THE BACKGROUND OF SYMBOLISM: FROM ROMANTICISM TO ART FOR ART'S SAKE

Romanticism has always been looked upon as a literary revolution. It was the first in the history of French literature that cannot be separated from a comparable revolution in painting. The Salon of 1827, the painting exhibit held the same year the Préface de Cromwell was read and published by Victor Hugo, showed Delacroix's Le Christ au jardin des Oliviers and the work of a twenty-one-year-old artist, Louis Boulanger, a painting called Mazeppa, which was enthusiastically received by the painters. Boulanger became momentarily Hugo's favorite painter.

This union of poetry and art was further consecrated by another cénacle, quite different from Hugo's, which is sometimes considered the birthplace of the movement called l'art pour l'art. It was a studio workshop, an atelier, on the rue du Doyenné, today replaced by the Place du Carrousel, in front of the Louvre. The two leaders and spokesmen of the group were Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval.

The word rapin, first designating a fine-arts student, and then, by extension, a “bohemian” artist, is most apt in describing the type of artist frequenting the meetings of friends in the rue du Doyenné. The rapins were eccentrics, hostile to all bourgeois standards, truculent in their behavior, often very gifted, and usually representing failures in their vocation.

At the beginning of his career, Théophile Gautier hesitated between painting and poetry. When he finally chose poetry, he brought to it the style, ideas, and habits of the painting studio. In his book Les Jeunes-France, he gave an animated picture of the young “left-wing” romantics.

The questions relating to “art for art's sake” have been raised in every age, but the phrase in its most precise meaning applies to this French movement, originating with Gautier, Nerval, and Pétrus Borel, in their avowed aversion to the bourgeois spirit and Saint-Simonianism, or humanitarianism. Most scholars agree that the first reference to l'art pour l'art is in a work by the philosopher Victor Cousin, Questions esthétiques et religieuses (1818), in which he says that art is not enrolled in the service of religion and morals or in the service of what is pleasing and useful. Art exists for its own self: “Il faut de la religion pour la religion, de la morale pour la morale, et de l'art pour l'art.”

With the founding of the Second Empire, in 1852, the opposition between those writers concerned with the defense of a national morality and the cause of progress and those representing the tradition of art for art's sake became clear. In his preface to the Poèmes antiques (1852), Leconte de Lisle quarrels with everyone on every subject, and sees the political future sullied for a long time with bourgeois meanness, industrialism, and utilitarianism. As the politics of the Second Empire (1852-70) continued, the younger writers and artists looked for a new faith not in participation in active life but in rejuvenated forms of art.

The “bourgeois” art of the day had no originality and no style, according to the strong attacks made against it by Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, and Théodore de Banville. The younger Hugo of 1830 was still revered, and Alfred de Vigny was respected for having said that a book must be composed, cut and sculptured as if it were a statue of Parian marble. Gautier represented the continuation of that tradition. Baudelaire regretted having come too late, after the glorious days of romanticism, after le coucher de soleil romantique. At the end of his career Gautier, in his Histoire du romantisme, spoke of the early period as a golden age. The beginnings of the new movement, between 1851 and 1853, resembled the beginnings of romanticism. The new bohemianism was celebrated and idealized. Henri Murger is perhaps the best historian of this renaissance, in Scènes de la vie de Bohème (1851), a novel made famous years later by Puccini in his opera La Bohème.

In reality, there was no “school” uniting such different temperaments as Flaubert and Renan, the Goncourts, and Leconte de Lisle. But there were common aspirations and a belief in the principle of the independence of art. The historian of Parnassian art, Catulle Mendès, went to great pains to point out that Le Parnasse never represented a school. It was a theory—a doctrine—similar to art for art's sake, a form of faith coming directly from romanticism. Théophile Gautier was the central figure. He had proclaimed as early as 1835 the doctrine of art for art's sake in the preface to his novel Mlle de Maupin.

Flaubert admired Gautier, and at least during the early part of his career considered himself Gautier's disciple. Both were joined in their dislike for their contemporary world. In his home in Neuilly, Gautier often received at his Thursday dinners Flaubert, Banville, Jules and Edmond Goncourt, and Baudelaire. Baudelaire, who had probably met Gautier for the first time in 1849 at the Hôtel Pimodan, where both of them lived briefly, dedicated Les Fleurs du Mal to Gautier:

Au poète impeccable, au parfait magicien ès lettres françaises, au très cher et au très vénéré maître et ami.

(To the impeccable poet, to the perfect magician of French Letters, to the very dear and very venerated master and friend.)

Gautier, in his turn, wrote the laudatory introduction to the complete works of Baudelaire.

The new poets were published in three anthologies by the publisher Lemerre in 1866, 1869, and 1877, under the title Le Parnasse Contemporain. The word parnassien can be applied to theories of l'art pour l'art. There was very little development or change in these theories after 1870. Gautier died in 1872. Flaubert seemed to look upon the new democracy, the Third Republic, as the end of art. He was convinced that a reign of utilitarianism was going to triumph: “Nous allons devenir un grand pays plat et industriel comme la Belgique” (“We are going to become a great flat industrial country like Belgium”).

For about fifty years the principles of art for art's sake (Parnassianism) were current in France. Belief in the artist's freedom was clearly stated in Hugo's preface to Cromwell, but the specific doctrines themselves were analyzed and clarified best in Flaubert's letters and the Goncourts' journal, the prefaces of Leconte de Lisle, and the critical writing of Baudelaire.

Flaubert was the least charitable of these writers. He examined the French bourgeoisie as if it were a world reserved for his research, and collected a long series of extracts from conversations he had overheard, out of which he compiled the Dictionnaire des idées reçues. He and Baudelaire referred endlessly to examples of bourgeois stupidity—la bêtise, as they called it.

These French writers and artists often analyzed the difficulties in creating the kind of work that would match their ideals. Their pages on the slow, painful process of artistic creation are among their most valuable contributions. The achievement of anything like perfection requires time and labor and constant revision. The emotions of the artist in the process of creating his art are brilliantly studied in Delacroix's Journal, in Flaubert's correspondence, and in the Goncourts' journals. But whereas romanticism emphasized the sentiments and sorrows of the individual, the Parnassian creed emphasized the artist's passion for beauty, which separates a man from everything that is vulgar and banal.

The principal theories on morality and art, as developed by Flaubert, Baudelaire, and the Goncourts, are still the bases for the aesthetics of modern art. These writers would say that truth is not immoral, and art is not immoral. Obscurity is immoral only when it is untruthful. Intellectual honesty is a leading characteristic of the true artist, and such honesty is in itself a moral principle. Such men, for whom art is almost a religion (Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Joyce, Henry James, T. S. Eliot), were morally unified in their temperaments and in the scrupulousness with which they carried out their work as artists.

Art contains in itself its own principle of morality. With this thought in mind, the exponents of l'art pour l'art advanced the theory that there is more moral integrity in a work of art when it is devoid of a specific moralizing intention. A vigorous, bold depiction of vice and passion can have a moral effect on the public. The morality of a great artist is in the forcefulness and the truthfulness of his treatment of whatever subject he chooses. In other words, the morality is in the form of the art and not in its subject matter.

FROM L'ART POUR L'ART TO LE SYMBOLISME AND LA DéCADENCE

When Sainte-Beuve used the phrase “ivory tower” to designate Alfred de Vigny's retreat from the world and from the activities of Paris, he could not have realized how the phrase would be used subsequently by those exponents of l'art pour l'art to describe precisely the site of the artist's isolation—not for the purpose of exile, not to manifest his scorn for the world of everyday actuality, but for the purpose of understanding his world more deeply and discovering the means of expressing his thought in a richer and more original manner. The ivory tower (la tour d'ivoire) was used this way, with this precise meaning, by Flaubert and Henry James, by Pound and James Joyce, by Proust in his cork-lined room, by Eliot, and by Yeats.

The word associated with Baudelaire in the new aesthetic credo was bizarre. In announcing in his salon of 1855 that “le beau est toujours bizarre” (“beauty is always strange”), he indicated that the artist's attraction to the strange is an element of his personality and separates him from most men, who submit easily to the conventional and the traditional, who prefer not to be startled by originality. Those impulses that often manifest themselves in the subconscious—fantasies, hallucinations, and sentiments of fear—and which in most men are not allowed to develop represent the sources of experiences in man's moral and physical life. The artist, for Baudelaire, feels a desire to know and explore such fantasies that border on dreams and nightmares.

The word maudit (“cursed”), used by Verlaine in three essays in 1883 to characterize the new type of poet, was more aggressive than the word bizarre. The three poets he discussed were Corbière, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé—“Satanic” poets whom normally constituted citizens would repulse through fear that their work contained the germs of dissolution.

More vigorously than the essays of Verlaine, J. K. Huysmans's novel A rebours (1884) developed the theme of decadence in art. The book's protagonist, Des Esseintes, represents Huysman's philosophical pessimism about the world, strongly reminiscent of Schopenhauer's thought, and a horror for what he considered the stupidity of most people and the malice of fate.

Des Esseintes is as refined as the comte de Montesquiou (who participated later in the makeup of Charlus in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu). The tapestries in his house are chosen as carefully as the bindings of his books. The sensations of smell are as acute for him as they were for Baudelaire. Indeed all forms of sensuality are celebrated as if they were part of a mystical cult. Perfumes have an effect on his spiritual life. He creates symphonies of smells as if he were illustrating Baudelaire's sonnet Correspondances and the doctrine of synesthesia. He is as refined in his analysis of sensations as he is unusual in his taste for so-called decadent literature. In modern literature his predilections start with Baudelaire and continue with Poe, Ernest Hello, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Verlaine, Corbière, Mallarmé. Neurosis and decadence (névrose, décadence) are terms freely expressed throughout the novel, in Des Esseintes's passion for the paintings of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.

A rebours (Against the Grain) created a sensation. It revealed to a fairly wide public the work of the poètes maudits as continuing the work of the Parnassians and illustrating the renewed belief in l'art pour l'art. Such works and such theories formed the basis for attitudes that were struck in the 1890s in France and England, often referred to as aesthetic and decadent attitudes. The history of taste and morals and aesthetics is difficult to describe chronologically. The English terms “gay nineties” and “mauve decade” and the French term fin de siècle are applicable to at least fifty years of literary and art history.

In 1883, a poem of Verlaine, Langueur, called attention to the word décadence. The opening line is the poet's self-portrait as he calls himself “the ‘empire’ at the end of the age of decadence”: “Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la décadence.” In England, where the term was associated with certain aspects of French civilization, writers were, on the whole, worried about the term being attached to them. To offset the evil implied in the word “decadence” and a purely aesthetic view of life, comic elements were added. The tone of dead seriousness in A rebours is quite altered in Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. English levity offset French grimness. Swinburne, as well as Wilde, was able to parody himself. The high camp of Wilde and Max Beerbohm probably testifies to an English reticence and puritanism in the face of French extravagance and “immorality.” The thesis that Wilde develops so brilliantly in his essay “The Critic as Artist” (in his book Intentions) is one of the significant contributions to be drawn from the entire movement of l'art pour l'art.

Undoubtedly inspired by Gustave Moreau's paintings, Wilde's play Salomé (written in French), in which the heroine is turned into a sadist, was one of the more serious English contributions. But even here, the seriousness of the text was parodied by Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations. Arthur Symons, in his analysis of what he called “the decadent movement in literature,” did not minimize the French sources and examples. He called decadence a “beautiful disease” and suggested that a more appropriate name to use was “symbolism.” This may have influenced Symons in naming his book-length study of 1899 The Symbolist Movement in Literature. The words “decadent” and “aesthetic” were thereby given in England a healthier terminology. Corruption was given a new chance and a new garb.

At the time, during the Second Empire, when art for art's sake came into its own, Gautier, perhaps because of his limitations, or perhaps because he never felt with the intensity of a Baudelaire, reached a degree of impassiveness in his behavior and outlook and gave in his writing the clearest example of a belief in laborious, difficult technique. In his poem L'Art, printed in the second edition of Emaux et Camées, in 1857, he defined the precept that only those forms of art that are technically difficult and demanding of an artist's patience have any chance for survival. The harder the material is to work in, the more beautiful the work will be. Gautier lists as examples: first, poetry, and then marble, onyx, and enamel:

Oui, l'oeuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
          Rebelle
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.
(Yes, the work emerges more beautiful
from a form
rebellious to labor
Poetry, marble, onyx, enamel.)

If these requirements of robustness and strength are met, the piece of sculpture and the poem, whose versification is complex, will endure longer than the city.

Tout passe.—L'art robuste
          Seul a l'éternité:
                    Le buste
          Survit à la cité.
(Everything disappears—Robust art
          alone is eternal:
                    The Bust survives the city.)

Ezra Pound, in Mauberley (1920), recapitulated this theory of Gautier and imitated the versification of the French poem. The art of Flaubert is compared to Penelope's tapestry, patiently and everlastingly begun over again each day in the artist's hope to reach perfection:

His true Penelope
Was Flaubert
And his tool
The engraver's
Firmness
Not the full smile
His art, but an art
In profile.

In an earlier poem, L'Hippopotame, Gautier described the new attitude of the Parnassian poet by comparing his indifference to the hostile world of the bourgeoisie and the traditional critics with the thick hide of the hippopotamus. The poet's convictions, his aloofness and aloneness, were evoked in the hippo's stolid heaviness as he wanders through the jungles of Java:

L'hippopotame au large ventre
Habite aux jungles de Java …
Je suis comme l'hippopotame:
          De ma conviction couvert.
(The hippopotamus with the huge belly
Inhabits the jungles of Java …
I am like the hippopotamus:
          Protected by my conviction.)

Eliot wrote the same kind of poem, in terms of form and tone, in The Hippopotamus, but gave a different meaning to the metaphor by comparing the hippopotamus to the Church of Rome:

The 'potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

The cult of formal beauty and the application of elaborate technique were always present in art for art's sake. And in France, the passion behind this cult was, to some extent, hatred of successful mediocrity. The ascetic dignity and conscientiousness that Leconte de Lisle in Poèmes antiques and Heredia in his Trophées gave to pure craftsmanship were admired by the English—by Swinburne, for example—but the art was never directly copied by them. The French prose writers had perhaps more tangible influence. Walter Pater's essay “Style” recapitulates theories of Flaubert.

It is impossible to estimate how much Baudelaire's so-called morbidity and taste for extracting beauty from unusual experiences developed because of his hatred for the world in which he lived. At one time, and not very long ago, Baudelaire was looked upon, both in England and France, as an isolated psychopathic case. Today, largely because of Eliot's three essays on him, he is studied in England and America as the modern poet—the modern Dante, in fact—who has given to the doctrine of morality in art its profoundest meaning. The wide range of themes in contemporary poetry, extending from the classical theme of Gregory Corso's poem Uccello to the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, is owed in some degree to Baudelaire's example.

The word “symbolism” has come to have as many meanings as “romanticism.” Ibsen's plays and Wagner's operas have been called “symbolist.” For some, decadence became a means to religious conversion—in the cases, for example, of Barbey d'Aurevilly and Verlaine. Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer and Les Illuminations played a part in Paul Claudel's return to his faith. The decadent symbolist Huysmans of A rebours became a Catholic in Là-Bas (1891).

At the very end of the century, several events seemed to make clear that art for art's sake and its survival in decadence were over. The triumph of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897 indicated that the public wanted heroes and sentiment, action and wit. The Dreyfus affair encouraged many writers to turn into fighters. Nationalism, an outgrowth of imperialism, was pioneered by Maurice Barrès, whose cult of human energy was an attack on art for art's sake. In England, Rudyard Kipling put his art in the service of energy and imperialism. The odor of decadence diminished before the socialism of Jean Jaurès and Zola and Anatole France. Yet some disciples of art for art's sake did survive. The turn-of-the-century movements did continue their work far into the century, although never occupying a central position in their day: Pierre Louÿs in France, for example, and George Moore in England.

The 1920s were characterized by the appearance of many forms of art for art's sake: a philosophical pessimism, an archsophistication, a renewed interest in literary techniques, the emergence of somewhat defiant forms of immorality. Abbé Bremond's discussion with Paul Valéry over the theory of poésie pure was a worthy topic for art for art's sake. In describing European art in 1925, José Ortega y Gasset called it “new,” and yet the traits he analyzed are those we associate with the pure art created in an ivory tower.

Such a doctrine as l'art pour l'art can be born and develop only in a blatantly materialistic age. The prosperity of Louis Napoleon's era, when Gautier, Baudelaire, and Flaubert wrote their best works, was not unlike the Victorian atmosphere of austerity in which Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater flourished. The letters exchanged between Gide and Valéry from 1890 to 1910 refer frequently to the uselessness of art and the characteristic of art as not serving any definable function. The type of man unable to understand and feel art is Flaubert's pharmacist, Homais, in Madame Bovary. He was the type easy to scandalize. “Epater le bourgeois” (scandalize the bourgeois) had once served almost as a battle cry. In America he was to become Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. Such literary creations as Homais and Babbitt inevitably beget art for art's sake.

Since the time Jean-Jacques Rousseau revealed so much of himself in his Confessions to a public eager to know the personal details of his life, the artist's life and personality have been a part of literary study. There have been two moments in the history of literary criticism when marked opposition to biography was felt: in the 1930s in America, in the “new criticism,” the back-to-the text movement, and in the 1950s and 1960s in France, with the structuralist critics. From Rousseau's day on, despite the fact that most artists have led quite conventional lives, the general public has grown to believe that they are temperamental and irresponsible, if not immoral.

The great importance given to aesthetic theories in Baudelaire's generation, theories either identical with those of art for art's sake or closely related to them, tended to conceal or disguise the moral and philosophical problems felt by that generation. An attitude toward life that in the age of romanticism was called le mal du siècle is in evidence at the end of the century, when it is called le mal de fin de siècle. Paul Bourget's Essais and Nouveaux Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine (1883 and 1885) still offer today a penetrating analysis of a drama taking place in the moral conscience of a generation. The suffering studied by Bourget was more than the familiar phase of melancholy that most young people go through when their world seems limited and their aspirations limitless. It was something more than introversion. The poetry of Jules Laforgue reveals many aspects of a dissatisfaction and even resentment that had to do with the prodigious development of the large cities, with the monotony of provincial life, with the routine existence of employees and civil servants (fonctionnaires), and with la vie quotidienne in general, coming after two generations of romanticism in the arts in which individualism had been exalted.

Baudelaire occupied a central position in the Bourget essays as the artist who had the courage to call himself a decadent and adopt an attitude of sympathy with artificiality and strangeness. The mysterious word décadence would seem to mean the will of the artist to understand the basic drives of his nature, to explain what Baudelaire called the “inner abyss” or “cemetery” of the self, and to use the creation of art as a remedy for “ennui” or “spleen,” or what might be called by the simpler term “pessimism.”

The artists in France in 1885 were far more cut off psychologically and sociologically from society than their elders had been in 1820. Their suffering was more neurotic and morbid. Their inability to adapt to society was more radical. The themes of their poetry were more personal, more introverted, more symptomatic of serious psychological upheavals. A fatigue with life is at the basis of such a poem as Baudelaire's Chant d'automne. A disenchantment with everything that life had promised him pervades the verse of Jules Laforgue. The need to escape from the mortal boredom of provincial life is studied in Flaubert as well as in the poetry of the decadents. The desperate need to live in a distant legendary land is sung by Verlaine in Les Fêtes Galantes, by Baudelaire in L'Invitation au voyage, and by almost all of the lesser poets during the last part of the century. But finally, dreams themselves become impossible and all hope disappears. Albert Samain, in Au jardin de l'infante, says that the sense of the void, of nothingness, has forged a new soul for him: “Et le néant m'a fait une âme comme lui.”

Around 1890, the proliferation in Paris of literary magazines was proof that le symbolisme had grown into something comparable to a movement. La Vogue, La Plume, L'Ermitage, and Le Mercure de France provided the new writers with the means of publishing and propagating those trends of the new literature that still preserved from the earlier Parnassian days an emphasis on art forms, especially those forms that would bring out the musical qualities of language. Less importance was granted to the shape and color of objects, those plastic qualities celebrated by the Parnassians. There were new traces of moral and psychological preoccupations, of metaphysical problems, and of a style of writing more impressionistic than Parnassian.

At the Saturday night gatherings in the Latin Quarter, under the auspices of La Plume, the Bohemian extravaganzas and enthusiasms for art recalled the rue du Doyenné meetings, where Gautier and Nerval once discussed their theories. Yet, on the whole, the fin de siècle gatherings were less bohemian than those of the rapins of 1835. Pierre Louÿs warned his new friends André Gide and Paul Valéry that Heredia was a mondain and that Mallarmé was so serious and correct in his behavior that they would have to give up wearing their wide-brimmed hats and long neckties. Mallarmé's mardis had almost an official air about them in 1890. At least in a social sense, Mallarmé had won out over Verlaine. The salon had replaced the café.

While Gide was still attending the “Tuesdays” of Mallarmé, he wrote and published a manifesto on art that, although it was subtitled théorie du symbole, was also a recapitulation of Parnassian theories on the role of the artist and his quest. The full title was Traité du Narcisse. Narcissus is the man seeking to find his own image and who sees at the same time the image of everything else in the world. Narcissus is presented by Gide as the myth of man's return to the beginning of time, when all forms were paradisaical and crystalline. Poetry is the nostalgia for Paradise that has been lost. Adam had seen this wonder before he had seen himself. When, according to Gide's interpretation of the myth, he saw himself, he then distinguished himself from everything else, and fell from grace.

By defining the poet as the man able to look, able to see Paradise behind appearance, Gide indicated affiliations with one part of the Parnassian creed. Every phenomenon is the symbol of a truth. The poet's duty is to manifest it. As the poet contemplates the symbols of the world, he penetrates at the same time their deepest meanings. This is why Gide calls the work of art a crystal, a partial paradise where the idea unfolds as a flower does, in its original purity. As an admirer of Mallarmé, Gide, in Traité du Narcisse, wrote a profession of faith in platonic idealism.

The symbol of Mallarmé's art, which can be as visible and precise as in Parnassian art—a swan, a vase, a faun—is the poet's creation, capable of suggesting. Suggérer is a key word in Mallarmé's aesthetics. It means first to awaken, to indicate without specifically naming or defining, to propose a meaning without dogmatically imposing it. Suggérer can also mean to incite and prolong an emotion on the part of the reader. During the decade of the 1890s, Mallarmé and his disciples enlarged the meaning of the symbol to include certain aspects of myth and allegory. Whereas an allegory is primarily didactic, a myth is addressed as much to the emotions of the reader as to his intelligence. It tends more to move him than to convince him. Allegory is therefore moralistic and myth is religious by nature. The object in Parnassian art and the symbol in symbolist art are primarily aesthetic, intended to give to the reader a sense of the beautiful. But the literary symbol, as it has been used since Baudelaire's time, in its aesthetic power, has a closer relationship with the religious spirit of man than with any reasonable, practical, or didactic use.

Symbolism has been a major study of literature since Baudelaire's Correspondances, which can be seen as a succinct manifesto. It has provided an aesthetic basis for works that have elements of both myth and allegory. They are among the most impressive literary works since 1850, which have reacted strongly against a realistic art of precision in order to reflect preoccupations that are religious and philosophical: the poetry of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Yeats and Eliot; the novels of Proust and Joyce.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the prevalence of pessimism throughout Europe between 1880 and 1900—the doubts and reservations expressed about science, the influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy, the negativism of Ibsen and Nietzsche. The aesthetic beliefs, often designated as “decadent,” came in part from the spread of intellectual and moral pessimism, from an exalting of Baudelaire's thesis concerning the decadence of aging civilizations.

From today's perspective, it is fairly clear that decadence was one aspect of the development of symbolism. Stefan George's activities were efforts without any subversive characteristics, intended to rally young German writers around a set of beliefs that were almost identical with art for art's sake. English decadence was more complex to follow and understand, and in fact was so complex that the word “decadence” seemed inappropriate. It was used, however, because of the scorn on the part of some writers for conventional morality and for certain morbid elements of art that were esteemed. The English origins for this cult for beauty may be found in the poetry of Keats in the early part of the century and later redefined and reformulated by Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. John Ruskin's teachings on aesthetics had a more direct influence, whereas the writings of Walter Pater rallied very little support. French influence was felt to some extent in the work of Swinburne and Pater, but especially in the writings of George Moore. In the 1890s, when the figure of Oscar Wilde dominated all others, the movement of decadence was openly a revolt against tradition.

The cult of art for art's sake continued well into the twentieth century. The assumption of this cult, as illustrated by Joyce and Proust, would claim that art by itself is capable of conferring value and meaning upon life, and even ultimate value. Such writers as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, who were in closest sympathy with the theories of art for art's sake and whose work reflects strong influences of those French writers associated with the movement, continued to show a similar attitude toward the world, at least toward the world of politics. They tended to look upon democracy as a standardizing process. Yeats felt almost a resentment for the prestige of science. They often gave evidence of a preference for an earlier social order. The cultural atmosphere of the early twentieth century was characterized by yearnings for the religious, the mystical, the occult, by the development of a new romanticism that merged with a belief in the sovereignty of the word in literature.

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THE LEGACY OF SYMBOLISM

Ever since the rich period of symbolism, in fact, ever since the work of the two leading forerunners of symbolism, Nerval and Baudelaire, French poetry has been obsessed with the idea of purity. To achieve poetry in a “pure state” has been the persistent ambition of a century of literary, and specifically, poetic, endeavor. The ambition is to create poetry that will live alone by itself and for itself. In a deep sense, it is poetry of exile, narrating both the very real exile of Rimbaud from Charleville and from Europe and Mallarmé's more metaphysical exile within his favorite climate of absence. In this effort of poetry to be self-sufficient and to discover its end in itself, it has appropriated more and more pervasively throughout the span of one hundred years the problem of metaphysics. As early as Nerval, who actually incorporated the speculations of the eighteenth-century illuminés, poetry has tried to be the means of communication between man and the powers beyond him. Nerval was the first to point out those regions of extreme temptation and extreme peril that have filled the vision of the major poets who came after him.

This search for “purity” in poetic expression is simply a modern term for the poet's will of all ages to break with the daily concrete life, to pass beyond the real and the pressing problems of the moment. Poets have always tended to relegate what may be called “human values” to novels and tragedies or to their counterparts in earlier literary periods. Poetry is the crossroads of man's intelligence and imagination, from which he seeks an absolute beyond himself. That is why the term “angelism” has been used to designate the achievement and failures of the modern poets, especially those of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Baudelaire called the poet “Icarus,” and Rimbaud called him “Prometheus, fire stealer.” The progressive spiritualization of modern art in all its forms is its leading characteristic. It brings with it a mission comparable to that of the angels, and also a knowledge of pride and defeat, which, strikingly, is the most exact characterization of some of the great poetic works of our day. Defeat of one kind is in Mallarmé's faun and in his Igitur. Claudel, in discussing Igitur, called it a “catastrophe.” Defeat of another kind is in the long literary silence of Rimbaud after his twentieth year. And still of another kind, there is defeat in most of the poetry of the surrealists, who found it impossible to apply their poetic theory rigorously to their actual poems.

The example of Mallarmé's art was never considered so fervently and piously as during the decade 1940-50. His lesson is the extraordinary penetration of his gaze at objects in the world and the attentive precision with which he created a world of forms and pure relationships between the forms. His will to abstraction isolated the object he looked at, and his will of a poet condensed the object into its essence and therefore into its greatest power of suggestiveness.

The object in a Mallarmé poem is endowed with a force of radiation, with a force that is latent and explosive. The irises, for example, in Prose pour des Esseintes, have reached a “purity,” from which every facile meaning has been eliminated. Such flowers as these come from the deepest soil of the poet's consciousness and emotions. They retain in their “purity,” exempt as they are from all usual responses, the virtue of their source in great depths of consciousness and dreams. Their purity is their power to provoke the multiple responses of the most exacting readers, those who insist that an image appear in its own beauty, isolated from the rest of the world and independent of all keys and obvious explanations. Whatever emotion, whatever passion, was at the source of the poem, it has been forgotten in the creation of the poem. Poetry makes no attempt to describe or explain passion—that is the function of the prose writer, of the novelist; rather the object or image is charged with the burden of the literal experience. The image becomes the experience, but so changed that it is no longer recognizable.

The metaphor is an image endowed with a strange power to create more than itself. Mallarmé's sonnet on the swan caught in the ice of a lake, “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui,” illustrates the power of metaphor to establish a subtle relationship between two seemingly opposed objects in the world: a swan and a poet. The relationship is not stated in logical, specific terms, but it is implied or suggested or evoked by the metaphor. The reader's attention is fixed on the swan, as it is almost never fixed on an ordinary object in the universe. This attention that the metaphor draws to itself becomes something comparable to a spiritual activity for the reader, as it had once been for the poet. The poet's consciousness is contained within the metaphor. When the metaphor is an image of a sufficiently general or collective meaning, it becomes a myth, not merely establishing a relationship with another object but translating some aspect of man's destiny or man's nature. It is often difficult to draw a clear distinction between a metaphor and a myth, as in the case of Mallarmé's swan, who testifies to a basic human struggle and defeat.

Today, almost a century after Rimbaud's death, his fame is higher than ever and the influence of his poetry is felt everywhere. Editions of his work multiply each year. More than five hundred books about him have been written in all languages. Perhaps never has a work of art provoked such contradictory interpretations and appreciations. One hears of his legend everywhere, and underneath the innumerable opposing beliefs, one continues to follow the legend and conceal whatever drama tormented him. He was the adolescent extraordinarily endowed with sight and equally endowed with speech. But with the advent of manhood he deliberately desisted from the prestige of letters and a poet's career. The period of wonderment about his life and his flight from literature is just about over now. In its place, the study of the writings themselves is growing into its own, and it is obvious that their mystery far exceeds the actual language of his writings. With Mallarmé's, it forms the most difficult work to penetrate in French literature and the most rewarding to explore, because for both poets the act of poetry was the act of obedience to their most secret drama.

The work of Rimbaud is far more knowable than his life, but in his case especially, the one cannot be dissociated from the other. The example of his human existence has counted almost as much as the influence of his writing. Breton named him a surrealist because of his life story. Rivière named him the supreme type of innocent. In all justice it must be noted that Breton modified his earlier view and called Rimbaud an apostate, one who renounced his discoveries and called them “sophisms.” Nerval's suicide and Lautréamont's total disappearance would please the surrealists more than Rimbaud's final choice of another kind of life than that of poetry.

Rimbaud's example will remain that of the poet opposing his civilization, his historical moment, and yet at the same time revealing its very instability, its quaking torment. He is both against his age and of it. By writing so deeply of himself, he wrote of all men. By refusing to take time to live, he lived a century in a few years, throughout its minute phases, rushing toward the only thing that mattered to him: the absolute, the certainty of truth. He came closest to finding this absolute in his poet's vision. That was “the place and the formula” he spoke of and was impatient to find, the spiritual hunt that did not end when the prey was seized.

Rimbaud's is the drama of modern man, as critics have often pointed out, by reason of its particular frenzy and precipitation, but it is also the human drama of all time, the drama of the quest for what has been lost, the unsatisfied temporal existence burning for total satisfaction, for total certitude. Because of Rimbaud's universality, or rather because of poetry's universality, the Charleville adolescent can seemingly appropriate and justify any title: metaphysician, angel, voyou, seer, reformer, reprobate, materialist, mystic.

The poet, as Rimbaud conceived of him, is, rightfully, all men. He is the supreme savant. The private drama of one boy, which fills the poignant pages of Une Saison en Enfer, is always deepened into the drama of man, tormented by the existence of the ideal he is unable to reach. And likewise, the pure images of Les Illuminations, which startle and hold us through their own intrinsic beauty, were generated and formed by a single man in the solitude of his own hope to know reality.

For the role of magus and prophet for the poet, so histrionically played by Victor Hugo, was substituted the role of magician, incarnated not solely by Rimbaud (whose Lettre du voyant of 1871 seems to be its principal manifesto) but by Nerval and Baudelaire, who preceded him, by his contemporary, Mallarmé, and by his leading disciples, the surrealists, thirty years after his death: Robert Desnos and René Char. This concept of the poet as magician dominates most of the poetic transformations and achievements of the last century. The poem, in its strange relationship with witchcraft, empties itself of much of the grandiloquence and pomposity of romanticism. The poet, in his subtle relationship with the mystic, rids himself of the traits of the Hugoesque prophet and the vain ivory-tower attitude of a Vigny. This emphasis on the poet as the sorcerer in search of the unknown and the surreal part of his being has also caused him to give up the poetry of love, or especially the facile love poetry of a Musset. Except for the poems of Eluard, a few pages of Breton, and a few poems of Apollinaire, there has been no love poetry in France since Baudelaire!

The modern poet in France has become the magician, in accordance with the precepts of Mallarmé, or a visionary, in the tradition of Rimbaud, by his willful or involuntary exploration of dreams and subconscious states. He prefers, to the coherence and the colors of the universe celebrated by the romantics, the incoherence and the half-tones of the hidden universe of the self. There the poet has learned to come upon thoughts and images in their nascent form, in their primitive beginnings, before a conscious control has been exercised over them. The vert paradis of the child's world, first adumbrated by Baudelaire, is the world the modern poet has tried to rediscover. To descend into it brought about a divorce between the poet and the real world around him. The world of childhood and innocence is so obscured in mystery and has been so outdistanced by the activities of adulthood that to return there, a system of magic, a new series of talismans, has to be invented. The richest source of the poet turns out to be the subconscious, precisely that world in himself that had not been expressed. The pride of the romantic poet and the somewhat melodramatic attitude he so often created for himself unquestionably helped him later to discover new regions of his spirit. The historical period of romanticism is seen more and more clearly to have been the preparation for the richer periods of symbolism and postsymbolism, when the poetic word is understood in terms of its potential magic and the symbol in its power of exorcism.

The critical writings of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry are as important as their poetry. They discovered, as if for the first time, some of the oldest laws of poetry. What Racine did in the seventeenth century for the ageless laws of tragedy, Baudelaire did in the nineteenth century for the ageless laws of poetry. He saw the constraints of rhythm and rhyme to be not arbitrary, but imposed by a need of the human spirit. A great line of poetry combines a sensual element with an intellectual vigor, and Valéry marveled at the delicate equilibrium that poetry established between them. This very equilibrium was defined by the modern poet as witchcraft, or the incantation of the word, which no other kind of word possesses.

Thus, poetry is not the art of obstacles and rules, but the art of triumph over obstacles and the transcending of adventure, brutality, love, and sorrow. Modern poetry will one day be described as the revindication of the profoundest principle of classicism where the most universal problems of life are transcribed in a style of language that has reached a high degree of enchantment. The most obscure mysteries of the French language, and of language in general, were explored by Rimbaud, in his seeming anarchy and disorder, and by Mallarmé, in his seeming abstractions and absences. The poetry toward which they were moving, and which they almost reached, was poetry that would have sung only of itself. Claudel and Valéry, in their time and in their acknowledged role of disciples, realized more acutely than Rimbaud and Mallarmé the perils of such an attainment, and they willfully diverted poetry from anarchy or verbal alchemy to a religious celebration of the universe, and from the dream of poetic purity to a celebration of the intellect.

Just at the moment when poetry might have become an abnegation or a defeat, Claudel redefined it as a conquest of the universe. Claudel's method, the new freedom of poetic expression developed by Léon-Paul Fargue, the new strength of poetic enumeration and breath discovered by Saint-John Perse, helped to close off the danger that poetry courted in the writings of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. If with Mallarmé poetry stopped being essentially a lofty mode of expression, it became in the subsequent poets what it had been only partially with Mallarmé—an instrument of knowledge, an art in the service of the human spirit, utilized in order to reach a higher degree of domination and knowledge of self. Cubism, surrealism, and existentialism have been some of the successive chapters in this same quest dominated by poetic experimentation.

Several French critics in the middle of the century—Rolland de Renéville, Thierry Maulnier, Jean Paulhan, Jules Monnerot, Roger Caillois, Maurice Blanchot—devoted the major part of their work to inquiries into the meaning and the scope of poetry. Their investigations and elucidations are varied, but they all agree on seeing poetry as one of the extreme “experiments” of modern times. The basis of their work is in their several interpretations of symbolism, in their effort to analyze the poet's indifference toward the world, his narcissism, and how close he came to a destruction of poetry by itself. They are the major critics who have seen the poetry of postsymbolism in France, the poetry published between 1900 and 1950, as the reconstruction of poetry.

Because of the extreme solitude of the poet, spoken of by Baudelaire and poignantly epitomized in the life stories of Rimbaud and Corbière, and because of the extreme detachment from the world exemplified in the art of Mallarmé, poetry almost ceased being the full creation that it really is. The past eighty years have witnessed a return of poetry to the joys and sufferings of man. This has signaled a revindication of the freedom of poetry, after the dizzying lessons of magic and abstractions of Rimbaud's alchemy and Mallarmé's purity. The act of constructing a poem has helped the poet to construct himself. The miracle of poetry has always been the conferring of a new life on that which already has life. By means of the word, designating signs in the physical world, the poet creates a world that is eternal. The lucidity with which the modern poet has learned to do this would probably not have developed without the examples of Baudelaire and the two major poets who succeeded him.

A poem is a marriage between expression and meaning. In order to compose the poem, the poet has to question everything all over again, because a successful poem is a new way of seeing and apprehending something that is familiar. This is Mallarmé's profoundest lesson, and it seems now to be fully incorporated in the contemporary poetic consciousness. The poet's power of questioning the universe is essential. His capacity to be amazed at what he beholds is his sign. Without it, his poem will never be the revelation it should be—the revelation to himself and to his readers of what his questioning glance has resurrected, illuminated, and understood. In order to be amazed, the poet has to practice a freedom that is unusual because it is related to everything: the physical world, morality, mythology, God. The practice of this freedom ensures what we may best call the poetic response to the world and to everything in it. This is vigilance, attentiveness, lucidity: all those disciplines that are impossible to define but that the artist needs in order to achieve his work.

Since 1940, French poetry has drawn its themes more directly from the tragic quality of contemporary events—war, catastrophe—than it did in the periods of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. And yet this newer poetry is far from being a reportage or direct transcription. The lesson taught by Mallarmé that there is no such thing as “immediate” poetry is to such a degree the central legacy of modern poetry that the younger poets move instinctively toward the eternal myths, like that of Orpheus, which are just beyond the event, the first reaction to it and the first sentiments.

The myth is man's triumph over matter. It is his creation of a world drawn from the world of appearance.

It is the world of poetry we are able to see and comprehend far more easily than the real world. This process was once called inspiration or enthusiasm by the Greeks. The modern poets prefer to call it the alchemy or the quintessence of the word.

French poetry is still engaged in one of the richest periods of its long history. Its roots are in symbolism, in the achievements of poetry between Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and the death of Mallarmé (1898). The first half of the twentieth century was dominated by four major writers, all born around 1870, and who reached the status of classical writer. Two were prose writers, Proust and Gide, and two were poets, Valéry and Claudel. Their common background was symbolism. Each reacted to symbolism in his own way and according to his own purposes. The first decade of the century was very much a part of the 1890s. These four writers had begun writing and publishing by the turn of the century, but recognition of their importance did not come until soon after World War I, about 1920.

Mallarmé was the guide, director, and high priest of symbolism. Rimbaud repudiated a literary career and had no direct influence on symbolism, although he wrote between 1869 and 1875. The example of Verlaine counted very little in the symbolist period. His was poetry of the heart and pure sentiment, a tradition maintained by Francis Jammes (1868-1938), who belonged to the first generation of twentieth-century poets. Even more isolated from the central evolution of French poetry stands Charles Péguy (1873-1914), celebrated for his deeply religious poetry on Notre Dame de Chartres and for his Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc (1910).

The combined examples and influences of Mallarmé and Rimbaud have proved more permanent and vital than any other in the twentieth century. The word “purity,” a concept with which modern poetry is permeated, is associated primarily with Mallarmé, with the doctrine he expounded on Tuesday evenings for so many years (1880-98) in his apartment on the rue de Rome. There his most brilliant disciple, Paul Valéry (1871-1945), in his early twenties, listened to Mallarmé's conversations on poetry. The leading symbols of Mallarmé's purity: his virgin princess Hérodiade, his faun, more interested in his own ecstasy than in the nymphs, his swan caught in the ice of the lake. All reappear, changed but fully recognizable in the leading symbols of Valéry's poetry: his Narcissus, the contemplation of self pushed to its mortal extreme; his Jeune Parque, and marine cemetery. La Jeune Parque (1914-17), composed during the war years, reflects in no way the events of the war. This poem, with the major poems of Mallarmé, with Rimbaud's Les Illuminations, and the early prose pieces of Gide, treated so pervasively the theme of solitude and detachment that it created a new mythology of poetic purity and human absence. This was poetry of exile, written outside the social sphere. It bore no relationship to a society or world that might have been comparable to the bond between the poetry of Racine and the monarchy of Louis XIV.

Rimbaud, in his own way, is as profound an example as Mallarmé of this separation of poetry from the immediate world. The experience of the bateau ivre was not only an exploration of exoticism and of the unknown, it was also a lesson on the exile that is man's solitude. After writing his poetry of exile, Rimbaud lived in exile in the deserts and cities of Abyssinia. The same need for voyage and solitude was felt by Claudel (1868-1955), who claimed Rimbaud as his master in poetry, as the writer who revealed to him the presence of the supernatural in the world. Rimbaud's ambition was to move beyond literature and poetry, and this was realized by Claudel, whose vocation as poet was always subordinated to his role of apologist of Catholicism. The form of his verset is reminiscent of the rhythms in Les Illuminations and Une Saison en Enfer. He continued Rimbaud's Dionysian turbulence, whereas Valéry, in his more chastened, more classical style, represented, with Mallarmé, the Apollonian tradition of French poetry.

Rimbaud's real disciples were not the symbolists of the 1880s and 1890s. They were the surrealists of 1925-35. Claudel was the first to understand and appropriate Rimbaud's lesson on poetry. His Cinq Grandes Odes of 1911 and his Poèmes de guerre of 1922 treat the universe as the communication of God to man.

The second generation of poets were those men born at the end of the century. On the whole, they participated in the experience of World War I more directly than the generation of Valéry and Claudel. In fact, some of the most gifted writers of that generation lost their lives in the war: Apollinaire, Alain-Fournier, Ernest Psichari, Charles Péguy. The poet was for them a far less exalted being than he had been for Mallarmé and Rimbaud. The intellectualism and aestheticism of the late symbolist period were drastically modified and diminished. The experience of the war and the rise of the cinema were only two of the many new forces that were shaping the younger poets at that time. La Nouvelle Revue Française, founded in 1905 by Jacques Copeau, André Gide, and Jean Schlumberger, became, between 1920 and 1940, an organ of great influence. It was a literary chapel, exclusive as such groups tend to be, but intelligent and judicious in its power. Its editor, Gaston Gallimard, was responsible for the publication of most of the major literary texts during that time.

The oldest figures of this second generation were Max Jacob and Léon-Paul Fargue, both born in 1896. They had begun publishing poetry long before the war, but their influence was felt after the war. Stylistic traits of Verlaine and Laforgue are as present in their writing as characteristics of Mallarmé and Rimbaud. They were both friends of painters and musicians and participated actively in the avant-garde movement in France. Jacob died in the German prison of Drancy, in 1944. Fargue survived the war and died in 1947.

Surrealism was the most significant literary movement in France between symbolism and existentialism. It flourished especially in the decade 1925-35 and attracted many of the younger poets. Pierre Reverdy, born in 1889, was as closely allied to symbolism as to surrealism. Tristan Tzara, born in Romania in 1896, was the founder of the Dada movement, in collaboration with Jean Arp and Hugo Ball, in Zurich in 1916. Dadaism was the immediate forerunner of surrealism. André Breton, the leading spirit and theorist of surrealism, born in 1896, made attempts after World War II to revive surrealism as an organized movement.

Some of the most orthodox of the surrealists died before the middle of the century: René Crevel (1900-1935), whose suicide was interpreted as an act of heroism; Robert Desnos (1900-1945), a victim of a German concentration camp; Antonin Artaud (1895-1948), who spent the last nine years of his life in an insane asylum. Louis Aragon, born in 1897, became the best-known Resistance poet, but by that time had broken all ties with surrealism. The oldest of the surrealist group, Paul Eluard, born in 1895, was one of the most gifted.

Jean Cocteau (1892-1963) wrote poetry intermittently throughout his career. He remains one of the most gifted poets of his generation, even if his signal success in other genres—theater, cinema, criticism—has somewhat detracted from his position as poet. One of the most independent modern poets, Henri Michaux (1899-1984) enlarged the domain of poetry. He was discovered in 1941 by André Gide, whose fervent criticism introduced him to a wider public than he had known. With Aragon, Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) is probably the most widely read of the French poets. More important than his poetry is his writing for films. Les Visiteurs du Soir and Les Enfants du Paradis are two major successes.

The ambition of this younger generation was, in general, to recall the poet to reality after the long experimentation of poetry with language, with the symbol, with the poet's hieratic role. The newer writers felt a greater desire for communication, for immediate communication with the reader. They appropriated the common basis of world events and world problems for their verse. This tendency had already been visible in the poetry of Eluard, of Jules Supervielle, and of Michaux.

Existentialism, as a literary movement, did not develop any poets, with the possible exception of Francis Ponge, on whose work Sartre himself wrote a long essay. Although Ponge was born in 1899, his first important publication was in 1942, Le parti pris des choses, a poetic work of great vigor and objectivity. In describing an object—a pebble, for example, or a piece of bread—Ponge wrote also as a moralist, as a contemporary of La Fontaine.

By many, and especially by Breton, Aimé Césaire (born in 1913) was considered the first major black poet in French. He lives in Martinique. Not until after World War II was his poetry discovered in France. Breton acclaimed him as one of the legitimate heirs of surrealism by reason of the violence and richness of his poems, and by the spirit of revolt against an unjust society.