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by conjuring up the three associated figures of crushed flowers, dishevelled by the wind, an overturned and mouldering cross, and a dead, unmourned idiot, makes this poem a model of the would-be profound production of a madhouse!

      When Moréas is not soft of brain, he develops a rhetorical turgidity which reminds us of Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau in his worst efforts. Only one example[144] of this kind, and we have done with him:

      ‘J’ai tellement soif, ô mon amour, de ta bouche,

       Que j’y boirais en baisers le cours detourné

       Du Strymon, l’Araxe et le Tanaïs farouche;

       Et les cent méandres qui arrosent Pitané,

       Et l’Hermus qui prend sa source où le soleil se couche,

       Et toutes les claires fontaines dont abonde Gaza,

       Sans que ma soif s’en apaisât.’

      Behind the leaders Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Moréas a troop of minor Symbolists throng, each, it is true, in his own eyes the one great poet of the band, but whose illusions of greatness do not entitle them to any special observation. Sufficient justice is dealt them if the spirit they are made of be characterized by quoting a few lines of their poetry. Jules Laforgue, ‘unique not only in his generation, but in all the republic of literature,’[145] cries: ‘Oh, how daily [quotidienne] is life!’ and in his poem Pan et la Syrinx we come upon lines like the following:

      ‘O Syrinx! voyez et comprenez la Terre et la merveille de cette matinée et la circulation de la vie.

       Oh, vous là! et moi, ici! Oh vous! Oh, moi! Tout est dans Tout!’[146]

      Gustav Kahn, one of the æstheticists and philosophers of Symbolism, says in his Nuit sur la Lande: ‘Peace descends from thy lovely eyes like a great evening, and the borders of slow tents descend, studded with precious stones, woven of far-off beams and unknown moons.’

      In German, at least, ‘borders of slow tents which descend’ is completely unintelligible nonsense. In French they are also unintelligible; but in the original their meaning becomes apparent. ‘Et des pans de tentes lentes descendent,’ the line runs, and betrays itself as pure echolalia, as a succession of similar sounds, as it were, echoing each other.

      Charles Vignier, ‘the beloved disciple of Verlaine,’ says to his mistress:

      ‘Là-bas c’est trop loin,

       Pauvre libellule,

       Reste dans ton coin

       Et prends des pilules …

      ‘Sois Edmond About

       Et d’humeur coulante,

       Sois un marabout

       Du Jardin des Plantes.’

      Another of his poems, Une Coupe de Thulé, runs thus:

      ‘Dans une coupe de Thulé

       Où vient pâlir l’attrait de l’heure,

       Dort le sénile et dolent leurre

       De l’ultime rêve adulé.

      ‘Mais des cheveux d’argent filé

       Font un voile à celle qui pleure,

       Dans une coupe de Thulé

       Où s’est éteint l’attrait de l’heure.

      ‘Et l’on ne sait quel jubilé

       Célèbre une harpe mineure

       Que le hautain fantôme effleure

       D’un lucide doigt fuselé! …

       Dans une coupe de Thulé!’

      These poems remind us so forcibly of those doggerel rhymes at which in Germany jovial students are often wont to try their skill, and which are known as ‘flowery [lit. blooming] nonsense,’ that, in spite of the solemn assurance of French critics, I am convinced that they were intended as a joke. If I am right in my supposition, they are really evidences, not of the mental status of Vignier, but of his readers, admirers, and critics.

      Louis Dumur addresses the Neva in the following manner:

      ‘Puissante, magnifique, illustre, grave, noble reine!

       O Tsaristsa [sic!] de glace et de fastes Souveraine! Matrone hiératique et solennelle et vénérée! … Toi qui me forces à rêver, toi qui me deconcertes, Et toi surtout que j’aime, Émail, Beauté, Poème, Femme. Néva! j’évoque ton spectacle et l’hymne de ton âme!’

      And René Ghil, one of the best-known Symbolists (he is chief of a school entitled ‘évolutive-instrumentiste’), draws from his lyre these tones, which I also quote in French; in the first place because they would lose their ring in a translation, and, secondly, because if I were to translate them literally, it is hopeless to suppose that the reader would think I was serious:

      ‘Ouïs! ouïs aux nues haut et nues où

       Tirent-ils d’aile immense qui vire …

      et quand vide

      et vers les grands pétales dans l’air plus aride—

      ‘(Et en le lourd venir grandi lent stridule, et

       Titille qui n’alentisse d’air qui dure, et!

       Grandie, erratile et multiple d’éveils, stride

       Mixte, plainte et splendeur! la plénitude aride)

      ‘et vers les grands pétales d’agitations

       Lors évanouissait un vol ardent qui stride. …

      ‘(des saltigrades doux n’iront plus vers les mers. …)’

      One thing must be acknowledged, and that is, the Symbolists have an astonishing gift for titles. The book itself may belong to pure madhouse literature; the title is always remarkable. We have already seen that Moréas names one of his collection of verses Les Syrtes. He might in truth just as well call it the North Pole, or The Marmot, or Abd-el-Kader, since these have just as much connection with the poems in the little volume as Syrtes; but it is undeniable that this geographical name calls up the lustre of an African sun, and the pale reflection of classic antiquity, which may well please the eye of the hysteric reader. Edouard Dubus entitles his poem, Quand les Violons sont partis; Louis Dumur, Lassitudes; Gustave Khan, Les Palais nomades; Maurice du Plessis, La Peau de Marsyas; Ernest Raynaud, Chairs profanes and Le Signe; Henri de Régnier, Sites et Episodes; Arthur Rimbaud, Les Illuminations; Albert Saint Paul, L’Echarpe d’Iris; Viélé-Griffin, Ancæus; and Charles Vignier, Centon.

      Of the prose of the Symbolists, I have already given some examples. I should further like to cite only a few passages from a book which the Symbolists declare to be one of their most powerful mental manifestations, La Littérature de tout-à-l’heure, by Charles Morice. It is a sort of bird’s-eye view of the development of literature up to the present time, a rapid critique of the more and most recent books and authors, a kind of programme of the literature of the future. This book is one of the most astonishing which exists in any language. It strongly resembles Rembrandt as Educator, but is far beyond that book in the utter senselessness of its concatenations of words. It is a monument of pure literary insanity, of ‘graphomania’; and neither Delepierre in his Littérature des Fous, nor Philomnestes (Gustave Brunet) in his Fous Littéraires, quotes examples of more complete mental dislocation than are visible in every page of this book. Notice the following confession of faith by Morice:[147] ‘Although in this book treating only of æsthetics—although of æsthetics based upon metaphysics—we shall remember to refrain, as far as possible, from pure philosophizing, we must approximately paraphrase a word which will more than once be made use of, and which, in the highest sense here put upon it, is not incapable of being paraphrased. God is the first and universal cause, the final and universal end; the bond between spirits; the point of intersection where two parallels would

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