practically every
aspect of his life acquired a more general significance through a gesture t h a t has re­
mained suggestive to this very day: the rebellious gesture of novelty. His place, his
role, his character and his peculiarities transcend the usual category of œuvre: his
essence, the esthetic essence t h a t pervades every line he wrote, can only be grasped if
we realize t h a t Ady's name, together with his poems, articles, travels and loves, con­
stitute a veritable Ady-myth in Hungarian literature. With the possible exception of
Sândor Petófi, no other Hungarian pòet has been so much written about both in his
lifetime and after his death.
The flood of articles and essays, or more exactly, of panegyrics and anathemas
gained full momentum after the publication in 1907 of his next volume Vér és Arany
(Blood and Gold). I t was then t h a t the literate public, both lay and professional, began
to sense the all-out rebellion of his "New songs for new times".
His radically revolutionary style shattered a complete system of imagery, one as
sterile as it was homogeneous. His poems pronounced with a romantic passion fierce
and brutal truths. Somewhat metaphorically speaking, we might say t h a t the t r u t h s
of Baudelaire and Freud, of Heine and Nietzsche, and to a certain extent, even Marx,
figured side b y side in his poetry to outrage his readers. His images and poems con­
tained such an excessively new mass of objects and realia, of sensations and situations,
t h a t even without his visionary associations their mere presence was enough t o radi-
cally alter the closed (then especially closed !) canon of what subjects and ideas could
be, indeed, h a d to be, treated in a poem.
The rebellion evident in these poems overturned the entire complex of expectation
having to do with the role and mission of a poet —- or, more generally, with poetry
itself. All the more so, as Ady consciously and deliberately shaped the poet-image
and poet-myth of the Ady-phenomenon.
This image of the poet, the romantic image of the nation's seer—which in nineteenth-
century Western European literature was most impressively embodied b y Victor Hugo—
had a tradition of long standing in Hungarian literature, one strongly intensified b y
Romanticism. I n the 1870's, however, the generation t h a t had fled from failure and

361
 lethargy to compromise and utilitarianism, saw this role as no more t h a n t h a t of ex­
pounding a philosophy of common sense; of an ethically-tinged, simplistic and didactic
conservatism à la "Heimatdichtung". At the outset of his career, Tibor Déry, then still
under the spell of Expressionism and Dadaism, paid tribute to the memory of Ady,
calling him the last Hungarian national poet. 1 That he was, and t h a t he had endeav­
oured to be; he is said to have declared t h a t he wanted to be not the Verlaine, b u t
the Victor Hugo of his own age.
He thus took upon himself the role of national poet, and with it the whole range
of restrictions in behaviour and choice of subject (and probably even in inspiration)
t h a t this role entailed—in other words, everything t h a t his immediate Western models
tended t o consider completely out of date. On the other hand, he repudiated the life­
less system of conventions of the years of Dualism t h a t provided half-solutions
to the national, ethnic and social problems preferred in an era hallmarked b y a compre­
hensive and dearly cherished network of compromises, a period which bound poetry
in the fetters of a b a d teleology prescribing not only the content and structure of a
poem, b u t also its formal limits and emotional intensity.
This conventional image of poetry and of the poet rested on the self-image of t h e
nation; the voicing of a new type of experience, or simply of a new t y p e of poetic thought
implicitly (but also explicitly) aimed at shattering this national self-image. There
can hardly be another literature in which the Symbolist revolution in expression, at
the moment of its breakthrough, exerted its influence so much through the force of
its message.
By the time Ady got to this point of being in the focus of the intellectual scene, he
was neither a young man nor a new-fledged poet. H e was twenty-nine; a slightly be­
lated revolutionary in the era of a triumphant Jugend — b u t then he h a d h a d to come
a longer way along a rougher path t h a t often wound far afield from literature to find
his own voice and subject matter.
He had published two slightly anaemic volumes of poems more or less in the taste
of the fin-de-siécle decadence, with some lines maybe more original, b u t a structure
(in keeping with Hungarian poetry of his days), more epic and didactic t h a n those of
say, his French contemporaries.
He had, however, produced several hundred newspaper articles b y t h a t time, for
he was a passionate journalist and had a passionate interest in politics. Nobody seems
to have had a more radical way of thinking t h a n he in the Hungary of his day. What­
ever he wrote about—theatre performances or ultramontanism, the local events of a
provincial town or young people's desire for change (and indeed he was interested in
everything) — he challenged the habit of smoothing and glossing over conflicts, actual
and potential. The most daring of his journalist contemporaries attacked conservatism
b u t with the relativism of liberalism, with an impertinence t a n t a m o u n t to a philosophy.
Ady created a journalism of tension: his articles confronted extremes t h a t were often
personified for effectiveness. Their unpredictable r h y t h m and pathos was far from the
logic of a newspaper article; b u t they were not merely t h e passionately intense exposi-

1
Tibor Déry, Az utolsó nemzeti költó (The last national poet) Nyugat, 1919.

362
tion of an idea. Through sudden changes of tone, elliptic phrases and unrestrained ex­
clamations, with a passion of intensity always greater than the importance of the sub­
ject warranted, Ady transformed the event, the person, or the situation described
into something of a category or a phenomenon; but the same happened to the man —
himself — whose presence and point of view so aggressively emphasized, and who
was not only the writer b u t also (and this is fairly explicit) the protagonist of the ar­
ticle. He was guided, I repeat, b y a brilliant sense of politics; his articles reveal impor­
tant, and often very important, insights; yet they almost invariably emit a tension,
a somewhat objectless tension, one much greater than the issue at hand justified.
They were written in anything b u t everyday style. Far from it; the prose of Ady's
articles might remind us of Huysmans' or Jules Laforgue's overcrowded prose, but,
unlike theirs, it is definitely non-static in character, is topically bound and purposive,
with hardly any self-indulgence of playfulness. He always begins his writings b y en­
larging and over-exposing some one aspect of his subject matter (or, rather, some pro­
jection of his own response to it); he then quickly, even roughly, outlines the conflict­
ing standpoints and carries them, through extremely dynamic tropes (chiefly verbs
and metaphors), up to a spectacular final twist. No matter how weighty the political
content of an article, the reader's attention is attracted rather b y the dramatic person­
ality t h a t conveys it. This personality, however, like what he has p u t down, is also
abstracted into something like a phenomenon; all the more so as he is not only the
emphatic protagonist and creator of the article, b u t also because with his aggressive
subjectivity he assimilates to himself—or rather, makes a function of his own response—
everything t h a t he writes down. The firm boundaries between reality and fiction, ob­
jectivity and irreality, person and environment dissolve. The immediate social impli­
cations and interest of the subject matter on the one hand, and this style of expression
(or, better to say, way of seeing and making others see) on the other, meet in a duality
which is a fundamental trait of the Hungarian version of this trend, and of Ady's
entire poetry. For if there is a political journalism in which we can detect features
pointing in the direction of Symbolism, it must be this highly stylized prose.
B u t the most dramatic change in his life and poetry was yet to come: his first
trip to Paris. (Later he made five further trips to Paris and spent several months there
each time.) A dramatic experience, yes; though its impact and content is hard to
define precisely.
The poet himself later said he "received the justification of his courage from some
tragic Frenchmen" 2 —referring probably to the courage to break through. Of course,
he knew a lot of contemporary French poetry even before his first trip to Paris in
1903, mainly poems by second or third-rate Symbolists. I n their Hungarian adaptation,
however, due to translation as well as to the different context of the journals and
newspapers there, they got fairly closely to resembling the poetic ideal then current in
Hungary, t h a t is, academic decadence (by academism we mean the purely rational, ex­
planatory, and epic structure of the model poem to be seen also in the young Ady's

2
Endre Ady: önéletrajz (Autobiography). Az Érdekes Ûjság (A Journal of Interesting Things),
1913; also in Ady Endre Válogatott cikkei es tanulmányai, (Budapest, 1964), p . 8.

363
first two volumes.) What, then, did Ady get from the really great poets, above all Bau­
delaire, and also Verlaine, those "tragic Frenchmen"? With some exaggeration we
might answer: nothing and everything. He was an extraordinary genius, explosive in
make-up and strength, a type that since Rimbaud, Dostoievsky, and, say, Nietzsche,
has been fairly infrequent in modern literature. He created an autonomous poetry,
an autonomous lyrical system whose originality is not affected by the motifs acting
as stimuli; nor by the question of how far the essential or decisive factors of his conduct
and mode of expression (like his going beyond allegorical expression towards metaphor
and symbol; or accepting the demonic, the Antichrist within himself) were directly or
indirectly inspired by Baudelaire's example.
What seems to be more important is that, judging by practically any of his ar­
ticles, his way of feeling and thinking was far more modern (and what is more, far more
independent and individual) than his poems, even the best of them, show. One reason
for this obviously lies in the nature of the genre: the inherently conservative charac­
ter and influence of the traditional' lyrical form. In Ady's formative years, however,
this tradition had become pathologically dominant in Hungarian poetry. Social in­
terest, insight, and form provided lyric poetry with a unity that was as stupid as it
was harmonious, but which served eventually to extinguish even its lyricism. The
young Ady—unlike his colleagues of a more speculative disposition who renewed
Hungarian literature through other kinds of symbolism—definitely started out from
this tradition, and up to his last period actually went on creating "experience poetry".
He had to arrive at new conclusions, or rather, at new ideas in the most fundamental
questions of poetry — or, to use his categories of poetry and life — in order to be able
to create something radically different in place of the experienceless experience poetry
of the prevailing canon.
What Baudelaire's example seems to have meant to him was above all the poten­
tial (and of course the actual form) of a new approach to the established conception of
poetry which hovered in the background and automatically fettered every Hungarian
poem of the period. Not only because this approach, striving for a truer expression of
the personality, immediately lifted a number of thematical taboos, but also because
it brought art as the totality of expression into the realm of the personality; it actually
regarded art as the sole possibility of realizing one's personality. The creative process
became the tension-laden scene of self-realization (or shall we say the struggle for self-
realization). Art became separated from the world of everyday things, obtaining a
privileged, separate existence, as did the inner universe in whose space the work of
art was conceived and enacted, and whose "connexions", laws and truths sought and
received their formulation in the only real entity: Beauty. Let us contrast this with
the Hungarian canon of the period, with the ars poetica of preconceived idealism and
material-experiential reality (these co-ordinates determining the genesis, value, and
validity of the work of art), and the importance of Les Fleurs du Mal and Hotel Pimo-
dan will at once be obvious.
Such a contrast might even seem unfair with its extreme simplification of cate­
gories. After all, even Symbolism's notion of the "ideal" was far more complex, and
Ady's own work does not satisfy all the criteria of the model equally echoing but

364
rather faintly the cult of Beauty, for instance. Moreover, we have not considered the
attempts (and more than just attempts) that had brought Hungarian poetry closer
to Symbolism before Ady; nor Ady's spontaneous approach through, for instance,
his journalism to this new mode of expression. But for the time being we shall confine
ourselves to describing the direction of these influences and not the completed œuvre.
That the latter was Symbolistic is in fact denied by many. Let it suffice here to say
that if by "symbolism" we mean not a narrow school or a set of stylistic devices, but
the stream of European poetry from Baudelaire to Rilke, the change that placed the
lyrical happening entirely in the inner space, thus making its starting-point and sub­
ject-matter (and thus the material elements worded in it) emphatically fictitious,
shifted the proportion between cognitive information and emotional suggestion in
favour of the latter, reforming language to suit expression through images and symbols,
and, after the universal myth of Romanticism had disintegrated, aimed at creating
and voicing individual myths in the poem (and in poetry) if, I say, symbolism is taken
to mean this change (with all its wider historical and philosophical significance) and
this new poetic behaviour, then Ady's new tack will definitely place him in the sphere
of European symbolism.3
It is a purely academic question whether without an intimate knowledge of the
tragic Frenchmen this turning-point in Hungarian poetry — which was two or three
decades in the making — would have happened differently. What is certain is that the
decisive breakthrough was inspired by the example of Baudelaire and Baudelaireanism
— a fact that, in turn, has little to do with the value or even originality, of the forma­
tion thus created. We spoke of poetic behaviour; what we meant was the relationship
of the poet and his poem, of the poet and poetry, and to some extent, of poetry and the
world.
There was another influence, however, that actually enabled him to embrace
Symbolism on the one hand, and to develop his own symbolism, on the other: the in­
fluence of Nietzsche. Nietzsche's influence, we might say, had a tremendous impact
in shaping him as a human and as a moral being.4 It is a commonplace that at the turn
of the century, Nietzsche's philosophy (we might say, the Nietzsche-phenomenon)
appeared as distinctly left-wing, and helped a whole generation of young intellectuals
to acquire self-confidence and to accept themselves. This was partly due to the con­
stant ambiguity of his system — in ensuing decades, this ambiguity would be more

3
On the meaning of the term "symbolism", see René WelJek's crucial study: "The Term and
Concept of. Symbolism in Literary History", Actes du Ve Congrès de VAILG (Belgrade) Amsterdam,
1969). Probably the most famous book exemplifying the broadest interpretation of the term is
C. M. Bowra's series of portraits of lyrical poets: The Heritage of Symbolism (London, New York,
1967); for French poetry, cf. Guy Michaud's monograph: Message poétique du symbolisme (Paris,
1954).
The narrow interpretation is used in most French handbooks (see e.g. the popular outline by
Pierre Martino, Parnasse et symbolisme, Paris 1925); and in Hungary very markedly by Istvän
Kiràly's monograph Ady Endre, (Budapest, 1971), especially pp. 256-263. On the contemporary
Hungariaii image of symbolism practically everything essential is told by André Karâtson (Le
symbolisme en Hongrie, Paris, 1969, pp. 36-51, 62-67, 76-77, and appropriate parts of the portraits
of respective poets).
4
E16d Halasz, Ady és Nietzsche (Ady and Nietzsche), (Budapest, 1942).

365
and more emphasized, and permit quite other distinctions. At the time of the appear­
ance of Romain Rolland, Gorky, Ady, and Vyacheslav Ivanov, the pathos, direction
and gestures of this philosophy proclaimed the possibility and necessity of the integral
personality; their message was freedom and destiny, and fate (as Nietzsche would
put it: the willing of Fate), while on the artistic plane they professed the grand style —
everything that seemed to have been terminated, if not exterminated, by modern
industrial society and its philosophy: positivism.5
This is why Ady responded so strongly to the "sacred, drunken words" of trans­
cendence, self-realization and unbounded pride: in a decade of careers and works that
facelessly merged into one another, he saw it and followed it as the way of creating
real life and real literature, in other words: individuality.
It was indeed the matter of a way of life; it was this which inspired him from the
beginning of his career and remained an unmistakable feature of his poetry to the last,
helping him accept and formulate his own distinctness. Explicit postulates and con­
clusions, on the other hand, tended to attract him only in his youth, at a time (and
this is symptomatic) when his poetry moved within the atmosphere of decadence
and when (to give a telling example) it was the figure of Hedda Gabler that most
attracted him of Ibsen's characters. He wrote passionately about her, the woman who
dared to challenge the whole world even though she was rushing to her destruction.
Thus he received from Nietzsche both more and less than his Western contempo­
raries like, say, Gide or even Suarès who accepted the postulates more directly, and
the unique way in which he absorbed these ideas sheds light on the defining features
of Ady's position and whole career. The reasons for the striking impact of the highly-
strung dithyrambs of the Zarathustra and its heroic (or heroized) pessimism and deca­
dence are usually seen in terms of the self-defence of the personality in the face of
mounting pressure. In the Hungary of the 1900's, however, this conflict was by no
means present as bluntly as that; it manifested itself in a curious, and undeniably
somewhat petty breach. Thus Ady's trajectory deviated from the classical right at
the start of his course.
The period of the development of capitalism and of the full establishment of the
bourgeoisie produced fairly entangled social formulas even west of the Rhine, as, for
example, Marx pointed out in his vitriolic essay, "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napo­
leon"; still, the basic trends must have appeared obvious. But the society of Hungary
was marked by incoherence. Its ruling stratum did maintain an appearance of unity
both in the structure and in the ideology of the society, but it could achieve this only
by relying on plain and stupid conservatism; it did not even need compromises, but

6
Nietzsche's philosophical ambiguity has an immense literature, and is treated by every general
survey of the history of philosophy: thus it would be arbitrary to quote any one of these. On his
influence, see: Geneviève Blanquis, Nietzsche en France (Paris, 1929); W. D. Williams, Nietzsche
and France (Oxford, 1952); D. E. Maximov, Ideya Puti v poeticheskom sozdanii Al. Bloka (Blo-
kovsky Sbornik, Tartu 1972. pp. 25-122, esp. 75ff.); Béla Lengyel, "Nietzsche és Gorkij a század-
forduló vilàgirodalmi köztudatabah" (Nietzsche and Gorky as seen by the literary world of the
turn of the century), Filológiai Közlöny, 1972. On his effect in Hungary, cf. Béla Lengyel, Nietzsche
magyar utókora (Nietzsche's effect on posterity in Hungary) (Budapest, 1938); Béla Zolnai, "Kosz-
tolányi, Juhász, Nietzsche" Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények, 1958.

366
simply ignored the changes taking place in the country. I t was out of this enormous
tension between appearance and reality t h a t Endre Ady's symbolism was born and
gained the eruptive force of speaking out.
The official view which was becoming more anachronistic each year, continued
to regard Hungary as a feudally hierarchic country where national problems had been
fully solved through the union of Austria and Hungary through the person of a com­
mon monarch, a system established b y the Compromise of 1867. This Compromise
secured equality between the two parties concerned. I t also secured the total suprem­
acy of the Magyars within the borders of Hungary over the ethnic groups which were
considered as "non-constituent" in the state. The nation, whose structure had thus
been both externally and internally strengthened b y constitutional law, was supposed
to rely almost exclusively on agricultural production: its way of life remained rural,
its way of thinking "soberly idealistic" — t h a t is, its attitude and judgment was
small-minded, politically royalist, and of course religious, with a considerable Catho­
lic bias.
No doubt there was still some (authoritatively upheld) reality behind this system
of ideas. B u t it took no account of all those new conflicts and tendencies in Hungarian
society which were to prove increasingly important during the decade and half to come.
Their list (even if we select but the chief ones) is spectacular. Many people realized
long before Ady's generation appeared on the scene that, useful as the Compromise
was in opening u p new possibilities, it was after all an uneasy coalition between a
declining empire and an arhythmically developing country. The very existence of this
coalition was threatened right from the start by the national minorities of the Carpa­
thian Basin, themselves striving for statehood; and it was regarded, at best, a bitter
necessity by those Hungarian classes t h a t clung to their (Protestant) traditions and
ambitions. Nor did t h a t anachronistic system of ideas recognize the greatest advantage
and natural consequence of the Compromise: a relatively quick industrialization and
the development of the middle class, with all t h a t this implies: a wholly new social
problem, urbanization, and the development in the towns of a (largely Jewish) intel­
ligentsia with a wholly new orientation; the spread of political liberalism and philo­
sophical materialism — in other words, an undeniable, though not rapid, change of
the feudal social and cultural order. 6 One could object t h a t this picture is one-sided.
For the decade ending 1905 was surely a period of remarkable development in Hun­
gary in many areas from painting to sociology; and though it is questionable how much
Ady actually knew of these developments, he certainly did know of some of the people
making things move and so we have every right to see his course as at least partly
parallel to their endeavours. B u t we must bear in mind t h a t (unlike in the case of
short-story writing, and despite the promising experiments of the precursors) it was
the period's stale lyrical poetry and stagnant lyrical ideal t h a t most plainly reflected

6
Concerning the official ideology, I follow primarily the view outlined by Zoltán Horváth,
Magyar századforduló (The turn of the century in Hungary) (Budapest, 1961); the historical pic­
ture I present here is built on Magyarorszâg története (History of Hungary) Vol. IV. (Budapest,
1972), and Vita Magyarorszâg kapitalizmuskori fejlödéséröl (Debate on the development of Hungary
in the Age of Capitalism) (Budapest, 1971).

367
the official standpoint. Now, the author of Versek (Poems, 1899 — Ady's first volume)
started out from, and had to assert himself against this background, b o t h sociolo­
gically and in his idea of art. His career therefore, especially in its first stage, had to
be governed b y impulses different from those of others.
The country was not simply divided into a reactionary and a progressivist camp:
there were in its political field several mutually intersecting trends and tensions (some
of which would not even recognize themselves as such). These, in the course of the
ensuing two decades, were to polarize around two opposing centres -— a fact largely due
to Ady's appearance.
This markedly incoherent structure, as well as the considerable loosening of the
structure of society outside the circle of power offered a wide range of possibilities to
fulfil personal ambitions and talents. The new-fledged Hungarian generation of t h e
turn of the century had not yet experienced the bitter disillusionment and a p a t h y
of Frederic Moreau; on the contrary, this is a decade of Rastignacian gestures and
success stories won with determined passion, especially in intellectual careers from
science to journalism. 7
I n fact, the official ideology, or rather, the only reality behind it, the gigantic
administrative apparatus was not really closed either. I t was exactly from Ady's so­
cial stratum t h a t so many accepted the forms of social advancement and personal suc­
cess it provided — even though these forms confined their thinking, as well as t h e whole
course, purpose, and pace of their career within predetermined categories aiid limits.
I t w a s j n contradistinction to this routine eschatology, to this dull determination of
personality and destiny t h a t Nietzsche's name symbolized an unbounded freedom
and unbounded grandeur of spirit and personality; this explains his profound influence
on the generation t h a t set out from circles other t h a n t h a t of the ruling class of this
incoherent society to break in and break through.
Ady had, since almost the very first moment of his consciousness, avoided all t h e
obvious paths into the middle class of this feudally hierarchic society a n d power
structure. H e experienced in a spectacular and many-faceted way the classic con­
flict of existing as an artist in a bourgeois society.
H e came from a restless, particularly heterogeneous area. His family led a fairly
stable and consolidated life, while inwardly harbouring, as if by ancient right, its
grievances and pride; it was a protestant family in every sense of the word. Though
they claimed to trace back their origins through seven centuries, they h a d become
completely impoverished, and hoped to regain their lost prestige b y joining the middle
class in power. An ambitious family, it seemed to accept and a t the same time question
the hierarchy's scale of values; it wished to rise by means of it, yet knew its own nobil­
ity to be older than t h a t of the country's rulers. Surrounded by a variety of religions
and nationalities, they lived in a world t h a t was both socially and ethnically too mobile
for any of its values to seem definitive, or for a person to necessarily feel curbed in any
respect.
7
To quote just one characteristic example: the book treating the beginning of the career of
Ady's fellow poets is entitled" A beérkezés küszöbén (On the Threshold of Success), (Budapest, 1972)
and its author, Ferenc Kiss, outlines these traditional career opportunities.

368
 An ambitious family — and more than t h a t : on account of its ancient origins, its
Protestantism, its nobility, it could feel itself worthy of whatever could be got in
this country, and more worthy than anyone else. From the very first article Ady wrote,
he spoke with supreme consciousness, regarding himself as the one called to fulfil
hopes: first of a rebellious youth, then, after 1906, of an epoch and a nation. H e never
doubted the significance of his personality or of his career. The crisis of the social
and ontological function of poetry, a phenomenon t h a t underlay and even inspired
Western European Symbolism from Baudelaire on he had little to do with. On the
contrary: he believed, with the strength of predestination, in his unique vocation, in
the historical and metaphysical necessity of his life and poetry.
And this is no exaggeration: we have his letter notifying his parents of his deci­
sion to discontinue his university studies and become a journalist. His lines throb
with the energy of refuting a conventional career, and with the consciousness of having
a vocation of a much wider scope. 8
H e joined the editorial staff of a provincial town's daily paper, to find himself
among brilliant and half-brilliant men who were restless in spirit, astonishingly well-
informed and needlessly restricted. His career can be said to have begun classically:
the yearning for an artist's existence, the spectacular crisis of his way of life, the con­
flict (so characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century) of artist and so­
ciety. We may trace his entire life along this line: Ady lived in probably the last wave
of the generations hallmarked b y Baudelaire and Vajda, Brahms and Verlaine, Keller
and Nietzsche, an epoch (to. use bombastic terms) of bachelors, of syphilitics, of fore­
doomed love-affairs with harlots and of ecstatically exalted devotions, an epoch in
which the distinguishing feature of a new way of life as an artist was the a t t i t u d e to
women and to the new forms of love they experienced. Ady's first love poem which is
really characteristic of him is entitled Fantom (Phantom). Ady's blood was already
infested with spirochaetae, a relic (as he saw it, a lethal and the same time inspiring
relic) of a love-affair with an actress, when he found the great love of his life: a married
woman, who was not only several years his senior b u t a Jewess as well, a highly cul­
tured and highly conspicuous woman, extreme in every respect, and with whom he
was to have a great, turbulent love-affair. Public opinion was right in seeing their love
not only as a scandal b u t also as a rebellion: the rebellion of sincerity and wild despair
against the decorous canon of emotionless decency and hypocrisy.
As a matter of fact, the last big change in his life-style may also be regarded as
inevitable. Attracted by a variety of forces — the woman who lived there much of
the time; the Hungarian intellectual tradition that, ever since 1789, h a d looked t o
the French for example and inspiration; his own interest in politics, a n d in things
beyond politics which drew him not t o t h a t provincial capital, Budapest, b u t t o the
centre of the modern world; a Baudelairean voyage nostalgia which drew t h e artists
of the age away from their dull and suffocating home towns in quest of (to use Georg
Lukács's expression) the inner, ''imaginary Tahiti" 9 — he went to Paris, and in doing

8
Letter to his mother, 24 November, 1898.
9
György Lukàcs, "Gauguin", Huszadik Század, 1907.

24 Balakian 369
so stepped out physically, too, from the Hungarian network of expectations and con
ventions. When we look back at his life, we find that at every stage of his life he seemi
to have sought out with great, perhaps instinctive certainty, the people, ideas, anc
situations remote from the centre of authority.
His metamorphosis as a poet, then, required the wholesale transformation of hi
life; and this did eventually take place through poetic experience, journalism, love
and travels. In 1903, Ady was hardly better than a mediocre poet; by 1905, his mos
perspicacious contemporaries, judging by the poems he published in periodicals anc
newspapers, realized that they marked the beginning of a new era in Hungarian lyri<
poetry.

2. ADY'S SYMBOLISTIC POEM

A few years earlier the other great poet of Austria-Hungary, Rainer Maria Rilke
had gone to Paris. He, too, was yet before his lyrical breakthrough. The conclusions
drawn from the trip he put down in two wonderful essays (Rodin and Briefe an einen
jungen Dichter) on the esthetics of inner absorption and tangible expression, the esthe
tics of Solitude, Emotion and Beauty.
Ady's lyrical breakthrough was ushered in by occasional newspaper articles
Though he wrote much about art (and perhaps most profoundly about Gauguin, whom
he knew by hearsay only), his outlook was far from art-centred. His attention was
attracted equally by the life of the streets, a strike at a power plant, or the person o
Jaurès. Nor was it unconditional enthusiasm that inspired him to write a new kinc
of poetry, for his uncritical admiration soon faded away. He did not receive a socia
deal o r an artistic canon, but again partly less and partly more than that: after the
Hungary of suppressed or vainly spent energies and "half-people", he saw the dyna­
mism of life lived to the full of a completely expressive artistic existence. As it is well
known, the lyrical poetry of the period, including that of the greatest French poets,
was born of a nervous (or else aristocratically premeditated) break between art and
life. Ady, however, from his New Poems on repeatedly stated that his chief aim was
to re-"new" his poetry as well as (no exaggeration!) Hungarian society through the
unity of these two.
The first really valuable œuvre of Hungarian symbolism was thus created under
conditions that differed in many important respects from those of its foreign forerun­
ners. Western European Symbolism was born of the crisis of Romanticism, of the lyric
personality and of lyric subjectivity. 10 Hungarian Symbolism, on the other hand, was
destined to be an answer to the meaninglessness of lyrical realism, or (to look at it another
way) of the concrete in lyrical poetry. Baudelaire's appearance marks the end of bour­
geois illusions and of the possibility of asserting one's personality in society; the sole

10
The ties between Symbolism and Romanticism have been especially thoroughly treated in
the literature on Gérard de Nerval. More generally it has been stressed by Oblomyevsky in his
survey (Frantsuzky Simbolizm, Moscow, 1973) in contrast to interpretations which linked the trend
beginning with Baudelaire to Classicism (see e.g. Hugo Friedreich Die Struktur der modernen
Lyrik. Hamburg, 1945; Wolfgang Kayser, Vortragsreise, Bern, 1958, p . 288).

370
 alternative was inner transcendency. 1 1 Ady, coming from a feudal country, could
still see in Paris the city of the victorious bourgeois revolution; while the vocation he
felt he had made him believe in the reality of a transcendent national, historical and
social ideal.
He never accepted t h e separation of Art and Life. The notion of Nothing (to bring
the most extreme example), so central already to the poetry of Nerval, is no specula­
tive entity in Ady's world, but has metaphysical perspective as the Nihil of a nation's
destruction. In the poetry of his Western European contemporaries expression had
become an existential problem; he started from the other side, making existence a
form of expression.
The particular course of his poetic development sheds light on the nature and
position of his symbolism as well. The overwhelmingly decadent atmosphere of his
first two volumes was basically conceived on the lines of the esthetics of lyrical realism,
while with his symbolist breakthrough he became the poet of the totality, and con­
quest, of life. His philosophy shows a definite affinity to the vitalist trends of the pe­
riod b u t is less irrational. The non-rational feeling expressed in the poem becomes
a way of seeing things, yet it remains tied to a person or situation. He was an occa­
sional poet in Goethe's sense of the word: for each of his nearly thousand poems, we
know with more or less certainty the actual event t h a t inspired its writing. On the
other hand, if we regard the poem as it is, both the situation and the person described
are completely fictitious or rather (to jump ahead in our argument), mythical. This
close and immediate intertwining of concrete and transcendent is a palpable property
of East European a r t ; for example, a study has recently shown similar traits in Russian
Symbolistic painting. 1 2
The formation of this duality — or shall we say unity? — in Ady's poetry was
fostered by a fundamental idea: t h a t of confronting moods and feelings with social
and historical reality by projecting the former onto the latter. We may cite parallels
to this method — above all t h a t of a Russian, Blok, in his late period 13 — b u t all
things considered, Ady seems to be unique in Symbolist world literature. F a r beyond
the categories of Charles Morice, who wrote of the social or philanthropic potentials
of the trend 14 , Ady is a veritable poet-prophet, and not (or not only) a prophet of
poetry and its metaphysical force, like Rimbaud or, in another context, Mallarmé, b u t
the prophet of a nation's moment of life or death, and of a social revolution. His poems
— as the first great figure of the emerging radicals, Oszkár Jászi wrote — brought
together people whom economic interests would never have been able to unite. 1 5 If we
insist on parallels, we can say t h a t Ady — in a much exaggerated form —- played the

11
On the problem of lyrical transcendency, see the excellent book by Karl Pestalozzi, Die
Entstehung des Lyrischen Ich (Berlin, 1970).
12
Éva Körner, "Az orosz avantgarde mûvészet a szovjet gyüjteményekben és kiállftásokon"
(Russian avantgarde in Soviet collections and exhibitions). (Képzömüvészeti Almanack, No. 2,
Budapest 1970).
13
14
See the volume of studies on Blok mentioned in Note 5.
15
See Charles Morice, La littérature de tout à l'heure (Paris, 1889).
Oszkár Jaszi, "Ady és a magyar jövö" (Ady and Hungary's future), Huszadik század, 1919.

24* 371
role both of a Y e a t s in creating a national myth, and of a Karl Kraus, describing with
black humour t h e disintegration of Austria-Hungary, the state and its w a y of life.
However, t h a t revolution of which Ady was the prophet was not even a possi­
bility at the time his New Poems were written, and in fact for almost a decade after.
All t h a t could be felt was its tension, its energy. " F o r in H u n g a r y " , Georg Lükacs
wrote after the publication of Ady's Az Illés szekerén, 1908 (On Elijah's Cart), "revolu­
tion is b u t a state of mind, it is simply the only form in which the despair over our
boundless feeling of isolation can at least find expression". H e then adds: "if Gorky
turns socialist, a great desire is gratified; if Shaw, a thinker draws the logical conclu­
sions of his social philosophy. Endre Ady's socialism is a religion, a cry in the wilder­
ness, a drowning man's shout for help, a tenacious clinging to the only possibility t h a t
still exists." 1 6
We might say t h a t Ady's symbolism was conceived in a state of mind t h a t was
"revolutionary" in every sense of the term. Everything t h a t he wrote about — from
the phantomized woman image of his love poems to the visionary recognition t h a t
its past and present doomed the whole country to ruin and perdition — was thus in­
variably marked b y the gesture of rebellion. In this way, after an expressly apethetic,
unlyrical period, lyrical emotion re-entered Hungarian poetry with full vigour.
His was clearly an emotional, if not down-right experiential poetry; b u t Ady
carried these categories and this behaviour to the extreme. At the centre of each poem
stands the poet himself, not merely as its subject matter b u t aggressively, emphati­
cally named. With a sense of the vocation to express himself, Ady had little in common
with contemporary trends of a crisis or loss of the personality.
The wider context of his poems often resembles real life situations. He comes close
to outlining some plot or happening; b u t he formulates each situation in a ballad-like
manner, in an extremely strained and definitely sombre, tragic tone. He never wrote
a really cheerful poem in his whole life; his poetry lacks all lightheartedness, as if he
were ignorant of the joys of beauty of putting something into words (a joy t h a t even
the tragic-sounding Baudelaire would not renounce), because he always and constantly
wanted t o communicate something weighty and significant. His poems are in fact
somewhat burdened with this incessant urge to say something of great consequence.
The subject-matter of his poems is, with some simplification, the collision of the
lyrical Ego with the outside world; it gets written, it erupts, at the climax of the pro­
cess in which Ady's Weltanschauung is projected onto the world. His poems look as
though they were the high points of monologues; their architecture is strongly drama­
tic; the most marked feature is the high-pitched dynamism informing every level of
the composition.
In this highly-strung medium the central character is of course b y no means
identical to his own empirical self; nor is the environment identical to empirical reality.
On the contrary: viewed from this aspect, Ady's symbolist breakthrough brought
about lyrical fiction and a wholly spiritual Weltbild,

16
György Lukács, "Ady E n d r e " (1909); Magyar irodalom — magyar kultúra (Hungarian liter­
ature—Hungarian culture) (Budapest, 1970).

372
 The lyrical Ego embodies the romantic poet image of Symbolism: extremely emo­
tional and even more energetic. The duality of free subjectivity and general ideas, held
b y Hegel to be the paradox inherent in all symbolization, 17 and which Baudelaire sub­
jected to the crystalline discipline of structure, is comprehended in Ady's poetry
through the energetic expression of the personality. He is a man of desires, of miracles,
of secrets, and of fate: sensitive and explosive. As if to prove Collingwood's famous
thesis t h a t language originated in bodily gestures, 18 anything he perceived of the world
through his senses he immediately exaggerates, heaps up, and blows up into symbols.
A sensual poet, we might say; b u t he was guided by a truly universal wealth of expe­
riences, and he opened u p the dimensions of the given moment to the very core of its
validity and significance; he is thus, at the same time a poet of profondeur,19 in J e a n -
Pierre Richard's sense of t h e word. After the bodiless allegories of academism and deca­
dence he raised the tangible concrete to the rank of symbol; and if (to quote J - P . Rich­
ard once again) " t h e object circumscribes the person who owns it" 2 0 ; this sheds
light also on his behaviour qua poet.
Putting it historically: after the crisis of the lyrical concrete, he reconquered the
material world for poetry, b u t at the same time spiritualized it. The feelings represented
are concrete and abstract at the same time. This turn, of course, had its antecedents
in Hungarian lyrical poetry, too; however, for nearly half a century even the problem
itself h a d been forgotten. The lyrical poet, Arany, to whom Ady (in his ballad-like
settings, for instance) owes much more t h a n he ever admitted, had clearly sensed as
early as the late 1850's t h a t with the demise of the idiom, the coherent lyrical m y t h
of Hungarian poetry ceased to be, and with it the objects' capacity for transcendence.
I t is easily seen in Arany's poems that, though he always insisted on a classicistic
exact depiction of the setting and of the realia, in the course of the creative process
he gives them considerable metaphoric value. 21
Ady launched his poems from the opposite pole and took the opposite road, as it
were: the settings of his poems are entirely unrealistic, or realistic only in the sense
t h a t Freudian dream-symbols are; it is not the fictitious-incidental appearances b u t
their affective content (die Affekte) t h a t is absolutely authentic. 2 2 I n the course of the
creative process, however, the openly declared (and at times directly persuasive)
message and the heap of sensually concrete objects in a way consolidates the medium
which itself is spiritual and fictitious throughout. I n this way, a most peculiar model
of symbolist poetry is created: the balance and equivalence of intimation and explicit-
ness, of feeling and intellect.

17
18
Hegel: Aesthetica. Vol. I, P a r t 2, Section 1: "On Symbols in General".
19
R. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1937), p . 243.
Jean-Pierre Richard, Poésie et profondeur, (Paris, 1955).
20
21
Op. cit., p. 27.
Such features of Arany's lyrical poetry have been pointed out by earlier studies as well.
See e.g. Laszló Baránszky-Jób, Arany lirai formanyelvének fejlödéstörténeti helye (The place of
Arany's lyrical forms of expression), (Budapest, 1957); Istvân Sôtér, Nemzet és haladás (Nation
and progress), (Budapest, 1963). Recent scholarship on Arany has confirmed this; cf. Béla G.
Németh, Arany Jânos (Budapest, 1970); Az el nem ért bizonyossdg (Unattained certainty);— a col­
lection
22
of studies, (Budapest, 1972).
Sigmund Freud, Traumdeutung, (Frankfurt, 1961), p . 376.

373
 Ady's poems, t h e development, as it were, of the constructive methods of his
newspaper articles, begin with the magnified picture of the emotive perception of some
extreme situation, with a symbol-exclamation, so to say. The central symbol is not,
or is not normally, developed in the course the poem — say, through the extension of
a simile or allegory until it becomes independent — b u t it is the primary form of the
experience. His symbolist poems are written primarily in pictures, their sense and
strength lies in their pictorial suggestiveness. "Erleben im Bild und des Bildes" — as
J u n g says 23 ; his is a literally pictorial communication which, accordingly, is less col­
lected and less organic than either the French Symbolists' poetry or George's poems,
which always rest on crystallized images. Anything can become a symbol, a n d — b y
means of unexpected contexts, extreme enlargement, the vibrant amassing of attrib­
utes and adverbs in an excited dialectic, constant inversions, unusual words, capital­
izations — everything does indeed become a symbol; for on the fundamental plane,
the situation determining the poem is, above all, of symbolic value.
One of Baudelaire's great discoveries is the composite character of the soul, the
lyrical personality of the homo duplex ("Qui parmi nous n'est pas un homo duplex").
Now the poetica personnalita at the centre of Ady's poems is a distinctly dramatic
personality, not merely a poète maudit, but a personnage or protagoniste maudit, and
in dramatic settings (his poems are often in scenes): in this tension, the elements of
the outside world are turned into images and symbols. His technique is again in many
respects akin to t h a t of Traumdeutung: the condensing energy of emotion (Verdich-
tungsarbeit) is primarily aimed not at objective depicting, b u t at the illustration of
a condition (gegenständlich — zuständlich), and for this reason has the various elements
overlap. I t is thus natural t h a t these images, too, defy the strict co-ordinates of space
and time. 24
I n Ady's world, every being and every object has a secret to it, or even more, a
fate, which actually bursts into symbols. Dawn is the realm of heaving and smothered
desires; behind the picture of the woman there hides an Indian goddess with dark pow­
ers and dark sorrows; even the garden where he first sees her breathes the grief of
magic and intoxicating scents; travel and the Gare de l'Est suggest the everhaunting
picture of death; Paris is the empire of mysteries and of hiding; and during a bout of
drinking he fights a fatal duel with the spirit of poetry. Always a poetry of roles; and
his symbol-creating energy knew no bounds, either extensive or intensive. The land­
scape, the country: a damned land, where everything and everybody is doomed t o
destruction; himself: at times a child, a t times his own (imaginary or real) ancestor;
in one poem he is the Lord's elect, the prophet Elijah, transported to heaven in a
fiery cart, while in another his coffin is lowered into the depths of the waters b y grave
and simple Breton fishermen —- b u t he is ready to use any gesture, any glance, kiss,
dream or impulse as the subject and symbol of a poem. Therefore any a t t e m p t a t giving
even an approximate list of his symbols is certain to fail (the ones mentioned are each
just the images of one particular poem). I t is the essence of his creative method t o
produce self-contained symbols in each poem, and in doing so he exaggerates t h e di-
25
C. G. Jung, Bewußtes und Unbewußtes (Frankfurt, 1963), p . 50.
24
S. Freud, op. cit. pp. 235, 411 ff.

374
mensions of every (material or non-material) element so inordinately that not only
the nouns surrounded by attributes but eventually even the verbs, his unusually pal­
pable verbs, or practically any trope or any grammatical element can acquire symbolic
value.
Around his picture of the symbolist poet, there is built up the other focal point of
his poetic model: the outside world, a system of pictures which, characteristically, is
symbolic in value, personal in reference, fictitious and spiritualized. The drama of his
writing, in other words the whole process of writing poetry, is thus internalized; all
stylization always individualizes, and this is a perfectly stylized, professedly subjec-
tivized world.
The actual experiences, however, the conflicts that not merely underly but prac­
tically cry out of these poems are very real and are by no means restricted to the inner
stage where they appear. To take a crucial and instructive example, the image of the
damned land has as much in common with the landscape visions of Symbolism as with
Széchenyi's view of Hungary as a "barren land" ("ugar") or Heine's vision of Germany
(ein Wintermärchen)25; and Ady's yearning for distant lands never got as far as the pure
metaphysics of "anywhere out of this world" or of Le Voyage. On the one hand, he is
too "land-bound" to do so (a chthonic character, as Lévi-Strauss would say, and the
poet of a strongly chthonic imagery); on the other hand, he lived his nostalgias and
daydreams within a system of societal interdependencies. Jung derived the creation
of symbols from the individual schism within himself (un-eins sein mit sich selbst).26
Ady tried to reestablish the unity through open confrontation with the world. What­
ever his poems are about, therefore, be it his love, his journeys, or the desired revolu­
tion, they always preserve and even emphasize the immediate experience, if not the
actual occasion that called them into existence. This process can be clearly followed
and along several lines. He is faithful not only to the sensually concrete force and weight
of his material world, but with a truly exceptional linguistic sensitivity he intentionally
ties the particular elements to well-definable historical, and in some cases social, ideals
or images. Placing himself unequivocally at the centre of the poem, he lends to the
setting, however fictitious, the convincing impetus of an open confession; and this
confession, the motivation and momentum of the stylized universe (and by no means
a sort of solution or dissolution thereof) is, from the very start of the poem, fairly ag­
gressively stressed.
The structure that thus comes into being is, as regards both the internal system
and the external relevance of the creation, an extraordinarily purposeful poem. Each
line and each picture is made to explode separately; in fact, the first line is already
something of a punchline to the poem as a whole. In this respect, he falls short of the
Baudelairean ideal of the perfectly organic poem, of Le Cygne. Driven by the desire
to utter with immediate intensity, this reckless genius, a poet of explosive inspiration,
did indeed put his life down in verse lines. His symbols may often appear to be forced,
signalling, as it were, the dangers and disadvantages inherent in an attitude which
25
That the origins of the "Hungarian fallow" motif go back to Széchenyi and Heine has been
stressed by Istvän Király's monograph (op. cit., Vol. I, p p . 148-153).
26
C. G. Jung, Über die Psychologie des Unbewußten. (Zürich, 1943), p p . 344.

375
magnifies any experience into art and any element into a symbol. The poems of this
stage of his development frequently strike the reader as somewhat overstrung — and
consequently as affected. A hypertrophic poetry, rather t h a n organic. I t is presumably
for this reason and not, as might seem, primarily because of certain of his images,
t h a t he has been said to have affinities with Art Nouveau (a thesis which, b y the way,
is not altogether unfounded).
W i t h his new model of what a poem ought to be, with the ars poetica of the equiv­
alence of feeling and intellect, and what is more, of objectivity and subjectivity, of
the emotional and the rational way of knowing, of imagination and reality, of the
empirical and the fictitious, of the concrete and the abstract, of bound and boundless,
and most broadly of Art and Life, he not only solved the crisis of Hungarian lyrical
poetry, b u t addressed himself to issue of such scope and intensity as had hardly been
done b y European poets after Baudelaire. I n this respect, Ady, apart from having
opened a new era in Hungarian poetry, established an unmistakably individual tone
as a potential of European Symbolism.

3. A LOOK AT T H E POTENTIALS OF T H E MODEL

The analysis of the actual realization of this potential would go far beyond the
scope of the present paper; I shall merely hint at its prospects b y referring to some of
its implications.
Tibor Déry — as noted above — saw Ady as Hungary's last national poet. 27 His
wording, however, implies another judgment which it might be useful to explicate:
in this period, Ady was the last universal poet (if not in fact, then in ambition) on the
European literary scene.
European Symbolism, to simplify it a bit, developed out of the collapse of two
philosopies or ideologies. One was Romanticism, a m y t h of universal validity which the
great poet of the transition, Gérard de Nerval had already supplanted, b y the individ­
ual m y t h of memories, or magic numbers and images; the other was Positivism, whose
confining causality had come to depressingly oversimplify the relationship of man
and phenomena. 28 I n their wake there came the uranic, lyrical m y t h of transdendency :
Symbolism.
The myths in Ady's volumes show t h a t , in spite of the ever tragic nature of his
vision, he saw the possibilities of external transcendence as well, sensing t h a t a turning-
point in the life of the nation was a t hand, he saw as real what the two epoch-making
works of the previous generátions, Les Fleurs du Mal and Education sentimentale, were
crying out for: connection between an individual and his destiny, between the individ­
ual and the nation, between the individual and history, and the individual and the
outside world.
His volumes, arranged in cycles continuing for years, acquired in this.way a uni­
versality which — if it were not misleading to speak thus of lyrical poetry — we might
27
28
See Note 1.
On the repercussions of the latter, and of Realism and Naturalism which were equally in­
fluential, let us quote Philippe Jullian's remarkable sentence on the 1880's. (Philippe Jullian, Jean
Lorrain ou le Satiricon 1900, Paris, 1974, p . 36).

376
say was encyclopaedic in its completeness. This is obviously not a question of subject-
matter. Baudelaire himself repeatedly wrote t h a t his poems receive their full signifi­
cance only in the context of the whole volume. Ady's work is not simply an arrange­
ment of contrasting elements; he constructs a whole system around the key motifs of
Death, Love, Life, God, Revolution, and Hungary. Some think his use of symbols is
perfectly coherent, and reconstruct from his works a consciously developed a n d com­
plete system, comparable to and commensurate with t h a t of the Divine Comedy.29
A strange, often overloaded b u t always extremely intense poetry is thus born. E v e n
single worlds of the universe he created over the years reinforce and explain each other;
yet each and every one of his poems reflects the will to give expression to the totality
of the world.
The central personality thus looms inordinately large. As one of his contempo­
raries, Laszló Vajthó well saw, the chief symbol of his system is he himself: E n d r e Ady.
Every symbol — to refer to an insight of the linguist, Eugène Minkowski, ("The
metaphor is provided b y language itself. The symbol, basically, need not be intro­
duced into language") 3 0 — bears in itself the act of creation. The most characteristic
feature of Ady's symbolism and system of symbols is t h a t this act, the individual m y t h
thus produced, takes on the classic task of lyrical poetry: the will, the necessity, or —
in Ady's case — the obligation to establish a communion.
The social revolution whose possibility, necessity (and dangers) even politicians
failed to face as bluntly as he did, became a vital question of transcendent dimensions
in the lyrical m y t h of his poetry ("He wrote love poems to revolution", said Georg
Lukâcs in a later article) 31 just as, say, the possibility or impossibility of poetical ex­
pression was a vital question for Mallarmé. Or, to look at it another way: after Arany's
(soon forgotten) attempts Hungarian lyrical poetry had to wait for Ady's œuvre to
take a definite turn in the direction of what is today usually referred to as ontological
poetry. Many of his contemporaries rightly saw Ady as the greatest Hungarian meta­
physical poet t h a t had ever lived.
The system itself, whether we regard it as perfectly unified or as built u p layer
on layer (either topically or with passing of time), can obviously be made sense of only
by following it symbol by symbol. Ady's sense of his vocation to unify the community
is unambiguously shown by the fact t h a t he refers to and builds upon the imagery and
consciousness of an existing (or non-existent) national mythology to an ever increasing

29
The standpoints and arguments on this are well-known. See: M. Babits, "Tanulmâny Ady-
ról" (A study on Ady), Nyugat, 1920; "Megjegyzések Földessy Ady-könyvére" (Remarks on Föl-
dessy's Book on Ady), Nyugat, 1921; Földessy, Ady minden titkai (All of Ady's secrets), Budapest,
1949; and László Bóka's numerous articles, monographs, and university lectures; see also an entire
wealth of material from Béla Balazs to Janos Barta. For another point of view, see Attila József
"Ady-vizió" (A vision of Ady), Toll, 1929, also József Attila összes Müvei Kritikai Kiadàs I I I . ,
Budapest 1958) and István Kirâly (op. cit. vol. I, p . 8), who categorically deny the existence of
such a symbol system.
30
Eugène Minkowski, "Métaphore et symbole" (Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme, 1964,
5.). 31
György Lukâcs, Ady, a magyar tragédia nagy énekese (Ady, the great minstrel of the Hun­
garian tragedy), (Budapest, 1954).

377
extent. The effect of this process can be seen at all stages of his poetry. His own person
and his birthplace, too, was re-stylized through the myth of his ancient lineage; his
prosody follows neither an accentual nor a metrical pattern (it could, rather, be called
free verse), b u t seems, rather, to be constructed according to an ancient-sounding pro­
portioned verse-sentence. The words and figures of speech of Hungarian m y t h s and
of an archaic folklore intertwine and often recur in his tropes. And these are just three
elements chosen at random. Even within this, his language is unusual. From 1909 —
1910 onwards, he turned his back on the linguistic medium of the age (and of his
own previous volumes); finding, as it were, the "imaginary T a h i t i " in the Hungarian
past, he created a strongly archaic and highly expressive language — often in defiance
of grammatical rules, using unusual suffixes, metaphorical word combinations, and
long-forgotten words. This is why in the analysis of his poetry Gilbert Durand's univer­
sally valid classification of symbols — cosmique, onirique, concrète -— is of no use: 32
this is a poetry of concrete transcendency. Through the medium of language he has
succeeded in creating poems where every element, including the setting, the symbols,
or the content (as paraphraseable in prose), with all their potential significances, all
have significance at the same time.
His poetry became epoch-making with the turn we called his symbolist break­
through. After his second great turn, t h a t of 1914, he goes beyond Symbolist literature
and the Symbolist concept of poetry in many respects, remaining within it only in a
very broad sense of the word. I n a couple of years, the times had changed radically.
Ady's poetry had always stood out b y its extraordinary sensitivity to Destiny, or let
us say, to Fate, a consciousness of F a t e which enabled him to realize, sooner and more
deeply than anyone else, the oncoming catastrophe. At the time of his breakthrough,
he had been the poet of the change and revolution of a country unwilling t o change
and revolt. Now both were a reality; yet he knew t h a t the revolution he had always
prophesied was doomed to failure, and the change would be for the tragic worse.
Amidst the holocaust which he watched with dread from the very first moment, seeing
the apocalypse t h a t had come and awaiting the one yet to come, the whole structure
of his mythology and expression changed again.
The axis now was the myths of Time, and magyarság (the latter being something
of a merging of the ideas of nation, race, and their history). His last three volumes:
Ki Idtott engem (Who H a s Seen Me), 1914, A halottak élén (Leading the Dead), 1918,
Az utolsó hajók (The Last Ships), posthumous, unquestionably constitute a system of
symbols pervaded by the tragical transcendency of the coming times and of the perdi­
tion of Hungary.
The personal element — except for the love poems written to his young wife — is
excluded from these poems. This puts an end t o the feature t h a t G. Lukács, his amazing­
ly acute contemporary, called (in a pejorative sense) the "curiosity" of Ady's poetry:
its affective overloadedness. His language and his poetic behaviour retreated i n t o the.
most primordial layer: he gives voice to the objectified destruction of the h u m a n world
with the impersonality of the Jeremiads a n d curses of the Old Testament. Things a n d

32
Gilbert Durand, L'imagination symbolique (Paris, 1963).

378
events just "happen" in his poems; his tone, too, instead of the earlier dramaticism,
now evokes the narrative prosody of the Bible. Incidentally, his way of seeing has
a lot in common with the newly starting avant-garde movements, especially expres­
sionism; but though his experience and subject-matter does overlap with theirs, the
chief organizing principle of his creative method would never accept their codified
irrationality raised to an ars poetica. His was a created system of symbols and here
we must attach equal importance to qualifier and qualified.
Ady, unlike the avant-garde, still knew a man's ties to history and to a nation to
be real and significant, though fatally tragic. And while he had suffered and assessed
the apocalypse of his own world, the poet's self, though it was no longer the direct sub­
ject of their poems, still dominated their system of symbols.
Ady's mythology, thus, was distinctly individual even in such a strongly objectified
form. It is a created system of symbols, an individual mythology of experiencing Time,
time present and time historical; but the tension and the contact between universal
and individual, reality and metaphysics, symbol and object, is never as extreme as
in this period.
This lyric model which is Ady's alone in world literature perfects and proves its
potential in these volumes. Their visionary objectivity, their universally valid mythol­
ogy is in close touch with the internal and external tendencies of European lyrical
poetry as a whole, of which the avant-garde is but one aspect. At this stage of his
development, he is comparable to the greatest poets of Europe.

Translated from the Hungarian by Ádám Nádasdy

379
 BoRIs CHRISTA

A N D R E Y B E L Y AND T H E SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT I N RUSSIA

The recognition t h a t the Symbolist movement produced one of the most brilliant
periods in Russian literary history has long become universal. Yet even its achievements
are frequently misunderstood. Due perhaps to the vagaries of Russia's historical
development in this century, the assimilation of the "modernism" of yesterday has
presented special difficulties for the Russian critics, and partisan views have only
gradually given way to clearer insights and less than grudging appreciation.
While to the Symbolist generation the tasks of defending or attacking ideological
and esthetic positions formulated in programmatic manifestoes by rival factions
loomed importantly large, these once hardfought controversies have long ceased to
generate polemical heat. A more important critical issue b y far is the full assessment
of the influence which the movement exercised on Russian literature and the recogni­
tion and appreciation of those works and writers t h a t have become a vital p a r t of it.
Viewed in this perspective, it appears ever clearer t h a t lasting significance attaches
especially to those Russian Symbolists where the ideas and techniques imported from
the West were fully assimilated and organically blended with the Russian national
literary tradition. The Symbolist movement presents, in this regard, problems t h a t are
characteristic of many Russian artistic, intellectual, and socio-political movements.
Deriving, as it does, its general inspirational force from the West, it releases in Russia
a clash of Westernizing and Slavophile impulses. Following a fairly prolonged initial
period of dialectical conflict between attitudes of passionate dedication or total rejec­
tion, a synthesis is reached between the innovative Western concepts and techniques
and the indigenous cultural heritage.
While it can be clearly shown t h a t the first phase of the development of the Sym­
bolist movement in Russia was essentially imitative and merely a variant of the cos­
mopolitan movement of the same name, 1 there can be no doubt t h a t the literature
produced after its momentum turned into specifically Russian channels was highly
original, rich, and varied. In this later phase, Russian Symbolism made it its task to
reinterpret the general European movement "in terms both more national and uni­
versal". 2 I t was this attempt which formed the basis of the literary revival often referred
,o as "the silver age óf Russian poetry". Its inspirational force was not the emulation

1
2
See G. Donchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague, 1958).
R. Poggioli, The Poets of Russia, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.), 1960, p . 116.

381
of Western models, but the attempt to create a new and spiritually revitalized Sym­
bolist literature on the basis of a synthesis of traditional symbolist artistic tenets such
as musicality, suggestive imagery, unconventionality, freedom of form, etc., with the
romantic, metaphysical, and Slavophile tradition that had become such a vital part
of the Russian literary heritage from Tyutchev to Solovyov.
Artistic fulfillment of this kind is unquestionably achieved in the poetry of Alex­
ander Blok (1880-1921), but it is also present in much of the work of that rather more
wayward genius, Andrey Bely (1880-1934), especially in his novels. In fact, his is a
much more massive body of literary achievement which, because of the great publish­
ing problems which Russian literature encountered between the world wars, has only
gradually become available and is only now beginning to appear in clear perspective.
It establishes for him a firm claim to be considered among Europe's most important
modernist writers.
The view that Andrey Bely is the writer who best reflects the many complex
facets of the Symbolist movement in Russia has steadily gained ground. In a Russian
literary generation that produced a dazzling array of talent, it has become increasingly
clear that he is the central and key figure. Not only does he occupy this position in
terms of his creative, critical, and programmatic writing and literary relationships, he
is also unquestionably the most influential and the most characteristically Russian
writer of the movement. He was steeped in the Russian literary tradition and responded
to it compulsively and with such extreme sensitivity that it creatively conditioned
all his work. Throughout, it reflects an ingrained determination to give the doctrines
of Symbolism a specifically Russian imprint, making it a unique, consciously messianic
contribution to world literature.
The most significant period in Russian Symbolism begins around 1903. At this
point, however, it had already been a name and a force in Russian literature for nearly
a decade, its beginning being usually dated to 1894, the year in which Valery Bryusov
(1873-1924) published his modish collection of translated and original verse under the
programmatic title Russkie simvolisty (Russian Symbolists). In the years that followed,
there emerged a group of writers, mostly poets, who, in the wake of Western precur­
sors, flaunted egocentric attitudes based on a cult of refined estheticism. The frequent
description of this developing phase of the Symbolist movement in Russia as the
"decadent" era appropriately stresses its literary affiliations. Reacting against the
conventions of their literary environment, in which the acceptance of civic goals for
literature had become the established norm, they gave specific prominence to anti­
social, iconoclastic, and sexually provocative themes.
While Bryusov is the major figure in the Russian Symbolist movement at this
pioneering stage, his talents and interests were too one-sided for him to maintain a
position of artistic and intellectual dominance in its later, more original phase. Deriving
his enthusiasm for Symbolist techniques and attitudes while still in his teens from the
assiduous study of the French Symbolist poets, he set about educating the Russian
public to an acceptance of the new poetry. He approached the task with a single-
minded dynamism which prompted Poggioli's description of him as "a Peter the Great
in miniature, who almost single-handedly westernized Russian poetry anew. He

382
reduced this process of westernization almost exclusively to the reshaping of Russian
literary culture after the pattern of French modernism". 3
The three issues of Russian Symbolists which Bryusov edited and published in
1894-5 presented works of the French Symbolist masters in translation, and examples
of the new style in Russian by himself and others. Written with the avowed aim of
startling the audience and shaking it out of its complacency—an intention in which
they succeeded admirably—these slender booklets firmly established the Symbolist
presence on Russian soil. Other works b y Bryusov soon followed, the best are Tertia
vigilia (1900) and Urbi et orbi (1903), where the strongest thematic influence is t h a t
of Emile Verhaeren. A skillful and cool-headed literary activist, Bryusov based his
poetry on a narrow range of fashionable themes and obtained effects of arresting
novelty b y metric experimentation and highly refined imagery. Influential as his verse
was, Bely was clearly conscious of its frigidity, even sterility, when he characterized
him as " a poet of bronze and marble". 4
I n spite of all his promotional activity in support of the modernist positions,
however, Bryusov seems not to have been a Symbolist by natural inclination. Notions
such as the reliance on suggestion rather than explicit statement, or t h a t the poet's
images were endowed with mystic force and able to penetrate literally into realms of
transcendental t r u t h appear to have been basically alien to him. Too much the ratio­
nalist to abandon any of the resources of technique or intellect in favor of " m e r e " intui­
tion, he saw inspiration as a submissive adjunct to be prodded and goaded into service
as a "faithful ox". 5 Symbolism was for him simply a literary method, a set of poetic
devices. His verse, like t h a t of the superbly gifted, somewhat older Symbolist poet,
Innokenty Annensky (1856-1909), is more Parnassian t h a n transcendental, a n d is
essentially unrepresentative of the highly romantic, more emotional, and specifically
Russian trend established by the younger writers of the movement, one characterized
b y theurgic aims and mystic nationalism. Nevertheless, Bryusov exercised a strong
influence on the Russian Symbolists of the younger generation.
Perhaps most significant of all, since it was reinforced both by the example of his
own practice and b y his influential position in the publishing world, was his challeng­
ing call for a new awareness in matters of poetic craftsmanship and style. Assuming a
conscious pedagogic role in this area, Bryusov took the young Symbolists under his
tutelage and spurred them on to decisive efforts in the recognition and mastery of
problems of prosody and technique. Bely's debt to Bryusov in this regard is most
considerable, as his example gave him the stimulus to embark on his epoch-making
investigations of the technical aspects of verse.
B y contrast, Konstantin Bal'mont (1867-1943), with his uninhibited lyricism, was
closer to the neoromantic current. Musical in an often somewhat facile way, with
a rather too liberal use of alliterative and assonantal effects, his best work, such as
the collection Budem kak solntse (Let Us Be Like the Sun), is characteristic of the

3
4
Ibid., p. 101.
5
A. Bely, Arabeski (Moscow, 1911), p . 462.
V. Bryusov, Stikhotvorenija (Moscow, 1936), p . 127.

383
spirit of exuberance which was exuded b y the Russian Symbolist movement in its
heyday. Even though the thematic range of Bal'mont, with his flamboyant displays
of self-adulation a n d flaunting of sexual taboos, often appears immature, there can be
no doubt of the vitality and innovative stimulus of his verse. As the Verlaine of t h e
Russian Modernist movement, he extracted from the Russian language a rousing
musicality t h a t marks a new literary departure. This was instrumental in inspiring in
the young Bely an almost fetishistic cult of musicality, one further nourished b y his
literal acceptance of the doctrines of Schopenhauer and of the Nietzsche of the Wagne­
rian period, doctrines which invested music with the capacity of acting as an inter­
mediary between man and ultimate t r u t h either directly, or b y inspiring symbols and
myths t h a t could achieve a similar purpose.
I n Russia, the rise of Symbolism to the dominant position which it occupied on
the literary scene for the first decade of the twentieth century was p a r t of a wider
cultural movement. This gave it, on the one hand, considerable flexibility, b u t also
produced conflict in the literary and esthetic credo of its exponents, with the "deca­
d e n t " and " m y s t i c " tendencies of the movement being especially at variance. I n its
struggle to find acceptance, Symbolism was greatly helped by the success of modernism
in other arts. I n this connection, the enormous prestige and artistic appeal of
Diaghilev'a famous journal Mir iskusstva (The World of Art) 6 was a factor of special
importance, as its acceptance of Symbolic poetry and programmatic essays conditioned
the public to an acceptance of the new trends even prior to the publication of the most
important and characteristic of the Russian Symbolist periodicals, the monthly Vesy
(The Scales). 7
The appearance of The Scales marks the emergence of the characteristically Russian
phase of the Symbolist movement. Bryusov, aware of the value to it of "faith a n d
vision," 8 was instrumental in installing Bely as a key contributor to this journal and
in skillfully building him up as its main theoretician. 9 Bely used his position to promote
a transcendental, neoromantic and neo-Slavophile interpretation of Symbolist doc­
trines. H e was helped into the role of spokesman of the younger generation of Sym­
bolists b y his academic attainments and b y his closeness to the Solovyov family. Highly
articulate, intellectually uninhibited, and dynamically creative, Bely regarded the
techniques and doctrines of the Western Symbolists as a kind of launching p a d for
poetic flight into uncharted transcendental regions. His highly eclectic world view was
derived as much from German nineteenth-century Romanticism, from Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, and Solovyov, as from Verlaine and Mallarmé. However, in spite of the
strong influence on him of Western thought and literature, Bely had acquired a n d
retained the Slavophile literary predilections t h a t were a feature of the literary salon
of the Solovyovs, where he had virtually a second home. They were as natural a n d
significant a p a r t of his outlook as an artist as were the modernistic trends which he

6
The World of Art existed from 1898-1904. For a detailed survey of its scope and contents,
see J.7 E. Bowlt, "The World of Art", Russian Literature Triquarterly, 4, 1972, pp. 183-217.
8
The Scales was published by the Scorpion Press, Moscow, from 1904-1909.
9
Literaturny kritik (Moscow, Oct-Nov, 1939), p . 238.
A. Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revolyutsii (Moscow, 1934), p . 338.

384
 had assimilated and made his own as a follower of Bryusov and Bal'mont. The strongly
metaphysical direction so characteristic of him was an organic blend of the indigenous
poetic mysticism of Tyutchev, Fet, and Solovyov with the heady transcendentalism
of Schopenhauer a n d Nietzsche, it launched him, together with his literary associates,
the young "argonauts", on a bold bid to conquer the riddles of the universe through
the revelatory medium of a hieratic poetry.
An important concomitant of Bely's unwavering assertion of transcendental values
was a mood of apocalyptic expectancy. Like many Russian intellectuals of the pre-
revolutionary era, he h a d an acute sense of impending crisis. Revelation he experienced
as being palpably close, a n d he regarded it as natural t h a t the heightened awareness
of the poet's perception should be directed to metaphysical and cosmic themes. These
attitudes owed a great deal t o the influence of Vladimir Solovyov.
I n spite of its seemingly total reliance on mystic inpulse, Solovyov's philosophy,
in fact, constitutes an a t t e m p t t o combine scholarly order and logic with a mystical
world view. I t has a number of unexpected points of contact with the realist approach
to esthetics propounded b y Chernysevsky, including a common hostility to " a r t for
art's sake". Art in Solovyov's view is not to be regarded as an end in itself b u t as a
means of gaining cognition of the inner reality of life, thus serving the sacred and
solemn purpose of bringing greater insight into life, promoting greater understanding
of how to live, and leading, b y corollary, to a better life for all mankind. 1 0 Solovyov
thus establishes a definite point of contact with the traditional positions of Russian
nineteenth-century literature which required from the artist a definite commitment
to idealistic goals associated with the achievement of positive social and ideological
aims. The commitment is merely transferred from the civic to a higher and more spiritu­
alized plane.
The emblematic incarnation of Solovyov's ideals was the Sophia, a divine feminine
being fulfilling the role of intermediary between man and God in the context of a
theological system in which the forces of the "cosmos" were seen as conquering " c h a o s "
through the development in man of a superior consciousness based on love. Defined
and extolled b y Solovyov as the divine wisdom of God incarnated in the spirit of the
earth, the mysterious and appealing image of the Sophia was identified b y the young
Symbolists with the Goethean vision of "das ewig Weibliche". 1 1 I n dedicating their
muse to this divine feminine being, they originated a poetic cult with strong erotic
overtones, giving opportunity for the lyrical formulation of unique esoteric experiences
in which religious uplift was combined with refined sensuality. Although they perceived
her in different ways, this feminine being dominates the early work of b o t h Bely and
Blok, both of whom associated with the Solovyov family and became close friends
while still at the university. Their creative writing developed with a constant awareness
of a deep common bond, working independently and without prior consultation or
collusion both would frequently take up the same or similar themes. B o t h sons of
notable university professors and born in t h e same year (1880), they made their literary

10
V. Solovyov, Sochineniya (St. Petersburg, 1901-7), Vol. 6, pp. 425-430.
11
A. Bely, "Vospominaniya o Bloke", Epopeya, 1 (1922), p . 164.

25 Balakian 385
debut simultaneously with works in which the techniques of Symbolism were blended
with neoromantic attitudes and the cult of Sophia. They also shared a profound
faith in Schopenhauer's doctrine concerning the ability of music to express the inmost
mysteries of the universe, ones inaccessible to a more cerebral approach. A common
desire to formulate poetic experience in musically effective form was a natural corollary
of this belief. Rhythm, in particular, was hailed by them as excerising a mystical power
but assonance and alliteration were also accorded great significance.
Bely's fervent interest in the technical and compositional elements of poetry wag
closely linked and, in fact, almost synonymous with a desire to develop the musical
qualities of poetry to unprecedented levels. Seeing in the symphony the most perfecl
of art forms, the one in which the aims of all artistic creation were most clearly defined,15
Bely directed his first literary efforts towards the creation of narratives written in
highly musical, poetic prose which he actually entitled "symphonies". In these he
tried to obtain codaic effects through linguistic "orchestration" and other deliberate
syntactic and semantic devices. Artistic experience was supposed to be communicated
by its arrangement into small segments containing verbal motifs and clusters of images
that were repeated in different combinations. The exposition of the themes, the effects
of counterpoint and fusion were all subject to a strictly controlled artistic formula.13
In practice, this wildly innovative style of composition fell far short of Bely's
hopes. It achieves an effect of alienation too drastic to maintain literary communica­
tion with anyone except a specially prepared and motivated reader. While some
critics have dismissed these experiments as "unreadable", 14 their historical signifi­
cance is undoubted. As Victor Shklovsky puts it, "Without the 'symphonies' it would
seem that modern Russian literature would have been impossible".15
The quest for music in Bely's first poetic cycle, Zoloto v lazuri (Gold in Azure),
takes somewhat more conventional forms. New ground is broken in the prominent use
of ternary verse, a feature that is probably attributable to French influence.16 Bely's
prosodic technique already displays great originality and brilliance. His favoring of
the anapest probably stimulated Blok to change from the almost exclusive use of
iambics in Ante Lucem to the frequent use of the anapest: although not quite as domi­
nant as thought by earlier commentators, this nevertheless became a major feature
of his mature work.17
The poetry of Solovyov—where, in each of his visions of the Divine Feminine, the
figure of the Sophia is enveloped in "gold and azure"—is evidently the thematic
inspiration of Bely's first cycle of poetry.18 Sharing with Bal'mont the theme of extolling
the sun, he uses this symbol in a markedly different way. While for the earlier poet the
sun represented the focal point of a sensuous cult of the joys of physical existence,

12
13
A. Bely, Simvolizm (Moscow, 1910), p . 169.
A. Bely, Kubok meteley 4-aya simfonia (Moscow, 1908), p . 1.
14
15
Poggioli, op. cit., p . 164.
V. Shklovsky, "Andrey Bely", Bussky sovremennik, 2 (1924), p . 243.
16
17
Donchin, op. cit., p . 177.
18
R. Kemball, Alexander Blok : A Study in Bhythm and Metre (The Hague,1965), p . 110.
S. D. Cioran, "Vladimir Solovyov and the Divine Feminine", Bussian Literature Triquarterly,
4 (1972), p . 230.

386
Bely uses it with the established symbolic connotation as representing a source of
spiritual enlightenment and transcendental insight. However, far from employing it
as an aloof and solemn religious emblem, he treats it with considerable imaginative
verve and uses striking metaphors in its description. It becomes "a glittering coin",19
"a bunch of crimson roses", 20 "a pineapple tossed in the air by a hunch backed dwarf".21
The sunlight shining through the clouds forms the image of a "leopard"22—an apoca­
lyptic symbol akin to William Blake's "tyger".
Bely's images are often strongly deanimizing, just as Blake's tiger is no animal
from the zoo but a mystical metaphor, so Bely's leopard is similarly emblematic. The
use of such apocalyptic images whose significance relates entirely to the mystically
heraldic plane is characteristic of Bely's consciously prophetic vein. In his early verse the
symbolic images, with their related strata of meaning, are still very obvious — some­
times to the point of being obstructive and forced. They become more subtle and
flexible in Bely's later work, which abounds with unexpected images and striking
new lexical forms that exercised considerable influence on his contemporaries, espe­
cially the emerging futurist poets.
In spite of the exurberance and playfulness of much of Gold in Azure, his concept
of the lyricist's art remains essentially religious. Poetry, due to its kinship to music,
is regarded as a sanctified medium by means of which "higher reality" can be made
accessible. Fulfilling his hieratic role, the poet becomes a theurgist—the servant of
a higher will. Against a background of skies ablaze with color the poems voice moods
of eager religious expectation. The phrases 'ya zhdu' (I am waiting) and golos zovyot
(a voice summons) recur constantly as the poet awaits the imminent revelation of a
mystic presence on which his poetic awareness is centered. Only rarely does the poet
address the elusive presence directly, but when he does he uses the Tebya (Thou) with
the initial capital letter that is so characteristic of Blok's first book of verse. Wor­
shipped by Blok in expectant exultation as the Beautiful Lady in the glow of icon
lamps, the Sophia hides elusively in the gold and azure tones of Bely's sun-filled
poetic visions. Both poets are deeply in love with their transcendental ideal.
Erotically tinged mysticism is a characteristic of the Russian Symbolists as it is
of the German Romantics, such as Novalis. In Gold in Azure, it reaches its climax in
the poem "Poslednie dni" ("The Last Days"). 23 Here, the Sophia is represented as an
ethereal "bride" in a setting of rarefied, azure dimensions of eternity. She is trans­
fixed by the adoring gaze of the "groom" who comforts her. She barely breathes and
closes her eyes as he kisses her again and again. A curious element in this poem is that
the bride is described as being tormented Christ-like fashion by a crown of thorns. In
trying to relate the religious symbology of Christ to the parallel theme of the Sophia,
Bely was clearly seeking to win his way through to a new interpretation. Although his
introduction of the Christ theme is significant in view of later developments, his
attempted synthesis is hardly successful.
19
A. Bely, Stikhotvorenija (Berlin: Grzhebin, 1923), p . 52.
20
Ibid., p . 19.
21
Ibid., p . 64.
22
Ibid., p . 22.
23
Ibid., p . 34.

25* 387
 In keeping with his generally less intellectual, more intuitive approach, Blok
confines the visions of his parallel work, Stikhi o prekrasnoy dame (Verses of the Beauti­
ful Lady) to more modest dimensions. His success is all the greater and his collection
represents, beyond question, one of the finest áchievements of Russian lyrical poetry.
But even if Blok clearly eclipses Bely as a lyricist, the exuberance and zest for com­
munal metaphysical enterprise expressed in Gold in Azure is strongly charismatic, and
points, in a more original and positive direction for the development of Russian Sym­
bolism. While Bely initiates a trend away from the cult of self, Blok takes longer to
emancipate himself from narcissistic attitudes.
In spite of the great evocative appeal of Blok's Verses of the Beautiful Lady, the
poems in this collection show a marked subjectivism which continues to be emphasized
in subsequent works: Gorod (The Town), which contains his famous poem Neznakomka
(The Unknown Woman), Balaganchik (The Puppet Show), or Snezhnaya Maska
(The Snow Mask). In these works, Blok takes up a creative stance which, in his own
words, defined the role of the artist as follows: "You are free in your magical world
filled with 'correspondences'. Create what you will because this world belongs to
you". 24 This is a doctrine characteristic of the antisocial, egocentric, and hedonist
attitudes of "decadence" and the early Russian Symbolists. The notion of using the
Symbolist technique for the spinning of an esthetic cocoon around the artist, within
which, protected from the rigors of the harsh, nonsubjective world outside, he is free
to indulge his self-centered dreams, was rejected progressively as the movement,
under the guiding star of Solovyov's philosophy, drew closer to the indigenous tradition
of social commitment. Here again Bely assumed a pioneering role. He was the first
of the Symbolists to devote his verse to folkloristic and earthy themes expressing the
idea of commitment to the people and to Russia as a land with a special historical
destiny. In the decisive pursuit of a Slavophile and messianic direction, he was himself
responding not only to Solovyovian influence but also to the ideas of Merezhkovsky.
If Bryusov stands for the Westernizing trend in the early stages of the Russian
Symbolist movement, the Slavophile counterpart is represented by Dmitry Merezh­
kovsky (1865-1941). He too had passed through a youthful period when, alienated by
what he saw as a degeneration of Russian cultural life in the 1880's, he had steeped
himself in Western Symbolism and had subsequently played a leading role in establish­
ing modernist trends. However, while sponsoring the aim of revitalizing Russian
literature, Merezhkovsky also made it his mission to assert with fervor the value of
the specifically Russian spiritual tradition associated particularly with Dostoevsky.
In neo-Slavophile, neo-Christian terms he called for a mystically oriented Symbolist
literature endowed with universal messianic appeal.25 In the Russsian ''God-seeking'*
spiritual heritage he saw the antithesis to the pagan tradition in Western culture, and
in his influential trilogy of historical novels Christ and Anti-Christ, devoted to an ex­
amination of these issues, he proclaimed its superiority with emphasis not only on the

24
A. Blok, "O sovremennom sostoyanii russkogo simvolizma", Apollon, (8, 1910), p p . 21-30.
25
D. Merezhkovsky, O prichinakh upadka i o novikh techenyakh sovremennoy russkoy literatury
(St. Petersburg, 1893).

388
Russian Orthodox Church b u t also on such variants as the dissident sects t h a t had
flourished in Russia since t h e seventeenth century.
I n Merezhkovsky's writing, as in t h a t of Zinaida Hippius (1869-1945), his talented
wife, a refined Slavophilism blended into modernism with a conscious assertion of the
validity of Russian cultural values. This was the kind of influence to which Bely was
especially receptive after his brief but stirring experience of political activism during the
1905 revolution. Moreover, his dreams of finding early and immediate mystic revela­
tion in poetical theurgism had ended in disillusionment. By now a close friend of the
Merezhkovskys, he spent many weeks during the 1905-6 period as a guest in their
St. Petersburg apartment. Inspired by a more committed king of Slavophilism, his work
begins to show a marked change. Taking the new direction in which he is presently
followed by Blok, he begins by making Russia, the motherland, the subject of poetic
contemplation in Symbolist terms.
I n turning to his new subject, Bely at this stage finds inspiration in a dedicated
study of Gogol, Nekrasov, and Dostoevsky, which soon influences the stylistic features
of his work. The forms a n d techniques of Symbolism acquire a novel and characteristi­
cally Russian aspect in his important cycle Pepel' (Ashes), the title of which signifies
t h e searing process t h a t has consumed Bely's youthful and immature infatuation for a
romantic, feminine, transcendental ideal, which he also associated with the very real
woman, Lyubov' Blok. His faith in the reality of a true Sophia is, however, retained,
but is now related to neo-Slavophile concepts and aspirations, according to which her
revelation is identified with the ideal of a new Russian social order. 26 This is to be
attained by the fostering of traditional religiomystical values and the rejection of the
decadent West.
The achievement of a kind of a "realism" now becomes a conscious aim of Bely's
poetry, in the pursuit of which he remains, however, very much t h e Symbolist poet.
As he directs his attention to folkloristic themes and the sights and sounds of everyday
Russia, he strives through the symbolic force of his images to penetrate to the inner­
most substance of the Russian national spirit. Developing a Gogolian technique based
on daring imagery and verbal flourishes, he reveals a suprarealistic Russia in which
hidden occult forces both aid and hamper progress towards a new millenium. H e sees
Russia's historical development as being conditioned by the struggle between a Dio-
nysian, chaotic, elemental force incarnated in the Russian people and an Apollonian
organizing spirit represented by its westernizing administrators.
Bely's concepts here forged a bond of common endeavor with the older b u t
less dynamically innovative Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949). Also
deeply influenced by Solovyov and the early Nietzsche, and sharing Bely's and Blok's
mystical view of Symbolism, Ivanov in his highly erudite and carefully mannered
essays called for a nonegocentric literature committed to the establishment of spiritual
harmony in the creation of which the artist fulfills the divine will.27 The concern which
Bely expressed for the Russian people in Ashes found a parallel formulation in Ivanov's
26
A. Bely, "Lug zelyony", Vesy, (8, 1905), pp. 6-10.
27
J . West, Russian Symbolism; a Study of Vyacheslav Ivanov and. the Russian Symbolist
Aesthetic (London, 1970), pp. 62-65 and p . 90.

389
 thesis that art, especially Dionysian art, must be the force uniting nature, the Divine,
and all mankind.28 In spite of his theoretical position on this issue, Ivanovas own
poetry was hardly of the kind to reach out to a wider audience. His preferred poetic
forms and genres are those of the past, such as the dithyramb or sonnet, and although
he revives them with consummate skill, the impact is one of studied stylization rather
than vibrant modernism. In Ivanov's verse, the carefully modulated diction and finely
chiselled elegance obtained through classical allusions and cryptic, lapidary formula­
tions produce a static and highly opaque effect which is often heightened by his use
of extensive, scholarly footnotes. As a result, even though his technique of symboliza-
tion and choice of theme are akin to those of his literary fellow travellers, his works
stand somewhat apart. Nevertheless, his notable classical erudition and intellectual
vigor made him a very formidable and influential figure among the Symbolists.
Ivanov's enthusiasm for Dionysian cults greatly stimulated Bely's own interests
in this field. Some of the most successful lyrics of the cycle Ashes are Dionysian in
inspiration, as, for instance, the Pesenka Komarinskaya (Komarinsky Polk Song),
where, through the shared experience of orgiastic abandon, the poet strives to achieve
that sense of oneness with the people which Ivanov had set as a basic literary aim. This
theme also furnishes the creative inspiration for Bely's first Symbolist novel, Serebrianny
golub (The Silver Dove). Here, as his hero seeks unsuccessfully to find religious
fulfillment in surrender to the religious charisma and lifestyle of Russian sectarian
fanaticism, he explores to the full the prospect of mystic revelation in orgiastic
experience which was, for. Bely himself, a fascinating possibility and a constant at­
traction.
Finding in the idea of Dionysian surrender a source of personal temptation, Bely
somewhat perversely, castigated its advocacy by others with particular ferocity. This
issue brought him, for a time, into sharp conflict with Ivanov, who took the view that
theurgistically valid artistic works could be inspired just as appropriately by Dionysian
passion and anarchy as by Apollonian restraint and order. On these grounds, Ivanov
sided with G. Tchulkov's "mystical anarchist" movement, which, for a short period
around 1906, united those Symbolists taking a very libertarian stance. He was bitterly
opposed in this by Bely, who launched scathing attacks on "mystical anarchism" from
the pages of The Scales. While hardly reflecting much credit on its participants in view
of the acrimony with which it was conducted, this controversy nevertheless shows up
vividly a significant characteristic of the Russian Symbolist movement—its passionate
concern with theoretical issues.
The extent to which Russian symbolism regarded itself as a philosophical move­
ment is demonstrated by its prolific production of essays which, in volume, almost
rival the works of Symbolist "belles-lettres". Much of this theoretical writing is nebulous,
confused, and contradictory. This is hardly surprising, since in the Symbolists' own
view it was axiomatic that truth was not to be achieved through deductive reasoning
and logic but through the inspired application of Symbolist literary techniques. Never­
theless, there is much of permanent literary and critical interest in these polemics.

28
Ibid., p . 77.

390
 As a theoretician, Bely occupies a central position in the movement. He differs
from most of the other Symbolists, with the exception of Ivanov, in that his writing
is conceptually lucid and generally consistent. His style ranges from the aggressively
polemical to the coldly statistical. In contrast to the theoretical writing of Ivanov,
which tends to concentrate on a limited number of points dealt with in great detail,
Bely ranges more widely and generally takes a more scientific approach. Although he
ultimately failed in his aim of writing a rigorous exposition and justification of the
philosophical foundation of the symbolist doctrines, his massive and highly influential
work, Simvolizm (Symbolism), bears witness to the earnestness with which he pursued
his task. In this, he demonstrates capacities for sustained abstract reasoning evidently
inherited from his father, a distinguished mathematician. As well as closely scrutiniz­
ing the literary methods of Symbolism and offering philosophical explanations, he also
makes Russian poetic technique the subject of precise and sophisticated analysis. His
pioneering investigations made a major impact on literary criticism and provided a
starting point for the renowned critical school of Russian Formalism.29
In spite of all earlier theoretical disagreements, the Russian movement closed its
ranks firmly in its final stages when Ivanov joined again with Bely and Blok to form
a recognized triumvirate of Symbolist leadership. Bely and Ivanov were inevitably
reunited by their common mystical orientation, by their shared attitude of concern
for the Russian people, and, above all, by their seriousness of creative purpose.
Bely's last major collection of verse, Urna (The Urn), reflects very clearly the great
concern of the Russian Symbolists for the techniques of the poet's craft. Characteristi­
cally, it is dedicated to Bryusov. In it the lyrical and prosodie tradition of Pushkin,
Baratynsky, and Tyutchev are reinterpreted with skill and originality. Russia, as a
poetic motif, has now receded, although its presence is still inherent in the frozen world
of wind and snow inhabited by elemental forces, inimical yet fatally attractive, that
fill the foreground in many of the poems. The blizzard theme Bely once again shared
with Blok. Both were strongly influenced by Ibsen, 30 as is shown by moods and motifs
reminiscent especially of Peer Gynt.
Another important ingredient in The Urn is the element of irony. This could, and
perhaps should, be regarded as another feature demonstrating the close link between
the Symbolism of Bely and Blok and the mainstream of the Russian literary tradition.
It is a significant characteristic specific to Russian Symbolism that, in spite of his
passionate dedication to metaphysical causes, the poet periodically steps aside from
his lofty aims and mocks them and himself. This is the attitude adopted by Blok when,
in his satirical Balaganchik (The Puppet Show), he treats the cult of the Sophia and
the doings of her poet-priests with scathing irony. In The Urn a similar tendency
appears as a dominant motif. Bely's frequent ambivalence and capacity for sustained
moods of intellectual self-flagellation was noted by many of his contemporaries.31 In

29
V. Erlich, Russian Formalism (The Hague, 1965), p . 21.
30
N. A. Nilsson, Ibsen in Russland (Stockholm, 1958), p . 200.
31
E. g., A. Ellis (L. Kobylinsky), Russkie simvolisty (Moscow, 1910), p . 283; N . Berberova,
The Italics are Mine (New York, 1969), p . 161; A. Turgenieff, Erinnerungen an Rudolf Steiner,
(Stuttgart, 1972), p . 12.

391
his writing this also emerges strongly in his Fourth Symphony, in the desperate out­
bursts of Leonid Ledyanoy in Zapiski chudaka (Notes of an Eccentric), in the frenzy
of Posle razluki (After the Parting), and in some of the tormented scenes and characters
of his last novels.
For Bely, The Urn marked the completion of a cycle of lyrical development. After
his marriage in 1910, he turned increasingly to prose as his main creative medium, and
his position the greatest exponent of the Symbolist novel in Russia soon came to
be unchallenged. His novels show the influence of Gogol far more t h a n t h a t of any
Western model. Yet they are characteristically Symbolist works in t h a t the central
creative idea in all of them is the expansion of recurring images into all-pervasive sym­
bols carrying the inner meaning of the action. Thus, in The Silver Dove, the novel
mentioned earlier, the symbol of the bird is used to evoke the destructive " E a s t e r n "
forces t h a t draw the hero Daryalsky to his doom, while in Peterburg (St. Petersburg)
the red domino and mask, which Nikolay Ablenkhov puts on repeatedly, suggests the
inner dilemma of revolutionary activity, when individuality tends to be suppressed
and replaced b y depersonalized behavior.
I n St. Petersburg—which has been hailed b y a number of discerning critics, in­
cluding Pasternak, Nina Berberova, and Nabokov, as one of the greatest works of
Russian literature—Bely takes up the apocalyptic theme of the profound dangers
threatening Russian civilization. I t is a theme also pursued in his later novels, all of
which are symptomatic of a time of great underlying historic tensions. Bely sees Russia
as being under attack by powers of evil t h a t seek to engulf the individual and force
him back into the dark ages of primitive tribal existence. These forces are revealed as t h e
twin evils of soul-destroying, sensually motivated mass behavior, and the Luciferian
force of coldly cerebral, ruthless self-assertion. Besides alerting the reader to t h e
existence of these dimensions of evil through sequences of evocative images t h a t
modulate the action, Bely creates a series of characters t h a t embody these forces.
The sense of overwhelming, brooding evil inherent in oppressive, anti-humanitarian
movements of a fascist nature is conveyed b y Bely with prophetic genius. While other
Russian Symbolist novelists, such as Andreyev or Sollogub, treated the fashionable
theme of evil in many variants, much of their impact has been lost. A great deal of
Andreyev's writing now appears unconvincing and theatrical, while the petty element
in Sollogub's much-vaunted Satanism has caused it to lose some of its spell in a rela­
tively taboo-free age, where the wickedness of the perversions t h a t he hints at has lost
much of its sensationalism. Bely's depiction of evil, b y contrast, has lost none of its
impact.
Bely's novels are striking not only in their themes b u t also in their use of highly
innovative techniques which initiated new trends in Russian literature. 3 2 His prose
style sparkles with inventiveness and originality. With a totally uninhibited creative
dynamism t h a t invites comparison with James Joyce, he produces dozens of arresting
stylistic novelties on every page. Frequently they are inspired by devices of poetry.
His narratives flow for pages in metrically composed sentences based especially on

32
See A. Honig, Andrej Belyjs Romane : Stü und Gestalt (Munich, 1965).

392
dactyllic and anapestic rhythms. Even beyond this, words are selected and orches­
trated to achieve assonantal and alliterative effects t h a t are highly evocative or directly
onomatopoeic. Also very frequent are plays on words, puns, and rhymes.
Equally unusual and daring is Bely's treatment of the lexical resources of the
Russian language. H e bends and adapts the language to suit his specific artistic pur­
poses, which often aim a t estrangement and the deliberate distortion of everyday reali­
ty. Not only does he marshal a vocabulary taken from the most varied stylistic levels,
but, with the creative fecundity of a Rabelais, he creates literally thousands of new
words by compounding existing stems or inventing from them new forms and derivatives
by the bold use of alternative prefixes or suffixal forms. As pointed out by Tschizew-
sky, the evanescent nature of this vocabulary does not negate its artistic significance;
it undoubtedly exercised a major influence on Mayakovsky. 33
The most radically experimental and unique of Bely's novels is his Kotik Letaev
(Kitten Letaev), which marks the high point of his technique as a Symbolist novelist.
Using dimly recollected childhood experiences as a starting point, Bely introduces
chronological shifts whereby the experiencing authorial " I " moves back in time to
prenatal experiences and forward to the mature adult. At the kernel of the novel is the
belief that, in infancy, the child's mental growth recapitulates the main stages in the
development, through the ages, of the human psyche. Bely gives this idea concrete
expression by identifying young Kotik's changing perception of the world with a series
of symbolic images and events. Based on factual people, objects, and happenings,
these become strange and illogical when seen from the point of view of the child. Bely's
symbolistic world view endows them with mythological significance. The apartment
where Kotik lives becomes a primeval environment where he has to struggle with
prehistoric creatures. H e experiences an Egyptian period where he meets a god with
the head of a bull and subsequently lives through the Biblical era in various encounters
marked by the presence of the emblems of Christianity. Gradually, the maturing
intellect of the child produces some order in the chaos of impressions, b u t although
the mythological-symbolic dimension of the novel is counterbalanced b y rational and
mundane explanation, the essential validity of its metapsysical dimension remains.
Kitten Letaev clearly reflects the studies in occultism which Bely pursued with
intensity after his marriage to Asya Turgeniev in 1910. Their direction was determined
by his continued faith in the teaching of Solovyov and by his own neo-Slavophile
convictions. They led him to become deeply interested in the anthroposophy of Rudolf
Steiner, which he saw as substantially incorporating both Solovyov's philosophy 34 and
the belief in a special spiritual mission for Russia and the soul of its people. 85 Like the
German poet Christian Morgenstern, Bely became a convinced follower of Steiner and
began actively promoting his ideas among the Russian Symbolists. Once again, Bely
here played an influential role. Although both Blok and Ivanov refused Bely's prompt-

33
D. Tschizewskij, "Nachwort", in Lily Hindley, Die Neologismen Andrej Belyjs (Munich,
1966),34pp. 122-124.
35
A. Bely, "Vbspominanyia o Bloke", Epopeya, 1 (1922), p . 163.
A. Blok and A. Bely, Perepiska (Moscow, 1940), p . 295.

393
ing to join him in becoming anthroposophists, Steiner's independent affirmation of the
Christ-bearing role of the Russian people, as interpreted by Bely, influenced them both.
Ideas and motifs based on anthroposophical ideas find expression not only in
Kitten Letaev b u t also in the small collection of contemplative poetry, Zvezda (The
Star), and, in fact, in all his later works. Under the influence of Steiner's christological
teachings, the key image of the elusive Sophia now recedes in favor of the more clearly
defined symbolic figure of the apocalyptic Christ. Transformation rather t h a n replace­
ment—this is a change t h a t mirrors the metamorphic development of the image of the
Divine Feminine in Solovyov's own writings. 36
Apocalyptic expectation and the prophesy of a cataclysm t h a t would usher in
a new era had long been a basic theme of Symbolist poetry. With the coming of the
revolution, Bely initially experienced a sense of fulfillment. An interpretation of the
events of 1917, in which the revolution is linked with the coming of Christ, was for
him a natural corollary of his neo-Slavophile world view. This synthesis of ideas finds
symbolic expression in his exultant poem Rodine (To the Fatherland) of August, 1917.
In it, Christ is described as having "come to earth again" and Russia is lauded as the
"messiah of the coming day". 3 7 From this poem, Blok found the thematic inspiration
for what was to become the most famous and most widely commented on poem of the
Russian Symbolist era — Dvenadtsat (The Twelve). Extracts from Bely's poem were
copied b y Blok into his diary on J a n u a r y 6, 1918, 38 on J a n u a r y 8 he began The Twelve,
which he finished very quickly; it appeared in print early in March, 1918.
In The Twelve and in the subsequent full-length narrative poem Kristos voskres
(Christ Is Risen), which Bely wrote in amplification of Blok's poem, the mystical in­
spirations of the Russian Symbolists reach their final apotheosis. I t marks the end of
their road as Symbolist poets. Yet both writers still shared common goals in directing
their final, significant poetic efforts towards the creation of long poems in which Sym­
bolist techniques are virtually abandoned in favor of straight narrative in the Evgeny
Onegin tradition, and in which autobiographical themes are treated in lexically and
rhythmically scintillating iambic tetrameters. Blok's creative strength, however, failed
him, and although his life dragged on for another three years until 1921, his Vozmezdie
(The Revenge) remained unfinished. Bely's Pervoe svidanie (The First Meeting) on the
other hand, stands as one of his finest works and has particular relevance for the under­
standing of the Symbolist era in Russia since it vividly recreates the exuberance and
sparkle of its literary and artistic life.
Bely's most significant contribution to the historiography of the Russian Sym­
bolist movement was, however, in the field of prose. His highly individualistic memoirs,
which, unfortunately, he was unable to complete before he died in 1934, are undoubt­
edly the most important source on this period. Bely, the pampered and admired young
prodigy of the Symbolist heyday, had unrivalled opportunities for meeting the writers,
-artists, and intellectuals of this brilliant era; in recording his personal impressions, he

36
S. D. Cioran, "Vladimir Solovyov and the Divine Feminine", Russian Literature Triquar-
terly, 374. (1972), p. 235.
38
A. Bely, Stikhotvoreniya (Berlin, Grzhebin 1923), p . 463.
A; Blok, Dnevnik (Leningrad, 1928), Vol. 2, p . 94.

394
recreates it with singular vividness and detail. Although circumstances lorced him to
adopt a more than ordinarily critical position in his memoirs, and all the personages
are presented refracted through the prism of his special angle of vision, the memoirs
are nevertheless full of atmosphere and offer penetrating insights.
Stylistically different and occupying a special place among his memoirs are Bely's
deeply sympathetic Reminiscences of Blok, whose supremacy as a lyricist Bely acknowl­
edged with great critical objectivity and generosity. This book forms a fitting epilogue
to a literary relationship which, in spite of all its vacillations, provided a rich source
of inspiration to both writers. With these memoirs, Bely made a final outstanding
contribution to the literary legacy of the Symbolist movement in Russia.

395
 PART V
TYPOLOGICAL STUDIES
 PIERRE BRUNEL

THE "BEYOND" AND THE "WITHIN": THE PLACE AND FUNCTION

OF MYTHS IN SYMBOLIST LITERATURE

Before attempting any further study, a statement on the "present state of Sym­
bolism" would be urgently needed. Valéry tried to formulate one in 1938 when he
defined the achievements, good or bad, of this so-called school of poetry within "a
given region of the literary world, that is to say France, between 1860 and 1900". 1
But this was both too much and too little. Too much, if one considers that, in the
course of these four decades, the most divergent literary trends met and mingled. Too
little, if one considers the foreign extensions of the Symbolist doctrine, which some­
times developed belatedly (it was only after 1908, for instance, that Japan began to
discover the French "Symbolists", thanks, in particular, to the translations of Ueda
Bin). Etiemble does not hesitate to see in Symbolism a truly planetary movement,
perhaps the only one in the history of literature. 2
But are these foreign "Symbolisms" really Symbolist? One can see that "the men
of 1880" in Holland chose the English Romantics as their masters; that the first genera­
tion of Russian Symbolists was mainly decadent; that the "Modernists" of Spain and
Spanish-speaking America listened above all to the very soft voice of Verlaine, who, in
spite of all that has been said about him, was probably no real Symbolist. As for the
French Symbolists, to what extent are they all truly Symbolist and as clearly distin­
guishable from the Decadents as Gustave Kahn and Jean Moréas claimed in Le Sym-
boliste of October 7, 1886? Or are they to be considered "pseudo-Decadents" and the
"shadow" of the Decadents, as Anatole Baju declared in Le Décadent of November 15,
1888? The confusion in all this is so extreme that one is tempted to agree with Ernest
Raynaud, though perhaps for other reasons, and to adopt his term la mêlée sym-
boliste, meaning "the Symbolist skirmish" or "mix-up".
As a literary phenomenon situated in time and space, Symbolism indeed appears
to be something that can scarcely be pinned down; and Valéry was thus able to observe
that "nothing in the writings and the memory of the survivors exists under this name
in the period that concerns us"; he thus concluded that Symbolism is only a "myth". 8

1
"Existence du Symbolisme", a text written in 1938 and printed and published by A. A. M.
Stolz, (A l'Enseigne de l'Alcyon, Maestricht, 1939). See Paul Valéry, Œuvres, vol. 1, ed. Jean Hytier
(Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), p . 688.
2
" . . . pour la première et jusqu'ici la seule fois dans l'histoire de la littérature universelle,
une école littéraire propage sur la planète entière son influence". ("Le symbolisme à l'étranger",
Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. XV,) p . 623.
3
"Existence du Symbolisme", p . 688.

399
 MYTH: the magic word had been uttered and launched. Instead of bringing light
m the darkness, it only added to the confusion. Valéry was using the word here to
signify an imaginary creation of the collective mind, a terminological illusion, an in­
flated bladder that needed to be burst: and he thus gave a kind of kickoff for the free-
for-all of critics obsessed with the need to de-mystify. But why should we not attempt
to go in the opposite direction, return to the full meaning of the term and thereby
view a myth as a manifestation of "the invasion of the world by what is sacred or
supernatural", 4 that is to say, as "the only valid revelation of reality"? 5 We would thus
be able to proceed from "the myth of Symbolism", a pleasant but probably fruitless
theme, to "Symbolism and myths".
Mythological figures quite obviously occupy an important place in Symbolist
imagery. One need but mention here Mallarmé's Hérodiade or his L'Après-midi d'un
faune, which seeks to "perpetuate" these nymphs6 whose irreversible death, towards
the end of the century, Pierre Louys was destined to sing;7 or else the figure of Sappho
in the writings of Francis Vielé-Griffin8 and in Rilke's Neue Gedichte9; or again the
importance that the myth of Leda acquires in the writings of Jean Lorrain 10 and in
those of Yeats. 11 Such memories of Greek and Roman mythology do not exclude,
however, a recourse to exotic mythologies (those of India in Edouard Schuré);12 or
else to national mythologies (Celtic myths in Yeats or Maeterlinck and even in Apolli­
naire; legends from the Kalevala in Leino; the figure of El Cid in Manuel Machado;
American-Indian myths in Ruben Dario). And we even see purely personal myths
crystallize, created by the poet himself, like the myth of Maximin in Stefan George or
that of the Belle Dame in Alexander Blok.
One may well gain the impression of having to deal with a real kaleidoscope of
myths. Not that we need to collect them after the manner of Leconte de Lisle, or as
they are found in the "Pantheon" of Louis Menard, which "contains all the gods that
the world has known". 13 borne gods are "elect", just as there exist paysages choisis ox
'elect landscapes";14 for instance, the gods that Jean Lorrain selects for his collection
of poems, Le Sang des Dieux : Eros, Selene, Zeus, Kytherea, and Helios.

4
5
Mircea Eliade, Aspects du mythe (Gallimard, Coll. "Idées N . R . F . , " 1963), p . 15.
Mircea Eliade, "Les mythes du monde moderne", La Nouvelle Revue Française (September,
1953),6 p . 441.
"Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer", the opening verses of L'Après-Midi d'un Faune, an
eclogue by Stéphane Mallarmé, first published by Alphonse Derenne, 1876; reprinted in Œuvres
complètes,
7
ed. Henri Mpndor and G. Jean-Aubry (Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1945), p . 50.
Le Tombeau des Naïades, in Les Chansons de Bilitis (Librairie de l'Art Indépendant, 1895).
8
La Lumière de Grèce (Pindare, Sappho, La Légende ailée de Bellerophon Hippalide) (Paris,
N. R.9 F., 1912).
Eranna an Sappho; Sappho an Eranna; Sappho an Alkaios, in Neue Gedichte (Insel Verlag,
1907).
10
Even in the novel Maison pour Dames (Ollendorff, 1908), p . 158, where "une Léda d'al­
bâtre, pâmée sous la caresse insistante d'un cygne" testifies to the temperament of the host, Mon­
sieur Agrada.
11
Leda and the Swan, from The Tower (1928); The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Macmillan,
1933),12pp. 241-2.
Trilogie du Destin (Karma, Nirvana, Immortalité) in /Arne des temps nouveaux, poèmod
(Librairie Académique Perrin, 1909).
13
Poèmes (E. Dentu, 1855).
14
Verlaine, Clair de lune, in Fêtes galantes (1869).

400
 Accoudés aux trônes d'érable
E t d'or, où nourrit leur fierté,
Ils ont aux cris des misérables
Des longs soupirs de volupté. 15

One senses here, above all, an effort to amalgamate them all into daringly syncretistic
figures of much the same nature as Isis in the writings of Apuleius. Baudelaire had
already pointed out t h a t Wagner's Elsa is much the same as " t h e Psyche of antiquity
who, likewise the victim of her own demonic curiosity and unwilling to respect the
incognito of her divine spouse, lost all her happiness when she penetrated its mystery";
or even like " t h e E v a of t h e serpent". 1 6 I n the eyes of Gabriele D'Annunzio, " t h e royal
daughter of H e r o d " is a t t h e same time

Gorgone antica nella grande chioma

Ella era Circe ed Elena ed Onfale,

Dalila meretrice dalle risa
17
Terribili.

The mere word " m y t h " is, moreover, dear to the Symbolists. I t appears in the
titles of poems, such as Annenski's The Myth of October' in his Cypress-wood casket, and
in those of whole volumes, such as Stefan George's Sagas and Songs18 and Henri de
Régnier's Scenes mythologiques.19 Mallarmé had already spoken to Banville in a letter
of December 25, 1871, 20 of a "book of mythology" t h a t he planned to write. Above
this whole generation there floated the huge shadow of Wagner, whose conception of
drama brought to Baudelaire the confirmation t h a t " t h e m y t h is a tree which thrives
everywhere, under every climate and every sun, spontaneously and without any slip-
cuttings. The religions and poems of all four parts of the world supply us overabundant
proof of this". 2 1 Quite rightly, this very universality of the m y t h is disturbing. Is Sym­
bolist poetry mythological? Yes, undoubtedly, b u t one might also apply this epithet
— and with how much more justification — to Parnassian poetry as well as to t h a t of
Romanticism, of Classicism, of antiquity, and even to popular poetry.
Symbolist poetry can yet be distinguished, in this respect, from all these other
kinds of poetry in t h a t its whole bearing is peculiarly mythical, a n d this may be why

15
Les Dieux, in Le Sang des Dieux (Edouard-Joseph, 1920), p. 153. [originally written in 1882]
16
"Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris", Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. G.
Le Dantec and Cl. Pichois (Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961), p. 1228. [first published
in La Revue européenne of April 1, 1861]
17
"A Gorgon of ancient times encircled by her great locks
She was Circe and Helen and Omphale,
And Dalilah, the whore, whose laughter
Is terrible
Prelude to "L'Intermezzo di rime" (1883), Tutte le Overe di Gabriele D'Annunzio, ed. Egidio
Bîanchettî
18
(Mondadori, 1950-1964), vol. 1, p. 215.
19
Buch der Sagen und Sänge (1895).
20
Bernard Grasset, 1924.
21
Quoted by Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, p. 1644.
"Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris", p. 1229.

26 Balakian 401
the various literary groups of t h a t age so often adopted Orpheus as their emblem, or
the Argonauts (in t h e ease of the Russian group formed around Bely), or P a n (in the
case of the circle formed in J a p a n in 1908), or Apollo (which was the name of the period­
ical founded b y t h e Russian Symbolists). One thus finds one's way back to what
Valéry h a d discovered in all this production which seems so much less clearly defined
t h a n all others: "some indefinable esthetic spiritualism, or some correspondence be­
tween those things t h a t are visible and those t h a t are not". 2 2
Such a metaphysical ambition is probably the major characteristic of the whole
Symbolist attitude—which does not necessarily mean t h a t it is the characteristic that
one finds most widely represented in Symbolist poetry. I n the eyes of Vyacheslav
Ivanov, for instance, art is a means of acquiring knowledge t h a t requires genius, and
the purpose of symbols is not so much to communicate an appreciation of the beautiful
as to develop t h e faculty of detecting in all phenomena their primary meaning. 23
Stefan George summarizes very well this shift of perspective when he writes, in his
''Vorrede zu Maximin"

Wo had tasted . . . all too generously this diversity of appearences t h a t are

poured forth in utter disorder . . . . What we needed was One who would be moved
by mere events and would reveal things to us as the eyes of the Gods see them. 24

B u t myths are precisely intended to allow us to recover such a divine gift of

vision. I n this respect, one can find no more significant statement t h a n t h a t of Yeats.
when he justifies himself, in his Autobiographies, for using mythology as he does:

I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, oi

the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost
an infallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages,
and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation
to generation by poets and painters, with some help from philosophers and theo­
logians . . . I had even created a dogma:
"Because those imaginary people are created out of the deepest instinct of man,
t o be his measure and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking
may be t h e nearest I can go t o truth. 2 5

Platonism has often been mentioned in such a context. Stefan George, for instance,
actually refers explicitly to Plato. B u t it would be a commonplace to state t h a t Plato,
in his very task of knowing, uses the myth, employing it, so to speak, to relay dialectic,
W h a t is the world of Ideas if not a mythical world, even if it is supposed t o be the

22
23
"Existence du Symbolisme", p. 687.
N . Struve, Anthologie de la poésie russe—La Renaissance du XXème siècle (Aubier-
marion,
24
1970), p . 20.
"Vorrede zu Maximin", Tage und Taten (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1925), p . 75: "Wir hatten . .
allzuviel gekostet von der buntheit der sich übersturzenden erscheinungen . . . Was uns not ta1
war Einer der von den einfachen geschehnissen ergriffen wurde und uns die dinge zeigte wie die
augen der götter sie sehen". [We have respected the author's spelling, without capitals for nouns/
25
W. B. Yeats, "The Trembling of the Veil"; "Four years", Autobiographies (London, Mac"
millan, 1926), I I , pp. 142-3.

402
 world in which true reality is rooted? This is indeed the world t h a t Mallarmé seems
to be approaching, though only to lose it again, in his Prose pour des Esseintes.
Once the m y t h has been defined and used as an instrument for acquiring knowl­
edge, one needs to examine its possible relationship to the symbol. If one is to believe
Téodor de Wyzewa, this relationship is of the nature of a simple equation. I n La Revue
Wagnérienne of J u n e 8, 1886, he claimed that, in modern art, legends and myths are
mere symbols. Most probably he should have said "allegories" rather t h a n "symbols",
and this would be the first distinction t h a t one should endeavour to formulate.
Baudelaire's poem Le Cygne would supply us with an excellent point of departure.
I n order to suggest the exile, in our world, of a native of the Ideal world, the poet uses
here several analogical figures: Andromache in Epirus, the swan torn away from its
original lake, the negress dying of consumption far from "splendid Africa". The second
of these examples is defined, in the very text, as a myth:

Un cygne qui s'était évadé de sa cage,

E t , de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec,
Sur le sol raboteux traînait son blanc plumage,
Près d'un ruisseau sans eau la bête ouvrant le bec

Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre,

E t disait, le cœur plein de son beau lac natal:
"Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?"
J e vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal,

Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l'homme d'Ovide,

Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu,
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide,
Comme s'il adressait des reproches à Dieu. 26

The word " m y t h " is perhaps more suited here to Andromache than to the swan,
but the use made by Baudelaire of his two examples is after all, the same; he infuses
the same meaning — his own — in both, and this meaning is allegorical. I n addition,
the poet seems to admit as much when, a few lines later, he now has recourse to this
last word and exclaims: " . . . tout pour moi devient allégorie" .27
Allegory, as Hegel once pointed out, is only " a symbol grown cold", 28 and thus to
reduce a myth to a merely allegorical significance means reducing it, above all, to a
single meaning. Henri de Régnier stated this clearly in his lecture on Les Poètes d'au-
jourd'hui (1900): "A myth is the conch in which a single idea resounds". In the eyes
of Yeats, Helen represents the fatal power of all beauty; for Stefan George, Algabal
is "the symbol of the despotic and inhuman soul which, in its omnipotence, can find
only solitude and sterility". 29 One can find, in this respect, no more characteristic

26
Les Fleurs du Mal no. 89 of the 1861 edition, lines 17-28.
27
Ibid., line 31.
28
Esthétique, first lecture, trans. Ch. Bénard (Hachette, 1875), p . 165.
29
M. Boucher, in a French edition of selected Dichtungen—Poèmes of Stefan George (Aubier-
Flammarion, 1969), p. 64.

26* 403
example t h a n t h a t of Henri de Régnier, who in his poem Epigramme (in t h e volume
Jeux rustiques et divins of 1897) offers us in the legend of the birds of Stymphalos an
allegory of passing time. These birds are the hours of his own life t h a t fall "into t h e
waters of [his] sadness or the tide of [his] joy". 3 0 L'Homme et la Sirène, another poem
in the same volume, represents none other t h a n the poet, subjected, like Ulysses, t o
the torture of fabulous temptations. 3 1 This "single meaning" brings one clearly and
inevitably back t o the person of the poet; and this, so it seems, would be the second
characteristic of the allegorical usage of myth. Annenski's Myth of October, which we
have already mentioned, testifies to this: here the "other", the Doppelgänger (in this
case, the blind man who, at night, stumbles on the roof of the house) is again the Ego.
We are thus reminded of the Nuits of Alfred de Musset; such a handling of m y t h
is, after all, not so very different from the one t h a t prevailed in the age of Romanticism.
Alfred de Vigny's Moses and Shelley's Prometheus, for instance, were also clearly
incarnations of an idea. In the eyes of Ballanche, moreover, the ultimate meaning
of myths could be reduced to a single idea: handed down to us by universal tradition,
they were, in his opinion, the symbols of primitive truths t h a t bring us back to Chris­
tian truth. As for Baudelaire, he remained resolutely allegorical, even in his article on
Wagner: he discovered in all myths, whether the master of Bayreuth h a d or h a d n o t
illustrated them, the universal meaning of sin, and finally defined myth as " a n allegory
created by the people". 32
Instead of such an incorrect symbolical interpretation of myth, which deserves
more properly to be called allegorical, we propose the manifold interpretation t h a t
should be limited to the term "symbolical", at least if we follow C.-G. Jung. 3 3 If t h e
m y t h is indeed considered to imply several possible meanings which it refers back t o
the unknown quantity or mystery t h a t it conceals, then the symbol recovers its full
value. A symbol, according to Jung, always presupposes t h a t the chosen expression
designates or formulates as perfectly as possible certain relatively unknown facts, t h e
existence of which is recognized and appears necessary. 34 I t can, therefore, have no
too specific meaning (Mallarmé was right on this point); 3 5 on the contrary, a m y t h
must bring together all possible meanings in the manner in which Rimbaud had perhaps
intended. 36 A symbol, again according to J u n g , is alive only as long as it is heavy with
meaning. As soon as this meaning has become clear in the light of day, t h a t is to say

30
31
Henri de Régnier, Les Jeux rustiques et divins, 15th edn. (Mercure de France, 1918), p. 33.
Ibid., p. 45 et seq. On this point, see Pierre Albouy, Mythes et mythologies dans la littérature
française
32
(Armand Colin, 1969), p. 108.
"Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris", p. 1229.
33
For the distinction between symbolische Bedeutung and semiotische Bedeutung, consult
Carl-Gustav Jung, Psychologische Typen (Zurich, Rascher, 1921), p. 468.
34
Ibid.: "Das Symbol dagegen setzt immer voraus, daß der gewählte Ausdruck die best-
mögliche Bezeichnung oder Formel für einen relativ unbekannten, jedoch als vorhanden erkannten
oder geforderten Tatbestand sei".
35
"Toute l'âme résumée", (1895) Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, p. 73: "Le sens trop précis
rature36/ Ta vague littérature".
In response to his mother's question about the meaning of Une Saison en Enfer, Rimbaud is
reported to have replied: "I wanted to say what it says, literally, and in every sense". "Paroles
attribuées à Rimbaud", Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Rolland de Renéville and J. Mouquet (Paris,
Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1963), p. 656.

404
when one finds an expression t h a t offers a better formulation of what was thereby
sought, expected, or intuited, then the symbol becomes dead and has only historical
value. 37
B y means of a myth, t r u e symbolism would thus grasp a mystery t h a t never fully
reveals itself and should never be dispelled and destroyed. Mallarmé has frequent
recourse to the term " m y s t e r y " even in its medieval meaning, 38 and is thus able to
s t a t e in 1891, in his reply t o the enquiry of Jules Huret on the evolution of literature:
" I t is the perfect use of this mystery t h a t constitutes a symbol". 3 9
From this kind of mystery, by analogy between modern decadence and the Silver
Age decadence of Latin, one easily passes on to the "mysteries", in the religious sense
of the term, such as those mysteries of Orpheus on which Mallarmé's project of a book
is founded, and the mysteries of Isis or of the Holy Grail which Stefan George's efforts
appear to suggest. 40 The mythical quest then becomes the image of a true mystical
quest. For Cavafy, there can be no other odyssey than the voyage within one's own
soul:
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon — you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside you,
unless your soul raises them up in front of you. 41

The p a t h of such a quest must in itself be mysterious. I t is "in a dark p l a c e " of

"profound horror and immense void" t h a t the "livid initiate" walks. 42 "A strange
secret", 4 3 poetry is in itself the very home of mystery, the labyrinth in which t h e
modern Daedalus loses himself as he builds it. The m y t h leads one towards t h e un­
known which it never allows one to attain. As Maurice Blanchot has stated, it is more
mysterious t h a n speeches, yet more clear t h a n riddles, halfway between knowledge
and ignorance, obtaining our approval by pleasing us, though alienating us b y its
strangeness, so t h a t it leads the soul by the hand in a search for what is, in order to
seek an explanation even beyond.
This may well explain why the poets of the period which we call Symbolist were
not only attracted b y the ambiguity of myth, b u t also towards-myths so ambiguous
t h a t one is tempted to view them as symbols of ambiguity as such. Sometimes the
mythical figure is born of a hybrid amalgam of several natures: fauns, chimaerae,
sphynxes, androgynous beings. Sometimes, too, a single figure appears and disappears
37
Psychologische Typen, loc. cit.: "Das Symbol ist nur lebendig, solange es bedeutungs­
schwanger ist. Ist aber sein Sinn aus ihm geboren, d.h. ist derjenige Ausdruck gefunden, welcher
die gesuchte, erwartete oder geahnte Sache noch besser als das bisherige Symbol formuliert, so ist
das Symbol
38
tot, d.h. es hat nur noch historische Bedeutung".
"Offices", Œuvres complètes, op. cit., p . 395: " . . . pénétrons en l'église, avec l ' a r t . . .
Toujours que, dans le lieu, se donne un mystère".
39
40
Ibid., p. 869.
Maurice Boucher, op. cit., p . 16: "On y trouve [dans la poésie de Stefan George] cette ob­
session du joyau, des pierres précieuses qui lancent leurs feux sans altérer leur puissance, cette
parenté voulue entre la poésie et les mystères du Saint-Graal qui rend à ceux qui la contemplent
la jeunesse
41
et la santé".
" I t h a k a " (1911). Selected poems by C. P . Cavafy, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
(Princeton,
42
N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 18.
43
Edouard Schuré, "Les Lutteurs", L'Ame des temps nouveaux. p. 280.
Mallarmé, "Crise de vers", op. cit., p. 364.

405
again in the halo of its own multiple meanings: Salome, for instance, as a victim of
sheer artifice in the work of Jules Laforgue, 44 in love with suffering in a poem of Cava-
fy,45 an incarnation of Hysteria, a venereal flower, and goddess of Syphilis in the
writings of J.-K. Huysmans. 4 6 Sometimes, too, she mixes the characteristics of other
mythical figures and then becomes a crossroads where contradictory trends meet,
such as the Salome-Artemis of Mallarmé (Hérodiade) or of Laforgue, who makes her
die of too willing a virginity, in contrast to the "Salome of the instincts" of the poet
Milosz,47 or to the delirious Bacchante of Oscar Wilde or Richard Strauss, 48 of Kasp-
rovicz 49 or of Sudermann. 5 0
The mystery, then, finds itself not so much enclosed within a single m y t h as truly
dispersed in the sum of its own reappearances. There then subsists the t h r e a t of too
clear a meaning, which would condemn the symbol to death and reduce it to allegory;
so true is this indeed, as Moréas admitted in one of the arguments of the manifesto
published in Le Figaro on September 18, 1886, t h a t " t h e essential character of Sym­
bolist art consist in never to go as far as to conceive the idea in itself". E v e n in those
writers who are most anxious to remain obscure, one senses the permanent temptation
to undertake an exegesis t h a t would be destructive. Such is, for instance, the poetic
commentary on Gustave Moreau's Helena t h a t Laforgue offers, 51 or the introduction
t h a t Mallarmé wrote for Swinburne's Erechiheus, though the latter consists of a simple
summary which ends by observing t h a t "the poem's tragic character is very restrained
and remains in the loftier regions of the idea". 52 This would mean t h a t the symbol,
once made explicit, leaves no mystery (except for t h a t which it symbolizes); t h a t the
myth, once made clear, refers back to something beyond the myth, something before
which it can only withdraw. We are thereby reminded of what is said, most probably
by Mallarmé himself, in the preface to Les Dieux antiques concerning "reproductions
of the antique": t h a t they are necessary "in order to crystallize briefly in our mind
the appearance of the gods before they fade away". 5 3
The whole of Les Dieux antiques itself merits our special attention. Quite recently,
it has been the subject of an excellent article by Pierre Renauld. 5 4 I t is known t h a t
this book was a very free adaptation of the Rev. George William Cox's Manual of
Mythology in the Form of Question and Answer, published in 1867. B u t both this manual

44
"Salomé", Moralités légendaires (1887, reprint edn. (Paris, Mercure de France, 1964),
pp. 1452 1 - 5 4 .
46
Among his Juvenilia,
In A Rebours (1884), where Huysmans, moreover, shifts his attention from the Salome
paintings of Gustave Moreau to Mallarmé's Hérodiade, who is again a Salome.
47
48
"Salomé", Le Poème des Décadences (Girard et Villerelle, 1899).
Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1896); Richard Strauss, Salome (1907), with a libretto adapted from
Oscar49Wilde by Hedwig Lachmann.
50
Mczta Herodyady [The Feast of Herodiade] (1905).
51
Johannes (1898).
Sur l'Hélène de Gustave Moreau", Poésies complètes, ed. Pascal Pia (Paris, Gallimard et
Librairie
52
générale française, 1970), p . 413.
Article published in La République des lettres of February 20, 1876, and reprinted in the
previously
53
quoted edition of his Œuvres complètes, pp. 700-3.
Preface to Les-Dieux antiques, by J. Rothschild (1880; reprinted in Mallarmé's Œuvres
complètes,
54
p. 1160).
"Mallarmé et le mythe", RHLF, vol. 73, no. 1. ( J a n . - F e b . 1973), 48-68.

406
and its French adaptation must be set again in the context of a broader movement,
an attempt at comparative mythology which had begun to develop in the middle of
the nineteenth century and which proposed a conception of the legends of antiquity
t h a t has somewhat absurdly been called "naturalist", the basic postulate of which
consists in the belief t h a t "nature has been the maternal foundation and the point
of departure of representations of the gods". 55 The names of the main representatives
of this school of thought — Ludwig Preller, Michel Bréal, and Adalbert K u h n — are
listed in the beginning of the foreword to Les Dieux antiques, and only the name of
the most notable among them, Max Mueller, is missing. 56
We would be t e m p t e d to call "archetypal" rather than "naturalist" the whole
system of thought t h a t is developed in the writings of these scholars in the field of
mythology, since they actually invite us to regress from the m y t h to the archetype
t h a t has been covered u p b y successive layers in the course of time. These archetypes,
as a whole, constitute the spectacle of the primal elements, the elementary forces and
dazzling manifestations of nature, such as the sun, rain, lightning, the flow of rivers,
or the growth of plants, which, "represented as the varied actions and changing con­
ditions of animated beings", express themselves in " t h e images of narrative" in the
great myths about gods. 57 The Symbolist poet may thus have to bring about the appear­
ance of these great spectacles and permanent conditions of life behind mythological
figures so as to reveal in them primordial images or elementary symbols. I n this con­
text, one should again quote Les Dieux antiques:

How much pleasure is mingled with our surprise when we see known myths slowly
evaporate, under t h e very magic which is implied by the analysis of t h e ancient
words, into water, light, and the elementary winds. 58

Adalbert K u h n and F.-W.-L. Schwarz had a preference for the archetype of

storm. Max Mueller, George William Cox, and consequently Mallarmé, too, gave pre­
cedence to t h a t of the sun; if one is to believe these last authors, epic poems tell b u t
"one and the same story", the "great solar drama accomplished each day and each
year before our eyes". Zeus is the cloudless sky; Athene is dawn; Hermes, the breeze
t h a t accompanies daybreak; Paris, the dark power of night t h a t steals the beautiful
sunset from the Western sky; the adventure of Ulysses is b u t the voyage of the sun
across the sky, and the abandonment of Ariadne or of Brunhilde means t h a t the sun
cannot dawdle with dawn in the East. As for Oedipus, if he "reveals himself as if
dominated by a power which he cannot resist", this is because " t h e sun may not rest
in the course of its voyage; it cannot act freely and, at eve, must join the dawn, from
which it must p a r t in the morn". 5 9

55
Ludwig Preller, Griechische Mythologie (Leipzig, Weidmann, 1854), p . 3; quoted in RHLF
as above, p . 48.
56
57
Les Dieux antiques, Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, p . 1159.
(ieorge William Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations (London, Longmans, Green and
Co., 1870),
58
vol. 1, p . vi.
59
Mallarmé, Les Dieux antiques, p . 1257.
Ibid., p . 1236; all the preceding examples were likewise borrowed from Les Dieux antiques.

407
 Let us leave the writings of scholars in the field of mythology in order to return
to literature. The parallel between destiny in Tête d'Or and the course of the sun is
too obvious in this first of Claudel's dramas; one cannot avoid discovering in it a new
paraphrase of what Mallarmé, whom Claudel had visited and heard in his rue de Rome
home, used to call "the solar act". "This sun, the first rays of which used to make him
sing/Like a stone cast against bronze", Claudel's hero indeed does his best to forget
arid to see in it only "a roe's lung hanging in the air by a butcher's doorway" 60 ; but
he nevertheless returns to find it as an ultimate talisman to accompany him on his
expedition to the gates of Asia, the land of the sunrise. The death of Tête d'Or occurs
at the end of a long agony that is also the agony of the sun in the sky:

O soleil ! Toi, mon

Seul amour ! ô gouffre et feu ! ô sang, sang ! ô
Porte ! Or, or ! Colère sacrée !
Je meurs. Qui racontera,
Que, mourant, les bras écartés, j'ai tenu le soleil
sur ma poitrine comme une roue? 61

And then one sees reappearing, now fully explicit, the myth of Memnon, the famous
black statue that sang under the influence of the first rays of the morning sun.62
How many more examples could be quoted here ! That of Ulysses appearing as
a "sun of revenge" in a poem by Saint-Pol-Roux,63 that of the sun as a source of in­
spiration for Stefan George,64 of the murderous sun in Bely, of the Herculean sun in
Rubén Dario,65 of the menstrual sun in Apollinaire,66 of the sun as "light and life"
that Tchernichovsky with untiring hope sought in an extraordinary collection of the
most varied myths, going as far as "opposite the statue of Apollo".67
The final goal of this solar quest through myths might well be the astounding
Cantique de la Connaissance of Milosz,68 which came as a result of "the teachings of
the sun-drenched hours of the nights of that which is divine". Here, again, the sun is
the priimary element from which "gold draws its substance and color; man, the light
of his knowledge". And it is the sun that has made it possible for the new poet to
achieve knowledge of the archetypes:

60
Tête d'Or, first version (Librairie de l'Art indépendant, 1890; reprinted in Paul Claude,
Théâtre, vol. I, ed J . Madaule and J . Petit (Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1967),
p . 90.
61
62
Tête d'Or, p . 161.
63
Ibid., p . 167: "Memnon crie dans le brouillard".
"Le Palais d'Itaque au retour d'Odysseus métamorphosé en mendiant", Anciennetés (Mer­
cure de France, 1903, though this poem is actually dated 1885; reprinted in Editions du Seuil,
1946,64pp. 45-6.).
See "Gebete I I I " in Der Siebente Ring (1907).
65
See "Salutacion del optimista" in Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905).
66
67
See "Merlin et la vieille femme" in Alcools (1913).
68
The title of a poem by Tchernichovsky, the Hebrew poet who also translated so many epics.
Published in La Confession de Lemuel (1922); reprinted in O. V. de L. Milosz, Poésies, ed. J .
Buge (Paris, André Silvaire, 1960), vol. 2, pp. 140-52.

408
 Le pouvoir de nommer des objets sensibles absolument
impénétrables à l'être spirituel
Nous vient de la connaissance des archétypes qui,
étant de la nature de notre esprit, sont comme lui
situés dans la conscience de l'œuf solaire.69

Such immediate knowledge must lead to the abolition of all symbols as instruments
of a mediated knowledge:

Les poètes de Dieu voyaient le monde des archétypes

et le décrivaient pieusement par le moyen des termes
précis et lumineux du langage de la connaissance.
Le déclin de la foi se manifeste dans le monde de la
science et de Tart par un obscurcissement du langage.
Les poètes de la nature chantent la beauté imparfaite
du monde sensible selon l'ancien mode sacré.
Toutefois, frappés de la discordance secrète entre le
mode d'expression et le sujet,
Et impuissants à.s'élever jusqu'au lieu seul situé,
j'entends Pathmos, terre de la vision des archétypes,
Ils ont imaginé, dans la nuit de leur ignorance, un
monde intermédiaire, flottant et stérile, le monde des symboles.70

One thus progresses from what Gilbert Durand calls the "numinosity" of myths 71
to the luminous world of archetypes. The "Idea" that Symbolist mysticism seeks comes
down from the heavens to return to the earth; it is less ideal than "Surreal", or perhaps
even merely real, since it means fundamentally the abolition of the duality of noumena
and phenomena in what appears to be the dream of Milosz and, with him, of all those
poets who have been called "naturists" and who were often only repentant Symbolists.
This turn of natural history that one all too easily tends to attribute to the turn of
the century can be explained more plausibly by the equivocations of Symbolism. We

69
"The power to name objects lending themselves to sense but
that the spiritual being can absolutely never penetrate
Is granted to us by knowledge of the archetypes which,
being of the same nature as our mind, are likewise
situated in the conscience of the solar egg".
70
"The poets of God saw the world of archetypes and described
it piously by means of the exact and luminous terms of
the language of knowledge.
The decline of faith manifests itself in the world of
science and of art through an obscuring of language.
The poets of nature sing of the imperfect beauty of the
world that can be sensed according to the ancient sacred
modé.
But they are struck by the secret discord
between their mode of expression and their subject
And are incapable of rising to the only true place, I mean
Patmos, the land of the vision of the archetypes,
And they have therefore imagined, in the night of their
ignorance, an intermediate world, floating and sterile,
71
which is the world of symbols".
See Les Structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire (Bordas, 1969).

409
can find no better example of these, perhaps, than in the following poem from the
Chants de la pluie et du soleil (1894) of Hugues Rebell, who insists on speaking of the
" I d e a " when he really refers to things:

J e ne m'occuperai point de ces petites agitations qui

commencent sur un vagissement.
E t se terminent par un râle,
Mais de l'Idée qu'elles révèlent.
J e regarde les larmes, je regarde les sourires,
Ainsi que la pluie et le soleil;
E t les rugissements, les cris, les clameurs joyeuses, les
appels désespérés,
Passent en moi comme le vent dans les branches d'un grand
chêne.
J e n'étudierai point une passion, une âme, un visage,
Mais je monterai sur la Tour qui domine l'horizon,
Pour découvrir les peuples en marche,
Voir la forêt, la plaine et la mer,
E t entendre des milliers de voix célébrer l'Harmonie. 72

After Whitman, both Gide and Vicente Huidobro agree to appeal to the things
of the earth. 7 3 I n a famous mythological poem, Les Muses, Claudel then set the task
of a second creator: to discover the gold t h a t is concealed in the heart of every other

72
" I will not concern myself with those petty excitements
that begin with a childish tantrum
And end with a death-rattle,
But only with the Idea that they reveal.
I look at tears, I look at smiles,
As I look at the rain and the sunshine;
And the roars, the cries, the joyous clamors, the
desperate calls,
Pass through me like the wind through the branches of
a great oak tree.
I will not study a passion, a soul, a face,
But I shall climb up to the top of the Tower t h a t
dominates the horizon,
In order to discover the' nations as they march,
To see the forest, the plain and the sea,
And hear the millions of voices celebrating Harmony".
Qu'importent tous les êtres?, no. XLIV of Chants de pluie et de soleil (Librairie Charles, 1894), p . 75.
73
André Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres (1897);
Vicente Huidobro, Adán (1916):
"Entrad en mi, Naturaleza,
Entrad en mi, oh, cosas de la tierra !
Dejad que yo os adquiera,
Dadme la suprema alegrla
De haceros substancia mia".
("Enter into me, Nature,
Enter into me, oh, things of the earth !
Allow me to acquire you,
Give me the supreme joy
Of making you into my own substance".)
Obras completas (Santiago de Chile, Zig-Zag, 1964), vol. 1, p . 237.

410
element, the gold of the divine presence which had been hidden b y the Wagnerian
myths. 74 This is indeed as if, in conformity with the wish expressed by Saint-Pol-Roux,
the revival of the Word really corresponded to the "Age of the Sun", with " t h e sun
opening up like a ripe fruit from which one must gather the seeds of light for the senses
and for man's moral sense". 7 5
Would this be the end of myths or their renewal ? Such an end-phase indeed has
all the characteristics of a new beginning. Without embarking on endless terminological
discussions, we have a t t e m p t e d to stress the extraordinarily vague status of m y t h in
this whole context, which is in itself vague enough and is generally called "Symbolist
literature". The poetic quest, aiming apparently at some "beyond", nevertheless
brings one back to something t h a t is "here below", on our side of things, because the
idealist temptation was mixed up with many others, and especially because the in­
tegrity of the myth appeared to be threatened on all sides. Allegory could indeed lead
one towards a pseudo-symbolism that used the myth merely as an instrument, and
the symbol itself was kept straining between the desire to achieve a polyvalent multi­
plicity of meanings and the search for a single meaning in which the m y t h would be
abolished. Lastly, the archetype, by inviting us back to the source and the primary
image t h a t lay beyond the myth, also invited us to do without the myth. This is perhaps
why Mallarmé rejected the Wagnerian myths for French poetry; b u t he thereby aban­
doned "fixed", "secular", and "notorious" myths only to imagine one t h a t would be
"utterly virgin", "the Figure t h a t Nothing is". 7 6 Like the Phoenix, the m y t h indeed
burns only to be reborn of its own ashes.

Translated from the French by Edouard Roditi

74
Les Muses (1900-1905), Cinq Grandes Odes, reprinted in Paul Claudel, Œuvre poétique, ed.
S. Fumet and J. Petit (Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1967), p . 229:
"L'Or, ou connaissance intérieure que chaque chose
possède d'elle-même,
Enfoui au sein de l'élément, jalousement sous le Rhin
gardé par le Nixe et le Nibelung".
("The Gold, or inner knowledge that each thing has of itself,
Buried in the heart of the element, jealously guarded
beneath the Rhine by the Nixe and the Nibelung".)
75
Saint-Pol-Roux, La Répoétique (Rougerie, 1971), p . 34.
76
"Richard Wagner, rêverie d'un poète français", first published in La Revue Wagnérienne of
August 8, 1885, and reprinted in Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, as above, pp. 544-5.

411
 HARTMUT K Ö H L E R

SYMBOLIST T H E A T E R

If Symbolist esthetics could be considered a charter which a t t e m p t s to redefine certain

relationships between Heaven and Earth, between Man and t h e World, the Symbolist
theater would be dealt with in an appendix: its statute is a derived statute, its articles
are complementary dispositions, formulated, it would seem, with the idea of assuring
a better propagation for the Symbolist "message".
Faced with the problem of finding a motivation for this rather constant trend of
the theater, I shall offer at first the somewhat hypothetical answer that, in Symbolist
poetry, which relies more upon its atmosphere t h a n on its essence, there is something
which approaches at least the rudiments of miming, if not of dramatic action. The very
type of beauty about which the Symbolist poet dreams (if you allow me to synthesize,
for the time being, a model) is similar in nature to an event which accomplishes itself
like grace which emanates from an unknown place, or a catastrophe which arises from
below. The ideas suggested in the works of these poets tend to become embodied in
persons with ephemeral outlines, tentative gestures and words murmured or cut short.
Instead of aiming at the full and rounded form of a statue, at a plastic or pictoral
form which is balanced and self-contained, or at a contemplative description, the Sym­
bolist sensibility prefers shifting outlines, sometimes standing out faintly against
settings as imaginary as possible and to which they remain mysteriously bound, some­
times also placed in sumptously upholstered interiors t h a t are suited to evocative
plays of light. I n this kind of poetry, we find countless mental genuflections or silent
supplications, outstretched or contorted arms, gifts languorously granted or religiously
received. Here, too, we find feverish or voluptous expectations, dreamlike exploits,
somnambulistic movements, withheld cries and murmured dialogues. All this is indeed
suited to suggest not so much a conception of drama, b u t a certain taste for dramatics
or rather dramatics of a specific kind. " J e t'apporte l'enfant d'une nuit d ' I d u m é e " is
the beginning of a scene indistinctly seen, and the poem L'Azur is a foreshortened
drama. To p u t it briefly, if the Symbolist poets were bound to the theater b y an an­
cillary passion, one must nevertheless admit t h a t this servant-girl had for them an
intense and intimate attraction.
After this vague and intuitive beginning, I would like to t r y to reply in a more
concrete fashion to the question: where should one seek Symbolist drama. This is not
a simple matter. To pose the question in this way seems to be an invitation to set about
seeking works which allow themselves to be classed together under one and the same
label, instead of starting from the works themselves in order to reach a higher unit

413
of conception. B u t in the practice of literary research, we can truly accept the term
of Symbolist d r a m a as an indication, with the value of a regulatory idea which René
Wellek has attributed to it.
The unit of what one generally calls a historical period in drama is generally
characterized by two presences: a corpus of works written for and executed on the
stage, and also a corpus of theoretical reflections upon which these works were founded
when they were first created or on which they subsequently found support.
I n Symbolist drama, then, we are faced with a rather difficult complication which
threatens to compromise, if not to destroy, the unity of the whole period, because we
find here theoretical reflections which are highly speculative and almost cast their
anathema on the whole practice of drama. We have works of some dramatic value,
b u t ones which defy staging; we also have plays imagined by their authors for the
stage b u t which these authors, because of their timidity, hesitated ever to submit for
performance; and we also have vigorously scenic plays which were considered unsuited
for performance. I n addition, we also find attempts which combine good will and poor
talent and a t t e m p t s to conform to the Symbolist doctrine, b u t which, for lack of real
inspiration, immediately fail. Finally, we also have products of genius which, when
they were generated, never left any doubt but t h a t they might be included, one day,
on the positive side of the Symbolist balance-sheet.
Confronted with this disturbing variety, I would like to propose a plan of orienta­
tion which would help us reply to the question "Where is Symbolist d r a m a ? " b y
grouping into three categories the phenomena which might be considered as concentric
phenomena. The first category, with.the smallest extension, the most dense, the most
poetically demanding—the category which we could consider as the nucleus of Sym­
bolist drama—is 'ideal' theater: poetry with theatrical value, which remains in some
sense on this side of traditional theater. The second category contains those rather
numerous plays which proclaimed themselves Symbolist and which, after a short
delay, did their best to transpose effectively on to the stage and to adapt, for the stage,
the theories of the Cénacle, without, however, having had the courage to remain within
the confines of the haughty and severe idealism of the first Symbolist masters. Such
Symbolist drama, in a concrete but limited sense, paid for its daring in a series of
failures or overnight successes t h a t had no future; it was basically found only in France
and is distinct from the third category, which goes beyond the frontiers of France and
even those of Europe. I n this area, critics have only recently attempted to define the
features which are common to a very rich and varied domain. F a r from being peripheral
in a negative sense, the authors of this international Symbolist theater are all to various
degrees within the orbit of French Symbolism, though formed by the traditions of
their respective countries, and already straining towards different horizons. They thus
introduced elements borrowed from the Symbolist esthetic in their works. Sometimes,
however, they were also the ones who supplied Symbolism with models of a more
generally symbolic nature or who found themselves simply integrated within the tastes
of French avant-garde circles. We thus find ourselves here in an ideal territory for
studies in comparative literature, in which American scholarship, represented above all
by Haskell Block and Anna Balakian, has distinguished itself particularly.

414
 Symbolism in the theater means individualism, subjectivism and an interior vision,
offered, imposed or suggested to the divinatory capacities of the spectator-reader b y
means of the word and b y means of scenic methods other than the spoken word—by
linguistic as well as extra-linguistic signs.
This attempt at a definition contains perhaps the two major problems of the Sym­
bolist esthetic: first the rights of the dream, its justification and its integration in t h e
real world; and secondly, the rivalry between the arts, t h a t is, between the means of
expression selected in order to conquer the soul of a spectator who demands to be sub­
jugated, mesmerized, converted, battered, carried away or annihilated—everything
t h a t one might wish provided it is neither "delighted" nor "improved".
The main idea of Symbolist drama is probably supplied to us for all time b y
Mallarmé's famous interpretation of Hamlet. For him, Hamlet is the perfect Shake­
spearean tragedy, "Parce que Hamlet extériorise, sur les planches, ce personnage unique
d'une tragédie intime et occulte". All the other characters of the drama owe their
justification only to him, and some of them might be considered merely individualized
fractions of his own existence: Dead Polonius, for instance, is only "le tas de loquace
vacuité gisant que plus t a r d il (Hamlet) risquerait de devenir à son tour, s'il vieillissait".
There is, adds Mallarmé with an authority t h a t eliminates all objection, no other subject
for the play than "l'antagonisme de rêve chez l'homme avec les fatalités à son existence
départies par le malheur".
This hyperbolically firm conviction, which seems quite typical for Mallarmé, of
the importance and the rights of individual vision embodied in the single protagonist,
in fact a monogynist, can be seen as the structural principle in more t h a n one work
of this period. Consider Hofmannsthal's first play, Gestern (1891), in which the main
character, André, believes t h a t he can consider each of his friends and even his young
wife as representatives of the various parts of his own being, each in a servile manner
responding to each one of his own evolutions. The author succeeds in formulating
these lines which are a true manifesto of estheticism: " I s t nicht die ganze ewige N a t u r
Nur ein Symbol für unsrer Seelen L a u n e n ? " His illusions are fatally shattered when
André realizes t h a t his wife deceives him by claiming her right to live autonomously.
There is a similar procedure in an incomparably superior play—Strindberg 's
Ett Drömpsel (The Dreamplay, 1902), perhaps the most profound and the richest of his
plays, which presents three male characters, an officer, a lawyer and a poet, each one
of them appearing as one of the products of the division of the consciousness of t h e
central, but absent, character of the play, the dreamer, through whom the author and
the spectator communicate.
This visionary subjectivity then sets out t o p u t itself in search of a frame of refer­
ence, an objective correlative. This is comprehensible, even inescapable, though it is
always a danger, artistically. This frame of reference could be given b y any one of
several things. One could be a legend, capable of serving the most secret individual
aspirations. After Wagner, one might think in this context of Edouard Schuré, Yeats
and others. Rare are those poets who can do without any m y t h other t h a n fatality:
Mallarmé, Kafka or Beckett. Another possibility is the fairy-tale. One need b u t t h i n k
of Maeterlinck's L'Oiseau bleu, Rautendelein in H a u p t m a n n ' s La Cloche engloutie or

416
Strindberg's Blanche de cygne (1901). Or it might be paganism, or an earthly kind of
Christianity, haunted by supertition as in D'Annunzio's La figlia di Jorio.
Another possibility is the voluptous paganism of antiquity, as in Eugenio de
Castro's Salome or La Reine de Saba, a play which is constructed on the ideally Sym­
bolist scheme of expectation and disappointment caused, at the end, b y the appearance
of reality. Indeed, the young queen Belkiss hears the warning of the old wise man,
Zophesamin, uttered in these very classical terms: "Reality is more bitter t h a n Helle­
bore". Similar to so many other heroines, Belkiss tingles to know enchanted under­
water forests, t o be p u t " a t the gates of the unknown".
Another possibility is the use of allegory, as in the case of Rachilde's Madame la
Mort, several of Hofmannsthal's plays, and Andreyev's The Life of Man.
Another possibility is psychoanalysis, for few dispute t h a t the advent of psycho-
analysis is one of the fruits of Symbolism; while psychoanalysis began to supply a
coherent theory of Symbolism, literature also began to make use of t h e symbolic
arsenal elaborated b y Freud.
Finally, one might consider Marxism. This is a powerful and robust frame of
reference, b u t also one which is highly seductive, and, on occasion, shamefully facile.
Without wanting to engage here in unjustifiable speculations, the idea t h a t Brecht,
without knowing about Mallarmé, became somewhat, in relation to Mallarmé, w h a t
Marx had been t o Hegel, does not seem to me to be sheer nonsense: he substituted
for the mind as the basic concept on which dramaturgical unity is founded, a totalizing
unity believed to be more concrete: society. W h a t is certain in any case is t h a t Brecht
in a number of his scenic inventions is heir to some of the formal discoveries of Sym­
bolism.
As for the second p a r t of my definition, the rivalry among the arts, one m u s t
realize t h a t the hour of the Gesamtkunstwerk is also the moment of an unprecedented
burgeoning in all the arts considered subsidiary to dramatic art: miming, dance, sets,
lighting—to say nothing of music. All at once all of these arts imperiously sought
emancipation. We must also see t h a t the greatest French poets of the time, in their
battle to win back from music what was, according to them, due to poetry, ended u p
by gaining at least a partial victory when they succeeded in saying everything or al­
most everything in mere poetic diction, developed to the point where it could suggest,
by its own virtue, an orchestra, movement and sets. This victory became a Pyrrhic
victory, for the reaction, on the stage, did not take long to become manifest. Thus, a t
the same time as belcanto, the beautiful word was also immediately assailed from all
sides. This tendency culminated, for a time, in the paradox of the great director, Gordon
Craig, who had lived in Germany long enough t o proclaim in his book The Art of Theatre
(1905), the brutal motto: "Sprechen streng verboten !"
With the director Adolphe Appia, who has been called the father of modern light­
ing, the visual aspect of the stage, which had been considered a poor relative of t h e
Gesamtkunstwerk, emerged from its neglected corner for the first time. No more painted
cardboard wings and reliefs, so t h a t the three dimensions of the stage were again fully
appreciated. (To find a truly adequate use of visual symbolism, the Wagnerian opus
nevertheless had to wait for the era of Wieland Wagner.) I n Russia, some time later,

416
Vsevolod Meyerhold was destined to erect the steel scaffoldings, the cubes and the
gangways of his constructivist theater.
I t is also true t h a t there was a reaffirmation, especially in France, of the rights
of the sppken word, especially in the work of Jacques Copeau a t the Theatre du Vieux
Colombier.
I n short, the age of t h e "trail-blazer" directors in modern staging was inaugurated,
although with a slight lag behind the other arts (but the theater suffers, b y nature,
a time-lag), much more under the impact of Symbolism t h a n under t h a t of Natu­
ralism.
Following the example of Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art, Antoine's Théatre Libre and
Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'(Euvre, there was throughout Europe a prodigious blossoming
of studio theaters (the nostalgia for the Thespian stables, pigeon-houses, cellars, work­
shops and carts dates from t h a t time). To name just a few other active theaters, there
was Stanislavski's "Theater of art, accessible to everyone" in Moscow in 1898, Adrian
Gaul's "Théâtre i n t i m e " in Barcelona as well as Strindberg's "Theatre I n t i m e , " first
founded in Copenhagen, then in Stockholm; in Berlin there was the Freie Bühne and,
later, Max Reinhardt's Kammertheater0, as well as the Künstlertheater in Munich (1908)
and the Abbey Theater in Dublin. In 1915 the Washington Square Players inaugurated
their season at t h e Bandbox Theater with Maeterlinck's Intérieur. I n spite of consider­
able differences, all these undertakings shared the common desire to "retheatricalize"
the spectacle on the stage and to banish from it the gossiping of salons and the clutter
of historicity.
The main problem, t h a t of the relationship between the word and the more material
disciplines, was destined to remain henceforth the subject of sharp controversies, and
to lead to more and more subtle solutions. All in all, one can discern here the process
of an interesting dialectic: hardly had the horrible "scènes à faire" of Scribe's
drama been denounced b y Mallarmé, when a new scenic faire of a completely different
scope arose to fill the gap.
Coming back to my original set of categories, let me now refer to a highly specula­
tive and existential (at the same time) opus, a half-dramatic and half-epic creation,
Mallarmé's Igitur, which is not only a key work in the intellectual evolution of its
creator b u t also the Holy of Holies of Symbolism, born or not born in a Hamlet-like
hesitation, sufficient nevertheless to set in motion in a decisive way the powerfully
theatrical imagination of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, whose Axel, a drama which reveals
a hostility to the stage, precedes, accompanies, inspires and goes beyond the Symbolist
era. I n Hérodiade and in L'Après-midi d'un faune, Mallarmé created the two master­
pieces which one could call, with some reservations, the Symbolist dramatic poem.
Mallarmé, though he sometimes felt strongly about the mixing of genres, yet created
a fusion of poetic and dramatic idioms, while constantly subsuming the dramatic
elements in poetic diction. He wanted, as he wrote, to hollow out the poetic verse,
"ce qui est bien difficile à cause de Taction". Action was, this indispensible evil, this
necessity which all the contemplative Symbolists tried their best to avoid! The dramat­
ic value of Hérodiade has been brilliantly demonstrated b y H . Block and others, and
we know t h a t the story of the Faune was originally conceived in several acts. The sub-

27 Balakian 417
divisions, " O v e r t u r e , " "Canticle/' show us the poem's close relationship to musical
compositions, just as the title, an eclogue, reminds us t h a t beyond Banville's Diane,
a faraway origin for this mixed genre can be found in bucolic poetry. I n addition, of
course, to the influence of a great number of specific works of the Romantic era, one
must also point out the generic model for ballads in which dialogues often alternate
with atmospheric passages, evoking memories, etc.
As for t h e later development of this genre, one shouldn't fail to recognize the fact
t h a t it was of capital importance in the elaboration of the technique of interior mono­
logue in prose as well as in verse. Much closer to Mallarmé, almost hanging onto his coat-
tails, one might say, especially in La Solyane, was the Belgian poet Van Lerberghe,
who, in turn, was one of Maeterlinck's masters with his play Les Flaireurs, I also insist
on not neglecting Valéry's La Jeune Parque. On the subject of this work, t h e opinion
of the philosopher Alain who wanted to discover in it an epic quality, seems to me totally
nonsensical; this opinion reveals a total failure to understand the fundamentally
dramatic character of its structure. While doing without all secondary characters, such as
nurses, servants or nymphs, which are all detrimental to purity of vision, it brings
together in a suggestive mode the totality of dramatic components: gestures, mime,
cries, expressive dances, painting, lighting and music—thus reproducing in rigorously
calculated order an almost exhaustive catalogue of states of the soul. Thus, La Jeune
Parque presents, without a doubt, the most richly articulated embodiment of Mallarmé's
old dream of a "theater of the mind".
The second category coincides essentially with the activities of the Parisian avant-
garde theaters of the 1890's. (For detailed information on this subject, one should
consult J . Robichez' thesis on Lugné-Poe and the Théâtre de l'Œuvre (L'Arche, 1957),
which is so very helpful for its numerous programs and analyses of rather inaccessible
plays which are reproduced in his appendix.) These activities are characterized b y a
curiously subjective internationalism: plays from the most diversified sources are
poured into the mold of a most bizarrely stylized taste—the slow and ample gestures
of Lugné-Poe, his monotonous diction tending towards recitative, Art Nouveau sets
which were far from reality and, especially for Scandinavian plays, slightly mystifying
symbolic backgrounds. This atmosphere was, moreover, as mixed as were the audiences,
in which anarchist groups sat next to the devotees of some dubious mysticism. (One
might presume t h a t it is this very mixture t h a t in p a r t explains the rebirth of interest in
this era, a revival which we have experienced in the past ten years in most of t h e Western
world, a phenomenon t h a t can perhaps be vaguely compared to the popularity t h a t
the 18th century, as characterized b y Watteau, enjoyed in the Goncourts' era.)
Among the more significant plays produced in France, though they m a y have all
been only of secondary importance, let us consider Pierre Quillard's La fille aux mains
coupées (1886), in which the action occurs "anywhere, b u t above all in the Middle
Ages", and in which a young girl of angelic appearance has her hands mutilated to
punish herself for having experienced the incestuous caresses of her father. Let us also
quote Rachilde's Madame la Mort, a "cerebral d r a m a " , the second act of which is
particularly interesting because it presents, in the very mind of the protagonist who
has just taken a dose of poison, the confrontation of allegorical characters representing

418
Life arid Death—an idea which perhaps anticipates Cocteau's Orphée or Sartre's Les
jeux sont faits.
A special place should be reserved for Maurice Maeterlinck, first because he served
the function of a crossroads in Europen literature (and this leads to the third of our
categories), and also for other reasons. He was warmly received by part of the con­
temporary public, though his present disfavor seems total and definite. To be just to
him, one should not forget that, in spite of his supra-national orientation, Maeterlinck
had quite a unique intellectual temperament and that he was, among the writers of
his time, one of those who were the most strongly turned towards the subterranean
spiritual currents of the West, so that an important part of his personality remained
and will remain inaccessible to many. The reservations expressed about his achievement
might thus be comprehensible, but a condescending attitude is hardly warranted.
Misunderstandings, however* have a way of accumulating aroud him. In his Livre
des Masques, the critic Remy de Gourmont represented Maeterlinck by paraphrasing
with much sympathy or "empathy" the famous Intruse in a text which is unfortunately
too long to be quoted here. .I was nevertheless rather surprised to see a contemporary
critic, John Gassner, in Directions in Modern Theatre, p. 101, quote this same text
describing it as a satirical description of Maëterlinck's drama ! This indeed leads us
very far from our author, through it can all be explained when one learns that Gassner,
instead of quoting the text according to Gourmont, allowed himself to be enticed by
Julien Benda's Bélphégor . . .
Another mistake or misunderstanding is the attempt to make Maeterlinck a pre­
cursor of the epic theater, if only because he introduced in Intérieur the characters of
an old man and a stranger who play the parts of mediator between the silent play of the
family inside the house, and the spectators.
For my part, I would like to make two personal remarks. One cannot read L'Intruse
or Intérieur without thinking about Beckett. About this, everyone is in agreement.
But, compared with Beckett, Maeterlinck's dialogue, reputed to drag, to be dying,
almost mute, appears as if it almost has verve and, in any case, at least a more closely
woven texture and a flow that follows through.
On the other hand, in his dramas which appear to be so very innocent—such as
La Mort de Tintagiles—there is undeniably a slight satanic element, a somber play
with the anguish of untouched souls. This should not hide the fact that Poe's spirit
had influenced Maeterlinck. I have asked myself why, in the 1970's, the idea of a
rebirth of interest in these plays would be totally absurd, or whether some gifted director
or adaptor might not find something to revive here. I add that I'm not thinking speci­
fically of Roman Polanski. . .
For the third category, since several names and works have already been mention­
ed, here are some further indications. First, there is the influence of Maeterlinck abroad,
about which one can refer profitably to Georges Sion's essay on Maeterlinck in the com­
memorative volume of the author's centenary (Brussels, La Renaissance du Livre,
1962). Maeterlinck was immediately translated in Germany—where Rilke, among
others, devoted sympathetic articles to him, though with some reservations—as well
as in Russia, where the poet Valeri Bryusov and, among men of the theater, Stanis-

27* 419
lavski and Meyerhold assured his renown. He also left a distinct mark on the work of
D'Annunzio, through whom young Hofmannsthal became acquainted with his work.
Maeterlinck also exerted a strong influence on a creative period of Strindberg's life,
after having welcomed and assimilated, in his own way, the ideas of Rosmersholm a n d
other Ibsen plays.
I t has been quite correctly pointed out t h a t Symbolist drama met with its greatest
successes in one-act plays. In this, we might see an analogy with Poe's famous theory
about the unity of inspiration which can be guaranteed only b y a poem of short dura­
tion. I n fact, we find in this era, and all the more since then, a great number of short
plays, lyrical scenes, which allow authors to undertake all sorts of experiments in
form. There was Hofmannsthal and Rilke, with a small number of " P s y c h o d r a m a s "
and a more mature play: The White Princess, from which I will quote some lines:
"Man soll nicht weinen und man soll nicht lachen, / hingleiten soll man wie ein sanfter
Nachen / und horchen auf des eignen Kieles Spiel" (2nd version, I, p . 206).
There is also Yeats, whose Shadowy Waters quite significantly was first written
as a poem, having undergone the influence of Villiers' Axel. One should also consider
Synge's Riders to the Sea. from which Bertolt Brecht could derive the formal model of
his Spanish play, Les fusils de Madame Carrar.
I t is useless to continue this enumeration. At the risk of causing disappointment,
I must neglect the crucial problem of this category, which, evidently is t h a t of circum­
scribing it clearly. What touchstone can allow one to distinguish what in H a u p t m a n n ,
for instance, is derived from Symbolism, Naturalism or Expressionism ? I may perhaps
be excused from offering one, for now I would like to consider, however briefly, questions
of theatrical technique.
I t seems t h a t times have changed since, as Anna Balakian has pointed out, one
blamed Symbolist theater for not being precisely what its authors didn't want it to
be: a theater in which man's energy and will power, triumphant or defeated, tested
itself. To revive Brecht's famous statement, this would be like blaming a green hat
for being blue and not red. All those who never weary of saying t h a t theater is either
action or nothing generally fail to consider t h a t a drama which is rigorously founded
on action and in which every element is subordinated to the development of the plot
has every chance of appearing cold or mechanistic to us. Didn't Stendhal already
criticize the bareness of Alfieri's action-dramas? Hofmannsthal, in a brilliant essay
on O'Neill, reminds us t h a t success in the theater always requires a dose of both pro­
pelling and retarding elements, and t h a t a typology of theater from this perspective
offers us not merely a simplistic alternative t o action and non-action, b u t also an
exceedingly varied gamut in which Symbolist theater places itself, since its language
aims, one might say, at attaining the stature of " a perpetual aside". This is where
Maeterlinck, too, complains t h a t Racine's characters only understand each other by
means of what they express, which is certainly an exaggerated judgement, b u t casts
light on his own intentions, For, every analysis of Symbolist techniques will be obliged
to attempt, to some degree, the impossible: to know or to divine the impalpable phenom­
ena, so dear to our authors —i.e., Maeterlinck's second-intentional dialogue, Stanis-
lavski's sub-text, Valéry's lateral effects—all of this non-encoded, supra-segmentary

420
information, to use modern linguistic terms. This would be a way to do justice to these
two fundamentally different attitudes towards the word: the partisans of one attitude
consider the word as t h e final goal, having left behind all other forms of expression;
while the other takes t h e word as a point of departure, and then attempts to replace
it in a semiotically global context which would be analogous, if not identical, to the
one which we all met for t h e first time as children.
One of the incantatory devices of the language used by Maeterlinck is the repeti­
tion of a word with the purpose of creating a musical effect, an effect borrowed from
Mallarmé's poetry, especially from Hérodiade. Maeterlinck used this device abundantly
in Pelléas et Mélisande, which earned him the approval of Mallarmé, no jealous master:
"Peut-être que si tacite atmosphère inspire à l'angoisse qu'en ressent l'auteur ce
besoin souvent de proférer deux fois les choses, pour une certitude qu'elles l'aient été
et leur assurer, à défaut de tout, la conscience de l'echo". (330) This device was sub­
sequently imitated by Hoffmannsthal in his early works, though his readers, I admit,
were made uneasy by it. As an example of it, here is how an imitator of genius, Oscar
Wilde, could use this device in the opening scene of Salome, where a young Syrian and
one of the pages of Herodias exchange the following dialogue:

The young Syrian

How beautiful is the Princess Salome tonight !
The page of Herodias
Look a t t h e moon ! How strange the moon seems ! She
is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like
a dead woman. You could fancy she was looking for
dead things.
The young Syrian
She has a strange look. She is like a little princess
who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are silver.
She is like a princess who has little white doves
for feet. You could fancy she was dancing.
The page of Herodias
She is like a woman who is dead. She moves very slowly.

Oddly enough, in both cases, t h a t of Maeterlinck and t h a t of Wilde, the deliberate

use of language as a kind of music, far from discouraging composers as Mallarmé
stated t h a t it would, attracted them rather though Richard Strauss used a translation
of Salome which simplified the diction of the original text.
If one now shifts one's attention from this linguistic to the visual field, one sees
t h a t the well-known concern of Symbolist poets to establish correspondences between
the lyrical subject's state of mind and the surrounding landscape, a concern shared
also by a considerable number of story-writers ranging from Poe to H a u p t m a n n , is
just as clearly expressed in Symbolist drama, where we find the emblematic landscape
revealed in the way t h a t stage-sets are imagined. These sets are indeed interwined

421
with and melted into the movements of the actors so as to extend them to the infinite,
thereby creating a highly precious unity of bodily forms and forms of the vegetable
world, indeed of fauna and flora. This kind of pattern is moreover reproduced a thou­
sand-fold in the graphic and plastic art of the age t h a t concerns us; these arts might
indeed seem to have been inspired by Bernini's famous Metamorphosis of Daphne into
a bay-tree. I t is almost useless to quote, from the beginning of L'Après-midi d'un
faune, these lines which provide a kind of archetype of this vegetable-spiritual inter­
lacing, when the F a u n asks himself whether he loved a dream:

Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, s'achève

E n maint rameau subtil, qui, demeuré les vrais
Bois mêmes, prouve, hélas ! que bien seul je m'offrais
Pour triomphe la faute idéale de roses.

We also find a similar version in D'Annunzio's Songe d'un matin de printemps. There
certainly was a transfer in the regions of neurasthenia, and certainly a loss of the
purity of the word in itself. The protagonist, an erotically traumatized lunatic, feels
the need to camouflage her face with branches and flowers. The theme of a garland,
moreover, plays an evocatory role. B u t instead of creating a design by means of his
verse, as did Mallarmé, D'Annunzio has recourse to scenic indications:

Al cancello, in fondo, sul limite tra il giardino

e il bosco, appare la Demente con un'attitudine
segreta, soffermandosi. Il suo viso è coperto da
un maschera di doglie; le sue mani sono fasciate
di fili d'erba. Misteriosa, silenziosa e verde,
simile a una strana larva vegetale, ella s'avanza
verso il portico tra le siepi di cipresso.
(Tragedie, I, 38)

Another important point to study is the utilization of time. Mallarmé allowed his
Faun to escape imperceptibly from the frustration of the present by refilling his mind
with various memories. These memories then come together and intermix, spontane­
ously and disturbingly, with his feelings of the moment. I t seems, however, t h a t
although Mallarmé thus opened, in this work, an extremely vast field for exploration,
the Symbolist drama lacked the courage to develop it and to make a systematic ex­
ploration of all the possibilities of deliberately confusing dramatic time, so t h a t we had
to wait for film, especially Robbe-Grillet's L'Année dernière à Marienbad, to accomplish
this task. Valéry's La Jeune Parque is, again, a major exception—his "timetable"
reveals a very sophisticated use of time of a complexity t h a t has still not been suffi­
ciently elucidated.
Any introduction of a symbol requires the activation, on the p a r t of the addressee/
consumer, of a process of training. If the play is known, the director may and should
introduce new, significant elements. If the play is new and quite ahead of its times,
the director must be content to play the part of a mediator. I n both instances, the
public must learn by experience. This is where, in a slightly larger framework of time,

422
the critic who explains can also find his own modest place. To illustrate to some degree
the forms of this apprenticeship on the part of the audience, I would like to propose
three examples taken from different genres, each of a different nature and artistic
level.
Our first example comes from the staging, at the Art Theater at Moscow, of a play
which, at first glance, is not at all Symbolist, Ibsen's Enemy of the People, produced
in 1900 by Stanislavski, who also played the part of Doctor Stockmann. A contem­
porary witness, the German critic and translator Arthur Luther, reports this about
the play: at the beginning, everyone was surprised to see, in the actions of this physi­
cian in a watering-place, all of the symptoms of a myopic person—he wrinkled his eye­
brows, read his letters inches from his eyes and also had t h a t typically lost look of a
short-sighted person when he took off his glasses. This myopia, however, seemed not
to fit with the general bearing of his character, which appeared sociable, lively and of
slightly voluble joviality. As the action developed, however, the spectators realized
that this marked physical defect only symbolized, by anticipation, the isolation and
interior uncertainty of Stockmann—his incredible blindness concerning the social
implications of his morally glorious action. While this physical-psychic parallelism
might seem slightly banal to us today, we couldn't deny t h a t , in this instance, Stanis-
lavski helped his Moscow audience to understand better Ibsen's profound antagonisms,
his desperately objective attitude towards his hero, and the poignant ambiguity of
this play dealing with material problems—the pollution of the waters, the lobbying
of a bogged-down municipality, all of which have since become all the more distressingly
relevant. In the Parisian production of this play, all such hint of mediating had been
eliminated, and the play was received as a pure and simple manifestation of individual
anarchism.
The second example infringes upon lyrical drama, since I propose to illustrate it
by a play t h a t is well-known to the public, or more correctly, not completely un­
known; Büchner's Woyzeck, which a musical composer of genius has interpreted yet
more profoundly by means of bold symbolization. In the second act of his opera,
Wozzeck (1925), Alban Berg enriched Büchner's dramatic t e x t by a musical passage
of extraordinary suggestivity. One might hesitate between calling it Symbolist or
Expressionist, though these distinctions really don't matter. The action occurs in the
barracks at night. The soldiers are all fast asleep. Wozzeck himself is haunted by ob­
sessions which keep him from sleeping. But even before the curtain rises, the audience
perceives something like a sonorous carpet of music of an enigmatic quality, a sort
of deep chant coming from an indistinct other world, and which will cease to be perceiv­
ed only several measures after the rising of the curtain, when Wozzeck himself begins
to groan and to emit anguished exclamations. In fact the score, a t this moment, in­
structs the choir of sleeping soldiers to articulate "with half-opened m o u t h s " sustained
harmonies—atonal, t h a t is—weakly modulated, without words. This cannot fail to
produce the idea of a peaceful background to life, like the peaceful waters of an animal
lack of awareness, the secure constancy of a collective soul, quite sheltered, into which
the tragic destiny of Wozzeck breaks out. Wozzeck is the one who fights against " t h e
fatalities of his own existence which are brought out by misfortune", as Mallarmé

423
expressed, it This symbolism is of a poetic value rarely equalled, appearing like an un­
heard of condensation of the most powerful and lasting Wagnerian discoveries, un­
thinkable in the era of Büchner (although prepared by him), and only comprehensible
thanks to attentively reiterated explorations.
A third example of the functioning of symbols comes from the domain of the
seventh art. Among contemporary film-makers, the one whose work owes the most
to Symbolist drama is, without a doubt, Ingmar Bergman.

Translated from the German by Edouard Roditi

424
 MANFRED HOPPE

THE SYMBOL IN THE AUSTRIAN LITERATURE OF THE TURN OF THE

CENTURY: PROBLEMS AND ATTEMPTED SOLUTIONS

As far as the use and meaning of the symbol iff concerned, Viennese literature before
the turn of the century, whose avant-garde we have become accustomed to calling the
Wiener Moderne, generally resembled that of the German writers of the time. On a small
scale Viennese literature reflects the general irresolution and bafflement which, with
regard to the symbol, seems to be the hallmark of the age. Just as symptomatically
it mirrors the various attempted solutions. In order to demonstrate that this situa­
tion results from a long-range development, we must summarize the latter in a few,
simplifying strokes.
In German literary theory, the notion of what a symbol is and should be has long
been governed by Goethe's use and concept as expressed in the statement: "True sym­
bolism is present where the particular represents the universal, not as a dream or shad­
ow, but as a vivid and instantaneous revelation of the inscrutable". 1 In its inscrutabili­
ty, however, the inscrutable is neither hostile nor, to use an expression coined by Rudolf
Otto, das ganz Andere (that which is entirely different).2 Rather, Goethe believed that
it constitutes a cosmos governed by universally valid laws. Accordingly, he was able
to call it God, Nature or Idea. In this capacity, it is, on the one hand, "eternal and
unique" and, on the other, "that which constantly appears and manifests itself to us
therefore as the law of appearances". 3 Goethe's notion of the symbol rests on this
conviction that the particular represents the universal within an order that is valid for
both. In this sense he could write to Charlotte von Stein that he was reading God in
herbis et lapidibus.4
In the age of German Romanticism, too, the universal which guarantees the signi­
ficance of the particular is called God, Nature or Idea. But now the particular no longer
points to a transcendent order but is identical with it. The internal and the external, the
part and the whole are no longer to be distinguished. Thus Novalis, too, recognizes God
in stones and plants, but in the following manner:

1
2
Gedenkausgabe, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949), Vol. 9, p. 532.
3
Das Heilige (Gotha, 1924) p. 28.
Gedenkausgabe, Vol. 9, pp. 539, 643.
4
Quoted from Emil Staiger, Goethe, Vol. 1 (Zürich, 1952), p. 525.

425
 Eins in allem und alles im Einen
Gottes Bild auf Kräutern und Steinen
Gottes Geist in Menschen und Tieren,
Dies muß man sich zu Gemüte führen.
Keine Ordnung mehr nach Raum und Zeit
Hier Zukunft in der Vergangenheit. 5

Where God a n d world, nature and spirit, self and universe coalesce, however,
undifferentiatedly in a programmatic hen kai pan, everything ends up as sym­
bolic; and we have the paradoxical situation t h a t the particular may now be represent­
ed by the more general, as is the case in some of Novalis' Fragments.
I t was characteristic of the nineteenth century, which was dominated by the
natural sciences, t h a t the focus of interest increasingly shifted toward the particular.
Realism, and subsequently naturalism, saw God in the minutiae of detail. And as for
the universal, one clung as long as possible, with more or less confidence, to the tradi­
tional views of God and Nature. B u t even t h a t seems to have become impossible by
around 1890; and the following two decades witnessed the most variegated and, often
desperate attempts to establish a new framework within which the particular could
once again take on meaning and significance. These attempts ranged broadly, from
Rilke's private mysticism to the call for a new humanity. 6
U p to a point, this situation and this development can be gauged from the work
of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the chief exponent of the Wiener Moderne. His beginnings
as a poet are clearly marked by the inflation of the symbol which had reached its
climax at the end of this Goethean century. To demonstrate this fact one need only
glance at his earliest poems. His first published poem, for instance, opens with t h e
lines:
Was ist die Welt? Ein ewiges Gedicht,
Daraus der Geist der Gottheit strahlt und glüht,
Daraus der Wein der Weisheit schäumt und sprüht,
Daraus der L a u t der Liebe zu uns spricht 7

Where everything can mean everything else, as is here the case, and where the
particular and the general are equally valid, there is the danger t h a t both may become
indifferent and t h a t their bland interchangeability may produce boredom. Hofmanns-
thal's poetic juvenilia are invariably prone to this danger and often enough succumb
to it. The most tempting way of expelling this démon ennui caused by the levelling of
symbols was driving language to ever greater extremes and introducing ever more subtle
nuances. In this process, language becomes increasingly exhausted and deflated, and the
symbol turns into shallow analogy. Thus in the poem " P s y c h e " we read:

5
6
Novalis, Schriften, Ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart, 1960), vol. 1, p . 318.
Compare the excellent essay by Heinrich Henel, "Erlebnisdichtung und Symbolismus";
Deutsche
7
Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 1958, Vol. 32, pp. 71-98.
Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben. Gedichte und lyrische Dramen (GLD), (Stockholm,
1952), p . 467.

426
 Mit wunderbar nie vernommenen Worten
Reiß ich dir auf der Träume Pforten:
Mit goldenglühenden, süßen lauen
Wie duftendes Tanzen von lachenden Frauen,
Mit monddurchsickerten nächtig webenden
Wie fiebernde Blumenkelche bebenden,
Mit grünen, rieselnden, kühlen, feuchten
Wie rieselndes grünes Meeresleuchten,
Mit trunken tanzenden, dunklen, schwülen
Wie dunkelglühender Geigen Wühlen,
Mit wilden, wehenden, irren und wirren
Wie großer nächtiger Vögel Schwirren . . . 8

The promiscuity of this language is unsurpassable, as it yields randomly to associa­

tions and sensory stimuli. This is the deepest reason for Hofmannsthal's increasing
skepticism with regard to language, which finds its most striking expression in t h e
"Chandps-Brief", and for t h a t disgust with language which, subsequently, will cause
Ariadne to say: "Here nothing is pure; here everything blends with everything". 9
Thus his encounter with French Symbolist poetry was bound to affect Hofmanns-
thal profoundly. The impact was enhanced by the fact t h a t the fascinating personality
of young Stefan George was its mediator. 1 0 Through George and contemporary French
poetry, Hofmannsthal learned to set new esthetic standards for the literary artefact.
How decisive this new perspective on quality became for his own poetry is easily
shown with reference to the entirely new tone which pervades the poems he wrote
after meeting George.
I n the Symbolist work of art—and this was the way out of the inflationary di­
lemma caused b y the devaluation of the symbol—the question concerning the linkage
of the particular and the more general in regard to their meaning is vain. For here
means and ends are identical. The symbol no longer points beyond the artificial space
with which it surrounds itself. I t is hardly accidental t h a t the intérieur is a major motif
in the poetry of an age t h a t is characterized b y the spirit of "lyrical nihilism". 1 1
To illustrate the point with a fictitious example: in Goethe's poetry, the fan sym­
bolizes the beloved and, in so doing, points to love as life, and to the Geist as the life of
life.12 The opening of the fan symbolizes the appearance of the idea, in the double
sense of hiding and revealing. 13 I n the Symbolist poem, on the other hand, the opening
of the fan signifies the poetic process itself. Together with the inscription on the fan,
it signifies the space of the poem, which displaces the void into which it is projected.
Hofmannsthal clearly recognized t h a t the linking of the particular and the uni­
versal im the concept of the symbol had become questionable. For a while a t least,
he therefore accepted the solution proposed by the Symbolists and programmatically

8
9
Ibid., p. 69.
10
Lustspiele III, p. 39.
Manfred Hoppe, Der Prophet. Hofmannsthals Gedichte an Stefan George. Neue Zürcher
Zeitung.
11
Literatur-Beilage 3. Februar, 1974 (Fernausgabe Nr. 33).
12
Emil Staiger, Die Kunst der Interpretation (Zürich, 1955), p. 253.
Gedenkausgabe, Bd. 3, p. 356.
13
Cff Wilhelm Emrich, Die Symbolik von Faust II (Bonn, 1957), p p . 44 ff.

427
stated in the Blätter für die Kunst. Thus, with amazing precision, his lecture on Poesie
und Leben ('Poesy and Life') offers the formulation " I believe t h a t t h e concept of
totality has been completely lost in art". 1 4 And, speaking of the possibilities of poetry, he
continues:

Words are everything — the words by means of which one can give new life to t h a t
which is heard or seen and portray it according t o inspired laws as a living being.
No direct p a t h leads from life to poetry, or from poetry to life.15

Outwardly, the influence exerted by Symbolist poetry and poetics appears in his
appropriation of certain motifs. From t h a t point on, for instance, Hofmannsthal uses
Mallarmé's hair motif as a symbol of barren beauty. The correspondence between
landscape and soulscape, which had been p a r t and parcel of the German lyric tradition
since Goethe's Strasbourg poems, acquired new interest in Amiel's theory and called
for emulation in the curious estrangement which ordinary things had undergone in
Verlaine's poetry. For a while, Hofmannsthal even heeded the call for raising the état
d'âme to the level of the intérieur d'âme. 16 And Rimbaud's ecstasies gave Hofmannsthal
t h e courage t o trace and reproduce soul states which would have remained alien to him
except for the mediation of his French colleague.
Thus Hofmannsthal wrote poems t h a t have been called Symbolist: Mein Garten,
Die Töchter der Gärtnerin, Leben, Vorfühling, Reiselied and Die Beiden. Among t h e
lyrical plays Das kleine Welttheater may well be regarded as a composition which is
overridingly Symbolist.
B u t if one is honest one will also have t o admit t h a t almost all the above titles
raise a doubt which makes the literary historian hesitant t o call the poems in question
Symbolist. With all due caution one may wish to say t h a t they more or less closely
approximate the idea of the Symbolist poem. W h a t differentiates them is, in m a n y
cases, their length, "measured b y the yardstick", to paraphrase a saying of Stefan
George's. 17 Hofmannsthal essentially lacks the rigorousness and ascetic self-restraint
which characterize the Symbolist poem. H e is affected b y everything and, like no
other German poet before him except, possibly, Clemens Brentano, willing to let himself
be carried away and seduced by sounds, sensory stimuli and compelling thoughts.
At any rate, it cannot be denied t h a t in addition to these poems, which approx­
imate Symbolist form, he wrote others which harbor little or none of t h a t spirit.
I n the final analysis, he uses the Symbolist style as one among many. H e may even
prefer it temporarily, without ever identifying himself with it.
Compared with the precision, discipline and intellectualism of George's early poetry
— not t o mention t h a t produced by certain French writers — the poems Hofmanns-

14
15
Prosa I , p. 262.
16
Ibid., p. 263.
Hermann Bahr, Zur Überwindung des Naturalismus. Theoretische Schriften 1887-1904, ed.
Gotthart
17
Wunberg (Stuttgart, 1968), pp. 49, 59.
Der George-Kreis. Eine Auswahl aus seinen Schriften, ed. Georg Peter Landmann (Köln,
1965), p. 17.

428
tahl wrote during this period are often vague, unreliable and, at best, mysterious.
Hofmannsthal at any rate must have feared that they would be seen as such when
compared with the works of George — a comparison which the former seems to have
made constantly in these years, during which he lived in a permanent state of artistic
bad conscience with regard to George.
It toiok years before Hofmannsthal, in his famous lecture "Der Dichter und diese
Zeit" (The Poet and This Age, 1906), dared programmatically to oppose his own
views about the nature and function of the poet to those propounded by the George
circle. It took him almost as long to proclaim his own theory of the symbol by justify­
ing his own concept of the latter—its nature, purpose and its proper function in the
present age—to himself and modern poetry. He did so in the "Gespräch über Ge­
dichte" (Conversation about Poetry, 103) which, using George's Jahr der Seele as its
point of departure, clearly betrays the underlying intention to establish differing
principles.
What is at the core of the theory of the symbol which Vienna thus holds up to
Heidelberg ? Hofmannsthal undertakes to reconstitute the concept of the symbol from
the notion of sacrifice. He asserts that the substitution, from the earliest times, of
animal sacrifice for human self-sacrifice in honor of God can be explained by the fact
that, sometime in the dim past, a human being, on the point of sacrificing himself to
an unknown divinity, in his trancelike state accidentally killed an animal resting
nearby, mistaking its blood for his own. Thus the animal, for a fraction of time, was
mysteriously identified with the human being and, therefore, capable of dying in his
stead. The fact that for an instant his Dasein had dissolved into that of another lies at
the root of all poetry,18 Hofmannsthal surprisingly concludes. Applied to the poetic
process, this is to say that the poet has the right to use an object symbolically, having
been joined with it mysteriously.
In spite of using a plethora of words, Hofmannsthal does not manage to describe
the mysterious fusion as a process or even to define it clearly. This unio mystica poetica
is not even within his power but is something that happens, or fails to happen, for
reasons which are just as puzzling and inexplicable. Hofmannsthal notes that it is
nature which, in this manner, forcefully takes us to its bosom and which, in this state
of enchantment, signifies that we and the world are essentially one.19
It is a bizarre theory which Hofmannsthal expects us to accept—a theory, moreover
which appeals to the reader's faith rather than his rational insight. One thing is clear,
however: it is a highly idiosyncratic theory of the symbol which does not lend itself to
an application to the œuvre of other poets. What is striking about this theory is not
merely that it has to make use of religious or pseudo-religous notions in order to
explain and justify an artistic mode, but that in this essay—if we focus once again on the
problem of the relationship between the particular and the universal on which the
functioning of the symbol depends and which inheres in the symbol—the particular
now seems to have become the universal.

18
Prosa II, p. 104.
19
Ibid.

429
 According t o Hofmannsthal, it is nature which, forcefully, brings about t h i s
mysterious unio quasi mystica of person and object. I n this context, however, nature
is defined as " t h e inner concept of the symbols which triumph over us". 2 0 These are
strange and inadvertantly revealing formulations. Literally, Hofmannsthal's formula­
tion means t h a t we do not signify the particular in view of the universal which is in­
herent in it (i.e., t h a t we do not discover the meaning of the symbol) b u t t h a t the object
is symbolic even before we assign a meaning to it and before it " t r i u m p h s " over us in a
manner unspecified by Hofmannstahl.
We should not be confused by the appearance of the word Nature in this context;
for it is highly probable t h a t Hofmannsthal uses this concept b y way of quotation or
as a makeshift term. For he simply does not have a concept of nature which, as with
Goethe, Hölderlin or Schelling, vouches for the unity of being as the concept of con­
cepts. And what kind of basis was there for such a concept around 1900 ? For the pupil
of Ernst Mach, Nature—like the similarly indeterminate concept Life—was only a
vague term for a totality no longer understood or believed in. If Hofmannsthal had tried
to explain it, he would have suffered the same fate as the young Lord Chandos: t h e
concept would have disintegrated like rotting mushrooms.
Hoimannsthal's argument becomes meaningful and intelligible only when one
relates it to his work and seeks to determine whether, and to what extent, the latter
conforms with his theory. For this purpose, we once again turn to Symbolist poetry,
such as George transmitted to Hofmannsthal. What, in spite of his adaptation of
certain elements, distinguishes Hofmannsthal's art from t h a t of the Symbolists is t h e
latter's utter neglect of history. History, though purified and detached, is past reality,
still one of the impure elements of life of which art has to rid itself if it is preoccupied
solely with itself. The orientation of Hofmannsthal's imagination, however, is funda­
mentally historical. In fact, Hofmannsthal cannot think but historically.
To adduce again the fictitious example of the fan: it reminded Goethe of "idea
and love' 2 1 : for the Symbolist poet it signifies the poem in the act of its creation, filling
the void. Neither Goethe nor the Symbolists care whether the fan is Chinese, Persian or
Rococo. But Hofmannsthal would be intrigued procisely by the historical specificity
of the fan. Only in t h a t capacity would it point, for him, from the particular t o t h e
more general. The Rococo fan would represent an entire style; and it is a style which, as
an expression of past reality, replaces in HofmannsthaFs œuvre the universal. B y
relating his own experiences (or those of his age) to an already meaningful symbol (by
providing, for instance, an inscription which, couched in the language of the eighteenth
century, reflects a very modern experience—as he did, on a large scale and in an ex­
tremely complex fashion, in the "Chandos-Brief"), 22 Hofmannsthal succeeds with amaz­
ing frequency in making us forget t h a t the symbol is derivative, causing it t o appear
as if new.
Seen in this light, his comments on the symbol in the "Gespräch über Gedichte"
begin to make sense. We begin to see why the symbols already signify, i.e., why t h e y
20
21
Ibid.
22
Gedenkausgabe, Vol. 3, p. 321.
H. Stefan Schultz, "Hofmannstahl and Bacon: The Sources of the Chandos Letter", Com-
parative Literature, Vol. 13., 1961 pp. 1-15.

430
are symbols even before we approach them. Hofmannsthal does not notice an object
unless it is stylistically preformed, has a meaning and is symbolic. Differently stated:
Hofmannsthal encounters the object—the particular—always and only in the guise of
art. In this sense he is perfectly justified in saying: "Being and meaning are one;
accordingly, whatever is, is symbolic". 23 Thus, to use an example offered b y Hof­
mannsthal himself, the cloud in the sky is no longer seen naively but, depending on
the prevailing mood, appears directly in the style of Poussin, Rubens or Böcklin. 2 4
Even before the beholder has sighted the cloud, the notion of a landscape with clouds
portrayed in the manner of these painters preexists in him. Insofar as the cloud in
the sky and the preformed idea of clouds painted in a specific style are juxtaposed
and merged, it is no longer clear where the beholder ceases and the observed object
begins. For was not the cloud prefigured within him?. Accordingly, it is both real and
remembered. The internal and the external cease to be opposites, and self and world
are fused. Thus Hofmannsthal can assert in the "Gespräch über Gedichte", " t h a t we
and the world are not distinct from one another". 25 The essence of the unio mystica is
constituted by the fact t h a t art, not God, is the alpha and omega of this union whose
true nature is so loquaciously hidden from view.
All this explains the peculiar indirection of the Symbolist world view as well.
Novalis, who resembled Hofmannsthal in so many ways, had already written:

The signification by means of sounds and letters is an admirable abstraction.

Three letters signify God, a few strokes a million things. How easy it is to manip­
u l a t e - t h e universe in this manner! And how plastic is the concentricity of t h e
spiritual world ! The science of language is the dynamic force of t h e spiritual realm. 2 6

Hofmannsthal, too, knew the happiness caused by the easy manipulation of the
universe which art, and especially language, render possible. "Glorious" he called it
when, like the magician in the poem Ein Traum von großer Magie, he managed to
reinvoke a totally forgotten age with the help of the symbols a t hand and to build
"a world into the world": 27

E r setzte sich und sprach ein solches Du

Zu Tagen, die uns ganz vergangen scheinen,

Daß sie herkamen trauervoll und groß:
Das freute ihn zu lachen und zu weinen.

E r fühlte traumhaft aller Menschen Los,

So wie er seine eignen Glieder fühlte.
Ihm war nichts nah und fern, nichts klein und groß. 28

28
24
Aufzeichnungen, p. 23.
25
Prosa I, p. 75 f.
26
Prosa II, p. 105.
27
Schriften, Vol. 2, p. 413.
28
Hofmannsthal, Briefe 1890-1901 (Berlin, 1935), S. 13 cf.
GLD.,p. 21.

431
 The same situation, however, could just as easily change into pain and deep de­
pression when the invocation failed and the dead, cast-off things surrounded him,
waiting to be revived, and cried for his blood. And since Hofmannsthal was weak to
the point of helplessness in the face of the demands made upon him b y these past
realities, he constantly succumbed to them. This is why he could say t h a t the symbols
" t r i u m p h " over us, and why some of his works have a vampire-like quality.
Hofmannsthal never seems to have given up the hope of somehow attaining
life, the "real thing", by way of art. There is a strange comment he made with
regard to the death of Antinous:
Did he sacrifice himself for his lover in order to turn an act into t r u t h b y actually
dying and thereby driving the act to its limits ?
Did he believe t h a t the lie, driven to its limits, would open a door to the
beyond of lie ?29
Hofmannsthal's theory of the symbol is the most important a t t e m p t t o come to
grips with the questions and problems which were bound to result from the confronta­
tion with the program of French Symbolism. In its desire to overcome a r t by art
and to drive it, finally, to execute the famous qualitative leap of Kierkegaard—not
into religious belief b u t into the social sphere which carries quasi-religious overtones—
HofmannsthaFs theory of the symbol remains ultimately close to the spirit of Sym­
bolism, closer, at any rate, than the solutions offered by other members of the Wiener
Moderne, who were just as urgently beset by the problem generated by the symbol and
by the problematic relationship between the particular and the more general which it
implies.
At first glance, it is Richard Beer-Hofmann who seems to have been closest to
Hofmannsthal in this respect. He, too, found the object encountered without some
kind of mediation to be senseless and insignificant. Like Hofmannsthal, he required
an artificial frame embedding the particular in the makebelieve of a totality. H e
bypassed the problem (or postponed its solution) b y settling on the description of
reality in the guise of a dream or, at least, on blurring the borderlines between the two
realms, as in his novel Der Tod Georgs and, subsequently, in the strange pantomime
Das goldene Pferd. The dream, or the fiction of the dream, relieved him of t h e task of
having to forge a clearly intelligible link between the particular and the universal. The
scope of the problem was thus diminished through the choice of a specific artistic
method. As in the dream, a connection is provable; b u t since this link is based on t h e
irrational and illogical, Beer-Hofmann is spared the burden of proof. By transposing
reality into the subjunctive, he obviates the question which would require an answer
in the indicative.
Since, treated in t h a t manner, reality constantly disappears from view, Beer-
Hofmann, like Hofmannsthal, completes the scenery of his dream world b y borrowing
elements from history and art history. The climax of Der Tod Georgs, for example, is
constituted by the description of the great Near Eastern temple feast, a symbol of the
rejuvenation of culture through death and ecstasy—a deliberate counterpoint to the
29
Aufzeichnungen, p. 136.

432
weak and weary world to which the dreamer belongs. I t is quite obvious t h a t Nietzsche
has furnished the kulturphilosophisch frame of reference here. I n its principal lines, the
description of the feast itself follows Jacob Burckhardt's book Die Zeit Konstantins des
Großen,30 embellished and overloaded with mythological details drawn from the works
of Bachofen. 31
Essentially the same thing happens in Beer-Hofmann's drama Der Graf von Charo-
lais, which offers a variation on the theme which, in the early seventeenth century,
Philip Massinger and N a t h a n Field treated in their play, The Fatal Dowry. In choosing
and closely emulating a literary model (as, by the way, Hofmannsthal did concurrently in
his Greek plays and his adaptation of Otway's V enice Preserved), Beer-Hofmann also
relies on the pre-existing pattern of meaning. I n this context, however, the spiritual
nuances which matter to the author and constitute his personal contribution also
acquire a meaning of their own. The problem we are here concerned with is altogether
obscured, finally, b y the fact t h a t Beer-Hofmann chooses for his theme the notion
of fate, of inexplicable destiny, as centre of his drama, in which the figures seem thus
to be justified in tottering about as puppets of fate. 32
Beer-Hofmann, who possessed a great esthetic sensibility, did not fail to perceive
these difficulties. Thus, at a relatively early point in his career, he anticipated the
solution which he was ultimately to embrace. His interest in the cultures of the Near
East, their myths and their history, ended u p b y focusing on the people of his own
origin. I n his last great work, the trilogy Die Historie vom König David, Judaism and
Jewish history provide the frame in which the particular once again acquires a func­
tional symbolic character.
The problem was posed in an entirely different manner in the case of Leopold
Andrian, whose poems, as well as his prose poem Der Garten der Erkenntnis, t h e mem­
bers of the George circle esteemed more highly t h a n the poems of Hofmannsthal.
Andrian's little narrative has been called "one of the most beautiful poetic documents
of Symbolism"; 33 and its form has been designated as " t r u l y symbolic". 3 4 Closely
scrutinized, its literary quality cannot be meaningfully defined as being either symbolic
or Symbolist. One reason which strongly mitigates against calling Andrian a Sym­
bolist is his striking preference for things concrete. A disproportionately large p a r t of
the succinct narrative is taken up with descriptions of factual matters, landscapes and
individuals. There can be no question of t h a t Symbolimmanenz which we have singled
out as a hallmark of Symbolism. At the same time, one must admit t h a t all things
named and described seem to point beyond themselves to something t h a t might yield
a clue to the true meaning of the detail. The designation "symbolic," accordingly, would
seem to be more appropriate. B u t (and in this regard even this epithet is invalidated
in regard to Andrian's work) this totality never enters the reader's field of vision, not

30
31
Gf. the chapter "Das Heidentum und seine Göttermischung".
32
Cf. Otto Oberholzer, Richard Beer-Hofmann. Werk und Weltbild des Dichters (Bern, 1947).
33
Solomon Liptzin, Richard Beer-Hofmann (New York, 1936), p. 39.
Walter H. Perl, "Leopold Andrian, ein vergessener Dichter des Symbolismus". Phüobiblon,
2 Jg.,3 4Heft 4. November 1958, p. 306.
Gerhart Baumann, "Leopold Andrian: Das Fest der Jugend". Germanisch-Romanische
Monatsschrift, N. F . p . 6 (1956), p. 145.

28 Balakian 433
even by way of allusion. The constantly repeated references point nowhere or back t o
the narrator as the only guarantor for their overall meaning. Andrian seems to have been
fully cognizant of this dilemma when he wrote: "The creatures and things all had their
own meaning within themselves and a different one for h i m " (i.e., the narrator). 3 5
B u t insofar as, in the final analysis, the symbol can thus be deciphered only with
reference to the narrator's private existence, it is reduced to a cypher which, given
the slimness of Andrian's œuvre, cannot be deciphered. For that, one needs a sequence
of recurrent cyphers. Andrian's œuvre is, potentially, a hermetic one.
Still another, no less representative solution was the one embraced b y Arthur
Schnitzler, the fourth important exponent of the Wiener Moderne with which we are
here concerned. Some of Schnitzler's early works, like those of his contemporaries, are
undoubtedly linked to the fashionable problem of decadence in its specifically Austrian
guise: the burden imposed by tradition, the arrogant suffering from the awareness of
being a decadent and belonging to a dying culture. Into this context belong several
motifs which, by thematically encompassing the vacuity and fatuity of existence,
could almost be regarded as symbols—for instance, the play or game (Spiel) in its
different forms, as the game of chance or the playing of roles. As a personified Dasein the
actor consistently seems to alert us to the fact that, in relation to ourselves as well as
to others, we are invariably deceived. 36
B u t no matter how questionable man's relation to a transcendent and meaningful
whole may be, there can be no doubt t h a t he is ruled b y life and death. And even though
both life and death may end up in mystery, they belong, in the guise of birth and
dying—two facts which no human existence can elude—to a recognizable reality
within our grasp. Schnitzler's work thematically oscillates between these two poles;
and within t h a t totality, reduced to a minimum, appropriate symbols may once more
surface. Coitus is such a symbol in his early play Reigen. In its paltriness and
blandness coitus no longer points to "idea and love" b u t to a world view shaped b y the
medical sciences, one regarding man as a distinctly physical, rather t h a n spiritual,
being.
Basically, this position did not change in Schnitzler 's subsequent works, except
t h a t one segment of the natural sciences came to the foreground as vouching for t h e
intelligibility of the whole: depth psychology. I t is amazing how, in a work like Fräulein
Else, Schnitzler brought about a fusion of the symbolism of acting with t h a t governed
by the sexual sphere. For in the individual determined by depth psychology both
aspects coincide as he turns into the "actor of the dreams of his own making". 3 7
I t is relatively easy to find the contemporary parallels to the a t t e m p t e d solution
of a problem of intellectual history such as we have shown to have emerged in the con­
frontation with French Symbolism. I n a comparable way, Rilke, Brecht, Trakl and
Thomas Mann, each for himself, solved crises with a common origin in the separation
of art from life, the latter term used with the very ambiguity it had in the thinking

35
36
Leopold Andrian, Das Fest der Jugend (Berlin, 1919), p . 34.
37
Aufzeichnungen, p. 92.
G L D . , p . 182.

434
 of the time, in which it played such an important role. But from the outset there
was a decisive difference between the Austrian poets and the German writers: this new
artistic movement, in which the problem of life and art is radicalized, was immedia­
tely translated into a distinctly Austrian mode and adapted to the literary tradition
which had developed there. It is this translation which distinguishes the Austrian
poet from his German counterpart. Here, too, we are confronted, from the outset, with
a "conservative revolution" 38 .
Translated from the German by Ulrich Weisstein

38
Prosa IV , p. 413.

28* 435
 LAJOS NÉMETH

CONTRIBUTION TO A TYPOLOGY
OF SYMBOLIST P A I N T I N G

Recent years have witnessed an impressive growth in the critical literature concerned
with Symbolist painting. Significant exhibits, such as the "Peintres de l'Imaginaire"
on the Pre-Raphaelite and Belgian Symbolist painters in 1972 in Paris point to inten­
sified scholarly inquiry. The Pre-Raphaelite school and the esoteric direction of the
Symbolist movement have particularly come into focus. Surrealism, t h a t famous
adventure of the human mind, has provoked countless questions in the field of a r t
history; and since one of the conditions of the understanding of a given trend within
cultural history is the examination of its antecedents, interest in the sources of Sur­
realism has quite naturally reawakened interest in the Romantic currents of the nine­
teenth century, particularly in those prevalent towards the end of the century. I n his
analysis of the esoteric elements inherent in the arts of the fin de siècle, Philippe Jullian
correctly perceived t h a t the underlying unity of style, spirit and design which develop­
ed in the arts of t h a t period was actually related to the styles of two historically remote
periods, to Mannerism on the one hand, and to Surrealism on the other. 1
We are dealing here with one of the significant moments within a historical process
spanning several centuries, a cultural movement which is perhaps historically determin­
able b u t is more difficult to define in its substance. Indeed, its roots reach back into
the distant past. After all, Mannerism itself goes back a long way, for its appearance
did not merely imply an irrational, subjective reaction to the rational objectivism and
classical idealism of the Renaissance; it also pointed to the rebirth of one of the com­
ponents of medieval culture: the magico-mystical, alchemical and heretical tendencies.
Further, Mannerism is also considered the forerunner of Romanticism, a movement
which summed up and at the same time questioned the progress of European culture.
In this perspective the Symbolism of the late nineteenth century appears as the logical
sequel to Romanticism; and indeed there is a tendency in critical literature to consider
Pre-Raphaelitism and Symbolism as expressions of late Romanticism. 2 The ties with
Romanticism seem clear if we examine the particular symbol-creating mechanisms
which were present in the various features of Symbolism; yet it would be impossible
to understand the complex structure of late nineteenth century art if we viewed it
merely as a postscript to Romanticism.

1
2
Ph. Jullian, Esthètes et Magiciens, (Paris, 1969), p. 231.
H. Hönnighausen, Prårafaeliten und Fin de Siècle. Symbolistische Tendenzen in der englischen
Spätromantik (München, 1971).

437
 Despite the growing interest in the mainstream of fin de siècle Symbolism, critics
seem rather uncertain in their analysis of the concept and of the limits of Symbolist
painting. The difficulty of their task is aggravated by the fact t h a t Symbolist painting
was closely related to Symbolist literature: frequently the two art forms permeated
one another or even overlapped. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to merely point to
analogies or to parallelisms in the two art forms. The paradigm of Romantic literature
is expressed in the Baudelairean concept of ''correspondences":

. . . nous arrivons à cette vérité que tout est hiéroglyphique

et nous savons que les symboles ne sont obscurs que d'une manière
relative, c'est-à-dire selon la pureté, la bonne volonté ou la
clairvoyance native des âmes. Or qu'est-ce qu'un poète. . . .
si ce n'est un traducteur, un déchiffreur ? Chez les excellents
poètes, il n'y a pas de métaphore, de comparaison ou d'épithète
qui ne soit d'une adaptation mathématiquement exacte dans la
circonstance actuelle, parce que ces comparaisons, ces métaphores
et ces épithètes sont puisées dans l'inépuisable fonds de
l'universelle analogie. 3

I t is well known t h a t the concept of "universal analogies", with its roots in Romanti­
cism, had as its necessary esthetic and formal consequence the theory of the interrela­
tionship of the various art forms—poetry, music and the plastic arts—a theory we
find realized in the art of the Symbolist movement. The "universal analogies" prin­
ciple was also instrumental in influencing the conceptual framework of the relationship
between man, cosmos and nature; and Symbolist artists were, by and large, conscious
of this. The theory of the analogy between poetry and music, as it was stated b y
Mallarmé or by Verlaine, found its echo in the writings of Gauguin as well, who main­
tained t h a t colors were able to evoke musical impressions, or in the thoughts of
Whistler, who actually made it one of his aims to concretize the concept of the inter­
dependence of painting and music. Symbolist literature's preoccupation with dream,
myth and the unconscious is not unknown in the fine arts either; t h e following sta­
tement from Moréas' Symbolist manifesto could easily pass for a quotation from one of
Gustave Moreau's Cahiers:

Tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester

eux-mêmes. Ce sont là de simples apparences sensibles
destinées à présenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec
les idées primordiales.

One could continue listing further similarities; yet, despite obvious relationships it
would be a mistake to define Symbolist painting in terms of Symbolist literature. The
distinction between the two—one which, in the final analysis, resides in the qualities
intrinsic to the two art forms—seems most clearly manifest in the symbol-creating

3
Baudelaire, "Victor Hugo", Œuvres Complètes (Bibl. de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1961),
p. 705.

438
mechanism proper to Symbolist painting. I t is precisely on this subject t h a t we find
a certain lack of critical clarity in the works dealing with Symbolist painting: frequently,
critics accept only those traits as properly "Symbolist" which have analogies in Sym­
bolist literature; often, as we have implied earlier, the relationship is seen as symbiotic.
A good illustration of the critics' uncertainty as to what is Symbolist painting may be
seen in Edward Lucie-Smith's work published in 1972, where Van Gogh's name is
mentioned only incidentally, as the friend of Gauguin and of Emile Bernard, and for
having influenced R. N. Roland Host. 4 (The latter had, for a brief period, adhered to
the Symbolist movement.) This seems all the more astonishing since a great deal has been
written on the symbols in Van Gogh's art. The name of Hans von Marées, someone who
dreamt endlessly of Golden Ages and of Arcadias, is missing not only from E . Lucie-
Smith's book b u t also from other critical works dealing with Symbolism, despite t h e
fact t h a t the affinity of both Romanticism and Symbolism for the "arcadia" concept
is quite well-known, 5 and t h a t Hans von Marées, like the late Romantic Turner {Garden
of the H esperides), and the Pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones (Hesperides), also executed
a work on the theme (1873, Naples).
The above examples point to the haziness of the definitions of Symbolist art. I t is
no mere coincidence that, in an attempt to dispel the confusion, Hans H . Hofstätter, one
of the foremost specialists in the field, distinguishes between "symbolic a r t " on the
one hand, and "Symbolism" on the other, cautiously adding:
Die Symbolrichtung kann bestimmt werden, aber das symboli­
stische Bild bleibt rätselhaft und unauflösbar. An die Stelle
des intellektuellen Verstehens muß das einfühlende Verstehen
treten. I m Gefühl, im Erlebnis, dem man sich beim Betrachten
hingibt, in die Stimmung des Bildes auf die Stimmung des
Betrachters bezogen, liegt die Einheit des Bildes, in ihr
liegt sein Sinn. Nur in der Resonanz der Symbole kann ein
symbolistisches Bild verstanden werden. 6

"Symbolism" thus appears to be a collective term for the types of symbolistic painting
t h a t would otherwise be hard to define.
Hofstätter attempts to establish a typology for the various interpretations of the
symbol-concept as it appeared in the course of the nineteenth century. He differentiates
between the following types:
1. The idealistischer Symbolbegriff, which corresponds to the concepts established
in Goethe's Maximen:
Das ist die wahre Symbolik, wo das Besondere als
Allgemeine repräsentiert, nicht als Traum und
Schatten, sondern als lebendig augenblickliche
Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen. 7
4
5
E. Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art (London, 1972), pp. 91-92 and 172.
See: H. Wendel, Arkadien im Umkreis der bukolischen Dichtung (München, 1933); B. Snell,
'Arkadien, die Entstehung einer geistigen Landschaft", Antike u. Abendland 1/1944; M. Petriconi,
'Das neue Arkadien", Antike u. Abendland 3/1948.
6
H. H. Hofstätter, Symbolismus und die Kunst der Jahrhundertwende (Dumont Dokumente,
Köln, 1966), p. 46.
7
Ibid., 32.

439
This particular symbol interpretation is illustrated by David's painting Le Serment des
Horaces, symbolizing freedom against tyranny.
2. The metaphorisches Symbol, where an image carries a "transposed significance",
t h a t is, it becomes ''symbol" when "dieses 'Andere' allgemeingültigen Charakter hat,
d.h. die Lebensauffassung oder Weltanschauung der Epoche ausdrückt". An example
is Courbet's Casseurs de pierres as the symbol of "Vita activa", or his La vague as a
"Symbol des Lebens". In the case of this "metaphoric symbol", "das Bild ist also nicht
symbolisch, sondern es wird durch die Auffassung des Betrachters zum Symbol", 8 and
as such, it becomes entirely dependent on subjective interpretation.
3. The romantischer Symbolbegriff, the characteristic trait of which is t h a t "im
Gegensatz zur bewußten Symbolsetzung von der Idee her, bildet sie die Symbole aus
dem Gefühl, dem Empfinden, dem persönlichen Erleben." 9 This symbol concept is
grounded in the pantheistic interpretation of nature, and "das Erlebnis der mythischen
Kräfte in der unendlichen Tiefe des menschlichen Seins." 1 0
4. The anthropologischer Symbolbegriff, the paradigm of which is Carl Gustav
Carus' book Symbolik der menschlichen Gestalt, published in 1853.
5. The pantomimische Symbolik.
6. The graphologischer Symbolbegriff.
7. The Symbolbegriff der Psychoanalyse.
This somewhat arbitrary typology further highlights the complexity of nineteenth-
century Symbolist theory; this complexity is largely due to the intermingling of a great
variety of symbol interpretations as they came down through the ages, to a degree t h a t
makes the differentiation between symbol concepts most difficult. And this although
the philosophical interpretation of the concept as a whole had been given b y Hegel:

Symbol überhaupt is eine für die Anschauung unmittelbar

vorhandene oder gegebene äußerliche Existenz, welche jedoch
nicht so, wie sie unmittelbar vorliegt, ihrer selbst wegen
genommen, sondern in einem weiteren und allgemeineren Sinne
verstanden werden soll. Es ist daher beim Symbol sogleich
zweierlei zu unterscheiden: erstens die Bedeutung und
sodann der Ausdruck derselben. Jene ist eine Vorstellung
oder ein Gegenstand, gleichgültig von welchem Inhalte,
dieser ist eine sinnliche Existenz oder ein Bild irgendeiner Art. 1 1

W h a t has remained unclarified, however, is the sort of relationship existing between

signification and expression, i.e., between the signified and the signifier: it is in the
particular nature of this relationship t h a t we find the pecularities of the symbol-creating
mechanism of nineteenth century art, t h a t give us the outlines of the typological dif­
ferences.
The symbol-creating aspect of the fine arts in the nineteenth century appears in­
creasingly complex if we remember t h a t a number of contrasting currents served as a

8
9
Ibid., p. 33.
10
Ibid., p. 33.
11
Ibid., p. 35.
Hegel, Aesthetik (Berlin, Aufbau Verlag, 1953) pp. 312-313.

440
foil to Romanticism, namely, Realism, Impressionism and Naturalism. These currents
never went beyond the realm of sensory experience and of the sensuous: their graphic
signs fulfilled concrete, designative-descriptive functions, and the signs did not invite
"further and more general" understanding since their purpose was mimetic and at t h e
same time self-referential, t h a t is, they fulfilled primarily pictorial a n d formal functions,
and as such, their role was esthetic, not symbolic. Thus, only in an allegorical sense did
realistic painting become a carrier of secondary significance, of a significance beyond its
self-referential, descriptive mode, as occured in Courbet's painting of the artist's atelier,
which is considered a "realistic allegory". 12 For it was in the nineteenth century t h a t
the process originating in the Renaissance culminated: the goal was mimesis, the
mirroring of reality, with the guiding principle being empiricism, i.e., optical illusion.
This mimesis, contrary to t h a t of antiquity, was not the imitation of the human ethos
but of nature, although during the Renaissance empiricism was still associated with
the Platonic idealism nourished by neoplatonism. Later, however, the scale tipped un­
mistakably in favor of knowledge through sensory experience i.e., the "idea", and all
conceptual significance was subordinated to concrete sense experience. Sensualist
philosophy and nineteenth-century positivism furnished this effort with its conceptual-
philosophical basis. Romanticism, with its obsession with the irrational and t h e trans­
cendental, necessarily opposed this trend aided b y the principles of pansymbolism
and pansubjectivism, it attempted to transcend the illusionistic optical ties of the
empirical
Thus, nineteenth century Symbolism was largely determined b y the peculiar
relationship t h a t existed between Romanticism and Realism: a t times antagonistic, at
times symbiotic. This was true also of its symbol-creating mechanism. One cannot
discern a unified symbol interpretation, nor even a relatively homogenous symbol-
creating mode; there developed several highly intricate, complex symbol types. If we
reduce these to two extremes, we would obtain the two types distinguished by L.
Hönninghausen in Gabriel Rossetti's iconographic system: a typological-allegorical
creative mode, and an expressive symbolism. 13 I t would be more useful, however, to dis­
tinguish these further. Essentially, one may differentiate five types in nineteenth century
symbolist art, specifically, the symbolist art of the end of the century: 1. The allegoric-
metaphoric, as exemplified by the Pre-Raphaelites and by artists such as Max Klinger.
2. The illustrative-literary; to this category belong those efforts which a t t e m p t t o con­
vey symbolic meaning b y borrowings from literary works or personages (the Pre-
Raphaelites' D a n t e cult, Beatrice and the Mona Lisa as the "eternal feminine", etc.),
or from Biblical works (Puvis de Chavanne), or b y t h e use of mythological scenes.
Gauguin's symbolism may be classified within this category. 3. The pantheistic, pan-
symbolic, represented b y German Romanticism; its model is Caspar David Friedrich.
4. The subjective, psychologically motivated; this latter is characterized b y dream, fan­
tasy, b y the projection of unconscious anxieties in the form of pictorial representation.
I t s Romantic forerunners were Fuseli and Goya; in the late nineteenth century one

12
M. Winner, "Gemalte Kunsttheorie zu Gustave Courbets "Allegorie réelle" und die Tradi-
tion", in Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen N F 4/1962, pp. 151-185.
13
H. Hönnighausen, op. cit., p, 98.

441
of its typical representatives is Odilon Redon, and those artists whose work was steeped
in the numerous "crisis-philosophies" of the period (e.g., theosophy or spiritualism),
such as the artists of the Rose+Croix movement. 5. The sensorial-sensuous, expressive,
which is the most clearly to be seen in Van Gogh's art.
I t goes without saying t h a t there are no rigid lines of demarcation among the
various types: they overlap and mingle in all individual artistic expression. The types
indicated above m a y in turn be further differentiated: for instance, the subjective,
psychologically motivated type may be subdivided into Freudian and Jungian cate­
gories.
Both the differences among the types and their common features are particularly
evident if one singles out a dominant motif for close analysis. We will focus on the
nature motif, in particular on the various artistic interpretations of vegetation, especial­
ly of the tree motif. We will pay special attention to Van Gogh's sensorial-expressive
symbolism since, as we have indicated earlier in reference to E . Lucie-Smith's book,
the literature on Symbolism has b y and large ignored the t y p e illustrated by Van
Gogh's art.
Landscape as a motif was singularly favored b y the Romantics, and landscape as
état d'âme is an invention of Romanticism. Landscape thus became the pictorial means
of expressing the endless and the distant, the romantic yearning for escape and for
the inaccessible. 14 Man's pantheistic relation to landscape, the belief in an analogical
link between man and nature, constituted some of the basic tenets of Romanticism's
world of symbolism. 15 Several of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings {Klösterkirchhof im
Schnee, Berlin, 1819, Staatliche Museen, National Galerie; Winter, Munich, Neue
Pinakothek; Abtei im Eichwald, Berlin, ca. 1809, Schloß Charlottenburg; Die geschei-
terte Hoffnung, Hamburg, 1821, Kunsthalle) portray human anguish of cosmic dimen­
sions. 16 Be it landscape devoid of man's presence, or t h a t cherished view of the Roman­
tics, landscape glimpsed through a window, suggesting escape and the desire for free-

14
H. H . Hofstätter, op. cit., pp. 161-167; J. Gramm, Die ideale Landschaft (Freiburg im Br.,
1912); H. Schrade, "Die romantische Idee von der Landschaft" in Neue Heidelberger Jahrbuch
(Heidelberg, 1931), pp. 1-94; P. van Tieghem, Le sentiment de la nature dans le préromantisme
européen (Paris, 1960); H. Ladendorf, Die Motivenkunde und die Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts,
Festschrift
15
E. Trautscholdt, (Hamburg, 1965), pp. 173-282.
Hönnighausen, op. cit., p . 21.,
16
An early pre-romantic antecedent of Caspar David Friedrich's approach to landscape as a
"state of mind" was Richard Wilson's Solitude (Swansea, Glynn Virian Art Gallery). I t is especially
Friedrich's post-1801 pictures that show a complex symbolism with plants and trees playing an
important part. Good examples of this are a sketch from 1802: Schlafender Knabe in the Kunsthalle
in Bremen, as well as the Frau mit Spinnennutz zwischen Kahlen Bäumen and Frau mit Abgrund,
both woodcuttings from 1803-4, executed by Christian D. Friedrich. This is what Helmut Börsch-
Supan has to say about the latter in his Caspar David Friedrich (Munich, Prester Verlag, 1973):
"Der Abgrund ist der Tod, den die Frau vor sich sieht. Ihre Vergangenheit und ihre Zukunft
werden durch die aufrecht stehende lebendige und die entwurzelte Fichte versinnbildlicht. Die
Blumen bedeuten das schnell vergängliche Leben. Jenseits der Schlucht jedoch ragen Berge als
Verheißung eines Daseins nach dem Tode auf. In der Unruhe der Formen, in der Betonung der
plastischen Werte und psychologischen Ausdrucks, der Wendung des Angst und Verzweiflung aus­
sprechenden Gesichtes zum Betrachter, liegt ein Pathos, das sich in späteren Gestaltungen verliert".
Among the later works see particularly: Hünengrab am Meer (1807, Weimar, Staatliche Kunstsamm­
lungen), Bauernhaus mit Ziehbrunnen (1806, Dr. Georg Schäfer Coll.), Der Winter (1807-8, München,
Neue Pinakothek), Landschaft mit Eichen und Jäger (1811, Winterthur, Oskar Reinhardt Foun­
dation), Dorflandschaft bei Morgenbeleuchtung (1822, Berlin, National Galerie).

442
dom, the symbolic inspiration cannot be misunderstood. 17 Subjective emotional states,
the sense of pantheistic fusion with nature—whose theoretician was Carus18—-cosmic
anxiety, these traits typify the Romantic attitude toward nature.
The landscape of fantasy, as it developed into an iconographical type during the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was reborn within a new, Romantic orchestration.
This is particularly apparent in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites, for they revived the
type of landscape illustrated by the Divina Commedia: the garden, perceived as the
Heavenly Jerusalem, the earthly replica of paradise, or the type represented b y the
themes of the Locus Amoenus and the Hortus Conclusus. 19
Landscape and the relationship between landscape and man were not alone in
taking on symbolic significance: the world of plants also acquired symbolic meaning,
especially since vegetal organism was perceived as a natural analogue of the human
organism. 20 The significance attributed to the flower and the tree motifs was deepened
as these acquired symbolic meaning. I t is through the analysis of these motifs t h a t one
is most likely to observe the difference between the iconographic-allegoric a n d the
expressive interpretation of the symbol.
I t is well known t h a t in medieval art the flower motif followed strict iconographic
rules; a similarly complex, symbolic-allegoric iconographic system determined the
vegetation motif in Renaissance art as well. 21 Although these iconographie restrictions
lost their normative aspect during the nineteenth century, the motifs survived with
a conventionalized significance; the flower motif especially marked emphasis from the
Pre-Raphaelites, who were particularly sensitive to medieval iconography. The new
dimension was t h a t the highly structured area of significance was allowed to open u p
and let subjective motivations surface. The paradigm of the flower symbol is Rossetti's
Willowwood cycle, in which critics have ventured to read deeply rooted psychological
motivations. 22 The lily, the "rose with the secret meaning", the mysterious "blue
flower", however, take on in nearly all cases allegoric-metaphoric meanings; their sig­
nificance is fixed by convention, carrying traces of the emblematic art t h a t was still of
great importance during the nineteenth century. 23 The flower symbol undergoes a
process of individuation in French Symbolist literature, however, primarily in the
underlying concept of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal.
Similarly, it is possible to discern the medieval origins of the concept of human
and vegetal organic unity, as we see in the personal mythology of the art of Odilon

17
E. Forssmen, "Fensterbilder von der Romantik bis zum Moderne", Kunsthistorika Studier
(Stockholm, 1966); J. Bialastocki, "Stil und Ikonographie", Studien zu Kunstwissenschaft (Dresden,
1966), Chapter "Romantische Ikonographie"), pp. 156-181.
18
C. G. Carus, Neue Briefe über Landsmalerei (Leipzig, 1831) and Zwölf Briefe über das Erd-
leben 19
(Stuttgart, 1841).
20
H. Hönnighausen, op. cit, p. 203.
21
J. B. Friedrich, Die Symbolik der Mythologie der Natur (Würzburg, 1959).
G. B. Ladner, Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of Renaissance, New York, 1961, Fest-
schrift Panofsky I. pp. 303-322.
22
H. Hönnighausen, op. cit., p. 69. For the use of symbols in Rossetti's art, see H. Talon, D. G.
Rossetti: The House of Life. Quelques aspects de l'art, des thèmes et du symbolisme. (Paris, 1966); J.
Savarit,
23
Tendances mystiques et ésotériques chez D. G. Rossetti (Paris, 1961).
E. Burne-Jones, The Flower-Book (London, 1905); R. Freeman, English Emblem Books
(London; 1967).

443
Redon. At the source of his personal symbolism lies his belief in the original unity of
all beings, a belief which is based partly on Darwin's and partly on Armand Chavaud's
doctrines of mystic biology; 24 yet a characteristic work like La Fleur du marécage,
where the seeds are made of tiny skulls, is still rooted in medieval iconography. 25
I n the symbolic interpretation of vegetation, the tree was of particular importance.
This is not peculiar to Romanticism, for we know t h a t the tree symbol is of outstanding
significance in many religions, and has a great variety of meanings. 26 I n the Near East,
for instance, it was the symbol of the Magna Mater which was frequently identical
with the moon goddess; but it has also symbolized the tree of life, the world tree,
the world axis, knowledge, good and evil; it has stood for the tree of life, and of death,
for the tree of growth—we could continue enumerating further types of meanings.
I t was the regularity and frequency with which the tree symbol with all its related
meanings recurred t h a t prompted Jungian psychology to classify it as an archetypal
image. 27
The varied interpretations of the tree symbol reached the nineteenth century b y
way of several sources. In addition to the medieval, ecclesiastic symbolic interpreta­
tion of the tree, which in the final analysis is based on the tree symbol's function in
biblical mythology, significant roles were also played b y folklore and the acquaintance
with the mythico-religious ideas of primitive societies; of similar importance were the
Ovidian interpretation of the tree, and the resolving of the dilemma of life and death
in the Pythagorean theory of the migration of souls, its separation from the self—the
latter implying not death, however, b u t a metamorphosis.
These varied sources of symbol interpretation created a highly complex p a t t e r n
in the iconographic systems of Romanticism and of Symbolism. A new factor was
introduced—this became apparent in all the art forms from Romanticism on—with
the surfacing of subjectivism. The figure of the tree, while remaining the carrier of
universal symbolism, became increasingly the medium of subjective projection. The
recognition of this striking phenomenon in the arts of the nineteenth century led
modern psychology to develop the test type of projection analysis. 28
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the tree was still represented con­
ventionally and had a symbolism derived from earlier iconographical systems. I t is
revealing, for instance, t h a t the "arbre squelette" type of tree representation, which
developed during the Middle Age and in particular in the Mannerist period, exerted
a powerful influence on Baudelaire; it was while browsing through Hyacinthe Langlois'
Danse Macabre t h a t he was struck by the connection between the symbols of the tree

24
G. Standström, Le monde imaginaire d'Odüon Redon (Lund, 1955) pp. 64-78.
25
J. Baltrusaitis, Une survivance médiévale. La plante à tête, La revue des arts 4/1954,
pp. 81-92.
26
For the bibliography of the symbolic representation of the tree in the fine arts see: Lexikon
der christlichen Ikoographie. "Allgemeine Ikonographie", 1960 and M. Lurker", Symbol, Mythos
und Legende in der Kunst. (Die symbolische Aussage in Malerei, Plastik und Architektur)", in
Studie zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 1958, p. 314.
27
C. G. Jung, Der Philosophische Baum Vorhandlungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft,
Basel, LVT/2), pp. 411 ff. — "Von den Wurzeln des Bewußtseins", Studien über den Archetypus
(Zürich, 1954).
28
K. Koch, Der Baumtest (Bern—Stuttgart, 1954).

444
of knowledge and of the tree of death, as it appeared in Mannerist symbolism; this
motif recurred even in Félicien Rops' design for the cover of Baudelaire's Les Épaves.
A further example is Gustave Moreau's Les Chimères—Moreau's ars poetica—a, work
comparable to Goethe's Walpurgisnacht and to Flaubert's La Tentation de St. Antoine;
the artist seems to present to us the crown of an enormous tree turned into a world
stage upon which he places symbolic figures with both a conventional and a personal
significance. A characteristic example of allegoric symbolism is Max Klinger's painting
Der Tote, representing the corpse of a young mother with a small child seated on her:
the already overstated symbol is still further emphasized by the contrasting presence
of an old and of a freshly sprouting tree in the background.
A characteristic example of the rebirth of the mythological tree symbol in Sym­
bolist painting is Giovanni Segantini's work.29 Tree and nature appear in his art gener­
ally in a traditional, allegoric manner similar to that of the Pre-Raphaelites. In his
painting Idyll for instance, the blossoming tree branch is clearly accentuated, which
seems to agree with the comments found in his notes: "Die Blume ist besser als irgend­
welche Worte, was die Schönheit ist". 30 Equally characteristic is his work, Birth, in
the Segantini museum in St. Moritz, where the rich foliage of a tree bends protectively
over mother and child. In his Art Nouveau painting, Ave Maria one version of which
is in the Museo Civicio, Milan, the other in the Szépmûvészeti Muzeum, Budapest, the
delicate extensions of the branches surround, like a web of fine hair, the figure of the
Madonna. In this case however, the significance is primarily a formal one, since it
results from the synthesis of several styles. The dry trees in The Punishment of Lust
and the barren, gnarled trees in the symbolist-allegoric painting Unnatural Mothers
where the evil women hang from the branches by their hair, are already clearly sym­
bolic of the experience of frustration, of traumas and inner conflicts, of contingency
and death. The motif itself points to a Buddhist legend; the particular design of the
trees, however, have been shown by psychological projective tests to coincide with
expression of tragic traumas. 31
It seems then that this type of symbolic interpretation of the tree motif is essen­
tially an objective "given" (such as the symbol of life and death, the tree of life, Bud­
dhist mythology, etc.); yet, in the Segantini type of representation, subjective psycho­
logical projection is already operative. From the Romantic period on, along with an
objective, established meaning, one may thus also observe a subjective symbol inter­
pretation. The first examples still belong to the metaphoric-allegoric, associative sym­
bol type. A characteristic example is Caspar David Friedrich's work dating from 1823,
"Einsamer Baum" (Berlin, Stiftung Preußlischer Kulturbesitz, Staatliche Museen,
National Galerie), where the solitary tree carries metaphoric significance, symbolizing
man's, particularly the artist's, solitude. In this instance, then, the representation of
the tree as mimetic sign does not aim merely to represent nature as concrete existence,

29
For Segantini's symbolism: M. Martersteig, Giovanni Segantini (Die Kunstsammlung
Illustrierter Monographien, Berlin) Vol. 21, pp. 43-48; F. Servaes, G. S., sein Leben und sein Werk,
chapter XIII. "Symbolik und Stilkunst".
30
31
G. Segantini, Schriften und Briefe (Leipzig, no date), p. 68.
K. Koch, op. cit., pp. 161 ff.

446
perceivable by the senses, but it also signifies a more generalized concept, that of
"solitude": the representation of the tree thus establishes an associative relationship
between the sign and its meaning. Subjectivity in this instance is still subordinated to
general content.
In contrast to this metaphoric-allegoric type of symbolism which as such is still
tied to an associative mechanism, we find at the closing of the Symbolist period, and
already leading into Expressionism, a motif interpretation in which subjective projec­
tion acquires predominant importance. This is illustrated by, among others, Egon
Schiele, whose work, at the juncture of Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and Expressionism,
always presents us with drawings of barren, autumnal and wintry trees. 32 Their agitated,
convulsive lines reveal psychoanalytically motivated feelings of anguish, of frustra­
tion, and trauma, similar to those expressed in his paintings of nudes which seem almost
graphic illustrations of the theories of Freud. The psychic Schiele's trees project coin­
cides with that shown by the appropriate "tree test" model: frustration, hopelessness
and alienation. Here, subjective expression comes to overrule a more general sym­
bolism; the tree representation does not point to general concepts but is a subjective
expression of psychic motivation. The graphic representation of the tree as concrete
existence perceivable by the senses is subordinated to its subjective significance, and
the relationship between sign and signified is subordinative. But, while in the case of
Caspar David Friedrich's work subordination implied the domination of the conven­
tional and of the general, in this instance subordination means the rule of the psycholog­
ically, subjectively motivated expression; it leads us from Symbolism to Expression­
ism, where the symbol-creating act will be subordinated to expression and as such,
will be a secondary component.
It is between these two types that we may situate Van Gogh's type of symbolism:
here, the symbol-creating act and its expression is still of a piece.
For a full understanding of the particular nature of Van Gogh's symbolization,
it is necessary to recall some of the basic tenets of Van Gogh's art. It is important to
remember that for him, painting represented the sole mode of self-realization. It was
his feeling that only through his art could he tear himself away from the hated con­
straints of contingency and thus attain a level of true humanity. Yet he also felt that
his way was merely a substitute for real life. As he wrote to Emile Bernard, "l'amour
de l'art fait perdre l'amour vrai". 33 A. M. Hammacher commented quite correctly
that "Die Kunst wird sein Eros, seine Frau, seine Religion".34 For Van Gogh, this act
of self-realization remains inseparable from the search for an adequate means of com­
munication.35
These essential properties of Van Gogh's art were expressed within the realm of
the sensory-concrete and the sensuous. However romantic his emotional and con-

32
See particularly: Small Tree in Late Autumn (1911, Berlin, Mgt.), Autumn Tree in Movement
(1912), Sun and Autumn Trees (1912). Concerning Egon Schiele's symbolism and psychology:
R. Leopold, Egon Schiele. Paintings-Watercolours-Drawing (London, Phaidon, 1973).
33
Lettres de Vincent van Qogh à Emile Bernard. Publié par Ambroise Vollard (Paris, 1911),
p. 111.
34
35
A. M. Hammacher, Vincent van Gogh und sein Bruch mit der Gesellschaft (Köln, 1967), p. 10.
Ibid., p. 13.

446
ceptual world, in its execution, his work still belongs to t h e realist, mimetic mode of
representation. His point of departure was nature: it was by analyzing the properties
of nature t h a t he was able to reach a personal pictorial reality and to formulate t h e
rules t h a t governed his own painting. One of the cardinal problems of his a r t t h u s
became how to express conceptual-symbolic meanings while still remaining rooted in
the realm of the sensorial and concrete; i.e., he posed t h e problem of how to charge
the visual sign—with its descriptive, denoting function—with conceptual meaning.
P a r t of his picture of the world was the conviction (a conviction motivated also
by his psychosis) t h a t the manifold manifestations of reality are interconnected b y
means of an underlying system of symbols and analogies. I n his view, t h e world was
constituted of a series of polar opposites, where t h e contraries of life and death, love
and hate, light and darkness, earth and fire remained polarized. I n Van Gogh's peculiar
world picture, light, the sun, occupied a singularly important position. 36 His concept
of art seems to reflect t h e rebirth of the anagogics of the Middle Ages. I n his psychosis,
he experienced these polar opposites as fundamental archetypes. His symbolic system
cannot really be explained without a clear understanding of his inner constitution a n d
his psychosis. 37 Yet, important as it may seem to dwell on this point, (one much treated
in Van Gogh criticism), one nevertheless feels forced to agree with Michel Florissone
who insists (already in the very structuring of his book) t h a t t h e underlying crisis in
Van Gogh's life was not one of mental disorder: "c'est une crise de Tordre, ce n'est pas
un drame de folie". For in his art what becomes manifest was the "crise de l'ordre social'
of which the "crise de l'ordre artistique" and the "recherche de l'ordre du m o n d e " were
various phases.

Jusque dans sa mort Vincent est resté logique; sa violence est l'aboutissement
normal d'une vie de quête passionnée. Sa tragédie est la tragédie de la connais­
sance dans l'ordre universel. 38

Van Gogh's system of symbols has two major components: t h e organization of

the motifs on the one hand, and the symbolic interpretation of formal elements on
the other. I n his early period, his symbolism was still tied to t h e human figure, a n d it
remained related to the allegoric-metaphoric symbolism specific to realism. I n one of
his characteristic statements he comments t h a t in his opinion, in t h e works of Millet
and of Lhermitte reality is raised to the level of symbol. His interpretation of symbols
lives on in certain recurring figures in his own art, such as t h e figure of t h e sower, of
the peasant, or of t h e painter going to work. I n his letters he comments frequently
t h a t the representation of the human figure is not only art's most challenging b u t its
36
M. Robin, Van Gogh ou la remontée vers la lumière (Paris, 1966), " L a recherche de l'absolu",
p. 15.37
L. Roelandt, " L a maladie de V.v.G.", Aesculape, 35/1954, pp. 23-78; F . Minkowska, Van
Oogh, sa vie, sa maladie et son œuvre (Paris, 1963); Ch. Mauron, "Notes sur la structure de Tin-
conscient chez V.v.G." Psyche, Nr. 75-78, Paris, 1953; G. Aigrisse, "L'évolution psychologique de
V.v.G. à travers le symbolisme des éléments", Cahiers intern. Symbolisme, Nr. 8, 1965, p p . 59-74;
H. Nagera, V.v.G., a Psychological Study (London, 1966); H. R. Graetz, The Symbolic Language of
V.v.G. (London, 1964); V. Doiteau—E. Leroy, "Lafolie de V. v. G. Coll. sous le signe de Saturne",
Aesculape,
38
Paris, 1928.
M. Florissone, Van Gogh (Paris, 1937).

447
noblest task (cf. his letter to Théo, in January, 1886). Characteristically, in his letter
of December 19, 1885, he points to the different sorts of experience of representing a
Gothic cathedral a n d of portraying a human being: he emphasizes t h a t he prefers t o
paint the human eye rather than a cathedral because in eyes he perceives what is
missing in cathedrals, i.e., the human soul, be it t h a t of a poor devil or of a street
walker.
Soon however, nature and the world of vegetation acquire in his work equal status
with man; nature and vegetation become concept carriers and serve as the medium
for reflecting the polarities of his symbolic picture of the world. This is expressed with
striking insistence in his two loved and regularly recurring motifs, the sunflower and
the tree.
The symbolic meaning of the sunflower is well known in the traditions of both
folklore and the fine arts, and its roots reach far into the past. In church hymns and
in icons, the sunflower symbolizes, as late as the nineteenth century, the human soul
turned towards God. In the Mannerist and Baroque concept of emblematic allegory,
it stands as the symbol for the art of painting. The sunflower motif is also a favorite
of the Symbolist writers: it is emphatically present in Oscar Wilde's work, for instance,
so much so in fact t h a t it appears even in the caricatures made of Wilde; and it appears
also in Symbolist painting, for instance in Whistler's work. 39
Van Gogh did not perceive in the sunflower merely a pictorial motif. I t is well
known t h a t , in order to properly welcome Gauguin, he wished to decorate his studio
in Arles with a series of sunflowers:

J ' y songe de décorer mon atelier d'une demi-douzaine de tableaux de Tournesols,

une décoration où les chromes crus ou rompus éclateront sur des fonds divers,
bleus depuis le véronèse la plus pâle jusqu'au bleu de roi, encadré de minces belles
peintes en mine orange. Des espèces d'effets de vitraux d'église gothique. 4 0

That his intent was to transmit symbolic significance seems apparent in his letter
addressed to Théo on February 12, 1890:

Mettons que les deux toiles de tournesols qui actuellement sont aux Vingtistes
ayant de certaines qualités de couleur et puis aussi que ça exprime une idée sym­
bolisant la gratitude.

And in his letter of J a n u a r y 23, 1889, he notes: "Moi, j ' a i un peu le tournesol". K o n r a d
Hoffmann, having recapitulated the salient features of t h e conventionalized interpreta­
tions of the sunflower motif still prevalent in the nineteenth century, correctly states
in his excellent analysis of the iconography of Van Gogh's sunflower paintings t h a t :

Van Gogh malte die Sonnenblumen im Atelier als Zeichen einer Künstlergemein­
schaft. E r verband so die beiden Traditionen von der Sonnenblume als Zeichen
der K u n s t und als Sinnbild der 'Liebe' im weiteren Verständnis. 4 1

39
R. Spencer, The Aesthetic Movement,
Theory and Practice (London 1972), pp. 152-53.
40
Lettres de Vincent van Oogh à Emile
Bernard, op. cit., p. 139.
41
K. Hoffmann, Zu van Goghs Sonnenblumenbildern, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 31/1968,
p. 92.

448
In fact, the sunflower is one of the essential symbol transmitting motifs in Van Gogh's
anagogic field. Yet, a t the same time, each sunflower still emphatically belongs within
the sphere of the sensorial and the concrete.
Similar characteristics are revealed in another favorite Van Gogh motif, namely
the representation of t h e tree. We find again that, as in the case of the sunflower motif,
Van Gogh's point of departure was the need to translate into pictorial reality sensorial
and the concrete experience. In many of his letters he reasserts the excitement of
dealing with the tree as a pictorial motif. I n his third letter to Emile Bernard, for
instance, he writes: "Actuellement je suis pris par les fruitiers en fleur: pêchers roses,
poiriers blancs, jaunes". 4 2 Even in his last letter to Bernard, written already from
St. Rémy, he insists how much this subject matter preoccupies him:
. . . actuellement je travaille dans les oliviers, cherchant les effets variés d'un
ciel gris contre terrain jaune, avec note vert-noir du feuillage; une autre fois le
terrain et le feuillage sont vidés contre le ciel jaune; puis terrain ocre rouge et ciel
rose-vert. 43
Along with his preoccupation with such theoretical problems as color dynamics, t h e
representation of trees h a d for him also a symbolic and psychically motivated content.
I t is possible to find in his work the conventionalized emotional meaning associated
with the image of the blossoming tree—a theme which becomes especially prevalent
during some of the more hopeful periods in his life, like the spring of 1888; it plays in
his personal symbolism a role similar to t h a t of the bridge motif, another symbol
bearing positive significance (i.e., interpersonal communication), and it also resembles
in meaning the motif of the sower. I t is interesting to note t h a t if used in psychological
projective tests, these tree pictures convey the idea of interpersonal relationship, a for­
ward looking attitude, ambition, a positive self image; they point toward possibilities
of assimilation and of adjustment to the outside world. Yet, immediately following
this series of pictures, as if optimism had bred its own negation, Van Gogh paints, in
August 1888, The painter on the road to Tarascon. I n the background one can see two
trees drawn with especial accentuation (one with no foilage), neither of which casts
a shadow; in the foreground the painter, resembling a chained prisoner, drags behind
him the burden of his own shadow. From this point on, Van Gogh's symbolic interpreta­
tion of the tree becomes unmistakable; in general, it was from the fall of 1888 on t h a t
Symbolism becomes an unquestionable p a r t of his art. I n his work the Sower, painted
in the fall of 1888 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), for the first time one can see the sun's
disk, the figure of the sower, and the immense tree t r u n k which structurally encompas­
ses the silhouette of the sower, all fused into an overwhelming, cohesive whole. I t is
during this same period t h a t he begins to work on the sunflower series, a n d also on
the café 3eries, which he himself qualities as "Symbolist". Equally characteristic is
his painting of October 1888 The lovers : the poet's garden (location unknown), and which
was intended for Gauguin's room: behind the enlaced lovers there appear the cypresses,
a species which in the mythico-religious world of the Mediterranean peoples always
ranks as the tree of death, the tree of the cemeteries. Thereafter, trees and branches,
42
Lettres de Vincent van Gogh à Emile Bernard, p. 178.
43
Ibid., p. 154.

29 Balakian 449
even blossoming trees, become so overwhelmingly convulsed, they radiate such trau­
mas, t h a t it is no longer possible to read the conventional associations into them; on
the contrary, t h e y take on the contrary connotations ("Orchard in blossom", 1888,
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).
When Van Gogh's great plan for a collective studio comes to nought and his
tragedy is set in motion, the psychic significance of the tree is emphasized, and in
general, psychic projection begins to dominate. One may consider his painting Orchard
with View of Arles (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) as a key work in this respect. Here, an
enormous, dried-up tree, destroyed b y lightning, dominates the picture; in the back­
ground there hides the steeple of the church of Aries, dwarfed in the distance. The
earlier, blossoming trees mirrored a belief in the possibility of a positive relationship
with the outside world; from here on however, consistent emphasis will be placed on
such aspects as broken branches, the absence of foliage, on the predominance of roots,
on branches pointing downward and toward the left. All these features, the tree tests
suggest, indicate an excessive tendency to introversion, and in general the predominance
of the unconscious; further, they mirror psychic states characteristic of feelings of
failure and of frustration, and of traumatic experiences. I t is revealing t h a t from 1890
on, the cypress becomes the dominant tree in his paintings. These trees are not merely
the media for his own subjective psychic projection, however; Van Gogh wants t h e m
to express a more universal psychic content and symbol. This intention is apparent
when, in connection with his work The Garden of St. Paul's Hospital, painted in October
1889 in St. R é m y (Essen, Folkwang Museum), he comments:

Voilà la description d'une toile qui j ' a i devant moi dans moment. U n e vue du
parc de la maison de santè où je suis: à droite une terrasse grise, un pan de
maison. Quelques buissons de roses déflories, à gauche le terrain du parc — ocre
rouge — terrain brûlé par le soleil, couvert de brindilles de pin tombées. Cette
lisière du parc est plantée de grands pins aux troncs et branches ocre rouge, au
feuillage vert attristé par un mélange de noir. Ces hauts arbres se détachent sur
un ciel du soir strié de violet sur fond jaune, le jaune tourne dans le haut au
rose, tourne au vert. Une muraille — ocre rouge encore — barre la vue et n'est
dépassée que par une colline violette et ocre jaune. Or,le premier arbre est un
tronc énorme mais frappé par la foudre et scié. Une branche latérale cependant
s'élance très haut et retombe en avalanche de brindilles vert sombre. Ce géant
sombre — comme un orgueilleux défait — contraste, en t a n t que considéré comme
caractère d'être vivant — avec le sourire pâle d'une dernière rose sur le buisson
qui se fane en face de lui. Sous les arbres des bancs de pierre vides, du bois
sombre, le ciel se reflète — jaune — après la pluie, dans une flaque. U n rayon de
soleil, le dernier reflet, exalte jusqu'à l'orange, l'ocre sombre. Des figurines noires
rôdent ça et là entre les troncs. Tu comprendras que cette combinaison d'ocre
rouge, de vert attristé de gris, de traits noir qui cernent les contours, cela produit
un peu la sensation d'angoisse dont souffrent souvent certains de mes compag­
nons d'infortune, qu'on appelle 'noir-rouge'. E t d'ailleurs le motif du grand arbre
frappé par l'éclair, le sourire maladif de la dernière fleur d'automne vient con­
firmer cette idée. 44

44
Ibid., p. 147.

450
 I t appears as no accident then t h a t in one of his last paintings completed shortly be­
fore his death, the Trees, Roots and Branches of July, 1890, (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum),
Van Gogh presents a cluster of writhing, intertwined roots, branches and tree-trunks
as an impenetrable, opaque fabric; it seems here t h a t finally the forces of his uncon­
scious have triumphed over the organizing powers of reason.
Thus it seems t h a t in addition to the traditional, conventionalized associative-
allegoric meaning of the tree (such as life and death, rebirth, etc.), in Van Gogh's work
the tree also becomes the projection of his personal psyche, a symbolic system colored
b y his psychosis and rooted in his private worldpicture. I t is interesting to note t h a t
when symbolism becomes dominant in his art, he no longer holds t h a t the graphic
representation of the h u m a n figure is alone capable of acting as a transmitter of concepts
and symbols nor even natural and cosmic phenomena (such as vegetation, t h e sun a n d the
constellations); we find buildings and a whole world of objects bearing symbolic signifi­
cance. There were already earlier examples in his work of attempts a t giving symbolic
(allegoric-metaphoric) meaning to the world of objects, as in the case of his representa­
tion of peasant shoes, a n d the chairs in Aries. A significant change occurs, however,
when his buildings also become transmitters of "inner realities" or of "souls", a privi­
lege earlier attributed only to the human figure. Already in March, 1888, in a letter
from Aries, he notes t h a t the nave of St. Trophîme is to be marvelled at, yet it affected
him as something cruel, monstrous, like a tormenting dream which he wanted to flee
from. Yet, in one of his last works, The Church of Anvers, (Paris, J e u de Paume), the
building becomes a complete statement of all his conscious and subconscious intentions:
every element of the work becomes the carrier, as well as the graphic representation,
of his world view and of t h e promise of self-realization through t h e creative act, which
he verbally describes as follows: " J ' a i des moments où je suis tordu par l'enthousiasme
ou la folie ou la prophétie comme un oracle grec sur son trépied." 4 5
Along with the symbolic interpretation of motifs, the second component of Van
Gogh's symbolism consists of symbolically charged formal elements; in this respect his
views coincide with Gauguin's. We are dealing here not merely with a system of symbols
come upon instinctively; many of his letters attest to the fact t h a t he wished t o attrib­
ute specific symbolic meaning to colors, for instance. To Théo he writes:

Exprimer l'amour de deux amoureux par un mariage de deux complémentaires,

leur mélange et leur opposition; e x p i m e r la pensée d'un front p a r le rayonne­
ment d'un ton clair sur un fond sombre, exprimer l'espérance p a r quelque étoile;
l'ardeur d'un rêve par un rayonnement de soleil couchant. (letter no. 531)

Thus blue and yellow become expressive of the spiritual, green and red of feelings of
anguish; it is no accident t h a t in his Self-portrait with a bandaged ear these two colors
dominate; 4 6 for as he writes in September, 1888, not only colors are charged with sym­
bolic significance, b u t also the sinuous line, the circulating r h y t h m , etc. These formal
elements, in a fashion similar to t h a t of the tree motif, have both a personal motiva­
tion and a more universal symbolism.
45
Ch. Carneir, Auvers-sur-Oise et Van Gogh. La Revue des deux Mondes; 1 er janvier, 1959, p. 45.
46
G. Aigrisse, op. cit., pp. 70-71.

29* 451
 The uniqueness of Van Gogh's symbolism resides in the fact t h a t all the above
traits find their actualization within the realm of the sensorial a n d concrete. I n this
respect, his debate with Emile Bernard, concerning Gauguin's and Bernard's a t t e m p t
to express symbolic content within the framework of religious a n d mystical themes,
seems revealing. To him, this seemed mere abstraction, since:

pour dormer une impression d'angoisse on peut chercher à le faire sans viser droit
au jardin du Gethsemani historique; que pour donner u n motif consolant et doux
il n'est pas nécessaire de représenter les personnages du sermon sur la montagne. 4 7

A. M. Hammacher was thus right when he separated Van Gogh's symbolism from
t h e dogmatic Symbolist school of t h e late nineteenth century:

Van Gogh m a c h t die Religiosität de facto abstrakt, frei von der alten Ikono­
graphie. Auch das h a t den K o n t a k t seiner K u n s t mit seiner Zeit erschwert. E r
war radikaler als die Symbolisten, die dekorativen und monumentalen Träumer
von einem neuen Mittelalter, die Erneuerer wie Maurice Denis. 48

In this perspective, Van Gogh's symbol-creating mechanism seems t o find its echo in
the work of t h e Hungarian painter, Csontváry, in whose a r t the tree motif has also
played a primary role. Csontvâry's major work Solitary Cedar reveals itself as the sym­
bolic expression of the universal tree, of the Homo Maximus, of the Nietzschean con­
cepts of Zarathustra and of the megalomaniac consciousness. Like Van Gogh's, Csont-
váry's symbolism is also realized within the realm of the sensorial, concrete and the
sensuous. B u t unlike in Van Gogh's work, in Csontvâry's paintings collective conscious­
ness plays a more significant role; personal psychic projection is also more strongly
tied to collective archetypal signs. An example of this is another of Csontvâry's sym­
bolically suggestive works, the Pilgrimage to the Cedars of Lebanon which represents
to equal degrees universal and personal mythology. 49
A. most essential aspect of Van Gogh's type of symbol interpretation is t h a t in the
motif bearing graphic sign, the relationship between the expressed and its expression,
is not merely a visual metaphor or associative and allegoric; the relationship between
signifier and signified is not one of subordination. A similar unity characterizes the
various constructive elements of the symbol inherent in t h e graphic sign; it carries
individually motivated signification (one which is determined b y subjective, psychic
projection) as well as an objective one, rooted in a universal, archetypal symbolic-field.
I n the case of the metaphoric-allegoric type, such a unity cannot come to be, because
the conventionalized associative interpretation dominates the subjective, while in the
case of the expressionist type of symbolism, subjective psychic projection is more clearly
tied to the subjectively particular. For this reason, t h e possibility of the Van Gogh or
the Csontvåry type of symbolism is historically limited. I t s necessary historical pre­
condition was t h a t Romanticism liberated the subjective in t h e creative act, while

47
Lettres de Vincent van Gogh à Emile Bernard, pp. 147-48.
48
49
A. M. Hammacher, op. cit., p. 52.
L. Németh, A Magányos cédrus (The Lonely Cedar) (Budapest, 1973), pp. 177-193.

452
the mimetic function remained, i.e., subjective self-expression became objectified in
sensorial concrete representation. Another necessary pre-condition was the a t t e m p t to
go beyond Naturalism and of Impressionism, i.e., while maintaining the sensorial-
concrete, sensuous factor, t o have rediscovered the conceptual symbolic meaning ig­
nored b y Naturalism a n d Impressionism. The semantic component in this instance,
however, was linked to t h e sensorial-concrete; the expressive, concrete sensory image
was not separate from the associative-conventional, allegoric and metaphoric meaning.
I n the Symbolist art of the nineteenth century it is, therefore, necessary to distin­
guish between two sharply distinct types: one which is still contiguous with Roman­
ticism, the metaphoric-allegoric type which can still be qualified as late Romantic,
where the signified and the signifier remain in a subordinative relationship; and the
other, the sensorial-concrete, expressive type, where the signified and signifier fuse into
one. The former belongs more to the domain of illustrative, literary, esoteric philosoph­
ical concepts and to conventional content; the latter is closer to the various trends
of subjective self-expression dominating the twentieth century.

Translated from the Hungarian b y M. Kosinski

453
 M I C H E L BÉNAMOU

DISPLACEMENTS OF P A R E N T A L SPACE:
AMERICAN P O E T R Y AND F R E N C H SYMBOLISM

The unadulterated American Symbolist in the tradition of Baudelaire's Correspondances

is Norman 0 . Brown, who wrote in Love's Body:

Symbolic consciousness, the erotic sense of reality, is a return t o the principle of

ancient animistic science, mystical participation, but now for the first time freely;
instead of religion, poetry. 1

Even if it is possible to read Baudelaire in this way through a series of palimpsest-

uous superpositions intent on a single objet perdu, the mother, this is no longer t h e way
we read him, much less Mallarmé, whom J - P Richard has dis-intricated from t h e web
of nostalgias. If, Richard argued, Baudelaire's "anterior life" was a haunting lost u n i t y
which language failed to restore, "Mallarmé on this score resembles Baudelaire very
little: the 'green paradise' is lost forever to him, and so all he wants to do is t o manu­
facture a modern paradise of his own, a new linguistic virginity . . . " 2 How will Mal­
larmé proceed? Instead of an abysmal descent within the words, he will effect his meta­
morphosis between the words, in the " p l a y " afforded by the gaps. The point is capital.
For it defines symbolism in a new way, no longer fraught with the nostalgia of original
unity, no longer obsessed with a return, through symbols, to an interior, anterior belly
of substitutions, but now syntaxing its way forward in the only space left mother-free,
father-free, the space which separates words from one another. Discontinuities will be
prized by what Richard calls " a rhetorics of the abrupt". 3 Rather t h a n a natural belly,
whose grotto inspired Baudelaire's Correspondances, Mallarmé will use an artificial
womb of silence, a resonant space between the words of a line, for something to have
birth. Something which is no longer the child of a poet: "The pure work implies t h e
disappearance of the poet as speaker, he leaves the initiative to the words "4
If symbolism is participation mystique, a nostalgia for origins, and the symbol a
symptom of neurotic maternal obsessions, then it is obvious t h a t much of Mallarmé,
indeed much of Baudelaire himself, exceeds the definition. A reappraisal was already
under way when Jean-Pierre Richard called attention to the paradoxical resemblance
between Rimbaud and Verlaine, both of whom he saw as attempting to free poetic

1
2
Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (New York,) p . 82.
3
J.-P. Richard, L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (Paris, 1961), p . 535 (my translation).
Ibid., p . 539.
4
Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crise de vers", Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, (Paris,
1945), p . 366.

455
language from its nostalgia for origins, and to create a poetic universe without d e p t h -
Rimbaud b y explosion and metamorphosis toward the future, Verlaine b y a flattening
and emptying out of space into a sort of positive void. 5 Is it possible then t h a t poetry
does not mean depth? Baudelaire himself reversed the charmed night of "Corre­
spondances" into the blasphemous void of "Obsession". Idolater turned iconoclast, he
expressed revulsion from nature as temple, from the very ocean he had loved, from the
language of stars in the night sky. Eventually, since he cannot be free from symbol, the
symbolist's suicide is his only way of escape from the parental presence. 6 His mother-
tongue bores him, and he flees. His plunge down the deep end is not a return to origins,
but the opposite; " a u fond de l'inconnu pour trouver du nouveau" (Le voyage).
Maurice-Jean Lefëbvre, who first drew conclusions from this reversal, interpret­
ed Baudelaire's rejection of symbols as a further proof of the power of symbols.
Imperfect, the symbol separated the poet from the absolute, b u t the absolute remained
the goal of his quest. 7 Symbolism, in sum, differed from Romanticism b y a critical
discovery: the ambiguity of symbols. I t became aware of the breakdown in man's
communications with the ultimate original presence and made literature out of it. Such
a view has influenced most historians in their claim of French Symbolism's impact on
American poetry. They make much of the occult element, based on Baudelaire and
Mallarmé's cabalistic beliefs in the lost power of language to evoke essences—sor-
cellerie évocatoire of a notion pure. 8 A new attitude is shaping u p among French critics,
however, which ought to cast a different light on the development of American poetry.
I n a word, this attitude considers the breakdown of symbols as a breakthrough for
modern man.
The reevaluation of the 1860's follows several complicated routes which would
lead us quite far. I t is interesting to note briefly t h a t the three most innovative inter­
preters of Mallarmé today are philosophically oriented: J . - F . Lyotard, J . Derrida, and J .
Kristeva, all of whom concentrate on Un Coup de dés and Le Livre as the turning points
of literature in the history of Western consciousness. Hitherto, writes Lyotard, poetry
has had an integrative function, resolving contradictions within culture by metaphoric
language, a function it began to abandon irreversibly in the sixties for another role:
critique, or deconstruction. 9

5
J.-P.Richard, Poésie et profondeur (Paris, 1953), p . 9-11.
6
If we were to accept Norman O. Brown's "return to the principle", we would say t h a t the
poet's suicide resembles the Narcissistic escape, whereby the young hero prefers his own death to
the sexual demands of the Mother Goddess. The culture hero, on the contrary, is he who kills the
Gorgon. On this perhaps not so far-fetched analogy, see Erich Neumann's Origin and History of
Consciousness
7
(New York, 1954).
Maurice-Jean Lefebovre, "L'ambiguïté des symboles de Baudelaire à nous" Cahiers inter-
nationaux
8
de symbolisme, No. 5, 1964, p . 67.
Most historians of French influence on modern American poetry stress the occult element.
See René Taupin, L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine de 1910 à 1920 (Paris
1929), p. 45; Glauco Cambon, The Inclusive Flame (Bloomington, 1963), p. 50; Wm. York Tyndall,
The Literary Symbol (New York, 1955) pp. 54-55; Haskell Blok, in The Shaken Realist, eds. Melvin
Friedman and Robert Vickery (Baton Rouge, 1970), p. 196.
Roy H. Pearce rejects the influence of French symbolism because of the theological difference
between
9
the Symbolist and the American adamists (Continuity of American Poetry, Princeton, 1961).
Jean-François Lyotard, Discours — Figure (Paris, 1974), p . 319.

456
 The "critical p o e m " owes more to Nietzsche than to Hegel, because it escapes t h e
orb of language, symbols and dialectics, and transgresses conscious thought itself.
How was this transgression achieved? By placing "unexpected spaces" between the
words, within the words, t h a t give discourse the same flesh, nearly, as the perceived
world. Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés, to Lyotard, accomplished this recessus b y sensually
representing the object, so t h a t the listing ship and blown constellation were present in
the very discourse about them. A double space thus appeared, not of mere reflexion b u t
of "sur-réflexion" as Merleau-Ponty called it, "taking into account the effects of reflex­
ion on the spectacle" of t h e world, keeping in mind perception and the perceived thing
"before it is a thing stated in language". 1 0
The metaphysical dimension of such acts of consciousness was fully realized b y
Derrida when in 1967 he attacked Richard's thematic approach as being still dependent
on polysemy. 1 1 Behind polysemy there lurked a theological idea. Give etymology a
twist and semy recalls t h e phallic power of Logos, the Word which in the Western tra­
dition since Plato enjoys (pro)creative firstness. Mallarmé dis-seminated language b y
two operations on literature. The first was to work words so t h a t they would not reflect
an outside Presence b u t one another, a revolution of metaphor turning it into meton­
ymy, displacement, pure combination. Derrida illustrates t h e new poetics b y quoting
from Mallarmé's "Mimique":

So operates t h e Mime, whose playing is limited t o perpetual allusion without

breaking t h e mirror: he installs, thus, a space, pure, of fiction. 12

Derrida's comment now: "The operation which no longer belongs t o the system of
truth, manifests, produces, unveils no presence; nor does it constitute any c o n f o r m i t y . . .
between a presence a n d a representation". 1 3 Outside t h e stage of writing (to continue
the theatrical metaphor), there is no act; nothing except the idea, nothing itself, a
non-presence. Hence the second operation: to break out of t h e symbolist intimacy
which the mirror, in a classical reading of Mallarmé (that of Richard, even) re-flects,
re-duplicates, enfolds in reflexivity. The fold, Derrida explains, is t h e materialization
of the hermeneutic concept of polysemy. The second operation is semiological rather
than semantic. I t incorporates the blank space between words as p a r t of their meaning
(at least from Coup de dés onward); each " w h i t e " of the metaphoric series

(snow
swan
paper
virginity, etc)

thus becomes t h e trope of a metonymic "blank", itself so disseminated on t h e page,

t h a t spacing (l'espacement) without a center, decentering space, the exact semiological

10
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible (Paris, 1964), p. 71, quoted by Lyotard,
op. cit.,
11
p. 53.
12
Jacques Derrida, L'Ecriture et la différence (Paris, 1967), p. 11.
13
Stéphane Mallarmé, op. cit., p. 310.
Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris, 1972), p. 236.

457
counterpart of t h e denial of any origin outside the stage of words, becomes t h e purpose
of the literary operation. The "pure fiction" announced b y Mallarmé on the stage of his
non-mimetic mime thus bred the poem without a mother-tongue or a faber-father, and
the whole generative metaphor went pftt.
Kristeva's semiotic approach to Un Coup de dés combines structural linguistics
with Freudian psychology. Roman Jakobson in his famous essay, on aphases 1 4 had
observed anew t h e predominance of the metaphoric process (a trope based on substi­
tution) in the Romantic and Symbolist schools, and pointed out the less obvious pre­
dominance of metonymy (a trope based on combination) which governed t h e realist
literary current. Extending his dichotomies to include sign systems other t h a n litera­
ture, he went on to note the manifest metonymic orientation of cubism, and the meta­
phoric- response of the Surrealist painters. H e took heed of Freud's decision to ascribe,
dream symbols either to condensation or to displacement, both metaphoric. If the
unconscious is indeed a language, then Jacques Lacan is perhaps right to interpret the
metaphor-metonymy polarity as condensation versus displacement: "The symptom is
a metaphor, . . . as desire is a metonymy". 1 5 Thus Kristeva applies the Jakobson-
Lacan reading to Mallarmé: a Symbolist, Mallarmé is condensation-prone and bent on
metaphor. W h a t Kristeva calls the "Revolution of Poetic Language" is the revolt
against the metonymies of the "symbolic", t h a t is to say t h e social order coded and

14
Roman Jakobson, "Two Types of Language and two types of Aphasia" Fundamentals of
Language,
15
('S-Grawenhage, Mouton, 1956).
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits I (Paris, 1966), p. 289. For a devastating critique of this analysis by
J. F. Lyotard, see op. cit., pp. 250-260. I am translating his table of the Jakobson position, p. 252:

paradigmatic syntagmatic
relations relations
Levels
Nature of the
relationships
Language
between (langue)
terms similarity contiguity
Speech Act (parole) selection combination |
Trope metaphor metonymy
^^*^^^
Genre poetry prose
School romantic, symbolist classical |
For Lacan, we would add a psychoanalytical level of dream operation (Traumarbeit)
condensation displacement
For Kristeva, three more levels would be added:

Archetype maternal paternal

Signification semiotic symbolic
social order anarchistic bourgeois
But Lyotard argues convincingly that artful language reverses the processes of dream, and Guy
Rosolato, in a recent reconsideration of the Freudian model as it applies to esthetics, "L'Oscilla-
tion métaphorométonymique" (Topique, Vol. V, No., 13, May, 1974, pp. 75-99) takes a surrealistic
theory of metaphor as scandal and gap, breaking into the metonymic social order and linguistic
codes which are under the Mother's safeguard. His model, turning one full turn, reveals to us a use
of metaphor which corresponds to the new definition of post — symbolism as a breakthrough for
the hero. (I would differ with Rosolato when he calls the metaphoric order "paternal": it is the son,
as he disseminates the symbolic parents, both father and mother, who uses metaphor in the new,
liberating mode of "espacement", gap, and contextual code.)

458
imposed by men. The predominance of metaphor, a pre-symbolic, pre-oedipal, "mater­
nal" structure flouting the logics of science and the state, corresponds in the early
Mallarmé to his fetishization of woman, as it corresponds in the early Lautréamont to
Ducasse's homosexuality. But, Kristeva's argument continues, the second, unpublished,
phase of their revolution (Mallarmé's Le Livre and Le Tombeau d' Anatole: Lautréamont's
Les Poésies) reintroduces the "paternal" symbolic order, although with the scandalous
intent to reconcile it with the timeless maternal unconscious. But the bourgeois social
code, materialized in the Salon of the rue de Rome or the high class hotel where Ducasse
died, will not undergo a change as abrupt or radical as the poetic hero, "a contradictory
synthesis of the two sovereignties separated by the mythologies".16
In spite of wide distances between their lines of approach to the "Maître" of
Symbolism, these three revaluations converge to give to Mallarmé's poetic language an
urgency for post-modern man which earlier "esthetic" theories thought more decorous
to omit. That they are recent theories, based on much in Mallarmé that was un­
published when the four great American Modernists (now dead) were writing, makes not
a difference in the world. Comparative Literature is no longer a hunt for influences.
Words like "decentering" are words of our present condition which we read back with
profit into the work of poets who never heard of them. In the perspective newly opened
by Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Kristeva, the Central American poet of the post-
symbolist era is—as Joseph Riddel has already pointed out17—Wallace Stevens. In
Stevens we find the "sur-réflexion", the "decentering", and the synthesis of parental
space which characterized Mallarmé's "critical poem". But if the no less characteristic
"spacing" seems mostly lacking from his verse—whereas it can be found, with logo-
centric lapses, in much of Williams and Pound—we also detect in Stevens a number of
nostalgias: a weakness for origins including his own, a foible for foyers of being, a yearn­
ing for "pure reality" and "things as they are". Such differences also make Stevens
central, because he was so American.

II
From Pater into Son-Paterson
Joseph Riddel,
The Inverted Bell

William Carlos Williams' affinities with Imagism and Cubism link him with a
metonymic art, in the Jakobsonian sense, and contradict Wallace Stevens' metaphoric
analogies. The conflict erupted, as Riddel recounts, around the publication of Kora in
Hell, a book which Stevens thought lacked a center. The tension would be resolved, how­
ever, by ironic seesaw. Inherent in the oscillation between the metaphoric-metonymic
poles is a possibility of reversal. In Paterson V, Williams had final recourse to both a
16
17
Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris, 1974), p. 607.
Cf. Joseph Riddel "Interpreting Stevens: An Essay on Poetry and Thinking", See also his
review of my Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton, 1972) in English Language
Notes, September, 1974, pp. 55-61, and his book on William C. Williams, The Inverted Bell, (Bâton
Rouge, 1974) which extends a good number of early insights about Stevens which he published in
his important study of the poet's evolution, The Clairvoyant Eye, (Baton Rouge, 1965).

459
mythic construct, t h e Unicorn, and a concept of art as salvation which stand in exact
parallel to Stevens' own evolution. The mythic center, the Unicorn of the Cloisters'
Tapestries, remains problematic because, as Riddel puts it, "it is a presence only in a
fiction t h a t proclaims its fictiveness": 18
The Cloisters—
on its rock
casting its shadow—
"la réalité ! la réalité !
la réa, la réa, la réalité !" 19
T h a t the form of the verse itself, variable foot or no, is a deconstruction, and t h a t frag­
mentation "is the undermining of the idea of the Center" 2 0 are not at issue here, al­
though these points may appear somewhat overstated. Something separates Williams'
broken lines from, say, Mallarmé's bifurcations of meaning:

un roc
faux manoir
t o u t de suite
evaporé en brumes
qui imposa
une borne à l'infini 21
The something which makes all the difference is t h a t to the American the museum
becomes real, urging an inner/outer dichotomy between the fictive content and the real
container (we shall see the same dichotomy a t work in Stevens, too), while t o t h e
Frenchman the rock seems a temporary stand on the brink of physical absence, then
dissolves leaving only the landmark of words on the page: that, to Mallarmé, was t h e
only réalité!
The bedrock of American realism underpins the fictive construct of Williams'
museum. This concept of reality would make his deconstruction of art centers almost
suspect, were it not for the masculine need, at once central and decentered, says Riddel,
of a unicorn hunt at the end of a career devoted to metonymic art. This need seems to
Riddel both a pursuit of art and a radical upset of t h e old order. The discovery of a
world "without truth, without origin" 22 thus defines Derrida's Mallarmé and Riddel's
Williams as well.
If Norman 0 . Brown epitomized the symbolist creed in terms t h a t appealed so
strongly to the youth of the sixties, Joseph Riddel represents, perhaps with excess of
ardor, 23 the new American criticism influenced b y the French revaluation of Mallarmé
18
19
The Inverted Bell, p. 188.
Paterson (New York, 1963), p. 209.
20
21
Joseph Riddel, op. cit., p. 188.
22
Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de dés, op. cit., p. 471.
23
Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination, (Paris, 1972), p. 239.
Riddel's interpretation raised a major objection at least for Hillis Miller (see diacritics,
summer 1975, pp. 24-31): namely that Williams. like Stevens, oscillated between mimesis and
deconstruction. Riddel's response (ibid. fall, 1975): Miller, and with him Paul De Man, Harold
Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman, are humanists valorizing "major texts" haunted by presence, if
unwilling to state that literature is deception. But is there no self-deception in Williams' recourse
to the Unicorn ?

460
and Nietzsche as t h e first thinkers of the post-modern movement. This influence, me­
diated b y Derrida a n d Foucault, will, in turn, permit us to value more the heirs of Wi­
lliams among the incredibly rich poetry of the sixties and seventies in the U n i t e d States,
a poetry of new spacing a n d aleatory combinations which extends from Charles Olson
t o Jackson MacLow across a wide range of textures and structures, all eventually in­
debted to Un Coup de dés a n d Le Livre.
Poet, patting more nonsense foamed
From the sea ( . . ) Take t h e place
Of parents, lewdest of ancestors.
We are conceived in your conceits.
Prelude to Objects

The death of metaphor coincides in the poetry of Wallace Stevens with t h e b i r t h of a

hero. This coincidence comes as no surprise if we keep in mind t h e post-symbolist act
of "decreation", Stevens' own phrase. A shift from maternal to heroic imagery takes
place a t the end of the Harmonium period, 1914-1931. 24 At the same time, as t h e moon is
eclipsed by the sun a n d t h e symbolic constellations of the hero, style changes from t h e
impressionist metaphors to t h e cubist/metonymies. The deconstruction of m y t h , princi­
pally in Sunday Morning leaves a blank in t h e place once held vicariously b y m a n in
the name of t h e father. As Michel Foucault p u t it, somewhat dramatically, t h e Nietz-
schean post-mortem does n o t so much proclaim the death of God as announce " t h e end

24
We shall adopt the following abbreviations for Stevens' works, all published by Alfred
Knopf: The Necessary Angel, Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1951): NA; Collected Poems
(1954): CP; Opus Posthumous (1957): OP. I n the following table, the abbreviations are titles of
books or sections of the Collected Poems: Harm: Harmonium; I of O: Ideas of Order; MBG: The
Man with the Blue Guitar; PoW: Parts of a World; TS: Transport to Summer; AA: Auroras of Autumn;
Rock: The Bock.
The displacement of moon imagery by the solar image operated not only on entire symbolic
constellations, but some words as well. Stevens' enigmatic coinage, Hoon, which I have long sus­
pected of resulting from the collapse of Moon (the M of mother unconsciously displaced by the
H of Hero) probably owes much to a desire to rid oneself of the maternal presence. A quick run-
through of the words mother, father, child and hero gives another perspective on the family tri­
angle: against our expectation after 1935 the hero, rather than the father, supplanted the mother,
and the parental myth underwent a period of latency until 1947, when Stevens published
Transport to Summer:

Harm I of O MBG PoW TS AA Rock

1931 1935 1937 r942 1947 1950 1954

Father 1 0 1 0 14 13 4
Mother 19 3 2 3 7 15 3
Child 8 6 2 4 19 9 4
Hero 2 3 2 4 7 2 2
Center 2 6 2 27 19 16 8

These numbers are only indicative of contrasts within Stevens' development in terms of
parental space. The initial mother-son duality, provisionally ended by t h e birth of a hero is replaced
by a new father-son duality accompanied by problematic obsession with centers.

461
of His murderer". 25 The death of the gods, in Stevens' telling analogy, left us "feeling
like children without parents". 26 All that is left, Foucault argued, is language, and its
comedy:
Natives of poverty, children of malheur
The joy of language is our seigneur.27

Language becomes our house, albeit a "prison-house" as Nietzsche called it, out of
which we break by invention: it was the only home for Stevens, "Who knew he was a
spirit without a foyer". "Little existed for him but the few things/For which a fresh
name always occurred. /These were that serene he had always been approaching/ As
toward an absolute loyer beyond romance".28 Several differences leap into view here,
although the critical language, hardly "poetry" any more, confirms the post-symbolist,
Mallarméan function of poetry. That at the end of his life Stevens still adhered to a
poetics of metaphors (a name substituted for another) and to a nostalgia of the center
(although decentered constantly) calls into question what we just wrote about the birth
of his hero and the death of metaphor. The positions of the symbolic figures to the
tropes remain ambiguous in his poetry, because the center is a language place and also
a marriage place. The development of his poetry is exemplary. It corrects the Norman
0. Brown definition of Symbolism as participation mystique and polymorphic perversity
by a thrust toward abstraction and a higher form of unity, but, like Mallarmé's Fiction,
it returned to the sexual mystery as to the only origin.
Sea Surface Full of Clouds will be the first test of this theory. Justly celebrated as a
tour de force of literary impressionism, it is, with its single frame repeated five times, a
beautiful metaphorical machine. The ocean is also a metaphorical machine. Further­
more, the poem is, like the ocean, a "perplexed machine" because it cannot decide
between the five sets of substitutions which it generates. The first set evolves meta­
phors of a Baudelairean paradise; its language moves as close to the maternal semiosis,
a pre-symbolic fusion of the senses, as the vocabulary of the painters, especially Monet,
can re-verberate without loss of meaning. A universal analogy flows from the sky to the
waterfloor, the reflections of the clouds becoming transformed into sea blooms. The
same correspondence fuses the images of the second stanza, only death now replaces
the paradisial connotation. In III the tense machine becomes a tranced machine: death
and ecstasy are one. Metaphor is participation mystique, oneness with the cosmos, un­
broken communication. Correspondances makes us believe in some anterior, interior
life of unity, calm pleasures, ocean swells lulling the images of heaven. I t is a child-
centered world, undivided, as yet unsplit between Father-sky and Mother-earth, a
cosmic and spiritual oneness which guarantees that one sense-impression can substitute
for another, one liquid for another, a sea-bloom for a sea-cloud, the lower for the higher,
the body for the spirit. Colors become states of mind, reflecting themselves like Narcis­
sus in the watery mirror. Stevens, in a later essay, claimed that this kind of cosmic

25
Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1966), p. 396.
26
27
OP, 207.
28
Esthétiens du mal, CP, p. 322.
Local Objects, OP, pp. 111-112.

462
Narcissism is a pleasure dispensed by Nature on her favorites, 29 a revelation of a trans­
figured self, itself, a revealing metaphor of maternal privilege. The mirror, however,
cuts the surface of t h e poem at an angle, because Stevens chose his echo to speak French.
Displacing English, pure metonymy interrupting pure metaphor, these five French
lines, one to each stanza, form a delayed poem within the poem:

C'était mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme.

C'était mon frère du ciel, ma vie, mon or.
Oh ! C'était mon extase et mon amour.
C'était ma foi, la nonchalance divine.
C'était mon esprit bâtard, l'ignominie. 30

In a microcosm of the parent poem—and indeed of the companion poems collected with
it in the 1931 edition of Harmonium, this metaphoric series a t first intimates perfect
oneness, specular unity on the two sides of a surface. Child, brother, lover, all one in
ontological peace. Then abruptly, the mirror cracks, the poet sees himself as clown,
bastard twin, a mixture. I n revulsion he ends the participation mystique, declaring t h e
whole light-show to be a conjuration, the sea a "cloud-conjuring sea", poetry a contriv­
ance rather t h a n a divine act. As in many Harmonium poems where death, mother,
and beauty correspond, sex intrudes (there are autobiographical motifs, inevitably, as
the Letters let on).
The next stylistic-symbolic change occurred in the 1936 edition of Ideas of Order,
limned b y t h e first of Stevens' parental farewells, this time to Florida and its maternal
substitutes: moon, woman, vegetation, summer, music and death recalling the in­
satiable venus libitina of O Florida Venereal Soil in which the sexual metaphor inverted
womb into tomb. Farewell to Florida inaugurated a new tension between paradigmatic
series at warring poles. To the demands of the terrible mother, Stevens opposed men in
mobs, leafless mud, wintry slime, violence and the energy of a ship, his vehicle of de-
symbolization not unlike Baudelaire's vessel plunging toward the new.
The swing from the metaphoric to the metonymic pole came in the first long poem
about the hero, written in 1937, The Man with the Blue Guitar. I n addition to the synec­
doches of broken surface, discontinuities justly compared to cubist designs, metonymy
is also thematic because the poem concerns itself with absence, desire and the rejection
of all symbols of plenitude. Roundness eludes Stevens, completeness escapes him. I t is a
poem of patches t h a t "cannot bring a world quite round" 3 1 a poem of deprivation,
refusing the consolations of metaphor, a suspended poem, hanging in the "universal
intercourse" with "earth feeling, sky t h a t thinks", without hope of ever acquiring t h a t
feeling, t h a t thinking, for poetry is sur-réflexion, consciousness of itself,

Poetry is the subject of t h e poem,

From this t h e poem issues and

29
80
Three Academic Pieces, NA, p. 80.
Sea Surface Full of Clouds, CP, pp.
99-102.
31
The Man with the Blue Guitar, CP, p. 165.

463
 To this returns. Between t h e two,
Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say. 32

No mother, for t h e earth is not the mother t h a t made death easeful,

B u t stone like stone, no: not

The mother but an oppressor 33

and while the s y n t a x dissolves the maternal myth, the metonymic machine also negates
the transcedence of the Father, affirming the son, the hero: This self, not t h a t gold self
aloft. 34 This is de-ontology, the ultimate displacement, Nietzschean more t h a n Emer­
sonian, as Riddel would point out, and I agree. Its language will verge on the kind
of aphasia which Jakobson listed among disorders of similarity. Watch for it in line
three of this pronunciamento:

Throw away the lights, the definitions,

And say of what you see in t h e dark

That it is this or t h a t it is that,

B u t do not use the rotted names. 3 5

Randall Jarrell complained t h a t Stevens had turned from Peter Quince into "G. E .
Moore a t the Spinet". 3 6 From a harmonium to a guitar, even blue, the change of instru­
ments made metaphorists wince wistfully.
Before writing the poem t h a t made him the central American modernist, his Notes
toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), Stevens still had to move from negativity to an affir­
mation of freedom. H e tried to alchemize a hero, purifying his masculine principle
while continuing the attack on the terrible mother (MacMort, the spider of ancestral
halls). The anima figure reappeared only in brief epiphanies throughout Parts of a
World, b u t the hero occupied the stage, as actor, a n d author of himself. Hence the
difficulty of his immaculate beginning: he is

A largeness lived and not conceived, a space

T h a t is ah instant nature, brilliantly. 37

If the mystery of immaculate conception reserved all t h e symbolic power of generation

for the father, as Freud demonstrated in Moses and Monotheism, t h e fact t h a t it was
symbolic meant t h a t the mother, though hidden away, retained the only real power,
32
33
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 173.
34
Ibid., p. 176.
35
36
Ibid., p. 183.
37
Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age, (New York, 1955), p. 131.
Chocorua to its Neighbor, CP, p. 301.

464
 genital and reproductive. 3 8 The attempt to create a hero in a non-parental space, in the
crystal retort of some " d a r k blue glass, or ice/Or air collected in a deep essay, / Or light
embodied", whose luminous flesh would be, qua philosophical stone, "both substance
and non-substance" 3 9 falls short, although repeated almost as often as the alchemist's
opus, because abstraction alone, purification alone, cannot produce the rotundum.
Any true alchemist knows t h a t a union of opposites is needed. The hero can receive his
re-birth, as homunculus, only through the hieros-gamos of the chymic wedding. Why
the alchemical language, so prevalent in Stevens after 1942? Because it institutes a
fictive double of the social power-pair (father as symbolic power, mother as pleasure
and genitality). The poet encompasses the reproductive process within himself as signif­
ying subject, unifying the opposite poles of abstraction and the pleasure principle,
maternal metaphor and paternal metonymy, the final androgynous principle trans­
gressing the rigid social order of separate productions and reproductions. Mallarmé
found this " h y m e n " a necessary fiction, as Derrida brilliantly and exactly described it:
the Book to him was stage, fold, weave, text, and object of sexual desire (hymn, hymen,
"milieu, pur, de fiction"). 40 He sexualized literature Kristeva contends, exploring the
bi-sexuality of the father in the "unpublishable" notes he wrote at the death of his son,
thus transgressing the bounds of the nineteenth century social family through his
theory of poetic creation. 41
The structure of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction moves from an attack on the
father metaphor (Phoebus) and a praise of masculine abstraction (rabbi, chieftain,
actor), to a hymn of the "suitable amours", for the sexual principle is the origin of
change, b u t inclusive of bi-sexuality ("my self, Sister and solace, brother and delight"), 4 2
and into a final reconciliation with the pleasure principle and its feminine symbol, " t h e
more than rational distortion, / The fiction t h a t results from feeling . . . my green, my
fluent mundo". 4 3 Its structure, therefore, accomplishes a "mystery", the Supreme
Fiction, which tentatively resembles a ritual sexual union: the disrobing of Nanzia
Nunzio, the bride never naked because a fictive weave covers her; the "mystic marriage"
of the great captain and the maiden Bawda whose marriage place, I agree again with
Riddel, cannot be any other place t h a n language. The poetry of earth, of "our earthly
birth", deontology, is also the poetry of the text (weave, sign), of the sexuality of the
t e x t (but not the textuality of sex: m y t h and veil are part of the mystery). Stevens
meets the Mallarméan deconstruction of parental space more t h a n half way: recognizing
the need for metaphor, the social role t h a t poetry can play as a double of societal
metonymies, he decentered the imagination b y a relentless demythologizing of language,
b u t in the name of change and compassion; when his friend Henry Church died, he let
the "more than rational distortion" create a "mythology of modern d e a t h " in lieu of
the established religious rites:

38
39
J. Kristeva, op. cit., p. 462.
40
Chocorua to its Neighbor, CP, p. 297.
41
J. Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris, 1972), p . 242.
42
J . Kristeva, op. cit., p . 462.
43
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, CP, p . 392.
Ibid., p . 406-407.

30 Balakian 465
 These are death's own supremest images,
The pure perfection of parental space,
The children of a desire that is the will,
Even of death, the beings of the mind . . . 44

Filiation is inversed: the mind is a child asleep among the creatures that it makes. The
parents to whom he said a last adieu in Auroras of Autumn (farewell to an idea) have
always been creatures of a child's mind, just as the only emperor always was the em
peror of ice-cream. At the origin was the self, but it took a lifetime to become one. Th(
process of individuation, its separation from the terrible mother, its heroic askesis anc
mythic re-coupling with the earth, ends in centroversion but not a center, not a "foyer"
(with Stevens' pun on the French meaning of a home). The playful poet pits Saint Johr
against a Back-Ache in a theological dialogue:

Saint John
The world is presence and not force.
Presence is not mind.
The Back-Ache
Presence is Kinder-Szenen45.

Such levity becomes the poet who has just vested himself with the power wrestec
from the symbolic parents and the mythic Parent. The decentering of presence implies
also the dis-seminating of the poet as father. Mallarmé's Theater, scribbled in the Book
staged two protagonists who functioned together in the Mystery of the hieros-gamos
the old priest (and death), the young worker (and procreation), almost a child.
Stevens' stage metaphor was quite as insistent as Mallarmé's and for the sam<
reason: it signified that literature is a fiction. But his actor shifted from the viril
young man of his fifties to the child asleep in the old man of his seventies. Ulysses
symbol of the seeker, spirit without a foyer, also strides the scene, in search of his anima
Penelope, but ultimately the self is a sibyl "whose jewel is found/At the exactest cente
of the earth / Is need"46 and who is "A child asleep in its own life".47 No center, surely
no maternal presence, but a child's dream "of mere being" comforts the old poet nea
death: it is a dream of presence but completely stripped from any logocentrism o
theocentrism. Metaphor desymbolizes and remains an enigma.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

44
45
The Owl in the Sarcophagus, CP, p. 436.
46
Saint John and the Back-Ache, CP, p. 436.
47
The Sail of Ulysses, OP, p. 104.
A Child Asleep in its Own Life, OP, p. 106.

466
 The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.48

Reality, wrote Stevens in his Adagia, is the ultimate value. And also this: "A poem is a
pheasant".49
Arrived at his "reality of decreation", Stevens shapes a dream object, no longer a
part of natùre. The oneness of the end is not the unity of the beginning. Perhaps, as
Roy Harvey Pearce suggested, the experience of the non-human and non-divine pres­
ence of the outer world was available in Spanish and French the whole time Stevens
was struggling with decentenng, but the struggle was necessary

48
49
Of Mere Being, OP, p. 117-118.
Adagia, OP, p. 168.

30*
 PART VI
THE SYMBOLIST IMPACT ON MUSIC
AND ART
 MARCEL SCHNEIDER

SYMBOLIST MUSIC

Does Symbolist music exist in the same way as Symbolist literature and painting?
The term doesn't yet have currency; it suffices to launch it. After Wagner and before
Stravinsky, between approximately 1885 and 1910, a small number of musicians
composed works which appeared to be somewhat related to each other and which
presented some Symbolist characteristics. In France, there was Debussy, Fauré,
Chausson, Satie in the period 1886-1895; elsewhere Schoenberg, and Berg and Webern,
in their earlier manner, as well as Strauss' Salomé, Bartók's In Bluebeard's Castle in a
limited sense, Delius, Sibelius and Scriabin. The name "symbolist" applies mainly to
French musicians, for it is in Paris that the Symbolist movement was born. An artist
such as Chausson, who counted among his friends Mallarmé, Régnier, Redon, Moreau
and Carrière, tried to bring the principles of Symbolism into the musical world. Both
his correspondence and his journal confirm our supposition. It is impossible to consider
purely instrumental music as Symbolist, except a symphony or a symphonic poem
which develops a subject or some themes, and which tends to produce different impres-
sions from those which "pure" music produces. Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra can be
classified in the Symbolist category, but not Roussel's symphonies. Lyrical dramas,
cantatas, melodies and lieder have even more evident affiliation with the Symbolist
world, for here it is the text which decides everything. Pelléas et Mélisande is a Sym-
bolist work, but not Janácek's Jenufa, although it was composed in 1902, the same year
Pelléas was first presented.
Verlaine had, of course, stated:

De la musique avant toute chose

Et pour cela préfère l'impair . . .

And Mallarmé, according to Valéry, "wanted to reconquer from music its own domain".
In these two cases music is taken in the sense that the poets gave to the term and not
in the musicians' sense. For Verlaine, "music" signified musicality, sweetness of har-
mony, rhythmic variety and tonal ambiguity. It did not signify that Verlaine wanted
to substitute the "sacred laws of music" for the "sacred laws of poetry". These two arts
can never exchange their various powers, as Debussy plainly said. For Mallarmé,
music was a total language with its own principles and rules, an end in itself, where one
could neither subtract nor add anything. How, then, in this instance, could he desire
to "take back from music its own domain ?" Music had not robbed poetry in any way:

471
the domain which they both possess, along with the other arts, this faculty to trans­
figure the world and to express the "secret" of the universe, is a common faculty of
Apollo and the Muses, as Pindar expresses it in his first Pythic Ode. By "music", Mal­
larmé meant incantatory magic. One must remember t h a t he dreamed of a poetic
verse t h a t would be just one word, never yet heard, a verse "which makes several
words into a new, total word, both foreign to the language and possessing incantatory
powers", as André Barre says in his thesis on Symbolism. Is Valéry's proposition to be
judged as bold, or was Mallarmé insincere when he set this goal? Valéry himself was
not far from believing t h a t Mallarmé wanted to mingle the principles and techniques
of poetry and music since, in an article in Variété, he declares t h a t Mallarmé aimed at a
magic formula, an all-powerful charm (carmen) of oracular and imprecatory poetry.
I n another essay in the same collection, Valéry shows t h a t Mallarmé's attitude did
not differ from the attitude of numerous other poets. Valéry recalls t h a t Mallarmé was
not very satisfied to see Claude Debussy write the musical score for his poem, L'Après-
midi d'un faune. H e felt, according to Valéry, t h a t his own music sufficed, and t h a t even
with the best intentions in the world, it was a veritable outrage against poetry to juxta­
pose it to music, beautiful as it might be. This recalls the famous injunction of Hugo:
" I t is forbidden to set my verses to music".
I n 1901, Debussy became the musical critic for La Revue Blanche, and later contrib­
uted to other reviews and newspapers. After his death his articles were collected and
published under the title Monsieur Croche antidilettante, which allows us an insight into
some of his opinions and tastes.
He especially emphasized the role of intuition in musical creation. "Music
is a mysterious mathematics whose elements participate in the Infinite. I t is respon­
sible for the movement of the waters, and for the play of the curves which describe
changing breezes: nothing is more musical than a sunset". Nothing can better define
La Mer or the three Nocturnes. H e adds: "For him who knows how to look with emotion,
the most beautiful lesson in this book, is about something not enough frequented by
musicians: Nature". This comes close to the famous aphorism: " I t is more useful to see
the sunrise than to hear the Symphonie pastorale". Debussy often referred to the primacy
of nature: "Music is a free art, surging forth, an art of the fresh air, an art in proportion
to the elements, the wind, the sky and the sea ( . . . ) Musicians alone have the privilege
of recording a complete poetry of day and night, of eartn and sky, so as to reconstitute
from it its own atmosphere and perceive the r h y t h m of its vast heartbeat". This is not
an impressionist imitation of what one sees before him a "sentimental transposition of
what is 'invisible' in nature. Does one render the mystery of a forest by measuring t h e
height of the trees ? Is it not rather its unfathomable depth which sets the imagination
into motion?" Debussy noted in 1913. H e had to fend off both ill-willed critics and his
faithful friends who wanted to circumscribe Debussy's work in a doctrine, though it was
based upon the unique principle t h a t it did not have a doctrine. These were the people
who wanted to found 'Debussyism', in correlation, they thought, with the Impressionist
movement. They, however, were only occupied with the visible universe; Debussy saw
beyond that. He attempted to attain " t h a t which is invisible in n a t u r e " , as he so well
said. From this statement arose the misunderstanding. I n 1905, La Mer aroused the

472
same misunderstandings t h a t Pelléas had earlier provoked. The public was expecting
torrents of music, a new Flying Dutchman and, as Pierre Lalo so wittily wrote, the pro­
duction was so calm t h a t "it was only like the pond in the Luxemburg Gardens".
Debussy, in fact, did not want to describe the spectacle of the sea, nor even the feeling
that one has in front of the ocean; he wanted to become the sea itself and not to lend it
his voice. His music describes nothing; it only suggests a world inside man.
Pelléas was the French, or rather Celtic, Tristan and Isolde. Debussy considered
that Wagner had annexed the legendary material of Brittany to the saga material of the
North, and in so doing, had made it excessively German. H e wanted to take u p the
subject again and treat it from Iseut's point of view. I t would be about Mélisande,
viewed as a small animal, both instinctive and fearing, mysterious and simple, a Mélis­
ande who is " h a p p y yet s a d " and who dies because she was not able to accommodate
herself to this low world. Maeterlinck's drama of Mélisande takes place in the kingdom
by the sea, in legendary Cornwall: mysterious forests, somber castles, miraculous
fountains, subterranean grottos, and craggy rocks all evoke the Celtic world. The
Romances of King Arthur, Marie de France's lays and the Breton legends find their
fulfillment in Debussy's music. This music has succeeded in achieving what Chausson,
Chabrier and Vincent d'Indy had attempted with various degrees of success, as well as
what Elgar, Delius and finally Benjamin Britten would pursue in t u r n after him.
Debussy's esthetics is not Impressionist b u t Symbolist: his favorite painters were
not Monet or Renoir, b u t Moreau and Redon; his favorite poets were the high priests of
Symbolism: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Maeterlinck, Laforgue, Edgar Allan Poe,
D'Annunzio. Symbolism aimedat transcending the appearance of things and suggesting
the invisible and the eternal by means of symbols. Pelléas, like La Mer or the three
Nocturnes, gives one impetus to dream in the way t h a t Debussy-like melodies, coming
from romances and courtly airs, extend beyond words and long resound in t h e sub­
conscious.
Debussy remains in the musical heavens a great solitary star; on account of his
horror for doctrines and systems, he never sought to form a "Symbolist school" of
music. One can, nevertheless, when reconsidering his work, find in it the major tenden­
cies of the Symbolist movement: the ineffable, the mysterious, the dream world, along
with all of the most highly considered and rare states of "refined sensibility", a desire
for transcendence, a diffuse mysticism and to a lesser degree the sense of the religious
and the holy, although Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien (1911) transcends the religious
sentiments of a mere esthete in order to attain in its chromatic complaint of the women
of Byblos for the funeral of Adonis, and in the ethereal lied of the Virgin Erigone the
profound sentiments of the Mystery religions of antiquity.
In the French, German and Austrian Symbolist circles the fervor for Wagner was
almost obligatory, as musicians could not escape an influence which the poets proclaimed
with such convincing arguments. Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss never liberated
themselves from Wagner's influence, and Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Webern sub­
mitted themselves to it as did the others. This can be seen in the Gurre Lieder of Schoen­
berg, in Berg's Sonate pour piano op. 1 and also in Webern's Mélodies op. 3 & 4 com­
posed from poems of Stefan George. The study of Debussy's situation demands more

473
precision and more nuances, for he is usually considered as the one who denounced
with the greatest vehemence Wagner's all-powerful position. Debussy, in fact, never
escaped from his fascination with Wagner and passionately admired the "old magus of
the n o r t h " t o the point of declaring, near the end of his life, t h a t he was his preferred
musician. If he decided, however, to submit himself more to the infuence of Mussorgsky
t h a n to t h a t of Wagner it is because he detected the danger, for an artist, of remaining
in the wake of an artist he venerated: " I will disavow Wagner because I love him".
H e did, nevertheless, remain faithful to him in essence: he applied in France t h e postu­
lates and esthetic approaches of Wagner. Debussy declared t h a t "To believe t h a t the
particular qualities of one race are transmissible to another race without loss is an error
which has warped our music rather often". In so doing, Debussy did for French music
what Wagner did for German music. Wagner brought back Bach and Beethoven;
Debussy sought to retrieve the connection and affiliation with Couperin and Rameau,
in order to follow Wagner's principles at the same time as he opposed Wagner's in­
fluence.
The Wagnerian influence, the Mallarméan notion of suggestion, the lessons t h a t
can be extracted from Debussy's work and diffuse mysticism founded more on spiritual
and esthetic intuitions than on religious dogma contribute towards forming what we
can call "Symbolist Music". Michel Décaudin divided the Symbolist writers into three
groups: poets of the soul, poets of free verse and theoreticians of language. We could
organize the musicians as well into three classes: musicians of the soul, champions of
free music and researchers, and theoreticians of a new language.
I n the first group we find musicians of the soul such as Duparc, Chausson, Fauré,
Elgar, Delius and Sibelius, corresponding to the elegiac poets Samain, Mikhaël and
Van Lerberghe. To Gustave K a h n and Francis Vielé-Griffin one can compare Erik
Satie, and for the theoreticians of language, Debussy, Schoenberg and Scriabin, as well
as two works between the frontiers of Symbolism and Decadence: Salomé and Elektra
of Richard Strauss.

I. MUSICIANS OF THE SOUL

César Franck's meditative and "sensitive" idealist disciples would a t t e m p t to

discover the Symbolist esthetic. Two of them are directly attached to the Symbolist
movement b y their works and by the friendships they established in this very closed
society: Henri Duparc and Ernest Chausson.
Duparc (1848-1933) had to retire very quickly from musical Jife on account of a
nervous illness, b u t before retiring he had the time t o compose fourteen melodies which
have kept his name alive. His symphonic poem Lénore, based on the famous ballad of
Bürger, evokes the dramatic movement (in music) of Liszt and t h e passionate chromat-
ism of Tristan, while the choice of poems which he p u t to music shows his taste: L'In-
vitation au voyage and La Vie antérieure of Baudelaire, Extase and Chanson triste of
J e a n Lahor and Robert de Bonnières' Le Manoir de Rosemonde, H e had to stop com­
posing in 1885 and remained silent until his death in 1933 principally because of blind-

474
ness. Ohausson's career was also prematurely interrupted: he was killed in 1899 at the
age of 44 in an accident. Along with Gabriel Fauré he represents in Symbolist music
the connecting link between Franck and Debussy.
Like Schumann, Chausson hesitated between literature, painting and music
during his adolescence. Born of an opulent bourgeois family, he led a "delicate" and
distinguished life, gathering Mallarmé, Henri de Régnier, Fantin-Latour, Degas and
Odilon Redon around him. Eugène Carrière, the most excellent painter of Symbolist
chiaroscuro, left a famous painting of Chausson and his family. At a time when Wagner
reigned and when there seemed to be no way for a composer to gain praise outside lyr­
ical drama, Chausson attempted to give new life to the symphony and to chamber
music. Debussy was severely critical of Chausson's Symphonie en si bémol, op. 20; in it
he found the Flemish heaviness of Franck.
First he set to music Serres chaudes, the poems of Maeterlinck, so simple in ap­
pearance, yet so subtle in reality. Then followed Viviane, a symphonic poem composed
in 1882. At that time the romances of the Round Table were very fashionable in Sym­
bolist circles. Chausson put into music the enchanted sleep of Merlin as he succumbed
to the witchcraft of Viviane, who surrounded him with an inescapable prison of air.
The Poème de l'amour et de la mer, based on Maurice Bouchor's text, shows affinities
with the Brittany of Gauguin and Sérusier. Chanson perpétuelle, based on a poem of
Charles Cros, is dated December 17, 1898, just a few months before the composer's
death. Here Chausson was able to find a troubled and pure melody which would ex­
press the disorder of the grief-stricken lover:

Bois frissonnants, ciel étoilé,

Mon bien-aimé s'en est allé
Emportant mon cœur désolé.
Vents, que vos plaintives rumeurs,
Que vos chants, rossignols charmeurs,
Aillent lui dire que je meurs!

Chanson perpétuelle is a priceless testimony to what the union of a poet and a musician
in the Parisian Symbolist world could be. His Concert en ré majeur op.21 for piano,
violin and string quartet translates his personal anguish. Chausson's work is impreg­
nated with a disturbed melancholy, an exasperated sadness so very typical of the end
of the nineteenth century. Affluent though plagued by illness, he expressed disqui­
etudes and an intimation of death in his music. He registered this confession in his
Journal, February 7, 1892: " I have piety without having faith . . . this is indeed my
state in life. An affirmation of the unknown, a cry towards the unnamed. Will it al­
ways be like this ? ( . . . ) A battle, a battle forever. Cry out to this unknown God in
whom you believe. The true faith can only come from above. If you were more pure,
perhaps you would already possess it".
Jan Sibelius, famous in Scandinavia and in the Anglo-Saxon countries, unites, in
his music, his veneration for Debussy and Wagner. Following Debussy's lesson, he

475
only listened t o " t h e advice of the wind t h a t passes, telling us the history of the world".
This comes true in a symphonic poem like Finlandia (1899) which sums up this declara­
tion of the composer: " I love the mysterious winds of the fields and the forests, the
water and mountains". Like Wagner, he preferred legend to history and m y t h to
legend. Kalevala, t h e famous Finnish epic, served him as an inexhaustible subject for
meditation, occupying as large a place in his life and work as the Nibelungen in Wagner's.
The Kalevala inspired Sibelius to write seven symphonic poems, of which The Swan of
Tuonela (1893) and Tapiola (1925) are the most accomplished. Tuonela is the island of
Avalon, the kingdom of the dead in Finnish mythology. I t is on the somber waves t h a t
surround this Ultima Thule—as somber as the famous Isle of the Dead of the painter
Arnold Böcklin—-where the swan of Sibelius, symbolized by a beautiful melody of the
English horn, sails. Tapiola is the domain of the king of the forests, Tapio.
Although Debussy's Pelléas eclipsed the other works inspired by the same subject,
there are, however, two works, from illustrious composers, which need mention: the
orchestral suite of Fauré (1898) and Schoenberg's symphonic poem for full orchestra
(1902-1903).
Fauré's suite preceded the presentation of Debussy's opera. Fauré was asked t o
compose, for the representation of Maeterlinck's drama at the theater of the Prince of
Wales in London, musical fragments composed of diverse pieces and interludes destined
to keep the public interested during the change of scenery. From these varied pieces,
Fauré kept four parts which he arranged into an orchestral suite. These four pieces are:
Prélude, Fileuse, Sicilienne and Mort de Mélisande. The molto adagio ending, the sum­
mit of the score, victoriously bears comparing with the death scene of Mélisande in
Debussy. The points of comparison are to be found in a similarly poignant depiction of
humanity, a similar intensity of emotion in the main character, and the same studied
simplicity. The enigmatic character of the young lady, as Maeterlinck indeed wanted
it, the sorrowful force of resignation and moreover the despair which takes hold of t h e
dying girl are truly and profoundly expressed in Fauré's molto adagio.
If Bartók borrowed nothing musically from Dukas' Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, the same
is not true of Béla Balázs, author of the libretto for Château de Barbe-Bleue; the H u n ­
garian poet, who underwent the influence of the French and German Symbolists, owes
much to Maeterlinck. Although he reduced the number of imprisoned (but not assas­
sinated) wives from seven to four, he revived the theme of the last wife who a t t e m p t s
to liberate her sisters and bring new light into the darkness. Bartok profited from De­
bussy's modal harmony and from the dramatic style adopted by Strauss in Salomé a n d
Elektra: the action is presented in one act lasting approximately one hour (an hour in
which the tension becomes almost intolerable), with very few persons on the stage:
here we have a bass, the Duke Blue Beard and his last wife, a mezzosoprano, whose
name, Judith, evokes the m y t h of Holofernes. This is an opera with no action other t h a n
the movements of the soul and of passion, no other decor t h a n a Gothic room which
suggests a closed world, an ivory tower of lovers and poets. The real characters in Bar-
tók's Château de Barbe-Bleue are night, blood, tears, silence and death. While t h e music
is influenced by Debussy, it is more violent, more somber and almost percussive, ex­
pressing with flamboyant intensity t h e Symbolist character of this descent into t h e

476
servitude of love a n d of erotic and sexual slavery. Le Château de Barbe-Bleue (1911-12),
turned down b y a j u r y of musicians, had to wait many years before being presented in
public. Disheartened, B a r t o k wrote no other opera.
Fauré's Requiem op.48 (1887) dissociates itself from the well-trodden paths b y its
intimate and meditative character. I t is a lullaby of death, an "intimate liturgy" in
the style of Verlaine. Fauré's Requiem, more like chamber music t h a n like church music,
aims neither at t h e symphonic brilliance of Mozart's Requiem, nor at the theatrical
and dramatic power of Verdi's Requiem. I t is an interiorized and confessional work
which gives an impression of melancholic fervor and pure emotion. I t expresses neither
terror of death nor fear of t h e Last Judgement; furthermore, this work contains neither
the Dies Irae nor the terrifying trumpet of other versions of the Requiem. B y its
aspiration to death and t o a beatific vision, b y its tenderness and its mystery, Fauré's
Requiem is directly connected to the Symbolist esthetic. Its long melodies and its
changing harmonies, so knowingly modulated, give its poetic language a vaporous,
subtle and slightly sublimated quality which can be associated with poets such as
Verlaine, Vielé-Griffin, a n d Charles Van Lerberghe. I t is not b y chance t h a t F a u r é
put to music poems of t h e first, and the Chanson d'Eve of the last.
I n adapting the legend of Salomé, much in the foreground of Symbolist writings,
to musical composition, Richard Strauss reduced the coldness and perversity of Salomé;
b y virtue of his music, so strikingly colorful and full of passionate passages, he brought
her closer to humanity, more touching and more banal in her monstrosity. She became
a sort of holy animal, a tigress who was prisoner at the court and h a d not yet lost her
pride, her free gait and her nostalgia for the desert. On the other hand, she accentuated
the bestial aspect of those who represented the Old Regime, the world doomed to de­
struction: Herod is a swine exuding lechery and Herodias is a déclassée bitch, perpetually
in heat. Opposite them is Jokanaan, the holy, the pure, who announces the future,
revolution and life, and who is himself a promise of renewal. Whether we look at the
fated couple or the prophet, we consider, alternately, vice and virtue. Initially the
work had created a scandal; yet in fact, it gives food for very serious moral reflection.
An instinctive and unconscious Salomé, somewhere between vice a n d virtue is led b y
forces which overpower her and lead her to her destruction: she incarnates eternal
Desire which brings ruin when it is sublimated.
However, neither Richard Strauss' musical symbolism nor the extraordinary dra­
matic movement with which he animates this one-act opera, with its striking develop­
ment of action, makes the moral significance evident: it seems t h a t the forces of evil
carry her away and t h a t vice triumphs, although Salomé is finally executed b y orders
of a terrified Herod. P u t t i n g it to music does not render banal this difficult and almost
intolerable subject. Thanks to the innate qualities of music to express t h e inexpressible,
it exposes t h a t which Wilde's text relegated into the background, t h e mystery. of love
and death.
Elektra, the vehement and strange drama dreamed u p b y Hofmannsthal, was p u t
to music b y Strauss and first presented in 1909. I t has always been a very controversial
work and never obtained the audience or the success of Salomé. There are, nevertheless
many resemblances between its characters and subject and those of Salomé, although

477
their esthetics differ. Strauss' score, tense and breathless, is animated by a crescendo
which ends with the work itself. It obliges the conductor—and the public — to engage in
an exhausting hand-to-hand struggle. Clytemnestra's long scene, the most original and
most inspired part of this non-uninterrupted drama, shows us Richard Strauss venturing
out to the limits of tonality. The goal of Wagner and the Symbolist musicians had al­
ways been to enrich and complicate harmony by chromaticism, never to have a fixed
tonality, but to group harmonies which would establish by themselves their own to­
nality. To destroy the tonal system and replace it with the twelve-tone system and the
serial method is to break away from the Symbolist ideal and to desire to create a new
order, a new Classicism based on totally different assumptions. Symbolist music
couldn't accept this development.

II. FREE MUSIC

Although he transformed ritardando or più mosso into "du bout des yeux" and
"un peu saignant", Erik Satie, essentially known as a humorist, had a serious side
when he said: "Without music, men have always seemed incomplete to me". Having
decided, like Descartes, to go through life wearing a mask, larvatus prodeo, he accumu­
lated all sorts of misunderstandings about his own character. He put up a number of
foolish obstacles between himself and the public in order to protect his real personality,
only showing its most baffling aspects to the public. To be worthy of his friendship, one
had to accept this enigma without asking him any questions.
From the very first, he affirms a language which owes nothing to Chopin or to
Schumann. The four pieces of Ogives date from 1886, when Satie was only twenty years
old. They preceed Sarabandes, Gnossiennes and the famous Gymnopédies. They are
written without key signature or measures, and beneath their apparent simplicity
they represent the very refined essentials. Ogives, composed of repetitions with subtle
alterations, fulfills the linear technique and is in the "white and mystical" modal style
which Debussy admired. The nine pieces of Danses gothiques, all with a very slow tempo
and also without time signature, date from 1893. They constitute a "novena for the
greater 3alm and stronger tranquility of my soul" put to music from the invocation of
Saint Benedict. There are also the Pages mystiques, recently found again by Robert
Caby and published in 1969. During those years, Satie underwent the influence of the
Symbolist writers. This influence was decisive between 1890-1895, when he became the
official musician of the brotherhood founded by the one who himself named Sâr Mero-
dack or Sâr Péladan, Joséphin Péladan.
For the Brotherhood of the Rose + Croix, Erik Satie wrote the "Air of the Order",
"The Air of the Great Prior" (Antoine de la Rochefoucauld), and the "Air for the Grand
Master" (Sâr Péladan), much in the style of medieval sonneries (or bell-ringings).
These works were not to be executed outside reunions of the order, without the permis­
sion of the Grand Master—in the same way that Parsifal wasn't to be given outside the
Festival of Bayreuth. These three sonneries, in a very severe and majestic style, were
printed in red with a sketch by Puvis de Chavannes.

478
 Satie also composed three preludes for harp and flute to accompany Sâr Péladan's
Le Fils des Etoiles, Wagnérie kaldéenne. This piece was presented on March 17,1892, at
the Durand-Ruel gallery during the Rose+Coix evening meetings. The reception of
this piece was frigid—a total failure. In spite of the Wagnerism placed in Sâr Péladan's
title, Satie's music showed no Wagnerian influence, but rather the influence of plainsong
and of modal writing. Satie relied on the Symbolist esthetic which he saw as both de­
corative, static, transparent and pure white to the point of incandescence. The musical
language he used was stripped almost bare, concentrated, colorless. This is why Debussy
addressed to him the following dedication at the beginning of his Cinq poèmes de Charles
Baudelaire: "For Erik Satie, sweet and medieval musician, led astray in this century,
thankfully from his friend Claude Debussy, October 27, 1892".
Satie dedicated to himself the Prélude à la Porte héroïque du Ciel, which he composed
for an esoteric drama of 1894 by Jules Bois. The harmonic writing in this piece is very
personal, and as such, completely new for this era. Satie used irregular progressions in
this piece and chords which remind one of Guillaume de Machaut. In it he attained a
timeless music, an almost "white" music, immobile, presumably simulating dream
music.
He moved away from the Rose + Croix to establish, on his own, a new brotherhood
and was now able to excommunicate all those who contributed to the esthetic and
moral decadence of the era, such as Lugné-Poe, Laurent Tailhade, Alfred Valette and
most of all, Henry Gauthier-Villars, or Willy, who had just married the young Colette
and who signed articles of music criticism, at that time, under the name of Œuvreuse du
Cirque d'Été. This brotherhood was called the Eglise métropolitaine de Jésus Conducteur
and was formed at the time that Satie was living in Montmartre on rue Cortot.
This is where Satie composed his Messe des pauvres in 1895, the last work that one
can attach to his Symbolist period, the period during which Antoine de la Rochefou­
cauld, as well as Georges de Feure, both known in the same circles, painted his portrait.

III. THEORETICIANS OF A MUSICAL LANGUAGE

The Schoenberg of serial music existed, in seed form, in the Symbolist period—that
is, on the musical, Wagnerian and atonal planes—as a composer, while the personal
drama of the artist, by his own admission, consisted in "trying to make something
totally conventional, and failing. It was always against my will and the result became
always something obsolete". To invoke irresistible and irrational forces as well as the
all-powerful force of mystery and instinct is a way of relating directly to one of the
major paths of Symbolism. Even if we consider that Schoenberg put a bit of malice in
his declaration, this declaration is no less revelatory of a constant state of mind. Schoen­
berg seems to have wanted to deromanticize music and dispel its magical essence by
human reason: it we are to believe the declarations that he made, he would, under no
circumstances, be the creator of an intellectual system and an arbitrary formalism, but
ráther a sort of medium who transmitted obscure forces. Accordingly, we would still
be on the Symbolist path. Let us remember that he wrote in his Harmony. "The laws
of a man of genius are the laws of future humanity".

479
 Scriabin is much closer to the Theosophical movement t h a n to Symbolist research;
moreover, he never frequented the circles of the poets Valeri Bryusov, Alexandr Blok
or Gumilev. Nevertheless, Stravinsky, in Souvenirs et commentaires, declares: "Scria-
bin had a literary bent. He was crazy about Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Huysmans, and all
the 'decadent' group. This was in the Symbolist era and, in Russia, the gods of this
epoch were Scriabin and Constantin Bal,mont". Is this not, however, a confusion of
Symbolism and Decadence ? Scriabin was the first in Russia and one of the first in the
world to a t t e m p t t o blow up the tempered tonal system and to create new harmonies.
His inventive genius made him desire an enlarged and synthetic conception of musical
creation. H e went from a writing technique and a language which he had inherited
from Chopin and Liszt to a very personal atonalism which, in his own mind, went back
to the Theosophical doctrine. The musician Henry Barraud summarizes Scriabin's method
by stating t h a t it consists in the staggering of fourths: "His chord of six or seven notes,
arranged b y fourths, corresponding to modal scales of the same number of sounds,
makes one hear all the notes of these scales. From here, the name of synthetic chords or
variation of a fifth is banished. This is atonalism before it officially existed".
The Poème de l'extase op.54 (1908) presents a very sensual and sexual aspect which
would be evident even if the musician had not explained it in a long commentary whose
overcharged style, strained irritability and images bring Swinburne's Laus Veneris back
to mind. The single theme is expressed by ascending fourths and ends u p in a visionary
explosion, a sort of "cosmic orgasm" which announces psychedelic art.
Proméihée, Poeme du feu, with choir, piano and luminous organ (1911), was not
only an example of synthetic art for Scriabin (with the keyboard projecting on a screen
colors which varied according to the harmonic changes), b u t also a sort of "auto-
sacramental" ceremony where Catholicism gave up its place to Theosophy in order to
assure acceptance. Scriabin had become a sort of prophet of future humanity. B u t this
" m y s t e r y " in which the composer planned to give a place to the interpreters as well as
to the public, and which, without a doubt, foresaw stereophonic effects, was never
executed.
The Cinquième sonate pour piano op.53, written in one unique movement, develops,
like a poem, a poem of the soul, having neither beginning nor end, a fragment taken
from universal music. Here is Scriabin's epigraph which sums it u p :

J e vous appelle à la vie, forces mystérieuses !

Noyées dans les obscures profondeurs
De l'esprit créateur, craintives
Ebauches de vie, à vous j ' a p p o r t e l'audace !

Here is clear evidence t h a t the technique of this musician relates to t h a t of the Sym­
bolists who wanted to give a voice to obscure forces and to express the original
mystery.
I t is a notable fact t h a t there is a lapse of twenty or fifty years between research in
music and research in the other arts: Berlioz, who proudly announced " I am Attila
who has just ravaged European music", composed his Symphonie fantastique some

480
fifty years after the frenetic dramas of the German writers of the Sturm und Drang
period; Debussy was twenty years younger than Mallarmé, and Schoenberg's theory of
serialized music came twenty years after the experiments of the Fauves and the Ex­
pressionists. The reason for this phenomenon may be that the processes of musical
expression are at once more simple and more rigid, and cannot develop as rapidly as
those of the other arts.
Translated from the French by Edouard Roditi.

II Balakian 481
 ELAINE BRODY

MUSICAL SETTINGS OF SYMBOLIST POEMS

One of the least treated aspects of the interrelationship of music and Symbolist poetry is
the precise technique of wedding music to these poetic texts. 1 W h a t I propose to do here
is to look at the peculiarities of the musical settings of Symbolist poems: their origin,
and their relationship t o their German counterpart, the Lied) their melody, harmony,
accompaniment, text underlay or scansion (the manner of setting individual notes t o
syllables); text reflection (the manner in which particular words are highlighted also in
the music); and ultimately, the form and style of numerous well-known examples of
the genre. Chausson, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Satie and Séverac are among the more
celebrated composers who set Symbolist texts to music. J a n e Bathori became the pio­
neer interpreter of almost all of these songs, many of which demanded a far different
vocal technique from t h a t traditionally in use. Ricardo Vines was among the first
pianists to accompany singers of these mélodies, and he, too, had specific ideas with
regard to their performance. Indeed, he was so totally involved with Symbolism and
the Symbolist movement t h a t the names of Rodenbach, Huysmans, Gustavus Adolphus
Becquer, Léon Bloy, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, and Poe appear just as fre­
quently in his unpublished journal as do those of Debussy, Ravel, Séverac, Albéniz and
de Falla, many of whose works he presented in first performances.
Berlioz was one of the first composers to use the term mélodie to describe a short
vocal piece. 2 The Lieder of Schubert were introduced into France at about this time
(1830s), and they, too, were called mélodies, the French generally avoiding the adoption
of the German term Lied. Essentially, the mélodies were different from earlier French
songs in which the melodic line or tune was the most significant element of the piece.
Those songs were called romances or chansonettes and their most endearing qualities
were their tunefulness and accessibility. The more sophisticated mélodie, with its com­
bination of rhythmic flexibility, melodic subtlety, harmonic richness, and complex
accompaniment, held out far less promise to the amateur, b u t attracted instead the
professional singer and the more serious music lover. Because poets had begun to aban-

1
One of the few analytical discussions of Debussy's songs appears in John Trevitt, "Debussy
inconnu: An Inquiry into the Earlier Vocal Music", in Musical Times, CXIV (1973), pp. 881-886.
Another good commentary on Debussy's musical style may be found in Nicolas Ruwet, Langage,
Musique, Poésie (Paris, 1972).
2
David Cox, "France", in The History of Song, ed. Denis Stevens, rev. ed. (New York, 1970),
p. 201; Edward Lockspeiser "French Song in the 19th Century", in The Musical Quarterly, X X V I
(1940), p. 192, suggests that Saint-Saens was one of the first composers to use the term as part of
the title in his Melodies Persanes (1870).

31* 483
don stereotyped phrase lengths and couplets, composers could permit themselves greater
freedom of melodic structure. 3
The renaissance of French music, indeed the French " Re vi val", emerged almost
concurrently with the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Actually, the first meeting of
Saint-Saëns and Bussine, organizers of the Société Nationale de Musique, occurred
before the conclusion of the war. French musicians, determined to free themselves of
the yoke of German influence, looked around to find the best means of achieving their
goal. 4 Some among them never broke away. They just continued to imitate Wagner.
Others took Catulle Mendès's advice, assimilated Wagner's ideas, and applied them to
French music. I n other words, they began to look into their own musical and mytholog­
ical past in order t o do for French music what Wagner had done for German music. 5
I t was, however, only after the French had accepted themselves t h a t they could begin
to write in a new and different style.
Owing to the generally poor financial situation at t h a t time, the attention of French
composers was directed away from the grand and glorious spectacle of opera and to­
ward the more intimate domain of chamber works, pieces t h a t could easily be performed
without the panoply and panache of the theater or large concert hall. U p to this time,
most short vocal pieces (romances), had been written in the shadow of the theater or
music hall. "The mélodie had to be liberated from the domination of the theater before
a true poem for voice and piano could develop". 6 As a result of the enrichment of French
instrumental music by composers such as Saint-Saëns, Lalo, and Franck, the mélodie,
with its greater emphasis on piano accompaniment and heightened concentration on
text underlay, could finally surface.
J u s t as Schubert and Schumann could not have embarked on the composition of
their magnificent Lieder had not Goethe and Heine first produced an abundance of
lyrical poems which provided their inspiration, so the remarkable efflorescence of the
French mélodies could only occur in the aftermath of the creation of the poetry of such
writers as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. As always, the words had to come first.
The French music and poetry of this epoch are so closely related t h a t Georges
Jean-Aubry was perfectly justified in claiming t h a t "it is impossible today to have
accurate views on the evolution of French music in the last quarter of a century if one
is not sufficiently informed of the evolution of French literature in t h a t same period.
They hold together more closely than ever, and they can only have profited from their
union". 7 While symphonic poems and program music were penetrating musical com­
position, poets disjoined romantic alexandrines and brought "into existence a free
verse t h a t in the hands of a de Régnier, a Gustave K a h n , aVielé-Griffin, a V e r h a e r e n . . .
acquired a diversity of inflection and revealed unsuspected qualities". 8 Verlaine, trying
3
David Cox, "France", in The History of Song, p . 201.
4
Romain Rolland, Musicians of Today (New York, 1915). See particularly the chapter entitled
"The Awakening", p ^ . 246-324.
5
Elaine Brody, "La Famille Mendès: A Literary Link between Wagner and Debussy", Music
Review
6
X X X I I I (1972), pp, 177-189.
7
Frits Noske, French Song from Berlioz to Duparc, second edition, (New York, 1970), p . 219.
8
Georges Jean-Aubry, French Music of Today (London, 1920), p . 206.
Ibid., p. 205. Suzanne Bernard, in Mallarmé et la Musique (Paris, 1959), p . 11, says: "C'est
sous le signe de la musique, en effet, que les poètes Symbolistes vont combattre pour libérer la

484
to render French verse more supple, to highlight its lyrical elements, and to rescue
poetry from rhetoric, found his counterpart in Fauré, Duparc, and Debussy, 9 who
paralleled this poetic technique with unusual accompaniments, unexpected chordal
progressions and new sources of melodic inspiration—from old church modes to the
pentatonic and eastern scales—in their musical compositions.
Because of the significance of language to French composers, musical accentuation
generally follows textual accentuation; musical cadences parallel the textual ones; the
musical phrase reflects t h e textual phrase with caesuras indicated by rests. One of the
formidable problems of word settings in the French language, however, relates to t h e
differing accents. For example, musical accent normally occurs on the last sounded
syllable of a French word. Cox shows us t h a t in the phrase bois jolis the accent would
ordinarily fall on the second syllable of jolis, but in the phrase jolis bois, the first syl­
lable should receive the accent. Why? Tradition, perhaps, b u t even the French cannot
offer a logical reason. 10
E v e n a very selective list of French composers who set the works of the French
Symbolist poets would include—besides the three mentioned above—Chausson,
Dupont, Ravel, Séverac, Koechlin, Hahn, Roussel, Sauguet, Ibert, and there was also
the Swiss Honegger. The poets whose works inspired them include Baudelaire, Heredia,
Laforgue, Leconte de Lisle, Maeterlinck, Mallarmé, Moréas, Régnier, Rimbaud, Samain,
Verhaeren, Verlaine, and Villiers de TIsle-Adam. Verlaine inspired the most settings. 1 1
B u t musical settings of Symbolist poems are not confined to French composers alone.
Turina set poems by Gustavus Adolphus Becquer; Schoenberg set the poems of the
German Symbolists Rilke, Dehmel, and Stefan George, and he also wrote a symphonic
poem, Pelléas et Mélisande, after Maeterlinck. Rilke and George inspired all three Vien­
nese Expressionist composers—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—as well as Mahler;
and Rilke proved attractive also to Hindemith and the French composer Henri Sauguet.
One of the few instances of a Baudelaire poem set in translation is Berg's concert aria
Der Wein, set to a George translation of three poems b y Baudelaire. I t is indeed unusual
for a French Symbolist poem to be set in translation; 1 2 it is equally rare for a German
composer to set one in the original. 13

forme poétique du joug de la versification classique et chercher les formes plus souples, plus fluides,
et des 9harmonies neuves".
10
Georges Jean-Aubry, op. cit., pp. 205, 206.
David Cox, "France" in The History of Song, p. 204. Foreigners setting a French text (see,
for example, Benjamin Britten's Les Illuminations of Rimbaud) are often guilty of grievous errors
in text underlay.
11
Edward Lockspeiser, "French Song in the 19th Century", The Musical Ouarterly, op. cit.,
p. 196, points out t h a t despite the popularity of his poetry among composers, Verlaine did not
know Debussy and Fauré, nor had he ever heard their songs. He was friendly only with Chabrier.
12
For a stimulating discussion of the problems of translation in general, see John Weightman,
"Considerations on the ^.rt of Translation", Réalité, No. 258 (May, 1972), pp. 58-61.
13
On the other hand, the poems of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, a favorite of the
French Symbolists, were set in translation by many composers, particularly French musicians like
Caplet, Debussy, Séverac, and Inghelbrecht, as well as the Russian Miaskovsky and the German
Franz Schreker. Se^May Garrettson Evans, Music and Edgar Allan Poe : A Bibliographical Study
(Baltimore and Oxford, 1939), and Burton R. Pollin, "More Music to Poe", Music and Letters, IV.
(1973), pp. 391-404.

485
 Remarkably enough, Maeterlinck's Pellêas et Mêlisande, although set only once as
an opera, by Debussy, the Frenchman most eminently suited to the task, was also pro­
vided with incidental music, and proved the inspiration of symphonic music 14 b y
Schoenberg 15 as well as by Fauré and Sibelius.
Composers rarely discuss the reasons for their choice of a particular poem over
some others t h a t they have rejected. 16 B u t their reasons are often as diverse as the poems
themselves. Sometimes an unknown composer selects the words of a famous contem­
porary, perhaps to link his name with t h a t of a celebrity; sometimes the inspiration is
in the suggestiveness of the text itself or in the relationship of the musician to the poet
whom he may regard as a friend or a model. Sometimes it is the specific objects described
in the poem, or perhaps the sentiments or objects left unsaid and just hinted at; some­
times it is the innate musicality of the verse or the mood or atmosphere t h a t the poet
is trying to create; 17 and sometimes it is simply the Zeitgeist. When exoticism, for ex­
ample, became popular in the late 1820s, many writers, including Gautier and Hugo,
succumbed to its influence. Similarly, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Félicien David, and Meyer­
beer (not generally known as composers of songs) were among musicians who sought
to use eastern or oriental melodies in their songs. 18 Some composers t r y to depict an
exterior object: a guitar, a spinning wheel, etc. If t h a t exterior object is tied to a psychic
state, as is the spinning wheel in Schubert's Gretchen, its depiction is, of course, more
effective and more readily applicable in music. Some composers concentrate on imitating
lutes, bird calls, the pelting sound of rain, etc. Fauré and Duparc, however, are two
composers who usually try to avoid the picturesque unless it offers the possibility of
symbolism. 19

14
This kind of music differs considerably, however, from a mélodie or other text-oriented
piece. Even a setting like VAprès-Midi d'un Faune will not pose the same problems as the mélodies.
As Suzanne Bernard has indicated in Mallarmé et les Musiciens, p. 161, "Ce poème a été mis en
musique
15
sous forme non de mélodie, mais de 'paraphrase' musicale".
16
Schoenberg's Herzgewächse (1911) is another vocal work based on a Maeterlinck text.
In an unpublished letter (to an unidentified correspondent) at the Lincoln Center Library
for the Performing Arts New York, we find a rare instance of Debussy commenting on poetry and
music: "J'aime mieux la prose rythmée que les vers (au moins pour la musique) ça rebondit da­
vantage et on n'est plus arrêté par des tas de considérations d'ailleurs, la musique et les vers c'est
deux chansons qui cherchent vainement à s'accorder, même dans les cas très rares ou cela s'accorde
ça fait l'effet d'un mauvais calembour", [sic]
On the other hand, Paul Dukas, Debussy's contemporary, feels that "La plupart de ces com­
positions sont ainsi des symboles de symboles mais exprimés en une langue par elle-même si riche,
si persuasive, qu'elle atteint parfois à l'éloquence d'un verbe nouveau, portant en soi sa propre loi,
et souvent beaucoup plus intelligible que celle des poèmes qu'elle commente". See Paul Dukas,
"Nocturne de Debussy", Revue Hebdomadaire (Feb., 1901).
17
Stanislas Fumet, in his article "Poème et Mélodie ou un mariage ingrat", Revue Musicale
(1952), p . 76, quotes the French poet Pierre Reverdy in a broadcast conversation with Henri Bar-
raud, to whom he had given permission to set one of his poems: " . . . mon poème, dès lors que je
vous le cède, ne m'appartient plus. Vous en faites ce que vous voulez, ce que votre musique exigé
d'en faire. Traitez-le à votre guise, transformez-le: je n'ai plus à m'en occuper. Dans vôtre chant il
cesse d'être à moi". Fumet believes that unless one and the same person provides both poem and
music, rarely is the resulting mélodie an enhancement of the poem. I t is simply something else,
another creation, another work of art. I t is, however, the wise poet who realizes the truth of this
statement.
18
Most writers would be unwilling to accept it.
Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde also shows the eastern influence. Its text consists of Hans
Bethge's
19
translation of Chinese poems entitled Die chinesische Flöte.
These examples originate with Frits Noske, French Song from Berlioz to Duparc, p . 82.

486
 I t is important to recognize t h a t the principal characteristics of the German Lied,
its Empfindsamkeit and Volkstümlichkeit, its sentimentality as well as its melodic acces­
sibility are absolutely alien t o the French tradition. 2 0 Other traits associated with t h e
Lied, (for example, elements of the fantastic and supernatural) are also absent from the
French melodie. The model of the boldly adventurous German ballad found no counter­
part in the melodie either. The mélodie is more subtle, more inclined to suggestion rather
than heavy-handed description, to evocation rather than delineation, with touches of
exoticism and eroticism a n d absolutely no reference to the folk element, despite occa­
sional recollections of W a t t e a u and his Commedia delVarte figures. Patterned, recurrent
water figurations, similar to those found in Schubert's piano accompaniments, are rarely
present in the mélodie.21 P a r t writing, too, except inDebussy's songs, is less often stressed
in the mélodie's accompaniments. Both the German Lied and the French mélodie,
however, often reflect the outdoors, with the French being more concerned with t h e
sun and the sky and the Germans focusing instead on the forest, the trees, and the nether
world, be it caves or oceans.
Schumann appears to have had a decisive influence on the composers who set the
poems of the Symbolist poets—not through his Lieder so much as via his piano music: 22
the Carnaval, Papillons, and Faschingsschwank aus Wien, wherein he uses a very special
compositional technique. I n all of these his fragmentation of musical material, juxta­
position of unrelated melodic and harmonic elements, varying textures, and irregular
meters placed in a kind of musical kaleidoscope seem to duplicate a similar procedure
in the texts of the Symbolist poets. Also, in the Carnaval Schumann borrows sevefal
of his titles from the commedia delVarte characters like Pierrot, Harlequin^ P a n t a l o n ,
and Columbine, much as Verlaine does in his Fêtes galantes. I n the Carnaval, a fairly
regular occurrence is the displacement of one melody b y another before t h a t first
melody has actually assumed a delineated shape or profiler Debussy carries this tech­
nique much further in his piano pieces and in both "the accompaniment and the vocal
parts of bis songs, where a melody is so elusive t h a t it dissolves before it has become
more t h a n a hint of a tune.
Musical sounds tend to transform—sometimes even to eliminate—poetic sounds.
And French poetry generally has fewer sharp or striking verbal accents t h a n German
poetry. Starting from a more refined and polished language, the French composer
instinctively practices restraint in his melody, rhythm, range, and—again with the
exception of Debussy—texture.
J a n e Bathori, the first interpreter of so many of these songs, has written:

Parmi les mélodies contemporaines françaises, il en est peu d'aussi belles,

d'aussi parfaites aux points de vue littéraire et musical que celles de
Claude Debussy. Son sens aigu de la langue française, sa sensibilité fine

20
21
Ibid.
For examples of Schubert's water figures, see Elaine Brody and Robert A. Fowkes, The
German Lied and Its Poetry (New York, 1971), pp. 84-85. In his piano music (cf. Reflets dans l'eau,
UI sie joyeuse, Poissons d'or) Debussy does employ water figures, but they tend not to be recurrent.
22
See Elaine Brody, "Schumann's Legacy in France", Studies in Romanticism (Fall, 1974).

487
 qui n'a jamais dépassé l'expression juste, sans emphase, disant bien ce
qu'il voulait et soulignant d'un accent le mot qu'il entendait
mettre en valeur. 23
Mallarmé supposedly worked hard to achieve his absolute command of words.
If the word be regarded as the unit of thought and expression for Mallarmé, 24 the chord
not the key, is the unit for Debussy, just as the note will later be the unit for the serialist
and dodecaphonic composers. I n their poems, the Symbolists' original use of words led
to the creation of new words; in the same way, Debussy uses common chords, b u t in a
new context, so t h a t they sound differently in his works. 25 J u s t as " t h e method of build­
ing any poem which was not mere narrative was the cinematic method, the method
of juxtaposition", so in Debussy's works, too, "one feeling gained in significance and
effect from being followed immediately by a second feeling. B u t there need be no logical
connection; the connection was entirely emotional". 26 Debussy conscientiously ab­
horred German ideas of symphonic development. 27
Debussy's mélodies warrant closer examination. Of the fifty-eight songs Debussy
wrote between 1876 and 1915, five were set to poems by Baudelaire, eighteen to poems
by Verlaine, and four to Mallarmé's works (including the tone poem V'Après-midi d'un
faune). The following observations might help to summarize the main characteristics of
Debussy's songs: The range of his melody usually extends over an octave, sometimes as
wide as two octaves. The fact of this range is never evident because pitches proceed
most frequently in a stepwise motion with only occasional wide leaps. 28 No ornamenta­
tion appears in the voice part; sometimes, however, it is added to the accompaniment.
(See "Chevaux de bois" in Ariettes oubliées; " L a Flûte de P a n " in Chansons de Bilitis;
and "Les Ingénus" of Fêtes,) Melodic accents occur often on weak beats; melodic and
textual phrases usually correspond; the melody rarely clashes with the accompaniment.
Occasionally the composer doubles the vocal line in the accompaniment, b u t never for
very long. His doubling is particularly subtle (See Le Jet d'eau).29 Text setting is
generally syllabic (one note to a syllable), only rarely neumatic (a few notes to a syl­
lable), and almost never melismatic (many notes to a syllable). 30 Phrases have strong
directional profiles. (See Cinq Poèmes de Baudelaire; Le Balcon; "C'est l'extase" of
Ariettes oubliées; "Il pleure dans mon cœur"; and "Spleen"). I n these mélodies, phrases
with a strong profile alternate with a static line consisting of the repetition of a single
note, a kind of monotonie setting.
28
Jane Bathori, Sur l'interprétation des mélodies de Claude Debussy (Paris, 1953), p . 8.
24
C. Henry Philips, "The Symbolists and Debussy", Music and Letters, xiii (1932), p . 299.
25
Ibid., p . 307.
26
Ibid., p . 301.
27
28
Ibid., p . 303.
Where his melody moves in seconds or thirds, what emerges is basically a triadic melody
filled 29in with seconds.
This subtle friction between the melody and the accompaniment is also evident in Schu­
mann's 30
piano piece "Aufschwung" from the Fantasiestücke, op. 12.
Th. Gerold, in his article "Monodie et Lied", in the Encyclopédie de la musique et Diction-
nair e du Conservatoire, (Paris, 1930), I I m e partie, vol. 5, pp. 2864-2865, effectively describes Debussy's
type of text setting: "Le chant n'est parfois qu'une sorte de recitative mélodieuse . . . On ne peut
guère parler ici de mélodie continue, puisque bien souvent il n'y a pas de mélodie proprement dite,
mais plutôt une récitation mélodique. Les compositions sur les cinq poèmes de Baudelaire dépassent
la forme du lied; elles rentrent complètement dans le cadre des grandes monodies".

488
 The r h y t h m of t h e vocal line is generally fluid, with sharper rhythmic motives
reserved for the accompaniment. Debussy frequently employs cross rhythms between
voice and accompaniment, and he often changes meter and tempo within a song. E a c h
melodie usually includes several key changes, b u t concludes on t h e tonic chord. H a r ­
monies are coloristic rather than structural, t h a t is, the harmonic changes do not artic­
ulate the formal outlines of the poem; instead, changes of harmony provide contrasts
of color.
I t is difficult to determine with Debussy's songs whether or not the music could
have existed without the text. With Fauré, it could not; with Debussy, it might have.
His accompaniments often can stand on their own, the voice p a r t seemingly superim­
posed. (See " I l pleure dans mon cœur" of Ariettes oubliées). A layered effect in which
each line of the accompaniment has its own individual pattern 3 1 adds substance t o t h e
piano part. The simultaneity of these patterns creates the impression of a contrapuntal
texture.
Pictorial accompaniments (eg. water figures in "Le J e t d ' e a u " and arpeggios
to suggest tournez in "Chevaux de bois") occur infrequently. B y and large, however, t h e
accompaniment is more interesting t h a n the vocal melody. Although Debussy does not
really favor a thick texture, the variety of melodic and rhythmic patterns he uses
makes these accompaniments seem rather dense. Considering his views on the relation­
ship of text and tone, 3 2 we can rightfully expect t h a t Debussy would follow t h e poetic
form faithfully. Where t h e poet repeats the text, Debussy clothes it in the same music,
sometimes with b u t slight modifications (cf. "Le Balcon".) Most mélodies are through
composed (à composition continue), the music changing with the text. For variety, we
occasionally notice a distinct refrain ("Le J e t d'eau"). Then, too, within the framework
of constantly unfolding new material t h a t parallels the progress of t h e text, some specif­
ic melodic or rhythmic motives reappear in modified form.
In view of his settings of many of the Verlaine poems of La Bonne Chanson, prob­
ably the most significant French song cycle of the period, Fauré's mélodies must be
analyzed next. Of a hundred songs written between 1865 and 1922, two are set to poems
by Baudelaire, seventeen (including the nine of La Bonne Chanson) are to poems b y
Verlaine; Fauré, in addition, made settings of poems b y Villiers de risle-Adam, Richepin
and de Régnier. He set no poema b y Mallarmé.
Fauré's settings share many similarities with Debussy's. Were we to examine their
respective settings of the same text, however, we could observe m a n y individual differ­
ences. I n general, range of melody, correspondence of melodic and textual phrases,
syllabic text setting, and a lack of ornamentation parallel those techniques employed
b y Debussy. Fauré does, however, have a unique kind of continuously evolving melody

31
This technique was often used by Hugo Wolf. See Elaine Brody and Robert A. Fowkes,
The German
32
Lied & its Poetry, pp. 283-284.
C. Henry Philips, in "The Symbolists and Debussy", p . 305, writes t h a t in Debussy's
Pelléas et Mélisande "all melody . . . is rejected, all rhetoric in the Italian style excluded, and in its
place Debussy has made the inflections of speech the mainspring of the vocal line, which floats
lovingly on an undercurrent of murmuring accompaniment. No highlights, no impassioned moments,
but a sensuous counterpart to the indescribable atmosphere in which the play works out its sad
story".

489
t h a t often hovers about a focal area of notes. (See "Puisque l'aube"). In the latter song,
subtle clashes between melody and accompaniment occur, although the melody here is
definitely the most significant element in the song. A peculiar chromaticism manifests
itself in some of Fauré's songs, with horizontal cross relations at a distance of about a
measure (for example, " C " in one measure and " C ö " in the next). There appears to be
more doubling of t h e vocal line in these songs and, sometimes, word painting (chantent
in "N'est-ce p a s ? " ) . Fauré's accompaniments could not exist without their vocal
parts; they are intimately related. For this very reason, perhaps, literary critics today
prefer Fauré's mélodies to Debussy's, in which musical accompaniment threatens to
deflect the listener's interest from the text.
Subtlety is a watchword with Fauré. Where meter and tempo changes occur
within a song, they are never jarring. No sharp rhythmic motives appear in the vocal
line, they emerge only occasionally in the accompaniments. The accompaniments are
not layered (nor, for t h a t matter, is the texture in his piano music), but unfold on one
level. Fauré favors the "Ave Maria" type of arpeggiated accompaniments; he often
maintains one p a t t e r n in the piano p a r t throughout an entire song. Textures, generally
thin, show a clear polarization between melody and accompaniment; yet they are inter­
dependent. A rare contrapuntal texture appears in "Une Sainte en son auréole". Most
mélodies are through composed, but they do include recurrent rhythmic and melodic
patterns t h a t provide a degree of homogeneity. With rare exceptions, Fauré seems more
concerned with evoking the general atmosphere or mood suggested b y the text rather
than underlining specific words or lines of the poem.
I t might be helpful briefly to compare two different settings, one by Fauré and
one b y Debussy, of the same Verlaine poem, En sourdine. Fauré's song, written in 1890
when the composer was already forty-five, shows him a t the height of his creative pow­
ers. Fauré's stepwise melody, embedded in the accompaniment lind extended in
Grouuod-like sequences, is even anticipated (a& in-Italian opera arias) in the piano
prelude. Here the rippling accompaniment militates against a genuinely calm sound.
Word painting occurs on langueurs in the second stanza. The composer uses harmony
for color and contrast rather t h a n to outline the form which is through-composed, the
stanzas articulated through rests.
Debussy, when he set En sourdine in 1892, was just beginning to write his more
serious works. I n his vocal pieces he was still experimenting. I n this song he sets the
opening of the text to a monotone, thus suggesting a wonderful feeling of repose b y his
clinging to one note. Melodic movement in general is stepwise. The first section of the
piece has the accompaniment focused on " G " and the voice on " D " . Several different
accompanimental figures reach their highest density at the middle of the song. This
piano accompaniment could indeed stand on its own, severed from the melody. We must
note its resemblance to the Ravel solo piano piece "Oiseaux tristes", from' Miroirs.
Extremely precise performance instructions, rêveusement lent or intimement doux,
indicate the composer's, concern with sonority. Debussy's masterful control of r h y t h m
makes us unaware of the slight syncopation in the accompaniment, or even of his use
of two rhythmic modules t h a t act as unifiers here. Debussy delays the appearance of
the tonic chord until the end of the second stanza, thus providing harmonic tension

490
while a t the same time outlining the form at the point of resolution. This song reveals
a remarkable combination of unity and variety in the same work.
Ravel was far less prolific than Debussy. Of'thirty-five songs written between
1894 and 1932, two are based on poems by Verlaine and four on poems by Mallarmé,
b u t these last include the Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, which are really chamber
works. 33 Ravel, however, also set poems by Verhaeren, de Régnier, and Jules Renard.
Starting as an Impressionist, Ravel soon moved further away from the evocative style
of Debussy and proceeded to outline very carefully his formal structures and musical
materials, particularly r h y t h m and melody, in a way t h a t must be regarded as antipodal
to the efforts of the Symbolists in their poetry.
Of Chausson's approximately thirty-two songs, three are settings of Verlaine's
poems, and the five of the collection Serres chaudes are to Maeterlinck's poems. Partic­
ularly interesting is the setting of Verlaine's Apaisement, in which Chausson indeed
enhances the suggestiveness of the poem through his music. I n the Maeterlinck group,
an intensely expressive chromaticism reveals the influence of both Wagner and Franck.
Duparc, whose reputation rests, incredibly enough, on a mere fourteen melodies,
seems to have had a special affinity for both Parnassian and Symbolist poets. Baude­
laire's L'Invitation au voyage and La Vie antérieure received their earliest—and some
consider, their best — musical treatment a t his hands. 3 4 A flowing piano accompani­
ment diffused harmonically through the use of pedal point or ostinato, generally
supports an expressive vocal melody, more often t h a n not punctuated with consider­
able chromaticism.
One final point on the relationship between Symbolist poems and the French
mélodies seems appropriate here: namely, t h a t Symbolist poems were the inspiration
for some of the best songs of composers like Debussy and Fauré; and t h a t these vocal
works evolved not from earlier musical forms, b u t from the essentially musical quality
of Symbolist poetry.

83
P . Meylan, Les Ecrivains et la musique (Lausanne, 1944), p . 17, says t h a t for a poem by Mal­
larmé to be set is sheer nonsense. I t is already orchestrated. As recently as 1957, Pierre Boulez
composed two vocal pieces, Improvisations, based on Mallarmé's works. But Boulez is not concern­
ed about whether or not the musical setting should serve primarily to enhance the poetry. "If
you wish to understand the text", says he, "read it". For him, music shifts the words to another
level of experience. See a similar opinion expressed by Fumet above, fn. 17.
34
Fumet, "Poème et Mélodie", p . 78, feels t h a t "Duparc, Chausson, Debussy attachent
beaucoup plus d'attention que Fauré à la structure du poème".

491
 VLADIMIB P A D W A

SYMBOLISM I N A L E X A N D E R SCRIABIN'S MUSIC

Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin (1872-1915) occupies a unique* position in t h e history

of Russian music. H e has no noticeable ties with the Russian composers preceding him,
nor with his contemporaries: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Mussorgsky,
Rachmaninoff, and others. Like all the great composers, however, Scriabin too, h a d his
roots in the past, and these roots lead back to Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. I t was natural
t h a t an outstanding concert pianist like Scriabin would be influenced by the piano
music of Chopin and Liszt. Chopin, especially, had the strongest influence on Skriabin's
early period as a composer, and there are masterpieces among his compositions of t h a t
period. However, it is in his last—greatest—period t h a t he can be associated with
symbolism in music. This almost sudden change in Scriabin's musical mentality came
about not through any outside musical influences, not through a revision of theoretical
foundations, but through a drastic change in his philosophical and religious thinking.
The new harmonies and new theoretical principles which Scriabin introduced in his
music were merely by-products of this ideological revolution. Therefore, for a real un­
derstanding of Scriabin's work, a general understanding of his philosophy is basic. This
philosophy is recorded in his numerous letters and writings, as well as in his conver­
sations with his friends, especially as reported by his closest friend and biographer,
Leonid Sabaneyev.
Scriabin became more and more absorbed in Theosophical Mysticism. H e dreamt
of a Cosmic Union of Spirit and Matter, the Masculine and the Feminine poles of the
Universe, striving toward the Ultimate Cosmic Orgasm of Death. Out of this dream
developed what became the mainspring of his life and his work. This mainspring may be
described in one word: Mysterium. He envisioned this Mysterium to be a gigantic
festival of arts: music, instrumental and vocal; choirs, processions and dances; poetry;
colors, shapes, pictures, and even scents; all this, fused in a giant counterpoint of arts,
was to be performed somewhere in India. Scriabin felt t h a t it would take hold of man­
kind's mind and lead it toward the Ultimate Union with the Cosmic Spirit in t h e Final
Ecstasy of Death. The idea of this work took shape gradually in Scriabin's mind. At
first, he planned to write an opera, in which an Artist created such a synthesis of arts.
He himself admitted t h a t he owed this idea of combining the arts to Wagner, who had
aimed at such a combination of music, poetry, and dance. However, Scriabin subse-

* "-Unclassifiable Russian composer" (Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music).

493
quentlyfelt that Wagner had simply thought of a "mechanical" combination of these
arts, not of their "chemical", organic synthesis which would result in a new kind of art.
Another step in the evolution of Scriabin's thinking was his conviction that it was
not sufficient to have a third person, a character in an opera, to be the creator of this
all-embracing Cosmic Festival. He came to the conclusion that he himself was that
Artist. Furthermore, the creation of this work was meant not merely for subsequent
passive Contemplation; rather, the Artist was to be the leader, the magician, who ac­
tively directed mankind toward the Eternal Light.
This idea, finally, took complete possession of Scriabin's mind and became an
obsession with him. Was it genius or insanity? Whatever it was, all of Scriabin's
creative life became geared to this idea, and all the compositions he wrote during this
period, all his Sonatas, Preludes, Poems, Nocturnes, etc. were nothing but preparations
for his Mysterium.
In 1905 he began one of his most important symphonic works—The Poem of Ecstasy
Its original title was Orgiastic Poem.
Here are a few lines from it:
Spirit,
Winged with thirst for life,
Is drawn into flight
On the summits of negation.
There, under the rays of its dream,
Emerges a magical world
Of heavenly forms and feelings,
Spirit playing,
Spirit desiring,
Spirit creating all with a dream,
Surrenders to the bliss of love.
Mid the risen creations
It dwells in languor,
From the height of inspiration
Calls them to flower.
And drunken with soaring
It is ready to sink into oblivion.
(Translated by George Reavey)

The Symphony itself was planned by Scriabin in the following way:

1) Theme—sweetness of dreaming, the winged Spirit or Soul, desire to create, fatigue,
thirst for the unknown.
2) Flight to the heights of active negation or denial, Creativity.
3) Elements of dejection caused by doubt.
4) Endeavor of the conjuring will.
5) Man-God.
6) Tranquility in motion.
The eroticism of the text was translated by Scriabin into certain harmonies, such as
augmented triads, altered ninth-chords, and other chromatic alterations, which had
first been used by Wagner and Liszt (Mephisto-Waltz) as erotic musical symbols. But

494
Scriabin did not stop there; he developed his harmony b y following the row of over­
tones (Fig. 1). The row is acoustically pure. The well-tempered system, which has been
adopted in Western music for the past 300 years, is correct, mathematically, b u t

Fig. 1
h
4 k£ te * ~
c\ o

1 2 3 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

compared to the acoustical row of overtones, it is actually out of tune. If this row is
played on the piano, it will be out of tune, since the overtones 7, 11, 13, and 14 should
be slightly lower, and t h e overtone 17 slightly higher. Scriabin's harmonies were con­
ceived as a continuation of this acoustic row of overtones, and since the tone color de­
pends on the choice and combination of overtones, one could describe his harmonic
texture as tone colors rather than tone combinations derived from contrapuntal move­
ments of voices. H e felt that, historically, the conception of the "consonance" evolved
along this row of overtones. Thus, the first interval of the octave (overtones 1-2)
was heard as a consonance. Then came fifths and fourths (overtones 2 - 3 and 3-4)—the
"organum" of the Middle 4 g e s - The next breakthrough was the major third (overtones
4-5). The following minor third (overtones 5-6) was grudgingly accepted as t h e next
consonance, although—during the Baroque period—it had to be replaced, as the final
chord, by a major ("Picardy") triad, even if a composition was in a minor key. The
next step was the dominant seventh (oveftone 7). We find it in Chopin's 23rd Prelude
as a "consonant" closing chord, and in the famous introductory phrase of Wagner's
Tristan and Isolde (Fig. 2). A seventh-chord was traditionally considered a "dissonance"
and required a resolution into a "consonance". B u t here the seventh-chord (Fig. 3)
feels like a consonance—resolved as it is from a more tense dissonance.

Fig. 2 J Fig. 3

#^P ZflgNs=é

^m m m

Scriabin continued this evolution. To him, it was not a theoretical manipulation, but
a search for the new symbols of his philosophical ideas.
On the road to the Mysterium, Scriabin began his work on a new Symphonic
poem—Prometheus y or The Poem of Fire, as it was originally called. To him, Prometheus

495
was the symbol of Active Energy, the primeval principle t h a t created the Universe.
He is the same as Satan or Lucifer ("the carrier of light"), the Fire, the Mind, the Power,
the Light. (See Prometheus chord, Fig. 4). To symbolize light, Scriabin reached out for

Fig. 4
"PROMETHEUS"

SÉË
new media. The obvious direction was the parallel between sound and light. A beam of
light, passing through a prism, divides itself into several constituent colors, which in
their aggregate represent t h a t fundamental beam of light. A tone, similarly, produces
a row of overtones, which are parts of t h a t fundamental tone. B y skillful manipulation
of these overtones, Scriabin tried to achieve an effect of light. Also, as the next step
toward a fusion of the arts, he introduced a new orchestral instrument into his score,
the keyboard of colors— clavier à lumières. This instrument was supposed to engulf the
auditorium in the light of different changing colors.
To Scriabin, all the tonalities were symbolized by colors. Going around the Circle
of Fifths, he followed the colors of the rainbow. We must admit, however, t h a t these
symbols are quite subjective, and although many composers matched colors with
tones, they seldom agreed on the same definitions. For instance, while Scriabin thought
of C Major as red, Rimski-Korsakov felt it as white; G Major was orange-pink to
Scriabin, golden brown to Korsakov; A Major was green to Scriabin, pink to Korsakov.
I t is interesting to compare this association of tones and colors in Scriabin t o
similar symbols in the poem Les Voyelles by Arthur Rimbaud. Obviously, Rimbaud and
Scriabin were in full disagreement on their symbols !
Scriabin lived at a time when the whole literary temper of Russia revolved around
the Symbolists. He became a focal point of their gatherings. Vyacheslav Ivanov, Alex­
ander Blok, Andrei Bely, Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Valéry Bryusov, and of course, Konstan­
tin Bal'mont, were members of t h a t circle. Scriabin's harmonies and rhythms were
more than impressions of his symbols. They were supposed to be magical, hypnotic
invocations which would entrance the listeners, as envisioned in the forthcoming
Mysterium.
To Scriabin his symbols were absolute. He used his harmonies and r h y t h m s as a
magician uses his invocations and commands. During his creative life, Scriabin wrote ten
piano Sonatas, of which the seventh was his favorite. H e thought t h a t it was the nearest
he had got to the Mysterium. Aside from his two major tone poems, Scriabin wrote,
during his last period, a great number of short piano pieces: Preludes, Nocturnes,
Poems, etc. Some of them had titles which were symbolic suggestions of his future
project: Poème Satanique, Poème ailé, Vers la flamme, Enigme, Caresse dancée, Ironies,
Masques, Etrangeté, etc. Also, his works were full of directions, symbolizing his philos-

496
 ophy, such as: "l'épouvante surgit, elle se mêle à la danse délirante", "avec une céleste
volupté", "avec une fausse douceur", 'Vol joyeux", "en un vertige", and so on.
Scriabin was unable to complete his project. The nearest approach to it was his
sketch of the text to the so-called Prefatory Action. Scriabin once said to Sabaneyev
that ho would not survive the moment in which he would realize that he was unable
to write the Mysterium. Perhaps it was his fortunate fate to be saved from this tragic
realization: a small pimple on his upper lip gangrened, and "Sister Death" came
to claim Alexander Scriabin.

I am the ineffable bliss of dissolution,

I am joy of death,
I am freedom,
I am ecstasy 1

(from the Prefatory Action, translated by George Reavey)

32 Balakian 497
 EDOUARD R O D I T I

T H E S P R E A D AND EVOLUTION
O P SYMBOLIST IDEALS I N A R T

In spite of its widespread diffusion and long life, Symbolist art has been shockingly
neglected by most of our more authoritative art historians of t h e past fifty years.
If one is indeed to believe their writings and theories, all the modern a r t of our century
stems directly from French Impressionism, which marked, in their opinion, a distinct
break with the more traditional art of the past, ranging from the late Middle Ages or the
Renaissance to the Romanticism of Delacroix and the Realism of Courbet. Nor does
one find, in the writings of most of these art historians, many references t o other forms
or styles of art except, of course—and in derisive terms—to the academic a r t of Gé-
rôme, though at least two other novel styles of art, Symbolism and t h e more naturalistic
Realism of Bastien-Lepage, Jules Adler, and Louise Breslau flourished in Prance
during the decades which witnessed the heyday of French Impressionism. These other
styles, however, have rarely been considered worthy of serious comment; for many
years, art historians and museum curators tended to include Odilon Redon, for in­
stance, among borderline Impressionists because of his flower paintings and Fantin-
Latour, as a painter of portraits and flower pieces, was likewise generally placed, to­
gether with his friend Whistler, among minor or peripheral Impressionists. Today,
however, both Redon and Fantin-Latour are regularly included in books and exhibi­
tions devoted to Symbolist art, which constitutes a new and more and more widely
accepted category of art and field of study.
Odilon Redon and Fantin-Latour certainly had recourse, in m a n y of their works, to
recognizably Impressionist techniques and devices. I n this respect, Fantin-Latour can
sometimes appear to have much in common with Manet, though t h e sfumato effects
of his more obviously Symbolist or allegorical works reveal a greater affinity with
Tranquillo Cremona, his much-neglected Italian contemporary; and Redon, even in his
typically Symbolist works, often used color harmonies and devices of brushwork
similar to those t h a t characterize, for instance, Monet's Giverny garden compositions.
If one extends the term ' 'Symbolist" to include some of the more obviously symbolical
or allegorical paintings of such Italian artists as Segantini and Previati, one must
recognize t h a t their painting technique, t h a t of Italian Divisionism, is likewise closely-
related, both in theory and in practice, to the Pointillism of Seurat, Signac, and other
French Post-Impressionists, and is indeed derived from much the same scientific theories
concerning the nature of color and light. B u t we also know t h a t the French Symbolist
painter Séon had developed an esoteric or mystical version of these scientific theories,
and t h a t he in turn influenced his friend Seurat.

32*
499
 On the other hand, some Symbolist painters, such as Eugène Carrière in France or
Otto Greiner in Germany, can often be readily confused, if only because of their fre­
quent choice of very realistic subjects, with representatives of the other neglected
school of art of t h e latter part of the nineteenth century: the more politically motivated
Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage and Jules Adler in France, and of Hans Baluschek in
Germany. The m u t e d pathos of a Carrière Maternité certainly influenced some of the
early work of K ä t h e Kollwitz, who was not immune to Symbolist ideals, in spite of the
strong appeal t h a t the sardonic work of the Berlin Realist, Zilie, exerted on her sym­
pathies. I n this respect, the sculpture of the Belgian Constantin Meunier poses a partic­
ular problem: even in his most realistic and politically motivated representations of
workers, his style of modelling is the same as in his Symbolist or allegorical compositions,
and in both he has much in common with his Symbolist colleague and compatriot,
Georges Minne, though some critics have tried to discredit Meunier as a "pseudo-
Symbolist".
In England a n d Germany, many artists who are often referred to as Symbolists,
such as Lord Leighton and Sir Edward John Poynter or Arnold Böcklin and Franz von
Stuck, can appear to have been technically more closely related to the English Pre-
Raphaelites or to some earlier German Romantics; or else, especially Poynter, to have
been somewhat academic artists of much the same kind as Gérôme and those other
French masters who, in Paris, were most violently opposed to the "shocking" theories,
techniques, and choices of subject matter t h a t characterized, between 1870 and 1880,
the work of the Impressionist innovators. B u t the academic realism of Gérôme distin­
guishes his work from that, for instance, of Gustave Moreau, among Symbolist masters,
or indeed of Böcklin and Watts, too, all of whom were much less concerned than G ^
rome, Alma-Tadema,, or Poynter with historical accuracy and verisimilitude, and
were never afraid of allowing themselves imaginative anachronisms.
Among the German Symbolists, Greiner, in particular, often handled subjects
observed in real life in a spectacularly realistic manner, and even his more Neoclassical
Symbolist allegories reveal a curiously compulsive interest in anatomical detail, in
Herculean brawn and remarkably muscular buttocks. Because of its more vigorous or
boisterous sensuality and its more obviously neoclassical ambition to emulate "The
glory t h a t was Greece and the grandeur t h a t was R o m e " , much of the Symbolist art of
Germany—from Feuerbach, Böcklin, and Marées to Stuck, Klinger, and Greiner—
cannot readily be confused with the more manneristic or decorative Symbolism which,
in England, Belgium, and France, so soon began to adopt, especially in its treatment
of human figures, the androgynous morphology which characterizes Art Nouveau in the
applied arts. There is indeed nothing ambivalent about the mythological or allegorical
figures of the kind of German art t h a t the sociologist Dolf Sternberger has somewhat
sarcastically called "das Reich der Schönheit", a term which distinguishes it neatly from
the more stylized Jugendstil or Art Nouveau of Munich and Darmstadt.
Much of the work of the British artists of the Glasgow School, of the Belgian Sym­
bolists, and of such French Rosicrucians as Armand Point, Lévy-Dhurmer, and de
Feure, on the contrary, suggests to us a sexless world of fin-de-siècle decadence. The
muscular male athletes and the buxom women of Greiner, in particular, must certainly

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have displeased m a n y admirers of the more conspicuously refined art of Beardsley or
Léon Bakst, much as these same art lovers may also have been repelled by the frankly
virile misogyny which comes to the surface in the imagery of Félicien Hops. An ob­
session with prostitution indeed pervades much of the work of Rops, especially in Les
Sataniques and in La Pornocracie, whereas Watts, in his very robust The Minotaur,
protests against it by offering us here a Symbolist myth to illustrate W. T. Stead's
journalistic The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, which shocked Victorian England
by exposing the facts of organized London prostitution. Greiner's notorious lithograph
Der Mörtel had a similar pamphleteer significance as a Symbolist protest against man's
sexual exploitation of womanhood, but now seems far more explicit t h a n the somewhat
'cryptic Minotaur.
The wide variety of styles, techniques, and devices to which Symbolist artists had
recourse leads to the conclusion t h a t Symbolism is characterized by choices of subject
matter and b y the meanings t h a t it attaches to it rather t h a n b y technique, brush
stroke, or color harmonies. Prom a strictly painterly point of view, the Symbolist
artists must, therefore, be considered to have been, like the Mannerists of the Renais­
sance, technical and stylistic eclectics. But Symbolist art, because of the significance
and the wide variety of its choice of subject matter, proves to have been just as eclectic
in this respect, and thus lends itself far more readily t h a n Impressionism to iconographie
analysis and research. Unfortunately, however, systematic iconographie research in the
art of the latter half of the nineteenth century remains very rare. Such studies in this
area would require very extensive readings in other fields, too, if only because so m a n y
of the painters and sculptors of the Romantic era which immediately preceded the
Symbolist movement, as well as of Symbolism proper, had associated closely with
writers and composers, or were acquainted with their art and influenced by it as was
Fantin-Latour, for instance, by the operas of Berlioz and of Wagner.
If one takes, in this broader context, the French painter Gustave Moreau's earliest
representations of Salome, one sees t h a t these were painted before 1870 under the influ­
ence of the style of writing of Flaubert's Salammbô, as well as of the paintings of Chas-
sériau and of La Mort de Sardanapale of Delacroix. Later, they inspired, in turn, the
prose of Huysmans in A Rebours and Mallarmé's poetry on the same theme, as well as
a great deal of other French Parnassian or Symbolist poetry and prose, including such
neglected works as Ephraïm Mikhaël's prose poem Halyartès. All these, especially Mo-
reau, Huysmans, and Mallarmé, then suggested to Oscar Wilde the theme of his lyrical
drama, Which in turn inspired the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley as well as the opera
of the composer Richard Strauss, who used Wilde's text as his libretto. B u t Beardsley's
Salome illustrations also reveal a sardonic quality of intentional anachronism which
is certainly derived from his readings of the Salome fantasy in Laforgue's Moralités
légendaires, and perhaps, too, of the ironically told legends of Myrrha, vierge et martyre
which Jules Lemaître collected and published in a volume in 1894, the year of the publi­
cation of Beardsley's Salome illustrations.
Before his death in 1871» Victor Müller, a succesful German Romantic, had also
painted a Salome in Munich; his example in choosing this subject, perhaps quite in­
dependently, was then followed b y a number of other Germans, including Max Klinger,

501
who, in 1893, carved a polychrome marble Salome which, compared with those of
Moreau and Beardsley, seems very Germanic and robust.
As a theme, Salome then continued to haunt the minds of other artists during the
next few decades. In Roumania, Cecilia Cu^escu-Storck, who had associated with the
Symbolists of Munich and Paris around 1900 drew, sometime between 1910 and 1916,
an oval pastel of Salome embracing the Baptist's head; it has much the same visionary
quality as Redon's Head of Orpheus Besting on His Lyre, which is believed to have been
conceived during the years that immediately preceded Redon's death in 1916. The
Roumanian sculptor Fritz Storck, who had, around 1900, been a Symbolist in a curvilin­
ear, Secessionist idiom that suggests influences of the schools of Munich and of Vienna
as well as of Rodin, and who then became the husband of the painter Cecilia Cu^escu,
even created (as late as 1930) a fine bronze Salome representing her in a curiously
contorted pose and in a typically art deco style. As a kind of Jungian archetype, the
theme of Salome appears to have finally died its natural death when the second decade of
Surrealism, after 1930, began to stress, especially in the works of Dali and Victor
Brauner, the less impersonal symbols of dreams that lend themselves to Freudian
analysis rather than those of myths that lend themselves to Jungian interpretations.
Other such thematic affiliations may prove to be less complex and obscure. The
theme of the Holy Grail, from Wagner's Parsifal, inspired a great deal of Symbolist
painting, especially in France, Germany, and Belgium, until it likewise became a real
topos or commonplace, often used by artists who may never have witnessed a single
production of Wagner, but who merely borrowed his themes from each other. As for
the theme of Redon's Head of Orpheus Resting on His Lyre, are we to locate its first
appearance in Symbolist art, in poetry, or in music ? In art, it may well have made its
first Symbolist appearance in Moreau's Maiden of Thrace Carrying the Head of Orpheus,
which is known to have been painted in 1865-66, seven or eight years after the Paris
production of Offenbach's scandalous Orphée aux enfers, which squeamishly refrains
from mentioning or presenting on the stage the macabre death of Orpheus. But the
success of Offenbach's scurrilous parody led, in 1859, to a Paris production of Gluck's
Orfeo et Euridice, originally produced in 1762 and subsequently revised by Berlioz,
whom both Fantin-Latour and Moreau are known to have admired. Gluck's very neo­
classical version of the Orpheus myth likewise refrains, of course, from referring to the
hero's legendary death, which Striggio, the librettist of Monteverdi's La Favola
d'Orfeo of 1607, had nevertheless included in his original draft of the last act, though
Monteverdi or his sponsors then preferred to produce the opera with a happier and less
gruesome end. In 1883, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam published his collected Contes cruels,
which includes the tale Vera, where he handles the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice
in a modern setting and creates an atmosphere reminiscent of Poe. In 1911, a couple
of years before Odilon Redon painted his Head of Orpheus, the composer Vincent
d'Indy, who was himself no Symbolist but had many friends among the French Sym­
bolists, produced, in turn, at the Théâtre Réjane, his own revision of Monteverdi's
opera. Within slightly more than fifty years (which happen to have been roughly those
that separate Moreau's Maiden of Thrace from Redon's Head of Orpheus) three very
different musical versions of the Orpheus myth thus attracted considerable attention in

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 the Parisian world of theater and music, and each of them in t u r n may well have inspired
writers and artists to refer back to the complete and more classical version of the m y t h
bhat one finds in Virgil's Georgias.
Moreau's Thracian maiden bears the head of Orpheus cradled on his lyre; in
Redon's later version of this single detail of Moreau's painting, the head appears literally
bo have become p a r t of the lyre. I n studying the morphological evolution of this theme
from Moreau to Redon, one should not neglect to consider a number of similar a n d less
famous intervening representations of the same theme, such as those painted by Henri
Séon and, in 1893, b y J e a n Delville; nor, indeed, the passage in the Salome episode of
Laforgue's Moralités légendaires where the ironical French poet compares the head of t h e
Baptist t o t h a t of Orpheus and even places it next to Salome's lyre.
Before we can develop a serious historical method of studying Symbolist art,
there is a need for research, on the chronological and morphological evolution of such
individual iconographie themes as Salome, the Holy Grail, Sappho, Orpheus a n d his
Lyre, Lohengrin and the Swan, and Heliogabalus—to name just a few of those themes
that spring more readily to mind. When and how did each one of these themes first
appear in the Parnassian or Symbolist literary, musical, or artistic idiom ? For instance,
did the Dutch writer Louis Couperus, when he wrote his Heliogabalus, know the Belgian
Symbolist painter Delville's La Fin d'!un règne, or had Delville heard of Couperus,
or did they both borrow this theme from another common source or from different
sources ? And from what iconographie or literary source did the German poet Stefan
George derive the idea for his Algdbal? H a d they all been reading Gibbon's Decline and
Fall, or the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, from whom Gibbon derives much
of his material concerning Heliogabalus ?
I n the early decades of Romanticism, artists as well as writers and composers h a d
begun to seek inspiration more deliberately from untapped or unorthodox legendary
and mythological sources. I n Denmark, Abilgaard depicted scenes from the comedies of
Terence and from The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius, as well as from The Subterranean
Travels of Niels Klim, a fantastic narrative by the Danish writer, Holberg. B u t t h e
whole complex of themes widely borrowed from the works once atributed to Ossian,
t h a t imaginary "Homer of the North", offers us one of the most significant examples of
this new eclecticism. The popularity of pseudo-Ossianic themes may well have lasted
only a few decades, but Ossian's vicarious immortality is now securely founded on
FingaVs Gave in the music of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, as well as on a number of great
paintings, such as those of Abilgaard and Ingres, and especially on numerous more
popular prints which represent Malvina or other Ossianic characters or topics. I n
German Romantic art, one likewise finds a number of themes borrowed from the fairy
tales of Musaeus or the Brothers Grimm, especially in the paintings of Moritz von
Schwind, who borrowed the theme of Der Traum des Bitters from Weber's opera Oberon,
which in turn derived the plot of its libretto from Tieck and Schlegel's translation of
A Midsummer Night9s Dream and from the romance of Huon de Bordeaux in medieval
French literature. I n England, both Fuseli and J o h n Martin, among other artists,
depicted the witches of Macbeth, Fuseli in a somewhat neoclassical close-up of their
profiles, J o h n Martin in tiny figures set in a vast a n d dramatic landscape. Martin has,

503
moreover, puzzled many an art historian by borrowing the subject of Sadak in Search
of the Waters of Oblivion from an obscure pseudo-oriental work, Tales of the Genii,
supposedly translated by Sir Charles Morell, but actually written, it seems, b y J a m e s
Ridley.
I n Central and Eastern Europe, the more patriotic representatives of Romanticism
and Symbolism meanwhile sought to popularize themes t h a t may seem novel or exotic
to m a n y foreigners. I n Russia, for instance, a Slavophile interest in native sources of
legend, mythology, and folklore can be observed in many of the paintings of Alexander
Wrubel, one of the few truly great Symbolist painters; he remains relatively unknown
outside his native land since practically none of his works can be seen elsewhere in
private or public collections. For instance, one of Wrubel's paintings depicts the fairy­
tale Swan Princess who likewise inspired a Tchaikowsky ballet; another, the Russian
epic hero Mikula Seljaninowitch. A whole series of Wrubel's more important works
illustrates The Demon, a poem by Lermontov; another series has as its subject Ler-
montov's novel A Hero of Our Times. I n his handling, on the other hand, of a theme
borrowed from classical antiquity, t h a t of the god Pan, Wrubel achieves an almost
barbaric intensity which contrasts strikingly with the more consciously or uncons ci-
ously humanist, Western European representations of the same deity, such as those b y
Signorelli, Poussin, or even Picasso.
One of the least familiar of the Slavic themes t h a t were revived b y patriotic
Romantics or Symbolists is t h a t of the legendary Slovenian prophetess Libuse, who
was depicted in 1892 by another Slavophile artist, Vitezlav Carel Masek, a Czech who
appears to have been a disciple of the Munich master Franz von Stuck, though t h e
brushwork of this huge and striking canvas reveals an influence of French Pointillism
or of Italian Divisionism. Libuse also happens to be the heroine of a rarely performed
opera of the same name by Smetana; Masek's interest in her reveals t h a t he was a
Slavophile of the same general nature as Wrubel, though more specifically a cultural
nationalist or Separatist within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, rather t h a n a Pan-
Slavic idealist. I n this respect, Masek probably shared the cultural and political as
pirations of Alfons Mucha, the famous Czech Art Nouveau designer of Sarah Bern­
hardt's posters; as a Symbolist painter, Mucha also exerted a great influence on much
of the earlier work of Franz Kupka, before t h e latter became a pioneer of abstract a r t in
Paris around 1912.

II

Any a t t e m p t to classify the various types of themes which can be found in Sym­
bolist art might lead us very far. The age of Symbolism remained, until 1914, one of
great intellectual and artistic ferment and eclecticism, and Symbolism as an art mo­
vement soon began to spread much faster and more widely t h a n as a literary movement;
in fact, it spread more rapidly and further afield t h a n sixteenth-century Mannerism,
with which it has often been compared. Between 1875 and 1914, political frontiers were
less closely guarded than in recent decades, and the publications of the literary and ar­
tistic avant-garde could circulate more freely, though only among a restricted elite.

504
 In Symbolist esthetics, atmosphere acquires a truly anagogical character, and this
is where Symbolist evocations of the past, however much they may be influenced by
such earlier Romantic masterpieces as La Mort de Sardanapale by Delacroix, differ most
clearly from the more realistically and painstakingly pedantic reconstructions of the
past such as Gérôme's The Death of Caesar, in which some masters of post Romantic
academic art also sought t o emulate Delacroix. However learned in his borrowings of
studiously selected iconographie details from the works of Mantegna, Botticelli, Gior-
gione, and other Renaissance masters Burne-Jones may have been, he never intended,
nor indeed did Moreau, t o achieve a merely scholarly, "imitation of the ancients".
On the contrary, Burne-Jones and Moreau used historical detail for its suggestive appeal
to the imagination, and perhaps also by association of ideas and memories, they utilized
it in a manner t h a t is neither literal, metaphorical, nor allegorical, b u t anagogical in the
sense in which Dante used this term in the cryptic poetics of his Letter to Can Grande
della Scala.
The loftier or more spiritual knowledge and understanding t h a t anagogical Sym­
bolism sought to provide b y means of this process of "leading u p " or of initiation was
not necessarily of a religious nature in the sense of a traditional dogma, though some
Symbolist artists did indeed claim to serve in their works the spiritually didactic
purposes of Roman Catholicism, of High Church Anglicanism, or of some mystic sect
of Christian Rosicrucians. More often, anagogical symbolism was used by writers and
artists to serve the new "religion of a r t " or "cult of b e a u t y " t h a t had very slowly been
gaining ground ever since Vasari, in the sixteenth century, wrote his Lives of Excellent
Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, where he cryptically suggested parallels between
artists and saints; for instance, between Piero di Cosimó and Saint Francis of Assisi, in
what was intended to be a kind of humanist analogue of the Golden Legend.
But this new religion of art, like early Christianity, was still a tangle of conflicting
sects t h a t included, among many others, a very Germanic cult of classical antiquity,
illustrated in many works of Böcklin, Marées, and Franz von Stuck; a medievalist cult,
represented mainly by William Morris and a number of minor English Pre-Raphaelites ;
an Italianate cult of the Renaissance, of which Burne-Jones remained the High Priest;
a Wagnerian cult; and finally, several cults of Orientalists, and even some groups of
more or less explicit Satanists. Among the latter, one might be reasonably tempted to
include a few of the artists, such as Rops and Klinger, who specialized in demonically
ambiguous or apocalyptic interpretations of contemporary life as Baudelaire defined it
in his writings on art. In analyzing the intentions of many a Symbolist artist, it may
thus prove difficult to disentangle and define clearly the anagogical purpose of his work.
In Aubrey Beardsley's The Mysterious Rose-Garden, first published in The Yellow Book,
there are obvious references to traditional representations of the Annunciation, includ­
ing the traditional symbolism of the Rose; but Beardsley clearly intends to suggest t h a t
these other works of art are things of beauty in themselves rather t h a n guides towards
the understanding of religious dogma and mysteries. I t can, thus, be said t h a t Symbolist
art is more often anagogical by analogy t h a n truly anagogical in the sense t h a t D a n t e
intended.
In Eastern Europe, Symbolist art underwent some very interesting changes, es-

505
pecially after 1890, in those nations where, as in Hungary, Poland, a n d t h e Baltic
provinces of Tsarist Russia, vigorous aspirations towards national and cultural in­
dependence were capable of breathing new life into the alien and often more decadent
Art Nouveau, Symbolist or Sezession idioms t h a t emanated mainly from distant Paris,
Munich, Vienna, a n d the London coterie of The Yellow Book, I n the Roumanian city
of Tirgu-Mureç, situated in the area of Transylvania t h a t was a p a r t of H u n g a r y until
the end of the First World War, one can admire a number of remarkable examples of
Hungarian Symbolist mural painting, and stained-glass windows by Aladår Körösföi
Kriesch, Sandor Nagy and their anonymous pupils and assistants, who decorated this
city's extraordinary Palace of Culture in 1913. Paul Constantin 's very informative and
richly illustrated Arta 1900 in Romania (Editura Meridiane: Bucarest, 1972) offers
ample evidence of t h e vigor and variety of Symbolist art in Old Roumania and in its
more recently acquired, formerly Hungarian, provinces. Though relying on Hungarian
history and folklore for its choices of subject matter, the Symbolist art of Transylvania
was stylistically more closely allied, of course, to t h a t of the Sezession movements in
Vienna and Munich, or to the Slavophile art of Mucha and Masek in the Czechoslovak
provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, than was Roumanian Symbolism, which
often achieved a subtle synthesis of both Germanic and French trends and of some
native Neo-.Byzantine elements. I n all the existing French, English, or German liter­
ature on Symbolist art, t h a t of this vast Danubian and Balkan area, with the exception,
of course, of Vienna, has so far been almost ignored, so t h a t it still offers a rich field for
scholarly and critical investigation.
I n Russia, the influence of Beardsley soon bore some remarkably original fruit,
especially in the theatrical designs, for costumes and sets, of Léon Bakst and other
artists of. the Mir Iskicsstva movement in Saint Petersburg. Among these artists,
Nicholas Roehrich developed a primitivist Baltic-Scandinavian Symbolism of his own,
founded, to a great extent, on the sagas of the Vikings and on what little he knew of
their art. Bakst and several other artists were haunted by a nostalgia for the more
medieval Slavic, Tartar, Byzantine, or Oriental past of Central, Southern, and Eastern
Russia, or else by memories of the rococo splendors of the reign of Catherine the Great,
and of Saint Petersburg's elegant past as a true "Venice of the N o r t h " . E d w a r d Lucie-
Smith in his book, Symbolist Art has suggested t h a t only Conder and Beardsley were
able, in England, to infuse a Symbolist relevance into the fête galante a r t of Watteau
which haunted the minds of Verlaine and Henri de Régnier, as well as other French
Symbolist poets; but this somewhat unusual and highly refined idiom of Symbolism
also had its adepts, as we have seen, in Saint Petersburg as well as in Vienna and London,
and even a few rare adepts, such as the painters Sievogt and Paul Teschner among the
Post-Impressionists and the Jugendstil artists of Berlin and Vienna.
Though Russian Symbolism exerted a great influence throughout Europe when
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes began to reveal the talent of its theatrical designers in
Western Europe, it appears to have produced only two major painters, Wrubel and
Victor Borissov-Mussatov, neither of whom is known outside of Russia nor exhibited in
any non-Russian museums. Like other Symbolist artists in Western Europe, Wrubel
associated closely with several composers, and designed sets and costumes for, among

506
others, some operas of Rimski-Korsakov. The peculiar genius of Wrubel has already
been all-toö-briefly discussed; t h a t of Borissov-Mussatov, a less epic and more elegiac
painter, distinguishes itself b y its nostalgic memories of an aristocratic, mid-nineteenth-
century Russian provincial life, in which idealized young women resembling apparitions
haunt dreamlike parks. However, on his return to Russia from Paris towards the end of
his brief life, Borissov-Mussatov abandoned Symbolism and painted a few more reso­
lutely Post-Impressionist works, among them some landscapes in which one can perhaps
detect something of Van Gogh's influence.
Russian Symbolism also proved to be an important and decisive influence in t h e
evolution of a small group of emancipated Russian-Jewish artists, at least one of whom,
Marc Chagall, was destined, a few decades later, to become world famous. In the early
work of Chagall, Issachar Ryback, the American (but Russian-born) painter
Mané-Katz, and Max Weber, we can indeed detect an ardent search for a Jewish ar­
tistic identity t h a t reflects, in a Yiddish context inspired by the writings, among others,
of Sholem Aleichem, the kind of search for a national identity t h a t during the Sym­
bolist era haunted the minds of writers, composers, and artists also of other cultural
minorities in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. I n Finland, for instance, t h e
painter Akseli Valdemar Gallen-Kalela depicted—in a somewhat academic manner
t h a t reveals memories of late Pre-Raphaelitism—some scenes from the Kalevala, t h e
Finnish national epic which, in America, had suggested to Longfellow the meter of
Hiawatha. A close friend of the composer Sibelius, Gallen-Kalela was also active in
developing, in Finnish arts and crafts, a somewhat abstract Art Nouveau style t h a t
elaborated upon designs found in ancient Finnish artifacts and t h a t soon came to be
known as the "Kalevala style".
One of the more surprising by-products of the search for national identity in E a s t ­
ern-European Symbolist art, in this respect, was the founding of Jerusalem's Bezalel
School of art, by the Galician-Jewish graphic artist and book-illustrator E . M. Lilien
and the Roumanian-born Jewish artist Boris Schatz. Though no longer at all faithful
to the Symbolist styles of its founders, the Bezalel Institute is now Israel's official
School of Fine Arts.
Still divided between Tsarist Russia and the German and Austro-Hungarian em­
pires, Poland offers—in the paintings of Jacek Malczewski, S. Wyspiafiski, and Boles-
law Biegas—an example of a particularly complex amalgam of Symbolist influences,
though often more Germanic than Russian, Austrian, or French. I n Estonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania, Symbolism and Art Nouveau adopted national forms t h a t are similar
to those of Finland, but which have never attracted much attention abroad. Only t h e
Lithuanian composer and painter Mikolajus Öiurlionis, who first came t o the fore as a
musical prodigy and whose theories of sound and color had much in common with those
of Scriabin, is mentioned again and again in books on Symbolist a r t as a pioneer of a
kind of "musicalist" abstraction which, around 1905, he practiced in paintings founded
on principles derived from those of musical composition; b u t none of these works of
Ciurlionis appear to be available except in the Museum of K a u n a s and in a few other
Russian museums; the French post-Cubist painter H e n r y Valensi, who visited Russia
before 1914, may have seen some of them there and may have been influenced by them

507
when, after 1915, he became the founder and main representative of his own musicaliste
school of painting in Paris. I t has sometimes been suggested t h a t the abstract style of
Ciurlionis influenced the early work of Kandinsky. But Ciurlionis painted only in Vilna
and Saint Petersburg and only between 19()2 to 1911, a time when Kandinsky was al­
ready living in Munich with the German painter Gabriele Munter and expressing, in
general, little interest in any new developments in Russian art.
Much has already been written about the very complex and varied nature of the
Symbolist styles of the great Norwegian painter E d v a r d Munch. In 1885, Munch came
to Paris for the first time; on his return to Norway, he expressed great admiration for
the work of Manet, but seems to have actually been more lastingly and profoundly
impressed b y Eugène Carrière's The Sick Child, a painting which was first exhibited in
Paris t h a t year and supplied the theme and title of the first important work t h a t Munch
painted on his return to Scandinavia.
However peripherally a Symbolist, Carrière's influence appears to have liberated
Munch from t h a t of the Swedish Realist-Impressionist Anders Zorn, and thus to have
facilitated Munch's rapid evolution towards the Symbolist-Expressionist art which
earned him his great fame within his own lifetime and his widespread influence, especially
on such major German Expressionists as Nolde and Rohlfs. Together with Van Gogh
and Ensor, Munch thus became one of the three sources of a kind of Nordic Post-
Impressionism t h a t was at the same time Symbolist and in some respects, Expressionist.
In the earlier and unequivocally Symbolist or allegorical paintings and drawings of
Lovis Corinth, this indirect and exemplary influence of Munch is particularly fruitful.
Though Munch is generally recognized as one of the most original and important
of the Symbolist artists, few historians of art ever venture further afield in an explora­
tion of Scandinavian Symbolism; the work of the Swedish painter Ivar Arosenius,
for example, which is well-represented in the fine museum of his native Göteborg, is
practically never mentioned. Arosenius appears to have developed, after a brief stay in
France, a very personal and esoteric idiom in which he combined devices learned from
the associates of Gauguin and Emile Bernard in Pont-Aven with a conscious naïveté
t h a t he owed to his admiration for Henri Rousseau, who should always be interpreted
as having had distinctly Symbolist aspirations in many of his overtly allegorical works.
Irish Symbolism remained mainly literary, immersed in the haunted twilight of
the Celtic Revival. Though fairly active and productive in the popularization of an­
cient Celtic designs in the applied arts, it failed to bring forth any artist of real distinc­
tion, except perhaps Jack Yeats, the brother of the poet, a somewhat provincial and
belated Symbolist painter whose work displays Expressionist affinities.
The Glasgow School is famous mainly for its architecture and decorative art.
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, the wife of the great architect Charles Rennie Mackin­
tosh, and her sister Frances, who married the designer Herbert McNair, remain the
two outstanding Scottish representatives of Symbolist painting. Essentially decorative
and calligraphic in its design and composition, their work often has a floral character
and tends towards the same kind of abstraction as t h a t of Ciurlionis and a number of
Munich Art Nouveau or Jugendstil designers, such as Olbrich and Endell. Several
critics and historians have suggested t h a t these Symbolist paintings of the Glasgow

508
School have much in common with those of the Dutch Symbolist painter J a n Toorop,
but the similarities between Toorop's arabesques, so nostalgically imitative of the art of
his native Indonesia, and those of the Glasgow School, so clearly derived, though in a
highly elaborated form, from those of the floral patterns of contemporary wallpapers
and textiles of the school of William Morris and his disciples and competitors, are a t
best superficial. If the Symbolist art of Glasgow reveals any real affinity with t h a t of
Holland, it would rather be with some of the work of the Dutch painter and designer,
Johan Thorn Prikker, or with the very decadent book illustrations and drawings of
Christophe Karel de Nerée tot Babberich, both of whom developed complex personal
styles involving the use of the arabesque t h a t bordered on abstraction in such a manner
as almost to conceal occasional erotic implications of the kind t h a t Beardsley also
enjoyed suggesting.
An extremely eclectic artist, Toorop tried his hand, always with great proficiency,
at a number of different styles.These include, in many drawings, a Post-Impressionist
Realism t h a t emulates the early Dutch work of Van Gogh, and also, in a few paintings,
some very expert but uninspired exercises in Pointillism. Toorop is at his best, however,
in his strangely curvilinear Symbolist compositions, such as 0 Grave Where is Thy
Victory and The Three Brides, where the kind of Symbolism t h a t one finds in some of the
work of Burne-Jones and in most of the work of Fernand Khnopff is reinterpreted by
Toorop in a very personal fin-de-siècle idiom of highly stylized and elongated human
figures and plant forms t h a t may well be derived from Beardsley, Ricketts, Rackham,
and other book illustrators, but has been entirely transformed into a kind of flowing,
submarine universe by Toorop's memories of the morphology of Balinese Hindu art.
How did Symbolist art fare beyond the confines of Europe ? Pre-Raphaelitism and
the publication of The Yellow Book had some slight repercussions here and there in the
British Empire. I n Australia, Adelaide's, Melbourne's, and Sydney's public collections
of Australian art of the turn of the century prove t h a t the aspirations of most of the
more gifted pioneers of a native Australian art tended towards Impressionism rather
t h a n Symbolism; the same appears to be true of Canada: the artists of a frontier com­
munity, as was the case in the United States in the age of the Hudson River School, are
more often interested in discovering and depicting the wonders of nature t h a n those of
the mind.
Though Latin America gave Spanish literature two of its most truly outstanding
Symbolist poets, Ruben Dario and Jose Asuncion Silva, whose irony compares only
with t h a t of Laforgue, it produced no Symbolist artists of note, if one excepts the native
Symbolism of popular Mexican art, which is generally anonymous.
Edward Lucie-Smith has affirmed t h a t Symbolism failed to bear much fruit in t h e
United States. Though he mentions Elihu Vedder as " a provincial Pre-Raphaelite",
Vedder's Cumaean Sybil might more aptly be described as the work of a belated
Romantic disciple of Fuseli. Lucie-Smith also mentions, quite properly, the orientalist
allegories of Sargent's decoration of the Boston Public Library, and the few Symbolist
works of Maurice Prendergast and Arthur B . D avies, in both of whom an influence of
the classical style of composition of Puvis de Chavannes can be observed. B u t Lucie-
Smith fails to mention an earlier and more native American Symbolist undercurrent

509
which began to appear before 1850 in such paintings as John Cole's The Titan's Goblet
and in his two great series, The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life, and which
then continued to come to the surface in some paintings by John Quidor, in most of the
works of Ryder, and in some of those of Blakelock.
In the case of Quidor and Ryder, this trend of American Symbolism is closely
related to the Romanticism that appears in the fairytales of Washington Irving and in
the poetic fantasies of Poe, whose writings later proved to be one of the main sources of
European literary Symbolism. In some of the works of Ryder, one can also sense an
apocalyptic quality of transcendentalism akin to the one which pervades the writings of
Melville. Later, this native American Symbolist art merged into the main current of
European Symbolism in the rare works of an expatriate New York artist, Pinkus
Marcius Simons, who has so far been entirely neglected by American art historians,
collectors, and museum curators. In Europe, Pinkus Marcius Simons acquired, at a
relatively early age, a virtuoso painterly technique (derived from Turner) in depicting
fairy-tale fantasies of the kind that John Austin Fitzgerald and Richard Doyle had
begun to popularize in mid-Victorian England, when Christina Rossetti's Ooblin Market
was enjoying its greatest success.
Little is known, in Europe and America, of Japanese Symbolism, though Japanese
artists, during the whole Meiji period, were as eager to assimilate new techniques
and styles as their European colleagues. From Whistler and Beardsley to Van Gogh,
European artists were to copy the decadent art of the Edo period, which they believed
to be the best that Japan could offer. Yet the Japanese artists of the Shiro-uma group
held their first ''secessionist" exhibition in Tokyo as early as 1895, and the work of
Shigeru Aoki alone reveals how profoundly this great painter had already assimilated,
by 1903, all that he could learn from the most significant works of major Engli&h,
French, German, and Russian Symbolists, including Burne-Jones, Albert Moore,
Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Puvis de Chavannes, Hans von Marées, and Wrubel. Aoki
seems to have had an ample supply of the best European art publications and to have
been able to study their illustrations with the understanding and the critical acumen of
a true genius.
In the State of Kerala in Southern India, in Triyandrum, former capital of the
Rajahs of Trayancore, a small museum displays the paintings of three successive gene­
rations of these rulers, each one of whom, in turn, was variously influenced in depicting
scenes from Hindu mythology or classical Indian poetry by the English Pre-Raphaelites
or their Symbolist followers, but especially by such turn-of-the-century book-illus­
trators as Ricketts and Rackham. Elsewhere in India, but especially in Bombay, Delhi,
Calcutta and Baroda, these same English influences inspired, mainly between 1900 and
1930, an important Anglo-Indian revival of the traditional Indian art of illustration in
miniatures.
Ill
The major Symbolist artists of Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Austria possessed
an exceptional character which poses special problems. Arnold Böcklin, typically
Germanic in his Romantic idealization of classical antiquity and of Renaissance Italy,

510
exerted an influence on the evolution of German and Eastern European Symbolist art
as important as that of Moreau and of Burne-Jones on that of Western Europe. Böck-
lin's famous The Isle of the Dead communicates much the same languorous, dreamlike
mood as Tennyson's poem The Lotus-Eaters, but most of the Swiss master's mythological
compositions representing centaurs, tritons, satyrs, or mermaids display a muscular joy
of life that distinguishes them clearly from the androgynous figures of Burne-Jones and
Moreau. They suggest a closer affinity with Watts, with whom Böcklin also shared a
greater dramatic sense and a broader diversity of moods and interests.
Böcklin's sense of drama is expressed in the vigorous movement of his mytholog­
ical figures and even in the few landscapes without figures that he painted. These are
settings where one expects something dramatic to happen, and the figures of some of his
other landscapes, such as The Isle of the Dead or Galypso and Ulysses, do not overtly
perform an action that tells us a story, but rather communicate to us a sense of sus­
pense, as if we were witnessing a dramatic pause between two separate actions. In
Germany, where Böcklin lived during most of his creative years except for those spent
in Italy, his Symbolism fathered that of Klinger, Greiner, and Stuck, though only
Klinger and Greiner inherited his mysterious sense of drama. Böcklin's paintings that
depict a recognizable action, such as his Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross, can some­
times strike us as depicting figures in poses which seem overdramatic, in fact, even
melodramatic or operatic, as if they were striking an attitude before bursting into song.
The memoirs of the Italian painter Carlo Carra offer us a devastating picture of the
desperate condition of the Italian art world around 1900. Rome, Florence, Venice, and
Naples had long ceased to be centers of anything but commercial genre painting of a
kind that sold easily to sentimental foreign tourists. The Macchiaioli, a group of Italian
pleinairiste painters of real talent who were contemporaries of the Barbizon School and
the early Impressionists of Prance, left their mark mainly as somewhat regional or
provincial masters. Many Italian painters of talent preferred to seek their fortunes
abroad, generally in Paris. Only in Genoa and Milan was there still some desultory
artistic activity.
In such an atmosphere, Symbolism failed to have the kind of impact it had in more
active or lively European art centers. In Northern Italy, however, a small group of
Italian Divisionist painters, among whom Giovanni Segantini and Gaetano Previati
were leaders, managed to develop a curiously novel and atypical style of Italian art that
had more in common with the Symbolism of Austria than with any other Italian style
of art. As a Symbolist, Segantini is truly remarkable in a few curiously visionary inter­
pretations of scenes from Dante's Inferno, such as the one where he depicts The Unnat-
ural Mothers in a highly stylized but truly apocalyptic landscape. The very clearness
and precision of Segantini's vision, both here and in his Alpine scenes, infuses in most
of his works a transcendental, contemplative quality. This quietistic character of
his art can indeed qualify Segantini as a Symbolist, even in works that appear, at first
sight, to be most unequivocally Realist.
Compared with the apparent ease and simplicity of Segantini's major achievements,
the Symbolist works of Previati strike one, at best, as elegantly mannered, perhaps even
shallow. Previati distinguished himself, however, as one of the very few European

511
Symbolists who, like Conder in England, could handle eighteenth-century fêtes galantes
themes in a Symbolist spirit. Other Italian Symbolists include Vittorio Zecchin, a
Venetian disciple of Klimt; the very morbid and decadent sculptor, Adolfo Wildt, who
was obsessed with death; the sculptor Medardo Rosso, whose extremely sensitive work
displays a s y m p a t h y with the aspirations of both Rodin and Carrière; a n d an oddly
belated Tries tine Symbolist painter, Arturo Nathan. A very withdrawn Jewish artist,
Nathan painted visionary views of seashores with ships, figures, and statues. H e died in
a Nazi concentration camp. Neither during his lifetime nor since his death has his ex­
tremely personal kind of pittura metafisica earned the attention t h a t it deserves.
I n the circle of the poet D'Annunzio, a number of somewhat derivative and de­
cadent Italian Symbolist artists attracted attention a bit belatedly, b u t their feeble
utterances were soon shouted down in the hubbub t h a t accompanied t h e birth of
Italian Futurism. Among the Futurists, however, Boccioni has left some early works,
especially drawings, which prove t h a t he at one time had Symbolist aspirations of a
somewhat Secessionist or Art Nouveau character. Futurism did lead, nevertheless, t o
a revival of Symbolist ideas in an entirely metamorphosed idiom; Giorgio de Chirico,
Carlo Carra, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Savinio, and a few former Futurists developed
their pittura metafisica, which subsequently exerted such a powerful influence on
Surrealism. I n this context, one should note t h a t Chirico had studied art in Munich,
where he became a great admirer of Böcklin and, in particular, was a pupil of a minor
Greek Symbolist, Nicholas Ghisis, who belonged to the circle of Böcklin and Stuck.
In Spain, the political and economic crises t h a t preceded and followed the Spanish-
American war had serious repercussions on the nation's cultural life. While Spanish
literature continued to maintain relatively high standards of creativity, the art world of
Spain remained dormant, on the whole, except in Catalonia, which was more open t o
foreign influences. I n Barcelona a number of more experimental artists were influenced
by decadent, Symbolist, and Art Nouveau styles t h a t reached them from abroad.
Their importance, especially t h a t of the painter Isidro Nonelly y Monturiol, consists
mainly in the influence t h a t they exerted on Picasso in his early years. I n Portugal,
the only significant Symbolist appears to have been the painter Antonio Carneiro,
whose major work, a triptych entitled A vida, presents a Symbolist allegory of a wom­
an's life, composed in a style derived from t h a t of Puvis de Chavannes, b u t with some
Pre-Raphaelite reminiscences and a pathos which also suggests an influence of such
Parisian Rosicrucians as Carlos Schwabe.
Though the Austrian Sezession movement was extremely active and influential
in the applied arts, its only major Symbolist artist was Gustav Klimt. Among younger
artists of the following generation, however, both Schiele and Kokoschka, still produced,
though in an Expressionist idiom, a few Symbolist works of outstanding quality, such
as Kokoschka's The Bride of the Wind. I n their references to the world in which t h e
artist actually lived, the works of Klimt can often be as disturbingly a n d deliberately
contemporary as some of the works of Klinger or of Greiner, though K l i m t is never as
realistic as they are, and remains predominantly calligraphic a n d decorative in his
style of composition. B u t t h e truly hieratic quality of Klimt's portraits of upper class
Viennese women sets these paintings apart from most other masterpieces of Central

512
 European Symbolism and transforms their models into beautifully sexless and utterly
threatening creatures, endowed with a malevolent or at least inhumanly indifferent
quality of ambiguity which might even lead us to suspect them of transvestitism.
In a way, Klimt can be said to be the Symbolist hero who finally triumphed over the
monstrous femme fatale haunting so much Symbolist poetry and art since the age of
Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and the early works of Moreau and Rops. Only her face
and hands now emerge, in these works of Klimt, from a veritable labyrinth of decorative
detail that dominates and imprisons her, thus reducing to a minimum her potential
appeal to the spectator's eye and emotions. No longer human nor divine nor diabolical,
she has become a "thing", of much the same nature as an embroidered design in her
dress or the facets on a jewel. In some of his later portraits, however, Klimt trans-
cended this very personal style of Symbolism and began to develop an equally personal
style of Expressionism which reveals coloristic affinities with the Fauvism of Van
Dongen.
However realistic they may be in terms of every detail, Klinger 's compulsively
narrative illustrations of real or imaginary nightmares, such as those depicted in The
Glove, can communicate to us the same kind of anxieties as Max Ernst does in the in-
congruities of his early Surrealist collages. Though the latter are composed of elements
borrowed from old book illustrations with a macabre sense of the absurd, they suggest,
like some of Klinger's fantasies, the cataclysmic acts of a vengeful God or the brainless
malevolence of sheer chance. East Berlin's National Gallery can boast of exhibiting
what may well be Klinger's masterpiece in this particular genre of nightmare art: a
sinister landscape of industrial turn-of-the-century suburbia in which a middle-class
Sunday wanderer finds himself threatened, if not yet physically attacked, by a scattered
group of obviously evil-minded Lumpenproleten, thus offering us a perfect illustration
of the fears, anxieties, and fantasies which could be suggested to a middle-class mind
by the guilt, feelings of class consciousness. In many works of Félicien Rops and of
Otto Greiner, disturbingly Symbolist transfigurations of real-life elements similarly
derived from the contemporary social scene acquire such a sinister quality of sado-
masochistic alienation. Not only does Symbolism here provide a legitimate art-historical
link from Romanticism to Surrealism, but it also proves, as we have seen, to have been
the source of a number of other forms or styles of the modern art of the first two de-
cades of our century.
On the one hand, in such works as those of the American Symbolist Albert Pink-
ham Ryder, especially in his Jonas in the Smithsonian Institution's Washington col-
lection of American art, we find a kind of anticipation of true Symbolism that is still
closely allied, both in its visionary quality and in its technique, to the Romanticism of
John Martin, in England, and of Daumier, Gustave Doré, and Rodolphe Bresdin
in France, as well as to the writings of Poe, who later served as examples to Bau-
delaire and the other literary theorists of French Symbolism. On the other hand, in
the works of Gustave Moreau, an acknowledged master of these same theorists, we
discover the source of the early work and the later stylistic development of Rouault,
Matisse, and the Roumanian painter Theodor Pallady, all three of whom had been
Moreau's pupils. Many other French Fauvists who were not pupils of Moreau derived

33 Balakian 513
their theory of color from Gauguin and Emile Bernard, both of whom are now generally
considered to have been Symbolists, though of a nature that is different from that oi
Moreau. The Symbolism of Gauguin and Bernard sought its exoticism in the present,
in Brittany or Tahiti, rather than in a legendary past. In his early work, Mondriar
likewise displays a strong influence of the Dutch Symbolism of Toorop, while Ken-
dinsky, until 1907, continued again and again to use themes and develop styles thai
he had learned or derived from the works of the Russian Symbolists Wrubel and Roeh-
rich, as well as from such German Symbolists as Habermann, who were then his mas­
ters in Munich. In the early work of Paul Klee and Alfred Kubin, we likewise discovei
obvious influences of Franz von Stuck, whose art classes they had both attended in
Munich. Kubin, moreover, informs us in his autobiography that his discovery of the
works of Klinger and of the Belgian Symbolist De Groux, among others, proved to be
the real turning point in his own artistic development. As we have already stated,
Giorgio de Chirico had also spent his formative years as a student in Munich and, foi
several years thereafter, continued to be influenced by Böcklin, whom he greatly ad­
mired, as well as by Stuck and the Greek Symbolist, Ghisis. In the National Gallery
in East Berlin, two early paintings of Chirico clearly reveal these Munich influences.
As for Kupka, we have already pointed out his debt to Mucha; it would, moreover, be
interesting to investigate the possibility of the influence of the German Romantic
painter Runge's Der Morgen on some of the early Symbolist painting of Kupka.
To untangle the skein of the complex evolution of Symbolist art, however, es­
pecially in Central and Eastern Europe, historians still need to do a great deal of pains­
taking and detailed research. Who would suspect, at first glance, that the German Ex­
pressionist sculptor Ernst Barlach had once contributed to the Munich periodical
Die Jugend a Symbolist cover design conceived in the idealistic pastoral idiom of Hans
von Marées and Puvis de Chavannes, and later developed by their German disciple,
Ludwig von Hoffman? Or that the Dada and Surrealist master, Hans Arp had, at one
time, attended the same Ludwig voii Hoffman's art classes in Weimar, and had actually
been influenced by him in some of his own early work ? Even if one chooses to limit the
application of the term "Symbolist" only to artists closely associated with those writers
who, like Moréas in France and George in Germany, deliberately claimed to be Sym­
bolists, one soon discovers that some of these artists (for instance, Melchior Lechter,
who illustrated the early, limited editions of George's poems), can now be distinguished
only arbitrarily, on the basis of actual work rather than of literary friendships and
associations, from other painters and book illustrators of the same generation (e.g.
Heinrich Vogeler, Thomas-Theodor Heine, and Marcus Behmer) whose activity was not
so exclusively restricted to illustrating or decorating books by explicitly Symbolist
writers. On the other hand, in spite of its verbal and visual pun on a studio life class,
Picasso's "Blue Period" painting La viß—though Picasso never associated with the
Paris Symbolist writers— belongs quite clearly in the category of art derived, however
loosely, from the classicizing Symbolism of Puvis de Chavannes, as does the Portuguese
painter Carneiro's more manneristic and less original triptych, A vida.
In the field of book illustration, poster design, and the graphic arts in general,
it becomes almost impossible to draw a clear line of demarcation between manifestations

514
of Symbolist art and those of Art Nouveau. The latter, especially in France and Belgium,
tended to adapt t o the applied arts many of the themes, ideas, and devices of what might
be termed " p u r e " or " g r e a t " art. Such artists as de Feure and Grasset distinguished
themselves in both fields, as Symbolist painters and as Art Nouveau graphic artists.
I n the University of California's Museum at Berkeley, one can find two i m p o r t a n t
Symbolist paintings b y Melchior Lechter, who has, in recent years, been all too easily
and readily discussed b y most scholars only as a master of Art Nouveau book illus­
tration; these two paintings reveal t h a t Lechter, before specializing as a designer of
beautiful books for Stefan George and the circle of his disciples, had also been a Sym­
bolist painter of a somewhat different nature, in fact, a nostalgic devotee of t h e
idealized and pastoral "Golden Age" which is depicted in the works of Puvis de Chavan-
nes, Hans von Marées, Arnold Böcklin, or Ludwig von Hoffman.
In the tangle of influences which contributed to the spread of the doctrine of
Symbolism all the way from its main centers in Western Europe, England, France, a n d
Belgium, to Scandinavia, the Iberian peninsula, Roumania, Tsarist Russia, a n d even
America and J a p a n , one can detect a few major characteristics of subject m a t t e r t h a t
stamp an artist as a Symbolist whatever his actual style or technique may have bçen,
and this is particularly true in the neglected area of Symbolist sculpture.
Though the occasional sculptures of Klinger and Franz von Stuck generally
remain in their choice and handling of mythological or legendary themes a n d their
actual technique and style more neoclassical or even academic t h a n truly Symbolist,
they yet reveal their affinity with Symbolism when, for instance, the artist chooses to
mix his materials and thus achieve polychrome effects in bronze and ivory, or uses
marble of contrasting textures and colors. I n the allegorical sculptures of Carpeaux,
especially in La Danse, one sense a much stronger and more real affinity with Symbolism,
especially with the Symbolist paintings of Fantin-Latour; b u t Carpeaux's portraits,
so many of which can be studied in Copenhagen's magnificent Carlsberg Glyptothek,
remain masterpieces of Realist-Impressionist rather t h a n of Symbolist sculpture,
reminding us, in this respect, of some of the early portraits of Monet. Like F a n t i n -
Latour, Carpeaux thus appears to have been an Impressionist in his portraits, b u t a
Symbolist in his allegories.

IV

The rapid evolution and broad diffusion of Symbolist art permits the formulation
of a few general conclusions. On the one hand, in selected works of Doré, Rops, F e r n a n d
Khnopff, Klinger, Greiner, Munch, Klimt and even of the English Pre-Raphaelite
painter Simeon Solomon, there are allegorical transmutations of scenes and subjects
observed by the artist in his own contemporary environment b u t depicted in such a
manner as to suggest an ulterior or even apocalyptic significance in an otherwise mean­
ingless reality. This is particularly true of Doré's visions of Victorian London as a t r u e
' 'City of Dreadful Night", of Simeon Solomon's nightmarish fantasies on the same theme,
of the allegories of prostitution t h a t haunted the mind of Rops, and of some of t h e
more visionary and less neoclassical lithographs and engravings of Greiner and Klinger.

33* 515
Far from withdrawing from contemporary reality into memories of a more or less
imaginary, idealized past, the Symbolist artist here uses contemporary reality as a spring­
board for apocalyptic fantasies in which he expresses his horror and revulsion at the
present. On the other hand, in the works of Moreau, Burne-Jones, Böcklin, Marées,
Puvis de Chavannes, Wrubel and most other Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, there is a
predilection for historical, legendary, or mythological themes which contrast strikingly
with the usual practice of their Realist or Impressionist contemporaries ranging from
Courbet, Leibl, Menzel, and Riepin to Manet, Degas, Monet, or Renoir.
These almost paradoxical characteristics of subject matter, whether apocalyptic
transmutations of contemporary reality or idealized and nostalgic visions of an imag­
ined past, nevertheless, have one quality in common: they communicate something
t h a t was in the artist's mind rather than, as in the case of most Realist or Impressionist
painters, something t h a t the artist merely saw in his environment and depicted more or
less faithfully or literally, however personal his style or idiom. Though the Symbolists,
in strictly rhetorical terms, may have all too often relied on allegory rather t h a n on
true symbols, and though they may have used real-life models for their visionary
fantasies, they always integrated these models in a very personal vision of an idealized
world. In the case of Hans, von Marées, Puvis de Chavannes, and their various disciples
(e.g. Séon, Osbert, Carneiro, and even Arthur B. Davies and LouisEilshemius in America,
or, in Germany, Ludwig von Hoffman) the artist deliberately deprived his model, even
in preliminary sketches, of almost all idiosyncratic or realistic characteristics so as to
produce an impersonal, idealized, and classical figure.
Puvis de Chavannes, Burne-Jones, Moreau, Böcklin, Marées, and Feuerbach
remain pioneers and masters of this more neoclassical and immediately post-Romantic
trend in Symbolist art. Their rejection of contemporary reality and their deliberate
idealization of all t h a t they depict distinguishes their work both from the earlier and
often more realistic work of such Romantic masters as Géricault and Delacroix and
from the medievalism or the meticulously detailed Realism of such earlier English
Pre-Raphaelites as Holman Hunt, as well as from the the more maudlin religious senti­
ment of some Nazarene German Romantics. Some Symbolist* pioneers and masters,
especially Moreau and Burne-Jones, exerted a decisive influence on those writers of
Mallarmé's circle in France who later developed a whole theory of Symbolism as a
literary school; this theory, in turn, influenced the later developments of Symbolist
art in France and Belgium, where it became more willfully mannered or withdrawn in
its stylization of reality and its choices of subjects, and less easily distinguishable
from Art Nouveau.
In England Whistler and Albert Moore tried to react against this danger by devel­
oping a style of figurative painting that, like a still life, would no longer suggest any
narrative or story and, divested of every element of drama, would also be free from all
pathos. In this respect, their ideal of pure beauty was fairly close to t h a t of Puvis de
Chavannes and Hans von Marées, both of whom likewise reduced narrative to a min­
imum in an idiom of figurative painting of stressed classical principles and values of
composition. B u t Whistler and Moore were also less abstemious or more sensual in their
handling of color and texture as indications of mood.

516
 We cannot help finding a close and unconscious dialectical relationship between
the explicit theory of Ideal Beauty propounded in the eighteenth century by t h e neo­
classical painter, Anton Raphael Mengs, and the frequent examples of ideal horror
t h a t one finds among t h e works of several of his pupils, especially Fuseli, Abilgaard,
and Goya. A similar p a r a d o x appears to be inherent in Symbolist art. On the one hand,
artists such as Albert Moore proposed in their work a philosophy of ideal b e a u t y t h a t
finally developed, some decades later, into idioms of abstract art t h a t transcend both
beauty and horror by being nonfigurative; on the other hand, a tradition of macabre
fantasy or ideal horror leads from some of the works of Bresdin, Doré, or t h e Belgian
painter Wiertz t o J a m e s Ensor, Munch (in such works as The Cry), and Odilon Redon;
and then on to those manifestations of Expressionism which were felt, between 1910
and 1925, to be most shocking or most like a caricature; and finally, to the depiction
of Surrealist nightmares. Between these two extremes, Gustave Moreau often offers ùs
a curiously alchemical amalgam of beauty and horror in his ambiguous visions t h a t are
also splendid nightmares.
From the critical perspective of time, the most powerful or imaginative Symbolist
graphic artists now prove t o be either those masters, such as Moreau, P u vis de Chavan-
nes, Burne-Jones, Hans von Marées, Böcklin, Bresdin, and Rops who anticipated by a
few years the self-proclaimed Symbolists of France and Belgium; or else those peripheral
and more independent artists, such as Carrière, Munch, Gauguin, or Ensor, whose
association with the Symbolists of Paris and Brussels remained tangential; or again,
those whom the Paris Symbolists ignored, such as Klimt, Klinger, and Wrubel.
Of the many other Symbolist artists of France and Belgium, some have been un­
justly neglected for a long while, especially Khnopff and Lévy-Dhurmer, and are now
being rediscovered one by one. But many such recent rediscoveries and revaluations
smack somewhat of the kind of sheer speculation t h a t characterizes an international
art market which is no longer guided by any consistent principles of taste, a n d only
by an unquenchable thirst for novelty. However odd or interesting he may be as an
individual and as a case history, the transvestite Russian artist Kalmakoff, for instance,
who made his debut as the "Beardsley of Saint Petersburg" in the circle of Bakst and
who died as an exile in a French mental hospital, cannot justifiably be claimed t o have
been an artist of major importance. Nor can one reasonably claim more than an interest
of sheer curiosity for the work of the spiritualist German artist who adopted the pseud­
onym of Fidus.
In order to properly assess the historical importance of ideas or images first for­
mulated or popularized by some of these neglected Symbolist masters, we still need to
develop a more systematic method of research. Teamwork is required in the complex
field of study involving the diffusion of ideas and the metamorphoses t h a t these can
undergo in the creative mind. A single example of such a diffusion and of such morpho­
logical changes may serve here as an illustration of the kind of comparative s t u d y t h a t
this would imply. Many editions of the works of the Austrian Symbolist poet, Rainer
Maria Rilke, have for their frontispiece the poet's portrait by the Russian painter,
Leonid Pasternak, father of the Russian writer, Boris Pasternak. Although t h e majority
of Leonid Pasternak's works are clearly more Realist or Impressionist t h a n Symbolist,

517
he yet had frequent recourse to the typically Symbolist sfumato effects and the muted
palette of Eugène Carrière. In this particular portrait of Rilke, however, Pasternak
depicts the Austrian poet against a background representing an idealized view of the
Kremlin's skyline. The artist appears to have borrowed this device from two other
portraits of writers b y the French Symbolist painter Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, both of
which had been widely reproduced in popular art journals of the period. I n one, Lévy-
Dhurmer has depicted the Belgian Symbolist writer, Georges Rodenbach, against a
backdrop view of Bruges and its Gothic monuments and canals; in the other, t h e French
novelist Pierre Loti stands out against a background view of the Golden Horn, with
the domes and minarets of the skyline of the old city of Istanbul. I n all three portraits,
the architectural background serves as a symbol of the model's travels, writings and
romantic interests. Lévy-Dhurmer's influence, surprisingly enough, also appears to
have spread as far west as America. In the Smithsonian Institution's National Collection
of Fine Arts in Washington, D . C , a number of fine Symbolist pastels b y Alice Pike
Barney {Lucifer (1892), Medusa (1892), Woodsprite, Circe, Babylon (1904) and Woman
Clothed With the Sun), all reveal the unmistakable influence of the French artist whom
she had met in Paris and who was also a close friend of her daughter, Natalie Clifford
Barney, whom Lévy-Dhurmer depicted in a pastel of 1906, as well as a number of her
friends, including t h e Symbolist poetess, Renée Vivien.
As a movement, Symbolism remains, in spite of the idiosyncrasies and aberrations
of many of its followers, a movement of primary importance in the a r t history of the
past hundred years. Its influence can be traced in the works of a great number of
outstanding artists in many lands, and it nearly always proved to be of great
value in liberating them from the stifling restrictions of a rigid academic train­
ing or from the positivist-materialist, restrictive philosophy of Impressionism. In the
area of the history of ideas rather than of art, however, Symbolism was all too often
stunted or distorted in its growth by mere fashion or else b y idiosyncrasies and mys­
tical philosophies t h a t were of passing interest (e.g. the painter Séon's theories of color
and form) but have no lasting validity. The real importance of many of these idiosyn­
crasies and philosophies, such as the Rosierucianism of Sâr Péladan and his followers,
consists in their brief influence as elements t h a t contributed, in the teeming crucible
of thoughts and styles of the turn of the century, to the otherwise incomprehensible
evolution of twentieth-century art, with all its contradictions and conflicting styles,
and, since 1945, its peculiarly negativistic and self-destructive tendencies.

518
 D O R E ASHTON

T H E O T H E R SYMBOLIST I N H E R I T A N C E
I N PAINTING

Beyond the myths, the Salomes and the panic gods, there lay in Symbolism still more
for the painters. Or rather, for certain painters whose temperaments bore them in­
exorably toward the creation of pure form. Many painters were content to borrow t h e
motifs of poetic symbolism. Some were literally illustrators of hallowed Symbolist
themes. B u t others hovered in the Symbolist purlieus eager only to fulfill their hunger
for essential form; for purely distilled emotions detached from occasion and examined
in and for themselves. They sought, in their own medium, the meaning of t h a t abstraction
which was certainly one of the mysterious centers of Symbolist thought.
Dreams of plastic abstraction were deposited early in the Symbolist tradition.
Many late nineteenth century artists must have noticed the acute visual imagery and
occult geometries in t h e works of Edgar Allan Poe. Most notable is the passage in The
Fall of the House of Usher where Poe describes the paintings b y Usher as "pure abstrac-
ions" characterized by vagueness. " B y the utter simplicity, b y the nakedness of his
designs, he arrested and overawed attention". Poe even contrived to paint one of these
pictures in words (though he had noted: " I would in vain endeavor to educe more t h a n
a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words"):

A small picture presented the interior of an

immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel,
with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption
or device. Certain accessory points of t h e design
served well to convey the idea t h a t this excavation
lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the
earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its
vast extent, and no torch or other artificial source
of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays
rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly
and inappropriate splendor.

Poe's interest in plastic imagery, as Richard Wilbur has pointed out, extended t o
all his works, from the slightest commentary on furniture t o t h e most arcane tales. 1
Since the scenes and situations of Poe's tales are always "concrete representations of
states of mind", it is important to recognize the significance of certain scenic or situ­
ational motifs. Wilbur continues:

1
The Recognition of Edgar AUan Poe, ed. by Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor, University of
Michigan Press, 1966).

519
 "Since I have been speaking of geometry—of straight lines and curves and spirals,
perhaps the first thing to notice about Poe's dream rooms is their shape. I t has already
been said t h a t t h e enclosures of Poe's tales incline to a curving or circular form. And
Poe himself, in certain of his essays and dialogues, explains this inclination by de­
nouncing what he calls the harsh mathematical reason of the schools and complaining
t h a t practical science has covered the face of the earth with.rectangular obscenities.
Poe quite explicitly identifies regular angular forms with everyday reason, and the
circle, oval or fluid arabesque with the otherwordly imagination. Therefore, if we discover
t h a t the dream chambers of Poe's fiction are free of angular regularity, we may be sure
t h a t we are noticing a pointed and purposeful consistency in his architecture and décor".
Despite his horror of "infernal Twoness", Poe did carry within his works dualities
which opened varied possibilities to painterly temperaments. There was the Poe of
phantom women, vernal paradises, and ghastly apparitions, available for the romantic
painter's predilections. B u t there was also the stern geometer, the unscrambler of
mathematical conundrums, and the dreamer of abstract symbols—those fluid ara­
besques t h a t haunt the whole of nineteenth and much of twentieth century painting.
Poe's priming hints were deftly caught by the French painters, and their history is well
known. Less celebrated perhaps, is the interest Poe had for the painters of his own
country. The most obvious descendent is Albert Pinkham Ryder, who, in his best-known
Poe allusion, painted an analogue for Roderick Usher's ballad, The Haunted Palace,
(It is significant t h a t this allegory of Usher's mental decline was delivered as a "rhymed
verbal improvisation" accompanied by the guitar. Musicality, as always, is stressed.)
Ryder called his painting The Temple of the Mind, freely allegorizing upon Poe's allegory
by placing, as he wrote in 1907, "three graces who stand in the center of the picture
where their shadows from the moonlight fall toward the spectator. They are waiting for
a weeping love to join them. On the left is a Temple where a cloven-footed faun dances
up the steps snapping his fingers in fiendish glee at having dethroned the erstwhile
ruling graces". 2 I n this painting, Ryder cleaves to symbolist imagery, partaking of
Poe in what is usually called a literary manner (the problem of "literary" painting hav­
ing been argued from the early years of the nineteenth century with considerable
contention. B u t there is the other side of it, the other tradition, and it is perhaps on this
tradition, the expressive formal tradition, t h a t Ryder's deepest painterly conviction
draws. His striving to surpass conventional imitative painting was early expressed.
He described in later years how as a youth, he had, in his desire to be true to nature,
lost himself in a maze of detail; how, try as he would, his colors were not those of nature.
Then, one day, an old scene presented itself formed in an opening between two trees:

It stood out like a painted canvas—the deep blue of a midday sky—a solitary tree'
brilliant with the green of early summer, a foundation of brown earth and gnarled
roots. There was no detail to vex the eye. Three solid masses of form and color—
sky, foliage and earth—the whole bathed in an atmosphere of golden luminosity...

1
Letter to Prof. John Pickard, cited in Lloyd Goodrich, Albert P. Ryder (New York, Braziller,
1959).

520
 I saw nature springing into life upon my dead canvas. It was better than nature,
for it was vibrating with the thrill of a new creation . . . 3

If this was better t h a t nature, was this not consonent with the Poe ideal? Even
more like Poe is his statement t h a t "the artist should fear to become the slave of detail.
He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. W h a t avails a storm
cloud accurate in form a n d color if the storm is not therein?" Ryder did in fact strive t o
express his thought and not its surface when he instinctively rhymed cloud forms and
sea swells; when he found analogies between the lineaments of trees and the patterns of
sky; when he developed his arabesque and left out the "vexing details". For, as Marsden
Hartley, heir of Ryder, whose own late works returned to a Ryderesque simplicity,
wrote, "this master of arabesque, this first and foremost of our designers, this real
creator of pattern [was] the painter poet of the immanent in things". 4
Hartley was in a good position to recognize the poet of the immanent in things,
having been exposed to the last echoes of Mallarmé's mardis at the turn of the century at
the Closerie de Lilas. There he certainly overheard the kind of poet-and-painter dialogue
which led to discussions of " p a t t e r n " and "arabesque" while yet retaining the "under­
current of meaning" so important to the Symbolists. The poetic tradition in which a
primal language is posited was easily transliterated in the realm of the plastic. I t was
not difficult for painters to find parallels for those characteristic allusions to t h e alpha­
bet, the dictionary of forms, the eternal rhyming scheme of all things. Line and color, as
Baudelaire suggested, were equivalent to word and phrase, and could be employed for
their "musicality" rather than their descriptive powers. Once Baudelaire accepted
Poe's theory t h a t the object of poetry was only itself ("Poetry cannot, under penalty
of death or failure, be assimilated to science or morality; it does not have T r u t h as its
object, it has only Itself"), 5 the way was ope" to the other language, the primal lan­
guage of form.
The sources t h a t best fed into the painters' taste for abstraction are implicit in both
Poe and Baudelaire, and are to some extent paradoxical. From Swedenborg comes the
first possibility. "Correspondences" implicitly suggest a system, or a t least a scheme,
and systems are formal abstractions. Baudelaire understood the structural implications
as the celebrated passage alluding to Swedenborg in Y Art Romantique indicates: 6

Tout est hiéroglyphique . . . chez les excellents poètes il n'y a pas de métaphore,
de comparison ou d'épithète qui ne soit pas d'une adaptation mathématiquement
exacte dans la circonstance actuelle, parce que ces comparisons, ces métaphores
et ces épithètes sont puisées dans l'inépuisable fonds de Puniverselle analogie, et
qu'elles ne peuvent être puisées ailleurs.

The symmetry of "mathematically e x a c t " analogies is implicit in Symbolist formal

experiments. Paul Valéry recognized it in his own essay on Poe's Eureka, where he

3
4
Ibid.
6
Marsden Hartley, Adventures in the Arts (New York; Boni & Liveright, 1921).
Charles Baudelaire "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar P o e " (1857), in The Recognition of Edgar
Allan 6 Poe, op. cit.
"L'Art Romantique", Œuvres complètes (Paris, Gallimard, 1961), p. 1078.

521
stresses the "mathematical foundations" of Poe's literary theory, and speculates on the
scientific possibility of Poe's correctness in stating: "Each law of nature depends at all
points on all the other laws". To this day painters of abstractions tend to speak of their
process in the same terms. The whole idea of the system of interrelationships, carefully
weighed, each part dependent on the whole, underlies the prime theories of modern
painting. This mathematical, formal, or structural reflex springs up everywhere in
Symbolist literature. Suddenly, from within the cauldron of Rimbaud's letter to De-
meny (May 15, 1871), there comes the other voice, the voice that tells us that modern
poems "toujours pleins du Nombre et de YHarmonie", are made to be lasting. Between
Baudelaire's decision that "les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent" and
Rimbaud's Platonic notion of harmony, there is no break. Nerval, in Vers Dorés,
suggested that "à la matière même un verbe est attaché", and later, in the nineteenth
century, the "verbe" seemed to pronounce itself liberated from all syntactical con-
ventions except that proposed in the verb se répondre, "Du reste", wrote Rimbaud,
"parole étant idée, le temps d'un langage universel viendra". It remained for Mallarmé
to make a reality of the notion that every word is an idea; to detach the single word
and invest it with mysterious powers that emanate relationships with other words.
The questfon of Mallarmé's influence in the visual arts is still vigorously argued.
His friends among the painters of his day included artists of sharply differing tempera-
ments and styles. Historians stress his relationship with the Impressionists, but Mal-
larmé did not seem bound by a stylistic preference when he made friends with painters.
His direct influence on painters is less important to establish than is the fact of the
resonance of his ideas in the flow of modern painting. There are a few concrete facts,
of course. He himself said he saw Manet every day. He arranged for Octave Mirbeau
to write the enthusiastic article on Gauguin which was to help the latter finance his
passage to Tahiti. He corresponded with a large number of artists. Many of these letters
have already been published. He welcomed to his mardis artists of every stamp, and
not a few of them have left awed accounts of the significance of these encounters.
True, no one knows exactly what Mallarmé discoursed about, but it may be assumed
that certain of his preferred theories would have emerged. Artists frequently found his
poetry beyond their comprehension, but from all accounts, his discourse was perfectly
intelligible to them. The generation of Symbolist painters, those who caught the last of
the mardis y seemed to have had no difficulty. Mallarmé's forceful presence and his willing
didacticism saturated the end of the century with ideas that remain, to this day, stim-
ulants to visual artists. It must be understood that painters quickly apprehend ideas
of which they have a need. The history of nineteenth century painting is rich with
premonitions of ideas such as those which Mallarmé injected into modern art. The artists
who recognized Mallarmé had themselves arrived at positions which made them welcome
his articulation.
One of the richest and most suggestive ideas had been formulated early in the
century by Coleridge, was taken up by Poe, and restated by Mallarmé: the idea that
a poem is, as Coleridge maintained, a fusion of many forces into one, and that what we
admire in a great poet is his "continuous under-current of feeling" (this notion, and
many others, was directly transmitted by Poe.) The idea of a whole, constructed object

522
which would maintain a specific subterranean feeling throughout was then put forward
in numerous ways by Mallarmé, who called Poe his master. He wrote: "And future
volumes of poetry will be traversed by a majestic first verse which scatters in its wake
an infinity of motifs originating in the individual's sensibility".7 The diction of Mal-
larmé's critical writings bears out the leitmotif idea taken from music, of scattering
throughout a single structure an undercurrent of feeling. He speaks of distillation, of
condensation, of musicality and evocation: the favored diction of the early Symbolist
painters, and of many abstract painters of the twentieth century.
The other, most significant Mallarméan injunction was to become a common as­
sumption both of poets and painters, in the twentieth century. He recommended the
dismantling of traditional syntax, insisting that the means of poetry lay in the in­
herent magic of its concrete components. The word was to be liberated from the matrix
of centuries of syntactical accreations. The primal language sought by the Romantics,
whose existence was reaffirmed resoundingly by Mallarmé (in his Le Tombeau d'Edgar
Poe, he speaks of "ayant jadis Tange/Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu"),
could be restored only by ceding its inherent expressive qualities to words alone:
"Words rise up unaided". 8
Mallarmé's willingness to create new elements is legendary. In one of his most
assiduously studied poems, Sonnet IV, the " x " rhymes are abetted by Mallarmé's
invented word "ptyx". He said, and without irony I believe, that he used the word
and was assured that it existed in no language, hoped it didn't, and preferred the charme
of having created it "by the magic of the rhyme". (Artists would certainly have re­
sponded to his commentary on the sonnet to Henri Cazalis, in 1868, that it was not very
plastic perhaps, but it was very black and white).
Aside from the obvious support that artists could draw from Mallarme's theory
of suggestion rather than description, and from his psychological dimensions (the
constant allusion to antériorité and the immemorial, so appealing to modern artists
turning to the "primitive" cultures), there were highly suggestive possibilities in his
confidence in the power of the unmoored word. Substitute for "word", line, color, or
form, and the impulse of modern art is encapsuled.
For all the organized voices of the Symbolist painters . . . the manifesto by Aurier,
the various commentaries crowding the art pages during the early 1890¾ . . . it is still
through Gauguin that an intimation of the power of Mallarmé 's ideas on painters can
be gauged. Although Gauguin frequented the mardis only briefly, and met Mallarmé
for the first time the year before his voyage to Tahiti, he seems to have held Mallarmé's
in especially high regard. He refers-frequently in his journals and diaries to his friendship
with the poet. And the echoes of Mallarmé's principles are everywhere to be found.
In the case of Gauguin and Mallarmé there was a consanguinity of ideas even
before their contact. In his 1885 letter to Schuffenecker,9 Gauguin already stated his

7
"The Evolution of Literature" in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, ed.
by Bradford Cook (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956).
8
9
"Mystery in Literature", Ibid.
Letter to Emile Schuffenecker, Copenhagen, (New York, Jan. 14, 1885, cited in "Letters to
his Wife and Friends", ed. Maurice Malingue (New York, World, 1949).

523
conviction t h a t "there are noble sounds, others t h a t are vulgar; peaceful and consoling
harmonies, others t h a t provoke by the audacity . . . why should not lines and colors
reveal also t h e more or less grand character of the artist". Three years later he told
Schuffenecker, " D o n ' t copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction". 1 0 Later, in a
letter to André Fontainas dated March, 1899, Gauguin quotes Mallarmé. He defines
color as "vibration the same as music is", and says t h a t color "reaches to what is most
general and therefore vaguest in nature: its interior force". And, quoting Mallarmé, he
continues, "Accordingly, immaterial and superlative, the essential quality of a work
consists precisely in what is not expressed: what follows implicitly is line without color
or words, it is not materially constituted of them". 1 1 Paraphrasing Mallarmé, or per­
haps merely agreeing with him, Gauguin writes to Daniel Monfried in 1901, t h a t "paint­
ing should seek suggestion more than description, as indeed music does". 1 2 And the
dim echoes of Poe via Mallarmé resound in his note in the Intimate Journals: " I believe
t h a t the thought which has guided my work, a part of my work, is mysteriously linked
with a thousand other thoughts, some my own, some those of others". 1 3
Gauguin's Noa-Noa was published in La Revue Blanche in 1897. We know from
contemporary accounts t h a t it was widely read by painters. Some would have recognized
familiar Symbolist reflexes such as the insistence on naïveté (of which Baudelaire had
shaped his own definition: " B y naïveté of the genius you must understand a complete
knowledge of technique combined with the Know Thyself of the Greeks, but with knowl­
edge modestly surrendering the leading role to temperament". Footnote to Salon of
1846). They would have noticed his repeated allusions to "enigma" and his insistence
on some universal language which only the solitary artist could intuitively evoke.
B u t it was probably Gauguin's repeated speculations concerning the pure ex­
pressiveness of the various means of painting, divorced from their pretexts, t h a t found
the most attentive readers during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the
first years of the twentieth. Both Picasso and Matisse had shown special interest in
the work and theory of Gauguin. Picasso owned an early edition of Noa-Noa which he
had annotated. His youthful reading in Paris around 1905, as Maurice Raynal has
reported, included Verlaine, Mallarmé and above all Rimbaud; still earlier he had read
the German Romantic, Novalis. Certain of his statements enclose a distinctly Mallar-
méan thought, such as the 1923 statement to de Zayas: " A r t is a lie t h a t makes us
realize t r u t h " . His early work, particularly during the Blue Period, was often a literal
adoption of Symbolist principles. Later, when he evolved Cubism, he had recourse t o
the notion of the Idea which had to be articulated in a crystalline structure. The Cubist
visual syntax, with its implication of number (geometry) and harmony (the whole
composition consisting of interrelated forms) was a natural extension of the prophetic
Symbolist theory. Moreover, Picasso's early association with Apollinaire, who never
relinquished certain Mallarméan convictions, carried him into the compass of Symbolist
thought.

10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
The Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin" (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1958).

524
 But Picasso, while having certain affinities with Symbolist attitudes, was far less
consistent in his exploration of the other Symbolist tradition than Henri Matisse.
Matisse maintained a lifelong interest in the poetry of Mallarmé, composed some of his
most beautiful drawings as illustrations for Mallarmé's poetry, and had a thorough
exposure to Symbolist painting principles while a student of Gustave Moreau. Moreau's
own paintings fell into two categories, only one of which was familiar to the connoisseurs
of his time. The Moreau admired by Huysmans was a painter of symbolist allegory,
faithful to the themes drawn from Eastern and Western mythology, and the Bible.
The other Moreau was a secretive experimentalist, whose small oil sketches can only be
called abstractions. I t is not known whether Matisse was aware of his master's private
experiments, but it can be taken for granted t h a t Moreau's favorite ideas concerning
painting were certainly expounded in his studio. Moreau took seriously Delacroix's a n d
then Baudelaire's notion of the arabesque and must have pointed out in different
ways his belief t h a t " a r t is dead when, in the composition, the reasonable combinations
of the mind and good sense come to replace in the artist the almost purely plastic imagi­
native conception . . . in a word, the Love of the Arabesque". 1 4
Matisse's interest in Gauguin was strong enough for him to buy a small drawing
during a period in his life when he had very little money. His affinity with the painter
of primitive goddesses can be seen in several of his early works, where Gauguin's sim­
plified manner of drawing, his way of embedding his figures in the landscape as well as
his violent color harmonies seem to be remembered by Matisse. The Symbolist prin­
ciple of simplification finds almost identical expression in the writings of Gauguin and
Matisse. Gauguin writes: "Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it all sensations
are condensed . . . " (c. 1890),15 Matisse observes: " I want to reach t h a t state of con­
densation of sensations which constitutes a picture". 1 6
The more than casual interest in Symbolist theory displayed around the t u r n
of the century and carried through to the First World War is apparent in Apollinaire 's
various commentaries on the painters of his milieu who were active during the first
decade of the twentieth century. In 1907 Apollinaire interviewed Matisse, interspersing
his own observations with those of the painter. The unmistakable ring of Symbolist
dogma can be heard throughout this interview: 17
"You have often been reproached, my dear Matisse, for this summary expression,
but you have thereby accomplished one of the most difficult tasks: to give a plastic
sense of your picture without the aid of the object except as it arouses sensations.
"The eloquence of your works comes first of all from the combination of colors a n d
lines. T h a t is what constitutes the artistry of a painter and not . . . as some superficial
spirits still believe . . . the mere reproduction of the object".

14
Cahier IV, p. 23. cited in Ragnar van Holten: L'Art Fantastique de Gustave Moreau (Paris)
J. J. Pauvert,
16
1960).
*16 "Notes on Painting", cited in: John Rewald, Gauguin (New York, Hyperion Press, 1938).
"Notes of a Painter", cited in: Alfred H. Barr, Matisse, His Art and His Public (N. Y.,
Museum of Modern Art, 1951).
17
Ibid,

525
 Apollinaire completes the interview stating that "there is a relationship between
ourselves and the rest of the universe, we can discover it and then try no longer to go
beyond it".
A year later, Apollinaire writes an article, 'The Three Plastic Virtues", in which
he paraphrases the old idea of naïveté first accented by Baudelaire: "Purity is the
forgetfulness that comes after study". 18 The imagery of Mallarmé is evoked to define
purity: "The root, the stem, and the flower of the lily show the progression of purity
up to its symbolic blossoming". Still more in the Symbolist canon is his deification of
the artist: "But the painter must above all be aware of his own divinity, and the paint­
ing he offers for admiration of other men will confer to them the glory of experiencing
also, for a moment, their own divinty. To do that, one must take in, at a single glance,
the past, the present, and the future".
During the same year (1908), Matisse himself published "Notes of a Painter" in
which the Symbolist undercurrent is apparent. 19 When discussing how he paints a
woman, he says he tries to condense the meaning of the body by drawing its essential
lines. He remarks that there are two ways of expressing things: "One is to show them
crudely, the other is to evoke them artistically". Not only does he return to the idea
of evocation throughout his life, but he holds permanently to the Symbolist principle
of musicality enunciated in the 1908 statement: "When I have found the relationship
of all the tones, the results must be a living harmony of tones, a harmony not unlike
that of a musical composition".
Matisse's cultural inheritance, which drew on both the visual and literary traditions
of the nineteenth century, has never been denied. He adopted an attitude very similar
to Gauguin's that the thought in his work was linked with a thousand other thoughts,
some his own, some those of others. No more striking evidence of the abiding inspira­
tion the Symbolist poets provided for Matisse can be found than that in the vivid "nov­
el" the poet Louis Aragon wrote about Matisse. The authenticity of Aragon's ob­
servations is verified by Matisse himself who read most of the manuscript and appended
his comments which Aragon published in the text. The long visits Aragon had with
Matisse discussing his Mallarmé illustrations are reported at length and provide a per­
fect corroboration for the view that Matisse's central thought remained true to funda­
mental Symbolist principles.20 Aragon recalls one visit, during which Matisse was
"worrying over":
Quelle soie aux baumes de temps
Où la chimère s'exténue
Vaut la torse et native nue
Que, hors de ton miroir, tu tendf

Aragon was struck with the idea that "this quatrain is Matisse". He says that during
the conversation Matisse pointed out the likeness of this poem to one in Gautier's
Emaux et Camées:
18
19
BEUT, Chroniques d'Art (Paris, Gallimard, 1960).
Qp. cit.
20
Louis, Aragon, Henri Matisse: A Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1972).

526
 A l'horizon monte une nue
Sculptant sa forme dans l'azur !
On dirait une vierge nue
Emergeant d'un lac au flot pur.
Aragon comments: " H e thinks t h a t Mallarmé must have known it. 'But', he says, 'one
is not an idiot, one can't repeat what someone has said earlier'". Aragon emphasized
the importance Matisse attached to certain lines in Mallarmé; on several occasions he
referred to the following except from Las de l'amer repos . . .
Imiter les Chinois au cœur limpide et fin
De qui l'extase pure est de peindre la fin
Sur des tasses de neige à la lune ravie
D ' u n e bizarre fleur qui parfume sa vie
Transparente la fleur qu'il a senti enfant
au filigrane bleu de l'âme se greffant. . .

B u t it was not just Matisse's obvious devotion to Mallarmé t h a t marked t h e Sym­

bolist cast of his thought. Matisse spoke to Aragon during the 1940's from the same
position as he held when he spoke to Apollinaire more t h a n t h i r t y years earlier. (The
following is a typical rhetorical question of his): " I s n ' t a drawing the synthesis, the
climax of a series of sensations which the brain has retained and gathered together, and
which one final sensation triggers off, so t h a t I may execute to drawing almost as irre­
sponsibly as a m e d i u m ? "
I n a very long note which Matisse appended to Aragon's manuscript, he speaks
(in 1945) of the role of light in his paintings. The diction is t h a t of a Symbolist: " F o r
a very long time now I have been conscious of expressing myself through light or in
light, which seems to me like a block of crystal in which something is happening . . . it
was only after enjoying the sunlight for a long time t h a t I tried to express myself
through the light of the mind". H e goes on to describe the various lights he has known,
and speaks of his pilgrimage to Tahiti, which inevitably brought him to Gauguin and
to his own long-pondered notion of " t h e color of ideas". Again, the synthesizing reflex
is expressed: "The different sorts of light I experienced have made me more exacting
about imagining the spiritual light of which I am speaking, born of all the lights I have
absorbed".
Matisse's approach to his work corresponds in large measure to the approach of the
Symbolist poet. For the artist of the word, the subject must exist throughout t h e poem.
I t is a means of expression and not an end as Mallarmé established. The individual struc­
tural components . . . the words . . . are arrayed in order to evoke, in the poem's entirety,
a superior ideal, or an ideal harmony. Matisse, using the means of t h e painter, strove
to achieve the "spiritual light" which he felt was implicit in his experience of the things
of the world. Other artists such as Mondrian and Kandinsky used subjects once re­
moved from direct experience; their works accordingly reached the realm of t h e abstract
suggested by Poe. The abstract content (states of mind intuitions of t h e cosmos) called
up the abstract means. For the twentieth century abstract painter, painting, much as
Mallarmé's Book, was seen as an ingathering of forces which, skillfully woven together,
create, in their wholeness, a single symbol.

627
 PHILIPPE JULLIAN

T H E ESTHETICS OF SYMBOLISM
I N F R E N C H AND BELGIAN A R T

Symbolism is a network of allegorical representation t h a t is either personal or shared

by a very small number of m|nds. Symbolist works are not read b u t rather guessed;
they pay more attention t o what is not said, to what is not represented. A true Symbo­
list painting is, more t h a n anything else, an atmosphere a n d sometimes a quasi-me-
diumesque message. The strangeness of the designation m a y sometimes conceal the
simplest message and vice-versa.
The discussion of content in painting is a new phenomenon; even a modern observ­
er such as P a u l Valéry h a d mocked it in some quite famous pages. Y e t it is the most
appropriate approach to t h e study of the history of Symbolist art.
Like Mannerism, Symbolism affects a certain preciousness, a refusal of the real—it
is an art in which design takes the upper hand over painterliness and also an art which
quickly became morbid or affected. The existence of Symbolist painting and its close
relationships with poetry stretches the Symbolist kingdom from the Scheldt to the
Seine, with a continuous exchange between the two capitals, Brussels and Paris:
a country of cathedrals, of Primitives, of Watteau—an industrial, yet mystical country.
Maeterlinck and Verlaine were its undisputed rulers for t w e n t y years. To understand
this Franco-Belgian Symbolism, one must know all the dislikes and all the passions
which united its young painters around 1885.
First, a look at t h a t which they detested: Realism, which t h e y called photo­
graphic art and which triumphed in the annual Salons with subjects such as one would
also find in Zola's novels, such as representations of toiling workers or scenes from
bourgeois life. Zola was their pet aversion, for he represented the apotheosis of the
machine and of capital, with no other faith t h a n progress. A poster for the Salon of
the Rose + Croix thus depicts Art brandishing the head of the great novelist. The Sym­
bolists nurtured the same hatred of the Impressionists as of Zola, Monet being the only
Impressionist they appreciated. They were equally disgusted with the academic mas­
ters through whose studios they had to graduate, disgusted with their facile qualities,
their tricks, their allegories, their draftsmanship which left nothing to the imagination
and their theatrical compositions.

T H E MASTERS

Whom did they like among their elders ? Chassériau was one of their favorites; they
found in him a certain eurythmy, the representation of a n ideal life with sensuous
nudes depicted without recourse to tired academic conventions. They adored Gustave

34 Balakian 529
Moreau, whose work remained very mysterious; he brought images to their minds
similar to those which Baudelaire had earlier evoked. The immense intellectual in­
fluence of Moreau was felt even more strongly by writers like Wilde, Lorrain, Montes-
quiou and Henri de Régnier than by painters. Though Moreau was quite close t o the
Parnassian poets with his taste for a splendid and dramatic antiquity, the Decadents
also loved him for his representations of massacres, and especially for his women,
Helen and Salome, whose beauty could bring about the fall of an empire. I n an era
when homosexuality was beginning to be openly expressed, the poets, heroes and
young martyrs whom Moreau covered with flowers and jewels flattered a taste for the
equivocal—the uncertain. Moreau's ambition to give form to the image of another
world, a world dedicated to Beauty and Death, also aroused considerable interest.
Moreau was moreover addicted to occultism, and this is proven by the books listed
in his library: Eliphas Levi, Papus, Alan Kardec and de Schüre—books which the
Symbolists devoured. Moreau was also a secretive man, difficult to approach, who
rarely exhibited, b u t whose work was known through numerous engravings. We know
t h a t Sarah Bernhardt was passionately fond of his Salomes and that, in fact, her pro­
ductions of dramas like Gismonda or Theodora were inspired by Moreau canvases as
much as Wilde's Salome which she was destined to play later.
I n the last years of his life, Moreau accepted a position as Professor a t the École
des Beaux-Arts. His more famous students included Matisse and Rouault. Although
Moreau could sketch almost as well as Ingres and paint almost as well as Delacroix,
he scarcely influenced the painting methods and techniques of the Symbolists. W h a t
he did pass on to these painters, however, was the mark of his imagination. H e was a
magician much more than a master.
The master of the Symbolists in every reasonable sense, open to everyone, was
P u vis de Ohavannes. His influence on technique was infinitely greater t h a n Moreau's;
thanks to him, p a r t of Gauguin's work, as well as Matisse's and Picasso's early works,
can be attributed to Symbolism. He furthermore influenced Seurat. If the subjects of
the Symbolists were often themes whose mystery Moreau had renewed after they had
been dissipated by generations of academic painters, their manner of painting was
derived much more from Puvis than from Moreau. Almost all the Symbolists used a
muted palette, avoiding lively tones; indeed, they specialized in grey. Quite often their
canvases seem to be seen through a thick haze of memory. I n contrast to the work of
the Impressionists, their work is devoid of sunlight and they found the research of an
artist like Renoir—the sparkling of light on water or t h e contours of the flesh—un­
worthy of their attention. Often bizarre or equivocal, their works are only rarely sen­
sual. Their nudes are, more than anything else, abstractions: they represent B e a u t y
and are never portraits of a woman ready to get dressed again, once her posing is fin­
ished. On account of this, they all abhorred Courbet. Their nudes are static.
The same concern with abstraction is seen in their landscapes, where-nothing is
picturesque, there are no animals and especially none of t h e cows so dear t o the Real­
ists; moreover, everything is seen in the same even lighting. Puvis is again t h e model
for this. When they handled portraits, the Symbolists wanted to go beyond appear­
ances to find what motivated the person.

530
 Their choice of subjects was the same as t h a t of the Symbolist poets. I n painting
as in literature, one must return to the distinction made in 1926 by Chassé between
" w h i t e " Symbolism and "black" Symbolism. The former brings t o mind in subject
and matter, Puvis, along with the works of painters like Séon and Osbert. The latter
adopted the subjects a n d the somber eroticism of Moreau, though not all his subject
matter, and is exemplified by painters such as Delville, Khnopff and Lévy-Dhurrner.
Redon certainly does not belong to either of these categories, but rather participates
in both: his pastels belong in the first group, while his lithographs belong in the second.
Redon was greatly admired by Huysmans and J e a n Lorrain. He had, from t h e t i m e
of the publication of his first series of lithographs, a considerable public, and although
he might be considered t h e greatest of the Symbolists, his influence was in no way as
extensive as t h a t of Puvis or Moreau. Though highly revered by the majority of t h e
Symbolist writers, Redon exerted only a limited influence among symbolist artists.
Let us look at some of the artists who were Symbolists in some ways, or who
served the Symbolists as models.
Cazin was closer to Naturalism t h a n to Symbolism, b u t by the simplicity of his
biblical compositions and his muted palette, he exerted considerable influence. As
for Fantin-Latour, he was a link between his friends, the Impressionists, when he paint­
ed flowers, and the Symbolists, who loved his Wagnerian paintings. Let us not forget
that Redon and Seurat worked with him in lithography. These are, basically, t h e elders
of Symbolism, certainly less important t h a n the two masters, Moreau a n d P u v i s .
There were also three precursors of visionary art who were destined t o exert a
great influence: Doré, Hugo and Bresdin. Doré, in his illustrations of Poe and Tennyson,
is a direct link between Romanticism and Symbolism. His powers of imagination
were able to renew, in Orlando Furioso, the most threadbare iconographie themes of
the Romanti cs. He gave new life to fairies, both in Balzac's and Perrault's tales. Victor
Hugo, whose sketches were reproduced by engravers as illustrations of his works : Le Rhin
and Les Travailleurs de la Mer (The Rhine and The Toilers on the Sea) was, himself, a
direct link with a fantastic art which tended less towards the picturesque t h a n t h a t of
Doré, but rather more towards spiritual visions. As for Bresdin, whose mysterious
forests Baudelaire loved, and who was Redon's master, the obscurity of his life a n d
the rarity of his works did not prevent him from being considered t o be one of t h e mas­
ters of Symbolism. Much too individual to be truly inspiring, he was mainly an exem­
plary person—one of the saints of the Symbolist paradise.

THEORETICIANS

The most important document for pictorial Symbolism is the Monitoire, begun
by Péladan at the time of the first Salon of the painters of the Rose -f- Croix. P é l a d a n
declared t h a t art is a priesthood in which the artist represents God upon earth.
Péladan brought back faith in art at a time when the church contributed very little
to religious belief. The Belgian artist Delville is the best example of a Rose + Croix
painter. Joséphin Péladan was a curious person whose numerous ridiculous actions

34* 531
often make one forget his extraordinary gifts, much as the extravagance of his style
prevented the audacity of some of his thoughts from being perceived. B o r n in Lyon
into a very Catholic background, equally interested in mysticism and the occult, he
visited Florence, a n d then Bayreuth before arriving in Paris in 1880, rather similar
in appearance to certain prophets of the "hippie"' culture. He proclaimed himself
Sâr, Persian for magus, and brought life back into the esoteric order of t h e Rose +
Croix. I n a totally materialist period, his appeal to the most archaic Catholic ideal
sparked many an imagination. I n the same manner, the latent and equivocal eroticism
of his novels charmed all the Decadents. Symbolist artists found their ideal of physical
beauty in his narratives. And these artists rushed headlong to his Salon when he inau­
gurated it, accompanied by the music of Eric Satie.
Rodin didn't exhibit in the Salon of the Rose + Croix; neither did Gauguin,
Moreau or Redon. The excesses of Péladan, which he cheerfully braved along with
other absurdities, kept them away from him. But most of the other important artists
of Europe figured in his six Salons which, along with the Salons des XX in Brussels,
were the most characteristic demonstrations of Symbolism. I n the first exhibitions
we see the names of Khnopff, Hodler, Toorop and Rouault. Delville was t h e most
faithful disciple of the Sâr and continued his own work when Péladan himself, feeling
the tide turn, retired to his ivory tower in 1898.
After Péladan, Huysmans and Aurier were the critics who exerted t h e greatest
influence on young painters. Then came a very young painter, the most gifted of his
generation, Maurice Denis. Huysmans, after having rejected Zola and Naturalism,
gave a "catalogue raisonné9' of all the tastes of the Esthetes in A Rebours in 1883.
There are pages in this novel about Moreau which were destined to become very famous.
Redon, Rops and Bresdin were equally recommended t o all those wanting t o go "any­
where out of this world". As for the criticism t h a t Huysmans expressed about the Sa-
lons,*the§e* opinions guided young painters thinking of finding ways to get away from
the beaten paths, such as Gauguin. After Huysmans, his friend J e a n Lorrain played,
for many, an important role in the diffusion of "black" Symbolism. I n his novel Mon-
sieur' de Phocas, Lorrain takes up all the phantasms of this aspect of Symbolism. Lor­
rain also made Ensor and Toorop known to his audience in some extraordinary pages.
I n the same direction, b u t more important for Art Nouveau t h a n for Symbolism,
Robert de Montesquiou's influence can be seen, both in his articles and in his poems.
Thanks to Montesquiou, we also see t h e influence of Whistler on the Symbolist move­
ment.
Albert Aurier, who died young in 1893, was, above all, a theoretician:

L'œuvre d'art devra être: 1. Idéiste puisque son idéal unique sera l'expression de
l'idée. 2. Symboliste, parce qu'elle exprimera une idée par des formes. 3. Synthé­
tique, parce qu'elle écrira ces formes et ces signes selon un mode de compréhension
général. 4. Subjective, puisque l'objet n ' y sera jamais considéré en t a n t qu'objet,
mais en t a n t que signe perçu p a r le sujet. 5 Décorative, (c'est une conséquence)
car la peinture telle que l'ont conçue les Egyptiens et les Primitifs n'est autre
chose qu'une manifestation d ' a r t à la fois subjectif, synthétique, symboliste et
idéiste.

532
 Aurier's favorite painter was Gauguin, but he also liked Van Gogh. A new t y p e
of beauty can be seen in their works. Intellectual and refined up to the point of being
morbid, this beauty is completely different from the astonishingly healthy qualities
of women in Renoir's paintings. The famous pages of Walter P a t e r on Leonardo's
Giownda defined this beauty, and Delville's extraordinary portrait of Mme Stuart
Merillis the Gioconda of t h e Symbolists. Gustave Moreau had earlier given a D a Vinci­
like quality of mystery t o his figures, endowing them with an enigmatic cruelty. Mo-
reau's beauties walk freely over the corpses of their admirers and drag their sil­
ken draperies through pools of blood. To these Salomes, whom K l i m t took u p again
20 or 30 years later, stylizing them, incorporating them into a Byzantine mosaic,
are opposed the Ophelias, the pale creatures destined to .a watery grave, with hair
undulating like seaweed, t h e daughters of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, so often painted
by Rossetti and Holman H u n t . A third type of woman dear to the Symbolists, and more
particularly to those who, like de Feure, Mucha, and Schwabe, tended towards Art
Nouveau, is woman in t h e form of a flower: she comes from Klingsor's garden in Wag­
ner's Parsifal. All these beauties are unreal and were created to satisfy erotic fantasies
and not physical needs.
One of the most current phantasms of t h a t time was the hermaphrodite which
appears again and again in Péladan's novels andinRachilde's, as well as in J e a n Lor-
rain's poems. From the androgyne to the young boy, we might say, there is only one
step. While very few artists dared take this in reality, they expressed the need t o paint
subjects depicting adolescent troubles similar to those which Swinburne and Wilde
admired in the work of a late Pre-Raphaelite, Simeon Solomon. The Italian painter
Sartorio painted the greatest number of these young warriors sacrificed or offered to
some strange Caesar; his immense canvases were composed in t h e light of some of
D'Annunzio's poems. One type shows up often in Symbolist works, the thinker, the
visionary—the man devoured by the Idea; he is Edgar Allen Poe's Usher, a n d des
Esseintes also resembles him strangely.

THE DECOR

To adorn these disturbing beauties, some Symbolists, following the example of

Moreau, pillaged the treasures óf the Orient and the styles of Niniveh or Alexandria.
Semi-precious stones and all their symbolism inherited from ancient alchemists had
extraordinary popularity at t h a t time. A good example of this is the jewelry invented
by Lalique for Sarah Bernhardt. Beardsley's imitators, in particular, such as Alastair
in Germany, couldn't have enough diadems and necklaces to weigh down their legend­
ary characters. I n contrast, the adepts of " w h i t e " Symbolism, those who admired
Puvis de Chavannes, preferred for their models simple draperies, which, sometimes,
after the manner of Burne-Jones, clung to their bodies as if wet. These models eschewed
jewelry, b u t were often adorned with foliage or pale flowers. Osbert, Séon, Maurice
Denis and Khnopff thus invented a wardrobe which recalls the fashions extolled b y
the esthetes of Chelsea, in fact costumes for "souls" rather t h a n for bodies.
What were the sources t h a t the Symbolists most often consulted for this kind of

633
clothing ? Botticelli's light draperies embroidered with flowerswere one source, Mantegna
likewise inspired Burne-Jones, while Carpaccio influenced Moreau and, in Lévy-Dhur-
mer's case, Memling provided an inspiration. The German Symbolists, such as Böcklin
and von Stuck, loved barbarian or preclassical antiquity of the kind t h a t Schliemann
had recently discovered. Very few Symbolists, Aman-Jean and Beardsley being excep­
tions, depicted "scenes galantes" with persons dressed in eighteenth century costume;
Symbolist a r t was in this respect unlike Symbolist poetry, such as t h a t of Verlaine,
which found such scenes a source of inspiration. Por the Symbolist artists, the Middle
Ages were simplified: a legendary period, romanesque rather t h a n Gothic, if only as a
reaction against " g o t h i c " Romanticism. They created in their own minds ideal repre­
sentations of Wagner which were not encumbered by the real settings of the actual
operas.
Little is known about the sets of Symbolist plays; the ideal of some Symbolist
dramatist would seem to have been a reconstruction of the setting of a Burne-Jones
or a P u vis painting: a dimly lit scene which would give one the impression of seeing
the actors as if t h e y were in an aquarium. At the Theatre Libre, Lugné-Poe demanded
simplicity in stage sets by Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier—evocation, rather t h a n
representation. This Symbolist taste in stage-sets was destined to have an immense
influence on the sets and productions of Gordon Craig. The lighting used b y the dancer
Loie Puller certainly exerted a great influence on the painters Lévy-Dhurmer and Del-
ville. Some of the minor Symbolists even used green, rose or mauve lighting, like the
lighting projected on the dancer, but the similarity ends here; were one to develop this
point further, one might actually confuse certain aspects of Symbolism with Art
Nouveau.
Oscar Wilde, who more t h a n most others helped form t h e taste of his time, her­
alded the birth of a new style of art, which was also an aspect of Symbolism:

Art takes life as p a r t of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh
forms, is absolutely indifferent to facts, invents, imagines, dreams and keeps be­
tween herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style of decorative
or ideal treatment. (The Decay of Lying)

Symbolism, which preceded the beginnings of Art Nouveau by at least five or six
years, influenced it strongly, b u t determined neither its birth nor its evolution. The
history of Art Nouveau as a decorative style is much more closely connected with so­
cial conditions and scientific curiosity, to say nothing of the Japanese influence. Nev­
ertheless, Van de Velde was an excellent Symbolist designer, as were also Gallé and
Mucha. Symbolism created only the spiritual climate favorable to this strange flower­
ing. Art Nouveau jewels had, thus, adorned Gustave Moreau's women ever since the
Second Empire. The Symbolists were scarcely interested in the practical aspects of
things, lived in their dreams and never worried about changing a world in which they
felt themselves to be outsiders; they were only slightly interested in the work of the
architects or decorators of their own age. In this sense, they were very different from
the Pre-Raphaelites. De Peure was one of the very few Symbolists in Prance to con­
tribute to the formation of the 1900 Art Nouveau style when he designed his furniture

534
and textiles; Lévy-Dhurmer likewise may have exerted a slight influence through his
ceramics. The Symbolists brought to the Art Nouveau artisjb a type of beauty, a renewed
palette of clear and misty tones and a sinuous line which gives to the body or even t o
stone a plant-like suppleness. Of all the great masters of this time, the one in whom
one finds these characteristics most clearly represented is Rodin. His groups of inter­
twined women fit admirably in a Majorelle salon and recall the poems of Samain or
Renée Vivien. Redon and Gauguin were too independent to be categorized in a single
style. Khnopff and von Stuck, on the other hand, didn't like the "floral" style of Art
Nouveau but built their residences in the neoclassical style, decorated in white and
gold. Lévy-Dhurmer, however, reveals close affinities with Galle. Another connection,
an affinity, too, rather t h a n an influence of Symbolism on Art Nouveau can be seen
in the use of water; Symbolist architecture, vases and jewels seem to flow, in a delib­
erate attempt at fluidity. This is what Verlaine had hoped for in his Art poétique,
Three influences marked this art which ignored frontiers, for there was only one
Symbolist kingdom in a Europe still divided b y nationalist and industrial rivalries.
Three areas—English, French and German—contributed to the specific character of
this spiritual kingdom. I n a sense, the English had been Symbolists one hundred years
before anyone else, thanks to William Blake, though his work was almost totally ignored
on the continent until 1900. Along with Blake, one can also quote Fuseli. The Pre-
Raphaelites, on the other hand, had been known in Paris ever since the Exposition
of 1867, and they, in turn, had known the work of Blake. They aroused interest b y t h e
curious nature of their paintings and by their attention to minute detail, rather t h a n
by the moral or esthetic message which they hoped to convey. The mystics from Lyon
had indeed expressed the same message, but without much success, as had also t h e
German JSTazarenes, already known in France for their book-illustrations, b u t this
whole message was too foreign to the mentality of the French Second Empire or to
t h a t of the truly modern painting of the time, such as t h a t of Courbet or Manet. The
Pre-Raphaelites attracted more attention after the Exposition of 1878, in the age t h a t
also witnessed the triumph of Realism and of Academic painting.
Rossetti's paintings corresponded rather closely to the Baudelairean ideal, if
only because his women displayed such prodigious manes of hair; besides, he was
known to be an intimate of Swinburne's. Young Maurice Barrés, in a quite character­
istic statement of anglophilia declared: "For me, the three most important men of
the nineteenth century are Byron, Disraeli and Rossetti". Rossetti's influence in E n ­
gland was not, however, the preponderant one at the time; Watts, then Burne-Jones
were much more important. W a t t s ' Hope, this blindfolded woman, seated on a globe
and painted is moonlike tones, is one of the first truly Symbolist paintings. His por­
traits, moreover, contributed an ideal of intellectual distinction, quite alien to t h e a r t
of the painters of the Paris Salon. Watts gave a soul to his aristocratic models, and
Khnopff imitated him later in this respect.
Burne-Jones, especially in his works illustrating Arthurian legends, delighted
Wagnerian Europe; the sad and ambiguous beauty of the characters in his paintings
imposed itself everywhere except in Germany, a new and vigorous nation which
already had Böcklin and von Marées. Burne-Jones' success is inseparable from the

536
success William Morris had with his books and tapestries. Around both of them grew
all the manifestations of an esthetic movement which would help those painters who
preferred dreaming as an escape from Realism. T h a t young Proust should have vad-
mired Whistler almost as much as he admired Gustave Moreau is quite characteristic
of the annexation of the painter of ' 'symphonies" and ''arrangements" b y the adepts
of Symbolism. Whistler's influence on Carrière was very important, and Lévy-Dhur-
mer was destined, like Whistler, to paint a marvellous Peacock room, now in the Metro­
politan Museum in New York, as Whistler's is today in the Freer Collection in Wash­
ington.
The magazine, The Studio, which began in 1895, helped the rapid propagation of
English styles, showing their refinement, the affected simplicity of the Arts and
Crafts movement, and totally new style of book-illustration. B u t these esthetic styles
took almost twenty years to cross the Channel and, by the end of the nineties, the fig­
ures in Maurice Denis' paintings revealed his indebtedness t o m a t e Greenaway and to
the simplicity of Walter Crane, both famous through their popular albums. Beardsley
came on the scene too late to exert an influence on French Symbolists, b u t he was
adored, for the Symbolists found here, in an outrageously sophisticated manner, all
of Moreau's themes, and the characters of Burne-Jones. I n the decade of The Yellow
Booh, however, Parisian influences were considerable in England. One need b u t go
through the issues of a rather vulgar magazine like Pick me up, to realize how much
it is an imitation of Le Chat Noir. Wilde crossed the Channel constantly to throw
himself a t Sarah Bernhardt's feet. In France, he knew all the young poets and brough
back his discoveries to London. Wilde had a luxurious edition of Silver Points, the poems
of his friend, J o h n Gray, designed and published, and later helped further the career
of the illustrator Laurence Housman. His taste swept away the too literal principle
of Vtoicrian book-illustration:

W h a t we need is a good book ornament, a decorative ornament t h a t will go with

type and printing, and give to each page a harmony and unity of effect.

Two very gifted painters, his disciples, profited greatly from these doctrines:
Ricketts and Shannon. Ricketts in his illustrations for the Sphinx, was much closer to
Daudelet, the illustrator of Maeterlinck, than to Beardsley (let us remember t h a t Wilde
took a long time to admit the genius of the illustrator of Salome). I n a luxurious re­
view, The Dial, somewhat less interesting t h a n the German review Pan, Ricketts also
allied the lessons of William Morris with Parisian styles, b u t much more closely with
the style of French Art Nouveau. His friend Shannon, in his rather academic, slightly
equivocal paintings, can likewise remind us of Aman-Jean or Besnard. I t is very diffi­
cult, in fact, to distinguish in the English painting of the nineties the Pre-Raphaelite
tradition from the Symbolist influence due to Wilde and Arthur Symons, who was also
in close contact with French Symbolist circles. A painter like Water house was rapidly
adopted, at t h a t time, by the public of the Royal Academy. This art, devoid of real
poetry—uniquely seen in small flashes—can today please the amateurs of Kitsch.

536
 The Symbolist influence was more important on numerous illustrators of books,
among them Rackham, who illustrated admirably the Wagnerian Tetralogy, A Mid-
summer Night's Dream and, above all, La Motte Fouqué's Undine.
The Anglo-Saxon literary contribution to French Symbolist art and literature
was immense. I n France and in Belgium, thanks to Baudelaire's translations, Poe
was read and reread. His was a double influence, encompassing b o t h the macabre a n d
the idyllic. The Raven represents, above all, the macabre: how many ravens does one
find, for instance, in Gauguin? In front of the architecture in the paintings of the
Franco-Belgian Symbolist, Degouves de Nuncques, half-sinking into canals we are
reminded of the fall of the House of Usher, too. But Poe also describes the idyllic
domain of Arnhem, the Landor cottage, sinister, too, in its own way, smothered in flow­
ers and heavy with perfumes, all of which may well have influenced the swarming
forests engraved by Bresdin and the disquieting flowers of the Dutch Symbolist, Thorn
Prikker, as well as the lithographs which Redon devoted to Poe's writings.
The influence of Tennyson was almost as important as t h a t of Poe on French a n d
Belgian Symbolist artists, though less through his poems themselves t h a n through the
illustrations of Pre-Raphaelite artists in the very popular Moxon edition. The vignettes
for The Lady of Shalott, for The Eve of Saint Agnes and for The Idylls of the King contrib­
uted greatly towards Maeterlinck's esthetics. Swinburne, exaggerating the dark and
masochistic side of Baudelaire, was very soon translated into French and inspired the
poetry of Samain, among others, while Swinburne's bizarre, exotic influence became
finally confused elsewhere with t h a t of Beardsley. Then there was Ruskin, t h e prophet
of the Esthetic Movement. Proust translated him, and many passages in A la Recherche
du Temps Perdu describing flowers or churches are marked by Ruskin's influence,
while J e a n Lahor took up Ruskin's social ideas, so very hostile to the industrial society.
The influence of Wilde was also important, though more attention was granted t o his
fiction than to the dialogues of Intentions. Wilde's Salome was, moreover, originally
written in French after a visit to Moreau's studio, and was first performed b y Sarah
Bernhardt.

THE GERMAN INFLUENCE

The major German influence on French Symbolism, and indeed on all European
Symbolism, was t h a t of the composer Richard Wagner. Poet and musician, a n d the
friend of a King, Ludwig I I , he was a legend in his time; and this legend counted
almost as much as his music in the fervor which he inspired, and which transformed
Bayreuth into one of the Holy Cities of Symbolism. Wagner dreamed t h a t t h e painter
Arnold Böcklin would design the sets for his tetralogy. AU Böcklin's dragons, all his
sirens clinging to rocks above a tragic sea, are to be found in the works of m a n y French
Symbolists, especially in those of the disciples of Péladan who cried: " O h ! Oh ! this
instant when the Holy Grail appeared before our eyes . . . W h a t a revelation of infinite
splendor ! What a shock to our souls ! Oh, art is sanctified ! Here is the real presence of
God incarnated in Beauty !" {Revue Wagnérienne)
This is the Wagner of primitive forces, of great myths, or perhaps the erotic Wag­
ner of Tristan, or better yet, the mystical Wagner of Parsifal. Delville was inspired

537
by the first, Redon by the second, and, after Redon, all the artists who contributed
to the Revue Wagnêrienne. Except for Beardsley, Wagner exerted only a minor in­
fluence in England, and almost none in the Mediterranean countries.
Of all the German philosophers, Hegel was the most appreciated in France:
was he not recommended by Péladan ? In a Rose -f-Croix catalogue can be found the fol­
lowing statement: " A r t rivals nature, like nature, and represents ideas better t h a n
nature. Art uses forms as symbols for experiments and with them, it shapes them and
remakes them in a more perfect and purer form/'

T H E FRENCH INFLUENCE

If Wagner was the model for the artist turned demiurge, Baudelaire was t h e con­
solation for those who could not fight against the century, as well as the excuse for
the failures so numerous in the Symbolist world. H e supplied a conscience for artists.
The greatest, Moreau and Rodin, recognized him as their master. Baudelaire influenced
Symbolist Art much more by his poems t h a n by his esthetic writings; the poems were
an inexhaustible source of morbid or sublime images for these artists of t h e Imaginary
who later would find, in Les Salons and in Baudelaire's texts on Delacroix, m a n y things
which were not to their taste. They were astonished t h a t the poet admired Manet,
though they later consoled themselves a little b y reading these words addressed b y
Baudelaire to the author of Olympia: "You are only the first to show the decay of your
a r t / ' B u t Courbet ! H e was, for Maurice Denis, "an unconscious genius, uttering legend­
ary stupidities". For Baudelaire's admiration of Courbet, one found consolation in
remembering t h a t his discovery of Poe, driving the poet towards the supernatural,
diverted his attention from the realist painter of L'Atelier, much as his readings of
Joseph de Maistre's idea of a theocracy made Baudelaire reject the stupidities of 1848.
And how often do we find the influence of Swedenborg in his poems ! This influence of
the Swedish mystic is distributed equally throughout Baudelaire's writings; in L'Art
Romantique, he even speaks of correspondences as "the affinities which exist between
states of the soul and aspects of nature; those who realize these correspondences are
the artist, and their art has value only to the degree t h a t it expresses these mysterious
relationships".
One might ask oneself whether the poet would have appreciated t h e canvases
of his admirers when one reads what he wrote about Chenavard's immense grisailles
representing "the philosophy of history", and covering the walls of the Paris P a n t h e o n :
" I n his head things are not clearly arranged; they are only reflected through a clouded
space . . . " Baudelaire also commented: "Let us say right off t h a t Chenavard h a d a
great superiority over all the other artists; though he may not be animal enough, they
are scarcely spiritual enough."
Baudelaire preferred, by far, good painting to great ideas, b u t imposed on his admir­
ers a terribly capable draftsman who saved himself from obscenity (in his sketches)
only by his portrayal of horror: this was Félicien Rops, who developed to the ut­
most the most disturbing images of Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire's poem Les Phares
did not succeed in obtaining admission to the imaginary museum the Symbolists had

538
for Rubens and Michelangelo, alongside the other deities already mentioned by the poet:
Leonardo da Vinci, "this deep and somber mirror," Watteau "this carnival . . . ",
Goya "this nightmare full of unknown things . . . ".
As for Baudelaire's verse about Delacroix, we can quote the poet's own commentary
on them: "A blood-red lake—haunted by evil angels; supernaturalism—a wood for­
ever green: the green is complementary to the red—an afflicted sky: the tumultuous
and storm-ridden backgrounds to his paintings—the fanfares of Weber: ideas of ro­
mantic music are awakened by the harmonies of his color."
Albert Aurier, the critic for La Plume, commented on the poem Correspondances
in the following way: " A superior man alone knows how to tame and master the mon­
ster of illusion, how to walk as a master through this fantastic temple

. . . où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles

while the imbecilic flock of humanity, duped by appearances which lead it to deny
the most essential ideas, passes, eternally blind

. .■. à travers la forêt de symboles

Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

The great and honored master of Symbolism, Mallarmé, basically preferred the
Impressionists and Whistler. But his difficult writings exerted little influence on artists.
Mallarmé's life and his attitude were exemplary for the Symbolist artists: his great
simplicity and great refinement, allied with a profound dislike of the common. Further­
more, he brought to Gauguin the backing of his immense prestige, though without
imposing his own esthetic ideas.
Verlaine, on the other hand, contributed to art a hundred images and an atmo­
sphere much like t h a t found in the painters Aman-Jean or Le Sidaner; moreover, Ver­
laine was very fond of Rossetti. Highly appreciated by Verlaine, Eugène Carrière was
in many ways, a Symbolist who bathed his representations of family scenes in a misty
fog. Verlaine particularly liked Puvis de Chavannes, whose robust nudes were much
to his taste; but he was also very close, in his " d a m n e d " poems, to the atmosphere of
Moreau:

J'aime ce mot de décadence tout miroitant de pourpre . . . Il est fait d'un mélange
d'esprit charnel et de chair triste et de toutes les splendeurs violentes du Bas
Empire . . . L'écroulement dans les flammes des races épuisées de sentir le bruit
envahissant des trompettes ennemies.

I t is certain t h a t Moreau himself borrowed many of his sumptuous images from

Flaubert, as their respective curiosities were so close, both morbid and exotic a t the
same time, in Salammbô and in Hérodias. In La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier,
many illustrators on the borderline of Symbolism found an exotic brand of mysticism.
We all know that La Tentation de Saint Antoine inspired Redon, who devoted two series

539
of his most beautiful lithographs to this subject. As a source of images, Flaubert,
infinitely less often quoted by Symbolist critics who saw him as allied to the Naturalists,
is almost as important as Baudelaire.
Finally, t h e list of images gathered by J a r r y from his favorite poems can be iden­
tified in paintings b y de Groux, or even by Degouves de Nuncques or Khnopff : ''From
Baudelaire, E d g a r Poe's silence, while taking pains to retranslate, into Greek Baude­
laire's translation. From Bloy, the black pigs of Death, the procession of the Fiancée.
From Coleridge, t h e crossbow of the Ancient Mariner, the floating skeleton of a ship.
From Elskamp, the hares which, as they run over the sheets, change into plump hands
and bear the spherical form of the Universe like fruit. From K a h n , one of those golden
resonances of heavenly jewellery. From Maeterlinck, the lights which the first blind
sister heard. F r o m Péladan, the reflection in the mirror of a shield whitened by the
ashes of an ancestor, by the sacrilegious massacre of the seven planets. F r o m Régnier,
the sorrel marsh where the modern centaur snorted. F r o m Rimbaud, the shafts of ice
thrown by the wind of God into the stagnant p o o l s / ' (A. J a r r y , Gestes et Opinions du
Docteur FaustrolL)

SYMBOLIST THEMES

The themes t h a t interested the Symbolist artists more t h a n anything else were
those which the ancient masters had handled and also those themes which a few paint­
ers in the Salon h a d already exploited. I t is enough, however, t o compare Regnauld's
Salome with Moreau's tp see the difference: Regnauld's Salome is a laughing gypsy,
with beautiful teeth, in the studio of an orientalist; Moreau's is a young princess, naked
under quasi-sacerdotal ornaments, who dances under the vault of a mysterious basilica;
the first artist reconstructs antiquity, the second recreates it. Many of these themes
had been revived b y Baudelaire, b u t some also came from Gautier, transmitted by
the Parnassian poets and by Swinburne before being taken u p again b y t h e many
Symbolist poets.
The Bible played a large part in furnishing legendary themes. E v e inspired Ro­
din, Gauguin and often Lévy-Dhurmer; she represented t h e happiness of the senses
before the idea of sin. Salome represented sin, the world before Redemption. She
dominated " b l a c k " Symbolism and inspired all the painters who were more or less
masochistic. How many Salomes there are between Moreau's a n d Klimt's creations!
The young Saint J o h n the .Baptist provided, as during t h e Renaissance, an ambi­
guous topic, in t h e works of Filiger, for instance. The figure of Christ is a major
Symbolist topic, found among French Symbolist painters as different a^ Redon and
Rops, Filiger and Mucha, Maurice Denis and Besnard. Most of their Christ images re­
main faithful to traditional iconography, however simplified, humanized; they are
Tolstoi-like Saviors, with the exception of the image in Rops when the artist appears
to have blasphemous intentions, or in de Groux, where t h e artist's intentions are
vengeful. Moreau and Puvis, both completely agnostic, didn't represent Christ. F a i t h
returned with the crisis in man's consciousness around 1890; it was one of the ways
of escaping from this material world.

540
 The Virgin had often been handled b y Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was later di­
rected towards other subjects by his eroticism. There is also the Virgin in Carlos Schwa-
be, suffocating among lilies, and disguised as a girl dressed u p for her confirmation
in Maurice Denis. Puvis depicts Saint Genevieve basically as a transposition of t h e
Virgin; the mauve shades of evening which surround her in the fresco at the P a n t h e o n
are found again in the work of Maurice Denis. Saint Geneviève is the Anti-Salome,
and beside her we must place Ophelia; the world for these two is pure and cold. W i t h
the exception of Denis, Symbolism didn't represent a maternal Virgin—it remained
true to the type of anguished young lady invented b y Rossetti for his Ecce Ancilla
Domini, such as the young saints of Osbert or Henri Martin. The style of religious
painting was established as early as 1889 in a painting by Maurice Denis, Le My s-
tère catholique, where "The Virgin is a great lily inclined towards the Word t h a t is close
b y " [La Plume). There were also archaistic representations, be they in the imagery
of Emile Bernard, or in the icon-style of Filiger which Rouault would take u p later.
The dramatic scenes of the Gospels didn't t e m p t the Symbolists, with the exception
of Maurice Denis, though in paintings t h a t are cleared of every sad detail. P e r h a p s
the ultra-realistic illustrations of the Passion b y James Tissot, which then had a great
success, directed the Symbolists away from these scenes because they were horrified
by violence. De Groux is a striking exception to this, though his Christ aux Outrages
symbolizes beauty insulted by the crowd. Christ and the Virgin expressed a latent
and not necessarily religious mysticism, as in the paintings of the school of Loethen
Saint-Martin and especially in the sketches of the Belgian sculptor, Georges Minne.
There was often b u t a step between Symbolist imagery and the maudlin iconography
of "holy" picture-cards commemorating a catholic confirmation. Luc Olivier Merson
crossed this frontier in his famous Flight into Egypt, Edgar Maxenee continued
this trend with his saints wearing medieval head-dresses t h a t were reproduced in
L'Illustration up to 1930, and finally the Genevan painter Burnand, too, with evan­
gelical drawings t h a t for a long while adorned Calvinist homes.
Angels are very numerous in French and Belgian Symbolist art because t h e y are
souls, because they stand above all contingencies, and because angels exist in the works
of Baudelaire and Swedenborg. We see them traverse, in white robes, the background
of Henri Martin paintings as well as those of Maxenee and Segantini, then see t h e m in
the Art Nouveau intertwining designs of Carlos Schwabe or Mucha. They are Byzan­
tine for Filiger, Breton for Gauguin, and quite close to Eros for both Armand P o i n t
and Delville. Moreau painted damned angels, the angels of Sodom, in Le Soir et la
Douleur. B u t can we call angels those beings who, dressed in white, appear carrying
a lyre or palm-fronds to the figures in Puvis de Chavannes ? Be they muses or souls
having returned from pagan Elysean fields, we find them in Osbert, in Séon and, heavily
placid, in Mellery. Redon expressed the angelic quality in their faces. Wings, however,
weigh down the fallen angels who creep along the ground,and the Lost Angel even has
wings of stone. When an angel has cartilaginous wings like those of bats, he is a demon
who flies in subterranean kingdoms. Redon is one of the very few to have represented
Satan in his Suite d'après Flaubert.

541
 THE GEOGRAPHY OF SYMBOLISM

The landscapes chosen by the Symbolists were as far away as possible from t h e
flowery suburbia and the seasides of the Impressionists, for their geography was mainly
legendary. Of the Mediterranean world, for instance, they only selected the most dis­
t a n t m y t h s in which the joy of living had no place. Böcklin is the painter of t h e House
of Atreus, of abandoned palaces, disquieting reefs; Moreau dreams of an Alexandrian
Orient, Hebraic or even Brahmin, bristling with domes and cabochon gems, peopled
with elephants, lands over which criminal queens and perverse gods reign. Above all,
Byzantium was the capital of Symbolist exoticism; or rather, decadent Paris called
itself happily Byzantine. Byzantine golden backgrounds and heretical qualities, as
well as mystical pomp verging on sacrilege inspired Mucha and Rochegrosse as well
as Filiger and Klimt. Only Ménard remained faithful to the idyllic landscapes and sun­
sets t h a t Baudelaire admired in the work of Claude Lorrain.
Western Europe had two capitals for Symbolist painters: Bruges, and Florence—
the Florence of the Pre-Raphaelites, The City of the Soul of Ruskin. Under English
influence, a group of painters came into being in Florence which one could call d'Annun-
zian Pre-Raphaelites.
Bruges, the dead city with its network of dormant waters, inspired painters and
poets, and was represented in the midst of cloudy countrysides in which the greens
turned to gray and were only animated by clouds. Degouves de Nuncques, F r a n k
Brangwyn, Thorn Prikker and so many others found their home there; Toorop found
there his drowned women and listened to the bells of its belfries, Lévy-Dhurmer and
Khnoppf depicted its silent canals. One might even speak of a school of Bruges, or more
exactly of Ghent, which is quite near and resembles Bruges: in this school we find
designers such as Daudelet and Minne grouped around Maeterlinck. The. sea which
borders this Flemish countryside is the one upon which Isolde's ship floats, and t h e
one t h a t brought Mélisande ashore; it also borders t h e Celtic forests of Arthurian legend
all the way up to Ireland, whose interlacing Celtic patterns come to life again in Art
Nouveau and in the decorative art of the school of Glasgow. Another forest, towards
the East, is the one of the Wagnerian gods who communicate with the Scandinavian
world, where the early works of Munch were inspired b y the paintings of Carrière a n d
other Symbolists which he had seen in Paris.
Finally, t o the West and equally important, was Brittany, the land of Celtic
legends, which played the same role in the painting of the nineties as Ireland did in
the English poetry of t h a t time. The B r i t t a n y of Arthurian myths, the forest of Broce-
liande was also still believed to be a country untouched b y industrial civilization. One
still lived there as one did before the French Revolution; beliefs there were deep-rooted
and, a t times, strange. The School of Pont-Aven developed in B r i t t a n y parallel t o Sym­
bolism and exchanges between the two were constant. A passage from a letter of Gau­
guin's underlines quite clearly the similarities and the differences between P o n t -
Aven a n d the Parisian Symbolists: "Puvis explains his idea b u t does not paint it. H e
is a Greek, whereas I am a savage a wolf without a collar in the forest. Puvis called
one of his paintings Pureté, and to explain the concept, painted a picture of a young

542
virgin holding a lily in her hand—this is a well-known symbol t h a t everyone can
understand; Gauguin, painting the same subject, will paint a landscape of limpid
waters; there will be no t a i n t of civilized man t h a t can be expressed in a human f i g u r e / '
Gauguin had too violent a personality to accept the softness, the equivocal quality
and the exquisite taste of the Symbolists. His disciples were much more influenced
b y poetic painting and, when they wanted to be powerful, as Emile Bernard or Séru-
sier did sometimes, they went off on the wrong path. A few landscape painters of P o n t -
Aven were even pure Symbolists, such as Shuffenecker or Henri Rivière. But t h e P o n t -
Aven School also gave birth, thanks to Sérusier, to the principles which t h e N a b i
(Hebrew for prophet) School decided on, though this does not permit us to class Bon-
nard or Vuillard or the other artists promoted by La Revue Blanche—with the excep­
tion of Maurice Denis—among the Symbolists, even if they evoked the atmosphere
and the interiors of a world of poets.
The Symbolists left China and J a p a n to the Impressionists and their disciples.
Spain, Italy and the Mediterranean world were too sun-bathed to tempt them, with t h e
exception of Ménard, Aman-Jean and Lévy-Dhurmer in his very beautiful late pastels of
Constantinople, or his paintings of Marrakech, where the post-romantic Orientalism
of Diaz and Ziem became swathed in Symbolist mists. The Symbolists, however, all
adored Venice as the veritable capital of Decadence. Having undergone these varied
influences and chosen these climes and landscapes, the French and Belgian Symbolists
followed their four masters who had showed them the way, Moreau, P u vis, Böcklin
and Burne-Jones, and thus rejuvenated the themes and topics and manners already
used by the Academics and equally hated by Realists and Impressionists.

SYMBOLISM'S CONTRIBUTION

Angels and sphinxes, lilies and bluebirds are found in all the art influenced b y Sym­
bolism and not just in painting, for the movement renewed two genres, book-illustra­
tion and mural decoration. There is nothing stunning in the fact t h a t these very liter­
ary painters collaborated with writers and really worked with them in the spirit of
the image-makers of the Middle Ages. We have, thus, seen t h a t the book-illustrators
under Wilde's influence were the only real representatives of Symbolism in England.
I n France, Carlos Schwabe was the strangest of all illustrators, illustrating b o t h
the poems of Albert Samain and Zola's Le Rêve. Maurice Denis illustrated Verlaine,
and Gide's Le Voyage d'Urien, blazing a trail for the illustrations later ordered b y Vol-
lard from most of the major modern painters.
The most charming of the French illustrators was Eugène Grasset, about whom
La Plume wrote, in 1898: " H e is the ultra-modern type, expert at looking a t n a t u r e
and deriving precious teachings from it, as well as being equally capable of bringing
together all sorts of documents. H e has plundered all the arts of Byzantium a n d t h e
Far East, as well as those of the Middle Ages and Young E n g l a n d / ' Péladan had Khnopff
and Rops do his frontispieces, and Daudelet illustrated Maeterlinck, a bit in t h e style
of old woodcuts. In 1970, a quite beautiful exhibition at the Houghton L i b r a r y a t
H a r v a r d testified to the richness of Symbolist book art; it was a veritable renaissance

543
which, in Germany, also produced the admirable review Pan and the illustrated edi­
tions of the Insel Verlag.
Regarding the other contribution of Symbolism, t h a t is, mural decoration, it is
rather poorer, for our painters had much more ambition t h a n skill in this field. They
loved frescos which substituted an imaginary world for t h e real one: " W h a t a wonder­
ful way of transforming our depressing hovels into oases where the spirit can quench
its thirst after t h e worries of mundane existence. Oh 1 frescos on the walls, harmo­
nious patterns of color bounded b y the knowledgeable lines of the masters J Oh ! t o
forget the ugliness of the street when we look at an idealized landscape, t h e Lyrical
messenger of t h e infinite !" (A. Germain, L'Ermitage, 1892) They also believed in prac­
ticing this, in rejuvenating the Quattrocento. The murals of Puvis (they are not fres­
cos) subsist; important ones, immense oil paintings, can still be admired in the Boston
Public Library, and those of Gustave Doré adorn the library of the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles. B u t the great frescos of Besnard have suffered a fate worse t h a n
being forgotten—humidity. A few of Maurice Denis' frescos remain, as does Redon's
great decor at the Abbey of Fonfroide, a few allegories also in City Halls in Belgium
arid the marvelous Peacock Room of Lévy-Dhurmer at the Metropolitan Museum in
New York both so very Symbolist and so Art Nouveau. With von Stuck and Klimt,
the Germanic countries also witnessed a renewal in mural decoration, in fact a much
more complete fusion than in France of painting and architecture.
No exhibition in Paris was as important as the Secession group exhibition in
Vienna, not even those of the Rose -f-Croix, which even J e a n Lorrain, though favorable
to the movement, didn't take quite seriously: "Scarcely having entered, I saw t h a t I
was in a temple: chiaroscuro and incense fumes, the whispering of the faithful in ado­
ration in the corners, and, around the four walls of the room (I almost wrote chapel),
glistening stained-glasa windows which are paintings signed b y Duthoit, Chabas,
Moriset, Armand Point, and all t h a t the catalogue suggests ! W h a t titles ! Legendary
Princess, Princess of V espera, Arthemise, Viviane, Morgana, Perseus and the Magi,
The Tower of Regret and The Guardian of Mourning ; further on, I see The Demon of
War dying in a sea of blood, and here we have Dead Love and The Fate of Dreams.
A Monsieur Sala exhibits a Virginital (Oh, m y head, my poor head !), and M. Alexandre
Séon a Chimaera's Despair hanging between a Melusine and a Magdelaine, and then
I get five or six visions and the series of these visionaries ends with a Breton from
Saint-Lunaire who has sent in a Kundry Rose d'Enfer and a Primitive Demoness. And
to think t h a t all these symbolic simpletons depict the cycle of human existence !
There is some talent here, nevertheless, lots of talent amidst all these satanic visions,
as the good poet J e a n Moréas has pointed o u t / ' (Jean Lorrain, Echo de Paris, 1895.)
The first important exhibition of the French Symbolists was the one organized
b y Gauguin and his friends a t the Café Volpini, in front of the doors of the Exposition
of 1889. Maurice Denis kept an astonished recollection of it: "Instead of being like the
Impressionist paintings with their windows opened onto nature, it was all heavily-
loaded, decorated surfaces, strong colors and outlines in a harsh cloisonne style, for people
also spoke of cloisonnism and Japonism. I n these peculiar works we detected the in­
fluence of Japanese prints, of the popular prints of Epinal, of painting and romanesque

544
stylization." The creation of the Salon des Indépendants grouped the Symbolists under
the banner of Puvis at o n e time, against the tyranny of the Institut. Besnard, Aman-
Jean and Armand P o i n t soon became famous. B u t it was in the small galleries, like
those of Bouteville or of t h e periodical La Plume, where exhibitions were devoted to
only one artist, t h a t Symbolist art attracted its public—one which was always rather
small, slightly snobbish, b u t generous. The Symbolists sold quickly and at rather high
prices. Later Bing and his famous Galerie de V Art Nouveau made decorator-painters
like de Feure famous.
I n Brussels, where official salons and academic painting had no prestige, t h e paint­
ers of the imaginary were better exhibited than in Paris, first in the Salon des X X ,
then at L a Libre Esthétique. This came about because Belgium was experiencing a
sort of national renaissance.
T H E DECLINE

Symbolism lasted m u c h longer in the rest of Europe t h a n in France, developing

without a break into t h e Art Déco style of the Twenties or into a frankly modern style
of painting. K u p k a and Kandinsky began by being Symbolists. One might also stress
the links with the Blue Rider School and the Expressionists, mostly thanks to Munch,
painter of agony. Belgian Symbolism still lives basically in the work of such Surreal­
ists as Delvaux. Elsewhere, the mystic Flemish painters kept the spirit of Symbolism
alive in the school of Loet hem Saint-Martin, with painters like Van de Woestine.
The retreat from Symbolism began in France in 1896, when the affectations of
the Salon "of the R o s e + C r o i x were openly mocked. The Wilde scandal provoked an
anti-esthetic campaign which was fostered by the nationalists at the time of the Dreyfus
Affair.
Symbolism made its own official way, however, for if the members of the I n s t i t u t e
considered the painters of the imaginary a minor evil, they did not bar t h e m from
their salons or even their museums; the Symbolists thus found an important market
which at the same time compromised them. Not affronting the competition of masters
like Picasso, Matisse or Braque, the Symbolists in the rest of Europe continued to
. develop while they became stagnant in France, even Khnopff and Delville, after 1900.
That year, which saw t h e spread of Art Nouveau at the Paris Exposition Universelle
was also the year when people of good taste, along with t h e new generation of artists,
ceased to take Aman-Jean or Lévy-Dhurmer seriously, much as they began also to
mock at the subtleties of poets like Stuart Merrill or Albert Samain. Then the Fauves
and the Russian Ballet came. I n Italy, the Futurists had the same devastating effect.
Gustave Moreau was forced into oblivion; Puvis was considered a respectable bore;
only Odilon Redon continued to gain prestige, perhaps because many, seeing his flow­
ers, took him for an Impressionist gifted with imagination. Maurice Denis t u r n e d to
monotonous religious painting, Khnopff declined to the rank of a local artist; Delville
became a Professor in Glasgow; Henry de Groux lapsed into poverty; Lévy-Dhurmer and
Aman-Jean became portraitists of a vaguely artistic bourgeoisie. Other painters sent
to the Salon and to the illustrated literary supplements of magazines their images of
medieval women and fairies, which were finally hung in the waiting rooms of dentists.

35 Balakian 545
 Thus esthetic Symbolism corresponded exactly to the last ten years of the century,
a pessimistic era, shaken by crises and scandals and which can, justly, be called deca­
dent. The optimism which prevailed after the Paris Exposition of 1900 was fatal foi
this flower which grew in the shade. Some artists continued to cultivate the Symbolist
spirit without proclaiming their allegiance to it. These include Rouault, especially,
Moreau's favorite pupil, the Douanier Rousseau, who wanted to be an allegorical
painter but was truly a Symbolist, Picasso in his Blue period, and even Matisse in a
few of his works. But it is incorrect to place under the Symbolist banner all artists
who, in their youth, succumbed to the charm of a poetic climate, or who, at one time
were upheld as the painters of ideas because they had turned away from Impressio
nism as much as from all that they had learned at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Cézanne
was really the determining factor in the creation of a modern style of painting whicr
goes from Matisse to Pollock, a painting for which we haven't yet found a name, bu1
which is already in museums.

Translated from the French by Edouard Rodit

546
 PART VII
SOME NATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
 JACINTO PRADO-COELHO

SYMBOLISM IN PORTUGUESE LITERATURE

1. THE PRECEDENTS

One of the most important figures of the 1865 generation, the poet and philosopher
Antero de Quental (1842—1891) was also the main spokesman for the idealism and pes­
simism that marked Portuguese poetry after 1890. His Sonetos Completes, published
in 1886, are remarkable not only for their philosophical optimism but also for their
dire despair; it was the latter, in fact, which led Quental to commit suicide. In. his
moments of virile lucidity Quental perceived "the universal chain of existences",
the progressive steps towards consciousness, a "gradual and systematic spiritualiza-
tion of the Universe": starting in the inert stone, this ascension endb in Man, free and
virtuous. He expressed this conception, for example, in the sonnet Redemption; en­
couraging the desire for liberty which animates all things, he speaks to them in person
with fraternal pity: "Souls that are sisters of my own soul, captive souls !" At other
moments, however, he discovered a "gloomy void" beyond the world of forms, and he
reached the conclusion that all is illusion and useless suffering; he summoned Nirvana
and greeted death in friendly terms. In the spiritualist parts of his poetry and in his
nocturnal, nihilistic aspect Quental announced and prepared the way, in fact, for
the Symbolist Weltanschauung. This does not necessarily imply, however, that he was
subjected to an influence, and even less to an exclusive influence, for the Portuguese
Symbolist poets were in a position to be acquainted either directly or through go-
betweens, with Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Baudelaire, or Leopardi.
Between 1865 and 1890, that is, during the twenty-five years which preceded the
publication of the Symbolist collection of Oaristos by E. de Castro, several important
experiments were made in the esthetic domain, and because of them we can accurately
speak of a line of "pre-Symbolist" poets. We should add that an ironic note was not
missing in these experiments; neither was a sense of humor. Their common source was
Baudelaire's lesson of modernity (modernité). Pre-Symbolist seems to be a suitable
designation, because in the Fleurs du Mal there are numerous instances of the Symbo­
list use of imagery, allegory, and the sonorous virtualities of the signifiers; moreover,
the influence of Baudelaire was still prevalent after 1890 to stimulate and sustain
Symbolism.
The 1865 generation enthusiastically received and assimilated the innovations of
French culture: on the one hand, the marmorean perfection of the Parnassians; on the
other, the "new thrill" of Baudelaire, with, to quote Eça de Queirós, "its subtle and
sober notation of the charm and horror of existence". And, curiously enough, it is in
the youthful texts of Eça de Queirós (1845—1900), the future Realist novelist, that

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 the first growth of "premature Symbolism" in Portugal can be discerned. These con­
sist of the articles published in the Oazeta de Portugal in 1866 and 1867; they were later
collected together a n d published in a volume entitled Prosas Barbaras. They represent
the late eruption of t h a t Nordic Romanticism which was as misty as it was mystical,
and from which Portuguese Romanticism had remained estranged. They also represent
stylistic exercises, which were often quite successful, based on readings of Victor Hugo,
Heine, Nerval, Gautier, Poe, and Baudelaire.
Two fundamental ideas can be perceived in Prosas Barbaras. The first is t h a t of
the unity of the physical world, which is achieved through an incessant number of
metamorphoses; an individual's soul is extinguished, but his body is perpetuated in
the "enormous m a t t e r " as it engenders other souls, perfumes, or sounds. The second
idea is t h a t all the objects and beings of the universe are alive; this is t a n t a m o u n t t o
animism, which, as we have already noted, is a major theme in the work of Quental.
To a certain extent, Queirós is one of the believers (or gives us the impression t h a t he is)
in the reality of dreams; this belief was shared by the German Romantics and Baude­
laire. Dreams and visions, Queirós tells us, are only "fantastic and disorderly attitudes
t h a t the shadows lent to t r u t h " . Two years later, in 1869, the Baudelairean side of
Queirós was affirmed once more; in collaboration with Quental and Batalha Reis,
he invented a satanicpoet, Carlos Fadrique Mendes, a few of whose poems appeared in
the press.
Meanwhile, a minor poet, Manuel Duarte de Almeida (1844—1914), was inspired,
it seems, by Baudelaire to renew his themes and his style. The sonnet Aromatografia,
dated 1872 and published in 1873 in the review A Folha, is perhaps his most remark­
able poem as a manifestation of pre-Symbolism; in it, he sketches the portrait of a
voluptuous woman through synesthesia, replacing colors b y perfumes.
Cesårio Verde (1855—1886) was only nineteen years old when he published his
poem Responso in 1874. In an unreal setting, which consists of a "deserted and solitary
castle" on the shores of a lake and surrounded by "gloomy forests", a lady of the manor
wanders dressed in black; she is "blond like the sweet Scottish women,/Her b e a u t y is
ideal, almost undefined"; her soul is tortured by the ghosts of the past. The compo­
nents of the scenery have a symbolic function: crows and vultures hover around the
battlements; and wh9n the lady of the manor tells the flagstones about her hidden
drama, "the huge crimson of the curtains/Ripples like a blood-stained sea". With its
severe architecture, the poem is composed of twelve quatrains, each one of which is
followed by a couplet. The quatrains are devoted to a gradual evocation of this myste­
rious woman, who is surrounded by an atmosphere t h a t reverberates with "doleful
sighs like the supplications of the blind" and "the groans of the shipwrecked". I n
the couplets, Verde reaffirms the platonic desire to serve her, to accompany her in her
suffering, to unite himself with her in death. The monotony of the reiteration soothes
the strange obsession of the poet; it is a kind of litany which resembles some of the
poems in Fleurs du Mal. B u t this prematurely Symbolist text, which already reveals
a deliberate and refined art, is an exception in the complete works of Verde. H e proved
t h a t his real vocation was to evoke daily, immediate, useful, simple, and banal events
and things in a powerfully original manner t h a t celebrated the freshness of sensations.

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 I n 1875, fifteen years before the advent of the Symbolist school, Gomes Leal
(1848—1921) published a collection entitled Claridades do sul. A Realist and a t t h e
same time full of fantasy and humor, he contributed a new vein of images, unusual
rhymes, and a more supple style to Portuguese poetry. His poem Tristissima is a fine
example of pre-Symbolism: an unhappy queen is pining away on a legendary island
engulfed by sobbing winds. Its series of four sonnets, 0 visionârio ou som e cor, illus­
trates the Baudelairean doctrine of correspondences. Despite several differences, which
are nevertheless very significant, one can clearly perceive t h a t Leal followed t h e lesson
of Baudelaire; he described himself as a "visionary" poet who wandered around in
the "immense forest" of theories; he created an association between sounds and t h e colors
of plants; he used the same didactic method—the enumeration of examples—and he,
too, had recourse t o a musical instrument, the hautboy, as a t e r m of comparison.
"There are perfumes as fresh as the flesh of children", wrote Baudelaire. "There are
ideal plants, born of a divine song,/Sisters of the hautboy, twins of t h e violin", wrote
Leal. The main difference is t h a t Leal the poet speaks of himself, his ideas, his senti­
ments, his sensations, and he concentrates his attention on the colors while he omits
the perfumes. He does not have a gift for synthesized and impersonal form.

2. THE ADVENT OF SYMBOLISM

The advent of Symbolism as a school took place during 1889—1890, only three
years after the famous manifesto by J e a n Moréas had consecrated the designation
"Symbolism". B u t since 1886 Portuguese readers had been able to follow the literary
movement which was taking place in France: one has only to recall t h e " L e t t e r from
Paris" by Xavier Carvalho, which was published in the newspaper A Provlncia (Porto,
17 April 1886), for in it he promised to keep his readers informed of "all the literary
tastes" which were current in France, and he quoted Huysmans, Richepin, a n d others.
And he kept his word, for in his column he mentioned the Déliquescences d'Adoré Flou-
pette by G. Vicaire and H . Beauclair (28 April, 1886), the poet Charles Cros a n d t h e
Chat Noir group (28 August, 1888), etc. And, on 6 December, 1888, he announced:
"The fever of literary periodicals of the decadent and symbolist schools continues. A new
school has just been founded, t h a t of the sensory instrumentalists. I t is possible t h a t a
periodical will soon be published in Portugal which will serve as their mouthpiece".
I n 1889, two student periodicals, Boémia Nova and Os Insubmissos, published in
Coimbra, also testified t o their knowledge of the new French poetry, both Decadent
and Symbolist, and to their intention of introducing it in Portugal. The periodicals
proved to be ephemeral, b u t among their contributors were individuals whose names
were to become famous, in particular those of Antonio Nobre (Boémia Nova) and Eugé-
nio de Castro (Os Insubmissos) .The "Reports from P a r i s " t h a t Alberto Osório de Castro
published in the first of these periodicals mention René GmTs Traité du verbe, Verlaine,
Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers; they also refer t o " t h e latest liter­
ary schools, the Symbolist church, the school of Mallarmé, t h e mysterious poets like
Rollinat, all t h a t incomparable and strange French poetry which extends from Charles
Baudelaire to our d a y s " . Osório de Castro proposed the creation, through t h e study

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of the most modern French art, of a "fresh and strong school which could give a 'new
thriir to the Portuguese art of the last decades of the century". Another poet, Joäo
de Meneses, published, in turn, in Os Insubmissos, the poem Nemoral; its subtitle was
"Symbolist Esotericism" and its vocabulary was rich in keywords of the School, such
as vespéral, oaristys, and so on.
A few months later, in 1890, Eugénio de Castro (1869 — 1944) emerged as the leader
of Portuguese Symbolism, for he was not only the author of the first collection of osten­
sibly Symbolist poems (Oaristos), but also the author of a t e x t (it formed the preface
of the first edition of Oaristos) which is the only Symbolist manifesto ever written in
Portuguese, even though it consisted of no more than a simple statement of the prob­
lems of poetic language and versification. With all t h e audacity of youth and with
indisputable talent and virtuosity, Castro intended to introduce a "selected and varied"
vocabulary b y employing rare words because he thought, like Baudelaire, t h a t "words
remain independent of the idea t h a t they represent and have their own particular
b e a u t y " gomil, for example, is more beautiful than jarro. H e also felt sympathetic
towards the " d e c a d e n t " style in the sense t h a t Gautier defined it: "an ingenious, com­
plicated, learned style, full of nuances and studied elegance, always extending the lim­
its of the language . . . striving to express the most ineffable aspects of thought and
the most vague a n d fleeting outlines of form, a style t h a t listens to the subtle secrets
of neurosis in order to achieve its ends". Moreover, the author claimed t h a t his book
was "the first t h a t defended freedom of rhythm in Portugal". Castro composed alexan­
drines without a caesura, or with a displaced caesura; he adopted the "delicious r h y t h m "
of the rondel; he used alliteration and rare rhymes very extensively. He attached such
importance to the music of his verses t h a t René Ghil considered him an "adept of in-
strumentalism," while Francis Vielé-Griffin "sought to liberate him from the influence of
René Ghil in order to draw him definitively into the ranks of the Symbolists", to
quote Denyse Chast's reference to a letter t h a t Vielé-Griffin wrote to Castro.
The poems collected in the Oaristos are evidently love poems; they are all varia­
tions on one particular theme: the poet stubbornly courts a strange, cold, haughty,
languishing, exquisite woman, the "polar Flower" while she wishes to be the object
of a purely platonic love. This theme is the pretext for poems t h a t are long evocations
in which the dream world invades the real world. Moreover, these poems are full of
brilliant images and deliberately unusual associations.
I t was also in 1890, on the twenty-second of November, t h a t the second series of
the literary periodical Intermezzo began to be published at Porto. I n the fifth issue of
the first series (2 J a n u a r y , 1890) the poet Alberto de Oliveira had described the intellec­
tual climate of the fin de siècle: "An undefined and anguishing melancholy springing
up like a strange, deeply intricate flower from the work of a r t " . After the twenty-
second of November, already under the influence of Eugénio de Castro and the move­
ment t h a t he launched in Portugal, Intermezzo showed obvious traits of Symbolism.
E . de Artayett, the editor, encouraged the poets to escape into subjective world where
one could taste the strangest delights. Among the contributors, one finds Joäo Bar-.
reira, with his fantastic and "decadent" poems in prose; Julio Brandäo, who also em­
ployed in his poems a new, purified, musical language: " A artemisia do Luar, jaspi-

552
nea Flor!/ Brando boiava na cerulea altura .'. . ' " Mention should also be made of
Camilo Pessanha, Alberto Osório de Castro, and D. Joäo de Castro.
I n fact, the collection Oaristos (followed, in 1891, b y another collection in t h e same
style, Horas) produced t h e refreshing scandal and enthusiasm t h a t its author hoped
for. A group of young people formed a small school around Eugénio de Castro; the most
important names were those of Antonio de Oliveira Soares \Azul, 1890; Exame de
Consciência, 1891); D . J o ä o de Castro (Alma Póstuma, a series of sonnets inserted,
in 1890, in the Revista de Portugal of Eça de Queirós); Julio Brandäo, perhaps the most
gifted poet (0 Livro de Aglais, 1892); Joäo Barreira (Gouaches, 1892, disturbing a n d
morbid poems in prose which the Brazilian Symbolists would declaim, according t o
Andrade Muricy, "secretly, on their knees"); and, finally, Henrique de Vasconcelos,
the author of a collection of sonnets, Os Esotéricös (1894), which contains sketches of
the great French Symbolists. I n their works these young poets displayed their sick
souls, prematurely old; t o avoid the " B a r b a r i a n s " they withdrew into ivory towers
where t h e y pursued a dream of strange beauty. They sang with a kind of mystical
voluptuousness of their love, devoted to disdainful, haughty, glacial women like Elue
in the Oaristos, or to women of an intangible purity. Less often they wrote of gratified
love which brought them only disillusionment and boredom: "Dreaming of divine things
I forgot/That the earth I lived on was only m u d " , D . Joäo de Castro complained sadly.
Their language was embellished with biblical images or borrowed terms from Christian
liturgy; it generally described misty or crepuscular landscapes with blood-streaked
skies. I t was a language t h a t was strewn with neologisms and rare words; it also indulged
in t h e conventional connotations of poetics, such as adjectives ending in -ante, -ente,
-ah luciolante, auréolante, algente, liquescente, aparecente, biblial, lilial, eburneal.
If one speaks of the scandal caused by Oaristos, one immediately thinks of reac­
tions of hostility, criticism, mockery, and caricature. As could be expected, these
reactions came, in part, from representatives of the older generation, such as the poets
Joäo de Deus (1830—1896), Guerra Junqueiro (1850—1923), Antonio Feijó (1859—
1917), and the prose writer Fialho de Almeida (1857—1911). Despite the s y m p a t h y
t h a t Guerra Junqueiro showed for the new school—it actually went as far as his using
some of their methods in his own lyrical collection of poems, Os Simples—he did not
hesitate, in a letter which served as the preface to the Book of Aglais, to mention w h a t
he considered to be their defects: the lack of sincere, personal expression; " a conven­
tional literary Catholicism, the decadent-Gothic style of an artistic beer-hall"; "all
t h a t scénographie liturgy of deliquescent bric-a-brac". The Parnassian poet Antonio
Feijó, for his part, admitted to Eugénio de Castro, in a letter of 16 March 1891: " F o r
me, in any work of art, sincerity is the only pure source of emotion, and it seems t o me
t h a t there is, in fact, no sincerity, t h a t supreme quality, in your Horas . . . Your Ca­
tholicism is not sincere, your chastity is not perfect, your monarchism is riot authentic.
These ideas are only ingredients in your literary makeup kit, and so are the confused
and affected methods t h a t you employ". (Quoted b y Andrée Rocha, A Epistolografia
em Portugal. [Coimbra, 1965.] pp. 374—75.) Insincerity and affectation: these were
the principal accusations levelled against t h e young Portuguese Symbolists, including
the leader of the school. Fialho de Almeida also emphasized this negative aspect in

553
his column in Os Gatos on 21 September, 1892. He pointed to the Catholicism derived
from Verlaine, the excessive bookishness, the insincere defence of the sterile woman,
the fabricated anguish. He made a point of criticizing the School's obsession with rich
rhymes and with t h e effects of sonority, all the exaggerations of what has been called
"instrumentalism", t h a t is to say (he explains), "the tendency to make poetry b y pro­
voking emotions, not through the sense of the words, which, in the end, is abolished,
but through effects of sonority brought about by various combinations of syllables;
the latter method is tantamount to identifying poetry and music". In short, the critics
would have preferred a more human and a truer poetry.
J o a o de Deus, G. Junqueiro, and A. Feijó also wrote parodies mocking Symbolism,
but not without a measure of goodwill. In his "Letter to Francisco de Almeida 'in
the néphélibate style"' (collected in Campo de Flores, 2nd ed., 1896), J o ä o de Deus
ridiculed the simulated neurosis of the young poets; Junqueiro sent the editors of the
newspaper Aurora do Lima the poem Hevarysta, a text t h a t caricatured t h e language
of the OaristoSy using phrases such as Exicial, lilial, vaporeamente flava . . . (It was
rediscovered and inserted in the 1972editionof his collected works.) In 1890, the news­
paper Novidades published compositions by an imaginary poet, Gustavo Cano, " t h e
inspired décadiste", who was said to be the "author of a work of genius called Yvaris-
tus". As for the caricatures written b y A. Feijo, later collected in Bailatas (1907),
the poet exploited the audacious metaphors and the play of sounds of the new poetry
in such a clever manner, with such humor and elegance, t h a t the result went far be­
yond his satirical intentions.
Gradually, however, criticism and mockery died down. I n 1895, Eugénio de Castro,
who was only twenty-seven at the time, was elected to the Academy of Sciences of
Lisbon; while he travelled in France, a banquet, presided over b y Catulle Mendès, was
given in his honor. H e wrote ceaselessly, and his works were translated and commented
on in the Symbolist press; in short, he became a celebrity. I t was also in 1895 t h a t the
publication Arte first appeared: an "international review" edited by Eugénio de Castro
and Manuel da Silva Gaio; it was the most important of the Symbolist and Decadent
periodicals to appear in Portugal. Among its contributors were several of the great
French and Belgian Symbolists. Leafing through its eight numbers one finds texts,
apparently unpublished elsewhere, b y Paul Verlaine, Rémy de Gourmont, Gustave
Kahn, Stuart Merrill, Saint-Pol-Roux (L'éternel inceste), a poem dedicated to Eugénio
de Castro, and Les accouchées de la vallée, Francis Vielé-Grif fin, Emile Verhaeren, Henri
de Régnier, Tristan Klingsor, and A. Ferdinand Hérold. English poets e.g. Arthur
Symons, and German and Italian poets were also represented. Mention was made,
moreover, of the books and periodicals of French Symbolism, the Poèmes, of Régnier,
for example. Manuel da Silva Gaio and Carlos de Mesquita, the two best Portuguese
critics of Symbolism, who were also practicing poets, contributed to Arte.

3. T H E PERSONALITIES

The three most remarkable Symbolist poets of the 1890 generation were Eugénio
de Castro, Camilo Pessanha, and Roberto de Mesquita. The first, as we have seen, knew

554
how to promote his reputation; as for Pessanha and Mesquita, they lived withdrawn
lives and wrote somewhat obscurely, but their Symbolism, and therefore their poetry,
was more authentic.
In 1895, the poet a n d critic Manuel da Silva Gaio, writing in Arte, made t h e just
observation t h a t t h e vocation of de Castro led him toward classicism: " W i t h regard
to the interest and generic aspect of his work, we will call it classical, for like the true
classics, he appreciates a n d sees in poetic creations the human and philosophical side,
and pays more attention t o these than to the particular, individual, or historical notes
which can serve to clothe each figure and each work". Critics also emphasized t h e fact
that de Castro had a sensuous temperament, that he enjoyed the changing spectacle
of life, t h a t he relished t h e pleasure of the literary art, and t h a t because of this he rep­
resented a countercurrent to his own fin de siècle pessimism. De Castro had, in fact,
completely assimilated t h e decadent and decorative aspects of French Symbolism. If
the actual word "symbol", which did not occur in the preface to the Oaristos, did appear
at the beginning of another of his books, Sylva (1894), the role t h a t t h e author attrib­
uted to the symbol was somewhat ornamental and extravagant. An atmosphere of
suggestive ambiguity rarely pervades his poems; his symbols are always symbols a
priori, " t h e deliberated word", as Maeterlinck would say; they are therefore allegories,
and not spontaneous, polyvalent, and untranslatable. Moreover, the Symbolist period
of de Castro lasted only seven years, from 1890 to 1897, and these were, it must be
recognized, years of great fecundity during with the following works appeared: Oaristos,
Boras, Sylva, Interlvnio, Belkiss, Tirésias, Sagramor, Salome, and other poems. Some
of these titles reveal the poet's predilection for myths and the attractions of the Bible
and the Orient. After 1897, his evolution was parallel to t h a t of J e a n Moréas; it was
marked by constant loyalty to perfection of form and led him to embrace the ideal of
classical simplicity.
Camilo Pessanha, (1867 — 1926), however, remained anchored in Symbolism.
A high school teacher at Macau, the Portuguese territory in China, he showed little
taste for glory; he took drugs, enjoyed dreaming, and led a nonchalant life with his
sweet-natured Chinese concubines. Gifted with a delicate, morbid sensibility, he pre­
ferred to lead a withdrawn life and did not object to being forgotten. I t was not until
1920 t h a t his poems were collected and published in a slim volume entitled Clepsidra.
His lyricism is discreet, there is a calm resignation in it and, at times, a poignant self-
control; he hardly ever sounds a note of self-love or revolt. His states of mind, removed
from biographical circumstances, are not actually expressed, b u t rather suggested
through brief allusions t h a t are mingled with fragmentary, indecisive, and fleeting vi­
sions. The symbols t h a t he uses (or invents) are typically and truly Symbolist, those
ambiguous symbols which, in the words of Marcel Raymond, "represent a complex
state in the process of transformation".
Although the work of Roberto de Mesquita (1871 — 1923) does not attain t h e rare
quality of t h a t of Pessanha, it is nevertheles worthy of attention owing to its authen­
ticity and its documentary value. Mesquita lived in a small village of the Azores, Santa
Cruz das Flores, and travelled only on one occasion, in 1904, to the Portuguese main­
land. A latecomer to poetry, he was equally attracted to Romanticism, Parnassianism,

555
and Symbolism. W h a t makes him a fine poet is the spontaneous convergence of his
own human experience and the poetic language he mastered. I n his insular isolation,
in his nostalgia for a hazily imagined, faraway world beyond the sea, his particular sen­
sibility was well a t t u n e d to the climate of Symbolism. He defined himself in poetry as a
visionary, one who has the privilege of seeing the invisible, of perceiving t h e true as­
pects and of hearing the real voices of things. And it is in making us sense the hidden
souls of things t h a t he comes under the sign of AnterodeQuental (hence t h e title of his
collection: Almas Cativas, 1931).
Guerra Junqueiro is a special case; a "Realist" poet and a pamphleteer, he never­
theless proved capable, at the age of forty, of assimilating Symbolism. I n his collection
Os Simples (1892), several poems composed between April and October of t h e previous
year clearly reveal the influence of the new school, for he had assimilated Symbolism
in a highly discreet-manner which never led him to betray his own vigorous personality.
In his study of Junqueiro, Pierre Hourcade rightly singled out the following qualities
of his style: "Musicality, the search for vocal harmonics, disarticulation of rhythm,
the purely suggestive and sensual value of the symbols replacing the comparisons, t h e
predominance of t h e created atmosphere over the t h e m e " ; these are, in fact, t h e quali­
ties t h a t characterize the poems of Junqueiro in 1891, not to mention the use of several
words t h a t are typical of Symbolism, names of precious stones, adjectives like lates-
cente, opâlico, algente, and so on.

4. PROSE FICTION AND THEATER

The most striking example of the decadent aspect of Symbolism in prose fiction
is t h a t of Raul Brandäo. Born in 1867, he belongs to the generation of Camilo Pessanha
and Eugénio de Castro. To begin with he belonged to a group of young néphélibates
who used to meet regularly in Porto during the years 1891 — 1893. Between 1895 a n d
1896, he was one of the editors of the Revista de Hoje, a periodical of young decadents
(Joäo Rocha, D. J o â o de Castro, Julio Brandäo) who preached the necessity of the
supernatural. As critics have often emphasized, the work of Raul Brandäo somewhat
resembles t h a t of the great Russian novelists whose works were introduced into Portugal
around 1890. Jaime de Magalhäes Lima, the future apostle of the doctrines of Tolstoy,
tells us, in Gidades e paisagens (1889), of the visit t h a t he made during t h e previous
year to Iasnaia Poliana, where he saw the master "crowned with a halo of humility".
Four years later, in 1893, the thinker Sampaio Bruno dared affirm t h a t it was the task
of Russia to regenerate all the Europeans "through its human mysticism and its social
evangelism". I n his books, Brandäo similarly reveals a troubled conscience, a profound
moral and metaphysical disquiet. H e enjoyed stirring the m u d of t h e subterranean
world, denouncing the cruelty and the ruses of egoism. He preferred the world of the
poor, the victimized, the outcast, the grotesque. His novels are principally monologues;
the places, the characters, and the events are presented as visions and thereby attain
symbolic scope. There is a muscial aspect in the organization of his most important a n d
best work, Humus (1917), in which repetition plays a fundamental role. P a r t Symbolist,
part Existentialist, Raul Brandäo is today considered as a brilliant forerunner of both
movements.

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 With Maeterlinck as principal model, Symbolism also invaded the theater, m
1894 Eugénio de Castro published a dramatic prose poem entitled Belkiss, whose heroine
"Queen of Shaba, of A x u m and of Hymiar", embodied the disillusion and despair t h a t
succeed gratified desire; with a pessimism worthy of the sage Zophesamin, the poem
concludes t h a t "happiness is more inaccessible than the planets". I t was also in 1894
t h a t D. Joäo da Câmara made his first unsuccessful attempt at Symbolist theater with
O Pântano. H e had previously introduced Naturalism into Portuguese theater with
Os Velhos (1893). And he did, in fact, achieve success with Meia Noite (1900), which
deals with the contrast between marriage and renunciation and is inspired b y the Song
of Songs.
The dramatic poem (a "static drama") 0 Marinheiro (1913) b y Fernando Pessoa,
is a work for three voices t h a t deals with the mystery and anguish of existence. How­
ever, in this domain of poetical theater, where the characters, actions, gestures, a n d
words, attain more or less indecipherable symbolic functions, it is the name of Antonio
Patricio (1878 — 1930) which is most important; he was also the author of partly Sym­
bolist, partly decadent poems. O Fim (1909) is the prophetic vision of the end of a
nation: the court, full of ghosts, is in agony; foreign troops disembark in Lisbon; b u t ,
at the decisive hour, the torpid people awake and succeed, almost miraculously, in
driving back the invaders, Messianism and defeatism join hands. Other poetic plays
of Patricio include Pedro o Gru (1918), Dinis e Isabel (1919), D. Joäo e a Mascara (1924).

5. INFLUENCES

Portugal assimilated Symbolism all the more easily because Portuguese culture h a d
thoroughly assimilated French influences ever since the eighteenth century, especially
after 1840. Eça de Queirós described the avid manner in which the young students a t
Coimbra, in 1865, read the French books t h a t had recently been published. The same
phenomenon occured again in 1890, according to the poet Alberto de Oliveira:
"Meanwhile, the Symbolist movement sprang up in France and people started talking
of Verlaine, Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio, Rodenbach, Paul Adam, Barres. The first books
of most of the writers and of others who are still famous today were read in Coimbra a t
the same time as they were read in France. I remember perfectly having spent entire
nights deciphering the hermetic poems of Mallarmé". (Chronicle 52, Pombos Correios,
1913)
The majority of Portuguese poets were thus intimately acquainted with F r e n c h
literature, and it would be quite impossible to make an inventory here of the influ­
ences. I have already referred in detail to the echoes of Baudelaire which marked pre-
Symbolist literature. He remained, even after 1890, one of the masters whom P o r t u ­
guese poets followed. I n an article on modern poetry published in the Jornal de Co-
mércio (12 June, 1892), Eugénio de Castro mentioned the "four Evangelists" who
should inspire the movement of literary renovation: Poe, Baudelaire, Wagner, and
Villiers de TIsle-Adam. Clepsidra, the title of the collection of poems by Camilo Pessanha
is probably derived from a line b y Baudelaire: " L e grouffre a toujours soif; la clep­
sydre se vide". Nevertheless, it seems t h a t in the last decade of the century the influence

657
of Verlaine, t h e Verlaine of Sagesse, was even more extensive t h a n t h a t of Baudelaire's
Fleurs du Mal. Verlaine was very often invoked, evoked, translated. Julio Brandäo ideal­
ized him in 0 Livro de Åglals (1892): "Verlaine, the winged ascetic/ the Poet of Prayer
and the Hospital". In Os Esotêricos (1894), Henrique de Vasconcelos dedicated one of his
sonnets to Verlaine; he relished " t h a t voice t h a t sighs /Toward the sky, toward the
sky, from the midst of filth !" And Verlaine was the favorite bedside reading of C. Pes-
sanha; mentally t h e y belonged to the same family, and their art was eminently musical
and melancholy. Two poems from Clepsidra, Violincelo, and Ågua morrente, were in­
spired by two very well-known poems of Verlaine—Ghanson d'automne and one of the
Ariettes oubliées', Pessanha used the first two lines of the latter as an epigraph: "II
pleure dans mon cœur/ comme il pleut sur la ville". B u t Pessanha was a poet who
transformed what had influenced him to such an extent t h a t the influence became
for him a touchstone of reality. Finally, Verlaine was t h e most important and the most
obvious influence in the work of Roberto de Mesquita; on the one hand, there was the
evocation of abolished time; on the other, a taste for hazy landscapes with mist and
rain. The Portuguese epigones of Symbolism did not forget Verlaine; the Livro das
Oraçoës (1916) of Alfredo Pimenta had as an epigraph the following words from Sagesse:
" P a u v r e âme pâle, au moins cette eau de puits glacé / Bois-là".
As for Mallarmé, the young poets of 1890, in particular Eugénio de Castro, cer­
tainly knew and appreciated his work. H e was one of the French poets to whom Hen­
rique de Vasconcelos, in Os Esotêricos, dedicated a sonnet, following in the manner of
Baudelaire in his poem Les Phares-, the sonnet entitled Herodiate, begins: "Herodias !
the beauty t h a t you express / Is the beauty t h a t makes us dream". And in the Cari-
caturas a Garvao t h a t Gomes Leal inserted in Firn de um Mundo-Såtiras Modernas
(1899) Mallarmé appears, along with Baudelaire, Verlaine, Huysmans, the "deca­
dents", and the 'néphélibates' ; "There goes the obscure singer of the enigmatic for­
est ! . . . " B u t it was, above all, the generation of 1915, as we shall see, t h a t mastered
the lessons of Mallarmé.
French influences in the works of Eugénio de Castro have already been studied
b y Denyse Chast and René Poupart. Poupart fixed his attention on the elements bor­
rowed from Villiers de TIsle-Adam and Maurice Maeterlinck. Nevertheless, this re­
mains a domain where there is still ample scope for research.

6. THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: FROM SYMBOLISM TO

"SAUDOSISMO"

From the beginning, Symbolism suffered competition from traditional neo-Ro-

manticism. At times, the latter incorporated decadent or Symbolist estheticism and/or
fin de siècle pessimism (Antonio Nobre, Manuel da Silva Gaio, etc.). B u t where doc­
trine was concerned, the antagonism between the two currents (i. e., nationalism ver­
sus cosmopolitanism) came clearly to the surface. Alberto de Oliveira, the dreamer-
poet and artist of Biblia do Sonho / Pores-do-Sol (1891), became the apostle of neogar-
rettismo, t h a t is to say, of the return to the literary nationalism of Garrett, one of t h e
great masters of Portuguese Romanticism. Nothing justifies, Oliveira declared in Pa-

558
lavras Loucas (1894), a servile attitude vis-à-vis French poetry; the latter is poor, with
the sole exception of Verlaine, while our poets have infinite possibilities, for the Portu­
guese are a "mystic and superstitious people, still suffering and dying from the fever
of grandeur". National history, the countryside, native folklore, these are the sources
of inspiration t h a t de Oliveira proposed to his compatriots. I t is only in the formal do­
main of the plastic arts t h a t the Portuguese could learn from the French. Around
1910, Saudosismo was the prolongation of traditional neo-Romanticism.
In 1899, it was already possible to formulate a complete judgement of Symbolism.
I n his thesis entitled O Simbolismo como manifestacäo de degenerescência, Jose Coelho
Moreira Nunes, a doctor, presented a very complete picture of the culture of the epoch;
he included Nietzsche, Wagner, Puvis de Chavannes, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Moréas,
Maeterlinck (who, he remarked, imitated Walt Whitman, " a patriotic and lyrical
poet, one of those who have revealed the art of the future"), as well as Dostoievsky,
Ibsen, Rossetti, Ruskin, William Morris, etc.; and, among the Portuguese writers,
Joäo Barreira, "one of the most elegant Symbolists in the Gouaches", Delfim Guima-
räes, "the pessimist of the Gonfidencias who returns to erotic mysticism in the Evan-
gelho", Antero de Figueiredo, Joäo Grave, and many others mentioned in the preceding
pages. According to Moreira Nunes, even though Symbolism constitutes " t h e most
modern and perfect form with which to protest against the real", it should be opposed
as a "form of mental malady, a manifestation of mystic degeneracy", and therefore
as a reactionary movement.
Twelve years later another complete view, t h a t of Veiga Simöes in A Nova Ge-
raçao (1911), gives a picture of the esthetic ideas and tendencies t h a t were current
at the beginning of the twentieth century. A fervent adept of Wagnerism because of
the latter's desire for totality, he also stressed the importance of the Impressionism of
Debussy, though he believed t h a t Impressionism was an ephemeral current t h a t de­
pended too much upon literature (e. g., Verlaine, Maeterlinck); he confessed his admi­
ration for the sculpture of Rodin and the paintings of Carrière, two expressions of a
"synthetic", universal art, both plastic and intimate, like the musical dramas of Wag­
ner. I n Portuguese literature, Simöes distinguished two tendencies: egocentric esthet-
icism, the most qualified representative of which was Eugénio de Castro, and nation­
alism, which had been set into motion by M. da Silva Gaio (one could also add t h e
names of Alberto de Oliveira, de Lopes Vieira, etc.). With regard to Symbolism, which
the essayist associated with Decadentism, it was envisaged in its double aspect: t h e
hermetic vocabulary, in the manner of René Ghil, and the neo-Catholicism, taken from
the work of Verlaine. Owing to the temperament of Eugénio de Castro, the chief of the
line, Portuguese neo-Catholicism had taken on a formal, superficial character, and could
be considered (in 1911) quite outmoded. Simöes perceived, moreover, two reactions t o
Symbolism. The first was the Naturalism of Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, represented
in Portugal by Joäo de Barros, the editor, along with Sousa Pinto, of the periodical
Arte e Vida, which appeared in 1904. The task of art according to de Barros, would be
"to create a more conscious and more beautiful life" which would be enjoyed, not
only by the privileged classes, b u t also, and above all, by "the enormous legion of
those who work painfully in order to earn their bread". The other reaction, "construc-

659
ti v e " nationalism, which was preached by M. da Silva Gaio, proved to be, a t t h a t date,
the victorious current. In retrospect, Symbolism is seen to have had much more vitality
than V. Simöes believed; indeed, with the generation of Orpheu, it received a new
impulse.
7. "SAUDOSISMO"

I t is very difficult, if not impossible, to establish clear frontiers between the poetic
currents of the period t h a t stretches from 1890 to 1925. While a poet like M. da Silva
Gaio declared t h a t he was at once "cosmopolitan" and "nationalist" (in the review
Arte, 1895), and the cult of beauty and artistic elegance brought Symbolists and
nationalists together, there were instances of reciprocal influence (in the case of J a i m e
Cortesäo, for instance) even of crosscurrents like nostalgic, dreaming Saudosismo and
Nietzschean "animism" which extolled health, energy, and clarity. At the same time,
Américo Duräo, for instance, in the sonnets included in Tântalo (1921), was seduced
by the sumptuous aspects of decadence while remaining an adherent, as Óscar Lopes
has remarked, of the "Saudosismo" school, and making use of its typical vocabulary.
I n fact, the same basic idealism, the sense of mystery, animism or pantheism, and the
pessimism of Schopenhauer permeated not only Symbolism, b u t also Saudosismo
and the Modernist movement of 1915.
As a poetic language Saudosismo (the name derives from the adjective saudoso,
which corresponds with saudade, meaning "regret" or "nostalgia") represented a with­
drawal from Symbolism; "saudosista" wording is more simple, more direct, a n d more
oratorical. B u t its representatives, Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877 — 1952), the leader of
the school, Mario Beiräo, Alfonso Duarte, Lopes Vieira, Correia de Oliveira, all ap­
proached Symbolism to some extent not only through images and rhythms, b u t essen­
tially through their attitude to the universe, a universe t h a t appeared in their eyes to
be peopled with shadows and myths. To quote José Regio, a poet and essayist of the
1927 generation: " I n the intermediary and imprecise zone through which he soars,
Pascoaes gradually identifies himself with the mountains, the trees, the water, the air,
the mist; he dissolves in t h a t inanimate landscape which attracts him and which he
animates". (Bulletin des Etudes Portugaises, 1952.) The Saudosistas spiritualized matter
and filled nature with souls. Cortesäo evoked "poplars of the soul" and D u a r t e "after­
noons of the soul", "twilights of sorrow". They intended to hint at the uncertain, the
faraway, the undefined, an inexpressible beyond. Words such as Saudade, Alma, Bruma,
Longe are at once typically Symbolist and typically Saudosistas. This is why anyone
wishing to study Symbolism cannot ignore the sort of mystic nationalism of which
Pascoaes was the inspired theoretician.
Antonio Carneiro (1872—1930) provides us with a perfect example of t h e conver­
gence of Saudosismo and Symbolism, both in his painting and in his poetry (Solilóquios,
1936). As Julio Brandäo has remarked, "His disturbing vision envelops nature and men
in a mist of dreams". Pascoaes has noted t h a t color " p r a y s " in his canvases, which he
painted "in a kneeling position". Carneiro was the art editor of A Aguiâ, a periodical
which was, from 1912 onward, the organ of Saudosismo.

660
 8. T H E " O R P H E U " GENERATION AND T H E EPIGONES
OF SYMBOLISM-DECADENTISM

Veiga Simöes was mistaken in his belief that 1911 marked the end of Symbolism.
Por 1912 was the publication of a collection of poems by Martinho Nobre de Melo,
Bitmos do Amor e do Silëncio, in which there is more than a measure of Symbolist art.
It was also the date of a story, Nova Safo, by Vila-Moura; its heroine is a lesbian artist
who is an avatar of the decadent spirit. In 1914, Fernando Pessoa (1888 — 1935) pub­
lished the poem Pauls (actually dated 29 March, 1913) in A Benascenca; a complex
evocation of boredom and dreams, it set out to perfect Symbolism by founding a new
school. As the author himself stated: "Paulsmo (the word is derived from Pauls,
which means stagnant pools, and was chosen to designate the embryonic school because
of its connotations) belongs to that current of which the first clear manifestation was
Symbolism . . . It has progressed considerably beyond foreign forms of Symbolism and
neo-Symbolism." {Paginas Intimas, p. 126). In another passage, Pessoa remarked that
Max Nordau did not know how to interpret Symbolism; he had noticed the "decadent
elements" which Symbolism contained but not "that which, above and beyond these
elements, makes Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Paul Verlaine great poets". Symbolism,
Pessoa continued, represents three things at the same time: "1) a decadent offshoot of
Romanticism; 2) a movement that contests Scientism; 3) a moment in the evolution
(or a beginning of the evolution) of a new art". {Paginas de Estétlca, p. 159). And this
art was bound to be an art of dreams, consequently a musical art. {Ibid. pp. 156—58.)
The first issue of Orpheu was published in 1915; it was the mouthpiece of Portuguese
Modernism, (which should not be confused with Portuguese Symbolism) and the docu­
ment of the simultaneous aftermath of Symbolism — Decadence. The introduction,
which was signed by one of the editors, the poet Luis de Montalvor, constituted an
esthetic manifesto. Orpheu was defined as "an exile of artistic temperaments"; the
review adhered to an "esoteric" ideal. Some of its contributors still placed themselves
completely or partially under the sign of Mallarmé and Eugénio de Castro; they includ­
ed: Fernando Pessoa, the most genial modernist and the greatest Portuguese poet
after Gamoes; Mario de Så-Carneiro a poet and short-story writer who used splendid
images, one whose Symbolism was disturbing and obscure (it reminds one, at times, of
Rimbaud); Luis de Montalvor; Alfredo Guizado; and Armando Cortes-Rodrigues.
It was at this time, in fact, that the influence of Mallarmé reached its high point. With
regard to Montalvor, for example, Pessoa stated: "He is very little removed, in point
of style and spiritual direction, from Mallarmé, who, it is not difficult to guess, must
be his favorite poet". {Paginas Intimas, p. 149).
In the following years (till about 1925), Symbolism and Decadence did not cease
to bear fruits. Mention has already been made of Vila-Moura (1877 — 1935), a disciple
of Wilde, Ruskin, and D'Annunzio, who was also influenced by Pierre Louys.The name
of Carlos Parreira (1890—1950) should be added; he was the author of A Esmeralda de
Nero, written in 1908—1909 and published in 1915, which is a strident criticism of
Huysmans' A Bebours. He was also the author of Blzânclo (1920) and Ex-Votos (1924).
Some of his quotations provide us with excellent points of reference: "Every soul is a

36 Balakian 561
melody" (Mallarmé); "Musicbefore everything" (Verlaine); and he also quotes the Gon-
court brothers, Gustave Moreau, Whistler, Picasso, Marinetti, Boccioni, Toulouse-
Lautrec, Maeterlinck, Wilde, Verhaeren, Laforgue ("that fantastic Hamlet of rhymes")
Sade, Ruskin, Rollinat ("mademoiselle Squelette,/Elle était si maigrelette"), Debussy,
Ravel, and Schumann. In 1916, in Centâuro, Lufs de Montai vor published "An Attempt
at an Essay on Decadence".* "We are the descendants of the century of Decadence",
he affirmed. "All great art is decadent". Judith Teixeira's book, Nua: Poemas de
Bizâncio, represents a belated symptom of the same taste.

9. A TENTATIVE EVALUATION OF PORTUGUESE SYMBOLISM

Even if we omit the poets that have been referred to as "pre-Symbolist", the Sym­
bolist—Decadent movement in Portugal lasted for an exceptionally long period, about
thirty-five years, from 1890 to 1925. We should not entertain any illusions, however,
for it was dominant only in poetry and only for short intervals. During that era, the
kingdom was, so to speak, divided between Naturalism, Populism, historicist neo-
Romanticism, several other nationalist currents, Regionalism, and, after 1915, Moder­
nism; the latter posed, in a "revolutionary" manner, the problem of the relationship
between the writer and his writing, the word and the void. In actual fact, as a collec­
tive movement, Symbolism enjoyed a first flowering between 1890 and 1897, a flowering
which caused some scandal. The year 1897 marked the date when the leader of the
school abandoned Symbolism and became a wise, neoclassical poet. There was a second
flowering in 1915, with the publication of Orpheu; it included such poets as Pessoa,
Sa-Carneiro, Guizado, Cortes-Rodrigues, and Ângelo de Lima. But at that time, Sym­
bolism was taken up again only to be surpassed. Pessoa was well aware that from an
esthetic point of view, Saudosismo had no future, but that Symbolism could still be
used as a bridge. And from 1915 onward, in fact, Symbolism, integrated and absorbed
by Modernism, was only a surviver. It was in this context that Pessoa considered Pes-
sanha, along with the "Impressionist-Realist" Cesårio Verde, as one of the masters
of modern poetry in Portugal. And even today one can find echoes of Symbolism in
Portuguese poetry in the work of Natércia Freire, for example, whose delicate, oneiric
poetry is a tissue of mist and mystery, as the following lines reveal: "Immaculate, this
country that exists / Where eyes seek regret / And the hair of the moon is disentangl­
ed." But is not called Symbolist; it is classified more accurately, as neo-Symbolist.
The fact is that as a group phenomenon, Symbolism proved to be more convention­
al, more bizarre; it tended to be a fashion that brought out the more decadent and
boisterous aspects of Symbolism. This does not, however, deny the existence of writers
for whom Decadence became the necessary expression of their personalities, writers
such as Så-Carneiro and, at another level, Vila-Moura.
Finally, there were particular conditions which explain the peculiar tonality that
the Symbolist-Decadent movement adopted in Portugal. Since theoretical reflection

* Translator's note: The original text wa» written by Pessoa in English.

562
 was almost entirely absent from literary criticism which was itself not particularly
developed, Portuguese Symbolism proved to be, on the whole, more ingenuous and
less cerebral than French Symbolism. The Symbolism of the most typical Portuguese
Symbolist, Pessanha, was a way of feeling life; it was a new language, not a metaphys­
ical quest. The same can be said of Eugénio de Castro and R. de Mesquita. Moreover,
the nostalgia for the golden age that the country had known in the sixteenth century,
the memory of the great maritime discoveries, the nationalist reaction, essentially
provoked by the English Ultimatum of 1890 concerning the African colonies, the aspi­
ration toward a renaissance—all these factors served to impregnate Portuguese poetry
with traditional leitmotifs that found a propitious climate in Symbolism: distance,
the sea, exoticism, the unknown, regret, that saudade which has been considered,
since the fifteenth century, to be a typically Portuguese sentiment (hence the convic­
tion that the word is untranslatable) and which has become a key myth for the under­
standing of Portuguese culture.

36* 563
 ELIZABETH HESS

THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN BELGIUM

Before 1880 there was no indication that Belgium would be a notable participant in
the international Symbolist movement. In the fifty years following the creation of
Belgium as a political unit in 1830, this small country had produced only a few writers
who were known beyond its borders: Charles de Coster (1827—1879), author of the Fle-
mish epic prose poem La Légende d'U lenspiegel; the romantic poet, Octave Pirmez
(1832—1883); and Camille Lemonnier (1845—1913), a prolific novelist who adapted
the French literary trends of the seventies to his nationalistic subject matter.
Then suddenly during the decade of the eighties a new generation of poet-intellec-
tuals emerged from the universities, determined to awaken their somnolent country-
men to the wonders of the Parnasse. The "little reviews" were to be the key to their
success.1
In 1881 Max Waller became the combatative editor of La Jeune Belgique. He and
his impressive group of neophite writers followed in the footsteps of their mentor,
Camille Lemonnier, drawing their inspiration from Baudelaire and Gautier in poetry
and from Zola in prose. Their espousal of the art for art's sake credo would be the subject
of lively editorial exchanges with L'Art Moderne, a review founded in the same year
by an established socialist writer, Edmond Picard. Picard denounced Parnassianism
and insisted on the creation of a national art and literature which would improve Bel-
gian society. He would later, in 1886, be an unexpected ally of the Symbolists by virtue
of the fact that they had a common enemy in La Jeune Belgique.
For the-next five years La Jeune Belgique published the works of two successive
waves of young writers: the first, Albert Giraud, Iwan Gilkin, Georges Rodenbach, Emile
Verhaeren, Georges Eekhoud and Georges Khnopff; the second, a few years later, André
Fontainas, Charles van Lerberghe, Grégoire Le Roy and Maurice Maeterlinck. Many
of these early works were collected in 1887 in an anthology entitled Le Parnasse de la
Jeune Belgique. By then, however, Symbolism had triumphed, and Verhaeren, Roden-
bach, Eekhoud and Khnopff refused to rally around the tattered parnassian banner
which had been flying in France since 1866. Their works were not included in the an-
thology.
During the formative years of the Symbolist movement, many young French
speaking writers made regular pilgrimages to the literary circles of Paris. In 1884,
1
For a complete analysis of the "little reviews", see Andrew Jackson Mathews, La Wallonie
1886-1892, The Symbolist Movement in Belgium (New York, King's Crown Press, 1947). See also
the Little Review of October, 1918 for Ezra Pound's article on "Albert Mockel and La Wallonie".

665
two of them, André Fontainas and Charles-Henry de Tombeur, founded their own re­
view in order to introduce the new poetic trends in Belgium. Unfortunately, the spon­
sorship of Camille Lemonnier inhibited their theoretical stance, and La Basoche
simply printed, without commentary works by such budding Belgian symbolists as
Grégoire Le Roy, Arnold Goffin, Célestin Demblon, Fontainas himself, as well as the
poems of many French symbolists including René Ghil and Stuart Merrill. The project
survived for sixteen months; in the words of Andrew Mathews, "La Basoche died of
indefiniteness. It was not yet time for Symbolism in Belgium".2
The right moment came in 1886 when Albert Mockel, a young man of twenty,
founded La Wallonie in Liège. From 1886 to 1892 his dedication to the new school of
poetry was to be the unifying force in creating a coherent literary trend in Belgian
letters. La Wallonie would also soon provide a forum for the French Symbolists at a
time when the movement was at a low ebb in Paris. During those early years of ex­
perimentation and uncertainty, Mockel provided both moral support to the new writers
with his firm and lucid defence of their techniques and practical support by opening
his pages to all innovations. These formative years of the movement in Belgium can
be regarded as a microcosm of the more complex parallel movement in France. A study
of the battles waged by Mockel during his years in the combat zone may serve to illu­
minate both the general problems of any new literary coterie and the specific problems
encountered in small countries by those who give priority to a theory which favors the
universal rather than the regional.
Before casting his lot with the new French movement, Mockel called for a regional
emphasis in letters. A prefatory note to the reader announces that the purpose of the
Wallonie will be to "sing, exalt and glorify" Wallonia. Then in the fifth issue, the goal
was changed, and from this time on the journal championed an international literary
movement. Mockel issued a call to arms which is cautious, but clear. Claiming the uni­
versality of Symbolism he stated that:
. . . all art which is eternal contains a symbol, a beloved swan guiding the work
on waves of light through the infinite lake of the centuries . . . Two centuries ago
Tartuffe was a hardy symbol. Now he is nearly mythological. The evolution has
been accomplished and, from the generic Symbolism of the seventeenth century
to the-esoteric symbolism of modern writers, there has been a decided progress
in subtlety. 3

Having established the titres de noblesse of the new school, he then continues by
renouncing the sort of dogmatism practiced by the Belgian parnassians and Natural­
ists:
. . . We must welcome the Symbolists not as a governing and pontificating school,
not with the exclusivity of fanatics, but with words of greeting and hurrahs of
joy worthv of a group of sincere and delicate artists who bring us what is New.
(I, p. 149)

* Ibid., p. 20.
8
Volume I (1886), p. 149. Prose translations in this article are my own.

566
 The challenge was delivered and for many years the theoretical duel enlivened the
columns of the rival reviews. Max Waller saw many of his best poets defect to the enemy
camp. His campaign of criticism and ridicule intensified in 1887 when the editors of
La Wallonie officially announced that they would carry on the work of the defunct
Ecrits pour Vart, a French Symbolist review, by opening their columns to their ideolog-
ical confrères across the border. Typical of the attacks of La Jeune Belgique was this
pastiche, reprinted in La Wallonie, dedicated to the symbolists of La Wallonie and
L'Art Moderne :

Nihilisme Trismégiste

Nodal L'homme y passe à travers

(Calle de la Vuelta Abajo.) des forêts de symboles
Baudelaire
Ah! NadaîNadada!
Petit cheval de bois !
La canne à Canada !
Oh plusieurs à la fois !

Voilà ! Goya gronda

Nada, quand Quinquempoix,
Camarde ! canarda
Soulary sous la croix

Du carrefour. L'ara
Qu'aura Lara leurra
Laura, qu'amarrera,

Flotte ! l'honorera
Ses père et mère. Hara
Kiri, Caro, Cora.
(II. pp. 1 0 2 - 1 0 3

The name-calling was exuberant and good-natured. It was the comic relief that
made the otherwise solemn exchanges of theoretical debate a focus of interest for the
reading public. La Wallonie took delight in ironically underlining the jeune in the name
of a review which championed the old:

La Jeune Belgique stuffs her juvenile paunch into a quilted dressing gown. You
must read, my brothers, the extraordinary article entitled "Six years, or Lohengrin
as beef stew". Examine the "new" doctrines solemnly pronounced on the subject
of neologisms and be dumfounded, my friends !
One must also read in the October number of La Jeune Belgique the bizarre
phenomenon of a "Literary Chronicle" preceded by a pathetic moaning. La Jeune
Belgique sheds pearly tears for these "visionaries of art" known as Symbolists.
We are moved by their pain. They call Jean Moréas the "Prophet of Gibberish".
(II, p. 70)

567
The upstart review undoubtedly welcomed the attention, and had no intention of
compromising:

This poor Jeune Belgique is quite mad; and we have the privilege of provoking
their old-maidish cries, just as red aggravates turkeys. (Ill, p. 70)

The sharpness of the debate mellowed with age. La Wallonie regularly affirmed
its independent status, even proclaimed in 1889 that the era of schools was over and
came out for "le triomphe de Tart individuel" (IV, p. 219). Mockel could not, however,
retreat into eclecticism, because the adversary persisted in deploring or celebrating
their differences. In its last issue, the Wallonie printed a letter from their long-time
debating partner, Albert Giraud of La Jeune Belgique. He summarizes their major
points of contention:

As for our ideas on esthetics, they differ in that you are partisans of suggestion
in the manner of Mallarmé, and I am, on the other hand, partisan of the work
which is classically complétée You ask the reader to be a sort of interpreter and
collaborator. I ask the poet to impose his conception upon the reader. (VII, p. 358)

In addition to the debates inspired in Belgium by conflicting literary theories

imported from France, there was a whole area of internal controversy to deal with.
The question of regional and national imperatives was an ever-present, complicating
factor on the Belgian literary scene of this period. Albert Mockel and his editorial col­
leagues performed a balancing act, pleasing the regionalists while championing a
cause which was international in its aims. This feat was made possible by the fact
that there was no easily defined set of "Belgian" characteristics, and no compelling
body of mythology to inspire a literary movement on the national level. Other small
nations who were linguistically and ethnically unified simply exported Symbolist
theory from France and transformed it in their own image. The divided nature of the
Belgian population confused the issue of nationalism in a way which permitted the
Belgian Symbolists to maintain a sort of cultural dual nationality, French and Belgian,
and to participate actively in the larger movement.
The vagaries of geography and history had created a nation in which the maximum
unit for ethnic identification was the region. Until independence came in 1831, Belgium
had always paid the price of subjugation for being a crossroads territory. Occupation
and annexation were her lot, until the revolution of 1830 fixed rather arbitrary bound­
aries and created a nation split into the Germanic-Dutch Flanders in the northwest
and the Gallic Walloon territory in the southeast. The situation was further compli­
cated by the fact that Flemish, based on the Dutch language, did not have a status
truly equal to French in the "bilingual" nation. For the most part the Flemish bour­
geoisie used French as its native tongue. Many well-known Belgian Symbolists were
born in Flanders, as their names indicate, then studied and wrote in Wallonia. This
development undercut Mockel's early attempts to connect the regional literature that
he was publishing to Symbolist theory. He claimed certain dreamy, musical qualities
for the Walloon character and concluded a review of a play by stating that "le symbole

568
est l'essence de la Wallonie" (I, p. 192). Most attempts, both past and present, t o assign
a set of traits to each half of the population are too schematic to include the endless
exceptions to the prefabricated "rules".
The only generalization that seems valid concerns Belgian Symbolists of both
backgrounds, who are said to bring a pictoral dimension to their poetry. Working
closely with artists of t h e period, such as James Ensor, William Degouve de Nuncques,
Jean Del ville, George Minne and Fernand Khnopf f, they painted with words. For
example, Verhaeren was an early biographer and interpreter of Khnopff, who could
well have illustrated this eerie tableau from Les Moines:

E t la route d'amont toute large s'ouvrant

Sur le couchant rougi comme un plant de pivoines,
A voir ces arbres nus, à voir passer ces moines,
On dirait qu'ils s'en vont, ce soir, en double rang,

Vers leur Dieu dont l'azur d'étoiles s'ensemence;

E t les astres, brillant là-haut sur leur chemin,
Semblent les feux de grands cierges, tenus en main,
Dont on n'aperçoit pas monter la tige immense.

Even Van Lerberghe, the most ethereal of poets, states t h a t "All my poems, as
Maeterlinck and others have said, are paintings. My Chanson d'Eve is as much painted
as sung". 4 He claimed to have been inspired by Rossetti and Burne-Jones. One can
easily visualize a Pre-Raphaelite Eve in this passage from Van Lerberghe's book-
length poem:
Elle dort dans l'ombre des branches,
Parmi les fleurs du bel été.
Une fleur au soleil se penche . . .
N'est-ce pas un cygne enchanté?

Elle dort doucement et songe.

Son sein respire lentement.
Vers son sein nu la fleur allonge
Son long col frêle et vacillant.

E t sans qu'elle s'en effarouche,

La longue, pâle fleur a mis,
Silencieusement, sa bouche
Autour du beau sein endormi.
(p. 136)

4
Quoted in Guy Miehaud's Message poétique du symbolisme (Paris, Nizet, 1955), vol. I, p. 239,
note 17.'

669
Later, the invisible takes on form:

Au long des eaux pâles, dans ces vallées

De lune et de saules argentées,
Au bleu crépuscule, deux à deux,
Une main sur l'épaule,
Ou seules,
De lentes Ombres se promènent:
Ce sont les Ames.
(p. 191)

This one unifying characteristic, the visual imagination, gives a special stamp to the
works of the Belgian Symbolists.
The linguistic and ethnic complexity of the new country inhibited the develop-
ment of regional literatures in the Flemish and Walloon dialects. The partisans of se-
paratism found that the entire literary establishment was in league against their at-
tempts to reduce Belgian literature to a local phenomenon. In a rare case of ideological
agreement, V Art Moderne, La Jeune Belgique and La Wallonie closed ranks against
the onslaught of the "flamangistes" and the promoters of the Walloon dialect. In a
"Chronique littéraire" of 1887, Celestin Demblon laments the official promulgation
of patois as seen in a 586-page "Bulletinde la Société liégeoise de littérature wallonne",
adding that

The powerful and lucid young people who have just appeared as by enchantment
in Wallonia will most certainly take their place enthusiastically before the great
organ of the French language. (II. pp. 327--8)

Although linguistic diversity presented potential dangers to the intellectual renais-

sance in Belgium, the rich cultural traditions of the two regions were an accepted
source of subject matter for writers of any theoretical persuasion. Without being
regionalists, they used local color as a resource. In the previously quoted letter from
Albert Giraud, printed in the last issue of La Wallonie, we see the most fanatic of the
Francophones lay claim to a special Belgian cultural ambiance:

I do not believe in a Belgian literature any more than you d.O. I think that our
writers are French writers and I detest patois and those who promote its use;
but I think that we have a particular accent, which I feel to be septentrional.
(VII, p. 358)

Regional themes were popular with the public and sold magazines; the success of
La Légende d'U lenspiegel in 1867 had awakened interest in Belgium's real or imagined
past. The major part of each issue of tjie Wallonie is awash in folklorish prose and poetry
of dubious merit. The review seems almost schizophrenic, split between sharpness of
theory and blandness of literary content. Symbolist works were usually showcased
in the first pages; then for the rest of the journal the anonymous legions of folkloristes
droned off into the countryside. Thus practical considerations often dictated esthetic
policy and regionalism was an economic necessity.

570
 Unlike the French Symbolists, the Belgians did not theorize at length about sub-
ject matter, only form; therefore, poets were free to use the décor of their homeland.
The external landscape served to express the poet's interior world. The somber, ancient
buildings of the great cities and the misty canals of this foggy northern country fur-
nished an ideal setting for revery. Swans cease to be a tiresome symbolist cliché when
they glide in the silent, dead city of Bruges described by Georges Rodenbach in Du
Silence (XIX):

Les cygnes blancs, dans les canaux des villes mortes,

Parmi l'eau pâle où les vieux murs sont décalqués
Avec des noirs usés d'estampes et d'eaux-fortes,
Les cygnes vont comme du songe entre les quais . . .

Although this landscape was common in the poetry of the Belgians, it was not
compulsive, as it might have been in a more ethnically unified small country. Also the
lack of French theoretical dictates encouraged the poet to work as an individual artist,
to choose the colors of his own palette.
Two of Belgium's most original writers, Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck,
developed very different but equally influential pictoral techniques. The stylized myth-
ical locale of Maeterlinck's plays would furnish the basic symbolist décor for poets
of many lands.5 Verhaeren portrayed his homeland in many ways during his long ca-
reer, proving that a visual poet did not need to remain a Parnassian.
Verhaeren's first volume, Les Flamandes (1883) is a verbal transcription of the
kermesses of the great Flemish painters. He uses the same technique in Les Cloîtres,
a description of the mystical side of Flemish life. The triology which follows (Les
Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les Flambeaux noirs) is written in the midst of illness and volun-
tary exile in London, and shifts the scene to a tortured, interior landscape. In the next
volumes (Les Campagnes hallucinées, Les Villages illusoires and Les Villes tentaculaires)
he again views his native land, but now the exterior scene passes through the inner
vision and emerges as symbol. The once familiar Belgian countryside and the modern
cities are deformed and transformed by this hallucinatory process, as we see in this
passage from Les Plaines in Les Campagnes hallucinées:

Et les grands bras des Christ funèbres

Aux carrefours, par les ténèbres,
Semblent grandir et tout à coup partir
En cris de peur vers le soleil perdu.

C'est la plaine, la plaine

Où ne vague que crainte et peine.

5
For a detailed analysis, consult Maeterlinck et le symbolisme by Marcel Postic (Paris, Nizet,
1970). Maeterlinck had a strong influence on the art of the era. See Symbolism in Belgium by Fran-
cine-Claire Legrand (Brussels, Laconti, 1972).

671
 He developed a Symbolist technique which begins with the object, rather t h a n
using a state of mind as a point of departure and then finding exterior objects to ex­
press the state. Kenneth Cornell compares Verhaeren to the Henri de Régnier of Sites:

The visual images are fictitiously created by the poet to describe his state of mind
an almost reverse process to t h a t of Verhaeren, who uses reality as a starting
point for t h e evocation of the mysterious and the terrible. With de Régnier one is
present a t the process of an artificially constructed landscape; with Verhaeren
the process is t h a t of a transmutation through the mind. The paradoxical element
in the reading of such verse is t h a t many readers will feel t h e sincerity of the
Belgian's distorted images and sense a kind of artistic insincerity in the less star­
tling settings evoked by de Régnier. Yet both methods are valid in the realm of sym­
bolist verse, for both are built on the idea of suggestion of mood through imagery. 6

This technique is common among the Belgian Symbolists, with their penchant
for the visual. French Symbolist theoreticians exaggerated their strictures against
pictoralism, overreacting to the opposing schools which gave priority to description.
Had the Belgians been tractable rather than individualistic, they might not have con­
tinued looking at t h e world in their special way. A pragmatic outlook inbred b y cen­
turies of political subjugation may account for the fact t h a t this group of poets used
theory as an inspiration rather than as a constraint. Their independence gave them
the accent particulier which kept them from being assimilated into the list of "French
Symbolists". Instead we read of "French and Belgian Symbolists".
The crossroads location of Belgium, coupled with its lack of paralyzing national­
istic traditions, encouraged a cosmopolitan outlook on the world. Belgian writers
were psychically free to participate in a literary movement which was international
in character. They travelled widely and welcomed visitors from other countries. Their
literary reviews were open to writers of all nationalities.
I n 1887, when La Wallonie offered its pages t o the French writers of Ecrits pour
Vart, there was only one Parisian journal, La Revue Indépendante, which welcomed
the Symbolists. The moment was right for partnership. During the next six years
La Wallonie published regularly the works of Henri de Régnier, René Ghil, Francis
Vielé-Griffin, J e a n Moréas and Stuart Merrill, among others. Even Le Maître himself
submitted several poems, including Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe and Ses purs ongles in 1889.
Strong ties of mutual interest developed between the two countries. The hospitable
policy of La Wallonie led to its diffusion in France and brought recognition to Belgian
poets who might otherwise have been neglected. For example, soon after the collabo­
ration began, Octave Maus treated the work of Rodenbach, Verhaeren and Khnopff
in an article in La Revue Indépendante (no. 8, p p . 372—89). I n addition t o publishing
original works, La Wallonie gave thoughtful, detailed reviews of French Symbolist
publications. Henri de Régnier was the Paris editor of the review during its last few
years and was responsible for obtaining contributions by André Gide, Pierre Louys
and Paul Valéry. The Paris-Liège relationship was reciprocal; during these years the

6
Kenneth Cornell, The Symbolist Movement (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961), p. 7i.
See also pp. 66 ff.

672
Belgian Symbolists received exposure in the Parisian reviews which helped to launch
their careers. The best of them would maintain their ties with Paris in the years follow­
ing the demise of the Symbolist periodicals in Belgium.
The list of Belgian poets contributing to the Wallonie includes all Symbolists of
the period. Mockel also encouraged the beginnings of the symbolist theatre, deploring
the fact that "Notre theatre, notre anémique scène agonisante, elle agonise pour les
lettres" (IV, p. 112). He published the innovative one-act play,Les Flaireurs by Charles
Van Lerberghe in 1887 and L'Intruse by Maeterlinck in 1890. Realizing the impor­
tance of Maeterlinck's theatre, which included La Princesse Maleine, he states that
"after Charles Van Lerberghe, he established an unknown art in the theater, landing
at a place of the most solitary dreams" (V, p. 217).
In 1892, La Wallonie claimed to have accomplished its goal and ceased publica­
tion. For the next five years, French and Belgian Symbolists still had many outlets,
including La Jeune Belgique and a flurry of new reviews such as Floréal, Le Réveil,
L* Art jeune and Le Goq rouge. The last attempt to maintain the esprit de corps occurred
in 1894 when Floréal merged with Le Réveil in Gand. The editorial board included an
honor roll of leaders: Mockel, Gérardy, Maeterlinck, Van Lerberghe and Verhaeren.
Yet the project was short-lived; the era of youthful enthusiasm directed to a group
effort was over. The best of the Symbolist poets would now pursue their divergent
paths. Belgian periodicals became more and more regionalistic and by 1896 there were
no Symbolist reviews in the country.
Most of the poètes minores would now fade into obscurity, but a remarkable number
of Belgian Symbolists would join in the movement which spread Symbolist poetics
to all corners of the globe. Many members of this Symbolist diaspora lived and published
in France, helping each other to continue their mission. Albert Mockel was instrumental
in extending Verhaeren's fame to France and then throughout the world. The poet of
Les Villages illusoires (1894) and Les Villes tentaculaires (1895) would be feted and imi­
tated in Germany, Russia, England and America to the end of his prolific career in
1916.7 Maurice Maeterlinck enjoyed a similar international reputation, joining Ver­
haeren in the Symbolist canon.
A special example of Belgian-German collaboration began in 1892 when Paul
Gérardy, the editor of Floréal, translated several poems of Stefan George for his review.
George founded his Die Blätter für die Kunst in the same year, and Gérardy became a
principal contributor. Gérardy's manifesto, Geistige Kunst (Art intellectuel) was trans­
lated in Le Réveil, and in the following year the Belgian journal analysed and praised
the work of Gérardy, Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In her documenta-

7
The following works are useful in charting the influence of Verhaeren and other Belgian
Symbolists:
Georgette Donchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (Paris, Mouton,
1958); René Taupin, UInfluence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine (de 1910 à 1920)
(Paris, Champion, 1929); and Enid Lowry Duthie, L*Influence du symbolisme français dans le
renouveau poétique de VAllemagne, les Blatter für die Kunst de 1892 à 1900 (Paris, Champion, 1933).
Two early critical works which both devote chapters to Emile Verhaeren and Albert Samain
are: Amy Lowell, Six French Poets (New York, Macmillan, 1915) and Edmund Gosse, French Pro-
files (London, Heinemann, 1913).

573
tion of this exchange, Enid Duthie summarizes Gerardy's article, "Jung Belgien",
which appeared in Allgemeine Kunst Chronik no. 4, 1895:

He gave a rapid résumé of the young Belgian literature, speaking of novelists

(Lemonnier, Edkhoud, etc.) of dramatic authors (Maeterlinck) and of lyric poets
(Giraud, Gilkin and especially the young Symbolists — Emile Verhaeren, Albert
Mockel, Charles Van Lerberghe, Grégoire Le Roy, Fernand Severin, Maurice
Maeterlinck, Max Eiskamp).8

The energy and initiative fostered by the Wallonie in the early days of the move­
ment had become a way of life for the Belgian poets, and they continued to,make
their presence felt in the international arena of letters. Writers from this tiny country,
who could so easily have been assimilated without a trace into the French cultural
scene, established and maintained a separate identity. One always speaks of the French
and Belgian Symbolists.

8
Duthie, op. cit., p. 476.

574
 L E I F SJÔBEBG and NIELS LYHNE JENSEN

I. EARLY SCANDINAVIAN SYMBOLISM

Is there such a thing as "Scandinavian" symbolism? The answer, strictly speaking,

is, "No". One can, of course, speak of Symbolism of a kind in each of the Scandina-
vian countries; in Denmark, which came first, in Sweden, Norway and Iceland. In this
context one can do no more than merely record that the great poet Einar Benediktsson
(1864—1940), who dominated the Icelandic poetic scene during the first three decades
of the twentieth century, was clearly influenced by French Symbolism as well as by
Nietzsche. Other compatriots of Benediktsson indebted to French Symbolism were,
according to Sveinn Skorri Höskuldsson, 1 such writers as Gudmundur Gudmundsson
(1874—1919), Hulda (pseudonym of Gunnur Benediktssdóttir Bjarklind (1881—1946),
Sigurjón Fridjónsson (1867—1950), Sigurdur Sigurdsson (1879—1939), Jonas Gud-
laugsson (1887—1916), and, above all, the poetic and dramatic genius, Johann Sigur-
jónson (1880—1919).
It is a true if embarrassing fact that hardly any Scandinavian Symbolists have
been adequately translated into English. Non-Scandinavian readers of this chapter
on early Scandinavian Symbolism will find it limited to only the major representatives
of Scandinavian Symbolism: Sigbjørn Obstfelder for Norway, Vilhelm Ekelund for
Sweden, and Johannes Jørgensen and Sophus Claussen for Denmark. Not included are
various offshoots of Symbolism as they appeared in, for instance, the Finnish-Swedish
poet Edith Södergran (1892—1923), the Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist (1891 — 1974)
or the Norwegian Olav Nygård (1884—1924).
When Henrik Ibsen was through with his monumental dramatic poems, Brand
(1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), he declared that he had abandoned poetry for good. But
by the time lyric poetry in Norway emerged (about 1890), Ibsen had already incorpo-
rated a fair amount of "poetry" in his dramas which express intense feeling, moods
and reminiscences rather than action. French critics (to Ibsen's displeasure) were
quick to point out similarities between his work and the Symbolist playwright Maeter-
linck's La dame de la mer when it was produced by Lugné-Poe in Paris in 1892. 1B B y
that time, poetry in general had invaded prose, especially in the form of the prose
poems, as well as short stories and novels.
In Norway there was thus a clear breakthrough for lyric poetry around 1890.
"One of the reasons for the strong position of lyrical poetry was that the new—as well
1
"Icelandic Literature", Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature—2nd Edition,
forthcoming.
1B
Cf. M. Meyer, Ibsen A Biography (New York, Doubleday, 1971), pp. 699-700.

575
as the old—writers no longer wanted to describe social and moral problems in a societal
perspective. They now wanted to give expression to strong, psychical experiences
or gentle, uncertain states of mind. Consequently they had to use a musical language
which could be suggestive and which would play on the over- and under-tones of the
words. The result was that they also renewed lyrical form".2 Especially Obstfelder,
but. also Vilhelm Krag in certain texts, writes in a way which is reminiscent of French
models.
Vilhelm Krag (1871 — 1933) is generally considered as the one through whom
there developed what was most commonly called New Romanticism. ("Nyromantikken"
is the designation which the young Norwegian poets themselves preferred.) A poem
which is characteristic of this early New Romanticism in Norway—read in the Studen-
tersamfundet in Kristiania (Oslo) in the fall of 1890 as a programmatic poem for the
young avant garde—was Krag's Fandango, which begins:

Ikke janitscharmusik !
Stille, I marschtunge rythmer!
Stille, for fan, musikanter !

(Literally: Not Janissary music ! / Quiet, you march-heavy rhythms ! / Damn it all,
quiet, musicians !) In this musical poem there is much that will recur in modern Nor­
wegian poetry: "a vague, youthful disgust with life placed in an exotic environment,
the rhythm in the verse is varied and a row of onomatopoeic words are used". 3
By the time Fandango appeared, Krag, according to Asbjørn Aarseth, had read
Obstfelder's unpublished poems4 and may have been influenced by him. Sigbjørn
Obstfelder (1866 — 1900) was born in Stavanger, as the seventh of sixteen children
of a baker who apparently was "very strict". 5 Obstfelder started his philological studies
in Cristiania, combining the study of Norwegian and German, English and French.
However, he gave up these studies after two years and entered a technical school to
become an engineer, as had a younger brother. When he was about to take his final
examination in May of 1890, he had a nervous breakdown which prevented him from
taking the exam. In the summer of 1890 he went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he
worked as a draftsman for a bridge-building company, and in February, 1891, went
to Chicago to work. Dissatisfied with this employment, he decided to become a compos­
er. Later he returned to Cristiania to train himself as a musician but there suffered a
psychosis which led to a three-month hospitalization. After recovery and a period of
great indecision, Obstfelder went to Paris, staying for some weeks with his friend
Jens Thus. They also visited Bruges, Ghent and Brussels.6 Returning to Stavanger and
Cristiania he later made trips to Berlin, Stockholm and Copenhagen; in 1895 he spent

2
Arne Hannevik, "Nils Collett Vogt, Vilhelm Krag og Sigbjørn Obstfelder", in Skoleradioens
programserie om norsk lyrikk, p. 34.
8
Ibid., p. 35.
4
Letter, September 28, 1976.
5
Arne Hannèvik, Obstfelder og mystikken, en studie i Sigbjørn Obstfelders forfatterskap, (Oslo:
Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1960), pp. 20 ff.
«Ibid., p. 21.

676
a couple of months with the Norwegian authors then living in Paris: Knut Hamsun,
Vilhelm Krag, Peter Egge, Erik Lie and Johan Bojer.7 His marriage in 1898 started
with a stay of several months in Paris and Normandy. Obstfelder died of tuberculosis
on the 29th of July, 1900, at the age of 34.8
In certain poems written in the winter of 1892—93 there has been noticed "some­
thing of the same low-keyed, intimate and melodious diction that Verlaine cultivated". 9
A poem such as Barcarole was probably influenced both in form and tone by Verlaine.10
It is characteristic that in Obstfelder's Digte (Poems, 1893) in one section, called "Melo­
dies", there are to be found two other poems suggesting music, Barcarole and Berceuse.
The idea of musical poetry must have appealed to Obstfelder, who had planned to be­
come a composer. But, as Arne Hannevik observes, there is a great difference: "Earlier
he had dreamed of music which could express the rhythmic movement of life itself, a
cosmic music. Now it is the milder moods he wishes to catch, melodies and not large
musical compositions".11 Obstfelder's poem, Roccoco, which Hannevik presumes to
date from the fall of 1893, he calls "a discreet pastelle in Verlaine-style à la Fêtes
galantes'9.12 In spite of fine nuances, the poem about a countess having a siesta and later
walking, is lacking in larger perspectives.
Obstfelder's relationship* to Symbolism is, as Reidar Ekner has shown, of partic­
ular interest since he was one of the first in Scandinavian literature to have success­
fully employed symbols "in the spirit of Symbolism".13
Next to Baudelaire (considered in the Symbolist lineage) Maeterlinck is the Sym­
bolist to whom Obstfelder is most attuned. During the 1890's the program of the two
writers is similar: "contents pregnant with thought, refined usage of subtle symbols
and an almost naive simplicity in the expression".14
Obstfelder in an undated, but probably early draft for a letter speaks of his "igno­
rance de la poésie française, Prudhomme, Verlaine, etc", 15 but perhaps this can be
disregarded since it is from the introduction to an unpublished French book of verse.16
Obstfelder was interested in Nietzsche, and he was aware of Poe and Whitman. As
far as Symbolism is concerned, Obstfelder learned to conceive phenomena in a symbol­
ic manner, perhaps primarily from his experiences of illness—but obviously Symbol­
ism strengthened Obstfelder's belief in the use of symbols and dreams for artistic pur­
poses.17 His development is, above all, a personal and logical development of himself
rather than a theory of poetics.18

7
8
Ibid., p. 22.
Ibid., p. 23.
•Ibid., p. 121.
10
11
Ibid., p. 128.
12
Ibid., p. 128.
13
Ibid., p. 141.
Reidar Ekner, En sallsam gemenskap, Baudelaire, Söderberg, Obstfelder, Rilke. Litteratur-
historiska essäer. (Stockholm: Norsitedts, 1967), p. 59.
14
15
Ibid., p. 60.
Ibid., Note 24, p. 60.
"Ibid., pp. 60-61.
17
18
Ibid., p. 61.
Ibid., p. 62.

37 Balakian 577
 I t is instructive to connect Obstfelder with Edvard Munch, since there was con­
siderable interaction between the two. Sometimes it may even be hard to determine
who inspired whom, the poet or the artist. "Two artists in different media can hardly
get closer to each other without losing their identity t h a n Munch and Obstfelder
did". 1 9 As examples of such interchange, Ekner mentions Munch's Karl Johan, A
Spring Evening a n d Obstfelder's The City, which throw light upon each other, as do
Munch's Jealousy and Obstfelder's Anguish or The Deserted. Munch's famous versions
of Woman in Three Stages (1895 and 1899) present the female t y p e around whom
Obstfelder 's imagination circled, 20 and it is revealing t h a t Obstfelder in his penetrating
essay " E d v a r d Munch" pays special tribute to Munch/s Madonna?1 To this it might
be added t h a t Munch made two portraits of his friend Obstfelder (1896 and 1897).
I t is not entirely unlikely t h a t if Obstfelder had had a long life, and if the art of
the word had possessed an ability equal to t h a t of pictorial art to transgress national
boundaries, Obstfelder's international reputation would still have been so much smaller
than t h a t of the famous painter, as Ekner suggests. 22
I t is a task for future research to establish exactly to what extent Obstfelder's
Symbolism, especially his type of musicality and form experiments, affected—among
Swedish writers—Tage Aurell (1895—1976) who wrote an appreciative essay on Obst-
felder in Ord och Bild (1922); Hjalmar Gullberg (1898—1961), in his early musical ex­
periments; and Ivar Lo-Johansson (b. 1901), who claims t h a t Obstfelder's Korset
was his bible while at school. Perhaps even the early P ä r Lagerkvist (1891 — 1974) was
impressed by Obstfelder, as suggested by Sven Linnér. The Pinnish-Swedish writer,
Rabbe EnckelFs Dikter (Poems, 1923) and Flöjtblasarlycka (Flutist's Happiness, 1925)
were allegedly influenced by Obstfelder. The same thing may apply to Elmer Dikto-
nius. 23
In addition to having inspired several Scandinavian composers who set his poems
to music, Obstfslder posthumously inspired Rilke 's writing of Die Aufzeichnungen des
Malte Laurids Brigge. This relationship can be supposed because of the strong impres­
sion the prose fragment Høst (Autumn) had made on Rilke. 24 Rilke also reviewed
Obstfelder 's Pilgerfahrten (consisting of twenty-five prose poems, fragments, a diary
of the poet's stay in Milwaukee and of his trip home as well as art essays) in Die Zeit
(Vienna), November 13, 1904.
In Obstfelder's prose poems—several in Baudelaire's manner—Rilke must have
recognized the affinity between himself and the Norwegian, who, like Rilke, was also
an admirer of Baudelaire and J . P . Jacobsen. 25

19
20
Ibid., p. 87.
21
Ibid., p. 87.
22
Ibid., p. 87.
Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Här är sa underligt, Dikter i urval och översättning av Reidar Ekner.
(Stockholm:
23
FIB:s Lyrikklubb, 1975), Ekner's introduction, p . 9.
Reidar Ekner, En sallsam gemenskap, p . 118.
24
Ibid., pp. 164 ff.
25
Cf. Ekner, p. 170; Hannevik, p . 144. Scholarly literature on the subject includes detailed
studies such as Christian Rimestad's "Rilke, Jacobsen et Obstfelder", Les cahiers du moi, No.
23-23, (Paris, 1926); also Werner Kohlschmidt, "Rilke und Obstfelder", in Festschrift für Friedrich
Maurer (Stuttgart, 1963, pp. 458-477); and Børge Gedsø Madsen, "Influence from J. P . Jacobsen and

578
 These two available poems by Obstfelder, translated into English by Mary K a y
Norseng and Ross Shideler, reveal much of his loneliness and his quiet despair:

Does the mirror speak?

Does the mirror speak?

The mirror speaks.
Peering at you every morning,
prying,

peering at you, — deep, wise eye,

— yours !
welcoming, warm, murky-blue eye:
Are you pui*e?
Are you true?

] see

I see white sky,

I see gray blue clouds,
I see blood red sun.

So this is the world,

so this is home for the planets.

A drop of rain !

I see tall houses,

thousands of windows,
a distant church tower.

So this is the world,

this the home of man.

Lead blue clouds gather. The sun is gone.

I see well-dressed gentlemen,

I see smiling ladies,
stooped horses.

The leaden clouds grow heavy.

I look, I look . . . .
This must be the wrong planet.
I'm a stranger here . . .

Sigbjørn Obstfelder on Rßiner Maria Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge";
Scandinavian Studies, 26 (1954), p. 3; Steffen Steffensen's essay "Rilke und Skandinavien", (Co­
penhagen, 1958).

37*
579
 Evidence of Obstfelder's importance for the Swedish poet Vilhelm Ekelund
(1880—1949) in his youth is Ekelund's fine appreciation of the Norwegian poet pub­
lished in Fram (1908) and reprinted in Ekelund's Antikt ideal (1909).26

***

While avant garde Symbolist and Decadent coteries were forming in Paris after
1880, August Strindberg (1849—1912) and Ola Hansson (1860—1925) made great
headway in developing an avant garde in Sweden, where b y 1900 there were several
counterparts to Parisian groups. Students at Uppsala University joined t o form Les
quatre diables, to which belonged Sigfrid Siwertz (1882—1960) and Sigurd Agrell
(1881 1937).27 This group exhibited their predilection for French poets, Arthur Rim­
baud in particular, after he had been introduced in Svenska Dagbladet b y Oscar Lever-
tin (1862—1906). The poetic production of this period was later resolutely rejected by
the poets themselves, which, as Gunnar Brandeli put it, "has been a contributing factor
to the disrepute of all Swedish Symbolism". 28 Tuakretsen (The Tua-group) a t Lund,
led by Bengt Lidforss (1868 — 1913), cultivated the avant garde approach and kept
up contacts with other international-oriented coteries, especially those in Berlin.
Their favorites were Dehmel, George, Hofmannsthal and Rilke. I n this group, Vilhelm
Ekelund (1880—1949), then a young student and budding poet, was influenced signif­
icantly. 29
When Ekelund made his debut as a poet with Vårbris (1900, Spring Breeze) in a
verse "of extraordinarily sensitive musical quality", 3 0 he described the nature of his
native Scania in the manner of A. U. Bååth (1853—1912) and Ola Hansson, rather t h a n
in t h a t of more established poets such as Werner von Heidenstam (1859—1940), whose
tendencies towards national romanticism and pomposity Ekelund did not care for.
According to Algot Werin, the Ekelund scholar whose comprehensive research
is followed here, a new orientation in Ekelund's writing is noticeable in Syner (Visions,
1901) where the names of Dehmel, Verlaine and Verhaeren occur. 31 When visiting
Berlin in 1902 Ekelund met Dehmel, who later sent Ekelund his collection Zwei Men-
schen (1903). For some time it appears as if Ekelund chose Dehmel as his master above
all others. Verlaine, whom Dehmel and George had introduced in Germany, appears
in a motto to Ekelund's poem En februarimorgon (A Morning in February). The motto
is from Verlaine's "Il pleure dans mon cœur". "While in Verlaine his heart's quiet
crying is accompanied by the song of the rain, in Ekelund the h a p p y exultation of
spring is contrasted with the melancholy and darkness of his soul. However, this is

26
Carl-Henning Wijkmark's important essay "Symbolistinfluenser hos Vilhelm Ekelund"»
available after the completion of this survey, includes a section, entitled "Jacobsen, Obstfelder"»
pp. 27-36 in Samlaren (Uppsala), vol. 89, 1968, pp. 7-36. The first section deals with George,
pp. 7-14;
27
the second section discusses the influence of Baudelaire and Poe, pp. 14-27.
Gunnar Brandeil, Svensk litteratur, 1870-1970, I, Från 1870 till första världskriget (Stock-
holm: Aldus, 1974), p. 321.
28
29
Ibid., p. 322.
30
Ibid., p. 322.
Alrik Gustafson, A History of Swedish Literature (New York, The American Scandinavian
Foundation,
31
1961), p. 365.
Vilhelm Ekelund, I, (1960)-, pp. 91 ff.

580
naturally not as heavy in t h e twenty-year-old poet, whose poem is more brightly accen­
tuated t h a n t h a t of t h e thirty-year-old Verlaine, whose health was in decline . . .". 32
If Ekelund has made the mood of the Verlaine poem his, or, if he identified with it
as he met it in Romances sans paroles is hard to determine. Ekelund's poem, Verlaine
stämning, (In the Manner of Verlaine) also has a motto from Il pleure:

Pour mon cœur qui s'ennuie

O le chant de la pluie !

Ekelund's poem is, as Werin points out, a variation on Verlaine's theme:

Det regnar öfver staden,

det regnar tyst och sakta
på gatans tysta hus.

Från mjukt beslöjad himmel

igenom skymningen silar
e t t mildt och dämpadt ljus.

O denna veka, stilla

vårkvällsmelankoli !
och regnets sakta sus—

Mitt hjärta gråter t y s t . . .

(Translation: I t rains over the city, / i t rains quietly and softly / on the quiet houses
of the streets. // From a gently darkened sky / through the dusk filters / a mild and
dimmed l i g h t . / / O h this tender, quiet/spring—evening—melancholy ! / and the low
tapping of the rain— // My heart cries quietly . . . )
For some time Verlaine's verse music enchanted Ekelund, as is especially notice­
able in his poems of 1900—1901. 33 However, in many of these poems he also comes
close to Ola Hansson's Notturno poetry, which may or may not have been influenced
by the French Symbolists. A nature scene as a state of the soul, the gently gliding
verse, the vague moods and the undefined sentiments—all of this Ekelund could find
in Notturno (1885) as well as in Verlaine's Romances sans paroles (1874) and Sagesse
(1880).34
I t was in the last portion of Syner t h a t Verlaine's influence (and t h a t of Ola Hans-
son) was felt most strongly. Ekelund followed Verlaine even in his next collection of
poetry, Melodier i skymning (Melodies in Twilight 1902). I n November, 1902, Ekelund
in a literary chronicle in Svenska Dagbladet reviewed a German Verlaine anthology.
He suggested t h a t among the French poets of the past century, Verlaine 35 was the one

82
83
Ibid., p. 96.
Ibid., p. 96.
84
85
Ibid., pp. 97ff.
For an account of "Verlaine i Norden", see Ingvar Holm, Orbis Litterarum (1947).

681
who might have the greatest appeal to Germanic sympathies whereas Baudelaire
(like Platen) had as yet failed to gain recognition there.
In the spring of 1902, Ekelund wanted to translate Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en
prose and the same spring he wrote a brief essay on "Baudelaire—Przybyszewski"
published in Majgrefven (Lund). 36 Ekelund finds many similarities between Baudelaire
and Przybyszewski; both are Rauschkünstler, a term borrowed from Przybyszewski's
book of essays, Chopin und Nietzsche (1892). Of the two, the Swedish poet feels closer
to Baudelaire. Pure contemplation, the ecstasy of beauty gave him, too, moments of
a higher life.
Ekelund finally presented his version of the little introductory poem of Petits
poèmes en prose, L'Étranger, The stranger recognizes neither relatives, friends, nor
fatherland; his love he wishes to offer to Beauty, but he is without hope. Ekelund
put the last few words as the motto of his essay:

B u t what do you love, you unusual stranger?

— I love
t h e skies — the skies t h a t wander—up there —
the strange skies !

Melodier i skymning is considered the greatest and also the most complex of Eke-
lund's collections of poems. 37 I t is a book in which he freely acknowledges his sources
and influences, and contains celebrations of the romantic Stagnelius (1793—1823),
of Platen, Hölderlin and Mallarmé, as well as translations of Theodor Storm and
Stefan George. One poem is entitled Des Esseintes after the main character in Huys-
mans' novel A Rebours (1884; Eng. tr., Against Nature, 1959). I t is characteristic of
Ekelund's attitude during this phase of dependence on Symbolism t h a t thought of
the sea in Afsked (Farewell) make for a death poem, and t h a t Till hafvet (To the Sea)
becomes a love poem:

O Haf, när skum af ångst min syn förblindas

och själen våndas i sin onda dröm,
är du den arm jag känner sakta lindas
omkring mitt hufvud älskande och öm.

(Literally: Oh Sea, when my eyes are blinded b y dark anguish, / and the soul endures
its evil dream, / you are the arm I feel, l o v i n g l y / a n d tenderly, encircling my head.).
As it was perceived by many at t h a t time, the sea here is both a death symbol and one
filled with erotic content.

36
In the same issue of Majgrefven (1902) Ernst Kleen (1868-98), the bohemian par excellence
and considered a Swedish Rimbaud, also appeared, and apart from Ekelund's contribution, there
was a poem in memoriam of the leading Norwegian Symbolist, S. Obstfelder by N. P . Svensson,
who also translated a Verlaine poem; contributions by G. Ullman (1881-1945); G. Hellström (1882-
1953) and posthumous poems by Ernst Kleen. (According to Brandell, p . 322, August Strindberg
sat by37Kleen's death-bed and later wrote a preface to Kleen's Valda skrifter (1907; Selected Poems).
The entire paragraph is from A. Werin, Vilhelm Ekelund, I (1960).

582
 Ekelund's Den hemliga liljan (The Mysterious Lily) becomes the symbol of the
growth and flowering in his soul. He is moved to speak of the underblomma, the wonder-
flower living in his soul, which raises its perianth from a dark well. Above this is art
arched room from which resounds a wordless melody t h a t fills his soul:

ack ! som en öfverfylld skål,

högt buren på rädda händer,
bär dig min själ,
o du min käraste !
Du min hemliga lilja—
Du min ofödda melodi !

(Literal translation: Like an overflowing cup / b o r n e high on fearful hands, / my soul

carries you, / oh you my dearest ! / you my mysterious lily— / You my unborn melody !)
"As no other Swedish poet after Tegnér (1782—1846) Ekelund has celebrated the sub­
lime effect of Song and the redeeming power of Beauty". 3 8
After Elegier (Elegies, 1903), In Candidum (1905), and Hafvets stjärna (The Star
of the Sea, 1906) influenced by Hölderlin, Platen and Nietzsche, Vilhelm Ekelund's
poetry takes a characterictic line, stressing the heroic in the lifestyle of antiquity
(Pindar, Heraclitus, Plato, etc.). This development away from Symbolism is fore­
seen in Ekelund's seventh and final collection of poetry, Dithyramber i aftonglans
(Dithyrambs in Evening-luster, 1906) in which the poem Lunaria appears.
The following discussion is based on Carl-Erik af Geijerstam's essay on Lunaria: 39
In Lindman's treatise on the species of plants, Lunaria is called "moon violet" (mån-
viol), a three-foot plant with large purple petals; when the valves (valvlerna) fall off
and the broad, silvery intermediate wall is laid bare, the plant acquires a rather strange
appearance. I n the poem it is emphasized t h a t in its splendor the plant is alone (1. 1).
Lunaria has a brightness of its own, is " a flame". This brightness is sharply contrasted
to the shadowy place from which it strives upwards. " I t is the quality of being carrier
of an inner light source which is celebrated in the dithyrambic second strophe". 4 0 In
the third strophe Lunaria is placed in relation to the surrounding world. Outwardly
the flower is "alien and quiet" (1. 17) and its look (blick) is "rare and cold". In its vicin­
ity, the collective life (of the other flowers) flourishes, but it is mindless, character­
ized largely b y carelessness or indifference. No one ever bothers to pay attention to
the moon violet, which is thus, literally, left alone. Only at night, when the buzz of the
day is no more, Lunaria can break out of its isolation—by speaking to the stars. The
poet clearly identifies with the flower.
The solitary feeling so clearly expressed in Lunaria and common among the
poets around the turn of the century gradually becomes acceptable to Ekelund as a
sign of his distinctive character. Does he not indicate in his poem t h a t the solitary
is also the unique, and t h a t precisely the unique gives the opportunity for personal

38
39
I b i d , p. 111.
Lyrisk tidspegel. Diktanalyser av Carl Erik af Geijerstam, Erik Hörnstrom, Gunnar Svan-
feldt,4 0Gunnar Tidestróm (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerups forlag, 1947), pp. 22-27.
Ibid., p. 26.

583
 growth, for t h e fulfillment of personality? The "coldness" of Lunaria's beauty must
be seen as representing Ekelund's detached, high-brow attitude, his Nietzschean con­
tempt for sentimentalism. 4 1
To be sure, N a t u r e becomes — in Ekelund's later work even more than before
— a symbol of the state of the soul, but the appropriation of nature's beauty breeds
struggle and requires the active participation of all mental powers. There is an ever-
present longing for the moment when the pain and the oppressive conditions of life
can be conquered and the spirit raised to a higher and richer life, and finally pain
itself to Ekelund becomes a stimulating means and a precondition of reaching the
sublime.
"The dreamlike in the description of reality and the passive in sentient life, so
typical of Symbolism, was dominant for only a few years in Vilhelm Ekelund". 4 2
I t is one of t h e considerable achievements of Symbolism t h a t it made Ekelund into
the great liberator and pioneer of free verse in Sweden. 43
Dithyramber i aftonglans was Ekelund's last collection of poetry. He went abroad
(to Germany) in 1908 and gave up poetry as unsuited to his t y p e of temperament. He
wrote twenty-five books of aphorisms, essays, and criticism. H e returned to Sweden
in 1921, admired b y a few loyal friends and supporters.
I n conclusion let us briefly consider Hjalmar Söderberg (1869—1941), the novelist
and short story teller who moved to Copenhagen permanently in 1917. Söderberg
claims to have heard of Baudelaire and Verlaine in the winter of 1891 — 1892, according
to a passage quoted in Bo Bergman's study, Hjalmar Söderberg (1951).44 And in 1893
he published in Figaro (Stockholm) two translations of Le mauvais moine and De pro-
fundis clamavi, both from "Spleen et idéal" in Les Fleurs du Mal. I t has been suggested
by Reidar Ekner t h a t Söderberg picked up Baudelaire from Johannes Jørgensen's
essay on Baudelaire (Tilskueren, 1891).45 Ekner makes it possible to read certain of
Söderberg's prose pieces in a new way, namely as symbolistic prose poems rather t h a n
as regular short stories or anecdotes. Drommen om evighet, (The Dream of Eternity),
Mardröm (Nightmare) and the well-known En herrelös hund (A Stray Dog) can be said
to be clearly reminiscent of the Petites Poèmes. Söderberg was for long considered by
literary scholars as a late 80-talist, but according to more recent evaluations he is a
key figure in the new century 46 in giving Oestalt to Lebensangst as well as to a broad
spectrum of subjective receptivity. His novel Martin Birchs ungdom (1900; Engl. tr.
Martin Birck's Youth, 1930) contains daydreams and night dreams with "obvious
but not obstrusive" symbols. 47

41
42
Ibid., p. 24.
43
Ibid., p. 27.
44
Ibid., p. 28.
45
R. Ekner, En sällsam gemenskap, p. 29.
46
Ibid., p. 29.
Erik Hj. Linder, Fem decennier av nittonhundratalet (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1965),
Vol. l47, p . 51.
Wolfgang Butt, Hj. Söderberg: Martin Birchs ungdom (Studies in Swedish Literature),
Edited by Gavin Orton and Philip Holmes, Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of
Hull, 1976.

584
 ADDENDA :
In a major essay, Ordkonst och bildhonst (Word Art and Pictorial Art, 1913) subtitled "About
the Decadence of Modern Fiction, About the Vitality of Modern Art", which has many ideas in
common with Denis's manifesto "Définition du Néotraditionisme", (1890), Lagerkvist expressed"
his great interest in Cubism, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and the ancient and primitive cultures of the
past.
Bertil Malmberg (1889-1958) appears to have been influenced by Decadent and Symbolist
poets and especially by German writers, such as Rilke, George and Spengler.
Erik Lindegren (1910-68) and Gunnar Ekelőf (1907-68) had their roots in a Romantic and
Symbolist tradition. Ekelöf in later years, in particular, praised Mallarmé for his style. Ekelöf was
deeply influenced by Rimbaud. R. Ekner's edition of Arthur Rimbaud. Lyrik och prosa, inledning och
översättning av Gunnar Ekelöf (Stockholm: Forum, 1972), 162 pp., gives a detailed account in Ekner's
"Efterskrift", pp. 144-162.
Christina Sjöblad's dissertation, Baudelaires väg till Sverige. Presentation, mottagande och
litterära miljöer 1855-1917, (avec un résumé en français pp. 295-299) (Lund, Liber Läromedel,
1975. 307 pp.), as well as Kjell Espmark's Att översätta själen. En huvudlinje i modem poesi-frân
Baudelaire till Surrealismen (with a summary in English), (Stockholm, Norstedt, 1975, 286 pp.),
should be of great interest to anyone who wants to pursue this study. Even in volume I I of Esp­
mark's study, Själen i bild (The soul in images; Stockholm, Norstedt, 1977, 329 pp.),'his subject is
what Baudelaire termed "translating the soul". However, in volume I I Espmark focuses his atten­
tion on Swedish (and Finland-Swedish) poets, starting with Ola Hansson's Notturno (1885) "with
its almost insubstantial emotional landscapes, double exposures of faintly outlined scenery and
melancholy which come very close to Verlaine's paysages d'âme", (p. 314), and analyzing individual
poems by Ekelund, Södergran, Sjöberg, Lundkvist, Ekelöf, Lindegren, Vennberg, Thoursie, Tran-
strömer, Aspenström, Forssell, Printz-Påhlson, Sonnevi, and others. The significance of Strindberg's
A Dream Play and Lagerkvist's work is emphasized.
Of the Anti-Naturalists of the 1890's in Sweden —von Heidenstam, 1859-1940, who in his
program stressed imagination, individualism, exoticism, and had a bent for the heroic and the
historic; Gustaf Fröding, 1860-1911; E. A. Karlfeldt, 1864-1931; Selma Lagerlöf, 1858-1940; and
Oscar Levertin, 1862-1906 —at least among the poets no one except Levertin took an interest in
the Symbolists*, poetry. Levertin wrote an essay on Mallarmé (1898), on Rimbaud (1900), and on
Baudelaire (1903), almost twenty years after he had first discovered Baudelaire. Cf. Sjöblad
p. 192.

685
 I I . SYMBOLISM I N DENMARK

Danish Symbolism—so-called—may be seen as arising from a reaction in the late 1880's

against the Realism or Naturalism dominating Scandinavian literature since 1871.
Underlying this development are the complex factors of material and social
causes. The economic crises of the Eighties, which came after the social dynamism and
comparative material progress of the Seventies, produced unemployment and social
misery on a vast scale, bringing home to intellectuals and artists in Denmark for the
first time the alienation and merciless inhumanity of an urban industrialized civiliza­
tion. These conditions, combined with the bitterness felt at the virtual dictatorial power
assumed by a reactionary minority government during a prolonged parliamentary
deadlock, produced an intellectual climate of disillusionment and despondency. E d u a r d
V. H a r t m a n n and Schopenhauer became the chosen thinkers of the day and prepared
the ground for changes in attitudes and ideas. I n addition, the development of N a t u r ­
alism, passing from a literature of social indignation and radical attack on established
values to one of subtle psychological analysis and the depiction of moods, led writers
to the exploration of the irrational spheres of the mind, and to occultism and tran­
scendentalism.
The reaction against Naturalism and the so-called modern breakthrough of the
Seventies was anticipated by two writers initially closely associated with Georg Brandes
(1842—1927), who had begun and led the movement of Realism and Radicalism in
the North. Karl Gjellerup (1857 — 1919) denounced the leader and his ideas in 1885, 1
and turned to a high-minded idealism inspired by German Neo-Classicism as well as
by Wagner and Swinburne, for example in his heroic tragedy Brynhild. Holger Drach­
mann (1846—1908) reacted against modern society and Realism in a lyrical-satirical
piece of travelogue Ostende-Brügge (1883); from then on he displayed his poetic talent
in romantic melodramas and lyrical poetry about love and freedom, with the ocean
as a central image.
Another sign of a change in values and attitudes was offered b y Georg Brandes
himself with his launching of Nietzsche in the famous essay "Aristocratic Radicalism"
(1889), a work of seminal importance to the writers who were to set the trend in the
following decade.
The first indication of a new generation in opposition to the literary establishement
may be found in the short-lived periodical Ny Jord (New Soil, 1888—89). A new orien-

1
See Karl Gjellerup, Vandreaaret (1885).

587
tation is shown here by translations of Baudelaire and Maeterlinck appearing side by
side with H a m s u n ' s remarkable novella, Hunger, and Strindberg's The Battle of the
Brains. A young critic, Valdemar Vedel (1865—1942), with his essay "Om moderne
Digtning" stirred u p a lively debate. He declared the ideas and the Realism of the Mod­
ern Breakthrough of the 1870's to be outmoded. Instead he called for a literature
t h a t would release " t h e poetry of the nerves", of a sophisticated urban civilization,
a literature t h a t would effectively suggest moods, and arouse the imagination through
the evocative power of words. In Ny Jord new poets such as Johannes Jørgensen, So­
phus Claussen, Viggo Stuckenberg, and Sophus Michaëlis published their early works
and were indentified as a group.
From t h e beginning of the Nineties, the trend inaugurated by Ny Jord made
itself increasingly felt, b u t its exponents and their work were watched with skepticism
and suspicion b y the Realist establishment. Erik Skram (1847 — 1923), a leading
critic from Brandes' camp, accused the young poets of romantic recidivism, of "mac-
ropsychia", and egomania reminiscent of Maurice Barrès' Le culte du moi.
Johannes Jørgensen (1866—1956) emerged as the leader of the Nineties genera­
tion. As a critic he drew attention to the new anti-Realist trend in European culture,
to the poetry of Verlaine, Maeterlinck and Mallarmé, to the paintings of Gauguin, van
Gogh, and Puvis de Chavannes. He translated poems by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and
Stuart Merrill and wrote critical studies of Baudelaire, Poe, a n d Huysmans. I n Jørgen-
sen's own volume of verse and poems in prose Stemninger (Moods) (1892) he applied
his new poetics. The following translation of one of his prose poems may serve as an
example of his work at t h a t time, Twilight:

Autumnal Twilight in Rosenberg Gardens

Down below where you walk the foliage gives off a yellow
light through t h e gloom, but the tree-tops are black against
t h e dense metallic whiteness of the sky — like a globular
shell turned from dull pewter.

I am standing on the bridge at Rosenborg Palace. Behind

the dark palace wall trees raise their inky skeins of branches
against a background bordered below by the red gold of sunset
and at the t o p by purple cloud reminiscent of t h e blood-stained
petals of Fuchsia lachrymae Christi.

The canal reflects the black wall and the golden belt of
sunset mounted with the black filigree of the outlines of the trees.
And it holds t h e cloud, its purple fading into an ashen hue
marble-veined by the reflections of the trees.

The line dividing the black shadow of the wall and t h e

pale water quivers with a constant ripple, and now and again the
bubbles rise as if someone from below vainly struggled t o raise
his head above it.

588
 I depart.
Under t h e shadows of the trees one hears the splashing of the
fountain. And fleeting through the dark like the fairies of
the autumnal twilight there are two slender girls with long
strips of fur like pennants behind them.
The sky lours heavily with a fantastic violet colour as
if wrought from some dark mysterious metal. 2
One notices the ornate adjectival style of this descriptive prose, with its pains­
taking attention to colors and shades of light, which is a heritage from Jens Peter
Jacobsen. His precious artistry made him an obvious source of inspiration for the gen­
eration of the nineties. A melancholy mood, though unspoken, pervades the landscape
with its vague b u t persistent suggestions of mysteries behind the surface of the phenom­
ena. This quality is the salient feature of Jørgensen's symbolism in the volume as a
whole. I t also recurs in Jørgensen's slim autobiographical novels of the nineties where
he monotonously treats of the alienation and erotic frustrations of aspiring artists and
writers in the metropolis.
Jørgensen's keen intellect 'and talent as a critic made him the obvious choice as editor
of the short-lived b u t significant journal of Danish Symbolism Taarnet (The Tower,
1893—94) — the name referring to the retreat of Huysmans' hero Durtal in Là-Bas (1891).
I n advance of the journal's publication, Johannes Jørgensen had written a mani­
festo of the Symbolist movement in an article "Symbolism" published in Tilskueren
(The Spectator, 1892) and followed up by a reply to critics "Naturalisme — Kleri­
kalisme" in the first issue of Taarnet (1893). He summed up the position of the move­
ment as follows:
"All true art is symbolical. In all great masters you find Nature interpreted as an
external sign of an inner spiritual life. For t h a t reason so many of their works seem to
the uninitiated to be incomprehensible. Their works are like those stained glass windows
to which Goethe compared his poems. They are only to be seen from within".
"On this showing one may accuse me of mysticism. I plead guilty in advance.
Furthermore, it is my firm conviction t h a t a true world view must be mystical. The
world is deep, which shallow spirits will ever fail to understand". 3
As is obvious, like other Symbolist critics, Johannes Jørgensen has little to say
t h a t does not echo romantic theories of poetry. The words "The world is d e e p " from
Zarathustra's midnight song show what registered with Jørgensen's group in Nietz­
sche's work.
The transcendentalism of Johannes Jørgensen's manifesto, as well as his ensuing
editorial policy undoubtedly went further than what the poets with whom he was
associated found acceptable. Sophus Claussen (1865—1931), who traveled abroad a t
the time, and therefore only occasionally contributed to the journal, explained his
position in relation to Johannes Jørgensen's clericalism in an interview given in Rome
on 14th April, 1894, and quoted in Taarnet. 4 H e does not object to the word "clerical"
2
3
Translated from "Skumring", Stemninger (1892), pp. 34-35.
Taarnet, December, 1893, I, 1 (1894), p . 26.
Taarnet, June, 1894, I, 2 (1895), p p . 126-127.

589
with which Georg Brandes had slurred the journal provided it was meant to suggest
t h a t modern poetry was no empty vessel into which might be poured, now a mess of
Christianity, now a mess of Atheism. To the poet, poetry itself was a religion. The very
fact t h a t he felt like " a ship begirt with flames" made him sacred and an offering t o
eternal powers, sacred and in the hands of the gods.
Johannes Jørgensen, however, continued along the p a t h he suggested in his mani­
festo. Contact with Roman Catholic intellectuals, particularly the Dutch painter and
writer J a n Verkade (1868—1946), 5 who was a prominent contributor to Taarriet, led
to the Dane's conversion and reception into the Church in 1896.
Johannes Jørgensen's development as a poet and a person during these years
is evident from his main book of verse Bekendelse (Confession 1894). I t is neatly
structured to show the stages of his life's way. The first p a r t shows the refinement
of his art which Jørgensen derived from French Symbolism. There are sophisticated
experiments with synesthesia and precious word compounds 6 combined with an
exquisite musicality of language. Thematically, this artistry goes with a feeling
of elegiac spleen reminiscent of Baudelaire 7 and an anguished dualism oscillating
between carnal desire and transcendental longings. 8 The middle part is dominated
b y a refined simplicity of. style in which a pious nature worship finds expression.
P a r t I I I is devoted to a cycle of sonnets "Kaldaea" where the poet's religious
crisis, a conflict between his commitment to free intellectual inquiry and his need
for religious faith and discipline is unfolded, but not resolved. The volume pointedly
ends with a "Confiteor" representing the poet's surrender t o Catholicism underlined
b y an imagery drawn from Dante's Commedia, and the metre of the Dies irae.
Johannes Jørgensen's conversion meant an end to his commitment to t h e esthe­
tics of Symbolism, b u t also a break with his poet friends Stuckenberg and Claussen as
is movingly recorded in Stuckenberg's cycle of poems, Bekendelse (1896) 9 and reflected
in Jørgensen's poems written immediately after his reception into the Catholic Church. 1 0
Viggo Stuckenberg (1863—1905) was Jørgensen's closest friend, and there are
points of similarity in their lyrical work: the nature worship, the melancholy and the
feeling of alienation in modern society. Stuckenberg's art is, however, almost without
the sophistications t h a t Jørgensen found in the French Symbolists. His main contri­
bution to the Symbolist movement in the narrowest sense is the Maeterlinckian play
Den vilde Jæger (The Wild Hunter, 1894) where he uses a ballad motif about the killer
who courts and wins his victim's bride. Stuckenberg's short novels from the nineties
are in the line of descent from Jacobsen's novellas in their a t t e m p t to strip fiction of
psychological and social analysis, substituting suggestive sketches of characters and
evocations of moods. Stuckenberg's main theme, both in his poetry and his prose fic­
tion, is matrimonial love and its tensions. Stuckenberg used to be the most widely
read of the group, but his reputation tends to be lower t h a n Jørgensen's and Claussen's.

5
6
Seethe memoirs of Willibrord (Jan) Verkade, Die Unruhe zu Gott (1920).
See'Vinterskumring" (Winter gloaming), Johannes Jørgensen, Udvalgte Værker, V I I , p . 91.
7
See"Vinter", Udvalgte Værker, VII, p. 90.
8
9
See"Bekendelse", Ibid,, pp. 103-104.
10
SeeViggo Stuckenberg, Samlede Værker, I I I , pp. 182-193.
See "Gylden Taage" (Digte, 1898), Johannes Jørgensen, Udvalgte Værker, VII, pp 152-154.

590
 Sophus Claussen (1865—1931) published no volumes of poetry during the years
t h a t Symbolism flourished. Publication was to occur later. Beside a novel and prose
sketches, he published during the early nineties two significant travel books Antonius
i Paris (1896) and Valfart (Pilgrimage, 1896). Both are autobiographical, b u t humor­
ous and imaginative accounts of the poet's travels in France and Italy, including
poems t h a t are his best work. I n Antonius i Paris he records in prose his encounter
with Paul Verlaine and his contact with Symbolist circles. The chapter on his meeting
with Verlaine is the memorable highlight of the book, a superb piece of Dichtung und
Wahrheit. Claussen's story owes a great deal to the portrait of Verlaine in the Dutch
writer Bywanck's memoirs Un Hollandais à Paris en 1891.
Claussen is the Danish poet closest to the mainstream of European Symbolism.
His poetry brings both Baudelaire and Rimbaud to mind, but it would be untrue to
characterize him as in any way derivative.
His early poetry has little of the melancholy of his associates'. He is an untiring
worshipper of woman, cultivating with equal enthusiasm the strict, innocent maiden
of the Danish province, the Parisian fille de joie, and the fey, emaciated hag whose
very hideousness appeals to "his deepest and holiest desire".
There is a playful note in all this, but also a serious attempt to extend the bounds
of experience and poetry. Claussen is fascinated b y the unexpected potentialities of
language, when words and names engender novel visions and unheard-of associations. 11

11
As an illustration of the said characteristics, the poem "Ekbátana" will be quoted in full:

Ekbdtana
Jeg husker den Vaar, da mit Hjærte i Kim Hin fjærne Vaar, da min Sjæl laa i Kim
undfangede Drømmen og søgte et Rim, og drømte umulige Roser og Rim,
hvis Glans skulde synke, jeg ved ej hvorfra, er svunden, skønt Luften var lys ogsaa da,
som naar Solen gik ned i Ekbåtana. som den Sol, der forsvandt bag Ekbátana.
En Spotter gav mig med Lærdom at ane, Men Drømmen har rejst sig en Vaar i Paris,
at Vægten paa Ordet var Ekbatáne. da Verden blev dyb og assyrisk og vis,
Den traurige Tosse, han ved ej da, som blødte den yppigste Oldtid endda . . .
at Hjærtet det elsker Ekbátana. Jeg har levet en Dag i Ekbátana.
Byen med tusind henslængte Terrasser, Min Sjæl har flydt som en Syrings af Toner
Løngange, svimlende Mure—som passer til Solfaldet farvede Parkernes Kroner
der bagest i Persien, hvor Rosen er fra, og Hjærtet sov ind i sin Højhed som fra
begravet i Minder—Ekbátana ! en Solnedgang over Ekbåtana.
Men Folkets Sæder? den stolte Bedrift?
hvad nyt og sælsomt skal levnes derfra ?
En Raedsel, et Vanvid i Kileskrift
paa dit Dronningelegem — Ekbåtana.
Men Rosen, det dyreste, Verden har drømt,
al Livets Vellyst—hvad var den da?
E t Tegn kun, en Blomst, som blev givet paa
Skrømt
ved en kongelig Fest i Ekbåtana.
Da blev jeg taalmodig og stolt. Jeg har drømt
en dybere Lykke, end nogen har tømt.
Lad Syndflodens Vande mig baere herfra
—jeg har levet en Dag i Ekbåtana.

591
From what may seem gaucheness of rhyme and imagery he salvages new and surprising
contexts and relationships. Underlying it there is a firm belief in poetry as a medium
of the discovery of reality; it is to him "the most pious of all creeds". Claussen hero­
ically stuck to the poetics to which he swore allegiance in his youth as is evident
from the weighty collection of literary essays Løvetandsfnug (Dandelion Downs,
1918). His later work, however, betrays what it cost him to retain his faith in poetry
as he grew older in a soulless and mechanical civilization. The most powerful and orig­
inal expression of his disenchantment with the times and the feeling of emptiness
t h a t beset him is t h e poem Imperia. Here, the poet creates a m y t h about the goddess
of dead matter, the embodiment of everything t h a t is barren and toneless. His con­
frontation with everything t h a t denies his art is, however, a new experience t h a t may
be turned into poetry. That is the triumph always available to the artist. Sophus
Claussen's transformation of his experience of nothingness—into something positive
by virtue of his art—aligns him with the poets of late Symbolism and Modernism in
the early twentieth century. I t is not surprising t h a t his fascination with language,
inherent in the metapoetic quality of much of his late work, has made him a favorite
poet of recent Danish writers.
Beside the close-knit group of Jørgensen, Claussen, and Stuckenberg, which may
be said to form the center of Danish Symbolism, there are two poets who, while never
of their circle, are still related to them in their themes and forms of expression.
Helge Rode (1870—1937) is one of the religiously inclined writers of his generation,
attracted both to Tolstoi's unorthodox Christianity and to the mysticism inherent in
Nietzsche's work. I n his Hvide Blomster (White Flowers 1892), he voices his quest
for a God unknown, as well as his fascination with the mystery of death. In other poems,
published here and later, he voices his feeling of union with the cosmos. Rode's poetry
possesses a wider register than t h a t of his contemporaries. I t is more rhetorical and
less even in quality, but at its best it is enlivened by a fine humour and a magnificent
fullness of tone. 12 Rode was also a prolific dramatist, b u t none of these works are now
read or performed. In his later years, Rode was active as a critic and published vol­
umes of essays which rank high in the history of Danish prose. 13
From this cursory overview of the major Danish writers possessing an awareness
of the Symbolist Movement, there arises the question of their tangible achievements.
If the reaction against the Naturalist prose fiction was the order of the day in the eigh-

The poem may be paraphrased as follows:

The poet recalls his first love and labor with metre and rhyme when the name Ekbåtana gave
him visions of delight. However, a pedantic friend points out t h a t the word has the stress on the
penultimate syllable not understanding that the Persian city of roses in the poet's dreams can only
be called Ekbátana. Youth and dream fade, but in Paris Ekbátana is resurrected. An erotic ad­
venture has made him live one day in Ekbåtana. The purchased love was mere make-believe, but
it has made him recover the dream of love of the Ekbátana of his youth.
The poem is typical of Claussen's art. He evokes from a word a vision in which he forges to­
gether disparate elements of experience.
12
See "Vaaren i Frederiksberg Have In memoriam Shelley", Helge Rode, Udvalgte Digte
(1945) Gyldendal, pp. 1X)9-113.
13
See "Min Fader" and "Ved Tolstois Død" Ibid., p p . 206-208, pp. 98-100.

592
 ties, the poets of the nineties certainly produced a renaissance of lyrical poetry, but
imaginative epics and plays on the scale of the great literature of the past—which
Verdel, for one, had hoped might be the result of the anti-Naturalist reaction— they
certainly did not produce. Monotonously they wrote about themselves and their person­
al problems. Claussen and Jørgensen did seek inspiration in the poetic experiments
of the French Symbolists, but it cannot be said that the poets of the nineties achieved
a break with tradition. They were deeply indebted to the language of poetry created
by the Romantics of the early half of the nineteenth century, who brought their infal­
lible sense of the right word and the music of language to an apogee. Though a reaction
against their poetry came with Johannes V. Jensen's early poetry, they survived
later attempts at renewal and revolt until the beginning of the fifties when Modernism
swept out both the regular metres to which they had mainly adhered and the themes
to which they had applied their talent. Claussen is the only one who has remained a
living force.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
The critical studies of the nineties are not many. The fullest account of the period is
given by F. J. Billeskov Jansen in Dansk Litteraturhistorie, Vol. III, (København, Politikens forlag,
1966, pp. 333-470. Also the classical handbook of Danish literature, Vilhelm Andersen & Carl S.
Petersen, Illustreret dansk Litteraturhistorie, Vol IV (København, Gyldendal, 1925, pp. 554-721,
contains detailed information about the writers of the period. Sven Møller Kristensen, "Digteren
og samfundet", Vol. II. (København, 1942), pp. 23-47, surveys the period in relation to the attitude
of writers to society.
There are also a few major monographs.
Emil Frederiksen: Johannes Jørgensens Ungdom, (København, Gyldendal, 1946) gives a survey of
the period. While dealing with biography its emphasis is on the formation of Johannes Jørgensen's
intellectual ideas and artistic aspirations during his career until 1896. Glyn Jones, Johannes Jørgen-
sens modne år (1963), is a sequel to it. Idem: Johannes Jørgensen, (New York, Twayne, 1969) is a
short monograph in English.
Jørgen Andersen, Viggo Stuckenberg og hans Samtid 1944, Vol I-II, is the standard work on the
writer and his age.
Ernst Frandsen: Sophus Claussen, Vol I-II, 1950, is a detailed study of the writer and his work
where the main emphasis has been given to the writer's personal life.
In addition to these scholarly contributions, we should mention a few works by the protagonists
themselves.
Johannes Jørgensen, Mit Livs Legende 1916-17, Vols I-III, deals with the writer's life from his early
years to the end of the Nineties. It contains an invaluable picture of the age and the movement,
but it is not to be relied on in details. The writer gives a carefully edited presentation of his early
years as a writer.
Helge Rode: Det sjælelige Gennembrud (1928)
Sophus Claussen, Løvetandsfnug (1918)
Sophus Claussen, Foraarstaler (1927)
Sophus Claussen, Jord og Sjael (1961)
For a detailed bibliography of the period, see Dansk Litteraturhistorie, Vol. III, pp. 593-599.

38 Balakian 593
 IRMA RANTAVAARA

SYMBOLISM AND F I N N I S H L I T E R A T U R E

Outside the Scandinavian countries—Denmark being especially important in the me­

diation of Symbolism—Paris was, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the head-
quarters of Finnish artists. I t was there t h a t artists, especially painters, imported the
latest trends in the arts: Realism and Impressionism in the 1880's, Symbolism in the
1890's. Symbolism—or neoromanticism, as it is often somewhat inexactly termed in
Finland—overlapped the so-called "frost years" (i. e., the period of intensified attempts
at Russification b y the Tsarist government) and "Karelianism", the return to the ideal­
ization of the mythical past embodied in the Finnish national epos, Kalevala. Rem­
nants of the past were to be found in Karelia, where rune-singing could still be heard.
I t was perhaps a kind of self-protecting gesture, during the years of political oppres­
sion and strain, to cherish a dream of a magnificent though mythical past.
J e a n Sibelius wrote from Vienna on April 15, 1891 to his fiancée, Aino Järnefelt:

I am sure t h a t the time is not far off when we shall begin to see what a rich store
we have in our genuine folksongs. I t will become obvious t h a t the ancient Finns
who created the Kalevala were also highly gifted musically. I am now struggling
with a new symphony, Finnish through and through. This feeling of being utterly
Finnish has taken possession of me body and soul. When I obey it, I succeed best.

The symphony mentioned is Kullervo, first performed in 1892. Sibelius' period of

Karelianism covered ten years (1892—1902); it also inspired the composition of Satu
(En Saga, 1892), Tuonelan joutsen (The Swan of Tuonela, 1893), and the three other
legends of the Lemminkäinen Suite (1895), the Karelia Suite (1893), and numerous
pieces of vocal music. In 1892, Sibelius married Aino Järnefelt, and for their honey­
moon they went on a walking tour of Karelia, the favorite pastime of Finnish artists
in the 1890's. I n the same year, J u h a n i Aho, novelist, traveled to eastern Karelia
with his wife and Eero Järnefelt, both of whom were painters. While they were being
rowed across one of the lakes, the oarsman began spinning a yarn about animals and
fairies. The listeners were spellbound—so Aho tells us—speechless with admiration
of the man's imagination and the ease with which he expressed himself: the oral tra­
dition was still evidently alive. The solemn stillness of the scenery and the feeling
of being one with nature were powerfully experienced b y all three.
I n 1890, Kasimir Leino, a poet, critic, and scholar who had been studying in Paris
to prepare his doctoral thesis on Prosper Mérimée (1895), brought some Symbolist
literature home with him. His paper on "New Tendencies in French Literature", read

695
38*
in 1891, was published the following year. This long article has been said [by Prof.
Annamari Sarajas, Eläntän meri (1961), p. 19] to have, in a sense, started the history of
Symbolism. As early as 1866, Kaarlo Bergbom, director of the Finnish theatre, had
mentioned .Les Fleurs du Mal as "flowers already faded at their birth". Kasimir Leino
dealt especially with the Parnassians, Decadents, and Symbolists, of whom he payed
particular attention to Mallarmé and Verlaine, while also quoting the manifesto by
Moréas. A committed Realist, Kasimir Leino was not overenthusiastic about the new
movement. He likened the Decadents, with whom he associated Symbolism, to degen­
erate cells in the organism of society, lacking positive, creative energy, but having
the asset of the unprejudiced minds of skeptics. He admitted, too, that theirs was a
necessary reaction against the singlemindedness of Naturalism. It had become obvious
in the North that Realistic and Naturalistic treatments of themes no longer satisfied
the artistic avant-garde, who felt a need for something less earthbound, more elevated,
more lyrical and mystical. In an address in Stockholm, Ibsen himself had voiced the
longing for something new, of which The Master Builder (1892) was a signal. In the north­
ern countries, too, the artist became a translator of universal analogies, a seer in the
world of Platonic ideas, which were to be revealed and made sensuous by a new kind
of imagery. There is perhaps an innate lyrical vein, both in the Finnish landscape and
in the national temperament that made the transition from Realism to Symbolism a
fairly easy one—for the artists, that is, for in the general attitude there was ambiva­
lence and antagonism.
The papers and magazines were providing ample information. Ferdinand Brune-
tière's article in La Revue des Deux Mondes April 1, 1891, also became well known in
Finland, and the Paris correspondents of Finnish journals wrote articles in Finnish
and Swedish on Péladan and Moréas. The Finsk Tidskrift had, in 1891, published two
articles on Symbolism, one by C. G. Estlander, professor of Esthetics and Literature
at Helsinki University, which displayed antagonism and a lack of knowledge; the other
by Richard Kaufmann, a Dane who had settled in Paris and was well-versed in these
matters, but who remained somewhat critical in his opinions. Maeterlinck had been
given attention ever since his works appeared on the Paris stage in 1891. L'Intruse
was translated into Finnish by Kasimir Leino. Lemaître's article on Maeterlinck was
published in a Finnish translation in the daily paper Päivälehti on January 23, 1892.
The playwright was frequently discussed on the pages of literary magazines, notably
in 1902—3 in Euterpe, an important Swedish literary-cultural paper in Finland.
Several of his plays were later translated into Finnish and performed here. Sibelius
composed the music for Pelléas et Mélisande. The Finnish Nobel-prizewinner Frans
Emil Sillanpää was, despite his biological monism, strongly attracted to Maeterlinck
at the beginning of his career (c. 1915).
The above-mentioned Euterpe was also the name of a group of writers and scholars,
sons of élite families, with a strong interest in French literature. They became enthu­
siastic supporters of Symbolism. One of them is said to have committed to memory
a great deal of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. In 1905, Emil Zilliacus,
later Professor of Greek and Latin at Helsinki University, defended his doctoral thesis
on "The Newer French Poetry and Antiquity", which included a concise and expert

596
delineation of French Symbolism. All Swedo-Finnish writers were not equally enthu-
siastic, however. K. A. Tavaststjerna, while basically a Realist, displayed Symbolist
traits in his novel I forbind med döden (Allied with Death, 1893); b u t only two years
later he ridiculed its pseudo-profundities of thought (in the Hufvudstadsbladet, November
20, 1895): "The mere word Symbolism has brought with it a kind of a mental fog in
which one fumbles about guessing everything vaguely, fantastically enlarged and
distorted"
Through Georg Brandes, Denmark had always played an influential role in Fin­
nish cultural affairs. I n the 1890's, some young Danish writers had begun to raise their
voices against Brandes himself. Their interest was turned towards writers like Poe,
Maeterlinck, Huysmans, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Oscar Wilde, the Pre-Raphaelites
and Swinburne. They had founded a Symbolist magazine, Taarnet. in 1893, its first
issue appearing in October. The Helsinki daily paper Päivälehti was quick to advertise
this venture: the first advertisement appeared on November 1, making known the fact
t h a t the new magazine was available at the Academic Bookstore. While the young
painters were eager to acquire it, the writers were less enthusiastic. The leading Fin­
nish painter Axel Gallen told Louis Sparre in a letter (1894) t h a t he had read Taarnet
with enthusiasm, having become acquainted with Symbolism in Paris. In Finland, 1894
marked the year of Symbolism's breakthrough in painting. Whereas the literary
infection had only just begun, in the pictorial arts Symbolism was at its peak between
1890 and 1895. [A thorough treatment of the theme can be found in Salme Sarajas-
Korte's "Suomen varhaissymbolismi ja sen lähteet" (" The Early Symbolism in Fin­
land and Its Origins"), diss., Helsinki, 1966.] I n 1894, Gallén's famous painting S y m -
posion-with the figures of Sibelius, Robert Kajanus (the leading orchestra conductor),
and the painter himself—created a sensation at an exhibition where Symbolist paintings
were for the first time being shown to the general public. Kasimir Leino interpreted
Symposion as a work presenting " a fleeting moment in which life's short dream and
everlasting eternity were occupying the thoughts of these young men". The more pro­
saic members of the public, however, saw only three heavily intoxicated figures seated
round a table covered with empty bottles and wineglasses, with a mystical wing of a
dark bird hovering above them. In the room at the Ateneum, the Finnish national
gallery where the sensational exhibition originally took place, the same paintings can
still be seen grouped together. One's attention is inevitably drawn to the swan motif
in several of them, a motif popular in the French and Scandinavian art of t h a t period.
Gallén's most famous pupil was Hugo Simberg, who was to remain the leading Symbol­
ist of Finnish pictorial art. He, too, created a sensation with his Symbolist decorations
for the cathedral at Tampere, which he painted with the help of another Symbolist,
Magnus Enckell, from 1904—06.
The vicissitudes of Symbolism in Finland cover some twenty years. In 1899, when
reviewing Eino's Symbolist Tuonelan joutsen (The Swan of Tuonela), Jalmari H a h l
declared t h a t "in Europe, generally speaking the Symbolist fashion can be considered
passé". I n 1916, the Estonian Friedebert Tuglas, who, with another Estonian, J . Aavik,
had been an eager advocate of Symbolism in Finland, felt himself justified in claiming
jn the magazine Sunnuntai: "We are floating in the wake of Symbolism. There is no

697
d o u b t t h a t Symbolism in a narrower sense . . . has already passed its prime. We are
again entangled with Realism". But only two years earlier, his article on J u h a n Liiv
had been a real Symbolist manifesto. In 1910, Anna Maria Tallgren, an enthusiastic
reader of French literature, had written a flattering essay on Baudelaire.
Annamari Sarajas, Professor of Finnish Literature at Helsinki University, in her
illuminating study of some leading Symbolist writers (Elämän meri, The Sea of Life,
Porvoo, 1961) has, with some justification, pointed out (p. 139) t h a t the history of
Finnish Symbolism can best be illuminated by concentrating upon Eino Leino, poet,
essayist, and critic, who took a lively and active part in literary movements and de-
bates. Eino Leino, the younger brother of the above-mentioned Kasimir Leino, matric­
ulated from school at the unusually early age of sixteen, the same year in which t h e
German poet Stefan George published his Hirten -und Preisgesänge. Leino's own pro­
gram of estheticism can be said to be found in the long poem Hymni (Hymn, 1898)
extolling the absolute value of poetry and its life-enchancing qualities in a manner
t h a t reminds one of George's credo. In his poetic play Tuonelan joutsen, written in t h e
course of 1896, he combined Kalevala, Symbolism and the Nietzschean Übermensch
ideal in the strong-willed, truth-seeking hero, Lemminkäinen. According to the poet
himself, he entwined in the hero's trains of thought ideas inherited from the Symbolists
and the pessimistic German philosophers—Schopenhauer had been strongly influen­
tial on the Danish brand of Symbolism. To the hero's question: "Who am I ? " , the
Maiden of Tuoni, who is washing her veils in the river Tuoni (i. e., Lethe), answers:
"Man is as man wills." The swan of Tuonela, the symbol of t r u t h glides along the river,
the object of Lemminkäinen's ambitious hunt. B u t t r u t h escapes human striving.
I n a letter, Eino Leino explained the symbolism of his play: "Lemminkäinen has been
made a titan, a seeker after t r u t h . . . The swan is the Queen of Death, the symbol of
Tuoni's secret, which is to be caught by Lemminkäinen's arrow, t h a t is, an Idea, bring­
ing peace to himself and a message of joy to suffering mankind . . . He is about to
shoot when the shepherd of Pohjola's arrow, i. e., Lemminkäinen's own guilt, kills
him . . . The man who conquers death must be guiltless (Christ)". The typical Symbol­
ist devices make the play representative of its kind: an evocative vocabulary, varying
rhythms, alliteration and accumulation, the musicality and suggestiveness needed to
convey the vanishing lyrical moment as contrasted with the metaphysical questioning
of eternal truths.
Leino had been occupied with Symbolist art throughout 1898; in t h a t year, both
The Swan of Tuonela and a collection of poems appeared, the latter of which included
what has been said to be his first real Symbolist poem "Yökehrääjä". I n 1898 there also
appeared Leino's analysis of Burne-Jones in the magazine Nykyaika, whose editorship
he held at t h a t time. He analyzed different attitudes towards Symbolism when dealing
with Selma Lagerlöf's works. His article on Gustaf Fröding in the same year can be con­
sidered a real Symbolist manifesto. I n the following year, he criticized the performance
of Ibsen's Brand on the Finnish stage because it was not—as it should have been—
based on the symbolic content of the play. Further analyses can be found in his book
on Finnish writers (1909) and in his history of Finnish writers (1910). I n the latter, he
used the adjectives "symbolic" and "allegorical" as synonyms: "The literary trend

598
 has changed to romantic, mystical, allegorical (symbolic)". It is also worth noting his
differentiation between Symbolism and national neoromanticism. The latter, he
points out, is not just Symbolism absorbed undiluted, but an amalgamation of the
elements that have been brought to it by Realism as well as by Symbolism. Our
Romantic trend is a synthesis similar to what has taken place, according to Leino, in
the amalgamation of the English Pre-Raphaelite tradition with European Symbolism
and native folkloristic elements. In Finland, the new poetic creation is based on the
realistic world view supplemented by national Romanticism, European Symbolism,
and mysticism—and by the sine qua non of a rich imagination.
Eino Leino's theory of poetry, with its permanent stress on imagery, remained
unchanged after the turn of the century, but a new attraction towards pantheism and
mysticism brought it even nearer to the metaphysics of the Symbolists as interpreted
and presented by the influential Danish theorists (e. g., Vald. Vedel in his "Suggestion
of Symbol", in the Tilskueren of 1894). At one time, Leino had spoken disparagingly
of modern trends as "esthetic religiosity" and "sentimentalizing in the twilight".
However, it has been pointed out (by Maria-Liisa Kunnas in her dissertation Mieli-
kuvien taistelu (The Struggle of Images), Helsinki, 1973, p. 36) that the religious mys­
ticism characteristic of Danish Symbolism remained basically alien to Leino. His
ideas were more closely related to the French school, with which he had early become
acquainted through his brother Kasimir. When Eino Leino became closely associated
with the Euterpe group, from 1902 onwards, he was attracted to that pantheistic con­
ception upon which were founded Baudelaire's Swedenborgian appropriations of
"correspondances". In 1904, when Leino reviewed Arvid Järnefelt's short story Elämän
meri (The Sea of Life), he used as a criterion of value the typical Symbolist conception
of the power of suggestion, and praised the writer for having succeeded in creating
this effect. Järnefelt's conception of a pantheistic god, the pantheistic unknown spirit
of the universe, looked back to Kant-Schopenhauer-Tolstoy. Arvid Järnefelt, Aino
Sibelius's brother, had been an ardent disciple of Tolstoy since the 1890's, when he gave
up his profession as a lawyer and devoted his life to spreading Tolstoy's ideas.
Tolstoy's name is not out of place in this discussion of Symbolists. His essay en­
titled What is Art ? had been translated into Finnish in 1898 and was reviewed by Eino
Leino in the same year. Tolstoy had acquainted himself with the new trends in various
ways. He took his examples from the works of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and
Maeterlinck, whom he naturally treated very critically. Tolstoy's attitude was negative
where Leino's was positive, but the Finnish writer's theoretical opinions may be traced
back to Tolstoy's presentation of the French Symbolists.
A writer who openly declared French Symbolism to have been one of the main
sources from which he had drawn inspiration was Wolter Kilpi (1894—1939). His
youthful prose poems Bathseba (1900), Parsifal (1901), and Antinous (1903) are all
tinged with Nietzschcan and Symbolist estheticism, revealing moments of the pantheis­
tic immersion and trancelike abandon which remind one of Baudelaire's moments of
getting hold of "the world soul of God". In his article on "Modern Trends in the Arts"
(1905), Kilpi pointed to Arnold Böcklin and the English Pre-Raphaelites as seminal
influences in the new fashions. Later, in the second decade of this century, Kilpi

599
turned to the stream-of-consciousness technique—without knowing either Joyce's
or Virginia Woolf's work. He was an experimenter, sensing what was "in the air".
Another poet who confessed to the influence of the Symbolists was V. A. Kosken-
niemi (1885—1962), who was also a critic, essayist, and later Professor of Literature
at the University of Turku. In his memoirs, Vuosisadan alun ylioppilas (Undergraduate
Years Around the Turn of the Century 1947), he names, besides the self-evident Georg
Brandes, the Swedish poets Gustaf Frőding and Oscar Levertin as his spiritual and
poetic mentors. Their "musical effects, oriental splendor of images, and lyrical-sensuous
rhetorics" gave him special pleasure. Through Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Koskenniemi
extended his lyrical horizon to include " t h a t circle of poets t h a t had settled round
Stefan George to form an exclusive lyrical congregation with George as their High
Priest". This led Koskenniemi, (after his French had improved), to Paul Verlaine
and Charles Baudelaire. "One can say," he continues, " t h a t these two 'decadents'
stood as portal figures at each side of the gate from behind which gradually emerged
the world of French poetry". In his attempts at interpreting Baudelaire's poetry,
Koskenniemi was helped by George's translation of Les Fleurs du Mal. Soon he him­
self began translating French poetry into Finnish.
Stefan George was born in 1868, V. A. Koskenniemi in 1885. Both were admirers
of French poetry, George being permanently attached to the Symbolist and "Fart
pour T a r t " credos, Koskenniemi only in passing. Mallarmé's virtuosity, which was
considered b y George to be the most adequate form of poetic expression, remained
for Koskenniemi less important. B u t the central ideas of the Symbolists—their belief
in poetry as the reflector of the " t r u e " reality behind the visible reality, of " t r u e "
beauty, whose connection with this world occurred through the recognition of "corre­
spondences"—attracted the youthful Finnish poet. His Hiilivalkea collection (1914)
was later considered the most prominent work of "decadent" poetry in Finland. B u t
in the same year, in the collection of essays entitled Runon kaupunkeja (Cities in Poetry),
he may, in fact, have protested against Symbolism in protesting against Rodenbach's
vision of "Bruges-la-morte" by naming his essay "the Living Bruges". He saw the
" d e a d " Bruges to be "nothing b u t an image in the sick mind of the p o e t " and recom­
mended t h a t the traveller stuff Rodenbach into a suitcase and leave him there, and
trust, rather, in what he sees around him: a town very much alive.
Of Koskenniemi's and Leino's contemporaries, the two " m o o d " poets, Volter
Kilpi and Otto Manninen (1872—1950), were the boldest and the most individual ex­
perimenters in the use of words, both stretching their expressive power to its utmost
limits. Otto Manninen's "Joutsenlaulua" (Swan Song, 1905), is a Symbolist poem not
only in its mood and imagery, b u t also in its theme, t h a t of poetic creation and of the
poet's task. The swan imagery, an emblem of a certain period in European poetry,
has been long-lived in Finland, perhaps bearing testimony to its persistent Romantic
heritage.
The group of Finnish writers t h a t assembled round Eino Leino in the first decade
of the century consisted of poets and essayists who were especially interested in French-
literature. The woman poet, L. Onerva (1882—1972), translated Symbolist poetry,
and Anna-Maria Tallgren (1886—1949) wrote an important essay on Baudelaire (1910)

600
—to mention only a few names. Koskenniemi had a seminal influence on his students
of literature at Turku University around 1930. Two of the most prominent poets of
the thirties, Uuno Kailas (1901 — 1933) and Kaarlo Sarkia (1902—1945) were to follow
their tutor and master as translators of French poetry. Sarkia's version of "Le Bateau
ivre" (1934) deserves special mention. Of Les Fleurs du Mal, he translated only six
poems—the whole collection was published in Finnish only in 1971; it was translated
by Yrjö Kaijärvi, who also translated Verlaine's poetry (1965)—but Sarkiâ's rich imag­
ery, his interest in form, and his striving after musical effects and rhythmical experimen­
tations bear witness to a lifelong devotion. One finds in his poetry a fondness for syn­
esthesia, analogies for Baudelaire's gouffre images, traces of satanism and maso­
chism, urban imagery, etc. He wrote an M. A. thesis on Baudelaire for Koskenniemi in
1928. and from that time on he made the poet an object of systematic reading. It is
not mere chance that Sarkia's latest biographer has devoted a large part of a chapter
to Baudelaire's influence on the poet {Kaarlo Sarkia, by Aune Hiisku, 1972, ch. IV).
Professor Unto Kupiainen, in his Baudelaire (1953), has, however, chosen to see Uuno
Kailas as the nearest to Baudelaire in his poetic qualities.
In summing up the relations between Symbolism and Finnish literature, one can
say that the former was, in its narrowest sense, a passing fashion which lasted, roughly,
from 1890 to 1910, and was received with ambivalence, even antagonism; but in a
wider sense, as a belief in the central expressive value of the image in poetry, Symbol­
ism's legacy still prevails, as it does in the poetry of every other country, as a general
poetic principle.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rafael Koskimies, Der nordische Dekadent. Eine vergleichende Literaturstudie, Annales Aeademiae
Scientiarum Fennicae (Helsinki, 1968).
Maria-Liisa Kunnas, "Mielikuvien taistelu. Psykologinen aatetausta Eino Leinon tuotannossa"
(Diss.) (Helsinki, 1972).
Olof Mustelin, Euterpe. Tidskriften och kretsen kring dem (Åbo, 1963).
Irma Rantavaara, "Stefan George in Finnland", Nerthus, I I I (1972). Nordisch-deutsche Beiträge,
(Copenhagen 1972).
"A Nation in Search of Identity. Finnish Literature, 1830-1917", eds. D. Daiches & A.
Thorlby, Literature and Western Civilization, vol. V. (London, Aldus Books Ltd., 1972).
Annamari Sarajas, Elämän meri. Tutkielmia uusromantiikan kirjallisista aatteista. (Porvoo-Helsinki,
1961).
Salme Sarajas-Korte, "Suomen varháissymbolismi ja sen lähteet. Tutkielma Suomen maalaustai-
teesta 1891-1895" (Diss.) (Helsinki, 1966).

601
 VITAUTAS KUBILIS

SYMBOLISM TN BALTIC LITERATURES

Symbolism, the first manifestation of modernism in Western Europe, did not take
the form of a single, widespread movement in Baltic literatures as it did in Russian
literature. Symbolism's own peculiar contemplation of the inner life at the crossing
of the eternal and the ephemeral, its searchings for the essence of existence and reality
within the phenomena of nature, intertwined here with the traditions of a still vital
Romanticism and the Impressionist stylistics infiltrating from Scandinavia.
Only certain literary works can be considered authentically Symbolist, but they
do not constitute a movement as a whole; they were, as a rule, heterogeneous works.
Symbolist esthetics spread to the Baltic countries along with such ideas as Nietzsche's
individualism, Bergson's intuitivism, and P. Bourget's Catholicism. On the one hand,
it drew support from the Romantic view of the world; on the other, from Expressionist
poetics. The assertion of Symbolism and Impressionism in these literatures signified
essentially a reorientation from the rural reader to the intellectual reader, from a
rural typology with its peculiar scenes and linguistic norms to an individual spiritual
world and its individualized language.
The Symbolist wave rolled into the Baltic shores belatedly; in the West, it had
already been replaced by other currents, and in Russia it was experiencing a slump
(in 1910, Blok had declared that Russian Symbolism was dead). In Baltic literatures
the Symbolist wave rose during a violent epoch of Tsarist reaction and spiritual de­
spondency: it seized that generation of poets which made its debut between the two
Russian revolutions. Seized by Symbolism, the poets' withdrawal from the "noise of
the day", to positions of social indifference, often imparted a reactionary meaning to
their work in the struggle for social and national independence. Their slogans pro­
claiming the autonomy of the beautiful and their search for reality's essence in respect
to social, historical, and psychological ties provoked opposition in the literatures of
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which developed side by side with these national
movements and which had actively proven their worth during the 1905 and 1917 revo­
lutions. When the Lithuanian essayist, S. Ciurlioniene, referred to Baudelaire in her
book In Lithuania (Lietuvoke, 1910) as an unknown but necessary factor in the cultural
life of Lithuania, the positivist-inclined writer G. Petkevicaite-Bite, the very embodi­
ment of social conscience in literature, asked: but of what use will he be to the Lithua­
nian public? "With respect to our national character and its history, this is compa-

603
rable to growing southern plants in our forests". 1 The Marxist critic, J . Jansons-
Brauns, was even more sharply anti-Symbolist (as well as being anti-modernist in
general) in his book Fauni vai Klauni? (Fauns and Clowns? 1908); as was the realist
writer A. Upits in his articles, "Purity and Impurity in A r t " (1909), and "The Deca-
dentism of Decadence" (1910).
Given the intensive circulation of artistic values in the twentieth century, no
nation could continue to hold its poetry separate from the general context of world
literature. Western European literature often served as a model for exposition in
Eastern European countries experiencing a national renaiscence. 2 Neccessarily lacking
entire stages of natural development, Baltic poetry approximated European models,
often at the cost of artificial poses and mannerisms.
In 1904, following the Tsar's lifting of the ban on the Lithuanian press, and as a
result of the revolutionary assaults in 1905, Estonians and Latvians received greater
rights to cultural activity. Their poets took it upon themselves to revive radically the
fund of their national poetry, and they searched hungrily for models in neighboring
literatures.
I n 1905, the Estonian poet, G. Suits, p u t forward the slogan: "More European
culture. Let us remain Estonians, b u t let us become Europeans". Springing into exis­
tence in the same year, the movement called "New E s t o n i a " {Noor-Eesti) had as its
aim the creation of an Estonian literature based upon a European model, free from
the hint of utilitarian didacticism and intended for the enlightened reader. I n their
albums (the first, 1905—1915) and their journal Noor-Eesti (1910—1911), the repre­
sentatives of this group denied the social function of literature, putting forth first
and foremost the problems of individualism, man's relationship to the universe, while
at the same time typifying their own work as opposed to realism. 3 The leading poets
of the Noor-Eesti group, G. Suits and V. Grunthal-Ridala, were well acquainted with
the French and Baltic forms of Symbolism, which had reached them by way of Scan­
dinavia, as well as with Stefan George's journal, Die Blätter für die Kunst.
At the same time, there appeared in Latvia a modernist-oriented group of poets
united around the journal Dzelme (The Gulf 1906—1907). Their declaration, "Motives
of Our A r t , " proclaimed t h a t art should not be a handmaiden to the masses, and t h a t
it was not obliged to express the views of this or t h a t "social clique". They greatly
admired the Russian Symbolists—especially Bryusov, Bal'mont, and Ivanov. 4 Re­
turning from Vienna in 1907, where he had studied philosophy, F . Barda supplied
Romantic traditions with the theses of philosophical idealism: he declared t h e irra­
tional aspect of dreams to be the most important object of poetry, basing his state­
ments on the theories of Bergson. German literature had for a long time exerted an
influence on the development of Lithuanian literature: two new points of orientation

1
G. P . Sofijos Ciurlionienes (Kymantaites), " 'Lietuvoje' Kritika", Lietuvos žinios, No. 11
(1911).
2
I. Sótér, Aspects et parallélismes de la littérature hongroise (Budapest, 1966), p . 209.
3
E. Nirk, Estonian Literature (Tallinn, 1970), pp. 153-159.
4
V. Valenis, Virzienu jautajumas latviesu literature, X X gadsimta sakuma. "Literatura un
maksla", 1969, Jan. 18.

604
were offered in the persons of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke. Of
those writing in French during the first decade of the twentieth century, the only
writer to be translated into Lithuanian was G. Rodenbach.
Lithuanian literature had turned to modernism later than other national litera-
tures: the movement called Młoda Polska served as its first impulse towards reorien­
tation. The participants of Młoda Polska considered the author of Les Fleurs du Mal
their teacher; as early as 1897, they had published translations of Baudelaire, Verlaine,
and Mallarmé: I n Zetonly Batonik, a cabaret in Cracow where the stars of the new
art gathered, the Lithuanian littérateur J . Herbaciauskas, who also wrote in Polish,
"strode onto the stage and with a singing Lithuanian accent delivered his long
speeches, . . . creating an impression of demonic madness". 5 I n his book Erskeciu
vainikas (Crown of Thorns, 1908), he was the first Lithuanian writer to declare t h a t
Realism had aged; t h a t with the theory of Realism "one could travel only as f a r . . .
as the cultural center of the town Bal'baerisckis; to take one's direction toward Europe
was frightening, not to say shameful". 6
Similarly, S. Ciurlioniene, who studied in Cracow, wrote in her articles: "Lithua­
nian literature must move away from those local criteria of spiritual values deter­
mined by the struggle for national liberation: it must move to the more general criteria
of human existence. The writer's talent is a particular force which destroys the exte­
rior cover of things, baring our hidden spiritual essence buried in the depths, revealing
undiscovered secrets and unexpected beauty in places the rational mind is powerless
to describe." 7
The Lithuanian modernist almanac Pirmasai baras (First Landmark 1915) was
published by a group of littérateurs who had studied in Moscow; it already reflected
the influence of Russian Symbolism—included were translations of poems b y Blok
and Bal'mont, In 1916, the young poet and critic B. Sruoga began to frequent J u . Bal-
trušaitis's literary salon in Moscow, where Bryusov, Bal'mont, Bely, and Viachislav
Ivanov gathered. Sruoga became the most fervent adherent of Russian Symbolism.
He compiled and translated into Lithuanian an anthology of world poetry, Ziedai ir
Dulkes (Flowers and Dust) b u t it remained in manuscript form. Included in the anthol­
ogy were works by Verlaine, Baudelaire, Blok, Bal'mont, Bryusov, V. Ivanov, and F .
Sologub. The first translation of Baudelaire into Lithuanian (Spleen) was only pub­
lished in 1917 in M. Gustaitis's collection Sielos akordai (The Soul's Chords).
The Symbolist theories found in Baltic literatures, coming as they did from various
sources, did not distinguish themselves by any particular originality or indivduality.
In fact, the Estonian poet G. Suits, the Lettish poets and essayists V. Eglitis and K.
Jekabsons, and the Lithuanian writers J . Gerbacauskas, S. Ciurlionene, and B . Sruoga
repeated the positions which had already been formulated b y the French J . Moréas
and R. Ghil, by Stefan George, by the English A. Symons, the Pole S. Przyby-
szewski and, finally, by the Russian Bryusov, Bely, and Ellis (J. Kobilinskij). The
esthetics of verisimilitude, affirmed b y the art of the previous century, had become
5
6
T.Zelensky-Boy, 0 Krakowie (Krakow, 1968), p . 517.
Jaunutis-Vienuolis, Erskeciu vainikas (Krokuva, 1908), p . 48.
7
S. Ciurlioniene (Kymantaites), "Liusos mintis", Viltis, No. 12 (1909).

605
meaningless, since the outward side of things could be captured exactly b y photography.
Poetry, on the other hand, expressed not an instant in time b u t the perspective of
transcendental existence: the clear-sighted poet was entrusted with the keys t o uni­
versal secrets. The symbol was the basic means of transformation and of comprehen­
sion: the poetization of the material in a poem of this movement was motivated b y
psychological and metaphysical evidence of a double kind. B . Sruoga contended t h a t
any symbol of the outer world in a poem inevitably became a symbol of an inner ex­
perience. Another Lithuanian poet, V. Mykolaitis-Putinas, declared t h a t in a r t nothing
could be an end in itself because all vital material the artist "united with the immortal
idea of deity into perfect harmony, and in this way he created a higher synthesis, con­
tinuing the work of the First Creator". 8 The oft-quoted words of the Russian philoso­
pher Vladimir Solovyov were a model of perfect Symbolist expression for many Lith­
uanian and Lettish poets: "Dear friend, you do not see / T h a t everything visible / Is
only a reflection, only a shadow / Of t h a t which is invisible to our eyes".
Two types of Symbolist poetry can be distinguished in Baltic literatures, just as
in Western literature. The first is intuitive: arising chiefly from the subconscious, it is
replete with emotions. I t lacks the more or less constant cliche-symbols, consisting
instead of mobile, darkened poetic though reminiscent of Rimbaud. The second is
intellectual: it bases itself on philosophical reflection and inspired contemplation aimed
towards a permanent hierarchy of values. I t operates by means of rational systems
and is rather enclosed within itself by an index of images similar to Bryusov's.
The work Luuletused (By Means of Poems, 1909—1910) of J . Liiv belongs to the
first type. In this work, the ideal heights of Romanticism die away little b y little,
leaving in its place the spontaneous self-expression of a lone, homeless person, an ex­
pression full of dynamic changes, tortured mental states, and with a particularly inti­
mate identification with mother nature.
The Lithuanian poet B . Sruoga was strongly influenced b y his compatriot, the
Russian-speaking poet J u . Baltrušaitis, as well as b y Bal' mont's lyrics. Sruoga felt
t h a t the creative act was a half-conscious state: "Sometimes I don't know what I am
saying in poetry and what I want to say. I always write only 'half-consciouslyV 9
Particularly during his intense creative period, during the First World War (afterwards
published in the collections Saule ir smiltys (Sun and Sand, 1920) and The Dievu takais
(The Tropes of the Gods, 1923), Sruoga renounced the ideological and moral prerog-
gatives which were found at the center of Lithuanian poetry since the start of the na­
tional movement, also excluding logical recitative from his poetry. Sruoga initiated
the mood of freedom in Lithuanian poetry; with great strength he revealed the poetic
effect of sudden emotional breaks, effusions andflashes; he discovered tremendous poetic
energy in the most elementary experiences, creating a spontaneous and sincere intona-
tional quality in his narration. A representative plan of Sruoga's is splintered into
minuscule though highly mobile atoms. H e created, in Lithuanian literature, a poem

8
V. Mykolaitis-Putinas, "Grozio ir meno kuriamosios dailes reiksme", Logos, No. 1-2 (1921),
p . 59.
9
Letter to V. Ciurlionyte, 25 May, 1916. Manuscript Department, Library of Lithuanian
Language and Literature, F . 53-35.

606
modelled on Verlaine, in which the discourse is rich with half-tones and nuances, where
the base of the image consists of threads coming apart from minute to minute; and
where the basis of the composition lies in a game of emotional associations whose largest
range is in the sub-text. Demonstrating inner happenings and relinquishing both lucid­
ity in describing situations and the external spring in the development of actions,
Sruoga, in effect, engendered the reform Verlaine had brought to French poetry, Blok
to Russian, and Ju. Liiv to Estonian poetry.
An impressionist game of sensitive effects combined with frank eroticism appeared
in the work of V. Eglitis, the envious preacher of Russian Symbolism in Latvia. This
is particularly evident in his collection Elegijas (Elegy, 1907), a work without any great
originality. A similar tone is found in A. Kenins's poetry. Kenins also translated Ver­
laine into Lettish. 10
Symbolist poetry of the intellectual sort, searching as it did for a perspective on
infinity in everything, did not go beyond the bounds of rational systems, syntactic
symmetries, and classical forms of verse. Devoid of suggestive reservations and quiv­
ering overtones, the words were frequently strengthened by a rhetorical framework
(for example, in Bryusov's poetry). It represented a distinctive compromise with clas­
sical poetic forms whose development of the beginning of the twentieth century had
by no means ended.
G. Suits's intellectual poetry, replete with allusions to European literature, was
extremely contradictory and many-sided. The variegated content of his collection
Tuulemina (The Land of Winds, 1913) speaks of the hostility in bourgeois civilization,
of a striving to unite with the universe, and expresses hints of the superman. This
dissonant tonality, with its peculiar expressivity, was characteristic of the sharp social,
political, and ideological disagreements in the midst of which the Symbolist influence
came to operate in Baltic literatures.
The book Zerrtes dels (Son of the Earth, 1911) by the Lettish poet F. Barda, is not
really distinguishable stylistically from neo-Romantic works; but the partial influence
of Symbolism is evident in the leading leitmotif of the dream, the irrational perception
of reality, which is underlined by a philosophical tract on the phenomena of nature.
Transcendental ideas and Symbolist constructions occupied a dominant position in
the collection of poems Uz mūsu zemes (Towards our Land, 1904) by K. Ekabson
the confirmed modernist and editor of the journal, Dzelme.
In his collections of poems, Meile (Love, 1914), Tevynes asaros ir Erskeciu vainikas
(Tears of the Motherland and the Crown of Thorns, 1916), the Lithuanian poet M. Gus-
tajtis completely rejected the sense of " I " ; in the center of his works he presented the
panorama of the universe, where the subject acquired the role of witness and mediator,
but was in no way the main actor. According to the poet, a poem's development should
not reflect the story of an individual consciousness; rather, it should reveal pure es­
sences removed from historical time and without individual interpretation. In this way
it remains metaphysically eternal. It was necessary to distinguish poetry from history,

10
V. Valeinis. Latviesu Lirika XX gadsimta sckuma (1900-1917) (Riga, 1973), p . 147.

607
t h a t is, man as a particle in the universe and not as a l'social animal" (a thesis pro­
posed b y Bely). 1 1
V. Mykolaitis-Putinas and the Estonian G. Suits dramatized poems which often
contained theoretical or allegorical constructions. Mykolaitis-Putinas's collections
Pastai (Works, 1921) and Tarp dvieju ausfa (Between Two Dawns, 1927) contain poems
made up of several contrasting threads and dissonant harmonies. A dramatic break
marks the entire structure of the poems without allowing room for descriptions of life
in society, or for poetic ornamentation. Like the majority of Symbolists (including
his favorite Russian philosopher, Solovyov, about whom he wrote his doctoral disser­
tation), Mykolaitis-Putinas attempted to find a formula for unity in the world. His
striving to unite those antonyms over which idealistic philosophy was split served to
define the dramatic situation in his verse. Divine and human, eternal and transient,
ideal and material—such is the range of his poetic synthesis, indeed, are the reasons
for the poet's inner conflicts. Night as a leitmotif was borrowed from the philosophic
hymns of Novalis a n d Nietzsche: it suggested a system of images based on the antithe­
ses of light and darkness, star and earth, summit and pit. I n the poetry of Mykolaitis
Putinas, nature's unexpected cataclysms and unfathomable depths acquired a verti­
cal plane of representation which was unusual for Lithuanian verse. Like Bryusov,
Mykolaitis-Putinas remained true to the classical tradition; within his poetical lexicon,
with its harsh triumphant intonation, the classical tradition peeped through in rhetor­
ical syntactic patterns.
In forming its own independent structure, Symbolist verse met with many diffi­
culties within the young Baltic literary tradition. I t was constantly threatened b y
hard rhetoric or elegant imitations of songlike phrases. Nonetheless, Symbolism had
a vital influence on the development of Baltic poetry. The intellectual excitement
engendered by Symbolism, its radiant moral energy, its spiritual fire originating from
its striving after imagined abstractions—all these elements provided new possibilities
for creation. Words were included as part of the movement of an abstracting conscious­
ness, transforming everything objective and concrete into a system of higher concepts,
and searching for the invisible thread linking the individual to infinity.
Symbolism spread mostly as a part of European culture. I t was a vital source of
mythical thought and folklore, providing a pantheistic view of the world. As a result,
Estonian, Lettish, and Lithuanian poetry produced, firstly, t h a t profound transfor­
mation of reality which is necessary for poetry, and, secondly, a sub-text which would
not lend itself to single interpretations.
Symbolism entered Estonia and Latvia during the 1920's primarily as an avant-
garde literary school. When it finally arrived in Lithuania, it exhausted itself b y 1930.
A late regeneration was evidenced in J u . Baltrušaitis's collection Asaru vainikas
(Crown of Tears, 1942), a poet who had begun writing in Lithuanian. However, notice­
able traces of Symbolist motifs and poetics were still evident in the works of m a n y
poets who made their debut after 1920—the Estonians, M. Under and J . Barbaras, t h e
Lettish poet, J . Sudrabkalns, and the Lithuanian poetess, S. Neris.

11
A. Bely, Poems (Berlin—Petersburg—Moscow, 1923), p . 350.

608
 MICHAL GŁOWINSKI

POLISH SYMBOLISM

1. SCOPE, CHRONOLOGY, NAMES

It is traditionally accepted that the period of Symbolism in Polish literature falls

between the years 1890—1914. Nevertheless, this does not exclude its earlier and—
especially—its later realizations (the works of the most outstanding Polish Symbolist
poet, Boleslaw Lesmian (1878—1937), though already formed in the period mentioned
above, fall, for the most part, in the interwar years). As in most European literatures
of that time, Symbolism was not an isolated phenomenon. It was one of the trends
tied in variously with other trends, and influenced by them in many ways. This fact
was reflected in the terms used for that period in Polish studies on literature and crit­
icism, terms which were already accepted at the time. The most widespread and at
the same time the most general term is (Młoda Polska) ''Young Poland", so vast and
neutral that it can encompass various trends without prejudging their character.
Also — next to Symbolism — were "neoromanticism" and "modernism", to mention
only the terms used most oftėn and still in use today.
As far as the internal periodization of this period is concerned, it is usually accepted
that it fell into two stages; the fundamental break occurred in the year 1900. The first
period was one in which Symbolist tendencies revealed themselves especially in lyric
poetry and in programmatic declarations, without, however, a fully crystallized shape.
Besides, the new trends mixed with the old ones, often existing solely in the realm of
prognostications. The second period — after 1900 — was characterized by the many-
sided and differentiated realization of the new tendencies, and a high degree of origi­
nality as compared with the previous decade, as well as with the proposals of European
Symbolism.
2. SYNCRETIC CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD
It was difficult to isolate trends in the Young Poland period, especially in its
first stage of development. They were predominantly tied in with elements of Parnas-
sism and Impressionism (which, by the way, was not a Polish peculiarity but was the
realization of certain conformities which characterized European literature at the time).
The narrow boundaries of literary trends and tendencies are based on schematizations
indispensible to the literary historian's work, but they never completely cover literary
reality which is, as a rule, richer and more complex. These schematizations sometimes
result from the use of categories used by the very participants in a given literary situa­
tion; this precisely is what we find in the case of Polish Symbolism. Around the year
1898, Symbolism became a phenomenon postualted by critics and poets. There were

39 Balakian 609
numerous informative articles about what was happening in the literary life of the
West. Reports on the literary phenomena of the West in the Polish press were nothing
new. B u t all at once it was not just a matter of information and reports; it was suggested
t h a t Polish literature should draw conclusions from these new trends, and t h a t it should
assimilate its new experiences.
I t was not only the literatures well known in Poland like German and, most of
all, French t h a t were being written about, b u t also those literatures which up to
then were little known, primarily Czech literature as well as the literatures of the Scan­
dinavian countries. Among the authors of articles on contemporary world literature
were two men—poets and critics—whose work strongly influenced the formation of
the first phase of Symbolism: Antoni Lange (1861 — 1929), and Zenon Przesmycki,
writing under the pseudonym of Miriam (1861 — 1944). Both were active translators;
Lange along with Zofia Trzeszczkowska prepared (among others) the first complete
translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1894). Przesmycki — the translator of
most of the outstanding contemporary poets — prepared (among others) a vast col­
lection of Maeterlinck's dramas (1894) providing it with a programmatic preface.
This introduction points to the second area in which the esthetic postulates of the
period revealed themselves, namely, the numerous declarations and programmatic
manifestos. Przemycki introduced a complete program of Symbolism in some earlier
articles, one of them a study on Maeterlinck. Here he presented the concept of the sym­
bol as the chief element of the new literature. Most of the programmatic formulations
broke with the mimetic concept of art which characterized Realism and Naturalism;
artistic creativity was allowed full autonomy. A specific emphasis was placed on the
conflict between artist and society in the collection Forpoczty (Outposts, 1895), written
by three publishers and writers: Czar Jellenta, Maria Komornicka and Wacław Nał-
kowski. These themes came into prominence in the manifesto of Artur Górski (1870—
1959) entitled Young Poland (1898), and primarily in the famous programmatic dec­
laration of Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868 — 1927) Confiteor (1899). Przybyszewski
built his estheticism on the artist's opposition to the Philistine in art; for him, art
was an expression of the artist's experience of deeply metaphysical problems. I t was
one of the many program declarations on the literary criticism of the time, which tied
in with the development of literary journalism. To a smaller or greater degree, t h e
long-existing periodicals opened their columns to these new trends (among them t h e
weeklies Glos (Voice), Prawda (Truth), Tygodnik Illustrowany (Illustrated Weekly)
as did the new periodicals, and among them, Życie Warszavian, (Warsaw Life, 1887 —
1890), published by Przemycki, and Życie Krakowian (Cracow Life, 1897 — 1900),
published in its last phase by Przybyszewski. Chimera (1901 — 1907), published by
Przesmycki was the most representative and, from an artistic point of view, the best
periodical of the period, published in the Secession style. Krytyka (Criticism, 1904—
1914) was edited by the critic Wilhelm Feldman, and fused Symbolistic trends with a
socialist program Sfinks (Sphinx 1908—1914), was published by the poet, Wladysław
Bukowiński. Museion (1911—1913) was published by the poet and playwright, L. H .
Morstin, who was a representative of the classical trend.

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 3. POLISH POETRY 1890-1900

The development of poėtry in this decade was very important. The second half
of the nineteenth century saw a renaissance of poetry, the excellent Romantic works
of the first half of the century having been followed by a period of stagnation during
which it was rather prose and the novel t h a t developed. One of the elements of t h e poet­
ic renaissance were the programmatic references to the traditions of Polish Roman­
ticism, above all, to the works of Juliusz Słowacki (1809—1949). Slowacki, chiefly an
artist of visionary poetry, was considered precursor and patron of the Symbolists (one
of the most outstanding critical works of the period concerning this matter was the
work b y Ignacy Matuszewski (1858—1919), Slowacki i nowa sztuka (Slowacki a n d the
new art) which appeared in 1902. The experience of the Romantics and particularly
t h a t of Slowacki permitted elements of Symbolist poetry to be grafted onto the native
literary traditions. This new poetry was not isolated; in many cases it was fused with
features characteristic of the poetry of Impressionism and of the Parnasse all in the
works of the same poet. The purest expression of the Parnasse trend was to be found
in the poetry of Antoni Lange, wherein virtuosity of form plays a great role, with trends
drawn from all the history of culture, and with its elements of oriental stylization.
Parnassian elements also appeared — alongside Impressionism and Symbolism — as
the strongest influence on the creative work of the poet Kazimierz Tetmajer-Przerwa
(1865—1940) who was also an author of novels and plays. Published in 1894, his Series
II Poetry was decisive in the formation of the new trend, and was the first work of its
kind to win great publicity and success among the public. Tetmajer was the first who
expressed the moods and experiences of the younger generation in a new poetic form.
Its characteristics were disillusionment with the old ideals, rebellion against the stag­
nant social institutions, a rebellion expressing itself more in passive negativism than
in deeds (thence the appeal of the Nirvana motif), and a philosophical orientation de­
riving mainly from Schopenhauer, who had a large following in Poland during this
decade. A separate domain in the works of Tetmajer was an erotic lyricism in which
the poet transgressed the taboo boundaries respected b y the preceding generation.
Tetmajer, like most of the poets of these years, was a Symbolist only in part.
J u s t as influential at this time was J a n Kasprowicz (1860—1926). H e began as
an author of narrative poems close t o naturalism, with elements of social criticism;
his work really started in the middle of the 1890's, when he published poems about
the individual in a vein rather close to Symbolist poetry. Symbolism plays the greatest
role in Kasprowicz's religious poems with apocalyptic themes such as P r o m e t h e u s e
dispute with God, a cycle of poems in later publications entitled Hymny (Hymns).
B u t the poet most closely aligned with Symbolism was Wacław Rolicz-Lieder (1866—
1912); completely unknown during his lifetime, he was discovered in the thirties.
I n the last years of the nineteenth century, he was probably the only one who operated
with symbols far from allegory, vague and not given to rational explanation. His work
is one of suggestive lyricism, and of intimations. Rolicz-Lieder's peculiarity was t h a t
unlike the majority of the Polish poets of the period, who were mostly influenced b y
French poetry, he was close to contemporary German poetry through his ties with
the circle of Stefan George.

39* 611
 4. POETRY AFTER 1900

The real development of Polish Symbolism was essentially during these years;
the majority of t h e active poets in the previous period continued their creative work.
The character of these years, however, put its mark on the literary output of the poets
who began around 1900. As much as the Symbolism of the preceding decade was re­
lated to the poetics of a former era, this period showed tendencies and trends charac­
teristic of most of the poetry of the twentieth century, and which were conducive to
its further development.
The most representative lyricist of these years was Leopold Staff (1878—1957)
a prolific and versatile poet; his debut, Sny o Potędze (Dreams about Power) of 1901
was a literary event. Staff was able to find a poetic language expressing a Nietzschean
view of world. (During this period, Nietzsche along with Bergson became the most
influential philosopher with his philosophical and intellectual symbolism). Staff was,
however, true to Nietzscheanism only in his earliest creative work. Two other trends
dominated his evolution to 1914. The first was the classical symbolism programmat-
ically relating itself to the Symbolism of the Mediterranean; the second was Francis-
canism, the poetry of little, everday things, one still close to Symbolism b u t already
foreshadowing a reaction against it. (In the last years of Young Poland, poetical Fran-
ciscanism was a phenomenon of great scope: see, for instance, J a n Kasprowicz's vol­
ume Chwile (Moments), 1909.) During this time, Symbolism also appeared together
with trends which could be defined as pre-Expressionist, most outstandingly in the
work of the playwright, poet, and novelist Tadeusz Miciński (1873—1918), author of
the volume W Mroku Gwiazd (In the Twilight of Stars), 1902. Miciński's poetry, full
of dark symbolism, had a visionary character and broke with continuity of expression;
it is basically unconsolidated, operating with allusions and intimations. The outstand­
ing poetess, Bronislawa Ostrowska, (1880—1928), was also close to thiś trend in her
best creative works.
The most outstanding poet of this period and at the same time, the most outstand­
ing representative of Symbolism was Bolesław Leámian. H e started his working to­
wards the end of the nineteenth century; his first volume of poetry, however, appeared
only in 1912 Sad Roztajny (Garden of Crossroads). Three further collections of his
poetry were published in the interwar period: Łąka (Meadow) in 1920, Napój Cienisty
(Shadowy Potion) in 1936, and — posthumously — Dziejba Leśna (Forest Tale) in
1938. Leśmian was also an excellent theoretician of poetry, following Bergson's school
of philosophy. I n a way characteristic of Symbolism, he sought the r h y t h m which would
break out of the fossils of rational language; poetry he believed, should not name the
world, b u t only suggest it, as does magic. Leśmian was no longer concerned with the
symbol as an isolated problem; Symbolism for him was a matter of the general struc­
ture of poetical expression, an attribute of language. Leśmian's language derives
from the norms of contemporary literary Polish; he multiplied neologisms a n d reached
back for archaisms to find ways of conveying the unattainable dynamism of the world;
in this period, he was the greatest innovator of poetic language, and because of this,
had a strong influence on the avant garde poets. I n his poetry, he created a mythology

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of primordial nature still existing in a state uncorrupted by civilization. He compared
the poet to primitive man, who had to create language alone because he could not
operate with the existing language that had become conventional and rational. His
poetry mostly took the form of fantastic narrations often tying in with Slavic mythol­
ogy and folklore; he reactivated the ballad with apparitions unknown to his time.
A separate area of his work was his erotic poetry, the most outstanding in Polish liter­
ature since the Romantic period. The poetry of Lesmian was metaphysico-philo-
sophical in character. Though it was resolved to be non-discursive, it does not reflect
on its use of concepts; we can identify philosophical themes often inspired b y the
thoughts of Bergson in t h e language of this poetry and in its figurativeness.

5. DRAMA

An intensive development of Symbolist drama took place in the second Young

Poland period. I t is necessary to single out its two basic types: the psychologico-sym-
bolic, and the poetic drama, the latter doing more to establish Symbolism. The psy-
chologico-symbolic drama asserted itself under the strong influence of the later works
of Ibsen, as well as of the Scandinavian and German dramatists. Symbolism was intro­
duced in various ways. Often there are symbolic implications of a realistic plot because
of the particular atmosphere in which the plot is developed. This is what we see in the
work of the most outstanding representative of this trend in contemporary Polish
drama, (who also wrote in German), Tadeusz Rittner (1873—1921), who wrote W
Małym Domku (In the Little House) in 1907 and Głupsi Jakub (Foolish Jacob) in 1910.
The style of Stanislaw Przybyszewski was similar: however, at times he introuced
into his dramas characters who were exclusively symbolic (e. g. in the play Śnieg
(Snow, 1903). In certain cases stage directions were used to introduce symbolic ele­
ments; they were written in poetic prose, and functioned as an integral element of the
dramatic text (characteristic — in this respect — were the plays of J a n August Ki-
sielewski, 1876 — 1918). The drama which we qualified as poetic was distinguished not
only by being written in verse. I t derived from traditions other t h a n those discussed
above, primarily from the monumental Romantic dramas (Mickiewicz, Słowacki,
Krasinski), from the inspirations of Wagner's operas, as well as from the newest in
Symbolist theatre, above all the works of Maeterlinck. Among the authors of this
type of drama, Staff must be mentioned, whose Symbolical Skarb (Treasure) of 1904
had great success among his contemporaries, as must Jerzy Żuławski (1874—1915),
the prolific poet, novelist and playwright. His drama Eros and Psyche (1904) received
the greatest recognition. I t is a story of a symbolic pair of lovers shown in various
historical situations throughout t h e centuries. This poetic play drew its chief themes
from history and mythology, often Slavic.
The most outstanding representative of poetic drama and the most outstanding
dramatist of the period, whose creative work in scale and originality went well beyond
most contemporary Polish art was Stanislaw Wyspianski (1869 — 1907). A noted painter
and poet, he was a man of the theatre as well, striving to create an integral monumen­
tal theatre t h a t was to be almost as significant as the influence of Greek tragedy. I n

613
the tradition of the great Polish Romantics, Wyspiański enhanced the social and nation­
al role of drama. H e did not, however, make any concessions to general contemporary
tastes. H e was one of the greatest innovators of the period. Among a dozen or so of
his plays, the most outstanding are Warszawianka (1898); Klątwa (The Curse, 1899);
Wesele (The Wedding, 1901), his masterpiece which was recognized as a classic of
Polish literature in his own lifetime; Wyzwolenie (Liberation, 1903); Akropolis (1904);
Noc Listopadowa (November Night, 1904), and Sędziowie (The Judges, 1907). Besides
The Wedding which was a contemporary play built around an authentic incident
(realistic as well as symbolic characters appear in it), Wyspiañski drew themes from
mythology (Slavic as well as Greek) and Polish history. Characteristic of his work
was t h a t themes from mythology and history appeared alongside each other, and over­
lapped (e. g. in November Night) or in Akropolis, where the Greek world overlaps the
Polish world. Wyspiański was a great theatrical innovator, and had a powerful influence
on the development of Polish drama, foreshadowing many of the formal denouements
which were to characterize European drama later.

6. SYMBOLISM IN NARRATIVE FORM

I t is difficult to talk about the Symbolist novel, since its starting-point was differ­
ent. However, Symbolism did affect the novel prose of the period. Its influence can
be seen in the poetization of style and the subjectivization of narration; it affected
the description of characters and the general composition. In this respect, its traces
can be found in the works of the representative novelists of the period: Stefan Zeromski
(1864-1925), Władysław S. Reymont (1867-1925), Andrzej Strug (1873—1937).
The role of Symbolism in Polish prose was not limited, however, to facts of this type.
Symbolism brought to life new forms of narration. These new forms were not limited
to isolated motives, least of all in the works of Wacław Berent, (1873—1940), probably
the most outstanding prosaist of the period, whose work included the historical novel
Żywe Kamienie (Live Stones, 1918), which created a vision of Medieval Europe, and
the novel Ozimina (First Sowing, 1911).This latter novel was developed on two planes.
Its action took place in a single night in Warsaw, in February, 1904, and ostensibly
its motive was solely realistic. However, to the realistic plane a symbolistic plane was
added, reactivating the Greek myths: Demeter and Persephone as well as Dionysius.
I t was precisely on this plane t h a t the basic idea of the novel was expressed; also, other
myths were developed in an episodic form, the labyrinth m y t h among them. Other
elements also earned symbolic value mainly through allusions to works of various
kinds, from the Apokalypse through Goethe's Faust to masterpieces of Polish literature.
Ties with Symbolism were also expressed in the organization of the language of the
novel which, though still structured as a novel, was constructed as a poetic work;
the element of tone plays a great role in it.
In Polish literature, Symbolism also gave rise to a unique type of prose narrative,
commonly known as a rhapsody. I n it, the plot plays a minimal role; what is dominant
is the description. Characteristic elements were the specific epic invocations; in the
rhapsody, there was not so much a narration as the singing of the praises of the hero

614
or of some phenomenon. Rhapsodies were written in poetic prose, were often rhythmic,
unusually rich, and at times archaic (its immediate tradition was, in most cases,
the Polish romantic epic, especially Stowacki's Król Duch (King Spirit). Thematically,
rhapsodies were varied. Among them there were works close t o psychological prose
resembling the lyrical monologue (several of Przybyszewski's works were of this type);
these works created a mythology of nature, Gody Życia (Festivities of Life, 1902) by
Adolf Dygasinski, (1839—1902), a writer who belonged to the previous generation.
Visions of history dominated his works, which were imbued with different kinds of
symbols, often mythologized. Zeromski's works of this kind should also be mentioned,
among them, Powieść o Udalym Wałgierzu (Tale of the Beautiful Walgierz, 1906),
and primarily Duma o Hetmanie (The Song of Hetman 1908), and also Władisław Orkan's
(1875—1930) Pomór (Plague, 1910), and Drzewesij (In Ancient Times, 1912).

7. LITERARY CRITICISM

I t was a period of dynamic development in Polish literary criticism. In the first

phase of this period, there dominated a criticism which, as we have seen, had a pro­
grammatic character and inspired a break in Symbolism. From the moment when
Symbolism became t h e dominant trend of this period, it began to promote the new
Polish literature. Besides the critics already mentioned, it is necessary to mention
three more. Ostap Ortwin (1876—1942) was primarily the theoretician of new dramatic
forms postulating the renaissance of tragedy, forms which were to develop a new genre.
Ortwin was probably the most outstanding critic of Wyspianski's works, in which he saw
the realization of his theoretical program. Karol Irzykowski (1873—1944), the author
of the innovative novel Paluba (The Deck, 1903), was a critic who, especially in his
volume of essays, Czyn i Słowo (Deed and Word, 1913), expressed a critical attitude
towards the literary achievements of this p3riod; his ideas were significant in overcom­
ing the influence of Young Poland on the further development of Polish literature.
The most outstanding critic of this era was Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878 — 1911), who
was also a novelist. Brzozowski considered criticism to be a p a r t of the philosophy of
culture which preoccupied him in most of his writing (Brzozowski's literary output
was immense, especially when we consider his short life span). Brzozowski wrote about
many philosophers, both former and contemporary, and also about the outstanding
Polish writers of his age. H e dealt with this period in an immense study Legenda Mło-
dej Polski (The Legend of Young Poland, 1909), which, together with works as his
novel Płomienie (The Flames, 1908), and a few volumes of studies Kultura i Zycie,
(Culture and Life, 1907). Idee (Ideas, 1910), Głosy Wśród Nocy (Voices in the Night,
1912), strongly influenced the consciousness and the ideology of the Polish intelligentsia.
The literature of this period in its entirety was presented in a synthesis b y two critics:
Wilhelm Feldman (1868 — 1919), and Antoni Potocki (1867—1939).

615
 8. CONCLUSION

As in other European literatures in this period, Symbolism appeared in the Young

Poland era together with other literary trends. I t found its fullest expression in poetry
and drama. Polish Symbolism played a great role in the development of Polish liter­
ature; it was closely tied to European literature b u t also deeply rooted in Polish liter­
ary traditions (especially through its ties to Romanticism). Symbolism made its im­
print on m a n y works which hold an invaluable position in Polish literature, and it als o
determined its further development. Symbolism was significant as a n element of a posi­
tive tradition in its various continuations, but was itself grounded in negations and
polemics. Paradoxically the importance of Symbolism for t h e development of litera­
ture depended also on the fact t h a t it allowed for an anti-Symbolist reaction which
proved t o be no less important for twentieth century literature t h a n Symbolism itself.

Translated from t h e Polish b y C. Oleikowski

BIBLIOGRAPHY
W. Feldman, Contemporary Polish Literature, 8th edition, (Warsaw, 1930), (first edition, 1902).
A. Potoeki, Contemporary Polish Literature, 2 vol., (Warsaw, 1911—1912).
J . Krzyzanowski, Polish Neoromanticism 1890—1918, 2nd edition, (Wroclaw, 1971.)
K. Wyka, Polish Modernism, 2nd. edition, (Cracow, 1968).
Collected work: Picture of Polish Literature, series 5: Literature in the Period of Young Poland,
3 vol., (Warsaw, 1967—1973).
M. Głowiński, The Novel in Young Poland, (Wroclaw, 1969).
M. Podraza-Kwiatkowska (ed.): Programs and Literary Discussions in the Period of Young Po­
land, (Wroclaw, 1973).

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 ALENA HÁJKOVÁ

CZECH SYMBOLIST POETRY

Czech literature of the eighties, as far as poetry is concerned, was dominated b y the
so-called Lumír headed b y Jaroslav Vrchlicky. Whereas in fiction and drama realistic
tendencies were asserting themselves more and more, poetry was generally characteriz-
d by a decorativeness and artificiality well-suited to express the spirit of contentment
of the bourgeoisie t h a t had come into its own. Czech culture had ceased to be exclusi­
vely dependent on German culture; ties with French poetry (and spiritual life as con­
veyed in Romance literatures) were established, and were soon to prove of great signif­
icance as inspiration. A feeling of unity among all strata of Czech national society
still characterized all cultural efforts t h a t were undertaken at t h a t time: in 1882,
Prague University was divided into a Czech and a German institution; in 1883, t h e
Czech National Theatre was opened; the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts was
established in 1890; and the beginnings of Otto's Encyclopaedia edited by J . Otto go
back to this period as well.
At the same time, the conflict between the Czech bourgeoisie and its German
counterpart was intensified, so t h a t along with social discrepancies, those of a national­
istic character were also becoming more marked. Thus, t h e traditional struggle for t h e
nation's independence coincided with a similar battle for social welfare; in some re­
spects, one outweighed the other, according to the position of t h e competing classes
and their interests.
The esthetic motivation of the " n e w " generation—though it was b y no means
only a problem of generations—was characterized b y a strong desire to find a new
language for the changed reality. The individuality of the artist was now given first
place/Responding to reality with a new emotional force and ridding themselves of
traditional ideas and clichés, the artists of t h e nineties gave birth to a poetry which
can be called "modern". That is why the nineties have become a literary concept, and
are regarded as a period in which Czech literature—and especially poetry—attained
a Western European level of prominence.
Symbolist poetry was not the only type of poetry of the nineties; nor did it appear
quite unexpectedly. In addition to Symbolist poetry, other types of poetic interpreta­
tions of reality arose: realistic poetry, overflowing either with irony or compassion
in its depiction of contemporary life; impressionistic poetry, endeavoring to render t h e
fleeting moment and its particular mood; decadent poetry, with its favorite theme of
the futility of life and of all human striving; and workers' poetry, which, though artis­
tically far from outstanding, was destined to play a decisive p a r t in future decades.

617
To complete t h e panorama of Czech literary life in the nineties, it should be noted
t h a t t h e poetic tendencies of the previous period did not disappear entirely, either, as
a list of t h e poetry produced in those days indicates. This short survey is, of course,
only approximate; individual authors can often be classified in several categories ac­
cording to their development.
As for Symbolist poetry, one can find t h a t symbols had been used in Czech poetry
since the Romantic period; there is, however, a qualitative difference to be observed
in their utilization in the nineties as compared to former times. The atmosphere of
disillusionment, a result of contemporary social stratification, gave birth to a choice
of symbols which was based on the poet's emphasized relation to reality: reality itself
was " p u t into brackets", suppressed in order to make t h e poet's bearing more pointed.
This was achieved by groups of symbols, i.e., polysemantic signs corresponding to
the poet's individual imaginative radius by means of which communication was shifted
from the conceptual to the emotional sphere. This was the difference between, e.g.,
J a n Neruda's Zpěvy páteční (The Songs of Good Friday, 1896) and Svatopluk Čech's
Pisnĕ otroka (The Songs of a Slave, 1895), on the one hand, and Symbolist poetry on
the other; both Neruda, who was a member of the generation of the sixties, and Sva­
topluk Cech, whose creativity had reached its height in the eighties, aimed at present­
ing the national struggle for liberty and the struggle for social equality with t h e utmost
possible objectivity.
The main tendencies of the nineties are expressed in the Manifesto of Czech Modern
Poetry (1895). Let us quote at least those excerpts from it which concentrate upon two
foci: individualism in artistic creation, and socialist humanism as a general orientation:

Individuality, in the xirst place, boiling with life and creating life. Today, when
esthetics has found refuge solely in textbooks of grammar schools, when t h e fights
for the purpose of art are but a ridiculous anachronism, when all old things are
falling into decay and a new world is beginning, we demand from the artist: Be
yourself and bo y o u ! We do not by any means emphasize Czech character: be
yourself and you will be Czech. Mánes, Smetana, Neruda, these today's genuine
Czech artists par excellence were half of their lives considered t o be aliens who
were expressing themselves in Czech . . .
As to our social attitude, we want to be human above all. Do we consider the
workers to be part of the nation ? Even when they declare it to be international ?
Yes . . . The parties disappear, the nation persists . . .
The bourgeoisie of all Europe is alike. Emancipated by t h e French Revolu­
tion, they have soon forgotten the bitter fate of the oppressed; for t h e gentry
and t h e landowners—even they passed through a similar school—they stand
u p against the callous begging hands of t h e white slaves . . . . They have forgotten
(proudly calling themselves a popular party) their vocation, they conform t o the
atmosphere and circumstances; instead of criticism, they negotiate; instead of
work, they declaim.

I t is in these ideas t h a t the importance of the Manifesto lies. Artistically, its

signers soon went different ways: 0 . Březina and A. Sova were Symbolists for a shorter
or longer period; J . S. Machar became the representative of Realism; the prose writers

618
V. Mrštík and J . K. Šlejhar oscillated between Realism and Naturalism, the former
tending more to Realism, the latter to Naturalism. A great deal of the wording of the
Manifesto is due to F . X. Salda, who, at t h a t time, was the critic of the young genera­
tion. Salda's activities and his influence extended, of course, far beyond the end of the
century; he continued writing about literature until the period between the two world
wars. In the nineties, however, the most valuable feature of his lifelong critical activity
developed: the endeavor to counterbalance individual experience with a work of art
and its universal poetic value, thus opposing impressionistic, arbitrary caprice, on the
one hand, and dry, formalistic criticism on the other. In addition to his participation
in the above-mentioned Manifesto, his main contribution to the Symbolist movement
consists of the essay "Synthetism in New Art," which is virtually devoted to paving
the way for Symbolism, and in his studies on the Symbolist poets' production. The
latter will be referred to at a later point in this essay.
The most distinctive features of the nineties may be found in the works of those
authors who published only in t h a t decade—either because they died prematurely, or
because they stopped writing prematurely. I n the latter category, Czech poetic Sym­
bolism is most clearly embodied in the works of Otakar Březina, whose real name was
Václav Ignác Jebavý (1868-1929). He is nowadays considered to be an esoteric author
whose metaphors are hard to decipher, but in his time he was understood b y the read­
ing public well enough and his poems were even declaimed at workers' meetings. There
are some impressionistic touches in his poetry, b u t his poems are not restricted to con­
veying moods: intellectual content is always present in Březina. H e tried to create
poetry full of serious thought, one whose top priority was the resulotion of the problems
afflicting mankind. To this end, he created free verse and utilized a rich poetic vocab­
ulary, often using words of foreign origin which were clustered into unusual rhymes.
Because he frequently drew his images from Catholic liturgy, the Catholic Group of
Modern Poets (i.e., poets who inclined to Catholicism yet tried to keep pace with con­
temporaneous formal innovations) endeavored to monopolize Bfezina for themselves.
Březina, however, though a thoroughgoing idealist, did not give u p the effort t o attain
knowledge on his own, independent of dogmas.
The reader who permits himself to be captivated by Březina's poetic language will
hardly understand how such a fascinating work could be accomplished in the course
of the isolated and completely pedestrian life of a country teacher. As in t h e case of
Mallarmé his realistic first works, both in verse and prose, were published under another
pseudonym: the adoption of the pseudonym Otokar Bfezina proclaimed the emergence
of a new personality in the field of Czech literature. The circumstances which brought
forth the poets' artistic transformation are partially to be found in his private life
(the death of his parents in 1890), but the decisive role is to be attributed to the great
intellectual adventure of a man whose imagination was far more potent t h a n the
experience which reality could offer him. Hence, the tendency to exploit his inner life
as muçh as possible.
Březina's five poetic books appeared between 1895 and 1901; a book of essays
was published in 1903; his other works, both poems and essays, remained frag­
ments.

619
 Březina's speculative sytem remained, as a whole, alien to modern socialist poetry.
But his persistent struggle for incorporation into the objective course of the evolution
of mankind and for higher forms of life has remained worthy of estimation—and so has
his artistic language, which Vítězslav Nezval later praised in the poem "The Bell Tolls
for Otokar Brezina".

The Agony of MAN

The malice of our enemies had brought us near to breaking;

The sun glared down upon us with a hard obsidian stare;
The tools fell from our trembling hands; with hearts and bodies aching
Among t h e quarry boulders we sat down with our despair.

We wiped away our bitter sweat, we talked with death like brothers,
Under a burning, motionless sky, t h a t laughed in glittering reds
t o t a u n t us,
As children lay their heads for comfort in the kind laps of their mothers,
So we laid down t h e hopeless griefs t h a t never ceased to haunt us.

And then by our own magic power, the racial birthright of our nation
We entered by the hidden door into our secret grace,
Like captive princes in the ricefields of the victor's slave plantation,
Watched by invisible overseers, and exiled from their race,

Whose hearts behold their native towns, abloom on lakes of healing,

The sweet stars of familiar skies, twilights of consolation,
And in their mute captivity hear bells by thousands pealing,
And shouts of loyal multitudes hailing a coronation.

from The Hands, trans. E d i t h Pargeter

Of those poets whose work extends far beyond the nineties into our century,
Antonín Sova (1864-1928) should be mentioned. H e experienced all t h e literary move­
ments of the nineties except Naturalism; writing for more than forty years, he also ab­
sorbed modern tendencies and has remained influential until the present time. Symbolist
features prevailed in Údolí nového království (The Valley of a New Kingdom), published
together with Ještě jednou se vrátíme (Once More We'll Return, 1900), inspired by the
poet's longing for the social justice which had to be fought for after his descent from
the mountains of dreams into the human crowd. H e himself characterized these poems
as an expression of great demands on life, causing the poet much pain b u t forcing him
to feel very strongly how life might be beautiful if people knew how to live and let
others live, too. In the essential discrepancy between the poet's faith in life and his
sharp insight into social injustice, optimism prevailed after all. Though Sova's private
life was far from idyllic, (ruled b y personal disappointment and, in the last years of
his life, by an incurable disease) his poetry preserved the bearing of Údolí nového krá­
lovství (The Valley of a New Kingdom) and repeatedly manifested the courageous heart
of its creator. The last word of Sova's Symbolism is to be found in Dobrodružství odvahy

620
(The Adventure of Courage, 1906), partially inspired by the Russian Revolution of
1905. His collective rhythms and free verse of the Symbolist period remind us of those
of Březina, but Sova's symbols are, on the whole, more transparent than those of
Březina, and his imagery is more earthly. This type of Symbolist poetry, reacting to
social reality in a manner often abstract but suggestive, inaugurated the sound devel­
opment of pure Symbolism towards modern Socialist poetry is in the new Czechoslovak
State. The highest estimation of Sova's turn-of-the-century poetry comes from Julius
Fuěík, who called Sova the "St. John the Baptist of modern Czech poetry".

Pastorale
Today I'll let the roaring waves of night
Beat on the flowering shore of dreams with might.
My thoughts shall roam the dreamland hills above,
Silent and still I'll lie, and never move.

Let them go forth in the green dusk, a band

Of unknown marksmen through the quiet land.
Many who go will come back wounded sore,
And many, many will come back no more.

And when the lamp of the late night burns low,

Into the hills I'll bid the black hound go,
Prick-eared and swift the dreamland heights to comb,
The hound of grief, who hunts the long ranks home.

I went out into the twilight. Wartime it was, and the earth
Smelled of tempest and storm, and everywhere splashing of rain.
The dogs howled, shut in the sties of an old and rejected culture;
When the anarchy of the soul goes forth, old towns are its playground.

The dogs of the ancient world raised swollen and festered eyes
From the bones on which they lay. Sometimes they howled in the
distance.
We wandered unheard through towns, we passed unhindered through
walls,
Re-tinted waters, and saturated the scent of the flowers.

We wrote Memento on churches, on the soaring ramparts of castles,

On the doors of bedrooms. Wartime it was, and the earth,
Drenched with us, blackened to herald the spring of the following ages.
We marched in mist through the towns, to the song of the psalms of
the future.
from Assuaged Griefs,
trans. E. Pargeter

Karel Hlaváček (1874-1898) crystallized, during his lifetime prematurely cut short
by tuberculosis, into the representative of decadent poetry. His books Pozdě h ránu
(Shortly Before Dawn, 1896) and Mstivá kantiléna (Vengeful Cantilena, 1898) impart

621
the poet's feelings of melancholy and sadness without the aid of reflection, reaching
a hitherto unknown type of verse music. I n the latter book, he identified himself with
Les Gueux, t h e impoverished descendants of Dutch and Flemish nobles who, in the
sixteenth century, rebelled against Spanish oppression and whose insurrection was
drowned in blood. B y means of this symbol, his poetry was enriched b y a feeling of
solidarity with t h e poor, though its collective appeal was weakened, from t h e beginning,
by the knowledge of defeat.
All the trends of the nineties are exquisitely synthesized in the poetry of P e t r
Bezruö (his real name Vladimir Vašek, 1867-1958), whose significance has gone far
beyond his epoch a n d whose work appeals to the present-day public with undiminished
intensity. Most of the poems constituting Bezruč's only collection of verse, Slezské
písně (Silesian Songs), appeared in the years 1899-1900 and made Bezruö an overnight
success. The main reason for this success was the poet's complete identification with
the working class, his expression of all t h a t was felt and experienced b y t h e exploited
laborers in the mines and fields of Silesia and in the industrial Ostrava region.
The abrupt break between the generation of the nineties and their predecessors
brought about quite an explosion of autostyling, whose exalted vehemence is differen­
tiated with rare delicacy in Šalda's essay. Březina's poetic ecstasy quite naturally takes
the form of a tragic longing for martyrdom in the service of a r t ; in Sova's poetry Salda
finds several types of direct autostyling, mostly polemically provoked and provoking,
e.g., the romantic t y p e of a wanderer escaping from modern civilization to t h e " 'moun­
tains of d r e a m s " (Assuaged Griefs). The initial poem of the Silesian Songs, Red Flower,
shows the poet in t h e mask of a rude, cutting cactus (which one day shot u p t o become
a red flower), in defiance of the conventional poet and reader of poetry, who admire
only the academic beauty of a rose. This image was, however, b u t the starting point
for another form of autostyling, i.e., t h a t of a wild, barbarous, demoniac, half-mythic
apparition endowed with life by means of a magnificent symbolic effort. Thus, the
poet introduces himself in a row of intentionally repellent symbols as the "ugly augur",
the "crazy fiddler", etc., finally identifying himself completely with the typical repre­
sentatives of his desperately fighting people. (The power of this autostyling has been
confirmed b y the fact t h a t for some time, Bezruö, a civil servant with a university
education, was held to be a miner or a proletarian; sustained b y his anonymity, his
autostyling displayed an unrivalled importunity, impetuosity, and a striking appeal
to the masses, such as no living author would have been able to achieve had he used
his own name.) Bezruč's autostyling, though belonging to t h e common traits of the
generation of the nineties, is much more monumental as a result of its complete merging
with the symbolic struggle of his people. I t may be added t h a t Bezruč not only saw deeply
into the wretched life of his nation's people; he also recognized t h a t their fate coincided
with the fate of the proletarian class in general. While Brezina's attitude towards the
human multitude was t h a t of a visionary bringing mankind an important message,
Bezruč's Silesian man became the symbol of working man in general, and Prague,
negligent of the dying Silesian tribe, became the symbol of the Czech bourgeoisie.
Here Bezruč's poetry achieved its highest and most vital level, one which signalled
the initiation of realistic poetry in the best sense of the word.

622
 Who'll Stand in My Place?

Blood I have little and yet from my mouth

It flows.
When the grass grows
Over my grave, when I die,
Who'll stand in my place,
Who will hold my shield high ?

Wrapped in smoke from the furnace I came,

My eyes black as night, my nostrils aflame,
In morning sunlight, at evening's close,
Stern-browed I take the measure of those
Murderers—Jews in the money, lords of the line-
I, hideous-looking, straight out of the mine !
Diadems your noble brows may adorn,
I hold each of you prisoner in my scorn,
And my clenched fist defiant fills
With a miner's wrath from Beskyd hills.

Blood I have little and yet from my mouth

It flows.
When the grass grows
Over my grave, when I die,
Who'll stand guard for me,
My shield held high?
from the Silesian Songs,
trans. Ian Mílner

There are other Symbolist poets of the nineties whose names—now almost un­
known to the Czech reader—would mean even less to a foreign reader. Symbolism did
not, of course, end with the generation of the nineties; it continued to be a productive
and viable style in the twentieth century as well, but only as a transient stage in the
development of some authors or as a means of expression coexisting with others.
As was mentioned earlier, Czech Symbolism brought about a revolution in the
organization of verse. By the eighties, the existence of a common national program
determined the common structure of a poem—which was usually divided into regular
strophes with regularly alternating rhymes. (This, of course, is only a general pattern
based upon the bulk of the poetry; there were many exceptions.) In the nineties, how­
ever, the substitution of a common program by several antagonistic—or, at least,
divergent—literary movements was accompanied by a differentiation of the verse
structure as well. Among these movements, Symbolist poetry was distinguished by
an endeavor to express an imaginative idea which could no longer sustain a regular
verse scheme. Deep changes of poetic rhythm can be observed in Symbolist poetry,
which form a part of the literary revolution of the nineties.
Free verse (vers libre) represented such a negation of the past; it was one of the
ways in which the poet manifested his contempt for everything that had, up to that
time, been regarded as a literary value. In contrast to the discipline, harmony, and

623
regularity of metric verse, free verse is anarchic and irregular; by means of its rhythmic
liberty it interrupts tradition. Though this break was not (and could not be) entirely
complete—deviations from the syntactic structure of the spoken language being com­
mon to both periods—the main features common to all poets of the Symbolist school
brought about the birth of a new poetic quality.
Complementing the use of free verse is the character of the Symbolists' poetic
vocabulary. Having been amplified and enlarged by expressions drawn from the most
divergent fields of reality—scientific terms, designations of mental states, etc. —Sym­
bolist poetry united them in the easy flow of free verse. The choice of words for their
prosodic qualities could, in free verse, almost completely give way to the choice of
words for their meaning. Thus, Symbolist poetry utilized words in a manner which
had not been previously employed in poetry; moreover, it also lent itself to the crea­
tion of expressive, unexpected, and at the same time, close connections between
words.
All these characteristic features of Symbolist poetry combine to grasp reality
synthetically, their conception being that of a totality based on contradictions. The
same observation holds true for the style of Symbolist poetry in general. Here we can
discover the tendency towards an organic style characterized by two main features:
the endeavor to achieve a maximum individuality of expression, and the demand for
the absolute unity of the poetic sense of the work with its actual artistic form. This
represents a permanent contribution to the creative practice of succeeding decades.
From the generic point of view, one can speak of a new genre of modern meditative
poetry which is continued—though with many alterations—in some prewar poetry, as
well as in some postwar poems by Nezval, Biebl . . ., up to the contemporary poetry
of Hrubín, Florian, and others. The poet's capacity to open his verse—more or less—to
reality has, of course, made all the difference here, as the preceding pages have attempted
to suggest.
Although Vítězslav Nezval, the representative of Czech avant garde literature in
the period between the two world wars, is, in one aspect of his work, a successor to
this type of poetry (which can be traced back to Sova), he himself regarded the in­
heritance of Czech poetic Symbolism from another angle. According to him, its most
vital feature is reflected in the bulk of modern Czech poetry, not merely in one part of
it. He has in mind the revival of spontaneous imagination, or, to put it in a different
way, the direct expression of the poet's sensibility without the intervening collabora­
tion of rational explanation (Bïezina, Hlaváček!). The contribution of various poets,
in this respect, may have differed in degree, but their entering into the realm of freely
floating imagination contributed very importantly to the birth of modern Czech
poetry.
Translated from the Czech by Edith Pargeter

624
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources:
The Linden Tree: An Anthology of Czech and Slovak Literature, 1890-1960 (Prague, Artia, 1962).
Poetic illustrations have been quoted from this source.
An Anthology of Czech Literature, ed. W. E. Harkins, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1953).
A Book of Czech Verse, ed. and trans. A. French (London, Macmillan, 1958).
Secondary Sources :
Otokar Březina, Básně. (Praha, Čs. spisovatě), forthcoming. Epilogue by Josef Hrabák).
Julius Fučík, "Machar a Sova" (Praha, St. nakladatelství politické literatúrý, 1954), I n : Julius
Fucík, Milujeme svůjnárod.
St. K. Neumann, Básné I (Praha, SNKLU, 1962), epilogue by Zdeněk Pešat.
Vítězslav Nezval, Moderní básnické směry (Praha, Čs. spisovatel, 1964).
F . X. Šalda, Karel Hlaváček, Mstivá kantiléna (Praha, Melantrich, 1951). In: F . X . Šalda, Kritické
projevy, vol. 4. "On poetic autostyling, especially in Bezruč", Slovo a slovemost, 1, no. 1: 13/28
(1935).

40 Balakian 626
 VLADETA R. KOŠUTIČ

SYMBOLIST ELEMENTS I N S E R B I A N P O E T R Y

I t was when Symbolism began to lose its significance in its native land after the deaths
of Verlaine and Mallarmé t h a t it spread to other countries becoming, like German
Romanticism, an international movement. Often linked with the Parnassian ideals and
theories in its spread outside of France, Symbolism marked a turning point in the
poetry of such countries as Russia, Garmany, England, Italy, and Spain. I t also made
its impact on Serbian lyric poetry, which had already become Westernized and accept­
ed" l ' a r tpour l'art" theories along with the vast impact of Baudelaire on Serbian
poets.
Considering the fact t h a t this influence reached Serbia not until the early years
of the twentieth century, it places the Symbolist element in Serbian poetry in the same
chronological period as the assimilation of Symbolism in the Modernism of Spanish,
Russian, and American poetry.
At the turn of the century, it was on the poetry of J o v a n Dučić (1871 — 1943) and
of Milan Rakić (1876 — 1938) t h a t Symbolism had a brilliant impact.
Irresistible because of his luxuriant vocabulary, Baudelaire, the proud pessimist
and poète maudit, exerted the strongest influence on Dučić's verse Poems (1901 — 1904)
and on Rakić's Poems (1903); they reflect the amalgamation of their own character­
istic pessimism and esthetics with the pessimism and esthetics of Les Fleurs du Mal.
However, just as Baudelaire might be considered to be simultaneously a Parnas­
sian and the forerunner of Symbolism, so the Serbians, and particularly Dučić, created
a hybrid poetic style and model of the poetic ideal. Dučić's "My Poetry," written in
1904, possesses at t h e same time the Parnassian features of the Muse, "peaceful as
marble and cold as shadow", and his warning against undemocratic pride, as it sug­
gests also "the pale little girl who dreams, too sad because of poverty," while around
her:

Instead of gaudy and luxurious clothes

Floats only a patch of mysterious fog. 1

1
These and all subsequent verses are given in an unrhymed translation by Ranka Kuić.

40* 627
 This kind of joining of the objective and the felt, the plastic and the impression­
istic, the definite a n d the indefinite, Dučić, the greatest of t h e disciples of t h e West,
could not avoid in the majority of his poetry: he is almost always experienced as a
Parnassian a n d a Symbolist, read through the Heredia-like lines:

I n t h e broad shade of palm trees' fans

The lovely Naksis is lying. The sun has reached
I t s zenith above the Nile. A flock of swallows
Is moving around and making stitchwork in t h e sky
And through the warm air silken threads are being stretched.

(Ancient Motifs)

and the verse stylized Impressionism:

The night smells sadly of cypress trees' sap.

The sky is ash-coloured. Both land and sea
Seem to be breathing with a strange pain in this night,
Silent sorrow is drifting from a distant vault.
(Beside the Water)

T H E ACCEPTANCE OF "HALF-SYMBOLISM"

Mallarmé's "clear" poetry and "thirst for the absolute" did not attract t h e Serbian
beginners in Modernism. 2 After Baudelaire, they were more drawn—particularly in
the case of Dučić—to the "more comprehensible" translatable lyricists among the
Symbolists who were writing in French, such as Albert Samain, Georges Rodenbach,
Henri de Régnier, Maurice Maeterlinck, Francis Jammes and Emile Verhaeren.
As t o Verlaine's Impressionism and verbal music, they found a successor only in
the Verlaine-like nature of the modest Stevan Luković (1877 — 1902), who died young,
and whose posthumous collection ("Poems", 1903) contains An Autumn Rain Song3

2
After Mallarmé's death, the so-called "new Symbolists", Gustav Kahn, Paul Fort, Vielé
Griffin, developed the study of l'audition colorée, inspired a torrent of words in free verse, replacing
the expression
3
of the obscure with obscure expression.
Untranslatable, like Chanson d'automne, those who know Serbian can look a t the inter­
pretation of its musical sound of gloom on p . 195 of my book, The Parnassians and Symbolists of
Serbia, Belgrade, SAN, 1967.

628
devoted to his own inner state and to the reflection of a sombre, rainy autumn. Luko-
vić like Verlaine, listening to the rustle of the autumn violins, arranges the meter into
melodious p a t t e r n a n d creates his own single individual experience which happily
augurs a newer Serbian poetry based upon this condition: de la musique avant toute
chose.

VLADISLAV PEKOVIĆ-DIS: A REAL BROTHER

OF THE DAMNED POETS AND OF "PAUVRE LÉLIAN"

Only Vladislav Peković-Dis in his amazing collection The Drowned Souls (1911),
unconsciously and originally wove the real lyric of presentiment, of daydreams, a n d
the "gray poem", proving t h a t he, without any knowledge of schools and movements,
could succeed better t h a n any of the disciples of Western Symbolism in expressing the
soul of thing3 a n d beings. 4
A great loner in company and in life, he, like Poe, was a herald who gave " u n
sens plus pur aux mots de la tribe", but whom the tribe (critics, in particular) neither
accepted nor even reviewed. This meteoric poet begins his collection with the poem
Prison, confessing his exile from the land and his nostalgia for E d e n :

T h a t is the life I too fell into

From t h e unseen distances, with stars' eyes
And with a tear of mine unconsciously shining
And mourning, like a bird for its destroyed nest.
T h a t is t h e life I too fell into.

The poet is like the deposed ruler who senses t h e peril of "rough reality" to a
greater extent t h a n even an albatross does, "prince des nuées";

4
Born in 1880 in a village near the market town of Čaćak. Not having matriculated from
grammar school, he adopted various professions, turning into an eternal bohemian and poet, living
mostly in Belgrade and writing his disturbing and bitter lyrics at a café table. After the fall of
Serbia in 1915, he escaped as a refugee to France, but during the return to Corfu the boat on which
he was sailing was sunk by a German submarine, and he met death in the Ionian Sea on May 16,
1916.

629
 From the secret thrones and dreams and sounds
I have found myself removed to the low passions, . . .
I have come without pain or longing
Here where nobody has an eye to see the sky
Here where even the dead are being killed by men.
(Decrepitude)

Such a life unavoidably forced the poet to withdraw into his shell and, at the
same time, to exaggerate the tragic elements of existence. Glancing at nature—"the
forest of symbols"—absorbed by waking dreams, Dis discovered a new religion of
poetry as did Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. He identifies himself with the most
refined voices and phenomena of the visible world, cherishing intuition, visions, and
dreams—all of which basically represent anti-Parnassian aspiration and the reverse of
its positivistic prosody:

Like an ancient secret I have started to live

Nailed down to the earth which serves life,
To move my eyes towards great distances,
While the wreath of dreams crowns my head.
Like an ancient secret I have started to live.
To feel myself in the glance of plants,
Of nights, of waters; and to listen to the being
And my spirit as it strongly sleeps in everything
As an only song, an only discovery;
To feel myself in the glance of plants.
And with the eyes seen by my strength,
The eyes calling like a voice of silence,
Like the speech of the woods, like a lovely darling,
Of the lost dreams, of the heights asleep,
And with the eyes seen by my strength.
(Prison)

630
 For the first time in Serbian poetry, Dis breaks both with the worn-out Romantic
commonplaces, and with every kind of fatal clarity of chiselled words, that charac­
teristic of the "French pupils" Milan Rakić, Milutin Bojić, and Sima Pandurovic.
Moreover, the poet of The Drowned Souls, himself drowned in dreams, modestly ad­
mits that reality does not have to be the foundation and condition of art:

Now I don't recognize the expression of God's world,

And I have no notion of thoughts and colors . . .
The Ceasing of Reality

which coincides with Verlaine's advice that not thoughts and colors but feelings and
nuances be given priority.
Such a recognition surprised both the readers and the "learned" poets, who did
not know of such a state of the soul, but most of all the inviolable critic Jovan Skerlic,
who, extremely exasperated by Dis's verse, warned against him.

THE GREAT MISTAKE OF THE GREAT MENTOR

As soon as The Drowned Souls appeared, Skerlic's damning criticism was issued
under the title "False Modernism in Serbian Literature" a verdict on the unhealthy
appearance of the uneducated poet Vladislav Petkovié-Dis:

The new art which expresses the unconscious and the unattainable in man,
which prefers dream to reality, instinct to understanding, deliberately seeks to
be dark and mysterious, to speak in a way that even the dedicated cannot under­
stand. . . . And therefore Petkovic, not recognizing "the expression of God's world"
anymore, speaks darkly, mysteriously, Sybil-like. The whole of his poem has no
meaning at all, and the poet himself would be hard put to explain what that aim­
less pile of empty words means. It is worth admitting that in this Petkovic has
had some success: in the whole of the poems there is as much meaning as at the
beginning of The Strivings of Peace:
I have buried my love like the daylight of a dark forest,
Like the unknown darkness of an aged depth;
I have buried my love like the daylight of a dark forest.
Petković is a transcendental phenomenon in Nature and he possesses senses
which other people do not:
And then I felt for the air, looking for a trail,
But your words were not to be found.

He does not resemble other people in any way:

My dream does not feel like a dream.

631
 That may all seem very fine and very original, but there is nothing easier than to
explicate such poetry. Logic has to be trampled underfoot, the meaning of words
scorned, words which have nothing to do with each other joined together—the
poet can say anything which comes to his mind."

Today, the final words of his criticism: "The poetry of V. Petković is, in fact, an
unlettered argumentation," have, ironically, proved the reverse to be true: Skerlic's
criticism was the unlettered argumentation of a critic who did not understand the
meaning, neither the impressionism nor the symbolism, of those words. And Dis's
verse irrefutably proves that ignorant though he was of what was going on in the
West, he was, in fact, the unrecognized father of Serbian Modernism. His scattered
sparks of precious metaphor, comparison, and personification clearly show that under
a luckier course of events, an as educated poet, he would have been the first real Ser­
bian poet of the soul, more important and greater than Dučić, the lyricist, who is
most in the field of world poetry.
Dis knew of French poetry only in terms of "spleen" which was then used as
a contemporary expression among Serbian for tædium vitæ. He believed that it was
most important to sing, to speak out in the unclear voice of the senses, not caring
whether to do so was called "Symbolism" or "Decadence". He expressed his feelings
stutteringly, unevenly, and nonchalantly, not taking into account that there was a
craft in poetry, whether it be the Parnassian sculpturing style or the impressionistic
form of "romances sans paroles". Because of his lack of craftsmanship he could not
fulfill his full potential. He created astonishing fragments, scattering a few precious
verses in almost every poem; the finished whole, however, almost never equalled the
quality of certain of its parts. The following are samples of the "ignorant poet" 5 who,
in the undivided opinion of today's critics "turned our poetry in a new direction"9 in
his instinctively Impressionist and Symbolist manner.
One of Verlaine's crucial pieces of advice on poetic skill was to strive for ambigu­
ity:
Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise:
Rien n'est plus cher que la chanson grise
Ou l'Indecis au Précis se joint.
Art Poétique

Or, in Mallarmé's words':

. . . car, le sens trop précis rature

ta vague littérature.
(Toute l'àme resumée)

It was as if Dis strove to meet this objective not to measure words, but to weigh the
adequate expression, to join the unjoinable:

5
See p . 181 of my book for proof t h a t he was completely ignorant of the French language and
its poetry.

632
 I removed my hand from the trigger of eternal darkness,
There is no sense in marring pointlessness in its' course
(Poem)

A clear case of "illogicality". It would be understandable if he shot with light at

the pointlessness which is the enemy of the poet. Rather, he shot at it with darkness,
and that no poet "in his right mind" would either do or say. La méprise, therefore, has
made an about-face, inexact but, surprisingly, poetically acceptable.
That unimaginable joining of words is a feature of Dis's vocabulary, ambiguous
because of the ambiguity of meaning:

The eyes which call like the voice of silence

(Prison)

Dark pictures, fading like dreams

Rustle ruin, who knows whose.
(Presentment)

The wind of the unconcerned death is dying

With a star's jail, with my house of darkness.
(With Closing Eyes)

This night I have been visited by the seas

All withered, without waves or foam.
(Nirvana)

As for synesthesia ("l'audition colorée"), of which Baudelaire gave the first

examples, this the Symbolist school eagerly practiced, aspiring to discover ever more
refined combinations in multiple perceptions. But while the French disciple Dučić
goes no further than:

633
 The salt and bluish smell of the springtime sea
(Noon)

And when the old piano is touched by a light hand,

I t s sounds will be black . . .
(Return)

Dis gives expression to the higher mathematics of synesthesia. We cannot find, even
among the French "new Symbolists," examples such as these:

The smell of sorrow takes the horizon away from my sight

(The First Star)

The sigh spread its odors

(The Main Point)

Let the bad smell on thee creep as its own shadow

(Anthem)

I hear t h e shadow
Of silence treading . . .
(Mirror)

The silence filled with petrified wrinkles

( With Closing Eyes)

To come to the supreme poem Perhaps She Sleeps, who would have thought t h a t
after Verlaine another Mon rêve familier could be written, not as a paraphrase, b u t
from the original presentiment which transforms dream into reality? While Verlaine
experiences a direct vision:

634
 Je fais ce rêve étrange et pénétrant
d'une femme inconnue . . .

Dis's vision originates from a melody of which only an inkling remains before waking:

This morning I had forgotten the song,

A song in my dream which I had dreamed the whole night:
I have tried and tried all day long to hear i t . . .

Verlaine's dream is exempt from the physical characteristics of an unknown woman.

She makes her whole impression on him (and on us) by the sound of her name and her
voice:

Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse?—Je l'ignore.

Son nom ? Je me souviens qu'il est doux et sonore
Comme ceux des aimés que la Vie exila.
Et pour sa voix, lointaine et calme et grave, elle a
L'inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tués.

Such a wonderfully indistinct face brings us, by virtue of a hint and of ambiguous
comparison,6 closer to the impression and ensures that the poem's meaning remains
unsaid to the end, that it is not completely exhausted once and for all. But while Ver-
laine's certainty of a dream is not to be contradicted, Dis remains below the surface
of remembrance of the unconscious:

Now I can hardly know that ever I had a dream,

And a pair of eyes in it, somebody's sky,
A certain face, I know not which, a child's perhaps,
An old song, old stars, a certain old day.
Now I can hardly know that I ever had a dream.

While Verlaine uses the Parnassian comparison for the eyes of the woman:

Son regard est pareil au regard des statues . . .

6
Jules Lemaître has pointed out various possibilities of interpreting the verse "comme des
ałmés que la Vie exila" and of "l'inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tuées".

635
Dis remembers nothing; his dream is woven of the frailest stuff, and his justification
is metaphysical: he does not remember the eyes of his ladylove, nor the soul which
leaves the sleeping body:

I don't remember anything anymore, not even those eyes,

As if m y dream had all been made of foam,
Or if those eyes were my soul outside myself,
Not even a tune nor all the rest I have dreamed this night.
I don't remember anything anymore, nor those eyes.

Intuition, therefore, again becomes the one support, the unshakable conviction of the
existence of the nonexistent:

B u t I have an inkling—that's all I can have—

I now have a feeling about those eyes, t h a t they are exactly those
That strangely lead me and drive me throughout m y life:7
They come into my dreams to see what I myself am doing.
B u t I have an inkling—that's all I can have.

" I can only have inklings"—that is the greatest, the eternal ability of Dis, the Sym­
bolist capability with which he penetrates the secret.
And while Verlaine rehearses the dream: " J e fais souvent ce rêve . . ., (italics
mine) finding consolation in the dream because the unknown-woman loves him and
understands him:
. . . et les moiteurs de mon front blême
elle seule les sait refraîchir, en p l e u r a n t . . .

Dis does not succeed in remembering his dream; his dream is crushed by rough reality
and, completely helpless and inconsolable, he gives himself up to the one possibility,
repeating over and over to himself and to us t h a t his ladylove has " p e r h a p s " fallen
asleep, there som3where, "beyond there" (and therefore she cannot visit him in his
dream), but t h a t they will perhaps meet after "this dream", an obscurity which we can
interpret in two ways: either t h a t she will appear in his life anyway, after the poetic
dream, or after this dream of life, in a mystical meeting of blessed souls:

7
We recapture "La méprise" in the meaning of: "the eyes which lead me and drive me".
(italics mine)

636
 Now I have not got m y darling and her voice I cannot know;
I don't know the place she lives a t or rests in:
I don't know why reality shelters her and my dream;
Perhaps she sleeps and t h e grave sadly cherishes her form.
Now I have not got my darling and her voice I cannot know.

Perhaps she sleeps with her eyes beyond any evil,

Beyond things, illusions, beyond life itself,
And her unseen beauty sleeps with her;
Perhaps she is still alive and might come after this dream.
Perhaps she sleeps with her eyes beyond any evil.

Thus, in this suggestive rondo, "in the most beautiful and the most indefinite
and the most ghostly poem written in the Serbian language"—so the contemporary
critics describe it—as in Verlaine, of the presence of the unknown woman we sense
only her absence, her fascinating shadow, which yet has more verisimilitude t h a n any
sculptured and obvious ideal.
The great aspiration of Symbolism which was realized b y both poets was t h a t the
poem, flowing without dimensions from some region of dreams, should attain a real,
predicted goal. "Good art points with the finger, like a sick man too ill to speak, like
a small child. . . ." 8

T H E GREATEST AND MOST CRUCIAL PRESENTIMENT

If symbolism is, above all, the poetry of presentiment, then not only poetic b u t
real life presentiment preoccupied Dis as it did few other poets, providing not only
the theme b u t also the title of his collection The Drowned Souls like a symbol of pre­
destination. Therefore, we cannot ignore t h a t "remembering of things to come" which,
as in Lermontov, G. Heym, and F . G. Lorca, sharpened the detailed description of t h e
landscapes and places of personal tragedy. 9
Dis's premonition, mysterious, b u t in a n y case, definite, turns up in several places
in the collection, becoming the reason for his defeatism and resignation:

8
L. Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, TV.
9
In the poem "Dream" (At boiling noon in the valley of Dagistan) by Lermontov, in
"Ophelia" by G. Heym, and in "Casida del herido por el agua" by Lorca.

637
 I removed my hand from the trigger of eternal darkness;
There is no sense in marring pointlessness in its course.
Since my birth my grave stands ready and waiting for me
To take away all I have got into the deep depth.

"The deep depth", appears like the disturbing region of his dreams; thence comes
his wish to forget both the somber reality and also the dream in a rest without dreams,
which was considered by the accursed poets—and Baudelaire in particular— as a
helpful remedy against consciousness and subconsciousness. As Dis put it:

We feel like sleeping, we don't feel like dreaming

so that he will not have to watch the ending of the dream:

Some greyish mist is approaching me,

A pale foreshadow of the distant shores.
Looking for a long time at the misty veil
Where to my days have spread
A great shroud is being spread, huge, white,
With drowned souls underneath.
(The Drowned Souls)

He saw not only his own shroud but the national one, the shroud of many Serbian
soldiers, his friends, buried in the communal "blue graveyard", the victims of the
pains and burdens of the First World War.
On the other hand, he had desired such an exit as a salvation from faith in life;
and that was no poetic picture but the conviction of a unique and inevitable remedy:

638
 I feel like sleeping. Only let my body lie
I n t o t h a t dead gloom which is spreading
I n t o the soul, the last death-rattle, t h e requiem,
So t h a t everything t h a t was not be drowned,
Be drowned and be wrapped
B y grey mists. May hoar frost and forgetting
Fall down even on love.
May all be drowned.
(Presentiment)

A grave as large as t h a t of unavoidable death,

How large a grave ! And I, there, close b y it

Standing like a shape of the deceased times,
The last man on t h e border of the world,
The last wave of the bygone remembrances.
Dead sea all around, everywhere just nothing;
And t h e waters asleep and there are no changes.
There are no changes. The dream equal, petrified,
Links all t h e places with the regions of hope.
A feeling of silent flatness on me
And beyond t h e things reign unstirringly.
In my eye t h e last locks
Of the still-living hair. No suffering any more.
(With Closing Eyes)

I n the end, t h a t nightmare of the elements and of the immeasurableness of it all

was sometimes transferred into a sinister and confusing event:

639
 Tonight I was visited by the seas
All withered, without wave or foam . . .
Nirvana

With eyes that are already tired I'm looking at the

lived-through epochs,
And at all that used to be and at all that surrounds me
And a strange picture is being formed: a sea made of ashes
And the air pierced through with a cry above it as if it
were a nymph's slaughter
(Poem)

Such presentiments which penetrated the dreams and the verse written in 1911,
the verse of an inlander who had never seen the sea, nor passed over the modest border
of Serbia and its culture, belong nowadays to the treasury of Serbian lyrics, like rough
silver coinage, perhaps more precious than the polished gold of the French school.

Translated from the Serbian by Melanie Orr-Lazić

640
 GEORGI DIMOV

SYMBOLISM IN BULGARIAN LITERATURE

By the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, profound
changes had occurred in the national literature of Bulgaria. The rise of critical realism
was paralleled by the birth of revolutionary-proletarian literature. The various trends
of modernism were also afoot. Prevalent among these was Symbolism, which attracted
some very promising talents. Bulgarian literature owes a number of important works
to them.
Symbolism appeared in Bulgaria ten or twenty years after its advent in Western
Europe and proceeded to develop in a highly complex and controversial social, political,
and cultural climate. The young bourgeoisie of a state which had just emerged from
five centuries of severe foreign domination aspired to complete economic and political
power. Alien to the democratic ideals and the renaissance spirit of the national revolu­
tionary movement of the pre-liberation era, this class unscrupulously connived at the
rampant political demagogy, moral degradation, and partisan intolerance of the day.
All radical ideas were bound to be throttled. Although the democratically-minded
were discontent, their inward revolt against the tyranny of the ruling clique proved
unable to halt the precipitous decay of society. The socialist movement was still in
embryo. And though it initially had many converts from among the intelligentsia,
they eventually diverted their civic, humanitarian, and esthetic interests elsewhere.
With its sturdy stock planted deep in the toiling classes of the nation—having tasted
the bitter cup of life—the creative intelligentsia was repelled by the unscrupulous
practices that reigned in bourgeois society. Nor would they any longer go with the
literary tradition that poetically exalted the struggles for national liberation and iden­
tification and praised cultural progress. In their quest for something new they rejected
past and present, urged on by the vision of a consummation to come. It was only
natural that their discontent and gropings should lead them to seek models beyond
the country's borders, in the literature and culture of Europe dominated, at the time,
by individualism and idealism in philosophy and by modernistic estheticism. An
aristocratic contempt for philistine values and for the poor in spirit, and their vague
striving for beauty flung them into the isolation of a world of their own and led them
to the themes and motifs of international literary modernism.
Given the overall atmosphere in Bulgaria at the turn of the century, the peculiar
setup in which Bulgarian men of arts and letters lived—their frame of mind and ethos,
their ethical attitudes—could not but set them on the path of philosophic and esthetic
trends then in the air. Yet the singular national conditions and the psychological idio-

41 Balakian 641
syncrasies of the young generation of writers shaped Bulgarian Symbolism in a unique
way, thus presenting world literary history with a most interesting phenomenon.
As an event of international dimensions, Symbolism had a common philosophic
and esthetic program, a common poetic credo. In each country, however, it appeared
with a face of its own, and this certainly holds true for Bulgaria, both as a school of
defined poetic ideas and in its actual poetic manifestations. Though imported as a
philosophy and as a system of esthetics, owing to its specific social conditions and
structure, national traditions, and mentality, Bulgarian Symbolism remains unique.
In this country the recurrent motifs and prevalent moods, the favored artistic devices
and poetic imagery took on a specific aura and function.
The first Symbolist poems to be produced in Bulgaria appeared in 1905 in the
pages of the magazine Misal (Thought), which became the rostrum of individualism
in philosophy and modernism in literature. Those poems were the creation of the emi­
nent poet P. K. Yavorov, whose inspired poetic diction had previously centered on
social and patriotic themes. In his collection of poems entitled Insomnia (1907), which
bears testimony to the crisis in his outlook and his esthetic vision, Yavorov asserted
himself as the sire of Symbolism in Bulgaria.
Yavorov's road was taken by quite a few young and budding talents—Teodor
Trayanov, Nikolai Liliev, Lyudmil Stoyanov, Dimcho Debelyanov, Emanuil Papdi-
mitrov, and Christo Yassenov. Another pillar of their modernistic esthetic views they
discerned in Pencho Slaveikov, a controversial personality, standing out in bold outline
against the spiritual horizon. Although he himself had written many realistic works,
Slaveikov was the first to oppose the existing realistic tradition and became a promi­
nent spokesman of modernism and philosophic individualism in Bulgaria. With time,
however, he rejected the excesses of Symbolism in Bulgaria.
Typical of Bulgarian literary life at the turn of the century were the intrinsic
contradictions in the works of a number of writers, the rather eclectic profile, as regards
social and esthetic ideas, of the contemporary literary magazines and the emerging
literary groups. This is borne out by the concrete exploits of the Bulgarian Symbolists.
Their works appeared in magazines of diverse orientations and were found side by side
with pieces of marked realistic leanings. Until they had an organ of their own, the
Symbolists used to publish in the magazines Misal (Thought), Democratic Review,
Contemporary, Thought, Bulgarian Miscellany, Artist and even in Savremennik (Con­
temporary)—whose editor. Georgi Bakalov, was the ideologist of the new proletarian-
revolutionary literature which had paved the way ahead. The restive ever-searching
novelist, Anton Strashimirov, who often changed his esthetic views, gave much space
to the Symbolists in his magazines Nash Zhivot (Our Life) and Nablyudatel (Observer).
But even here, more than one realistic work found its way into these pages. After
World War I, Geo Milev, on the one hand, and Teodor Trayanov and Ivan Radoslavov,
on the other, started the respective magazines Vezni (Scales) (1919) and Hyperion (1922),
the pages of which were primarily filled with the works of the Symbolists. But as the
latter soon came to produce less and less, the periodicals also ceased publication.
Besides the numerous poems which appeared on the pages of these magazines,
separate collections of poetical works were also published which, in varying degrees,

642
also reflected the poetics of Symbolism. Thus, for instance, besides Insomnia Yavorov
also published Chasing the Clouds' Shadows (1910); Teodor Trayanov—Regina Mortua
(1909) and Hymns and Ballads (1912); Emanuil Papdimitrov—The Dream of Love
(1912); Lyudmil Stoyanov—Visions at a Crossroad (1914); and Christo Yassenov The
Knight's Château (1921). Some anthologies were also published, e.g., Southern Flowers
(1907). I n prose, the poetics of Symbolism is best exemplified in a number of works b y
Nikolai Rainov and D . Ivanov-Cheren; and in drama, b y A. Strashimirov a n d I.
KiriloV.
The most significant theoreticians of Symbolism were Ivan St. Andreichin, Dimo
Kiorchev, and Ivan Radoslavov. Their theoretical formulations made no claims to
originality, as they simply transplanted to Bulgarian soil what had had already been
achieved b y the French, German/ and Russian Symbolists and modernists. B u t , as
was the case with poetry itself, in the theoretical studies as well there coexisted elem­
ents and attitudes akin t o the poetics of Realism and Romanticism. Poets who, for a
shorter or longer time, gravitated towards Symbolism included Lyudmil Stoyanov,
P . K. Yavorov, D . Debelyanov, A. Strashimirov, and Geo Milev. Thus, in his " L i t e r a r y
L e t t e r s " printed in the Listopad (Falling Leaves) magazine (1913), Geo Milev wrote
t h a t the future belonged to the poetry of Symbolism and modernism, to the kind of
poetry offered b y Verlaine, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, R i m b a u d ,
Verhaeren and Samain. He, as well as others like himself, translated the works of
German and Russian Symbolists and deeply believed t h a t this was the genuine poetry
of t h e day.
Eagerly aspiring to create a new poetry concordant with the contemporary fash­
ions, t h e Bulgarian Symbolists read and translated the works of French, German,
a n d Russian modernists. To them these works were paragons of poetry which touched
a corresponding chord in their emotional and mental disposition. Thanks t o their
knowledge of foreign tongues, they could communicate directly with poets such as
Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Gott­
fried Keller, Bryusov, Bely, Blok, Bal'mont, and many others. They regularly perused
the fashionable and influential magazines—Vessi, Scorpion, Mercure de France, Neue
Deutsche Bundschau—which served ás a forum for the Symbolists of Europe. F r o m
them, Bulgarian Symbolists borrowed not only ideas but also artistic devices and
poetic images.
Bulgarian Symbolism arose two decades after the French school, developed along
different sociopolitical lines, and transformed, in a specific manner, the various foreign
influences. Both external conditions and individual psychological differences seemed
to prevent the Bulgarian Symbolists from totally immersing themselves in t h e poetics
of Symbolism and the philosophy of individualism typical of European literature. E a c h
poet had his own destiny and creative record, his specific milieu and inner life. T h a t is
why they sometimes produced works t h a t were highly heterogeneous as far as experience,
emotional message, and esthetic tone is concerned. They h a d come into contact with
Symbolism in dissimilar ways and were to abandon it in like fashion.
Though strictly abiding by the tenets of Symbolism and borrowing profusely
from their favorite foreign poets, a number of Bulgarian Symbolists displayed a pro-

41* 643
nounced vitality and a greater tangibility of images, visions, and emotions in their
works. The demophilic, democratic stream did not run dry even among the most
orthodox apologists of modernism. Much of their verse is saturated with unaffected
humanism and compassion for the underdog. It is these traits of Bulgarian Symbolism
that distinguish it from the Western European and Russian versions of the movement
and invest it with a down-to-earth quality, closer to man's fate in bourgeois society.
This is most characteristic of Yavorov, Debelyanov, and Yassenov. They wrote Sym­
bolist, Romantic and Realistic verse simultaneously. Yavorov embraced Symbolism
after he had experienced a dramatic loss of his social and patriotic ideals: his Symbolist
poems reveal the tragedy of a man bereft and lonely, tortured by the anguish of dichot­
omy. Even T. Trayanov, the staunchest of Symbolists, who did not go back in his
Symbolist credo to the end of his life, did create several poems (The Secret of the Strou-
ma; Death on the Plains) permeated with fairly earthy feelings and experiences, con­
taining vivid and deeply human glimpses of life, all rendered in the moving, romantic
spirit of the folk song. In Debelyanov's poetry by contrast, despondency and pessimism
are matched by a passionate love of life, a deep resentment for the imperfections of
the surrounding reality. His private sorrows and his bitter lot were the prism that
refracted his innermost humanistic concepts of man's duty to the community. Debel­
yanov wrote some of his most moving and truthful poems while stationed at the front
line during World War I, where, in 1916, he fell in action, thus testifying to the collapse
of his Symbolist illusions.
On the whole, the works of the Bulgarian Symbolists are ideologically and estheti-
cally stratified. The Symbolist tissue of the poetry also exhibits realistic, romantic,
impressionistic, and expressionist elements, while separate works are totally built
upon principles alien to Symbolism. For all their kowtowing to the dogma of Sym­
bolism, it failed to deface and standardize the born artists, the original talents. Few of
them were interested in the philosophic and gnostic basis of Symbolism. Though one
of the theoreticians of Symbolism, Ivan Radoslavov, wrote, in 1914, that realistic
esthetics had nothing to do with the creative spirit and called on the poets to explore
"the abysmal depths of the immortal, multifarious soul', many of the Symbolists, for
all their hankering after a "transcendental dream world", were unable to break the
bonds that held them captive in their earthly existence. They rejected as obsolete the
national, democratic, and realistic tradition, and proclaimed themselves high priests
of pure art, worshippers of form, of eternal beauty; and yet they retained their intrinsic
link with the peoples' destinies and the surrounding world. This is the reason why the
verse of N. Liliev, one of Bulgaria's most typical Symbolists, captivates the reader
with its inimitable lyrical pathos and fine landscape images, while battle trumpets
blare out from Yassenov's medieval castles.
Beyond a doubt, a comparative study of Bulgarian Symbolism set against the
background of French, German, and Russian Symbolism will show the particular way
in which the themes of Symbolism and the concomitant moods and feelings were inter­
preted in this country—the specific rendition given to the concepts of good and evil,
of the individual's experiences and sufferings, of his amorous thrills and emotions as
affected by nature and the external world in general. The social, political, and ideolog-

644
ical—as well as the intimately personal—dissatisfaction of Bulgaria's Symbolists
determined an extrapolation of the tenor of Symbolism other than that found in the
rest of Europe. Proof of this is also given by their rapid ideological and esthetic meta­
morphosis under the impact of the momentous social and political conflicts accompany­
ing the class polarization of society.
For about two decades, from around 1905 to 1923, Symbolism was at the zenith
of Bulgarian literature and was artistically incarnated in some major literary works,
mostly in the field of poetry. Though it was brought to life by a transient vogue, there
was fertile soil for Symbolism's growth in Bulgaria; its spread was anything but acci­
dental. On the other hand, with few exceptions, the work of Bulgaria's Symbolists was
not confined within the bounds of European Symbolism. They transcended its doctri­
naire scope, broke away from its theoretical norms. They were free of the stylistic con­
ventions of French Symbolism and German modernism. One looks in vain for deeper
traces of the philosophy of Nietzsche, notwithstanding his popularity among their
generation and his being continually translated and studied. Still less does one find
the typical features of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In general, the Bulgarian Symbolists
betray but a faint influence of the idealistic philosophic systems. For that reason they
survived Symbolism without inner dramatic collisions, in a painless, natural way. The
national catastrophes of the second decade of the century sobered up many of them
and drove them out of the "ivory towers" in which they had sought seclusion. They
adopted a more immediate, philosophic attitude to life and occupied themselves with
questions of how the ills of society were to be alleviated. Ethical concerns, hitherto
veiled, now came to the fore; they became aware of the interrelationship between
private and public, between native and panhuman, between transient and eternal.
The proclamation of Symbolism as a criterion of genuine creation was sure to
provoke the reaction of many contemporary writers and critics who stood for a poetry
rooted in life, and were no longer caught by pessimism and skepticism; they ruled out
escapism as a weapon against corruption, and did not seek out exotic images and
mythical heroes. The Symbolists themselves were soon to realize the ephemeral nature
of their former illusions, to face the world in its stark reality, to reassess the Symbolist
values and look for new roads in order to place their art at the service of history.
As early as 1910-1912, Yavorov was back on the path to realism. He wrote his
plays At the Foot of Vitosha and When the Lightning Thunders divorced from the poetics
of Symbolism. The first national catastrophe, brought about by the Second Balkan
War (1913), prompted many writers and poets to create patriotic works which would
provide the dispirited nation with hope and optimism. Thus, Lyudmil Stoyanov wrote
To the Motherland, Christo Yassenov-Elegies: T. Trayanov—The Secret of the Strouma:
and N. Liliev—War. Though still under the spell of Symbolism, these poems are down-
to-earth, comprehensible, concordant with the suffering of the people.
The drift away from Symbolism was intensified after the First World War and
the revolutionary events following it. During the war, Debelyanov created his most
moving romantic and realistic poems. In 1919, Yassenov wrote his famous verses
Petersburg to hail the socialist revolution of the Russian workers and peasants. In
1923, Lyudmil Stoyanov published his antiwar story The Mercy of Mars, which in-

645
dicated that the one-time Symbolist was treading a new path. And the first anti­
­ascist uprising in the world (1923) inspired Geo Milev, until then a devoted apologist
of Symbolism and modernism, to write his magnificent revolutionary poem September
(1925) which brought the poet both death and immortality.
Thus, as early as the mid-twenties of our century, Bulgarian Symbolism swiftly
began to disintegrate as an ideological and esthetic movement to make way for the
new theoretic and artistic principles that marked a new stage in the development
of the national literature of Bulgaria.
During the first two decades of the century, Bulgarian Symbolism, firmly implant­
ed in our literature, translated into poetry the characteristic features of this European
trend, while in its turn enriching it with new aspects and tendencies. That is why a
more extensive comparative study will distinguish between what was imported from
without—as a result of two-way contacts or interrelations of direct and indirect in­
fluences—and what had an indigenous basis or was bred by the specific conditions of
the social and spiritual life of Bulgaria.

Translated from the Bulgarian by Todor Kirov

646
 ROBERT JOUANNY

SYMBOLISM IN GREECE

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, certain historical factors might have com­
bined in Greece to bring about a relatively spontaneous literary movement comparable
to French Symbolism: the disastrous war for 1897 and the economic crisis that preceded
and followed it; the withdrawal of young people from an uninspiring political and social
climate, the feeling of suffocation that made them critical of traditional national values,
and their hesitation between the attractions of the real world and the mirages of the
imagination; and lastly, the eternal question of the Greek language, which was far
from being resolved despite the efforts of Psichari and a few others, in reality, however,
nothing of the kind occurred; whatever slight Symbolist current there may have been
was filtered into Greece under foreign influences, a phenomenon which occurs there
relatively frequently. Did not Romanticism and Surrealism also make belated appear­
ances in Greece in a fairly stale form that did not immediately take on a specifically
Hellenic character? The closed world of Symbolism, with its internal harmonies and
its odor of decadence, where the very mention of Byzantium evoked an image of death
in its perfect serenity, could hardly have immediately appealed to a nation quick to
grasp the plastic beauty of the sensual world, to savor its fruits, and to see in Constan­
tinople an inspiring promise of things to come. Symbolism remained foreign to the
Greek spirit; it was too extreme in its devices and its mimicry. Only later would it
bring a positive contribution—after having been Hellenized from generation to genera­
tion—when such men as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis entered into the heritage
bequeathed by mediocre earlier attempts.
By around 1890, Symbolism had become an accomplished European fact. Its
manifestations could no longer be ignored by a cultivated public which, in Greece,
was always anxious to compensate for its insularity with endless curiosity concerning
Western European intellectual and artistic activity and with a constant effort to
assimilate foreign influences. Doubtless, the infiltration of European Symbolism occurred
in a somewhat haphazard way; in the course of individual trips, chance encounters,
and translations made strictly for anthologies. Though these works were little or ill-
known, the same was not true of the doctrine based on idealism and a change in artistic
form. Furthermore, the fact that Moréas had come to play a very important role in
France, was a source of continuing interest to the younger writers. A number of them
attempted careers that were a clear emulation of the example of Papadiamandopoulos;
Nicolas Episcopopoulos (born in 1874), and Epaminondas Deligeorges, for example,
who, with varying degrees of success—the first under the name of Nicolas Ségur—at-

647
tempted to make their furtunes in France; and also Miltiade Malacassis (1869-1943)
and Tellos Agras (1899-1944), both of them admirers and translators of the Stances,
whose poetic œuvre found one of its sources in Moréas.
Foreign influences were not, however, fortuitous; they interrupted developments
more properly Hellenic or Hellenized: a morbid post-Romanticism which appealed to
the exacerbated pessimism of the preceding generation (Paparrigopoulos, Vassiliadis,
Paraschos, etc.); a tradition of lyricism associated with popular music which found
resonance in musical aspirations and reference to myth, both proper to Symbolism;
a general development of literary life in the process of its being freed from linguistic
and prosodie imperatives. Not negligible, lastly, was the individual influence of the
poet whose personality dominated his age, Costas Palamas (1859-1943), who, without
actually being a Symbolist, nevertheless played, especially in The Eyes of My Soul
(1892), the role of the sponsor of young poets. They followed his example in using
"multiple-turn verse"—in other words, free verse, just as they learned from him to
associate in the warp of complex thought—obscure thought, as Palamas' earliest
detractors called it—both national tradition and Western contributions. Such a series
of convergences surely facilitated the timid infiltration of Symbolism into the Greek
literary continuum, while at the same time, it must be said, concealing its originality
and limiting its autonomous development. In fact, the European movement was repre­
sented in Greece by a small number of writers who, crushed by Palamas' personality
and conditioned by historical reasons and by the problems of neo-Hellenic literature,
assimilated Symbolism only insofar as it fit the natural national evolution; even the
least assimilable elements, such as the vagueness of the writing or the affected sweet­
ness of the tone, were taken over, and even exploited as desired—but remained external
to the essence of poetry and devoid of authenticity. This explains the astonishing dual­
ity that one discovers in certain writers between their writings of Hellenic inspiration
and those of a Symbolist hallmark. It is this we see in the case of Costas Hadzopoulos,
where it is difficult to decide where it is that he is really expressing himself; in his
social and realistic writings (Love in the Village, 1910; Castle on the Water's Edge, 1915)
and/or in his Symbolist writings.
The first group of resolutely Symbolist verse appeared in 1892 with the significant
title Sonatas, by the poet Stephanos Stephanou (1868-1944); in 1893 Gryparis publish­
ed a first version of European Symbolism in The Echo of Constantinople. Greece's cul­
tural diversity hardly promoted thus the collective awareness necessary to the de­
velopment of a literary school. Several years went by before the new current of
thought became widespread. There was no literary review in Greece such as the
Mercure de France to act as a quasi-exclusive mouthpiece. In this connection, however,
special credit must go to the ephemeral periodical Art (τέχνη) which, from November,
1898, to October, 1899, attempted to make known the most important works of Euro­
pean Symbolism in the form of translations. Art was less pragmatic that most con­
temporary Greek literary magazines, but more attentive to questions of esthetics and
language, manifesting a certain eclecticism in the choice of contributors who were to
embody Symbolist poetry, publishing P. Vassilikos (also known as Costas Hatzopoulos),
Gryparis, Cambyssis, etc. Dionysos (1901-1902), whose principal contributors were D.

648
Hatzopoulos, Costas Hatzopoulos' brother (1872-1936), who wrote under the pseud­
onym of ''Bohème", and J. Cambyssis, was a publication of Nietzschean inspiration;
Hegeso and Abritas (1904-1906) also deserve mention as examples of the disorderly
combatíveness of a generation that was more critical than truly constructive. Most
of the important literary periodicals of the time were, moreover, quite receptive;
either out of curiosity or through a network of personal relations, to forms of
literary expression which never had the polemical character in Greece that they
had elsewhere.
Among the poets, active around 1900, a number of names stand out. Jean Cam­
byssis (1872-1902) had spent some time in Germany as a student. He was dazzled by
his discoveries in the areas of philosophy, music, and poetry, and developed a rather
juvenile adoration for Wagner, Nietzsche, Hauptmann, and George. He wanted to
spread the message of his discoveries to his compatriots with all the conviction and
dogmatism of a neophyte. He might have played a determining role, but death prevent­
ed him from consolidating his thoughts and giving it expression. His work, which was
very confused and had barely begun (philosophical essays, Symbolist poetry, social
drama), are less noteworthy than the writer himself.
The career of Costas Hatzopoulos (1868-1920) is significant, as an illustration of
the vicissitudes of Symbolism in Greece. Poet of Agrinion and European at the same
time, he published two confusedly Symbolist collections of verse, Songs of Solitude and
Elegies and Idylls, in which he wanted (but did not always succeed) to appear a simple
and harmonious poet removed from.all romanticism and rhetoric. In fact, Symbolism in
Greece is always associated with elegiac and neo-romantic elements. After a stay in
Germany, Hatzopoulos became more involved with social problems, to the extent that
Symbolism only made sporadic appearances in his subsequent work. His novel Autumn
(1917) is considered by some critics as a masterpiece of Greek Symbolism, by others as
a good school exercise, the merit of which lies largely in its exceptionally beautiful
style: Hatzopoulos portrays troubled states of mind with a vaguely Nordic sensibility,
and refuses to take either the external world, or the structures of the mind, and the
forms of art into consideration. Autumn also heralds modern narrative techniques in
the Symbolist mode. The same quest for a world and a form of writing in the midst of
decomposition is the basic material of the two last groups of Hatzopoulos' verse, Simple
Modes and Evening Legends, published in 1920. For the most part, these are mere
impressionistic notations which do not always escape the banal, but they manage to
create a Symbolist atmosphere in which vagueness and suggestiveness prevail.
Two collections of poems by Lambros Porphyras (1879-1932), Shadow (1920) and
Musical Voices (1934), are also characterized by a chaste pursuit of nuances and by
a sense of melancholy halftones. Equally brief, the verse of Jean Gryparis is interesting
because it shows the hesitation of Greek poetry between Parnassian and Symbolist
influences. Scarabs and Terra-Cottas is a collection of poems (1919) which were, for the
most part, written between 1890 and 1900. Gryparis owes his taste for sonnets and his
attention to form as well as his erudition and coloration to the Parnassians, while his
connection with Symbolism is evidenced by his musicality, his melancholy lyricism,
and his erudite interlacing of themes borrowed from popular music. He is the perfect

649
representative of Hellenic eclecticism, which attempted to explicit common elements
and to extract the quintessence from "the very flavor of things".
The writing of Apostolos Melachrinos (1883-1952) may be compared to that of
Gryparis, whose work, in fact influenced him. Melachrinos was the director of the
periodical Life (1902) in Constantinople and was at the crossroads of various traditions
—Byzantine, ancient Greek, and popular music—to which was added a Parisian con­
temporaneity. He was a good craftsman rather than a true poet and represented a
Mallarméan tendency in Greek Symbolism without having succeeded in playing the
role of chef d'école which he would have liked to.
Miltiade Malacassis, on the contrary, stands apart from the great literary currents
of his time. He knew how to choose the best at the various points, and his work always
remained personal and authentic. He was an inspired poet whose inspiration was based
upon his everyday life, loves, and dreams. Apparently indifferent to technical prob­
lems, he quite naturally found a musical rhythm strictly his own. He was the first of
the generation of writers who preferred the poetry of smiling resignation and recon­
ciliation with reality to the torments of the Symbolist sensibility. Other poets tended
to withdraw more and more from the poetic enthisuasm of their first years; such was
the case of S. Stephanou and Sotiris Skipis (1879-1952), who, after being the active
director of Akritas, devoted a great deal of his time to the theatre and to criticism
The same was true of Costas Christomanos (1867-1911). His first book of verse, Orphic
Songs was in German; both this, and his Book of the Empress Elizabeth (1907) were of
Symbolist inspiration. He attempted to renew the theatre within the framework of
"The New Stage" (1901), and gave up poetry to devote himself almost exclusively to
a theatre that had little originality.
Between 1920 and 1930, however, a generation of poets appears to have discovered
that Symbolism was not only a literary school but was also rich in technical lessons.
Lack of confidence in oneself and in life ceased to be a literary theme for these poets.
The distant heritage of Romanticism as seen through Symbolist eyes—suicide (Caryo-
takis, 1896–1928; Lapathiotis, 1893-1943), tuberculosis (Marisa Polydouri, 1905-1930;
Zotos), mortal boredom (Tellos Agras), and the recourse to artificial paradises (Papani­
colaou, 1900–943) were for them realities which authenticated their literary testimony.
Doubtless, it would be arbitrary to classify this whole generation exclusively with
that of the fin de siècle, which had been tormented by the miasma of decadence, instead,
there were also other models that these poets sought to imitate (e.g., the Surrealists
and the "Lost Generation") nor were the historical circumstances likely to make for
happiness. But undoubtedly, their work is characterized by a half-hearted pessimism,
by a sense of decrepitude and failure, an aspiration to nothingness which made them
the heirs of Symbolism, and exaggeratedly so, like the heirs, fifty years earlier, of
Romanticism. For most of them, formal considerations were matters of secondary
importance; occasionally their language is purist and their verse is deliberately tradi­
tional.
It was as if there had been two "Symbolist generations" in Greece: the first one
approximately contemporary with European Symbolism, and especially interested in
what the latter could contribute in the way of formal renewal; and the second twenty

650
years later, which was closer in its inspiration and themes to the movement, but in
truth, derived far less from it than the former. It would be more precise to say, that,
in effect, Symbolism remained truly foreign to all the poets we have mentioned, all of
whom were of secondary importance, and the list of whom might have been much
longer. Their almost general indifference to doctrine, or, if one prefers, to the philosophy
of Symbolism, and their almost exclusive interest in that which constituted its external
manifestations - poetic form or shades of sensibility—is indicative, if not of total
incomprehension, at least of their inability to grapple with the true problems. Was this
not also the case in France, where Symbolism is to be found more in the direction of
Rimbaud and Mallarmé than in that of Dujardin, Samain, de Régnier and so many
other skillful craftsmen of verse ? Pursuing this analogy, we find that the leaven of
Symbolism came from the truly creative poets, and, in Greece as elsewhere, was fairly
independent of the School and its doctrinal commitments. When Angelos Sikelianos
(1884-1951), from the Visionary (1907) to Delphic Discourse (1927), discovers the
cosmic breath that joins words in a passionate union of man and the outer world, and
with words rhymed in verse to the very rhythm of Creation, gives expression to the myth
of man, he is a Symbolist poet. Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) was a Symbolist poet in
another vein; originally a poet of halftones, he escaped from the affected sweetness of the
instant to suggest—sometimes by virtue of the absence of things, sometimes by virtue of
their abundance—the eternity of space and time. Finally, Georges Seferis (1900-1971)
remains a Symbolist insofar as he adopts from Valéry the heritage of Mallarmé, and,
transcending the tragic fate of Hellenism as well as of himself, attains a pessimistic
and harmonious vision of the human dimension. They are three great poets whose
work, tone, and preoccupations differ profoundly. Without exactly belonging to the
Symbolist movement, they express the fecundity of the underlying idea of this poetic
revolution and the admirable aptitude of an authentic poet to transcend, by his own
creative impulse, the mediocre formal considerations to which poetry cannot be limited.
Did Symbolism exist in Greece? Though it is difficult, as we have observed, to
speak of Greek Symbolism and all that this expression would specifically indicate and
define, Symbolist echoes can be found in Greek poetry. The fundamental individualism
of the Greek nation is not conducive to the assimilation of any formula, and the literary
history of modern Greece constitutes, in this respect, an eternal renewal. Perhaps this
nonexclusive impregnation, the effects of which were positive when the poets were
able to avoid seeing Symbolism as a system, was best suited to the real significance of
Symbolism. For as Moréas himself wrote in 1885, before he got involved in futile aca­
demic quarrels: "Symbolism is not a figure of rhetoric; it is an extremely old artistic
concept; from the Bible to Baudelaire, all poetic works of any value are based on the
symbol".
Translated from the French by Edouard Roditi

651
 HASKELL M. BLOCK

ASPECTS OF SYMBOLIST POETRY

IN THE UNITED STATES

Despite the efforts of several literary critics and historians to define the Symbolist
tradition in the literature of the United States, 1 it would be difficult to contend for the
presence of a Symbolist school or a Symbolist movement in modern American poetry.
Even a Symbolist style occurs more in isolation than as the expression of a widespread
and common attitude and sensibility. Recent American poetry is marked by a variety
of descriptive, discursive, and rhetorical styles, generally close to the concreteness of
everyday reality, with little of the complex interiorization of experience, the sugges-
tiveness, musicality, and mysticism that we associate with the Symbolists. Indeed, the
broad lines of modern American poetry, from Robinson and Frost to Williams and his
followers, are in marked opposition to the Symbolist tradition. The claims of fact and
statement, of argument and exhortation, of the colloquial and conversational, have
made the more consciously literary style of Symbolist poetry an exception on the
American scene.
With this large qualification in mind, it may be of interest all the same to examine
some of the principal ways in which Symbolist poetics and poetry have found expression
in the United States. During the early 1890's such critics and reviewers as T. S.
Perry, Theodore Child, and Aline Gorren called the attention of readers of the leading
literary periodicals of the day to the latest developments in France. 2 Even earlier, the
American poet Stuart Merrill, while dividing his time between New York and Paris,
helped to make the writings of the French Symbolists better known. In 1887 and 1888,
Merrill contributed authoritative essays to New York newspapers on the French Sym­
bolist poets, their precursors and contemporaries. In 1890 he published a collection
of prose poems in translation entitled Pastels in Prose, including versions of Mallarmé's
Plainte d'automne and Frisson d'hiver. The volume also contained a perceptive intro­
ductory essay on the prose poem by William Dean Howells. Howells sought unsuccess-

1
See René Taupin, L'Influence du Symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine (de 1910 à
1920) (Paris, 1929); Harold Rosenberg, "French Silence and American Poetry", The Tradition
of the New (N. Y., 1959), pp. 87-95; Kenneth Rexroth, "The Influence of French Poetry on Ameri­
can", Assays (N. Y., 1961), pp. 143-174; Frederick J . Hoffman, "Symbolisme and Modern Poetry
in the United States", Comparative Literature Studies, 4 (1967), 193-199; Haskell M. Block, "The
Impact of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry", in Melvin J . Friedman and J o h n B .
Vickery (eds.), The Shaken Realist : Essays in Modern Literature in Honor of Frederick J. Hoffman
(Baton Rouge, 1970), pp. 165-217. Also see F . O. Matthiessen, "American Poetry, 1920-40",
Sewanee Review 55 (1947), pp. 24-55.
2
See Bruce A. Morrissette, "Early English and American Critics of French Symbolism",
Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley (St. Louis, 1942), p p . 159-180.

653
fully to persuade Merrill not to return to France in 1892 but to remain in the United
States and make his career as an American poet. 3 In that year, Merrill left his native
country never again to return. Despite his importance as a literary intermediary be­
tween France and the United States, his work must be considered as a part of French
rather than American literature.
It should be recognized that Stuart Merrill's role in making Americans aware of
the resources and values of French Symbolism was not inconsiderable. His relation­
ship to the editors and publishers of the Chicago literary magazine, The Chap-Book,
is of special importance as part of the early history of Symbolism in the United States.
The Chap-Book was founded by two young Harvard undergraduates, Herbert Stone
and Hannibal Kimball, who formed the Chicago publishing house of Stone and Kimball
in 1893.4 From the very beginning, the magazine was cosmopolitan in orientation,
including contributors from France and England as well as from the United States.
The French influence reflected the interests of the assistant editor, Harrison Rhodes,
who travelled to France in 1893 and, through the mediation of Stuart Merrill, met
Verlaine and Mallarmé.5 Early issues of The Chap-Book presented both texts and trans­
lations of Verlaine, and several of Mallarmé's letters in quatrains were published for
the first time in French in the issue for December 15, 1894. The following year The
Chap-Book published a partial and somewhat elaborate translation of Hérodiade by
Richard Hovey, who was also to translate and popularize the plays of Maeterlinck.
Mallarmé's essay, "Arthur Rimbaud," was first published in the issue of the Chicago
magazine for May 15, 1896. All through the pages of The Chap-Book there is a deep
and sustained interest in the work of Mallarmé and his contemporaries. This interest
was also expressed in the books published by Kimball and Stone,6 whose titles included
translations of Verlaine and Maeterlinck. The announcement of books to be published
in 1894 called attention to a volume, Poems of the Symbolists, by Stuart Merrill. Merrill
actually completed the translations but did not write the introduction, and the project
was never brought to fruition. The manuscript, still unpublished, includes poems by
Verlaine, Mallarmé, Régnier, Vielé-Griffin, Laforgue, Maeterlinck, and others.7 It is
tempting to speculate on what the impact of Symbolism in the United States might
have been had Merrill completed his task, for no one was better qualified to introduce
the best of French Symbolist poetry to American readers.
There were, of course, other avenues for the popularization of Symbolism in the
United States at the turn of the century. Vance Thompson's journalistic essays on the
Symbolists—lifted, in large part, as Bruce Morrissette has shown, from Wyzéwa's Nos
maîtres—were published in periodical form in 1895 and collected in French Portraits
in 1900. The visit of Henri de Régnier to Boston and New York in 1900 also aroused
attention, and his impact on young university students must have been considerable.

3
Marjorie Louise Henry, Stuart Merrill (Paris, 1927), p . 86.
4
See Sidney Kramer, A History of Stone and Kimball and Herbert S. Stone and Co. (Chicago,
1940).5
6
Ibid., p . 32.
The importance of The Chap-Book has been pointed out by Taupin, pp. 32-35. Also see
Henry7 Regnery, "The Chap-Book", Chicago History, 4 (Summer 1975), p p . 87-95.
For discussion of the manuscript, see Henry, p . 230.

654
We may see reflections of Symbolist style in the poems of Trumbull Stickney, Walter
Conrad Arensberg, and the young Wallace Stevens, all of whom were in residence at
Harvard University at the end of the 1890's. Then as now, Harvard functioned as a
center of literary cosmopolitanism where young and aspiring American writers could
become aware of the dominant European tendencies of the day. This awareness was
to be of special importance in the later career of Wallace Stevens.
If it is now commonplace to date the beginnings of modern American poetry from
the founding of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in Chicago in 1912, we should not forget
that many of the truly gifted poets of the decades 1890-1910 died young, cut off be­
tween promise and fulfillment. Moreover, the Symbolist elements in the work of the
turn of the century poets were often derivative, lacking in the personal assimilation of
Symbolist values. Modernist styles of poetry, beginning with Ezra Pound's program­
matic campaign on behalf of Imagism, seemed superficially to break with Symbolist
notions of musicality, as in Pound's insistence on composition "in sequence of the
musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome". 8 It may be suggested in passing that
Pound's early poetry with its sculptured and static sense of form presents affinities
with the art of French Symbolists, but Pound's emphasis on concreteness and con­
centration is at sharp variance with the Symbolist preoccupation with vagueness and
suggestiveness. The early critical statements and poems of William Carlos Williams
reveal an even more pronounced antagonism towards the Symbolists, and may
reflect attitudes of some of the avant-garde poets in France during the years of the First
World War.
If Symbolism seemed unduly ethereal and remote to the modernist American
poets, Imagism tended to reduce itself to a fragmentation of both language and ex­
perience and to an obsessive concentration on stark and arresting figures, striking
in themselves, but without any larger function or relation. The Symbolists at their best
viewed poetry as an act of intellectual construction in which abstract thought invested
human events with deep philosophical import. This dimension is noticeably absent
in the art of those Imagists closest to the Symbolist tradition, such as John Gould
Fletcher or Amy Lowell. Amy Lowell's Boston lectures of 1915, Six French Poets,
helped to enhance the appreciation of some of Mallarmé's younger contemporaries or
followers, but had no larger impact. To the extent that French examples served to
shape poetic style in the United States in the 1920's, one must look instead to the work
of Rimbaud and Laforgue; but Rimbaud cannot be fairly claimed as a Symbolist poet,
and Laforgue's ironic and conversational style, drawn upon imaginatively by such
poets as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, represents the farthest removal
from Symbolism in Laforgue's art.
It may be contended that the primary impact of Symbolism on American poetry
in the years between the two great wars lies in the area of poetic theory rather than
poetry. It could be readily shown that the reflections on poetry of T. S. Eliot, early
and late, are replete with broad similarities to Symbolist poetics. Eliot's impersonal
theory of poetry, his sharp separation of poetry and prose, his distrust of inspiration,
his view of the music of poetry as inherent in the structure of a poem, all point to a
8
Cited in Stanley K. Coffman, Jr., Imagism (Norman, 1951), p . 9.

666
close relationship to Paul Valéry. Unmistakably, both Eliot a n d Valéry reflect
a common Symbolist heritage in their poetics and poetry. Eliot's poetry is a t once so
eclectic and personal as to defy easy categorization, b u t his last major composition,
Four Quartets, is essentially a Symbolist poem, not only in its style, but in t h e t h e o r y
of the language of poetry which the poem itself asserts. The complex orchestration of
themes and images in Eliot's elaborate musicalization of religious experience is a noble
tribute to the force of the Symbolist example.
I t must be recognized t h a t the values of abstraction, construction, musicality,
suggestiveness, a n d spirituality were derived by the French Symbolists in p a r t from
the precept and example of Edgar Allan Poe. The assertion of Symbolist elements in
modern American poetry is often a restatement of the vitality of Poe for twentieth
century American poets. The influence of Poe is, fittingly, often conjoined with t h a t
of Baudelaire, particularly on Southern poets such as Allen Tate and J o h n Peale
Bishop, who wrote with a full sense of the role of Baudelaire's doctrine of correspon­
dences as a source of the fluidity and liveliness of metaphor. In both his poetry a n d
criticism, Tate invoked Baudelaire's correspondent vision, not only for the spiritualiza-
tion of material reality, but for its encouragement of synesthetic metaphor and t h e
interplay of resources of seemingly disparate poetic genres. I n his essay on J o h n Peale
Bishop, Tate calls special attention to the efforts of the Symbolists " t o push t h e borders
of one sense over into another". 9 One of Tate's early poems is a version of Baudelaire's
Correspondances, published in The Fugitive in December 1924. Even American poets
who knew little or no French and were relatively unfamiliar with Baudelaire or Mallar­
mé, such as H a r t Crane, assimilated the poetics of correspondences and m a d e bold
enlargements of the planes of poetic language and experience. This sense of experimenta­
tion and adventure is surely one of the enduring contributions of Symbolism t o modern
American poetry.
The philosophical themes of Symbolist poetry, especially the conflicting claims
of solipsism and experience of the world, are mirrored in the best poems of T a t e a n d
Bishop, such as Tate's Ode to the Confederate Dead or Bishop's Narcissus. B o t h poems
dramatize the inability of the mind to break out of its self-imposed prison a n d t h e
anguish consequent on the mind's awareness of its own limits. The similarity in theme
and imagery to such Narcissus poems as Hérodiade or Le Cimetière marin is unmistak­
able. Verbal parallels and echos could be found in other poems as well as in poetic
theory. Neither Tate nor Bishop has had a large impact on the course of more recent
American poetry, but their best poetry is a generous tribute to the Symbolist example.
The foremost American symbolist poet in the universal sense of the t e r m is un­
questionably Wallace Stevens. 10 Stevens' relationship to the Symbolist tradition is a
many-sided and intriguing subject, and the fascination it offers dramatizes Stevens'
powerful originality and the strong individuality of his poetic voice. "While, of course,
I come down from the past", he remarked in a letter of 1953, " t h e past is m y own". 1 1
Stevens at once embraces and transcends the traditions shaping his art.
9
Allen Tate, The Man of Letters in the Modem World (N. Y., 1955), p . 275.
10
See Michel Benamou, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton, 1972).
11
Wallace Stevens, Letters (New York, 1966), p . 792.

656
 Stevens has been described as a poet who wrote French poetry in English, but
quips of this sort are less than half-truths. The young Stevens was attracted first of all
to the Elizabethans and the English Romantics, but from the time of his studies at
Harvard, he came to have considerable familiarity with French Symbolist poetry,
notably with Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Laforgue, and Valéry, as well as lesser
Symbolistes. As a mature poet, Stevens protested against too exclusive an attachment
of his work to that of Mallarmé,12 insisting that Mallarmé was but one of the many
forces shaping his development. Robert Buttel has called attention to the role of Ver­
laine in directing the young Stevens to a poetry of indirection, wistful melancholy, and
a longing for idealized beauty. 13 Stevens moved away from his early languorous idiom,
exploiting the verve and energy of a correspondent vision accompanied by a fondness
for strong and bizarre metaphor and a spirited sense of humor. Increasingly, Stevens'
later poems came to embody complex philosophical assertions in a rich interplay of
abstract and concrete language. It is in his mature poetic theory and his late philosophi­
cal poems that Stevens' essential kinship with the Symbolists is to be found.
Stevens' most elaborate formulations of poetic theory are contained in the essays
that constitute the collection, The Necessary Angel (1951). The volume is subtitled
"Essays on Reality and the Imagination," the two terms at the center of Stevens'
poetic thought. Poetry, he insists, must be grounded in reality; it is the pressure of
reality that provides the imagination with its motive power. Reality and Imagination
are not opposites in Stevens' thought, but interact in a dialectical relationship. The
imagination is perforce present in the realm of objective fact, just as the real persists
in and through the imagination. Poetry, he insists, is the imagination of life, the fusion
of reality and imagination by means of language. Words for Stevens are themselves
charged with dynamic potency, capable of endless metamorphosis. Metaphor, he in­
sists, "has its aspect of the ideal". Clearly, Stevens' theory is less mystical, more closely
rooted in concrete and tangible reality, than what we may find in the Symbolists,
but his definition of poetry as "a transcendent analogue" is a direct expression of the
poetics of correspondences and has the same consequences for poetic language and
style for Stevens as for his French predecessors.
Stevens' late long poems are philosophical meditations marked by a relentless,
often harsh and painful interrogation of reality. These are poems of anxiety and tension,
reflecting the intensity of the poet's inner life, his effort to explore and harmonize
the worlds of sensory experience and the mind. The dominance of abstract thought,
the exteriorization of the poet's mind as a theatre of the intellect, the pursuit of poetry
as itself part of a great poem, the equation finally of poetry and reality, all are restate­
ments of Symbolist thought and expression. The triumph of Stevens' achievement is
to be found in such compelling meditations as The Man with the Blue Guitar, Esthétique
du Mal, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.
The ceaseless examination in these late poems of the interplay of appearance and reality,

12
13
I b i d . , p . 391.
See Robert Buttel, Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium (Princeton, 1967),
pp. 56-64.

42 Balakian 657
the interrelationships of being and seeming, of the imagined and the real, is central
to Symbolist poetry and serves to dramatize Stevens' place as part of the Symbolist
tradition. To the extent that we may speak of a Symbolist poetry in the United States,
Stevens is its fullest and truest embodiment.
In his influential study, Axel's Castle (1931), Edmund Wilson argued that the
Symbolist movement represents a final and complete stage of a literary evolution which
is now finished.14 In retrospect, we can readily see that Wilson's conclusion was in­
correct. The Symbolist tradition has continued to assert its vitality in American poetry.
Even poets markedly different in spirit from the Symbolists are often familiar with
the resources of Symbolist art and employ Symbolist devices and techniques without
any awareness of a conscious affiliation. The Symbolists continue to serve young Ameri­
can poets as a point of departure, and even when these poets rebel against the Sym­
bolists in the name of a more apocalyptic or revolutionary poetics, they often draw
strength from what they reject as well as from what they assert. Paradoxically, in
seeking to delimit the claims of the Symbolists, Edmund Wilson restated their impor­
tance. The contribution of American poetry to the Symbolist movement may not be
great in its number of poets of the very first rank, yet without the Symbolist tradition
American poetry would assuredly be far poorer than it is today.

14
See Sherman Paul, Edmund Wuson (Urbana, 1965), p . 78.

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 PART VIII
SYMBOLISM IN OTHER CONTEXTS
 LEON EDEL

SYMBOLIC STATEMENT: A PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW

The Symbolist movement, as is known, anticipated by a number of years the studies

in dream symbolism of Sigmund Freud and the profound penetration of symbolic
thought and theory by the psychoanalytical movement.
Freud, in his book on dreams (1900), showed us that a dream seems to engage the
same process and the same mysterious faculties as symbolism in poetry although it
does not make poets of all men. The essential difference resides in the involuntary char­
acter of dreaming; and the wellsprings of the dream have only been partially explored
in recent dream experiments. Dreams are not consciously planned by dreamers as are
poems. And Freud's explorations of the relations of art to daydream could only be,
for all their brilliance, tentative. The poem, springing from its unfathomed depths, is
shaped and formed in a more conscious way. But what is important for our understand­
ing of Symbolism is the idea that the dream is nearly always made up not only of
symbols of a highly personal kind but is, in its totality, a "symbolic statement". I t is a
record in symbol language, often elaborately distorted, of various states of feeling in
the dreamer. In other words, symbolism—any discussion of it—must move beyond
the mere symbol: the cliff that is seen as a phallus; the snow that reminds Westerners of
death because it "buries" and covers; the decay and death that reside in the iridescence
of Venice (as Mann or James saw in Death in Venice and The Wings of the Dove).
That is one kind of symbolic thinking, one kind of symbolic theory, and it has
dominated our modern critical approach to poetry and fiction. However, the idea of
total "symbolic statement" is less understood, although it has been before us not only
in the work of Freud but in Edmund Wilson's early exposition of the Symbolist mo­
vement, his study of certain moderns in AxeVs Castle.
To offer an immediate example, it could be said that James Joyce's novel A Por­
trait of the Artist as a Young Man (his least redundant and obsessive-compulsive work),
his most finished and satisfactory work of art, is total symbolic statement. Its early
pages give us the language and the development of the sensory world of the would-be
artist in childhood; its second portion, by its linguistic virtuosity, tells us of the ex­
posure of the adolescent's senses to the world; later we see these senses, under the stress
of a religious crisis, and the impregnation of religious thought with perceptual feeling;
and finally, the novel gives us the intellectual development of the potential artist
(there is no evidence that he really became an artist), part of this is devoted to a dis­
cussion of esthetics, in which symbolism and the idea of symbolism figure in a large way.
The entire novel is addressed, not to a narrative of externality, as in traditional fiction,

661
but to the representation—through a series of symbolic statements—of conditions of
consciousness, until a total growth and development has been rendered by the language
of evocation, by the color and feeling of words, and so arranged as to constitute a ''por­
trait" of a young man who believes himself destined for art. The novel is very close to
the condition of poetry; it is also an integral Symbolist novel, a total Symbolist state­
ment.
Thoreau called poetry a piece of "Very private history" which "unostentatiously
lets us into the secret of a man's life". That piece of private history is, in the end, a
symbolic statement of a part of—the secret of—a man's life. We might go beyond
this to say that it is an attempt by the poet to tell us a parable about himself. Is it not
true that what we have is expression, and what is expressed is something tissued out of
the innermost being of the poet, and therefore symbolic of that poet ? Tissued in that
complex and condensed way in which our dreams come to us, with their seeming
strangeness and distortion, and sometimes their mockery of meaning? Dreams, too,
are parables, as the ancients knew, for the language of dreams spoke to them out of
primitive depths from which they were less distanced than we are.
Today, if we would speak of the literary imagination, we must recognize the role
of night-dream and day-dream, that is, of symbolic statement; if we would speak of
the content of a literary work, we would need to recognize in it even more profound
depths of symbolism than we have believed.
George du Maurier, in his strange novel about ''dreaming true", Peter Ibbetson
(1895), wrote that "evidently our brain contains something akin both to a photo­
graphic plate and a phonographic cylinder, and many other things of the same kind not
yet discovered: not a sight or a sound or a smell is lost; not a taste or a feeling or an
emotion. Unconscious memory records them all, without our even heeding what goes
on around us beyond the things that attract our immediate interest or attention".
Psychology—and neurosurgery—long ago established the truth of this, a truth which
Proust discovered for himself and incorporated in his great novel.

II
Within a tradition, within the verbal system, the strange images and shapes, all
symbolic, the verbal formulations, can become a symbolic structure of some unknown
state of being or feeling in the artist. Without that state of being or feeling there would
be no impulse to write. The impulse is some condition of disequilibrium, some tension
or field of force in the physical system which takes this kind of outlet, which, in the
verbally sensitive individual, is shaped in language as, in a more subjective way, it can
take musical form or be molded in plastic and tactile materials. The reader is aware of
a process but can gain only occasional glimpses into it. These, moreover, are glimpses
which might be called biographical, for the reader is watching a specific imagination in
action.
Of what use is this to the practitioner of literary psychology, even when he accepts,
as axiom, that everything a writer sets down is a symbolic expression of some deep
state of his being; that every choice made represents a specific choice of the unconscious

662
and not an accidental one—although it may never be clear why a poet used one word
instead of another, or chose one image rather than another, or devised one of the many
kinds of similes or metaphors open to him. What can be known—and can be studied—
when we make ourselves alert in this fashion, is the dream pattern, the dream context.
This leads to the ''symbolic statement" of a work: the statement which contains within
it certain emotions, certain states of being, and reveals, in this way, the extraordinary
capacity artists possess (we all possess this capacity in varying degrees, but only the
artist knows how to use it) of finding ways to conjure up the unknown within them.
How difficult it is to describe or speak of the unconscious ! We cannot smell it,
touch it, or see it. It has no shape. It is not a soul or spirit within us. It appears to us, in
dream, as if it were the shadow of an object we cannot see. It is in our nerve ends and
our brain cells. It resides in our muscles, it is composed of invisible learned things which
are called up when a memory-inducing sense goes into play. An elementary illustration
might be that given by Sully in his Studies of Childhood. He describes a child seeing
pansies and then later butterflies. In a foreshadowing of poetic expression the child
exclaimed: "The pansies are flying". The flying butterfly shape retrieved out of that
child's memory the shape of the pansies, seen earlier, and the two were merged in his
imagination. This is the simplest kind of example. One has only to read some of Freud's
dream analyses to see how much experience we can condense and how remarkable our
faculty is for associating like with like, using experience in depth, and thus finding
symbols for that experience.

III
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a model illustration of Symbolic statement.
The critics of Conrad have dissected it and biographers have related it to the story­
teller's own trip to the Congo. He wrote the story out of actual experience. He made such
a trip, made it into the depths of Africa, and he could have written the story as a jour­
nalist might, as an adventure. Heart of Darkness—in the story Conrad also speaks of
"Darkness of Heart". What can be the heart of darkness? It is like saying "the black­
ness of black". There was the "Heart of Darkness" when Dante journeyed deeper and
deeper in the Inferno until he came to the sea of ice and the figure of Satan. But in
such a speculation, he was dealing with mythic elements: the night journey, the journey,
also, into the self. The power of Conrad's tale, which catches the imagination and which
always offers something new, resides not in the mere recital of the events of how Mar­
lowe travelled up that river and finally found the satanic Kurtz. It is the way in which
Conrad invested his story with the dreamwork of his own imagination, redreaming
again and again the essential statement of the story. The tale, as Albert Guerard has
said, is "an angry document on absurd and brutal exploitation", a document on death
and trade, trade and death, and on the hypocrisy of those who claim to be carrying the
banner of civilization into the depths of the jungle when they are only trying to bring out
of those dark depths ivory and other riches. The illustration of symbolic statement can
be made by fixing upon three or four sentences or paragraphs which are tucked away in
this story and which, on first reading, one simply absorbs without necessarily relating

663
their substance to the essential statement. Yet these contain within them, in a highly
condensed form, the very essence of the story. There is for instance, Marlowe's first
glimpse of Africa. He observes a little incident, nothing much in those parts and at that
time, an ancient bit of the history of conquest:
Once, I remember, (the narrator says) we came upon a man of war anchored
off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush.
It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign
dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over
the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying
her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was,
incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns;
a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white would disappear, a tiny pro­
jectile would give a feeble screech — and nothing happened. Nothing could happen.
There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding; a sense of lugubrious drollery in
the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly
there was a camp of natives—he called them enmies !—hidden out of sight
somewhere.

That is the first picture chosen. It has, indeed, a touch ot insanity in it. A big
warship firing guns—into a continent. No visible target. An unseen camp, enemies,
who knows? Something hidden out of sight. And this ship, which seems so tiny in the
cosmos—an immensity of earth, sky, water—pumping little projectiles into the bush.
Here is another example. The narrator is in the trading station:

Then I noticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped

and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre—almost
black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight
on the face was sinister.

Marlowe is told that the painting was the work of Mr. Kurtz. The third example
is as follows: Marlowe comes on a hut in the jungle:

A torn curtain of red twill hung in the doorway of the hut, and flapped sadly in
our faces. The dwelling was dismantled; but we could see a white man had lived
there not long ago. There remained a rude table—a plank on two posts; a heap of
rubbish reposed in a dark corner, and by the door I picked up a book. It had lost
its covers, and the pages had bean thumbed into a state of extremely dirty soft­
ness; but the back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread,
which looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find. Its title was An Inquiry
into Some Points of Seamanship, by a man, Towser, Towson—some such n a m e -
Master in His Majesty's navy. The matter looked dreary reading enough, with
illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures, and the copy was sixty
years old. I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness,
lest it should dissolve in my hands. Not a very enthralling book; but at the
first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for
the right way of going to work.

These are three very small items, three pictures or images, which illustrate the
stuff of sleep and dream. Conrad himself speaks of dream and nightmare. After describ-

664
ing that warship pumping shells into a continent, Marlowe remarks that the entire
journey up that river in the Congo "was like a weary pilgrimage among hints for night­
mares".
Hints for nightmares! And in another passage, as he recalls the phantasmagoria of
his journey, that strange tenebrous crawl toward the goal far inland, he says:

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because

no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of ab­
surdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion
of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams. No, it is
impossible, it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's
existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating
essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone . . .

Dreams—those little flashes from within that still, in their insistent way, throb-
bingly and luminously assume the shape of a picture, a scene, an action. The warship
pumping shells into a continent. Conrad may have seen such a ship—and at such a
moment—approaching the shores of Africa. And with his large imagination he saw,
not just the shoreline and the surf and the heaving swell, but observed that ship as if he
were looking at a map, a panorama and a ship made tiny by the great land mass beside
which it was anchored. Instead of those large and lethal shells bursting in the bush
around and within some target, he saw them in the panorama as if they were peas or
tiny projectiles out of long six-inch guns. It is the language and the meaning of that
language that must be examined. The empty immensity of earth, sky, and water. In
those terms, this warship, so large and ominous, so capable of dealing death, came from
the faraway country, from France, from the lands of civilization, to place itself in the
greasy, slimy swell, with its thin masts swaying, firing guns "into a continent". In­
comprehensible, there she was. And he adds: "There was a touch of insanity in the
proceeding, a lugubrious drollery". His imagination has thus transformed this suddenly
imaged scene, this premonition of his own journey into a continent, a journey which he
had earlier described as "a journey to the centre of a continent", to "the centre of the
earth". Here is a remarkable symbolic statement: the guns are being fired into the heart
of darkness; the vessel, which is made to seem like a toy, is throwing its shells into a
target so vast that the act is meaningless; it is irrational, it has a touch of insanity to it.
There is a little screeching noise. Then the silence of the jungle. The heart of darkness
swallows up the shells. The little scene holds in it the central meaning of Conrad's
entire story.
With this key, what can be said of the second image—Kurtz's painting of a woman,
draped and blindfolded, carrying a torch? The background is sombre, almost black.
The effect of the torchlight on the face is sinister. Yet once again the statement is sym­
bolic. Kurtz, the intelligent and accomplished administrator, has no illusions about
what he is doing. His painting seems to attach itself to the figure of Justice, blindfolded
and holding the scales, which is seen in front of so many of the courthouses of the world.
Justice is blind; that is, it is impartial. It holds balancing scales, without looking.
But Kurtz has changed the traditional picture. He has removed the scales. He has put

665
a flaming torch into the hand of the blindfolded woman. He has given her a light by
which she can walk in the darkness. Only he lets the darkness remain—she is blind­
folded. She cannot see. She will not know where to carry that livid flame into the heart
of the darkness. She is as irrational in her proceeding as the warship. She, too, encases
the meaning of the story Conrad is writing. He redreams in this painting, or Kurtz has
redreamed, the motivating emotion of the entire tale. The civilized countries are going
blindfolded into the Congo. They can never see what they are doing. And they will
blunder; they will not reach their destination.
Elsewhere in the story, there is a reiteration of this point. "Imagine a blindfolded
man set to drive a van over a bad road". The imagery is obsessive; it tells the reader,
in a hundred different and reimagined figments of dream, the same story, the same thing:
what hypocrites are they who pretend to take light into darkness when their object is
really empire and loot.
And so to the third picture—the hut, in the jungle, where a white man has lived.
Later that man, too, will fill out the picture, this man who knew Kurtz and looks like
a harlequin because he has patched his clothes with rags of many colors. The reason for
his coming into this phantasmagoria and the meaning behind the colors and the harle­
quin costume can be deferred for the moment. The focus instead is on one item, the
book that he left behind in his hut, Towson's sixty-year-old book, an inquiry into some
points of seamanship. Conrad still cannot let his central image alone. When the narrator
meets the man in motley and learns that he was the inhabitant of that hut, he restores
the book on navigation to him, and the man, who is a polyglot Russian, says "the only
book I Lad left and I thought I had lost i t . . . So many accidents happen to a man going
about alone, you know". The symbolic statement of this episode becomes obvious.
Conrad had all the world's libraries to choose from; he could have given the man a book
of travel into Africa, a detective story, a Bible—but no, he endows him with what?
A book on navigation. A book on navigation—in the heart of darkness ! This fits pre­
cisely the picture of the general madness painted by Conrad. To carry a book on navi­
gation into a jungle is the equivalent of blindfolding yourself and carrying a torch to
show yourself the way in the darkness; it is the equivalent of firing shells into a conti­
nent. Later on, Conrad will underline this meaning for us. His narrator will notice
Towson's book sticking out of the pocket of the harlequin and remark to himself; "He
seemed to think himself excellently equipped for a renewed encounter with the wilder­
ness". Warship, torch, book of navigation—and a man whose clothes look like a map,
who speaks various languages, and who carries a book of navigation in the jungle.
Who is this harlequin? Conrad may have had many meanings for him. He evokes the
description, early in the story, of the way the narrator looked at maps; and here in
Africa, in the Congo, are the emissaries of these mapped countries, these civilized beings
either resisting or capitulating to the wilderness—and if they capitulate, as Kurtz did,
it is only to give some terrible twist to theirviolence, like shooting shells into a continent;
or the various passengers on the ship, ironically dubbed "Pilgrims", who are trigger
happy and fire their guns at anything that seems to move in the thick jungle when a
simple screech of the steamboat's whistle will frighten the savages away more effectively
than any gun. Civilization surrendering to savagery is more savage than simple savage-

666
ry. That is one of the things Conrad is saying in his picture of the irrationality of t h e
entire proceeding. A civilized man should know better than to surrender to his primor­
dial violence. One expects a savage to be savage; t h a t is where he is at in the scale of
evolution. B u t there they are, the countries of Europe, in the heart of darkness-—trade
and death, death and trade ! And it is all pieced together in the creative imagination
out of images and pictures, reality endowed with symbolic depth, and into continuous
obsessive symbolic statement — as in our dreams.
The narrator, Marlowe, is more than merely Europe in Africa, or an individual
making a journey into the depths of himself, attracted by the figure of evil, K u r t z , who,
in some way, is the secret sharer of his own depths of evil. He is also eternal man quest­
ing in the jungle of life or making his way through the heart of darkness—which is his
life journey, in which there are also the unknowns, the traps, the strange encounters,
the phantasms of an occult world, the figments of dream and nightmare. Conrad's
Heart of Darkness can be compared to Henry J a m e s ' story The Beast in the Jungle—a
story dealing with an entirely different theme in which, however, the symbolism of
darkness, of man stalked by beasts, of the terrors of the unknown, are implicit in the
very title; and also the erroneous assumptions which man makes in undertaking these
journeys. Like Marlowe, Marcher in James' story is also, in effect, blindfolded as he
waits, believing the beast will spring at any time in the dark depths in which he finds
himself.
And so in art, Coleridge's "stuff of sleep and d r e a m s " is molded b y the artist, with
reason, discipline, tradition, into his medium—in this case —his capacity for symbolic
statement. Literary psychology can fix upon the symbolic statement and, in essence, does
what all competent critics do in the close analysis of the texture of a work; b u t psychol­
ogy helps the critic avoid the terrible pitfalls of his own subjectivity. By its insistence
upon the continuity and relatedness of the fragments, by their total relevance, however
bizarre, literary psychology keeps the critic from projecting into the work his own sym­
bols, his own imaginings. To do this he must look closely at his text; but he must look
beyond it too, be sufficiently scholarly to recognize the context of life out of which the
particular fantasy, dream, or tale has originated: not only to recreate an actual t r i p to t h e
Congo which Conrad made, but to decide whether the interpretation accords with the
central modes of imagining of the artist himself. This can be done not only by research
into the biography the author, but also by an attempt at consistency in one's reading
of Heart of Darkness with all the other of Conrad's writings. Literary psychology takes
as axiom the fact t h a t all of the works of a writer are a continuous and developed par­
able, a symbolic statement and restatement of certain fundamental problems, t r u t h s ,
beliefs, and myths residing within the artist himself.
Critics have, for instance, seen the element of the secret sharer in Heart of Darkness]
Conrad's story The Secret Sharer is, in a sense, a retelling of the story of Marlowe a n d
Kurtz. And in its largest statement, we might conclude from our practice of literary
psychology, the ally of literary symbolism, t h a t the nature of Conrad's heroes, their
journeys, their sense of being trapped by circumstances not of their own making—as
in Under Western Eyes—their unremitting search to get at the darkness within them­
selves, is all of a pattern, a tapestry.

667
 Thinking in terms of symbolic statement enables us to see a deeper significance in
literary things we have hitherto taken for granted. Earlier readers would simply have
considered it an odd whim t h a t the man in motley is carrying a book of navigation
in t h e jungle. And they might have said—well, Conrad gave him t h a t book because
he was himself a navigator. Our criticism abounds in this kind of obvious interpretation.
Conrad may have given the man in motley the book b y Towson, b u t Conrad also
knew only too well t h a t a book of navigation is hardly a useful book in any jungle. And
if he chose this book because he had been a seaman, he chose it nevertheless for quite
another purpose as well, which is underlined again and again in the text. I t illustrates
the insanity in the proceedings he describes, it is a p a r t of the reiterated statement, it
becomes a portentous symbol.
Stuff of sleep a n d dreams. That stuff has been a part of the heritage of all men and
all races. And t h e mystery of the unconscious, the mystery and rationality and improb­
ability of dream, has fascinated artists from the earliest times—for they have seen in
the strange and extraordinary telescopings of images and of time and space a kind of
wonderland, a landscape of fable, a landscape of symbol and myth. T h a t landscape in
our time has been t h e subject of direct exploration in the movement which called itself
surrealist. B u t this would lead us into a still deeper area of symbolic statement—into
''discontinuity'' a n d "fragmentation". I t is a subject for another essay t h a t might be
written on t h e mysteries of man's extraordinary faculty—his ability to create and use
symbols.

668
 E M I R RODRÍGUEZ MONEGAL

D A R Í O AND RODÓ:
T W O V E R S I O N S O F T H E SYMBOLIST D R E A M
I N SPANISH AMERICAN L E T T E R S

Of all the versions of the Symbolist dream offered by Spanish American literature a t t h e
turn of the century, none was more beautiful and persuasive t h a n the two produced b y
the Nicaraguan poet R u b é n Darío, and the Uruguayan essayist, José Enrique R o d ó .
Their work was decisive in shaping Spanish American "modernismo" and in making
its poetics into a coherent body to be followed b y the Hispanic writers. Darío and R o d ó
were both deeply embedded in French literature and had been influenced b y Symbolist
writings since the early stages of their careers. They were b o t h men of letters in t h e
French sense of the word and had developed the most important p a r t of their careers
respectively in Buenos Aires and Montevideo: the most cosmopolitan capitals of South
America a t the time. 1 For a short period, they were also friends and worked towards
a common goal. B u t their visions of the world were to come apart and become so dif­
ferent t h a t until quite recently they seemed irreconcilable. Many critics used t o place
them at opposite poles. 2 B u t now, the common origin of their écritures and their de­
pendence on the same ideological and poetical models have become evident. Their
contrasted versions of the Spanish American dream, of ''Cosmópolis'' and of "Ariel's'
Island", had one consistent link: the poetical code called Symbolism.
Rubén Darío was born in Nicaragua in 1867. B y 1888, he had moved South a n d
published in Valparaíso, Chile, a slim volume of prose and verse, Azul..., in which
the styles of Romanticism and of Parnasse, of Hugo and Gautier, were curiously a n d
unsatisfactorily blended. Eight years later, he had left Chile and was in Buenos Aires,
publishing simultaneously two decisive books: one of poems, paradoxically called Prosas
profanas, and placed under the aegis of Verlaine's sensual music and imagery; a n d one
of critical articles, Los raros, in which he collected articles on modern writers such as
Poe and Verlaine, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Léon Bloy, J e a n Moréas and Lautréamont,
Max Nordau and Ibsen, Martí and Eugenio de Castro. Many of these articles h a d been
especially written for one of the largest Spanish-speaking newspapers in the world,
La Nación, published in Buenos Aires b y the influential Mitre family. The literary pages
of La Nación published original articles and stories and poems b y the most famous
writers in Europe; the Cuban José Martí, while living in New York and conspiring t o
free his native country from the Spanish rule, wrote regulary for La Nación.

1
Cf. Max Henríquez Ureña, Breve historia del modernismo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Eco­
nómica,
2
1954), pp. 170-276. *
Cf. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, José E. Rodó en el Novecientos (Montevideo: Número, 1950).

669
 Buenos Aires was already the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world, and it
was truly cosmopolitan in spirit. The importance the Symbolists attached to the con­
cept of "Cosmopolis" is well known. Tn her critical appraisal of The Symbolist Movement-,
Anna Balakian has this to say about the cosmopolitan nature of the writers who partic­
ipated in that movement: "It was one of the closest intellectual alliances in European
history, marked by a cosmopolitanism totally devoid of self-consciousness or political
intent". 3 A few pages later, and in talking about the Parisian character of the movement,
Balakian adds:

Symbolism was not French; it happened in Paris. Symbolism was to be a Parisian

movement (in distinction from French). Parisian in terms of its cosmopolitan char­
acter, preparing that particular international climate which has proved so pro­
pitious for subsequent avant-garde coteries: cubism, futurism, dadaism, and sur­
realism. With symbolism, art ceased in truth to be national and assumed the
collective premises of Western culture. Its overwhelming concern was the non-
temporal, non-sectarian, non-geographic, and non-national problem of the human
condition: the confrontation between human mortality and the power of survival
through the preservation of the human sensitivities in the art forms, (pp. 9—10)

But if Paris was Cosmopolis, local and even colonial versions of it were to be created
all over the world. Buenos Aires was, in the Spanish-speaking world, the only city which
could aspire to that title. At the time, Madrid and Barcelona were still emerging from
the nineteenth century nightmare of a Spain overwhelmed by a reactionary church, a
tyrannical governement, and a collapsing empire. Buenos Aires had been founded in the
early sixteenth century but was totally renewed in the last decades of the nineteenth
century. Immigrants from Spain and Italy, plus some assorted Irishmen and English­
men (among them, Borges' paternal grandmother Haslam), Germans and Frenchmen,
and even a few North Americans (William Henry Hudson's father came from the North)
had built this new city out of the desolate pampa, had made it into a dream of Genoa
and Madrid, of London (they even had a local branch of Harrod's) and, of course, of
Paris.
Darío had been gravitating toward Buenos Aires almost from the day he began
writing in tropical and backward Guatemala. The stops in Valparaiso and Santiago de
Chile were only rehearsals of what he was going to achieve while in Buenos Aires. His
hegemony over Spanish American letters would have been impossible had he not stayed
and worked in Buenos Aires. (Martí failed to achieve a comparable status because he
lived too far away, in New York, and devoted the best part of his energies to the Cuban
revolution).4
In Buenos Aires, Darío found Cosmopolis, or at least the second-best version of it.
Even later, when he visited Paris and set up residence there, Darío's literary fortune

3
Cf. Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement (New York: Random House, 1967), p . 5. All
quotes
4
from this book are identified by page numbers at the end of the quote.
The boring academic dispute about who was the real "creator" of Modernismo can be follow­
ed in the partial collection of critical articles edited by Homero Castillo, Estudios críticos sobre el
Modernismo (Madrid: Gredos, 1968). An early interpretation is to be found in my " L a póesía de
Martí y el modernismo", Número, 22 (1953), p p . 38-53.

670
continued to depend on Buenos Aires. He went back regularly to his literary base; he
dutifully wrote a Canto a la Argentina (1910) to celebrate the first centenary of its in­
dependence. H e also wrote an Ode to President Mitre and many other poems and proses
to pay tribute to t h e country which had made him. In doing this, he was denying some
of the high principles he h a d so beautifully and insolently stated at the beginning of his
Prosas profanas. B u t Cosmopolis was worth a mass.
Even today, t h e "Palabras liminares" Darío wrote to preface his 1896 book of
poems are scorching. 5 T h e y were deliberately set to infuriate the thick bourgeois, t h e
Monsieurs Prudhommes of this world, the ubiquitous Celui-qui-ne-comprend-pas to whom
Darío alludes in his preface. Darío wrote these words in Buenos Aires, b u t he could
have written them in any Cosmopolis. At the beginning, he claims he is not going to
write a manifesto. Immediately, he proceeds to write one. His motives for refusing to
become a chef d'école while acting like one are clearly stated:

(a) Because of t h e absolute lack of mental perspective of t h e thinking major­

ity on our continent . . . Celui-qui-ne-comprend-pas is among us; professoi, cor­
respondent member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Language, newspaperman,
lawyer, poet, rastaquoère.
(b) Because t h e entire work produced by the new writers in Spanish America
is still vain, many of t h e best talent being in the limbo of a complete ignorance
of the same Art they devote their lives to.
(c) Because proclaiming as I do proclaim, an anarchist esthetics, t h e impo­
sition of a model or of a code would imply a contradiction. I do not have a litera-
ture of my " o w n " . . . t o mark the path to others: my literature is mine in myself
(p. 545).

The insolent tone, the parading of anarchist esthetic ideas and the underlined
individualism, the " I " so blatantly exposed: all these were signs of Darío's refusal to
become the leader of the pack, the chief of the scattered pléiade of young poets and prose
writers Spanish America was then producing. B u t was this statement to be t a k e n
literally? Or was it p a r t of the Symbolist charade? Only nine years later, recalling in
the preface of his next book of poems. Cantos de vida y de esperanza (1905), the success
of his campaign for a new form of Hispanic poetry, Dario was to forget the above quoted
words from Prosas profanas, and proudly state: "The movement of freedom which I
had the chance to start in Spanish America, reached Spain, a n d both here and there
victory has been achieved", (p. 625)
The words do not seem to come from the same man. They do not, actually. I n 1896,
Darío was almost thirty. Although b y then he knew very well what he wanted, he was
not very sure if he was going to achieve it. H e then assumed t h e mask of the anarchist
ideologue and the poète maudit, so loved b y the Symbolists, to reject not only bourgeois
vulgarity but also what he thought the vulgarity of literary schools, movements a n d t h e
bureaucracy of letters. Nine years later, when he was approaching forty, Darío realized
he had won the battle. H e was then writing in Spain, after having conquered the old

5
All Dario 's texts (except otherwise noted) are from Poesías Completas, ed. Alfonso Méndez
Plancarte and Antonio Oliver Belmas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967). Page numbers follow quotations.

671
metropolis and produced a mutation in the Hispanic verse of this century. His anarchistic
ideas could be shelved. Retrospectively, he saw himself not as an isolated and proud
individual but as the founder of a movement.
But the poet which this article is trying to recapture now is not the leader of the
Modernistas but the lonely voice who despised Celui-qui-ne-comprend-pas as much as he
despised maîtres or petits-maîtres—the Argentine Darío of the year 1896. He had a
vision of Cosmopolis which was condensed in his "Palabras liminares". The poet, ap­
proaching thirty, turns back to look at his work with some sense of perspective and
writes as if he were a thousand years old:

I told, in the pink mass of my youth, my antiphones, my sequences, my profane

prose. Time and less toil of soul and heart have failed to make me a good priest,
and my capitals worthy of every page of the breviary. (Through the divine fires
of the painted windows, I laugh at the wind that blows outside, at the evil which
passes by.) Toll, golden bells, silver bells, toll every day, calling me to the feast
in which the eyes of fire shine, and the roses of the mouth bleed unique delight.
My organ is an old Pompadour clavichord, whose gay gavottes made our fore­
fathers dance; and the perfume of your breasts is my perfume, eternal incensory
of flesh. Immortal She-male, flower of my rib. Homo sum. (pp. 545—546)

The mock religious vocabulary, the hints of fashionable satanism, the eroticism
of metaphors: the whole decadent concept of Cosmopolis was there. Dario was writing
in Buenos Aires but his paper was marked with the water-marks of Maldoror and Des
Esseintes. A touch of Verlaine's Fêtes galantes was also present. But already Darío had
located his dream in the real Utopian space: it was the space of desire in which flesh
was mutated into a custody, and woman was god.
The next paragraph allowed Darío to review his Spanish American pedigree and
to explore which parts of the vast continent would be incorporated into his cosmopolitan
dream. Again, insolence is so evident that it places the text in a truly decadent écri­
ture. The poet asks himself:

Is there in my veins a drop of African blood or of Chorotega or Negrandan Indian ?

It may well be, in spite of my marquis' hands; but behold, you will see in my
verses princesses, kings, imperial matters, visions of far-away or impossible
countries: what can I do ! I hate the life and times in which it was my lot to
be born; and I could not greet the President of a Republic in the language in
which I would sing to you, Heliogabalus, whose court—gold, silk, marble —
I remember in dreams", (p. 546)

Later, Dario was to write a song against Teddy Roosevelt, the President of the
United States, and another song to Bartolomé Mitre, the Argentine President, but this
later Darío is of no concern here. The 1896 poet will continue his "Palabras liminares"
with these words:
If there is any poetry in Our America, it is in the old things: in Palenke and Utat-
lán, in the legendary Indian and the subtle and sensual Inca, and in the great
Montezuma of the golden throne. The rest is yours, democratic Walt Whitman.
(p. 546).

672
And then he moves dramatically to the next line to write: "Buenos Aires, Cosmopolis",
and to the next to add: "And tomorrow !"
By this point, Darío's dream of a Utopian place is explicitly named: it is the Buenos
Aires of today, and the Buenos Aires of the future. He rejects everything that is new
and democratic in the New World and leaves it to Whitman, and he redefines the Old
Utopias of the discoverers and conquerors. The great Mayan ruins of his native Guate­
mala, the subtle Inca empire, the magnificence of Montezuma: those are the monu­
ments of the American past which attract him. His vision of America is as selective,
and decadent, as his vision of eroticism and of the religious frisson. To this selective
vision of America he adds the whole world of exquisite things. The Utopian dream has a
name and a place: it is Cosmopolis, that is, Buenos Aires.
The rest of the "Palabras liminares" is more specifically related to Dario's own
poetic practice, his creation of models (in which he includes "the brave Góngora" and
Verlaine, Quevedo, "the strongest of them all", together with Hugo), his diction, his
own erotic paradigm ("Oh multitude of naked nymphs, of rose queens, of amorous
goddesses !") to conclude, in a sentence or two of scornful poetic machismo: "And the
first law of the creator is to create. Let the eunuch puff and blow. When one of the
Muses presents you with a son, have the other eight pregnant", (p. 547)

One of the best contemporary accounts of Prosas profanas came out of the Monte­
video presses in 1899. It was a slim blue pamphlet called, Rubén Darío. His Literary
Personality. His Latest Work.9 The author was a twenty-eight-year-old critic who was
going to become the most famous essayist of Spanish American Modernismo. Prosas
profanas had cast a spell over José Enrique Rodó. His literary initiation, as critic of
the Revista Nacional de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales (1895-1897), had shown him to be
closer to the Spanish tradition of literary criticism (Menéndez Pelayo, Valera, Clarín)
and to the best of the Spanish American essayists (Bello, Juan María Gutiérrez, Sar­
miento) than to the Modernistas. He even had made some barbed remarks about the
"blue" decadents in his private correspondence with Clarín.7 But the reading of Prosas
profanas changed him. He underwent a conversion.
In devoting a long study to the book and its author, Rodó tried very hard to look
as knowledgeable about current French literature as Darío himself was. It is easy to see
from the very beginning that Rodó was doing his best to define Dario's work according
to the poet's own notions. It is also obvious that the essayist is trying to match, word
by word, Dario's écriture artiste in his prosodic but not less artistic writing. The core of
his essay is a poem-by-poem analysis which takes the form of a prose paraphrase and
changes each of Darío's verse poems into very symbolistic prose poems.
In the first part of his study, devoted to Darío's literary personality, Rodó develops
many of the critical ideas advanced by the poet himself in "Palabras liminares". He
6
All Rodó's texts are from Obras Completas, ed. Emir Rodríguez Monegal (Madrid: Aguilar,
1967). Page numbers follow quotations.
7
Cf. Rodó's correspondence with Clarín in Obras Completas, p p . 1322-28.

43 Balakian 673
presents Darío as a delicate, exquisite poet, totally alien to the Spanish American or
Spanish poetic tradition. His work is called "disinterested and free". An allusion to
Béranger's committed poetry places Darío at the opposite end of the scale: Darío's
natural habitat is a palace where a refined and noble conversation is perpetually going
on. Even religion has to be beautiful for him, and a bit strange. The allusion to the title of
Darío's book of essays, Los raros, is pointed. Quoting Verlaine, Rodó indicates: Le rare
est le bon. Art is what Darío is after. Action is only worth something if taken as a parody
of daydreaming. Rodó was to go on praising Darío's deliberate mannerisms, his instinct
for luxury, his refinement. He saw Darío not as a model for all but as a select individual.
According to Rodó, Darío had a sacred horror for the tyranny of the masses. "Art is
fragile and Caliban has rough and hard hands", he concluded, already identifying the
Shakespearean character with the mob. The ultimate consequences of this allusion to
Caliban will be discussed later.
In commenting on Darío's heraldic bird, the swan, Rodó does not miss the oppor­
tunity of making a reference to Wagner, and to parade other emblematic birds: Hugo's
eagle, Heine's nightingale, Poe's raven, and, outside of the ornithological domain,
Baudelaire's pensive and hieratic cat. The references to French literature, or to the part
of world literature the French had woven into the fabric of their own writing, is over­
whelming. Rodó had already quoted Taine and Renan, Baudelaire and Daudet, Gautier
and Edmund Schérer, and he keeps on piling up allusions to Gyp, Catulle Mendès,
Barbey d'Aurevilly, Leconte de Lisle, Saint-Pol-Roux, and Mallarmé.
In paraphrasing the poems, Rodó would pick up the faintest allusions and would
complement with his own elaborate prose the suggestive quality of the poet. Verlaine
was prominent among those most often quoted or alluded to. But there are specific
references to Gérard de Nerval, Mérimée, Loti, Henri de Régnier, Banville, Aurélien
Sholl, Halévy, Rimbaud, Maurras, Anatole France, Chénier, Maurice Du Plessys,
Maurice de Guérin, Dumas fils, Henri Mariot, Gustave Khan, Rémy de Gourmont, and
even Max Nordau, a Parisian by election. The great and not so great, the poets and the
chroniclers, the sublime and the banal: what counts in this catalogue is the range of
reading it reveals.
In the first six paragraphs of his study and in an epilogue, Rodó concentrated on
his view of Darío. He began his study by discussing the very relevant question: was
Darío an American poet? His answer was clear: "Undoubtedly, Darío is not the poet of
America"* But he did not stop here, as do many of the critics who quote him. He went
on to explain and qualify his answer :

Do I have to say that in 30 stating I am not pointing to a certain literary inferior­

ity . . . ? Our America is still a very ungenerous soil for art. To obtain poetry
out of forms every day more vague and inexpressive of its sociability, mere copy­
ing is useless; a refraction in the mind of a seer, in the mind of Walt Whitman,
would be needed, (p. 169)

In justifying Darío for not being what he was not, a Whitman, Rodó followed the
poet's own example. He picked up on the same Whitman Dario so regally had left in
charge of democratic America in his "Palabras liminares". In developing the notion

674
 of Darío's individual and exquisite poetry. Rodó introduced a valuable notion: Darío's
anti-Americanism (or perhaps it would be better to call it un-Americanism) was not
deliberate. For Rodó, in being the way he was, Dario was being authentic.
In returning to this view in the epilogue to his study, Rodó would introduce his
own personality in the general discussion. He would present himself as a good comrade
of the poet. H e felt he was closer, from the ideological point of view, to the poet t h a n
many of those who were quoting him every step they took, or who adored him. R o d ó
would state: " I am also a modernista; I belong with all my soul to the great reaction
which gives character and meaning to the evolution of thought which, in the last years
of this century, has started out from literary naturalism and positivism and has made
them evolve into higher conceptions without altering what is more fruitful in t h e m " .
(p. 191) In defining Darío's contribution to t h a t movement—which Rodó placed in a
larger philosophical context and not in the normally confining poetical context used
by later critics—he would underline the fact t h a t the poet's own work is one among
many manifestations in art of "our anarchic contemporary idealism". The last para­
graphs of his study were dedicated to the hope t h a t the poet's journey to Spain would be
successful, and t h a t the Spanish writers would welcome "his presence, as t h a t of t h e
princes in Oriental tales, who bring from remote countries the fountain of gold, t h e
talking bird and the singing tree", (p. 192)
Rodó ends his critique with this Arabian Nights' imagery which was truly pro­
phetic. Dario was so taken with it t h a t he asked Rodó to allow him to reproduce it as
prologue to the 1901 Paris edition of Prosas profanas. The critic agreed, the prologue
was published, but somebody forgot to put Rodó's name to it. I t came out as a substan­
tial and anonymous text. Rodó raged, and asked for an explanation; the printers accused
Darío, the poet tried to excuse his negligence with a phrase: Rodó's style was so recog­
nizable t h a t a n y signature was superfluous. The apology was accepted, b u t friendship
between Darío and Rodó was no longer possible. 8

While he was still working on his Rubén Darío, Rodó had been completing a new
and probably more important book. I t was called Ariel and it came out in Montevideo
in 1900. Using the narrative frame of a valedictory speech delivered b y a teacher called
Prospero by his students (he had a status of Ariel presiding over his office), Rodó con­
densed his views on many subjects of general moral and political interest.
From the point of view of this paper, its title is even more important t h a n t h e
text. The book's first paragraph makes explicit reference to The Tempest, B u t t h e
Shakespearean play and its symbols had reached Rodó through a rather complex a n d
almost oblique textual journey. In the fourth section of the speech he makes an ex­
plicit reference to another book, a continuation of The Tempest written by the French
essayist Ernest Renan, and called Caliban. Under t h a t title, Renan published in 1878
a philosophical drama whose interest lay not in his undramatic and flat writing b u t in its

8
Darío's quarre with Rodó can be studied in Rodó's Obras Completas, p p . 1364-1368.

43* 675
thesis. Renan imagined that instead of staying on the island, Caliban would follow
Prospero to Italy, would become a leader of the masses and eventually would be elected
prince. Ariel by then had vanished into thin air, and Prospero would finally have to
come to terms with Caliban.
Using Renan's clumsy attempt to revitalize the Shakespearean imagery, Rodó fi­
nally produced his own iconography. According to him:

Ariel, genius of air, represents in the symbolism of Shakespeare's work, the noble
and winged part of the spirit. Ariel is the empire of reason and feeling over the
low stimuii of irrationality; it is the generous enthusiasm, the high and disinter­
ested incentive to action, the culture's spirituality, the alertness and grace of
intelligence, the ideal toward which human selection moves, rectifying in the
superior man the stubborn traces of Caliban, symbol of sensuality and clumsiness,
with the persevering chisel of life. (pp. 206—207)

Shakespeare's complex characters have been reduced in Rodó's text to a classic

dichotomy: soul and body, spirit and flesh, intelligence and sensuality, Jekyll and
Hyde. In the teacher's speech, Rodó would suggest another binary opposition: Ariel
would become the democratic ideal to be raised as a symbol of Spanish America's
future while Caliban would become the symbol of a democracy corrupted by utilitarian­
ism, by nordomania, by all the gross instincts in man's nature. The poetic symbols of
Shakespeare, after having been reinterpreted by Renan's philosophical dramas, had
finally found a new political meaning.
There were other and no less relevant sources for Rodó's new symbols. On May 2,
1898, the Franco-Argentine writer Paul Groussac gave a speech in Buenos Aires mainly
devoted to attacking the United States' participation in the 1898 Cuban war.9 In
analyzing metaphorically the aggression of the United States, Groussac said: "Since
the War of Seccession and the brutal invasion of the West, the yankee spirit had freely
emerged from the shapeless and 'calibanesque' body", (p. 197) Groussac belonged by
origin and education to that tradition of French writers who had devoted a great part
of their energies to criticizing the United States. He had written a whole book, Del
Plata ál Niágara, to collect his personal impressions of that barbaric nation. It was not
unexpected, then, that he should apply the image of Caliban (obviously taken from
Renan) to define the shapeless political body of American democracy. The name would
reach Rodó, and would obviously influence him, through the intermediary of an article
written by Rubén Darío. The poet had attended the May 2 rally and had written an
account for El Tiempo, the Buenos Aires newspaper, called "El triunfo de Caliban". It
was published on May 20, 1898.10 The conclusion of the article, if too emotional, was
very effective; it underlined the identification between Caliban and the United States:
"Miranda would always prefer Ariel; Miranda is the charm of the spirit;
and all the mountains of stone, of gold and bacon, would not make my Latin soul
prostitute itself to Caliban", (p. 198)

9
Groussac's speech is partially quoted in Rodó's Obras Completas, p p . 197-198.
10
Darío's speech is analyzed and partially quoted in Rodó's Obras Completas, p . 198.

676
 There is very little evidence in The Tempest that Miranda preferred Ariel in the
sense implied in the article. It was obvious she did not want to become Caliban's mate
but she seemed frankly inclined to Ferdinand. But that is irrelevant to Darío's argu­
ment. What matters is that both Groussac and Darío had anticipated Rodó's use of the
Shakespearean symbols to create a metaphorical model of the opposition between
Spanish America and the United States. Rodó's genius was not in the invention of the
image or in the developing of it, but in attaching a certain very specific meaning to the
symbols, in creating a code which, in spite of being based on French Symbolism, be­
came deeply embedded in the Spanish American political consciousness.

677
CONCLUSION, BIBLIOGRAPHY,
AND INDEX
 ANNA BALAKIAN

CONCLUSION

Symbolism created a new way of thinking, a new way of reading. The language of
Symbolism reflects an ontology or its ontology creates a new language for poetry. This
is the basic factor in any study of the Symbolist Movement in European poetry. In the
pages of this volume there have been multiple manifestations of poetic writing identified
by the critics as "symbolist". The reader has distinguished many contradictions as to
why and how at a certain moment in its literary history a certain cluster of poets de­
viated from the standard means of poetic communication. What unifies, however, the
approach of all those who wrote about the Symbolist impact on literature within these
pages is the recognition of a common Zeitgeist and its need to be expressed through a
revised notion of the nature and function of poetic language. And although many
references have been made to changes in versification, which is the most obvious form
of dissent against poetic structure, the real proof of the conscious misuse of standard
poetic form is demonstrated, not through new forms of verse, but through a new net­
work of images and through the strategic use of single words indicative of certain
mutations of accepted meanings, paralleled in all the languages to which Symbolism
was available and mutually recognizable from one language to another in spite of the
obstructions of translation. No such phenomenon has existed either prior to or since the
emergence of Symbolist expression. Some poets came to be linked together because of
their alliance with the original cénacle of Symbolism; others appropriated the Paris
school's general attitudes to their own independent base and made their own personal
adaptation of the concept of Symbolist communication. In either case, this galaxy of
poets created consciously or unconsciously a body of poetic writings integral to a given
historical period of profound philosophical crisis in which poetry became not a conduit
to mind or heart or soul but a substitute universe.
It is likely that this multifaceted volume will once and for all dispel the notion
that Symbolism as a literary school or Symbolism as an esthetic mode is the tail-end of
Romanticism, as so many of its earlier historians had led readers to believe. It was an
understandable association; it could be disentangled only with distance in time from
both these widespread and fertile modes of writing which left an indelible imprint on the
literature of our European heritage, nationally and internationally.
The linkage was understandable in view of some of the basic references to the
Romantic poets which prevailed in the Symbolist terminology: the correspondences in
nature to human feelings and intuitions, confirmed by a popular religion, Sweden-
borgism, which guaranteed this relationship all the way into eternity, placing the poet

681
among those in the forefront of the ritual of communion, right behind the Angel and
the priest: "everything in the natural world t h a t springs from the spiritual world is
called a 'correspondent'", said Swedenborg. 1 The spirituality of Wordsworth, Novalis
or Hölderlin, Lamartine or Hugo, acquiesced in t h a t assumption.
Inconstestably, nature was the buffer between the human and the unknowable
inhuman, a standing reference in most poetry in the course of the nineteenth century.
I t became the reflector both of the subjectivity of the author and of the image of a
supernal world. A series of images emerged t h a t became the coins of exchange in the
poetic communication of these interstates: the forest of symbols, the boat, the ladder,
the veil, the fountain, the well, the castle, the caves, flowers of all colors, birds, gardens/
parks, the mirror and its cognate-reflectors such as ponds, lakes, glass, etc. The poet's
own identification with the seekers of the unknowable became clothed, as we know, in
the guise of ancient m y t h figures such as Prometheus, Lohengrin, Percival, Orpheus,
Hamlet, Proserpine, and with transgressors of the human condition such as Narcissus,
Leda, and Herodiade/Salome, not only in poetry but in art and in opera as well. Launch­
ed in certain recognizable roles in the framework of the Romantic movement, they
were recast by the Symbolists, and the fact t h a t only Prometheus ceased to retain its
importance as a Figure is very significant of the strategic shift in the human contest
for divine power. B u t in general, the recurrences of these familiar mythological per­
sonae contributed largely to the assumption t h a t there was an orderly progression
from Romanticism to Symbolism. Not too many literary historians have worried in
print about the organic changes of concept t h a t occurred in the character and function
of these figures as they were appropriated by the Symbolists. In this respect Pierre
Brunei's2 analysis of the function of m y t h in Symbolist literature is a major breakthrough.
I n his sensitive but misconceived book, L'Ame romantique et le Rêve, Albert Béguin
did much to confirm the assumption of the continuity from Romanticism to Symbolism.
On the one hand, he made an important contribution, for he introduced to French
readers certain German Romantic poets previously little known in France, and in
situating them within the framework of France's own second generation of Romanticism,
united many who had been overshadowed by the towering figure of Goethe with those
who had paled in the glory of Hugo. I n carrying the association of the German Roman­
tics with later French poets beyond the second generation of Romanticism, he found
the common denominator to be the dream, b u t perhaps because of his own religious
bias he assumed t h a t the dream in both cases was the road to a divine existence: " t h e
sumptuous porch t h a t leads to paradise. Sometimes it is God himself who b y this chan­
nel delegates to us solemn warnings, and sometimes it is our own terrestial roots t h a t
plunge through them into the fecund breast of nature. The rhythm of the oneiric life,
which inspires the rhythm of our arts, can be attuned to the eternal march of t h e stars
and to the original pulsation which was t h a t of our soul before the fall." 3 Obviously,

1
Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, "Correspondence of Heaven with Man", (Sweden­
borg Foundation, New York, 1972), p . 53.
2
3
References to the contributors to this volume will be italicized.
The translation of this quotation from Béguin's book, of which there is as yet no published
translation into English, is mine; all other translations into English in this Conclusion are also mine
unless otherwise stated.

682
Béguin has placed b o t h the dichotomy of the human and the divine, and the nature of
human fallibility within the context of the Christian code.
I n his definition of Symbolism, René Wellek makes it clear t h a t this linking of
Romanticism, both French and German, directly with Symbolism is a mistake, t h a t
"affinities should not be overrated".
W h a t separates these two literary movements is a cleavage of both an ontologicai
and a linguistic order, dislodging the notion of the sacred and the divine from previous
connotations. Many years after the phenomenon of Symbolism, W . B . Yeats perceived
the problem well when, in writing about Symbolism, he said: " H o w can the arts over­
come the slow dying of men's hearts t h a t we call the progress of the world, and lay their
hands upon men's heartstrings again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old
times?"1 Romanticism is the most glorious flowering in poetry of the Christian vision
of preconceived notions of immutable beauty, good and truth, and their perfect sym­
metry, fearful though it may sometimes seem, as in William Blake's Tyger. The poet's
function in the duality of heaven and earth, the natural and the supernatural, is t h a t
of discerner, recognizer, decipherer of these pre-established relationships. In his preface
to Edgar Allan Poe's Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires, Baudelaire refers to Sweden­
borg and supports him in this basic assumption: " I t is this admirable, this immortal
instinct of the Beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its spectacles as a vision,
a correspondence of Heaven".
So ingrained, so entrenched was the Christian code in European languages at t h a t
time, t h a t even iconoclastic Romanticists such as Shelley unconsciously acquiesced—in
their language if not wholly in their thought—in the intentioned human universe.
But Symbolism was of another vintage. I t belonged to the forthcoming age of
undeterminism, to the post-Darwinian shakeup relating to questions of origin and
destiny, of human necessity and of objective chance. As the uncertainties of t h e human
condition were compounded and human values ceased to be givens, the poet searched
for the language of uncertainty, for the expression of the sense of the unreliability of
phenomena. Of course, Mallarmé had to discard the function of narration from his
poetic theories. Narration implies sequence, and the poet h a d gravitated toward un­
measured time, into states of suspension and discontinuity. Yeats understood t h e situ­
ation of Mallarmé well when he said in The Autumn of the Body t h a t Mallarmé had es­
caped from History. The most spectacular representation of this escape from time in
Mallarmé's writings was indeed a work t h a t was not even known to his followers who
established the Symbolist cénacle. I n Igitur, not published until 1925, Mallarmé re­
placed the measured r h y t h m of the regular beat of humanly conceived time with the
molecular shock patterns of unregulated matter as the chronological hour plunged into
absolute Midnight. Beginning with Mallarmé, the notion of fiction, so long associated
with narrative, assumed the opposite meaning in poetics, as Mallarmé created a set of
situations t h a t the artist can control in a universe where it is deemed t h a t no one else
has control, neither man, nor nature, nor the gods. Outside of the controls t h a t the artist
can impose on his own created universe, which are his fictions, there is no discernible

4
Italics mine.

683
or predictable sequence of phenomena. In fact, instead of demonstrating in the work of
art a correspondence with nature, the poet proposes an alternative to the natural, using
the materials of the previous correspondence to furnish his fictitious universe. In fact,
Manfred Hoppe notices that in the Austrian poet, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the notion
of artistic landscape pre-exists to nature.
As time stands still, in a state of abeyance, it must inevitably follow that the vision
of a new theater, conceived as the demonstrative, objectified form of poetry, must also
be static, substituting an eternal expectancy in the place of action. Just as fiction would
no longer be associated with narrative, action ceased to be identified with drama. In
this respect, Edmund Wilson's opinion on Yeats' dramatic writings in Axel's Castle
appears entirely out of focus: "Yeats' plays have little dramatic import because Yeats
himself had little sense of drama", he concluded. The fact is that he was simply measur­
ing Yeats' sense of drama in terms of the sense of drama of another era, one quite in­
applicable in the case of Yeats or of Mallarmé as both moved toward a new concept of
what was indeed "dramatic".
The new philosophical orientation of the age altered the tropes handed down from
Romanticism although they were not eliminated. Using the garments of the meaningful
universe, the poet reached outside that "interpreted world" (gedeutete Welt) in which
he was no longer at home, as Rilke explains in his First Elegy. The universe becomes,
instead, what Rilke called a "useless space" (unbrauchbarer Raum).
The poets of the end of the nineteenth century who are associated with Symbolism
carried the new tradition into its remarkable flowering in the early part of the twentieth
century, as demonstrated in the organization of this volume. They proceeded from a
dualistic notion of existence to a monistic expression of it, and then on to a complete
rift as their distortion both of the known tropes and the known connotations of words
became a self-destructive activity proceeding from denotation to renewed connotation
and to eventual fictionalization of meanings.
The veil trembled, then was ripped, 5 and nothing was found behind. So the veil
moved from its function as curtain hiding the mystery of the outside world to mask
hiding the ambiguity of the inner human world, what Rilke called "Innerer Wald"
and sometimes "Inneres Wildnis", moving in either case the forest of symbols within
the self. In discussing the poetry of Stefan George in Das Jahr der Seele, Manfred
Osteiger explains that for George beauty is seen "as a refuge, as a garden of Innerlichkeit
set against an outside world which can no longer be mastered and therefore becomes
insecure, profoundly dubious, and threatened with grief and melancholy".
The boats of Romanticism ran into dry dock, the lakes became stagnant pools,
"empty cisterns and exhausted wells", as seen in the Fire Sermon of T. S. Eliot's The
Waste Land. The swan lost its habitat, the solitary princes sought not the towers but the
caves of their castles. And in the case of Yeats where the tower survives, it is not for its
high position but to serve as a guideline to the poet's movement to and fro, from cons-

5
See Mallarmé, "Crise de vers", Œuvres Complètes (Bibl. de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard,
1946), p . 360.

684
ciousness to his share in the collective unconscious: " I declare this tower is my symbol;
I declare/This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair", says
Yeats in Blood and the Moon.
The harmonious gardens where in Swedenborgian symbolism each flower had a
specific meaning, are replaced by neglected, impersonal parks and wastelands. Eliot
was to say in A Game of Chess: "The desert in the garden the garden in the desert/Of
droughthy spitting from mouth the withered apple-seed". In George's Algabal the black
flower grew obsessively in a garden where there was no air nor any warmth. But most
impudently of all, Mallarmé suggested that he was looking for the flower "absent from
all bouquets".
The Swedenborgian correspondences are not the signet of Symbolism although
perversely the terminology remained in use. The balanced relationship between the
spiritual and the material, which is the basis of the analogical pact between the human
and the divine, provided the forest of symbols that could be well expressed in the
metaphoric antithesis so universally utilized by the Romantics. But in the case of
poetry leading to Symbolism, the metaphoric base shifted to designate a relationship
between the abstract and the concrete both of which related directly to the human
plane and eliminated the divine quality. Already in Baudelaire, there can be discerned
a gap between the theory of Swedenborgian orientation and its practical realization in
several of his poems. The first break can be noticed in the sonnet, Correspondances,
where synesthesia is no longer a promise of spiritual experience but a strictly human
possibility dependent on verbal achievements. The mind and the senses are deemed
capable of expanding the enjoyment of sensual realities ad infinitum, concludes the
poem without mentioning the soul and its sphere of beatitudes. 6 And in Harmonie du
soir—which is perhaps the basic model for the future Symbolist poem—Baudelaire
suggests the image of the temple without mentioning the temple itself; he suggests it
through the metonymic word-images of incensor, altar, monstrance, all of which become
correspondences which the poet mediates between himself and nature without re­
course to any supernal level. The sun drowning in its blood is a projection of the poet's
heart sinking into its own abyss, and instead of a correspondence there is an exchange
whereby blood is transferred to sun and the notion of a physical sinking of the sun beyond
the range of visibility is transferred to a sense of the human inner abyss, intangible but
just as real.-The transcendental dimension associated with a monstrance in a religious
ritual is transferred to the very human power of illumination that can be produced by
the activity of the poet's memory.
Thus, even though Baudelaire continued to write as a decipherer of spiritual hiero­
glyphics, he was an initiator of the movement to promote the poet from his role of
interpreter of enigmas to that of creator of perplexities, a perpetrator of mystifications
of which he can obstinately guard the formula in order to prevent its translation into
unilateral meaning. Such is the sense of Rimbaud's statement: "J'ai seul la clef de cette
parade sauvage", in Les Illuminations. Symbolist poetry was to aim at a system of
selective communication identifying rather than clarifying areas of human perplexity.
6
See Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement : A Critical Appraisal, new edition (N. Y. U .
Press, 1977), for the development of this analysis in the chapter on Baudelaire.

685
 If nature was still a temple of contemplation, it no longer served as an intermediary
station toward higher spaces; it became a terminal, but one accommodating a "between
space" as Rilke expressed it in the notion of "Zwischenräume"', separating the inner
spaces from t h e outer, inert space with an intermediary area where the poem breathes
with ease.
The poetic experience of the Romantic poet normally took an upward motion like
the soaring of a skylark. The Symbolist's movement is a descent into self, and the descent
into Hades is detached from concepts of sin and retribution. Rimbaud's Une Saison en
Enfer is still a semi-Christian experience with strong notions of sin intervening in the
exploratory operation of the nether regions of human consciousness. Eventually, the
dichotomous r a p p o r t between earth and hell changes into a relationship between con­
sciousness and unconsciousness, between sleep and wakefulness, between life and death.
The transition is represented in Mallarmé's walk down the stairs of the ancestral ob­
livion in Igitur, or in the sea t h a t swallows up Forgael and Dectora in Yeats' Shadowy
Waters-, in Valéry's La Jeune Parque; and in his Narcissus poems, the Narcissus para­
digm acts as a sieve in the passage from the conscious to the unconscious.
When there is a return from the depths, the poet is a privileged Orpheus whose
language expresses the experience of the descent. "A god can do it", says Rilke in terms
of his Orpheus persona. The overtone suggests t h a t if the god can do it, so can the poet
as a usurper of the authority of the god. In Rilke's first Sonnet, Orpheus is indeed
trying to break the dichotomy, t h a t very correspondence which is the sign of down-below
mortality rather t h a n of transcendental otherwordliness, as he replaces the process of
antithesis b y one of metamorphosis. Although Orpheus is represented as very frail and
very mortal, in his disintegration he leaves a permanent imprint as a mouth of nature
and an ear adhering to Rock, the most prevailing of nature's entities.
The Symbolist writer was generally haunted b y intimations of mortality from
which he found release only through the work of art. I n fact, poetry became what this
writer has called elsewhere a "nursing of nihilism t h a t constantly negates itself through
the work of a r t " . And if no heavenly spirit breathes poetic creativity into the poet, the
role of so-called inspiration ceases to be a major factor in the work of the artist. As his
own master, he establishes his own rules and tries to abide b y them. I n speaking of
Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire had considered the sacred character of language and
the need to handle it with wisdom. He admonished those who could make of it a game
of chance. Although for Baudelaire the poet was still a discoverer rather t h a n an in­
ventor, his reverence of poetic language made him a model for symbolist craftsmanship.
That is the reason why theory and process became as significant a concern for the
Symbolist poet as the actual product of the creative operation. As Mallarmé saw it
"Don du Poême" was not a free gift; it was produced under manipulated control
factors and hard labor, b u t it was the triumph of the poet over both God and nature.
T h a t is the most prevalently unifying theme from Mallarmé onward of all poets who
are associable with Symbolism.
A little implementation of such a broad statement is here appropriate. To begin
with, Mallarmé's L'Après-Midi d'un Faune is centrally the victory of art over human
frustration. Although Mallarmé makes no a t t e m p t to formulate a philosophical state-

686
ment to t h a t effect, t h e poem itself throbs with this victory. Not knowing whether he
dreamed or remembered t h e vision of an aspiring sensuality and its default, the F a u n
exclaims: "Tant pis" in disdainful reaction to the ephemeral quality of both dream and
reality. He will perpetuate the nymphs not in single enjoyment as men are wont t o do
in real life, b u t in double intensity on t h a t eternal afternoon which, like the absolute
midnight of Igitur, takes him outside the human competition and its limited conse­
quences. Rather t h a n being vague and abstract, he expresses his will to preserve in his
own dictated eternity, t h e ephemeral human experience of ecstasy, b y means of very
concrete and obsessively lingering images. I n them is revealed the poet's action t o
overcome material limitations.
"C'est, à l'horizon pas remué d'un ride/Le visible et serein souffle artificiel/De
l'inspiration, qui regagne le ciel". The important word is "artificiel" as opposed to the
natural, and the "ciel" is t h e divine abode of the world of art as the words ciel/heaven
and ciel/sky are both replaced by the sky untouched by cloud or wind b u t b y t h e t a n ­
gible countenance of artifice. "Tâche donc, instrument des fuites, ô maligne/Syrinx, de
r???fleurir aux lacs où t u m'attends/Moi, de ma rumeur fier, je vais parler longtemps/Des
déesses; et par d'idolâtres peintures,/A leur ombre enlever encore des ceintures;/Ainsi,
quand des raisins j ' a i sucé la çlarté,/Pour bannir un regret par ma feinte écarté,/Rieur,
j'élève au ciel d'été la grappe vide/Et, soufflant dans ses peaux lumineuses, avide/
D'ivresse, jusqu'au soir je regarde au travers." The major task of the Symbolist is
outlined in these lines which simultaneously contain the process, and the product of t h e
process. Syrinx, invoked, becomes both the subject and the object of the work of a r t as
it plots the work of art; to synchronize all art, Mallarmé first denotes a musical instru­
ment, the Syrinx, and then evokes painting; and all the time the reader knows t h a t he is
really talking about writing. "Idolatrous paintings" suggest worship of what is godlike.
All this is in concrete language. The attitude of the artist is one of defiance, impudence,
mockery: "maligne", "fier", "Rieur", all suggest irreverence of the god-associated
creativity now taken on and expressed b y two natural images t h a t are destroyed in the
very act of being conveyed. To deflower what is absent: " A leur ombre enlever encore
des ceintures", and to e m p t y the natural fruit and infuse into the skin, which is the
shell, (parallel to the "ombre" image) his own essence, creating his own pleasure in
what is nothingness, holding up the nothingness to the sky (heaven), using t h e old
word in its new connotation as he enjoys what only the artist's eye can create in im­
perishable dimensions. I n his article on Mallarmé, Lloyd Austin conclusively expresses
the symbolic power of t h a t grape image: "The poem exemplifies . . . the power of art
to evoke, by means of sublimated reminiscences, the ideal essence of fleeting phenom­
ena". 7 Austin views the poem as a recuperative action on the p a r t of the poet. One
might go further and say t h a t the artist's skill not only restores the memory or dream
but revises it, corrects it, recasts it and finally gives new form t o it. The Faun/Artist's
only fault was to be susceptible t o the "faute idéale de rose", which in its grammatical

7
See Lloyd Austin '"L'Après-midi d' un Faune' de Stéphane Mallarmé: lexiques comparés
des trois états du poème", Studi in Onore de Carlo Pellegrini, (Biblioteca de "Studi Francesi", 1963),
pp. 733-38.
ambiguity becomes ontologically clear: the flower state is the human, perishable state
even if it is as beautiful as the rose.
This theme is resumed by Rilke as a central preoccupation; the struggle against the
fragility of flowering is particularly striking in his Sixth Elegy about the fig tree. The
blooming of a tree is likened to the waiting period, deemed an uncomfortable, un­
productive, ephemeral one; the fig tree is the only one which goes directly to fruit; so
it is with the creative artist, denying the flower/life state to reach the fruit. Art is in­
deed the "Doppelbereich" for Rilke, the duplicate existence in the world of art; and the
space, represented as a mirror melding the time/space distinctions, "Zwischenräume der
Zeit", becomes the artist's fictional union of the notions of time and space. The mirror
prevails while we who are subject to the beautiful but perishable flower state pass on.
That is the symbol-suggestion of the Sonnet no.3 in Part II; more directly expressed in
no.29 Part I I is the notion that the poet does not decipher but becomes the power
behind his own universe. "Sei in dieser Nacht aus Übermass/Zauberkraft am Kreuzweg
deiner Sinne/ihrer seltsamen Begegnung Sinn."
Viewed from this perspective, Yeats, a contemporary of Rilke, can be taken out of
the strictly English literary-lineage of Blake, Shelley, and Keats. The Anglo-American
critics who are most noted for their studies of Yeats rarely speak of the Symbolist
impact on him. Denis Donoghue's article in this volume is a notable exception. In the
poems where the Symbolist influence is discernible, Yeats' desire for transcendence is
not a theological or even a deistic one. The golden bird of Byzantium is not a Grecian
urn. The prevalence of art over life in Keats' poem has wistful overtones. Byzantium
where Yeats sails is a defiance of that paltry thing called human life. The emphasis is on
the artist's triumph over the natural within his life experience, and not on the demon­
stration of life's evanescence. Taking the old historical symbol of Byzantium, which
peaked Beauty and Power just before its demise, he does not use the historical fact as a
universally relivable myth; instead, he distorts the acceptable meaning of the historical
event as a myth and suddenly, among the human mire and veins, "Byzantium" will
no longer fall. It is permanent, for it is the locus of the poet's creativity. The image has
gone counter to the expected artistic utilization of the historical fact and it has become
a universal myth. Instead of the expected correspondence of Byzantium with Deca­
dence, Yeats inserts into his created Byzantium a golden bird whose permanence is of
the same order as that of the Faun who in Mallarmé's poem was able to perpetuate his
rape of the nymphs beyond boundaries. If Mallarmé has violated mythology in an
instance where all traces of its historical basis are extinct, Yeats mythologizes where the
historical dimensions are still available. Yeats' disdain of historicity is an even bolder
stroke. He tears Byzantium away from historical time by equating "past, or passing
or to come", cleverly integrates all time in his poem by a connective word, "or" which
rejects all sense of continuity and instead of the diachronic, proposes synchronic al­
ternatives.
Yeats starts both Sailing to Byzantium and Byzantium with the same sort of human
standard images which he readies to reject; in the first it is the image of the young,
followed by "Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long/Whatever is begotten, born,
and dies". The pictures of earthly life are followed with the determination to sail away

688
 from them: " A n d therefore I have sailed the seas and come/To the holy city of Byzan­
tium". The " h o l y " does n o t make of Byzantium a heavenly Camelot b u t is an attribute
of the place where he can be gathered "into the artifice of eternity". The important
word again is "artifice" concording with the "souffle artificiel" of Mallarmé. "Once out
of nature I shall never take/My bodily form from any natural thing", explicit in its
meaning, says t h a t w h a t he will create will be a place—call it Byzantium—where art is
freed from historicity as it is from nature. In "Byzantium" he begins with the image of
the Emperor, which emerged at the end of the previous Byzantium poem, both sug­
gesting temporal powers t o be overcome. And it is the cosmos t h a t joins him this time
to reject "All t h a t m a n is,/All mere complexities,/The fury and the mire of human veins".
I t is to be noted t h a t Y e a t s employs the reductive power of the word " m e r e " with the
encumbrance of the word "complexities", and allocates equal significance/insignificance
to "fury" and t o " m i r e " . And when in "Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,/More mir­
acle than bird or handiwork,/Planted on the star-lit golden b o u g h " the miracle takes
over, the meaning of " m i r a c l e " like t h a t of "holy" is deprived once more of its religious
connotation to take on t h e artist's as "all complexities of mire or blood" are dissipated.
And the power of the flame and of the dance on the imperishable marble at the end of
the poem is not used to provoke a danse macabre, for its flame is free of the burning of
material things: " i t cannot singe a sleeve", having indeed dissipated the "bitter furies
of complexity"; t h e artist steps beyond human cares to his own powerhouse of "Images
t h a t yet/Fresh images beget".
Another m y t h t h a t is radically distorted by the Symbolists is t h a t of Leda, with
which they so often connect the central Symbolist image of the swan. If the legend tells
us t h a t Jupiter impregnated a mortal woman and thereby produced a semi-divine
person in the guise of Helen, symbol of Beauty, certainly for t h e Symbolist poets it
symbolizes the divine character of art being breathed into the mortal being. This is
indeed the power of J u p i t e r breathing his spirit into the swan in the Sixth Elegy. I t is
more explicitly suggested in Rubén Darío's El Gisne where t h e aggregate force of both
the Leda legend and t h a t of the Wagnerian swan t u r n the mythopoetic rape into the
violation of old forms of art by the "nueva Poesía".
I n Yeats' Leda and the Swan the poet plays on the magic of cause and consequence,
thereby deriding the gratuitous character of history. Mallarmé's "thunder in the forest",
which Yeats had learned so well, is p u t to the test in a series of metonymic images show­
ing the divine power's scope of reverberations and a remarkable ability for understate­
ment. The poem ends with a crucial question for the artist left unanswered b y Yeats:
did the mortal being catch the knowledge and the power of the divine intruder ? Here
the poem falls into a teasing ambiguity. Who is cast as t h e espouser of the divine ? Is it
the poet or the reader who is in the position of receiver ? Is the poet viewed as the artist-
Jupiter infusing the reader? Or is he Leda receiving the inspiration? I n either case,
divine gestation bears a powerhouse full of imagery.
The Symbolist tradition of the godlike poetic process can be detected in the poetry
of Wallace Stevens, although he denies any direct influence of Mallarmé and admits t o
the more overt influence of Verlaine. Be t h a t as it may, in The Man with the Blue Guitar
he identifies poetry with an "exceeding music" t h a t " m u s t take the place/Of e m p t y

44 Balakian 689
heaven and its h y m n " . I t is the same kind of invasion and distortion of "del" as in
Mallarmé. The severance from external divinities is, if anything, explicit in Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction: "How clean the sun when seen in its idea/Washed in t h e
remotest cleanliness of a heaven/That has expelled us and our images/The death of one
god is the death of all". But instead of deploring the death of all t h e gods, he says:
" I can/Do all t h a t angels can", echoing the implications of Rilke's " a god can do i t " .
The rest of the l o n g theory-poem explaining process and its creative result is founded
on the vision of t h e survival of the work of art: "The wild orange tree continued to
bloom and to bear/Long after the planter's death . . . The water of/The lake was full
of artificial things/That is how we made the world our own". Here again is the word
"artificial" used in the sense of a creative fiction denying natural realities. This per­
spective also helps explain the fascination which rock has for Stevens, reminiscent, of the
many Tombeau images of Mallarmé, symbolic here as in t h e earlier poet not of death
but of the possibility of survival in the world of perishable goods. Rock becomes identi­
fied with the resilience of art in relation to the vulnerability of the artist himself.
I n fact, the only escape from mortality is through the work of art, which becomes
sacred in the eyes of the giver. The poet is not immortal b u t can bestow immortality,
even as Leda, who is not immortal, can have a semi-divine offspring. The only chance
art has of preserving this endowment is by severing its ties to its human, perishable
engenderer. I n this context the Narcissus image in Valéry becomes also a violation of
the classical m y t h . Narcissus does not reflect his own image, as the poet does not reflect
his in his work, b u t something more: "O semblable-Et p o u r t a n t plus parfait que moi-
même/Ephémère immortel, si clair devant mes y e u x ; " the separation of the poet
from his work suggests the permutable quality of the work, which makes it immortal as
it is projected into an objective view, distancing itself from t h e corporal, tangible being
from which it emanates.
Thus did Orpheus himself bring back from Hades his song/art, whereupon he was
physically destroyed b y the furies; b u t his song prevailed. The emphasis of the Symbolist
is not on the fatal character of the Orpheus m y t h b u t on what survived or can survive
of human plight; it is a highlighting of the power of unification of the arts t h a t dominates
the Symbolist optic rather t h a n the fragmentation of the human Orpheus. B y sub-
ordinating the creator to his creation, within the destiny of Orpheus, the Symbolist
writer is measuring the work of art b y its power to reach t h e anonymity of the m y t h
state. I n other words, it is the function of the m y t h t h a t is appropriated rather t h a n
its meaning. I t is a stance which brings in its wake much renewed interest in t h e nature
of myth creation. First in terms of the Greek and the Roman; later, in the case of Yeats,
Lorca and the Symbolist poets of the Central European countries, the universalization
of personal poetic lyricism through the uses of m y t h actually revived interest in regional
folklore. Miklós Szabolcsi writes in his article on "The Spread of Symbolism": "Symbol­
ism was often used as a means of reaching out to the distant national past, and later of
plumbing the most profound depths of the folk poetry of a particular people. Symbolist
poetry utilized folklore, revaluated it, and made it appear in a new light".
B u t all these attitudes connected with the rejection of certain theological concepts
and with Nietzschean nihilism could simply have remained p a r t of t h e Zeitgeist.

690
"Supersensitivity does not by itself constitute poetry." 8 The ontological position of the
poet created a language of its own, and going beyond the mere creation of a style,
changed the function of language in its purpose of communicating poetry. I n serving as
the base of a series of mediations from God to man, from man to nature, from m a n t o
his creation in competition with nature, correspondences altered the uses of language.
The Symbolist, in tackling the problem of Being and survival, also probed the problem
of communication, and his major discovery was t h a t real, deep-seated communication
did not consist of the identification of the thought of the writer with the thought of the
reader, but of the ability to install a series of prismatic interferences in the p a t h of
direct communication in the form of objects, places, persons, m y t h creatures, a n d fi­
nally, bare words containing a full range of ambiguities that diffuse the communication
with a pervasive if somewhat perverse element.
The role of Wagner in this respect was very important. He had predicted t h a t
parallel research in music and poetry had to be done in the search for a form of com­
munication t h a t would convey not the phenomenon of life b u t its wonder, answering
a "profoundly inner need of mankind". H e studied language in terms of its associations
and in terms of the collective images suggested by kindred speech roots such t h a t the
poet/musician can utilize by discerning their "seriously cognizable" resemblances
As we know, Wagner became such a fundamental inspiration to the Symbolists t h a t
they named their first literary journal La Revue Wagnérienne. His preference for m y t h
over history, his mutation of standard m y t h interpretations, his extension of t h e much
discussed experience of synesthesia to the integration of multiple art forms, his appeal
to poets and musicians to discover a new language of communication made of him a
central resource for the Symbolists.
Whether by means of myth distortion, image association, or language manipu­
lation, the cult of ambiguity fulfilled a crucial need of Symbolist vision, a n d appro­
priately it came to be recognized as its most obvious trademark. B u t t h e vagueness
suggested in Verlaine's Art poétique is not at the core of the Symbolist ambiguity. The
work of the Symbolist writer marks a passage from the use of the word as a designator
of a world possessing an a priori design to the word suggestive of what Wallace Stevens
calls in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction " a universe of inconstancy". To express t h e
inconstancy the poet resorts to a multiplicity of meanings where design becomes per­
missive. Thence, the word is used as a container, or, speaking in terms of the old her­
metic terminology, it can be said to be a vase or matrix. The vase was often t h o u g h t to
reside within the tree. If, as observed in the Introduction of this volume, the spread of
Symbolism had the structure of a tree with a main t r u n k and roots and branches, t h e
tree is also a central image of Symbolist écriture. If only p a r t of the tree is visible, all of
it is real. I t has invisible roots; it also has branches rising to the level of a reality which
becomes less and less visible. The branches rise beyond the range of the contemplator's
vision, and the ultimate one can be imagined—as in Sonnet no.17 of Rilke— in t h e shape
of a lyre. And the sap, the invisible and precious element contained in the vase, unites
in its flow all the vital signs. The Word (i.e. language) in the best of Symbolist writing
/
8
Anna Balakian, op. cit., p . 205.

44* 691
possesses the same functions as the tree: it has visibility of primary designation, it has
etymological reality like the invisible root, it has split and deviating branchings of
connotations, and the fluidity of a connector of all possible meanings through the central
life-giving flow of creativity. As a result, it can be noted that there is a passage from
metaphor, Romantic in the dichotomy it generally embodies, to metonymy, Symbolist
in the absences that are suggestive of the whole in the fragment. The most significant
element of the change is that finally the power of the single word emerges, released both
from its erstwhile position in the metaphor as well as from its role in the metonymy.
As a constellation, it carries its own total power of a multiplicity of associations, and
each of its many possible meanings creates an intrinsic metaphor within the range of
the connotations, each combination constituting a whole that is at the same time a part
of a larger whole. In his article, "The Structure of the Symbolist Movement", György M.
Vajda accepts the notion of "word-symbol" which in its role of central "essence of
things" creates a series of meanings in terms of "symbolic reference".
Nowhere is this supremacy of the single word with its multiple signifying potential
more evident than in Mallarmé's Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, which be­
comes the outer frontier of Symbolist language, even though for another three decades
at least, authentically Symbolist poetry was to continue to be written.
A firm distinction can be made between word-symbol as seen in the final work of
Mallarmé, and collage writing, that signet of twentieth-century écriture. Collage is the
juxtaposition of distant realities which would achieve a continuity of sense only if we
found the means—we have not yet done so—of discovering the links of subconscious
associations. The prismatic dispersion of words from a single base, such as witnessed in
Mallarmé's Un coup de dés is on the contrary the very conscious construct of a fictitious
universe based on a very rational knowledge of the nature of words, i.e. their malle­
ability and deductibility. In his article on Symbolism, Valéry saw this device as a
central discovery of the Symbolists: "Que sais-je? Le pouvoir excitant d'un mot est
illimité".
In the methodological process of word selection, there was also an awareness of
how much seepage occurred from one signification to another, a seepage that is caught
in the next word; this phenomenon occurs sometimes through phonemic contamination,
sometimes through semantic contagion, and sometimes through form provocation.
In the fortunate marriage of words which constitutes the introduction of the sonnet by
Mallarmé: "Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd'hui", the chain reaction occurs through
seepage, the initial striking of the note vierge resolving into vivace through tone-asso­
ciation first, through syntactic contamination in the use of the adjective as a noun,
through the suggestion of form which graduates to the third association, then drops
one of the three elements of the analogical process, that of the phonemic, since the b
of bel does not repeat the v of the two other noun-adjectives although it is adjacent in
the consonant phonetic chart. Actually, there is a retreat from a labial to a labio-dental.
Another distancing occurs because the vowel sound of the open e loses the hold of the
previous two closed sounds of i. As a result, the third association occurs through cu­
mulative visual data provoked by the first two as the sound association weakens. But
on the way, the ambiguous central image that has been emerging has picked up another

692
association, t h a t of a grammatical paradox of sex-identification, vierge having created
à tension between its masculine article and its inherent feminine signification; the
tension extends to bel which conveys a stronger feminine association t h a n the masculine
because it conjurs the auditory feminine, while the visual masculine is a rare form of the
adjective/noun masculine. Working together in their various ambiguities, the adjec­
tive-nouns and the masculine-feminine signifiers produce a series of fluid effects gravi­
tating toward aujourd'hui, which also has a syntactic ambiguity since it is normally an
adverb, later concording in its adverbiality with autrefois, yet assuming the encum­
brance of the three attributes t h a t appear to qualify it as if it was meant to play the
role of a noun. The ambiguities of language have pulled their resources t o stage t h e
deeper ambiguity of the state of the mind of the poet caught in the impasse of creativity
versus stagnation: the swan/poet unable to fly/write, yet knowing t h a t flying/writing
is the vital element of its/his existence.
The most obvious evidence of the preeminence taken by the single word in t h e ana­
logical structure of t h e Symbolist écriture is the practice of substituting an unexpected
signifier for the expected one. This distrust of denotation is nowhere more evident t h a n
in the self-designation of the poet. Mallarmé himself rarely designates himself in his
poetry by the word poet although the list is long of the substantives t h a t imply t h e
meaning of poet. I t must be supposed t h a t by the time the Symbolist emerged, t h e
word poet had become so brittle and the extension of its connotation so narrow t h a t
verbal evasion was t h e only way to reestablish the concept and restore it t o its primal
complexity. The evasion was already flagrant in Rimbaud. The notion of substitution
caught on rapidly throughout European poetry so t h a t a whole set of substitute sub­
stantives arose such as master, musician, painter, explorer, acrobat, saltimbanque
prince, angel, Figur, ephebe, and of course, Orpheus, which became virtually a com­
mon noun. Altogether, these words constitute the aggregate power of the notion of poet
t h a t the Symbolists wanted to suggest in order to obliterate the congealed condition
t h a t the original word had settled into.
In his definition of the new writing, Mallarmé had proposed two types of sugges-
tiveness or contrived ambiguity. One would proceed from the mind and its fantasies
outward to embody the material reality of an object or landscape or a human otherness ;
the other way was for the poet to become attracted to an outside reality without know­
ing exactly why and then, probing his empathy with an object/place/person/myth/song/
painting/natural phenomenon, he set his power of association t o work t o consolidate t h e
links. " I t is the perfect use of this mystery t h a t constitutes the symbol: to evoke an
object, little by little, in order to show a mood, or conversely to select an object and
to extricate a mood from it, b y means of a series of decodings". 9
I t was the first part of Mallarmé's definition t h a t was most often applied b y t h e
Symbolist coterie, and it became the more quoted p a r t of the definition of symbol.
I t is interesting to note t h a t if Baudelaire's Harmonie du soir is t h e model of t h e first
process, his Cygne—which was to trigger all the Symbolist swans—was t h e threshold

9
Mallarmé, "Enquête de Jules Huret", in Œuvres Complètes (Bibl. de la Pléiade, Paris, Galli­
mard, 1945), p . 869.

693
 of the second process. Here the scene of the construction of the Carrousel unleashes a
whole series of associations in a circular fashion from the Andromache m y t h to Ovid
back t o Paris to a swan trapped in an alien environment, back to Andromache, then
on to the displaced black woman missing the warm climate of her native tropics and
then the final leap of the analogical mechanism to an island of shipwrecked sailors.
As the images accumulate, it is not until near the end t h a t the poet realizes t h e state of
being t h a t has provoked the chain reaction: t h a t of his sense of disorientation within
the context of familiar surroundings. The circle closes almost involuntarily three-
quarters through t h e poem, and it is in the final part t h a t the poet artificially constructs
a supplement to t h e natural stream of memory. In this early model of t h e Symbolist
construct, it can be seen t h a t Baudelaire is still a recognizer rather t h a n a builder, a
recognizer, of the forest of symbols which has moved from the exterior world inward:
"Ainsi dans la forêt où mon esprit s'exile".
The enigmatic power of an external reality was to become more and more the basis
of the Symbolist poem as it entered the twentieth century. The physical Figure func­
tioned exactly in the same capacity as the prismatic word-image, and the process
through which the state of mind of t h e spectator/poet is discovered is deductive rather
than inductive, whereas it would be inductive in the other form of Symbolist writing
suggested by the first part of the definition. Certainly, the movement from objective
reality to the subjective brings into poetic contemplation a larger universe a n d tends
virtually to eliminate in some cases the dichotomy between the material and the spiri­
tual. Taken from the point of view of the reader's personal association with t h e vision
of the poet, his participation becomes much more independent of the process of identi­
fication which had always been the basis of empathy in previous traditions. As a result,
the receiver goes through his own deductive process wherein the poet himself takes the
role of an exterior object—such as the one t h a t catalyzed the poem in the first place.
Thereupon, the poet becomes the mediator, releasing the reader from having to go
through the poet's particular interpretation of correspondences. Instead, he can now
launch on his very own analogical process. This release of the reader from the writer's
meaning is well captured in T.S. Eliot's observation in "The Music of P o e t r y " where he
says t h a t a poem can mean much more than intended b y the poet: "There may be
much more in a poem than the author was aware of. The different interpretations may
all be partial formulations of one thing, the ambiguities may be due to the fact t h a t the
poem means more, not less, t h a n ordinary speech can communicate". H e is actually
echoing the theory Mallarmé inherently expressed in Tombeau d'Edgar Poe: "Tel qu'en
lui-même enfin l'éternité le change", which implies t h a t the poem will pass from the poet's
field of mediation between vision and language to the reader's. Valéry confirms this
attitude when he observes t h a t "Il n ' y a de vrai sens d'un texte". 1 0 The progression is
clear as the plethora of symbol-images progress from Mallarmé to the poets of t h e 1920's.
The word as a bundle of connotations all vying for associations moves from a unit of
ambiguity residing within it to the total poem which then plays the same role for the

10
Valéry, Variété, in Œuvres Complétes (Bibl. de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard), p . 1507.

694
reader as a provocative exterior entity having the same function of arousing t h e imag­
ination as had Baudelaire's Carrousel.
Symbolist poetry a t its best should bring much insight to those who pursue t h e
study of Reception-Esthetics or the functioning of the processes of interpretation.
Symbolist poetry is, on t h e other hand, a devastating failure when submitted t o t h e
process of analytical reductions because deconstruction tends to tie down the poem to a
single pattern or meaning, whereas its power as an art form is precisely its protean and
perpetual passage from one set of meanings to another. I t is neither linear nor circular,
but polysemantic. I t parallels in music a series of chords or t h e transcript of a partita,
a score which only an adept conductor or performer can grasp in the synchronism of its
multiple features.
The relationships of signifier to the signified are completely demolished. The major
thrust of recent criticism has been to explore the signifiers which no longer relate to
the signified. Our critics have discovered the ways in which authors divert signifiers
from the signified from their usual places in an accepted code as a form of censure of t h e
code itself. Symbolist language neither subverts the signifier nor does it abort t h e signi­
fied. Before he begins his poetic game, the poet has already divested his signifiers of all
meanings relative to a n y specific signified idea or object. H e has absolved words from
their commitments to previous relationships. He has, in effect, laundered language.
In Wallace Stevens' words: "Do not use the rotted names . . . Nothing must stand/
Between you and the shapes you take/When the crust of shape has been destroyed". 1 1
If the veil of mystery has disappeared from the temple of Isis, likewise it can be said
t h a t language has been stripped of congealed codes. B u t ironically, the lifting of t h e
veil did not eliminate the mystery of meaning because mystery was moved into t h e
words themselves. The ambiguity of meaning is precisely based on t h e fact t h a t this
alleviation from expected connotations results in what Ezra P o u n d observed in reading
Arthur Symons, as reported in Clive Scott's article on "The Liberated Verse", " a new
modus in the sequence of words". A new sequence could not have been possible without
the liberation not only of the verse form b u t of the words themselves. The release of
words from expected meanings also provides a reason why in the global glossary t h a t
Louis Forestier has provided us of Symbolist imagery, he notes t h a t much of t h e ambi­
guity comes through contradictions in " a game of contraries". May not many of these
contraries be caused b y the demolition of the standard relationships between signifier
and signified? The nature of these relationships received a detailed analysis in the article
oiClaude Abastado on "The Language of Symbolism". H e says: " T h e s y m b o l . . . unites
a signifier to several signifieds", and he explains his statement b y observing t h a t " t h e
symbol is polysemantic. The mind simultaneously perceives several processes of signi­
fication . . . and at the same time correspondences among signifieds . . . These corre­
spondences are not fixed; at least they do not possess the rigor of t h e lexical "signifier-
signified" relationship t h a t is found in the sign . . . The mind is relatively free t o accept
or reject correspondences." One might conclude t h a t the creative liberty of t h e poet
makes it possible for the reader to exercise his own liberty of interpretation.

11
Stevens in The Man with the Blue Guitar.

695
 The seemingly benign, apathetic melancholy attributed to the Symbolist poem has
a sharp, self-contained scythe, devastating in its power to ravage stilted, settled mean­
ings and beings, relationships previously considered inalienable in the permanence of
their affirmations. Although somewhat marginal to the central thrust of the Symbolist
movement, Rimbaud's revolutionary approach to poetry as evidenced in his Illumina­
tions shows how derogatory one can be toward commonly accepted significations in the
very act of using them. Many a critic has been led into a trap by the mischievous Rim­
baud in reading Après le Déluge as a post-deluvian beatitude. The privileged vision is
not for Rimbaud one of restoration after the deluge but of the rising of the deluge, and
his mockery of the resettling of the dust is expressed by language intentionally abound­
ing in unilateral meanings: the piano in the Alps could, of course, mean the restoration
of sociability, Barbe-bleue can, of course, be associated with human cruelty; and the
excavations of precious stones cease and give way to the standard cultivation of flowers
when man surrenders his power to search. All of this makes the poet raise his voice in a
fit of rage, calling for more deluges. Thereafter, in his other pieces, each recognizable
entity such as Childhood, Youth, Cities, Flowers, Parade, etc. is concrete and clear
in terms of life's platitudes, the signifiers harmoniously connected to signified, except
that Rimbaud's intention is to demolish the relationship, and anyone who explains
him away according to one set of meanings will have missed the "illumination" which
comes only with the realization of the extent of the multiplicity of meanings of which
the first signals the rupture of the given assumption.
In like manner, Yeats often explores the multiplicity of meanings in the use of the
Celtic myth. To take one of the simpler examples, the word "sidhe" means both a certain
kind of whirling wind and designates the people of the Fairy Hills. The patterns of
poetic imagery that ensue take both paths simultaneously, weaving the natural force
of the wind-element into the imagined one of a fairy population which is of his own
recasting of an ancient myth. The deflowering of language has also a political power
sometimes in Yeats. In the Byzantium poems, in the Second Coming, and in a number
of others, Yeats becomes a revolutionary without even raising his voice but by spilling
the signified content of language and giving back to it a cleaned, lubricated machine
to produce new meanings as it annihilates civilizations guided by the old meanings.
In fact, the stilted becomes the nemesis of Symbolist poetry, and it is used in a
conscious way to become its own attacker covering up a quiet subversion of things
dying and dead. When social critics and the launchers of new avant-gardes attacked the
Symbolists for their inertia and lack of social consciousness, it appears more and more
certain that they were thinking of the Decadents rather than the Symbolists. For indeed
the Symbolists had turned their esthetics into a weapon for demolition and transformation.
This phenomenon becomes clear when we discover how in countries searching for social
revolution the erstwhile Symbolist poet was indeed capable of becoming a fervent social
critic. Since he had with all Symbolists yielded his " I " and proceeded to demolish in
language the prejudiced, established meanings of words to release them to new signi­
fications, the passage to the "We" and to new collective interpretations of the human
condition and to new verbalizations of redemption was natural to him. In this light,
the turn of the Belgian Symbolist, Emile Verhaeren, from the projection of the standard

696
inner landscapes of Symbolist writing modes to the image of the City is not really a
conversion from Symbolism to some other form of expression. His Cities are constituted
not of their expected residents but of collective, faceless effects: " L a force en r u t de la
matière" (Les Usines). Ambiguous of denotation, the poem carries in the substitution
of restless m a t t e r in the place of men the signature of Symbolism as a form of censure
and rebellion. Verhaeren's model was implemented by many later Symbolists.
This development was frequently the case in Eastern European literatures. E n d r e
Ady, the Hungarian poet who had started as a Symbolist much taken by Baudelaire
and Mallarmé and their followers, subsequently became a socially aware poet. André
Karátson in his article about the Hungarian translators of the French Symbolists says:
" W a r was simultaneously waged against the poetry of the past which was congealed
in Academism, and against feudal, provincial conservative Hungary. Undoubtedly,
the t r u t h of art was pursued, but not in the world of essences, and more fully in the
intellectual, spiritual, and even social reality of the epoch." The same was true of the
later works of Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely. Boris Christa observes in his article
t h a t Bely and Blok returned to narrative the better to communicate the sense of
"cataclysm t h a t would usher in a new era", as they envisaged the Revolution of 1917.
The Symbolist mode was suitable for the announcement of upheaval in Yeats' Second
Coming as in the poems of Blok and Bely. Events both social and literary have proved,
however, t h a t other forms would be needed to convey the Revolution itself. Ambiguity
is magnificent as the language of socio-political prophecy b u t hardly effective as a
language of ideological assertions. This distinction is made clear in Michel Décaudirís
general assessment of the Symbolist movement. He sees the Symbolist poet as rep­
resentative of man capable of changing the world while still remaining integrated in
its order.
To a certain extent, however, Mallarmé in his disguise as a timid schoolteacher had
opened a Pandora's box of troubles for the social as well as artistic establishment,
troubles of which perhaps the most untamable would be the distrust of language,
whereas the initial objective may well have been the pleasures of language.
As it is well known, the eventual demise of the Symbolist movement was due not
to an excessive use of its poetic powers but to its recessive use. Through imitation, the
ambiguities were p u t into new standards of association, the new patterns gained clarity
as the shocking became acceptable, all of which reduced and eventually dispelled their
obscurities. Symbolism, rising out of allegory, returned to it because in trying t o escape
the established relationships between signifier and signified it produced a new set of
relationships constituting a new code which could be easily decoded because of t h e
frequency of imitative referents. The field of its mystery became so crowded t h a t it
turned into a commonplace, the word, dislodged from its standardized context, assumed
again a recognizable context by the repetition of contexts newly discovered. The swan
caught in ice, human hair caught in precious jewels, the hothouse of Maeterlinck turn­
ing into the aquarium of Georges Rodenbach, the images running so parallel t o each
other t h a t they tended to unilaterally perceived common denominators.
I n respect to the character of Symbolist writing, Stefan George's Die Spange can
be viewed as emblematic of the two horns of t h e Symbolist dilemma. I t can signify two

697
contradictory meanings if indeed, as most critics believe, it is making a statement about
the nature of poetry. The artist, again avoiding the term "poet", is this time an artisan
working with metals; he wants to forge a plain clasp—it could be for the hair or a
decorative pin for a dress—but he cannot find the plain metal and has to make a lavish
bejeweled piece. On the one hand, the image of what it was to be and what it became
could refer to the inability of the artist to deal any longer with natural elements such as
iron: therefore, he has to resort to artificial decoration. The gold will have permanency,
and it is the mission, one might add, of the artist not to be satisfied with plain ingre­
dients. On the other hand, one can also take the poem as a criticism of the embellish­
ments that it became customary for the artist to use, standardizing the very process
that was to be the way of avoiding disclosure of any intended interpretation. Indeed
the brief and terse poem, freed of its author's intention, quietly makes its point of the
basic flaw of the Symbolist écriture. Running away from the poetic stereotypes of
Romanticism, it becomes evident that many Symbolist poets got caught in newer ones.
The Romantic dichotomy of the material and the spiritual had driven the poet to
a frequent use of the hyperbole, which became the vehicle of poetic eloquence. The
Symbolist chose understatement as the appropriate tone of prismatic word-expression;
the litotes became a vehicle for the suppression of eloquence. From the litotes the
Symbolist proceeded to almost an aphasic utterance and eventual silence when he did
not turn around like Verhaeren, Bely, Blok or Ady to move toward social expression of
collective states.
I t bears repetition to observe that the theater of Samuel Beckett voices the death-
throes of Symbolist language where the words dislodged from context have ultimately
lost their elasticity and can fall back only upon themselves. Estragon repeats the
Besmes character of Claudel's La Ville on his way to silence and the annulment of
further expectation.
The in-between spaces from designation by consensus to obliteration of all pro­
cess of naming filled up an excessively prolific strain of poetry. Like all excessively
tilled land, it was eventually exhausted of its nutrients, but only after having yielded
one of the richest harvests of European poetry.
Anna Balakian

Postscript to volume
In matters of bibliographical references and omissions of the ever-increasing books
on Symbolism, the reader will kindly remember the time lapse between the completion
of the manuscript and its publication.

698
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON SYMBOLISM
AS AN INTERNATIONAL
AND INTERDISCIPLINARY PHENOMENON

compiled by
ULRICH WBISSTEIN

A. Bibliographies and Documentary Sources

B. Studies of Symbolism as an International Movement
C. Historical, Critical and Methodological Studies of Symbolism in Various Languages
(mostly booklength)
D. Studies of Symbolism in Relation to Other Movements and Studies of Related
Contemporary Trends and Movements in Literature
E. Symbolism and Prose Literature
F . Symbolism and the Theater (Drama)
G. The Antecedents of the Symbolist Movement
H. Symbolism in Literatures Other t h a n French
I. Symbolism and the Visual Arts
J . Symbolism and Music

The present compilation, comprising approximately 500 items, is not meant t o be

exhaustive by any means but should be regarded as a working bibliography aimed at
providing a convenient point of departure for any study of Symbolism in its inter­
national context. Modestly and somewhat sporadically annotated, it is based on D a v i d
L. Anderson's Symbolism: A Bibliography of Symbolism as an International and Inter-
disciplinary Movement (New York, New York University Press, 1975), from which it
derives ca. 80% of its entries—most of them rechecked and .quietly corrected when
necessary—and to which it refers in the headnotes to the subsections of Sections F
through J . Additional entries (ca. 125 in number and marked b y an asterisk) were
culled from the bibliographies by Robert R. Anderson and Henry Krawitz listed in
Section A or ferretted out by the compiler.
The selection herewith presented is based on the following considerations a n d
decisions:

a) The listing is limited to items genuinely and pervasively concerned with Symbolism
as an artistic current of the 1880's and 1890's arising in France and ultimately
spreading throughout the world. I t excludes materials dealing with symbolism in
the broader sense.
b) Since, by and large, the emphasis is on t h e comparative aspects of Symbolism, t h e
section dealing with French Symbolism as a whole focuses on the most significant
books and offers references to only a small handful of essays.

699
c) For similar reasons, few entries on the great figures and pioneers of Symbolism
—from Baudelaire to Valéry—are given.
d) Specific influence studies (Baudelaire and Jorge Guillén, Verlaine a n d Stefan
George, etc.) have been omitted unless t h e y address themselves to central or
methodological questions. However, an exception has been made in t h e case of
Mallarmé, t h e Symboliste pur sang and acknowledged high priest of the movement.
e) I n principle, I have not included references to 1) chapters in s t a n d a r d literary
histories or handbooks, 2) brief and miscellaneous articles, and 3) s t a t e m e n t s
(mostly pre-1900) which, rarely comparative, are primarily of historical interest.
The organization of t h e material parallels t h a t used in the bibliography appended t o
Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon (Budapest/Paris, 1973), the
first volume in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. I n
modifying t h e basic structure of David L. Anderson's list, I hope t o have furnished new,
and different perspectives from which t o view and study Symbolism. The list includes
materials published through 1977. The deficiencies, inevitable as they may be, are glaring
(Scandinavian literature is hardly covered, for example); they should be blamed on t h e
limited resources at my disposal and the usual lack of "world" and time.

U.W.

A. BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND DOCUMENTARY SOURCES

Anderson, David L., Symbolism : A Bibliography of Symbolism as an International and Multi-

Disciplinary Movement (New York, New York University Press, 1975) 160 pp. (3182 entries
in four categories [General and Miscellaneous, National and International Movements, Forms
and Genres, Individual Figures] and an Author Index.)
Anderson, Robert R., Spanish-American Modernism: A Selected Bibliography (Tucson, University
of Arizona Press, 1970) 167 pp. (A General References section followed by sections devoted to
18 individual authors.)
Barre, André, Bibliographie de la poésie symboliste (Paris, Jouve, 1911) (twice reprinted) 294 pp.
(Companion piece to Barre's study Le Symbolisme, Individual sections devoted to 42 authors
and covering both primary and secondary literature.)
Krawitz, Henry, A Post-Symbolist Bibliography (Metuchen, N. J.', Scarecrow Press, 1973) 284 p p .
(4141 entries in four major categories: I. International Studies; I I . National Studies; I I I .
Comparative Studies; IV. Individual Studies by authors [Bely/Blok/Briusov, Benn, Bonnefoy,
Brennan, Darío, Eliot, George, Guillen, Hofmannsthal, Jiménez, Lorca, Rilke, Stevens,
Ungaretti, Valéry, Vallejo and Yeats]. Special emphasis on recent [1950-1970] criticism.)
Michaud, Guy, ed. La Doctrine symboliste: Documents (Paris, Nizet, 1947), 119 pp.

B. STUDIES OF SYMBOLISM AS AN INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT

Balakian, Anna, "Le Caractère international du Symbolisme" in Proceedings of the Fifth ICLA-
Congress (Amsterdam, Swets & Zeitlinger, 1969) p p . 293-299. (English version in Mosaic 2
[1969], No. 4, pp. 1-8.);
— , The Symbolist Movement : A Critical Appraisal (New York, Random House, 1967) 208 p p .
(Chapters I I and VI-VIII deal with the international context.)
Etiemble, René, "Le Mythe de Rimbaud en domaines étrangers" in Le Mythe de Rimbaud (Paris,
Gallimard), vol. I (Genèse du mythe), 1954, p p . 361-510;
—, "Le Symbolisme à l'étranger", Encyclopedia Universalis (Paris, 1958), XV, p p . 621-623.
Kayser, Wolfgang, "Der europäische Symbolismus", Die Vortragsreise: Studien zur Literatur
(Berne/Munich, Francke, 1958), pp. 287-304.
Wellek, René, "The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History" in Discriminations:
Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970) p p . 90-121, esp.
97-111.

700
 C. HISTORICAL, CRITICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL STUDIES OF FRENCH SYMBOLISM IN VARIOUS
LANGUAGES (MOSTLY BOOKLENGTH)

Balakian, Anna, "Studies in French Symbolism, 1945-1955", Romanic Review 46 (1955), pp. 2 2 3 -
230. (Review article.)
Balasov, Nikolai, "Simbolismul francez", Studii şi Cercetări de Istorie Lit. şi Folclor 10 (1961),
pp. 317-344.
Barre, André, Le Symbolisme : Essai historique sur le mouvement symboliste en France de 1885—
1900 (Paris, Jouve, 1911) 407 pp. (Twice reprinted.)
Becker, Carl, "Der Werdegang und die Bilanz des französischen Symbolismus" Germanisch—Roma­
nische Monatsschrift 5 (1913), p p . 544-552.
Bernadelli, Giuseppe, "Giochi technici nel simbolismo francese: Sul genere dalla rima". Aevum 47
(1973), pp. 137-143.
* Boeschenstein, Bernhard, "Symbolismus" in Fischer-Lexikon, Literatur II/2 (Frankfurt, S. Fischer,
1965), p p . 539-549.
Bonn eau, Georges, Le Symbolisme dans la poésie française contemporaine (Paris, Boivin, 1930)
138 pp.
Bornecque, Jacques-Henri, "Rêves et réalités du Symbolisme", Revue des Sciences Humaines 77
(1955), pp. 5-23.
Bowra, Maurice, The Creative Experiment (Cavafy, Apollinaire, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Eliot,
Lorca, Alberti.) (London, Macmillan, 1949) 255 pp.;
—, The Heritage of Symbolism (London, Macmillan, 1943). 231 pp. (Essays on Valéry, Yeats,
Eliot, Blok and Rilke.)
Brunetière, Ferdinand, " R e v u e littéraire: Le Symbolisme contemporain", Revue des Deux Mondes,
April 1891, pp. 681-692.
Carter, A. E., The Idea of Decadence in French Literature 1830-1900 (Toronto, University of Toronto
Press, 1958) 154 p p .
Castex, Pierre-Georges, éd. Autour du Symbolisme : Villiers, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud (Lille,
Faculté des Lettres, 1955) 319 pp.
Champigny, Robert. "Trois Définitions du Symbolisme", Comparative Literature Studies 4 (1967),
pp. 127-133.
Charpentier, John, Le Symbolisme (Paris, Les Arts et le Livre, 1927) (Critical study and anthology
[pp. 160-319].) 319 p p .
Chérix, Robert-Benoit, L'Esthétique symboliste (Thèse, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, 1922)
52 pp.
Ciobanu, Valeriu, "Simbolismul francez". Revista de istorie şi teorie literară 1 (1965), pp. 45-71.
(Summary in French.)
Cornell, Kenneth, The Symbolist Movement (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1951) 217 pp.
(Contains a list of 55 periodicals, pp. 201-206.);
—, Post-Symbolist Period: French Poetic Currents 1900-1920 (New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1958), 182 pp.
Décaudin, Michel, La Crise des valeurs symbolistes: Vingt ans de poésie française, 1895-1914 (Toulouse,
Privat, 1960) 527 p p ;
—, "Pré-Symbolisme, Symbolisme, Post-Symbolisme" in Problèmes de périodisation dans
l'histoire littéraire: Colloque organisé par la Section d'Etudes Romanes de l'Université Charles
de Prague, 1966 (Prague, 1968), pp. 41-46.
*Delsemme, Paul, "Le Message doctrinal du Symbolisme français", Revue de l'Université de Brux­
elles, 1974, Nos. 3/4, 264-281;
—, Un Théoricien du Symbolisme : Charles Morice (Paris, Nizet, 1958), 276 pp.
Delvaille, Bernard, La Poésie symboliste (Paris, Seghers, 1971) 431 pp. (Introduction [pp. 11-46]
and anthology, including poems by Elskamp, van Lerberghe, etc.)
De Michelis, Euralio, "Delle traduzioni da poesia e in ispecie dai simbolisti francesi" in Studi in
onore di Vittorio Luglio e Diego Valeri (Venice, Pozza, 1961), pp. 325-332.
Divoire, Fernand, Le Symbolisme : Son Influence sur la poésie d'aujourd'hui (Paris, Cercle de la
Librairie, 1924).
Drimba, Ovidiu, "Le Style symbolisme français, style de culture" in Studii de literatură universală
(Bucharest, 1966), pp. 223-237. (Summary in French.)
Etiemble, René, "Le Mythe Symboliste" in Le Mythe de Rimbaud (Paris, Gallimard), vol. I I (Struc­
ture du mythe), 1952, pp. 63-104.
Feldman, David, "La Revue symboliste La Plume (1889-1899)". Diss., Sorbonne, 1954.
Fiser, Eméric, Le Symbole littéraire : Essai sur la signification du symbole chez Wagner, Baudelaire,
Mallarmé, Bergson et Marcel Proust (Paris, Corti, 1941) 223 pp. (Part I I I , pp. 107-150, is
especially relevant.)
Fontainas, André, Mes Souvenirs du Symbolisme (Paris, La Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1928) 220 p p ;
—, and Nina Berberova, Le Symbolisme: Textes suivis de débats au studio franco-russe (Paris,
Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1931), 67 p p .

701
Gengoux, Jacques, Le Symbolisme de Mallarmé (Paris, Nizet, 1950), 269 pp.
Ghil, René, Les Dates et les œuvres: Symbolisme et poésie scientifique (Paris, Crès, 1923), 338 pp.
Gille, Valére, "Du Symbolisme", Bulletin de l'Académie de Langue et de Littérature Françaises 19
(1940), pp. 21-37.
Gresset, Michel, *'Voyeur et voyant: Essai sur les données et le mécanisme de l'imagination sym­
boliste". Nouvelle Bevue Française, November 1966, pp. 809-826.
Guiraud, Pierre, Index du vocabulaire du Symbolisme 5 vols. (Paris, Klincksieck, 1953-1962).
Hatzfeld, Helmut A., Der französische Symbolismus (Munich/Leipzig, Roesl, 1923) 169 p p .
Johansen, Svend, Le Symbolisme: Etudes des symbolistes français (Copenhagen, Munksgaard, 1945),
377 pp.
*Jokíc, Vujadin, Simbolizam (Cetinje, "Obod", 1957), 192 pp. (Introduction, pp. 5-46, followed by
an anthology of French and Russian Symbolists, a selection of manifestos, critical statements,
pp. 131-165, and an extensive bibliography.)
Jones, Percy Mansell, The Background of Modern French Poetry: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge,
England, Cambridge University Press, 1961) 196 pp. (A collection of essays previously pub­
lished. Part I : Three Major Influences, pp. 1-92; Part I I : The Emergence of the vers libre,
pp. 9 3 - 181.)
Kahn, Gustave, Les Origines du Symbolisme (Paris, Messein, 1936), 71 pp. (An essay by t h a t title
appeared in vol. 26 [1901] of the Revue Blanche,);
—, Symbolistes et décadents (Paris, Vanier, 1902), 404 pp.
*Komlós, Aladar, A Szimbolizmus (Budapest, Gondolat, 1965).
Kugel, James L., The Techniques of Strangeness in Symbolist Poetry (New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1971), 123 pp.
Lawler, James R., The Language of French Symbolism (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1969), 270 pp.
Lehmann, Andrew G., The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885-1895 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1950),
Second edition 1968. 328 pp.
*Lerik, Ivan, Simbolizam u Književnosti (Belgrade, 1967) 27 pp.
Lethève, Jacques, Impressionistes et Symbolistes devant la presse (Paris, Colin, 1959).
Losereit, Sigrid, "Die Suche nach dem verlorenen Eden in der Lyrik der französischen Symbolisten:
Zur Tradition eines mythischen 'thème'". Diss., Heidelberg, 1969.
Luzi, Mario, L'idea simbolista (Milan, Garzanti, 1959) 247 pp. (An international anthology.)
Mayoux, J. J., "At the Sources of Symbolism". Criticism 1 (1959), 279-297.
Mercier, Alain, Les Sources ésotériques et occultes de la poésie symboliste 1870-1914 Vol. I and I I :
Le Symbolisme français (Paris, Nizet,. 1969 and 1974), 281 pp.
Michaud, Guy, Message poétique du Symbolisme (Paris, Nizet, 1947). 3 vols. One-volume edition
1968 (819 pp.);
— , "Symbolique et Symbolisme", Cahiers de l'Association Internationale des Etudes Françaises
6 (1954), pp. 75-95.
Morawska, Ludmila, L'Adjectif dans la langue des symbolistes français: Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry
(Poznan, University Publishing House, 1964); 169 pp;
—, "Le Nom épithète dans la langue des symbolistes: Essai d'une interprétation", Kwartalnik
Neofilologiczny 11 (1964), pp. 70-73.
Moreau, Pierre, "Symbole, Symbolique, Symbolisme", Cahiers de l'Association Internationale des
Etudes Françaises 6 (1954), pp. 123-129.
Morier, Henri, Le Rythme du vers libre symboliste et ses relations avec le sens 3 vols. (Geneva, Presses
Académiques, 1943-44) (Vol. I : Verhaeren; vol. I I : Henri de Régnier; vol. I I I : Vielé-Griffin.)
Morrissette, Bruce A., Les Aspects fondamentaux de l'esthétique symboliste Diss., Clermont-Ferrand,
1933 182 pp.
Le Mouvement symboliste et son expression dans les revues symbolistes majeures (Geneva, Slatkine,
1970).
Muñer, Mario, Per il riordinamento sistematico degli studi su simbolismo, decadentismo, ermetismo
(Cremona, Editoriale Pizzorni, 1957), 12 pp.
Nyman, Alf Tor, Begreppet lyrisk erfarenhet : Kunskapsteoretiska och estetisk-psykologiska studier i
Symbolistik och realistik diktining (Lund, Gleerup, 1958), 423 pp. Summary in French,
pp. 416-423. (Uses French and Swedish examples.)
Öblomovieskij, D., Francuzskij simvolism (Moscow, Nauka, 1973), 301 pp.
Orliac, Antoine, La Cathédrale symboliste (Paris, Mercure de France, 1948);
—, * Péladan et le Symbolisme ésotérique (Paris, Edition du Vieux-Colombier, 1947).
Pellegrini, Carlo, "Il paesaggio interiore nei poeti simbolisti francesi" in Studi in onore di Vittorio
Luglio e Diego Valeri (Venice, Pozza, 1961), pp. 701-713.
Peyre, Henri, Qu'est-ce que le Symbolisme ? (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1974) Collection
SUP. 262 pp. (Mostly French Symbolism but has a concluding section [pp. 205-244] entitled
"L'héritage du Symbolisme en France et hors de France".)
* Pouillart, Raymond, "Problèmes du roman symboliste", Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1974,
Nos. 3/4, pp. 334-360.

702
Pucciani, Oreste, "The Universa JLanguage of Symbolism", Yale French Studies No. 9 (1952),
pp. 27-35.
Raynaud, Ernest, En Marge de la mêlée symboliste (Paris, Mercure de France, 1936) (second edition)
286 p p ;
—, La Mêlée symboliste (1870-1910) : Portraits et souvenirs (Paris, La Renaissance du Livre,
1920-1922), 3 vols.
Retté, Adolphe, Le Symbolisme: Anecdotes et souvenirs (Paris, Vanier, 1903), 276 pp.
Richard, Noël, A l'Aube du Symbolisme: Hydropathes, fumistes et décadents (Paris, Nizet, 1961),
334 p p ;
—, Le Mouvement Décadent : Dandys, esthètes et quintéssents (Paris, Nizet, 1968), 285 pp.
Ricoeur, Paul, "Le Symbolisme et l'explication structurale", Cahiers Internationales du Symbolisme
4 (1964), pp. 81-96.
Roinard, P.-N., V.-E. Michelet and G. Apollinaire. La Poésie symboliste: Trois entretiens sur les
temps héroïques (Paris, L'Edition, 1909).
Schinz, Albert, "Symbolism in France", PMLA 18 (1903), pp. 273-307.
Schmidt, Albert-Marie, La Littérature symboliste (1870-1900) (Paris, Presses Universitaires de
France, 1967), 128 pp.
Schrader, Ludwig, Sinne und Sinnenverknüpfungen : Studien und Materialien zur Vorgeschichte der
Synästhesie und zur Bewertung der Sinne in der italienischen, spanischen und französischen
Literatur (Heidelberg, Winter, 1969)
Segalen, Victor, "Les Synesthésies et l'Ecole Symboliste", Mercure de France 42 (1902), pp. 57-90.
Senior, John, The Way Down and Out: The Occult in Symbolist Literature (Ithaca, Cornell University
Press, 1959), 217 p p . (Reprint New York, Greenwood Press, 1968).
Spitzer, Leo, "Die syntaktischen Errungenschaften der Symbolisten" in Aufsätze zur romanischen
Syntax und Stilistik (Halle, Niemeyer, 1918), pp. 281-339.
Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London, Constable, 1899).
Valéry, Paul, "Existence du Symbolisme" (1938) in Œuvres (Pléiade edition), I., p. 688.
Vedia, Leonidas, La Poesía del simbolismo (Buenos Aires, Kraft, 1961), 113 pp.
* Weinberg, Bernard, The Limits of Symbolism : Studies on Five Modern French Poets (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1966), 430 pp. (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, St. John
Perse). Reviewed by Haskell M. Block in Comparative Literature Studies 8 (1970), pp. 489-503,
under the heading "Interpretation of Symbolist Poetry.")
Wilson, Edmund, Axel's Castle : A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (New York,
Scribner, 1931), 319 pp.
* Wroblewski, Michael James, "Four Symbolist Periodicals: Toward the Definition of an Aesthetic".
Diss., Indiana University, 1977 — (La Revue Wagnérienne, La Revue Indépendante, La Vogue,
Le Symboliste).

D. STUDIES OF SYMBOLISM IN RELATION TO OTHER MOVEMENTS, AND STUDIES OF RELATED

CONTEMPORARY TRENDS AND MOVEMENTS IN LITERATURE

Antignani, Gerardo, Dalla scapigliatura alVermetismo (Salerno/Roma, Di Giacomo, 1949), 120 pp.
Apollonio, Mario, Ermetismo (Padua, CEDAM, 1945), 136 pp.
Araujo, Murillo, Quadrantes do modernismo brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro, Livraria Saõ José, 1972)
(second edition), 53 pp.
* Bahr, Hermann, Studien zur Kritik der Moderne (Frankfurt, Ruetten & Loening, 1894);
—, * Zur Überwindung des Naturalismus: Theoretische Schriften 1887-1904, ed. G. Wunberg
(Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1968).
Binni, Walter, La poetica del decadentismo (Florence, Sansoni, 1949), 141 p p .
Caccese, Neusa Pinsard, Festa. Contribuicão para o estudo do modernismo (Saõ Paulo, Inst, de
Estudos Brasileiros, 1971), 242 pp.
* Brun, Jean, "Analogie et anatomie: La Verbe et la chair dans le Symbolisme et le Surréalisme",
Archivio di Filosofía, No. 3 (1965), pp. 43-51.
Cary, Joseph B, "The Theory and Practice of the Vague: A Study in a Mode of 19th-century
Poetry", Diss., New York University, DA 27 (1966/67), 1362A, 386 p p .
Charlesworth, Barbara, Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature (Mad­
ison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 155 pp.
* Coffman, Stanley, Imagism : A Chapter for the History of Modem Poetry (Norman, University of
Oklahoma Press, 1951).
Décaudin, Michel, "Poésie impressioniste et poésie symboliste", Cahiers de l'Association Inter­
nationale des Mudes Françaises 12 (1960), pp. 133-142.
* Decker, Henry W, Pure Poetry 1925-1930 : Theory and Debate (Berkeley/Los Angeles, University
of California Press, 1962) 128 p p . (Focuses on Henri Bremond's volume of 1926 and the criti­
cal reaction to it on the p a r t of Valéry and others.)

703
* Diaz-Plaja, Guillermo, Modernismo frente a Noventa y Ocho: Una introducción a la literatura
española del siglo XX (Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1951), 366 pp.
Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, "Naturalisme et Symbolisme" in Sur les Ecrivains: Essais critiques réunis
(Paris, Gallimard, 1964), pp. 224-232.
* Fletcher, Ian, "The 1890s: A Lost Decade", Victorian Studies 5 (1961), pp. 345-354.
Flora, Francesco, La poesia ermetica (Bari, Laterza, 1936), 214 p p .
Formigari, Lia, "Poesia simbolista et poesia realista", Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana II
(1957), p p . 343-359.
* Frattini, Alberto, Dai crepuscolari ai Novissimi (Milan, Marzorati, 1969) 393 p p ;
—, Poesia nuova in Italia: Tra ermetismo e neoavanguardia (Milan, I P L , 1968), 252 p p .
Friedrich, Hugo, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik von Baudelaire bis zur Gegenwart (Hamburg,
Rowohlt, 1960), 214 pp.
* Gaunt, William, The Aesthetic Adventure (London, Cape, 1945), 222 p p .
Giannessi, Ferdinando, Oli ermetici (Brescia, La Scuola, 1951), 117 p p . Second edition Milan, 1963.
* Hamilton, William, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London, Reeves & Turner, 1932).
Jackson, Holbrook, The Eighteen Nineties : A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth
Century (London, Richards, 1913), 368 pp.
Kopp, Karl C , "The origin and Characteristics of 'Decadence' in British Literature of the 1890s",
Diss., University of California. DA 24, (1963), 1604.
*Koppen, Erwin, Dekadenter Wagnerismus: Studien zur europäischen Literatur das Fin de siècle
(Berlin, de Gruyter, 1973), 386 pp.
Koskimies, Rafael, Der nordische Dekadent: Eine vergleichende Literaturstudie (Helsinki, Suomalai-
nen Tiedeakatemia, 1968), 119 pp.
Lafue, Pierre, "Le Naturalisme corrigé par le Symbolisme", Hier et Demain 10 (1944), p p . 145-155.
Lester, John, A., Journey Through Despair, 1890-1914: Transformation in British Literature and
Culture (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1968), 211 pp.
Macrí, Oreste, Health del simbolo : Poeti i critici del novecento italiano (Florence, Vallecchi, 1968),
646 pp.
Marcazzan, M., "Decadenza romantica e decadentismo", Humanitas (Brescia) 11 (1956), pp. 5 4 3 -
557.
Marzot, Giulio, Il decadentismo italiano (Bologna, Capelli, 1971), 304 p p .
Nelson, James G., The Early Nineties: A View from Bodley Head (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press, 1971), 387 pp.
Perticucci Bernardini, Ada, Simbolisti e decadenti (Rome, Casa Editrice "Ausonia", 1935), 135 pp.
Pozzi, Gianni, La poesia italiana del Novecento : Da Oozzano agli ermetici (Torino, Einaudi, 1965),
397 pp.
Rose, William, "The Poets of Young Poland 1890-1903", Slavonic Yearbook, American Series 1
(1941), pp. 185-199.
Ruprecht, Erich and Dieter Bänsch, eds. Literarische Manifeste der Jahrhundertwende 1890-1910
(Stuttgart, Metzler, 1970), 579 pp.
Santilli, Tommaso, L'ermetismo (G. Ungaretti, E. Montale, S. Quasimodo: Spunti critici) (Pescara,
Trebi, 1966), 101 pp.
Schulman, Ivan A., "Reflexiones en torno a la definición del Modernismo", Cuadernos Americanos,
No. 147 (1966), pp. 211-240.
Secchi, Giovanni, "L'involuzione dei poeti ermetici", Nuova Corrente 15 (1959), pp. 21-34.
* Siebenmann, Gustav, Die moderne Lyrik in Spanien (Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1965);
—, "Reinterpretación del modernismo" Symposium Unamuno 65 (1966), pp. 497-511.
Stephan, Philip, "Naturalist Influences on Symbolist Poetry, 1882-1886", French Review 45 (1972)
pp. 299-311.
* Stevenson, Lionel, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press,
1972), 269 pp.
"A Symposium on Literary Impressionism". Yearbook of Comparative and Oeneral Literature 17
(1968), pp. 40-68. (Proceedings of an ACLA meeting, followed by a bibliography of writings
on literary Impressionism.)
Tamayo Vargas, Augusto, "La muerte de Darío y el Modernismo en el Peru", Letras Nos. 76/77
(1966), p p . 15-30.
Weintraub, Stanley, "The Savoy": Nineties Experiment (University Park, Pa., Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1966), 294 p p ;
—, "The Yellow Book" : Quintessence of the Nineties (Garden City, N . Y., Doubleday, 1964),
373 pp.
Young, Howard T., The Victorian Expression: A Study of Four Contemporary Spanish Poets: Una­
muno, Machado, Jiménez, Lorca (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 223 p p .

704
 E. SYMBOLISM AND PEOSE LITERATURE

Cartier, M., La Prose de Verlaine et de Mallarmé: Contribution à l'étude de la prose des symbolistes
français. Quelques problèmes de langue et de stylistique (Berne, Städt. Gymnasium, 1964)
* Freedman, Ralph, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963). (Chapter IV:
"André Gide: Fiction and the Symbolist Method'', pp. 119-184.);
—, "Symbol as Terminus: Some Notes on Symbolist Narrative", Comparative Literature Studies
4(1967), pp. 135-144.
Swift, Bernard C , "The Hypothesis of the French Symbolist Novel", Modern Language Review 68
(1973), pp. 776-787.
Uitti, Karl D., The Concept of Self in the Symbolist Novel (The Hague, Mouton, 1961), 66 p p .

F. SYMBOLISM AND THE THEATER (DRAMA)

Block, Haskell M., Mallarmé and the Symbolist Drama (Detroit, Wayne State University Press,
1963), 164 pp. (Only brief references to non-French drama.)
Got, Maurice, Théâtre et Symbolisme: Recherches sur Vessence et la signification spirituelle de Vart
symboliste (Paris, Le Cercle du Livre, 1955), 344 pp. (A very broad study which does not specif­
ically focus on Symbolisme.)
Ireson, John C , "Towards a Theory of the Symbolist Theatre" in Studies in French Literature
Presented to H. W. Lawton by Colleagues, Pupils and Friends, ed. J . C. Ireland et al (Man­
chester, Manchester University Press, and New York, Barnes and Noble, 1968), pp. 135-156.
Jasper, Gertrude R., Adventure in Theater: Lugne-Poë and the Théâtre de l'Œuvre to 1899 (New Bruns­
wick, N . J., Rutgers University Press, 1947), 355 pp.
Knowles, Dorothy, La Réaction idéaliste au théâtre depuis 1890. (Paris, Droz, 1934), 558 p p .
* Köhler, H a r t m u t , "Le symbolisme au théâtre". Neohelicon 2 (1974), Nos. 3-4, pp. 31-47. (Original
version of essay contained in this volume.)
* Marie, Gisèle, Le Théâtre symboliste: Ses origines, ses sources, pionniers et réalisateurs (Paris, Nizet,
1973), 190 pp.
Robichez, Jacques, Le Symbolisme au théâtre: Lugne-Poë et les débuts de VŒuvre (Paris, L'Arche,
1957), 568 pp.
* Szondi, Peter, Das lyrische Drama des Fin-de-Siècle, ed. H. Besse. (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1975),
532 pp.
Zillmer, Herman L., "A Study of the Use of the Symbol in the Dramatic Aesthetics of Mallarmé,
Maeterlinck, Valéry and Claudel", Diss., University of Wisconsin. DA 26, (1965), 5600A.

G. THE ANTECEDENTS OF THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT

See also Anderson, nos. 1867-1880 (Ibsen), 2446-2477 (Poe), 3060-3063 (Whitman).
Bertocci, Angelo P., From Symbolism to Baudelaire (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press,
1964) 223 pp. (Chapter I: Symbolism: From Plotinus to Dante, pp. 3-14; chapter I I : Sym­
bolism: Goethe and the Romantic Theorists, pp. 15-29.)
Braak, S., "Novalis et le Symbolisme français", Neophilologus 7 (1922), pp. 243-258.
Chiari, Joseph, Symbolism from Poe to Mallarmé: The Growth of a Myth (London, Rockliff, 1956),
198 pp.
Graaf, D. A. de, "Trepunten tussen het Franse Symbolisme en de Duitse romantiek", De Vlaamse
Gids 46 (1962), p p . 533-554.
Jones, Percy Mansell, "Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarmé", Lettres (special issue, 1948) pp. 69-78;
—, "Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarmé: A Problem of Literary Judgment", Modem Language
Review 39 (1944), pp. 236-246;
—, "Whitman and the Symbolists", French Studies 2 (1948), pp. 54-67.
Lemonnier, Léon, "L'Influence d'Edgar Poe sur les conteurs français symbolistes et décadents",
Revue de Littérature Comparée 13 (1933), pp. 102-133.
Seylaz, Louis, Edgar Poe et les premiers symbolistes français (Lausanne, La Concorde, 1923), 183 p p .
Stahl, Ernst Leopold, "The Genesis of Symbolist Theories in Germany", Modern Language Review
41 (1946), pp. 306-317 (Focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature.
Thorel, Jean, "Les Romantiques allemands et les Symbolistes français" in Entretiens politiques
et littéraires, September 1891, pp. 95-109.
de Visan, Tancrède, "Le Romantisme allemand et le Symbolisme français", Mercure de France,
November/December 1910, pp. 577-591.
Vodtriede, Werner, Novalis und die französischen Symbolisten : Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des dichte­
rischen Symbols (Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1963). 196 pp. (Chapter IV: Novalis in Frankreich
vor 1893; Chapter X : Richard Wagner als Vermittler.)
Weinberg, Kurt, Henri Heine, 'romantique défroque*, héraut du Symbolisme français (New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1954), 303 pp. (See esp. P a r t I I I , p p . 207-282).

45 Balakian 705
 H. "SYMBOLISM" IN LITERATURES OTHER THAN FRENCH

1. Arabic
* Al-Jundi, Muhammãd Darwish, Al Ramziyyah fi al-Adab al-'Arabi (Symbolism in Arabic Litera­
ture.) (Cairo, Dãr Nahdat Misr, 1958) 590 pp.
* Ghattas, Antun, Al-Ramziyyah wa alAdab al-'Arabi (Symbolism and Modern Arabic Literature.)
(Beirut, Dar al--Kashshãf, 1949), 190 pp.

2.. Australia
Chisholm, A. R., " L a Fortune du Symbolisme français en Australie", Mercure de France 307 (Sep­
tember 1949), pp. 112-116;
—, "Le Symbolisme français en Australie: Mallarmé et Brennan", Révue de Littérature Com­
parée 18 (1938), pp. 354-359.
Kirsop, Wallace, "The Greatest Renewal, the Greatest Revelation: Brennan's Commentary on
Mallarmé", Meanjin 29 (1970), pp. 303-311.

3. Belgium (francophone)
See also Anderson, nos 383-656 (Romance), 1849-1866 (Huysmans), 1884-1895 (Jammes), 2015-
2016 (van Lerberghe), 2048-2075 (Maeterlinck), 2669-2672 (Rod), 2673-2679 (Rodenbach)
pp. 2867-2881 (Verhaeren).
* Austin, Lloyd James, "Mallarmé, Verhaeren et le 'Pitre châtié'", Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles
1974, Nos. 3/4, p p . 282-293.
Braet, Herman, L'Accueil fait au Symbolisme en Belgique 1885-1900: Contribution h l'étude du
mouvement et de la critique symbolistes (Brussels, Palais des Académies, 1967), 205 pp.
Champagne, Paul, Essai sur Albert Mockel: Contribution à l'histoire du symbolisme en France et en
Belgique (Paris, Champion, 1922) 54 pp.
Costaz, G., "Lugne-Poë et le théâtre symboliste belge à la fin du X I X e siècle", Audace 16, No. 1
(1970), p p . 130-135.
Décaudin, Michel, "Maeterlinck et le Symbolisme", Europe, Nos. 399/400 (1962), pp. 105-114;
—, * "Poètes belges et français devant l'idéalisme symboliste", Les Flandres ¿Lans les mouve­
ments romantique et symboliste. Actes du Second Congrès National de la Société Française de
Littérature Comparée (Paris, Didier, 1958), pp. 95-102.
* De Corte, Fernande, "Introduction à l'étude des revues symbolistes belges: Leur naissance, leur
vie et leur rôle dans l'histoire du Symbolisme français", Diss. (University of Ghent, 1947),
343 p p .
Delvaille, Bernard, " D u Symbolisme à l'Unanimisme: Notes sur Verhaeren", Audace 16, No. 1
(1970), p p . 91-104.
* Fontainas, André, "Le Rôle de La Wallonie dans le mouvement symboliste", Le Monde Nouveau
(September 1924).
Mathews, Andrew Jackson, 'La Wallonie' 1886-1892: The Symbolist Movement in Belgium (New
York, King's Crown Press, 1947), 115 pp. (Chiefly concerned with Albert Mockel).
Mockel, Albert, Esthétique du Symbolisme, ed. with an introduction by Michael Otten (Brussels,
Palais des Academies, 1962), 256 pp.
Nardis, L. de, "Simbolismo minore: Maeterlinck". Annali della faculta de filologia e letteratura dell'
Università S totale de Milano 16 (1963), pp. 103-110.
Ousterhout, Polly B., "Maeterlinck's Early Plays and the Symbolist Aesthetic", Diss. (Washington
University, 1970), 150 pp. DA 31, 1971, 3559A).
Postic, Marcel, Maeterlinck et le Symbolisme (Paris, Nizet, 1970), 255 pp.
* Van Nuffel, Robert O., "Van Lerberghe devant le Symbolisme français", Les Flandres dans les
mouvements romantique et symboliste. Actes du Second Congrès National de la Société Française
de Littérature Comparée (Paris, Didier, 1958), pp. 138-148;
—, "Polémiques belges autour du Symbolisme", Comparative Literature Studies 4 (1967) pp.
91-102.
Wautier, André, "La Tradition symboliste chez les poètes français de Wallonie", Culture Française
11, No. 5 (1962), p p . 10-43.

4. Brazil—See Portugal

6. Bulgaria
* Khadzhikosev, Semeon, Bulgarskiiat Simvolism . . . (Bulgarian Symbolism and European Mod­
ernism) (Sofia, Nauka izkustvo, 1974) 242 p p ;

706
 —, * "Le Symbolisme bulgare et l'influence qu'il a subie de la part des Symbolistes français"
(in Bulgarian) Literaturna misúl 11, No. 1 (1967) pp. 49-76.
6. Canada
See Anderson, nos. 2360-2373 (Nelligan)
7. China
Loi, Michelle, Roseaux sur les murs: Les poètes occidentalistes chinois, 1919-1949 (Paris, Gallimard,
1971), 609 pp.
8. Denmark
See also Anderson, nos. 1434-1440 (Claussen), 1915-1921 (Jorgensen), 1968-1969 (Krag)
Amsinck, Hanne, Sceneinstruktoren Herman Bang og det franske symbolistiske teater (Copenhagen,
Gad, 1972), 125 pp.
9. England
See also Anderson, nos. 274-333 (Anglo-American), 1577-1619 (T. S. Eliot), 1553-1557 (Doolittle),
1560-1566 (Dowson), 1844-1848 (Hopkins), 1922-1926A (Joyce), 2314-2322 (Moore), 2417-
2422 (Pater), 2773-2774 (Swinburne), 2775-2780 (Symons), 2781 (Synge), 3101-3180 (Yeats).
d'Agostino, Nemi, "La fin-de-siècle francese e la poesia di Pound ed Eliot", Galleria 4 (1954)
pp. 327-339.
Beyette, Thomas Kent, "Symbolism and Victorian Literature", Diss., University of Texas, Austin,
1969, 197 pp. DAI 30 (1970) 5440A.
Block, Haskell M., "The Alleged Parallel of Metaphysical and Symbolist Poetry", Comparative
Literature Studies 4 (1967) pp. 145-159.
Cazamian, Louis, Symbolisme et poésie: L'exemple anglais (Neuchâtel, Editions de la Baconnière,
1947), 252 pp. (Chapter VI: Le Nouveau Romantisme, pp. 192-220).
* Coffman, Jr., Stanley K., "Imagism and Symbolism", Chapter IV of Imagism: A Chapter for the
History of Modern Poetry (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1951).
* Dale, Hilda, La Poésie française en Angleterre 1850-1890: Sa Fortune et son influence (Paris,
Sonogy, 1954).
Farmer, Albert J.,Le Mouvement esthétique et 'décadent' en Angleterre (1873-1900) (Paris, Champion,
1931), 413 pp.
Fletcher, Ian, "Le Symbolisme français en Angleterre: Compléments à la bibliographie de G. Ross
Roy", Revue de Littérature Comparée 36 (1962), pp. 158-159. (See the entry Roy below).
Goodman, John F., "Arthur Symons and French Symbolism: The Critical Theory", Diss., Uni­
versity of Wisconsin, 1969, DAI 30 (1970), 5408A.
* Greene, E. T. H., "Jules Laforgue et T. S. Eliot", Revue de Littérature Comparée 22 (1948),
pp. 363-397;
—, * T. S. Eliot et la France (Paris, Boivin, 1951), 248 pp.
Hassan, Ihab H., "Edith Sitwell and the Symbolist Tradition", Comparative Literature 7 (1955),
pp. 240-251;
—, "French Symbolism and Modern British Poetry: With Yeats, Eliot and Edith Sitwell as
Indices". Diss., (University of Pennsylvania, 1953), DA 13 (1953), pp. 232-233.
Hayman, David, Joyce et Mallarmé 2 vols. (Paris, Les Lettres Modernes, 1956).
* Hönnighausen, Lothar, Präraphaeliten und fin de siècle: Symbolistische Tendenzen in der englischen
Spätromantik (Munich, Fink, 1971), 489 pp.
Husain, F . N. Yusuf Jamal, "Edith Sitwell and the Symbolist Tradition", Diss., University of
Minnesota, 1965 237 pp. DA 26 (1966), 5437.
Kronegger, Marlies E., "Joyce's Debt to Poe and the French Symbolists", Revue de Littérature
Comparée 39 (1965), pp. 243-254.
Morrissette, Bruce, "Early English and American Critics of French Symbolism", Studies in Honor
of Frederick W. Shipley (St. Louis, Washington University Press, 1942), pp. 159-180.
Nozick, Martin, George Moore and French Symbolism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1942),
Master's Essay.
Pauly, Marie-Hélène, "W. B. Yeats et les Symbolistes français", Revue de Littérature Comparée
41 (1967), pp. 351-366.
Rees, Thomas R., "T. S. Eliot's Early Poetry as an Extension of the Symbolist Technique of Jules
Laforgue", Forum (Houston), 8, No. 1 (1970), pp. 46-52.
Roache, Joël, "Baudelaire and Symons: Symbolism and Decadence", Revue de Littérature Comparée
41 (1967), pp. 351-366.
* Ross, Roy G., A Bibliography of French Symbolism in English-Language Publications to 1910",
Revue de Littérature Comparée 34 (I960), pp. 645-659. (Deals primarily with Mallarmé, Rim­
baud, Verlaine.)

46 Balakian 707
Schneidau, Herbert N . , "Pound and Yeats: The Question of Symbolism", Journal of English Literary
History 32 (1965), pp. 220-237.
Schrickx, W., " W . B. Yeats: Symbolist en visionair dichter", De Vlaamse Gids 49 (1965), p p . 380-
396.
Starkie, Enid, From Gautier to Eliot : The Influence of France on English Literature, 1851-1939
(London, Hutchinson, 1960), 236 pp. (Part I, chapter 5, deals with Symbolism.)
Stern, Carol S., "Arthur Symons' Literary Relationships, 1882-1900: Some Origins of the Symbolist
Movement". Diss., Northwestern University, 1968, DA 29 (1969), 2282-2283A.
Taupin, René, "French Symbolism and the English Language", Comparative Literature 5 (1953),
pp. 310-322.
Temple, R u t h Zabriskie, The Critic's Alchemy : A Study of the Introduction of French Symbolism into
England (New York, Twayne, 1953), 345 pp.
Wiegner, Kathleen, "French Symbolism in England 1890-1900", Wisconsin Studies in Modern
Literature 6 (1969), pp. 50-57.

10. Estonia
* Matthews, W. K., "The Background and Poetry of Gustav Suits: A Study in Estonian Symbolism"
American Slavic and East European Review 9 (1950), pp. 116-127.

11. Finland
Rantavaara, Irma, "From Realism Towards Symbolism: National and International Elements in
Finnish Literature in the 1880s and 1890s", Proceedings of the Fifth ICLA Congress (Amster­
dam, Swets & Zeitlinger, 1969) pp. 311-316. (Mainly Juhani Aho.)
12. Germany, Austria and Switzerland,
See also Anderson, nos. 334-382 (Germanic), 1330 (Beer-Hoffmann), 1666-1738 (George), 1804-1843
(Hofmannsthal), 2543-2587 (Rilke), 2793 (Trakl).
Allernann, Beda, "Rilke und Mallarmé: Entwicklung einer Grundfrage der symbolistischen Poetik"
in Rilke in neuer Sicht, ed. Käthe Hamburger (Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1971) p p . 63-82.
Berry, Robert Meyers, "The French Symbolist Poets in Germany [Baudelaire, Verlaine, R i m b a u d ] :
Criticism and Translations 1870-1914". Diss., Harvard University, 1944. An abstract in
Harvard Summaries of Theses, 1943-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1947) pp. 504-508.
Block, Haskell M, "Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Symbolist Drama", Transactions of the
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences 48 (1959), pp. 161-178.
* Böschenstein, Bernhard, "Georg Trakl und Arthur Rimbaud", Studden zur Dichtung des Absoluten
(Zurich, Atlantis, 1968) pp. 140-149;
—, * "Hofmannsthal, George und die französischen Symbolisten", Arcadia 10 (1975),
pp. 158-170;
—, "Wirkungen des französischen Symbolismus auf die deutsche Lyrik der Jahrhundert­
wende. I : Stefan George und Francis Vielé-Griffin", Euphorion 58 (1964), p p . 376-386.
(Same essay in his book Studien zur Dichtung des Absoluten above.)
Duthie, Enid Lowry, L'Influence du symbolisme français dans le renouveau poétique de l'Allemagne :
Les "Blätter für die Kunst" de 1892 à 1900 (Paris, Champion, 1933), 507 pp.
von Faber du Faur, Curt, "Stefan George et le Symbolisme français", Comparative Literature 5
(1953), pp. 151-166.
Frank, Heinz G., "Wechselwirkungen deutsch-französischer Einflüsse in symbolistischer Dichtung",
Diss., University of Manitoba, 1967.
Grey, M. A. R., "Hofmannsthal and Nineteenth-Century French Symbolism", Diss., Dublin,
1950/51.
Grossmann, Dietrich, "R. M. Rilke und der französische Symbolismus", Diss., Jena, 1938, 66 p p .
Gsteiger, Manfred, Französische Symbolisten in der deutschen Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (1869-
1914) (Berne/Munich, Francke, 1971), 325 pp. (I: Phasen der Rezeption; I I : Formen der
Reproduktion. ) ;
—, " L a Fortune littéraire de quelques Symbolistes belges dans les pays de langue allemande".
Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1974, Nos. 3/4, pp. 252-263.
Klemperer, Viktor, "Christian Morgenstern und der Symbolismus", Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde
42 (1928), pp. 39-55, 124-136.
* Müller, Wolfgang G., "Der Weg vom Symbolismus zum deutschen und anglo-amerikanischen
Dinggedicht des beginnenden zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts", Neophilologus 58 (1974),
pp. 157-179. (Baudelaire/Rilke as paradigm.)
Perl, Walter H., "Leopold von Andrian: Ein vergessener Dichter des Symbolismus, Freund Georges
und Hofmannsthals", Philobiblon, December 1958, pp. 303-309.

708
Pollak, I., "Die Einwirkung der französischen Parnassiens und Symbolisten auf Stefan George und
seinen Kreis", Diss., Vienna, 1931.
Saalmann, Dieter, "Die symbolistische Grundlage von Rainer Maria Rilkes Die Aufzeichnungen des
Malte Laurids Brigge unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der äusseren Form des Werkes",
Diss., Washington University, St. Louis. 231 pp. DAI 31 (1971), 3562-3A (German text with
French interspersions.)
* Sandberg-Braun, Beatrice, "Wege zum Symbolismus: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte dreier Gedichte
ö. F. Meyers (Zurich, Atlantis, 1969).
Sior, Marie-Luise, "Stefan George und der französische Symbolismus", Diss., Giessen, 1932
(Würzbùrg, Triltsch, 1932), 104 pp.
Spenlé, Jean-Edouard, "Stefan George et les poètes symbolistes français", Helicon 2 (1940),
pp. 9-23.
Steffen, Hans, "Hofmannsthals Übernahme der symbolistischen Technik" in Literatur- und Gei­
stesgeschichte : Festgabe für Heinz Otto Burger,ed. R. Grimm and C. Wiedemann (Berlin, Erich
Schmidt, 1968), p p . 271-279.

13. Greece
Panayotopoulos, J. M., "Le Symbolisme et les poètes lyriques néo-grecs',, Hellénisme contemporain
(March 1954), pp. 99-111.
Stergiopoulos, Kostas, Apo ton symbolismo sti nea pisii (Athens, 1967). (Vaphopoulos, Geralis,
Dimakis, Varvitsilis, Themelis.)

14. Hungary
See also Anderson, nos. 1142-1145 (Ady).
* Gedeon, Jolán, Ady és a fvancia irodalom (Ady and French literature) (Budapest, 1936).
* Harsányi, Zoltán, A 'franciás' "Nyugat" : francia vonatkozások a "Nyugat" harminc esztendejében
(The "French" Nyugat: The Relations between Nyugat and French Literature from 1908 to
1938) (Debrecen, 1942).
Karátson, André, Le Symbolisme en Hongrie: L'Influence des poétiques françaises sur la poésie
hongroise dans la première part du XXe siècle (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1969),
498 pp.
* Komlós, Aladár, A szimbolizmus és a magyar lira (Symbolism and Hungarian poetry) (Budapest,
Akadémiai Kiadó, 1965).

15. India
Bhattacharya, Lokenath, "French Influences in Contemporary Bengali Poetry", Indian Literature
8, Nos. 1/2 (1965), pp. 90-107 (From Baudelaire to Valéry.)
Bose, Mme¡ Das, "Les thèmes et la prosodie du symbolisme français dans la poésie bengale mo­
derne", Diss., Paris, 1970.
Subrahmanian, Krishnaswami, "The Theory of 'Suggestion' in Sanskrit Poetics, English Romanti­
cism and French Symbolism". Diss., Indiana University, 1969. 144 pp. DAI 30, 1970,
4957A. (IV : The Doctrine of Suggestion; V I : Dhrani and Symbolism.)

16. Italy
See also Anderson, nos. 383-656 (Romance), 1466-1488 (D'Annunzio), 2021 (Levi) 2402 (Onofri),
2405 (Parini), 2406-2411 (Pascoli), 2482 (Prati), 2803-2810 (Ungaretti).
Cordié, Carlo, "Arrigo Solmi critico dei Parnassiani e dei Simbolisti francesi", Studi in onore di
ítalo Siciliano (Florence, Olschki, 1966), pp. 255-277.
Gutia, Joan, "Ungaretti e Mallarmé", Bivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate 3 (1952),
pp. 254-259.
Macri, Oreste, "Simbolismo e realismo: Intorno all'antologia di Castellet", L'Approdo Letterario 9
No. 21 (1963), pp. 71-86.
* de Nardis, Luigi, "Prospettive critiche per uno studio su Vittorio Pica e il decadentismo francese"
Bivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate 19 (1966) pp. 202-209.
Nicoletti, B., "Max Nordau e i primi critici del Simbolismo in Italia", Studi Francesi 3 (1959),
pp. 433-438.
Petrucciani, Mario, "Stéphane Mallarmé precursore dell'ermetismo italiano", Bivista di Critica 1,
No. 1 (1950), pp. 19-26.
Picco, F., "Simbolismo francese e simbolismo italiano", Nuova Antologia, May 1, 1926, p p . 82-91.
(Comparison of Verlaine and Pascoli.)

709
Ragusa, Olga, "French Symbolism in Italy", 'Romanic Review 46 (1955), 231-235 (An important
review article.);
—, Mallarmé in Italy : Literary Influence and Critical Response (New York, Vanni, 1957 ), 228 p p ;
—, "Vittorio Pica: First Champion of French Symbolism in Italy", Italica 35 (1958), p p . 255-
261.
Romani, Bruno, "Lucini e la via italiana al simbolismo", Prospetti 7, Nos. 25/26 (1972), p p . 42-53.,
Romano, Salvatore, Poetica dell'ermetismo (Florence, Sansoni, 1942), 185 pp. (Part I, Introduzione
all'ermetismo, p p . 11-42, is relevant.)
* Sémproux,. André, "Le premier Ungaretti et la France", Revue de Littérature Comparée 37 (1963),
pp. 360-367 (Mallarmé, Apollinaire.)
Tosi, Guy, "Le Tentation symboliste chez D'Annunzio, 1890-1893", Revue des Sciences Humaines,
fasc. 78 (1955), p p . 285-296.
Valeri, Diego, "Posizione di D'Annunzio nel simbolismo europeo", L'Approdo Letterario 9, No. 22
(1963), pp. 6-19.
Viazzi, Glauco and Vanni Scheiwiler, eds. Poeti simbolisti e libertà in Italia (Milan, All'insegna del
Pesce d'Oro, 1971) (Anthology.)
17. Japan
* Kubota, Hanya, Nihon no shocho shijin (Symbolist poets of Japan) (Tokyo, Kinokuniya-Shoten,
1963).
* Nakamura, Shinichiro, "Nihon no shochoshugi chogenjitsushugi" (Symbolism and Surrealism
in Japan) in Bungaku no hoho (Tokyo, Iwanami-shoten, 1957).
Tsukimura, Reiko, "The Language of Symbolism in Yeats and Hagiwara", Diss., (Indiana Uni­
versity, 1968. 206 pp. DA 28, 1968, 3689A).
Won, Yo, "The Symbolist Influence on Japanese Poetry", Comparative Literature Studies 8 (1971)
254-265. (Áriake Kambara, Hakushu Kitahara, Rofu Miki, Sakutaro Hagiwara.)
18. The Netherlands
See also Anderson, nos. 1360 (Bloem, 1448-1453 (Couperus), 1570-1573 (van Eeden), 1752-1758
(Gorter), 2006-2014 (Leopold), 2375-2378 (Nijhoff), 2991-2998 (Verwey).
Brachin, Pierre, "Le 'Mouvement de 1880' aux Pays-Bas et la littérature française", Revue des
Littératures Modernes, Nos. 52/53 (1960), pp. 4-35.
* de Graaf, Daniel A., "Le Mouvement Van nu en Straks dans le cadre du Symbolisme" in Les
Flandres dans les mouvements romantique et symboliste. Actes du Second Congrès National de la
Société Française de Littérature Comparée (Paris, Didier, 1958), pp. 110-116.
Kamerbeek, J a n Jr, "Op zoek naar een definitie van het symbolisme", Levende Talen, No. 273 (1970)
pp. 767-777. (On J . H. Leopold).
* Minderaa, P., Karel van den Woestijne : Zin leven en werk. Arnheim: van Loghum Slaterns, 1942
(Pp. 143-167: Litteraire invloede: Fransche letterkunde.)
Rutten, M., "Le Symbolisme français et le renouveau de la poésie belge d'expression néerlandaise",
Etudes Germaniques 17 (1962), pp. 328-343. (On Van Nu en Straks, Vermeylen, Morice, van
de Woestijne.)
Thys, Walter, "The Literature of the Netherlands in the Eighteen Nineties and European Trends"
in Proceedings of the Fourth ICLA-Congress, Fribourg, 1964 (The Hague, Mouton, 1965) I,
pp. 505-510. (A French version of the essay appeared in Etudes Germaniques 12 [1957],
pp. 305-311.)
Valkhoff, P., L'Influence de la littérature française dans les Pays-Bas. Leiden, 1918 (Van Nu en
Straks.)
19. Poland
See also Anderson, nos. 657-705 (Slavic), 1970 (Krysinska), 2303 (Micinski), 3182 (Zaromski).
Domaradzki, Théodore F., "Un Message symboliste oublié: A l'occasion (May 13, 1969) du cente­
naire de la parution du poème De la Liberté de la parole de C. Norwid". Etudes Slaves et Est-
Européennes 14 (1969) pp. 49-72. (Cyprian Kamil Norwid.)
Lam, Andrzej, Polska awangarda poetycka ;. Programy lat 1917-1923. 2 vols (Cracow, Wydawn.
Literackie, 1969) (I, 17-35: Spadek po symbolizmie.)
* Mâchal, Jan, 0 symbolismu v polske e ruske literature (Prague, Slavistic Institute, 1935) 224 pp.
(French summary: pp. 186-202. Polish Symbolism treated on pp. 5-91.).
Nowakowski, Jan, "Symbolizm i dramaturgia Wyspianskiego", Pamietnik Literacki 53 (1962)
pp. 423-450.
Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Maria, "Symbolistyczna koncepcija poezji", Pamietnik Literacki 61, No. 4
(1970), pp. 91-138;
—, * Poezji symbolu w okresie Młodej Polski (Wroclaw, 1970).

710
Szymanski, Wieslaw Pawel, "Neosymbolizm: Proba zarksu (o awangardowej poezji polskiej w
latach trzydziestych)" in Neosymbolizm o awangardowej wlatach trzydziestych (Cracow, 1973),
pp. 311-377.
Terlecki, Tymon, "Stanislaw Wyspianski and the Poetics of Symbolist Drama", Polish Review 14,
No. 4 (1970), pp. 55-63.

20. Portugal and Brazil

See also Anderson, nos. 383-656 (Romance), 1148-1153 (Andrade), 1393 (Brandäo), 1410
(Castro), 1780 (Guimaraens), 1964-1965 (Kilkerry), 2433-2435 (Pessanha), 2436-2439
(Pessoa).
* Bastide, Roger, "O lugar de Cruz e Sousa no movimento simbolista" in A poesia Afro-Brasileira
(Sao Paulo, Livraria Martins, 1943), pp. 109-128;
—,. * "Le Symbolisme Brésilien", Mercure de France, November 1, 1953, pp. 516-519.
Belchior, Maria de Lourdes, Verlaine e o simbolismo em Portugal. (Lisbon, Edicöes Brotéria, 1970)
(Preceded by an article with the same title in the periodical Brotéria 90 [1970], pp. 305-319.).
Bertrán, P., and J u a n Bautista, "Caravana de poetas a Bélen: Del simbolismo hasta nesetros dias:
España, Francia, Italia", Razon y Fe 48 (1948), pp. 12-36.
Castelo, J. Aderaldo, "Apontamentos para a historia do simbolismo no Brasil", Revista de Universi-
dade de Sao Paulo, No. 1 (1950), pp. 111-121.
Castro, Ernesto Manuel de Melo, L Influence du symbolisme français dans la poésie portugaise con­
temporaine (Paris, Champion, 1923).
Chast, Denyse, "Eugenio de Castro et les Symbolistes français" in Mélanges d'études portugaises
offerts à Georges Le Gentil (Lisbon, Instituto para a Alta cultura, 1949), pp. 155-161;
—, "Eugenio de Castro et Stéphane Mallarmé", Revue de Littérature Comparée 21 (1947),
pp. 243-253;
—, * "Les Ecrivains français et la revue portugaise Arte (1895-96)", Revue de Littérature
Comparée 24 (1950), pp. 93-103.
Coelho, Jacinto do Prado, "Entre le Symbolisme et l'existentialisme: Humus (1917) de Raoul
Brandão" in Proceedings of the Fifth ICLA-Congress, Belgrade, 1967 (Amsterdam, Swets &
Zeitlinger, 1969), pp. 355-361.
Correa, Manuel T., "Mallarmé e Fernando Pessoa perante o 'Corvo' de Edgar Allan Poe", Occidente
65 (1963), pp. 4-20.
Crespa, Angel, "Muestrario de poemas simbolistas brasileños", Revista de Cultura Brasileña, No.
22 (1967), pp. 217-280. (Introduction, pp. 217-242.)
Fein, John M., "Eugénio de Castro and the Reaction to Symbolism in Portugal". Modem Language
Journal 36 (1952), pp. 268-271, (Reaction to the volume Oaristos [1890] and a critical study
by Fialho d'Almeida, Los gatos [1911].)
Ferro, Tulio Ramires, "Raul Brandäo et le Symbolisme portugais", Bulletin des Etudes Portugaises
et de l'Institut Français au Portugal 13 (1949), pp. 210-228.
Franzbach, Martin, "Brasilianischer Beitrag zu einer Geschichte des Lachens: Der Symbolismus
des Cruz e Sousa", Ibero-Romania (Munich) 2 (1970), pp. 158-161.
* Haddad, Jamil Almansur, "Essencia e forma do Simbolismo", Revista do Arquivo Municipal, Sao
Paulo 12 (1945), pp. 7-28.
* Le Gentil, Georges, "Le Cinquantenaire du Symbolisme et le Portugal", Bulletin des Etudes
Portugaises . . . 5 (1938).
Lopes, M. T., Fernando Pessoa et le drame symboliste : héritage et création Diss., Paris, 1973.
Martins, António C , "Subsidios para o estudo da poética simbolista: O decassilabo de Camilo
Pessanha", Coloquio internacional de estudos luso-brasileiros (Lisbon, 1959) I.
*Meneses Filho, Rodrigo Ottavio de Longgaard, "Reflexos do simbolismo na poesia brasileira" in
Simbolismo e penumbrismo (Rio de Janeiro, 1970), pp. 19-60.
Moisés, Massaud, O simbolismo (1893-1902) (Saõ Paulo, Cultrix, 1966), 293 pp. (Vol. 4 of a history
of Brazilian literature.)
Montenegro, Abelardo F., Cruz e Sousa e o movimento simbolista no Brasil (Fortaleza, S. C. P., 1954),
187 pp.
Muricy, José Candido de Andrade, Panorama do movimento simbolista brasileiro 3 vols. (Rio de
Janeiro, Departmento de Imprensa Nacional, 1951-52), (Introduction I, 1-73.);
—, * "Da critica do simbolismo pelos simbolistas" in Critica e História Literaria, Anais do I
Congresso Brasileiro de Critica e História Literaria (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Tempo Brasileiro,
1964), pp. 235-266.
Nuñes, Antonio de Padua, Aspectos estilisticos da poesia di Castro Alves (Rio de Janeiro, Livraria
Sao José, 1972) (A Brazilian Symbolist avant la lettre.)
* Peregrino, João, Jr., Origem e evoluçâo do simbolismo (Rio de Janeiro, 1956)
Queiroz, Maria J . de, "O simbolismo e José Severiano de Resende", Minas Gerais, Suplemento
leterario No. 23 (December 1972), pp. 12-14.

711
Ramos, Pericles Eugenio da Silva, Poesía simbolista : Antología (Saõ Paulo, Ediçoes Melhoramentos
1965) (Introduction, pp. 11-32.)
Silva, Wilson Melo da, O simbolismo e Alphonsus de Guimaraens (Belo Horizonte, Imprensa Oficial,
1971), 416 pp.
Silveira, Tasso da, " A poesia simbolista em Portugal", Occidente 26 (1945), pp. 150-158.

21 Romania
See also Anderson, nos. 1157-1170 (Anghel), 1187-1197 (Bacovia), 1356-1359 (Blaga), 2440-2442
(Philippide).
Bote, Lidia, ed, Antología poeziei simboliste româneşti (Bucharest, Minerva, 1972), 391 pp. (Preface,
pp. 5-11.);
—, * Simbolismul românesc (Bucharest, Editura pentru literatură, 1966), 494 pp. Second edition
1968, 541 pp.
* Dobrowolski, Klotilde, "Die französischen Einflüsse in dem Werke Alexandru Macedonskis",
Diss., Berlin, 1953.
Drimba, Ovidiu, "Alexandru Macedonski et le Symbolisme français", Studii de literatura universală
11 (1968), pp. 87-102. (Summary in French.)
Micu, Dumitru, "Un simbolist baroc: 100 de ani de la nasterea lui Dimitrie Anghel", Viata Român­
eascâ (Bucharest) 25, No. 7 (1972), pp. 61-71.
* Popa, Nicolas, "Aspects particuliers du Symbolisme Roumain" in Proceedings of the Fifth ICLA-
Congress, Belgrade, 1967 (Amsterdam, Swets & Zeitlinger, 1969), pp. 301-310.
Zamfir, Mihai, "Simbolismul ornamental al lui Macedonski: Analiza sonetului 'Avatar'", Limba
şi literatură 28 (1972), pp. 108-113.

22 Russia

See also Anderson nos. 657-717 (Slavic), 1198-1199 (Balmont), 1331-1346 (Bely), 1361-1383
(Blok), 1751 (Gorki), 1798-1802 (Hippius), 1881-1882 (Ivanov), 1966 (Konevskoi),
1971 (Kuzmin), 2076-2108 (Mayakovsky), 2412-2416 (Pasternak), 2733-2736 (Sologub),
2737-2740 (Soloviev), 2798 (Tyutchev).
* Charguina-Németi, Ludmilla, "Le Symbolisme russe et ses rapports avec les littératures française
et allemande". Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 1974, Nos. 3/4, pp. 307-317.
Donchin, Georgette, "French Influence on Russian Symbolist Versification". Slavic and East
European Review 30 (1956), pp. 405-419. (Vesy.) ;
—, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague, Mouton, 1958) (Biblio­
graphy, pp. 216-233.)
Grigor'jan, K. N., "Verlen i russkij simvolizm", Russkaja literatura 14 (1971), pp. 111-120.
Grossman, Leonid, "Brjusov i francuszkie simvolisty", Mastera Slova (Moscow) 1928, pp. 261-269.
Laffitte, Sophie, "Le Symbolisme occidental et Alexandre Blok", Revue des Etudes Slaves 34 (1957),
pp. 88-94.
* Máchal, Jan, O symvolismu v polske a ruské literature (Prague, Slavistic Institute, 1935), 224 pp.
(Summary in French, pp. 186-202. Russian Symbolism treated on pp. 95-183.).
Maslenikov, Oleg A., The Frenzied Poets: Andrey Biely and the Russian Symbolists, (Berkeley/Los
Angeles, University of California Press, 1952), 234 pp.
Matlaw, Ralph E., "The Manifesto of Russian Symbolism", Slavic and East European Journal 1
(1957), pp. 177-191. (Mereszkovski's "On the Causes of the Present Decline and the New Cur­
rents of Contemporary Russian Literature".)
Mohrenschildt, D. S. von, "The Russian Symbolist Movement", PMLA 53 (1938), pp. 1193-1209.
Poggioli, Renato, "Simbolismo russo e occidentale", Letterature moderne 11 (1961), pp. 586-602.
* Raggio, Olga, "Brjusov e la poesia francese", Letterature moderne 6 (1956), pp. 569-582.
Reeve, F. D., "Dobroljubov and Brjusov: Symbolist Extremists", Slavic and East European Journal
8(1964), pp. 292-301;
—, * "Vesy: A Study of a Russian Magazine", Slavic and East European Review 37 (1958),
pp. 221-235.
Stremoukhov, D., "Echos du symbolisme français dans le symbolisme russe", Revue des Sciences
Humaines, fasc. 78 (1955), pp. 2 9 7 - 3 1 9 . )
Theile, Wolfgang, "Die Beziehungen René Ghils zu Valerij Brjusov und der Zeitschrift Vesy : Ein
Beitrag zum Verständnis des französischen Symbolismus in Russland", Arcadia 1 (1966),
174-184.
West, James, Russian Symbolism: A Study of Vyacheslav Ivanov and the Russian Symbolist Aesthetic
(London, Methuen, 1970), 250 pp.

712
23. Spain and Latin America
See also Spanish-American Modernism: A Selected Bibliography, ed. Robert R. Anderson
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970) and Anderson, nos. 383-656 (Romance), 1183-
1185 (Azorín), 1489-1532 (Darío), 1647-1659 (García Lorca), 1750 (Gomez Carillo), 1771-1779
(Guillén), 1783-1785 (Gutiérrez Nájera), 1792-1797 (Herrera y Reissig), 1897-1914 (Jimé­
nez), 2030-2045 (A. Machado), 2046 (M. Machado), 2292-2294 (Martí), 2404 (Pardo Ba-
zán), 2680-2682 (Rodo), 2683 (Rojas), 2710 (Rulfo), 2729-2730 (J. A. Silva), 2800-2802
(U.???amuno), 2860-2865 (Valle-Inclán).
Abril, Xavier, Dos Estudios (Buenos Aires, 1960) (I: Vallejo y Mallarmé.)
Aguirre, José Maria, António Machado, poeta simbolista (Madrid, Taurus, 1973), 388 p.
* Avango, Ferer Javier, "Abel Farina: El Simbolismo en Colombia", Boletín Cultural y Biblio­
grafico (Bogota) 7 (1964), pp. 1174-1178.
* Beltroy, Manuel, "José Maria Eguren, poeta simbolista" in José María Eguren, Poesías completas
(Lima, Barranco, 1952), pp. 11-18.
Carden, Poe, "Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadentism—and Spanish-American Modernism",
Hispania 43 (1960), p p . 545-551.
* Diaconescu, Ana M., "Parnasiana o simbolista? Estudio comparativo de la 'Sinfonía en gris mayor'
de Rubén Darío" in Homenaje a Pablo Neruda y Miguel Angel Asturias, ed. F . Sanchez-
Castañer and L. Sainz de Medrano (Madrid, 1973), pp. 798-810.
Durand, René L., "Rubén Darío et les lettres françaises", Revista Interamericana di Bibliografía
17 (1967), pp. 157-164.
Eguía Ruiz, C , "La crisis del simbolismo en literatura en España", Literaturas y Literatos 1 (1914),
pp. 433-456.
Faurie, Marie-Josephe, Le Modernisme hispano-américain et ses sources françaises (Paris, Centre de
Recherches de l'Institut d'Etudes Historiques, 1966), 292 pp. (Bibliography, pp. 275-284.)
Fein, John M., "Eugénio de Castro and the Introduction of Modernismo to Spain", PMLA 73
(1958), pp. 556-561.
Ferreres, Rafael, Verlaine y los modernistas españoles (Madrid, Gredos, 1975), 272 pp.
Fox, E. Inman, "La poesía 'social' y la tradición simbolista", Torre, No. 64 (1969), pp. 47-62.
Fuente, Carmen de la, "El simbolismo y Ramón López Velarde", Cuadernos Americanos, No. 170
(1970), pp. 175-190.
Gicovate, Bernard, J. Herrera y Reissig and the Symbolists (Berkeley/Los Angeles, University of
California Press, 1957), 106 pp.
—, "The Poetry of Julio Herrera y Reissig and French Symbolism", PMLA 68 (1953),
pp. 935-942;
—, "La poesía de Juan Ramón Jiménez en el simbolismo", Comparative Literature Studies 4
(1967), pp. 119-126.
Gonzales-Lopez, Emilio, "La poesía simbolista de Valle-Inclán", Oriol 23 (1969), pp. 27-36.
Gullón, Ricardo, "Simbolismo y modernismo en Antonio Machado", Torre, Nos. 45/46 (1964),
pp. 329-347.
* Gutierrez, J. F., "Guillermo Valencia: Simbolismo o decadentismo", Tierra Nueva (Bucaramanga)
4, No. 186 (1930), pp. 1-4.
* Guzzy y de la Mora, Luisa, Enrique Gonzáles Martínez frente al simbolismo frances (Mexico City,
1954), 59 pp.
* Lepiorz, Gerhard, Themen und Ausdrucksformen des spanischen Symbolismus, Diss., Tübingen
(Düsseldorf, Nolte, 1938), 94 pp.
* Lowry, Hope, "L'influence de la littérature française sur les poètes hispano-américains de l'école
moderniste", Diss., Montreal, McGill University, 1931.
Mapes, Erwin K., L'Influence française dans l'œuvre de Rubén Dario (Paris, Champion, 1925).
* Maya, Rafael, Los origines del modernismo en Colombia: Artículos literarios (Bogota, 1961), (Ten
essays from El Espectador.)
Neddermann, Emmy, Die symbolistischen Stilelemente im Werke von Juan Ramón Jiménez (Hamburg,
Seminar für romanische Sprachen und Kultur, 1935), 145 pp.;
—, " J u a n R. Jiménez: Sus vivencias y sus tendencias simbolistas", Nosotros n. s. l/3 (1936),
pp. 16-25.
* Nugent, Robert, "Guillermo Valencia and French Poetic Theory", Hispania 45 (1962), p p . 4 0 5 -
409.
Previtali Morrow, Giovanni, "Don Segundo Sombra y los simbolistas franceses." Cuadernos Hispano­
americanos No. 235 (1969), pp. 222-231. (Novel by Ricardo Guiraldes.)
Reyes, Alfonso, "Mallarmé en español", Revue de Littérature Comparée 12 (1932), pp. 546-568;
—, Mallarmé entre nosotros (Buenos Aires, Ed. Destiempo, 1938), 94 p p .
Romero, Hector R., "Simbolismo e impresionismo en la trilogía Antonio Azorin*9, Romance Notes
15 (1973), pp. 30-36.
Rubio, David, Symbolism and Classicism in Modem Literature : Introduction to the Study of Sym­
bolism in Spanish and Spanish-American Literature (Philadelphia, no. d., 1923), 56 p p .

713
Russell, Dora Isella, "Roberto de la Carreras, iniciador de simbolismo en el Uruguay'*, Cuadernos
* Hispanoamericanas 73 (1968), pp. 333-355.
Schulman, Ivan A., and Manuel P. Gonzalez, Martí, Dario y el Modernismo, Madrid, 1969.
* Spelucin, Alcides, " E l simbolismo en el Peru", Letras (Lima) 1 (1929), pp. 181-188.
Vigée, Claude, "Jorge Guillen et les poètes symbolistes français" in Révolte et Louanges : Essais sur
la poésie moderne (Paris, Corti, 1962), pp. 139-197;
—, "Jorge Guillén et l'esthétique du Symbolisme français" in Studies in Western Literature,
ed. D. A. Fineman (London, Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 270-292.
* Zerega-Fombona, Alberto, Il simbolismo en la poesía hispano americana (Madrid, 1920);
—, Le Symbolisme français et la poésie espagnole moderne (Paris, Mercure de France, 1919)
(An essay by the same title appeared in the Mercure de France, fasc. 135 [1919] pp. 192-224).

24. Sweden

See also Anderson, nos. 1641-1646 (Fróding), 2018-2020 (Levertin), 2397-2401 (Obstfelder).
Block, Haskell M., "Strindberg and the Symbolist Drama", Modem Drama 5 (1962), p p . 314-322.
Wijkmark, Carl-Henning, "Symbolist influenser hos Vilhelm Ekelund: Tre studier", Samlaren 89
(1968), pp. 7-36.

25. Turkey

* Atal, Gül, "Ahmet Hashim's Reflections on Poetry: A Turkish Symbolist Manifesto", Yearbook
of Comparative and General Literature 12 (1963), pp. 50-55;
—, "Turkish and French Symbolism: Ahmet Hashim", Diss., (Indiana University, 1963. 114
pp. DA 23, 1964, 4351-4352).
* Ongun, C. S., Sanat Sistemleri ve Ahmet Hasimin Sembolizmi (Istanbul, 1947), 96 pp. (Systems
of A r t . . . )
* Yetkin, S. K., Ahmet Hasim ve Sembolizm (Ankara, 1938), 16 pp.

26. United States of America

See also Anderson, nos. 274-333 (Anglo-American), 1454-1460 (Hart Crane), 1632-1633 (J. G.
Fletcher), 1883-1895 (James), 2024-2026 (Amy Lowell), 2323-2325 (M. Moore), 2742-2746
(W. Stevens).
Beatty, Richmond C , "The Heritage of Symbolism in Modern Poetry", Yale Review 36 (1947),
pp. 467-477., (Tate as well as Yeats and Eliot).
Benamou, Michel, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1972). 154 pp. (Preceded by articles in Critique, 1961 and 1964).
Block, Haskell M., "The Impact of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry" in The Shaken
Realist: Essays in Modern Literature in Honor of Frederick J. Hoffman, ed. M. J. Friedman
and J. B. Vickery (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1970), pp. 165-217.
Gaughan, Gerald C , "Wallace Stevens and Stéphane Mallarmé: A Comparative Study in Poetic
Theory", Diss., Northwestern University. DA 27 (1967) 3453A.
Henry, Marjorie, La Contribution d'un Americain au Symbolisme français: Stuart Merrill (Paris,
Champion, 1927), 290 pp.
Hoffman, Frederick J., "Symbolisme and Modern Poetry in the United States", Comparative Litera­
ture Studies 4 (1967), 193-199.
McKulick, Benjamin M., "Archibald MacLeish and the French Symbolist Tradition", Diss., Uni­
versity of South Carolina, 1970. 198 pp. ÛA 30 (1970), 3950A.
Ramsey, Warren, Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance (New York, Oxford University Press
1953), 302 pp;
—, "Uses of the Visible: American Imagism, French Symbolism", Comparative Literature
Studies 4 (1967), pp. 177-191.
Rexroth, Kenneth, "L'Influence de la poésie française sur la poésie américaine", Europe, Nos.
358/359 (1959), pp. 43-66.
Simons, Henri, "Wallace Stevens and Mallarmé", Modern Philology 43 (1947), pp. 235-259.
Taupin, René, L'Influence du Symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine de 1910 à 1920 (Paris,
Champion, 1929), 302 pp.
Winters, Yvor, "The Symbolist Influence", Hound and Horn 4 (1931), p p . 607-618. (A review of
Taupin's book.)

714
27. Yugoslavia
See also Anderson, nos.16???3o-1640(Franko), 2295 (Matos), 2799 (Ujevié).
Kośutić,Vladeta R., "Le Parnasse et le Symbolisme chez les Serbes", Anali filolośki fakultet, Bel­
grade University, 2 (1962), pp. 295-309. (French summary, pp. 309-310. Two excerpts from
a dissertation by the same title: preface and chapter on Vladislav Petkovic-Dis. The disser­
tation also concerns J o van Dućić and Milan Rakić.);
— , "Les Parnassiens et les Symbolistes chez les Serbes: Les influences sur Milan R a k i é " ,
Füološki Pregled (Belgrade) Nos. 3/4 (1964), pp. 143-184.
I. "Symbolišm" and the Visual Arts. Entries are limited to items concerning Symbolism, synthetism,
the Nabis and Gauguin with the School of Pont-Aven. Books and articles focusing on the
decorative outgrowths of the movement, especially art nouveau and Jugendstil, are excluded,
as are the historically significant reports on the seven "Expositions des peintres impression­
nistes et symbolistes" published, between 1892 and 1894, in La Plume. The catalogues of the
numerous exhibitions of Symbolist art held during the last three decades in Paris, Washington,
Turin, Toronto, London, New York and elsewhere are not listed. For additional references,
see Anderson, nos. 718-880 (Art), 1404-1407 (Carrière), 1550-1552 (Denis), 1622-1627
(Fantin-Latour), 1661-1665 (Gauguin), 2345-2353 (Moreau), 2486-2497 (Puvis de Chavan-
nes) and 2503-2517 (Redon).
Aurier, G.-Albert, "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin", Mercure de France, March, 1891,
pp. 155-165.
* Austin, Lloyd James, "Mallarmé and the Visual Arts", French Nineteenth-Century Painting and
Literature, ed. Ulrich Finke (Manchester, Manchester University Press, and New York, Harper
& Row, 1972), pp. 232-257.
Barilli, Renato, Il gruppo dei Nabi in Varte moderna (Milan, Fabbri, 1967);
— , Il simbolismo nella pittura francese dell'ottocento (Milan, Fabbri, 1967), pp. 100.
Berger, Klaus, Odilon Redon : Fantasy and Colour, tr. by Michael Bullock (New York, McGraw Hill,
1965) Part I : Symbolism (pp. 9-39). Original German edition published by Du Mont Schau«
berg in Cologne in 1964.
* Borowitz, Helen O., "Visions of Salome", Criticism 14 (1972), pp. 12-21. (A thematic study focusing
on Mallarmé, Huysmans, Moreau and Redon).
* Bowlt, John, "The Blue Rose: Russian Symbolism in Art", Burlington Magazine 118 (1976),
pp. 566-577;
—, * "Synthesism and Symbolism: The Russian World of Art Movement", Forum for Modern
Language Studies 9 (1973), pp. 35-48.
* Chassé, Charles, Gauguin et le Groupe de Pont-Aven : Documents inédits (Paris, Floury, 1921);
—, Le Mouvement symboliste dans Vart du XIXe siècle : Gustave Moreau, Redon, Carrière,
Gauguin et le Groupe de Pont-Aven (Paris, Floury, 1947);
—, The Nabis and their Period (New York, Praeger, 1969).
* Chipp, Herschel N., ed. Theories of Modem Art : A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley/Los
Angeles, Univ. of California Press, 1968) P a r t I I : "Symbolism and other Subjectivist Ten.
dencies: Form and Evocation of Feeling" (pp. 48-123)
* Christoffel, Ulrich, Malerei und Poesie: Die symbolistische Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts (Vienna,
Gallus-Verlag, 1948).
Denis, Maurice, Du Symbolisme au classicisme: Théories. Textes réunis et présentés par Olivier
Renault d'Allonnes (Paris, Herman, 1964) An earlier version appeared under the title Théories
1890-1910 : Du Symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique (Paris, Bibliothèque
d'Occident, 1912). The volume contains Denis' preface to the ninth exhibition of t h e Im­
pressionists/Symbolists, as well as the essay listed below;
—, "L'Epoque du Symbolisme". Gazette des Beaux-Arts 11 (1934), p p . 165-179.
Fowlie, Wallace, "Mallarmé and the Painters of his Age", Southern Review, n.s. 2 (1966), p p . 542-
558.
* Gauss, Charles E., The Aesthetic Theories of French Artists : 1855 to the Present (Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins Press, 1949) (Chapter V: "Symbolism and Fauvism: Gauguin, Denis, Matisse"
[pp. 53-68]).
Gray, Camilla, The Great Experiment in Russian Art 1863-1922 (London, Thames and Hudson, 1962)
(Has comments on the periodical Mir Iskusstva [The World of A r t ] and on the painter Victor
Borissov-Mussatov).
Grojnowski, Daniel, "Le Mystère Gustave Moreau". Critiqua 19 {1963), 225-238 (A lengthy review
of two Paris exhibitions).
* Heller, Reinhold, "Edvard Munch's Vision and the Symbolist Swan". Art Quarterly 36 (1973),
pp. 209-249.
Hofstätter, Hans H., Symbolismus und die Kunst der Jahrhundertwende: Voraussetzungen, Erschei­
nungsformen, Bedeutungen (Cologne, Du Mont Schauberg, 1965) (A basic study) 274 p p .
Humbert, Agnès, Les Nabis et leur époque: 1880-1900. (Geneva, Cailler, 1954), 1 5 1 p p .

715
* Huyghe, René, La Relève du réel : La peinture française au XIXe siècle, Impressionisme. Symbolisme
(Paris, Flammarion, 1974) (Chapter V I I I : La Crise de l'esprit et le Symbolisme, p p 265-315.)
Jaworska, Wladyslawa, Gauguin and the Pont-Âven School, tr. by Patrick Evans (London, Thames
& Hudson, 1972). The original, French version appeared in 1971 in Neuchatel (Switzerland).
Jullian, Philippe, Dreamers of Decadence : Symbolist Painters of the 1890s, tr. Robert Baldick (New
York, Praeger, 1971) 272 pp. Original version: Esthètes et Magiciens : L'Art fin de siècle (Paris,
Perrin, 1969).
—, The Symbolists, tr. Mary Anne Stevens (New York, Phaidon, 1973).
Legrand, Francine-Claire, "Fernand Khnopff: Perfect Symbolist". Apollo 85 (1967) p p . 278-287;
—, Le Symbolisme en Belgique (Brussels, Laconti, 1971), 251 pp. An English translation by
Alistair Kennedy appeared in 1972 under the same imprint.
Lethève, Jacques, Impressionnistes et Symbolistes devant la presse (Paris, Colin, 1959) (Impressionist
painters, Symbolist poets) 302 pp.
Loevgren, Sven, Genesis of Modernism : Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh and French Symbolism in the
1880s (Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1959; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).
Lucie-Smith, Edward, Symbolist Art (New York, Praeger, 1972), 316 pp.
Marchiori, Giuseppe, "Le Rendez-vous symboliste", XXe Siècle 33 (Dec, 1969), p p . 61-68.
Les Mardis: Stéphane Mallarmé and the Artists of his Circle, Exhibition catalogue prepared by
Klaus Berger (Lawrence, Kansas, Univ. of Kansas Museum of Art, 1966).
* Martin, Elizabeth Puckett, The Symbolist Criticism of Painting 1880-1885. Diss., Bryn Mawr,
1948.
* Martino, Pierre,e "Rapports de la littérature et des arts plastiques: Parnasse et Symbolisme" in
Actes du V Congrès de la Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes
(Florence ,Valmartina, 1955), pp. 399-410, esp. 406ff.
Masini, Lara V., "Simbolismo, Nabis, art nouveau", Ulisse 76 (1973), pp. 27-34.
* Metelitz, M., "La Poésie symboliste en France dans ses relations avec la peinture", Diss., Paris,
1951
Mullay, Terence, "Odilon Redon and the Symbolists", Apollo 66 (1957), pp. 181-185.
Peyre, Henri, "Le Symbolisme dans la peinture et la musique" in Qu'est-ce que le Symbolisme?
(Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), Chapter V I I I .
Pincus-Witten, Robert, "Iconography of Symbolist Painting", Artforum 8 (January, 1970), pp. 56-62.
Polak, Bettina S., Het fin-de-siècle in de Nederlandse schilderkunst : De symbolistische beweging
1890-1900 (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1955), 415 pp.
Raynal, Maurice, Histoire de la peinture moderne de Baudelaire à Bonnard, 3 vols (Geneva, Skira,
1949).
* Reverseau, Jean-Pierre, "Pour une étude e du thème de la tête coupée daus la littérature et la
peinture dans la seconde partie du X I X siècle", Gazette des Beaux-Arts 80 (1972), p p . 173-184.
Rookmaker, H. R., Synthetist Art Theories : Genesis and Nature of the Ideas on Art of Gauguin and his
Circle (Amsterdam, Swets & Zeitlinger, 1959), 365 pp.
Sandström, Sven, Le Monde imaginaire d'Odilon Redon (Lund, Glei up, and New York, Wittenborn,
1955) (An iconological study).
* Sarajas-Korte, Salmi, Suomen varnaissymbolism ja sen lahteet: Tutkielma Suomen maalaustaiteesta
1891-1895 (Helsinki, Otava, 1966), 368 pp. (Finnish Symbolist painting).
* Seznec, Jean, "Odilon Redon and Literature", French Nineteenth-Century Painting and Litera-
ture, ed. Ulrich Finke (Manchester, Manchester Univ. Press and New York, Harper & Row,
1972), pp. 280-298.
Vanor, George», L'Art Symboliste Paris, Vanier, 1889. Preface by Paul Adam.
* "Three Inquiries into the Effects of Symbolism", Art Journal 23 (1963), pp. 96-116 (An intro­
duction by Peter Selz, G. Mauner's "Nature of Nabi Symbolism", M. S. James' "Mondrian
and the Dutch Symbolists" and D. Robbins' "From Symbolism to Cubism: L'Abbaye of
Creteil").
Wallis, Anne Armstrong, "The Symbolist Painters of 1890", Marsyas 1 (1941), pp. 117-152.

J . "SYMBOLISM" AND MUSIC

Since Symbolism does not constitute a distinct entity or movement in musical history (no
entries on the subject are to be found in the standard musicological reference works), the
following list is limited to items concerned a) with the Symbolist writers' attitude toward
music, especially that of Richard Wagner, b) the relation between the Symbolists and con­
temporary French composers, andc) the literary connections and predilections of some prom­
inent Impressionist composers, notably Claude Debussy. For additional entries see Ander­
son, nos. 915-963 (Music) and 3029-3059 (Wagner)
* Albrecht, Hans, "Impressionismus", Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel, Bärenreiter-
Verlag) VI (1957), pp. 1163-1180.
* Aubry, Georges Jean, "Jules Laforgue et la musique", Revue de Genève 3 (1921), p p . 443-459;

716
 —, * "Paul Verlaine et les musiciens", La Musique française d'aujourd'hui (Paris, Perrin, 1916),
pp. 236-252.
Austin, Lloyd James, "Mallarmé on Music and Letters", Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 42
(1959), p p . 19-39.
Baudot, Alain, "Poésie et musique chez Verlaine: Forme et signification". Etudes Françaises 4
(1968), p p . 32-54.
Beaufils, Marcel, Wagner et le Wagnérisme (Paris, Aubier, 1947).
Bernard, Suzanne, Mallarmé et la Musique (Paris, Nizet;1959), 184 pp.
* Brown, Calvin S., "The Musical Analogies in Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés", Comparative Literature
Studies 4 (1967), pp. 67-79..
Bruyr, José, "Maeterlinck et ses musiciens", Musica No. 105 (Dec, 1962), p p . 29-36.
Carcassonne, E., "Wagner et Mallarmé", Révue de Littérature Comparée 16 (1936), p p . 347-366.
Coeuroy, André, Wagner et l'esprit romantique. Wagner et la France. Le Wagnérisme littéraire (Paris,
Gallimard, 1965), 80 p p .
* Cupers, Jean Louis, "Correspondance entre l'impressionnisme musical et le symbolisme littéraire",
Bevue des Archéologues et Historiens d'Art de Louvain 4 (1971), pp. 199-224.
Drougard, E., "Richard Wagner et Villiers de l'Isle-Adam", Revue de Littérature Comparée 14 (1934),
pp. 297-330.
Duchesne-Guillemin, Jacques, "Paul Valéry et la musique", Revue Musicale No. 210 (1952),
pp. 113-121.
Dujardin, Edouard, "Le Mouvement Symboliste et la musique", Mercure de France 72 (1908),
pp. 5-24.
Fehr, A. J. A., De franse symbolisten en de muziek . . . (Groningen, Wolters, 1960), 24 pp.
Fortassier, Pierre, "Verlaine, la musique et les musiciens", Cahiers de l'Association Internationale
des Etudes Françaises 12 (1960), pp. 143-159.
Graaf, Daniel A. de, "Arthur Rimbaud en de muziek", Mens en Melodie 7 (1952), pp. 252-257.
Guichard, Léon, La Musique et les lettres en France au temps du Wagnérisme (Paris, Presses Uni­
versitaires de France, 1963), 354 pp;
— , * "Les Symbolistes et la musique", Bulletin des Lettres 5 (1936), pp. 193-199, 232-239.
Jäckel, Kurt, Bichard Wagner in der französischen Literatur, 3 vols. (Breslau, Priebatsch, 1931/1932).
* Jarocinski, Stefan, Debussy. Impressionnisme et Symbolisme, tr. Thérèse Duchy (Paris, Seuil, 1971)
English version, tr. Rollo Myers (London, Eulenburg, 1977).
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Lambert, L. Gary, "Richard Wagner vu par Charles Baudelaire", Proceedings of the Pacific North­
west Conference on Foreign Languages, ed. W. C. Kraft (Corvallis, Oregon State University,
1971), p p . 38-45.
Lassus, J. de, "L'Influence wagnérienne sur le symbolisme français", Vie des Peuples ( D e c , 1925),
pp. 673-687.
Loncke, Jocelynne, Baudelaire et la musique (Paris, Nizet, 1975) (Chapter I I I : Rapport avec des
musiciens, pp. 43-77).
Mauclair, Camille, "Les Symbolistes et leur musiciens", Revue de Paris 43 (1936), p p . 285-301.
Meylan, Pierre, Les Ecrivains et la musique : Etudes de musique et de littérature comparée Volume I I
(Lausanne: Edition du Cervin, 1951) (Baudelaire to Cocteau).
Mitchell, Joyce, "Symbolism in Music and Poetry", Diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1944.
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(Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1974) Chapter V I I I .
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Rauhut, Friedrich, "Vom Einfluss der französischen Literatur des Symbolismus auf die moderne
französische Musik", Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 24 (1936), p p . 440-460.
Schmitt-Garre, Helmut, "Dichtung, die Musik sein wollte", Neues Hochland 60 (1968), pp. 624-635;
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Terenzio, Vincenzo, "Debussy e Mallarmé", Bassegna Musicale 17 (1947), p p . 132-135.
Vestdijk, S., "Baudelaire en de muziek", Maatstaf 5 (1957), pp. 248-264.
* Wenk, Arthur B., Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley/Los Angeles, University of California Press,
1976).

47 Balakian 717
 INDEX

Aarseth, Asbjørn 576 Armfield, Maxwell 536

Aavik, Johannes 597 Arnold, Matthew 128, 299, 304, 307
Abastado, Claude 695 Arosenius, Ivan 508
Abilgaard, Ove 503, 517 Arp, Hans 514
Adam, Paul 18, 71, 557 Arrieta, Rafael Alberto 229
Adler, Jules 499, 500 Arrom, José J u a n 233, 234
Ady, Endre 11, 13, 31, 32, 37, 39, 167, 170, Artayett, E. de 552
1 7 1 - 1 7 3 , 1 7 5 - 1 7 7 , 185, 187, 188, 3 6 1 - Ashton, Dore 13
363, 379, 697, 698 Auden, Wystan Hugh 155, 275, 289
Agras, Tellos 648, 650 Augustini, Delmira 221
Agrell, Sigurd 580 Aurell, Tage 578
Agrippa, Cornelius 285 Aurier, G. Albert 70, 79, 94, 120, 532, 533, 539
Aho, Juhani 595 Auriol, George 105
Aiken, Conrad 298 Austin, Lloyd James 687
Ajalbert, Jean 69, 77 Azorín, José 158
Alain, Emile Auguste 418
Alastair, Hans Henning von Voigt 533 Bááth, Albert Ulrik 580
Albéniz, Isaac 483 Babbitt, Irving 303, 304
Alberti, Rafael 157 Babits, Mihály 31, 39, 1 6 7 - 1 7 8
Alechem, Sholem 507 Bach, Johann Sebastian 272, 474
Alfieri, Vittorio 420 Bachofen, Johann Jakob 433
Allais, Alphonse 74 Bahr, Hermann 33, 36, 145, 146, 193
Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence 500 Bajou, Anatole 20, 32, 69, 80, 399
Almeida, Francesco de 554 Bakalov, Georgi 642
Almeida, José Valentin Fialho de 553 Bakst, Léon 186, 501, 506, 517
Almeida, Manuel Duarte de 550 Balakian, Anna 24, 27, 229, 231, 350, 414, 420,
Almeida Garrett, J o a o Baptista 558 670
Alonso, Amado 249 Balázs, Béla 1 8 6 - 1 8 8 , 476
Altolaguirre, Manuel 218 Ballanche, Pierre Simon 19, 404
Amador, Fernán Félix de 225 Bally, Charles 40
Aman-Jean, Edmond François 534, 536, 539, Bal'mont, Konstantin 185, 3 8 3 - 3 8 6 , 480, 496,
543, 545 6 0 4 - 6 0 6 , 643
Amiel, Henri Frédéric 312, 318, 428 BaltruŠaitis, Jurgis 25, 496, 605, 606, 608
Ammianus, Marcellinus 503 Baluschek, Hans 500
Anceschi, Luciano 311, 320 Balzac, Honoré de 29, 33, 235, 531
Andreichin, Ivan 643 Banville, Théodore de 37, 68, 149, 160, 236, 316,
Andreyev, Leonid Nikolaevich 392 401, 418, 674
Andrian, Leopold 433, 434 Baratynsky, Jevgeny Abramovitch 391
Annensky, Innokenty 383, 401, 404 Barbarus, Johannes 608
Antoine, André 417 Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules 234, 674
Aoki Shigeru 510 Barbier, C. P . 63
Apollinaire, Guillaume 57, 73, 79, 122, 150. Barbusse, Henri 168
408, 525, 526, 527 Barda, Fricis 604, 607
Appia, Adolphe 416 Barlach, Ernst 514
Apuleius, Lucius 401, 503 Baroja y Nessi, Pío 158
Aragon, Louis 105, 526, 527 Barraud, Henri 480
Arany, János 172, 373, 377 Barre, André 18, 21, 122, 472
Arensberg, Walter, Conrad 655 Barreira, João 552, 553, 559
Arent, Wilhelm 193 Barrès, Maurice 70, 73, 74, 76, 7 9 - 8 1 , 92, 107,
Arghezi, Tudor 189 110, 234, 235, 535, 557, 588
Aristotle 17 Barros, João de 559

718
Bartók, Béla 1 8 6 - 1 8 8 , 471, 477 Blake, William 26, 282, 285, 387, 535, 683, 688
Bastien-Lepage, Jules 499, 500 Blakelock, Ralph Albert 510
Bataille, Henry 168, 172 Blanchot, Maurice 405
Batalha Reis 550 Blass, Ernst 199
Bateson, Thomas 304 Bloch, Ernst 202
Báthori, Jane 483, 487 Block, Haskekll 414, 417
Baudelaire, Charles 1 8 - 2 4 , 28, 31, 32, 44, 45, Blok, Alexander 11, 31, 150, 185, 371, 382,
52, 55, 60, 68, 69, 71, 78, 92, 103, 1 0 8 - 3 8 5 - 3 9 5 , 400, 480, 496, 603, 605, 607,
110, 114, 129, 130, 133, 137, 139, 145, 643, 697, 698
1 4 7 - 1 5 7 , 161, 162, 1 6 7 - 1 8 2 , 200, 220, Blok, Ljubov 389
230, 236, 255, 262, 273, 274, 276, 291, Bloy, Léon 78, 147, 483, 540, 669
2 9 5 - 2 9 9 , 302, 304, 306, 310, 316, 319, Bo, Carlo 160
320, 331, 341, 343, 344, 347, 349, 355, Boccioni, Umberto 512, 562
356, 361, 363, 364, 365, 369, 370, 3 7 2 - Böcklin, Arnold 205, 431, 476, 500, 505, 511,
377, 401, 403, 404, 443, 444, 445, 455, 512, 5 1 4 - 5 1 7 , 534, 535, 537, 542, 543,
456, 463, 473, 474, 4 8 3 - 4 8 5 , 4 8 8 - 4 9 1 , 599
505, 513, 521, 522, 525, 526, 530, 531, Boehringer, Robert 199
537, 538, 540, 541, 5 4 9 - 5 5 2 , 557, 558, Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 52, 165
565, 567, 577, 578, 582, 584, 588, 590, Bois, Jules 479
591, 596, 5 9 8 - 6 0 1 , 603, 605, 610, 627, Bojer, Johan 577
628, 630, 633, 638, 643, 651, 656, 657, 674, Bojic, Milatin 631
683, .685, 686, 693, 694, 695, 697 Bondi, Georg 194, 256
Beardsley, Aubrey 106, 501, 502, 505, 506, 509, Bonnières, Robert de 474
510, 533, 534, 5 3 6 - 5 3 8 Borges, Jorge Luis 113, 247, 670
Beauclair, Henri 32, 69, 551 Borissov-Mussatov, Victor 506, 507
Becher, Johannes R. 206, 211 Borodin, Alexander Porfyrievich 493
Beckett, Samuel 415, 419, 698 Botticelli, Sandro 34, 316, 339, 505, 533
Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo '216, 223, 236, 341, Bouchor, Maurice 71, 475
345, 483, 485 Bouhélier, Saint-Georges de 72, 79, 101, 559
Beer-Hofmann, Richard 432, 433 Bourde, Paul 18, 82, 101
Beethoven, Ludwig van 24, 474 Bourget, Paul 69, 234, 603
Béguin, Albert 682, 683 Bowra, Sir Cecil Maurice 13
Behmer, Marcus 514 Brahms, Johannes 369
Beiräo, Mario 560 Brandeli, Gunnar 580
Bello, Andrés 673 Brandes, Georg 587, 588, 590, 591, 597, 600
Bely, Andrey 13, 3 8 2 - 3 9 5 , 402, 408, 496, 605, Brandão, Julio 552, 553, 556, 558, 560
608, 643, 697, 698 Brandão, Raul 556
Benda, Julien 269, 304, 419 Brangwyn, Frank 542
Benediktsson, Einar 575 Braque, Georges 545
Benjamin, Walter 155, 280, 329 Brauner, Victor 502
Benn, Gottfried 154-156, 191, 192, 1 9 7 - 2 0 0 , Bréal, Michel 407
211, 330 Brecht, Bertolt 35, 150, 153, 155, 264, 416, 420,
Béranger, Pierre-Jean de 44, 674 434
Berberova, Nina 392 Brennan, Christoper 56, 62
Berceo, Gonzalo de 160 Brentano, Clemens-428
Berent, Waclaw 614 Brereton, Geoffrey 26
Berg, Alban 423, 471, 473, 458 Bresdin, Adolphe 10, 105, 513, 517, 531, 532,
Bergbom, Kaarlo 596 537
Bergman, Bo 584 Breslau, Louise 499
Bergson, Henry 31, 37, 40, 603, 604, 612, 613 Breton, André 270
Berkeley, George 23 Bǐezina, Otakar (Jeblavý, Václav Ignác) 618 —
Berlioz, Hector 48l0, 483, 501 624
Bernard, Emile 439, 446, 449, 452, 508, 514, Brinkmann, Richard 191
541, 543 Britten, Benjamin 473
Bernhardt, Sarah 504, 530, 533, 536, 537 Brody, Elaine 13
Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo 422 Brookrose, Christine 27
Bertocci, Angelo 12, 19 Brown, Norman O. 455, 460, 462
Besnard, Albert 536, 540, 544, 545 Browning, Robert 299
Betti, Ugo 13 Brunei, Pierre 9, 107, 682
Bezruè, Petr (Vasek Vladimir) 622 Brunetière, Ferdinand 86, 596
Biebl, Konstantin 624 Bruno Sampaio, José de 556
Biegas, Boleslaw 607 Bruns, Max 257
Bierbaum, Otto Julius 193, 263 Bryusov, Valery 80, 185, 257, 3 8 2 - 3 8 6 , 388,
Binni, Walter 311 391, 419, 480, 496, 6 0 4 - 6 0 8 , 643
Bishop, John Peale 656 Brzozowski, Stanislaw 615
Bizet, Georges 486 Buber, Martin 151
Büchner, Georg 423, 424 Chavaud, Armand 444
Bukowinski, Wladyslaw 610 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich 145
Bull, Olaf 25 Chenavard, Paul Joseph 538
Burckhardt, Jacob 433 Chénier, André 44, 120, 273, 274, 674
Bürger, Gottfried August 474 Chesneau, Ernest 107
Burke, Kenneth 289 Chevreul, Michel Eugène 102
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward 216, 439, 505, 509, Child, Theodore 653
510, 511, 516, 5 3 3 - 5 3 6 , 543, 569, 598 Chirico, Giorgio de 512, 514
Bussine 484 Chisholm, A. R. 62
Buttel, Robert 657 Chopin, Frédéric 478, 480, 493, 495
Byron, George Gordon, Lord 33, 217, 535 Christa, Boris 697
Byvanck, Willem 78, 591 Christomanos, Costas 650
Ćiurlionis, Mikolajus 508
Ciurlioniene, S. 603, 605
Caby, Robert 478 Claudel, Paul 18, 22, 61, 67, 71, 73, 75, 99, 105,
Câmara, João D. da 557 123, 151, 154, 269, 270, 273, 408, 410, 698
Cambyssis, Jean 648, 649 Claussen, Sophus 25, 575, 588 — 593
Camões, Luis de 561 Clifford Barney, Natalie 518
Campos, Rubén M. 235, 246, 249 Cocteau, Jean 419
Cano, Gustavo 554 Coelho, José 559
Caraguel, Clement 80 Cohn, R. G. 63
Carducci, Giosuè 315 Cole, John 510
Carlyle, Thomas 19, 24, 70, 315, 325, 326 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 19, 24, 26, 34, 43, 153,
Carneiro, Antonio 512, 514, 516, 560 230, 302, 304, 308, 667
Carpaccio, Vittore 534 Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle 479
Carpeaux, Jean Baptiste 515 Collingwood, R. G. 373
Carrâ, Carlo 5 1 0 - 5 1 2 Conrad, Joseph 300, 663 — 668
Carrière, Eugène 471, 475, 500, 508, 512, 517, Constantin, Paul 506
518, 536, 539, 542, 559 Conti, Angelo 321, 3 2 4 - 3 2 6
Carrillo, Enrique Gómez 78, 235, 241 Contini, Gianfranco 311
Carus, Gustavo Carl 440, 443 Copeau, Jacques 417
Carvalho, Xavier de 59, 551 Coppée, François 68, 123, 236
Caryotakis 650 Coquelin, Constant 48
Casal, Julián del 226, 233, 336 Corbière, Tristan 297, 299, 306
Cassirer, Ernst 285 Corinth, Lovis 508
Castagnou, André 110 Corneille, Pierre 335
Castro, Alberto Osório de 551, 553, 555 Cornell, Kenneth 18, 572
Castro, Eugenio de 59, 158, 233, 416, 549, 5 5 1 - Cortes-Rodrigues, Armando 561, 562
559, 561, 563, 669 Cortesão, Jaime 560
Castro, João de 553, 556 Cosimo, Piero di 505
Castro, Raul Silva 251 Coster, Charles de 565
Catullus, Caius Valerius 223, 306 Couder, Louis Charles Auguste 506, 512
Cavafy, Constantin 405, 406, 647, 651 Couperin, François 474
Cazalis, Henri (Jean Lahor) 46, 86, 168, 523 Couperus, Louis 503
Caze, Jules 69 Courbet, Gustave 440, 441, 499, 516, 530, 535,
Cazin, Paul 531 538
Cecchi, Emilio 311 Court de Gebelin 90
Ćech, Svatopluk 618 Cox, George William 54, 406, 407, 485
Celan, Paul 151, 200 C*aig, Gordon 145, 416, 543
Cendrars, Blaise 270 Crane, H a r t 655, 656
Cernuda, Luis 157, 161 Crane, Walter 536
Cézanne, Paul 103, 105, 546 Cremona, Tranquillo 499
Chabás, J u a n 544 Creuzer, Friedrich 23
Chabrier, Emmanuel 473 Croce, Benedetto 40
Chadwick, C. A. 63 Cros, Charles 101, 107, 108, 112, 115, 475, 551
Chagall, Marc 607 Crowe, Catherine 24
Chandler Moulton, Louise 60 Csontváry Kosztka, Tivadar 452, 453
Charcot, Jean Martin 37 Curtius, Ernst Robert 151, 154
Charpentier, John 22 Cutescu-Storck, Cecilia 502
Chassé, Charles 531
Chassériau, Théodore 601, 529
Chast, Denyse 552, 658 Dalí, Salvador 502
Chateaubriand, François Auguste René vi­ D'Annunzio, Gabriele 13, 152, 230, 231, 234,
comte de 11, 236, 318, 335 235, 240, 2 4 4 - 2 4 6 , 249, 255, 257, 265,
Chaucer, Geoffrey 288 3 1 1 - 3 3 2 , 401, 4 2 0 - 4 2 2 , 473, 512, 633,
Chausson, Ernest 4 7 1 - 4 7 5 , 483, 485, 491 557, 561

720
Dante, Alighieri 287, 296, 303, 3 0 7 - 3 0 9 , 441, Dreyfus, Alfred 73
505, 511, 590, 663 Dryden, John 128
Darien, Georges Adrien 75 Duarte, Alfonso 560
Darío, Rubén 11, 13, 24, 78, 79, 1 5 8 - 1 6 3 , Du Bos, Charles 151
2 1 3 - 2 2 6 , 229, 230, 233, 234, 236, 247, Ducasse, Paul 459
3 3 6 - 3 4 1 , 400, 408, 509, 6 6 9 - 6 7 7 , 689 Ducic, Jovan 627, 628, 632, 633
Darwin, Charles 444 Dujardin, Edouard 20, 22, 70, 73, 75, 80, 81,
Daudet, Alphonse 236, 674 122, 123, 651
Daudelet 536, 542, 543 Dumas, Alexandre, Fils 674
Daumier, Honoré 513 Duparc, Henri Fouques 474, 485, 486, 491
Dauthendey, Maximilian 206 Du Plessys, Maurice 74, 80, 120, 674
David, Jacques Louis 440 Dupont, Auguste 485
Dvid, Félicien 486 Durand, Gilbert 378, 409
Davidson, Hans 150 Duräo, Americo 560
Davies, Arthur B. 509, 516 Durkheim, Émile 98
Day, Robert 300 Duthoit 544
Debelyanov, Dimeho 642 — 645 Duthie, Enid 574
Debenedetti, Giacomo 311 Dygaáinski, Adolf 615
Debussy, Claude 36, 146,316, 4 7 1 - 4 8 1 , 483,
4 8 5 - 4 9 1 , 559, 562 Eça de Queirós, José Maria de 549, 550, 556
Décaudin, Michel 12, 21, 73, 74, 474, 697 Eckmann, Otto 105
De Falla, Manuel 483 Eekhoud, Georges 565
Dehmel, Richard 193, 203, 257, 258, 485, 580 Egge, Peter 577
Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar 225, 475, 516 Eglitis, V. 605, 617
Delacroix, Eugène 499, 501, 505, 516, 525, 530, Eguren, José María 219, 225
538, 539 Eichendorff, Joseph von 207
Deligeorges, Epaminondas 647 Eilshemius, Louis 516
Delhis, Frederick 471, 473, 474 Ekelund, Vilhelm 575, 5 8 0 - 5 8 5
Delia Rocca de Vergalo, Nicanor 59 Ekner, Reidar 577, 578, 584
Delvaux, Paul 503, 545 Elgar, Sir Edward 473, 474
Delville, Jean 503, 5 3 1 - 5 3 4 , 537, 541, 545, 569 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 13, 61, 128, 129, 134,
Demblon, Célestin 566, 570 136, 143, 154, 155, 158, 199, 270, 2 7 4 -
Denis, Maurice 452, 5 3 2 - 5 3 4 , 536, 538, 540, 276, 279, 282, 284, 2 9 5 - 3 1 0 , 311, 347,
541, 543, 544, 545, 585 353, 655, 656, 684, 694
De Robertis 328 Eiskamp, Max 59, 72, 540
Derrida, Jacques 456, 457, 459, 460, 461, 465, Eluard, Paul 270
560 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 19, 24, 236
Déry, Tibor 362, 376 Enckell, Magnus 597
Descartes, René 478 Enckell, Rabbe 578
Descaves, Lucien 75 Endell, August 508
Deschamps, Emile 81 Ensor, James 508, 517, 532, 569
Deus, João de 553, 554 Episcopopoulos, Nicolas (Nicolas Segur) 647
D'Halmar, Augusto 235, 250 Erdélyi, József 187, 189
Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich 186, 384, 506 Ernst, Max 150, 187, 513
Díaz, Leopoldo 59, 543 Ernst, Paul 187
Díaz-Plaja, Guillermo 157, 158 Esparbes, Georges d' 247
Diderot, Denis 32
Diederich, Eugen 151 Espronceda, José de 217, 341
Dierx, Léon 150 Estlander, C. G. 596
Diktonius, Elmer 578 Etiemble, René 9
Dilthey, Wilhelm 187 Euripides 145, 273, 303
Disraeli, Benjamin 535 Evers, Franz 257
Dobrolyubov, Nikolay Alexandrovich 33
Dobson, Henry Austin 143 Fabre d'Olivet, Antoine 89
Dominici, Pedro César 222, 235, 246 Falke, Gustav 193
Donne, John 303, 306 Fantin-Latour, Ignace Henri Jean 475, 499,
Donoghue, Denis 688 501, 510, 515, 531
Doré, Gustave 513, 515, 517, 531, 544 Faulkner, William 155
Dostoievsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich 364, 389, Fauré, Gabriel 471, 4 7 4 - 4 7 7 , 483, 485, 486,
559 489-491
Douglas, Lord Alfred 129, 130, 133, 134 Feijó, António 553, 554
Doumic, René 21 Feininger, Lionel 150
Dowson, Ernest 129, 131 — 136, 158 Feldman, Wilhelm 610, 615
Doyle, Richard 510 Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe 236
Dörmann, Felix 193 Fénéon, Félix 70, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81, 279, 315,
Drachmann, Holger 587 322

721
Fergusson, Francis 275 147-149, 155, 173, 1 9 1 - 2 1 2 , 2 5 5 - 2 6 6 ,
Fernández, José 217 374, 400, 405, 408, 4 2 7 - 4 3 0 , 473, 485,
Fernández, Ramón 306 503, 514, 515, 573, 580, 582, 585, 598, 600,
Fet, Afanassy Afanasievich 385 604, 605, 611, 649, 684, 685, 697
Feuerbach, Ludwig 500, 516 Gerardy, Paul 573, 574
Feure, Georges de 479, 501, 515, 533, 534, 545 Gerbacauskas, J. 605
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 23 Géricault, Theodore 516
Field, Nathan 433 Gerôme, Jean Léon 500
Figueiredo, Antero de 559 Ghiano, Juan Carlos 248
Filiger 540, 541, 542 Ghil, René 20, 30, 37, 68, 70, 71, 75, 79, 80, 86,
Fiser, Emeric 22 8 8 - 9 0 , 119, 145, 149, 165, 341, 551, 552,
Fitzgerald, John Austin 510 559, 566, 572, 605
Flaischlen, Cäsar 193 Ghisis, Nicholas 512, 514
Flaubert, Gustave 33, 46, 74, 86, 153, 154, 235, Gibbon, Edward 32, 503
236, 316, 318, 445, 501, 539, 540, 585 Gide, André 61, 7 1 - 7 3 , 78, 79, 99, 104, 121,
Fletcher, John Gould 655 122, 146, 151, 152, 200, 257, 269, 270, 276,
Florian, Miroslav 624 305, 366, 410, 543, 572
Florissone, Michel 447 Gil, Enrique 220
Fontainas, André 59, 79, 104, 105, 109, 114, 524, Gilkin, Iwan 168, 565
565, 566 Gill, Austin 63
Fontaine, Charles 70 Gille, Valère 59
Forestier, Louis 695 Gilman, Margaret 19
Fort, Paul 22, 71, 72, 74, 77, 79, 103, 121, 122, Giorgione, II 324, 505
168, 341, 417 Girardin, Emile de 82
Foucault, Michel 459, 461, 462 Giraud, Albert 59, 81, 565, 568, 570
Fouqué, Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Gjellerup, Karl 587
Motte 23 Goering, Reinhard 198, 199
Fowlie, Wallace .63 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 19, 25, 26, 35, 154,
France, Anatole 81, 82, 99, 153, 234, 305, 674 156, 206, 207, 214, 230, 255, 296, 371,
Franck, César 474, 475, 484, 491 425, 427, 428, 430, 439, 445, 484, 589, 614,
Freire, Natércia 562 682
Freud, Sigmund 37, 361, 416, 446, 458, 464, Goffin, Arnold 59, 566
661 Gogh, Vincent van 70, 439, 442, 4 4 6 - 4 5 3 , 5 0 7 -
Freyre, Ricardo Jaimes 158 510, 533, 545, 588
Friedmann, Heinrich 197 Gogol, Nikolay Vassilievich 389, 392
Fridjónsson, Sigurjón 575 Golberg 79
Friedrich, Caspar David 441, 442, 445, 446 Golovin, I. M. 186
Friedrich, Hugo 32, 37, 155 Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich 33
Frost, Robert 26, 653 Goncharova, Natalia Sergeyevna 186
Fröding, Gustaf 585, 598, 600 Goncourt brothers 236, 315, 316, 418, 551, 562
Fry, Roger 293 Goncourt, Edmond de 235
Frye, Northrop 25 Gonne, Maud 280, 289
Fuĕik, Julius 621 Góngora y Argote, Luis de 157, 224, 345, 347,
Fuller, Loie 534 348, 673
Fuseli, Henry 441, 503, 509, 517, 535 González Martínez, Enrique 223, 226
González Prada, Manuel 233
allé, Émile 534, 535 Gorky, Maksim 34, 365, 372
allen-Kallela, Akseli Valdemar 507, 597 Gorren, Aline 653
allup, Donald 295 Górski, Artur 610
Garcia Lorca, Federico 13, 155, 157, 219, 227, Gosse, Edmund 60, 143
347, 350, 351, 354, 356, 359, 637, 690 Goudeau, Emile 68
Garcilaso de la Vega 345, 347 Gounod, Charles François 490
Gardner, Helen 295 Gourmont, Rémy de 22, 40, 7 3 - 7 5 , 103, 105,
Gassner, John 419 107, 109, 117, 119, 120, 170, 172, 234, 284,
Gauguin, Paul 67, 70, 370, 438, 439, 448, 303, 305, 307, 419, 554, 674
449, 451, 452, 475, 508, 514, 517, 5 2 2 - Goya, Francesco 441, 517, 539
527, 530, 532, 533, 535, 537, 539, 5 4 0 - Grass, Roland 12
544, 588 Grasset, Eugène 515, 543
Gaul, Adrian 417 Grave, João 559
Gauthier-Villars, Henri 479 Gray, John 137, 138, 140, 141, 279, 297, 536
Gautier, Théophile 55, 68, 149, 168, 169, 236, Greenaway, Kate 536
299, 306, 316, 317, 486, 526, 540, 550, 552, Greene, Edward J. H. 295, 298
565, 674, 686 Gregh, Fernand 72, 168, 172
Geibel, Emanuel 207 Greiner, Otto 500, 501, 5 1 1 - 5 1 3 , 515
Geijerstam, Carl-Erik af 583 Grierson, Sir Herbert John 303
George, Stefan 11, 13, 24, 25, 31, 59, 145, Griesebach, Eduard 193

722
Grimm brothers 146, 503 Hermant, Abel 75
Groot, José Maria Rivas 235, 246 Hermogenes 89
Groux, Henry de 513, 514, 540, 541, 545 Hérold, André Ferdinand 109, 112, 120, 554
Groussac, Paul 676, 677 Herrera y Reissig, Julio 214, 222-227, 339,
Grunthal-Ridala, D. 604 340
Grünewald, Matthias 147 Heym, Georg 198, 211, 637
Gryparis, Jean 648, 649, 650 Heymel, Alfred Walter 148
Gsteiger, Manfred 146 Hiisku, Aune 601
Gualdo, Luigi 59 Hiller, K u r t 211
Guaita 75 Hippius, Zinaida 389
Gudmundsson, Gudmundur 575 Hlaváček, Karel 26, 621, 624
Gudlauggson, Jonas 575 Hodler, Ferdinand 532
Guerard, Albert 663 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 23
Guerin, Charles 72, 79, 109 Hoffmann, Konrad 448
Guérin, Maurice de 674 Hoffmann, Ludwig von 514 — 516
Guerra Junqueiro, Abilio 550, 554, 556 Hofmannstahl, Hugo von 11, 13, 24, 145, 147,
Guillen, Jorge 157, 270, 3 4 7 - 3 5 8 148, 149, 155, 185, 191, 193, 194, 195, 197,
Guimaräes, Delfim 559 206, 255, 257, 258, 263, 265, 266, 333, 415,
Güiraldes, Ricardo 247 416, 420, 421, 4 2 6 - 4 3 3 , 477, 573, 580, 600,
Guizado, Alfredo 561, 562 605, 643, 684
Gullberg, Hjalmar 578 Hofstätter, Hans H. 439
Gulyás, Pál 187 Holberg, Ludwig 503
Gumilev 480 Holz, Arno 150, 193, 203, 204, 205, 209, 212
Gundolf, Friedrich 196, 197, 259 Homer 296
Gustaitis, M. 605, 607 Honegger, Arthur 485
Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel 216, 217, 223, 233, Hopkins, Gerard Manley 128
336 Hoppe, Manfred 684
Gutiérrez, Juan María 673 Horace, Quintus Horacius Flaccus 306
Guttadauro, Isaotta 321 Horne, Richard Hengist 60
Host, Roland N. R. 439
Habermann, Hugo 514 Hourcade, Pierre 556
Hadzopoulos, Costas (P. Vassilikos) 648, 649 Housman, Laurence 536
Hahl, Jalmari 597 Houssaye, Arsène 236
Hahn, Reynaldo 485 Houville, G. de 105
Halévy, Daniel 674 Hovey, Richard 60, 654
Hamerling, Robert 193 Howells, William Dean 653
Hammacher, M. 446, 452 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich 149, 150,
Hannevik, Arne 577 154, 255, 430, 582, 583, 682
Hamsun, K n u t 577, 588 Hönnighausen, L. 441
Hansson, Ola 25, 580, 581, 585 Hõskuldsson, Sveinn Skorri 575
Hardt, Ernst 257 Hrubin, Frantíšek 624
Hart, Julius 1 9 3 - 1 9 4 Hudson, William Henry 670
Hartleben, Otto Friedrich 193 Hugo, Victor 19, 44, 69, 159, 160, 213, 273, 335,
Hartley, Marsden 521, 529 361, 362, 472, 486, 531, 550, 669, 673, 674,
Hartmann, Eduard von 23, 31, 74, 549, 587 682
Hartmann, Sadakichi 60 Huidobro, Vicente 410
Hasenclever, Walter 206, 211 Huida (Biarklind, Unnur Benediktsdottir) 575
Hauptmann, Gerhart 145, 263, 415, 420, 421, Hunt, William Holman 216, 516, 533
649 Huret, Jules 71, 81, 87, 94, 119, 257, 266, 317,
Hebbel, Friedrich 147 321, 405
Hegel, Georg Friedrich 23, 50, 51, 93, 373, Huysmans, Joris-Karl 32, 69, 75, 103 — 104,
403, 416, 440, 457, 538 114, 1 4 5 - 1 4 7 , 230, 232, 234, 235, 240,
Hegner, Jakob 151 241, 245, 246, 266, 317, 320, 336, 363, 406,
Heidenstam, Werner von 580, 585 480, 483, 501, 525, 531, 532, 551, 558, 561,
Heine, Heinrich 23, 147, 206, 207, 223, 236, 582, 588, 589, 597
361, 375, 484, 550, 674
Heine, Thomas-Theodor 514 Ibert, Jacques 485
Heliogabalus 260, 503 Ibsen, Henrik 78, 146, 366, 391, 420, 423, 559,
Henley, William Ernest 60, 128, 143 575, 596, 598, 613, 669
Henry, Charles 70, 75 Illyés, Gyula 37
Heraclitus 583 Imbert, Enrique Anderson 236, 240
Herbaciauskas, I. 605 Indy, Vineent, d' 473, 502
Herbert, George 310 Ingram, John 60
Herder, Johann Gottfried 19 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 503, 530
Heredia, José-Maria de 120, 168, 316, 485 Irving, Washington 510
Hermlin, Stefan 200 Irzykovski, Karol 615

723
Ivanov, Vyacheslav 366, 3 8 9 - 3 9 1 , 393, 402, Kisielewski, J a n August 613
496, 605, 643 Klabund (Alfred Henschke) 150
Ivanov-Cheren, Ilya 643 Klammer, Karl 150
Klee, Paul 150, 514
Jakobson, Jens Peter 145, 578 Klein, Carl August 194, 201, 212
Jakobson, Roman 180, 458, 464 Kleist, Heinrich von 206
James, Henry 661, 667 Klimt, Gustav 512, 513, 515, 517, 533, 540, 542,
Jammes, Francis 72, 73, 78, 79, 121, 168, 169, 543
172, 341, 628 Klinger, Max 205, 441, 445, 500, 501, 505, 511,
Janáček, Leos 471 512, 513, 514, 515, 517, 520, 522
Jansons-Brauns, J. 604 Klingsor, Tristan 215, 554
Järnefelt, Aino 595 Knowles, Dorothy 22
Järnefelt, Arvid 599 Kobilinsky, I. 605
Järnefelt, Eero 595 Kodály, Zoltán 187
Jarrell, Randall 464 Koechlin, Charles 485
Jarry, Alfred 7 3 - 7 4 , 540 Kokoschka, Oscar 512
Jászi, Oszkár 371 Kolasz, Jakub 189
Jaurès, Jean 370 Kollwitz, Käthe 500
Jean-Aubry, Georges 484 Komjáthy, Jenó" 172, 179
Jean, Paul 149 Kommerell, Max 196, 197
Jekabsons, K. 605, 607 Komornicka, Maria 610
Jellenta, Czar 610 Koskennierni, V. A. 600, 601
Jensen, Johannes V. 593 Kosztolányi, Dezső 167, 168, 170, 171, 1 7 3 -
Jiménez, J u a n Ramón 13, 158, 159, 162, 214, 175, 178, 179, 182
218, 2 2 3 - 2 2 7 , 335, 339, 3 4 1 - 3 4 5 , 376 Kőrösfői-Kriesch, Aladár 506
Jones, Ernest 17 Krag, Wilhelm 576, 577
Jørgensen, Johannes 575, 584, 588, 589, 590, Krasiński, Zygmunt 613
592-593 Krasko, Ivan 25
Jouffroy, Théodore 19 Kraus, Karl 372
Joyce, James 61, 279, 301, 392, 600, 661 Kristeva, Julia 456, 458, 459, 465
Jullian, Philippe 13, 437 Kroó, György 188
Jung, Carl Gustav 98, 374, 375, 404 Kubin, Alfred 514
Jünger, Ernst 152, 155 Küchler, Walther 150
Kugel, James L. 309
Kafka, Franz 113, 146, 151, 185, 415 Kuhn, Adalbert 407
Kahn, Gustave 18, 21, 23, 33, 70, 72, 73, 80, 93, Kunnas, Maria Liisa 599
103, 109, 110, 120, 127, 257, 399, 474, 484, Kupala, J a n k a 189
540, 545, 554, 674 Kupiainen, Uuto 601
Kaijärvi, Irjö 601 Kupka, Franz 604, 514, 545
Kailas, Uuno 601 Krysinska, Marie 104
Kaiser, Georg 198, 199, 206, 211
Kajanus, Robert 597 Lacan, Jacques 88, 96, 97, 458
Kalmakoff 517 Laforgue, Jules 69, 70, 74, 77, 101, 103, 110,
Kandinsky, Vassily 31, 330, 508, 514, 527, 545 115, 136, 168, 2 9 5 - 2 9 9 , 3 0 1 - 3 0 6 , 310,
Kant, Immanuel 19, 23, 324, 599 341, 363, 406, 473, 485, 501, 503, 509, 562,
Kantorowicz, Ernst 197 654, 655
Karátson, André 697 Lagerkvist, Pär 575, 578, 585
Kardec, Alan 530 Lagerlöf, Selma 585, 598
Kasprowicz, J a n 406, 611, 612 Lalo, Pierre 473, 484
Kassner, Rudolf 146, 151, 187 Lamartine, Alphonse de 44, 223
Kaufmann, Richard 596 Lang, C.Y. 216
Keats, John 50, 51, 168, 315, 688 Lange, Antoni 610, 611
Keller, Gottfried 369, 643 Langer, Susanne K. 34, 35
Kenins, A. 607 Langlois, Hyacinthe 444
Kenner, Hugh 281 Lapathiotis, Napoleon 650
Kermode, Frank 26, 324 Larbaud, Valéry 22
Keyserling, Hermann von 151 Larionov, Mikhail Fyodorovich 186
Khnopff, Fernand 79, 325, 342, 343, 509, 515, La Rochefoucault, Antoine de 478, 479
517, 5 3 1 - 5 3 3 , 535, 540, 542, 543, 545, Larreta, Enrique 215, 235, 249
569, 572 La Tailhède, Raymond Gagnabé de 120
Khnopff, George 565 Laurent, 56
Kierkegaard, Søren 31, 432 Lautréamont (Isidor Ducas) 18, 22, 27, 70, 459
Kilpi, Walter 599, 600 669
Kimball, Hannibal 654 Lawrence, David Herbert 127, 134, 135, 292
Kiorchev, Dimo 643 Leal, Gomes 551, 558
Kirilov, J . 643 Le Blond, Maurice 72

724
Le Cardonnel, Louis 75, 79, 123
Leektcer, Melchior 614, 515
Lecomte, George 82
Leconte de Lisle, Charles René Marie 68, 159,
168, 400, 485
Ledyanoy, Leonid 392
Lefèbvre, Maurice Jean 48, 91, 456
Lehmann, A. C. 26
Leibl, Wilhelm 516
Leighton, Lord 500
Leino, Eino 400, 595, 598, 599, 600
Leino, Kasimir 595, 598, 599
Lemaître, Jules 21, 82, 92, 99, 168, 596
Lemerre, Alphonse 82
Lemonnier, Camille 565, 566, 574
Lenbach, Franz von 205
Leonardo da Vinci 48, 269, 270, 274, 533, 538
Leopardi, Giacomo 337, 549
Lepiorz, Gerhard 161
Lermontov, Mikhail Yuryevich 33, 504, 537
Le Roy, Grégoire 104, 105, 565, 566, 574
Leroux, Pierre 19
Le Sidaner, Henri Eugène 539
Leśmian, Boleslaw 609, 612, 613
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 19, 32
Levértin, Oscar 580, 585, 600
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 88, 96, 97, 375, 388, 396,
398
Lévy-Dhurmer, Lucien 79, 500, 518, 531, 534,
535, 536, 540, 5 4 2 - 5 4 5
Lévy, Eliphas 530, 540
Lévy-Brühl, Lucien 98
Lhermitte, Léon 447
Lichtenberger, Henri 39
Lidforss, Bengt 580
Lie, Erik 577
Liiv, Juhan 598, 606, 607
Liliencron, Detlef von 193, 263
Liliev, Nicolai 642, 644, 645
Lima, Angelo de 562
Limayrac, Paulin 19
Lindegren, Erik 585
Lindman, Ludwig Mathias 583
Linner, Sven 578
Liszt, Franz 474, 480, 493, 494
Littré, Emile 92
Lo-Johansson, Ivar 578
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 168
Lopes, Óscar 560
Lorrain, Jean 104, 105, 107, 109, 110, 114, 316,
400, 530, 531, 532, 533, 543
Loti, Pierre 234, 518, 674
Louys, Pierre 72, 80, 104-106, 234, 400, 561,
572
Lowell, Amy 127, 168, 655
Luar, Artemisia do 552
Lucie-Smith Edward 439, 442, 506, 509
Lucretius, Titus Lucretius Caus 89, 307
Lugné-Poe, Aurélien-Marie 22, 417, 418, 479,
534, 575
Lugones, Leopoldo 158, 213, 218, 221, 222,
2 2 4 - 2 2 7 , 234, 235, 2 4 6 - 2 4 8
Lukács, Georg 202, 264, 369, 372, 377, 378
Lukovié, Stevan 628, 629
Lundkvist, Arthur 585
Luther, Arthur 423
Luti, Giorgo 311
Lyotard, Jean François 456, 457, 459
Macdonald, Frances 508
Macedonski, A. 184
Mach, Ernst 36, 430
Machado, Antonio 24, 1 5 8 - 1 6 2 , 214, 224, 226,
227, 340, 341
Machado, Manuel 24, 1 5 8 - 1 6 2 , 216, 224, 227,
228, 400
Machar, Josef Svatopluk 618
Machaut, Guillaume de 479
Mackintosh, Charles Renuil 508
Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald 508
MacLow, Jackson 461
Maeterlinck, Maurice 13, 21 — 23, 25, 29, 30, 31,
33, 59, 70, 71, 101, 103, 1 0 5 - 1 1 0 , 112,
113, 115, 121, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151,
159, 168, 187, 188, 193, 264, 280, 326, 345,
346, 400, 415, 4 1 7 - 4 2 1 , 473, 475, 476, 483,
485, 486, 491, 529, 536, 537, 540, 542, 543,
555, 557, 558, 559, 562, 565, 569, 571,
5 7 3 - 5 7 5 , 577, 588, 596, 597, 599, 610, 613,
628, 643, 654, 697
Magalhães, Lima Jaime de 556
Magnin, Charles 19
Magre, Maurice 81
Mahler, Gustav 473, 485
Maistre, Joseph de 638
Malacassis, Miltiade 648, 650
Malczewski, Jacek 507
Mallarmé, Stéphane 11, 18, 20, 22 — 24, 25, 26,
27, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 4 3 - 6 3 , 67, 68, 70,
71, 7 3 - 7 6 , 77, 79, 81, 83, 8 5 - 8 8 , 9 0 - 9 3 ,
96, 99, 101, 1 0 3 - 1 0 6 , 108, 111, 1 1 3 - 1 1 7 ,
1 2 0 - 1 2 3 , 1 4 5 - 1 5 8 , 161, 162, 165, 169,
174, 178, 180, 191, 193, 200, 214, 2 5 5 -
257, 260, 263, 265, 266, 2 7 0 - 2 7 5 , 2 7 9 -
281, 286, 287, 292, 293, 296, 302, 305, 306,
309, 310, 3 1 6 - 3 1 8 , 324, 327, 335, 338,
339, 341, 343, 345, 347, 349, 350, 354, 371,
377, 384, 4 0 0 - 4 0 8 , 411, 4 1 5 - 4 1 8 , 4 2 1 -
423, 428, 438, 4 5 5 - 4 6 0 , 462, 465, 466,
4 7 1 - 4 7 3 , 475,481, 483, 484, 485, 4 8 8 -
489, 491, 501, 516, 5 2 1 - 5 2 3 , 5 2 5 - 5 2 7 ,
538, 561, 5 5 7 - 5 5 9 , 5 6 1 - 5 6 2 , 568, 582,
585, 588, 596, 599, 600, 605, 619, 627, 628,
630,632, 643, 651, 6 5 3 - 6 5 7 , 6 7 4 , 6 8 3 -
690, 6 9 2 - 6 9 4 , 697
Malmberg, Bertil 586
Manes, Josef 618
Manet, Edouard 48, 103, 297, 499, 500, 508,
516, 6 2 2 - 5 3 8
Mané-Katz, Max 607
Mandin, Louis 105, 109, 110
Mann, Thomas 33, 145, 437, 681
Mannien, Otto 600
Mantegna, Andrea 505, 534
Mapes, E . K. 158
Marache, Maurice 19
Marc, Franz 326
Marées, Hans von 439, 500, 505, 510, 515, 516,
517, 635
Marie de France 473
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 128, 150, 662
Mariot, Henri 674
725
Marmontel, Jean François 92 Milner, Ian 623
Marsh, Edward 127, 134 Milosz, Oscar Venceslas de Lubicz 67, 406, 408,
Martí, José 12, 215, 216, 223, 224, 230, 2 3 3 - 409
238, 240, 241, 336, 669, 670 Milton, John 128, 216
Martin, Henri 541 Minne, (Georges 500, 541, 542, 569
Martin, John 503, 513 Minkpwski, Eugène 377
Martínez, Enrique González 223, 226 Mirbeau, Octave 74, 146, 522
Martínez, Rafael Arévalo 235 Mirón, Salvador Diaz 233
Martinho Nobre de Melo 561 Mitre, Bartolomé 672
Marvell, Andrew 305, 306 Mockel, Albert 59, 62, 79, 93, 117, 121, 148, 181,
Mauron, Charles 102 566, 568, 573
Marx, Karl 147, 155, 361, 366, 416 Mondor, Henri 62
Mašek, Vitezlav Carel 504, 506 Mondrian, Piet 514, 527
Massinger, Philip 433 Monet, Claude 103, 462, 473, 499, 516, 529
Mathews, Andrew 566 Monfried, Daniel 524
Matisse, Henri 513, 5 2 4 - 5 2 7 , 545, 546 Monod, Julien P . 269
Matthiessen, Francis Otto 295, 298 Montale, Eugenio 155
Matuszewski, Ignacy 611 Montal vor, Luis de 561, 562
Mauclair, Camille 168 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat 236
Maupassant, Guy de 74, 168, 316, 336 Montesquiou, Robert de 78, 79, 103, 106, 530,
Maurier, George du 662 532
Maurras, Charles 71, 79, 120, 304, 674 Monteverdi, Claudio 502
Maus, Octave 60, 572 Montoliú, Manuel de 214
Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich 393 Moore, Albert 510, 516, 517
Maxence, Edgar 541 Moore, George 24, 60, 279, 302
McNair, Herbert 508 Moore, T. Sturge 279
Medici, Lorenzo 317 Morandi, Giorgio 512
Melachrinos, Apostolos 650 More, Paul Elmer 303
Mellery, Xavier 541 Moréas, Jean (Jean Papadiamantopoulos) 18 —
Melville, Herman 510, 550 21, 34, 35, 67, 6 9 - 7 4 , 7 6 - 8 1 , 85, 91,
Memling, Hans 534 1 0 1 - 1 0 3 , 107, 114, 120, 157, 159, 165,
Ménard, Louis 400 168, 200, 235, 255, 303, 341, 343, 399, 406,
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 162, 503 438, 485, 514, 544, 551, 555, 559, 567, 572,
Mendès, Catulle 68, 76, 234, 236, 316, 484, 554, 596, 605, 647, 648, 651, 669
674 Moreau, Gustave 74, 79,103,105-108,112, 214,
Mendes, Fadrique Carlos 550 230, 317, 406, 438, 445,471, 473, 485, 5 0 0 -
Mendéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino 673 503, 510, 5 1 3 - 5 1 7 , 5 2 5 - 5 3 4 , 5 3 6 - 5 4 3 ,
Meneses, Joao de 552 546, 562, 565, 591
Mengs, Anton Raphael 517 Morgenstern, Christian 150, 393
Menzel. Adolf 516 Morice, Charles 18, 21, 70, 77, 88, 93, 119, 145,
Mercier 168 317, 321, 371
Meredith, George 56 Morisel 644
Merezhkovsky, Dimitry, Sergeyevich 388, 389 Morrel, Sir Charles 504
Mérimée, Prosper 674 Morris, William 236, 306, 505, 508, 536, 559
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 457 Morrissette, Bruce 664
Merrill, Stuart 20, 24, 70, 77, 78, 106, 120, 121, Morstin, L. H . 610
168, 200, 214, 224, 255, 257, 545, 554, 566, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 477, 514, 533, 534,
572, 588, 653, 654 540-542
Merson, Luc Olivier 541 Mueller, Max 407
Mesquita, Roberto de 554, 555, 668, 563 Müller, Curt 19
Meunier, Constantin 500 Müller, Victor 501
Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand 255, 257, 263 Mukarovsky, J a n 26, 27
Meyerbeer, Giacomo 486 Munch, Edvard 507, 508, 5 1 5 - 5 1 7 , 542, 545,
Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilyevich 145, 417, 420 578
Michaud, Guy 1 8 - 2 2 , 35, 101, 115, 117, 121, Munter, Gabriele 508
165 Muricy, Andrade 553
Michaelis, Sophus 588 Musaeus, Johann Karl August 503
Michelangelo, Buonarotti 539 Musil, Robert 146
Michelet, Victor-Emile 75, 114 Musset, Alfred de 44, 146, 169, 341, 404
Michetti, Francesco Paolo 312 Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich 474, 493
Micinski Tadeusz 612 Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas 606, 608
Mickievicz, Adam 613
Mikhaël, Ephraïm 474, 501
Milev, Geo 642, 643, 646 Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich 392
Mill, John Stuart 17 Nadal, Octave 275
Millet, J . F . 447 Nagy, Sándor 506

726
Nalkowski, Waclaw 610 Otway, Thomas 433
Nardis, Luigi de 6ε Ovid, Publius Ovidius Naso 694
Natanson brothers 81
Nathan, Arturo 512 Palamas, Costas 648
Nau, John Antoine 106 Palazzoschi, Aldo 150
Naumann, Walter 62 Palizzi, Filippo 312
Nekrasov, Nikolai Alexeyevich 389 Palivu 312
Nerée tot Babberich, Christoph Karel de 509 Pallady, Theodor 513
Nencioni, Enrico 311 Palma, Clemente 215
Neris, Solomója 608 Pandurovié, Sima 631
Neruda, J a n 618 Papanicolaou 650
Nerval, Gérard de 18, 22, 52, 147, 376, 522, 550, Paparrigopoulos 648
674 Papus 75, 530
Nervo, Amado 78, 158, 226, 227, 235, 241 Parasshos, Achilles 648
Nezval, Vitézslav 620, 624 Pargeter, Edith 620
Nietzsche, Friedrich 23, 31, 37, 145, 147, 149, Parnell, Thomas 288
154, 189, 234, 255, 287, 318, 322, 326, 361, Parreira, Carlos 561
364, 365, 366, 368, 369, 384, 385, 389, 433, Pascal, Blaise 346
457, 461, 462, 559, 575, 577, 583, 587, 589 Pascoli, Giovanni 257, 312, 317
592, 603, 608, 612, 643, 645, 649 Pasternak, Boris 392, 517
Nobiling, Franz 62 Pasternak, Leonid 517
Nobre, Antonio 551, 558 Paté 168
Nobre de Melo, Martinho 361 Pater, Walter 287, 290, 292, 316, 324, 325, 533
Noferi' Adelia 311 Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton 128
Nolde, Emil 508 Patricio, António 557
Nonelly, y Monturiol, Isidoro 512 Payne, John 60
Nordau, Max 157, 561, 669, 674 Paz, Octavio 158
Norseng, Kay Mary 578 Pearce, Roy Harvey 467
Noulet, Emile 62, 225 Péguy, Charles 22, 73, 77, 79, 122
Nouveau, Germain 103 Péladan, Josephin 75, 94, 478, 479, 518, 5 3 1 -
Novalis, Friedrich von Hardenberg 23, 24, 147, 533, 537, 538, 540, 543, 596
202, 255, 312, 321, 326, 387, 425, 426, 431, Pérez Galdós, Benito 215
524, 608, 682 Perrault, Charles 188, 531
Nuñes Moreira, José Coelho 559 Perry, T. S. 653
Núñez, Rafael 222 Pessanha, Camilo 553 — 558, 562, 563
Nuncques, William Degouve de 537, 540, 542, Pessoa, Fernando 557, 561, 562
569 Petkovié-Dis, Vladislav 629, 6 3 1 - 6 3 8
Nygard, Olav 575 Petkevicaite-Bite, G. 603
Petófi, Sándor 33, 172, 361
Petrarch 148, 223, 273
Obstfelder, Sigbjørn 5 7 6 - 5 7 8 , 580 Pfemfert, Franz 204
O'Connell 288 Pica, Vittorio 59, 78
Oegger 89 Picard, Edmond 60, 565
Offenbach, Jacques 502 Picasso, Pablo 504, 512, 514, 525, 530 545, 546,
Ogden, John 53 562
O'Grady, Standish 289 Pike-Barney, Alice 518
O'Higgins, Kevin 288 Pimenta, Alfredo 558
Ojetti, Ugo 321 Pindar 472, 683
Olbrich, Josef Maria 508 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 111
Oliveira, Alberto de 552, 557, 558, 559 Pirmez, Octave 565
Oliveira, António Correia de 560 Platen, August von 255, 582, 583
Oliveira-Soares, Antonio de 59, .553 Plato 17, 23, 402, 457, 583
Olson, Charles 461 Plowert, Jacques (Paul Adam) 70
O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone 420 Poe, Edgar Allen 22, 24, 44, 45, 48, 55, 60, 78,
Onerva, Madetoja 600 155, 160, 168, 175, 199, 209, 210, 212, 223,
Onís, Federico de 233 224, 236, 257, 275, 296, 301, 302, 306, 310,
Orfer, Leo d' 51, 80, 82 321, 326, 419, 420, 421, 473, 483, 509,
Orkan, Wladislaw 615 513, 519, 5 2 0 - 5 2 4 , 527, 531, 533, 537,
Ortega y Gasset, José 217 538, 540, 550, 557, 688, 597, 629, 656,
Ortiques, E. 96 669, 674, 683
Ortwin, Ostap 615 Poggioli, Renato 382
Osbert 516, 531, 533, 541 Poictevin 315, 322
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur 60 Point, Armand 500. 541, 544, 546
Ostrowska, Bronislawa 612 Polanski, Roman 419
Otto, J. 617 Pollock, Stephen 546
Otto, Rudolf 425 Polydourni, Maris 650

727
Popdimitrov, Emanuil 642, 643 168, 200, 255, 257, 326, 401, 403, 404, 471,
Pope, Alexander 301 475, 484, 485, 489, 491, 506, 630, 540, 554,
Porphyras, Lambros 649 572, 628, 651, 654, 674
Potocki, Antoni 615 Reinhardt, Max 417
Pouillart, Raymond 73 Réjaune 502
Pound, Ezra 1 2 7 - 1 2 9 , 133, 141, 143, 148, 154, Renould, Pierre 406
158, 199, 279, 291, 2 9 7 - 3 0 6 , 459, 655, 695 Renoir, Auguste 106, 473, 515, 516, 530, 533
Poupart, René 558 Retté, Adolphe 21, 70, 73, 74, 75, 79, 102, 116,
Poussin, Nicolas 431, 504 120
Poynter, Sir Edward George 500 Renan, Ernest 51, 674—676
Prado, Pedro 235, 2 5 0 - 2 5 2 Renard, Jules 491
Prahl, S. 59 Reverdy, Pierre 270
Praz, Mario 311 Reviczky, Gyula 172
Preller, Ludwig 407 Reyes, Alfonso 248, 338
Prendergast, Maurice 509 Reyles, Carlos 235, 241, 246
Previati 499, 511 Reymont, Wladislaw Stanislaw 189, 614
Prikker, Johan Thorn 509, 537, 542 Reynal, Maurice 524
Proust, Marcel 22, 61, 73, 106, 122, 536, 537, Rhodes, Harrison 60, 654, 664
662 Ricciardi, M. 314
Pržesmycki, Miriam 610 Richard, Jean-Pierre 56, 63, 373, 455, 457
Pržesmycki, Zenon 610 Richards, I. A. 26, 53
Przybyszewski, Stanislaw 582, 605, 610, 613, Richepin, Jean 68, 168, 489, 551
615 Ricketts, Charles 279, 509, 536
Psichari, Ernest 647 Rictus, Jehan 170
Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich 33, 391 Riddel, Joseph 459, 460, 464, 465
Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 55, 441, 478, 509, Ridley, James 604
510, 512, 5 1 5 - 5 1 7 , 530, 531, 533, 534, Riepin, Ilya Yefimovich 515
539, 540, 5 4 1 - 5 4 3 , 559, 588 Rilke, Rainer Maria 13, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 147,
Puy, Michel 122 149, 1 5 1 - 1 5 3 , 156, 156, 169, 185, 191, 197,
206, 267, 258, 270, 276, 310, 361, 365, 370,
400, 419, 420, 434, 485, 518, 519, 578, 580,
Quental, Antero de 549, 550, 556 585, 605, 643, 684, 686, 688, 690, 691
Quesada, Gonzalo de 236 Rimbaud, Arthur 22, 27, 31, 32, 34, 37, 39, 44,
Que vedo y Villegas, Francisco de 223, 673 60, 67, 68, 70, 92, 101, 107, 111, 114, 136,
Quidor, John 509 138, 140, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159,
Quillard, Pierre 70, 104, 418 161, 168, 169, 175, 179, 180, 191, 214, 273,
Quinet, Edgar 24 276, 279, 297, 326, 349, 364, 371, 404, 428,
Quintce, Peter 464 455, 456, 485, 496, 521, 540, 561, 580, 591,
Quiroga, Horacio 215, 235 596, 606, 643, 651, 654, 656, 674, 686, 686,
693, 696
Rabelais, François 393 Rimsky-Korsakov, N . A. 493, 496, 507
Rachilde, Margaret 416, 418, 533 Ringelnatz, Joachim 150
Rachmaninoff, Sergey 493 Rittner, Tadeusz 613
Racine, Jean 269, 273, 420 Rivière, Henri 326, 330, 543
Rackham, Arthur 509, 537 Rivas Groot, José Maria 235, 246
Radoslavov, Ivan 642, 643, 644 Rivoire, André 168
Raines 25 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 113, 422
Rainis, J a n 189 Robinson, Edwin Arlington 653
Rainóv, Nikolay 643 Robichez, J. 22, 418
Rakič,' Milan 627, 631 Rocha, João 556
Ral, Adelaida 236 Rocha, Carlos López 223
Rameau, Jean-Philippe 474 Rocha, Andrée 553
Rauhut, Franz 62 Rochegrosse, Georges 542
Ravel, Maurice 36, 483, 485, 490, 491, 562 Rode, Helge 592
Raymond Marcel 555 Rodenbach, Georges 73, 108, 168, 483, 618, 557,
Raynal, Maurice 524 565, 571, 572, 600, 605, 628, 697
Raynaud, Ernest 18, 69, 70, 93, 120, 168, 399 Rodin, Auguste 36, 502, 512, 532, 635, 538, 540,
Rebell, Hugues 410 559
Rebolledo, Efrén 215, 221 Roditi, Edouard 13
Redon, Odilon 79, 105, 214, 442, 444, 471, 473, Rodó, José Enrique 219, 669, 6 7 3 - 6 7 7
475, 499, 502, 503, 517, 531, 532, 534, 535, Rodríguez, Manuel Díaz 215, 217, 235, 241, 242,
6 3 7 - 5 4 1 , 544 244, 246, 249
Regio, José 56 Roehrich, Nicolas 186, 506, 514
Regnault, Henri 540 Rohlfs, Christian 508
Régnier, Henry de 20—22, 27, 69, 72, 73, 79, Rolioz-Lieder, Waclaw 611
107, 111, 1 1 3 - 1 1 6 , 120, 121, 122, 153, Rolland, Romain 83, 122, 366

728
Rollinat, Charles 68, 551, 562 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 24, 503
Romagosa, Carlos 229 Schliemann, Heinrich 534
Ronsard, Pierre de 81, 317 Schlumberger, Jean 151
Rops, Félicien 105, 316, 445, 501, 505, 507, 513, Schneider, Elisabeth 295
515, 517, 532, 538, 540, 543 Schneider, Marcel 13
Roosevelt, Theodore 672 Schnitzler, Arthur 185, 434
Rossetti, Christina 216, 510 Schönberg, Arnold 473, 474, 476, 479, 481, 485,
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 39, 214, 216, 255, 262, 486
441, 443, 533, 535, 539, 541, 559, 561, 569 Schopenhauer, Arthur 23, 31, 38, 70, 74, 78,
Rosso, Medardo 512 172, 213, 337, 3 2 4 - 3 2 6 , 3 8 4 - 3 8 6 , 549,
Rostand, Edmond 168 560, 587, 598, 599, 611, 645
Rouault, George 147, 513, 530, 532, 541, 546 Schreyer, Lothar 203, 207—211
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 90, ¡236, 335 Schröder, Rudolf Alexander 148
Rousseau, Henri 508, 546 Schubert, Franz 483, 484, 486, 487
Roussel, Albert 471, 485 Schuffenecker, Emil 523, 524, 543
Royer, Jean 122 Schulmann, Iván A. 223, 236, 238
Rubens, Pieter Pauwel 431, 539 Schumann, Robert 162, 225, 244, 475, 478, 484,
Runge, Philip Otto 514 487, 562
Ruskin, John 537, 542, 557, 559, 561, 562 Schuré, Edouard 75, 94, 400, 415, 476, 530
Ruysbroeck, J a n Van 146, 147 Schurig, Paul 506
Ryback, Issachar 507 Schwabe, Carlos 512, 533, 541, 543
Ryder, Albert Pinkham 510, 513, 520, 521 Schwarz, F-W-L. 407
Schwind, Moritz von 503
Sabaneyev, Leonid 493, 497 Schwitters, Kurt 150
Sá Carneiro, Mario de 561, 562 Schwob, Marcel 72, 115
Sade, Donatien, marquis de 562 Scott, Clive 695
Saint Antoine (Henri Mazel) 21, 92, 119 Scriabin, Alexander Nicolaevich 471, 474, 480,
Saint Francis of Assisi 505 4 9 3 - 4 9 7 , 507
Saint J o h n of the Cross 213, 219, 309, 345 Scribe, Eugène 417
Saint-Martin, Louis-Claude de 89 Seferis, Georges 647, 651
Saint-Paul, Albert 148, 200, 201, 255 Segantini, Giovanni 511
Saint-Pierre, Eustache de 199 Segantini, Victor 445, 499, 511, 541
Saint-Pol-Roux, Pierre-Paul 67, 71, 73, 75, 77, Ségur, Nicolas 647
119, 122, 408, 411, 554, 674 SempruM, Jesus 244
Saint-Saëns, Camille 484, 486 Sénancour, Etienne Pivert de 33, 318
Saint Theresa 214, 223 Séon, Alexandre 499, 503, 516, 518, 531, 533,
Saint-Victor, Paul Bins, comte de 236 541, 544
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 11 Sérusier, Paul 475, 534, 543
Saintsbury, George Edward Bateman 134 Seurat, Georges 75, 499, 530, 531
Salda, Frantiśek Xaver 619, 622 Séverac, Déodat de 483, 485
Salinas, Pedro 222, 347, 350, 353, 356, 358 Shakespeare, William 71, 146, 296, 415, 676
Salis, R. 68, 74 Shannon, Charles 536
Salmon, André 78 Shaw, George Bernard 372
Samain, Albert 31, 72, 73, 107, 112, 1 6 8 - 1 7 0 , Shelley, Percy Bysshe 168, 285, 287, 3 1 4 - 3 1 6 ,
340, 3 4 1 - 3 4 3 , 474, 485, 535, 537, 543, 325, 404, 683, 688
545, 628, 643, 651 Shidler, Ross 578
Sánchez, Luis Alberto 232, 235 Shklovsky, Victor 386
Santarcangeli, Paolo 113 Sholl, Aurélien 674
Sarajas, Annamari 596, 598 Sibelius, J a n 471, 4 7 4 - 4 7 6 , 486, 507, 5 9 5 - 5 9 7 ,
Sarajas-Korte, Salme 597 599
Sarcey, Francisque 99, 101 Siciliano, ítalo 73
Sarkia, Kaarlo 601 Signac, Paul 75, 499
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 242, 247, 336, Signorelli, Luca 504
573 Signoret, Emmanuel 73, 75, 79, 80, 81, 168
Sartre, Jean-Paul 49, 153, 281, 419 Sigourney Rice, Sara 60
Sartorio, Aristide Giulio 533 Sigurdsson, Sigurdur 575
Satie, Erik 471, 473, 474, 478, 479, 483, 532 Sigurjónsson, Johann 575
Sauguet, Henri 485 Sikehanos, Angélos 647, 651
Saussure, Ferdinand de 40, 88, 94, 95, 97 Sillanpää, Frans Emil 596
Savinio, Albuto 512 Silva Castro, Raúl 251
Sawa y Martínez, Alejandro 157, 158, 163 Silva Gaio, Manuel de 554, 555, 558—560
Schaukai, Richard 257 Silva, José Asunción 160, 214—218, 233, 235,
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 19, 430 336, 509
Schérer, Edmund 674 Silvestre, Armand 76
Scherer, J . 63 Simberg, Hugo 597
Schiele, Egon 446, 612 Simmel, Georg 187

729
Simões, Veiga 559, 560, 561 Suares, André 366
Simons, Pinkus Marcius 510, 540 Sudermann, Hermann 406
Singer, K u r t 197 Sudrabkalns, J . 608
Sinka, István 187, 189 Suits, G. 604, 605, 607, 608
Sion, Georges 419 Sully, James 663
Siwertz, Sigford 580 Sully Prudhomme, Armand 168, 577
Skerlič, Jovan 631 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 90, 289, 521, 538, 541,
Skipis, Sotiris 650 682, 683
Slaveikov, Pencho 642 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 60, 70, 168, 255,
Skram, Erik 588 262, 297, 299, 303, 315, 406, 480, 533, 535,
šlejhar, Josef Karel 619 537, 540, 587, 597
Slevogt, Max 506 Symons, Arthur 13, 24, 29, 61, 128, 129, 131,
Slowacki, Juliusz 611, 613, 615 133, 134, 1 3 6 - 1 4 3 , 142, 168, 279, 280,
Smetana, Bedfich 504, 618 282, 2 8 4 - 2 8 7 , 292, 297, 298, 302, 311,
Socrates 89 325, 536, 554, 605, 695
Sologub, Fyodor 605 Synge, John Millington 162, 420
Sollogub, Vladimir 392 Szabó, Lõrinc 169
Solomon, Siméon 515, 533 Szabolcsi, Miklós 690
Solovyov, Vladimir 382, 384—386, 388, 389, Széchenyi, István 375
393, 394, 606, 608
Sousa, Pinto 559 Tablada, José Juan 220
Souza, Robert de 21, 105, 122 Tailhade, Laurent 18, 69, 74, 75, 120, 168, 479
Sova, Antonín 618, 620 — 622 Taine, Hippolyte 24, 674
Söderberg, Hjalmar 584 Tallgren, Anne Marie 598, 600
Södergran, Edith 575 Tasso, Torquato 148
Sorensen, Bengt Algot 19 Tate, Allen 656
Sõtér, István 10 Taupin, René 24, 295
Sparre, Louis 597 Tavaststjerna, Karl August 597
Sperelli, Andrea 312, 318, 319 Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilyich 493, 504
Spinoza, Baruch 304 Tchernichovsky, Saul 408
Spire, André 123 Tchizewsky, D, 393
Spoerri, Theophil 154 Tchulkov, Georgy Ivanovich 390
Sruoga, B. 605, 606, 607 Tegner, Esaias 583
Stadler, Ernst 198 Teixeira, Judith 562
Staël, Germaine Necker, Madame de 19 Teixeira de Pascoaes, Joaquina 560
Staff, Leopold 612, 613 Tellier, Jules 74, 82
Stagnelius, Erik Johan 582 Tennyson, Alfred 202, 511, 531, 533, 537
Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeyevich 417, 419, Terence, Publius Terentius Afer 503
420, 423 Tetmajer-Przerwa, Kazimierz 611
Stead, William Thomas 501 Thibaudet, Albert 62, 154
Stein, Charlotte von 425 Thiis, Jens 576
Steiner, Rudolf 151, 203, 393, 394 Thompson, Francis 128
Stendhal, Marie Henri Beyle 33, 34, 235, 420 Thomson, Vance 654
Stephanou, Stephanos 648, 650 Thoreau, Henry David 236, 662
Sternberger, Dolf 500 Thorel, Jean 23, 93, 257
Sternheim, Carl 198 Tibullus, Albius 223
Stevens, Wallace 13, 270, 275, 290, 4 5 9 - 4 6 7 , Tieck, Ludwig 503
498, 6 5 5 - 6 5 8 , 6 8 9 - 6 9 1 , 695 Tindall, William York 230, 231, 235, 252
Stickney, Trumbull 655 Tissot, James 541
Stone, Herbert 654 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 33, 288, 556, 592,
Starck, Fritz 502 599
Storm, Theodor 582 Tombeur, Charles-Henry de 566
Storni, Alfonsina 221 Tomlinson, Charles 292
Stoyanov, Lyudmil 642, 643, 645 Toorop, J a n 509, 514, 532, 542
Stramm, August 150, 206, 210 Torres-Ríoseco, Arturo 243, 244, 250
Strashimirov, Anto 642, 643 TOSÍ, Arturo 311
Strauss, Richard 185, 197, 406, 421, 4 7 1 - 4 7 8 , Tóth, Arpád 167, 1 6 9 - 1 7 1 , 175, 179, 180, 189
501 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 562
Strauss, Walter A. 22 Trakl, Georg 151, 163, 186, 434
Stravinsky, Igor 186, 471, 480 Trayanov, Teodor 642—645
Striggio, Alessandro 502 Trzeszczkowska, Zofia 610
Strindberg, August 29, 415—417, 420, 580, 589 Tuglas, Friedebert 597
Strug, Andrzej 614 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich 33
Stuck, Franz von 500, 504, 505, 5 1 1 - 5 1 3 , 515, Turina, Joaquin 485
534, 535 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 439, 510
Stuckenberg, Viggio 588, 590, 592 Tyutchev, Fyodor Ivanovich 382, 385, 391

730
Ubell, Hermann 255, 256 Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Philippe-Auguste 22,
Unland, Ludwig 207 23, 56 60, 67, 70, 71, 74,106,113, 120, 122,
Unamuno, Miguel de 158, 160, 217, 227, 243, 123, 149, 234, 417, 420, 480, 485, 489, 502,
249, 340 557, 558, 597, 669
Under, Marie 25, 608 Vinet, Alexandre 19
Ungaretti, Giuseppe 270 Viñes, Ricardo 483
Unruh, Fritz von 198, 199 Virgil, Publius Vergilius Maro 226, 273, 296, 503
Upits, A. 604 Visan, Tancrède de 122
Uxküll, Jakob von 150 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 25
Vivien, Renée 518, 535
Vajda, György M. 692 Vogeler, Heinrich 514
Vajda, János 172, 369 Voinovié, Ivo 25
Vajthó, László 377 Vollard, Ambroise 543
Valbert, G. (Victor Cherbuliez) 70 Volney, François de Chasseboeuf, comte de 236
Valensi, Henri 507 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 162, 335
Valera y Alcalá Galiano, J u a n 673 Vrchlický, Jaroslav 617
Valéry, Paul 13, 18, 22, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 43,
61, 67, 73, ???, 94, 99, 101, 103, 111, 121, Wagner, Richard 2 2 - 2 4 , 32, 39, 55, 70, 71, 78,
145, 148, 151-155, 157, 191, 197, 199, 79, 81, 109, 112, 145, 156, 161, 189, 214,
248, 269, 270-277, 296, 302, 303, 310, 216, 271, 318, 325, 401, 404, 415, 437, 471,
327, 399, 400, 402, 418, 420, 422, 471, 472, 4 7 3 - 4 7 6 , 478, 484, 491, 4 9 3 - 4 9 5 , 501,
521, 529, 572,???6?.,656, 657, 686, 690, 694 502, 533, 534, 557, 559, 587, 613, 649, 674,
Valle-Inclán, llamón del 158, 159, 162, 216, 691
217 219 Wagner, Wieland 416
Vallette,' Alfred 81, 479 Wais, K u r t 62
Van de Velde, Henry Clemens 534 Walden, Herwarth 150, 191, 2 0 3 - 2 1 2
Van de Woestine, Karel 545 Walden, Nell 204
Van Dongen, Cornelius 513 Waller, Max 565, 567
Vanier 70, 81 Walter, André 104
Van Lerberghe, Charles 121, 146, 168, 177, 418. Walzer, Pierre Olivier 101
565, 569, 573, 574 Warren, Austin 26
Vanor, Georges 70, 88, 93, 117 Waterhouse, J o h n William 536
Vašek, Vladimir 622 Watteau, Antoine 418, 487, 506, 529, 539
Vasari, Giorgio 505 Watts, George Frederick 500, 501, 511, 535
Vasconcelos, Henrique de 553, 558 Weber, Carl Maria 503, 507, 538
Vassiliadis 648 Webern, Anton 471, 473, 485
Vaugelas, Claude Favre de 166 Weinberg, Bernard 27
Vedder, Elihu 509 Wellek, René 9, 191, 193, 414, 683
Vedel, Valdemar 588, 599 Wellesley, Dorothy 293
Vellay, Charles 123 Wells, Herbert George 257
Verde, Cesario 550, 562 Werfel, Franz 185, 206, 211
Verdel 593 Werin, Algol 580
Verdi, Giuseppe 477 Wheelwright, Philip 26
Verhaeren, Emile 21, 31, 59, 72, 92, 112, 121, Whibley, Charles 60, 303
168, 172, 280, 283, 484, 485, 491, 554, 562, Whistler, James 60, 224, 438, 448, 516, 532,
565, 569, 5 7 1 - 5 7 4 , 580,28, 643, 6 9 6 - 6 9 8 536, 539, 562
Verlaine, Paul 18, 21, 22, 26, 31, 32, 38, 55, 67— Whitehead, Charles 283, 289
69, 7 1 - 7 4 , 8 1 - 8 3 , 101, 104, 109, 116,131, Whitman, Sarah Helen 60
132,136,138,140,141,145,147-150,157- Whitman, Walt 70, 78, 120, 128, 168, 410, 559,
160,163,167-193,223,225,255, 2 6 0 - 2 6 3 , 577, 673, 674
265, 279, 297, 316, 317, 338, 339, 3 4 1 - Wiener, Philip P . 19
343, 354, 362, 364, 369, 384, 399, 428, 438, Wiertz, Antoine Joseph 517
455, 456, 471, 473, 477, 484, 485, 487, 4 8 9 - Wilbur, Richard 519
491, 506, 524, 529, 534, 535, 539, 543, 551, Wilde, Oscar 60, 106, 168, 169, 234, 236, 237,
554, 5 5 7 - 5 6 2 , 577, 580, 581, 584, 588, 240, 280, 406, 421, 448, 477, 501, 530, 533,
591, 596, 599, 600, 601, 605, 607, 6 2 7 - 534, 536, 537, 543, 545, 561, 562, 597
637, 643, 654, 657, 669, 6 7 2 - 6 7 4 , 689, 691 Wüdt, Adolfo 512
Vicaire, Gabriel 32, 69, 551 Williams, William Carlos 459, 460, 461, 653, 655
Vielé-Griffin, Francis 20, 21, 24, 40, 69, 70, 72, Wilson, Edmund 290, 658, 661, 684
7 8 - 8 0 , 93, 120, 200, 255, 257, 260, 261, Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 19
400, 474, 477, 484, 552, 554, 572, 654 Wollheim, Richard 308
Vigée, Claude 349 Wolters, Frédrick 197
Vignier, Charles 18, 69 Woolf, Virginia 600
Vigny, Alfred de 404 Wordsworth, William 162, 682
Vila-Moura 561, 562 Wrubel, Mikhail Alexandrovich 186, 504, 506,
Villaespesa, Francisco 158, 162 507, 510, 514, 516, 617

731
Wyndham, George 303 Zecchin,, Vittorio 512
Wyspiański, Stanislaw 189, 507, 6 1 3 - 6 1 5 Zeromski, Stefan 189, 614, 615
Wyzewa, Teodor de 20, 23, 24, 70, 73, 78, 79,85, Ziem, Félix 543
88, 93, 317, 318, 403, 654 Zilcken, P . V . 59
Zille, Heinrich 500
Zilliacus, Emil 596
Yassenov, Hristo 642—645 Zola, Emile 29, 30, 32, 36, 40, 74, 82, 87, 145,
Yavorov, Felo Kraeholov 642—645 232, 235, 257, 316, 529, 532, 543, 565
Yeats, Jack 508 Zorn, Anders 508
Yeats, William Butler 13, 24, 26, 39, 61, 148, Zorrila, J u a n de San Martín 217, 233, 341
162, 276, 279, 2 8 0 - 2 9 3 , 302, 310, 311, Zotos 650
315, 317, 372, 400, 402, 403, 415, 420, Zulawski, Jerzy 613
6 8 3 - 6 9 0 , 696, 697 Zum Felde, Alberto 249

732
In the series Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages the following titles have been
published thus far or are scheduled for publication:

XXIII Gillespie, Gerald, Manfred Engel and Bernard Dieterle (eds.): Romantic Prose Fiction. xxi, 733 pp.
XXII Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.
Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume III: The making and remaking of literary
institutions. 2007. xiv, 522 pp. [Subseries on Literary Cultures 3]
XXI Eysteinsson, Astradur and Vivian Liska (eds.): Modernism. With the assistance of Anke Brouwers,
Vanessa Joosen, Nathan Van Camp, Dirk Van Hulle, Katrien Vloeberghs and Björn Thor Vilhjálmsson. 2007.
xii, 1043 pp. (2 vols.).
XX Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.
Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume II. 2006. xiv, 512 pp. [Subseries on Literary
Cultures 2]
XIX Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.
Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume I. 2004. xx, 648 pp. [Subseries on Literary
Cultures 1]
XVIII Sondrup, Steven P. and Virgil Nemoianu (eds.): Nonfictional Romantic Prose. Expanding borders. In
collaboration with Gerald Gillespie. 2004. viii, 477 pp.
XVII Esterhammer, Angela (ed.): Romantic Poetry. 2002. xii, 537 pp.
XVI Knabe, Peter-Eckhard, Roland Mortier and François Moureau (eds.): L'Aube de la Modernité 1680-
1760. 2002. viii, 554 pp.
XV Arnold, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 2: English- and Dutch-speaking
regions. 2001. x, 672 pp.
XIV Glaser, Horst Albert and György M. Vajda † (eds.): Die Wende von der Aufklärung zur Romantik 1760–
1820. Epoche im Überblick. 2001. x, 760 pp.
XIII Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner and Paul Chavy (eds.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). Tome
IV: Crises et essors nouveaux (1560–1610). 2000. xiv, 817 pp.
XII Arnold, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. 1997.
xviii, 398 pp.
XI Bertens, Hans and Douwe W. Fokkema (eds.): International Postmodernism. Theory and literary practice.
1997. xvi, 581 pp.
X Arnold, A. James, Julio Rodriguez-Luis and J. Michael Dash (eds.): A History of Literature in the
Caribbean. Volume 1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions. 1994. xviii, 579 pp.
IX Gillespie, Gerald (ed.): Romantic Drama. 1993. xvi, 516 pp.
VIII Garber, Frederick (ed.): Romantic Irony. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1988. 395 pp.
VII Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner et André Stegmann (dir.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600).
Volume 1: L'avènement de l'esprit nouveau (1400–1480). (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest594 pp. Expected Out of
print
VI:2 European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Volume 2. 1986.
VI:1 European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Volume 1. 1986.
V Weisgerber, Jean (dir.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume II: Théorie. (Akadémiai Kiadó)
Budapest, 1986. 704 pp.
IV Weisgerber, Jean (dir.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume I: Histoire. (Akadémiai Kiadó)
Budapest, 1986. 622 pp.
III Vajda, György M. † (dir.): Le Tournant du siècle des lumières 1760–1820. Les genres en vers des lumières au
romantisme. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1982. 684 pp.
II Balakian, Anna (ed.): The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages. (Akadémiai Kiadó)
Budapest, 1984. 732 pp.
I Weisstein, Ulrich (ed.): Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest
Expected Out of print
The series incorporates a subseries on Literary Cultures
I. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and
20th centuries.
Volume I (Vol. XIX in the main series)
Volume II (Vol. XX in the main series)
Volume III (Vol. XXII in the main series)
Volume IV n.y.p.
(Eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer)
II. Comparative Histories of Nordic Literary Cultures n.y.p.
III. Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula n.y.p.