I
'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,' writes Mr. Arthur Symons in _The Symbolist Movement
in Literature_, a subtle book which I cannot praise as I would, because it
has been dedicated to me; and he goes on to show how many profound writers
have in the last few years sought for a philosophy of poetry in the
doctrine of symbolism, and how even in countries where it is almost
scandalous to seek for any philosophy of poetry, new writers are following
them in their search. We do not know what the writers of ancient times
talked of among themselves, and one bull is all that remains of
Shakespeare's talk, who was on the edge of modern times; and the
journalist is convinced, it seems, that they talked of wine and women and
politics, but never about their art, or never quite seriously about their
art. He is certain that no one, who had a philosophy of his art or a
theory of how he should write, has ever made a work of art, that people
have no imagination who do not write without forethought and afterthought
as he writes his own articles. He says this with enthusiasm, because he
has heard it at so many comfortable dinner-tables, where some one had
mentioned through carelessness, or foolish zeal, a book whose difficulty
had offended indolence, or a man who had not forgotten that beauty is an
accusation. Those formulas and generalizations, in which a hidden sergeant
has drilled the ideas of journalists and through them the ideas of all but
all the modern world, have created in their turn a forgetfulness like that
of soldiers in battle, so that journalists and their readers have
forgotten, among many like events, that Wagner spent seven years arranging
and explaining his ideas before he began his most characteristic music;
that opera, and with it modern music, arose from certain talks at the
house of one Giovanni Bardi of Florence; and that the Pleiade laid the
foundations of modern French literature with a pamphlet. Goethe has said,
'a poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work,' though
that is not always necessary; and certainly he cannot know too much,
whether about his own work, or about the procreant waters of the soul
where the breath first moved, or about the waters under the earth that are
the life of passing things; and almost certainly no great art, outside
England, where journalists are more powerful and ideas less plentiful than
elsewhere, has arisen without a great criticism, for its herald or its
interpreter and protector, and it is perhaps for this reason that great
art, now that vulgarity has armed itself and multiplied itself, is perhaps
dead in England.
All writers, all artists of any kind, in so far as they have had any
philosophical or critical power, perhaps just in so far as they have been
deliberate artists at all, have had some philosophy, some criticism of
their art; and it has often been this philosophy, or this criticism, that
has evoked their most startling inspiration, calling into outer life some
portion of the divine life, of the buried reality, which could alone
extinguish in the emotions what their philosophy or their criticism would
extinguish in the intellect. They have sought for no new thing, it may be,
but only to understand and to copy the pure inspiration of early times,
but because the divine life wars upon our outer life, and must needs
change its weapons and its movements as we change ours, inspiration has
come to them in beautiful startling shapes. The scientific movement
brought with it a literature, which was always tending to lose itself in
externalities of all kinds, in opinion, in declamation, in picturesque
writing, in word-painting, or in what Mr. Symons has called an attempt 'to
build in brick and mortar inside the covers of a book'; and now writers
have begun to dwell upon the element of evocation, of suggestion, upon
what we call the symbolism in great writers.