SOURCE: LeSage, Laurent. Introduction to The Rhumb Line of Symbolism: French Poets from Sainte-Beuve to Valéry, pp. 1-10. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978.

[In the following introduction to his book-length study of Symbolism, LeSage encapsulates the Symbolist movement in France as it developed in the late nineteenth century, noting the poetic contributions of its major figures: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rimbaud.]

The Symbolist movement can be viewed today as a development and, in some respects, a fulfillment of the ideals set up by the earlier Romantic generations everywhere in Europe.¹ It seems indeed a part of Romanticism, which, in the broad sense of the word, stands for the intuitive as opposed to the rational, the subjective as opposed to the objective, for individuality and liberty.² Thus philosophically and esthetically considered, Symbolism is a modern expression of one of the fundamental tempers of man, and, as such, can be properly placed in the line of all mystic, oracular, illuminist, or idealist traditions.³ This is the broad view. It takes in some of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century in France and includes as well the chief creative geniuses of our own times. But if we take the narrow view, we see merely a swarm of poets loosely called Symbolists grouping and regrouping themselves during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century into ephemeral schools and cliques. No poet of genius is within the field of our vision, nor, in spite of constant jockeying for position, any single great leader capable of rallying writers under a clearly defined banner marked Symbolism.

Understood in this very literal and limited sense, the Symbolist movement began in 1886 when Jean Moréas, smarting under the accusation that he and his associates were morbid and neurotic, denied the charge in the 18 September issue of the Figaro and went on to explain their lofty aims and ambitions. They were seeking, he affirmed, to create beauty through a search for the “pure concept” and the “eternal symbol.” Although vague, verbose, and very abstract, Moréas's remarks pleased almost all the new poets. They approved his emphasis upon the positive quality and the grandeur of their aspirations and accepted the article as a manifesto. Symbolism became thereby officially baptized and Jean Moréas was constituted leader of a school so denominated.

The new poets soon proved themselves more enthusiastic and energetic than disciplined. Individual talents cried for expression, and vied with one another in the numerous little magazines that sprang up following Moréas's manifesto. Poetic circles were in a foment of activity, a general mêlée ensued. René Ghil became editor of a new periodical called La Décadence and challenged the leadership of Moréas. Moréas immediately took up the challenge and, with Gustave Kahn, founded another magazine, Le Symboliste. Other leaders and other magazines joined in the fray, with poets and supporters constantly shifting allegiance. Ghil, by 1890, had lost his following and was embarked alone on a course of poetic speculation leading away from Symbolism. The following year Moréas himself stepped down. In another letter to the Figaro, he announced that Symbolism, only a transitory phenomenon, was dead and that he was founding the Ecole Romane to succeed it. The movement went on without leaders or found new ones. Conflict, at least nominal, increased as new poets established their theory either outside the Symbolist cadre or in apparent opposition to it. In the name of nature, life, simplicity, or clarity, Symbolism came under attack. Chief among the adversaries were, besides the Ecole Romane, the Naturists, but there were many Lilliputian schools hoping to deal Symbolism a death blow. Magazines pronounced it already dead and covered it with ridicule. The general public, never vitally concerned, was more interested in the Dreyfus Case than in poetry. Poets themselves turned from their metaphysical speculation to affairs of the day; writers like Régnier or Samain moved away from Symbolism in proportion as their native genius declared itself. No champion of any stature would present himself to defend the cause that had been espoused with such pride and confidence. As the century drew to an end, there was little left to attack, the subject was scarcely discussed and, although for some time there would be attempts to rally old adherents and enlist “Neo-Symbolists,” the period of the schools was over. As Michel Décaudin declares, “S'il y a encore des poètes symbolistes en 1900, il n'y a plus de symbolisme.”⁴

The self-conscious and self-styled Symbolist poets represent, as I have already suggested, only an articulate and militant phase of a general development in French poetry stemming from the Romantic period and continuing to the present day. Moréas's manifesto did not begin the movement, nor did the ultimate abandonment of all hopes of founding an integrated and enduring Symbolist school alter the trend. Poets of the twentieth century have continued in theory and practice where nineteenth-century Symbolists left off. Among them we can count our greatest contemporary poets, far greater than any who wrote and argued in the little magazines of the eighties and nineties. Poets of genius preceded and followed the movement strictly defined, whose chief significance is to have glossed and exploited the genius of the ones and to have thereby made possible the full flowering of the other. To trace the Symbolist heritage, I have chosen those poets whom I consider significant and representative. Doubtless other selections could have served and surely no claim is made for comprehensiveness. Some of the greatest poets—from Victor Hugo to Apollinaire or to Saint-John Perse—have been left out because their identity is only partially or incidentally defined by Symbolism. In the matter of emphasis, intrinsic merit has not served as sole criterion for the treatment given individual poets; if some of the major figures receive less than their due, it is because they have abundantly obtained it elsewhere. It has seemed more useful to present a minor figure difficult of access than to expatiate upon the familiar. Similar thinking prompted the choice of texts, although, when possible or useful, the most often anthologized pieces were used. Even these are not always easy to come by, and one of the justifications of this work is the broad sweep of pertinent texts, not to be found in translation or even in the original. Among the poets of the Romantic period, we now distinguish several who, somewhat off the main highway, seem to have followed a byway that would broaden into Symbolism. Hence our interest in Aloysius Bertrand, who recorded his hallucinations in prose poems; Gérard de Nerval, who strove to associate music and transcendental knowledge with poetry; Sainte-Beuve, whose poetry struck a rare intimate note; Charles Baudelaire, who integrated and gave the most complete expression to these early manifestations of the Symbolist spirit.

Baudelaire (1821-1867) is thus the first of the great Symbolist masters. In the words of Hugo, this poet had brought a “frisson nouveau” into French poetry, a “frisson” induced by intimate revelation and poetic suggestion of mystery, evil, unhealthy and melancholy beauty. The influence of the Fleurs du Mal operated through successive generations of latter nineteenth-century poets. The Parnassian craftsmen, following Gautier, were interested primarily in the technical aspect of Baudelaire's verse; Decadents and Symbolists, however, were attracted by its broad implications. A concept of beauty that included the ugly and the evil (the “frisson nouveau”) strongly appealed to the Decadents. Symbolists saw in Baudelaire a poet on the track of a poetic magic that might conjure up, through a blending of rhythm, sound, and image, the veritable face of the universe. In his famous sonnet entitled “Correspondances” and in his article on Théophile Gautier (“L'Art romantique”), he had suggested that the poet was in moments of perfect evocation capable of perceiving the analogies in nature which bind the universe together, of establishing the symbols which stand for the absolute itself.

From these two aspects of Baudelaire, the artist and the seer, may be traced the two traditions that have threaded through poetic history down to the present day.⁵ In the line of artists, there are the Mallarmés and the Valérys; in that of the seers, Rimbaud and the Surrealists.⁶

Verlaine (1844-1896), following his natural inclination, had moved slowly away from the Parnassian ideal toward a concept of poetry that anticipated Symbolism. Even in his earliest collection of verse, the Poèmes saturniens (1866), a strong current of Baudelairianism, running counter to its general Parnassian themes and techniques, indicated the direction which this young poet was going to follow. Not many years later, Verlaine formulated his anti-Parnassian notions about poetry in the piece which has become famous, “Art Poétique.” Verse must be musical, a harmony of sounds inspiring revery. Rime, architecture, must be attenuated; rhetoric must be replaced by suggestion and nuance.

Toward 1885, the young poets discovered poor Lélian, as Verlaine had called himself. Captivated by the legend that had grown up around his name, they saluted him as a leader and tried to imitate his manner. His verses were eagerly sought after by all the Symbolist magazines. He had given in his Poètes maudits models for the young poets to follow: Tristan Corbière, the naive bohemian author of the Amours Jaunes; Mallarmé; Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, whom they called their Chateaubriand; Lautréamont, poet of Promethean revolt and the prodigious image.

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is the third major force in the Symbolist movement. Like Verlaine he proceeded from Baudelaire, like Verlaine he was a guide and teacher to younger poets writing during the latter nineteenth century. Unlike Verlaine, his own poetic production was very limited. But his poetic ambitions exceeded those of Verlaine, and have interested successive generations at least as much as Verlaine's accomplishments. His poetry stands for the most sublime of all Symbolist dreams, one which has challenged the greatest poets and which is still the object of numerous and voluminous commentaries.

Obsessed by the notion of correspondences, which he had found in the Fleurs du Mal, Mallarmé saw everything in the universe bound by subtle analogies which the poet alone could detect. They might lead him beyond the world of appearances into that world of pure ideas whose existence had been affirmed by philosophers from Plato to Hegel. To serve him in his hermetic alchemy, Mallarmé deliberately made his verse obscure by omissions, peculiar syntax, and unconventional diction.

Mallarmé was made known to the poets of 1886 by Huysmans's description of him in the celebrated A Rebours. Soon he was surrounded by a fervent group who came every Tuesday to the apartment in the rue de Rome to listen to the master expound his doctrine. As Mallarmé spoke of the revelatory symbol, of Wagner and the possibility of synthesizing poetry with music, Moréas composed his manifesto and René Ghil mapped out his theory of “instrumentation verbale.”

Rimbaud (1854-1891) completes the tetrad of the masters of Symbolism. Ten years younger than Mallarmé or Verlaine, Rimbaud nevertheless belonged to their generation. At fifteen he was already a poet. At twenty his career was over. But in three or four years he produced his amazing work and had improvised an esthetic that would inspire writers of future generations. The “Alchimie du verbe” proudly and defiantly states his accomplishments: “… avec des rythmes instinctifs, je me flattai d'inventer un verbe poétique accessible … à tous les sens … je notais l'inexprimable. … Je m'habituai à l'hallucination simple. … Je finis par trouver sacré le désordre de mon esprit.”⁷ Rimbaud's assertions define the poet's rôle as that of a seer, of a voyant. As such he acclaimed Baudelaire “le premier voyant, roi des poètes, un vrai Dieu!”⁸ Rimbaud's sojourn in poetic circles was too brief—moreover, he was too young—to exert the personal influence upon poets that Mallarmé and Verlaine held. His work itself, only partially known during his lifetime, had to wait until recent times to receive its fullest acclaim. Except for a few copies, Une Saison en Enfer remained with the publisher until the work was discovered in 1901, and the discovery was not made known until 1914. The “lettre du voyant” was first published in 1912. But the poets of 1886 used the Illuminations to illustrate their new theories, and writers like René Ghil were quite patently in Rimbaud's debt.

If Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud were to triumph in the mid-eighties, it is because the youthful rebels against the poetic party then in office had finally gathered enough strength to require leadership for a full-scale revolt. The school of Parnasse had ruled officially since 1866. But by the end of the seventies, a decade marked by poetic lethargy, opposition to the values upon which Parnassianism rested or with which it was associated became general enough to indicate a new poetic movement was underway. Positivistic philosophy, bourgeois society, the cult of form in art were under attack by an increasingly large proportion of the younger generation. The Hydropaths, the Hirsutes, and the others sought to outrage the bourgeois by their unconventional ideas and manners. Contemptuous society called the bearded and Bohemian revolutionaries the Decadents, and they accepted the label with bravado.

Although neither bearded nor Bohemian, the poet who represents the highest achievement of Decadentism is Jules Laforgue. To convey anguish and irony, cosmic visions and timid complaints, Laforgue found new and subtly effective measures. Fellow Decadents copied his neologisms, the liberties that he took with rhythm and rime. He is said to have invented free verse.

When Jean Moréas, in retort to the contemptuous attack upon himself and his colleagues, proposed the name of Symbolist to replace that of Decadent, the latter term soon fell into disuse. For a time there was conflict between poets calling themselves Symbolists and others calling themselves Decadents, but before long their differences were lost in the general Symbolist mêlée. The Decadent period had been one of general revolt and fierce defiance; the new one was in the main more constructive and more exclusively concerned with literature. The differences which soon cropped up among the Symbolists were on purely literary matters.

René Ghil founded a school called “symbolique et harmoniste” to oppose Moréas. Exploiting the implications of Rimbaud's vowel sonnet, Ghil developed his theory of “instrumentation verbale” to reduce the poem to pure music and suggestivity. Several magazines of the times supported Ghil and numerous poets studied with him.

The question of free verse for some critics summarizes the entire Symbolist movement. Gustave Kahn declared that it was his invention. He described, defined, and defended it in the Revue Indépendante in 1888, but his claim for paternity was hotly contested. The entire issue of free verse incited passionate and widespread controversy for years to come. It was the most radical alteration French verse had ever in its entire history undergone. The public was shocked and the poets dazzled by their own daring. But it was the logical step in the direction away from the visual toward the auditory in poetry. Less ambitious than Kahn, Vielé-Griffin nevertheless contributed much discussion to the theory of free verse. His own poetry is something between the regular stanza and free verse. The other outstanding vers-libriste, Stuart Merrill, likewise avoided excessive metrical eccentricities. In 1897, another innovation in poetic forms made a stir: Paul Fort had devised for his ballads a very personal sort of rhythmic prose that accommodated itself easily to the poet's moods.

When the critic Brunetière defined Symbolism as simply the “réintégration de l'idée dans la poésie” he was oversimplifying, but less so than those who found Symbolism merely a matter of free verse or music. His statement points out a very fundamental attitude of the poets who followed Mallarmé and accepted the metaphysic of Baudelaire's “Sonnet des Correspondances.” They all sensed the presence of a higher reality behind the world of appearances which they called the world of ideas. Accordingly, all phenomena assumed symbolic value, indications of that higher reality. Phenomena are linked to the ideas behind them and to one another by the mysterious bonds of analogies which are detected only in the poetic experience. Given this fundamental philosophic assumption and ambition, the matters of poetry=music, of free verse, of suggestion and obscurity take their place as secondary manifestations of the Symbolist thought.

Lying at the heart, therefore, of the Symbolist doctrine is the symbolic image. Each poet sought to translate his aspirations, his thoughts and emotions by its means. Mallarmé had taught that the humblest objects could serve, and many poets attempted to use familiar objects of daily existence. But the pictures tended to conventionalize: fountains and pools of water, moonlight, dawn, twilight, fogs, old parks, and dead cities. Antiquity and the Middle Ages were ransacked to build up a common fund of imagery. Greco-Latin lore offered sirens, chimeras, nymphs, satyrs; the recently discovered Middle Ages provided princesses and saints, figures from Celtic and Germanic legends. Henri de Régnier used legendary beasts, all sorts of medieval material, and gardens so dear to Marcel Proust. Albert Samain was fond of antique images and great sustained metaphors. Some studded their verse with novel images, some with quaint and some with modern metropolitan.

Symbolist poets were eager to carry their theories into the theater. Wagner's prodigious dream of combining the arts in theatrical presentation had fascinated Mallarmé and continued to inspire his successors. Not that they, any more than Mallarmé, hoped to emulate the German master, but in their modest way they hoped to challenge the monopoly of the Naturalistic play and the pièce à thèse. Numerous poets, following Mallarmé's example in Hérodiade, composed poems in dramatic form. These could be adapted for the stage. Other poems and prose in dialogue could be recited effectively against scenery and accompanied by music, illustrated by mime or the dance. Lights and even perfumes might prove effective auxiliaries. Audiences, the Symbolists hoped, would become accustomed to this sort of dramatic entertainment just as they went to concerts made up of fragments of operas and symphonies. Between 1890 and 1900, several theaters made such experiments, notably the Théâtre d'Art of Paul Fort and the Théâtre de l'Œuvre of Lugné-Poe. However interesting these attempts may seem, the only real success that the Symbolist theater could claim was the work of Maurice Maeterlinck.

If by 1900 Symbolism was dead officially, it has nevertheless lived on in the most significant poets of the twentieth century. Apollinaire, in treating his whimsical and wistful themes, made full use of the metrical freedom that the Symbolists had won. Charles Péguy embroidered his medieval themes on Symbolist-inspired patterns. Paul Claudel throughout a long lifetime defended Symbolist theses and illustrated them in the most sumptuous theater of our century. Jean Giraudoux, who was hailed as having realized Symbolism in the novel, went on to create a theater that accomplished the Symbolist ambition to discredit Realism. The early plays and prose pieces of André Gide were written under Symbolist masters, and his style was marked forever by the Symbolist associations of his youth. His ethic, too, one might say. Proust's esthetic and metaphysic derive quite clearly from the great nineteenth-century poets. Paul Valéry is Mallarmé's successor. Dadaism and Surrealism, the chief poetic movements of the between-wars period, pushed Symbolist theories to their ultimate conclusion. In many respects, one may say that French poetry of the twentieth century comes out of Symbolism, and that from Baudelaire to the poets of the present age we can trace an almost unbroken line.

Nor has Symbolism's influence been restricted to France. Poets from all over the world have received inspiration from Symbolists, and carried into their own countries the ideas and techniques they found in France. Throughout Europe, the Americas, and even in Asia, Symbolism has stimulated great poetic revivals and oriented native geniuses. France, once described by Emerson as that country “where poets were never born,” has thereby acquired a prestige and importance that can scarcely be challenged.

Notes

1. To introduce my subject, I have repeated here, in the main, an article which I wrote for the Dictionary of French Literature, edited by Sidney D. Braun (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958).

2. It is always convenient, in such matters, to begin with Rousseau. In the Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire and in the Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard, we find implicit already the Romantic attitude toward nature, the artist, and his work. Down through Surrealism, poets will continue to affirm the authority of the subjective ego, passivity as a condition of inspiration, etc. They will furthermore note that in revery, where the creative imagination plays freely, the subject seems to move into a blissful state of timelessness and of direct contact with the absolute.

3. For ample treatment of this affiliation, see Georges Cattaui, Orphisme et Prophétie chez les poètes français, 1850-1950 (Plon, 1965); Alain Mercier, Les Sources esotériques et occultes de la poésie symboliste (Nizet, 1969); Jacques Roos, Aspects littéraires du mysticisme philosophique (Strasbourg: P. H. Heitz, 1951); Auguste Viatte, Les Sources occultes du Romantisme (Champion, 1928).

4. Décaudin, La Crise des Valeurs symbolistes, p. 101. Literary historians like Décaudin and William Cornell have studied the fluctuations of Symbolism year by year, the personal quarrels, the ideological and political pressures, the shifting emphasis in doctrine and point of view. See Readings, p. vi [in this work].

5. The emphasis on inspiration starting with Rousseau's Rêveries and Madame de Staël's Le Sentiment de l'Infini surely paves the way for the concept of the poet as seer. However, among the chief Romantic authors, inspiration may mean little more than exaltation of sentiment over reason, spontaneity over craftsmanship, particularity of the artist's rôle in society (Lamartine's “son cœur dicte, la plume obéit”; Hugo's “écho sonore,” etc.). Some of the lesser Romantics, such as those previously mentioned, did hold a more transcendental concept of the poet.

6. The differences between Baudelaire and his successors have been emphasized by Marcel Ruff in L'Esprit du Mal et l'Esthétique Baudelairienne, Colin, 1955. Other critics have reminded us that the inclusion of evil and the ugly in the concept of beauty as well as the doctrine of correspondences was not peculiar to Baudelaire. Baudelaire's impact on subsequent poets has been nonetheless strong, and the genealogical scheme made famous by Marcel Raymond (De Baudelaire au Surréalisme, Corti, 1933) does not seem to be invalidated by such strictures.

7. Arthur Rimbaud, “Une Saison en Enfer,” in Œuvres complètes de Arthur Rimbaud (Gallimard, 1946), p. 220.

8. “La lettre du voyant,” ibid., p. 257.