Symbolism

Charles Chadwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351981996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1971, this work provides a helpful introduction to the French Symbolism movement. After an introduction to the defining ideas of the movement, it explores five key Symbolist writers: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Valéry. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of Symbolism across Europe.

This book will be of interest to those studying nineteenth-century French literature.

1

The theory of Symbolism

Spelt with a small initial letter the word ‘symbolism’, like the words ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’, can have an extremely wide meaning. It can be used to describe any mode of expression which, instead of referring to something directly, refers to it indirectly through the medium of something else. Clearly, therefore, the meaning of the word ‘symbolism’ must be narrowed down if it is to have any significance as a critical term.

A first stage in this process would be to agree that it is not the mere substitution of one object for another – comparing, for example, as Milton does, Satan’s defeated legions to ‘the autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa’ – but the use of concrete imagery to express abstract ideas and emotions. This still, however, leaves its meaning very wide since, as T. S. Eliot pointed out in an essay on Hamlet, the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding what he calls, not a symbol, but an ‘objective correlative’, that is ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion’. Stéphane Mallarmé had said something of the same sort thirty years before in 1891 when he had defined Symbolism as the art of ‘evoking an object little by little so as to reveal a mood or, conversely, the art of choosing an object and extracting from it an “état d’âme”’ (Oeuvres Complètes, p. 869). But he had added that this mood should be extracted ‘par une série de déchiffrements’ – ‘by a series of decipherings’ – and in the previous half of his definition it is important to note that he had talked of evoking an object ‘little by little’. Both these phrases imply that the ‘objective correlative’ and its associated mood should not be revealed openly and clearly but should merely be hinted at. This is, in fact, a point which Mallarmé emphasizes elsewhere in the same passage where he contends that ‘to name an object is to banish the major part of the enjoyment derived from a poem, since this enjoyment consists in a process of gradual revelation.’ The object, he claims, should merely be suggested – ‘suggérer, voilà le rêve’ – and he concludes that it is the perfect practice of this mysterious process which constitutes Symbolism – ‘c’est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le symbole.’

Mallarmé’s disciple, Henri de Régnier, made much the same point when he defined the term ‘symbol’ as being a comparison between the abstract and the concrete with one of the terms of the comparison being merely suggested – ‘une comparaison de l’abstrait au concret dont un des termes reste sous-entendu.’ And, as Régnier further pointed out, because the symbol thus frequently stands alone, with the reader being given little or no indication as to what is being symbolized, Symbolist poetry inevitably has a certain built-in obscurity. Mallarmé is reputed to have said that he had banished the words ‘as’ and ‘like’ from his vocabulary, and although some of his earlier poems are clearly divided into an opening image followed by a section interpreting the image, in his later poems, as we shall see, he tends more and more to omit, or at least to play down the interpretation and to leave the symbol virtually unexplained. Similarly, the sad and mournful landscapes of Mallarmé’s contemporary, Paul Verlaine, are intended to convey to the reader the poet’s profound melancholy though his poems rarely state explicitly that this is their purpose.

Symbolism can therefore be defined as the art of expressing ideas and emotions not by describing them directly, nor by defining them through overt comparisons with concrete images, but by suggesting what these ideas and emotions are, by re-creating them in the mind of the reader through the use of unexplained symbols.

This, however, is only one aspect of Symbolism, what may be called the personal aspect that remains on the human plane. There is a second aspect, sometimes described as ‘transcendental Symbolism’, in which concrete images are used as symbols, not of particular thoughts and feelings within the poet, but of a vast and general ideal world of which the real world is merely an imperfect representation. This concept of the existence of an ideal world lying beyond reality which was popularized by the eighteenth-century philosopher, Swedenborg, goes back, of course, at least to Plato, and plays its part in Christianity, but it was not until the nineteenth century, when the decline in Christian belief was accompanied by a search for other ways of escaping from the harsh world of reality, that the idea was conceived of this other world being attainable, not through mysticism or religion, but through the medium of poetry. ‘C’est par et à travers la poésie’, said Baudelaire in his Notes Nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, ‘que l’âme entrevoit les splendeurs situées derrière le tombeau’ – ‘it is through and by means of poetry that the soul perceives the splendours lying beyond the grave’ – and he went on to say that when a perfect poem brings tears to the eyes, this is evidence of the fact that the reader feels himself exiled in an imperfect world and longs to break out from it into the paradise that has been revealed to him – ‘c’est le témoignage d’une nature exilée dans l’imparfait et qui voudrait s’emparer immédiatement sur cette terre même, d’un paradis révélé’. It was Baudelaire and his successors who elevated the poet to the rank of priest or prophet or what Rimbaud called ‘le poète-voyant’ – ‘the poet-seer’ – endowed with the power to see behind and beyond the objects of the real world to the essences concealed in the ideal world. The purpose of poetry became to create for the reader this world outside reality by a subtle transformation of reality as we know it. Mallarmé defined this goal in a well-known passage in which he claimed that he created in his poetry not any real flower but ‘l’absente de tous bouquets’, the essential flower which is not to be found among any of the flowers of the world below. The whole purpose of poetry, he said in another famous phrase, was to create, ‘sans la gêne d’un proche ou concret rappel, la notion pure’ – pure essences, unhindered by any echo of the concrete reality which surrounds us.

But although the aim of the transcendental Symbolist is to go beyond reality he must obviously, like the human Symbolist, use reality as his starting-point and it is in order to make the transition from the real to the ideal that the imagery in Symbolist poetry of this kind is so often obscure or confused. This is a deliberate blurring so that the reader’s eye can focus beyond reality on the essential Idea (to use the Platonic term much favoured by the Symbolists) of which the various symbols are partial and inadequate manifestations. To take just a single example, based on the one Mallarmé himself used – if the poet wants to present to the reader the ideal flower, he must not draw too clearly the specific image of a rose or a lily, but must confuse the two images so that the essence of them both may be perceived. Mallarmé’s own magnificent and virtually untranslatable definition of this process, part of which has already been quoted, runs as follows: ‘Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, et tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets’ (Oeuvres Complètes, p. 857). Mallarmé, therefore, starts from reality, but any tangible flower is consigned to oblivion and something other than a ‘known calyx’, rises from this oblivion, the perfect Idea of a flower, the ‘absente de tous bouquets’ that has already been referred to.

It is significant that in this passage Mallarmé uses the adverb ‘musicalement’, because one of the tenets of Symbolism, both of the human and of the transcendental kind, that further help to define its meaning more closely, was the equation between poetry and music in preference to the equation between poetry and sculpture, or poetry and painting that had been current in the middle of the nineteenth century in France. The reason for this belief that, as Walter Pater put it in his essay on Giorgione published in 1873, ‘all art aspires towards the condition of music’, was that music possesses just that quality of suggestiveness that the Symbolists were looking for, and lacks just that element of precision which words necessarily possess and which the Symbolists wished to suppress. ‘De la musique avant toute chose’, is the celebrated command with which Verlaine’s Art Poétique, written in 1874, begins, and it ends with a peremptory dismissal of everything that does not possess this vague, suggestive, musical quality as mere literature: ‘Et tout le reste est littérature’ (Oeuvres Complètes, p. 207), echoing Rimbaud’s equally peremptory dismissal, in a letter written three years before, of the whole of French poetry: ‘Tout est prose rimée.’ Paul Valéry, who can perhaps be considered as the last of the Symbolists, expresses a similar idea when he defines Symbolism in an essay on Baudelaire (Oeuvres Completes, pp. 611–12) as being simply the desire shown by several poets to ‘reprendre à la musique leur bien’ – to take back from music what really belonged to them – an idea which Mallarmé had already expressed the other way around in an essay on Wagner whom he had described as ‘usurping the duty of the poet’ (Oeuvres Complètes, p. 541).

It was because of this desire to attain the fluidity of music that Symbolist poetry so often refused to conform to the rigid conventions as regards versification which, despite the earlier revolutionary efforts of the Romantic poets, still held sway in France. The kind and the degree of freedom practised by the Symbolist poets varies of course with the individual – the earliest of them, Baudelaire, was no great innovator in this respect and Verlaine was scarcely bold enough to go beyond ‘vers libérés’ – freed verse – to ‘vers libres’ – free verse. Rimbaud, on the other hand, soon went far beyond these modest attempts to liberate French poetry from the shackles of the traditional patterns of rhyme and rhythm and he adopted the form of the prose poem. As for Mallarmé although he appears for the most part to work within a conventional framework, he is in fact as great a revolutionary as Rimbaud in his paradoxically discreet way and in the last months of his life in 1898 he wrote Un Coup de Dés (Oeuvres Complètes, pp. 455–77), the originality of which has probably never been equalled by anything written since.

Symbolism can, then, be finally said to be an attempt to penetrate beyond reality to a world of ideas, either the ideas within the poet, including his emotions, or the Ideas in the Platonic sense that constitute a perfect supernatural world towards which man aspires. In order to thus get behind the surface of reality there is often a fusion of images, a kind of stereoscopic effect to give a third dimension. Great emphasis is also laid on the musical quality of poetry (which Valéry in fact defined as ‘cette hésitation prolongée entre le son et le sens’ – ‘this constant hovering between sound and sense’) and, because of the wish to achieve a greater flexibility, the regular rhythm of the twelve-syllable alexandrine, for example, and the recurring pattern of conventional rhyme schemes were discarded.

It was along these lines that Symbolism, which had slowly been shaping an identity for itself, was in fact defined in a manifesto published by Jean Moréas in an article in the newspaper Le Figaro on 18 September 1886. In it, he claimed that Romanticism had had its day, that its successors, the Parnassian movement in poetry and the Naturalist movement in the novel were also at an end, and that a new form of art was awaited and was indeed necessary and inevitable. He defined the new movement as being against the purveying of information, against declamation, against false sensibility and against objective description. Instead, he declared its aim to be the attempt to give outward form to Ideas (and he clearly means this term to be taken in the Platonic sense) – ‘la poésie symbolique cherche à vêtir l’Idée d’une forme sensible.’ Among the leaders of the new movement he named Baudelaire as ‘le véritable précurseur’ and praised Mallarmé for having given to it ‘le sens du mystère et de l’ineffable’, while Verlaine’s contribution he defined as having been ‘to break the cruel bonds of versification’. Rimbaud’s absence from this list may seem surprising, but it is no ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• 1 The theory of Symbolism
• 2 Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’
• 3 Verlaine’s melodies
• 4 Rimbaud the ‘voyant’
• 5 Mallarmé and the infinite
• 6 Valéry’s return to reality
• 7 The repercussions of Symbolism
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX