Mallarmé's Letters to Arthur Symons: Origins of the Symbolist Movement

346 MALLARMÉ'S LETTERS TO ARTHUR SYMONS: ORIGINS OF THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT By Bruce Morris (San Carlos, California) It is now generally assumed that it was Yeats who weaned Arthur Symons from Decadent affectation, recast him in a PanCeltic mold, and who supplied the controlling thesis for Symons' best book of criticism. The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).1 But before Yeats could formulate his grand synthesis of magic, psychology and aesthetics, it was necessary that Symons be on intimate terms with those French writers he would eventually popularize as members of a new, international "Symbolist School." For although Yeats was the first to link French symbolistes, Pre-Raphaelites and Celts within a contemporary anti-materialistic "movement" in poetry, drama, and the visual arts, he was forced to concede that this new "movement" lacked "sufficient philosophy and criticism" unless those essential ingredients were "hidden in the writings of M. Mallarmé, which I have not French enough to understand." Yeats instead reached back and converted William Blake into "the first great symboliste of modern times."2 Symons, on the other hand, had been acquainted with Mallarmé since 1890 when he and Havelock Ellis made an artistic pilgrimage to France and attended a mardi in the rue de Rome. Although impressed with Mallarmé's impersonal dedication to poetry, Symons was initially more attracted to the personality and art of Paul Verlaine, whom he admired immensely. However, after Verlaine's death in January 1896, Symons turned increasingly toward Stéphane Mallarmé as the chief living representative of the intérieur school of modern French verse. The following three letters to Symons from Mallarmé3 reveal some interesting new details of the cultural exchange Symons was helping to facilitate outre-Manche between the Continental Symbolists and their counterparts in London and Dublin. In the first, written from his country retreat at Valvins on 1 July 1896, Mallarmé offers his assistance having The Savoy advertised in the famous Revue Blanche and next asks Symons, in exchange, to serve as London correspondent of the committee established to collect subscriptions for a Paris memorial to Verlaine. Here Mallarmé also acknowledges the genius of The Savoy's principal illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley, describing his illustrations "avec préciosité de leur outrance," in terms he usually applied to the elaborate language of his own poetry. In the second, dated Paris, 12 January 1897, Mallarmé lavishly praises Symons' translation from the Hérodiade (which had just appeared in the final December 1896 number of The Savoy), and then relays that 347 Symons will soon be receiving a review copy of Divagations, a recent collection of Mallarmé's essays and prose poems. He goes on to note that the rest of the Hérodiade will not be ready for Symons to translate though until that coming spring. Thomas Jay Garbáty has cited two of these letters previously in his article "The French Coterie of The Savoy 1896,"4 but misquotes the first, severely truncates the second, and ignores entirely the existence of a third letter (Paris, 28 February 1897), which is probably the most important of the trio because in it Mallarmé specifically endorses Symons' interpretation of Divagations and assigns him the difficult task of explicating Mallarme's aesthetic philosophy "là délicatement et magnifiquement," a suggestion that later matured into an essay which would become the centerpiece of The Symbolist Movement. Like Yeats, Mallarmé too was quick to perceive Symons' greatest strength, his emphathetic ability to serve as a clear medium for the transmission of the characteristic images and ideas of other artists. NOTES !•See John M. Munro, "Arthur Symons and W. B. Yeats: The Quest for Compromise," Dalhousie Review 45 (1965), 137-52. 2w. B. Yeats, "William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy," The Savoy: an Illustrated Monthly, ed. Arthur Symons, No. 3 (July 1896), 41; hereafter cited as Savoy, followed by the number and month of issue. 3stéphane Mallarmé, letters to Arthur Symons: 1 Juillet (1896), 12 Janvier 1897, and 28 Février 1897, Box 24, ts. and holographs, Arthur Symons Papers, Princeton Univ. Library, Princeton, New Jersey; hereafter cited as ASP. I have been able to quote these letters by special permission of Princeton...