What follows is the first English translation of Achille Delaroche’s “Les Annales du Symbolisme” (“The Annals of Symbolism”), originally published in La Plume No. 41, 1st January 1891—a journal devoted to independent literature, criticism, and art. Written at a pivotal moment in the Symbolist movement’s history, Delaroche’s essay offers an invaluable insider’s chronicle of the battles, manifestos, and personalities that shaped one of the most consequential literary revolutions in modern French letters.
From the movement’s embattled beginnings in the early 1880s—when it faced hostility from the press, mockery from an uncomprehending public, and the lingering dominance of exhausted Naturalism—through the crucial publications and critical engagements of the later decade, Delaroche traces Symbolism’s arduous path from ridicule to recognition. He recounts the founding of essential journals (La Vogue, La Revue Indépendante, La Wallonie), the publication of landmark manifestos (notably Moréas’s 1886 statement in Le Figaro), and the contributions of the movement’s central figures: Mallarmé, Verlaine, Moréas, Kahn, Laforgue, and many others. Throughout, he defends the Symbolists’ radical innovations in prosody—the liberation of verse from rigid classical constraints, the invention of vers libre, the pursuit of musical rather than merely descriptive effects—and their philosophical commitment to expressing the Idea through symbol rather than through servile imitation of external reality.
Delaroche writes not as a detached historian but as a participant and advocate, addressing his fellow Symbolists directly in a stirring peroration that urges them to press forward, confident in their artistic conscience, towards “the broadened pathways of the future.” His essay remains an essential primary source for understanding how the Symbolists understood their own achievement and ambitions.
I sought to accompany this translation with a portrait of Delaroche himself, but no photograph or image of him appears to have survived. In lieu of a visual likeness, I offer instead a literary one: Henri Degron’s impressionistic sketch of the poet, originally published in Portraits du Prochain Siècle. Tome premier, poètes et prosateurs (Edmond Girard, Éditeur, Paris, 1894). Degron’s prose-poem captures something perhaps more revealing than any photograph could—the melancholy intensity, the medieval reverie, the knightly idealism that marked Delaroche as a true son of the Symbolist generation. This, too, appears here in English for the first time.
Achille DELAROCHE
In those Western regions where, amidst the monotonies of the wind, there sings—nay, weeps—the soul of the heathlands wherein neither broom nor bracken grows green, I have oft been told that melancholy witches chanted their incantations through the night, keeping company with the owls…
Now, ’twas beneath such skies as these that Achille Delaroche beheld his childhood fall away leaf by leaf…—amid the melancholy of long desert plains where the same Dream, eternally mournful, broods! His countenance? A sorrowful cast which wrinkles already adorn—ah, the vigils and the anguish!… Yet beautiful withal, so deeply is stamped thereon the fatal and sublime lineament of an Idea not yet attained, but divined with mastery. His smile?… Mere irony—and with reason, albeit the uninitiate shall never know the warm surrender of the man as friend. His gesture?.. So professorial that a mischievous comrade, confounding manner and visage alike, mistook him for some Michel de l’Hospital—yet thoroughly modern…
But nay, Delaroche, who was among the first to bear aloft the banner of Idealism, seems to me the very Knight-Poet of that fairest of epochs when Kings and Pages alike were poets, and when, by Durandal! their rhymes rang sonorous as the chant of clashing shields! What does he love?… The rich and storied Setting that heralds the coming of imaginary heroes and princesses who proclaim Love and Beauty. He is a champion of the new Reaction whose heroic forebears stretch from Théroulde to Olivier de Magny, and who full oft gathers in his “Gardens” Asphodels for his knight “Adonis.” Does he there behold his Lady?… Aye, “Aénor,” that enchantress who, like Marguerite de Navarre of old, led him towards a paradisal Grail girt round with felicity and Dreams!…
I have set it down: Achille Delaroche, Symbolist poet—and that says all!
HENRI DEGRON.
THE ANNALS OF SYMBOLISM
Literary manifestations follow one another in France with a rapidity and profusion that may well bewilder the observer. Yet none, we venture to say, has known a more arduous fortune than Symbolism. The more or less acknowledged hostility of its predecessors and of the press, the grumbling inertia of a public whose consent is ever slow to innovations that disturb its settled habits, the dangerous puerilities, even, of certain among its own adherents—all these it had to face, and if at last it prevailed, the victory was hardly won.
Posterity will scarcely credit by what strange aberration of the critical sense this splendid renaissance—itself fresh testimony to our prodigious artistic vitality—should have been branded, from the very first, with the name of Decadence. What stood truly in decadence about the year 1883 was precisely the condition in which the Symbolists discovered the poetic idea, notwithstanding “the honourable and meagre attempt of the Parnassians,” as M. Moréas, with courteous euphemism, styled it.
The vigorous effort of Romanticism to liberate verse from those illogical shackles devised by certain narrow spirits of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries had halted midway of its goal. That magnificent lyric impulse which, in the Méditations of Lamartine, the Poèmes of Alfred de Vigny, and the Contemplations and Légende des Siècles of Victor Hugo, seemed for a moment on the very threshold of establishing true poetry upon enduring foundations, speedily degenerated into lamentable declamation and insipid parody of the noblest sentiments. Even at its finest hour, moreover, it betrayed the most superficial vision and a tendency to regard things by their external and decorative aspect—a tendency which culminated, particularly in the Parnassian period, in a species of documentary reportage more or less competently rhymed. Thus Romanticism failed nearly all its fair early promise when Naturalism rose to supplant it.
Naturalism, at bottom merely an exaggeration of those same methods and of that same superficial observation, but shorn of imaginative freedom—this latter being replaced, upon the plea of realism, by impassive description of every squalor—presumed, armed with daily jottings and certain pretended scientific theories, to furnish us with the faithful portrait of Man and of society. Then it was that our language, already somewhat maltreated by the Romantics, suffered reduction to that pitiful jargon which every true artist has had occasion to deplore. The impotence of Naturalism to render us truly either the soul or Nature herself stands to-day manifest. And among the most decisive proofs thereof is this: that never has any poet—by which I mean the quintessence of the writer, the sovereign creator of souls—found it possible to breathe in that atmosphere. The sole writers of the school destined to endure—Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, whom it has, besides, unduly claimed for its own—were, in their finer aspect, profoundly idealist.
To such an ebb, then, had fallen both language and poetry when a handful of young writers conceived the audacious design of reawakening the slumbering ideal, even as “the scholar” François Villon had summoned back the “Fair Ladies of times past.” Brought together by chance of circumstance but united in fervour for their art, they swiftly reached accord upon essential principles. Villon, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Edgar Poe, Vigny, Charles Baudelaire—these were the masters to whom they most readily appealed. Certain small literary journals did themselves honour by publishing their productions, to the great scandal of those few readers whom so unwonted an art bewildered. These young neophytes—Jean Moréas, Charles Morice, Laurent Tailhade, Maurice Barrès, Charles Vignier, Félix Fénéon, and others—were thus engaged in meditating a literary renovation when an unforeseen ally came to join their ranks.
A poet who had belonged to the Parnassian group, though somewhat as an enfant perdu, Paul Verlaine, returning from the land of the Bible and of Sherry brandy after sundry wanderings abroad, encountered the innovators in full ferment. He laid before their admiring gaze three fresh artists, the “Accursed Poets”—Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé—whom he had the honour of being the first to reveal to the lettered world. Under the impulse of these original spirits, the younger writers’ conception grew more pronounced and assumed a more definite character, though perhaps deflecting somewhat from the true goal to be attained. Les Amours jaunes, L’après-midi d’un Faune, the Hérodiade, the strangely suggestive prose and verse of Arthur Rimbaud—these became their sacred texts. Paul Verlaine himself arrived at the head of an already imposing body of work: the Poèmes Saturniens, the Fêtes Galantes, the Romances sans paroles, La Bonne Chanson, Sagesse. Breaking with Parnassian rhetoric, he had been the first to discover the musical expression of all that mystical and sensuous melancholy of the modern soul which, oppressed by so many centuries of artificial culture, would fain take refuge in the childish stammering of the primitives.
“… Towards the Middle Age, enormous and delicate.”
Of the three poets whom Verlaine revealed, the first was dead, the second vanished—perchance towards some mysterious Atlantis: there remained, therefore, naught but to hold converse with them through their works. But M. Mallarmé, happily, was very much alive. The young artists frequented his Tuesday evenings and enjoyed the privilege of hearing him unfold, with that unaffected geniality and inspired gesture which are his, those ingenious and subtle aperçus wherewith the author of L’après-midi d’un faune enriches his most casual discourse. There too they encountered that other writer of genius and brilliant conversationalist, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whom since then blind death has ravished from the affection of the lettered, but only to set him definitively within the temple of glory.
Meanwhile volumes of verse were appearing: Verlaine’s Jadis et Naguère, Moréas’s Les Syrtes, Laurent Tailhade’s Le Jardin des Rêves, and presently Jules Laforgue’s Les Complaintes. Reviews were founded: Félix Fénéon’s Revue Indépendante; M. Edouard Rod’s Revue Contemporaine; Les Taches d’encre, which Maurice Barrès both directed and wrote single-handed for several months with all the ingenuity and talent that distinguish his charming intelligence. It was from his pen that there issued the first respectable articles upon Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and those ideas dear to the literary youth of the hour.
All this artistic ferment could not long remain confined within the walls of the coteries. An amusing parody assisted its diffusion. Two young poets, Gabriel Vicaire and Beauclair, published in 1885, with Lion Vané—Byzance—Les Déliquescences, by Adoré Floupette, decadent poet—a collection of verse with preface wherein the aims and the manner of their friends were held up to gentle ridicule. This small volume enjoyed an extraordinary vogue throughout the press. The daily chroniclers took it at face value, or affected to confound this caricatural skit with the serious work of the younger writers: some even appeared to believe in the authentic existence of the pretended Floupette. Articles appeared apprising the public of this literary scandal. Mystifiers, madmen, and decadents were the mildest epithets bestowed upon the newcomers. A few critics, however—men of genuine letters—essayed to be just. Paul Bourget, in the Débats, acknowledged that these young men possessed “the sense of Mystery.” Paul Arène, in Gil Blas, urged them not to be disturbed by the raillery to which they were subjected, recalling that he himself had once, in Le Parnassiculet, parodied the Parnassians, his own friends, without any intention of denying their literary merit. M. Paul d’Armon, in La France Libre, whilst offering certain reservations upon their style, which he pronounced obscure, observed that these “decadents” were exquisite musicians and subtle painters, and related their philosophical conception to the Unconscious of Hartmann and to Buddhism. Finally, M. Paul Bourde published concerning them, in Le Temps of 6th August 1885, an extensive article well worth recalling, for it marks an epoch.
Echoing in his turn the current prejudices against the younger writers, he drew their portrait thus: “Health being essentially vulgar and fit only for boors, the decadent must be at the very least a neuropath, and have recourse to the Pravaz syringe to obtain that morbid condition which becomes him… In morals, he is Catholic that he may blaspheme God and lend piquancy to his pleasures by the notion of sin… In literature, his direct father is Baudelaire.” M. Bourde reproached the decadents, as others had done, with the obscurity of their phrasing, but did justice to their rhythmic reforms. “They have emancipated themselves,” said he, “from the caesura and from the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. By the exclusive employment of feminine rhymes they achieve pieces that whisper, with half-tones subdued; by masculine rhymes exclusively, sonorities of resonance impossible under the yoke of the ancient rules.”
This article, though it represented a serious effort towards understanding the new ideas, contained errors and injustices enough to require an answer. One of the poets of the group most frequently assailed in this critique, and withal the most conspicuous by reason of his talent, M. Jean Moréas, undertook to set forth for the public the principles of the new aesthetic. In the journal Le XIXe Siècle of 11th August 1885, he made short work of the fanciful portrait M. Bourde had drawn of the young writers, and claimed for them the title of Symbolists, supporting his claim by citations from Alfred de Vigny, Edgar Poe, Stendhal, and Baudelaire. “The pretended decadents,” he wrote, “seek above all in their art the pure Concept and the eternal symbol.” That melancholy character of their poetry which is censured they share with all the great poets, from Aeschylus to Victor Hugo. Their innovations in style or the strangeness of their syntax can hardly affright the grammarians when Littré has welcomed those of Théophile Gautier. As to the obscurity with which they are reproached, let us rather consult Edgar Poe: “Two things are eternally requisite: first, a certain degree of complexity, or more properly, of combination; secondly, a certain amount of suggestiveness, something like an under-current of meaning, not visible, indefinite… It is the excess in the expression of the meaning—which ought merely to be suggested—it is the mania for forcing the under-current of a work into the upper and visible current, which transmutes into the flattest prose the pretended poetry of certain self-styled poets.”
Despite these clear and categorical declarations and the repudiation of that preposterous label of “decadents,” the equivocation none the less persisted in press and public alike, where men appeared to take a perverse pleasure in confounding jests with serious work and mountebanks with genuine artists. Certain young men of letters even, in a spirit more well-intentioned than judicious, adopted this label which ought to have been consigned to oblivion by silence and scorn, and hoisted it as their standard. Heavy therefore is their responsibility for the injustice which still pursues the artistic endeavour of our generation amongst the ill-informed.
The year 1886 proved decisive for Symbolism. At this juncture the ideas assumed their more or less definitive form, the groups organised themselves, and a truly systematic campaign was undertaken to sustain and propagate the new principles. Fresh recruits of talent—M. Jules Laforgue, who had already published Les Complaintes, M. Paul Adam, author of Soi, M. Gustave Kahn—joined the original band. The last-named, a man of organising faculty, founded La Vogue and essayed to unite, in concerted effort, sundry small literary journals, more or less independent, which had fostered the public confusion. The attempt miscarried, and La Vogue was compelled to continue the good fight alone. In its pages appeared Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer; Jules Laforgue’s Moralités légendaires and Concile féerique; Gustave Kahn’s Palais Nomades; poems and prose pieces by Jean Moréas: and finally a new form of verse, derived from Rimbaud and the Gothic rhythmists, destined to resounding fortune under the designation of Free Verse—though, strictly speaking, there exists no such thing as free verse, every rhythmic line so termed obeying intrinsic laws perfectly requisite.
In this same year Messrs. Jean Moréas and Paul Adam published jointly Le Thé chez Miranda and Les Demoiselles Goubert. The former, a collection of tales somewhat immature, derived its chief interest from the preludes interspersed amongst them. The latter was intended by its authors as nothing more than a parody of the Naturalist novel, whose paltry methods were thrown into relief by contrast with symbolic figures. The chroniclers of the daily press chose to see in it merely stylistic eccentricities; and such phrases of Moréas as “It is the wintry night…” or “Beneath the weight of levelled skies…” became the standing jest of all raillery directed against Symbolism. Criticism founded its judgments upon productions which for their author had possessed no more than the importance of an agreeable diversion.
But more serious works appeared, and these commanded attention. Such were the Cantilènes, verse by Jean Moréas. Here the new conception of rhythm declared itself, together with a rare gift for seizing and expressing, in language and syntax schooled upon sound models, the very soul of legend and popular song. Everywhere the idea appeared wreathed in the symbolic decoration of analogies. Le Figaro, in one of its supplements, cited one of the volume’s poems, among the most beautiful and best known: La Détresse.
Throughout the summer the Parisian and provincial press published articles upon the new school occasioned by these books, but always with the same predetermined bias of injustice and familiar mockery. It was then that Le Figaro, wishing to lay before its readers the documents of the case pending between the young writers and their critics, and to enable them to pronounce judgment with full knowledge, invited M. Moréas to set forth in its columns the manifesto of Symbolism. The article appeared in the supplement of 18th September 1886. After recalling that literature, like the other arts, cannot remain stationary, the author essayed to analyse that new manifestation which, by an inexplicable contradiction, had been branded as decadence. “What is the reproach against it? Redundancy of ornament, strangeness of metaphor, a fresh vocabulary wherein harmonies combine with colours and with lines: the characteristics of every renaissance.” The designation Symbolism, already proposed, alone can characterise the present tendency of the creative spirit in art. And to trace its true filiation one must reach back to Alfred de Vigny, to Shakespeare, and to the Mystics. Baudelaire, however, must be regarded as the veritable precursor of the movement. “M. Stéphane Mallarmé—one had forgotten Gérard de Nerval—endowed it with the sense of mystery and of the ineffable: M. Paul Verlaine broke in its honour those cruel fetters of verse which the deft fingers of M. Théodore de Banville had already rendered supple.”
And what task awaits the new recruits who follow in their wake? “Hostile to didacticism, to declamation, to false sensibility, and to objective description, Symbolist poetry seeks to clothe the Idea in a sensuous form which shall not, however, be an end in itself, but which, whilst serving to express the Idea, shall remain subordinate to it. The Idea, in its turn, must not suffer itself to appear unrobed of the sumptuous vestments of external analogies: for the essential character of symbolic art consists in never proceeding so far as the direct apprehension of the Idea in itself. As for phenomena, they are but the sensuous appearances destined to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideas.”
“For the exact rendering of its synthesis, Symbolism requires a style at once archetypal and complex: the pure language, established and renewed, of the age before Vaugelas and Boileau—the language of François Rabelais and of Philippe de Commines, of Villon, of Rutebeuf, and of so many other unfettered writers who launched the keen shaft of speech like the toxotes of Thrace their sinuous arrows.
“Rhythm: the ancient prosody revived and quickened; a disorder learnedly contrived; the rhyme trembling into luminescence and hammered like a shield of gold and bronze, set beside the rhyme of hidden fluencies; the alexandrine with its multiple and shifting caesuras; the employment of certain odd numbers.
“The conception of the Symbolist novel is polymorphous: disdaining the puerile Method of Naturalism, it constructs a work of subjective deformation, grounded in this axiom—that art can seek in the objective nothing beyond a simple and extremely succinct point of departure.”
This manifesto, which excited prolonged discussion throughout the press, was subjected by M. Anatole France, in Le Temps of 26th September 1886, to a lengthy and erudite analysis.
La Revue Indépendante resumed in 1887, under the direction of Messrs. Edouard Dujardin and Félix Fénéon, a career interrupted since the close of 1884. Its programme declared that the review would hold itself “as far from the academic spirit as from the vain agitations of the decadents.” None the less, alongside the neo-Naturalists and kindred writers, certain Symbolists found a welcome in its pages. Laforgue, Verlaine, and Mallarmé contributed verse. The last-named conducted, for an entire year, the theatrical chronicle, wherein he lavished upon the art of the stage a wealth of fresh and original aperçus. Jean Moréas published there L’Empereur Constant (a paraphrase) and Aucassin et Nicolette, a remarkable adaptation of that exquisite romance of the Middle Ages. Gustave Kahn likewise caused to appear there certain of his poems, wherein he excels at setting to song, upon rhythms of a most singular music, the infinite complexity of lyric emotion.
La Revue Wagnérienne had been founded in 1886, again by M. Dujardin, with a parallel artistic purpose: to propagate and define the musical aesthetic of Wagner. Meanwhile the Symbolist movement was spreading through France and Belgium alike. Many young writers who had hitherto held themselves aloof, or had been fighting independently for the same ideas, now drew closer to the original group. At Liège, a small monthly review, La Wallonie, which had for some time been labouring valiantly in the literary cause, summoned to its staff in 1887 a group of Parisian Symbolists, who there encountered their Belgian colleagues. Since then others have continually joined their ranks, and to-day almost all those who have made any name or shown any talent within the Symbolist movement have contributed to its pages: Stéphane Mallarmé, verse and prose; Jean Moréas, certain much-noticed fragments of the Pèlerin Passionné; Henri de Régnier, some of his finest poems from Épisodes and Poèmes anciens et romanesques; Francis Vielé-Griffin, author of Joies and Ancœurs, several pieces of most delicate rhythm; Stuart Merrill, author of Gammes, perhaps his most felicitous alliterative music; Charles Van Lerberghe, Les Flaireurs, that essay in drama with orchestra; Maurice Maeterlinck, L’Intruse, the finest of his compositions, and one that met with the recognition it deserved; Emile Verhaeren, George Knopff, Adolphe Retté, Albert Saint-Paul, Achille Delaroche, Albert Mockel, P.-M. Olin, and others, with fragments of their respective works. For some months past La Wallonie, whose reputation is steadily growing, has had the happy inspiration of devoting a special number to each of its contributors in turn.
In Paris, meanwhile, other periodicals—La Cravache of M. Georges Lecomte, and La Revue Indépendante, of which Gustave Kahn shared the direction with M. Dujardin in 1888—sustained the fervour about the new ideas. These reviews, however, gathered under a broad eclecticism writers of widely divergent, often directly opposed tendencies. In July 1889, Gustave Kahn, acting in concert with Adolphe Retté, author of Cloches en la Nuit, conceived the idea of rallying the younger writers in a more unequivocally Symbolist review. La Vogue thus rose again from its ashes—though unhappily its second life proved no less brief than its first.
To-day, with the exception of La Wallonie of Liège, which has carved out a place entirely its own, and of the Entretiens politiques et littéraires, which appears to be specialising in prose, Symbolism possesses no official organ.
Yet several periodicals contend for the honour of affording it shelter: La Revue Indépendante under the new direction of M. de Nion, Le Mercure de France of M. Alfred Valette, and finally La Plume of M. Léon Deschamps, which serves so admirably as the bridge between the young literature of to-day and that of to-morrow.
The heroic period, moreover, appears all but closed, yielding place to one of silent and fruitful labour. The rhythmic and aesthetic reforms enthroned by Symbolism are to-day accepted by all writers of genuine talent or serious artistic conscience. Criticism itself seems at last to acknowledge them as the necessary evolution of our literature—witness the articles devoted to them in such encyclopaedias as Le Grand Dictionnaire Larousse, and in journals of weight such as La Nouvelle Revue and La Revue des Deux-Mondes, as well as the reception, already assured and yet to be confirmed, that awaits the new work of Jean Moréas and the forthcoming publications of his fellow Symbolist writers.
Under the title Symbolistes et Décadents, M. Maurice Peyrot (Nouvelle Revue, 1st November 1887) essayed to characterise, with greater impartiality than his predecessors, the tendencies of the new literature. He acknowledged that one could not deny the Symbolists “happy innovations in bold prosodic cadences, and an incontestable feeling for the musical sound of the phrase.” Yet he still censured “their verses of thirteen feet, rhyming only to the ear or not at all, the deliberate obscurity of their style, and—one scarcely knows why—the Germanic cast of their phrasing.” He disputed their originality in this manner of writing, of which Maurice Scève, a French poet of the sixteenth century, had availed himself before them, and questioned the novelty of their philosophy, which he professed to find already present in its entirety in Protagoras, Hume, Berkeley, and others. This would hardly constitute, one must admit, very conclusive evidence of the falseness of the new doctrines—doctrines which lay no claim to being without precedent, but only to being more profound and more artistically sound than those of Naturalism. “The novelist and the poet,” added M. Peyrot, “must write for all the world, and not for a restricted coterie of initiates.”
After him, M. Brunetière (Revue des Deux-Mondes, 1st November 1888) assessed the Symbolists with reference rather to their influence, he said, than to their personal merit or their works—which one was still awaiting (?). He observed that this influence corresponded “to an imminent revolution in literary taste.”
In the three great periods of French literature from the seventeenth century to the present, he discerned three corresponding modes of writing, each allied to a different art. The Classical school had enthroned a style of architectural structure; the Romantic school, enamoured of the picturesque and of less austere contours, aspired rather to emulate painting; finally, the latest arrival, the Symbolist school, appeared destined henceforth to rival music itself. Reacting against that worship of form carried to excess by the Parnassians, who reduced poetry “to mere pastime and transmuted the very gold of rhyme into tinsel, the Symbolists have rallied about them all who believe that verse may legitimately convey ideas and sentiments. And in an age when, under the banner of Naturalism, art had been degraded to a mere copying of the external surface of things, they have appeared to teach the younger generation afresh that things possess a soul as well.” Yet in their turn they seem somewhat to forget that the imitation of nature, whilst not constituting the whole of art, remains at least its primary condition. And perhaps, too, they have estranged themselves over-much from the Parnassians. He who rhymes less perfectly than his predecessors will always stand suspect of inferior mastery in their craft. And in fact certain writers of the new school have produced verse that is often no better than a species of prose, or even something which is neither prose nor verse. The obscurity of their style is likewise censurable, and moreover hardly novel, since one encounters it already in Maurice Scève. Be that as it may, they will perhaps endow our tongue with fresh qualities.
We mention only in passing the article by M. Jules Lemaître in La Revue Bleue (January 1888). That critic, invariably prejudiced when confronted with artistic innovation, chose to see in the Symbolist writers—whom he maliciously confounded, moreover, with certain extravagant persons of no authority—nothing but a recrudescence of that imitative harmony which flourished in the days of the abbé Delille. Scarcely had he the half-courage to render even a grudging justice to Paul Verlaine himself, whose name stands to-day consecrated.
One may perceive, none the less, from an analysis of the foregoing articles, that whilst injustices and prejudices still persist in the specious reasonings of criticism, it tends upon the whole to grow more comprehensive and to assume at least the forms of courtesy. M. Brunetière had indicated certain reasons for the literary evolution towards Symbolism. A poet of the school, M. Charles Morice, devoted an entire volume, La Littérature de tout à l’heure, to demonstrating in fuller fashion this aesthetic culmination of three centuries. Much discussed in the press upon its appearance, the work revealed in its author rare gifts for synthesis and the instinct for a profoundly idealist art. It will endure as a source of valuable intelligence for the history of Symbolism. One regrets only that in so voluminous a critique no place should have been accorded to the lofty and precious art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Yet one may unreservedly praise more than one chapter of interest, such as that entitled Commentaire d’un livre futur. Let us hope that M. Morice will not keep us waiting over-long for the execution in actual works of a theme so masterfully expounded.
It is materially impossible, given the limited space at our disposal, to assess here, even briefly, the work of all the writers who adhere to the Symbolist conception. We shall therefore confine ourselves to citing names, leaving to the future the task of determining their respective merit. And we beg those who may be overlooked in this catalogue not to take offence, nor to attribute such omission to any ill-will—a thought far from our mind.
A place apart must be reserved for two writers snatched from the young literature by premature death: Jules Laforgue, a delicate humorist and highly personal poet-psychologist, and Ephraïm Mikhaël, who had not time to achieve a truly original note, yet gave proof none the less of genuine talent in the fragments he has left us.
The young poets whose names follow attest by their works—some already published, others very shortly to appear—the evolution of Symbolism: Messrs. Jean Moréas, Charles Morice, Gustave Kahn, Laurent Tailhade, Charles Vignier, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Henri de Régnier, Stuart Merrill, Achille Delaroche, Maurice du Plessys, Adolphe Retté, Albert Saint-Paul, Ernest Raynaud, Louis Dumur, Edouard Dubus, Pierre Quillard, Edouard Dujardin, Ferdinand Hérold, Mathias Morhardt, Gabriel Mourey, Jules Bois, Dauphin Meunier, Albert Mockel, Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles Van Lerberghe, Emile Verhaeren, etc., etc…
Certain writers devoted exclusively to prose are likewise affiliated with the movement: M. Maurice Barrès, whose volumes Sous l’œil des Barbares and Un homme libre charm by that Platonic grace which wreathes a most subtle psychology; Francis Poictevin, a stylist of complex and delicate nuance; Paul Adam, a powerful novelist; Bernard Lazare, and others.
Young artists of the highest talent are attempting in their respective arts a renovation analogous to that of the Symbolists in literature: the musicians Gaston Dubreuilh and Henri Quittard; the painter Paul Gauguin, who unites to the learned colouring of the Impressionists a powerful simplification of line and a most suggestive symbolism. Some notion of this original talent may be formed from the fine composition which adorns the present number.
Among the criticisms levelled at the writers of the younger school, certain ones—notably those of M. Brunetière—reproach them with want of talent and with having as yet produced no masterpiece. We shall not be so foolish as to attempt proving by demonstrative reasoning the value of the aforesaid writers: their works defend themselves sufficiently in the eyes of unprejudiced judges. But even granting that they possess less talent than their predecessors—or, if you will, that they possess none whatever—this would in no wise prejudge the legitimacy and necessity of their artistic renovation. A literary movement cannot be judged by the merit of the individuals who compose it, but rather by its principles, the sum of its achievements, and its influence. Now, none can deny that the present movement is of profound interest, and that, even should it fail to realise all its aims itself, it prepares at the least the way for their eventual accomplishment. And indeed, nearly all that has been created in art of greatness and permanence was achieved through the execution, by superior genius, of ideas first elaborated collectively and through the concord of diverse wills. The objection is, moreover, so hackneyed that it might be applied to every literary school. What remains of Romanticism, which numbered in its ranks so many writers of such unequal value? Save Lamartine and Vigny, who were rather forerunners, perhaps at most three poets endure: Victor Hugo, Musset, Gautier. The future ever recognises its own, and alone confirms works of genuine strength.
What, then, do the writers of to-day desire?—To establish art at last upon its logical and necessary foundations; to banish from it all that parasitism and imposture which, under the most specious disguises, had crept surreptitiously into it. And to this end, to return to the sources—to all the sources: of etymology, of language, of rhythm, of the true poetic conception.
One must always, as Spinoza profoundly observed, regard each thing “sub specie aeternitatis“—under the aspect of eternity. Modern science has demonstrated that the external world is but a manifestation of energy, the seat of our sensorial symbols, the opacity of our representations. These appearances, obedient to the mysterious laws of change, we cannot modify at will: they impose themselves upon us as the most powerful of illusions, yet as illusion none the less. Behind each transitory form the poet must therefore discern the force, the energy, the soul which perpetually creates phantasms whilst remaining one and identical in its principle. Poetry, as Emerson admirably observes, is the perpetual endeavour towards the expression of things—an endeavour which, transcending the brute body, penetrates to its life, its reason for existence, and discerns, behind the ephemeral and fleeting effect, the immanent necessity of its cause… Poetry reveals itself in this essential characteristic: that in every moment of its harmony there is exhibited a mental activity testified by fresh employment of idea and image, by a preternatural faculty for perceiving analogies—so many words, so many poems… The ideas are few, the forms innumerable, in that spacious wardrobe of motley vestments wherewith Unity, ever the same, clothes itself.”
It is, then, as pure symbol and as vesture of the Idea that the Poet must regard the external world. Hence the futility of that criticism so often levelled against us—that by our artistic conception “the modern world is forbidden” to us. Modernism and Archaism, in art, are nonsense, and admit of no debate. One cannot call the Poet to account for preferring one epoch or one setting to another. He chooses that which best embodies, which most aptly clothes in the marvellous, the evolution of a given state of soul.
A singular error of the so-called Classical aesthetic consisted in regarding poetry, tacitly or avowedly, as the brief and easily memorable expression of objective facts. Whilst one cannot, in truth, deny it the power—in its lower forms—of serving as the lightning compendium or herald of acquired experience, as it did in Greece among the Gnomic poets, for instance, yet one must acknowledge that in its highest reach poetry is a special vision of things, an original state of soul.
And this vision, all but divinatory, whose syntheses may in time resolve themselves into the diversity of objective realisations—this mystical bond amongst phenomena—what is it?—Rhythm. Through rhythm art apprehends the unity of appearances; rhythm it is that externalises in eternal symbols the concatenation of universal laws hidden beneath the complexity of phenomena. And when rhythm waxes in sonority, as in language, it becomes music—music of a special kind, assuredly, composed of articulate sounds.
Let us cite here, following M. Brunetière who serves our purpose, this fragment from Carlyle: “Poetry,” he observes, “is metrical, possesses music, is song… Musical! How much lies in that word! A musical thought is a thought uttered by a spirit that has penetrated to the inmost heart of the thing, that has discovered therein the profoundest mystery… The significance of song goes deep. A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable utterance that brings us to the verge of the infinite, and there at moments suffers us to plunge our gaze… See profoundly, and you shall see musically.”
We would merely observe in passing, for the benefit of those who reproach us with failing to be “modern,” that poetry thus conceived enters, upon the contrary, into the grand current of modern—nay, contemporary—psychological evolution, wherein the musical sense has achieved such prodigious development.
A musical conception of poetry implied at once modifications both in metrics and in language. What was required to circumscribe the dream was no longer the classical verse with its fixed caesuras, conceived upon an invariable pattern, existing only in the company of its fellow and capable of isolation as a distich within assemblages that bear the name of strophes in name alone—but rather a verse, a strophe, whose unity should be psychical rather than syllabic, and variable in number and duration according to musical necessity. And to this end, the employment of every resource of linguistic art and sonority: timbre, tone, weight, movement, colour, rhyme, alliteration, internal or terminal assonance, and the rest. Whence the creation of that verse wrongly styled free, inasmuch as all its elements dispose themselves according to logical necessities and admit of no caprice whatever. And nothing less resembles “rhythmic prose” or “a mixture of prose and verse” inferior to Parnassian technique, as has been pretended.
It was needful, on the other hand, for rendering the ideal syntheses of poetry, to employ a language less analytical and, of necessity, less perspicuous than that of prose. “This double condition of speech,” to quote M. Stéphane Mallarmé’s phrase, is “here crude or immediate, there essential”—or again, in Ronsard’s words, speech presents us with “two sister enemies.” It is no less evident that the more closely phrasing obeys the musical conception, the less accessible it becomes to mere logic. And this without our being reasonably open to the reproach of imitating Lycophron or attempting to resurrect Maurice Scève, complete with some indefinable “Germanic cast” which could occur only to critics insufficiently acquainted with our French tongue as it existed before the grammarians. If one will but observe, moreover, the two learned poets thus urged against us merely obeyed, in the form of their compositions, the very necessities of the subjects they treated. But their example cannot constitute a law. That certain young writers, upon the plea of “suggestion” or “esotericism,” and yielding to influences ill understood, have at times produced an illegible pathos—this we shall not dispute. Their excuse lay in a neophyte’s fervour that deceives itself. But once this crudity is outgrown, there would seem to be danger in pursuing so extravagant and somewhat childish a game.
The task which henceforth devolves upon the younger writers is to forge at last that “archetypal” style which M. Moréas called for as early as 1886, and which he so amply realises to-day in his Pèlerin passionné. It is to break decisively with contemporary jargon and to restore to syntax certain of those learned and delicate forms employed by those marvellous artificers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, whose slightest songs are finely wrought jewels of pure craftsmanship. However precious certain contemporary influences may have proved, in truth, during the early days of the Symbolist movement—assisting as they did in liberating art from Naturalist inanity—and whatever admiration and gratitude we continue to feel towards them, yet these same influences, were they to persist, could only prove baneful. What was excellent in them will, moreover, shine through the Symbolist achievement, even as the river retains the fragrance of the regions through which it has passed.
Let us renew, then, leaping over the so-called Classical ages, the true tradition of the good French tongue. Among the Gothics lie in truth, buried beneath the dust of centuries, treasures meet to clothe in splendour the most intricate ideas and sentiments of the modern soul. “Thither then, O Poets,” shall we say again—paraphrasing Joachim Du Bellay—”march ye courageously towards that enchantress Brocéliande, and with the virgin spoils of her deck your temples and your altars. Fear ye no more those cackling geese, those impotent Aristarchuses, their lying oracles, nor yet their blunted shafts. Be ye mindful of your ancient Lutetia, that second Athens, and of your Gallic Hercules who drew the peoples after him by their ears with a chain made fast to his tongue.”
To-day all enlightened minds amongst press and public alike have grasped that you represent a force, and acknowledge the high worth of your movement. All ask only to acclaim your works. And should there remain yet certain laggards to revive against you—who struggle and suffer for the glory of Art—stale and wearisome pleasantries, to let fall from “their mouth of sphinx without riddle, with the resonance of an emphatic yawn, those words: ‘Literature of Decadence!’”—you shall pass by with a shrug of the shoulders, pitying such incurable ignorance or such wilful perversity, incapable of interest in aught that is great or beautiful. And fortified by the irrefragable testimony of your conscience, you shall march forward, calm and resolute, towards the broadened pathways of the future.
ACHILLE DELAROCHE.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 