In poetry the Parnassians revolted against Romantic self-worship on
the one hand and the realistic preoccupation of the naturalists on the
other. They, too, believed themselves impersonal, impassive--terms
only relative in creative endeavour. They climbed up their ivory
towers, away from vulgar mundanity, and substituted for the musical
vagaries of their unrepressed predecessors the cult of the clear
image and the sculptural line. And fast upon them followed the
Symbolist-Decadents,--some of whom, indeed, were nourished upon the
milk of Parnassianism,--and who, in their turn, abjured the modern
classicism of the Parnassians with their cult of form and clarity,
and set up instead a new musicality of method, a new intensity of
personalism. Their ivory towers were just as high, but were reared on
subtler fancies. Suggestion replaced precision; sculpture melted into
music. In a word, already neo-classicism had swung to neo-romanticism;
the pendulum, on its everlasting swing, had covered the same distance
in far faster time. Yet each seeming return to the old norms is a
return with a difference; more and more the basic elements of the
reaction are understood by the participants in their relations to
society and to the individual. Especially is their psychological
significance appreciated and--most important of all and most
recent--their nature as complements rather than as antagonists. When
Darío, in a famous poem, asked “¿Quien quieñ es no es Romántico?” (Who
that is, is not a Romantic?) he but stressed the individualism at the
bottom of all art. Perhaps the days of well-defined “schools” in art
are over; perhaps the days of the label in criticism are gone, or going
fast, even in academic circles; all men contain the potentialities of
all things and opposites grow out of opposites. Man is thus himself
unity in variety,--the old shibboleth of the estheticists,--and the
“schools” are but phases of the multiple personality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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