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T. S. Eliot and the Fin de Siècle Edward A. Geary Brigham Young University It is a commonplace of Eliot scholarship to date his serious development as a poet from his discovery of the French symbolists in late 1908. This event was undoubtedly important, but symbolism pervaded the arts at the end of the nineteenth century, and Eliot's undergraduate poetry shows that his symbolist tendencies were already well established before he encountered the version practiced by Laforgue and Mallarmé. An examination of the early poems, especially "La Figlia che Piange," which I take to be the culmination of the first phase of Eliot's career, will illustrate both his initial fascination and his growing dissatisfaction with fin de siècle aesthetic postures. Walter Pater's famous dictum, from "The School of Giorgione" (1873), echoes through the last decades of the nineteenth century like a musical leitmotif: "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." But though Pater regarded music as "the typical, or ideally consummate art," he claimed that each of the arts seeks to attain "a partial alienation from its own limitations" by incorporating qualities of the other arts (134-35). Nothing is more characteristic of the European fin de siècle than this emphasis on artistic cross-fertilization, the closeness of the arts to one another being perhaps a corollary of the separation of art from life. Literary works were called "portraits," "pastels," "nocturnes," "airs," or "symphonies." Symbolist painting at the turn of the century drew much of its inspiration from the French symbolist poets (Pilkington 2), but the symbolist poets were inspired in their turn by the Pre-Raphaelite painters (LucieSmith 43). The music of the period is characterized by musical landscapes and "tone poems." Indeed, in the case of Debussy, music aspires toward the condition of symbolist poetry. Even such a writer as Joseph Conrad, deeply suspicious of aestheticism, falls into Paterian rhetoric when he declares, in the Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus, " that the artist in words "must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture , the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music — which is the art of arts" (146). Pater's rationale for the supremacy of music is that ' 'while in all other forms of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form" (135), music, in "its consummate moments," achieves a "perfect identification of matter and form" (139). This perfect fusion is crucial, Pater claims, because art is "always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material" (138). Pater's choice of terms is interesting, suggesting both that "responsibilities" to subject and 21 22Rocky Mountain Review material exist and that they are impediments to pure art. His application of this idea to poetry constitutes a virtual license for the symbolists . He declares that the lyric is ' 'the highest and most complete form of poetry," artistically, "precisely because in it we are least able to detach the matter from the form. . . . And the very perfection of such poetry often appears to depend, in part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding . . ." (137). This was the aesthetic atmosphere in which T. S. Eliot grew up. His mother gave him Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance while he was still a schoolboy in St. Louis (Soldo 32), and he admitted to being strongly impressed at an early age by the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam and Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" (Bergonzi 4). Although his first verses published in the Smith Academy Record reflect his reading of Byron and Ben Jonson rather than the Victorians, his undergraduate poetry clearly shows the influence of the fin de siècle. There are echoes of A. E. Housman in "Song: 'When we came home across the hill' " (PWEY 18), which appeared in the Harvard Advocate in May 1907, and the language of Swinburne runs through "Circe's Palace" (PWEY 20), published in November 1908. But "Circe's Palace" is not merely...

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