SOURCE: Cornell, Kenneth. “Triumph and Schism, 1891.” In The Symbolist Movement, pp. 101-18. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951.

[In the following essay, Cornell details the literary events of 1891, a pinnacle year for French Symbolist verse.]

The first months of 1891, a year extremely rich in the annals of symbolism, are largely concerned with the circumstances surrounding the publication of Le Pèlerin passionné. Moréas had, it would seem, carefully prepared for much publicity at the appearance of his volume. In late December, 1890, just as the book was coming off Vanier's presses, Anatole France wrote a long article on Moréas for Le Temps.¹ Meanwhile Moréas had begun a campaign to celebrate the book and had enlisted the aid of Maurice Barrès and Henri de Régnier in arranging a banquet. In addition, since Deschamps had asked him to edit a special number of La Plume, he appears to have retarded his copy until January 1, 1891,² the exact moment when the copies of Le Pèlerin passionné were put on sale. The issue appeared with the name of Moréas in huge letters on the cover and contained, besides a drawing of Moréas by Gauguin, reprints of articles on Le Pèlerin passionné, by France and Barrès³ and selections from Moréas' published work. An essay by Achille Delaroche, called the “Annales du symbolisme,” did contain names of other writers, but again Moréas is mentioned several times.⁴

In the first week of February the banquet, at which Mallarmé presided, was held. The Parnassians had been invited and had sent their regrets; Catulle Mendès arrived at a late hour. Toasts were drunk to Moréas, Mallarmé, Verlaine (who was absent), and to the memories of Laforgue and Baudelaire. Henri de Régnier proposed a toast to Leconte de Lisle and to the fraternity of poets; Bernard Lazare suggested the name of Anatole France and Raoul Gineste that of Félicien Rops. Charles Morice read a sonnet entitled “A Jean Moréas.” According to Ernest Raynaud, this event marked the triumph of symbolism rather than of one author, yet many of the two hundred people present could not have failed seeing to what degree Moréas was striving to institute himself as leader of the young poetic generation. His preface to the Pèlerin passionné had not been without some pretensions:

Dirai-je, maintenant, de mes innovations rhythmiques, que le los et la complicité des plus affinés jeunes hommes de ce temps les sigillent à la disgrâce de ceux-là qui de prudence s'aggravent! Et n'ai-je, déjà, fait preuve de quelque supériorité en la poétique réglementaire? et qui me saurait tenir en suspicion!

Moréas had loyal friends in Ernest Raynaud of the Mercure de France and Léon Deschamps of La Plume. Immediate opposition, in February, was expressed in La Revue indépendante, where René Ghil with violent scorn and George Bonnamour in a gentler tone of reproof cast doubt on the importance of Moréas and his work.⁵ Huret's literary questionnaire later in the year gradually revealed a number of other poets who had little faith in the talents of Moréas, but these judgments were made after schism had split the symbolist ranks with the founding of the “Ecole romane.” At the moment of the banquet, although the intention of linking the current period with the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was clearly stated in the preface of Le Pèlerin passionné, no one seems to have guessed that Moréas was on the point of forsaking the name he had coined. The title of the issue of La Plume was “Le Symbolisme de Jean Moréas,” and Gauguin's picture bore the motto “Je suis symboliste.”

Although Moréas was succeeding in drawing much homage to himself, the time of his triumph was also that of reverence accorded to those writers whom the symbolists recognized as their spiritual ancestors. The year is the date of Vanier's new edition of Les Amours jaunes of Corbière⁶ and of Rodolphe Darzens' edition of Rimbaud's work under the title Le Reliquaire.⁷ The Genonceaux edition of Lautréamont (1890) inspired Remy de Gourmont's article “La Littérature ‘Maldoror’” in the Mercure de France.⁸ Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's name was beginning to be known abroad by such articles as that of Jan Ten Brink in the Dutch magazine Nederland and the brief essay by Arthur Symons in the Illustrated London News of January 24, 1891. Henry Bordeaux published his essay Villiers de l'Isle-Adam at Ghent in November, 1891. The Entretiens politiques et littéraires, now in the second year of existence, devoted many pages to unpublished fragments of Laforgue's prose. Although these fragments had been left by their author in a chaotic state, the critical comments on Baudelaire,⁹ Corbière, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Bourget are stimulating and suggest astonishing insight and ability.

The prestige of Mallarmé, evident at the banquet for Moréas, continued undiminished. During February and March, in the Revue indépendante, was printed the long study by Vittorio Pica.¹⁰ Though some of the critical analyses of the poems were odd, the essay, with its numerous quotations and its enthusiastic admiration, was one of the first attempts to follow Mallarmé's poetic evolution. The publication of Pages in Brussels at last brought together some of Mallarmé's prose writings; repercussions of the volume reached the French periodicals. In the Mercure de France appeared an essay by Pierre Quillard¹¹ and in the Entretiens politiques et littéraires one by Vielé-Griffin.¹²La Plume printed Mallarmé's “La Pipe,” and some pages which had appeared fifteen years before in the République des lettres were reprinted in the Mercure de France.

More equivocal is the situation of Verlaine. With two new volumes of poetry in 1891, and a Choix de poésies published by Fasquelle in an edition of fifteen hundred copies, he would seem to be an eminently successful poet. But his new production of verse was remarkably inferior and gave little impression of originality. The poems of Bonheur were written in the same mood of penitence as Amour, while Chansons pour elle seemed only a poor continuation of Parallèlement. Critics were aware of this and all that Edouard Dubus could find to say concerning Chansons pour elle was the rueful sentence, “Des vers de mirliton par un poète de génie.”¹³ Only La Plume, which had prided itself since the publication of Dédicaces on being Verlaine's special protector, used dithyrambic words of praise for Verlaine's new volumes. Thus Léon Deschamps, on receiving a copy of Bonheur, wrote his impression:

J'ai pleuré sur ce livre du cher Pauvre qui pardonne à tout et à tous: j'ai frémi de joie céleste en chantant pour moi seul ces divins rhythmes d'un poète étrange qui n'est pas le monstre d'orgueil symbolisé par Odilon Redon dans sa puissante Damnation de l'artiste.¹⁴

Verlaine was the object of one of the efforts to relieve the poverty of admired artists, laudable humanitarian efforts which the distress of Laforgue and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam had helped to awaken. Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art gave a benefit performance on May 21 for Verlaine and the painter Paul Gauguin. The results were negative for the material enrichment of the two. Verlaine's playlet “Les Uns et les autres” was badly presented and Charles Morice's “Chérubin” was a dismal failure; but worst of all the settings for Catulle Mendès' Soleil de minuit consumed all the profits. The only happy accomplishment of the venture was the representation of Maeterlinck's “L'Intruse” which was given a cordial reception by the audience. Another charitable effort of the year which also ended in failure was that of attempting to publish the poetry of Germain Nouveau, confined in an insane asylum but for whose recovery some hope was held.

In contrast with this reverence for the past is the emergence of a new generation of poets in 1891. Their arrival is signaled by the foundation of a magazine which proposed to have only twelve issues and to be limited to one hundred copies. Its name was La Conque and it has retained some celebrity because of two of its organizers, Pierre Louÿs and Paul Valéry. Their poetry appeared in almost every issue. This periodical of 1891 represents a spirit which is quite different from most of the pretentious and arrogant magazines of 1886 and for good reason, since it did not have the same prejudices to overcome. It was willing to pay homage to talent rather than schools of poetry, and this it effectively demonstrated by initial poems in each issue. These special offerings were signed by Leconte de Lisle, Dierx, Heredia, Mallarmé, Swinburne,¹⁵ Judith Gautier, Maeterlinck, Moréas, Morice, Verlaine, Vielé-Griffin, and Henri de Régnier. While such a list is to some degree the reflection of momentary renown, it is on the whole a very able evaluation of the best writing of the period.

Along with Valéry and Louÿs, frequent contributors to La Conque were Léon Blum, soon to become a literary critic of La Revue blanche, Eugène Hollande, whose later poetry marked a return to classicism, and Camille Mauclair, one of the devoted admirers, as were in fact most of the contributors of the review, of Stéphane Mallarmé. Mauclair was one of those who in 1891 began a campaign against Moréas, and Louÿs collected that year his poems into a first volume, Astarté. Valéry and Mauclair had both won honorable mention in a sonnet contest conducted by La Plume in the last months of 1890,¹⁶ and this was their inconspicuous entry into the world of Parisian letters where they were to become so famous. With them is to be associated their young friend André Gide, who had studied at the Ecole alsacienne with Louÿs and who published the Cahiers d'André Walter in 1891. This volume did not bear the name of its author, but it was hailed as the production of a delicate and idealistic spirit and as a point of view opposite from that of naturalism. Critical notes by reviewers as diverse as Paul Redonnel, Camille Mauclair, and Remy de Gourmont were enthusiastic in their praise.¹⁷ Another first volume by an anonymous writer did not awaken the same sort of unified response. This was the play Tête d'or which would one day be recognized as an important event in the symbolist theater, but of which the Revue indépendante professed not to understand the versification. La Plume thought that the unknown author, in order to be different, had caused his book to be printed in an idiotic fashion without margins and page numbers, but admitted that the volume was admired by Stuart Merrill. A paragraph by Pierre Quillard in the Mercure de France was one of the rare tributes given to Claudel's first dramatic effort.¹⁸

Even if Gide and Claudel preferred to remain anonymous in 1891, their books immediately received some comment. Another author, Francis Jammes, began publishing pamphlets of poetry that same year; but printed at Orthez and not placed on sale, these were not known in Paris until several years later. Even in December, 1893, the Mercure de France wonders whether the name of Jammes is not a pseudonym. On the contrary, Paul Fort, four years younger than Jammes, and indeed in 1891 only nineteen years old, was creating a great deal of stir with the experiments of his theater. In January his troupe gave Shelley's The Cenci in Félix Rabbe's translation, in March a curious program which included the recitation of Mallarmé's “Le Guignon,” Rachilde's three-act play Madame la Mort, Quillard's La Fille aux mains coupées, and a realistic play by Frédéric de Chirac entitled Prostituée! The intrusion of this last play in the repertoire of a theater which was combating naturalism and of which poetry and music were important elements may seem strange. The audience hissed the realistic play, and the Théâtre d'Art was accused of having represented the drama to produce just this reaction. The Verlaine-Gauguin benefit performance in May was, as we have seen, not entirely successful except for revealing Maeterlinck's dramatic production. If Paul Fort had been able to make a contract with the representative of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's widow, Axël would have been given in July. Toward the end of the year another complex program was presented, with Maeterlinck's Les Aveugles, Laforgue's Le Concile féerique, Gourmont's Théodat, some adaptations of old epic legends by Adolphe Retté, Camille Mauclair, and Stuart Merrill, and of the “Song of Songs” by Paul Roinard. This last number on the program was an attempt to make a synthesis of sensations through musical accompaniment and even diffusion of perfumes from an inadequate atomizer.

A very close bond between literature and art was established during 1891. Even in 1885-86 Téodor de Wyzewa had related the music of Wagner to painting and literature,¹⁹ and during the succeeding years Félix Fénéon had written many art criticisms to show that the independent school of painters was attempting to accomplish in pictorial form the same idealism and suggestion as the symbolist poets. But in 1891 the bonds between symbolism and painting are drawn much tighter and even the titles of articles in La Plume, “Théorie du symbolisme des teintes” or “Les Impressionnistes symbolistes à l'Exposition de St. Germain,” or an article on Paul Gauguin in the Mercure de France which is entitled “Le Symbolisme en peinture,” reveal the current of ideas on painting. But the links between painters and poets were on all manner of levels: Eugène Carrière had completed his portrait of Verlaine, Gauguin was completing his etching of Mallarmé in the early months of 1891;²⁰ there were dinners presided over by Jean Dolent, at which many artists and writers met. At the banquet given in March in honor of Gauguin, who was about to leave for Tahiti, the guests included Mallarmé, Morice, Vallette, Rachilde, Moréas, Dubus, and Retté. The recent deaths of Van Gogh and of Seurat caused much comment in critical columns of periodicals. A special number of La Plume was devoted to “Les Peintres novateurs” and contained many short articles on artists, among whom were Seurat, Signac, Luce, Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Cézanne, Pissarro, and Séon.²¹ In the Revue indépendante Arthur Symons wrote on Odilon Redon and Jules Antoine on Georges Seurat, while in the Mercure de France were essays on Gauguin, Dolent, Carrière, Renoir, and Henri de Groux.

Ties were meanwhile strengthened between Belgium and France by such events as Henri de Régnier's becoming an editor of La Wallonie and the transfer of La Revue blanche to Paris in October, 1891. In his book reviews for the Liége publication Régnier was particularly useful in unifying the Belgian and French literary movements. During 1891 he wrote on Quillard's La Gloire du verbe, Paul Adam's En décor, Vielé-Griffin's Diptyque, Mallarmé's Pages, and the Cahiers d'André Walter. La Revue blanche, in its three issues of the year, not only printed poetry by Merrill, Régnier, Vielé-Griffin, and Kahn, as well as literary notices by Lucien Muhlfeld on new books of poetry, but also an article on “Gentlemen de lettres”: Merrill, Régnier, and Vielé-Griffin. The June 15 issue of La Plume was entirely devoted to “Les Jeune-Belgique,” giving an anthology of poetry and short prose selections with indications of the authors' published work and their collaboration with Belgian periodicals.

Other important components in the literary scene in 1891, perhaps not important for poetry for the year but which furnish the tone or subject matter of some verse, are socialism and occultism. Richepin, Roinard, Camille Soubise, Octave Mirbeau, André Veidaux, and Louise Michel are among the agitators for social reform who knew and associated with many of the symbolist poets. Among the Socialists as among the occultists there were always poetic idealists. Certain forms of humanitarian poetry as well as a kind of false mysticism in the 1890's stem from contacts with the extremists of these groups. A translation of part of the Marx-Engels manifesto was published by the Entretiens politiques et littéraires and Henri de Régnier wrote a “Commentaire sur l'argent,” in which he contrasted the poverty of the artist of genius with the unworthy holders of wealth. In the same magazine articles by Bernard Lazare pictured the proletariat as the dupe of the rich. The poet of 1891 was usually an idealist and a dreamer; yet few followed Zo d'Axa and Malato to the excesses of anarchism. The same tangent but not all-embracing attitude is visible toward the occultists. Although Péladan, Stanislas de Guaita, and Jules Bois are often mentioned by the symbolist poets, the tone is almost universally one of mockery. The Revue indépendante published a long essay extolling the works of Péladan but was careful to head the article as “Tribune libre.”²² The metaphysical poem by Jules Bois, Il ne faut pas mourir, published in 1891, excited no comment from other poets; and we have nothing to show that the symbolists flocked to hear Alber Jhouney²³ lecture on “Le Christ esotérique.” On the other hand, the selections from Jean-Paul Richter, published in La Revue indépendante,²⁴ and an article by Jean Thorel entitled “Les Romantiques allemands et les symbolistes français,” which appeared in the Entretiens politiques et littéraires,²⁵ both are in close relationship with the poetic idealism and subjectivity of the age. That Tieck and Novalis, Fichte and the great romanticists of Germany had proclaimed the supremacy of poetry and the revelation of the soul of things had come gradually to the attention of those who were studying the literary trends in France at the end of the century. In the efforts of a preceding age and another country the poets of the 1890's were able to see a movement which paralleled to some degree their own and gave them added security.

But while this extension in understanding of literature was being attempted, the adherents of the Ecole romane began to preach a doctrine of two kinds of literature, that of the North, which was violent and crude, and that of the South, the only region capable of producing sweet and melodious harmonies, the only realm of the truly beautiful and mysterious. The French romanticists had been led astray by allowing themselves to embrace the crudity of the North; now Moréas proposed to rectify that error. The breviary for the Ecole romane was written by Charles Maurras and appeared in La Plume in an issue devoted to the Félibrean movement of southern France. It was entitled “Barbares et romans” and extolled the literary past of Greece and Italy; Maurras even went so far as to say that Shakespeare was Italian. His remarks did not go unchallenged; Adolphe Retté published “Le Midi bouge!”²⁶ written in the caustic tone for which he was later to become known, and Pierre Quillard with delicate irony asks whether the Middle Ages did not after all present some trace of the Germanic warrior and should therefore be outlawed from the doctrine of Moréas.²⁷

Maurras thus became the official spokesman for Moréas and the Ecole romane. He was seconded by Maurice du Plessys with the “Etrennes symbolistes” and the poem “Dédicace à Apollodore,” which had been read at the February banquet, and by Ernest Raynaud, who praised Moréas in an article in the Mercure de France. The opponents to the eulogies given Le Pèlerin passionné, as revealed by the Huret questionnaire, were quite numerous, perhaps sometimes inspired by jealousy but also by the excessive pretensions of a poet who almost appears a megalomaniac. The expression of discontent with the art of Moréas, too harshly expressed by Ghil, is best resumed by Camille Mauclair. In an article²⁸ he reviews the claims for innovation that have been made by Moréas and his adulators, shows that others are in truth more original, and concludes by stating that the author of the Pèlerin passionné does not possess the intellectual depth or the breadth of vision necessary for a great poet. What Mauclair admires in Le Pèlerin passionné is limited to two elements: the music of certain verses and the settings of some of the poems. He confesses to have felt that the poetry gave an original effect as he read it, but after reflection he decided that the impression resulted from Moréas' patchwork imitations of a number of different sources. The vocabulary with its obsolete words, according to Mauclair, came from the fabliaux, the ingenuous tone of the love songs from Charles d'Orléans; the settings were often suggested by Virgil or Theocritus, the sad or mysterious tone by Baudelaire and Poe. The author's conclusions are that if one must have a poetic leader, it would be better to seek a sincere artist such as Verlaine or Mallarmé, and it would be preferable to admire a poetic work in which there was some thought.

The pompous claims of Moréas, the flattery of his admirers merited much of this adverse criticism. His volume of verse is uneven in quality, but if he had not chosen to make a manifesto and constitute a poetic school it is probable that he would have been recognized as an artist who had recovered some of the charm of sixteenth-century lyrics, who used effects of alliteration and repetition, free verse, and assonance with considerable ability, and who was more interested in the form and sound of his poetry than in expressing an idea. He would have been remembered for his “Etrennes de doulce,” for the antique charm of:

Les fenouils m'ont dit: Il t'aime si
Follement qu'il est à ta merci;
Pour son revenir va t'apprêter.
Les fenouils ne savent que flatter:
Dieu ait pitié de mon âme.(29)

If Le Pèlerin passionné continued to be considered as the volume in which the author had announced that he was not an ignoramus of whom the Muses made fun, the overweening vanity of Moréas is to be blamed. His contemporaries more often remember his expressions of “Ronsard et moi” or “Hugo et moi” than the talent he possessed.

Although Moréas was a successful publicity maker, it is doubtful whether he, any more than René Ghil, did poetry a great service by his histrionics. The writers who spoke with such scorn of Le Pèlerin passionné during the Huret inquiry probably felt called upon to reprove conceit. The results of that inquiry inspired George Bonnamour and Gaston Moreilhon to write an article, “Le Fiasco symboliste,”³⁰ which omitted many names but treated scornfully almost all contemporary names except that of René Ghil. They followed this condemnation of symbolism with a long essay³¹ on the advocate of scientific and evolutive verse. This article terminated with praise for Ghil in no way less measured than was that of Maurras for the founder of the Ecole romane.

If all the critical literature and all published volumes of poetry had centered about these two strong personalities during 1891, the future of poetry would have appeared black indeed. But about this time it happened that almost all the symbolist group produced new volumes of verse and several interesting newcomers appeared on the poetic horizon. The Mercure de France had occasion to speak of some fifty collections of verse during the year; the bibliographical notices were often written by Edouard Dubus, Remy de Gourmont, and Pierre Quillard. With such critics it is not strange that the faults attributed to the Parnassian school are underlined. Thus Le Poème de la chair by Abel Pelletier is accused of being too traditional and not musical enough, and Ce qui renaît toujours by Jean Carrère of being at times too eloquent and declamatory. La Joie de Maguelonne by A.-F. Herold is praised because the author seems no longer under the influence of Leconte de Lisle. A healthy sign in these articles of the Mercure is that no volume, if one except Raynaud's essay on Le Pèlerin passionné, is given blind, excessive praise or subjected to unjust or biased attack. Remy de Gourmont expresses doubt as to whether the free verse of Dujardin's La Comédie des amours reveals much talent, and Pierre Quillard, always very conservative in matters of poetic form, regrets the free meters of Vielé-Griffin's Diptyque. Although Ernest Raynaud, in an essay on Dumur's Lassitudes, is much too obviously extolling the Ecole romane, it is with some reason that he sees in Dumur a tardy blossoming of the romantic spirit.

The poets born in the 1850's and sixties who are given the greatest praise and in general are accorded most space in the critical articles of the Mercure de France are: Moréas, Mikhaël, Raynaud, Quillard, Rodenbach, Tailhade, Vielé-Griffin, Merrill, Herold, Mockel, and Kahn.³² Henri de Régnier received briefer treatment in 1891 because his publication was a re-edition of Episodes and Sites with some new sonnets. The qualities which the critics see in these poets are those of personal expression, musical preoccupation in verse, a sense of mystery and suggestion, fluidity and evanescence—in general the qualities which had been associated with symbolist verse.³³ Nor in the reviews of poetry are the ancestors of the movement forgotten; Fernand Clerget's Les Tourmentes evokes the memory of Baudelaire for Charles Merki, and Léon Deschamps mentions Verlaine in discussing the same volume.

Recognition of the evolution which had taken place during the years of symbolism seems evident from these reviews; yet the great variety in poetic expression, ranging from the simple and direct statement of the emotions to the most ornate and complicated evocations of the mind, kept most critics from trying to formulate definitions. Among those who made such an attempt was Vielé-Griffin in an article entitled “Qu'est-ce que c'est?”³⁴, which does not find an answer but which suggests the importance of synthesis in sensation and of intuitive qualities in current verse. Vielé-Griffin was inspired to further examining of the question³⁵ by Brunetière's article of April 1 in the Revue des deux modes, and he professes to be in agreement with Brunetière on many points. He admits that the name symbolism is badly chosen and that there is danger of becoming amorphous through using free verse. But one sentence from Brunetière's article shocks him: “Comment serait-on à la fois symboliste et baudelairien?” In reply he quotes part of the sonnet “Correspondances” and then Brunetière's own words which seem to give part of the same message:

L'inconnaissable nous étreint: in eo vivimus, movemur et sumus; si nous réussissons, parfois, à en saisir quelque chose, il est également certain que ce n'est pas en observant la nature; mais nous y ajoutons, de notre fond à nous, les principes d'interprétation qu'elle ne contient pas. Et comment le pourrions-nous s'il n'y avait, certainement aussi, quelque convenance, ou quelque correspondance, entre la nature et l'homme, des harmonies cachées, comme on disait jadis, un rapport secret du sensible et de l'intelligible?³⁶

It is true that Brunetière, although granting that the symbolists had done good service in suggesting how narrow and superficial was the art of the naturalists, did not intend to become the champion of symbolism. His article is above all a somewhat attenuated denunciation of the innovations in diction and prosody among the symbolist poets. But recognition of certain of their accomplishments, the very appearance in the Revue des deux mondes of a serious discussion of symbolism, constituted a triumph. A second recognition of the current trend in poetry came from Anatole France, who in six articles in Le Temps³⁷ discussed “Les Jeunes Poètes.” At the outset he announces that since no one knows what symbolism is, he does not intend to find a definition but rather present what the young poets have accomplished. Then, in a series of short essays he takes up forty-two poets and gives examples of their work. Except for three or four names,³⁸ all those he treats are concerned in the history of symbolism. The contributors to the Mercure de France, La Plume, and the Entretiens politiques et littéraires, several of the Belgian poets such as Giraud, Verhaeren, Mockel, and Maeterlinck, the poets of the Ecole romane, the occultists such as Stanislas de Guaita, Jhouney, and Emile Michelet, and even the old contributors to Lutèce, Vignier and Krysinska, are represented. France gives rather more space to Moréas and Maurras than to the others, but his series is a fairly complete picture of current poetry.³⁹

But France in his brief notices of separate poets effects no synthesis of currents in lyricism. He does not note for instance a phenomenon which is apparent in the period, a tendency toward a kind of standardized symbolist setting for verse. The poet's dream and a legendary background have become fused by 1891. A contributor to this process was Jean Moréas, who in Les Syrtes (1884) and Les Cantilènes (1886) had utilized legendary material and had indeed written some poems which resemble the English ballad. Vielé-Griffin with his mythical drama Ancæus (1888), Pierre Quillard with his mystery play La Fille aux mains coupées (1886, 1891), Morhardt with the dramatic poem Hénor (1890), and Henri de Régnier with Poèmes anciens et romanesques (1890) also helped to establish a conventional pattern. The problem was to find an appropriate background for highly subjective and personal verse. Gustave Kahn in his Palais nomades and Adolphe Retté in Cloches en la nuit had attempted to do this through abstruse and unreal settings, but most poets desired a more coherent arrangement than the fugitive symbols of the mind. They did not choose Parnassian plasticity, but as the representation of their dream created a strange realm of forests, lilies, and swans in which roamed princesses and knights. The return to the legendary setting of the Middle Ages might seem a repetition of romanticism, yet in almost all cases the purpose of the poet appears an entirely different one. It is usually not the evocation of the past but an indirect statement of personal mood that was being sought. Idealism at first had found its symbols in religious terms, then had come to the timeless and spaceless setting of a remote era. Only exceptionally was the Hellenic background used, although in the course of the 1890's poets who at first had revolted against the usages of the Parnassians came to recognize the beauty and validity of the antique heritage.

For the moment, however, Greece and Rome remained out of the picture. Merrill, in Les Fastes, used Wagnerian and vaguely medieval settings; Kahn those of the remote land of dreams. Vielé-Griffin, in Diptyque, created a forest setting which is abstract, and if Ernest Raynaud, in Les Cornes du faune, was often inspired by the park of Versailles, his backgrounds remain curiously unreal and only incidental to his theme, the joys and sorrows of amorous possession. Some poets, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps willfully, reacted against the vapory and unsubstantial landscapes of their creation. In a word, and in the most literal sense, they begemmed their poetry. The princesses of Henri de Régnier, Merrill, and Kahn are laden with bracelets and rings; the images in the verse contain the names of precious stones. In this, contemporary art may have had its part; Gustave Moreau was admired by the symbolists and Merrill was well acquainted with the painting of Burne-Jones and the pre-Raphaelites. A paradox in style is created by this poetic manner; the evanescent and ethereal meet the flashing of jewels in the same poem.

The metrical question divides the poetic production of 1891 into two groups. But originality in form, most openly expressed by free verse, is not always accompanied by the most revolutionary expression. This is to be seen in Diptyque of Vielé-Griffin, a little pamphlet of two poems printed by the presses of the Entretiens politiques et littéraires in 1891. Vielé-Griffin had written more concerning free verse than any poet at this time,⁴⁰ for Gustave Kahn, who prided himself on having invented the form and published the first volume illustrating the technique, did not formulate his essay on free verse until the publication of his Premiers poèmes in 1897. The execution of Vielé-Griffin's theory is somewhat disappointing. “Le Porcher,” the first of the poems of Diptyque, is the meditation of a voluntary exile from society, the fugitive memories of his past life, and the statement of the author's belief that in nature is to be found the environment for happiness. The evocations of the swineherd, the wandering themes of his soliloquy bear some relationship with those of Mallarmé's faun, but Vielé-Griffin's shadings are far less subtle and his poetry sometimes becomes didactic. The other poem of Diptyque is a dialogue between the poet and the personified form of Art. The theme is again not very original and at times the counsels of Musset's muse seem re-echoed:

“Te voici, comme au soir de ta première extase,
Triste du vin de ma beauté;
Je t'ai donné tout l'or de l'héritage,
Tout l'or jaloux de la parole,
Et te voici pleurant vers moi ta pauvreté;”(41)

Even the versification of Diptyque is not startling when one considers the great numbers of lines of twelve, ten, and eight syllables. Much more audacious is Kahn's second volume of verse, Chansons d'amant. As in the Palais nomades, the author uses many long lines, identical rhymes, and above all a strange, complicated syntax from which obscurity is not absent. Yet these are love poems, of which the diction does not hide the sensuous note:

Que tes lèvres demeurent la saveur habituelle
à mes lèvres sevrées par l'orgueil,
à mes lèvres scellées par l'oubli,
et qu'à celui dont les rêves clos ne s'ouvrent plus à la vie habituelle
il n'est plus qu'un seul fruit,
le dernier à qui ses enfances encore firent accueil.(42)

Quite often the voluptuous quality of the verse is reinforced by imagery which evokes the Levant. Kahn had, to be sure, spent the years of his military service in northern Africa and the memories of the Arabian civilization he saw there may have left their trace in his poetry. But he was also the poet who had been a student in the Ecole des Langues Orientales, and it would appear that his readings had contributed to lines such as these:

Les esclaves qui lavent les turbans aux sources inconnues des fleuves
Les mausolées des ancêtres où stagnèrent les douleurs de veuves
Mes gazelles et les parures adamantines des ailes
Qui frôlèrent mes repos près d'elles,
Au margelles des puits profonds qui s'ignorent en ses yeux inconnus,
je les oublierai, perdu dans un rêve de bras nus.(43)

By Kahn's preface to his collected poems of 1897 we know that he thought of each poetic line as representing a single impulsion of thought. His long lines gained few adherents among poets, but in 1891 he was recognized as one of the important exponents of free verse. Vielé-Griffin found much to praise in this versification which was so unlike his own, in the unity of the stanzas and in the intuitive and symbolic composition of Chansons d'amant.⁴⁴ Although Kahn could scarcely have been more conceited than Moréas, he was apparently much more brutal in denouncing the efforts of others and this personal characteristic won him many enemies. Certainly his replies to Huret's questions in 1891 were not models of tact, and the accounts of those who knew him are invariably the portrait of a violent and uncompromising personality.

Much less audacious than Kahn, but still a devotee of free verse, was Albert Mockel of La Wallonie. Though his activities were centered about the Belgian literary scene, as the magazine of which he was editor came to have closer and closer contacts with Paris he began to be known in France. Like Edouard Dujardin, he appears to have come to the conception of free verse through the ideas of synthesis of music and poetry, and his point of departure, like that of Dujardin, was the musical drama of Wagner. Even in 1888 Mockel had begun to preach of “le rythme intérieur” and the restricted use of the alexandrine as a mere stabilizer for multiple eddies of melody.⁴⁵ His Chantefable un peu naïve of 1891, published anonymously, was his first attempt to place in a book the poetic expression of his ideas. The title “Chantefable” indicates how through prose and poetry he sought to effect a maximum of musical power. The subject matter of his volume is the description of his own emotional life, the joys, affections, and sufferings of a young man, his hesitations and timidities. Among the verses are “symphonic prose poems,” the whole work being written with a voluntary artlessness and some archaic constructions. Like Vielé-Griffin and Moréas, he uses traditional refrains from old folk tunes, and he accomplishes musical effects by building poems on only two rhymes: by replacing rhyme with assonance and by alliteration.

With these poets as leading writers of free verse are of course to be counted Henri de Régnier who had published the Poèmes anciens et romanesques in 1890, and Edouard Dujardin whose tragedy Antonia, written in free meters, was presented in 1891 at the Théâtre d'application. For the moment Moréas appears as a champion of free verse, but already about him is forming the group of Maurras, du Plessys, de la Tailhède, and Raynaud, the school which would attempt to confine poetry in most rigid rules. Other poets in 1891 are only occasionally bold in innovation, but there is a visible effort to vary rhythms and to liberate verse from too narrow rules. Both Stuart Merrill and Ferdinand Herold, in their respective volumes Les Fastes and La Joie de Maguelonne, use the most exacting of verse forms: the sonnet, the terza rima, the villanelle. Their quatrains give an appearance of regularity, yet Herold inserted in his volume a few couplets in free verse and used assonance at times instead of rhyme, and Merrill endeavored to give new music to his poetry by mingling at times lines of even and odd syllables:

Des frôlements de folles étoffes
                              Au jeu des bagues d'argent,
Et l'effroi de somnolentes strophes
                              Sur les cordes d'or et d'argent.(46)

The technical matters of versification are treated in almost all critical articles on poetic volumes of 1891, yet one senses that there are more important phenomena which tend to make a fraternity rather than isolated theorists of poets in this period. The most important of these is perhaps the alliance of senses, which had been one of Baudelaire's important gifts to later poetry. Even though Ernest Raynaud's Les Cornes du faune is entirely in sonnet form, the convergence of sensations of sound and color with visual perception belong to symbolism rather than to the Parnassian school. While the debt to “Correspondances” is not always acknowledged by the poets of the nineties, they are often clearly aware of this synthesis of the senses. Saint-Pol-Roux, writing on Quillard's La Gloire du verbe in 1891, expresses this idea in definite terms:

Promptement je répète que les choses doivent être contrôlées et traduites par nos cinq sens. Cette méthode ailleurs étendue, n'est-ce pas la réalisation de la symphonie dans sa plus vaste expansion? Ainsi l'artiste obtient l'œuvre prismatique aux facettes savoureuse-odorante-sonore-visible-tangible; le synthétique bouquet à cinq motifs qu'il parachève et paraphe avec le ruban de son émotion.⁴⁷

Reality transmuted by the emotions is to the poets of the period a necessary part of their artistry. Edouard Dubus finds that although Ajalbert's Femmes et paysages is filled with exterior descriptions, at times these become landscapes of the mind for the greater glory of symbolism.⁴⁸ The greatest compliment which can be accorded a poet is to call him personal and individualistic. The authors of critical articles in such magazines as La Plume, the Mercure de France, La Revue blanche, and a little later in l'Ermitage were very often poets themselves. This sometimes meant prejudiced judgments but also very keen perception of what was derivative from other writers and what was original. Such a poet as Michel Abadie, whose Sanglots d'extase appeared in 1891, was recognized as an able creator of images, but his fellow poets were quick to see how closely he modeled his verse on Raynaud, Merrill, and Verlaine. Raynaud's vocabulary in turn, the mingling of the definite and the indefinite, were noted as in the lineage of Verlaine, and Charles Maurras spoke of Raynaud as the only one who had successfully imitated the author of Fêtes galantes. When the impression of debt to one of the recognized ancestors of the symbolists is not too marked, the symbolist critics tend not to be harsh but rather to recognize the validity of such imitative tendency. When it becomes exaggerated, as in the Baudelairian poems of Fernand Clerget's Les Tourmentes, the author is usually reminded that he should be original. At times a volume would appear as a kind of parody of another poet, and this was quickly seized upon for caustic comment. Such a volume was Pierre Devoluy's Flumen, in which the blind admiration for René Ghil produced lines like the following:

Les générations en flottilles compactes
Voguant vers les Toisons des Futurs fastueux
Jettent par-dessus bord l'argile des vieux dieux;(49)

Apart from questions of style, the chief complaints of the symbolists against Devoluy and Ghil were concerned with the didactic nature of their verse. For most of the generation of the nineties poetry was an esthetic experience, not a lesson. Very likely the warm reception accorded Le Pèlerin passionné at the time of its publication was motivated by the personal note of the volume. But later in the year, with the founding of the Ecole romane and the symptomatic appearance of such poems as Maurice du Plessys' “Dédicace à Apollodore,” it became clear that a menace to the intuitive in verse was in progress. Ghil's activity had been isolated, but with the grouping of Raynaud, Raymond de la Tailhède, Maurice du Plessys, and Charles Maurras about Moréas, and the evident intent to make an active campaign that they evinced, a much more powerful poetic force was present.

It is perhaps to be regretted that the Romanist activity began at the very moment when poetry, after excesses, seemed on the point of obtaining some equilibrium in simultaneous portrayal of the external and internal world. Raynaud's articles of 1891 insisted on the necessity of a new school, and Maurice du Plessys announced the advent of Romanism as an inevitable development, but the reasons alleged by them seem inconclusive and specious. Raynaud insists that a pagan incursion was needed since literature was menaced by mysticism.⁵⁰ While it is true that poetry among the symbolists had rarely sought its inspiration in mythology, it seemed hardly necessary to make an issue of the myth as opposed to Christian or esoteric backgrounds. Although dramatic poems like Quillard's La Fille aux mains coupées and Herold's La Joie de Maguelonne, both of which were called “mystères,” recall the religious theater of the Middle Ages, a work such as Vielé-Griffin's Ancæus found its background in Greece. Raynaud's articles on the new school are not too clear. He speaks of the romantic error, the Parnassian error, and the Symbolist error and says that outside of the Romanists there is no hope for poetry, but one understands with difficulty why he insists that symbolism is gliding into the muddy bogs of Parnassianism. In truth the loyal followers of Moréas seem never to have wished to accept the principles enunciated in the preface of the Pèlerin passionné but to legislate and create new refinements of doctrine. This is true with Maurras, who preached against the inspiration of the North and who represented to some readers of 1891 simply a defender of the Félibrean movement of southern France.

A curious year for poetry was 1891. The triumph of symbolism sung at the February banquet and the death knell proclaimed by the Romanists before the passing of many months seem the paradoxical highlights of the period. In truth a new literary chapel had been formed, and while its advent caused much discussion and occasioned useless debate the influence was not by any means decisive. The mysticism so dreaded by Raynaud, the Wagnerianism against which Maurras spoke, continued to be poetic elements, enriched, it is true, by the re-entry of Greek and Roman myth. Nature, as an important part of lyric inspiration, was already heard in the work of Vielé-Griffin, and Henri de Régnier by this time represented a broader appreciation of Parnassian artistry. The importance of 1891 in the history of symbolism is that by that date all its inherent elements had been presented. In form, the double acceptance of free verse and syllabic count was present; rhyme and assonance or even blank verse had all received their consecration in print. The idealism, the suggestion, the synthesis of the senses, the indirect statement of the emotions, the use of symbol to express the emotions had all been amply demonstrated. The efforts to find new musical effects had been multiple and, if not always successful, had indicated most of the possible paths to follow.

Notes

1. On December 24, 1890.

2. During the last months of 1890 La Plume apologizes several times for delay of the issue.

3. Barrès' article had appeared in Le Figaro, December 25, 1890.

4. A supplement to the issue, “Etrennes symbolistes” by Maurice du Plessys, was also a panegyric of Moréas' work.

5. La Revue indépendante, XVIII, 145-152, 160-166.

6. Three of the poems from the volume were printed in La Plume, No. 56 (August 15, 1891), pp. 268-269.

7. The Mercure de France printed three of Rimbaud's poems from the Reliquaire in its issue of November, 1891. A review in the following number of the magazine, by Remy de Gourmont, criticized sharply the preface and indicated little admiration for Rimbaud. The first criticism is amply justified and Gourmont could have spoken of the poor editing of the volume. His article was later revised and became a part of the Livre des masques.

   Le Reliquaire, in which were certain apocryphal poems, contained a preface signed Rodolphe Darzens. Darzens later protested that he was not the author and asked that the edition be seized as a forgery.

8. The publication of selections from Lautréamont's Poésies in the Mercure de France (February, 1891), was of some importance, since the famous passage in which the author denied that poetry had made any progress since Racine and in which the poets of the romantic school receive such strange titles was included.

9. It may seem strange that Baudelaire did not furnish more often the matter for entire critical essays in this period. His name occurs frequently in the periodicals throughout the 1890's and almost always with veneration and respect. But his was a recognized reputation among the symbolists and their principal effort was toward establishing those whose fame was less secure. It is noteworthy how often his poetry seems to have produced, in succeeding young writers, imitations which were almost too close. For example, Camille Mauclair published in 1891 a poem entitled “Spleen” which begins:

   L'amertume et l'horreur des ciels pluvieux
   Que Décembre épandit sur nos fronts effarés
   Evoquent des linceuls moisis et déchirés
   D'où suinterait un sang pâle d'homme très vieux.

   La Revue indépendante, March, 1891

10. La Revue indépendante, XVIII, 173-215, 315-360.

11. III (July, 1891), 4-8.

12. III (August, 1891), 67-72.

13. Dubus is paraphrasing René Ghil's judgment on Moréas: “Des vers de mirliton écrits par un grammarien.”

14. La Plume, No. 50 (May 15, 1891), p. 169. The work of art by Odilon Redon appeared at the beginning of Iwan Gilkin's La Damnation de l'artiste.

15. This is the year when Gabriel Mourey's translation of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads appeared in France.

16. The winners of that contest were Marcel Noyer, Bénoni Glador, and Jules Laloue. The subscribers to the magazine judged the poems.

17. See La Plume, No. 49, p. 154; Mercure de France, II, 368; La Revue indépendante, XVIII, 405-407.

18. Mercure de France, II (April, 1891), 249.

19. Reprinted in Nos maîtres from articles in La Revue wagnérienne.

20. See Mercure de France II (March, 1891), 189.

21. For details on friendships between painters and writers see Charles Chassé's Le Mouvement symboliste dans l'art du XIX^e siècle.

22. La Revue indépendante, XX (September, 1891), 311-344.

23. Albert Jounet changed his name to this more exotic spelling about 1890. Shortly afterward he, as well as Jules Bois, began giving public lectures. Emile Michelet founded a magazine Psyché in November, 1891, and about the same time Péladan announced his “Salon esthétique,” of which the program was the rejection of all materialism and the search for the ideal in beauty.

24. La Revue indépendante, XXI (October-November, 1891), 70-79, 239-243.

25. Entretiens politiques et littéraires, III (September, 1891), 95-109.

26. La Plume, No. 55 (August, 1891), pp. 251-253.

27. Entretiens politiques et littéraires, III (August, 1891), 56-60.

28. La Revue indépendante, XX (July, 1891), 29-79.

29. Jean Moréas, Poésies 1886-1896, p. 35.

30. La Revue indépendante, XX (July, 1891), 1-29.

31. Ibid. (August, 1891), 178-251.

32. The volumes by these authors which inspired critical articles in 1891 were: Le Pèlerin passionné, Œuvres posthumes, Les Cornes du faune, La Gloire du verbe, Le Règne du silence, Au pays du mufle, Diptyque, Les Fastes, La Joie de Maguelonne, Chantefable un peu naïve, Chansons d'amant.

33. Laurent Tailhade's Au pays du mufle is of course an exception, but the reviewers turn from his volume of 1891 to speak of Au pays du rêve and ask whether he will not abandon violent satire and return to his earlier poetic manner.

34. Entretiens politiques et littéraires, II (March, 1891), 65-66.

35. Ibid. (May, 1891), 153-158.

36. Revue des deux mondes, CIV (April 1, 1891), 684.

37. On September 12, 16, 23; October 6, 7, 8, 1891.

38. France includes Robert de la Villehervé, born in 1849, and more in the tradition of Théodore de Banville than in that of the symbolists, as well as Daniel de Venancourt, born in 1873, whose first volume Les Adolescents was published in 1891.

39. Anatole France, this same year, wrote two articles on Verlaine in Le Temps. In the issue of April 19, 1891, he tells the story of “Gestas,” thereby giving definite form to the Verlaine legend. In the course of the same article he reviews Bonheur, and although he calls Verlaine a true poet and indeed the only Christian poet of the period, he predicts that the new volume will be less well received than Sagesse. France's essay of November 15, 1891, is concerned with Mes hôpitaux and the curious blend of mysticism and cynicism in Verlaine.

40. The preface to Joies and numerous articles in the Entretiens politiques et littéraires are his chief contributions. See Entretiens politiques et littéraires, I, 3-12, 56-60; II, 155-162, 213-217.

41. F. Vielé-Griffin, Poèmes et poésies, p. 220.

42. Gustave Kahn, Premiers poèmes, p. 213.

43. Ibid., pp. 177-178.

44. Entretiens politiques et littéraires, III (September, 1891), 110-114.

45. See Mockel's article on Fernand Séverin's first volume Le Lys (1888). This review appeared in La Wallonie, III, 137.

46. Stuart Merrill, Les Fastes, p. 59.

47. Mercure de France II (February, 1891), 117-118.

48. Ibid. (April, 1891), p. 248.

49. Concerning Devoluy's admiration for Ghil see La Revue indépendante, XXI (October, 1891), 128-133.

50. Mercure de France, III, 163-167. Raynaud mentions Barrès, Huysmans, and Bloy as these dangerous forces, and makes no allusion to Jules Bois, V.-E. Michelet, or Péladan. He appears to be thinking of some form of Christian mysticism or, in the case of Huysmans, of satanism rather than the esoteric manifestations of the epoch. Perhaps Paul Adam's pronouncement that the future of literature would be in mysticism served as a point of departure for Raynaud's theories.