The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History Author(s): Ren Wellek Reviewed work(s): Source: New Literary

History, Vol. 1, No. 2, A Symposium on Periods (Winter, 1970), pp. 249270 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468631 . Accessed: 15/08/2012 01:38
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The Term and Concept of Symbolism in LiteraryHistory Rene Wellek

is so vast that it cannot even be sketchedwithinthe limits of this paper. The word goes back to ancient Greece and had, there, a complex historywhich has not, I suspect, been traced adequately in the only historyof the term,Max Schlesinger's Geschichtedes Symbols,published in 1912.x What I want to discuss is something much more specific: not even symbol and symbolismin literaturebut the term and concept It of symbolism a period in literary as be history. can, I suggest, conthe literaturein all Western venientlyused as a general term for countriesfollowingthe decline of 19th-century realismand naturalism and precedingthe rise of the new avant-gardemovements:futurism, or surrealism, existentialism, whateverelse. How has expressionism, it come about? Can such a use be justified? We must distinguish among different problems: the historyof the word need not be identical with the history the concept as we of might today formulateit. We must ask, on the one hand, what the meant by it, who called himselfa "symbolist" who or contemporaries wanted to be included in a movementcalled "symbolism," and on the other hand, what modern scholarshipmightdecide about who is to be included and what characteristics the period seem decisive.In of located in history must we speaking of "symbolism"as a period-term also think of its situation in space. Literary termsmost frequently radiate fromone centerbut do so unevenly;theyseem to stop at the frontiers some countriesor cross them and languish thereor, surof flourish more vigorously a new soil. A geographyof liton prisingly, erarytermsis needed which mightattemptto account for the spread and distributionof termsby examining rival termsor accidents of biographyor simply the total situation of a literature. There seems to be a widespreadagreementthat the literary history
i Berlin, 1912.

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of the centuriessince the end of the Middle Ages can be divided into five successive periods: Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism and Realism. Among these termsBaroque is a comparativenewcomer which has not been adopted everywhere, though thereseems a clear need of a name forthe stylethatreactedagainstthe Renaissance There is, however,far less agreementas to but preceded Classicism.2 what termshould be applied to the literaturethat followed the end of the dominance of Realism in the 188os and '9os. The term "Modernism" and its variants such as the German "Die Moderne"3 have been used but have the obvious disadvantagethat theycan be applied art. in to any contemporary Particularly English,the term"modern" its to has preserved earlymeaningof a contrast classicalantiquityor is used for everything that occurredsince the Middle Ages. The Cambridge Modern History is an obvious example. The attemptsto disbetweenthe "modern"period now belongingto the past and criminate the "contemporaneous" seem forced, at least terminologically. "Modo," afterall, means "now." "Modernism"used so broadly as to art include all avant-garde obscures the break between the symbolist such as futurism, movements and all post-symbolist surrealism, period etc. In the East it is used as a catchall for everything existentialism, and alienated: it has become a disapprovedas decadent,formalistic, term set against the glories of Socialist realism. pejorative were appealed to at the turnof the century theThe older terms by who eitherbelieved that thesetermsare aporistsand slogan writers, as or thoughtof themselves revivplicable to all literature consciously paring the styleof an older period. Some spoke of a new "classicism," in ticularly France,assumingthat all good art mustbe classical. Croce shares this view. Those who felt a kinship with the Romantic Age, mainly in Germany,spoke of "Neuromantik"appealing to Friedrich Schlegel'sdictum that all poetryis romantic.Realism also assertedits claim, mainly in Marxist contexts,in which all art is considered of "realistic" or at least "a reflection reality."I need only allude to in Georg Lukaics'srecentAesthetik, which this thesisis repeated with obsessive urgency.I have counted the phrase "Widerspiegelungder Wirklichkeit"in the first volume; it appears 1,o32 times. I was too lazy or bored to count it in volume 2. All these monismsendanger schemesof literary meaningful periodization.Nor can one be satisfied such as FritzStrich's"Klassik und Romantik"which with a dichotomy
See my papers "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship" (1945) and "Postscript" (1962) in Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), pp. 69-127. 3 Eugen Wolff, Die jiingste Literaturstr6mungund das Prinzip der Moderne (Berlin, 1887), seems the source of this form. In 1884 Arno Holz urges "Modern sei der Poet,/ Modern von Scheitel bis zur Sohle."
2

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a leads away fromperiod concepts into a universal typology, simple division of the world into sheep and goats. For many years I have argued the advantage of a multiple schemeof periods as it permitsa varietyof criteria.The one criterion"realism" would divide all art into realistic and non-realisticart and thus would allow only one approving adjective: "real" or some variant such as "true" or "lifelike." A multiple scheme comes much closer to the actual varietyof the process of history.Period must be conceived neither as some essence which has to be intuited as a Platonic idea nor as a mere arbitrarylinguistic label. It should be understood as a "regulative idea," as a systemof norms, conventionsand values which can be traced in its rise, spread and decline, in competitionwith preceding and followingnorms,conventionsand values.4 "Symbolism"seems the obvious termfor the dominant stylewhich followed nineteenth-century realism. It was propounded in Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) and is assumed as a matterof course in Maurice Bowra's Heritage of Symbolism(1943) . We must beware,of or course, of confusingthis historicalformwith age-old symbolism, with the view that all art is symbolic, language is a system symof as bols. Symbolism the sense of a use of symbolsin literature clearly in is in literatureof many styles,periods and civilizations. omnipresent in Symbolsare all-pervasive medieval literatureand even the classics - Tolstoy and Flaubert,Balzac and Dickens - use symbols, of realism I often prominently. am myself guiltyof arguing for the crucial role of symbol in any definitionof Romanticismand I have writtenat lengthon the long German debate fromGoethe to FriedrichTheodor Vischer about the meaning of the term"symbol" and its contrastto the term "allegory."5 For our purposesI want to focus on the fortunes the concept as of a term,first a school, then as a movement, for and finally a period. as The term "symbolisme"as the designationfor a group of poets was first proposed by Jean Mor6as, the French poet of Greek extraction. In 1885 he was disturbedby a journalisticattack on the decadentsin which he was named togetherwith Mallarm6. He protested: "The so-called decadents seek the pure Concept and the eternal Symbolin theirart,beforeanything else." With some contemptforthe mania of
4 See my "Periods and Movements in Literary History," in English Institute Annual, r94o (New York, 1941), pp. 73-93, and the chapter "Literary History" in my and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (New York, 1949) 5 See my paper "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History" (1949), in Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), pp. 128-99,and the passages on symbol and allegory in A History of Modern Criticism,4 volumes (New Haven, 1955-65), e.g., I, 21o-11; II, 41-42, 76, 174-75; III, 221-22.

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criticsfor labels, he suggestedthe term "Symbolistes" replace the to In 1886 Moreas starteda reviewLe Syminappropriate"decadents."6 boliste which perished afterfour issues. On September18, 1886, he published a manifestoof "Symbolisme"in Figaro.7 Moreas, however, soon deserted his own brain-childand founded another school he was dead.8 Thus Figaro Moreas blandlyannounced that "symbolisme" was an ephemeral name for a very small clique of "symbolisme" French poets. The only name still rememberedbesides Moreas's is Gustave Kahn. It is easy to collect pronouncements the main by Verlaine, in contemporary poets repudiatingthe termfor themselves. resentfulof this "Allemandisme" and particular, was vehemently wrote even a little poem beginning"A bas le symbolisme mythe/et termite."9 In a way which would need detailed tracing,the term,however, and early90's as a blanketname forrecent caught on in the later 80o's developmentsin French poetryand its anticipations.Before Moreas' Anatole Baju, in Dicadent, April lo, 1886, spoke of Malmanifesto, the to larm6 as "the masterwho was the first formulate symbolicdoctrine."10 Two critics,Charles Morice, with La Litteraturede tout a in l'heure (1889) and T6odor de Wyz6wa,born in Poland, first the de essay "Le Symbolisme M. Mallarme" (1887), seemed to have been the main agents, though Morice spoke ratherof "synthese"than of symbol,and Wyzewa thoughtthat "symbol"was only a pretextand explained Mallarme's poetry purely by its analogy to music." As earlyas 1894 Saint Antoine (pseudonymforHenri Mazel) prophesied that "undoubtedly,symbolismwill be the label under which our of period will be classed in the history French literature."12
Moreasin XIXe 6 Paul Bourdein Le Temps,6 August1885,was the aggressor, avant tout dans leur art . . . le pur cherchent "Les prdtendus Sikcle, d~cadents Quoted fromGuy Michaud,Messagepodtiquedu Symbole." Conceptet l'6ternel symbolisme (Paris,1947), II, 331. in (Paris,1911), p. 11o. 7 Reprinted Andr6Barre,Le Symbolisme 8 Quoted in M. D6caudin,La Crisedes valeurssymbolistes (Toulouse,1960), p. versein Invectives(1896). Verlaine's 9 See Barre,pp. 16o-61. le Quoted fromMichaud, II, 335: "Le maitre qui a formul6 premierla lo doctrine symbolique." cf. See Nos 11 See Michaud,II, 355 ff, 427 ff. also Wyz6wa, Maitres (Paris,1895), Un du Charles see pp. 115-29. On Morice, Paul Delsemme, thdoricien symbolisme: Critic withL. Duval, Tdodorde Wyzewa: Morice (Paris,1958). On Wyz6wa, Elga
out a Country (Geneva, 1961).
22.

called "6cole romane." On September 14, 1891, in another number of

12 Michel Decaudin,p. 15; quoted from L'Ermitage, June,1894."Telle est sans doute l'6tiquettesous laquelle notre p6riode sera class6 dans l'histoirede la litterature frangaise."

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It is still a matterof debate in French literaryhistorywhen this movementcame to an end. It was several timesrevivedexpressly, e.g. in 1905 around a review, Vers et prose. Its main critic,Robert de Souza, in a seriesof articles,"Oh nous en sommes" (also published as separately,1906), ridiculed the many attemptsto bury symbolism and proudlyclaimed that Gustave Kahn, Verhaeren, premature Viel&Maeterlinck and Regnier were then as active as ever.13 Griffin, so Valery professed complete an allegiance to the ideals of Mallarme that it is difficult to thinkof him as a continuatorof symbolism, not of in 1938,on the occasion of the fiftieth though anniversary the symbolist manifesto,Valery doubted the existence of symbolismand Marcel Proust in the denied that there is a symbolistaesthetic.14 last volume of his great series, Le Temps posthumouslypublished aesthetic.But his retrouve (1926), formulated explicitlysymbolist an was often ambiguous or own attitude to symbolistcontemporaries negative.In 1896 Proust had writtenan essay condemningobscurity in poetry.15Proust admired Maeterlinck but disliked PWguyand Claudel. He even wrotea pasticheof Regnier,a mock-solemn description of a headcold.16When Le Temps retrouve (1926) was published and when a fewyearslater (1933) ValeryLarbaud proclaimedProust been a symbolist, had, at least in French poetry,definitely symbolism surrealism.17 replaced by Andre Barre's book on symbolism (1911) and particularlyGuy Michaud's Message podtique du symbolisme(1947) as well as many other books of French literary scholarshiphave with the hindsightof different phases of a vast French symliteraryhistorians,traced the of Baudelaire who died in 1867, bolist movement:the precursorship the second phase when Verlaine and Mallarme were at the heightof their power before the 1886 group, the third phase when the name what Michaud became established,and then in the twentieth century calls "Neo-symbolisme" by represented "La Jeune Parque" of Valery and L'Annonce faitei&Marie of Claudel, both dating from 1915.18 It seems a coherentand convincingconception which needs to be ex13 Vers et prose. Tome I, Mars - avril - Mai 1905, p. 79. "I1 me semble d'abord du que 1'enterrement Symbolisme6tait un peu pr6matur6,Craignons les inhumations hitives." 14 "Existance du symbolisme" (1938) in Pleiade ed. (1957), I, 686-706. 15 "Contre l'obscurit6" in Revue blanche, 15 July 1896. Reprinted in Chroniques. 16 For details see Walter A. Strauss, Proust and Literature (Cambridge, Mass.,
1957), PP. 191-93, 204. 17 Preface to Emeric Fiser, L'Esthitique de Marcel Proust (Paris, 1933). 18 See also Michaud's paper "Symbolique et symbolisme" in Cahiers de l'Association Internationale des AEtudes Franpaises,VI (1954), 75ff-

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tended to prose writers and dramatists: HuysmansafterA Rebours to at (1884), to the early Gide, to Proust in part and among dramatists, least to Maeterlinck, who, with his plays L'Intruse and Les Aveugles of symbolism the stage. on Knowledge of the French movementand admirationfor it spread soon to the otherEuropean countries.We must,however,distinguish between reportingon French events and even admirationshown by and a genuine transfer and assimilationof the French translations, movementin another literature.This processvaries fromcountryto countryconsiderably;and the variation has to be explained by the differenttraditions with which the French importation was confronted. In English, George Moore's Confessionsof a Young Man (1888) and his Impressionsand Opinions (1891) gave sketchyand often accountsof Verlaine,Mallarm6,Rimbaud and Laforpoorlyinformed Mallarme's poetryis dismissedas "aberrations a refined of mind," gue. and symbolism oddly definedas "saying the opposite of what you is mean." The three essayson Mallarm6 by Edmund Gosse, all dating from 1893, are hardlymore perceptive.Afterthe poet's death, Gosse turnedsharplyagainst him. "Now that he is no longerhere the truth must be said about Mallarm6. He was hardly a poet." Even Arthur Movement in Literature (1899) Symons,whose book The Symbolist made the decisive breakthrough for England and Ireland, was very lukewarm at first. While praising Verlaine (in Academy, 1891) he referred the "brain-sick to littleschool of Symbolistes" and "the noisy little school of Decadents" and even in later articleson Mallarm6 he complained of "jargon and meaningless riddles."19But then, he turned around and produced the entirelyfavorableSymbolist Movement. It should not, however,be overrated as literarycriticismor It account of Nerval, Villiers history. is a ratherlame impressionistic de l'Isle-Adam, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarme, Huysmans and Maeterlinck, with emphasison Verlaine. There is no chapteron But most importantly, book was dedicated to W. B. the Bauderline.20 Yeats proclaiminghim "the chiefrepresentative that movementin of our country."Symonshad made his first tripto Paris in 1889; he had visited Mallarme, met Huysmans and Maeterlinck,and a year later met Verlaine, who in 1893 became his guest on his ill-fatedvisit to London. Symonsknew Yeats vaguelysince 1891,but theybecame close
19 For referencessee Bruce Morrissette,"Early English and American Critics of French Symbolism," in Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley (St. Louis, Missouri, 1942), pp. 159-80. A chapter on Baudelaire was added to the expanded edition in 1919. 20

(1890) and Pelleas et Melisande

(1892), assured a limited penetration

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in friends 1895 only afterYeats had completedhis studyof Blake and had elaborated his own systemof symbolsfromother sources: occultism,Blake, and Irish folklore.The edition of Blake Yeats had prepared with Edwin Ellis in 1893 was introduced by an essay on "The Necessityof Symbolism."In 1894 Yeats visited Paris in the of companyof Symonsand saw therea performance Villiersde 1' Isleof Adams's AxIl.21 The essay "The Symbolism Poetry" (1900) is then dedication creed.22 Yeats' first full statement his symbolist of Symons's as Yeats shows an awarenessof symbolism an internationalmoveto ment: "In Germany,"he says,exaggerating greatly,"it seems to be is that which is deepest its permeatingthe whole of literature, spirit in Ibsen, it has absorbed the one new forcein Italy, Gabriele D'Anthere in nunzio. I am told of a group of symbolists Russian literature, in is anotherin Dutch literature, Portugal it has a littleschool of its that own under Eugenio de Castro. I even saw some faint stirrings way in Spain." Symonsshould have added the United States.Or could he in 1899? There were intelligentand sympathetic reportsof the French movement veryearly. T. S. Perrywrote on "The Latest LiteraryFashion in France" in The Cosmopolitan (1892), T. Child on "LiteraryParis - The New Poetry"in Harper's (1896), and Aline Gorren on "The Vance French Symbolists" Scribner's (1893). The almost forgotten in who fresh from Paris, edited the oddly named review Thompson, M'lle New York,wroteseveral perceptiveessays, mainlyon Mallarme
in 1895 (reprinted in French Portraits, 1900oo) which convey some

on accurate information his theoriesand attempteven some explication of his poetry with some success.23But only James Huneker of into the United became the main importer recentFrenchliterature States.In 1896 he defendedthe French symbolists against the slurs in Max Nordau's silly Entartung and began to write a long series of articleson Maeterlinck,Laforgue and many others,not botheringto conceal his dependence on his French master,Remy de Gourmontto
whom he dedicated his book of essays, Visionaries (1905).24 But the

See Richard Ellmann's Introduction to the 1958 New York reprint of The 21 SymbolistMovement. On Symonssee Roger Lhombreaud, Arthur Symons,A Critical Biography (London, 1963), and Ruth Zabriskie Temple, The Critic's Alchemy: A Study of the Introduction of French Symbolism into England (New Haven, 1953) 22 Reprinted in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903); since in Essays and Introductions (New York, 1961), pp. 153-64. See Morrissette'spaper quoted in note 19. 23 See Arnold T. Schwab, J. G. Huneker, Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford, 24 1963) -

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actual impact of French symbolistpoetryon American writingwas greatly delayed. Rene Taupin in his L'Influence du symbolisme franpaissur la podsie amfricaine (1929) traced some echoes in forgotten Americanversifiers the turnof the century but only two Ameriof cans living then in England, Ezra Pound around 1908 and T. S. Eliot around 1914, reflect the French influencein significant poetry. More recently and in retrospect one hears of a symbolist period in American literature:Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens are its main ways poets, Henry James, Faulkner and O'Neill, in very different and in different with its stagesof theircareer,show marked affinities teshniques and outlook. Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) was book whichdefinitely conceivedof symbolism apparentlythe veryfirst as an internationalmovementand singled out Yeats, Joyce,Eliot, GertrudeStein, Valery,Proust, and Thomas Mann as examples of a movementwhich,he believed, had come to an end in the time of his writing.Here we find the conception formulatedwhich, very generally,is the thesisof this paper and the assumptionof many historians since Wilson's sketch.Wilson's sourceswere the writings Huneof in ker whom he admiredgreatly, and the instruction Frenchliterature he receivedat PrincetonfromChristianGauss.25But the insightinto the unity and continuityof the internationalmovement and the selectionof the great names was his own. We mightonly deplore the inclusion of Gertrude Stein. But I find it difficult believe that to Wilson's book could have had any influence outsidethe English-speaking world. In the United States,Wilson's reasonable and moderateplea foran internationalmovementwas soon displaced by attemptsto make the F. whole of the Americanliterary traditionsymbolist. O. Matthiessen's The AmericanRenaissance (1941) is based on a distinction introduced Goethe. Allegoryappears as inferior symbol: Hawthorneinferto by ior to Melville. But in Charles Feidelson's Symbolismand American Literature (1956) the distinction and the betweenmodem symbolism use of symbolsby Romantic authors is completely obliterated.Emerson, Hawthorne,Poe, Melville, and Whitman appear as pure symbolists avant la lettreand their ancestryis traced back to the Puritans It who, paradoxically, appear as incomplete,frustrated symbolists. can be objected that the old Puritanswere sharplyinimical to images and symbolsand that thereis a gulf betweenthe religiousconception of signs of God's Providenceand the aestheticuse of symbolsin the
25 On Huneker see Classics and Commercials (New York, 1950), p. 114, and The Shores of Light (New York, 1952), p. 73- On Gauss the essay introducingthat volume.

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novelsof Hawthorneand Melville and even in the Platonizingaesthetics of Emerson.26 The symbolist conception of American literatureis still prevalent It owes its dominance to the attemptto exalt the greatAmeritoday. can writersto myth-makers and providers of a substitutereligion. in Ishmael (1956), puts it unabashedly,Melville is "the James Baird, supremeexample of the artisticcreatorengaged in the act of making new symbolsto replace the 'lost' symbolsof Protestant Christianity."27 interA very active trend in American criticism expanded symbolist to all typesand periods of literature it on writings pretation imposing whichhave no such meaningor have to be twistedto assume it. Harry Levin rightlycomplained in an address, "Symbolismand Fiction" (1956), that "everyhero may seem to have a thousand faces; every heroine may be a white goddess incognita; and every fishingtrip turnsout to be another quest for the Holy Grail."28The impact of and from Carl Jung is ideas from the Cambridge anthropologists in a obvious. In the studyof medieval texts, renewedinterest the fourfold levels of meaning in Dante's "Letter to Can Grande" has peror suaded a whole group of American scholars to interpret misinterChaucer, the Pearl poet, and Langland, in these terms.29 They pret should bear in mind that Thomas Aquinas recognizedonly a literal and that he reservedthe sense in a work inventedby human industry other three senses for Scripture.30The symbolist interpretation reaches heights of ingenuityin the writingof Northrop Frye who began with a book on Blake and, in The Anatomy of Criticism system (1957), conceived of the whole of literatureas a self-enclosed of symbolsand myths, "existingin its own universe,no longera combut containinglife and realityin a system on mentary life or reality, of verbal relationships."In this grandiose conceptionall distinctions between periods and stylesare abolished: "the literaryuniverse is a is universein which everything potentiallyidentical with everything
Cf. Ursula Brumm,Die religibse Typologie im amerikanischenDenken (Leiden, 1963), e.g., p. 8ff. 27 Baltimore, 1956,p. xv. 28 Contextsof Criticism (Cambridge,Mass., 1957), p. 007.
26

29 I allude particularly to D. W. Robertson's A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, 1963), and D. W. Robertson and B. F. Hupp6's Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (Princeton,1951) . 30o Cf. Morton W. Bloomfield, "Symbolism in Medieval Literature" in Modern Philology, LVI (1958), pp. 73-81. He quotes Thomas Aquinas, Questiones quodlibetales, VII. a. 16. "Unde in nulla scientia, humana industria inventa, proprio loquendo, potest inveniri nisi litteralissensus; sed solum in ista Scriptura, cujus Spiritus sanctus est auctor, homo verum instrumentum."

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betweenmyth, else."31Hence the old distinctions symboland allegory One of Frye's followers, Angus Fletcher,in his book on disappear. Allegory (1964), exalts allegoryto the centralprocedureof art, while Frye still holds fast to symbolism, recognizingthat "the criticsare often prejudiced against allegory without knowing the real reason, which is that continuousallegoryprescribes the directionof his comand so restricts his freedom."32 mentary, in The storyof the spread of symbolismis very different other countries. The effectin Italy was ostensiblyrather small. Soffici's pamphlet on Rimbaud, in 1911, is usually consideredthe beginning of the Frenchsymbolist but influence, therewas an earlypropagandist forMallarme,VittorioPica, who was heavilydependenton his French sources,particularlyT'odor de Wyz'wa. His articles in the Gazette letteraria (1885-6) on the French poets do not use the term; but in 1896 he replaced "decadent" and "Byzantine" by "symbolist."33 would be D'Annunzio, who knew and used some French symbolists, classed as "decadent" today, and the poets around Ungaretti and Montale as "hermetic." In a recent book by Mario Luzi, L'idea simbolista (1959), Pasoli, Dino Campana, and Arturo Onofri are called symbolist poets,but Luzi uses the termso widelythathe begins his anthologyof symbolismwith H61derlin and Novalis, Coleridge and Wordsworth,and can include Poe, Browning,Patmore, Swinburne, Hopkins and Francis Thompson among its precursors. Still, his list of symbolist poets,French,Russian, English,German,Spanish and Greekis, on the whole,reasonable.34 Onofriwas certainly strongly influenced Mallarme and later by Rudolf Steiner;Pascoli, however, by seems to me no symbolistin his poetry,though he gave extremely of symbolistinterpretations Dante.35 It might be wiser to think of as Montale and possibly "ermetismo" the Italian name forsymbolism: Campana are genuine symbolists. While symbolismat least as a definiteschool or movementwas absent in Italy, it is central in the historyof Spanish poetry.The Nicaraguan poet, Ruben Dario initiatedit afterhis shortstayin Paris
31 Princeton,1957, PP. 122, 124. 32 Ibid., p. 9o. 33 See Olga Ragusa, "Vittorio Pica: First Champion of French Symbolism in Italy" in Italica, XXXV (1958), 255-61, and Luigi de Nardis, "Prospettive critiche per uno studio su VittorioPica e il decadentismofrancese"in Revista de letterature moderne e comparate, XIX (1966), 202-9. 34 Milano, 1959. Luzi lists besides the French Bryusov, Balmont, Ivanov, Blok, Yeats, Eliot; George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Benn; Pascoli, D'Annunzio, Onofri, Campana; Dario, Antonio Machado, Jimenez,and the Greek Chantzopoulos. 35 Pascoli, Minerva oscura (1898), Conferenzee studi dantesche (1921), etc.

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in 1892. He wrotepoems under the symbolist influence and addressed, for instance,a fervent to Verlaine.36The influenceof French hymn the symbolist poetrychanged completely oratoricalor popular styleof The closeness of Guillhn to Mallarme and Spanish lyrical poetry. Valhry seems too obvious to deny and the Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y Reissig (1873-1909) is clearly in the symbolisttradition, often of the obscurestmanner.37Still, the Spanish critics favor the term "Modernismo" which is used sometimesso inclusivelythat it covers all modern Spanish poetryand even the so-called "generation of 1898," the prose writers Azorin,Baroja and Unamuno, whose associations with symbolism were quite tenuous.38 "Symbolism"can apply only to one trendin modernSpanish literatureas the romanticpoputhan elsewhere.Garcia Lorca's poetry lar traditionwas therestronger can serveas the best known example of the peculiar Spanish synthesis of the folksyand the symbolical,the gipsy song and myth.Still, the continuityfrom Dario to Jimenez,Antonio Machado, Alberti, and then to Guillen seems to me evident. Jorge Guillen in his Harvard lectures,Language and Poetry (1961), finds "no label convincing." "A period look," he argues,does not signify "group style."In Spain a therewere,he thinks, fewer"isms" than elsewhereand the break with that "any name seeking to the past was far less abrupt. He reflects give unity to a historicalperiod is the invention of posterity."But himselfand he while eschewingthe term "symbolism," characterizes well enough by expounding theircommon creed: his contemporaries their belief in the marriageof Idea and Music, in short,their belief in the ideal of Mallarme.39Following a vague suggestionmade by of Remy de Gourmont,the rediscovery G6ngora by Ortega y Gasset, Gerardo Diego, DdimasoAlonso, and Alfonso Reyes around 1927 fits into the picture: they couple G6ngora and Mallarme as the two in of poets who in the history all poetryhave gone furthest the search for absolute poetry,for the quintessenceof the poetic.40 In Germany,the spread of symbolismwas far less complete than
36 "Verlaine: Responso" beginning "Padre y maestro migico, liriforo celeste." On Dario see E. K. Mapes, L'Influence frangaise dans l'oeuvre de Rubdn Dario (Paris, 1925). 37 Cf. Bernard Gicovate, Julio Herrera y Reissig (Berkeley, 1957). 38 See Gustav Siebenmann, Die moderne Lyrik in Spanien (Stuttgart,1965), esp., and Guillermo Diaz-Plaja, Modernismo frentea Noventa y Ocho (Madrid, pp. 43ff., 1951). 39 Cambridge,Mass., 1961, p. 2144o Remy de Gourmont, Promenades littdraires,IVe s6rie (Paris, 1912). Ddmaso Alonso, G6ngora y la literatura contempordnea (Santander, 1932); also in Estudios y ensayos g6ngorinos (Madrid, 1955).

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Symonsassumed in 1899. Stefan George had come to Paris in 1889, had visited Mallarm6 and met many poets, but after his return to Germany he avoided, I assume deliberately,the term "symbolism" for himselfand his circle. He translateda selectionfromBaudelaire (1891) and smallersamples fromMallarm6,Verlaine and Regnier in Dichter (1905), but his own poetrydoes not, I think, Zeitgen*ssische show very close parallels to the French masters.Oddly enough, the seem to have left the most clearly discernible poems of Viel6-Griffin traceson George's own writings.41 early as 1892 one of George's As Carl August Klein, protested in George's periodical, adherents, fiirdie Kunst,against the view of George'sdependenceon the Bliitter French. Wagner, Nietzsche,B6cklin and Klinger,he says,show that thereis an indigenousopposition to naturalismin Germanyas everywhere in the West.42George himselfspoke later of the French poets book on George, allies" and in Gundolf'sauthoritative as his "former the French influenceis minimizedif not completely denied.43Among of the theorists the George circleFriedrichGundolf had the strongest symbolistleanings: Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (191i) and with Goethe (1916) are based on the distinctionof symbol-allegory Still, the term symbolismdid not symbol always the higher term.44 catch on in Germanyas a name forany specific poetic group, though Hofmannsthal,e.g. in "Das Gesprich iiber Gedichte" (1903), proin claimed the symbolthe one element necessary poetry.45 Later, the influenceof Rimbaud - apparentlylargelyin German translationBut if we on Georg Trakl can be demonstratedwith certainty.46 examine German books on twentieth-century literature,symbolism seems rarelyused. I found a section so called in Willi Duwe's Die (1936) which includes Hofmannsthal, Dichtung des 2o. Jahrhunderts
Symbolismusauf die deut41 See B. B6schenstein,"Wirkungen des franzbsischen in sche Lyrik der Jahrhundertwende," Euphorion, LVIII (1964), 375-95. Werner Vordtriede,"Direct Echoes of French Poetry in Stefan George's Works" in Modern Languages Notes, LX (1945), 461-68, lists trivial parallels to Baudelaire and Mallarm6. More in Claude David, Stefan George. Son oeuvre podtique (Paris, 1952). 42 Vol. I, No. 2, "Ober Stefan George, eine neue Kunst", reprintedin Die Sendung Stefan Georges (Berlin, 1935), pp. 69-70. 43 "Stern des Bundes," quoted in David, p. 285. Gundolf, George (Berlin, 1920o), PP. 50-51. 44 Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin, 1914), pp. 1-2 for distinction of symbol-allegory;and Goethe (Berlin, 1916), pp. 16, 28, for classification of Goethe's works. 45 Prosa, II, 104. 46 See B6schenstein,quoted in note 41, and Herbert Lindenberger,"Georg Trakl and Rimbaud," in Comparative Literature,X (1958), 21-35. Trakl read the translation by K. L. Ammer (pseudonymof Karl Klammer) published in 1907.

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Dauthendey,Cale, Rilke and George,while E. H. Liith's Literaturals Geschichte (Deutsche Dichtung von 1885 bis 1947), publishedin 1947, treatsthe same poets under the label "Neuromantikund Impressionismus." Later, however,we find a section "Parasymbolismus"which deals with Musil and Broch. Hugo Friedrich,in his Strukturder modernenLyrik (1956), avoids the term and argues that the quick successionof moderniststyles:dadaism, surrealism, futurism, expresetc. sionism,unanimism,hermetism, createsan optical illusion which between Mallarmb,Valhry,Guilhides the fact of a directcontinuity 16n, Ungaretti and Eliot.47 The little anthologyin the back of the book adds St. John Perse,Jiminez,Garcia Lorca, Albertiand Montale to these names. Friedrich'slist seems to me the list of the main symbolist poets even though Friedrich objects to the name. Clearly, German literaryscholarship has not been converted to the term, though Wolfgang Kayser's article "Der europtiischeSymbolismus" (1953), had pleaded for a wide concept in which he included, in addition to the French poets,D'Annunzio, Yeats, Valery,Proust,Virginia Woolf and Faulkner.48 In Russia we findthe strongest symbolist group of poets who called that. The close links with Paris at that time may help to themselves of explain this,or possiblyalso the strongconsciousness a traditionof symbolismin the Russian Church and in some of the Orthodox thinkers the immediatepast. VladmirirSolovev was thoughtof as of account a precursor.In 1892 Zinaida Vengerovawrote a sympathetic while in the following for of the French symbolists VestnikEvropy49 year Max Nordau's Entartung caused a sensation for its satirical as account of recentFrenchpoetrywhichreverberated late as in Tolstoy's What is Art? (1898). Bryusovemergedas the leading symbolist poet: he translated Maeterlinck'sL'lntruse and wrote a poem "Iz In Rimbaud" as earlyas 1892.50 1894 he published two little volumes That year Bryusovwrote poems under the title Russkie simvolisty. and "In the with titlessuch as "In the spiritof the Frenchsymbolists" manner of Stephane Mallarme" (though thesewere not published till 1935) and brought out a translationof Verlaine's Romances sans paroles.51 Bryusov had later contacts with Rene Ghil, Mallarme's in pupil, and derived fromhim the idea of "instrumentation" poetry
47 Hamburg, 1956,p. io8. 48 In Die Vortragsreise(Bern, 1958), pp. 287-304. 49 IX (1892), 115-43. Reprinted in Literaturnye Kharakteristiki (St. Petersburg, 1897) . 50 cf. G. Donchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague, 1958), p. 2351 In Neizdannye stikhotvoreniya(Moscow, 1935), PP. 426, 428.

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which was to play a great role in the theoriesof the Russian formalIn had, in 1893,published ists.52 the meantimeDimitri Merezhkovsky a manifesto:"On the causes of the decline and the new trendsof contemporary Russian literature," which recommended symbolism though Merezhkovsky appealed to the Germans: to Goethe and the Romanticsratherthan to the French.53 Merezhkovsky's pamphletforemovement.The younger shadows the split in the Russian symbolist men, Blok and VyacheslavIvanov as well as Bely distancedthemselves from Bryusov and Balmont. Blok in an early diary (1901-02) condemned Bryusovas decadent and opposed to his Parisan symbolism and his own, Russian,rootedin the poetryof Tyutchev, Fet, Polonsky, Ivanov in 1910o, shared Blok's view. The French Soloviv.54Vyacheslav influenceseemed to him "adolescentlyunreasonable and, in fact,not while his own symbolism veryfertile," appealed to Russian nationalLater Bely was to add ism and to the general mysticaltradition.55 occultism, Rudolf Steiner and his "anthroposophy."The group of poets which called themselves"Acmeists" (Gumilev, Anna AkhmaThe of tova, Osip Mandelshtam) was a directoutgrowth Symbolism.56 Annenmere factthat theyappealed to the earlysymbolist Innokenty in with Symbolism spite of theirdistastefor skyshows the continuity the occult and their emphasis on what they thoughtof as classical dominatesRussian poetrybetweenabout 1892 and clarity. Symbolism when Futurismemergedas a slogan and the Russian formalists 1914 attacked the whole concept of poetryas imagery. If we glance at the other Slavic countrieswe are struckby the diabout the French of versity theirreactions.Poland was earlyinformed and Polish poetrywas influenced the French symbolist movement, by In movementbut the term "Mltoda Polska" was preferred. Wilhelm Feldmann's Wspdtczesnaliteraturapolska (1905) contemporary poif etryis discussedas "decadentism"but Wyspiaxiski symbolist ever (a there was one) appears under the chapterheading: "On the heights All of romanticism."57 the historiesof Polish literatureI have seen
and Ghil's Traitd du 52 See Lettres de Rend Ghil (Paris, 1935), pp. 13-16, 18-20o, verbe (Paris, 1886). 53 0 princhinakh upadka i o novykh techenyakhsovremennoyrusskoyliteratury (St. Petersburg,1893). 54 "Yunocheski dnevnik Aleksandra Bloka" (1901-2), in Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, XXVII-XXVIII (1937), 302. 55 "Zavety simvolizma," in Apollon, VIII (1910), 13, and in Borozdy i mezhi (Moscow, 1916), p. 133. 56 For a good discussion see Jurij Striedter,"Transparenz und Verfremdung:Zur Theorie des poetischen Bildes in der russichen Moderne" in Immanente Aesthetik: AesthetischeReflexion,ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich, 1966), pp. 263-89. 57 In Vol. III: "Na wyiynach romantyzmu."

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speak of "Modernism," "Decadentism," "Idealism," "Neo-romanticism" and occasionallycall a poet such as Miriam (Zenon Przesmycki) but theyneverseem to use the termas a general name for a symbolist in Polish literature.58 a period In Czech literature the situation was more like that in Russia: and the idea of a Bfezina, Sova, and Hlavaicekwere called symbolists school or at least a group of Czech symbolist is firmly established. poets The term "Moderna" (possibly because of the periodical, Moderni Revue founded in 1894) is definitely associated with decadentism, de sidcle, a group represented Arno't Prochizka. A hymnical, fin by even chiliasticpoet such as Bfezina cannot and could not optimistic, be classedwith them.The greatcriticF. X. Salda wroteof the "school of symbolists" earlyas 1891,calling Verlaine,Villiersand Mallarm6 as its masters but denying that there is a school of symbolists with His very firstimportant article dogmas, codices and manifestoes.59 "Synthetismin the new art" (1892) expounded the aesthetics of Morice and Hennequin forthe benefit the Czechs,then still mainly of dependenton German models.60 The unevennessof the penetrationboth of the influenceof the French movementand verystrikingly the acceptance of our term of raises the question whetherwe can account for these differences in causal terms. sounds hereticalor obscurantist this age of scientifIt in ic explanation to ascribe much to chance, to casual contacts and personal predilections.Why was the term so immenselysuccessful in France, in the United States and in Russia, less so in England and Spain and hardlyat all in Italy and Germany? Germanythere In was even the traditionof the continuous debate about symbolsince Goethe and Schelling; before the French movementFriedrichTheodor Vischerdiscussedthe symbolelaboratelyand still the termdid not catch on.6xOne can thinkof all kinds of explanations: a deliberate
58 Zenon Presmycki had written an essay on Maeterlinck in 1891 (in ?wiat). More in Henryk Markiewicz,"Mtoda Polska i 'izmy'," in Iz Problem6w literatury polskiej XX wieku, Tome I (Warsaw, 1965), PP- 7-51, esp., p. 15; Teofil Wojefiski, Historia literaturypolskiej (Warsaw, 1946) has a chapter entitled "Symbolism i Neoromantyzmw Polsce"; Julian Krzyzanowski,Neoromantyzm Polski, z89o-1918 (Wroclaw- Warszawa, 1963), has a chapter, "Drama naturalistyczno-symboliczny," pp. 182ff. 59 "0 kole symbolistu" in Kritchkdprojevy (Prague, 1947), I, 185-86. Originally as "Zasldno" in Literarni listy, XIII (1891), 46-68, 65-66, 85-86. See J. Pistorius, Bibliografie dila F. X. Ialdy (Prague, 1948), p. 79. 60 "Synth6tismv nov6m um~ni," originally in Literarni listy (1891-2). A brief discussion in my "Modern Czech Criticism and Literary Scholarship," in Essays on Czech Literature (The Hague, 1963), pp. 179-80. 61 "Das Symbol" (1887) in Altes und Neues, Neue Folge, 1889.

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decision by the poets to distancethemselves fromthe French developments; or the success of the terms"Die Moderne" and "Neuromantik." Still, the verynumberof such explanationssuggests that the variin ables are so greatthatwe cannot account forthesedivergencies any manner. systematic If we, at long last, turn to the centralquestion: what is the exact contentsof the term,we must obviouslydistinguishamong the four concentriccircles definingits scope. At its narrowest,"symbolism" refersto the French group which called itselfso in 1886. Its theory These poets mainlywanted poetryto be nonwas ratherrudimentary. i.e. theyasked for a break with the traditionof Hugo and rhetorical, to the Parnassiens.They wantedwordsnot merely statebut to suggest; and symbolsnot only as they wanted to use metaphors,allegories decorationsbut as organizingprinciplesof theirpoems; theywanted their verse to be "musical," in practice to stop using the oratorical cadences of the French alexandrines, and in some cases to break completely with rhyme. Free verse - whose invention is usually ascribed to Gustave Kahn - was possiblythe most enduringachievein mentwhich has survivedall vicissitudes style.Kahn himself 1894 of summed up the doctrine simply as "antinaturalism, antiprosaismin in poetry,a search for freedomin the efforts art, in reaction against the regimentation the Parnasse and the naturalists."62 of This sounds has verymeager today: freedomfromrestrictions been afterall, the in slogan of a great many movements art. It is betterto thinkof "symbolism" a wider sense: as the broad in movement in France from Nerval and Baudelaire to Claudel and We can restatethe theories Valkry. propoundedand will be confronted an enormousvariety.We can characterize more concretely and it by forexample, that in symbolist the image becomes "thing." say, poetry The relation of tenor and vehicle in the metaphoris reversed.The utterance is divorced, we may add, from the situation: time and and societyare played down. The innerworld,la durde, place, history in the Bergsoniansense, is represented oftenmerelyhinted at as or "it," the thing or the person hidden. One could say that the grammatical predicate has become the subject. Clearly such poetrycan easily be justifiedby an occult view of the world. But this is not necessary:it might simplyimply a feelingfor analogy,for a web of a in correspondences, rhetoricof metamorphoses which everything reflects else. Hence the great role of synaesthesia, which, everything
62 Decaudin, p. 15; quoted from La Socidtd nouvelle, avril, 1894. "Anti-naturalisme, anti-prosaismede la podsie, recherchede la libert6 dans des efforts dans l'art, en reaction contre 1'enr6gimentation parnassienne ou naturaliste."

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of thoughrooted in physiologicalfactsand found all over the history became at that time merelya stylistic device, a mannerism poetry, This characterizationcould be easily imitated and transmitted.63 elaborated considerably we bear in mind that styleand world-view if and only together can definethe characterof a period or go together even of a single poet. Let me try to show, at least, how diverse and even incompatible were the theoriesof two such related poets as Baudelaire and MallarmL. Baudelaire's aestheticis mainly "romantic"; not in the sense of emotionalism,nature worship and exaltation of the ego, central in French romanticism, ratherin the English and German tradibut tion of a glorification creativeimagination,a rhetoricof metamorof phoses and universalanalogy. Though thereare subsidiarystrandsin he Baudelaire's aesthetics, his finest, graspsthe role of imagination, at derived "constructive imagination,"as he calls it in a termultimately It fromColeridge.64 gives a metaphysical meaning,"a positiverelation Art is another cosmos which transforms with the infinite."65 and hence humanizesnature. By his creation the artistabolishes the gulf between subject and object, man and nature. Art is "to create a suggestive magic containingat one and the same time the object and the subject, the external world and the artisthimself."66 Mallarm6 says almost the opposite in spite of some superficial resemblancesand the common attachment Poe and Wagner. Malto larm6 was the first radically discontentwith the ordinarylanpoet guage of communication;he attemptedto construean entirelysepaof than older cultivators rate language of poetryfar more consistently of diction" such as the practitioners trobarclus, or G6ngora "poetic or Mallarme's contemporary, Gerard Manley Hopkins. His aim of was no doubt in part negative: to exclude transforming language society,nature and the person of the poet himself.But it was also positive: language was again to become "real," language was to be magic,wordswere to become things.But thisis not, I think,sufficient reason to call Mallarm6 a mystic.Even the depersonalization he
63 See the many articles by Albert Wellek, e.g., "Das Doppelempfinden in der Geistesgeschichte,"in Zeitschriftfiir Aesthetik, XXIII (1929), 14-32; "Das Doppelempfinden im 18. Jahrhundert," in Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift fiir GeistesXIV (1936), 75-102. geschichte und Literahurwissenchaft, 64 "Constructiveimagination" quoted in English fromMrs. Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature, in Curiositdsesthdtiques,Conard ed. (Paris, 1923), p. 27965 Ibid., p. 275. "Elle est positivementapparent6e avec l'infini." 66 L'Art romantique, Conard ed. (Paris, 1925), p. 119: "C'est cr6er une magie suggestivecontenant A la fois l'objet et le sujet, le monde ext6rieur i l'artiste et

lui-mIme." l'artiste

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Truth. requires is not mystical.Impersonalityis rather objectivity, Art reaches for the Idea, which is ultimatelyinexpressible,because so abstractand general as to be devoid of any concretetraits.The term"flower"seemsto him poetic because it suggests "one, absent the fromall bouquets."67Art thus can only hint and suggest,not transformas it should in Baudelaire. The "symbol"is only one device to The so-called "negative" aestheticsof Mallarme is achieve this effect. thus nothing obscure. It had its psychologicalbasis in a feeling of who sterility, impotence and final silence. He was a perfectionist, of fulfillment: the book to end all proposed somethingimpossible books. "Everything earth existsto be containedin a book."68Like on before him, Mallarme wants to express the mystery of many poets the universe but feels that this mystery not only insoluble and is immenselydark but also hollow, empty,silent, Nothingnessitself. There seemsno need to appeal to Buddhism,Hegel, Schopenhaueror The atmosphereof nineteenth-century Wagner to account for this.09 and the general Neo-Platonic traditionin aesthetics suffice. pessimism Art searchesfor the Absolute but despairs of ever reaching it. The essence of the world is Nothingness, and the poet can only speak of this Nothingness.Art alone survives in the universe. Man's main vocation is to be an artist,a poet, who can save somethingfromthe general wreckage of time. The work or, in Mallarm6's terms,the Book, is suspended over the Void, the silentgodless Nothingness, Pocut offfromconcretereality, fromthe expressionof etryis resolutely the personalityof the poet, from any rhetoricor emotion, and becomes only a Sign, signifying In Nothing.70 Baudelaire, on the other transforms fromevil, creates a hand, poetry nature, extractsflowers new myth,reconcilesman and nature. But if we examine the actual verse of the symbolists this period of we cannot be content with formulaseither of creative imagination, suggestion, pure or absolute poetry.
67 Oeuvres completes, Pl6iade ed. (Paris, 1949), p. 368: "une fleur . . l'absente de tous bouquets." 68 Ibid., p. 378: "Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir Aun livre." 69 Jacques Scherer, L'Expression litteraire dans l'euvre de Mallarmd (Paris, 1947), PP- 155 ff,collects evidence for Mallarm"'s contacts with Platonism and occultism. Mallarme denied knowledge of Buddhism, Propos sur la podsie, ed. H. Mondor (Monaco, 1946), p. 59. Hasye Cooperman, The Aesthetic of Stiphane Mallarmd (New York, 1933), makes much of the influence of Wagner. Th-e only evidence of concern for Hegel is a letter of Villiers d'Isle-Adam to Mallarm6, quoted in Henri Mondor, Vie de Mallarmd (Paris, 1941), p. 222; "Quant A Hegel, je suis vraiment bien heureux que vous ayez accorde quelque attention A ce miraculeux genie." 70 See Guy Defel, L'Esthedtiquede Stdphane Mallarmd (Paris, 1951).

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On the thirdwider circle of abstractionwe can apply the term to the whole period on an internationalscale. Every such termis arbican be defendedas rooted in the conceptsof the but symbolism trary, as distinct meaningand as clearlysetting the period from in off period, fromromanthat precedingit: realism or naturalism.The difference ticismmay be less certainlyimplied. Obviously there is a continuity with romanticism and particularly German romanticism,also in France as has been recently argued again by WernerVordtriedin his Novalis und die franz6sichen Symbolisten (1963) .71 The direct contact of the French with the German romanticscame late and should not be overrated. Jean Thorel in "Les Romantiques allemandes seems to have been the firstto point et les symbolists frangaises," out the relation.72 Maeterlinck'sarticle on Novalis (1894) and his But little anthology (1896) came late in the movement.73 Wagner of course mediated between the symbolistsand German mythology though Mallarme's attitude,admiring toward the music, was tingled with ironyforWagner's subject matter.74 Heine, Early in the century, called himself, a romantique defroqueas he played the role of an inwhich, to my mind, has been exaggeratedin Kurt Weintermediary berg's study: Henri Heine: heraut du symbolismefrangais (1954).75 was widely translatedinto we E. T. A. Hoffmann, should not forget, view of music a Frenchand could supplyoccult motifs, transcendental and the theoryand practice of synaesthesia. Possibly even more importantwere the indirect contacts through English writers: through Carlyle's chapter on symbolismin Sartor Resartus and his essay on Novalis; through Coleridge fromwhom, Mrs. Crowe,Baudelaire drewhis definithroughanotherintermediary, tion of creative imagination; and throughEmerson,who was translated by Edgar Quinet.76 knew the theof Also French thinkers the early nineteenth century at ory of symbolism, least, in the wide application to all the religions of the world made by Creuzer whose Symbolikwas translatedinto
196371 Stuttgart,
72

In Entretienspolitiques et litte'raires, September 1891. 73 In Nouvelle Revue, 1894,and Les Disciples & Sais, suivi de Fragments (Bruxelles, 1985). The article on Novalis is included in Le Trdsor des humbles (1896).

74 Cf. "Richard Wagner: Reverie d'un potte frangais" (1885) in PlMiade ed., pp. 541-45. 75 New Haven, 195476 A. G. Lehmann, The SymbolistAesthetic in France, 1885-1895 (Oxford, 1950), makes good suggestions.

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French in 1825.77 Pierre Leroux used the idea of "symbolicpoetry" in There was Edgar Allan Poe who prominently the early thirties.78 drew on Coleridge and A. W. Schlegeland seemedso closelyto anticipate Bauderlaire's views that Bauderlaire quoted him as if he were Poe himself, sometimesdropping all quotation marks.79 howThe enormousinfluenceof Poe on the French demonstrates, and symbolism. betweenromanticism ever,most clearlythe difference of Poe is far frombeing a representative the romanticworld view or of the romanticaestheticin which imaginationis conceived as transformingnature. Poe has been aptly described as an "angel in a a machine": he combines a faith in technique and even technology, distrustof inspiration, rationalisticeighteenth-century a mind with a of The distrust inspiration, vague occult belief in "supernal" beauty.80 from the enmityto nature is the crucial point which sets symbolism all share it; while Rilke, romanticism. Baudelaire, Mallarme, Valkry a symbolist many of his proceduresand views, appears as highly in This is whyHugo romanticin his relianceon momentsof inspiration. Friedrichexcludes him fromhis book on the modernlyricand even disparageshim in a harsh passage.8' This is why the attemptto make Mallarmd a spiritualdescendantof Novalis, as Vordtriedetried,must fail. Mallarmd, one mightgrant,aims at transcendence but it is an the unity of while Novalis rapturouslyadores empty transcendence the mysterious universe.In short,the Romantics were Rousseauists, the symbolists beginningwith Baudelaire believe in the fall of man or if they do not use the religious phraseology, know that man is limited and is not, as Novalis believed, the Messiah of nature. The end of the romanticperiod is clearlymarked by the victoryof posiand pessimism. tivismand scientism, whichsoon led to disillusionment and even atheists,even if they Most symbolists were non-Christians with Oriental relitried to finda new religionin occultismor flirted who need not have read Schopenhauer They were pessimists gions. and Eduard von Hartmann,as Laforguedid, to succumbto the mood
77 Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten peared as Religions de l'antiquitd considerdes dans leurs translatedby Guigniaut in 1825. 78 See "Du style symbolique" in Le Globe, 29 March and a series of articles in Revue Encyclopdedique,1831. See my Criticism,III, 27-28. V6lker (181o) apformes symbolistes, 8 April, 1829, and History of Modern

79 In the essay on Gautier Baudelaire reproduces "The Poetic Principle." See also Marcel Frangon, "Poe et Baudelaire" in PMLA, LX (1945), 841-598o See my chapter in History of Modern Criticism,III, 152-63. 81 Strukturder modernenLyrik,p. 116.

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or of decadence, fin de sikcle, G6tterddimmerung, the death of God Nietzsche.82 prophesied by Symbolismis also clearly set offfrom the new avant-gardemovements after 1915: futurism,cubism, surrealism,expressionism, etc. There the faith in language has crumbled completelywhile in Mallarme and Valery language preservesit cognitive and even magic called Charmes.Orpheus power; Val6ry'scollectionof poems is rightly is the mythological hero of the poet: charmingthe animals, treesand even stones. With more recent art the view of analogy disappears: Kafka has nothingof it. Post-symbolist is abstractand allegorical art rather than symbolic.The image, in surrealism,has no beyond: it wells, at most,fromthe subconsciousof the individual. the Finally, thereis the highestabstraction, wide largestcircle; the of use of "symbolism"in all literature, all ages. But then the term, broken loose fromits historicalmoorings,lacks concretecontentand remains merelythe name for a phenomenon almost universal in all art. These reflections mustlead to what only can be a recommendation, to use the third sense of our term,to call the period of European to literature roughlybetween 1885 and 1914 "symbolism," see it as an internationalmovementwhich radiated originallyfrom France but produced great writersand great poetry also elsewhere. In Great Britain, Yeats and Eliot; in the United States,Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane; in Germany, George, Rilke and Hofmannsthal; in Russia, Blok, Ivanov and Bely; in Spain and South America,Dario, Machado and Guill6n. If we, as we should, extend the meaning of to symbolism prose,we can see it clearlyin the late Henry James,in the later Thomas Mann, in Proust, in the early Gide, in Joyce, Faulkner,and in D. H. Lawrence; and if we add the drama,we recognize it in the later stages of Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and in O'Neill. There is symbolistcriticismof distinction:an aestheticsin Mallarm6 and Val6ry,a looser creed in Remy de Gourmont,in Eliot school of symbolist and in Yeats and thereis a flourishing interpretation particularlyin the United States. Much of the French "new criticism" frankly Roland Barthes'snew pamphlet,Critiis symbolist. et vdritd(1966), pleads for a completelibertyof symbolist interque pretation. A our initial reminder. period conceptcan Still, we mustnot forget never exhaust its meaning.It is not a class concept of which the individual worksare cases. It is a regulativeidea: it struggles with preced82 See the review of Vordtriede's Novalis by Hans Robert Jauss in Romanische Forschungen,LXXVII (1965), 174-83.

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ing and followingideals of art. In the time under considerationthe strengthof the survivals was particularlygreat: Hauptmann's Die in Weber was performed the same year (1892) as Die Bliitter fifrdie Kunst began to appear; Blok's Poems on the Beautiful Lady were writtenin the same year (1901) as Gorky'sLower Depths. Within the same author and even within the same work of art the struggle was waged at times.Edmond Jaloux called Joyce"at the same time a The same is true of Proust and Mann. realist and a symbolist."'83 and naturalismas no other book of the combinessymbolism Ulysses time into a synthesisof grand proportion and strong tension. In Trieste Joyce lectured on two English writersand on two English Defoe and Blake.84 alone: theywere characteristically writers As agreementon the main periods of European literaturegrows, so agreementto add the period term"symbolism" the fiveperiods to now accepted should increase. But even if a different term should be victorious (thoughnone I can thinkof seems to me even remotely we preferable), should always recognizethat such a termhas fulfilled if its functionas a tool of historiography it has made us think not about individual worksand authorsbut about schools,trendsand only movementsand their internationalexpansion. Symbolismis at least a literaryterm which will help us to counteractthe dependence of much literaryhistoryon periodization derived from political and social history(such as the term"Imperialism"used in Marxistliterary histories which is perfectlymeaningless applied to poetry at that is time). Symbolism a term (and I am quoting the wordsI applied to draws our minds Baroque in 1945) "which prepares for synthesis, and facts, and paves away fromthe mere accumulationof observations the way for a futurehistoryof literatureas a fine art."''85
YALE UNIVERSITY

83 Quoted by Harry Levin, James Joyce (Norfolk,Conn., 1941), p. 19: "A la fois realiste et symboliste." 84 See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York, 1959), PP- 329-30. The lectures in 1912 were called "Verismo ed idealismo nella letteraturainglese." 85 See my Concepts of Criticism,p. 114.