It is difficult to characterize a literary evolution in the hour when
the fruits are still uncertain and the very blossoming in the orchard
unconsummated. Precocious _trees_, slow-developing and dubious trees
which one would not care, however, to call sterile: the orchard is very
diverse and rich, too rich. The thickness of the leaves brings shadow,
and the shadow discolors the flowers and dulls the hues of the fruit.
We will stroll through this rich, dark orchard and sit down for a
moment at the foot of the strongest, fairest, and most agreeable trees.
Literary evolutions receive a name when they merit it by importance,
necessity and fitness. Quite often, this name has no precise meaning,
but is useful in serving as a rallying sign to all who accept it,
and as the aiming point for those who attack it. Thus the battle
is fought around a purely verbal labarum. What is the meaning of
_Romanticism?_ It is easier to feel than to explain it. What is the
meaning of _Symbolism?_ Practically nothing, if we adhere to the narrow
etymological sense. If we pass beyond, it may mean individualism in
literature, liberty in art, abandonment of taught formulas, tendencies
towards the new and strange, or even towards the bizarre. It may also
mean idealism, a contempt for the social anecdote, anti-naturalism,
a propensity to seize only the characteristic details of life, to
emphasize only those acts that distinguish one man from another, to
strive to achieve essentials; finally, for the poets symbolism seems
allied to free verse, that is, to unswathed verse whose young body may
frolic at ease, liberated from embarrassments of swaddling clothes and
straps.
But all this has little affinity with the syllables of the word, for we
must not let it be insinuated that symbolism is only the transformation
of the old allegory or of the art of personifying an idea in a human
being, a landscape, or a narrative. Such an art is the whole of art,
art primordial and eternal, and a literature freed from this necessity
would be unmentionable. It would be null, with as much aesthetic
significance as the clucking of the hocco or the braying of the wild
ass.
Literature, indeed, is nothing more than the artistic development of
the idea, the imaginary heroes. Heroes, or men (for every man in his
sphere is a hero), are only sketched by life; it is art which perfects
them by giving them, in exchange for their poor sick souls, the
treasure of an immortal idea, and the humblest, if chosen by a great
poet, may be called to this participation. Who so humble as that Aeneas
whom Virgil burdens with all the weight of being the idea of Roman
force, and who so humble as that Don Quixote on whom Cervantes imposes
the tremendous load of being at once Roland, the four sons Aymon,
Amadis, Palmerin, Tristan and all the knights of the Round Table! The
history of symbolism would be the history of man himself, since man can
only assimilate a symbolized idea. Needless to insist on this, for one
might think that the young devotees of symbolism are unaware of the
_Vita Nuova_ and the character Beatrice, whose frail, pure shoulders
nevertheless keep erect under the complex weight of symbols with which
the poet overwhelms her.
Whence, then, came the illusion that symbolizing of the idea was a
novelty?
In these last years, we had a very serious attempt of literature based
on a scorn of the idea, a disdain of the symbol. We are acquainted with
its theory, which seems culinary: take a slice of life, etc. Zola,
having invented the recipe, forgot to serve it. His "slices of life"
are heavy poems of a miry, tumultuous lyricism, popular romanticism,
democratic symbolism, but ever full of an idea, always pregnant with
allegoric meaning. The idealistic revolt, then, did not rear itself
against the works (unless against the despicable works) of naturalism,
but against its theory, or rather against its pretension; returning
to the eternal, antecedent necessities of art, the rebels presumed to
express new and even surprising truths in professing their wish to
reinstate the idea in literature; they only relighted the torch; they
also lighted, all around, many small candles.
There is, nevertheless, a new truth, which has recently entered
literature and art, a truth quite metaphysical and quite _a priori_
(in appearance), quite young, since it is only a century old, and
truly new, since it has not yet served in the aesthetic order. This
evangelical and marvelous truth, liberating and renovating, is the
principle the world's ideality. With reference to th thinking subject,
man, the world, everything that is external, only exists according
to the idea he forms of it. We only know phenomena, we only reason
from appearances; all truth in itself escapes us; the essence is
unassailable. It is what Schopenhauer has popularized under this so
simple and clear formula: the world is my representation. I do not see
that which is; that which is, is what I see. As many thinking men, so
many diverse and perhaps dissimilar worlds. This doctrine, which Kant
left on the way to be flung to the rescue of the castaway morality,
is so fine and supple that one transposes it from theory to practice
without clashing with logic, even the most exigent. It is a universal
principle of emancipation for every man capable of understanding. It
has only revolutionized aesthetics, but here it is a question only of
aesthetics.
Definitions of the beautiful are still given in manuals; they go
farther; formulas are given by which artists attain the expression of
the beautiful. There are institutes for teaching these formulas, which
are but the average and epitome of ideas or of preceding appreciations.
Theories in aesthetics generally being obscure, the ideal paragon, the
model, is joined to them. In those institutes (and the civilized world
is but a vast Institute) all novelty is held blasphemous, all personal
affirmation becomes an act of madness. Nordau, who has read, with
bizarre patience, all contemporary literature, propagated this idea,
basely destructive of all individualism, that "nonconformity" is the
capital crime of a writer. We violently differ in opinion. A writer's
capital crime is conformity, imitativeness, submission to rules and
precepts. A writer's work should be not only the reflection, but the
magnified reflection of his personality. The only excuse a man has for
writing, is to express himself, to reveal to others the world reflected
in his individual mirror; his only excuse is to be original. He should
say things not yet said, and say them in a form not yet formulated.
He should create his own aesthetics, and we should admit as many
aesthetics as there are original minds, judging them according to what
they are not.
Let us then admit that symbolism, though excessive, unseasonable and
pretentious, is the expression of individualism in art.
This too simple but clear definition will suffice provisionally. In
the course of the following portraits, or later, we doubtless will
have occasion to complete it. Its principle will, nevertheless,
serve to guide us, by inciting us to investigate, not what the new
writers should have done, according to monstrous rules and tyrannical
traditions, but what they wished to do. Aesthetics has also become a
personal talent; no one has the right to impose it upon others. An
artist can be compared with himself alone, but there is profit and
justice in noting dissimilarities. We will try to mark, not how the
"newcomers" resemble each other, but how they differ, that is to say in
what way they exist, for to exist is to be different.
This is not written to pretend that among most of them are no evident
similarities of thought and technique, an inevitable fact, but so
inevitable that it is without interest. No more do we insinuate that
this flowering is spontaneous; before the flower comes the seed, itself
fallen from a flower. These young people have fathers and masters:
Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and others.
They love them dead or alive, they read them, they listen to them. What
stupidity to think that we disdain those of yesterday! Who then has
a more admired and affectionate court than Stéphane Mallarmé? And is
Villiers forgotten? And Verlaine forsaken?
Now, we must warn that the order of these portraits, without being
altogether arbitrary, implies no classification of prize-lists. There
are, even, outside of the gallery, absent personages, whom we will
bring back on occasion. There are empty frames and also bare places. As
for the portraits themselves, if any one judges them incomplete and too
brief, we reply that we wished them so, having the intention only to
give indications, only to show, with the gesture of an arm, the way.
Lastly, to join today with yesterday, we have intercalated familiar
faces among the new figures: and then, instead of rewriting a
physiognomy known to many, we have tried to bring to light some obscure
point, rather than the whole.