Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1850), prolific French novelist who wrote over 90 novels and short stories between 1829 and 1840. Balzac turned to literature having trained as a lawyer in the 1830s; during the 1840s he evolved an ambitious project of thematically linked novels, with recurring characters, the Comédie humaine. Although Balzac’s human comedy aimed to take in ‘scenes’ from across French society (‘provincial life’, ‘political life’ etc.), his most famous novels are probably those depicting life in Paris, such as Le Père Goriot (1835) and La Cousine Bette (1847) and Illusions perdues (1837–1843). Balzac’s writings are realist in style and focus on the materialism of the French middle classes in the years after the French revolution.
Baudelaire, Charles (1821–67), one of the pre-eminent poets of French literature. His collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal (1857) contains his most famous work, but his essays on art (particularly ‘The Painter of Modern Life’) have been highly influential, as have his prose poems and his translations from the American author Edgar Allan Poe. The world of Baudelaire’s poetry revels in sensual experience while revolting from its corruption. Symons translated a great deal of Baudelaire’s prose and poetry in the early years of the twentieth century, but his efforts were later excoriated by T.S. Eliot as ‘fumbled’.
Boehme, Jacob (1575–1624), German shoemaker turned mystic visionary and author of books on theology, philosophy and cosmology. His best known works are Mysterium Magnum (The Great Mystery) (1623), Aurora (1612) and De rerum signatura (1622), in which he maintained that ‘the whole outward visible world with all its being is a signature, or figure of the inward spiritual world’ (Ch. IX).
D’Annunzio, Gabriele (1863–1938), charismatic Italian novelist, playwright, poet and politician. D’Annunzio published his first collection of poetry, Primo vere, in 1879, aged 16. Among his most famous works is his novel Il Fuoco (1900), which alludes to his affair with the actress Eleonora Duse between 1895 and 1898. D’Annunzio’s novel Il Piacere (1889) has been compared to J.-K. Huysmans’ notorious novel of Decadence, À Rebours (1884), in form and content, although some critics maintain that his work displays sufficient interest in transcendent concerns to count as Symbolist. Symons met D’Annunzio (and Duse) in Paris during 1896 and translated several of his works, including The Dead City (1900), La Gioconda (1901) and Francesca da Rimini (1902).
Decadence. While Decadence was an important influence on literature across Europe at the close of the nineteeenth century, it is worth noting that different groups of writers in different countries came to align themselves in different ways with the term. In France, le décadence is traced back to literary expressions of discontent with the bourgeois consensus after the suppression of the Paris commune in 1871. However, it soon became associated with the poetry of Verlaine and the literary style of Huysmans, the Goncourt brothers and Mallarmé, modelled in part upon the syntax and exotic vocabulary of late Latin literature. Their work came to express a rejection of the philosophy and aesthetics of Positivism and Naturalism. In this respect, Decadence is a clear precursor of and influence on Symbolism.
In England during the 1880s and 1890s, the term came to be inseparable from a group of writers associated with the Yellow Book magazine: Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Arthur Symons himself, who wrote ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (see Appendix 1). See the introduction for a discussion of this problematic term in relation to Symons’ conception of the Symbolist movement.
De Quincey, Thomas (1785–1859), English journalist and author of Confessions of an Opium Eater (1822), an account of his own experiences with and addiction to opium. De Quincey emphasises the transformation of his experiences into symbolic and revealing visionary forms under the influence of the drug, although the euphoric start to the book shades into nightmare.
Flaubert, Gustave (1821–80), French novelist. Born into a medical family in Rouen, Flaubert was forced to abandon public life because of a series of epileptic fits in 1844. Retreating to his family’s home in Le Croisset, Flaubert became the most gifted stylist in French writing of the nineteenth century. Flaubert did not live in seclusion, however, travelling twice to Egypt and the Middle East, regularly visiting Paris from the 1860s onwards to keep in touch with literary life and conducting an affair with female author Louise Colet during the 1840s. His letters to Colet are a lesson in passion and commitment to precision in style and imaginative literature.
Flaubert is best known for his tale of provincial adultery, Madame Bovary (1857), and L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), a partially autobiographical novel of a young student’s experience in Paris. The last work he published during his lifetime, Trois contes (1877), is a collection of exquisitely written short stories.
Free verse – see vers libre.
Gautier, Théophile (1811–72), French poet, novelist and critic at the heart of the literary and journalistic scene in Paris during the mid-nineteenth century. Friend and contemporary to Baudelaire and Nerval, the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, with its rejection of political and didactic writing in favour of aesthetic formal values, supplied the Parnassian movement with its slogan of ‘L’Art pour l’art’ (‘art for art’s sake’). The novel itself contains a story of cross-dressing desire and sexual passion that challenged contemporary morals. Gautier also achieved popularity in France with Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863), a historical adventure story set in the seventeenth century.
His collection of exquisitely sculpted quatrains, Émaux et camées (1852), would later inspire T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound to experiment with the constraints of the same form.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832), foremost German Romantic writer, best known for his epic drama Faust, but also known throughout Europe for novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) – the book which made him a celebrity at the age of 25. Other works include his travel narrative Italian Journeys (1816), the novel Elective Affinities (1809), and a confessional work, Dichtung und Wahrheit (‘Poetry and Truth’), published in the year of his death.
Goncourt, Jules de (1830–70) and Edmond de (1822–96), French novelists and men of letters, most famous for their Journal (1887–96), recording in biographical and anecdotal form their view of contemporary artistic and literary life in Paris between 1851 and 1896. During the Second Empire they attended the salon of Princess Mathilde regularly, as well as the ‘dîners Magny’ where they met with Flaubert, Gautier and Taine, among others.
Towards the end of his life (after his brother’s death) Edmond de Goncourt held his own literary salons and left money towards the founding of the Académie Goncourt and the prestigious literary prize, le prix Goncourt.
Together the brothers wrote a series of novels, Germinie Lacerteux (1864), Manette Salomon (1867) and Madame Gervaisais (1869); and Edmond authored his own novels, including La Fille Élisa (1877), La Faustin (1882) and Chérie (1884). Their works are characterised by an emphasis on psychological and sexual realism, associated with the Naturalism of Émile Zola.
Symons refers to the Goncourts in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ and advertisements for the book that was to become The Symbolist Movement indicate that he planned to include them in the volume, but this did not happen until the expanded edition of 1919 (see Section II).
Heine, Heinrich (1797–1856), German poet best known for the short lyrics set to music by Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert as Lieder. Heine spent much of his life exiled in Paris, where his works were translated by Gerard de Nerval, amongst others. His essay ‘The Romantic School’ (1836) helped define our current understanding of that movement.
Heredia, José-María de (1842–1905), Cuban-born French poet on the editorial board of Le Parnasse contemporain. He was strongly influenced by Leconte de Lisle and attempted the systematic application of Parnassian principles to his poetry, working in the sonnet form from the 1860s. His best known work is the collection of sonnets Les Trophées (1893), published shortly before his election to the Académie française.
Hugo, Victor (1802–85), French poet, dramatist and novelist. One of the most famous writers in the nineteenth century and leader of the Romantic movement in French literature, he is probably best known today for two novels, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). However, collections of poems such as Feuilles d’Automne (1831), Les Châtiments (1856) and Les Contemplations (1856) have also received widespread acclaim.
Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906), Norwegian dramatist, renowned for his ‘problem plays’ that present key social and sexual topics in explicit, realistic terms. His plays are sometimes discussed in terms of Naturalism. These include A Doll’s House (1880) which addresses marriage and the roles imposed upon men and women within it by social convention, and The Wild Duck (1884), which deals with social morals, sexual guilt and inheritance. Ibsen’s work was espoused in England (where it caused controversy) by George Bernard Shaw, especially in his pamphlet The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).
The Kabbalah is a Jewish mystic theosophy, medieval in origins, which lays claim to open up scriptures using secret forms of knowledge, derived from a magical understanding of the cosmos. This is arrived at largely through numeric values and mathematical combinations derived from the Hebrew alphabet. For a history of its expansion into a global phenomenon, see Dan Joseph, Kabbalah: A Very Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Kahn, Gustave (1859–1936), French poet and editor who played a crucial role in le Symbolisme in France, publishing work by Rimbaud and Laforgue (with whom he was friends) in the magazine Vogue. He was a keen exponent of vers libre and even claimed to have invented the term, including a preface defending it in his first collection of poems in 1897.
Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie René (1818–94), French poet and a leading figure in the Parnassian movement in Paris, which found his commitment to impersonal aesthetic values exemplary. Leconte de Lisle’s major works are Poèmes antiques (1852), Poèmes barbares (1862) and Poèmes tragiques (1884).
Mendès, Catulle (1841–1919), French poet and critic, central figure in the Parnassian movement and co-founder of Le Parnasse Contemporain. Mendès married the historical novelist and poet Judith Gautier, daughter of Théophile Gautier, with whom he was friends.
Moreau, Gustave (1826–98), French painter closely associated with both Decadence and Symbolism. His works tend to combine mythic or classical topics with a style that mixed precise details and closely worked colours with nebulous, suggestive passages. J.-K. Huysmans singled out his work for praise in À Rebours, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 1883 and became a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1892.
Naturalism. The literary movement most closely associated with the work of Émile Zola, who used the term in the 1860s to describe his own attempts to surpass the literature of Realism. Naturalist texts draw on Positivism in their emphasis on the determining importance of science and fact. Zola conceived of fiction as a form of experiment intended to expose the workings of nature. Huysmans was also closely associated with Naturalism before rejecting it in favour of Decadence; he was one contributor (along with Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and others) to Les Soirées de Medan (1880), a collection of short stories, intended as a manifesto for the movement.
Parnasse. The Parnassians were a group of poets and writers largely organised by the efforts of Catulle Mendès, and taking inspiration from the poetic example of Leconte de Lisle. They rejected Romantic theories of inspiration and didactic poetry in favour of an emphasis on formal values, adopting Théophile Gautier’s ‘art for art’s sake’ as their rallying cry. Members included José-Maria de Heredia and Théodore de Banville, whose treatise on French verse gave voice to their views on rhyme. They published three volumes of verse, Le Parnasse contemporain, in 1866, 1871 and 1876, which included work by Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Many of the poets associated with ‘Le Parnasse’ would later become associated with Symbolism.
Pater, Walter (1839–94), fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford and foremost writer of Decadent critical prose. Pater is best known for the highly crafted essays on art and culture in The Renaissance and his carefully wrought historical novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885). His critical writings drew accusations of scandal for their hedonistic celebration of fleeting moments of appreciation. His writings were a sustained influence upon Symons from early in his career (see Introduction).
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49), American author, best known for his gothic and macabre short stories. Translated into French and popularised by Baudelaire, Poe’s works became highly influential upon French literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, inspiring the short stories of Villiers de l’Isle Adam and prompting Mallarmé to write his elegy ‘Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe’ in 1876.
Positivism. System of thought most strongly associated with the work of French philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte (1798–1857). In Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), Comte outlined a history of human thought, beginning with an emphasis on the role of supernatural forces, progressing to the development of metaphysical or abstract concepts, before culminating in scientific or positive methods, where knowledge is derived from material, observable phenomena. His confidence in the triumph of rationalism and experimental scientific methods was highly influential for thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Hippolyte Taine.
Rabelais, François (d. 1553), medieval French writer and humanist scholar, most famous for the satirical, bawdy and fantastic sequence of comic novels known as Pantagruel and Gargantua (1534–64).
Realism. The Realist movement in France is strongly associated with the painter Gustave Courbet (1819–77), who chose to exhibit his paintings (particularly The Burial at Ornans (1850)) under the title of ‘Le Réalisme’ when they were rejected by the official salons in 1855. Art critic and novelist ‘Champfleury’ (Jules Husson, 1821–89) wrote a catalogue for this exhibition, followed by a collection of articles, Le Réalisme (1857). The debate provoked Louis Duranty to establish a journal of the same title, which produced six issues in 1856–57.
In literary terms, realism has become associated with an emphasis on the working class, on sexual frankness and on the material circumstances of characters. It has been closely linked with the novels of Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola, although the latter evolved his own species of realism, Naturalism.
Redon, Odilon (1840–1916), French painter and print-maker, known for his mysterious and fantastic charcoal drawings and lithographs. During the 1880s the dreamy evocative forms in Redon’s works became associated with the Symbolist movement in France. Symons met Redon in 1890 and compared him to the self-taught British artist and mystic William Blake (1757–1827) in his article ‘A French Blake: Odilon Redon’ for the short-lived journal Art Review (July 1890).
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828–82), English poet and painter, son of Italian parents and brother to the poet Christina. Rossetti is most famous as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB). His best known poems include the sonnet sequence The House of Life (1868) and his best known paintings include The Blessed Damozel (1875–78).
Rossetti and the other members of the PRB came under attack from Robert Buchanan for their sensual values in an article titled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, published under the pseudonym ‘Thomas Maitland’ in the Contemporary Review in 1871. Although Rossetti proclaimed his indifference, his response to these criticisms has been linked to a period of mental breakdown. Symons’ essay ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ has been construed as a defence of literature in the face of similar criticisms.
Stendhal, pseudonym of Henri Beyle (1783–1842), French novelist, journalist and autobiographer. Stendhal is best known for Le Rouge et le noir (1830), depicting the rise of Julien Sorel, a carpenter’s son from the provinces, through the echelons of French society (until his fall), and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), a novel of contemporary historical events. His works combine a realistic style with social and political satire. La Vie de Henry Brulard (wr. 1835) turns his piquant wit upon his own early life and experiences in the Napoleonic wars in Italy.
Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772), Swedish scientist turned philosopher and mystic. Inspired by dreams and visions, in Heaven and Hell (1758) and other works he developed a theory of correspondences, according to which the physical world, including the body, is a symbol of the spiritual world and spiritual values. Swedenborg travelled extensively in England and died in London. A group of his followers there formed the New Church (poet William Blake was a member for a while) and in 1810 formed the Swedenborg Society to translate and propagate his works. As well as Nerval and Blake, Swedenborg’s writings were an important influence on W.B. Yeats, Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac, amongst others.
Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), Irish-born clergyman and writer, best known for his satirical fantasy in the form of a travel narrative, Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
Taine, Hippolyte (1823–93), French critic and historian, strongly interested in English writers and philosophers and closely associated with the philosophy of positivism. His Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1864) sets out his belief in the determining influence of material contexts upon society (defined as ‘race, milieu, moment’) and outlines his method of identifying the dominant characteristic (or ‘faculté maîtresse’) in works of art. He was a leading critic of his generation, who boldly championed Balzac and Stendhal and influenced the Naturalism of Émile Zola.
Tennyson, Alfred (1802–92), English poet, most famous for his celebration of English defeat during the Crimean War in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854). In 1833, following the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam, Tennyson began the long confessional elegy In Memoriam, although it was not published until 1850. He acquired fame and popularity with his allegorical study The Princess (1847) and his re-workings of Arthurian stories from Malory in verse form, Idylls of the King (1859); in 1850 he was appointed poet laureate. Although he has a reputation for conservatism, Tennyson’s output includes challenging works, such as his dramatic monologue Maud (1855), with its tale of erotic obsession and madness.
Vers libre (or free verse) breaks with key conventions of French versifi– cation, such as the use of a medial caesura or the alternation of masculine and feminine end-rhymes. Its development is closely associated with the poetry of Rimbaud, who experimented with abandoning rhyme in favour of assonance, although Verlaine also experimented with the use of lines containing an odd number of syllables (vers impairs), breaking with French traditions of symmetrical rhythmic patterning. Their Symbolist successors, such as Laforgue and Mallarmé, are credited with taking these innovations and freedoms even further.
Wagner, Richard (1813–83), German composer, known for his operatic re-tellings of Old German and Norse myths, most notably in Tristan und Isolde (wr. 1857–59; perf. 1865) and his Ring cycle of four operas: Das Rheingold (1869), Die Walküre (1870), Siegfried (1876) and Götterdämmerung (1876). Wagner’s emphasis upon the symbolic and narrative value of recurring musical themes, or leitmotifs, was a strong influence on nineteenth-century French poets and writers. One of the earliest Symbolist journals in France was the Revue wagnérienne founded by Téodor de Wyzewa and Édouard Dujardin in 1885.
Whistler, James McNeill (1834–1901), American painter and writer associated with Impressionism, aestheticism and the Decadent movement. He worked and travelled through Europe, but spent a considerable part of his life in London where he moved in the same literary circles as Oscar Wilde. He is most famous for Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (1872).
Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), Irish poet, dramatist and politician. As founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin he was a key figure in the Literary Revival in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century. Symons and Yeats met through the Rhymers’ Club in London during 1890; they later travelled to Paris together in 1896 and even shared lodgings at Fountaincourt together. As editor of the Savoy magazine (1896), Symons was instrumental in publishing work by Yeats. The two men corresponded closely during the period in which Symons edited The Symbolist Movement in Literature. For a discussion of the mutual channels of influence between Symons and Yeats see the Introduction. Yeats’ conduct during the period of Symons’ mental breakdown in 1908–10 was, however, a source of discord between the men and they never met after that period.
Yeats’ disillusionment with the politics and personnel of Irish culture is linked to the emergence in his work of a direct and confrontational voice. While he never abandoned Irish themes, he became known during the twentieth century as a mythopoeic poet of modernism and influenced almost every poet after him.
Following Irish independence in 1922, he became a senator and founder of the Irish academy.
Zola, Émile (1840–1902), French novelist, best known for the Rougon-Macquart series of novels, which attempts to depict French life in the nineteenth century across classes and material conditions. Zola was very much influenced by Positivism and theorised his practice as a novelist in Le Roman Experimental (1880), arguing that the novel should start from facts and material data. This essay became the ground of French Naturalism. His most famous novels are Germinal (1885), about a French mining community, and Thérèse Raquin (1867), about the guilty experiences of a dressmaker and her lover after the murder of her husband.
Zola’s novels became controversial in England when Henry Vizetelly was successfully prosecuted for obscenity in 1888 for his translation of Zola’s La Terre. Symons translated L’Assommoir by Zola in 1894, published Havelock Ellis’s defence of Zola in the first issue of the Savoy in 1896 and added ‘A Note on the Method of Zola’ to the second American edition of The Symbolist Movement in 1919 (see Appendix 2).