The Symbolist Movement in LiteratureSymons, Arthur
History
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
Symons, Arthur
French literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Symbolism (Literary movement) -- France
That, I fancy to myself, was his actual way of writing; here, in what
I prefer to give as a corollary, is the theory. "Symbolist, Decadent,
or Mystic, the schools thus called by themselves, or thus hastily
labelled by our information-press, adopt, for meeting-place, the point
of an Idealism which (similarly as in fugues, in sonatas) rejects
the 'natural' materials, and, as brutal, a direct thought ordering
them; to retain no more than suggestion. To be instituted, a relation
between images, exact; and that therefrom should detach itself a third
aspect, fusible and clear, offered to the divination. Abolished, the
pretension, æsthetically an error, despite its dominion over almost all
the masterpieces, to enclose within the subtle paper other than, for
example, the horror of the forest, or the silent thunder afloat in the
leaves; not the intrinsic, dense wood of the trees. Some few bursts of
personal pride, veridically trumpeted, awaken the architecture of the
palace, alone habitable; not of stone, on which the pages would close
but ill." For example (it is his own): "I say: a flower! and out of the
oblivion to which my voice consigns every contour, so far as anything
save the known calyx, musically arises, idea, and exquisite, the one
flower absent from all bouquets." "The pure work," then, "implies the
elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields place to the words,
immobilised by the shock of their inequality; they take light from
mutual reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,
replacing the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic personal direction
of the phrase." "The verse which out of many vocables remakes an entire
word, new, unknown to the language, and as if magical, attains this
isolation of speech." Whence, it being "music which rejoins verse,
to form, since Wagner, Poetry," the final conclusion: "That we are
now precisely at the moment of seeking, before that breaking up of
the large rhythms of literature, and their scattering in articulate,
almost instrumental, nervous waves, an art which shall complete the
transposition, into the Book, of the symphony or simply recapture
our own: for, it is not in elementary sonorities of brass, strings,
wood, unquestionably, but in the intellectual word at its utmost,
that, fully and evidently, we should find, drawing to itself all the
correspondences of the universe, the supreme Music."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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