Signs of Anarchy: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Symbolist Critic at the Mercure de France, 1890-95

Les petites revues sont indispensables pour l'histoire du symbolisme, qui fut surtout une œuvre de poètes et de critiques: on ne peut saisir que là son expression originelle, sa signification esthétique.¹

If Naturalism was primarily invested in the novel, for Symbolism the book was merely secondary. It was in the numerous small journals that sprang up in the wake of Jean Moreas' "Symbolist Manifesto" in 1886 and under the aegis of the Third Republic liberalized publishing laws that poets and critics shaped and polemicized the anti-naturalist rebellion. In the mid 1880s, Symbolism was not yet the reigning appellation for the aesthetic experiments of the young generation. Gustave Kahn notes, "En 1885 ... nous parlions de symbole, nous n'avions pas créé le mot générique de symbolisme."² Debate raged over whether the term symbolism or decadence was more apt, whether the symbolists were only "pseudo-décadents," or the decadents merely profane symbolists. Adolphe Retté would later nostalgically recall the atmosphere of these journals as "jardins chatoyants" where theories ripened and verse flourished.³ Stressing the sheer number of journals that appeared (and often as quickly disappeared), Ernest Raynaud put it differently: "on assista à une véritable levée des plumes."⁴ The political overtones of Raynaud's characterization, framed in terms of generational combat, are significant. Jules Lethève, in his Impressionnistes et symbolistes devant la presse , argues that even more than the publication of particular works, it was the polemics in the press themselves—between small journals, and also between established, traditional critics (Brunetière, Lemaître, Anatole France) and these youthful upstarts they disdained—that consecrated the existence of the new literary school.

In contrast to both the combativeness and the ephemeral quality of most of these journals, Le Mercure de France was founded in 1890 on the premise of an open and eclectic editorial policy, a refusal to take part in these sectarian squabbles, and a commitment to poetry, prose, criticism and the visual arts. It quickly became the pre-eminent literary journal of the Parisian fin de siècle —"the confluence, even the obligatory passage for all literatures and all thought"⁵ —and continued publishing until 1965. In the first five years of its existence (1890-95), it published the poetry of Mallarmé, Verlaine and Lautréamont, the fiction and drama of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, D'Annunzio, Maeterlinck and Jarry. It was the first to publish the letters of Vincent Van Gogh and the first to translate Nietzsche into French.⁶ Most significantly, perhaps, the Mercure constituted a privileged site of collaboration between the arts. Its early art critic, Albert Aurier, was the first to define Symbolism in art in an ambitious (and now canonical) article on Gauguin, and gave the first critical attention to the work of Van Gogh. Together with Remy de Gourmont, the foremost literary critic of the journal, the two gave Symbolism its most coherent and consistent theoretical elaboration. Their efforts to provide a philosophical explanation for Symbolist aesthetics across diverse media was a large part of the journal's early success and signaled a changed role for the critic at the fin de siècle .

The linguistic experimentation of poets and writers whose ornamental prose and recherché archaisms drew attention to the materiality of language was deliberately paralleled in painting by artists like Gauguin and Bernard who used color and texture to emphasize the "structure of surface."⁷ But if poets and painters were united by their desire to reject the slavish depiction of outward appearances, their anti-mimetic techniques alienated an uncomprehending public. For this reason, the importance of the critic became considerably heightened—no longer merely an arbiter of taste or judge of value, he became a translator of meaning. As Lethève maintains: "les journalistes se substituent aux peintres et parfois même aux écrivains pour expliquer à la foule leurs intentions."⁸ The Mercure de France became the dominant Symbolist revue precisely for this reason, because as both a forum for innovative literary tendencies and as an...