"I claim only an equal liberty for the rendering of every mood of that variable and inexplicable and contradictory creature which we call ourselves, of every aspect under which we are gifted or condemned to apprehend the beauty and strangeness of the world" (Preface to the Second Edition of "Silhouetes": Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli, London, February 1896).
Arthur Symons : Selected Letters, 1880-1935
Days and Nights (1889)
London Nights (1895)
The Symbolist movement in literature (1899)
SYMONS, Arthur William (1865-1945)
In The Decadent Movement in Literature:
"Impressionism and symbolism are really working on the same hypothesis, applied in different directions.... The Impressionist...would flash upon you in a new, sudden way so exact an image of what you have just seen.... The Symbolist in this new, sudden way, would flash upon you the 'soul' of that which can be apprehended only by the soul--the finer sense of things unseen, the deeper meaning of things evident."
Lionel Johnson to Katherine Tynan: "Symons is a slave to impressionism, whether the impression be precious or not. A London fog, the blurred, tawny lamplights, the red omnibus, the dreary rain, the depressing mud, the glaring gin-shop, the slatternly shivering women: three dexterous stanzas telling you that and nothing more."
(August 5, 1909):
"He saw liquid gold, coral and orient pearl. Because he saw them, they were his. These kings and queens are somewhere out of the world, in a realm where magic entrances the senses. The mere thought of that wonderful East inflamed his imagination to rise towards the clouds and to burn with unquenchable fire."
on Nerval (1909-1910):
"It was only by the effort of this contact with people who lived so entirely for the day, the minute, that he could find even a temporary foothold. With them, at least, he could hold back all the stars, and the darkness beyond them, and the interminable approach and disappearance of all the ages, if only his eyes on so frank an abandonment to the common drunkenness of most people of this world, here for once really living the symbolic intoxication of their ignorance!"
Like Whitman's prose in Democratic Vistas, careful controlled art (seeing to admit only pleasure) for the sensitive, cultured ear--but also about street things.
"Venetian Nights," (March 23, 1894):
"Only to live, only to be
In Venice, is enough for me.
To be a beggar, and to lie
At home beneath the equal sky,
To feel the sun, to drink the night,
Had been enough for my delight;...
Here my ambition dies; I ask
No more than some half-idle talk,
To be done idly, and to fill
Some gaps of leisure when I will..."
Confessions:
"It is one of the terrors of human existence that we may be lead at once to seek and shun solitude; unable to endure the nostalgia of its absence, unable to bear the mortal pressure of its embrace."
"To have drunk of the cup of dreams is to have drunk of the cup of eternal memory."
Confessions:
That Demon of Restlessness... "...as if one were driven onward by the intensity of a howling wind across a barren heath that verges on the sea."
"The sterile glitter and desolate fascination of the salt marshes, their innate splendours and barren beauties and multitudinous monotony of expanse."
London Nights (1895)
Prologue.
My life is like a music-hall,
Where, in the impotence of rage,
Chained by enchantment to my stall,
I see myself upon the stage
Dance to amuse a music-hall.
'Tis I that smoke this cigarette,
Lounge here, and laugh for vacancy,
And watch the dancers turn; and yet
It is my very self I see
Across the cloudy cigarette.
My very self that turns and trips,
Painted, pathetically gay,
An empty song upon the lips
In make-believe of holiday:
I, I, this thing that turns and trips!
The light flares in the music-hall,
The light, the sound, that weary us;
Hour follows hour, I count them all,
Lagging, and loud, and riotous:
My life is like a music-hall.
Epilogue: Credo.
Each, in himself, his hour to be and cease
Endures alone, yet few there be who dare,
Sole with themselves, their single burden bear,
All the long day until the night's release.
Yet, ere the night fall, and the shadows close,
This labour of himself is each man's lot;
All a man hath, yet living, is forgot,
Himself he leaves behind him when he goes.
If he have any valiancy within,
If he have made his life his very own,
If he have loved and laboured, and have known
A strenuous virtue, and the joy of sin;
Then, being dead, he has not lived in vain,
For he has saved what most desire to lose,
And he has chosen what the few must choose,
Since life, once lived, returns no more again.
For of our time we lose so large a part
In serious trifles, and so oft let slip
The wine of every moment, at the lip
Its moment, and the moment of the heart.
We are awake so little on the earth,
And we shall sleep so long, and rise so late,
If there is any knocking at that gate
Which is the gate of death, the gate of birth.
Confessions: A Study in Pathology. New York: Fountain, 1930.
XIII
"Nights of insomnia, days of anxious waiting, the sudden shock of such and event as this--at that critical moment, at that tragic crises of my existence--had for some time made me lose the thread which conducted me through intricacies of my world: for had I not been for I know not how many weary months, the dreamer of unbought and unsought dreams who is in peril at the hands of those very real phantoms who were the reflection of my fears? To have drunk of the cup of dreams is to have drunk the cup of eternal memory. The past, and it seemed to me the present, were continually with me; only the future fled continually from under my feet. That exit of mine was so sharp an awakening, from one state to another, that it led me across that narrow bridge of one step which lies between the Heaven I hoped for and Hell I had left" (88).
Arthur Symons, Essay on Meredith (1887): "What decadence in literature really means is that learned corruption of language by which style ceases to be organic and becomes, in the pursuit of some new expressiveness or beauty, deliberately abnormal."
"An Autumn City"
"...that sympathetic submissiveness to things which meant for him so much of the charm of life."
"...her mind took no subtle color from things, nor was there any active world within her which could transmute everything into its own image."
"She was dependent on an exterior world, cut to a narrow pattern, and, outside that, nothing had any meaning for her."
"Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticises before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself. Take, for instance, the idea of beauty. Almost every one can see the beauty of Raphael, only a certain number can see the beauty of Velasquez, not many can see the beauty of Blake. In the human figure, every one can see the beauty of a breast; not many can see the beauty of a shoulder-blade. In nature, every one can see the beauty of the Alps at dawn; not many can see the beauty of a putrescent pool. Yet all these are but different forms of the same essential beauty; all wait patiently for the same acceptance, all offer themselves to the same mere sight of the eyes." "Rodin" Symons.
"But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves."