TheChevaux de boisbegins thus:‘Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois,Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.’In a truly charming piece inSagessehe says:‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,Si bleu, si calme!Un arbre, par dessus le toitBerce sa palme.‘La cloche, dans le ciel qu’on voit,Doucement tinte.Un oiseau, sur l’arbre qu’on voit,Chante sa plainte.’In the passage inAmour, ‘Les fleurs des champs, les fleurs innombrables des champs ... les fleurs des gens,’ ‘champs’ and ‘gens’ sound somewhat alike. Here the imbecile repetitionof similar sounds suggests a senseless pun, to the poet, and as for this stanza inPierrot gamin:‘Ce n’est pas Pierrot en herbeNon plus que Pierrot en gerbe,C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot.Pierrot gamin, Pierrot gosse,Le cerneau hors de la cosse,C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot!’it is the language of nurses to babies, who do not care to make sense, but only to twitter to the child in tones which give him pleasure. The closing lines of the poemMainspoint to a complete ideational standstill, to mechanical mumbling:‘Ah! si ce sont des mains de rêve,Tant mieux, ou tant pis, ou tant mieux.’[130]The second peculiarity of Verlaine’s style is the other mark of mental debility, viz., the combination of completely disconnected nouns and adjectives, which suggest each other, either through a senseless meandering by way of associated ideas, or through a similarity of sound. We have already found some examples of this in the extracts cited above. In these we find the ‘enormous and tender Middle Ages’ and the ‘brand which thunders.’ Verlaine writes also of ‘feet which glide with a pure and wide movement,’ of ‘a narrow and vast affection,’ of ‘a slow landscape,’[131]of ‘a slack liqueur’ (‘jus flasque’), ‘a gilded perfume,’ a ‘condensed’ or ‘terse contour’ (‘galbe succinct’), etc. The Symbolists admire this form of imbecility, as ‘the research for rare and precious epithets’ (la recherche de l’epithète rare et précieuse).Verlaine has a clear consciousness of the vagueness of his thoughts, and in a very remarkable poem from the psychological point of view,Art poétique, in which he attempts to give a theory of his lyric creation, he raises nebulosity to the dignity of a fundamental method:‘De la musique avant toute choseEt pour cela préfère l’ImpairPlus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.’The two verbs ‘pèse’ and ‘pose’ are juxtaposed merely on account of their similarity of sound.‘Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles pointChoisir les mots sans quelque méprise;Rien de plus cher que la chanson griseOù l’Indécis au Précis se joint.‘C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,C’est par un ciel d’automne attiédi,Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!‘Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!Oh! la nuance seule fianceLe rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!’(This stanza is completely delirious; it places ‘nuance’ and ‘colour’ in opposition, as though the latter were not contained in the former. The idea of which the weak brain of Verlaine had an inkling, but could not bring to a complete conception, is probably that he prefers subdued and mixed tints, which lie on the margin of several colours, to the full intense colour itself.)‘Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,L’esprit cruel et le Rire impur,Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!’It cannot be denied that this poetical method in the hands of Verlaine often yields extraordinarily beautiful results. There are few poems in French literature which can rival theChanson d’Automne:‘Les sanglots longsDes violonsDe l’automneBlessent mon cœurD’une langueurMonotone.‘Tout suffocantEt blême, quandSonne l’heure,‘Je me souviensDes jours anciens,Et je pleure.‘Et je m’en vaisAu vent mauvaisQui m’emporteDeçà, delà,Pareil à laFeuille morte.’Even if literally translated, there remains something of the melancholy magic of the lines, which in French are richly rhythmical and full of music.Avant que tu ne t’en ailles(p. 99) andIl pleure dans mon cœur(p. 116) may also be called pearls among French lyrics.This is because the methods of a highly emotional, but intellectually incapable, dreamer suffice for poetry which deals exclusively with moods, but this is the inexorable limit of his power. Let the true meaning of mood be always present withus. The word denotes a state of mind, in which, through organic excitations which it cannot directly perceive, consciousness is filled with presentations of a uniform nature, which it elaborates with greater or less clearness, and one and all of which relate to those organic excitations inaccessible to consciousness. The mere succession of words, giving a name to these presentations, the roots of which are in the unknown, expresses the mood, and is able to awaken it in another. It has no need of a fundamental thought, or of a progressive exposition to unfold it. Verlaine often attains to astonishing effects in such poetry of moods. Where, however, distinct vision, or a feeling the motive of which is clear to consciousness, or a process well delimitated in time and space, is to be poetically rendered, the poetic art of the emotional imbecile fails utterly. In a healthy and sane poet even the mood pure and simple is united to clear presentations, and is not a mere undulation of fragrance and rose-tinted mist. Poems like Goethe’sUeber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,Der Fischer, orFreudvoll und leidvoll, can never be created by the emotionally degenerate; but, on the other hand, the most marvellous of Goethe’s poems are not so utterly incorporeal, not such mere sighs, as three or four of the best of a Verlaine.We have now the portrait of this most famous leader of the Symbolists clearly before us. We see a repulsive degenerate subject with asymmetric skull and Mongolian face, an impulsive vagabond and dipsomaniac, who, under the most disgraceful circumstances, was placed in gaol; an emotional dreamer of feeble intellect, who painfully fights against his bad impulses, and in his misery often utters touching notes of complaint; a mystic whose qualmish consciousness is flooded with ideas of God and saints, and a dotard who manifests the absence of any definite thought in his mind by incoherent speech, meaningless expressions and motley images. In lunatic asylums there are many patients whose disease is less deep-seated and incurable than is that of this irresponsiblecirculaireat large, whom only ignorant judges could have condemned for his epileptoid crimes.A second leader among the Symbolists, whose prestige is in no quarter disputed, is M. Stéphane Mallarmé. He is the most curious phenomenon in the intellectual life of contemporary France. Although long past fifty years of age, he has written hardly anything, and the little that is known of him is, in the opinion of his most unreserved admirers, of no account; and yet he is esteemed as a very great poet, and the utter infertility of his pen, the entire absence of any single work which he can produce as evidence of his poetical capacity, is prized as his greatest merit, and as a most striking proof of his intellectual importance. This statement must appear so fabulous to any reader not deranged in mind, that he may rightly demand proofsof these statements. M. Charles Morice[132]says of Mallarmé: ‘I am not obliged to unveil the secrets of the works of a poet who, as he has himself remarked, is excluded from all participation in any official exposition of the beautiful. The fact itself that these works are still unknown ... would seem to forbid our associating the name of M. Mallarmé with those of men who have given us books. I let vulgar criticism buzz without replying to it, and state that M. Mallarmé, without having given us books ... is famous—a fame which, of course, has not been won without arousing the laughter of stupidity in both petty and important newspapers, but which does not offer public and private ... ineptitude that opportunity for showing its baseness which is provoked by the advent of a new wonder.... The people, in spite of their abhorrence of the beautiful, and especially of novelty in the beautiful, have gradually, and in spite of themselves, come to comprehend the prestige of a legitimate authority. They themselves, even they, feel ashamed of their foolish laughter; and before this man, whom that laughter could not tear from the serenity of his meditative silence, laughter became dumb, and itself suffered the divine contagion of silence. Even for the million this man, who published no books, and whom, nevertheless, all designated “a poet,” became, as it were, the very symbol of a poet, seeking, where possible, to draw near to the absolute.... By his silence, he has signified that he ... cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create. Should cruel life refuse to support him in his effort, our respect—nay, more, our veneration—can alone give an answer worthy of a reticence thus conditioned.’The graphomaniac Morice (of whose crazy and distorted style of expression this literally translated example gives a very good idea) assumes that perhaps Mallarmé will yet create his ‘unprecedented work.’ Mallarmé himself, however, denies us the right to any such hope. ‘The delicious Mallarmé,’ Paul Hervieu relates,[133]‘told me one day ... he could not understand that anyone should let himself appear in print. Such a proceeding gave him the impression of an indecency, an aberration, resembling that form of mental disease called “exhibitionism.” Moreover, no one has been so discreet with his soul as this incomparable thinker.’[134]So, then, this ‘incomparable thinker’ shows ‘a complete discretion as regards his soul.’ At one time he bases his silence on a sort of shamed timidity at publicity; at another, on thefact that he ‘cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create,’ two reasons for that matter reciprocally precluding each other. He is approaching the evening of his life, and beyond a few brochures, such asLes Dieux de la GrèceandL’après-midi d’un Faune, together with some verses and literary and theatrical criticisms, scattered in periodicals, the lot barely sufficing for a volume, he has published nothing but some translations from the English and a few school-books (M. Mallarmé is a teacher of English in a Parisian lycée), and yet there are some who admire him as a great poet, as the one exclusive poet, and they overwhelm the ‘blockheads’ and the ‘fools’ who laugh at him with all the expressions of scorn that the force of imagination in a diseased mind can display. Is not this one of the wonders of our day? Lessing makes Conti, inEmilia Galotti, say that ‘Raphael would have been the greatest genius in painting, even if he had unfortunately been born without hands.’ In M. Mallarmé we have a man who is revered as a great poet, although ‘he has unfortunately been born without hands,’ although he produces nothing, although he does not pursue the art he professes. During the period when in London a great number of bubble-company swindles were being promoted, when all the world went mad for the possession of the least scrap of Stock Exchange paper, it happened that a few sharp individuals advertised in the newspapers, inviting people to subscribe for shares in a company of which the object was kept a secret. There really were men who brought their money to these lively promoters, and the historian of the City crisis regards this fact as inconceivable. Inconceivable as it is, Paris sees it repeated. Some persons demand unbounded admiration for a poet whose works are his own secret, and will probably remain such, and others trustingly and humbly bring their admiration as required. The sorcerers of the Senegal negroes offer their congregation baskets and calabashes for veneration, in which they assert that a mighty fetich is enclosed. As a matter of fact they contain nothing; but the negroes regard the empty vessels with holy dread, and show them and their possessors divine honours. Exactly thus is empty Mallarmé the fetich of the Symbolists, who, it must be admitted, are intellectually far below the Senegal negroes.This position of a calabash worshipped on bended knees he has attained by oral discourse. Every week he gathers round him embryonic poets and authors, and develops his art theories before them. He speaks just as Morice and Kahn write. He strings together obscure and wondrous words, at which his disciples become as stupid ‘as if a mill-wheel were going round in their heads,’ so that they leave him as if intoxicated, and with the impression that incomprehensible, superhuman disclosures have been made to them. If there is anything comprehensiblein the incoherent flow of Mallarmé’s words, it is perhaps his admiration for the pre-Raphaelites. It was he who drew the attention of the Symbolists to this school, and enjoined imitation of it. It is through Mallarmé that the French mystics received their English mediævalism and neo-Catholicism. Finally, it may be mentioned that among the physical features of Mallarmé are ‘long pointed faun-like ears.’[135]After Darwin, who was the first to point out the apish character of this peculiarity, Hartmann,[136]Frigerio,[137]and Lombroso,[138]have firmly established the connection between immoderately long and pointed external ears and atavism and degeneration; and they have shown that this peculiarity is of especially frequent occurrence among criminals and lunatics.The third among the leading spirits of the Symbolists is Jean Moréas, a Franco-Greek poet, who at the completion of his thirty-sixth year (his friends assert, it may be in friendly malice, that he makes himself out to be very much younger than he is) has producedin totothree attenuated collections of verses, of hardly one hundred to one hundred and twenty pages, bearing the titles,Les Syrtes,Les Cantilènes, andLe Pélerin passionné. The importance of a literary performance does not, of course, depend upon its amplitude, if it is otherwise unusually significant. When, however, a man cackles during interminable café séances of the renewal of poetry and the unfolding of a new art of the future, and finally produces three little brochures of childish verses as the result of his world-stirring effort, then the material insignificance of the performance also becomes a subject for ridicule.Moréas is one of the inventors of the word ‘Symbolism.’ For some few years he was the high-priest of this secret doctrine, and administered the duties of his service with requisite seriousness. One day he suddenly abjured his self-founded faith, and declared that ‘Symbolism’ had always been meant only as a joke, to lead fools by the nose withal; and that the true salvation of poetry was in Romanism (romanisme). Under this new word he affirms a return to the language, versification and mode of feeling of the French poets at the close of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance period; but it were well to adopt his declarations with caution, since in two or three years he may be proclaiming his ‘romanisme’ as much a tap-room joke as his ‘symbolism.’ The appearance of thePélerin passionnéin 1891 was celebrated by the Symbolists as an event which was to be the beginning of a new era inpoetry. They arranged a banquet in honour of Moréas, and in the after-dinner speeches he was worshipped as the deliverer from the shackles of ancient forms and notions, and as the saviour who was bringing in the kingdom of God of true poetry. And the same poets who sat at the table with Moréas, and delivered to him rapturous addresses or joined in the applause, a few weeks after this event overwhelmed him with contumely and contempt. ‘Moréas a Symbolist!’ cried Charles Vignier.[139]‘Is he one through his ideas? He laughs at them himself! His thoughts! They don’t weigh much, these thoughts of Jean Moréas!’ ‘Moréas?’ asks Adrien Remacle,[140]‘we have all been laughing at him. It is that which has made him famous.’ René Ghil calls hisPélerin passionné‘doggerel written by a pedant,’ and Gustav Kahn[141]passes sentence on him thus: ‘Moréas has no talent.... He has never done anything worth mentioning. He has his own particular jargon.’ These expressions disclose to us the complete hollowness and falseness of the Symbolistic movement, which outside France is obstinately proclaimed as a serious matter by imbeciles and speculators, although its French inventors make themselves hoarse in trying to convince the world that they merely wanted to banter the Philistine with a tap-room jest and advertise themselves.After the verdict of his brethren in the Symbolist Parnassus, I may really spare myself the trouble of dwelling longer on Moréas; I will, however, cite a few examples from hisPélerin passionné, in order that the reader may form an idea of the softness of brain which displays itself in these verses.The poem Agnes[142]begins thus:‘Il y avait des arcs où passaient des escortesAvec des bannières de deuil et du ferLacé (?) des potentats de toutes sortes—Il y avait—dans la cité au bord de la mer.Les places étaient noires, et bien pavées, et les portes,Du côté de l’est et de l’ouest, hautes; et comme en hiverLa forêt, dépérissaient les salles de palais, et les porches,Et les colonnades de belvéder.C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de tonadolescence.‘Dans la cité au bord de la mer, la cape et la dague lourdesDe pierres jaunes, et sur ton chapeau des plumes de perroquets,Tu t’en venais, devisant telles bourdes,Tu t’en venais entre tes deux laquaisSi bouffis et tant sots—en verité, des happelourdes!—Dans la cité au bord de la mer tu t’en venais et tu vaguaisParmi de grands vieillards qui travaillaient aux felouques,Le long des môles et des quais.C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de tonadolescence.And thus the twaddle goes on through eight more stanzas, and in every line we find the characteristics of the language used by imbeciles and made notorious by Sollier (Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile), the ‘ruminating’ as it were, of the same expressions, the dreamy incoherence of the language, and the insertion of words which have no connection with the subject.TwoChansons[143]run thus:‘Les courlis dans les roseaux!(Faut-il que je vous en parle,Des courlis dans les roseaux?)O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.‘Le porcher et les pourceaux!(Faut-il que je vous en parle,Du porcher et des pourceaux?)O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.‘Mon cœur pris en vos réseaux!(Faut-il que je vous en parle,De mon cœur en vos réseaux?)O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.‘On a marché sur les fleurs au bord de la route,Et le vent d’automne les secoue si fort, en outre.‘La malle-poste a renversé la vieille croix au bord de la route;Elle était vraiment si pourrie, en outre.‘L’idiot (tu sais) est mort au bord de la route,Et personne ne le pleurera, en outre.’The stupid artifice with which Moréas here seeks to produce a feeling of wretchedness by conjuring up the three associated figures of crushed flowers, dishevelled by the wind, an overturned and mouldering cross, and a dead, unmourned idiot, makes this poem a model of the would-be profound production of a madhouse!When Moréas is not soft of brain, he develops a rhetorical turgidity which reminds us of Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau in his worst efforts. Only one example[144]of this kind, and we have done with him:‘J’ai tellement soif, ô mon amour, de ta bouche,Que j’y boirais en baisers le cours detournéDu Strymon, l’Araxe et le Tanaïs farouche;Et les cent méandres qui arrosent Pitané,Et l’Hermus qui prend sa source où le soleil se couche,Et toutes les claires fontaines dont abonde Gaza,Sans que ma soif s’en apaisât.’Behind the leaders Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Moréas a troop of minor Symbolists throng, each, it is true, in his own eyes the one great poet of the band, but whose illusions of greatness do not entitle them to any special observation. Sufficient justiceis dealt them if the spirit they are made of be characterized by quoting a few lines of their poetry. Jules Laforgue, ‘unique not only in his generation, but in all the republic of literature,’[145]cries: ‘Oh, how daily [quotidienne] is life!’ and in his poemPan et la Syrinxwe come upon lines like the following:‘O Syrinx! voyez et comprenez la Terre et la merveille de cette matinée et la circulation de la vie.Oh, vous là! et moi, ici! Oh vous! Oh, moi! Tout est dans Tout!’[146]Gustav Kahn, one of the æstheticists and philosophers of Symbolism, says in hisNuit sur la Lande: ‘Peace descends from thy lovely eyes like a great evening, and the borders of slow tents descend, studded with precious stones, woven of far-off beams and unknown moons.’In German, at least, ‘borders of slow tents which descend’ is completely unintelligible nonsense. In French they are also unintelligible; but in the original their meaning becomes apparent. ‘Et des pans de tentes lentes descendent,’ the line runs, and betrays itself as pure echolalia, as a succession of similar sounds, as it were, echoing each other.Charles Vignier, ‘the beloved disciple of Verlaine,’ says to his mistress:‘Là-bas c’est trop loin,Pauvre libellule,Reste dans ton coinEt prends des pilules...‘Sois Edmond AboutEt d’humeur coulante,Sois un maraboutDu Jardin des Plantes.’Another of his poems,Une Coupe de Thulé, runs thus:‘Dans une coupe de ThuléOù vient pâlir l’attrait de l’heure,Dort le sénile et dolent leurreDe l’ultime rêve adulé.‘Mais des cheveux d’argent filéFont un voile à celle qui pleure,Dans une coupe de ThuléOù s’est éteint l’attrait de l’heure.‘Et l’on ne sait quel jubiléCélèbre une harpe mineureQue le hautain fantôme effleureD’un lucide doigt fuselé!...Dans une coupe de Thulé!’These poems remind us so forcibly of those doggerel rhymes at which in Germany jovial students are often wont to try their skill, and which are known as ‘flowery [lit.blooming] nonsense,’ that, in spite of the solemn assurance of French critics, I am convinced that they were intended as a joke. If I am right in my supposition, they are really evidences, not of the mental status of Vignier, but of his readers, admirers, and critics.Louis Dumur addresses the Neva in the following manner:‘Puissante, magnifique, illustre, grave, noble reine!O Tsaristsa [sic!] de glace et de fastes Souveraine!Matrone hiératique et solennelle et vénérée!...Toi qui me forces à rêver, toi qui me deconcertes,Et toi surtout que j’aime, Émail, Beauté, Poème, Femme.Néva! j’évoque ton spectacle et l’hymne de ton âme!’And René Ghil, one of the best-known Symbolists (he is chief of a school entitled ‘évolutive-instrumentiste’), draws from his lyre these tones, which I also quote in French; in the first place because they would lose their ring in a translation, and, secondly, because if I were to translate them literally, it is hopeless to suppose that the reader would think I was serious:‘Ouïs! ouïs aux nues haut et nues oùTirent-ils d’aile immense qui vire ...et quand videet vers les grands pétales dans l’air plus aride—‘(Et en le lourd venir grandi lent stridule, etTitille qui n’alentisse d’air qui dure, et!Grandie, erratile et multiple d’éveils, strideMixte, plainte et splendeur! la plénitude aride)‘et vers les grands pétales d’agitationsLors évanouissait un vol ardent qui stride....‘(des saltigrades doux n’iront plus vers les mers....)’One thing must be acknowledged, and that is, the Symbolists have an astonishing gift for titles. The book itself may belong to pure madhouse literature; the title is always remarkable. We have already seen that Moréas names one of his collection of versesLes Syrtes. He might in truth just as well call it theNorth Pole, orThe Marmot, orAbd-el-Kader, since these have just as much connection with the poems in the little volume asSyrtes; but it is undeniable that this geographical name calls up the lustre of an African sun, and the pale reflection of classic antiquity, which may well please the eye of the hysteric reader. Edouard Dubus entitles his poem,Quand les Violons sont partis; Louis Dumur,Lassitudes; Gustave Khan,Les Palais nomades; Maurice du Plessis,La Peau de Marsyas; Ernest Raynaud,Chairs profanesandLe Signe; Henri de Régnier,Sites etEpisodes; Arthur Rimbaud,Les Illuminations; Albert Saint Paul,L’Echarpe d’Iris; Viélé-Griffin,Ancæus; and Charles Vignier,Centon.Of the prose of the Symbolists, I have already given some examples. I should further like to cite only a few passages from a book which the Symbolists declare to be one of their most powerful mental manifestations,La Littérature de tout-à-l’heure, by Charles Morice. It is a sort of bird’s-eye view of the development of literature up to the present time, a rapid critique of the more and most recent books and authors, a kind of programme of the literature of the future. This book is one of the most astonishing which exists in any language. It strongly resemblesRembrandt as Educator, but is far beyond that book in the utter senselessness of its concatenations of words. It is a monument of pure literary insanity, of ‘graphomania’; and neither Delepierre in hisLittérature des Fous, nor Philomnestes (Gustave Brunet) in hisFous Littéraires, quotes examples of more complete mental dislocation than are visible in every page of this book. Notice the following confession of faith by Morice:[147]‘Although in this book treating only of æsthetics—although of æsthetics based upon metaphysics—we shall remember to refrain, as far as possible, from pure philosophizing, we must approximately paraphrase a word which will more than once be made use of, and which, in the highest sense here put upon it, is not incapable of being paraphrased. God is the first and universal cause, the final and universal end; the bond between spirits; the point of intersection where two parallels would meet; the fulfilment of our inclinations; the fruition which accords with the glories of our dreams; the abstraction itself of the concrete; the unseen and unheard and yet certain ideal of our demands for beauty in truth. God is, par excellence,THEvery word—the very word, that is to say, that unknown certain word of which every author has the incontrovertible, but undiscernible idea, the self-evident but hidden goal which he will never reach, and which he approaches as near as possible. In, so to say, practical æsthetics He is the atmosphere of joy in which the mind revels victorious, because it has reduced irreducible mystery to imperishable symbols.’ I do not for a moment doubt that this incomparable jumble will be quite intelligible to theologians. Like all mystics, they discover a sense in every sound; that is, they persuade themselves and others that the nebulous ideas which the sound awakens in their brains by association are the meaning of that sound. But anyone who demands of words that they should be the media of definite thoughts, will perceive in the face of this twaddle that the author was not thinking anything at allwhen he wrote, although he was dreaming of many things. ‘Religion’ is for Morice (p. 56), ‘the source of art, and art in its essence is religious’—an affirmation which he borrows from Ruskin, although he does not acknowledge it. ‘Our scholars, our thinkers ... the luminous heads of the nineteenth century,’ are ‘Edgar Poe, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Auguste Comte, Claude Bernard, Berthelot’ (p. 57). Edgar Poe by the side of Spencer, Darwin, and Claude Bernard! never have ideas danced a crazier fools’ quadrille in a disordered brain.And this book, of which the passages we have cited give a sufficiently correct idea, was, in France (just asRembrandt as Educatorwas in Germany), pronounced by thoroughly responsible critics to be ‘strange, but interesting and suggestive.’ A poor degenerate devil who scribbles such stuff, and an imbecile reader who follows his twaddle like passing clouds, are simply to be pitied. But what words of contempt are strong enough for the sane intellectual tatterdemalions who, in order not to offend or else to give themselves the appearance of possessing a remarkable faculty of comprehension, or to affect fairness and benevolence even towards those whose opinions they in part do not share, insist that they discover in books of this kind many a truth, much wit along with peculiar whims, an ideal of fervour and frequent lightnings of thought?The word ‘Symbolism’ conveys, as we have seen, no idea to its inventors. They pursue no definite artistic tendency; hence it is not possible to show them that their tendency is a false one. It is otherwise with some of their disciples, who joined their ranks, partly through a desire to advertise themselves, partly because they thought that, in the conflicts between literary parties, they were fighting on the side which was the stronger and the more sure of victory, and partly, also, through the folly of fashion, and through the influence exerted by any noisy novelty over uncritical minds. Less weak-brained than the leaders, they felt the need of giving the word ‘Symbolism’ a certain significance, and, in fact, drew up a number of axioms which, according to their profession, serve to guide them in their creations. These axioms are sufficiently defined to allow of discussion.The Symbolists demand greater freedom in the treatment of French verse. They fiercely rebel against the old alexandrines, with the cæsura in the middle, and the necessary termination of the sentence at the end; against the prohibition of the hiatus; against the law of a regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. They make defiant use of the ‘free verse,’ with length and rhythmad libitum, and false rhymes. The foreigner can only smile at the savage gestures with which this conflict is carried on. It is a schoolboys’ war against somehated book, which is solemnly torn in pieces, trodden under foot, and burned. The whole dispute concerning prosody and the rules of rhyme is, so to speak, an inter-Gallic concern, and is of no consequence to the literature of the world. We have long had everything which the French poets are only now seeking to obtain by barricades and street massacres. In Goethe’sPrometheus,Mahomet’s Gesang,Harzreise im Winter, in Heine’sNordsee Cyklus, etc., we possess perfect models of free verse; we alternate the rhymes as we will; we allow masculine and feminine rhymes to follow one another as seems good to us; we do not bind ourselves to the rigid law of old classic metres, but suffer, in the cradling measure of our verse, anapæsts to alternate with iambics and spondees, according to our feeling for euphony. English, Italian and Sclavonic poetry have gone equally far, and if the French alone have remained behind, and have at last found a need for casting aside their old matted, moth-eaten periwig, this is quite reasonable; but to anyone but a Frenchman they merely make themselves ridiculous when they trumpet their painful hobbling after the nations who are far in front of them, as an unheard-of discovery of new paths and opening up of new roads, and as an advance inspired by the ideal into the dawn of the future.Another æsthetic demand of the Symbolists is that the line should, independently of its sense, call forth an intended emotion merely by its sound. A word should produce an effect, not through the idea which it embodies, but as a tone, language becoming music. It is noteworthy that many of the Symbolists have given their books titles which are intended to awaken musical ideas. We findLes Gammes(The Scales), by Stuart Merrill;Les Cantilènes, by Jean Moréas;Cloches dans la Nuit, by Adolphe Retté;Romances sans Paroles, by Paul Verlaine, etc. To make use of language as a musical instrument for the production of pure tone effects is the delirious idea of a mystic. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites demand of the fine arts that they should not represent the concrete plastically or optically, but should express the abstract, and therefore simply undertake therôleof alphabetic writing. Similarly, the Symbolists displace all the natural boundary lines of art, and impose upon the word a task which belongs to musical signs only. But while the pre-Raphaelites wish to raise the fine arts to a higher rank than is suited to them, the Symbolists greatly degrade the word. In its origin sound is musical. It expresses no definite idea, but only a general emotion of the animal. The cricket fiddles, the nightingale trills, when sexually excited. The bear growls when stirred by the rage of conflict; the lion roars in his pleasure when tearing a living prey. In proportion as the brain develops in the animal kingdom, and mental life becomes richer, the means ofvocal expression are evolved and differentiated, and become capable of making perceptible to the senses not only simple generic emotions, but also presentative complexes of a more restricted and definitely delimitated nature—nay, if Professor Garner’s observations concerning the language of apes are accurate, even tolerably distinct single presentations. Sound, as a means of expressing mental operations, reaches its final perfection in cultivated, grammatically articulated language, inasmuch as it can then follow exactly the intellectual working of the brain, and make it objectively perceptible in all the minutest details. To bring the word, pregnant with thought, back to the emotional sound is to renounce all the results of organic development, and to degrade man, rejoicing in the power of speech, to the level of the whirring cricket or the croaking frog. The efforts of the Symbolists, then, result in senseless twaddle, but not in the word-music they intend, for this simply does not exist. No word of any single human language is, as such, musical. Many languages abound in consonants; in others vowels predominate. The former require more dexterity in the muscles employed in speaking; their pronunciation, therefore, counts as more difficult, and they seem less agreeable to the ears of foreigners than the languages which are rich in vowels. But this has nothing to do with the musical side of the question. What remains of the phonetic effect of a word if it is whispered, or if it is only visible as a written character? And yet in both cases it is able to awaken the same emotions, as if it had reached consciousness full-toned through the sense of hearing. Let anyone have read aloud to him the most cleverly chosen arrangement of words in a language completely unknown to him, and try to produce in himself a definite emotion through the mere phonetic effect. In every case it will be found impossible. The meaning of a word, and not its sound, determines its value. The sound is as such neither beautiful nor ugly. It becomes so only through the voice which gives it life. Even the first soliloquy in Goethe’sIphigeniewould be ugly coming from the throat of a drunkard. I have had the opportunity of convincing myself that even the Hottentot language, spoken in a mellow, agreeable contralto voice, could be pleasing.Still more cracked is the craze of a sub-section of the Symbolists, the ‘Instrumentalists,’ whose spokesman is René Ghil. They connect each sound with a definite feeling of colour, and demand that the word should not only awaken musical emotion, but at the same time operate æsthetically in producing a colour-harmony. This mad idea has its origin in a much-quoted sonnet by Arthur Rimbaud,Les Voyelles(Vowels), of which the first line runs thus:‘A black, e white, i red, u green, o blue.’Morice declares[148]explicitly (what in any case no one in a sane state of mind would have doubted) that Rimbaud wished to make one of those silly jokes which imbeciles and idiots are in the habit of perpetrating. Some of his comrades, however, took the sonnet in grim earnest, and deduced from it a theory of art. In hisTraité du VerbeRené Ghil specifies the colour-value, not only of individual vowels, but of musical instruments. ‘Harps establish their supremacy by being white. And violins are blue, often softened by a shimmer of light, to subdue paroxysms.’ (It is to be hoped the reader will duly appraise these combinations of words.) ‘In the exuberance of ovations, brass instruments are red, flutes yellow, allowing the childlike to proclaim itself astonished at the luminance of the lips. And the organ, synthesis of all simple instruments, bewails deafness of earth and the flesh all in black....’ Another Symbolist, who has many admirers, M. Francis Poictevin, teaches us, inDerniers Songes, to know the feelings corresponding to colours. ‘Blue goes—without more of passion—from love to death; or, more accurately, it is a lost extreme. From turquoise blue to indigo, one goes from the most shame-faced influences to final ravages.’Wiseacres were, of course, at once to the fore, and set up a quasi-scientific theory of ‘colour-hearing.’ Sounds are said to awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to some, this was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures; according to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal connection between the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means of nerve filaments. This anatomical explanation is entirely arbitrary, and has not been substantiated by any facts. But ‘colour-hearing’ itself is by no means confirmed. The most complete book hitherto published on this subject, the author of which is the French oculist, Suarez de Mendoza,[149]collects all the available observations on this alleged phenomenon, and deduces from them the following definition: ‘It is the faculty of associating tones and colours, by which every objective acoustic perception of sufficient intensity, nay, even the memory-image of such a perception, arouses in certain persons a luminous or non-luminous image, which is always the same for the same letters, the same tone of voice or instrument, and the same intensity or pitch of tone.’ Suarez well hits the truth when he says, ‘Colour-hearing’ (he calls itpseudo-photesthésie) ‘is often a consequence of an association of ideas established in youth ... and often of a special action of the brain, the particular nature of which is unknown to us, and may have a certain similarity to sense-illusion and hallucination.’ For my part, I have nodoubt that colour-hearing is always the consequence of association of ideas, the origins of which must remain obscure, because the combination of certain presentations of colour with certain sensations of sound may possibly depend upon the very evanescent perceptions of early childhood, which were not powerful enough to arouse the attention, and have therefore remained undiscerned in consciousness. That it is a question of purely individual associations brought about by the accident of associated ideas, and not of organic co-ordinations depending upon definite abnormal nervous connections, is made very probable by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a different colour to the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that to Ghil the flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in hisFarbenlehre) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter ‘a’ black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel as blue, and so on.The relation between the external world and the organism is originally very simple. Movements are continually occurring in nature, and the protoplasm of living cells perceives these movements. Unity of effect corresponds to unity of cause. The lowest animals perceive of the outer world only this, that something in it changes, and possibly, also, whether this change is marked or slight, sudden or slow. They receive sensations differing quantitatively, but not qualitatively. We know, for example, that the proboscis, or syphon, of thePholas dactylus, which contracts more or less vigorously and quickly at every excitation, is sensitive to all external impressions—light, noise, touch, smell, etc. This mollusc sees, hears, feels and smells, therefore, with this simple organ; his proboscis is to him at once eye, ear, nose, finger, etc. In the higher animals the protoplasm is differentiated. Nerves, ganglia, brain and sense-apparatus are formed. The movements of nature are now perceived in a variety of ways. The differentiated senses transform the unity of the phenomenon into the diversity of the percept. But even in the highest and most differentiated brain there still remains something like a very distant and very dim remembrance that the cause which excites the different senses is one and the same movement, and there are formed presentations and conceptions which would be unintelligible if we could not concede this vague intuition of the fundamental unity of essence in all perceptions. We speak of ‘high’ and ‘deep’ tones, and thus give to sound-waves a relationship in space which they cannot have. In the same way we speak of tone-colour, and, conversely, of colour-tones, and thus confound the acoustic and optic properties of the phenomena. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ lines or tones, ‘sweet’ voices, are frequent modes of expression, which depend on a transference of the perception of one sense to the impressionsof another. In many cases this method of speech may no doubt be traced to mental inertia. It is more convenient to designate a sense-perception by a word which is familiar, though borrowed from the province of another sense, than to create a special word for the particular percept. But even this loan for convenience’ sake is possible and intelligible only if we admit that the mind perceives certain resemblances between the impressions of the different senses—resemblances which, although they are often to be explained by conscious or unconscious association of ideas, are oftener quite inexplicable objectively. It only remains for us to assume that consciousness, in its deepest substrata, neglects the differentiation of phenomena by the various senses, passes over this perfection attained very late in organic evolution, and treats impressions only as undifferentiated material for the acquirement of knowledge of the external world without reference to their origin by way of this or that sense. It thus becomes intelligible that the mind mingles the perceptions attained through the different senses, and transforms them one into another. Binet[150]has established, in his excellent essays, this transposition of the senses in hysterical persons. A female patient, whose skin was perfectly insensible on one half of her body, took no notice when, unseen by herself, she was pricked with a needle. But at the moment of puncture there arose in her consciousness the image of a black (in the case of another invalid, of a bright) point. Consciousness thus transposed an impression of the nerves of the skin, which, as such, was not perceived, into an impression of the retina, of the optic nerve.In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of the differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly confounds the reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster.Moreover, it is an old clinical observation that mental decay is accompanied by colour mysticism. One of Legrain’s[151]mental invalids ‘endeavoured to recognise good and evil by the difference of colour, ascending from white to black; when he was reading, words had (according to their colour) a hidden meaning, which he understood.’ Lombroso[152]cites ‘eccentricpersons’ who, ‘like Wigman, had the paper for their books specially manufactured with several colours on each page.... Filon painted each page of the books he wrote in a different colour.’ Barbey d’Aurevilly, whom the Symbolists venerate as a pioneer, used to write epistles in which each letter of a word was coloured with a different tint. Most alienists know similar cases in their experience.The more reliable Symbolists proclaim their movement as ‘a reaction against naturalism.’ Such a reaction was certainly justified and necessary; for naturalism in its beginnings, as long as it was embodied in De Goncourt and Zola, was morbid, and, in its later development in the hands of their imitators, vulgar and even criminal, as will be proved further on. Nevertheless Symbolism is not in the smallest degree qualified to conquer naturalism, because it is still more morbid than the latter, and, in art, the devil cannot be driven out by Beelzebub.Finally, it is affirmed that Symbolism connotes ‘the inscribing of a symbol in human form.’ Expressed unmystically, this means that in the poems of the Symbolists the particular human form should not only exhibit its special nature and contingent destiny, but also represent a general type of humanity, and embody a universal law of life. This quality, however, is not the monopoly of Symbolistic poetry, but belongs to all kinds of poetry. No genuine poet has yet been impelled to deal with an utterly unprecedented and unique case, or with a monstrous being whose likeness is not to be found in mankind. That which interests him in men and their destiny is just the intimate connection between the two and the universal laws of human life. The more the government of universal laws is made apparent in the fate of the individual, the more there is embodied in him that which lives in all men, so much the more attractive will this destiny and this man be to the poet. There is not in all the literature of humanity a single work of recognised importance which in this sense is not symbolic, and in which the characters, their passions and fortunes, have not a typical significance, far transcending the particular circumstances. It is, therefore, a piece of foolish arrogance in the Symbolists to lay claim to the sole possession of this quality in the works of their school. They show, moreover, that they do not understand their own formulæ; for those theorists of the school who demand of poetry that it should be ‘a symbol inscribed in human form,’ assert at the same time that only the ‘rare and unique case’ (le cas rare et unique) deserves the attention of the poet,i.e., the case which is significant of nothing beyond itself, and consequently the opposite of a symbol.[153]We have now seen that Symbolism, like English pre-Raphaelitism (from which it borrowed its catch-words and opinions), is nothing else than a form of the mysticism of weak-minded and morbidly emotional degeneration. The efforts of some followers of the movement to import a meaning into the stammering utterances of their leaders, and falsely to ascribe to them a sort of programme, do not for a moment withstand criticism, but show themselves to be graphomaniac and delirious twaddle, without the smallest grain of truth or sound reason. A young Frenchman, who is certainly not adverse to rational innovation, Hugues Le Roux,[154]describes the group of Symbolists quite correctly in saying of them: ‘They are ridiculous cripples, each intolerable to the other; they live uncomprehended by the public, several by their friends as well, and a few by themselves. As poets or prose writers they proceed in the same way: no material, no sense, and only juxtapositions of loud-sounding musical (?) words; teams of strange rhymes, groupings of unexpected colours and tones, swaying cadences, hurtlings, hallucinations and evoked suggestions.’
TheChevaux de boisbegins thus:‘Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois,Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.’In a truly charming piece inSagessehe says:‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,Si bleu, si calme!Un arbre, par dessus le toitBerce sa palme.‘La cloche, dans le ciel qu’on voit,Doucement tinte.Un oiseau, sur l’arbre qu’on voit,Chante sa plainte.’In the passage inAmour, ‘Les fleurs des champs, les fleurs innombrables des champs ... les fleurs des gens,’ ‘champs’ and ‘gens’ sound somewhat alike. Here the imbecile repetitionof similar sounds suggests a senseless pun, to the poet, and as for this stanza inPierrot gamin:‘Ce n’est pas Pierrot en herbeNon plus que Pierrot en gerbe,C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot.Pierrot gamin, Pierrot gosse,Le cerneau hors de la cosse,C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot!’it is the language of nurses to babies, who do not care to make sense, but only to twitter to the child in tones which give him pleasure. The closing lines of the poemMainspoint to a complete ideational standstill, to mechanical mumbling:‘Ah! si ce sont des mains de rêve,Tant mieux, ou tant pis, ou tant mieux.’[130]The second peculiarity of Verlaine’s style is the other mark of mental debility, viz., the combination of completely disconnected nouns and adjectives, which suggest each other, either through a senseless meandering by way of associated ideas, or through a similarity of sound. We have already found some examples of this in the extracts cited above. In these we find the ‘enormous and tender Middle Ages’ and the ‘brand which thunders.’ Verlaine writes also of ‘feet which glide with a pure and wide movement,’ of ‘a narrow and vast affection,’ of ‘a slow landscape,’[131]of ‘a slack liqueur’ (‘jus flasque’), ‘a gilded perfume,’ a ‘condensed’ or ‘terse contour’ (‘galbe succinct’), etc. The Symbolists admire this form of imbecility, as ‘the research for rare and precious epithets’ (la recherche de l’epithète rare et précieuse).Verlaine has a clear consciousness of the vagueness of his thoughts, and in a very remarkable poem from the psychological point of view,Art poétique, in which he attempts to give a theory of his lyric creation, he raises nebulosity to the dignity of a fundamental method:‘De la musique avant toute choseEt pour cela préfère l’ImpairPlus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.’The two verbs ‘pèse’ and ‘pose’ are juxtaposed merely on account of their similarity of sound.‘Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles pointChoisir les mots sans quelque méprise;Rien de plus cher que la chanson griseOù l’Indécis au Précis se joint.‘C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,C’est par un ciel d’automne attiédi,Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!‘Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!Oh! la nuance seule fianceLe rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!’(This stanza is completely delirious; it places ‘nuance’ and ‘colour’ in opposition, as though the latter were not contained in the former. The idea of which the weak brain of Verlaine had an inkling, but could not bring to a complete conception, is probably that he prefers subdued and mixed tints, which lie on the margin of several colours, to the full intense colour itself.)‘Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,L’esprit cruel et le Rire impur,Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!’It cannot be denied that this poetical method in the hands of Verlaine often yields extraordinarily beautiful results. There are few poems in French literature which can rival theChanson d’Automne:‘Les sanglots longsDes violonsDe l’automneBlessent mon cœurD’une langueurMonotone.‘Tout suffocantEt blême, quandSonne l’heure,‘Je me souviensDes jours anciens,Et je pleure.‘Et je m’en vaisAu vent mauvaisQui m’emporteDeçà, delà,Pareil à laFeuille morte.’Even if literally translated, there remains something of the melancholy magic of the lines, which in French are richly rhythmical and full of music.Avant que tu ne t’en ailles(p. 99) andIl pleure dans mon cœur(p. 116) may also be called pearls among French lyrics.This is because the methods of a highly emotional, but intellectually incapable, dreamer suffice for poetry which deals exclusively with moods, but this is the inexorable limit of his power. Let the true meaning of mood be always present withus. The word denotes a state of mind, in which, through organic excitations which it cannot directly perceive, consciousness is filled with presentations of a uniform nature, which it elaborates with greater or less clearness, and one and all of which relate to those organic excitations inaccessible to consciousness. The mere succession of words, giving a name to these presentations, the roots of which are in the unknown, expresses the mood, and is able to awaken it in another. It has no need of a fundamental thought, or of a progressive exposition to unfold it. Verlaine often attains to astonishing effects in such poetry of moods. Where, however, distinct vision, or a feeling the motive of which is clear to consciousness, or a process well delimitated in time and space, is to be poetically rendered, the poetic art of the emotional imbecile fails utterly. In a healthy and sane poet even the mood pure and simple is united to clear presentations, and is not a mere undulation of fragrance and rose-tinted mist. Poems like Goethe’sUeber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,Der Fischer, orFreudvoll und leidvoll, can never be created by the emotionally degenerate; but, on the other hand, the most marvellous of Goethe’s poems are not so utterly incorporeal, not such mere sighs, as three or four of the best of a Verlaine.We have now the portrait of this most famous leader of the Symbolists clearly before us. We see a repulsive degenerate subject with asymmetric skull and Mongolian face, an impulsive vagabond and dipsomaniac, who, under the most disgraceful circumstances, was placed in gaol; an emotional dreamer of feeble intellect, who painfully fights against his bad impulses, and in his misery often utters touching notes of complaint; a mystic whose qualmish consciousness is flooded with ideas of God and saints, and a dotard who manifests the absence of any definite thought in his mind by incoherent speech, meaningless expressions and motley images. In lunatic asylums there are many patients whose disease is less deep-seated and incurable than is that of this irresponsiblecirculaireat large, whom only ignorant judges could have condemned for his epileptoid crimes.A second leader among the Symbolists, whose prestige is in no quarter disputed, is M. Stéphane Mallarmé. He is the most curious phenomenon in the intellectual life of contemporary France. Although long past fifty years of age, he has written hardly anything, and the little that is known of him is, in the opinion of his most unreserved admirers, of no account; and yet he is esteemed as a very great poet, and the utter infertility of his pen, the entire absence of any single work which he can produce as evidence of his poetical capacity, is prized as his greatest merit, and as a most striking proof of his intellectual importance. This statement must appear so fabulous to any reader not deranged in mind, that he may rightly demand proofsof these statements. M. Charles Morice[132]says of Mallarmé: ‘I am not obliged to unveil the secrets of the works of a poet who, as he has himself remarked, is excluded from all participation in any official exposition of the beautiful. The fact itself that these works are still unknown ... would seem to forbid our associating the name of M. Mallarmé with those of men who have given us books. I let vulgar criticism buzz without replying to it, and state that M. Mallarmé, without having given us books ... is famous—a fame which, of course, has not been won without arousing the laughter of stupidity in both petty and important newspapers, but which does not offer public and private ... ineptitude that opportunity for showing its baseness which is provoked by the advent of a new wonder.... The people, in spite of their abhorrence of the beautiful, and especially of novelty in the beautiful, have gradually, and in spite of themselves, come to comprehend the prestige of a legitimate authority. They themselves, even they, feel ashamed of their foolish laughter; and before this man, whom that laughter could not tear from the serenity of his meditative silence, laughter became dumb, and itself suffered the divine contagion of silence. Even for the million this man, who published no books, and whom, nevertheless, all designated “a poet,” became, as it were, the very symbol of a poet, seeking, where possible, to draw near to the absolute.... By his silence, he has signified that he ... cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create. Should cruel life refuse to support him in his effort, our respect—nay, more, our veneration—can alone give an answer worthy of a reticence thus conditioned.’The graphomaniac Morice (of whose crazy and distorted style of expression this literally translated example gives a very good idea) assumes that perhaps Mallarmé will yet create his ‘unprecedented work.’ Mallarmé himself, however, denies us the right to any such hope. ‘The delicious Mallarmé,’ Paul Hervieu relates,[133]‘told me one day ... he could not understand that anyone should let himself appear in print. Such a proceeding gave him the impression of an indecency, an aberration, resembling that form of mental disease called “exhibitionism.” Moreover, no one has been so discreet with his soul as this incomparable thinker.’[134]So, then, this ‘incomparable thinker’ shows ‘a complete discretion as regards his soul.’ At one time he bases his silence on a sort of shamed timidity at publicity; at another, on thefact that he ‘cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create,’ two reasons for that matter reciprocally precluding each other. He is approaching the evening of his life, and beyond a few brochures, such asLes Dieux de la GrèceandL’après-midi d’un Faune, together with some verses and literary and theatrical criticisms, scattered in periodicals, the lot barely sufficing for a volume, he has published nothing but some translations from the English and a few school-books (M. Mallarmé is a teacher of English in a Parisian lycée), and yet there are some who admire him as a great poet, as the one exclusive poet, and they overwhelm the ‘blockheads’ and the ‘fools’ who laugh at him with all the expressions of scorn that the force of imagination in a diseased mind can display. Is not this one of the wonders of our day? Lessing makes Conti, inEmilia Galotti, say that ‘Raphael would have been the greatest genius in painting, even if he had unfortunately been born without hands.’ In M. Mallarmé we have a man who is revered as a great poet, although ‘he has unfortunately been born without hands,’ although he produces nothing, although he does not pursue the art he professes. During the period when in London a great number of bubble-company swindles were being promoted, when all the world went mad for the possession of the least scrap of Stock Exchange paper, it happened that a few sharp individuals advertised in the newspapers, inviting people to subscribe for shares in a company of which the object was kept a secret. There really were men who brought their money to these lively promoters, and the historian of the City crisis regards this fact as inconceivable. Inconceivable as it is, Paris sees it repeated. Some persons demand unbounded admiration for a poet whose works are his own secret, and will probably remain such, and others trustingly and humbly bring their admiration as required. The sorcerers of the Senegal negroes offer their congregation baskets and calabashes for veneration, in which they assert that a mighty fetich is enclosed. As a matter of fact they contain nothing; but the negroes regard the empty vessels with holy dread, and show them and their possessors divine honours. Exactly thus is empty Mallarmé the fetich of the Symbolists, who, it must be admitted, are intellectually far below the Senegal negroes.This position of a calabash worshipped on bended knees he has attained by oral discourse. Every week he gathers round him embryonic poets and authors, and develops his art theories before them. He speaks just as Morice and Kahn write. He strings together obscure and wondrous words, at which his disciples become as stupid ‘as if a mill-wheel were going round in their heads,’ so that they leave him as if intoxicated, and with the impression that incomprehensible, superhuman disclosures have been made to them. If there is anything comprehensiblein the incoherent flow of Mallarmé’s words, it is perhaps his admiration for the pre-Raphaelites. It was he who drew the attention of the Symbolists to this school, and enjoined imitation of it. It is through Mallarmé that the French mystics received their English mediævalism and neo-Catholicism. Finally, it may be mentioned that among the physical features of Mallarmé are ‘long pointed faun-like ears.’[135]After Darwin, who was the first to point out the apish character of this peculiarity, Hartmann,[136]Frigerio,[137]and Lombroso,[138]have firmly established the connection between immoderately long and pointed external ears and atavism and degeneration; and they have shown that this peculiarity is of especially frequent occurrence among criminals and lunatics.The third among the leading spirits of the Symbolists is Jean Moréas, a Franco-Greek poet, who at the completion of his thirty-sixth year (his friends assert, it may be in friendly malice, that he makes himself out to be very much younger than he is) has producedin totothree attenuated collections of verses, of hardly one hundred to one hundred and twenty pages, bearing the titles,Les Syrtes,Les Cantilènes, andLe Pélerin passionné. The importance of a literary performance does not, of course, depend upon its amplitude, if it is otherwise unusually significant. When, however, a man cackles during interminable café séances of the renewal of poetry and the unfolding of a new art of the future, and finally produces three little brochures of childish verses as the result of his world-stirring effort, then the material insignificance of the performance also becomes a subject for ridicule.Moréas is one of the inventors of the word ‘Symbolism.’ For some few years he was the high-priest of this secret doctrine, and administered the duties of his service with requisite seriousness. One day he suddenly abjured his self-founded faith, and declared that ‘Symbolism’ had always been meant only as a joke, to lead fools by the nose withal; and that the true salvation of poetry was in Romanism (romanisme). Under this new word he affirms a return to the language, versification and mode of feeling of the French poets at the close of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance period; but it were well to adopt his declarations with caution, since in two or three years he may be proclaiming his ‘romanisme’ as much a tap-room joke as his ‘symbolism.’ The appearance of thePélerin passionnéin 1891 was celebrated by the Symbolists as an event which was to be the beginning of a new era inpoetry. They arranged a banquet in honour of Moréas, and in the after-dinner speeches he was worshipped as the deliverer from the shackles of ancient forms and notions, and as the saviour who was bringing in the kingdom of God of true poetry. And the same poets who sat at the table with Moréas, and delivered to him rapturous addresses or joined in the applause, a few weeks after this event overwhelmed him with contumely and contempt. ‘Moréas a Symbolist!’ cried Charles Vignier.[139]‘Is he one through his ideas? He laughs at them himself! His thoughts! They don’t weigh much, these thoughts of Jean Moréas!’ ‘Moréas?’ asks Adrien Remacle,[140]‘we have all been laughing at him. It is that which has made him famous.’ René Ghil calls hisPélerin passionné‘doggerel written by a pedant,’ and Gustav Kahn[141]passes sentence on him thus: ‘Moréas has no talent.... He has never done anything worth mentioning. He has his own particular jargon.’ These expressions disclose to us the complete hollowness and falseness of the Symbolistic movement, which outside France is obstinately proclaimed as a serious matter by imbeciles and speculators, although its French inventors make themselves hoarse in trying to convince the world that they merely wanted to banter the Philistine with a tap-room jest and advertise themselves.After the verdict of his brethren in the Symbolist Parnassus, I may really spare myself the trouble of dwelling longer on Moréas; I will, however, cite a few examples from hisPélerin passionné, in order that the reader may form an idea of the softness of brain which displays itself in these verses.The poem Agnes[142]begins thus:‘Il y avait des arcs où passaient des escortesAvec des bannières de deuil et du ferLacé (?) des potentats de toutes sortes—Il y avait—dans la cité au bord de la mer.Les places étaient noires, et bien pavées, et les portes,Du côté de l’est et de l’ouest, hautes; et comme en hiverLa forêt, dépérissaient les salles de palais, et les porches,Et les colonnades de belvéder.C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de tonadolescence.‘Dans la cité au bord de la mer, la cape et la dague lourdesDe pierres jaunes, et sur ton chapeau des plumes de perroquets,Tu t’en venais, devisant telles bourdes,Tu t’en venais entre tes deux laquaisSi bouffis et tant sots—en verité, des happelourdes!—Dans la cité au bord de la mer tu t’en venais et tu vaguaisParmi de grands vieillards qui travaillaient aux felouques,Le long des môles et des quais.C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de tonadolescence.And thus the twaddle goes on through eight more stanzas, and in every line we find the characteristics of the language used by imbeciles and made notorious by Sollier (Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile), the ‘ruminating’ as it were, of the same expressions, the dreamy incoherence of the language, and the insertion of words which have no connection with the subject.TwoChansons[143]run thus:‘Les courlis dans les roseaux!(Faut-il que je vous en parle,Des courlis dans les roseaux?)O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.‘Le porcher et les pourceaux!(Faut-il que je vous en parle,Du porcher et des pourceaux?)O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.‘Mon cœur pris en vos réseaux!(Faut-il que je vous en parle,De mon cœur en vos réseaux?)O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.‘On a marché sur les fleurs au bord de la route,Et le vent d’automne les secoue si fort, en outre.‘La malle-poste a renversé la vieille croix au bord de la route;Elle était vraiment si pourrie, en outre.‘L’idiot (tu sais) est mort au bord de la route,Et personne ne le pleurera, en outre.’The stupid artifice with which Moréas here seeks to produce a feeling of wretchedness by conjuring up the three associated figures of crushed flowers, dishevelled by the wind, an overturned and mouldering cross, and a dead, unmourned idiot, makes this poem a model of the would-be profound production of a madhouse!When Moréas is not soft of brain, he develops a rhetorical turgidity which reminds us of Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau in his worst efforts. Only one example[144]of this kind, and we have done with him:‘J’ai tellement soif, ô mon amour, de ta bouche,Que j’y boirais en baisers le cours detournéDu Strymon, l’Araxe et le Tanaïs farouche;Et les cent méandres qui arrosent Pitané,Et l’Hermus qui prend sa source où le soleil se couche,Et toutes les claires fontaines dont abonde Gaza,Sans que ma soif s’en apaisât.’Behind the leaders Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Moréas a troop of minor Symbolists throng, each, it is true, in his own eyes the one great poet of the band, but whose illusions of greatness do not entitle them to any special observation. Sufficient justiceis dealt them if the spirit they are made of be characterized by quoting a few lines of their poetry. Jules Laforgue, ‘unique not only in his generation, but in all the republic of literature,’[145]cries: ‘Oh, how daily [quotidienne] is life!’ and in his poemPan et la Syrinxwe come upon lines like the following:‘O Syrinx! voyez et comprenez la Terre et la merveille de cette matinée et la circulation de la vie.Oh, vous là! et moi, ici! Oh vous! Oh, moi! Tout est dans Tout!’[146]Gustav Kahn, one of the æstheticists and philosophers of Symbolism, says in hisNuit sur la Lande: ‘Peace descends from thy lovely eyes like a great evening, and the borders of slow tents descend, studded with precious stones, woven of far-off beams and unknown moons.’In German, at least, ‘borders of slow tents which descend’ is completely unintelligible nonsense. In French they are also unintelligible; but in the original their meaning becomes apparent. ‘Et des pans de tentes lentes descendent,’ the line runs, and betrays itself as pure echolalia, as a succession of similar sounds, as it were, echoing each other.Charles Vignier, ‘the beloved disciple of Verlaine,’ says to his mistress:‘Là-bas c’est trop loin,Pauvre libellule,Reste dans ton coinEt prends des pilules...‘Sois Edmond AboutEt d’humeur coulante,Sois un maraboutDu Jardin des Plantes.’Another of his poems,Une Coupe de Thulé, runs thus:‘Dans une coupe de ThuléOù vient pâlir l’attrait de l’heure,Dort le sénile et dolent leurreDe l’ultime rêve adulé.‘Mais des cheveux d’argent filéFont un voile à celle qui pleure,Dans une coupe de ThuléOù s’est éteint l’attrait de l’heure.‘Et l’on ne sait quel jubiléCélèbre une harpe mineureQue le hautain fantôme effleureD’un lucide doigt fuselé!...Dans une coupe de Thulé!’These poems remind us so forcibly of those doggerel rhymes at which in Germany jovial students are often wont to try their skill, and which are known as ‘flowery [lit.blooming] nonsense,’ that, in spite of the solemn assurance of French critics, I am convinced that they were intended as a joke. If I am right in my supposition, they are really evidences, not of the mental status of Vignier, but of his readers, admirers, and critics.Louis Dumur addresses the Neva in the following manner:‘Puissante, magnifique, illustre, grave, noble reine!O Tsaristsa [sic!] de glace et de fastes Souveraine!Matrone hiératique et solennelle et vénérée!...Toi qui me forces à rêver, toi qui me deconcertes,Et toi surtout que j’aime, Émail, Beauté, Poème, Femme.Néva! j’évoque ton spectacle et l’hymne de ton âme!’And René Ghil, one of the best-known Symbolists (he is chief of a school entitled ‘évolutive-instrumentiste’), draws from his lyre these tones, which I also quote in French; in the first place because they would lose their ring in a translation, and, secondly, because if I were to translate them literally, it is hopeless to suppose that the reader would think I was serious:‘Ouïs! ouïs aux nues haut et nues oùTirent-ils d’aile immense qui vire ...et quand videet vers les grands pétales dans l’air plus aride—‘(Et en le lourd venir grandi lent stridule, etTitille qui n’alentisse d’air qui dure, et!Grandie, erratile et multiple d’éveils, strideMixte, plainte et splendeur! la plénitude aride)‘et vers les grands pétales d’agitationsLors évanouissait un vol ardent qui stride....‘(des saltigrades doux n’iront plus vers les mers....)’One thing must be acknowledged, and that is, the Symbolists have an astonishing gift for titles. The book itself may belong to pure madhouse literature; the title is always remarkable. We have already seen that Moréas names one of his collection of versesLes Syrtes. He might in truth just as well call it theNorth Pole, orThe Marmot, orAbd-el-Kader, since these have just as much connection with the poems in the little volume asSyrtes; but it is undeniable that this geographical name calls up the lustre of an African sun, and the pale reflection of classic antiquity, which may well please the eye of the hysteric reader. Edouard Dubus entitles his poem,Quand les Violons sont partis; Louis Dumur,Lassitudes; Gustave Khan,Les Palais nomades; Maurice du Plessis,La Peau de Marsyas; Ernest Raynaud,Chairs profanesandLe Signe; Henri de Régnier,Sites etEpisodes; Arthur Rimbaud,Les Illuminations; Albert Saint Paul,L’Echarpe d’Iris; Viélé-Griffin,Ancæus; and Charles Vignier,Centon.Of the prose of the Symbolists, I have already given some examples. I should further like to cite only a few passages from a book which the Symbolists declare to be one of their most powerful mental manifestations,La Littérature de tout-à-l’heure, by Charles Morice. It is a sort of bird’s-eye view of the development of literature up to the present time, a rapid critique of the more and most recent books and authors, a kind of programme of the literature of the future. This book is one of the most astonishing which exists in any language. It strongly resemblesRembrandt as Educator, but is far beyond that book in the utter senselessness of its concatenations of words. It is a monument of pure literary insanity, of ‘graphomania’; and neither Delepierre in hisLittérature des Fous, nor Philomnestes (Gustave Brunet) in hisFous Littéraires, quotes examples of more complete mental dislocation than are visible in every page of this book. Notice the following confession of faith by Morice:[147]‘Although in this book treating only of æsthetics—although of æsthetics based upon metaphysics—we shall remember to refrain, as far as possible, from pure philosophizing, we must approximately paraphrase a word which will more than once be made use of, and which, in the highest sense here put upon it, is not incapable of being paraphrased. God is the first and universal cause, the final and universal end; the bond between spirits; the point of intersection where two parallels would meet; the fulfilment of our inclinations; the fruition which accords with the glories of our dreams; the abstraction itself of the concrete; the unseen and unheard and yet certain ideal of our demands for beauty in truth. God is, par excellence,THEvery word—the very word, that is to say, that unknown certain word of which every author has the incontrovertible, but undiscernible idea, the self-evident but hidden goal which he will never reach, and which he approaches as near as possible. In, so to say, practical æsthetics He is the atmosphere of joy in which the mind revels victorious, because it has reduced irreducible mystery to imperishable symbols.’ I do not for a moment doubt that this incomparable jumble will be quite intelligible to theologians. Like all mystics, they discover a sense in every sound; that is, they persuade themselves and others that the nebulous ideas which the sound awakens in their brains by association are the meaning of that sound. But anyone who demands of words that they should be the media of definite thoughts, will perceive in the face of this twaddle that the author was not thinking anything at allwhen he wrote, although he was dreaming of many things. ‘Religion’ is for Morice (p. 56), ‘the source of art, and art in its essence is religious’—an affirmation which he borrows from Ruskin, although he does not acknowledge it. ‘Our scholars, our thinkers ... the luminous heads of the nineteenth century,’ are ‘Edgar Poe, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Auguste Comte, Claude Bernard, Berthelot’ (p. 57). Edgar Poe by the side of Spencer, Darwin, and Claude Bernard! never have ideas danced a crazier fools’ quadrille in a disordered brain.And this book, of which the passages we have cited give a sufficiently correct idea, was, in France (just asRembrandt as Educatorwas in Germany), pronounced by thoroughly responsible critics to be ‘strange, but interesting and suggestive.’ A poor degenerate devil who scribbles such stuff, and an imbecile reader who follows his twaddle like passing clouds, are simply to be pitied. But what words of contempt are strong enough for the sane intellectual tatterdemalions who, in order not to offend or else to give themselves the appearance of possessing a remarkable faculty of comprehension, or to affect fairness and benevolence even towards those whose opinions they in part do not share, insist that they discover in books of this kind many a truth, much wit along with peculiar whims, an ideal of fervour and frequent lightnings of thought?The word ‘Symbolism’ conveys, as we have seen, no idea to its inventors. They pursue no definite artistic tendency; hence it is not possible to show them that their tendency is a false one. It is otherwise with some of their disciples, who joined their ranks, partly through a desire to advertise themselves, partly because they thought that, in the conflicts between literary parties, they were fighting on the side which was the stronger and the more sure of victory, and partly, also, through the folly of fashion, and through the influence exerted by any noisy novelty over uncritical minds. Less weak-brained than the leaders, they felt the need of giving the word ‘Symbolism’ a certain significance, and, in fact, drew up a number of axioms which, according to their profession, serve to guide them in their creations. These axioms are sufficiently defined to allow of discussion.The Symbolists demand greater freedom in the treatment of French verse. They fiercely rebel against the old alexandrines, with the cæsura in the middle, and the necessary termination of the sentence at the end; against the prohibition of the hiatus; against the law of a regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. They make defiant use of the ‘free verse,’ with length and rhythmad libitum, and false rhymes. The foreigner can only smile at the savage gestures with which this conflict is carried on. It is a schoolboys’ war against somehated book, which is solemnly torn in pieces, trodden under foot, and burned. The whole dispute concerning prosody and the rules of rhyme is, so to speak, an inter-Gallic concern, and is of no consequence to the literature of the world. We have long had everything which the French poets are only now seeking to obtain by barricades and street massacres. In Goethe’sPrometheus,Mahomet’s Gesang,Harzreise im Winter, in Heine’sNordsee Cyklus, etc., we possess perfect models of free verse; we alternate the rhymes as we will; we allow masculine and feminine rhymes to follow one another as seems good to us; we do not bind ourselves to the rigid law of old classic metres, but suffer, in the cradling measure of our verse, anapæsts to alternate with iambics and spondees, according to our feeling for euphony. English, Italian and Sclavonic poetry have gone equally far, and if the French alone have remained behind, and have at last found a need for casting aside their old matted, moth-eaten periwig, this is quite reasonable; but to anyone but a Frenchman they merely make themselves ridiculous when they trumpet their painful hobbling after the nations who are far in front of them, as an unheard-of discovery of new paths and opening up of new roads, and as an advance inspired by the ideal into the dawn of the future.Another æsthetic demand of the Symbolists is that the line should, independently of its sense, call forth an intended emotion merely by its sound. A word should produce an effect, not through the idea which it embodies, but as a tone, language becoming music. It is noteworthy that many of the Symbolists have given their books titles which are intended to awaken musical ideas. We findLes Gammes(The Scales), by Stuart Merrill;Les Cantilènes, by Jean Moréas;Cloches dans la Nuit, by Adolphe Retté;Romances sans Paroles, by Paul Verlaine, etc. To make use of language as a musical instrument for the production of pure tone effects is the delirious idea of a mystic. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites demand of the fine arts that they should not represent the concrete plastically or optically, but should express the abstract, and therefore simply undertake therôleof alphabetic writing. Similarly, the Symbolists displace all the natural boundary lines of art, and impose upon the word a task which belongs to musical signs only. But while the pre-Raphaelites wish to raise the fine arts to a higher rank than is suited to them, the Symbolists greatly degrade the word. In its origin sound is musical. It expresses no definite idea, but only a general emotion of the animal. The cricket fiddles, the nightingale trills, when sexually excited. The bear growls when stirred by the rage of conflict; the lion roars in his pleasure when tearing a living prey. In proportion as the brain develops in the animal kingdom, and mental life becomes richer, the means ofvocal expression are evolved and differentiated, and become capable of making perceptible to the senses not only simple generic emotions, but also presentative complexes of a more restricted and definitely delimitated nature—nay, if Professor Garner’s observations concerning the language of apes are accurate, even tolerably distinct single presentations. Sound, as a means of expressing mental operations, reaches its final perfection in cultivated, grammatically articulated language, inasmuch as it can then follow exactly the intellectual working of the brain, and make it objectively perceptible in all the minutest details. To bring the word, pregnant with thought, back to the emotional sound is to renounce all the results of organic development, and to degrade man, rejoicing in the power of speech, to the level of the whirring cricket or the croaking frog. The efforts of the Symbolists, then, result in senseless twaddle, but not in the word-music they intend, for this simply does not exist. No word of any single human language is, as such, musical. Many languages abound in consonants; in others vowels predominate. The former require more dexterity in the muscles employed in speaking; their pronunciation, therefore, counts as more difficult, and they seem less agreeable to the ears of foreigners than the languages which are rich in vowels. But this has nothing to do with the musical side of the question. What remains of the phonetic effect of a word if it is whispered, or if it is only visible as a written character? And yet in both cases it is able to awaken the same emotions, as if it had reached consciousness full-toned through the sense of hearing. Let anyone have read aloud to him the most cleverly chosen arrangement of words in a language completely unknown to him, and try to produce in himself a definite emotion through the mere phonetic effect. In every case it will be found impossible. The meaning of a word, and not its sound, determines its value. The sound is as such neither beautiful nor ugly. It becomes so only through the voice which gives it life. Even the first soliloquy in Goethe’sIphigeniewould be ugly coming from the throat of a drunkard. I have had the opportunity of convincing myself that even the Hottentot language, spoken in a mellow, agreeable contralto voice, could be pleasing.Still more cracked is the craze of a sub-section of the Symbolists, the ‘Instrumentalists,’ whose spokesman is René Ghil. They connect each sound with a definite feeling of colour, and demand that the word should not only awaken musical emotion, but at the same time operate æsthetically in producing a colour-harmony. This mad idea has its origin in a much-quoted sonnet by Arthur Rimbaud,Les Voyelles(Vowels), of which the first line runs thus:‘A black, e white, i red, u green, o blue.’Morice declares[148]explicitly (what in any case no one in a sane state of mind would have doubted) that Rimbaud wished to make one of those silly jokes which imbeciles and idiots are in the habit of perpetrating. Some of his comrades, however, took the sonnet in grim earnest, and deduced from it a theory of art. In hisTraité du VerbeRené Ghil specifies the colour-value, not only of individual vowels, but of musical instruments. ‘Harps establish their supremacy by being white. And violins are blue, often softened by a shimmer of light, to subdue paroxysms.’ (It is to be hoped the reader will duly appraise these combinations of words.) ‘In the exuberance of ovations, brass instruments are red, flutes yellow, allowing the childlike to proclaim itself astonished at the luminance of the lips. And the organ, synthesis of all simple instruments, bewails deafness of earth and the flesh all in black....’ Another Symbolist, who has many admirers, M. Francis Poictevin, teaches us, inDerniers Songes, to know the feelings corresponding to colours. ‘Blue goes—without more of passion—from love to death; or, more accurately, it is a lost extreme. From turquoise blue to indigo, one goes from the most shame-faced influences to final ravages.’Wiseacres were, of course, at once to the fore, and set up a quasi-scientific theory of ‘colour-hearing.’ Sounds are said to awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to some, this was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures; according to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal connection between the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means of nerve filaments. This anatomical explanation is entirely arbitrary, and has not been substantiated by any facts. But ‘colour-hearing’ itself is by no means confirmed. The most complete book hitherto published on this subject, the author of which is the French oculist, Suarez de Mendoza,[149]collects all the available observations on this alleged phenomenon, and deduces from them the following definition: ‘It is the faculty of associating tones and colours, by which every objective acoustic perception of sufficient intensity, nay, even the memory-image of such a perception, arouses in certain persons a luminous or non-luminous image, which is always the same for the same letters, the same tone of voice or instrument, and the same intensity or pitch of tone.’ Suarez well hits the truth when he says, ‘Colour-hearing’ (he calls itpseudo-photesthésie) ‘is often a consequence of an association of ideas established in youth ... and often of a special action of the brain, the particular nature of which is unknown to us, and may have a certain similarity to sense-illusion and hallucination.’ For my part, I have nodoubt that colour-hearing is always the consequence of association of ideas, the origins of which must remain obscure, because the combination of certain presentations of colour with certain sensations of sound may possibly depend upon the very evanescent perceptions of early childhood, which were not powerful enough to arouse the attention, and have therefore remained undiscerned in consciousness. That it is a question of purely individual associations brought about by the accident of associated ideas, and not of organic co-ordinations depending upon definite abnormal nervous connections, is made very probable by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a different colour to the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that to Ghil the flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in hisFarbenlehre) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter ‘a’ black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel as blue, and so on.The relation between the external world and the organism is originally very simple. Movements are continually occurring in nature, and the protoplasm of living cells perceives these movements. Unity of effect corresponds to unity of cause. The lowest animals perceive of the outer world only this, that something in it changes, and possibly, also, whether this change is marked or slight, sudden or slow. They receive sensations differing quantitatively, but not qualitatively. We know, for example, that the proboscis, or syphon, of thePholas dactylus, which contracts more or less vigorously and quickly at every excitation, is sensitive to all external impressions—light, noise, touch, smell, etc. This mollusc sees, hears, feels and smells, therefore, with this simple organ; his proboscis is to him at once eye, ear, nose, finger, etc. In the higher animals the protoplasm is differentiated. Nerves, ganglia, brain and sense-apparatus are formed. The movements of nature are now perceived in a variety of ways. The differentiated senses transform the unity of the phenomenon into the diversity of the percept. But even in the highest and most differentiated brain there still remains something like a very distant and very dim remembrance that the cause which excites the different senses is one and the same movement, and there are formed presentations and conceptions which would be unintelligible if we could not concede this vague intuition of the fundamental unity of essence in all perceptions. We speak of ‘high’ and ‘deep’ tones, and thus give to sound-waves a relationship in space which they cannot have. In the same way we speak of tone-colour, and, conversely, of colour-tones, and thus confound the acoustic and optic properties of the phenomena. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ lines or tones, ‘sweet’ voices, are frequent modes of expression, which depend on a transference of the perception of one sense to the impressionsof another. In many cases this method of speech may no doubt be traced to mental inertia. It is more convenient to designate a sense-perception by a word which is familiar, though borrowed from the province of another sense, than to create a special word for the particular percept. But even this loan for convenience’ sake is possible and intelligible only if we admit that the mind perceives certain resemblances between the impressions of the different senses—resemblances which, although they are often to be explained by conscious or unconscious association of ideas, are oftener quite inexplicable objectively. It only remains for us to assume that consciousness, in its deepest substrata, neglects the differentiation of phenomena by the various senses, passes over this perfection attained very late in organic evolution, and treats impressions only as undifferentiated material for the acquirement of knowledge of the external world without reference to their origin by way of this or that sense. It thus becomes intelligible that the mind mingles the perceptions attained through the different senses, and transforms them one into another. Binet[150]has established, in his excellent essays, this transposition of the senses in hysterical persons. A female patient, whose skin was perfectly insensible on one half of her body, took no notice when, unseen by herself, she was pricked with a needle. But at the moment of puncture there arose in her consciousness the image of a black (in the case of another invalid, of a bright) point. Consciousness thus transposed an impression of the nerves of the skin, which, as such, was not perceived, into an impression of the retina, of the optic nerve.In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of the differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly confounds the reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster.Moreover, it is an old clinical observation that mental decay is accompanied by colour mysticism. One of Legrain’s[151]mental invalids ‘endeavoured to recognise good and evil by the difference of colour, ascending from white to black; when he was reading, words had (according to their colour) a hidden meaning, which he understood.’ Lombroso[152]cites ‘eccentricpersons’ who, ‘like Wigman, had the paper for their books specially manufactured with several colours on each page.... Filon painted each page of the books he wrote in a different colour.’ Barbey d’Aurevilly, whom the Symbolists venerate as a pioneer, used to write epistles in which each letter of a word was coloured with a different tint. Most alienists know similar cases in their experience.The more reliable Symbolists proclaim their movement as ‘a reaction against naturalism.’ Such a reaction was certainly justified and necessary; for naturalism in its beginnings, as long as it was embodied in De Goncourt and Zola, was morbid, and, in its later development in the hands of their imitators, vulgar and even criminal, as will be proved further on. Nevertheless Symbolism is not in the smallest degree qualified to conquer naturalism, because it is still more morbid than the latter, and, in art, the devil cannot be driven out by Beelzebub.Finally, it is affirmed that Symbolism connotes ‘the inscribing of a symbol in human form.’ Expressed unmystically, this means that in the poems of the Symbolists the particular human form should not only exhibit its special nature and contingent destiny, but also represent a general type of humanity, and embody a universal law of life. This quality, however, is not the monopoly of Symbolistic poetry, but belongs to all kinds of poetry. No genuine poet has yet been impelled to deal with an utterly unprecedented and unique case, or with a monstrous being whose likeness is not to be found in mankind. That which interests him in men and their destiny is just the intimate connection between the two and the universal laws of human life. The more the government of universal laws is made apparent in the fate of the individual, the more there is embodied in him that which lives in all men, so much the more attractive will this destiny and this man be to the poet. There is not in all the literature of humanity a single work of recognised importance which in this sense is not symbolic, and in which the characters, their passions and fortunes, have not a typical significance, far transcending the particular circumstances. It is, therefore, a piece of foolish arrogance in the Symbolists to lay claim to the sole possession of this quality in the works of their school. They show, moreover, that they do not understand their own formulæ; for those theorists of the school who demand of poetry that it should be ‘a symbol inscribed in human form,’ assert at the same time that only the ‘rare and unique case’ (le cas rare et unique) deserves the attention of the poet,i.e., the case which is significant of nothing beyond itself, and consequently the opposite of a symbol.[153]We have now seen that Symbolism, like English pre-Raphaelitism (from which it borrowed its catch-words and opinions), is nothing else than a form of the mysticism of weak-minded and morbidly emotional degeneration. The efforts of some followers of the movement to import a meaning into the stammering utterances of their leaders, and falsely to ascribe to them a sort of programme, do not for a moment withstand criticism, but show themselves to be graphomaniac and delirious twaddle, without the smallest grain of truth or sound reason. A young Frenchman, who is certainly not adverse to rational innovation, Hugues Le Roux,[154]describes the group of Symbolists quite correctly in saying of them: ‘They are ridiculous cripples, each intolerable to the other; they live uncomprehended by the public, several by their friends as well, and a few by themselves. As poets or prose writers they proceed in the same way: no material, no sense, and only juxtapositions of loud-sounding musical (?) words; teams of strange rhymes, groupings of unexpected colours and tones, swaying cadences, hurtlings, hallucinations and evoked suggestions.’
TheChevaux de boisbegins thus:
‘Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois,Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.’
In a truly charming piece inSagessehe says:
‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,
Si bleu, si calme!
Un arbre, par dessus le toit
Berce sa palme.
‘La cloche, dans le ciel qu’on voit,
Doucement tinte.
Un oiseau, sur l’arbre qu’on voit,
Chante sa plainte.’
In the passage inAmour, ‘Les fleurs des champs, les fleurs innombrables des champs ... les fleurs des gens,’ ‘champs’ and ‘gens’ sound somewhat alike. Here the imbecile repetitionof similar sounds suggests a senseless pun, to the poet, and as for this stanza inPierrot gamin:
‘Ce n’est pas Pierrot en herbeNon plus que Pierrot en gerbe,C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot.Pierrot gamin, Pierrot gosse,Le cerneau hors de la cosse,C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot!’
it is the language of nurses to babies, who do not care to make sense, but only to twitter to the child in tones which give him pleasure. The closing lines of the poemMainspoint to a complete ideational standstill, to mechanical mumbling:
‘Ah! si ce sont des mains de rêve,Tant mieux, ou tant pis, ou tant mieux.’[130]
The second peculiarity of Verlaine’s style is the other mark of mental debility, viz., the combination of completely disconnected nouns and adjectives, which suggest each other, either through a senseless meandering by way of associated ideas, or through a similarity of sound. We have already found some examples of this in the extracts cited above. In these we find the ‘enormous and tender Middle Ages’ and the ‘brand which thunders.’ Verlaine writes also of ‘feet which glide with a pure and wide movement,’ of ‘a narrow and vast affection,’ of ‘a slow landscape,’[131]of ‘a slack liqueur’ (‘jus flasque’), ‘a gilded perfume,’ a ‘condensed’ or ‘terse contour’ (‘galbe succinct’), etc. The Symbolists admire this form of imbecility, as ‘the research for rare and precious epithets’ (la recherche de l’epithète rare et précieuse).
Verlaine has a clear consciousness of the vagueness of his thoughts, and in a very remarkable poem from the psychological point of view,Art poétique, in which he attempts to give a theory of his lyric creation, he raises nebulosity to the dignity of a fundamental method:
‘De la musique avant toute choseEt pour cela préfère l’ImpairPlus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.’
The two verbs ‘pèse’ and ‘pose’ are juxtaposed merely on account of their similarity of sound.
‘Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles pointChoisir les mots sans quelque méprise;Rien de plus cher que la chanson griseOù l’Indécis au Précis se joint.
‘C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,C’est par un ciel d’automne attiédi,Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!
‘Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!Oh! la nuance seule fianceLe rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!’
(This stanza is completely delirious; it places ‘nuance’ and ‘colour’ in opposition, as though the latter were not contained in the former. The idea of which the weak brain of Verlaine had an inkling, but could not bring to a complete conception, is probably that he prefers subdued and mixed tints, which lie on the margin of several colours, to the full intense colour itself.)
‘Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,L’esprit cruel et le Rire impur,Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!’
It cannot be denied that this poetical method in the hands of Verlaine often yields extraordinarily beautiful results. There are few poems in French literature which can rival theChanson d’Automne:
‘Les sanglots longsDes violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœurD’une langueur
Monotone.
‘Tout suffocantEt blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
‘Je me souviensDes jours anciens,
Et je pleure.
‘Et je m’en vaisAu vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,Pareil à la
Feuille morte.’
Even if literally translated, there remains something of the melancholy magic of the lines, which in French are richly rhythmical and full of music.Avant que tu ne t’en ailles(p. 99) andIl pleure dans mon cœur(p. 116) may also be called pearls among French lyrics.
This is because the methods of a highly emotional, but intellectually incapable, dreamer suffice for poetry which deals exclusively with moods, but this is the inexorable limit of his power. Let the true meaning of mood be always present withus. The word denotes a state of mind, in which, through organic excitations which it cannot directly perceive, consciousness is filled with presentations of a uniform nature, which it elaborates with greater or less clearness, and one and all of which relate to those organic excitations inaccessible to consciousness. The mere succession of words, giving a name to these presentations, the roots of which are in the unknown, expresses the mood, and is able to awaken it in another. It has no need of a fundamental thought, or of a progressive exposition to unfold it. Verlaine often attains to astonishing effects in such poetry of moods. Where, however, distinct vision, or a feeling the motive of which is clear to consciousness, or a process well delimitated in time and space, is to be poetically rendered, the poetic art of the emotional imbecile fails utterly. In a healthy and sane poet even the mood pure and simple is united to clear presentations, and is not a mere undulation of fragrance and rose-tinted mist. Poems like Goethe’sUeber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,Der Fischer, orFreudvoll und leidvoll, can never be created by the emotionally degenerate; but, on the other hand, the most marvellous of Goethe’s poems are not so utterly incorporeal, not such mere sighs, as three or four of the best of a Verlaine.
We have now the portrait of this most famous leader of the Symbolists clearly before us. We see a repulsive degenerate subject with asymmetric skull and Mongolian face, an impulsive vagabond and dipsomaniac, who, under the most disgraceful circumstances, was placed in gaol; an emotional dreamer of feeble intellect, who painfully fights against his bad impulses, and in his misery often utters touching notes of complaint; a mystic whose qualmish consciousness is flooded with ideas of God and saints, and a dotard who manifests the absence of any definite thought in his mind by incoherent speech, meaningless expressions and motley images. In lunatic asylums there are many patients whose disease is less deep-seated and incurable than is that of this irresponsiblecirculaireat large, whom only ignorant judges could have condemned for his epileptoid crimes.
A second leader among the Symbolists, whose prestige is in no quarter disputed, is M. Stéphane Mallarmé. He is the most curious phenomenon in the intellectual life of contemporary France. Although long past fifty years of age, he has written hardly anything, and the little that is known of him is, in the opinion of his most unreserved admirers, of no account; and yet he is esteemed as a very great poet, and the utter infertility of his pen, the entire absence of any single work which he can produce as evidence of his poetical capacity, is prized as his greatest merit, and as a most striking proof of his intellectual importance. This statement must appear so fabulous to any reader not deranged in mind, that he may rightly demand proofsof these statements. M. Charles Morice[132]says of Mallarmé: ‘I am not obliged to unveil the secrets of the works of a poet who, as he has himself remarked, is excluded from all participation in any official exposition of the beautiful. The fact itself that these works are still unknown ... would seem to forbid our associating the name of M. Mallarmé with those of men who have given us books. I let vulgar criticism buzz without replying to it, and state that M. Mallarmé, without having given us books ... is famous—a fame which, of course, has not been won without arousing the laughter of stupidity in both petty and important newspapers, but which does not offer public and private ... ineptitude that opportunity for showing its baseness which is provoked by the advent of a new wonder.... The people, in spite of their abhorrence of the beautiful, and especially of novelty in the beautiful, have gradually, and in spite of themselves, come to comprehend the prestige of a legitimate authority. They themselves, even they, feel ashamed of their foolish laughter; and before this man, whom that laughter could not tear from the serenity of his meditative silence, laughter became dumb, and itself suffered the divine contagion of silence. Even for the million this man, who published no books, and whom, nevertheless, all designated “a poet,” became, as it were, the very symbol of a poet, seeking, where possible, to draw near to the absolute.... By his silence, he has signified that he ... cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create. Should cruel life refuse to support him in his effort, our respect—nay, more, our veneration—can alone give an answer worthy of a reticence thus conditioned.’
The graphomaniac Morice (of whose crazy and distorted style of expression this literally translated example gives a very good idea) assumes that perhaps Mallarmé will yet create his ‘unprecedented work.’ Mallarmé himself, however, denies us the right to any such hope. ‘The delicious Mallarmé,’ Paul Hervieu relates,[133]‘told me one day ... he could not understand that anyone should let himself appear in print. Such a proceeding gave him the impression of an indecency, an aberration, resembling that form of mental disease called “exhibitionism.” Moreover, no one has been so discreet with his soul as this incomparable thinker.’[134]
So, then, this ‘incomparable thinker’ shows ‘a complete discretion as regards his soul.’ At one time he bases his silence on a sort of shamed timidity at publicity; at another, on thefact that he ‘cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create,’ two reasons for that matter reciprocally precluding each other. He is approaching the evening of his life, and beyond a few brochures, such asLes Dieux de la GrèceandL’après-midi d’un Faune, together with some verses and literary and theatrical criticisms, scattered in periodicals, the lot barely sufficing for a volume, he has published nothing but some translations from the English and a few school-books (M. Mallarmé is a teacher of English in a Parisian lycée), and yet there are some who admire him as a great poet, as the one exclusive poet, and they overwhelm the ‘blockheads’ and the ‘fools’ who laugh at him with all the expressions of scorn that the force of imagination in a diseased mind can display. Is not this one of the wonders of our day? Lessing makes Conti, inEmilia Galotti, say that ‘Raphael would have been the greatest genius in painting, even if he had unfortunately been born without hands.’ In M. Mallarmé we have a man who is revered as a great poet, although ‘he has unfortunately been born without hands,’ although he produces nothing, although he does not pursue the art he professes. During the period when in London a great number of bubble-company swindles were being promoted, when all the world went mad for the possession of the least scrap of Stock Exchange paper, it happened that a few sharp individuals advertised in the newspapers, inviting people to subscribe for shares in a company of which the object was kept a secret. There really were men who brought their money to these lively promoters, and the historian of the City crisis regards this fact as inconceivable. Inconceivable as it is, Paris sees it repeated. Some persons demand unbounded admiration for a poet whose works are his own secret, and will probably remain such, and others trustingly and humbly bring their admiration as required. The sorcerers of the Senegal negroes offer their congregation baskets and calabashes for veneration, in which they assert that a mighty fetich is enclosed. As a matter of fact they contain nothing; but the negroes regard the empty vessels with holy dread, and show them and their possessors divine honours. Exactly thus is empty Mallarmé the fetich of the Symbolists, who, it must be admitted, are intellectually far below the Senegal negroes.
This position of a calabash worshipped on bended knees he has attained by oral discourse. Every week he gathers round him embryonic poets and authors, and develops his art theories before them. He speaks just as Morice and Kahn write. He strings together obscure and wondrous words, at which his disciples become as stupid ‘as if a mill-wheel were going round in their heads,’ so that they leave him as if intoxicated, and with the impression that incomprehensible, superhuman disclosures have been made to them. If there is anything comprehensiblein the incoherent flow of Mallarmé’s words, it is perhaps his admiration for the pre-Raphaelites. It was he who drew the attention of the Symbolists to this school, and enjoined imitation of it. It is through Mallarmé that the French mystics received their English mediævalism and neo-Catholicism. Finally, it may be mentioned that among the physical features of Mallarmé are ‘long pointed faun-like ears.’[135]After Darwin, who was the first to point out the apish character of this peculiarity, Hartmann,[136]Frigerio,[137]and Lombroso,[138]have firmly established the connection between immoderately long and pointed external ears and atavism and degeneration; and they have shown that this peculiarity is of especially frequent occurrence among criminals and lunatics.
The third among the leading spirits of the Symbolists is Jean Moréas, a Franco-Greek poet, who at the completion of his thirty-sixth year (his friends assert, it may be in friendly malice, that he makes himself out to be very much younger than he is) has producedin totothree attenuated collections of verses, of hardly one hundred to one hundred and twenty pages, bearing the titles,Les Syrtes,Les Cantilènes, andLe Pélerin passionné. The importance of a literary performance does not, of course, depend upon its amplitude, if it is otherwise unusually significant. When, however, a man cackles during interminable café séances of the renewal of poetry and the unfolding of a new art of the future, and finally produces three little brochures of childish verses as the result of his world-stirring effort, then the material insignificance of the performance also becomes a subject for ridicule.
Moréas is one of the inventors of the word ‘Symbolism.’ For some few years he was the high-priest of this secret doctrine, and administered the duties of his service with requisite seriousness. One day he suddenly abjured his self-founded faith, and declared that ‘Symbolism’ had always been meant only as a joke, to lead fools by the nose withal; and that the true salvation of poetry was in Romanism (romanisme). Under this new word he affirms a return to the language, versification and mode of feeling of the French poets at the close of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance period; but it were well to adopt his declarations with caution, since in two or three years he may be proclaiming his ‘romanisme’ as much a tap-room joke as his ‘symbolism.’ The appearance of thePélerin passionnéin 1891 was celebrated by the Symbolists as an event which was to be the beginning of a new era inpoetry. They arranged a banquet in honour of Moréas, and in the after-dinner speeches he was worshipped as the deliverer from the shackles of ancient forms and notions, and as the saviour who was bringing in the kingdom of God of true poetry. And the same poets who sat at the table with Moréas, and delivered to him rapturous addresses or joined in the applause, a few weeks after this event overwhelmed him with contumely and contempt. ‘Moréas a Symbolist!’ cried Charles Vignier.[139]‘Is he one through his ideas? He laughs at them himself! His thoughts! They don’t weigh much, these thoughts of Jean Moréas!’ ‘Moréas?’ asks Adrien Remacle,[140]‘we have all been laughing at him. It is that which has made him famous.’ René Ghil calls hisPélerin passionné‘doggerel written by a pedant,’ and Gustav Kahn[141]passes sentence on him thus: ‘Moréas has no talent.... He has never done anything worth mentioning. He has his own particular jargon.’ These expressions disclose to us the complete hollowness and falseness of the Symbolistic movement, which outside France is obstinately proclaimed as a serious matter by imbeciles and speculators, although its French inventors make themselves hoarse in trying to convince the world that they merely wanted to banter the Philistine with a tap-room jest and advertise themselves.
After the verdict of his brethren in the Symbolist Parnassus, I may really spare myself the trouble of dwelling longer on Moréas; I will, however, cite a few examples from hisPélerin passionné, in order that the reader may form an idea of the softness of brain which displays itself in these verses.
The poem Agnes[142]begins thus:
‘Il y avait des arcs où passaient des escortesAvec des bannières de deuil et du ferLacé (?) des potentats de toutes sortes—Il y avait—dans la cité au bord de la mer.Les places étaient noires, et bien pavées, et les portes,Du côté de l’est et de l’ouest, hautes; et comme en hiverLa forêt, dépérissaient les salles de palais, et les porches,Et les colonnades de belvéder.
C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de tonadolescence.
‘Dans la cité au bord de la mer, la cape et la dague lourdesDe pierres jaunes, et sur ton chapeau des plumes de perroquets,Tu t’en venais, devisant telles bourdes,Tu t’en venais entre tes deux laquaisSi bouffis et tant sots—en verité, des happelourdes!—Dans la cité au bord de la mer tu t’en venais et tu vaguaisParmi de grands vieillards qui travaillaient aux felouques,Le long des môles et des quais.
C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de tonadolescence.
And thus the twaddle goes on through eight more stanzas, and in every line we find the characteristics of the language used by imbeciles and made notorious by Sollier (Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile), the ‘ruminating’ as it were, of the same expressions, the dreamy incoherence of the language, and the insertion of words which have no connection with the subject.
TwoChansons[143]run thus:
‘Les courlis dans les roseaux!(Faut-il que je vous en parle,Des courlis dans les roseaux?)O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.
‘Le porcher et les pourceaux!(Faut-il que je vous en parle,Du porcher et des pourceaux?)O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.
‘Mon cœur pris en vos réseaux!(Faut-il que je vous en parle,De mon cœur en vos réseaux?)O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.
‘On a marché sur les fleurs au bord de la route,Et le vent d’automne les secoue si fort, en outre.
‘La malle-poste a renversé la vieille croix au bord de la route;Elle était vraiment si pourrie, en outre.
‘L’idiot (tu sais) est mort au bord de la route,Et personne ne le pleurera, en outre.’
The stupid artifice with which Moréas here seeks to produce a feeling of wretchedness by conjuring up the three associated figures of crushed flowers, dishevelled by the wind, an overturned and mouldering cross, and a dead, unmourned idiot, makes this poem a model of the would-be profound production of a madhouse!
When Moréas is not soft of brain, he develops a rhetorical turgidity which reminds us of Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau in his worst efforts. Only one example[144]of this kind, and we have done with him:
‘J’ai tellement soif, ô mon amour, de ta bouche,Que j’y boirais en baisers le cours detournéDu Strymon, l’Araxe et le Tanaïs farouche;Et les cent méandres qui arrosent Pitané,Et l’Hermus qui prend sa source où le soleil se couche,Et toutes les claires fontaines dont abonde Gaza,Sans que ma soif s’en apaisât.’
Behind the leaders Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Moréas a troop of minor Symbolists throng, each, it is true, in his own eyes the one great poet of the band, but whose illusions of greatness do not entitle them to any special observation. Sufficient justiceis dealt them if the spirit they are made of be characterized by quoting a few lines of their poetry. Jules Laforgue, ‘unique not only in his generation, but in all the republic of literature,’[145]cries: ‘Oh, how daily [quotidienne] is life!’ and in his poemPan et la Syrinxwe come upon lines like the following:
‘O Syrinx! voyez et comprenez la Terre et la merveille de cette matinée et la circulation de la vie.Oh, vous là! et moi, ici! Oh vous! Oh, moi! Tout est dans Tout!’[146]
Gustav Kahn, one of the æstheticists and philosophers of Symbolism, says in hisNuit sur la Lande: ‘Peace descends from thy lovely eyes like a great evening, and the borders of slow tents descend, studded with precious stones, woven of far-off beams and unknown moons.’
In German, at least, ‘borders of slow tents which descend’ is completely unintelligible nonsense. In French they are also unintelligible; but in the original their meaning becomes apparent. ‘Et des pans de tentes lentes descendent,’ the line runs, and betrays itself as pure echolalia, as a succession of similar sounds, as it were, echoing each other.
Charles Vignier, ‘the beloved disciple of Verlaine,’ says to his mistress:
‘Là-bas c’est trop loin,Pauvre libellule,Reste dans ton coinEt prends des pilules...
‘Sois Edmond AboutEt d’humeur coulante,Sois un maraboutDu Jardin des Plantes.’
Another of his poems,Une Coupe de Thulé, runs thus:
‘Dans une coupe de ThuléOù vient pâlir l’attrait de l’heure,Dort le sénile et dolent leurreDe l’ultime rêve adulé.
‘Mais des cheveux d’argent filéFont un voile à celle qui pleure,Dans une coupe de ThuléOù s’est éteint l’attrait de l’heure.
‘Et l’on ne sait quel jubiléCélèbre une harpe mineureQue le hautain fantôme effleureD’un lucide doigt fuselé!...Dans une coupe de Thulé!’
These poems remind us so forcibly of those doggerel rhymes at which in Germany jovial students are often wont to try their skill, and which are known as ‘flowery [lit.blooming] nonsense,’ that, in spite of the solemn assurance of French critics, I am convinced that they were intended as a joke. If I am right in my supposition, they are really evidences, not of the mental status of Vignier, but of his readers, admirers, and critics.
Louis Dumur addresses the Neva in the following manner:
‘Puissante, magnifique, illustre, grave, noble reine!O Tsaristsa [sic!] de glace et de fastes Souveraine!Matrone hiératique et solennelle et vénérée!...Toi qui me forces à rêver, toi qui me deconcertes,Et toi surtout que j’aime, Émail, Beauté, Poème, Femme.Néva! j’évoque ton spectacle et l’hymne de ton âme!’
And René Ghil, one of the best-known Symbolists (he is chief of a school entitled ‘évolutive-instrumentiste’), draws from his lyre these tones, which I also quote in French; in the first place because they would lose their ring in a translation, and, secondly, because if I were to translate them literally, it is hopeless to suppose that the reader would think I was serious:
‘Ouïs! ouïs aux nues haut et nues oùTirent-ils d’aile immense qui vire ...
et quand vide
et vers les grands pétales dans l’air plus aride—
‘(Et en le lourd venir grandi lent stridule, etTitille qui n’alentisse d’air qui dure, et!Grandie, erratile et multiple d’éveils, strideMixte, plainte et splendeur! la plénitude aride)
‘et vers les grands pétales d’agitationsLors évanouissait un vol ardent qui stride....
‘(des saltigrades doux n’iront plus vers les mers....)’
One thing must be acknowledged, and that is, the Symbolists have an astonishing gift for titles. The book itself may belong to pure madhouse literature; the title is always remarkable. We have already seen that Moréas names one of his collection of versesLes Syrtes. He might in truth just as well call it theNorth Pole, orThe Marmot, orAbd-el-Kader, since these have just as much connection with the poems in the little volume asSyrtes; but it is undeniable that this geographical name calls up the lustre of an African sun, and the pale reflection of classic antiquity, which may well please the eye of the hysteric reader. Edouard Dubus entitles his poem,Quand les Violons sont partis; Louis Dumur,Lassitudes; Gustave Khan,Les Palais nomades; Maurice du Plessis,La Peau de Marsyas; Ernest Raynaud,Chairs profanesandLe Signe; Henri de Régnier,Sites etEpisodes; Arthur Rimbaud,Les Illuminations; Albert Saint Paul,L’Echarpe d’Iris; Viélé-Griffin,Ancæus; and Charles Vignier,Centon.
Of the prose of the Symbolists, I have already given some examples. I should further like to cite only a few passages from a book which the Symbolists declare to be one of their most powerful mental manifestations,La Littérature de tout-à-l’heure, by Charles Morice. It is a sort of bird’s-eye view of the development of literature up to the present time, a rapid critique of the more and most recent books and authors, a kind of programme of the literature of the future. This book is one of the most astonishing which exists in any language. It strongly resemblesRembrandt as Educator, but is far beyond that book in the utter senselessness of its concatenations of words. It is a monument of pure literary insanity, of ‘graphomania’; and neither Delepierre in hisLittérature des Fous, nor Philomnestes (Gustave Brunet) in hisFous Littéraires, quotes examples of more complete mental dislocation than are visible in every page of this book. Notice the following confession of faith by Morice:[147]‘Although in this book treating only of æsthetics—although of æsthetics based upon metaphysics—we shall remember to refrain, as far as possible, from pure philosophizing, we must approximately paraphrase a word which will more than once be made use of, and which, in the highest sense here put upon it, is not incapable of being paraphrased. God is the first and universal cause, the final and universal end; the bond between spirits; the point of intersection where two parallels would meet; the fulfilment of our inclinations; the fruition which accords with the glories of our dreams; the abstraction itself of the concrete; the unseen and unheard and yet certain ideal of our demands for beauty in truth. God is, par excellence,THEvery word—the very word, that is to say, that unknown certain word of which every author has the incontrovertible, but undiscernible idea, the self-evident but hidden goal which he will never reach, and which he approaches as near as possible. In, so to say, practical æsthetics He is the atmosphere of joy in which the mind revels victorious, because it has reduced irreducible mystery to imperishable symbols.’ I do not for a moment doubt that this incomparable jumble will be quite intelligible to theologians. Like all mystics, they discover a sense in every sound; that is, they persuade themselves and others that the nebulous ideas which the sound awakens in their brains by association are the meaning of that sound. But anyone who demands of words that they should be the media of definite thoughts, will perceive in the face of this twaddle that the author was not thinking anything at allwhen he wrote, although he was dreaming of many things. ‘Religion’ is for Morice (p. 56), ‘the source of art, and art in its essence is religious’—an affirmation which he borrows from Ruskin, although he does not acknowledge it. ‘Our scholars, our thinkers ... the luminous heads of the nineteenth century,’ are ‘Edgar Poe, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Auguste Comte, Claude Bernard, Berthelot’ (p. 57). Edgar Poe by the side of Spencer, Darwin, and Claude Bernard! never have ideas danced a crazier fools’ quadrille in a disordered brain.
And this book, of which the passages we have cited give a sufficiently correct idea, was, in France (just asRembrandt as Educatorwas in Germany), pronounced by thoroughly responsible critics to be ‘strange, but interesting and suggestive.’ A poor degenerate devil who scribbles such stuff, and an imbecile reader who follows his twaddle like passing clouds, are simply to be pitied. But what words of contempt are strong enough for the sane intellectual tatterdemalions who, in order not to offend or else to give themselves the appearance of possessing a remarkable faculty of comprehension, or to affect fairness and benevolence even towards those whose opinions they in part do not share, insist that they discover in books of this kind many a truth, much wit along with peculiar whims, an ideal of fervour and frequent lightnings of thought?
The word ‘Symbolism’ conveys, as we have seen, no idea to its inventors. They pursue no definite artistic tendency; hence it is not possible to show them that their tendency is a false one. It is otherwise with some of their disciples, who joined their ranks, partly through a desire to advertise themselves, partly because they thought that, in the conflicts between literary parties, they were fighting on the side which was the stronger and the more sure of victory, and partly, also, through the folly of fashion, and through the influence exerted by any noisy novelty over uncritical minds. Less weak-brained than the leaders, they felt the need of giving the word ‘Symbolism’ a certain significance, and, in fact, drew up a number of axioms which, according to their profession, serve to guide them in their creations. These axioms are sufficiently defined to allow of discussion.
The Symbolists demand greater freedom in the treatment of French verse. They fiercely rebel against the old alexandrines, with the cæsura in the middle, and the necessary termination of the sentence at the end; against the prohibition of the hiatus; against the law of a regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. They make defiant use of the ‘free verse,’ with length and rhythmad libitum, and false rhymes. The foreigner can only smile at the savage gestures with which this conflict is carried on. It is a schoolboys’ war against somehated book, which is solemnly torn in pieces, trodden under foot, and burned. The whole dispute concerning prosody and the rules of rhyme is, so to speak, an inter-Gallic concern, and is of no consequence to the literature of the world. We have long had everything which the French poets are only now seeking to obtain by barricades and street massacres. In Goethe’sPrometheus,Mahomet’s Gesang,Harzreise im Winter, in Heine’sNordsee Cyklus, etc., we possess perfect models of free verse; we alternate the rhymes as we will; we allow masculine and feminine rhymes to follow one another as seems good to us; we do not bind ourselves to the rigid law of old classic metres, but suffer, in the cradling measure of our verse, anapæsts to alternate with iambics and spondees, according to our feeling for euphony. English, Italian and Sclavonic poetry have gone equally far, and if the French alone have remained behind, and have at last found a need for casting aside their old matted, moth-eaten periwig, this is quite reasonable; but to anyone but a Frenchman they merely make themselves ridiculous when they trumpet their painful hobbling after the nations who are far in front of them, as an unheard-of discovery of new paths and opening up of new roads, and as an advance inspired by the ideal into the dawn of the future.
Another æsthetic demand of the Symbolists is that the line should, independently of its sense, call forth an intended emotion merely by its sound. A word should produce an effect, not through the idea which it embodies, but as a tone, language becoming music. It is noteworthy that many of the Symbolists have given their books titles which are intended to awaken musical ideas. We findLes Gammes(The Scales), by Stuart Merrill;Les Cantilènes, by Jean Moréas;Cloches dans la Nuit, by Adolphe Retté;Romances sans Paroles, by Paul Verlaine, etc. To make use of language as a musical instrument for the production of pure tone effects is the delirious idea of a mystic. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites demand of the fine arts that they should not represent the concrete plastically or optically, but should express the abstract, and therefore simply undertake therôleof alphabetic writing. Similarly, the Symbolists displace all the natural boundary lines of art, and impose upon the word a task which belongs to musical signs only. But while the pre-Raphaelites wish to raise the fine arts to a higher rank than is suited to them, the Symbolists greatly degrade the word. In its origin sound is musical. It expresses no definite idea, but only a general emotion of the animal. The cricket fiddles, the nightingale trills, when sexually excited. The bear growls when stirred by the rage of conflict; the lion roars in his pleasure when tearing a living prey. In proportion as the brain develops in the animal kingdom, and mental life becomes richer, the means ofvocal expression are evolved and differentiated, and become capable of making perceptible to the senses not only simple generic emotions, but also presentative complexes of a more restricted and definitely delimitated nature—nay, if Professor Garner’s observations concerning the language of apes are accurate, even tolerably distinct single presentations. Sound, as a means of expressing mental operations, reaches its final perfection in cultivated, grammatically articulated language, inasmuch as it can then follow exactly the intellectual working of the brain, and make it objectively perceptible in all the minutest details. To bring the word, pregnant with thought, back to the emotional sound is to renounce all the results of organic development, and to degrade man, rejoicing in the power of speech, to the level of the whirring cricket or the croaking frog. The efforts of the Symbolists, then, result in senseless twaddle, but not in the word-music they intend, for this simply does not exist. No word of any single human language is, as such, musical. Many languages abound in consonants; in others vowels predominate. The former require more dexterity in the muscles employed in speaking; their pronunciation, therefore, counts as more difficult, and they seem less agreeable to the ears of foreigners than the languages which are rich in vowels. But this has nothing to do with the musical side of the question. What remains of the phonetic effect of a word if it is whispered, or if it is only visible as a written character? And yet in both cases it is able to awaken the same emotions, as if it had reached consciousness full-toned through the sense of hearing. Let anyone have read aloud to him the most cleverly chosen arrangement of words in a language completely unknown to him, and try to produce in himself a definite emotion through the mere phonetic effect. In every case it will be found impossible. The meaning of a word, and not its sound, determines its value. The sound is as such neither beautiful nor ugly. It becomes so only through the voice which gives it life. Even the first soliloquy in Goethe’sIphigeniewould be ugly coming from the throat of a drunkard. I have had the opportunity of convincing myself that even the Hottentot language, spoken in a mellow, agreeable contralto voice, could be pleasing.
Still more cracked is the craze of a sub-section of the Symbolists, the ‘Instrumentalists,’ whose spokesman is René Ghil. They connect each sound with a definite feeling of colour, and demand that the word should not only awaken musical emotion, but at the same time operate æsthetically in producing a colour-harmony. This mad idea has its origin in a much-quoted sonnet by Arthur Rimbaud,Les Voyelles(Vowels), of which the first line runs thus:
‘A black, e white, i red, u green, o blue.’
Morice declares[148]explicitly (what in any case no one in a sane state of mind would have doubted) that Rimbaud wished to make one of those silly jokes which imbeciles and idiots are in the habit of perpetrating. Some of his comrades, however, took the sonnet in grim earnest, and deduced from it a theory of art. In hisTraité du VerbeRené Ghil specifies the colour-value, not only of individual vowels, but of musical instruments. ‘Harps establish their supremacy by being white. And violins are blue, often softened by a shimmer of light, to subdue paroxysms.’ (It is to be hoped the reader will duly appraise these combinations of words.) ‘In the exuberance of ovations, brass instruments are red, flutes yellow, allowing the childlike to proclaim itself astonished at the luminance of the lips. And the organ, synthesis of all simple instruments, bewails deafness of earth and the flesh all in black....’ Another Symbolist, who has many admirers, M. Francis Poictevin, teaches us, inDerniers Songes, to know the feelings corresponding to colours. ‘Blue goes—without more of passion—from love to death; or, more accurately, it is a lost extreme. From turquoise blue to indigo, one goes from the most shame-faced influences to final ravages.’
Wiseacres were, of course, at once to the fore, and set up a quasi-scientific theory of ‘colour-hearing.’ Sounds are said to awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to some, this was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures; according to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal connection between the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means of nerve filaments. This anatomical explanation is entirely arbitrary, and has not been substantiated by any facts. But ‘colour-hearing’ itself is by no means confirmed. The most complete book hitherto published on this subject, the author of which is the French oculist, Suarez de Mendoza,[149]collects all the available observations on this alleged phenomenon, and deduces from them the following definition: ‘It is the faculty of associating tones and colours, by which every objective acoustic perception of sufficient intensity, nay, even the memory-image of such a perception, arouses in certain persons a luminous or non-luminous image, which is always the same for the same letters, the same tone of voice or instrument, and the same intensity or pitch of tone.’ Suarez well hits the truth when he says, ‘Colour-hearing’ (he calls itpseudo-photesthésie) ‘is often a consequence of an association of ideas established in youth ... and often of a special action of the brain, the particular nature of which is unknown to us, and may have a certain similarity to sense-illusion and hallucination.’ For my part, I have nodoubt that colour-hearing is always the consequence of association of ideas, the origins of which must remain obscure, because the combination of certain presentations of colour with certain sensations of sound may possibly depend upon the very evanescent perceptions of early childhood, which were not powerful enough to arouse the attention, and have therefore remained undiscerned in consciousness. That it is a question of purely individual associations brought about by the accident of associated ideas, and not of organic co-ordinations depending upon definite abnormal nervous connections, is made very probable by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a different colour to the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that to Ghil the flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in hisFarbenlehre) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter ‘a’ black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel as blue, and so on.
The relation between the external world and the organism is originally very simple. Movements are continually occurring in nature, and the protoplasm of living cells perceives these movements. Unity of effect corresponds to unity of cause. The lowest animals perceive of the outer world only this, that something in it changes, and possibly, also, whether this change is marked or slight, sudden or slow. They receive sensations differing quantitatively, but not qualitatively. We know, for example, that the proboscis, or syphon, of thePholas dactylus, which contracts more or less vigorously and quickly at every excitation, is sensitive to all external impressions—light, noise, touch, smell, etc. This mollusc sees, hears, feels and smells, therefore, with this simple organ; his proboscis is to him at once eye, ear, nose, finger, etc. In the higher animals the protoplasm is differentiated. Nerves, ganglia, brain and sense-apparatus are formed. The movements of nature are now perceived in a variety of ways. The differentiated senses transform the unity of the phenomenon into the diversity of the percept. But even in the highest and most differentiated brain there still remains something like a very distant and very dim remembrance that the cause which excites the different senses is one and the same movement, and there are formed presentations and conceptions which would be unintelligible if we could not concede this vague intuition of the fundamental unity of essence in all perceptions. We speak of ‘high’ and ‘deep’ tones, and thus give to sound-waves a relationship in space which they cannot have. In the same way we speak of tone-colour, and, conversely, of colour-tones, and thus confound the acoustic and optic properties of the phenomena. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ lines or tones, ‘sweet’ voices, are frequent modes of expression, which depend on a transference of the perception of one sense to the impressionsof another. In many cases this method of speech may no doubt be traced to mental inertia. It is more convenient to designate a sense-perception by a word which is familiar, though borrowed from the province of another sense, than to create a special word for the particular percept. But even this loan for convenience’ sake is possible and intelligible only if we admit that the mind perceives certain resemblances between the impressions of the different senses—resemblances which, although they are often to be explained by conscious or unconscious association of ideas, are oftener quite inexplicable objectively. It only remains for us to assume that consciousness, in its deepest substrata, neglects the differentiation of phenomena by the various senses, passes over this perfection attained very late in organic evolution, and treats impressions only as undifferentiated material for the acquirement of knowledge of the external world without reference to their origin by way of this or that sense. It thus becomes intelligible that the mind mingles the perceptions attained through the different senses, and transforms them one into another. Binet[150]has established, in his excellent essays, this transposition of the senses in hysterical persons. A female patient, whose skin was perfectly insensible on one half of her body, took no notice when, unseen by herself, she was pricked with a needle. But at the moment of puncture there arose in her consciousness the image of a black (in the case of another invalid, of a bright) point. Consciousness thus transposed an impression of the nerves of the skin, which, as such, was not perceived, into an impression of the retina, of the optic nerve.
In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of the differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly confounds the reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster.
Moreover, it is an old clinical observation that mental decay is accompanied by colour mysticism. One of Legrain’s[151]mental invalids ‘endeavoured to recognise good and evil by the difference of colour, ascending from white to black; when he was reading, words had (according to their colour) a hidden meaning, which he understood.’ Lombroso[152]cites ‘eccentricpersons’ who, ‘like Wigman, had the paper for their books specially manufactured with several colours on each page.... Filon painted each page of the books he wrote in a different colour.’ Barbey d’Aurevilly, whom the Symbolists venerate as a pioneer, used to write epistles in which each letter of a word was coloured with a different tint. Most alienists know similar cases in their experience.
The more reliable Symbolists proclaim their movement as ‘a reaction against naturalism.’ Such a reaction was certainly justified and necessary; for naturalism in its beginnings, as long as it was embodied in De Goncourt and Zola, was morbid, and, in its later development in the hands of their imitators, vulgar and even criminal, as will be proved further on. Nevertheless Symbolism is not in the smallest degree qualified to conquer naturalism, because it is still more morbid than the latter, and, in art, the devil cannot be driven out by Beelzebub.
Finally, it is affirmed that Symbolism connotes ‘the inscribing of a symbol in human form.’ Expressed unmystically, this means that in the poems of the Symbolists the particular human form should not only exhibit its special nature and contingent destiny, but also represent a general type of humanity, and embody a universal law of life. This quality, however, is not the monopoly of Symbolistic poetry, but belongs to all kinds of poetry. No genuine poet has yet been impelled to deal with an utterly unprecedented and unique case, or with a monstrous being whose likeness is not to be found in mankind. That which interests him in men and their destiny is just the intimate connection between the two and the universal laws of human life. The more the government of universal laws is made apparent in the fate of the individual, the more there is embodied in him that which lives in all men, so much the more attractive will this destiny and this man be to the poet. There is not in all the literature of humanity a single work of recognised importance which in this sense is not symbolic, and in which the characters, their passions and fortunes, have not a typical significance, far transcending the particular circumstances. It is, therefore, a piece of foolish arrogance in the Symbolists to lay claim to the sole possession of this quality in the works of their school. They show, moreover, that they do not understand their own formulæ; for those theorists of the school who demand of poetry that it should be ‘a symbol inscribed in human form,’ assert at the same time that only the ‘rare and unique case’ (le cas rare et unique) deserves the attention of the poet,i.e., the case which is significant of nothing beyond itself, and consequently the opposite of a symbol.[153]
We have now seen that Symbolism, like English pre-Raphaelitism (from which it borrowed its catch-words and opinions), is nothing else than a form of the mysticism of weak-minded and morbidly emotional degeneration. The efforts of some followers of the movement to import a meaning into the stammering utterances of their leaders, and falsely to ascribe to them a sort of programme, do not for a moment withstand criticism, but show themselves to be graphomaniac and delirious twaddle, without the smallest grain of truth or sound reason. A young Frenchman, who is certainly not adverse to rational innovation, Hugues Le Roux,[154]describes the group of Symbolists quite correctly in saying of them: ‘They are ridiculous cripples, each intolerable to the other; they live uncomprehended by the public, several by their friends as well, and a few by themselves. As poets or prose writers they proceed in the same way: no material, no sense, and only juxtapositions of loud-sounding musical (?) words; teams of strange rhymes, groupings of unexpected colours and tones, swaying cadences, hurtlings, hallucinations and evoked suggestions.’