SOURCE: Thibaudet, Albert. “Symbolism.” In French Literature from 1795 to Our Era, translated by Charles Lam Markmann, pp. 428-33. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967.

[In the following essay, translated in 1967, Thibaudet summarizes the main poetic concepts and ideals associated with French Symbolism and surveys the movement's principal and allied proponents.]

THE NEW SCHOOL AND THE OLD SCHOOLS

Victor Hugo was born in the year of Le Génie du christianisme, and this man was so closely bound to the continuity of the century that it seems that the poetic revolution waited for the year of his death to announce itself. “I am going to clear the horizon,” he said.

He cleared it principally to the benefit of those poets born after 1860 who were later called the symbolist generation and whom one must be careful not to view too expressly as a reaction against Parnassus and against naturalism. Through their masters, Verlaine and Mallarmé, on the one side, and through Hérédia on the other, their connection with the Parnassians is evident. And one of the reasons why that date of 1885 is important is that in the preceding year one of the naturalists of Les Soirées de Médan, Huysmans, published A Rebours, a book that put the public at the disposal of the new poetic school and that, in a certain measure, played the preparatory part of a Génie du symbolisme.

Symbolism's no! was not very categorical, or else it was shouted with a certain confusion. It is not by what it denied that it must be defined but by what was new in its contribution. Now it produced three revolutionary drives that changed the conditions of poetic life in France. By reason of the fact of symbolism and the five pre-symbolist dissidents, a new poetry was opposed not only or chiefly to Parnassus but to the whole body of French poetry from Ronsard to Hugo.

FREE VERSE

The first and most serious revolution: the liberation of verse. The question of the origins of free verse is not complicated. It came from popular poetry, which, from time immemorial, has never shackled itself to rhyme or to syllabic scansion. The first deliberately free verse ever printed appeared in 1873 in Une Saison en enfer, in imitation of popular songs. There was a similar origin in Jules Laforgue. But side by side with this spontaneous free verse a deliberately planned free verse was to prosper, worked out with a calculated technique, an often arbitrary and abstruse dogmatism: in this field the initiator was Gustave Kahn. Be that as it may, the free-verse revolution changed the nature of the instrument put into the hands of half the French poets and created a rupture between the “normal” poets and the “free-verse” poets.

PURE POETRY

The second revolution: the advent of a pure poetry in contact and commerce with music. Symbolism, a contemporary of Hugo's departure, was also a contemporary of Wagner's arrival; he won the French public in a few years, and in 1885 one of the young symbolist magazines was called La Revue wagnérienne. The major aspiration of symbolism, according to the directive laid down by Mallarmé, was “to recapture the best in music.” And, if it is possible to speak accurately of a reaction against Parnassus, it was above all in this sense that the poetic enemy of symbolism was precision in all its forms, by which we mean, as in music, the preciseness to be given to the reader or the listener, not that technical precision invested by the author in his work, which in music is rigorous, and which the theoreticians of free verse easily carried into pedantism. Hérédia, who in the precision of his sonnets sought to suggest, was still favored by the symbolists, while Sully-Prudhomme, the final purpose of whose poetry was precision and who strove to apply it to the inner life, was viewed by symbolism as the enemy incarnate, on the same ground as Coppée.

THE REVOLUTION

The third revolution: the idea itself of revolution. The purpose of the romantic and Parnassian revolutions was a conquest and an organization, a stable condition of poetry—freedom perhaps, but freedom within forms. The fine frenzy of romanticism did not last ten years, and Parnassus was always careful. But symbolism accustomed literature to the idea of indefinite revolution, an artistic Blanquism, [Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who participated in the revolution of 1848, was the ancestor of the political theory of permanent revolution.—Translator.] a right and a duty of youth to overturn the preceding generation, to run after an absolute. If the poets were divided into “normal,” or “regular,” and free-verse, literature was divided into normal literature and “advance-guard” literature. The chronic avant-gardism of poetry, the “what's new?” of the “informed” public, the official part given to the young, the proliferation of schools and manifestos with which these young hastened to occupy that extreme point, to attain for an hour that crest of the wave in a tossing sea—all this was not only a new development of 1885 but a new climate in French literature. The symbolist revolution, the last thus far, might perhaps have been definitively the last, because it incorporated the theme of chronic revolution into the normal condition of literature.

DECADENCE AND SYMBOLISTS

It is possible that in an old literature this might be a sign of decadence. But it will be noted first of all that this was a question of a poetic climate and that poetry, precisely since symbolism, has been less and less the principal concern of literature. And it will be observed also that decadence as a word and as a fact was first inscribed on one of the banners of the new school and that one of its magazines was called Le Décadent. It was specifically in order to get rid of this name and to restore it to its natural state as a nickname that Jean Moréas invented the name of symbolism.

The symbolist impetus lasted some fifteen years, until about 1902. It was at its height of creative youth in 1890, when Jules Huret's Enquête sur l'evolution littéraire appeared in L'Echo de Paris. After 1902 one wondered what was going to take the place of symbolism. One of its prominent representatives, Henri de Régnier, was indeed admitted to the Académie in 1911. But that did not at all mean: “Symbolism not dead.” On the contrary.

Some order could be brought into the overcrowded picture of the poets of this school by making distinctions—somewhat artificially, as is inevitable—among the militants, the allies, the representatives, the heirs, and the rank and file.

MILITANTS

The militants were the early symbolists who established the forms and stated the problems of the school. Their activity was linked chiefly to that of the “little magazines” that were really big, like Harpagon's money box, by reason of their content and that were one of the bright ideas of symbolism. Two of the leading positions in this field must be given to the editors of La Vogue (the first issue appeared in April 1886), Jules Laforgue and Gustave Kahn. Laforgue, who died at the age of twenty-seven, would probably have been one of the newest and most complete writers of his generation. What he contributed to symbolism that was essential was the alliance between the habits (or the methods) of popular poetry and the widest and most delicate contemporary sensitivity. Let us add to this the not too beneficial influence of his reading of Schopenhauer and Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann. He has gone out of fashion but he has retained the loyalty of many. Gustave Kahn was an organizer and a technician in poetry. The history of symbolist technique should likewise not overlook either Stuart Merrill, an excessive champion of alliteration, or Robert de Souza, a poetic phoneticist. The most astonishing technical apparatus of this militant age of symbolism was the work of René Ghil, who aspired to depict, or rather to score, the evolution of the world and mankind in stonily schoolboyish free verse. All these militants were extremely serious, and, if one of the glories of poetry consists in these attacks, of which Mallarmé remains the hero, on a frontier,—they will deserve rescue from oblivion.

ALLIES

The influence of a school is measured by the allies or the sympathizers through whom it succeeds in infusing its color into the general complexion of a literature. Semi-symbolists hovered between symbolism and Parnassus and helped the imprecise musicality peculiar to the new school to enter into normal verse. They included Ephraïm Mikhaël, who was most purely Parnassian; Louis Le Cardonnel, a harmonious pagan who died a Christian; Albert Samain, whose median qualities made him the poet of his generation most read by the general public; the vibrant and burning Signoret, Pierre Quillard, Adolphe Retté, and, less Parnassian and more turned inward, Georges Rodenbach, a meticulous poet of Flanders, and Charles Guérin, a master of the elegy and even of the epistle.

REPRESENTATIVES

Let us define as official representatives of symbolism those poets who in the twentieth century, after the deaths of Verlaine and Mallarmé, figured as leaders and were recognized, in the manner of Gautier and Vigny, as veterans of the school or the movement.

About 1900 there was a tendency to couple the names of Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin, who helped to make free verse popular. Régnier seems to us the most complete, the most flexible, and the most varied poet of the symbolist movement. With a poor vocabulary, monotony of device, casualness, chance or padding in his themes, he exerts a deep charm through his sustained musicality, his remarkable gift for making the substance of words soft and sensual. An intelligent opportunism devoid of abdication and concession made it possible for him to go from a gracious freed—rather than free—verse to the finest and most solid forms of the sonnet and the stanza.

If Régnier moved through free verse as a courteous guest, Viélé-Griffin absolutely inhabited it, guiding and following its fortunes. Little odes, light sketches of spring in Touraine, secrets of love, tender, tranquil stories grow in gracious gradations that, with time, have passed.

THE HERITAGE OF MALLARMé

It is to genuine symbolism that Paul Valéry's work and remarkable career must be linked. Following Mallarmé, he conceived and practiced poetry as a series of explorations, experiments, games to be tried, obstacles to be overcome. The games were tried at first under influences—Mallarmé and Leonardo; then, beginning with La Jeune Parque after a long silence, in an independent and inventive fashion.

Valéry presents us with a man endowed with a dual faculty, or with two manias that thus far had been regarded as opposites. Two extremes met in him. On the one side there was the gift of pure poetry, which, in many forms, was the great discovery of symbolism. On the other side there is a singular sense of precision, the habit of conceiving every operation of the mind as a victory of the precise over the vague. He reminds us of the double harness of Bergsonian thought, but also of Leonardo's pictorial genius, of the necessary genius of music.

When the sense of poetry and the sense of precision exist together in the same mind, they would tend, it seems, to execute together the same work, a precise poetry. This is just the part that was played by the ingenious Sully-Prudhomme. Valéry played the opposite part. There is no precise poetry; there is pure poetry carried to its hyperbole and there is poetic form, poetic rigor, carried to the same hyperbole. The steam engine is used to make ice. It is the alliance of a pure poetry and a pure technique: a seemingly nonhuman position, for which Valéry would probably not have incurred the risk if there had not been the precedent of Mallarmé.

In the case of Sully-Prudhomme, as in that of a philosopher or a writer of prose, the face of poetry and mystery was the inner face, turned toward the poet, possessed in secret by the poet; the face of precision was the outer face, turned toward the reader, striven after with effort for his comfort and his pleasure: poetry was at the origin, precision at the goal. In the case of Valéry, on the contrary, the face of precision was the secret face that clung to the mind and the operation of the poet, and the face of pure poetry, of music, of accessibility and suggestion was the face turned toward the reader, the face that the reader perceived and enjoyed. Sully-Prudhomme's poetry is like a machine whose human driver is invisible. In Valéry's poetry the precise machinery is underneath, the human beauty above: this is the Hadaly of L'Eve future.

And indeed, reading Valéry's verse, one recalls the soft, elastic, incorruptible substance of Hadaly's naked arm. Valéry is one of those without whom one of the five or six extreme peaks of French verse would not exist. It was also, but it was not only, in the manner of a mathematician that he introduced new functions into poetry. And schools are not in vain: it required all the laboratory and all the sacrifices of symbolism to arrive at the Cimetière marin and La Jeune Parque.

One of the platitudes of critics hostile to symbolism consisted in reproaching it for being a school of foreign poets. That is also a title of honor. It must be observed that it was through symbolism that Belgium, which had had no French-language poets since the times of the Dukes of Burgundy, found herself once more incorporated into French poetry. Charles Van Lerberghe, Max Elskamp, Albert Mockel delivered their tributes. Maurice Maeterlinck's bare, mysterious, and musical Lieder were celebrated before his plays. But it was really within the ranks of symbolism, and as one of its greatest representatives, that the poet of Flanders, Emile Verhaeren, took his place.

IN THE RANKS OF THE SYMBOLISTS

With Viélé-Griffin Verhaeren was the recognized master of free verse. In the five collections of Toute la Flandre the favorite form is the set of irregular verses, oratorical, spontaneous, stressed on strong syllables, as habitually as Viélé-Griffin's groupings are lightened by the mute e. A symbolist both in his love of symbols and in his use of free verse, a fugitive from symbolism in his eloquent romanticism, Verhaeren flees it also in his stressed and consistent development, which is never satisfied with allusion and suggestion. This powerful and honest poet lacks resonance, opposes to pure poetry a poetry ballasted with heavy alloys, a civic and social poetry, too, which is never disinterested. He looked into the shadows as, in contrast, Viélé-Griffin's pastels turned paler.

The breadth of the symbolist movement is such that we can encompass in it an ultra-Parnassian like Signoret, a cicada drunk with music in the pines of Aix, as well as a poet as anti-Parnassus as Francis Jammes. The case of Jammes is instructive here. First Lamartine and then the Parnassians, by propagating their styles among the thousands of provincial poets, created and long kept alive a provincial style. Now Jammes was a provincial poet who would literally have been made impossible by the Parnassian system and who could have been brought to life only enveloped in and sanctioned by the symbolist climate. This poet, not so much of free verse as of freed verse given suppleness, is undoubtedly, with Lamartine and Mistral, the most original incarnation of the poetry of the provinces, and, through a fortunate rejection of Paris, a well-governed and subtly wary spontaneity, and the porosity and the freshness of an earthen jug, he was able, in his corner of Béarn, like Mistral in the middle of Province, to preserve the habit and the intimacy of its ways.