SYMBOLISTS, THE, the name given to a large but loosely connected group of French poets (many of them of foreign ex traction) writing in the 188o's. The term decadent was often used as an alternative, especially of the extreme manifestations of the movement. In 1888 the critic Brunetiere suggested that the his tory of French poetry from the 17th century could be plotted in three phases, the architectural, the pictorial and the musical. Bearing this programme in mind and taking as examples from his own literature Dryden's Ode to Mistress Anne Killigrew, Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and Tennyson's Claribel, the English reader will best understand the scope and extension of the Symbol ist movement. In its origin the movement was a revolt against Naturalism as being too concrete, and against Parnassianism as be ing too clear-cut, to satisfy young minds who had caught from E. A. Poe and Baudelaire, from Wagner, and to some extent from the Pre-Raphaelites, the "sense of the ineffable" and were seeking a medium for its expression. Their object was not to declaim, not to depict, and least of all to transcribe, but to suggest : to communicate in their lost subtlety the most intimate and evanes cent tones of experience. Baudelaire himself, Banville, Gerard de Nerval and Villiers de l'Isle Adam had already been engaged in the same quest. The common stock of poetic symbolism has been accumulated to serve common uses : a private symbolism, unless it is forced into currency by a great poet, is bound to be largely unintelligible and will often be suspected at least to be nonsense. It is not surprising therefore that the French public
was at first half inclined to regard the new poetry as a hoax, and on the other hand to take seriously a volume of parodies Les Deliquescences d'Adore Floupette (1885) which first made it popularly familiar. But in the meantime Verlaine had entered the circle ; he gave it a watchword : "Pas de couleur, rien que la nuance," and in his book Trois Poetes Maudits introduced the young decadents to their true masters, Rimbaud, Corbiere, Mal larme. The year 1885 may be taken as the centre of the move ment; besides the three already mentioned, Rodenbach, Ver haeren and Jean Moreas had then already appeared : Laforgue, H. de Regnier and Viele Griffin published their first volumes in 1885, and they were followed by Remy de Gourmont in 1886, Maeterlinck in 1889, Claudel in 189o, Robert de Montesquieu in 1893. With Samain's first volume in this last year the move ment may be said to rejoin the main stream. Its principal repre sentative, in prose, had been J. K. Huysmans : as poets, Rim baud, Verlaine and Mallarme, still after 4o years dominant influ ences in French literature. It was Mallarme who provided the symbolists with their aesthetic theory and the most accomplished models of metric style, and in the whole course of the move ment his weekly conversations were probably the most effective influence at work—an influence not unfelt in England, where it coincided with the aesthetic movement and the Celtic renascence.