The Symbolist Movement in Literature

By Arthur Symons

Book Overview

Without symbolism there can be no literature; indeed, not even language. What are words themselves but symbols, almost as arbitrary as the letters which compose them, mere sounds of the voice to which we have agreed to give certain significations, as we have agreed to translate these sounds by those combinations of letters? Symbolism began with the first words uttered by the first man, as he named every living thing; or before them, in heaven, when God named the world into being. And we see, in these beginnings, precisely what Symbolism in literature really is: a form of expression, at the best but approximate, essentially but arbitrary, until it has obtained the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness. It is sometimes permitted to us to hope that our convention is indeed the reflection rather than merely the sign of that unseen reality. We have done much if we have found a recognisable sign. "A symbol," says Comte Goblet d'Alviella, in his book on The Migration of Symbols, "might be defined as a representation which does not aim at being a reproduction." Originally, as he points out, used by the Greeks to denote "the two halves of the tablet they divided between themselves as a pledge of hospitality," it came to be used of every sign, formula, or rite by which those initiated in any mystery made themselves secretly known to one another. Gradually the word extended its meaning, until it came to denote every conventional representation of idea by form, of the unseen by the visible. "In a Symbol," says Carlyle, "there is concealment and yet revelation: hence, therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance." And, in that fine chapter of Sartor Resartus, he goes further, vindicating for the word its full value: "In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there." It is in such a sense as this that the word Symbolism has been used to describe a movement which, during the last generation, has profoundly influenced the course of French literature. All such words, used of anything so living, variable, and irresponsible as literature, are, as symbols themselves must so often be, mere compromises, mere indications. Symbolism, as seen in the writers of our day, would have no value if it were not seen also, under one disguise or another, in every great imaginative writer. What distinguishes the Symbolism of our day from the Symbolism of the past; is that it has now become conscious of itself, in a sense in which it was unconscious even in Gérard de Nerval, to whom I trace the particular origin of the literature which I call Symbolist. The forces which mould the thought of men change, or men's resistance to them slackens; with the change of men's thought comes a change of literature, alike in its inmost essence and in its outward form: after the world has starved its soul long enough in the contemplation and the re-arrangement of material things, comes the turn of the soul; and with it comes the literature of which I write in this volume, a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0BQY28C2B
• ISBN13: 9798371288202
• Release Date: December 2022
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 220 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

The Definitive Primer of the Symbolist Period

In all of the critical fog & political baggage that has since attached itself to the Symbolists, it is refreshing to read a contemporary's account of this fascinating artistic period. Symons wasn't an ivory tower academic, (he lived the "art for art's sake" life championed by the Decadents & Symbolists to the point of mental collapse), but few critics were as close to the circle of important writers of the 1880s & '90s as he was. His criticisms were not the speculations of a reader, but more nearly reportage culled from his own associations & early championing of the milieu the Symbolists sprang from. Pick up his letters or Karl Beckson's excellent biography & you'll see what I mean. Symons was uniquely positioned to shine a light on a movement that consciously wrapped itself in mystery. This is a must-read introduction for anyone interested in the period.

A Literary Study

I enjoyed this author's poetic brilliance in discussing the relation between a symbol and the infinite. What I did not realize, when I purchased the book, is that it is substantially a collection of essays on particular authors: Balzac. Jusmans, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, Flaubert, etc.

Wilde had his Pater and I my Symons.

Without this little gem, we may not have ever had T. S. Eliot emerge as fully as he has. When I first stumbled across this book, I went through one of my deepest awakenings and haven't stopped since. The Symbolist Movement in Literature is a must for any concerned with poetry and the poetic process. There is a common thread in poetry that has been carried from ancient Greece to the present (though deeply buried now) and one of its strongest showings occurs with the writers reported on in this book. Symons does not get super scholastic (partly because scholars and the modern scholarly anathema wasn't as menacing of a problem as it is now) but he treats the writers and their material as one with the wide-eyed wonder of a quiet witness to one of the most remarkable periods in ALL of literature.