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THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 IN LITERATURE 
 
THE 
 
 SYMBOLIST MOYEMENT 
 IN LITERATURE 
 
 I 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR SYMONS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE isf CO. Ltd. 
 
 1908 
 
First Edition, 1899 
 Second Edition, Revised, 1908 
 
 Printed by BAILAHXINE, Hanson &• Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh 
 
TO W. B. YEATS 
 
 May I dedicate to you this book on the Symbolist move- 
 metit in literature, both as an expression of a deep personal 
 friendship and because you, more than any one else, will 
 sympathise with what I say in it, being yourself the chief 
 representative of that movement in our country ? France 
 is the country of movements, and it is naturally in France 
 that I have studied the development of a principle which 
 is spreading throughout other countries, perhaps not less 
 effectually, if with less definite outlines. Your own Irish 
 literary movement is one of its expressions; your own 
 poetry and A. E.'s poetry belong to it in the most intimate 
 sense. In Germany it seems to be permeating the whole 
 of literature, its spirit is that which is deepest in Ibsen, 
 it has absorbed the one new force in Italy, Gabriele 
 d'Annunsio. I am told of a group of Symbolists in 
 Russian literature, there is another in Dutch literature, in 
 Portugal it has a little school of its own under Eugenia 
 de Castro ; I even saw some faint strivings that way in 
 
vi DEDICATION 
 
 Spain, and the aged Spanish poet Campoamor has always 
 fought on behalf of a " transcendental " art in which we 
 should recognise much of what is most essential in the 
 doctrine of Symbolism. How often have you and I dis- 
 cussed all these questions, rarely arguing about them, for 
 we rarely had an essential difference of opinion, but bring- 
 ing them more and more clearly into light, turning our 
 instincts into logic, digging until we reached the bases of 
 our convictions. And all the while we were workins as 
 well as thinking out a philosophy of art; you, at all 
 events, creating beautiful things, as beautiful, it seems to 
 me, as anything that is being done in our time. 
 
 And we talked of other things besides art, and there 
 are other sympathies, besides purely artistic ones, between 
 us. I speak often in this book of Mysticism, and that I, 
 of all people, should venture to speak, not quite as an 
 outsider, of such things, will probably be a surprise to 
 many. It will be no surprise to you, for you have seen 
 me gradually finding my way, uncertainly but inevitably, 
 in that direction which has always been to you your 
 natural direction. Still, as I am, so meshed about with 
 the variable and too clinging appearances of things, so 
 weak before the delightfulness of earthly circumstance, I 
 hesitate sometimes in saying what I have in my mind, lest 
 
DEDICATION vii 
 
 1 should seem- to be saying more than I have any personal 
 right to say. But what, after all, is one's personal 
 right ? How insignificant a matter to any one but oneself, 
 a matter how deliberately to be disregarded in thai surely 
 impersonal utterance which comes to one in one's most 
 intimate thinking about beauty and truth and the deeper 
 issues of things 1 
 
 It is almost worth writing a book to have one perfectly 
 sympathetic reader, who will understand everything that 
 one has said, and more than one has said, who will 
 think one's own thought whenever one has said exactly the 
 right thing, who will complete what is imperfect in read- 
 ing it, and be too generous to think that it is imperfect. 
 I feel thai I shall have thai reader in you; so here is 
 my book in token of that assurance. 
 
 ARTHUR SYMONS. 
 
 London, June 1899. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION ^^^i 
 
 GMAKD DE nerval 10 
 
 VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM . . .37 
 
 ARTHUR RIMBAUD 59 
 
 PAUL VERLAINE 75 
 
 JULES LAFORGUE 101 
 
 STEPHANE MALLARME 112 
 
 THE LATER HUYSMANS 136 
 
 MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 153 
 
 CONCLUSION . . 170 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES . . . .176 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 " 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." 
 
 Carltle. 
 
 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 sig- 
 nifications, 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 
 
 A 
 
2 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 it has obtained the force of a convention, for 
 an unseen reality apprehended by the con- 
 sciousness. 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 con- 
 cealment 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 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 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 move- 
 ment which, during the last generation, has 
 profoundly influenced the course of French 
 literature. All such words, used of any- 
 thing so living, variable, and irresponsible as 
 literatTire, are, as symbols themselves must 
 so often be, mere compromises, mere indi- 
 cations. 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 Gerard 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 
 
4 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 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 fiUs them with imitative odours, 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 and disturbs them with a too deliberate 
 rhetoric of the flesh. Flaubert, the one im- 
 peccable 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 Impres- 
 sionism 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 
 
6 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 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 Heredia's sonnets, in which the literatiire 
 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 uncom- 
 prehended 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 Mallarm^, for instance, which 
 can be compared with what we are accus- 
 tomed to call the Greek and Latin of the 
 Decadence. No doubt perversity of form and 
 perversity of matter are often found together, 
 and, among the lesser men especially, experi- 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 ment 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 con- 
 ventional virtue, is so provincial as conven- 
 tional vice ; and the desire to " bewilder the 
 middle-classes " is itself middle-class. The 
 interlude, half a mock-interlude, of Deca- 
 dence, diverted the attention of the critics 
 while something more serious was in pre- 
 paration. 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 themselv6s 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 
 
8 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 bringing verse to a bird's song, the art of 
 Mallarm^ in bringing verse to the song of an 
 orchestra. In Villiers de I'lsle-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 exteri- 
 ority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 tradition ; in this endeavour to disengage the 
 ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists 
 and can be realised 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 reUgion, with all the duties and 
 responsibilities of the sacred ritual. 
 
GERARD DE NERVAL 
 
 This is the problem of one who lost the 
 whole world and gained his own soul. 
 
 "I like to arrange my life as if it were 
 a novel," wrote Gerard de Nerval, and, in- 
 deed, it is somewhat difiicult to disentangle 
 the precise facts of an existence which was 
 never quite conscious where began and where 
 ended that " overflowing of dreams into real 
 life," of which he speaks. " I do not ask 
 of God," he said, " that he should change 
 anything in events themselves, but that he 
 should change me in regard to things, so that 
 I might have the power to create my own 
 universe about me, to govern my dreams, 
 instead of enduring them." The prayer was 
 not granted, in its entirety; and the tragedy 
 of his life lay in the vain endeavour to hold 
 back the irresistible empire of the unseen, 
 which it was the joy of his life to summon 
 
 10 
 
GlfiRARD DE NERVAL 11 
 
 about him. Briefly, we know that Gerard 
 Labrunie (the name de Nerval was taken 
 from a little piece of property, worth some 
 1500 francs, which he liked to imagine had 
 always been in the possession of his family) 
 was born at Paris, May 22, 1808. His father 
 was surgeon-major ; his mother died before he 
 was old enough to remember her, following 
 the Grande ArmSe on the Russian campaign ; 
 and Gdrard was brought up, largely under 
 the care of a studious and erratic uncle, 
 in a little village called Montagny, near 
 Ermenonville. He was a precocious school- 
 boy, and by the age of eighteen had published 
 six little collections of verses. It was during 
 one of his holidays that he saw, for the first 
 and last time, the young girl whom he calls 
 Adrienne, and whom, under many names, 
 he loved to the end of his life. One evening 
 she had come from the chateau to dance 
 with the young peasant girls on the grass. 
 She had danced with Gerard, he had kissed 
 her cheek, he had crovmed her hair with 
 laurels, he had heard her sing an old song 
 telling of the sorrows of a princess whom her 
 father had shut in a tower because she had 
 loved. To Gerard it seemed that already he 
 
12 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 remembered her, and certainly he was never 
 to forget her. Afterwards, he heard that 
 Adrienne had taken the veil ; then, that she 
 was dead. To one who had realised that it 
 is "we, the living, who walk in a world of 
 phantoms," death could not exclude hope; 
 and when, many years later, he fell seriously 
 and fantastically in love with a little actress 
 called Jenny Colon, it was because he seemed 
 to have found, in that blonde and very human 
 person, the re-incarnation of the blonde 
 Adrienne. 
 
 Meanwhile Gerard was living in Paris, 
 among his friends the Romantics, writing 
 and living in an equally desultory fashion. 
 Le hon Gerard was the best loved, and, in 
 his time, not the least famous, of the 
 company. He led, by choice, now in Paris, 
 now across Europe, the life of a vagabond, 
 and more persistently than others of his 
 friends who were driven to it by need. At 
 that time, when it was the aim of every one 
 to be as eccentric as possible, the eccentricities 
 of Gerard's life and thought seemed, on the 
 whole, less noticeable than those of many 
 really quite normal persons. But with 
 Gerard there was no pose ; and when, one 
 
Gl^RARD DE NERVAL 13 
 
 day, he was found in the Palais-Royal, lead- 
 ing a lobster at the end of a blue ribbon 
 (because, he said, it does not bark, and 
 knows the secrets of the sea), the visionary 
 had simply lost control of his visions, and 
 had to be sent to Dr. Blanche's asylum at 
 Montmartre. He entered March 21, 1841, 
 and came out, apparently well again, on the 
 21st of November. It would seem that this 
 first access of madness was, to some extent, 
 the consequence of the final rupture with 
 Jenny Colon; on June 5, 1842, she died, 
 and it was partly in order to put as many 
 leagues of the earth as possible between him 
 and that memory that Gerard set out, at the 
 end of 1842, for the East. It was also in 
 order to prove to the world, by his conscious- 
 ness of external things, that he had recovered 
 his reason. While he was in Syria, he once 
 more fell in love with a new incarnation 
 of Adrienne, a young Druse, Sal^ma, the 
 daughter of a Sheikh of Lebanon; and it 
 seems to have been almost by accident that 
 he did not marry her. He returned to Paris 
 at the end of 1843 or the beginning of 1844, 
 and for the next few years he lived mostly 
 in Paris, writing charming, graceful, remark- 
 
14 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 ably sane articles and books, and wandering 
 about the streets, by day and night, in a 
 perpetual dream, from which, now and again, 
 he was somewhat rudely awakened. When, 
 in the spring of 1853, he went to see Heine, 
 for whom he was doing an admirable prose 
 translation of his poems, and told him he 
 had come to return the money he had received 
 in advance, because the times were accom- 
 plished, and the end of the world, announced 
 by the Apocalypse, was at hand, Heine 
 sent for a cab, and Gerard found himself at 
 Dr. Dubois' asylum, where he remained two 
 months. It was on coming out of the asylum 
 that he wrote Sylvie, a delightful idyl, chiefly 
 autobiographical, one of his three actual 
 achievements. On August 27, 1853, he had 
 to be taken to Dr. Blanche's asylum at Passy, 
 where he remained till May 27,1854. Thither, 
 after a month or two spent in Germany, he 
 returned on August 8, and on October 19 he 
 came out for the last time, manifestly uncured. 
 He was now engaged on the narrative of his 
 own madness, and the first part of Le Reve 
 et la Vie appeared in the Revue de Paris of 
 January 1, 1855. On the 20th he came into 
 the office of the review, and showed Gautier 
 
G]fiRARD DE NERVAL 15 
 
 and Maxim e du Camp an apron- string which 
 he was carrying in his pocket. "It is the 
 girdle," he said, " that Madame de Maintenon 
 wore when she had Esther performed at 
 Saint-Cyr." On the 24th he wrote to a 
 friend : " Come and prove my identity at the 
 police-station of the Ch4telet." The night 
 before he had been working at his manuscript 
 in a pot-house of Les Halles, and had been 
 arrested as a vagabond. He was used to 
 such little misadventures, but he complained 
 of the difficulty of writing. "I set off after 
 an idea," he said, " and lose myself; I am 
 hours in finding my way back. Do you know 
 I can scarcely write twenty lines a day, the 
 darkness comes about me so close ! " He 
 took out the apron-string. " It is the garter 
 of the Queen of Sheba," he said. The snow 
 was freezing on the ground, and on the night 
 of the 25th, at three in the morning, the 
 landlord of a " penny doss " in the Eue de la 
 Vieille-Lanterne, a filthy alley lying between 
 the quays and the Rue de Rivoli, heard some 
 one knocking at the door, but did not open, 
 on account of the cold. At dawn, the body 
 of Gerard de Nerval was found hanging by 
 the apron-string to a bar of the window. 
 
16 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 It is not necessary to exaggerate the im- 
 portance of the half-dozen volumes which 
 make up the works of Gerard de Nerval. He 
 was not a great writer; he had moments of 
 greatness; and it is the particular quality of 
 these moments which is of interest for us. 
 There is the entertaining, but not more than 
 entertaining, Voyage en Orient ; there is the 
 estimable translation of Faust, and the ad- 
 mirable versions from Heine ; there are the 
 volumes of short stories and sketches, of 
 which even Les Illumines, in spite of the 
 promise of its title, is little more than an 
 agreeable compilation. But there remain 
 three compositions : the sonnets, Le Reve et 
 la Vie, and Sylvie; of which Sylvie is the 
 most objectively achieved, a wandering idyl, 
 full of pastoral dehght, and containing some 
 folk-songs of Valois, two of which have been 
 translated by Rossetti ; Le Rive et la Vie 
 being the most intensely personal, a narrative 
 of madness, unique as madness itself; and 
 the sonnets, a kind of miracle, which may 
 be held to have created something at least of 
 the method of the later Symbolists. These 
 three compositions, in which alone Gerard is 
 his finest self, all belong to the periods when 
 
GJ^RARD DE NERVAL 17 
 
 he was, in the eyes of the world, actually 
 mad. The sonnets belong to two of these 
 periods, Le Rive et la Vie to the last ; Sylvie 
 was written in the short interval between the 
 two attacks in the early part of 1853. We 
 have thus the case of a writer, graceful and 
 elegant when he is sane, but only inspired, 
 only reaUy wise, passionate, collected, only 
 really master of himself, when he is insane. 
 It may be worth looking at a few of the 
 points which so suggestive a problem presents 
 to us. 
 
 II 
 
 Gdrard de Nerval lived the transfigured 
 inner life of the dreamer. "I was very 
 tired of life ! " he says. And like so many 
 dreamers, who have all the luminous darkness 
 of the universe in their brains, he found his 
 most precious and uninterrupted solitude in 
 the crowded and more sordid streets of great 
 cities. He who had loved the Queen of 
 Sheba, and seen the seven Elohims dividing 
 the world, could find nothing more tolerable 
 in mortal conditions, when he was truly aware 
 of them, than the company of the meanest of 
 
 B 
 
18 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 mankind, in whom poverty and vice, and the 
 hard pressure of civilisation, still leave some 
 of the original vivacity of the human comedy. 
 The real world seeming to be always so far 
 from him, and a sort of terror of the gulfs 
 holding him, in spite of himself, to its fly- 
 ing skirts, he found something at all events 
 reaUsable, concrete, in these drinkers of Les 
 HaUes, these vagabonds of the Place du 
 Carrousel, among whom he so often sought 
 refuge. It was literally, in part, a refuge. 
 During the day he could sleep, but night 
 wakened him, and that restlessness, which 
 the night draws out in those who are reaUy 
 under lunar influences, set his feet wandering, 
 if only in order that his mind might wander 
 the less. The sun, as he mentions, never 
 appears in dreams ; but, with the approach of 
 night, is not every one a little readier to be- 
 lieve in the mystery lurking behind the world 1 
 
 Grains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'^pie ! 
 
 he writes in one of his great sonnets ; and 
 that fear of the invisible watchfulness of 
 nature was never absent from him. It is 
 one of the terrors of human existence that 
 we may be led at once to seek and to shun 
 
G]fiRARD DE NERVAL 19 
 
 solitude ; unable to bear the mortal pressure 
 of its embrace, unable to endure the nos- 
 talgia of its absence. " I think man's 
 happiest when he forgets himself," says an 
 Elizabethan dramatist ; and, with Gerard, 
 there was Adrienne to forget, and Jenny 
 Colon the actress, and the Queen of Sheba. 
 But to have drunk of the cup of dreams 
 is to have drunk of the cup of eternal 
 memory. The past, and, as it seemed to 
 him, the future were continually with him ; 
 only the present fled continually fi:om under 
 his feet. It was only by the efi^ort of this 
 contact with people who lived so sincerely 
 in the day, the minute, that he could find 
 even a temporary foothold. With them, at 
 least, he could hold back aU the stars, and 
 the darkness beyond them, and the inter- 
 minable approach and disappearance of all 
 the ages, if only for the space between tavern 
 and tavern, where he could open his eyes 
 on so frank an abandonment to the common 
 drunkenness of most people in this world, 
 here for once reaUy living the symbolic 
 intoxication of their ignorance. 
 
 Like so many dreamers of illimitable 
 dreams, it was the fate of Gerard to incarnate 
 
20 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 his ideal in the person of an actress. The 
 fatal transfiguration of the footlights, in 
 which reality and the artificial change places 
 with so fantastic a regularity, has drawn 
 many moths into its flame, and wiU draw 
 more, as long as men persist in demanding 
 illusion of what is real, and reality in what 
 is illusion. The Jenny Colons of the world 
 are very simple, very real, if one will but 
 refrain from assuming them to be a mystery. 
 But it is the penalty of all imaginative lovers 
 to create for themselves the veil which hides 
 from them the features of the beloved. It 
 is their privilege, for it is incomparably more 
 entrancing to fancy oneself in love with Isis 
 than to know that one is in love with Manon 
 Lescaut. The picture of Gerard, after many 
 hesitations, revealing to the astonished Jenny 
 that she is the incarnation of another, the 
 shadow of a dream, that she has been 
 Adrienne and is about to be the Queen of 
 Sheba ; her very human little cry of pure 
 incomprehension, Mais vous ne m'aimez pas ! 
 and her prompt refuge in the arms of the 
 jeune premier ride, if it were not of the 
 acutest pathos, would certainly be of the 
 most quintessential comedy. For Gerard, so 
 
GifiRARD DE NERVAL 21 
 
 sharp an awakening was but like the passage 
 from one state to another, across that little 
 bridge of one step which lies between heaven 
 and heU, to which he was so used in his 
 dreams. It gave permanency to the trivial, 
 crystallising it, in another than Stendhal's 
 sense ; and when death came, changing mere 
 human memory into the terms of eternity, 
 the darkness of the spiritual world was lit 
 with a new star, which was henceforth the 
 wandering, desolate guide of so many visions. 
 The tragic figure of Aur^Ua, which comes and 
 goes through aU the labyrinths of dream, is 
 now seen always "as if lit up by a lightning- 
 flash, pale and dying, hurried away by dark 
 horsemen." 
 
 The dream or doctrine of the re-incarna- 
 tion of souls, which has given so much con- 
 solation to so many questioners of eternity, 
 was for Gerard (need we doubt?) a dream 
 rather than a doctrine, but one of those 
 dreams which are nearer to a man than his 
 breath. "This vague and hopeless love," 
 he writes in Sylvie, " inspired by an actress, 
 which night by night took hold of me at the 
 hour of the performance, leaving me only at 
 the hour of sleep, had its germ in the recol- 
 
22 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 lection of Adrienne, flower of the night, un- 
 folding under the pale rays of the moon, rosy 
 and blonde phantom, gliding over the green 
 grass, half bathed in white mist. ... To love 
 a nun under the form of an actress ! . . . 
 and if it were the very same ! It is enough 
 to drive one mad ! " Yes, il y a de quoi 
 devenir fou, as Gdrard had found ; but 
 there was also, in this intimate sense of the 
 unity, perpetuity, and harmoniously reciir- 
 ring rhythm of nature, not a little of the 
 inner substance of wisdom. It was a dream, 
 perhaps refracted from some broken, illumi- 
 nating angle by which madness catches un- 
 seen light, that revealed to him the meaning 
 of his own superstition, fatahty, malady : 
 " During my sleep, I had a marvellous vision. 
 It seemed to me that the goddess appeared 
 before me, saying to me : ' I am the same 
 as Mary, the same as thy mother, the same 
 also whom, under all forms, thou hast always 
 loved. At each of thine ordeals I have dropt 
 yet one more of the masks with which I veil 
 my countenance, and soon thou shalt see 
 me as I am ! ' " And in perhaps his finest 
 sonnet, the mysterious Artemis, we have, 
 under other symbols, and with the deliberate 
 
GERARD DE NERVAL 23 
 
 inconsequence of these sonnets, the comfort 
 and despair of the same faith. 
 
 La Treizi^me revient . . . O'est encor la premiere ; 
 Et c'est toujours la seule, — ou c'est le seul moment : 
 Car es-tu reine, 6 toi ! la premifere ou dernifere ? 
 Es-tu roi, toi le seul ou le dernier amant ? . . . 
 
 Aimez qui vous aima du berceau dans la hihre ; 
 Celle que j'aimai seul m'aime encor tendrement ; 
 C'est la mort — ou la morte ... 6 d^lice ! 6 tourtaent ! 
 La Rose qu'elle tient, c'est la Rose tr6mi^re. 
 
 Sainte napolitaine aux mains pleines de feux, 
 Rose au coeur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule : 
 As-tu trouv^ ta croix dans le desert des cieux ? 
 
 Roses blanches, tombez ! vous insultez nos dieux : 
 Tombez, fant6mes blancs, de votre ciel qui brfile : 
 — La Sainte de I'abtme est plus sainte h. mes yeux ! 
 
 Who has not often meditated, above all 
 what artist, on the slightness, after all, of the 
 link which holds our faculties together in 
 that sober health of the brain which we call 
 reason? Are there not moments when that 
 link seems to be worn down to so fine a 
 tenuity that the wing of a passing dream 
 might suffice to snap it ? The consciousness 
 seems, as it were, to expand and contract at 
 once, into something too wide for the 
 
24 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 universe, and too narrow for the thought of 
 self to find room within it. Is it that the 
 sense of identity is about to evaporate, an- 
 nihilating all, or is it that a more profound 
 identity, the identity of the whole sentient 
 universe, has been at last realised ? Leaving 
 the concrete world on these brief voyages, 
 the fear is that we may not have strength to 
 return, or that we may lose the way back. 
 Every artist lives a double life, in which he 
 is for the most part conscious of the illusions 
 of the imagination. He is conscious also of 
 the illusions of the nerves, which he shares 
 with every man of imaginative mind. Nights 
 of insomnia, days of anxious waiting, the 
 sudden shock of an event, any one of these 
 common disturbances may be enough to 
 jangle the tuneless bells of one's nerves. 
 The artist can distinguish these causes of 
 certain of his moods from those other causes 
 which come to him because he is an artist, 
 and are properly concerned with that inven- 
 tion which is his own function. Yet is there 
 not some danger that he may come to 
 confuse one with the other, that he may 
 "lose the thread" which conducts him 
 through the intricacies of the inner world ? 
 
G:fiRARD DE NERVAL 25 
 
 The supreme artist, certainly, is the 
 furthest of all men from this danger ; for he 
 is the supreme intelligence. Like Dante, he 
 can pass through hell unsinged. With him, 
 imagination is vision; when he looks into 
 the darkness, he sees. The vague dreamer, 
 the insecure artist and the uncertain mystic 
 at once, sees only shadows, not recognising 
 their outlines. He is mastered by the 
 images which have come at his call ; he has 
 not the power which chains them for his 
 slaves. "The kingdom of Heaven suffers 
 violence," and the dreamer who has gone 
 tremblingly into the darkness is in peril at 
 the hands of those very real phantoms who 
 are the reflection of his fear. 
 
 The madness of Gerard de Nerval, what- 
 ever physiological reasons may be rightly 
 given for its outbreak, subsidence, and 
 return, I take to have been essentially 
 due to the weakness and not the excess of 
 his visionary quality, to the insufficiency of 
 his imaginative energy, and to his lack of 
 spiritual discipline. He was an unsystematic 
 mystic ; his " Tower of Babel in two hundred 
 volumes," that medley of books of religion, 
 science, astrology, history, travel, which he 
 
26 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 thought would have rejoiced the heart of 
 Pico della Mirandola, of Meursius, or of 
 Nicholas of Cusa, was truly, as he says, 
 " enough to drive a wise man mad." " Why 
 not also," he adds, " enough to make a mad- 
 man wise ? " But precisely because it was 
 this amas bizarre, this jumble of the perilous 
 secrets in which wisdom is so often foUy, and 
 folly so often wisdom. He speaks vaguely of 
 the Kabbala ; the Kabbala would have been 
 safety to him, as the Catholic Church would 
 have been, or any other reasoned scheme of 
 things. Wavering among intuitions, ignor- 
 ances, half-truths, shadows of falsehood, now 
 audacious, now hesitating, he was blown 
 hither and thither by conflicting winds, a 
 prey to the indefinite. 
 
 Le HSve et la Vie, the last fragments of 
 which were found in his pockets after his 
 suicide, scrawled on scraps of paper, inter- 
 rupted with Kabbalistic signs and " a de- 
 monstration of the Immaculate Conception 
 by geometry," is a narrative of a madman's 
 visions by the madman himself, yet showing, 
 as Gautier says, " cold reason seated by the 
 bedside of hot fever, hallucination analysing 
 itself by a supreme philosophic effort." What 
 
GJSRARD DE nerval 27 
 
 is curious, yet after all natural, is that part 
 of the narrative seems to be contemporaneous 
 with what it describes, and part subsequent 
 to it; so that it is not as when De Quincey 
 says to us, such or such was the opium-dream 
 that I had on such a night ; but as if the 
 opium-dreamer had begun to write down his 
 dream while he was yet within its coils. 
 " The descent into hell," he caUs it twice ; 
 yet does he not also write : "At times I 
 imagined that my force and my activity were 
 doubled ; it seemed to me that I knew every- 
 thing, understood everything; and imagina- 
 tion brought me infinite pleasures. Now 
 that I have recovered what men call reason, 
 must I not regret having lost theml " But 
 he had not lost them ; he was still in that 
 state of double consciousness which he de- 
 scribes in one of his visions, when, seeing 
 people dressed in white, " I was astonished," 
 he says, " to see them all dressed in white ; 
 yet it seemed to me that this was an optical 
 illusion." His cosmical visions are at times 
 so magnificent that he seems to be creating 
 myths; and it is with a worthy ingenuity 
 that he plays the part he imagines to be 
 assigned to him in his astral influences. 
 
28 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 "First of all I imagined that the persons 
 collected in the garden (of the madhouse) all 
 had some influence on the stars, and that the 
 one who always walked round and round in a 
 circle regulated the course of the sun. An old 
 man, who was brought there at certain hours of 
 the day, and who made knots as he consulted 
 his watch, seemed to me to be charged with 
 the notation of the course of the hours. I at- 
 tributed to myself an influence over the course 
 of the moon, and I believed that this star had 
 been struck by the thunderbolt of the Most 
 High, which had traced on its face the im- 
 print of the mask which I had observed. 
 
 " I attributed a mystical signification to the 
 conversations of the warders and of my com- 
 panions. It seemed to me that they were 
 the representatives of all the races of the 
 earth, and that we had undertaken between 
 us to re-arrange the course of the stars, and 
 to give a wider development to the system. 
 An error, in my opinion, had crept into the 
 general combination of numbers, and thence 
 came all the ills of humanity. I believed 
 also that the celestial spirits had taken 
 human forms, and assisted at this general 
 congress, seeming though they did to be 
 
Gl^RARD DE NERVAL 29 
 
 concerned with but ordinary occupations. 
 My own part seemed to me to be the re- 
 establishment of universal harmony by Kab- 
 balistic art, and I had to seek a solution by 
 evoking the occult forces of various religions." 
 
 So far we have, no doubt, the confusions of 
 madness, in which what may indeed be the 
 symbol is taken for the thing itself. But 
 now observe what foUows : 
 
 " I seemed to myself a hero living under 
 the very eyes of the gods ; everything in 
 nature assumed new aspects, and secret 
 voices came to me from the plants, the trees, 
 animals, the meanest insects, to warn and to 
 encourage me. The words of my companions 
 had mysterious messages, the sense of which 
 I alone understood ; things without form and 
 without life lent themselves to the designs 
 of my mind ; out of combinations of stones, 
 the figures of angles, crevices, or openings, 
 the shape of leaves, out of colours, odours, 
 and sounds, I saw unknown harmonies come 
 forth. ' How is it,' I said to myself, ' that I 
 can possibly have lived so long outside nature, 
 without identifying myself with her! All 
 things live, all things are in motion, all 
 things correspond; the magnetic rays eman- 
 
30 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 ating from myself or others traverse without 
 obstacle the infinite chain of created things : 
 a transparent network covers the world, 
 whose loose threads communicate more and 
 more clpsely with the planets and the stars. 
 Now a captive upon the earth, I hold con- 
 verse with the starry choir, which is feelingly 
 a part of my joys and sorrows.' " 
 
 To have thus realised that central secret 
 of the mystics, from Pythagoras onwards, the 
 secret which the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes 
 betrays in its "As things are below, so are 
 they above"; which Boehme has classed in 
 his teaching of " signatures," and Sweden- 
 borg has systematised in his doctrine of 
 " correspondences"; does it matter very much 
 that he arrived at it by way of the obscure 
 and fatal initiation of madness ? Truth, and 
 especially that soul of truth which is poetry, 
 may be reached by many roads ; and a road 
 is not necessarily misleading because it is 
 dangerous or forbidden. Here is one who 
 has gazed at light till it has bhnded him ; 
 and for us all that is important is that he 
 has seen something, not that his eyesight has 
 been too weak to endure the pressure of light 
 overflowing the world from beyond the world. 
 
GERARD DE NERVAL 31 
 
 III 
 
 And here we arrive at the fundamental 
 principle which is at once the substance and 
 the aesthetics of the sonnets " composed," as 
 he explains, "in that state of meditation 
 which the Germans would call ' super- 
 naturalistic.'" In one, which I will quote, 
 he is explicit, and seems to state a doctrine. 
 
 VERS DORIES 
 
 Homme, libre penseur ! te crois-tu seul pensant 
 Dans ce monde ou la vie delate en touts chose ? 
 Des forces que tu tiens ta liberty dispose, 
 Mais de tous tes conseils I'univers est absent. 
 
 Respecte dans la bete un esprit agissant : 
 
 Ohaque fleur est une ame k la Nature dolose ; 
 
 TJn myst^re d'amour dans le metal repose ; 
 
 " Tout est sensible ! " Et tout sur ton Stre est puissant. 
 
 Grains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'^pie ! 
 A la matifere meme un verbe est attache . . . 
 Ne la fais pas servir k quelque usage impie ! 
 
 Souvent dans I'etre obscur habite un Dieu cach6 ; 
 Et comme un ceil naissant couvert par ses paupiferes, 
 Un pur esprit s'accroit sous l'6corce des pierres ! 
 
32 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 But in the other sonnets, in Artemis, which 
 I have quoted, in El Desdichado, Myrtho, 
 and the rest, he would seem to be deliberately 
 obscure ; or at least, his obscurity results, to 
 some extent, from the state of mind which he 
 describes in Le RSve et la Vie : "I then saw, 
 vaguely drifting into form, plastic images of 
 antiquity, which outlined themselves, became 
 definite, and seemed to represent symbols, of 
 which I only seized the idea with difficulty." 
 Nothing could more precisely represent the 
 impression made by these sonnets, in which, 
 for the first time in French, words are used as 
 the ingredients of an evocation, as themselves 
 not merely colour and sound, but symbol. 
 Here are words which create an atmosphere 
 by the actual suggestive quality of their 
 syllables, as, according to the theory of 
 Mallarme, they should do ; as, in the recent 
 attempts of the Symbolists, writer after writer 
 has endeavoured to lure them into doing. 
 Persuaded, as Gerard was, of the sensitive 
 unity of all nature, he was able to trace 
 resemblances where others saw only diver- 
 gences ; and the setting together of unfamiliar 
 and apparently alien things, which comes so 
 strangely upon us in his verse, was perhaps 
 
g:6rard de nerval 33 
 
 an actual sight of what it is our misfortune 
 not to see. His genius, to which madness 
 had come as the liberating, the precipitating, 
 spirit, disengaging its finer essence, consisted 
 in a power of materialising vision, whatever 
 is most volatile and unseizable in vision, 
 and without losing the sense of mystery, or 
 that quality which gives its charm to the 
 intangible. Madness, then, in him, had lit 
 up, as if by lightning-flashes, the hidden 
 links of distant and divergent things ; perhaps 
 in somewhat the same manner as that in 
 which a similarly new, startling, perhaps over- 
 true sight of things is gained by the artificial 
 stimulation of haschisch, opium, and those 
 other drugs by which vision is produced de- 
 liberately, and the soul, sitting safe within 
 the perilous circle of its own magic, looks 
 out on the panorama which either rises out 
 of the darkness before it, or drifts from itself 
 into the darkness. The very imagery of these 
 sonnets is the imagery which is known to all 
 dreamers of bought dreams. Rose au cceur 
 violet, fieur de sainte Gudule ; le Tew/ple 
 au peristyle immense; la grotte oii, nage la 
 syrene: the dreamer of bought dreams has 
 seen them all. But no one before Gerard 
 
 c 
 
34 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 realised that such things as these might be 
 the basis of almost a new aesthetics. Did he 
 himself realise all that he had done, or was 
 it left for Mallarm^ to theorise upon what 
 Gerard had but divined ? 
 
 That he made the discovery, there is no 
 doubt ; and we owe to the fortunate accident 
 of madness one of the foundations of what 
 may be called the practical aesthetics of 
 Symbolism. Look again at that sonnet 
 Artemis, and you will see in it not only the 
 method of Mallarm^, but much of the most 
 intimate manner of Verlaine. The first four 
 lines, with their fluid rhythm, their repeti- 
 tions and echoes, their delicate evasions, 
 might have been written by Verlaine ; in the 
 later part the firmness of the rhythms and the 
 jewelled significance of the words are like 
 Mallarm^ at his finest, so that in a single 
 sonnet we may fairly claim to see a fore- 
 shadowing of the styles of Mallarmd and 
 Verlaine at once. With Verlaine the re- 
 semblance goes, perhaps, no further ; with 
 MaUarmd it goes to the very roots, the whole 
 man being, certainly, his style. 
 
 Gerard de Nerval, then, had divined, before 
 all the world, that poetry should be a miracle ; 
 
GJfiRARD DE NERVAL 35 
 
 not a hymn to beauty, nor the description of 
 beauty, nor beauty's mirror ; but beauty itself, 
 the colour, fragrance, and form of the 
 imagined flower, as it blossoms again out of 
 the page. Vision, the over-powering vision, 
 had come to him beyond, if not against, his 
 will ; and he knew that vision is the root out 
 of which the flower must grow. Vision had 
 taught him symbol, and he knew that it is 
 by symbol alone that the flower can take 
 visible form. He knew that the whole 
 mystery of beauty can never be comprehended 
 by the crowd, and that while clearness is a 
 virtue of style, perfect explicitness is not a 
 necessary virtue. So it was with disdain, as 
 well as with confidence, that he allowed these 
 sonnets to be overheard. It was enough for 
 him to say : 
 
 J'ai rev6 dans la grotte ovi nage la syr^ne ; 
 
 and to speak, it might be, the siren's lan- 
 guage, remembering her. "It will be my 
 last madness," he wrote, "to beheve myself 
 a poet : let criticism cure me of it." Criti- 
 cism, in his own day, even Gautier's criticism, 
 could but be disconcerted by a novelty so 
 unexampled. It is only now that the best 
 
36 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 critics in France are beginning to realise 
 how great in themselves, and how great in 
 their influence, are these sonnets, which, 
 forgotten by the world for nearly fifty years, 
 have all the while been secretly bringing 
 new aesthetics into French poetry. 
 
VILLIERS DE LISLE-ADAM 
 
 A ehacun son infini 
 
 Count Philippe Auguste Mathias de 
 ViLLiERS DE L'IsIiE-Adam was born at St. 
 Brieuc, in Brittany, November 28, 1838 ; he 
 died at Paris, under the care of the Frferes 
 Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, August 19, 1889. Even 
 before his death, his life had become a 
 legend, and the legend is even now not to 
 be disentangled from the actual occurrences 
 of an existence so heroically visionary. The 
 Don Quixote of idealism, it was not only 
 in philosophical terms that life, to him, 
 was the dream, and the spiritual world the 
 reality; he lived his faith, enduring what 
 others called reality with contempt, when- 
 ever, for a moment, he became conscious 
 of it. The basis of the character of 
 Vniiers was pride, and it was a pride which 
 covered more than the universe. And 
 
 37 
 
38 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 this pride, first of all, was the pride of 
 race. 
 
 Descendant of the original Eodolphe le 
 Bel, Seigneur de Villiers (1067), through 
 Jean de Villiers and Maria de I'lsle and 
 their son Pierre the first ViUiers de I'lsle- 
 Adam, a ViUiers de I'lsle-Adam, bom in 
 1384, had been Marshal of France under 
 Jean-sans-Peur, Duke of Burgundy ; he took 
 Paris during the civil war, and after being 
 imprisoned in the Bastille, reconquered 
 Pontoise from the English, and helped to 
 reconquer Paris. Another Villiers de I'lsle- 
 Adam, born in 1464, Grand Master of the 
 Order of St. John of Jerusalem, defended 
 Rhodes against 200,000 Turks for a whole 
 year, in one of the most famous sieges 
 in history ; it was he who obtained from 
 Charles V. the concession of the isle of 
 Malta for his Order, henceforth the Order 
 of the Knights of Malta. 
 
 For Villiers, to whom time, after all, was 
 but a metaphysical abstraction, the age of 
 the Crusaders had not passed. From a 
 descendant of the Grand Master of the 
 Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the nine- 
 teenth century demanded precisely the virtues 
 
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM 39 
 
 which the sixteenth century had demanded 
 of that ancestor. And these virtues were all 
 summed up in one word, which, in its double 
 significance, single to him, covered the whole 
 attitude of life : the word " nobility." No 
 word returns oftener to the lips in speak- 
 ing of what is most characteristic in his 
 work, and to Villiers moral and spiritual 
 nobility seemed but the inevitable conse- 
 quence of that other kind of nobility by 
 which he seemed to himself stiU a Knight 
 of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It 
 was his birthright. 
 
 To the aristocratic conception of things, 
 nobility of soul is indeed a birthright, and 
 the pride with which this gift of nature is 
 accepted is a pride of exactly the opposite 
 kind to that democratic pride to which 
 nobility of soul is a conquest, valuable in 
 proportion to its difficulty. This duality, 
 always essentially aristocratic and democratic, 
 typically Eastern and Western also, finds its 
 place in every theory of religion, philosophy, 
 and the ideal life. The pride of being, the 
 pride of becoming: these are the two ulti- 
 mate contradictions set before every idealist. 
 Villiers' choice, inevitable indeed, was signi- 
 
40 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 ficant. In its measure, it must always be 
 the choice of the artist, to whom, in his 
 contemplation of life, the means is often so 
 much more important than the end. That 
 nobility of soul which comes without effort, 
 which comes only with an unrelaxed dili- 
 gence over oneself, that I should be I : there 
 can at least be no comparison of its beauty 
 with the stained and dusty onslaught on a 
 never quite conquered fort of the enemy, 
 in a divided self. And, if it be permitted 
 to choose among degrees of sanctity, that, 
 surely, is the highest in which a natural 
 genius for such things accepts its own attain- 
 ment with the simplicity of a birthright. 
 
 And the Catholicism of ViUiers was also 
 a part of his inheritance. His ancestors had 
 fought for the Church, and CathoHcism was 
 still a pompous flag, under which it was 
 possible to fight on behalf of the spirit, 
 against that materialism which is always, in 
 one way or another, atheist. Thus he dedi- 
 cates one of his stories to the Pope, chooses 
 ecclesiastical splendours by preference among 
 the many splendours of the world which go 
 to make up his stage-pictures, and is learned 
 in the subtleties of the Fathers. The Church 
 
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM 41 
 
 is his favourite symbol of austere intellectual 
 beauty ; one way, certainly, by which the 
 temptations of external matter may be van- 
 quished, and a way, also, by which the desire 
 of worship may be satisfied. 
 
 But there was also, in his attitude towards 
 the mysteries of the spiritual world, that 
 " forbidden " curiosity which had troubled 
 the obedience of the Templars, and which 
 came to him, too, as a kind of knightly 
 quality. Whether or not he was actually a 
 Kabbalist, questions of magic began, at an 
 early age, to preoccupy him, and, from the 
 first wild experiment of Isis to the deliberate 
 summing up of Axel, the " occult " world 
 finds its way into most of his pages. 
 
 Fundamentally, the belief of ViUiers is 
 the belief common to all Eastern mystics.^ 
 "Know, once for aU, that there is for thee 
 no other universe than that conception thereof 
 which is reflected at the bottom of thy 
 thoughts." "What is knowledge but a re- 
 cognition?" Therefore, "forgetting for ever 
 that which was the illusion of thyself," hasten 
 
 1 "I am far from sure," wrote Verlaine, "that the philo- 
 sophy of ViUiers will not one day become the formula of 
 our century." 
 
42 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 to become " an intelligence freed from the 
 bonds and the desires of the present moment." 
 "Become the flower of thyself! Thou art 
 but what thou thinkest : therefore think thy- 
 self eternal." "Man, if thou cease to limit 
 in thyself a thing, that is, to desire it, if, so 
 doing, thou withdraw thyself from it, it will 
 follow thee, woman-like, as the water fills the 
 place that is offered to it in the hoUow of the 
 hand. For thou possessest the real being 
 of all things, in thy pure will, and thou art 
 the God that thou art able to become." 
 
 To have accepted the doctrine which thus 
 finds expression in Axel, is to have ac- 
 cepted this among others of its consequences : 
 " Science states, but does not explain : she 
 is the oldest offspring of the chimeras; all 
 the chimeras, then, on the same terms as 
 the world (the oldest of them !), are some- 
 thing more than nothing ! " And in £llen 
 there is a fragment of conversation between 
 two young students, which has its signifi- 
 cance also : 
 
 " Ooetze. There's my philosopher in full 
 flight to the regions of the sublime ! 
 Happily we have Science, which is a 
 
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM 43 
 
 torch, dear mystic ; we will analyse your 
 sun, if the planet does not burst into 
 pieces sooner than it has any right to ! 
 
 Samuel. Science will not suffice. Sooner or 
 later you will end by coming to your 
 knees. 
 
 Goetze. Before what ? 
 
 Samuel. Before the darkness ! " 
 
 Such avowals of ignorance are possible only 
 from the height of a great intellectual pride. 
 Villiers' revolt against Science, so far as 
 Science is materialistic, and his passionate 
 curiosity in that chimera's flight towards the 
 invisible, are one and the same impulse of 
 a mind to which only mind is interesting. 
 Toute cette vieille Ext^riorite, fnaligne, com,- 
 pliquee, inflexible, that illusion which Science 
 accepts for the one reality: it must be the 
 whole effort of one's consciousness to escape 
 from its entanglements, to dominate it, or to 
 ignore it, and one's art must be the building 
 of an ideal world beyond its access, from 
 which one may indeed sally out, now and 
 again, in a desperate enough attack upon 
 the illusions in the midst of which men 
 live. 
 
44 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 And just that, we find, makes up the work 
 of Villiers, work which divides itself roughly 
 into two divisions : one, the ideal world, or 
 the ideal in the world (Axel, Elen, Morgane, 
 Isis, some of the contes, and, intermediary. 
 La Eevolte) ; the other, satire, the mockery 
 of reality (L'Eve Future, the Contes Cruels, 
 Trihulat Bonhomet). It is part of the origi- 
 nality of Villiers that the two divisions con- 
 stantly flow into one another; the ideaUst 
 heing never more the idealist than in his 
 huffooneries. 
 
 II 
 
 Axel is the Symbolist drama, in all its 
 uncompromising conflict with the "modesty" 
 of Nature and the limitations of the stage. 
 It is the drama of the soul, and at the same 
 time it is the most pictorial of dramas ; I 
 should define its manner as a kind of spiritual 
 romanticism. The earlier dramas, EUn, 
 Morgane, are fixed at somewhat the same 
 point in space ; La Rivolte, which seems to 
 anticipate The Doll's House, shows us an 
 aristocratic Ibsen, touching reality with a 
 certain disdain, certainly with far less skill, 
 
VILLIERS DE L'lSLE-ADAM 45 
 
 certainly with far more beauty. But Axel, 
 meditated over during a lifetime, shows us 
 Villiers' ideal of his own idealism. 
 
 The action takes place, it is true, in this 
 century, but it takes place in corners of the 
 world into which the modem spirit has not 
 yet passed ; this Monastere de Religieuses- 
 trinitaires, le cloitre de Sainte Apollodora, 
 situe sur les conjins du littoral de I'ancienne 
 Flandre frangaise, and the tres vieux chdteau 
 fort, le burg des margraves d'AvSrsperg, 
 isole au milieu du Schwartzwald. The 
 characters, Axel d'Auersperg, Eve Sara 
 Emmanuele de Maupers, Maitre Janus, the 
 Archidiacre, the Commandeur Kaspar d'Auers- 
 perg, are at once more and less than human 
 beings : they are the types of different ideals, 
 and they are clothed with just enough 
 humanity to give form to what would other- 
 wise remain disembodied spirit. The religi- 
 ous ideal, the occult ideal, the worldly ideal, 
 the passionate ideal, are all presented, one 
 after the other, in these dazzling and profound 
 pages ; Axel is the disdainful choice from 
 among them, the disdainful rejection of life 
 itself, of the whole illusion of life, "since in- 
 finity alone is not a deception." And Sara? 
 
46 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Sara is a superb part of that life which is 
 rejected, which she herself comes, not with- 
 out reluctance, to reject. In that motionless 
 figure, during the whole of the first act silent 
 but for a single " No," and leaping into a 
 moment's violent action as the act closes, she 
 is the haughtiest woman in Uterature. But 
 she is a woman, and she desires life, finding it 
 in Axel. Pride, and the woman's devotion to 
 the man, aid her to take the last cold step 
 with Axel, in that transcendental giving up of 
 life at the moment when life becomes ideal. 
 
 And the play is written, throughout, with 
 a curious solemnity, a particular kind of 
 eloquence, which makes no attempt to imi- 
 tate the level of the speech of every day, but 
 which is a sort of ideal language in which" 
 beauty is aimed at as exclusively as if it 
 were written in verse. The modern drama, 
 under the democratic influence of Ibsen, 
 the positive influence of Dumas fils, has 
 limited itself to the expression of tempera, 
 ments in the one case, of theoretic intelli- 
 gences in the other, in as nearly as possible 
 the words which the average man would use 
 for the statement of his emotions and ideas. 
 The form, that is, is degraded below the level 
 
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM 47 
 
 of the characters whom it attempts to express ; 
 for it is evident that the average man can 
 articulate only a smaU enough part of what 
 he obscurely feels or thinks ; and the theory 
 of Realism is that his emotions and ideas 
 are to be given only in so far as the words at 
 his own command can give them. Villiers, 
 choosing to concern himself only with ex- 
 ceptional characters, and with them only in 
 the absolute, invents for them a more elaborate 
 and a more magnificent speech than they 
 would naturally employ, the speech of their 
 thoughts, of their dreams. 
 
 And it is a world thought or dreamt in 
 some more fortunate atmosphere than that 
 in which we live, that Villiers has created for 
 the final achievement of his abstract ideas. 
 I do not doubt that he himself always lived 
 in it, through aU the poverty of the precipit- 
 ous Rue des Martyrs. But it is in Axel, and 
 in Axel only, that he has made us also in- 
 habitants of that world. Even in Men we 
 are spectators, watching a tragical fairy play 
 (as if Fantasio became suddenly in deadly 
 earnest), watching some one else's dreams. 
 Axel envelops us in its own atmosphere ; it 
 is as if we found ourselves on a mountain- 
 
48 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 top, on the other side of the clouds, and 
 without surprise at finding ourselves there. 
 
 The ideal, to Villiers, being the real, spiritual 
 beauty being the essential beauty, and material 
 beauty its reflection, or its revelation, it is with 
 a sort of fury that he attacks the materialising 
 forces of the world : science, progress, the 
 worldly emphasis on " facts," on what is 
 " positive," " serious," " respectable." Satire, 
 with him, is the revenge of beauty upon 
 ugliness, the persecution of the ugly; it is 
 not merely social satire, it is a satire on- the 
 material universe by one who beheves in 
 a spiritual universe. Thus it is the only 
 laughter of our time which is fundamental, 
 as fundamental as that of Swift or Rabelais. 
 And this lacerating laughter of the idealist is 
 never surer in its aim than when it turns the 
 arms of science against itself, as in the vast 
 buffoonery of L'Eve Future. A Parisian wit, 
 sharpened to a fineness of irony such as only 
 wit which is also philosophy can attain, brings 
 in another method of attack ; humour, which 
 is almost Enghsh, another ; while again satire 
 becomes tragic, fantastic, macabre. In those 
 enigmatic "tales of the grotesque and 
 arabesque," in which Villiers rivals Poe on 
 
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM 49 
 
 his own ground, there is, for the most part, 
 a multiplicity of meaning which is, as it is 
 meant to be, disconcerting. I should not 
 like to say how far Villiers does not, some- 
 times, believe in his own magic. 
 
 It is characteristic of him, at all events, 
 that he employs what we call the supernatural 
 alike in his works of pure idealism and in 
 his works of sheer satire. The moment the 
 world ceased to be the stable object, solidly 
 encrusted with houses in brick and stone, 
 which it is to most of its so temporary 
 inhabitants, Villiers was at home. When 
 he sought the absolute beauty, it was beyond 
 the world that he found it ; when he sought 
 horror, it was a breath blowing from an 
 invisible darkness which brought it to his 
 nerves; when he desired to mock the pre- 
 tensions of knowledge or of ignorance, it 
 was always with the unseen that his tragic 
 buifoonery made familiar. 
 
 There is, in everything which Villiers 
 wrote, a strangeness, certainly both instinc- 
 tive and deliberate, which seems to me to 
 be the natural consequence of that intel- 
 lectual pride which, as I have pointed out, 
 was at the basis of his character. He hated 
 
 D 
 
50 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 every kind of mediocrity : therefore he chose 
 to analyse exceptional souls, to construct 
 exceptional stories, to invent splendid names, 
 and to evoke singular landscapes. It was 
 part of his curiosity in souls to prefer the 
 complex to the simple, the perverse to the 
 straightforward, the ambiguous to either. 
 His heroes are incarnations of spiritual pride, 
 and their tragedies are the shock of spirit 
 against matter, the invasion of spirit by 
 matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual 
 evil. They seek the absolute, and find 
 death ; they seek wisdom, find love, and fall 
 into spiritual decay ; they seek reality, and 
 find crime ; they seek phantoms, and find 
 themselves. They are on the borders of a 
 wisdom too great for their capacity; they 
 are haunted by dark powers, instincts of 
 ambiguous passions ; they are too lucid to 
 be quite sane in their extravagances ; they 
 have not quite systematically transposed 
 their dreams into action. And his heroines, 
 when they are not, like L'Eve Future, the 
 vitalised mechanism of an Edison, have the 
 solemnity of dead people, and a hieratic 
 speech. Songe, des cceurs condamvAs d, ce 
 suppUce, de ne pas m' aimer ! says Sara, in 
 
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM 51 
 
 Axel. Je ne I'aime pas, ce jeune homme. 
 Qu'ai-je done fait d, Dieu? says Elen. And 
 their voice is always like the voice of Elen : 
 " I listened attentively to the sound of her 
 voice ; it was taciturn, subdued, like the 
 murmur of the river Lethe, flowing through 
 the region of shadows." They have the im- 
 mortal weariness of beauty, they are enigmas 
 to themselves, they desire, and know not 
 why they refrain, they do good and evil with 
 the lifting of an eyelid, and are innocent 
 and guilty of all the sins of the earth . 
 
 And these strange inhabitants move in 
 as strange a world. They are the princes 
 and chatelaines of ancient castles lost in 
 the depths of the Black Forest; they are 
 the last descendants of a great race about 
 to come to an end ; students of magic, who 
 have the sharp and swift swords of the 
 soldier ; enigmatic courtesans, at the table 
 of strange feasts ; they find incalculable 
 treasures, tonnantes et sonnantes cataractes 
 d'or liquide, only to disdain them. All the 
 pomp of the world approaches them, that 
 they may the better abnegate it, or that it 
 may ruin them to a deeper degree of their 
 material hell. And we see them always at 
 
52 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 the moment of a crisis, before the two ways 
 of a decision, hesitating in the entangle- 
 ments of a great temptation. And this 
 casuist of souls will drag forth some horribly 
 stunted or horribly overgrown soul from 
 under its obscure covering, setting it to 
 dance naked before our eyes. He has no 
 mercy on those who have no mercy on 
 themselves. 
 
 In the sense in which that word is ordi- 
 narily used, ViUiers has no pathos. This is 
 enough to explain why he can never, in the 
 phrase he would have disliked so greatly, 
 "touch the popular heart." His mind is too 
 abstract to contain pity, and it is in his lack 
 of pity that he seems to put himself outside 
 humanity. A chacun son infini, he has said, 
 and in the avidity of his search for the infinite 
 he has no mercy for the blind weakness which 
 goes stumbling over the earth, without so 
 much as knowing that the sun and stars are 
 overhead. He sees only the gross multitude, 
 the multitude which has the contentment of 
 the slave. He cannot pardon stupidity, for 
 it is incomprehensible to him. He sees, 
 rightly, that stupidity is more criminal than 
 vice ; if only because vice is curable, stupidity 
 
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM 53 
 
 incurable. But he does not realise, as the 
 great novelists have realised, that stupidity 
 can be pathetic, and that there is not a 
 peasant, nor even a self-satisfied bourgeois, 
 in whom the soul has not its part, in whose 
 existence it is not possible to be interested. 
 
 Contempt, noble as it may be, anger, 
 righteous though it may be, cannot be in- 
 dulged in without a certain lack of sympathy ; 
 and lack of sympathy comes from a lack of 
 patient understanding. It is certain that the 
 destiny of the greater part of the human race 
 is either infinitely pathetic or infinitely ridi- 
 culous. Under which aspect, then, shall 
 that destiny, and those obscure fractions of 
 humanity, be considered? Villiers was too 
 sincere an idealist, too absolute in his ideal- 
 ism, to hesitate. "As for living," he cries, in 
 that splendid phrase of Axel, " our servants 
 will do that for us ! " And, in the Contes 
 Cruels, there is this not less characteristic 
 expression of what was always his mental 
 attitude : "As at the play, in a central staU, 
 one sits out, so as not to disturb one's neigh- 
 bours — out of courtesy, in a word — some play 
 written in a wearisome style and of which 
 one does not like the subject, so I lived, out 
 
54 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 of politeness " : je vivais par poUtesse. In 
 this haughtiness towards life, in this disdain 
 of ordinary human motives and ordinary 
 human beings, there is at once the distinction 
 and the weakness of Villiers. And he has 
 himself pointed the moral against himself 
 in these words of the story which forms the 
 epilogue to the Contes Cruels: "When the 
 forehead alone contains the existence of a 
 man, that man is enlightened only from 
 above his head ; then his jealous shadow, 
 prostrate under him, draws him by the feet, 
 that it may drag him down into the in- 
 visible." 
 
 Ill 
 
 All his life Villiers was a poor man; 
 though, all his life, he was awaiting that 
 fortune which he refused to anticipate by any 
 mean employment. During most of his life, 
 he was practically an unknown man. Greatly 
 loved, ardently admired, by that inner circle 
 of the men who have made modern French 
 literature, from Verlaine to Maeterlinck, 
 he was looked upon by most people as an 
 amusing kind of madman, a little dangerous. 
 
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM 55 
 
 whose ideas, as they floated freely over the 
 caf^-table, it was at times highly profitable to 
 steal. For Villiers talked his works before 
 writing them, and sometimes he talked them 
 instead of writing them, in his too royally 
 spendthrift way. To those who knew him 
 he seemed genius itself, and would have 
 seemed so if he had never written a line; 
 for he had the dangerous gift of a person- 
 ality which seems to have already achieved 
 all that it so energetically contemplates. 
 But personality teUs only within hands' 
 reach ; and Villiers faUed even to startle, 
 failed even to exasperate, the general 
 reader. That his Premieres Po6sies, pub- 
 lished at the age of nineteen, should have 
 brought him fame was hardly to be ex- 
 pected, remarkable, especially in its ideas, 
 as that book is. Nor was it to be expected 
 of the enigmatic fragment of a romance, Isis 
 (1862), anticipating, as it does, by so long a 
 period, the esoteric and spiritualistic romances 
 which were to have their vogve. But Elen 
 (1864) and Morgane (1865), those two poetic 
 dramas in prose, so full of distinction, of 
 spiritual rarity; but two years later, Claire 
 Lenoir (afterwards incorporated in one of 
 
56 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 his really great books, Tribulat Bonhomet), 
 with its macabre horror ; but La Revolte 
 (1870), for Villiers so "actual," and which 
 had its moment's success when it was re- 
 vived in 1896 at the Od^on; but Le Nou- 
 veau Monde (1880), a drama which, by some 
 extraordinary caprice, won a prize ; but Les 
 Contes Cruels (1880), that collection of 
 masterpieces, in which the essentially French 
 conte is outdone on its own ground ! It was 
 not till 1886 that Villiers ceased to be an 
 unknown writer, with the publication of 
 that phosphorescent buffoonery of science, 
 that vast parody of humanity, L'Eve Future. 
 Tribulat Bonhomet (which he himself defined 
 as houffonnerie ^norme et sombre, couleur 
 du si^cle) was to come, in its final form, and 
 the superb poem in prose AJcedysseril ; and 
 then, more and more indifferent collections 
 of stories, in which Villiers, already dying, is 
 but the shadow of himself : L' Amour Suprime 
 (1886), Histoires Insolites (1888), Nouveaux 
 Contes Cruels (1888). He was correcting the 
 proofs of Axel when he died ; the volume was 
 published in 1890, followed by Propos d'au- 
 delcL, and a series of articles, Chez les Fassants. 
 Once dead, the fame which had avoided him 
 
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM 57 
 
 all his life began to follow him ; he had une 
 belle presse at his funeral. 
 
 Meanwhile, he had been preparing the 
 spiritual atmosphere of the new generation. 
 Living among believers in the material world, 
 he had been declaring, not in vain, his belief 
 in the world of the spirit ; living among 
 Realists and Parnassians, he had been 
 creating a new form of art, the art of the 
 Symbolist drama, and of Symbolism in fiction. 
 He had been lonely all his life, for he had 
 been living, in his own lifetime, the life of 
 the next generation. There was but one 
 man among his contemporaries to whom he 
 could give, and from whom he could receive, 
 perfect sympathy. That man was Wagner. 
 Gradually the younger men came about him ; 
 at the end he was not lacking in disciples. 
 
 And after aU, the last word of Villiers 
 is faith; faith against the evidence of the 
 senses, against the negations of materialistic 
 science, against the monstrous paradox of 
 progress, against his own pessimism in the 
 face of these formidable enemies. He afSrms ; 
 he " believes in soul, is very sure of God ; " 
 requires no witness to the spiritual world of 
 which he is always the inhabitant; and is 
 
58 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 content to lose his way in the material world, 
 brushing off its mud from time to time with 
 a disdainful gesture, as he goes on his way 
 (to apply a significant word of Pater) " like 
 one on a secret errand." 
 
ARTHUR RIMBAUD 
 
 That story of the Arabian Nights, which is 
 at the same time a true story, the life of 
 Rimbaud, has been told, for the first time, 
 in the extravagant but valuable book of an 
 anarchist of letters, who writes under the 
 name of Paterne Berrichon, and who has 
 since married Rimbaud's sister. La Vie de 
 Jean-Arthur Rimbaud is full of curiosity for 
 those who have been mystified by I know 
 not what legends, invented to give wonder 
 to a career, itself more wonderful than any 
 of the inventions. The man who died at 
 Marseilles, at the Hospital of the Conception, 
 on March 10, 1891, at the age of thirty- 
 seven, negociant, as the register of his death 
 describes him, was a writer of genius, an in- 
 novator in verse and prose, who had written 
 all his poetry by the age of nineteen, and all 
 his prose by a year or two later. He had 
 
 given up literature to travel hither and thither, 
 ■ 59 
 
60 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 first in Europe, then in Africa ; he had been 
 an engineer, a leader of caravans, a merchant 
 of precious merchandise. And this man, who 
 had never written down a line after those 
 astonishing early experiments, was heard, in 
 his last delirium, talking of precisely such 
 visions as those which had haunted his youth, 
 and using, says his sister, " expressions of 
 a singular and penetrating charm " to render 
 these sensations of visionary countries. Here 
 certainly is one of the most curious problems 
 of literature : is it a problem of which we can 
 discover the secret ? 
 
 Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born 
 at Charleville, in the Ardennes, October 28, 
 1854. His father, of whom he saw little, 
 was a captain in the army; his mother, of 
 peasant origin, was severe, rigid, and un- 
 sympathetic. At school he was an unwilling 
 but brilliant scholar, and by his fifteenth 
 year was well acquainted with Latin litera- 
 ture and intimately with French literature. 
 It was in that year that he began to write 
 poems, from the first curiously original : 
 eleven poems dating from that year are to 
 be found in his collected works. When he 
 was sixteen he decided that he had had 
 
ARTHUR RIMBAUD 61 
 
 enough of school, and enough of home. 
 Only Paris existed : he must go to Paris. 
 The first time he went without a ticket ; 
 he spent, indeed, fifteen days in Paris, but 
 he spent them in Mazas, from which he 
 was released and restored to his home by 
 his schoolmaster. The second time, a few 
 days later, he sold his watch, which paid 
 for his railway ticket. This time he threw 
 himself on the hospitality of Andr^ Gill, 
 a painter and verse-writer, of some little 
 notoriety then, whose address he had hap- 
 pened to come across. The uninvited guest 
 was not welcomed, and after some penniless 
 days in Paris he tramped back to Charle- 
 ville. The third time (he had waited five 
 months, writing poems, and discontented to 
 be only writing poems) he made his way 
 to Paris on foot, in a heat of revolutionary 
 sympathy, to ofier himself to the insurgents 
 of the Commune. Again he had to return 
 on foot. Finally, having learnt with difii- 
 culty that a man is not taken at his own 
 valuation until he has proved his right to 
 be so accepted, he sent up the manuscript 
 of his poems to Verlaine. The manuscript 
 contained Le Bateau Ivre, Les Premieres 
 
62 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Cormnunions, Ma Boheme, Roman, Les 
 Effares, and, indeed, all but a few of tlie 
 poems he ever wrote. Verlaine was over- 
 whelmed with delight, and invited him to 
 Paris. A local admirer lent him the money 
 to get there, and from October 1871 to July 
 1872 he was Verlaine's guest. 
 
 The boy of seventeen, already a perfectly 
 original poet, and beginning to be an equally 
 original prose-writer, astonished the whole 
 Pamasse, Banville, Hugo himself. On Ver- 
 laine his influence was more profound. The 
 meeting brought about one of those lament- 
 able and admirable disasters which make 
 and unmake careers. Verlaine has told us 
 in his Confessions that, " in the beginning, 
 there was no question of any sort of affection 
 or sympathy between two natures so different 
 as that of the poet of the Assis and mine, 
 but simply of an extreme admiration and 
 astonishment before this boy of sixteen, who 
 had already written things, as F^nelon has 
 excellently said, ' perhaps outside literature.' " 
 This admiration and astonishment passed 
 gradually into a more personal feeling, and it 
 was under the influence of Rimbaud that the 
 long vagabondage of Verlaine's life began. 
 
ARTHUR RIMBAUD 63 
 
 The two poets wandered together through 
 Belgmm, England, and again Belgium, from 
 July 1872 to August 1873, when there oc- 
 curred that tragic parting at Brussels which 
 left Verlaine a prisoner for eighteen months, 
 and sent Rimbaud back to his family. He 
 had already written all the poetry and prose 
 that he was ever to write, and in 1873 he 
 printed at Brussels Une Saison en Enfer. 
 It was the only book he himself ever gave 
 to the press, and no sooner was it printed 
 than he destroyed the whole edition, with 
 the exception of a few copies, of which only 
 Verlaine's copy, I believe, still dxists. Soon 
 began new wanderings, with their invariable 
 return to the starting-point of Charleville : a 
 few days in Paris, a year in England, four 
 months in Stuttgart (where he was visited 
 by Verlaine), Italy, France again, Vienna, 
 Java, Holland, Sweden, Egypt, Cyprus, Abys- 
 sinia, and then nothing but Africa, until the 
 final return to France. He had been a 
 teacher of French in England, a seller of 
 key-rings in the streets of Paris, had un- 
 loaded vessels in the ports, and helped to 
 gather in the harvest in the country; he 
 had been a volunteer in the Dutch army, a 
 
64 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 military engineer, a trader ; and now physical 
 sciences had begun to attract his insatiable 
 curiosity, and dreams of the fabulous East 
 began to resolve themselves into dreams of 
 a romantic commerce with the real East. 
 He became a merchant of coffee, perfumes, 
 ivory, and gold, in the interior of Africa ; 
 then an explorer, a predecessor, and in his 
 own regions, of Marchand. After twelve 
 years' wandering and exposure in Africa he 
 was attacked by a malady of the knee, which 
 rapidly became worse. He was transported 
 first to Aden, then to Marseilles, where, in 
 May 1891, his leg was amputated. Further 
 complications set in. He insisted, first, on 
 being removed to his home, then on being 
 taken back to Marseilles. His sufferings 
 were an intolerable torment, and more cruel 
 to him was the torment of his desire to live. 
 He died inch by inch, fighting every inch ; 
 and his sister's quiet narrative of those last 
 months is agonising. He died at Mar- 
 seilles in November, " prophesying," says his 
 sister, and repeating, "Allah Kerim! Allah 
 Kerim ! " 
 
 The secret of Rimbaud, I think, and the 
 reason why he was able to do the unique 
 
ARTHUR RIMBAUD 65 
 
 thing in literature which he did, and then 
 to disappear quietly and become a legend in 
 the East, is that his mind was not the mind 
 of the artist but of the man of action. He 
 was a dreamer, but all his dreams were dis- 
 coveries. To him it was an identical act 
 of his temperament to write the sonnet of 
 the Vowels and to trade in ivory and frank- 
 incense with the Arabs. He lived with all 
 his faculties at every instant of his life, aban- 
 doning himself to himself with a confidence 
 which was at once his strength and (looking 
 at things less absolutely) his weakness. To 
 the student of success, and what is relative 
 in achievement, he illustrates the danger of 
 one's over-possession by one's own genius, 
 just as aptly as the saint in the cloister 
 does, or the mystic too full of God to speak 
 intelligibly to the world, or the spilt wisdom 
 of the drunkard. The artist who is above 
 all things an artist cultivates a little choice 
 corner of himself with elaborate care ; he 
 brings miraculous flowers to growth there, 
 but the rest of the garden is but mown grass 
 or tangled bushes. That is why many ex- 
 cellent writers, very many painters, and most 
 musicians are so tedious on any subject but 
 
 E 
 
66 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 their own. Is it not tempting, does it not 
 seem a devotion i rather than a superstition, 
 to worship the golden chalice in which the 
 wine has been made God, as if the chalice 
 were the reality, and the Real Presence the 
 symbol? The artist, who is only an artist, 
 circumscribes his intelligence into almost 
 such a fiction, as he reverences the work of 
 his own hands. But there are certain natures 
 (great or small, Shakespeare or Eimbaud, it 
 makes no difference) to whom the work is 
 nothing ; the act of working, everything. 
 Rimbaud was a small, narrow, hard, preci- 
 pitate nature, which had tbe will to live, and 
 nothing but the will to Uve ; and his verses, 
 and his follies, and his wanderings, and 
 his traffickings were but the breathing of 
 different hours in his day. 
 
 That is why he is so swift, definite, and 
 quickly exhausted in vision ; why he had his 
 few things to say, each an action with con- 
 sequences. He invents new ways of saying 
 things, not because he is a learned artist, but 
 because he is burning to say them, and he 
 has none of the hesitations of knowledge. 
 He leaps right over or „ through the conven- 
 tions that had been standing in everybody's 
 
ARTHUR RIMBAUD 67 
 
 way; he has no time to go round, and no 
 respect for trespass-boards, and so he becoines 
 the enfant terrible of literature, playing 
 pranks (as in that sonnet of the Vowels), 
 knocking down barriers for the mere amuse- 
 ment of the thing, getting all the possible 
 advantage of his barbarisms in mind and 
 conduct. And so, in life, he is first of all 
 conspicuous as a disorderly liver, a revolter 
 against morals as against prosody, though we 
 may imagine that, in his heart, morals meant 
 as little to him, one way or the other, as 
 prosody. Later on, his revolt seems to be 
 against civilisation itself, as he disappears 
 into the deserts of Africa. And it is, if you 
 like, a revolt against civilisation, but the 
 revolt is instinctive, a need of the organism ; 
 it is not doctrinal, cynical, a conviction, a 
 sentiment. 
 
 Always, as he says, revant univers fantas- 
 tiques, he is conscious of the danger as well 
 as the ecstasy of that divine imitation ; for 
 he says : " My life will always be too vast to 
 be given up wholly to force and beauty." 
 J'attends Dieu avec gourmandise, he cries, in 
 a fine rapture ; and then, sadly enough : "I 
 have created aU the feasts, all the triumphs, 
 
68 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 all the dramas of the world. I have set my- 
 self to invent new flowers, a new flesh, a new 
 language. I have fancied that I have attained 
 supernatural power. Well, I have now only 
 to put my imagination and my memories in 
 the grave. What a fine artist's and story- 
 teller's fame thrown away ! " See how com- 
 pletely he is conscious, and how completely 
 he is at the mercy, of that hallucinatory rage 
 of vision, vision to him being always force, 
 power, creation, which on some of his pages 
 seems to become sheer madness, and on 
 others a kind of wild but absolute insight. 
 He wlU be silent, he tells us, as to all that 
 he contains within his mind, " greedy as 
 the sea," for otherwise poets and visionaries 
 would envy him his fantastic wealth. And, 
 in that Nuit d'Enfer, which does not bear 
 that title in vain, he exalts himself as a kind 
 of saviour ; he is in the circle of pride in 
 Dante's hell, and he has lost all sense of 
 limit, really beheves himself to be " no one and 
 some one." Then, in the Alchimie du Verbe, 
 he becomes the analyst of his own hallucina- 
 tions. " I believe in all the enchantments," 
 he tells us ; "I invented the colour of the 
 vowels : A, black ; E, white ; I, red ; O, 
 
ARTHUR RIMBAUD 69 
 
 blue; U, green.^ I regulated the form and 
 the movement of every consonant, and, with 
 instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that 
 I had invented a poetic language accessible, 
 one day or another, to every shade of meaning. 
 I reserved to myself the right of translation 
 
 ^ Here is the famous sonnet, which must be taken, as it 
 was meant, without undue seriousness, and yet as something 
 more than a mere joke. 
 
 VOYELLES 
 A noir, E blano, I rouge, U vert, bleu, voyelles, 
 
 Je dirai quelque jour vos naissanoes latentes. 
 
 A, noir corset velu des mouches ^olatantes 
 Qui bombillent autour des puanteurs oruelles, 
 
 Golfe d'ombre ; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes, 
 Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles ; 
 I, pourpres, sang craoh^, rire des Ifevres belles 
 
 Dans la colere ou les ivresses p^niteutes ; 
 
 U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides, 
 Paix des patis sem^s d'animaux, paix des rides 
 Que I'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux ; 
 
 0, supreme Clairon plein de strideurs ^tranges, 
 Silences traverses des Mondes et des Anges : 
 — O 1' Omega, rayon violet de Ses Yeux I 
 
 Coincidence or origin, it has lately been pointed out that 
 Rimbaud may formerly have seen an old ABC book in which 
 the vowels are coloured for the most part as his are (A, black ; 
 E, yellow ; I, red ; 0, blue ; U, green). In the little 
 illustrative pictures around them some are oddly in keeping 
 with the images of Rimbaud. 
 
70 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 ... I accustomed myself to simple hallucina- 
 tion : I saw, quite frankly, a mosque in place 
 of a factory, a school of drums kept by the 
 angels, post-chaises on the roads of heaven, 
 a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; 
 monsters, mysteries ; the title of a vaudeville 
 raised up horrors before me. Then I ex- 
 plained my magical sophisms by the hallucina- 
 tion of words ! I ended by finding something 
 sacred in the disorder of my mind." Then 
 he makes the great discovery. Action, one 
 sees, this fraudulent and insistent will to live, 
 has been at the root of all these mental and 
 verbal orgies, in which he has been wasting 
 the very substance of his thought. Well, 
 "action," he discovers, "is not life, but a 
 way of spoiling something." Even this is a 
 form of enervation, and must be rejected from 
 the absolute. Mon devoir m'est remis. U ne 
 faut plus songer d, cela. Je suis reellement 
 d'outre-tombe, et pas de commissions. 
 
 It is for the absolute that he seeks, always ; 
 the absolute which the great artist, with his 
 careful wisdom, has renounced seeking. And 
 he is content with nothing less ; hence his 
 own contempt for what he has done, after all, 
 so easily ; for what has come to him, perhaps 
 
ARTHUR RIMBAUD 71 
 
 through his impatience, but imperfectly. He 
 is a dreamer in whom dream is swift, hard in 
 outline, coming suddenly and going suddenly, 
 a real thing, but seen only in passing. Visions 
 rush past him, he cannot arrest them ; they 
 rush forth from him, he cannot restrain their 
 haste to be gone, as he creates them in the 
 mere indiscriminate idleness of energy. And 
 so this seeker after the absolute leaves but 
 a broken medley of fragments, into each of 
 which he has put a little of his personality, 
 wrhich he is for ever dramatising, by multi- 
 plying one facet, so to speak, after another. 
 Very genuinely, he is now a beaten and 
 wandering ship, flying in a sort of intoxi- 
 cation before the wind, over undiscovered 
 seas ; now a starving child outside a baker's 
 window, in the very ecstasy of hunger ; now 
 la victime et la petite Spouse of the first 
 communion ; now : 
 
 Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien ; 
 Mais Tamour infini me montera dans l'fi,me, 
 Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un boh^mien. 
 Par la Nature, heureux comme avec une femme ! 
 
 He catches at verse, at prose, invents a 
 sort of vers lihre before any one else, not 
 
72 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 quite knowing what to do with it, invents 
 a quite new way of writing prose, which 
 Laforgue will turn to account later on ; and 
 having suggested, with some impatience, half 
 the things that his own and the next genera- 
 tion are to busy themselves with developing, 
 he gives up writing, as an inadequate form, 
 to which he is also inadequate. 
 
 What, then, is the actual value of 
 Rimbaud's work, in verse and prose, apart 
 from its relative values of so many kinds ? I 
 think, considerable ; though it wiU probably 
 come to rest on two or three pieces of verse, 
 and a still vaguer accomplishment in prose. 
 He brought into French verse something of 
 that " gipsy way of going with nature, as 
 with a woman " ; a very young, very crude, 
 very defiant and sometimes very masterly 
 sense of just those real things which are too 
 close to us to be seen by most people with 
 any clearness. He could render physical 
 sensation, of the subtlest kind, without 
 making any compromise with language, 
 forcing language to speak straight, taming 
 it as one would tame a dangerous animal. 
 And he kneaded prose as he kneaded verse, 
 making it a disarticulated, abstract, mathe- 
 
ARTHUR RIMBAUD 73 
 
 matically lyrical thing. In verse, he pointed 
 the way to certain new splendours, as to 
 certain new naiveUs ; there is the Bateau 
 Ivre, without which we might never have 
 had Verlaine's Crimen Amotis. And, inter- 
 tangled with what is ingenuous, and with 
 what is splendid, there is a certain irony, 
 which comes into that youthful work as if 
 youth were already reminiscent of itself, so 
 conscious is it that youth is youth, and that 
 youth is passing. 
 
 In all these ways, Rimbaud had his in- 
 fluence upon Verlaine, and his influence 
 upon Verlaine was above all the influence of 
 the man of action upon the man of sensation ; 
 the influence of what is simple, narrow, 
 emphatic, upon what is subtle, complex, 
 growing. Verlaine's rich, sensitive nature 
 was just then trying to realise itself. Just 
 because it had such delicate possibilities, 
 because there were so many directions in 
 which it could grow, it was not at fijst quite 
 sure of its way. Rimbaud came into the life 
 and art of Verlaine, troubling both, with 
 that trouble which reveals a man to himself. 
 Having helped to make Verlaine a great 
 poet, he could go. Note that he himself 
 
74 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 could never have developed : writing had 
 been one of his discoveries ; he could but 
 make other discoveries, personal ones. Even 
 in literature he had his future; but his 
 future was Verlaine. 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 
 
 "BiEN affectueusement . . . yours, P. Ver- 
 laine." So, in its gay and friendly mingling 
 of French and English, ended the last letter 
 I had from Verlaine. A few days after- 
 wards came the telegram from Paris telling 
 me of his death, in the Rue Descartes, on 
 that 8th January 1896. 
 
 " Condemned to death," as he was, in 
 Victor Hugo's phrase of men in general, 
 "with a sort of indefinite reprieve," and 
 gravely ill as I had for some time known him 
 to be, it was still with a shock, not only of 
 sorrow, but of surprise, that I heard the news 
 of his death. He had suffered and survived 
 so much, and I found it so hard to associate 
 the idea of death with one who had always 
 been so passionately in love with life, more 
 passionately in love with life than any man 
 I ever knew. Rest was one of the dehcate 
 
 75 
 
76 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 privileges of life which he never loved : he 
 did but endiire it with grumbUng gaiety when 
 a hospital-bed claimed him. And whenever 
 he spoke to me of the long rest which has 
 now sealed his eyelids, it was with a shudder- 
 ing revolt from the thought of ever going 
 away into the cold, out of the sunshine which 
 had been so warm to him. With all his 
 pains, misfortunes, and the calamities which 
 followed him step by step all his life, I think 
 few men ever got so much out of their lives, 
 or lived so fully, so intensely, with such a 
 genius for living. That, indeed, is why he 
 was a great poet. Verlaine was a man who 
 gave its fuU value to every moment, who got 
 out of every moment all that that moment 
 had to give him.* It was not always, not often, 
 perhaps, pleasure. But it was energy, the 
 vital force of a nature which was always 
 receiving and giving out, never at rest, never 
 passive, or indifferent, or hesitating. It is 
 impossible for me to convey to those who did 
 not know him any notion of how sincere he 
 was. The word " sincerity " seems hardly to 
 have emphasis enough to say, in regard to 
 this one man, what it says, adequately enough, 
 of others. He sinned, and it was with all 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 77 
 
 his humanity ; he repented, and it was with 
 all his soul. And to every occurrence of the 
 day, to every mood of the mind, to every 
 impulse of the creative instinct, he brought 
 the same unparalleled sharpness of sensation. 
 When, in 1894, he was my guest in London, 
 I was amazed by the exactitude of his memory 
 of the mere turnings of the streets, the shapes 
 and colours of the buildings, which he had 
 not seen for twenty years. He saw, he felt, 
 he remembered, everything, with an uncon- 
 scious mental selection of the fine shades, 
 the essential part of things, or precisely 
 those aspects which most other people would 
 pass by. 
 
 Few poets of our [time have been more 
 often drawn, few have been easier to draw, 
 few have better repaid drawing, than Paul 
 Verlaine. A face without a beautiful line, 
 a face all character, full of somnolence and 
 sudden fire, in which every irregularity was a 
 kind of aid to the hand, could not but tempt 
 the artist desiring at once to render a signi- 
 ficant likeness and to have his own part in 
 the creation of a picture. Verlaine, like all 
 men of genius, had something of the air of 
 the somnambulist : that profound slumber of 
 
78 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 the face, as it was in him, with its startling 
 awakenings. It was a face devoured by 
 dreams, feverish and somnolent ; it had 
 earthly passion, intellectual pride, spiritual 
 humility ; the air of one who remembers, not 
 without an effort, who is listening, half dis- 
 tractedly to something which other people 
 do not hear; coming back so suddenly, and 
 from so far, with the relief of one who steps 
 out of that obscure shadow into the noisier 
 forgetfulneSs of life. The eyes, often half 
 closed, were like the eyes of a cat between 
 sleeping and waking ; eyes in which con- 
 templation was "itself an act." A remark- 
 able lithograph by Mr. Eothenstein (the face 
 lit by oblique eyes, the folded hand thrust 
 into the cheek) gives with singular truth the 
 sensation of that restless watch on things 
 which this prisoner of so many chains kept 
 without slackening. To Verlaine every corner 
 of the world was alive with tempting and 
 consoling and terrifying beauty. I have 
 never known any one to whom the sight of 
 the eyes was so intense and imaginative a 
 thing. To him, physical sight and spiritual 
 vision, by some strange alchemical operation 
 of the brain, were one. And in the dis- 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 79 
 
 quietude of his face, which seemed to take 
 such close heed of things, precisely because 
 it was sufficiently apart from them to be 
 always a spectator, there was a realisable 
 process of vision continually going on, in 
 which all the loose ends of the visible world 
 were being caught up into a new mental 
 fabric. 
 
 And along with this fierce subjectivity, 
 into which the egoism of the artist entered 
 so unconsciously, and in which it counted for 
 so much, there was more than the usual 
 amount of childishness, always in some 
 measure present in men of genius. There 
 was a real, almost blithe, childishness in the 
 way in which he would put on his " Satanic " 
 expression, of which it was part of the joke 
 that every one should not be quite in the 
 secret. It was a whim of this kind which 
 made him put at the beginning of Romances 
 sans Paroles that very criminal image of a 
 head which had so little resemblance with 
 even the shape, indeed curious enough, of 
 his actual head. "Born under the sign of 
 Saturn," as he no doubt was, with that " old 
 prisoner's head " of which he tells us, it was 
 by his amazing faculty for a simple kind of 
 
80 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 happiness that he always impressed me. I 
 have never seen so cheerful an invalid as he 
 used to be at that hospital, the Hopital Saint- 
 Louis, where at one time I used to go and 
 see him every week. His whole face seemed 
 to chuckle as he would teU me, in his 
 emphatic, confiding way, everything that 
 entered into his head; the droll stories cut 
 short by a groan, a lamentation, a sudden 
 fury of reminiscence, at which his face would 
 cloud or convulse, the wild eyebrows slanting 
 up and down ; and then, suddenly, the good 
 laugh would be back, clearing the air. No 
 one was ever so responsive to his own moods 
 as Verlaine, and with him every mood had 
 the vehemence of a passion. Is not his 
 whole art a delicate waiting upon moods, 
 with that perfect confidence in them as they 
 are, which it is a large part of ordinary 
 education to discourage in us, and a large 
 part of experience to repress ? But to 
 Verlaine, happily, experience taught nothing ; 
 or rather, it taught him only to cling the 
 more closely to those moods in whose suc- 
 cession lies the more intimate part of our 
 spiritual life. 
 
 It is no doubt well for society that man 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 81 
 
 should learn by experience ; for the artist 
 the benefit is doubtful. The artist, it cannot 
 be too clearly understood, has no more part 
 in society than a monk in domestic life : he 
 cannot be judged by its rules, he can be 
 neither praised nor blamed for his acceptance 
 or rejection of its conventions. Social rules 
 are made by normal people for normal 
 people, and the man of genius is funda- 
 mentally abnormal. It is the poet against 
 society, society against the poet, a direct 
 antagonism ; the shock of which, however, 
 it is often possible to avoid by a compromise. 
 So much licence is allowed on the one side, 
 so much liberty foregone on the other. The 
 consequences are not always of the best, 
 art being generally the loser. But there 
 are certain natures to which compromise 
 is impossible ; and the nature of Verlaine 
 was one of these natures. 
 
 " The soul of an immortal child," says 
 one who has understood him better than 
 others, Charles Morice, "that is the soul 
 of Verlaine, with all the privileges and all 
 the perils of so being : with the sudden 
 despair so easily distracted, the vivid gaieties 
 without a cause, the excessive suspicions 
 
 F 
 
82 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 and the excessive confidences, the whims so 
 easily outwearied, the deaf and blind infatua- 
 tions, with, especially, the unceasing renewal 
 of impressions in the incorruptible integrity 
 of personal vision and sensation. Years, 
 influences, teachings, may pass over a tem- 
 perament such as this, may irritate it, may 
 fatigue it ; transform it, never — never so 
 much as to alter that particular unity which 
 consists in a dualism, in the division of 
 forces between the longing after what is evil 
 and the adoration of what is good ; or rather, 
 in the antagonism of spirit and flesh. Other 
 men ' arrange ' their lives, take sides, follow 
 one direction ; Verlaine hesitates before 
 a choice, which seems to him monstrous, 
 for, with the integral naivete of irrefutable 
 human truth, he cannot resign himself, how- 
 ever strong may be the doctrine, however 
 enticing may be the passion, to the necessity 
 of sacrificing one to the other, and from 
 one to the other he oscillates without a 
 moment's repose." 
 
 It is in such a sense as this that Verlaine 
 may be said to have learnt nothing from 
 experience, in the sense that he learnt 
 everything direct from life, and without 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 83 
 
 comparing day with day. That the exquisite 
 artist of the Files Galantes should become 
 the great poet of Sagesse, it was needful that 
 things should have happened as disastrously 
 as they did : the marriage with the girl- 
 wife, that brief idyl, the passion for drink, 
 those other forbidden passions, vagabondage, 
 an attempted crime, the eighteen months of 
 prison, conversion ; followed, as it had to be, 
 by relapse, bodily sickness, poverty, beggary 
 almost, a lower and lower descent into mean 
 distresses. It was needful that all this 
 should happen, in order that the spiritual 
 vision should eclipse the material vision ; but 
 it was needful that all this should happen 
 in vain, so far as the conduct of life was 
 concerned. Reflection, in Verlaine, is pure 
 waste ; it is the speech of the soul and the 
 speech of the eyes, that we must listen to 
 in his verse, never the speech of the reason. 
 And I call him fortunate because, going 
 through life with a great unconsciousness 
 of what most men spend their lives in con- 
 sidering, he was able to abandon himself 
 entirely to himself, to his unimpeded vision, 
 to his unchecked emotion, to the passionate 
 sincerity which in him was genius. 
 
84 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 II 
 
 French poetry, before Verlaine, was an 
 admirable vehicle for a really fine, a really 
 poetical, kind of rhetoric. With Victor Hugo, 
 for the first time since Eonsard (the two or 
 three masterpieces of Ronsard and his com- 
 panions) it had learnt to sing ; with Baudelaire 
 it had invented a new vocabulary for the ex- 
 pression of subtle, often perverse, essentially 
 modem emotion and sensation. But with 
 Victor Hugo, with Baudelaire, we are still 
 under the dominion of rhetoric. "Take elo- 
 quence, and wring its neck ! " said Verlaine 
 in his Art Po^tique ; and he showed, by writ- 
 ing it, that French verse could be written 
 without rhetoric. It was partly firom his 
 study of English models that he learnt the 
 secret of liberty in verse, but it was much 
 more a secret found by the way, in the mere 
 endeavour to be absolutely sincere, to express 
 exactly what he saw, to give voice to his own 
 temperament, in which intensity of feeling 
 seemed to find its own expression, as if by 
 accident. L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'etre ah- 
 solument soi-mSme, he tells us in one of his 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 85 
 
 later poems ; and, with such a personality as 
 Verlaine's to express, what more has art to 
 do, if it would truly, and in any interesting 
 manner, hold the mirror up to nature ? 
 
 For, consider the natural qualities which 
 this man had for the task of creating a new 
 poetry. " Sincerity, and the impression of 
 the moment followed to the letter " : that 
 is how he defined his theory of style, in an 
 article written about himself. 
 
 Car nous voulons la nuance encor, 
 Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance ! 
 
 as he cries, in his famous Art Podtique. Take, 
 then, his susceptibility of the senses, an emo- 
 tional susceptibility not less delicate ; a life 
 sufiiciently troubled to draw out every emotion 
 of which he was capable, and, with it, that 
 absorption in the moment, that inability to 
 look before or after; the need to love and 
 the need to confess, each a passion; an art 
 of painting the fine shades of landscape, of 
 evoking atmosphere, which can be compared 
 only with the art of Whistler ; a simplicity of 
 language which is the direct outcome of a 
 simplicity of temperament, with just enough 
 consciousness of itself for a final elegance ; 
 
86 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 and, at the very depth of his being, an almost 
 fierce humility, by which the passion of love, 
 after searching furiously through all his crea- 
 tures, finds God by the way, and kneels in 
 the dust before him. Verlaine was never a 
 theorist: he left theories to Mallarm^. He 
 had only his divination ; and he divined that 
 poetry, always desiring that miracles should 
 happen, had never waited patiently enough 
 upon the miracle. It was by that proud and 
 humble mysticism of his temperament that he 
 came to realise how much could be done by, 
 in a sense, trying to do nothing. 
 
 And then : De la musique avant toute 
 chose ; De la musique encore et toujours ! 
 There are poems of Verlaine which go as 
 far as verse can go to become pure music, 
 the voice of a bird with a human soul. It is 
 part of his simplicity, his divine childishness, 
 that he abandons himself, at times, to the 
 song which words begin to sing in the air, 
 with the same wise confidence with which he 
 abandons himself to the other miracles about 
 him. He knows that words are living things, 
 which we have not created, and which go 
 their way without demanding of us the right 
 to live. He knows that words are suspicious. 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 87 
 
 not without their malice, and that they resist 
 mere force with the impalpable resistance of 
 fire or water. They are to be caught only 
 with guile or with trust. Verlaine has both, 
 and words become Ariel to him. They bring 
 him not only that submission of the slave 
 which they bring to others, but all the soul, 
 and in a happy bondage. They transform 
 themselves for him into music, colour, and 
 shadow ; a disembodied music, diaphanous 
 colours, luminous shadow. They serve him 
 with so absolute a self-negation that he can 
 write romances sans paroles, songs almost 
 without words, in which scarcely a sense of 
 the interference of human speech remains. 
 The ideal of lyric poetry, certainly, is to be 
 this passive, flawless medium for the deeper 
 consciousness of things, the mysterious voice 
 of that mystery which lies about us, out of 
 which we have come, and into which we shall 
 return. It is not without reason that we 
 cannot analyse a perfect lyric. 
 
 With Verlaine the sense of hearing and 
 the sense of sight are almost interchangeable : 
 he paints with sound, and his Hne and atmos- 
 phere become music. It was with the most 
 precise accuracy that Whistler applied the 
 
88 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 terms of music to his painting, for painting, 
 when it aims at being the vision of reality, 
 pas la couleur, rien que la nuance, passes 
 almost into the condition of music. Ver- 
 laine's landscape painting is always an evoca- 
 tion, in which outline is lost in atmosphere. 
 
 C'est des beaux yeux derrifere des voiles, 
 C'est le grand jour tremblant de midi, 
 C'est, par un ciel d'automne attifedi, 
 
 Le bleu fouillis des claires etoiles ! 
 
 He was a man, certainly, "for whom the 
 visible world existed," but for whom it 
 existed always as a vision. He absorbed it 
 through all his senses, as the true mystic 
 absorbs the divine beauty. And so he 
 created in verse a new voice for nature, full 
 of the humble ecstasy with which he saw, 
 listened, accepted. 
 
 Oette ^me qui se lamente 
 En cette plaine dormante 
 
 C'est la n6tre, n'est-ce pas ? 
 La mienne, dis, et la tienne, 
 Dont s'exhale I'humble antienne 
 
 Par ce tiMe soir, tout bas ? 
 
 And with the same attentive simplicity 
 with which he foimd words for the sensations 
 of hearing and the sensations of sight, he 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 89 
 
 found words for the sensations of the soul, 
 for the fine shades of feeling. From the 
 moment when his inner life may be said to 
 have begun, he was occupied with the task 
 of an unceasing confession, in which one 
 seems to overhear him talking to himself, in 
 that vague, preoccupied way which he often 
 had. Here again are words which startle 
 one by their delicate resemblance to thoughts, 
 by their winged flight from so far, by their 
 alighting so close. The verse murmurs, with 
 such an ingenuous confidence, such intimate 
 secrets. That " setting free " of verse, which 
 is one of the achievements of Verlaine, was 
 itself mainly an attempt to be more and more 
 sincere, a way of txirning poetic artifice to 
 new account, by getting back to nature itself, 
 hidden away under the eloquent rhetoric of 
 Hugo, Baudelaire, and the Parnassians. In 
 the devotion of rhetoric to either beauty or 
 truth, there is a certain consciousness of an 
 audience, of an external judgment : rhetoric 
 would convince, be admired. It is the very 
 essence of poetry to be unconscious of any- 
 thing between its own moment of flight and 
 the supreme beauty which it will never attain. 
 Verlaine taught French poetry that wise and 
 
90 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 subtle unconsciousness. It was in so doing 
 that he " fused his personality," in the words 
 of Verhaeren, " so profoundly with beauty, 
 that he left upon it the imprint of a new and 
 henceforth eternal attitude." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Xai la fureur d'aimer, says Verlaine, in 
 a passage of very personal significance. 
 
 J'ai la fureur d'aimer. Mon cceur si faible est fou. 
 
 N'importe quand, n'importe quel et n'importe ou, 
 
 Qu'un eclair de beauts, de vertu, de vaillance, 
 
 Luise, 11 s'y prfecipite, il y vole, il y lance, 
 
 Et, le temps d'une ^treinte, il embrasse cent fois 
 
 L'Stre ou I'objet qu'il a poursuivi de son choix ; 
 
 Puis, quand 1' illusion a replie son aile, 
 
 II revient triste et seul bien souvent, mais fidele, 
 
 Et laissant aux ingrats quelque chose de lui. 
 
 Sang ou chair .... 
 
 J'ai la fureur d'aimer. Qu'y f aire ? Ah, laissez f aire ! 
 
 And certainly this admirable, and su- 
 premely dangerous, quality was at the root 
 of Verlaine's nature. Instinctive, unreason- 
 ing as he was, entirely at the mercy of the 
 emotion or impression which, for the moment, 
 had seized upon him, it was inevitable that 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 91 
 
 he should be completely at the mercy of the 
 most imperious of instincts, of passions, and 
 of intoxications. And he had the simple 
 and ardent nature, in this again consistently 
 childlike, to which love, some kind of affec- 
 tion, given or returned, is not the luxury, 
 the exception, which it is to many natures, 
 but a daily necessity. To such a tempera- 
 ment there may or may not be the one great 
 passion ; there wiU certainly be many passions. 
 And in Verlaine I find that single, child- 
 like necessity of loving and being loved, all 
 through his life and on every page of his 
 works ; I find it, unchanged in essence, but 
 constantly changing form, in his chaste and 
 unchaste devotions to women, in his passion- 
 ate friendships with men, in his supreme 
 mystical adoration of God. 
 
 To turn from La Bonne Chanson, written 
 for a wedding present to a young wife, to 
 Chansons pour Elle, written more than 
 twenty years later, in dubious honour of a 
 middle-aged mistress, is to travel a long road, 
 the hard, long road which Verlaine had 
 travelled during those years. His life was 
 ruinous, a disaster, more sordid perhaps than 
 the life of any other poet; and he could 
 
92 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 write of it, from a hospital-bed, with this 
 quite sufficient sense of its deprivations. 
 " But all the same, it is hard," he laments, 
 in Mes Hdpitaux, " after a life of work, set 
 off, I admit, with accidents in which I have 
 had a large share, catastrophes perhaps 
 vaguely premeditated — it is hard, I say, at 
 forty-seven years of age, in fuU possession 
 of aU the reputation (of the success, to use 
 the frightful current phrase) to which my 
 highest ambitions could aspire — hard, hard, 
 hard indeed, worse than hard, to find myself 
 — good God ! — to find myself on the streets, 
 and to have nowhere to lay my head and 
 support an ageing body save the pillows and 
 the menus of a public charity, even now 
 uncertain, and which might at any moment 
 be withdrawn — God forbid ! — without, appar- 
 ently, the fault of any one, oh ! not even, 
 and above all, not mine." Yet, after aU, 
 these sordid miseries, this poor man's vaga- 
 bondage, all the misfortunes of one certainly 
 " irreclaimable," on which so much stress has 
 been laid, alike by friends and by foes, are 
 externalities ; they are not the man ; the 
 man, the eternal lover, passionate and humble, 
 remains unchanged, while only his shadow 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 93 
 
 wanders, from morning to night of the long 
 day. 
 
 The poems to Rimbaud, to Lucien L^tinois, 
 to others, the whole volume of Dedicaces, 
 cover perhaps as wide a range of sentiment 
 as La Bonne Chanson and Chansons pour 
 Elle. The poetry of friendship has never 
 been sung with such plaintive sincerity, such 
 simple human feeling, as in some of these 
 poems, which can only be compared, in 
 modern poetry, with a poem for which 
 Verlaine had a great admiration, Tennyson's 
 In Memoriam. Only, with Verlaine, the 
 thing itself, the affection or the regret, is 
 everything ; there is no room for meditation 
 over destiny, or search for a problematical 
 consolation. Other poems speak a more 
 difficult language, in which, doubtless, Vennui 
 de vivre avec les gens et dans les choses counts 
 for much, and lafureur d' aimer for more. 
 
 In spite of the general impression to the 
 contrary, ail impression which by no means 
 displeased him himself, I must contend that 
 the sensuaHty of Verlaine, brutal as it could 
 sometimes be, was after all simple rather 
 than complicated, instinctive rather than 
 perverse. In the poetry of Baudelaire, with 
 
94 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 which the poetry of Verlaine is so often 
 compared, there is a deliberate science of 
 sensual perversity which has something 
 almost monachal in its accentuation of vice 
 with horror, in its passionate devotion to 
 passions. Baudelaire brings every compli- 
 cation of taste, the exasperation of perfumes, 
 the irritant of cruelty, the very odours and 
 colours of corruption, to the creation and 
 adornment of a sort of religion, in which an 
 eternal mass is served before a veiled altar. 
 There is no confession, no absolution, not a 
 prayer is permitted which is not set down 
 in the ritual. With Verlaine, however often 
 love may pass into sensuahty, to whatever 
 length sensuality may be hurried, sensuality 
 is never more than the malady of love. It 
 is love desiring the absolute, seeking in vain, 
 seeking always, and, finally, out of the depths, 
 finding God. 
 
 Verlaine's conversion took place while he 
 was in prison, during those solitary eighteen 
 months in company with his thoughts, that 
 enforced physical inactivity, which could but 
 concentrate his whole energy on the only 
 kind of sensation then within his capacity, the 
 sensations of the soul and of the conscience. 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 95 
 
 With that promptitude of abandonment which 
 was his genius, he grasped feverishly at the 
 succour of God and the Church, he abased 
 himself before the immaculate purity of the 
 Virgin. He had not, like others who have 
 risen from the same depths to the same 
 height of humiliation, to despoil his nature 
 of its pride, to conquer his intellect, before 
 he could become Venfant vetu de laine et 
 d'innocence. All that was simple, humble, 
 childlike in him accepted that humiliation 
 with the loving child's joy in penitence ; all 
 that was ardent, impulsive, indomitable in 
 him burst at once into a flame of adoration. 
 
 He realised the great secret of the Christian 
 mystics : that it is possible to love God with 
 an extravagance of the whole being, to which 
 the love of the creature cannot attain. All 
 love is an attempt to break through the 
 loneliness of individuality, to fuse oneself 
 with something not oneself, to give and to 
 receive, in all the warmth of natural desire, 
 that inmost element which remains, so cold 
 and so invincible, in the midst of the soul. 
 It is a desire of the infinite in humanity, and, 
 as humanity has its limits, it can but return 
 sadly upon itself when that limit is reached. 
 
96 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Thus human love is not only an ecstasy but 
 a despair, and the more profound a despair 
 the more ardently it is returned. 
 
 But the love of God, considered only from 
 its human aspect, contains at least the illusion 
 of infinity. To love God is to love the ab- 
 solute, so far as the mind of man can con- 
 ceive the absolute, and thus, in a sense, to 
 love God is to possess the absolute, for love 
 has already possessed that which it appre- 
 hends. What the earthly lover realises to 
 himself as the image of his beloved is, after 
 all, his own vision of love, not her. God must 
 remain deus absconditus, even to love ; but the 
 lover, incapable of possessing infinity, will have 
 possessed all of infinity of which he is capable. 
 And his ecstasy will be flawless. The human 
 mind, meditating on infinity, can but discover 
 perfection beyond perfection; for it is im- 
 possible to conceive of limitation in any 
 aspect of that which has once been conceived 
 as infinite. In place of that deception which 
 comes from the shock of a boundary-line 
 beyond which humanity cannot conceive of 
 humanity, there is only a divine rage against 
 the limits of human perception, which by 
 their own failure seem at last to limit for us 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 97 
 
 the infinite itself. For once, love finds itself 
 bounded only by its own capacity ; so far 
 does tbe love of God exceed the love of the 
 creature, and so far vp^ould it exceed that love 
 if God did not exist. 
 
 But if he does exist ! if, outside humanity, 
 a conscient, eternal perfection, who has made 
 the world in his image, loves the humanity 
 he has made, and demands love in return ! 
 If the spirit of his love is as a breath over 
 the world, suggesting, strengthening, the love 
 which it desires, seeking man that man may 
 seek God, itself tlie impulse which it humbles 
 itself to accept at man's hands ; if, indeed, 
 
 Mon Dieu m'a dit : mon fils, il faut m'aimer ; 
 
 how much more is this love of God, in its 
 inconceivable acceptance and exchange, the 
 most divine, the only unending, intoxication 
 in the world ! Well, it is this realised sense 
 of communion, point by point realised, and 
 put into words, more simple, more human, 
 more, instinctive than any poet since the 
 mediseval mystics has found for the delights 
 of this intercourse, that we find in Sagesse, 
 and in the other religious poems of Ver- 
 laine. 
 
98 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 But, with Verlaine, the love of God is not 
 merely a rapture, it is a thanksgiving for 
 forgiveness. Lying in wait behind all the 
 fair appearances of the world, he remembers 
 the old enemy, the flesh ; and the sense of 
 sin (that strange paradox of the reason) is 
 childishly strong in him. He laments his 
 oflFence, he sees not only the love but the 
 justice of God, and it seems to him, as in 
 a picture, that the little hands of the Virgin 
 are clasped in petition for him. Verlaine's 
 religion is the religion of the Middle Ages. 
 Je suis catholique, he said to me, mais .... 
 caiholique du moyen-dgel He might have 
 written the baUad which ViUon made for his 
 mother, and with the same visual sense of 
 heaven and hell. Like a child, he tells his 
 sins over, promises that he has put them 
 behind him, and finds such naive, human 
 words to express his gratitude. The Virgin 
 is really, to him, mother and friend ; he 
 delights in the simple, peasant humanity, 
 still visible in her who is also the Mysti- 
 cal Rose, the Tower of Ivory, the Gate of 
 Heaven, and who now extends her hands, 
 in the gesture of pardon, from a throne only 
 just lower than the throne of God. 
 
PAUL VERLAINE 99 
 
 IV 
 
 Experience, I have said, taught Verlaine 
 nothing ; religion had no more stable influence 
 upon his conduct than experience. In that 
 apology for himself which he wrote under 
 the anagram of " Pauwe Lelian," he has 
 stated the case with his usual sincerity. " I 
 believe," he says, " and I sin in thought as 
 in action ; I believe, and I repent in thought, 
 if no more. Or again, I believe, and I am 
 a good Christian at this moment; I believe, 
 and I am a bad Christian the instant after. 
 The remembrance, the hope, the invocation of 
 a sin delights me, with or without remorse, 
 sometimes under the very form of sin, and 
 hedged with all its natural consequences ; 
 more often — so strong, so natural and animal, 
 are flesh and blood — ^just in the same manner 
 as the remembrances, hopes, invocations of 
 any carnal freethinker. This delight, I, you, 
 some one else, writers, it pleases us to put to 
 paper and publish more or less well expressed : 
 we consign it, in short, into literary form, 
 forgetting all religious ideas, or not letting 
 one of them escape us. Can any one in good 
 
100 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 faith condemn us as poet? A hundred times 
 no." And, indeed, I would echo, a hundred 
 times no ! It is just this apparent complica- 
 tion of what is really a great simplicity which 
 gives - its singular value to the poetry of 
 Verlaine, permitting it to sum up in itself 
 the whole paradox of humanity, and especi- 
 ally the weak, passionate, uncertain, troubled 
 century to which we belong, in which so 
 many doubts, negations, and distresses seem, 
 now more than ever, to be struggling towards 
 at least an ideal of spiritual consolation. 
 Verlaine is the poet of these weaknesses 
 and of that ideal. 
 
JULES LAFORGUE 
 
 Jules Lafokgue was born at Montevideo, of 
 Breton parents, August 20, 1860. He died 
 in Paris in 1887, two days before his twenty- 
 seventh birthday. From 1880 to 1886 he 
 had been reader to the Empress Augusta at 
 Berlin. He married only a few months be- 
 fore his death. U allures? says M. Gustave 
 Kahn, fort correctes, de hauts gibus, des 
 cravates sobres, des vestons anglais, des par- 
 dessus clergymans, et de pa/r les n^cessit^S, 
 un parapluie immuablement place sous le 
 bras. His portraits show us a clean-shaved, 
 reticent face, betraying little. With such a 
 personality anecdotes have but small chance 
 of appropriating those details by which ex- 
 pansive natures express themselves to the 
 world. We know nothing about Laforgue 
 which his work is not better able to tell us, 
 even now that we have all his notes^ un- 
 finished fragments, and the letters of an 
 almost virginal naivetS which he wrote to 
 
 101 
 
102 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 the woman whom he was going to marry. 
 His entire work, apart from these additions, 
 is contained in two small volumes, one of 
 prose, the Moralites Ldgendaires, the other 
 of verse, Les Oomplaintes, L'Imitation de 
 Notre-Dame la Lune, and a few other pieces, 
 all published during the last three years of 
 his life. 
 
 The prose and verse of Laforgue, scrupu- 
 lously correct, but with a new manner of 
 correctness, owe more than any one has real- 
 ised to the half-unconscious prose and verse 
 of Rimbaud. Verse and prose are alike a 
 kind of travesty, making subtle use of collo- 
 quialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, 
 for their allusive, their factitious, their re- 
 flected meanings, with which one can play, 
 very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, 
 swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhe- 
 toric so piously that it prefers, and finds its 
 piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious. It is 
 really vers lihre, but at the same time correct 
 verse, before vers libre had been invented. 
 And it carries, as far as that theory has 
 ever been carried, the theory which demands 
 an instantaneous notation (Whistler, let us 
 say) of the figure or landscape which one 
 
JULES LAFORGUE 103 
 
 has been accustomed to dej&ne with such 
 rigorous exactitude. Verse, always elegant, 
 is broken up into a kind of mockery of 
 prose. 
 
 Encore un de mea pierrots mort ; 
 
 Mort d'un chronique orphelinisme ; 
 
 C'^tait un coeur plein de daudysme 
 Lunaire, en un dr61e de corps ; 
 
 he will say to us, with a familiarity of 
 manner, as of one talking languidly, in 
 a low voice, the lips always teased into a 
 slightly bitter smile; and he will pass sud- 
 denly into the ironical lilt of 
 
 Hotel garni 
 De I'infini, 
 
 Sphinx et Joconde 
 Des d^funts mondes ; 
 
 and from that into this solemn and smil- 
 ing end of one of his last poems, his own 
 epitaph, if you will : 
 
 II prit froid I'autre automne, 
 
 S'^tant attardi vers les peines des cors, 
 
 Sur la fin d'un beau jour. 
 
 Oh ! ce fut pour vos cors, et ce fut pour I'automne, 
 
 Qu'il nous montra qu' " on meurt d'amour ! " 
 
104 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 On ne le verra plus aux fStes nationales, 
 S'enfermer dans I'Histoire et tirer les verrous, 
 II vint trop tard, il est reparti sans scaudale ; 
 vous qui m'^coutez, rentrez chaoun chez vous. 
 
 The old cadences, the old eloquence, the 
 ingenuous seriousness of poetry, are all 
 banished, on a theory as self-denying as 
 that which permitted Degas to dispense with 
 recognisable beauty in his figures. Here, if 
 ever, is modern verse, verse which dispenses 
 with so many of the privileges of poetry, for 
 an ideal quite of its own. It is, after all, 
 a' very self-conscious ideal, becoming arti- 
 ficial through its extreme naturalness ; for 
 in poetry it is not "natural" to say things 
 quite so much in the manner of the moment, 
 with however ironical an intention. 
 
 The prose of the Moralit^s Legendaires is 
 perhaps even more of a discovery. Finding 
 its origin, as I have pointed out, in the 
 experimental prose of Eimbaud, it carries 
 that manner to a singular perfection. Dis- 
 articulated, abstract, mathematically lyrical, 
 it gives expression, in its icy ecstasy, to a 
 very subtle criticism of the universe, with 
 a surprising irony of cosmical vision. We 
 learn from books of mediaeval magic that 
 
JULES LAFORGUE 105 
 
 the embraces of the devil are of a coldness 
 so intense that it may be called, by an allow- 
 able figure of speech, fiery. Everything may 
 be as strongly its opposite as itself, and that 
 is why this balanced, chill, coUoquial style 
 of Laforgue has, in the paradox of its in- 
 tensity, the essential heat of the most ob- 
 viously emotional prose. The prose is more 
 patient than the verse, with its more com- 
 passionate laughter at universal experience. 
 It can laugh as seriously, as profoundly, 
 as in that graveyard monologue of Hamlet, 
 Laforgue's Hamlet, who, Maeterlinck ven- 
 tures to say, "is at moments more Hamlet 
 than the Hamlet of Shakespeare." Let me 
 translate a few sentences from it. 
 
 " Perhaps I have still twenty or thirty 
 years to live, and I shall pass that way like 
 the others. Like the ^others ? O Totality, 
 the misery of being there no longer ! Ah ! 
 I would like to set out to-morrow, and 
 search all through the world for the most 
 adamantine processes of embalming. They, 
 too, were, the little people of History, learn- 
 ing to read, trimming their nails, lighting 
 the dirty lamp every evening, in love, 
 gluttonous, vain, fond of compliments, hand- 
 
106 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 shakes, and kisses, living on bell-tower 
 gossip, saying, ' What sort of weather shall 
 we have to-morrow? Winter has really 
 come. . . . We have had no plums this 
 year.' Ah ! everything is good, if it would 
 not come to an end. And thou. Silence, 
 pardon the Earth; the little madcap hardly 
 knows what she is doing ; on the day of the 
 great summing-up of consciousness before the 
 Ideal, she wiU be labelled with a pitiful idem 
 in the column of the miniature evolutions 
 of the Unique Evolution, in the column 
 of negligeable quantities ... To die ! 
 Evidently, one dies without knowing it, as, 
 every night, one enters upon sleep. One 
 has no consciousness of the passing of the 
 last lucid thought into sleep, into swooning, 
 into death. Evidently. But to be no more, 
 to be here no more, to be ours no more ! 
 Not even to be able, any more, to press 
 against one's human heart, some idle after- 
 noon, the ancient sadness contained in one 
 little chord on the piano ! " 
 
 In these always "lunar" parodies, Salome, 
 Lohengrin, Fits de Parsifal, Persee et 
 Androm^de, each a kind of metaphysical 
 myth, he realises that la crSature va hardi- 
 
JULES LAFORGUE 107 
 
 ment d, itre ce'rSbrale, anti-naturelle, and he 
 has invented these fantastic puppets with an 
 almost Japanese art of spiritual dislocation. 
 They are, in part, a way of taking one's 
 revenge upon science, by an ironical borrow- 
 ing of its very terms, which dance in his 
 prose and verse, derisively, at the end of a 
 string. 
 
 In his acceptance of the fragility of things 
 as actually a principle of art, Laforgue is a 
 sort of transformed Watteau, showing his 
 disdain for the world which fascinates him, 
 in quite a different way. He has con- 
 structed his own world, lunar and actual, 
 speaking slang and astronomy, with a constant 
 disengaging of the visionary aspect, under 
 which frivolity becomes an escape from the 
 arrogance of a still more temporary mode 
 of being, the world as it appears to the 
 sober majority. He is terribly conscious of 
 daily life, cannot omit, mentally, a single 
 hour of the day ; and his flight to the moon 
 is in sheer desperation. He sees what he 
 calls VInconscient in every gesture, but he 
 cannot see it without these gestures. And 
 he sees, not only as an imposition, but as 
 a conquest, the possibilities for art which 
 
108 THE symb;olist movement 
 
 come from the sickly modern being, with his 
 clothes, his nerves : the mere fact that he 
 flowers from the soil of his epoch. 
 
 It is an art of the nerves, this art of 
 Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend 
 towards if we followed our nerves on all 
 their journeys. There is in it all the restless- 
 ness of modern life, the haste to escape from 
 whatever weighs too heavily on the liberty 
 of the moment, that capricious liberty which 
 demands only room enough to hurry itself 
 weary. It is distressingly conscious of the 
 unhappiness of mortality, but it plays, some- 
 what uneasily, at a disdainful indifference. 
 And it is out of these elements of caprice, 
 fear, contempt, linked together by an em- 
 bracing laughter, that it makes its existence. 
 
 II ny a pas de type, il y a la vie, La- 
 forgue replies to those who come to him 
 with classical ideals. Votre ideal est hien 
 vite magnifiquement submerge', in life itself, 
 which should form its own art, an art 
 deliberately ephemeral, with the attaching 
 pathos of passing things. There is a great 
 pity at the root of this art of Laforgue : 
 self-pity, which extends, with the artistic 
 sympathy, through mere clearness of vision. 
 
JULES LAFORGUE 109 
 
 across the world. His laughter, which 
 Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as 
 " the laughter of the soul," is the laughter 
 of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken 
 out of him with a deplorable gesture of the 
 thin arms, thrown wide. He is a meta- 
 physical Pierrot, Pierrot lunaire, and it is 
 of abstract notions, the whole science of the 
 unconscious, that he makes his showman's 
 patter. As it is part of his manner not to 
 distinguish between irony and pity, or even 
 beUef, we need not attempt to do so. Heine 
 should teach us to understand at least so 
 much of a poet who could not otherwise 
 resemble him less. In Laforgue, sentiment 
 is squeezed out of the world before one 
 begins to play at ball with it. 
 
 And so, of the two, he is the more hope- 
 less. He has invented a new manner of 
 being Ren^ or Werther : an inflexible polite- 
 ness towards man, woman, and destiny. He 
 composes love-poems hat in hand, and smiles 
 with an exasperating tolerance before all 
 the transformations of the eternal feminine. 
 He is very conscious of death, but his hlague 
 of death is, above all things, gentlemanly. 
 He will not permit himself, at any moment. 
 
110 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 the luxury of dropping the mask : not at 
 any moment. 
 
 Read this Autre Complainte de Lord 
 Pierrot, with the singular pity of its cruelty, 
 before such an imagined dropping of the 
 mask : 
 
 Celle qui doit me mettre au courant do la Femme ! 
 
 Nous lui dirons d'abord, de mon air le moins froid : 
 " La somme des angles d'un triangle, ch^re ame, 
 Est ^gale k deux droits. " 
 
 Et si ce cri lui part : " Uieu de Dieu que je t'aime ! " 
 
 — " Dieu reconnaltra les siens." Ou piqu6e au vif : 
 — " Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu sera mon seul th^me.'' 
 Moi : " Tout est relatif ." 
 
 De tous ses yeux, alors ! se sentant trop banale : 
 
 " Ah ! tu ne m'aime pas ; tant d'autres sont jaloux ! " 
 Et moi, d'un ceil qui vers I'lnoonscient s'emballe : 
 " Merci, pas mal ; et vous ? " 
 
 " Jouons au plus &dhle ! " — A quoi bon, 6 Nature ! 
 
 " Autant h, qui perd gagne." Alors, autre couplet : 
 — " Ah ! tu te lasseras le premier, j'en suis sHre." 
 — " Aprfes vous, s'il vous plait." 
 
 Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres. 
 
 Douce ; feignant de n'en pas croire encor mes yeux, 
 J'aurai un : " Ah gk, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre ! 
 0'6tait done s^rieux ? " 
 
JULES LAFORGUE 111 
 
 And yet one realises, if one but reads him 
 attentively enough, how much suffering and 
 despair, and resignation to what is, after all, 
 the inevitable, are hidden away under this 
 disguise, and also why this disguise is pos- 
 sible. Laforgue died at twenty-seven : he had 
 been a dying man all his life, and his work 
 has the fatal evasiveness of those who shrink 
 from remembering the one thing which they 
 are unable to forget. Coming as he does 
 after Rimbaud, turning the divination of the 
 other into theories, into achieved results, he 
 is the eternally grown up, mature to the 
 point of self-negation, as the other is the 
 eternal enfant terrible. He thinks intensely 
 about life, seeing what is automatic, pathe- 
 tically ludicrous in it, almost as one might 
 who has no part in the comedy. He has the 
 double advantage, for his art, of being con- 
 demned to death, and of being, in the admir- 
 able phrase of Villiers, " one of those who 
 come into the world with a ray of moonlight 
 in their brains." 
 
ST^PHAKE MALLARMfi 
 
 St^phane Mallarm:^ was one of those who 
 love literature too much to write it except by 
 fragments ; in whom the desire of perfection 
 brings its own defeat. With either more or 
 less ambition he would have done more to 
 achieve himself; he was always divided be- 
 tween an absolute aim at the absolute, that 
 is, the unattainable, and a too logical disdain 
 for the compromise by which, after all, 
 literature is literature. Carry the theories of 
 MaUarm^ to a practical conclusion, multiply 
 his powers in a direct ratio, and you have 
 Wagner. It is his failure not to be Wagner. 
 And, Wagner having existed, it was for him 
 to be something more, to complete Wagner. 
 WeU, not being able to be that, it was a mat- 
 ter of sincere indifference to him whether he 
 left one or two little, limited masterpieces of 
 formal verse and prose, the more or the less. 
 
 112 
 
ST^PHANE MALLARMHa 113 
 
 It was " the work " that he dreamed of, the 
 new art, more than a new religion, whose 
 precise form in the world he was never quite 
 able to settle. 
 
 Un auteur difficile, in the phrase of M. 
 Catulle Mendfes, it has always been to what 
 he himself calls " a labyrinth illuminated by 
 flowers" that Mallarmd has felt it due to 
 their own dignity to invite his readers. To 
 their own dignity, and also to his. MaUarm^ 
 was obscure, not so much because he wrote 
 diflferently, as because he thought differently, 
 from other people. His mind was elliptical, 
 and, relying with undue confidence on the 
 intelligence of his readers, he emphasised 
 the effect of what was unlike other people 
 in his mind by resolutely ignoring even the 
 links of connection that existed between 
 them. Never having aimed at popularity, 
 he never needed, as most writers need, to 
 make the first advances. He made neither 
 intrusion upon nor concession to those who, 
 after all, were not obliged to read him. And 
 when he -spoke, he considered it neither 
 needful nor seemly to listen in order to hear 
 whether he was heard. To the charge of 
 obscurity he replied, with sufficient disdain, 
 
 H 
 
114 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 that there are many who do not know how 
 to read — except the newspaper, he adds, in 
 one of those disconcerting, oddly-printed 
 parentheses, which make his work, to those 
 who rightly apprehend it, so fall of wise 
 limitations, so safe from hasty or seemingly 
 final conclusions. No one in our time has 
 more significantly vindicated the supreme 
 right of the artist in the aristocracy of letters ; 
 wUfally, perhaps, not always wisely, but 
 nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk 
 from that making of himself " a motley to 
 the view," that handing over of his naked 
 soul to the laughter of the multitude ? But 
 who, in our time, has wrought so subtle a 
 veil, shining on this side, where the few are, 
 a thick cloud on the other, where are the 
 many? The oracles have always had the 
 wisdom to hide their secrets in the obscurity 
 of many meanings, or of what has seemed 
 meaningless ; and might it not, after all, be 
 the finest epitaph for a self-respecting man 
 of letters to be able to say, even after the 
 vsrriting of many books : I have kept my 
 secret, I have not betrayed myself to the 
 multitude ? 
 
 But to MaUarm^, certainly, there might 
 
STfiPHANE MALLARM^ 115 
 
 be applied the significant warning of Kos- 
 setti : 
 
 Yet woe to thee if once thou yield 
 Unto the act of doing nought ! 
 
 After a life of persistent devotion to literature, 
 he has left enough poems to make a single 
 small volume (less, certainly, than a hundred 
 poems in all), a single volume of prose, a 
 few pamphlets, and a prose translation of the 
 poems of Poe. It is because among these 
 there are masterpieces, poems which are 
 among the most beautiful poems written in 
 our time, prose which has all the subtlest 
 qualities of prose, that, quitting the abstract 
 point of view, we are forced to regret the 
 fatal enchantments, fatal for him, of theories 
 which are so greatly needed by others, so 
 valuable for our instruction, if we are only a 
 little careful in putting them into practice. 
 
 In estimating the significance of St^phane 
 MaUarm^, it is necessary to take into account 
 not only his verse and prose, but, almost 
 more than these, the Tuesdays of the Eue de 
 Rome, in which he gave himself freely to 
 more than one generation. No one who has 
 ever climbed those four flights of stairs will 
 
116 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 have forgotten the narrow, homely interior, 
 elegant with a sort of scrupulous Dutch 
 comfort; the heavy, carved furniture, the 
 tall clock, the portraits, Manet's, Whistler's, 
 on the walls ; the table on which the china 
 bowl, odorous with tobacco, was pushed from 
 hand to hand ; above aU, the rocking-chair, 
 MaUarm^'s, from which he would rise quietly, 
 to stand leaning his elbow on the mantel- 
 piece, while one hand, the hand which did 
 not hold the cigarette, would sketch out one 
 of those familiar gestures : un peu de pritre, 
 un peu de danseuse (in M. Rodenbach's 
 admirable phrase), avec lesquels il avait I'air 
 chaque fois cZ'entrer dans la conversation, 
 comme on entre en scene. One of the best 
 talkers of our time, he was, unlike most 
 other fine talkers, harmonious with his own 
 theories in giving no monologues, in allowing 
 every liberty to his guests, to the conversa- 
 tion ; in his perfect readiness to follow the 
 slightest indication, to embroider upon any 
 frame, with any material presented to him. 
 There would have been something almost 
 of the challenge of the improvisatore in 
 this easily moved alertness of mental attitude, 
 had it not been for the singular gentleness 
 
ST^PHANE MALLARMfi 117 
 
 with whicli Mallarmd's intelligence moved, 
 in" these considerable feats, with the half- 
 apologetic negligence of the perfect acrobat. 
 He seemed to be no more than brushing the 
 dust off your own ideas, settling, arranging 
 them a little, before he gave them back to 
 you, surprisingly luminous. It was only 
 afterwards that you realised how small had 
 been your own part in the matter, as well as 
 what it meant to have enlightened without 
 dazzling you. But there was always the 
 feeling of comradeship, the comradeship of a 
 master, whom, while you were there at least, 
 you did not question ; and that very feeling 
 lifted you, in your own estimation, nearer 
 to art. 
 
 Invaluable, it seems to me, those Tuesdays 
 must have been to the young men of two 
 generations who have been making French 
 literature ; they were unique, certainly, in 
 the experience of the young Englishman 
 who was always so cordially received there, 
 with so flattering a cordiality. Here was a 
 house in which art, literature, was the very 
 atmosphere, a religious atmosphere ; and 
 the master of the house, in his just a little 
 solemn simplicity, a priest. I never heard 
 
118 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 the price of a book mentioned, or the number 
 of thousand francs which a popular author 
 had been paid for his last volume ; here, in 
 this one literary house, literature was un- 
 known as a trade. And, above all, the 
 questions that were discussed were never, 
 at least, in Mallarm^'s treatment, in his 
 guidance of them, other than essential 
 questions, considerations of art in the 
 abstract, of literature before it coagulates 
 into a book, of life as its amusing and 
 various web spins the stuff of art. When, 
 indeed, the conversation, by some untimely 
 hazard, drifted too near to one, became for a 
 moment, perhaps inconveniently, practical, it 
 was Mallarm^'s solicitous politeness to wait, 
 a little constrained, almost uneasy, rolling 
 his cigarette in silence, untU the disturbing 
 moment had passed. 
 
 There were other disturbing moments, 
 sometimes. I remember one night, rather 
 late, the sudden irruption of M. de Heredia, 
 coming on after a dinner-party, and seating 
 himself, in his weU-filled evening dress, pre- 
 cisely in Mallarm^'s favourite chair. He was 
 intensely amusing, voluble, floridly vehement ; 
 Mallarm^, I am sure, was delighted to see 
 
ST^PHANE MALLARMfi 119 
 
 him ; but the loud voice was a Httle trying 
 to his nerves, and then he did not know 
 what to do without his chair. He was like 
 a cat that has been turned out of its favour- 
 ite corner, as he roamed uneasily about the 
 room, resting an unaccustomed elbow on the 
 sideboard, visibly at a disadvantage. 
 
 For the attitude of those young men, some 
 of them no longer exactly young, who fre- 
 quented the Tuesdays, was certainly the 
 attitude of the disciple. Mallarm^ never 
 exacted it, he seemed never to notice it ; 
 yet it meant to him, all the same, a good 
 deal; as it meant, and in the best sense, a 
 good deal to them. He loved art with a 
 supreme disinterestedness, and it was for 
 the sake of art that he wished to be really 
 a master. For he knew that he had some- 
 thing to teach, that he had found out some 
 secrets worth knowing, that he had dis- 
 covered a point of view which he could to 
 some degree perpetuate in those young men 
 who listened to him. And to them this 
 free kind of apprenticeship was, beyond all 
 that it gave in direct counsels, in the pattern 
 of work, a noble influence. Mallarm^'s quiet, 
 laborious hfe was for some of them the 
 
120 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 only counterpoise to the Bohemian example 
 of the d'Harcourt or the Taverne, where art 
 is loved, but with something of haste, in a 
 very changing devotion. It was impossible 
 to come away from Mallarm^'s without some 
 tranquillising influence from that quiet place, 
 some impersonal ambition towards excel- 
 lence, the resolve, at least, to write a sonnet, 
 a page of prose, that should be in its own 
 way as perfect as one could make it, worthy 
 of Mallarm^. 
 
 II 
 
 " Poetry," said Mallarm^, " is the language 
 of a state of crisis " ; and all his poems are 
 the evocation of a passing ecstasy, aiTested 
 in mid-flight. This ecstasy is never the 
 mere instinctive cry of the heart, the simple 
 human joy or sorrow, which, like the Par- 
 nassians, but for not quite the same reason, 
 he did not admit in poetry. It is a mental 
 transposition of emotion or sensation, veiled 
 with atmosphere, and becoming, as it be- 
 comes a poem, pure beauty. Here, for in- 
 stance, in a poem which I have translated 
 line for lincj and almost word for word. 
 
ST^PHANE MALLARMfi 121 
 
 a delicate emotion, a figure vaguely divined, 
 a landscape magically evoked, blend in a 
 single effect. 
 
 SIGH 
 
 My soul, calm sister, towards thy brow, whereon scarce 
 
 grieves 
 An autumn strewn already with its russet leaves, 
 And towards the wandering sky of thine angelic eyea, 
 Mounts, as in m.elancholy gardens may arise 
 Some faithful fountain sighing whitely towards the 
 
 blue! 
 — Towards the blue pale and pure that sad October 
 
 knew. 
 When, in those depths, it mirrored languors infinite. 
 And agonising leaves upon the waters white, 
 Windily drifting, traced a furrow cold and dun. 
 Where, in one long last ray, lingered the yellow sun. 
 
 Another poem comes a little closer to 
 nature, but with what exquisite precautions, 
 and with what surprising novelty in its un- 
 hesitating touch on actual things ! 
 
 SEA-WIND 
 
 The flesh is sad, alas ! and all the books are read. 
 Flight, only flight ! I feel that birds are wild to tread 
 The floor of unknown foam, and to attain the skies ! 
 Nought, neither ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes, 
 
122 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Shall hold this heart that bathes in waters its delight, 
 
 nights ! nor yet my waking lamp, whose lonely light 
 Shadows the vacant paper, whiteness profits best, 
 Nor the young wife who rocks her baby on her breast. 
 
 1 will depart. steamer, swaying rope and spar. 
 Lift anchor for exotic lands that lie afar ! 
 
 . A weariness, outworn by cruel hopes, still clings 
 To the last farewell handerchief's last beckonings ! 
 And are not these, the masts inviting storms, not these 
 That an awakening wind bends over wrecking seas, 
 Lost, not a sail, a sail, a flowering isle, ere long ? 
 But, O my heart, hear thou, hear thou the sailors' 
 song 1 ' 
 
 These (need I say?) belong to the earlier 
 period, in which Mallarmd had not yet with- 
 drawn his light into the cloud; and to the 
 same period belong the prose-poems, one of 
 which, perhaps the most exquisite, I will 
 translate here. 
 
 "AUTUMN LAMENT 
 
 "Ever since Maria left me, for another 
 star — which? Orion, Altair, or thou, green 
 Venus?— I have always cherished solitude. 
 How many long days I have passed, alone 
 with my cat ! By alone, I mean without 
 a material being, and my cat is a mystical 
 companion, a spirit. I may say, then, that 
 
stjSphane mallarmjI; 123 
 
 I have passed long days alone with my cat, 
 and alone, with one of the last writers of 
 the Eoman decadence; for since the white 
 creature is no more, strangely and singularly, 
 I have loved all that may be summed up 
 in the word : fall. Thus, in the year, my 
 favourite season is during those last languid 
 summer days which come just before the 
 autumn ; and, in the day, the hour when I 
 take my walk is the hour when the sun 
 lingers before fading, with rays of copper- 
 yellow on the grey waUs, and of copper-red 
 on the window-panes. And, just so, the 
 literature from which my soul demands de- 
 light must be the poetry dying out of the 
 last moments of Rome, provided, neverthe- 
 less, that it breathes nothing of the rejuven- 
 ating approach of the Barbarians, and does 
 not stammer the infantile Latin of the first 
 Christian prose. 
 
 " I read, then, one of those beloved poems 
 (whose streaks of rouge have more charm 
 for me than the fresh cheek of youth), and 
 buried my hand in the fur of the pure 
 animal, when a barrel-organ began to sing, 
 languishingly and melancholy, under my 
 window. It played in the long alley of 
 
124 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 poplars, whose leaves seem mournful to me 
 even in spring, since Maria passed that way 
 with the tapers, for the last time. Yes, sad 
 people's instrument, truly : the piano glitters, 
 the violin brings one's torn fibres to the 
 light, but the barrel-organ, in the twilight of 
 memory, has set me despairingly dreaming. 
 While it murmured a gaily vulgar air, such 
 as puts mirth into the heart of the suburbs, 
 an old-fashioned, an empty air, how came it 
 that its refrain went to my very soul, and 
 made me weep like a romantic ballad? I 
 drank it in, and I did not throw a penny 
 out of the window, for fear of disturbing my 
 own impression, and of perceiving that the 
 instrument was not singing by itself." 
 
 Between these characteristic, clear, and 
 beautiful poems, in verse and in prose, and 
 the opaque darkness of the later writings, 
 come one or two poems, perhaps the finest 
 of all, in which already clearness is " a 
 secondary grace," but in which a subtle rap- 
 ture finds incomparable expression. L'Aprds- 
 midi d'un Faune and H^rodiade have 
 already been introduced, in different ways, 
 to English readers : the former by Mr. Gosse, 
 in a detailed analysis ; the latter by a trans- 
 
STifiPHANE MALLARMfi 125 
 
 lation into verse. And Debussy, in his. new 
 music, has taken L'Apr^s-midi d'un Faune 
 almost for his new point of departure, in- 
 terpreting it, at all events, faultlessly. In 
 these two poems I find Mallarme at the 
 moment when his own desire achieves itself ; 
 when he attains Wagner's ideal, that " the 
 most complete work of the poet should be 
 that which, in its final achievement, be- 
 comes a perfect music " : every word is a 
 jewel, scattering and recapturing sudden fire, 
 every image is a symbol, and the whole poem 
 is visible music. After this point began 
 that fatal " last period " which comes to 
 most artists who have thought too curiously, 
 or dreamed too remote dreams, or followed 
 a too wandering beauty. Mallarmd had long 
 been too conscious that all publication is 
 " almost a speculation, on one's modesty, for 
 one's silence " ; that " to unclench the fists, 
 breaking one's sedentary dream, for a rufiiing 
 face to face with the idea," was after all 
 unnecessary to his own conception of him- 
 self, a mere way of convincing the public 
 that one exists ; and having achieved, as he 
 thought, " the right to abstain from doing 
 anything exceptional," he devoted himself, 
 
126 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 doubly, to silence. Seldom condescending 
 to write, he wrote now only for himself, and 
 in a manner which certainly saved him from 
 intrusion. Some of Meredith's poems, ?ind 
 occasional passages of his prose, can alone 
 give in English some faint idea of the later 
 prose and verse of Mallarmd. The verse 
 could not, I think, be translated ; of the 
 prose, in which an extreme lucidity of thought 
 comes to us but glimmeringly through the 
 entanglements of a construction, part Latin, 
 part English, I shall endeavour to translate 
 some fragments, in speaking of the theo- 
 retic writings, contained in the two volumes 
 of Vers et Prose and Divagations. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It is the distinction of Mallarm^ to have 
 aspired after an impossible liberation of the 
 soul of literature from what is fretting and 
 constraining in " the body of that death," 
 which is the mere literature of words. 
 Words, he has realised, axe of value only 
 as a notation of the free breath of the 
 spirit ; words, therefore, must be employed 
 
ST^PHANE MALLARMfi 127 
 
 with an extreme care, in their choice and 
 adjustment, in setting them to reflect and 
 chime upon one another ; yet least of all 
 for their own sake, for what they can never, 
 except by suggestion, express. "Every soul 
 is a melody," he has said, "which needs to 
 be readjusted ; and for that are the flute or 
 viol of each." The word, treated indeed 
 with a kind of " adoration," as he says, is 
 so regarded in a magnificent sense, in which 
 it is apprehended as a living thing, itself 
 the vision rather than the reality; at least 
 the philtre of the evocation. The word, 
 chosen as he chooses it, is for him a liberat- 
 ing principle, by which the spirit is extracted 
 from matter ; takes form, perhaps assumes 
 immortality. Thus an artificiality, even, in 
 the use of words, that seeming artificiality 
 which comes from using words as if they 
 had never been used before, that chimerical 
 search after the virginity of language, is but 
 the paradoxical outward sign of an extreme 
 discontent with even the best of their service. 
 Writers who use words fluently, seeming to 
 disregard their importance, do so; from an 
 unconscious confidence in their expressive- 
 ness, which the scrupulous thinker, the pre- 
 
128 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 cise dreamer, can never place in the most 
 carefully chosen among them. To evoke, 
 by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of 
 language, without the formality of an after 
 all impossible description ; to be, rather than 
 to express: that is what Mallarm^ has con- 
 sistently, and from the first, sought in verse 
 and prose. And he has sought this wander- 
 ing, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul 
 of dreams, over more and more entangled 
 ground ; and it has led him into the depths 
 of many forests, far from the sunlight. To 
 say that he has found what he sought is 
 impossible; but (is it possible to avoid say- 
 ing?) how heroic a search, and what mar- 
 vellous discoveries by the way! 
 
 I think I understand, though I carmot 
 claim his own authority for my supposition, 
 the way in which MaUarm^ wrote verse, and 
 the reason why it became more and more 
 abstruse, more and more unintelligible. Re- 
 member his principle : that to name is to 
 destroy, to suggest is to create. Note, 
 further, that he condemns the inclusion in 
 verse of anything but, "for example, the 
 horror of the forest, or the silent thunder 
 afloat in the leaves; not the intrinsic, dense 
 
STfiPHANE MALLARM^ 129 
 
 wood of the trees." He has received, then, 
 a mental sensation : let it be the horror of 
 the forest. This sensation begins to form 
 in his brain, at first probably no more than 
 a rhythm, absolutely without words. Gradu- 
 ally thought begins to concentrate itself (but 
 with an extreme care, lest it should break 
 the tension on which all depends) upon the 
 sensation, already struggling to find its own 
 consciousness. Delicately, stealthily, with 
 infinitely timid precaution, words present 
 themselves, at first in silence. Every word 
 seems like a desecration, seems, the clearer 
 it is, to throw back the original sensation 
 farther and farther into the darkness. But, 
 guided always by the rhythm, which is the 
 executive soul (as, in Aristotle's definition, 
 the soul is the form of the body), words come 
 slowly, one by one, shaping the message. 
 Imagine the poem already written down, at 
 least composed. In its very imperfection, it 
 is clear, it shows the links by which it has 
 been riveted together ; the whole process of 
 its construction can be studied. Now most 
 writers would be content ; but with Mallamie 
 the work has only begun. In the final result 
 there must be no sign of the making, there 
 
 I 
 
130 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 must be only the thing made. He works 
 over it, word by word, changing a word here, 
 for its colour, which is not precisely the 
 colour required, a word there, for the break 
 it makes in the music. A new image occurs 
 to him, rarer, subtler, than the one he has 
 used ; the image is transferred. By the time 
 the poem has reached, as it seems to him, 
 a flawless unity, the steps of the progress 
 have been only too effectually effaced ; and 
 while the poet, who has seen the thing from 
 the beginning, still sees the relation of point 
 to point, the reader, who comes to it only 
 in its final stage, finds himself in a not un- 
 natural bewilderment. Pursue this manner 
 of writing to its ultimate development ; start 
 with an enigma, and then withdraw the key 
 of the enigma ; and you arrive, easily, at the 
 frozen impenetrability of those latest sonnets, 
 in which th& absence of all punctuation is 
 scarcely a recognisable hindrance. 
 
 That, I fancy to myself, was his actual way 
 of writing ; here, in what I prefer to give 
 as a corollary, is the theory. "Symbolist, 
 Decadent, or Mystic, the schools thus called 
 by themselves, or thus hastily labelled by our 
 information-press, adopt, for meeting-place. 
 
ST:6PHANE MALLARMfi 131 
 
 the point of an Idealism which (similaxly as 
 in fugues, in sonatas) rejects the ' natural ' 
 materials, and, as brutal, a direct thought 
 ordering them ; to retain no more than sug- 
 gestion. To be instituted, a relation between 
 images, exact ; and that therefrom should 
 detach itself a third aspect, fusible and clear, 
 offered to the divination. Abolished, the 
 pretension, aesthetically an error, despite its 
 dominion over almost all the masterpieces, 
 to enclose within the subtle paper other than, 
 for example, the horror of the forest, or the 
 silent thunder afloat in the leaves ; not the 
 intrinsic, dense wood of the trees. Some 
 few bursts of personal pride, veridicaUy 
 trumpeted, awaken the architecture of the 
 palace, alone habitable ; not of stone, on 
 which the pages would close but ill." For 
 example (it is his own) : " I say : a flower ! 
 and out of the oblivion to which my voice 
 consigns every contour, so far as anything 
 save the known calyx, musically arises, idea, 
 and exquisite, the one flower absent from 
 all bouquets." "The pure work," then, 
 "implies the elocutionary disappearance of 
 the poet, who yields place to the words, 
 immobilised by the shock of their inequality ; 
 
132 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 they take light from mutual reflection, like 
 an actual trail of fire over precious stones, 
 replacing the old lyric afflatus or the en- 
 thusiastic personal direction of the phrase." 
 "The verse which out of many vocahles 
 remakes an entire word, new, unknown to 
 the language, and as if magical, attains this 
 isolation of speech." Whence, it being 
 " music which rejoins verse, to form, since 
 Wagner, Poetry," the final conclusion : " That 
 we are now precisely at the moment of seek- 
 ing, before that breaking up of the large 
 rhythms of literature, and their scattering 
 in articulate, almost instrumental, nervous 
 waves, an art which shall complete the 
 transposition, into the Book, of the sym- 
 phony, or simply recapture our own : for, it 
 is not in elementary sonorities of brass, 
 strings, wood, unquestionably, but in the in- 
 tellectual word at its utmost, that, fuUy and 
 evidently, we should find, drawing to itseK 
 all the correspondences of the universe, the 
 supreme Music." 
 
 Here, literally translated, in exactly the 
 arrangement of the original, are some pas- 
 sages out of the theoretic writings, which I 
 have brought together, to indicate what seem 
 
STtPHANE MALLARMlfi 133 
 
 to me the main lines of Mallarm^'s doctrine. 
 It is the doctrine which, as I have already 
 said, had been divined by Gerard de Nerval ; 
 but what, in Gdrard, was pure vision, becomes 
 in Mallarm^ a logical sequence of meditation. 
 Mallarm^ was not a mystic, to whom any- 
 thing came unconsciously ; he was a thinker, 
 in whom an extraordinary subtlety of mind 
 was exercised on always explicit, though 
 by no means the common, problems. "A 
 seeker after something in the world, that 
 is there in no satisfying measure, or not at 
 all," he pursued his search with unwearying 
 persistence, with a sharp mental division of 
 dream and idea, certainly very lucid to him- 
 self, however he may have failed to render 
 his expression clear to others. And I, for 
 one, cannot doubt that he was, for the most 
 part, entirely right in his statement and 
 analysis of the new conditions under which 
 we are now privileged or condemned to write. 
 His obscurity was partly his failure to carry 
 out the spirit of his own directions ; but, 
 apart from obscurity, which we may all be 
 fortunate enough to escape, is it possible for 
 a writer, at the present day, to be quite 
 simple, with the old, objective simplicity, in 
 
134 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 either thought or expression ? To be viaif, to 
 be archaic, is not to be either natural or simple ; 
 I affirm that it is not natural to be what is 
 called "natural" any longer. We have no 
 longer the mental attitude of those to whom 
 a story was but a story, and all stories good ; 
 we have realised, since it was proved to us 
 by Poe, not merely that the age of epics is 
 past, but that no long poem was ever written ; 
 the finest long poem in the world being but 
 a series of short poems linked together by 
 prose. And, naturally, we can no longer 
 write what we can no longer accept. Sjmi- 
 bolism, implicit in all literature from the 
 beginning, as it is implicit in the very words 
 we use, comes to us now, at last quite con- 
 scious of itself, offering us the only escape 
 from our many imprisonments. We find a 
 new, an older, sense in the so worn out forms 
 of things ; the world, which we can no longer 
 believe in as the satisfying material object it 
 was to our grandparents, becomes transfigm-ed 
 with a new light ; words, which long usage 
 had darkened almost out of recognition, take 
 fresh lustre. And it is on the lines of that 
 spiritualising of the word, that perfecting of 
 form in its capacity for allusion and sugges- 
 
ST:fiPHANE MALLARM^ 135 
 
 tion, that confidence in the eternal corre- 
 spondences between the visible and the in- 
 visible universe, vrhich Mallarm^ taught, and 
 too intermittently practised, that literature 
 must now move, if it is in any sense to move 
 forward. 
 
THE LATER HUYSMANS 
 
 In the preface to his first novel, Marthe: 
 histoire d'une jille, thirty years ago, Huys- 
 mans defined his theory of art in this defiant 
 phrase : "I write what I see, what I feel, 
 and what I have experienced, and I write it 
 as well as I can : that is all." Ten or twelve 
 years ago, he could still say, in answer to 
 an interviewer who asked him his opinion of 
 Naturalism: "At bottom, there are writers 
 who have talent and others who have not ; 
 let them be Naturalists, Romantics, Deca- 
 dents, what you will, it is all the same to 
 me : I only want to know if they have talent." 
 Such theoretical liberality, in a writer of 
 original talent, is a little disconcerting : it 
 means that he is without a theory of his 
 own, that he is not yet conscious of having 
 chosen his own way. And, indeed, it is only 
 with En Route that Huysmans can be said 
 to have discovered the direction in which he 
 had really been travelling from the beginning. 
 
 136 
 
THE LATER HUYSMANS 137 
 
 In a preface written not long since for 
 a limited edition of A Rehours, Huysmans 
 confessed that he had never been conscious 
 of the direction in which he was travelling. 
 " My life and my literature," he affirmed, 
 " have undoubtedly a certain amount of pas- 
 sivity, of the incalculable, of a direction not 
 mine. I have simply obeyed; I have been 
 led by what are called 'mysterious ways.'" 
 He is speaking of the conversion which took 
 him to La Trappe in 1892, but the words 
 apply to the whole course of his career 
 as a man of letters. In Ld-Bas, which is a 
 sort of false start, he had, indeed, realised, 
 though for himself at that time ineffectually, 
 that "it is essential to preserve the vera- 
 city of the document, the precision of detail, 
 the fibrous and nervous language of Kealism, 
 but it is equally essential to become the 
 well-digger of the soul, and not to attempt 
 to explain what is mysterious by mental 
 maladies. . . . It is essential, in a word, 
 to foUow the great road so deeply dug out 
 by Zola, but it is necessary also to trace a 
 parallel pathway in the air, and to grapple 
 with the within and the after, to create, in 
 a word, a spiritual Naturalism." This is 
 
138 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 almost a definition of the art of £ln Route, 
 where this spiritual realism is applied to the 
 history of a soul, a conscience ; in La 
 Cathidrale the method has still further de- 
 veloped, and Huysmans becomes, in his own 
 way, a Symbolist. 
 
 To the student of psychology few more in- 
 teresting cases could be presented than the 
 development of Huysmans. From the first 
 he has been a man "for whom the visible 
 world existed," indeed, but as the scene of 
 a slow martyrdom. The world has always 
 appeared to him to be a profoundly un- 
 comfortable, unpleasant, and ridiculous place ; 
 and it has been a necessity of his tempera- 
 ment to examine it minutely, with all the 
 patience of disgust, and a necessity of his 
 method to record it with an almost ecstatic 
 hatred. In his first book, Le Drageoir d, 
 Epices, published at the age of twenty-six, 
 we find him seeking his colour by prefer- 
 ence in a drunkard's cheek or a carcase out- 
 side a butcher's shop. Marthe, published at 
 Brussels in 1876, anticipates La Fille Elisa 
 and Nana, but it has a crude brutality of 
 observation in which there is hardly a touch 
 of pity. Les Sosurs Vatard is a frame with- 
 
THE LATER HUYSMANS 139 
 
 out a picture, but in En Menage the dreary 
 tedium of existence is chronicled in all its 
 insignificance with a kind of weary and 
 aching hate. "We, too," is its conclusion, 
 "by leave of the everlasting stupidity of 
 things, may, like our fellow-citizens, live 
 stupid and respected." The fantastic unre- 
 ality, the exquisite artificiality of A Rebours, 
 the breviary of the decadence, is the first 
 sign of that possible escape which Huysmans 
 has always foreseen in the direction of art, 
 but which he is still unable to make into 
 more than an artificial paradise, in which 
 beauty turns to a cruel hallucination and 
 imprisons the soul still more fatally. The 
 end is a cry of hopeless hope, in which 
 Huysmans did not understand the meaning 
 till later : " Lord, have pity of the Christian 
 who doubts, of the sceptic who would fain 
 believe, of the convict of life who sets sail 
 alone by night, under a firmament lighted 
 only by the consoling watch-lights of the 
 old hope." 
 
 In Ld,-Bas we are in yet another stage of 
 this strange pilgrim's progress. The disgust 
 which once manifested itself in the merely 
 external revolt against the ugliness of streets, 
 
140 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 the imbecility of faces, has become more and 
 more internalised, and the attraction of wha,t 
 is perverse in the unusual beauty of art has 
 led, by some obscure route, to the perilous 
 halfway house of a corrupt mysticism. The 
 book, with its monstrous pictures of the 
 Black Mass and of the spiritual abomina- 
 tions of Satanism, is one step further in the 
 direction of the supernatural; and this, too, 
 has its desperate, unlooked-for conclusion : 
 " Christian glory is a laughing-stock to 
 our age ; it contaminates the supernatural 
 and casts out the world to come." In Ld- 
 Bas we go down into the deepest gulf; En 
 Route sets us one stage along a new way, 
 and at this turning-point begins the later 
 Huysmans. 
 
 The old conception of the novel as an 
 amusing tale of adventures, though it has 
 still its apologists in England, has long since 
 ceased in France to mean anything more 
 actual than powdered wigs and lace ruffles. 
 Like children who cry to their elders for "a 
 story, a story," the English public still wants 
 its plot, its heroine, its villain. That the 
 novel should be psychological was a discovery 
 as early as Benjamin Constant, whose Adolphe 
 
THE LATER HUYSMANS 141 
 
 anticipates Le Rouge et le Noir, that rare, 
 revealing, yet somewhat arid masterpiece of 
 Stendahl. But that psychology could be 
 carried so far into the darkness of the soid, 
 that the flaming walls of the world them- 
 selves faded to a glimmer, was a discovery 
 which had been made by no novelist before 
 Huysmans wrote En Route. At once the 
 novel showed itself capable of competing, on 
 their own ground, with poetry, with the great 
 " confessions," with philosophy. En Route 
 is perhaps the first novel which does not 
 set out with the aftn of amusing its readers. 
 It offers you no more entertainment than 
 Paradise Lost or the Confessions of St. 
 Augustine, and it is possible to consider it 
 on the same level. The novel, which, after 
 having chronicled the adventures of the 
 Vanity Fairs of this world, has set itself with 
 admirable success to analyse the amorous and 
 ambitious and money-making intelligence of 
 the conscious and practical self, sets itself at 
 last to the final achievement : the revelation 
 of the sub-conscious self, no longer the in- 
 telligence, but the soul. Here, then, purged 
 of the distraction of incident, liberated from 
 the bondage of a too realistic conversation. 
 
142 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 in which the aim had been to convey the 
 very gesture of breathing life, internaUsed to 
 a complete liberty, in which, just because it 
 is so absolutely free, art is able to accept, 
 without limiting itself, the expressive medium 
 of a convention, we have in the novel a new 
 form, which may be at once a confession and 
 a decoration, the soul and a pattern. 
 
 This story of a conversion is a new thing 
 in modern French ; it is a confession, a self- 
 ascultation of the soul ; a kind of thinking 
 aloud. It fixes, in precise words, all the 
 uncertainties, the contradictions, the absurd 
 unreasonableness and not less absurd logic, 
 which distract man's brain in the passing 
 over him of sensation and circumstance. 
 And all this thinking is concentrated on one 
 end, is concerned with the working out, in 
 his own singular way, of one man's salva- 
 tion. There is a certain dry hard casuistry, 
 a subtlety and closeness almost ecclesiastical, 
 in the investigation of an obscure and yet 
 definite region, whose intellectual passions 
 are as varied and as tumultuous as those of 
 the heart. Every step is taken deliberately, 
 is weighed, approved, condemned, viewed 
 from this side and from that, and at the same 
 
THE LATER HUYSMANS 143 
 
 time one feels behind all this reasoning an 
 impulsion urging a soul onward against its 
 will. In this astonishing passage, through 
 Satanism to faith, in which the cry, " I am 
 so weary of myself, so sick of my miserable 
 existence," echoes through page after page, 
 until despair dies into conviction, the con- 
 viction of " the uselessness of concerning 
 oneself about anything but mysticism and 
 the liturgy, of thinking about anything but 
 about God," it is impossible not to see the 
 sincerity of an actual, unique experience. 
 The force of mere curiosity can go far, can 
 penetrate to a certain depth ; yet there is a 
 point at which mere curiosity, even that of 
 genius, comes to an end ; and we are left to 
 the individual soul's apprehension of what 
 seems to it the reality of spiritual things. 
 Such a personal apprehension comes to us 
 out of this book, and at the same time, just 
 as in the days when he forced language to 
 express, in a more coloured and pictorial way 
 than it had ever expressed before, the last 
 escaping details of material things, so, in this 
 analysis of the aberrations and warfares, the 
 confessions and trials of the soul in penitence, 
 Huysmans has found words for even the most 
 
144 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 subtle and illusive aspects of that inner life 
 which he has come, at the last, to apprehend. 
 
 In La Cathedrale we are stiU occupied with 
 this sensitive, lethargic, persevering soul, but 
 with that soul in one of its longest halts by 
 the way, as it undergoes the slow, permeating 
 influence of " Za Cathedrale mystique par 
 excellence," the cathedral of Chartres. And 
 the greater part of the book is taken up with 
 a study of this cathedral, of that elaborate 
 and profound symbolism by which "the soul 
 of sanctuaries " slowly reveals itself (quel 
 laconisme hermetique I) with a sort of parallel 
 interpretation of the symbolism which the 
 Church of the Middle Ages concealed or 
 revealed in colours, precious stones, plants, 
 animals, numbers, odours, and in the Bible 
 itself, in the setting together of the Old and 
 New Testaments. 
 
 No doubt, to some extent this book is less 
 interesting than En Route, in the exact 
 proportion in which everything in the world 
 is less interesting than the human soul. 
 There are times when Durtal is almost for- 
 gotten, and, unjustly enough, it may seem 
 as if we are given this archaeology, these 
 bestiaries, for their own sake. To fall into 
 
THE LATER HUYSMANS 145 
 
 this error is to mistake the whole purpose 
 of the book, the whole extent of the discovery 
 in art which Huysmans has been one of the 
 first to make. 
 
 For in La Cathidrale Huysmans does but 
 carry further the principle which he had 
 perceived in Hn Route, showing, as he does, 
 how inert matter, the art of stones, the 
 growth of plants, the unconscious life of 
 beasts, may be brought under the same law 
 of the soul, may obtain, through symbol, a 
 spiritual existence. He is thus but extending 
 the domain of the soul while he may seem to 
 be limiting or ignoring it; and Durtal may 
 well stand aside for a moment, in at least the 
 energy of contemplation, while he sees, with 
 a new understanding, the very sight of his 
 eyes, the very stufi' of his thoughts, taking 
 life before him, a life of the same substance 
 as his own. What is Symbolism if not an 
 establishing of the links which hold the world 
 together, the affirmation of an eternal, minute, 
 intricate, almost invisible life, which runs 
 through the whole universe ? Every age has 
 its own symbols ; but a symbol once perfectly 
 expressed, that symbol remains, as Gothic 
 architecture remains the very soul of the 
 
 E 
 
146 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Middle Ages. To get at that truth which is 
 all but the deepest meaning of beauty, to 
 find that symbol which is its most adequate 
 expression, is in itself a kind of creation ; 
 and that is what Huysmans does for us in 
 La Caihedrale. More and more he has put 
 aside all the profane and accessible and 
 outward pomp of writing for an inner and 
 more severe beauty of perfect truth. He has 
 come to realise that truth can be reached and 
 revealed only by symbol. Hence, aU that 
 description, that heaping up of detail, that 
 passionately patient elaboration : all means 
 to an end, not, as you may hastily incline to 
 think, ends in themselves. 
 
 It is curious to observe how often an artist 
 perfects a particular means of expression long 
 before he has any notion of what to do with 
 it. Huysmans began by acquiring so aston- 
 ishing a mastery of description that he could 
 describe the inside of a cow hanging in a 
 butcher's shop as beautifully as if it were 
 a casket of jewels. The little work-girls of 
 his early novels were taken for long walks, 
 in which they would have seen nothing but 
 the arm on which they lent and the milliners' 
 shops which they passed ; and what they did 
 
THE LATER HUYSMANS 147 
 
 not see was described, marvellously, in twenty 
 pages. 
 
 Huysmans is a brain all eye, a brain which 
 sees even ideas as if they had a superficies. 
 His style is always the same, whether he 
 writes of a butcher's shop or of a stained- 
 glass window ; it is the immediate expression 
 of a way of seeing, so minute and so intense 
 that it becomes too emphatic for elegance 
 and too coloured for atmosphere or com- 
 position, always ready to sacrifice euphony 
 to either fact or colour. He cares only to 
 give you the thing seen, exactly as he sees it, 
 with all his love or hate, and with aU the 
 exaggeration which that feeling brings into 
 it. And he loves beauty as a bulldog loves 
 its mistress : by growling at aU her enemies. 
 He honours wisdom by annihilating stupidity. 
 His art of painting in words resembles 
 Monet's art of painting with his brush : there 
 is the same power of rendering a vivid effect, 
 almost deceptively, with a crude and yet 
 sensitive realism. " C'est pour la gourmandise 
 de I'ceil un gala de teintes," he says of the 
 provision cellars at Hamburg ; and this greed 
 of the eye has eaten up in him almost every 
 other sense. Even of music he writes as a 
 
148 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 deaf man with an eye for colour might write, 
 to whom a musician had explained certain 
 technical means of expression in music. No 
 one has ever invented such barbarous and 
 exact metaphors for the rendering of visual 
 sensations. Properly, there is no metaphor ; 
 the words say exactly what they mean ; they 
 become figurative, as we call it, in their 
 insistence on being themselves fact. 
 
 Huysmans knows that the motive force of 
 the sentence lies in the verbs, and his verbs 
 are the most singular, precise, and expressive 
 in any language. But in subordinating, as 
 he does, every quality to that of sharp, telling 
 truth, the truth of extremes, his style loses 
 charm ; yet it can be dazzling ; it has the 
 solidity of those waUs encrusted with gems 
 which are to be seen in a certain chapel in 
 Prague ; it blazes with colour, and arabesques 
 into a thousand fantastic patterns. 
 
 And now aU that laboriously acquired 
 mastery finds at last its use, lending itself 
 to the new spirit with a wonderful docility. 
 At last the idea which is beyond reality has 
 been found, not where des Esseintes sought 
 it, and a new meaning comes into what had 
 once been scarcely more than patient and 
 
THE LATER HUYSMANS 149 
 
 wrathful observation. The idea is there, 
 visible, in his cathedral, like the sun which 
 flashes into unity, into meaning, into in- 
 telligible beauty, the bewildering lozenges 
 of colour, the inextricable trails of lead, 
 which go to make up the picture in one of 
 its painted windows. What, for instance, 
 could be more precise in its translation of the 
 different aspects under which the cathedral 
 of Ghartres can be seen, merely as colour, 
 than this one sentence : " Seen as a whole, 
 under a clear sky, its grey silvers, and, if the 
 sun shines upon it, turns pale yellow and 
 then golden ; seen close, its skin is like that 
 of a nibbled biscuit, with its silicious lime- 
 stone eaten into holes ; sometimes, when the 
 sun is setting, it turns crimson, and rises 
 up like a monstrous and delicate shrine, rose 
 and green ; and, at twUight, turns blue, then 
 seems to evaporate as it fades into violet." 
 Or, again, in a passage which comes nearer 
 to the conventional idea of eloquence, how 
 absolute an avoidance of a conventional 
 phrase, a word used for its merely oratorical 
 value : " High up, in space, like salamanders, 
 human beings, with burning faces and flaming 
 robes, lived in a firmament of fire ; but these 
 
150 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 conflagrations were circumscribed, limited by 
 an incombustible frame of darker glass, which 
 beat back the clear young joy of the flames ; 
 by that kind of melancholy, that more seri- 
 ous and more aged aspect, which is taken by 
 the duUer colours. The hue and cry of reds, 
 the limpid security of whites, the reiterated 
 halleluias of yellows, the virginal glory of 
 blues, all the quivering hearth-glow of painted 
 glass, dies away as it came near this border 
 coloured with the rust of iron, with the russet 
 of sauce, with the harsh violet of sandstone, 
 with bottle-green, with the brown of touch- 
 wood, with sooty black, with ashen grey." 
 
 This, in its excess of exactitude (how 
 mediaeval a quality !) becomes, on one page, 
 a comparison of the tower without a spire to 
 an unsharpened pencil which cannot write 
 the prayers of earth upon the sky. But- for 
 the most part it is a consistent humanising 
 of too objectively visible things, a disengaging 
 of the sentiment which exists in them, which 
 is one of the secrets of their appeal to us, 
 but which for the most part we overlook as 
 we set ourselves to add up the shapes and 
 colours which have enchanted us. To Huys- 
 mans this artistic discovery has come, perhaps 
 
THE LATER HUYSMANS 151 
 
 in the most effectual way, but certainly in 
 the way least probable in these days, through 
 faith, a definite religious faith ; so that, be- 
 ginning tentatively, he has come, at last, to 
 believe in the Catholic Church as a monk 
 of the Middle Ages believed in it. And there 
 is no doubt that to Huysmans this abandon- 
 ment to religion has brought, among other 
 gifts, a certain human charity in which he 
 was notably lacking, removing at once one 
 of his artistic limitations. It has softened 
 his contempt of humanity ; it has broadened 
 his outlook on the world. And the sense, 
 diffused through the whole of this book, 
 of the living and beneficent reality of the 
 Virgin, of her real presence in the cathedral 
 built in her honour and after her own image, 
 brings a strange and touching kind of poetry 
 into these closely and soberly woven pages. 
 
 From this time forward, until his death, 
 Huysmans is seen purging himself of his 
 realism, coming closer and closer to that 
 spiritual Naturalism which he had invented, 
 an art made out of an apprehension of the 
 inner meaning of those things which he still 
 saw with the old tenacity of vision. Nothing 
 is changed in him and yet all is changed. 
 
152 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 The disgust of the world deepens through 
 L'Oblat, which is the last stage but one in 
 the pilgrimage which begins with En Route. 
 It seeks an escape in poring, with a dreadful 
 diligence, over a saint's recorded miracles, 
 in the life of Sainie Lydwine de Schiedam, 
 which is mediaeval in its precise acceptance 
 of every horrible detail of the story. Les 
 Foules de Lourdes has the same minute 
 attentiveness to horror, but with a new pity 
 in it, and a way of giving thanks to the 
 Virgin, which is in Huysmans yet another 
 escape from his disgust of the world. But it 
 is in the great chapter on Satan as the creator 
 of ugliness that his work seems to end where 
 it had begun, in the service of art, now come 
 from a great way oflF to join itself with the 
 service of God. And the whole soul of 
 Huysmans characterises itself in the turn 
 of a single phrase there: that "art is the 
 only clean thing on earth, except holiness." 
 
MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 
 
 The secret of things which is just beyond 
 the most subtle words, the secret of the ex- 
 pressive silences, has always been clearer to 
 Maeterlinck than to most people ; and, in 
 his plays, he has elaborated an art of sensi- 
 tive, taciturn, and at the same time highly 
 ornamental simplicity, which has come 
 nearer than any other art to being the voice 
 of sUence. To Maeterlinck the theatre has 
 been, for the most part, no more than one 
 of the disguises by which he can express 
 himself, and with his book of meditations 
 on the inner life, Le Tr^sor des Humbles, he 
 may seem to have dropped his disguise. 
 
 All art hates the vague ; not the mysteri- 
 ous, but the vague ; two opposites very 
 commonly confused, as the secret with the 
 obscure, the infinite with the indefinite. 
 And the artist who is also a mystic hates 
 the vague with a more profound hatred than 
 any other artist. Thus Maeterlinck, en- 
 
 153 
 
154 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 deavouring to clothe mystical conceptions 
 in concrete form, has invented a drama so 
 precise, so curt, so arbitrary in its limits, 
 that it can safely be confided to the masks 
 and feigned voices of marionettes. His 
 theatre of artificial beings, who are at once 
 more ghostly and more mechanical than the 
 living actors whom we are accustomed to see, 
 in so curious a parody of life, moving with 
 a certain freedom of action across the stage, 
 may be taken as itself a symbol of the aspect 
 under which what we fantastically term " real 
 life" presents itself to the mystic. Are we 
 not all puppets, in a theatre of marionettes, 
 in which the parts we play, the dresses we 
 wear, the very emotion whose dominance 
 gives its express form to our faces, have all 
 been chosen for us; in which I, it may be, 
 with curled hair and a Spanish cloak, play 
 the romantic lover, sorely against my will, 
 while you, a " fair penitent " for no repented 
 sin, pass whitely under a nun's habit? And 
 as our parts have been chosen for us, our 
 motions controlled from behind the curtain, 
 so the words we seem to speak are but 
 spoken through us, and we do but utter 
 fragments of some elaborate invention, 
 
MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 155 
 
 planned for larger ends than our personal 
 display or convenience, but to which, all 
 the same, we are in a humble degree neces- 
 sary. This symbolical theatre, its very exist- 
 ence being a symbol, has perplexed many 
 minds, to some of whom it has seemed 
 puerile, a child's mystification of small 
 words and repetitions, a thing of attitudes 
 and omissions; while others, yet more un- 
 wisely, have compared it with the violent, 
 rhetorical, most human drama of the Eliza- 
 bethans, with Shakespeare himself, to whom 
 all the world was a stage, and the stage 
 all this world, certainly. A sentence, already 
 famous, of the Tresor des Humbles, will 
 teU you what it signifies to Maeterlinck 
 himself. 
 
 " I have come to believe," he writes, in 
 Le Tragique Quotidien, "that an old man 
 seated in his armchair, waiting quietly 
 under the lamplight, listening without 
 knowing it to all the eternal laws which 
 reign about his house, interpreting without 
 understanding it all that there is in the 
 silence of doors and windows, and in the 
 little voice of light, enduring the presence 
 of his soul and of his destiny, bowing his 
 
156 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 head a little, without suspecting that all 
 the powers of the earth intervene and stand 
 on guard in the room like attentive servants, 
 not knowing that the sun itself suspends 
 above the abyss the little table on which 
 he rests his elbow, and that there is not 
 a star in the sky nor a force in the soul 
 which is indifferent to the motion of a fall- 
 ing eyelid or a rising thought — I have come 
 to believe that this motionless old man 
 lived really a more profound, human, and 
 universal life than the lover who strangles 
 his mistress, the captain who gains a 
 victory, or the husband who ' avenges his 
 honour.' " 
 
 That, it seems to me, says aU there is 
 to be said of the intention of this drama 
 which Maeterlinck has evoked ; and, of its 
 style, this other sentence, which I take from 
 the same essay : " It is only the words that 
 at first sight seem useless which really coimt 
 in a work." 
 
 This drama, then, is a drama founded on 
 philosophical ideas, apprehended emotion- 
 ally; on the sense of the mystery of the 
 universe, of the weakness of humanity, that 
 sense which Pascal expressed when he said : 
 
MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 157 
 
 Ce qui m'etonne le plus est de voir que tout 
 le monde n'est pas etonnd de sa faiblesse ; 
 with an acute feeling of the pathetic ignor- 
 ance in which the souls nearest to one 
 another look out upon their neighbours. It 
 is a drama in which the interest is concen- 
 trated on vague people, who are little parts 
 of the universal consciousness, their strange 
 names being but the pseudonyms of obscure 
 passions, intimate emotions. They have the 
 fascination which we find in the eyes of 
 certain pictures, so much more real and 
 disquieting, so much more permanent with 
 us, than living people. And they have the 
 touching simplicity of children; they are 
 always children in their ignorance of them- 
 selves, of one another, and of fate. And, 
 because they are so disembodied of the 
 more trivial accidents of life, they give 
 themselves without limitation to whatever 
 passionate instinct possesses them. I do not 
 know a more passionate love-scene than 
 that scene in the wood beside the fountain, 
 where Pelldas and M^lisande confess the 
 strange burden which has come upon them. 
 When the soul gives itself absolutely to love, 
 all the barriers of the world are burnt away, 
 
158 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 and all its wisdom and subtlety are as 
 incense poured on a flame. Morality, too, 
 is burnt away, no longer exists, any more 
 than it does for children or for God. 
 
 Maeterlinck has realised, better than any 
 one else, the significance, in life and art, of 
 mystery. He has realised how unsearchable 
 is the darkness out of which we have but 
 just stepped, and the darkness into which 
 we are about to pass. And he has realised 
 how the thought and sense of that twofold 
 darkness invade the little space of light in 
 which, for a moment, we move ; the depth to 
 which they shadow our steps, even in that 
 moment's partial escape. But in some of his 
 plays he would seem to have apprehended 
 this mystery as a thing merely or mainly 
 terrifying ; the actual physical darkness sur- 
 rounding blind men, the actual physical 
 approach of death as the intruder; he has 
 shown us people huddled at a window, out of 
 which they are almost afraid to look, or beat- 
 ing at a door, the opening, of which they 
 dread. Fear shivers through these plays, 
 creeping across our nerves like a damp mist 
 coUing up out of a valley. And there is 
 beauty, certainly, in this "vague spiritual 
 
MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 159 
 
 fear " ; but a less obvious kind of beauty 
 than that which gives its profound pathos to 
 Aglavaine et SMysette, the one play written 
 since the writing of the essays. Here is 
 mystery, which is also pure beauty, in these 
 delicate approaches of intellectual pathos, in 
 which suffering and death and error become 
 transformed into something almost happy, so 
 full is it of strange light. 
 
 And the aim of Maeterlinck, in his plays, 
 is not only to render the soul and the soul's 
 atmosphere, but to reveal this strangeness, 
 pity, and beauty through beautiful pictures. 
 No dramatist has ever been so careful that 
 his scenes should be in themselves beau- 
 tiful, or has made the actual space of forest, 
 tower, or seashore so emotionally significant. 
 He has realised, after Wagner, that the art 
 of the stage is the art of pictorial beauty, of 
 the correspondence in rhythm between the 
 speakers, their words, and their surroundings. 
 He has seen how, in this way, and in this 
 way alone, the emotion, which it is but a 
 part of the poetic drama to express, can be at 
 once intensified and purified. 
 
 It is only after hinting at many of the 
 things which he had to say in these plays, 
 
160 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 which have, after all, been a kind of subter- 
 ftige, that Maeterlinck has cared, or been able, 
 to speak with the direct utterance of the 
 essays. And what may seem curious is that 
 this prose of the essays, which is the prose 
 of a doctrine, is incomparably more beautiful 
 than the prose of the plays, which was the 
 prose of an art. Holding on this point a 
 different opinion from one who was, in many 
 senses, his master, Villiers de I'lsle-Adam, he 
 did not admit that beauty of words, or even 
 any expressed beauty of thoughts, had its place 
 in spoken dialogue, even though it was not 
 two living actors speaking to one another on 
 the stage, but a soul speaking to a soul, and 
 imagined speaking through the mouths of 
 marionettes. But that beauty of phrase which 
 makes the profound and sometimes obscure 
 pages of Axel shine as with the crossing fire 
 of jewels, rejoices us, though with a softer, a 
 more equable, radiance, in the pages of these 
 essays, in which every sentence has the in- 
 dwelling beauty of an intellectual emotion, 
 preserved at the same height of tranquil 
 ecstasy from first page to last. There is a 
 sort of religious calm in these deliberate sen- 
 tences, into which the writer has known how 
 
MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 161 
 
 to introduce that divine monotony which is 
 one of the accomplishments of great style. 
 Never has simplicity been more ornate or 
 a fine beauty more visible through its self- 
 concealment. 
 
 But, after all, the claim upon us of this 
 book is not the claim of a work of art, but 
 of a doctrine, and more than that, of a sys- 
 tem. Belonging, as he does, to the eternal 
 hierarchy, the unbroken succession, of the 
 mystics, Maeterlinck has apprehended what 
 is essential in the mystical doctrine with a 
 more profound comprehension, and thus more 
 systematically, than any mystic of recent 
 times. He has many points of resemblance 
 with Emerson, on whom he has written an 
 essay which is properly an exposition of 
 his own personal ideas; but Emerson, who 
 proclaimed the supreme guidance of the 
 inner light, the supreme necessity of trust- 
 ing instinct, of honouring emotion, did but 
 proclaim all this, not without a certain anti- 
 mystical vagueness : Maeterlinck has syste- 
 matised it. A more profound mystic than 
 Emerson, he has greater command of that 
 which comes to him unawares, is less at 
 the mercy of visiting angels. 
 
 L 
 
162 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Also, it may be said that he surrenders 
 himself to them more absolutely, with less 
 reserve and discretion ; and, as he has infinite 
 leisure, his contemplation being subject to no 
 limits of time, he is ready to foUow them 
 on unknown rounds, to any distance, in any 
 direction, ready also to rest in any wayside 
 inn, without fearing that he will have lost 
 the road on the morrow. 
 
 This old gospel, of which Maeterlinck is 
 the new voice, has been quietly waiting 
 until certain bankruptcies, the bankruptcy of 
 Science, of the Positive Philosophies, should 
 allow it fuU credit. Considering the length 
 even of time, it has not had an unreasonable 
 space of waiting ; and remember that it takes 
 time but little into account. We have seen 
 many little gospels demanding of every emo- 
 tion, of every instinct, " its certificate at the 
 hand of some respectable authority." With- 
 out confidence in themselves or in things, 
 and led by Science, which is as if one were 
 led by one's note-book, they demand a rea- 
 sonable explanation of every mystery. Not 
 finding that explanation, they reject the 
 mystery; which is as if the fly on the 
 wheel rejected the wheel because it was 
 
MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 163 
 
 hidden from his eyes by the dust of its own 
 raising. 
 
 The mystic is at once the proudest and the 
 humblest of men. He is as a child who re- 
 signs himself to the guidance of an unseen 
 hand, the hand of one walking by his side ; 
 he resigns himself with the child's humility. 
 And he has the pride of the humble, a pride 
 manifesting itself in the calm rejection of 
 every accepted map of the roads, of every 
 offer of assistance, of every painted signpost 
 pointing out the smoothest ways on which 
 to travel. He demands no authority for the 
 unseen hand whose fingers he feels upon his 
 wrist. He conceives of life, not, indeed, so 
 much as a road on which one walks, very 
 much at one's own discretion, but as a blown 
 and wandering ship, surrounded by a sea 
 from which there is no glimpse of land ; and 
 he conceives that to the currents of that sea 
 he may safely trust himself. Let his hand, 
 indeed, be on the rudder, there will be no 
 miracle worked for him ; it is enough miracle 
 that the sea should be there, and the ship, 
 and he himself. He will never know why 
 his hand should turn the rudder this way 
 rather than that. 
 
164 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Jacob Boehme has said, very subtly, " that 
 man does not perceive the truth but God 
 perceives the truth in man " ; that is, that 
 whatever we perceive or do is not perceived 
 or done consciously by us, but unconsciously 
 through us. Our business, then, is to tend 
 that " inner light " by which most mystics 
 have symbolised that which at once guides 
 us in time and attaches us to eternity. This 
 inner light is no miraculous descent of the 
 Holy Spirit, but the perfectly natural, though 
 it may finally be overcoming, ascent of the 
 spirit within us. The spirit, in all men, being 
 but a ray of the universal light, it can, by 
 careful tending, by the removal of all obstruc- 
 tion, the cleansing of the vessel, the trimming 
 of the wick, as it were, be increased, made to 
 burn with a steadier, a brighter flame. In 
 the last rapture it may become dazzling, may 
 blind the watcher with excess of light, shut- 
 ting him in within the circle of transfiguration, 
 whose extreme radiance will leave all the 
 rest of the world henceforth one darkness. 
 
 All mystics being concerned with what is 
 divine in life, with the laws which apply 
 equally to time and eternity, it may happen 
 to one to concern himself chiefly with time 
 
MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 165 
 
 seen under the aspect of eternity, to another 
 to concern himself rather with eternity seen 
 under the aspect of time. Thus many mystics 
 have occupied themselves, very profitably, with 
 showing how natural, how explicable on their 
 own terms, are the mysteries of life; the 
 whole aim of Maeterlinck is to show how 
 mysterious all life is, "what an astonish- 
 ing thing it is, merely to live." What he 
 had pointed out to us, with certain solemn 
 gestures, in his plays, he sets himself now to 
 affirm, slowly, fully, with that " confidence 
 in mystery" of which he speaks. Because 
 " there is not an hour without its familiar 
 miracles and its ineff'able suggestions," he 
 sets himself to show us these miracles and 
 these meanings where others have not always 
 sought or found them, in women, in children, 
 in the theatre. He seems to touch, at one 
 moment or another, whether he is discussing 
 La Beaute Interieure or Le Tragique Quo- 
 tidien, on all of these hours, and there is no 
 hour so dark that his touch does not illumi- 
 nate it. And it is characteristic of him, of 
 his " confidence in mystery," that he speaks 
 always without raising his voice, without sur- 
 prise or triumph, or the air of having said 
 
166 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 anything more than the simplest observa- 
 tion. He speaks, not as if he knew more 
 than others, or had sought out more ela- 
 borate secrets, but as if he had listened more 
 attentively. 
 
 Loving most those writers "whose works 
 are nearest to silence," he begins his book, 
 significantly, with an essay on Silence, an 
 essay which, like all these essays, has the 
 reserve, the expressive reticence, of those 
 " active silences " of which he succeeds in 
 revealing a few of the secrets. 
 
 " Souls," he tells us, " are weighed in 
 silence, as gold and silver are weighed in 
 pure water, and the words which we pro- 
 nounce have no meaning except through the 
 silence in which they are bathed. We seek 
 to know that we may learn not to know " ; 
 knowledge, that which can be known by the 
 pure reason, metaphysics, " indispensable " 
 on this side of the " frontiers," being after 
 all precisely what is least essential to us, 
 since least essentially ourselves. " We pos- 
 sess a self more profound and more boundless, 
 than the self of the passions or of pure 
 reason. . . . There comes a moment when 
 the phenomena of our customary conscious- 
 
MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 167 
 
 ness, what we may call the consciousness of 
 the passions or of our normal relationships, 
 no longer mean anything to us, no longer 
 touch our real life. I admit that this con- 
 sciousness is often interesting in its way, 
 and that it is often necessary to know it 
 thoroughly. But it is a surface plant, and 
 its roots fear the great central fire of our 
 being. I may commit a crime without the 
 least breath stirring the tiniest flame of this 
 fire ; and, on the other hand, the crossing of 
 a single glance, a thought which never comes 
 into being, a minute which passes without 
 the utterance of a word, may rouse it into 
 terrible agitations in the depths of its retreat, 
 and cause it to overflow upon my life. Our 
 soul does not judge as we judge ; it is a 
 capricious and hidden thing. It can be 
 reached by a breath and unconscious of a 
 tempest. Let us find out what reaches it ; 
 everything is there, for it is there that we 
 ourselves are." 
 
 And it is towards this point that all the 
 words of this book tend. MaeterUnck, unlike 
 most men (" What is man but a God who is 
 afraid ? "), is not " miserly of immortal things," 
 He utters the most divine secrets without 
 
168 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 fear, betraying certain hiding-places of the 
 soul in those most nearly inaccessible retreats 
 which lie nearest to us. AU that he says we 
 know already ; we may deny it, but we know 
 it. It is what we are not often at leisure 
 enough with ourselves, sincere enough with 
 ourselves, to realise ; what we often dare not 
 realise ; but, when he says it, we know that 
 it is true, and our knowledge of it is his 
 warrant for saying it. He is what he is 
 precisely because he teUs us nothing which 
 we do not already know, or it may be, what 
 we have known and forgotten. 
 
 The mystic, let it be remembered, has 
 nothing in common with the morahst. He 
 speaks only to those who are already prepared 
 to listen to him, and he is indifferent to the 
 " practical " effect which these or others may 
 draw from his words. A young and profound 
 mystic of our day has figured the influence of 
 wise words upon the foolish and headstrong 
 as "torches thrown into a burning city." 
 The mystic knows well that it is not always 
 the soul of the drunkard or the blasphemer 
 which is farthest from the eternal beauty. He 
 is concerned only with that soul of the soul, 
 that life of life, with which the day's doings 
 
MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC 169 
 
 have so little to do ; itself a mystery, and at 
 home only among those supreme mysteries 
 which surround it like an atmosphere. It is 
 not always that he cares that his message, or 
 his vision, may be as clear to others as it is to 
 himself. But, because he is an artist, and 
 not only a philosopher, Maeterlinck has taken 
 especial pains that not a word of his may go 
 astray, and there is not a word of this book 
 which needs to be read twice, in order that it 
 may be understood, by the least trained of 
 attentive readers. It is, indeed, as he calls 
 it, " The Treasure of the Lowly." 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 Our only chance, in this world, of a complete 
 happiness, lies in the measure of otu: success 
 in shutting the eyes of the mind, and dead- 
 ening its sense of hearing, and dulling the 
 keenness of its apprehension of the unknown. 
 Knowing so much less than nothing, for we 
 are entrapped in smiling and many-coloured 
 appearances, our life may seem to be but a 
 little space of leisure, in which it wUl be the 
 necessary business of each of us to speculate 
 on what is so rapidly becoming the past and 
 so rapidly becoming the future, that scarcely 
 existing present which is after all our only 
 possession. Yet, as the present passes from 
 us, hardly to be enjoyed except as memory 
 or as hope, and only with an at best partial 
 recognition of the uncertainty or inutility of 
 both, it is with a kind of terror that we wake 
 up, every now and then, to the whole know- 
 ledge of our ignorance, and to some per- 
 ception of where it is leading us. To Hve 
 
 170 
 
CONCLUSION 171 
 
 through a single day with that overpowering 
 consciousness of our real position, which, in 
 the moments in which alone it mercifully 
 comes, is like blinding light or the thrust 
 of a flaming sword, would drive any man 
 out of his senses. It is our hesitations, the 
 excuses of our hearts, the compromises of 
 our intelligence, which save us. We can 
 forget so much, we can bear suspense with 
 so fortunate an evasion of its real issues ; 
 we are so admirably finite. 
 
 And so there is a great, silent conspiracy 
 between us to forget death ; all our lives are 
 spent in busily forgetting death. That is 
 why we are active about so many things 
 which we know to be unimportant ; why we 
 are so afraid of solitude, and so thankful for 
 the company of our fellow-creatures. Allow- 
 ing ourselves, for the most part, to be but 
 vaguely conscious of that great suspense in 
 which we live, we find our escape from its 
 sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, 
 in religion, passion, art ; each a forgetfulness, 
 each a symbol of creation ; religion being the 
 creation of a new heaven, passion the creation 
 of a new earth, and art, in its mingling of 
 heaven and earth, the creation of heaven out 
 
172 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 of earth. Each is a kind of sublime sel- 
 fishness, the saint, the lover, and the artist 
 having each an incommunicable ecstasy vrhich 
 he esteems as his ultimate attainment, how- 
 ever, in his lower moments, he may serve 
 God in action, or do the will of his mistress, 
 or minister to men by showing them a little 
 beauty. But it is, before all things, an escape ; 
 and the prophets who have redeemed the 
 world, and the artists who have made the 
 world beautiful, and the lovers who have 
 quickened the pulses of the world, have really, 
 whether they knew it or not, been flee- 
 ing from the certainty of one thought : that 
 we have, all of us, only our one day; and 
 from the dread of that other thought : that 
 the day, however used, must after all be 
 wasted. 
 
 The fear of death is not cowardice ; it is, 
 rather, an intellectual dissatisfaction with an 
 enigma which has been presented to us, and 
 which can be solved only when its solution 
 is of no further use. All we have to ask 
 of death is the meaning of life, and we are 
 waiting all through life to ask that question. 
 That life should be happy or unhappy, as 
 those words are used, means so very little ; 
 
CONCLUSION 173 
 
 and the heightening or lessening of the 
 general felicity of the world means so little 
 to any individual. There is something almost 
 vulgar in happiness which does not become 
 joy, and joy is an ecstasy which can rarely 
 be maintained in the soul for more than the 
 moment during which we recognise that it 
 is not sorrow. Only very young people want 
 to be happy. What we all want is to be 
 quite sure that there is something which 
 makes it worth while to go on living, in 
 what seems to us our best way, at our finest 
 intensity; something beyond the mere fact 
 that we are satisfying a sort of inner logic 
 (which may be quite faulty) and that we get 
 our best makeshift for happiness on that so 
 hazardous assumption. 
 
 Well, the doctrine of Mysticism, with 
 which all this symbolical literature has so 
 much to do, of which it is all so much the 
 expression, presents us, not with a guide for 
 conduct, not with a plan for our happiness, 
 not with an explanation of any mystery, but 
 with a theory of life which makes us familiar 
 with mystery, and which seems to harmonise 
 those instincts which make for religion, 
 passion, and art, freeing us at once of a great 
 
174 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 bondage'. The final uncertainty remains, but 
 we seem to knock less helplessly at closed 
 doors, coming so much closer to the once 
 terrifying eternity of things about us, as we 
 come to look upon these things as shadows, 
 through which we have our shadowy passage. 
 "For in the particular acts of human life," 
 Plotinus tells us, "it is not the interior soul 
 and the true man, but the exterior shadow 
 of the man alone, which laments and weeps, 
 performing his part on the earth as in a 
 more ample and extended scene, in which 
 many shadows of souls and phantom scenes 
 appear." And as we realise the identity of 
 a poem, a prayer, or a kiss, in that spiritual 
 universe which we are weaving for ourselves, 
 each out of a thread of the great fabric ; as 
 we realise the infinite insignificance of action, 
 its immense distance from the current of life ; 
 as we realise the delight of feeling ourselves 
 carried onward by forces which it is our 
 wisdom to obey ; it is at least with a certain 
 relief that we turn to an ancient doctrine, 
 so much the more likely to be true because 
 it has so much the air of a dream. On this 
 theory alone does all life become worth living, 
 all art worth making, all worship worth 
 
CONCLUSION 175 
 
 offering. And because it might slay as well 
 as save, because the freedom of its sweet 
 captivity might so easily become deadly to 
 the fool, because that is the hardest path to 
 walk in where you are told only, walk weU ; 
 it is perhaps the only counsel of perfection 
 which can ever really mean much to the 
 artist. 
 
BIBLIOaEAPHY AND NOTES 
 
 The essays contained in this book are not in- 
 tended to give information. They are concerned 
 with ideas rather than with facts ; each is a study 
 of a problem, only in part a literary one, in which 
 I have endeavoured to consider writers as person- 
 alities under the action of spiritual forces, or as 
 themselves so many forces. But it has seemed to 
 me that readers have a right to demand informa- 
 tion in regard to writers who are so often likely 
 to be unfamiliar to them. I have therefore given 
 a bibliography of the works of each writer with 
 whom I have dealt, and I have added a number 
 of notes, giving various particulars which I think 
 are likely to be useful in fixing more definitely 
 the personal characteristics of these writers. 
 
 176 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES 177 
 
 GfiRARD DE NERVAL 
 
 (1808-1855) 
 
 Napoldon et la France Chierri&re, iUgies nationales, 
 1826 ; Za mort de Talma, 1826 ; L'Acaddmie, ou 
 les Memhres Introuvailes, com^die satirique en vers, 
 1826 ; NapoUon et Talma, dUgies nationales nouvelles, 
 1826 ; M. Dentscourt, ou le Cuisinier Grand Homme, 
 1826 ; Megies Nationales et Satires Politiques, 1827 ; 
 Faust, tragidie de Goethe, 1828 (suivi du second 
 Faust, 1840) ; Couronne FoMque de BSr anger, 1828 ; 
 Ze Pewple, ode, 1830 ; Po6sies Allemandes, Morgeaux 
 choisis et traduits, 1830 ; Choix de Fodsies de Mon- 
 sard et de Regnier, 1830; Nos Adieus d, la Ghavibre 
 de D6pwt4s de Van 1830, 1831; Zinore, traduite de 
 Burger, 1835 ; Figuilo, opdra comique (with Dumas), 
 1837; Z'Alchimiste, drame en vers (with Dumas), 
 1839; Zdo BurckJiardt, drame en prose (with Dumas), 
 1839; Scenes de la Vie Orientale, 2 vols., 1848- 
 1850; Zes Montenegrins, opira comique (with 
 Alboize), 1849; Le Chariot d' Enfant, drame en 
 vers (with M^ry), 1850 ; Les Niiits du Bamazan, 
 1850; Voyage en Orient, 1851; L'Imagier de 
 Harlem, Ugende en prose et en vers (with M^ry and 
 Bernard Lopez), 1852; Gontes et Facities, 1852; 
 Lorely, souvenirs d'Allemagne, 1852; Les Illumines, 
 1852; Petits Chdteaux de BoMme, 1853; Les 
 
 M 
 
178 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Filles du Feu, 1854; Misanthropic et Repentir, 
 drame de Kotzebue, 1855; La BohSme galante, 
 1855; Le RSve et la Vie: AurMia, 1855; Ze 
 Marquis de Fayolle (with E. Gorges), 1856 ; 
 (Euvres Competes, 6 vols. (1, Zes Deux Faust de 
 Goethe ; 2, 3, Voyage en Orient ; 4, Zes Illumines, 
 Zes Faux Saulniers ; 5, Ze RSve et la Vie, Zes 
 Filles du Feu, Za BoMme galante ; 6, Podsies Com- 
 plies), 1867. 
 
 The sonnets, written at different periods and 
 published for the first time in the collection of 
 1854, "Les Filles du Feu," which also contains 
 " Sylvie," were reprinted in the volume of FoSsies 
 Computes, where they are imbedded in the midst 
 of deplorable juvenilia. All, or almost all, of the 
 verse worth preserving was collected, in 1897, by 
 that delicate amateur of the curiosities of beauty, 
 M. Remy de Gourmont, in a tiny volume called 
 Zes Chivrdres, which contains the six sonnets of 
 " Les Chimferes," the sonnet called " Vers Dor^s," 
 the five sonnets of " Le Christ aux Oliviers," and, 
 in facsimile of the autograph, the lyric called " Les 
 Cydahses." The true facts of the life of G4rard 
 have been told for the first time, from original 
 documents, by Mme. ArvMe Barine, in two ex- 
 cellent articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 
 October 15 and November 1, 1897, since re- 
 printed in Zes Nevrosis, 1898; and, later, by M. 
 G. Labrunie de Ferrieres, in La Vie et I'CEuvre de 
 GSrard de Nerval, 1906. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES 179 
 
 VILLIEES DE LISLE-ADAM 
 
 (1838-1889) 
 
 PremUres Poisies, 1859; Isis, 1862; Men, 
 1864; Morgane, 1865; Claire Lenoir (in the 
 Revue des Zettres et des Arts), 1867; L' Evasion, 
 1870; La Mvolte, 1870; Azrael, 1878; Le 
 Nouveau Monde, 1880; Contes Gruels, 1880; 
 L'Eve Future, 1886; Ah'edyssiril, 1886; L' Amour 
 Supreme, 1886 ; Tribulat Bonhomet, 1887 ; Histoires 
 Insolites, 1888; Nouiieaux Contes Cruels, 1889; 
 Aodel, 1890; Chez les Passants, 1890; Propos 
 d'Au-deld, 1893; Histoires Souveraines, 1899 (a 
 selection). 
 
 Among works announced, but never pub- 
 lished, it may be interesting to mention : Seid, 
 William de Strally, Faust, Po4sies Nouvelles (In- 
 termMes; Gog ; Ave, Mater Victa ; Poisies diverses). 
 La Tentation sur la Montague, Le Vieux de la 
 Montagne, L' Adoration des Mages, Meditations 
 Littiraires, Mdlanges, TMdire (2 vols.). Documents 
 sur les Rdgnes de Charles VI. et de Charles VIL, 
 L' lUusionisme, De la Connaissance de I' Utile, 
 L'FocSgise Divine. 
 
 A sympathetic, but slightly vague. Life of 
 Villiers was written by his cousin, Vicomte 
 Robert du Pontavice de Heussey: Villiers de 
 
180 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 V Isle- Adam, 1893; it was translated into English 
 by Lady Mary Lloyd, 1894. See Verlaine's 
 Poetes Maudits, 1884, and his biography of Villiers 
 in Zes Hommes d' Aujourd'hui, the series of penny 
 biographies, with caricature portraits, published 
 by Vanier; also Mallarm^'s Villiers de V Isle- 
 Adam, the reprint of a lecture given at Brussels 
 a few months after Villiers' death. La Bdvolte 
 was translated by Mrs. Theresa Barclay in the 
 Fortnightly Review, December 1897, and acted 
 in London by the New Stage Club in 1906. 
 I have translated a little poem, Aveu, from the 
 interlude of verse in the Gontes Gruels called 
 Ghant d' Amour, in Bays and Nights, 1889. An 
 article of mine, the first, I believe, to be written 
 on Villiers in English, appeared in the Woman's 
 World in 1889 ; another in the Mlustrated London 
 News in 1891. 
 
 ARTHUR RIMBAUD 
 
 (1854-1891) 
 
 Uhe Saison en Enfer, 1873; Les Illuminations, 
 1886 ; Reliquaire, 1891 (containing several poems 
 falsely attributed to Rimbaud) ; Les Uluminatiom : 
 Une Saison en Unfer, 1892; Ponies CompUtes, 
 1895; (Euvres, 1898. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES 181 
 
 See also Paterne Berrichon, La Vie, de Jean- 
 Arthur Rimhaud, 1898, and Zettres de Jean-Arthur 
 Rimbaud, 1899 ; Paul Y&rl&iae, Les Podtes Maudits, 
 1884, and the biography by Verlaine in Les 
 Hommes d'Auj(nird!hui. Mr. George Moore was 
 the first to write about Rimbaud in England, in 
 " Two Unknown Poets " (Rimbaud and Laforgue) 
 in Impressions and Opinions, 1891. In Mr. John 
 Gray's Silverpoints, 1893, there are translations of 
 " CharleviUe " and " Sensation." The latter, and 
 " Les Chercheuses de Poux," are translated by 
 Mr. T. Sturge Moore in The Vinedresser, and other 
 Poems, 1899. 
 
 PAUL VERLAINE 
 
 (1844-1896) 
 
 Poemes Saturniens, 1866; FStes Galantes, 1869 ; 
 La Bonne Chanson, 1870 ; Romances sans Paroles, 
 1874; Sagesse, 1881; Les PoMes Maudits, 1884; 
 Jadis et Nagidre, 1884; Les MSmoires d'un Veuf, 
 1886; Louise Leclereq (suivi de Le Poteau, Pierre 
 Duchatelet, Madame Auhin), 1887; Am/mr, 1888 ; 
 ParalUlement, 1889; DMicaces, 1890; Bonhewr, 
 1891 ; Mes Hdpitaux, 1891 ; Chansons pour Mle, 
 1891; Litwrgies Intimes, 1892; Mes Prisons, 
 1893 ; Odes en son Honnmr, 1893 ; EUgies, 1893 ; 
 
182 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Qmnze Jowrs en Hollande, 1894; Dans les Lifrvbes, 
 1894; Mpigrammes, 1894; Confessions, 1895; 
 Ghuir, 1896 ; Invectives, 1896 ; Voyage en France 
 d'un Frangais (posthumous), 1907. 
 
 The complete works of Verlaine are now 
 published in six volumes at the Librairie L^on 
 Vanier (now Messein) ; the text is very incorrectly 
 printed, and it is still necessary to refer to the 
 earlier editions in separate volumes. A Choix de 
 Poisies, 1891, with a preface by Francois Copp^e, 
 and a reproduction of Carrifere's admirable por- 
 trait, is published in one volume by Charpentier ; 
 the series of Hbmmes d'Aujourd'hui contains 
 twenty-seven biographical notices by Verlaine ; 
 and a considerable number of poems and prose 
 articles exists, scattered in various magazines, 
 some of them English, such as the Senate; in 
 some cases the articles themselves are translated 
 into English, such as " My Visit to London," in 
 the Savoy for April 1896, and "Notes on 
 England: Myself as a French Master," and 
 " Shakespeare and Racine," in the Fortnightly 
 Review for July 1894 and September 1894. The 
 first English translation in verse from Verlaine is 
 Arthur O'Shaughnessy's rendering of "Clair de 
 Lune " in FStes Qalantes, imder the title " Pastel," 
 in SoTigs of a Worker, 1881. A volume of trans- 
 lations in verse. Poems of Verlaine, by Gertrude 
 Hall, was published in America in 1895. In 
 Mr. John Gray's Silverpoints, 1893, there are 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES 183 
 
 translations of "Parsifal," "A Crucifix," "Le 
 Chevalier Malheur," "Spleen," "Clair de Lune," 
 " Mon Dieu m'a dit," and " Green." A complete 
 translation of the F&ies Galantes, together with 
 poems from many other volumes, will be found 
 in a small book which is meant to be a kind 
 of supplement to this one. 
 
 As I have mentioned, there have been many 
 portraits of Verlaine. The three portraits drawn 
 on lithographic paper by Mr. Rothenstein, and 
 published in 1898, are but the latest, if also 
 among the best, of a long series, of which Mr. 
 Rothenstein himself has done two or three others, 
 one of which was reproduced in the Fall Mall 
 Gazette in 1894, when Verlaine was in London. 
 M. F. A. Cazals, a young artist who was one 
 of Verlaine's most intimate friends, has done I 
 should not like to say how many portraits, some 
 of which he has gathered together in a little 
 hook, Paul Verlaine: ses Portraits, 1898. There 
 are portraits in nine of Verlaine's own books, 
 several of them by M. Cazals (roughly jotted, 
 expressive notes of moments), one by M. Anquetin 
 (a strong piece of thinking flesh and blood), and 
 in the Choix de Poisies there is a reproduction 
 of the cloudy, inspired poet of Eugene Carri^re's 
 painting. Another portrait, which I have not 
 seen, but which Verlaine himself calls, in the 
 Dddicaces, im portrait en/in repos^, was done by 
 M. Aman-Jean. M. Niederhausern has done a 
 
184 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 bust in bronze, Mr. Rothenstein a portrait me- 
 dallion. A new edition of the Confessions, 1899, 
 contains a number of sketches ; Verlaine Des- 
 sinateur, 1896, many more; and there are yet 
 others in the extremely objectionable book of 
 M. Charles Donos, Verlaine IntiTne, 1898. The 
 Sommes d'Aujourd'hui contains a caricature-por- 
 trait, many other portraits have appeared in 
 French and English and German and Italian 
 magazines, and there is yet another portrait in 
 the admirable little book of Charles Morice, Pa^d 
 Verlaine, 1888, which contains by far the best 
 study that has ever been made of Verlaine as 
 a poet. I believe Mr. George Moore's article, " A 
 Great Poet," reprinted in Impressions and Opinions, 
 1891, was the first that was written on Verlaine 
 in England; my own article in the National 
 Review in 1892 was, I believe, the first detailed 
 study of the whole of his work up to that date. 
 At last, in the Vie de Paul Verlaine of Edmund 
 Lepelletier, there has come the authentic record. 
 
 JULES LAFORGUE 
 
 (1860-1887) 
 
 Les Complaintes, 1885; Z 'Imitation de Notre- 
 Bame la Lune, 1886; Le Concile F4erique, 1886; 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES 185 
 
 Moralitis Ldgendaires, 1887; Demiers Vers, 1890 
 (a privately printed volume, containing Des Meurs 
 de Bonne Volants, Le Goncile Fierique, and Demiers 
 Vers); Poisies GompUtes, 1894; CEuvres Gom/plites, 
 PoMes, Moralitis Ligendaires, Mdanges Posthumes 
 (3 vols.), 1902, 1903. 
 
 An edition of the Morality Ligendaires in two 
 volumes was published in 1897, under the care 
 of M. Lucien Pissarro, at the Sign of the Dial; 
 it is printed in Mr. Ricketts' admirable type^ and 
 makes one of the most beautiful books issued in 
 French during this century. In 1896 M. Camille 
 Mauclair, with his supple instinct for con- 
 temporary values, wrote a study, or rather an 
 eulogy, of Laforgue, to which M. Maeterlinck 
 contributed a few searching and delicate words 
 by way of preface. 
 
 STfiPHANE MALLARMlfi 
 
 (1842-1898) 
 
 Le Corbeau (traduit de Poe), 1875 ; La Demidre 
 Mode, 1875; L'Aprds-Midi d'un Faime, 1876; 
 Le Vathek de Beckford, 1876 ; Petite PMlologie d, 
 VVsage des Classes et du Monde : Les Mots Anglais, 
 1877; Ponies GompUtes (photogravdes sur le 
 manuscrit), 1887; Les Po&mes de Poe, 1888; Le 
 
186 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 Ten o'clock de M. Whistler, 1888; Pages, 1891; 
 Les Miens: Villiers de V Isle- Adam, 1892; Vers et 
 Prose, 1892 ; La Musique et les Lettres (Oxford, 
 Cambridge), 1894; Divagations, 1897; PoSsies, 
 1899. 
 
 See, on this difficult subject, Edmund Gosse, 
 Questions at Issue, 1893, in which will be found 
 the first study of Mallarm^ that appeared in 
 English ; and Vittorio Pica, Leiteratura d^JSccezione, 
 1899, which contains a carefully-documented 
 study of more than a hundred pages. There is 
 a translation of the poem caUed " Fleurs " in 
 Mr. John Gray's Silverpoints, 1893, and transla- 
 tions of " H^rodiade " and three shorter poems 
 will be found in the first volume of my collected 
 poems. Several of the poems in prose have 
 been translated into English ; my translation 
 of the " Plainte d'Automne," contained in 
 this volume, was made in momentary forget- 
 fulness that the same poem in prose had al- 
 ready been translated by Mr. George Moore in 
 Confessions of a Young Man. Mr. Moore also 
 translated " Le Phdnomtoe Fytur " in the Savoy, 
 July 1896. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES 187 
 
 JORIS KARL HUYSMANS 
 
 (1848-1907) 
 
 Le Brageoir a Efices, 1874; Marthe, Histoire 
 cCune Fille, 1876; Les Sceurs Vatard, 1879; 
 Croquis Parisiens, 1880; En M&nage, 1881; A 
 Vau-l'Eau, 1882; L'Art Moderm, 1883; A 
 BeboK/rs, 1884; Un Dilemme, 1887; Hn Bade, 
 1887; Certains, 1889; La BUvre, 1890; M-Bas, 
 1891 ; En Bmte, 1895 ; La Oathddrale, 1898 ; La 
 Bitvre et Saint-Siverin, 1898 ; Pages Catholiques, 
 1900; Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam, 1901; Be 
 Tout, 1902; L'OUat, 1903; Trois Primitifs, 
 1905; Les Foules de Lourdes, 1906. See also 
 the short story, Sac au Bos, in the Soirees de 
 Medan, 1880, and the pantomime, Pierrot Sceptique, 
 1881, in collaboration with L^on Hennique. En 
 Boute was translated into English by Mr. Kegan 
 Paul, in 1896; and La CathMrale by Miss Clara 
 Bell, in 1898. 
 
 I have been concerned here only with Huys- 
 mans under his latest aspect, but I may pre- 
 serve, from an article in the Fortnightly Beview 
 of March 1892, as not perhaps without some 
 psychological interest, a personal impression of 
 the man, which I made at the time when he was 
 writing Lti-Bas. 
 
188 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 " To realise how faithfully and how completely 
 Huysmans has revealed himself in all he has 
 written, it is necessary to know the man. ' He 
 gave me the impression of a cat,' some interviewer 
 once wrote of him ; ' courteous, perfectly polite, 
 almost amiable, but all nerves, ready to shoot out 
 his claws at the least word.' And, indeed, there 
 is something of his favourite animal about him. 
 The face is grey, wearily alert, with a look of 
 benevolent malice. At first sight it is common- 
 place, the features are ordinary, one seems to have 
 seen it at the Bourse or the Stock Exchange. 
 But gradually that strange, unvarying expression, 
 that look of benevolent malice, grows upon you, 
 as the influence of the man makes itself felt. I 
 have seen Huysmans in his office : he was formerly 
 an employ^ (' Sous-chef de bureau k la direction 
 de la surety g^n^rale ') in the Ministry of Foreign 
 Affairs, and a model employ^ ; I have seen him 
 in a caf^ in various houses ; but I always see 
 him in memory as I used to see him at the 
 house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back 
 on the sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, 
 expressive fingers, looking at no one and at 
 nothing, while Madame X. moves about with 
 solid vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary 
 menagerie of hric-d-brac. The spoils of all the 
 world are there, in that incredibly tiny salon; 
 they lie underfoot, they climb up walls, they 
 cling to screens, brackets, and tables; one of 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES 189 
 
 your elbows menaces a Japanese toy, the other a 
 Dresden china shepherdess ; all the colours of the 
 rainbow clash in a barbaric discord of notes. And 
 in a comer of this fantastic room, Huysmans lies 
 back indifferently on the sofa, with the air of one 
 perfectly resigned to the boredom of life. Some- 
 thing is said by my learned friend who is to 
 write for the new periodical, or perhaps it is the 
 young editor of the new periodical who speaks, 
 or (if that were not impossible) the taciturn 
 Englishman who accompanies me ; and Huys- 
 mans, without looking up, and without taking 
 the trouble to speak very distinctly, picks up 
 the phrase, transforms it, more likely transpierces 
 it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of 
 impromptu elaboration. Perhaps it is only a 
 stupid book that some one has mentioned, or 
 a stupid woman; as he speaks, the look booms 
 up before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, 
 a masterpiece and miracle of imbecility ; the un- 
 important little woman grows into a slow horror 
 before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant 
 aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity 
 of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a 
 touch of the sublime into the very expression of 
 his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and 
 every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. 
 He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, 
 an amused look of contempt, so profound that 
 it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility." 
 
190 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 (1862) 
 
 Serves Ghaudes, 1889; La Frincesse Maleine, 
 1890 ; Zes Amugles (L'Intruse, Les Aveugles), 1890 ; 
 L'OrTiement des Noces Spirituelles, de Ruysbroeck 
 I' Admirable, 1891; Zes Sept Princesses, 1891; 
 Pellias et Mdisande, 1892; Alladine et Palomides, 
 InUrieur, Za Mart de Tintagiles, 1894; Annabella, 
 de John Ford, 1895 ; Zes Disciples d, Sais et les 
 Fragments de Novalis, 1895 ; Ze Trisor des Humbles, 
 1896; Douze Chansons, 1896; Aglavaine et Sily- 
 sette, 1896; Za Sagesseet la Bestinde, 1898; ThMtre, 
 1901 (3 vols.); Za Vie des Abeilles, 1901; 
 Monna Vanna, 1902 ; Ze Temple Enseveli, 1902 ; 
 Joyzelle, 1903 ; Ze Bouble Jardin, 1904; Z'Zntelli- 
 gence des Fleurs, 1907. 
 
 Maeterlinck has had the good or bad for- 
 tune to be more promptly, and more violently, 
 praised at the beginning of his career than at 
 all events any other writer of whom I have 
 spoken in this volume. His fame in France 
 was made by a flaming article of M. Octave 
 Mirbeau in the Figaro of August 24, 1890. 
 M. Mirbeau greeted him as the " Belgian Shake- 
 speare," and expressed his opinion of Za Princesse 
 Maleine by saying " M. Maeterlinck has given us 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES 191 
 
 tlie greatest work of genius that has been pro- 
 duced in our time, and the most extraordinary 
 and the most naive too, comparable, (dare I say ?) 
 superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in 
 Shakespeare . . . more tragic than Macbeth, more 
 extraordinary in thought than Hamltt." Mr. 
 William Archer introduced Maeterlinck to Eng- 
 land in an article called "A Pessimist Playwright" 
 in the Fortnightly Review, September 1891. Less 
 enthusiastic than M. Mirbeau, he defined the 
 author of La PrivMsse Maleine as '' a Webster who 
 had read Alfred de Musset." A freely adapted 
 version of L'lntnise was given by Mr. Tree at the 
 Haymarket Theatre, January 27, 1892, and since 
 that time many of Maeterlinck's plays have been 
 acted, without cuts, or with but few cuts, at 
 various London theatres. The earliest of his books 
 to be translated into English were : The Frincesse 
 Maleine (by Gerard Harry) and The Intruder (by 
 William Wilson), 1892 ; Felleas and Melisanda and 
 The Sightless (by Laurence Alma-Tadema), 1892; 
 Ruyshroeck and the Mystics (by J. T. Stoddart), 
 1894 ; The Treasure of the Rumble (by A. Sutro), 
 1897; Aglavairve and Selysette (by A. Sutro), 1897 ; 
 Wisdom and Destiny (by A. Sutro), 1898 ; Alladine 
 and Falomides (by A. Sutro), Interior (by William 
 Archer), and The Death of Tintagiles (by A. Sutro), 
 1899. The later plays and essays have all been 
 translated into English, for the most part simul- 
 taneously with their appearance in French. 
 
192 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 
 
 I have spoken, in this volume, chiefly of 
 Maeterlinck's essays, and but little of his plays, 
 and I have said all that I had to say without 
 special reference to the second volume of essays, 
 La Sagesse et la Bestinie. Like Le TrSsor des 
 Ekmiles, that book is a message, a doctrine, 
 even more than it is a piece of literature. It is 
 a treatise on wisdom and happiness, on the 
 search for happiness because it is wisdom, not 
 for wisdom because it is happiness. It is a 
 book of patient and resigned philosophy, a very 
 Flemish philosophy, more resigned than even 
 Le TrSsor des Hwnbles. In a sense it seems to 
 aim less high. An ecstatic mysticism has given 
 way to a kind of prudence. Is this coming 
 nearer to the earth really an intellectual ascent 
 or descent ? At least it is a divergence, and 
 it probably indicates a divergence in art as well 
 as in meditation. Yet, while it is quite possible 
 to at least indicate Maeterlinck's position as a 
 philosopher, it seems to me premature to attempt 
 to define his position as a dramatist. Interesting 
 as his dramatic work has always been, there is, 
 in the later dramas, so singular an advance in 
 all the qualities that go to make great art, that 
 I find it impossible, at this stage of his develop- 
 naent, to treat his dramatic work as in any sense 
 the final expression of a personality. What the 
 next stage of his development may be it is 
 impossible to say. He will not write more 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES 193 
 
 beautiful dramas than he has written in Aglavaine 
 et Sdysette and in Pdleas ei M&isande. But he 
 may, and he probably will, write something 
 which will move the general world more pro- 
 foundly, touching it more closely, in the manner 
 of the great writers, in whom beauty has not been 
 more beautiful than in writers less great, but 
 has come to men with a more splendid energy. 
 
 Was I, when I wrote that, anticipating Monna 
 Vanna ? 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by Ballahtyhb, Hanson &• Co. 
 Edinburgh &' London 
 
 N 
 
BY THE SAME WRITER 
 
 Poems (Collected Edition in Two Volumea). 1902. 
 
 An Introduction to the Study of Browning. 1886, 
 1906. 
 
 Aubrey Beardsley. 1898, 1905. 
 
 The Symbolist Movement in Literature. 1899. 
 
 Flays, Acting, and Music. 1903. 
 
 Cities. 1903. 
 
 Studies in Prose and Verse. 1904. 
 
 A Book of Twenty Songs. 1905. 
 
 Spiritual Adventures. 1905. 
 
 The Fool of the World, and other Poems. 1906. 
 
 Studies in Seven Arts. 1906. 
 
 William Blake. 1907. 
 
 Cities of Italy. 1907.