The Dialogue of Life and Art in Arthur Symons' Spiritual Adventures

105 THE DIALOGUE OF LIFE AND AHT IN A3THUR SYMONS' SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES By Jan B. Gordon (State University of New York at Buffalo) Art begins where a man wishes to immortalise the most vivid moment he has ever lived. Life has already, to one not an artist, become art in that moment. And the making of one's life into art is after all the first duty and privilege of every man.l Although Arthur Symons* prescriptions about the role of art have long been viewed as the quintessence of the yellow nineties, his oft-neglected short fiction is Just as interesting, if for no other reason, than because it marks a kind of culmination in his career. Published in 1905, only three years prior to the initial symptoms of Symons* madness, the Spiritual Adventures provides imaginative variations upon the themes that had long preoccupied their author: the perpetual threat of imprisonment by the randomness of nature; the necessity of a mediating mask; and, ultimately, a progressive loss of selfhood which characterizes the conversion to art. ^^^^ Symons prefaces his Spiritual Adventures2 with an auto- Λγ biographical sketch, "A Prelude to Life," detailing his *%)'£* growth from infancy through adolescence. The most diHP rectly personal of the stories, the reflective voice ■that speaks in "A Prelude" sets it apart from the omnif sclent author found in the other eight stories. The most striking feature of the youth's childhood is the antiphony set up by the conflicting religious views of his parents. The father's Non-conformist convictions initiate the youth into an atomized, fluid universe:". . . what seemed so real and so permane ent to me, was but an episode in existence, a little finite part of eternity" [SA_, p. 17J. In contrast, the boy's mother is entirely worthy of his admiration, for she has succeeded in uniting the moments of her existence; present, past, and future are part of the simultaneity of experience: "life was everything to her, and life was indestructible" [SA, p. 23j. Without the organizing structure of any formal religion, she has brought about a union of the permanent and the mutable by converting her life into art. Through her guidance, the boy develops an insatiable curiosity about the myriad forms of life around him, and the "Prelude" concludes, like so many Victorian autobiographies, with a pilgrimage from rural Warwick to the hurly-burly of London. In the sea of faces that 106 ity of appearances into a religion of art - facial expression becomes , for him, part of a "religion of eyes" fSA. p. 26J. It is the initial step in converting experience into an aesthetic. Yet, lurking behind any fantasy of converting life to art is the boy's remembrance of a mad uncle who, unable to preserve the sanctity of self when confronted with the randomness of experience, spends his life lying nude in the garden of the childhood house. Yeats* choice of madman or saint would seem to be, similarly, the alternatives for Symons· aesthetic soul; in its prophecy of insanity, "A Prelude to Life" was accurate enough. As Barbara Charlesworth has suggested,3 Symons· first story in the collection is only quasi-autobiographical. By comparing the story to the account of Symons· childhood in Lhombreaud's biography, it is clear that Symons has refashioned the events of his growth into art.**· By calling it a "prelude," the author has caused life to approach the condition of music, that state which Symons, like Pater, felt to be the highest manifestation of art.5 Even more important is the way "A Prelude to Life" introduces the themes which reappear in the succeeding stories. Each of the protagonists in the remaining Spiritual Adventures, like the youth alone in the city, must attempt to reconcile the permanence of the "self" against the vagaries of random sensation. Self-isolation or a conversion at the altar of art become way stations in the life pilgrimages of Symons· personalities. In "Esther Kahn" Symons takes as his subject a young Jewess from the Liverpool slums. Not unlike the adolescent Symons of "A Prelude to Life," she finds herself trapped by the urban squalor of dockside surroundings. When she is introduced to the...