"It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously,
lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted
the noblest which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it
highest." Carlyle
Without symbolism there can be no literature; indeed, not even
language. What are words themselves but symbols, almost as arbitrary
as the letters which compose them, mere sounds of the voice to which
we have agreed to give certain significations, as we have agreed to
translate these sounds by those combinations of letters? Symbolism
began with the first words uttered by the first man, as he named
every living thing; or before them, in heaven, when God named the
world into being. And we see, in these beginnings, precisely what
Symbolism in literature really is: a form of expression, at the best
but approximate, essentially but arbitrary, until it has obtained
the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by the
consciousness. It is sometimes permitted to us to hope that our
convention is indeed the reflection rather than merely the sign of that
unseen reality. We have done much if we have found a recognisable sign.
"A symbol," says Comte Goblet d'Alviella, in his book on _The Migration
of Symbols,_ "might be defined as a representation which does not aim
at being a reproduction." Originally, as he points out, used by the
Greeks to denote "the two halves of the tablet they divided between
themselves as a pledge of hospitality," it came to be used of every
sign, formula, or rite by which those initiated in any mystery made
themselves secretly known to one another. Gradually the word extended
its meaning, until it came to denote every conventional representation
of idea by form, of the unseen by the visible. "In a Symbol," says
Carlyle, "there is concealment and yet revelation: hence, therefore, by
Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance."
And, in that fine chapter of _Sartor Resartus,_ he goes further,
vindicating for the word its full value: "In the Symbol proper, what we
can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly,
some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made
to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were,
attainable there."
It is in such a sense as this that the word Symbolism has been used to
describe a movement which, during the last generation, has profoundly
influenced the course of French literature. All such words, used
of anything so living, variable, and irresponsible as literature,
are, as symbols themselves must so often be, mere compromises, mere
indications. Symbolism, as seen in the writers of our day, would have
no value if it were not seen also, under one disguise or another, in
every great imaginative writer. What distinguishes the Symbolism of
our day from the Symbolism of the past; is that it has _now_ become
conscious of itself, in a sense in which it was unconscious even
in Gérard de Nerval, to whom I trace the particular origin of the
literature which I call Symbolist. The forces which mould the thought
of men change, or men's resistance to them slackens; with the change
of men's thought comes a change of literature, alike in its inmost
essence and in its outward form: after the world has starved its soul
long enough in the contemplation and the re-arrangement of material
things, comes the turn of the soul; and with it comes the literature of
which I write in this volume, a literature in which the visible world
is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream.
The great epoch in French literature which preceded this epoch was that
of the offshoot of Romanticism which produced Baudelaire, Flaubert, the
Goncourts, Taine, Zola, Leconte de Lisle. Taine was the philosopher
both of what had gone before him and of what came immediately after;
so that he seems to explain at once Flaubert and Zola. It was the
age of Science, the age of material things; and words, with that
facile elasticity which there is in them, did miracles in the exact
representation of everything that visibly existed, exactly as it
existed. Even Baudelaire, in whom the spirit is always an uneasy guest
at the orgie of life, had a certain theory of Realism which tortures
many of his poems into strange, metallic shapes, and fills them with
imitative odours, and disturbs them with a too deliberate rhetoric of
the flesh? Flaubert, the one impeccable novelist who has ever lived,
was resolute to be the novelist of a world in which art, formal art,
was the only escape from the burden of reality, and in which the soul
was of use mainly as the agent of fine literature. The Goncourts
caught at Impressionism to render the fugitive aspects of a world
which existed only as a thing of flat spaces, and angles, and coloured
movement, in which sun and shadow were the artists; as moods, no less
flitting, were the artists of the merely receptive consciousnesses of
men and women. Zola has tried to build in brick and mortar inside the
covers of a book; he is quite sure that the soul is a nervous fluid,
which he is quite sure some man of science is about to catch for us, as
a man of science has bottled the air, a pretty, blue liquid. Leconte
de Lisle turned the world to stone, but saw, beyond the world, only a
pause from misery in a Nirvana never subtilised to the Eastern ecstasy.
And, with all these writers, form aimed above all things at being
precise, at saying rather than suggesting, at saying what they had to
say so completely that nothing remained over, which it might be the
business of the reader to divine. And so they have expressed, finally,
a certain aspect of the world; and some of them have carried style to
a point beyond which the style that says, rather than suggests, cannot
go. The whole of that movement comes to a splendid funeral in M. de
Heredia's sonnets, in which the literature of form says its last word,
and dies.
Meanwhile, something which is vaguely called Decadence had come into
being. That name, rarely used with any precise meaning, was usually
either hurled as a reproach or hurled back as a defiance. It pleased
some young men in various countries to call themselves Decadents, with
all the thrill of unsatisfied virtue masquerading as uncomprehended
vice. As a matter of fact, the term is in its place only when applied
to style; to that ingenious deformation of the language, in Mallarmé
for instance, which can be compared I with what we are accustomed to
call the Greek and Latin of the Decadence. No doubt perversity of
form and perversity often found together, and, among the lesser men
especially, experiment was carried far, not only in the direction of
style. But a movement which in this sense might be called Decadent
could but have been a straying aside from the main road of literature.
Nothing, not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as conventional
vice and the desire to "bewilder the middle-classes" is itself
middle-class. The interlude, half a mock-interlude, of Decadence,
diverted the attention of the critics while something more serious was
in preparation. That something more serious has crystallised, for the
time, under the form of Symbolism, in which art returns to the one
pathway, leading through beautiful things to the eternal beauty.
In most of the writers whom I have dealt with as summing up in
themselves all that is best in Symbolism, it will be noticed that the
form is very carefully elaborated, and seems to count for at least
as much as in those writers of whose over-possession by form I have
complained. Here, however, all this elaboration comes from a very
different motive and leads to other ends. There is such a thing as
perfecting form that form may be annihilated. All the art of Verlaine
is in bringing verse to a bird's song, the art of Mallarmé in bringing
verse to the song of an orchestra. In Villiers de l'Isle-Adam drama
becomes an embodiment of spiritual forces, in Maeterlinck not even
their embodiment, but the remote sound of, their voices. It is all
an attempt to spiritualise literature, to evade the old bondage of
rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority. Description is banished that
beautiful things may be evoked, magically; the regular beat of verse is
broken in order that words may fly, upon subtler wings. Mystery is no
longer feared, as the great mystery in whose midst we are islanded was
feared by those to whom that unknown sea was only a great void. We are
coming closer to nature, as we seem to shrink from it with something
of horror, disdaining to catalogue the trees of the forest. And as we
brush aside the accidents of daily life, in which men and women imagine
that they are alone touching reality, we come closer to humanity, to
everything in humanity that may have begun before the world and may
outlast it.
Here, then, in this revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric,
against a materialistic tradition; in this endeavour to disengage the
ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever, exists and can be realized by
the consciousness; in this dutiful waiting upon every symbol by which
the soul of things can be made visible, literature, bowed down by so
many burdens, may at last attain liberty, and its authentic speech.
In attaining this liberty, it accepts a heavier burden; for in speaking
to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken
to us, it becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and
responsibilities of the sacred ritual.