Text: Anonymous, “The Art Named Symbolist,” New York Times (New York, NY), November 19, 1893, p. 16, col. 6

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Poe the Model of Charles Maudelaire1 and Stephane Mallarme and Inspirer of the Little Literary Revelation Which Leading France Triumphantly to the End of the and Philosophy of the New Writers Replacing the Feebly Fallen Into Pessimism.

The literature of France had, these last five years, exquisite interludes. They were and poems: Axel,” by Villiers de prose l’Isle-Adam; Vers et Prose.” by Stephane Mallarme; Amour,” by Paul Verlaine; Les Cantilenes,” by Jean Moreas; Sous Les Te Complaintes,” by Jules Laforgue; 1’Oetl des Barbares,” L’ Homme Libre,” and “Le Jardin de Berenice.” by Maurice Barres.

They were sketches by Arthur Rimbaud, novels by Joris Karl Huysmans and Paul Adam, verses and plays by Vignier, Henri de Regnier, Gustave Kahn, Tailhade, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Their terms were often archaic, their phrases only suggestive. Their verses at times were nelther scanned nor measured, but musically noted. Their ideas were still more unconventional. Interpreted in the sense of their widest aim they gave descriptions of states of mind, not of their causes; of awe of the forest or of mute thunder lurking in the leaves, not of the wood a and dense foliage of trees.

Their method was similar to the one employed in the composition of fugues and sonatas, but its effect was intellectual in a degree unattainable by music. Its fault was that the sentiments described might not be intelligible to persons who did not share them; but this is only relatively a fault.

Yet it this unintelligibility that the dally chroniclers of late Paris press with thousands of quodlibets, and the critics, onto with very serious reviews, attacked. The merit of Brunetiere, France, and Lemaitre implied only honor to the writers whom they esteemed deserving of the severity their censure. It pleaded for a popular, against a hieratic, literature.

A hieratic literature has in ambush at all the great epochs of French literature. As in politics, the enemy found its allies in foreign countries. Ronsard and his Pleiad in Greece, the Rambouillet circle in Italy, Corneille in Spain, Hugo in England, and Mallarme in America. But the French confound, in their detestation of ideas and forms which are not national, the foreign and the hieratic. They perpetually oppose equivalents of Villon, Marot, Regnier, La Fontaine, and Moliere to equivalents of Ronsard, Baif, Du Bellay, Desportes, Belleau, Corneille, and Racine. They prefer writers who simply reflect their national characteristics rather than writers who believe that the constant tendency to this single end entails the negation of their art.

Stephane Mallarme and the rest were opposed as hieratic and will never be popular, but they are great artists. They charmed readers by magic of style and elevation of ideas. They placed upon readers the burden of commentary, and never before in France were more delightfully experienced emotions of understanding. In this, inevitably, there were errors, and some of them were grave.

One was by Felicien Champsaur in naming decadents the new estheticians. Imitators copied the faults, the grimaces, of their masters, as imitators always do, instead of learning the good qualities by they became masters, and the chief of. which is not to imitate anybody, Imitators called themselves decadents and justified the appellation in its literal, realistic sense, not in the figurative sense of a pompous literary decline which it formerly evoked. Interpreters gave definitions, either imperfect or absolutely incorrect, of the new method which could not be defined except in an estimate of its widest aim.

It varied with the individual characteristics of Its artists. It was the transposition of symphonies into written language; with Mallarme, a harmonious blending of force and suavity; with Verlaine, the attribution of a figurative significance to Ideas and the expression of truths by images and analogies with others. Jean Moreas suggested the least unsatisfactory, generic designation in the word “symbolist.”

The terms used by the Symbolists were often archaic, but many new words regularly formed were added to their vocabulary, and they might have been defended with a quotation from Horace. unsuspected of a revolutionary tendency. But Horace was not quoted. Jacques Plowert compiled a glossary of scarce words in works of Symbolists, and proved that few were not authorized by Littre.

The verses of the Symbolists were often not compliant to rules of French prosody enacted by Bolleau, but they were enchantingly rhythmical, and Theodore de Banville had said: When Hugo liberated the verse it was supposed that poets who came after him would wish to be free, and, trained by his example, owe nothing except to themselves. But love of servitude is so profoundly anchored in us that the new poets copied and imitated the habitual forms and combinations of most instead of endeavoring to invent new ones.” Hugo, Theodore de Banville had said that French poetry had fallen from one condition of slavery into another. After hackneyed Classicists there are hackneyed Roin manticists, rhymes; and hackneyed the in forms, in phrases, hackneyed-that is the chronic in poetry as in aught else is death.”

The poems of the Symbolists of are the very reverse of hackneyed. Audacious in form, musical in tone, revolutionary in ideas, at present they are not defended, they are simply acclaimed. Critics cannot think of regarding them as of a magnificent literary decadence. symptoms They are, on the contrary, evidences of the rapidity with which literature in France follows science in the strides of progress.

In form the most recent expression of the beautiful, in philosophy sustained by phenomenism of Renouvier and the scientific Spinozism of the most modern metaphysicians, retrace new literature may the easily its evolution. The Romanticists came after Baour-Lormian and the the Vicomte traditions of d’Arlincourt, who badly guarded Classicism; the Naturalists came after George Sand and Octave Feuillet, whose works were pale copies of Romanticism; the men of letters named Symbolists are the successors of the writers feebly fallen into pessimism from the merciless and necessary lessons of naturalism.

Their theory is not new. Didymus, the is grammarian, insisted that the poet's duty the to make use of hidden symbols and to discover mystery Schiller under the symbolic wrote that be the world was interesting to poets only because it indicated in the symbols the various manifestation of thinker. Alfred de wrote Schiller poems in symbols, but neither Vigny Vigny nor nor Didymus nor Jouffroy, who thought that the universe combination of symbols, nor Lycophron, whose Alexander” was esoteric complex, is the immediate ancestor of the Symbolists.

Their immediate ancestor is Poe. They avow this, even when they quote Baudelaire: “Poetry, to one who interrogates his mind, recalls his moments of enthusiasm and meditates, has no other aim than itself; it cannot have another, and no poem shall be as grand, as noble, name of poem, as the really worthy of the name of poem, as one the which shall have been written solely for the pleasure of writing a poem.” When they say that the pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevated, and the most pure lies in the contemplation of the beautiful; when they assert that some complexity and an indefinite undercurrent of when thought are insist requisite in the poetic composition; when they insist on the value of suggestiveness, they are repeating dogmas of Poe. Their advantage is that they have faithfully observed them.

Baudelaire made Poe famous in France. His admiration for the American poet has been qualified as “a literary affinity,” but he was not a great poet until after he had translated Poe. He read fragments of Poe's tales in 1847, and instantly made his idol of their author. He was not diplomatic, but he had the patience to win the affection of Americans residing in Paris in order to edited obtain from them collections of journals by Poe. His first translation appeared in 1848, his last in 1855, and in the intervening years when not translating he was revealed absorbing in the ideas works and all the originality the of Poe.

Stephane Mallarme is not with Baudelaire except by reference comparable to Poe. Both are great poets, from trained Poe in the their dreams art, but Mallarme admirably took and the analytic gifts. Mallarme's translations of Poe's were poems the are prose, almost literal. They inspiration of the little literary triumphantly revolution which is leading France to the end of the This has happened a century. This has happened a century after another American, Benjamin Franklin, inspired the “Ca Ira” to the tune of which the Bastile fell.