The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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Poetry in the Late Nineteenth

Century: The Symbolists

Science and Technology

114 CHAPTER 31 The Move Toward Modernism

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fine rods of ruby surround the water rose.” The Symbolists

tried to represent nature without effusive commentary, to

“take eloquence and wring its neck,” as Verlaine put it. In

order to imitate the indefiniteness of experience itself, they

might string words together without logical connections.

Hence, in Symbolist poetry, images seem to flow into one

another, and “meaning” often lies between the lines.

Mallarmé

For Stéphane Mallarmé, the “new art” of poetry was a

religion, and the poet–artist was its oracle. Inclined to

melancholy, he cultivated an intimate literary style based

on the “music” of words. He held that art was “accessible

only to the few” who nurtured “the inner life.” Mallarmé’s

poems are tapestries of sensuous, dreamlike motifs that

resist definition and analysis. To name a thing, Mallarmé

insisted, was to destroy it, while to suggest experience was

to create it.

Mallarmé’s pastoral poem, “L’après-midi d’un faune”

(“The Afternoon of a Faun”) is a reverie of an erotic

encounter between two mythological woodland creatures,

a faun (part man, part beast) and a nymph (a beautiful for-

est maiden). As the faun awakens, he tries to recapture the

experiences of the previous afternoon. Whether his elusive

memories belong to the world of dreams or to reality is

uncertain; but, true to Bergson’s theory of duration, expe-

rience becomes a stream of sensations in which past and

present merge. As the following excerpt illustrates,

Mallarmé’s verbal rhythms are free and hypnotic, and his

images, which follow one another with few logical transi-

tions, are intimately linked to the world of the senses.

From Mallarmé’s “The Afternoon

of a Faun” (1876)

I would immortalize these nymphs: so bright 1

Their sunlit coloring, so airy light,

It floats like drowsing down. Loved I a dream?

My doubts, born of oblivious darkness, seem

A subtle tracery of branches grown 5

The tree’s true self—proving that I have known,

Thinking it love, the blushing of a rose.

But think. These nymphs, their loveliness... suppose

They bodied forth your senses’ fabulous thirst?

Illusion! which the blue eyes of the first, 10

As cold and chaste as is the weeping spring,

Beget: the other, sighing, passioning,

Is she the wind, warm in your fleece at noon?

No; through this quiet, when a weary swoon

Crushes and chokes the latest faint essay 15

Of morning, cool against the encroaching day,

There is no murmuring water, save the gush

Of my clear fluted notes; and in the hush

Blows never a wind, save that which through my reed^1

Puffs out before the rain of notes can speed 20

Upon the air, with that calm breath of art

According to Bergson, two primary powers, intellect

and intuition, governed the lives of human beings. While

intellect perceives experience in individual and discrete

terms, or as a series of separate and solid entities, intuition

grasps experience as it really is: a perpetual stream of sen-

sations. Intellect isolates and categorizes experience

according to logic and geometry; intuition, on the other

hand, fuses past and present into one organic whole. For

Bergson, instinct (or intuition) is humankind’s noblest fac-

ulty, and duration, or “perpetual becoming,” is the very stuff

of reality—the essence of life.

In 1889, Bergson published his treatise Time and

Freewill, in which he described true experience as dura-

tional, a constant unfolding in time, and reality, which

can only be apprehended intuitively, as a series of qualita-

tive changes that merge into one another without precise

definition.

Bergson’s poetical view of nature had much in common

with the aesthetics of the movement known as symbolism,

which flourished from roughly 1885 to 1910. The

Symbolists held that the visible world does not constitute

a true or universal reality. Realistic, objective representa-

tion, according to the Symbolists, failed to convey the

pleasures of sensory experience and the intuitive world of

dreams and myth. The artist’s mission was to find a lan-

guage that embraced the mystical, the erotic, and the inef-

fable world of the senses. For the Symbolists, reality was a

swarm of sensations that could never be described but only

suggestedby poetic symbols—images that elicited moods

and feelings beyond literal meanings.

In literature, the leading Symbolists were the French

poets Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), Paul Verlaine

(1844–1896), ArthurRimbaud (1854–1891), and Stéphane

Mallarmé (1842–1898), and the Belgian playwright

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949). Arthur Rimbaud, who

wrote most of his poetry while in his teens, envisioned the

poet as seer. Freeing language from its descriptive function,

his prose poems shattered the rational sequence of words

and phrases, detaching them from their traditional associ-

ations and recombining them so as to create powerful sense

impressions. In one of the prose poems from his

Illuminations, for example, Rimbaud describes flowers as

“Bits of yellow gold seeded in agate, pillars of mahogany

supporting a dome of emeralds, bouquets of white satin and

1877 Thomas Edison (American) invents the phonograph

1892 Rudolf Diesel (German) patents his internal

combustion engine

1893 Henry Ford (American) test-drives the

“gasoline-buggy”

(^1) A pipe or flute.