Essays on Symons

THE MODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH ASSOCIATION'S recent commitment to publishing works by or on Arthur Symons was sustained in 2017 with selections edited by Nicholas Freeman (Arthur Symons: Spiritual Adventures) and by Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Arthur Symons: Selected Early Poems). That commitment continues with the publication in hand, a volume of essays on Symons's life and work, many of which discuss his personal, intellectual, and artistic relations with aspects of European culture. The editors inform us that these essays had their origins in "a symposium on Arthur Symons …held at the Università Iuav di Venezia in 2015." In their short but excellent introduction, Bizzotto and Evangelista argue that their collection, "the first … entirely dedicated to Symons[,] … aims to project a new, nuanced view of Symons into the twenty-first century." They suggest that their book studies Symons's "engagement with multiple literary genres … as well as his journalistic activity[,] … his interest in aesthetics and the arts, as well as his incessant work of cultural mediation of material from Italy, France, and Belgium which he carried out by means of travel, reviews, and translations, and the cultivation of an impressive literary network." This claim prompts two questions: how far does Bizzotto and Evangelista's collection succeed in achieving their ambitions for it? And—perhaps a variant of the same question—do the individual pieces in it cohere?

The essays are grouped into three sections: "Artistic Connections," "International Mediations," and "Places and Connections." The opening section is made up of three pieces. The first, by Lene Østermark-Johansen, discusses what the author calls the "interrelationship between Rodin's Sculpture and Modern Dance at the Fin de Siècle" [Østermark-Johansen's punctuation]. Østermark-Johansen discusses "Symons's life-long admiration of Rodin as the greatest of modern sculptors and contextualises his fascination within the framework of the development of modern dance." Rodin was virtually the only contemporary sculptor of interest to Symons; by contrast, his fascination with dance was life-long and more broadly based. Evidence for it can be seen in the early poem "Javanese Dancers." His interest in the Javanese troupe had begun with his encounter with them at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and in his work as a reviewer for the Star and the Sketch in the 1890s. Østermark-Johansen then proceeds to describe the importance for Symons of Loïe Fuller and the contemporary significance of her "one-woman show," which also took place in Paris in 1889. Østermark-Johansen connects Symons's interest in dance and sculpture with the claim that the show was "fully competitive with Rodin's elaborate self promotion." The same kind of observation is made of Isadora Duncan's performances, when Østermark-Johansen goes on to argue:

As in Symons's "The World as Ballet," Duncan's notion of the dancer is gendered. The radiant image of the female dancer, who blends soul and body into pure expression, is an idealised abstraction of woman, but unlike Symons's symbolist, aestheticised image, Duncan's vision is highly politicised. The fact that the silent image had now been given a voice, and even an articulate one, stressed the gendered tension between male spectator/critic/poet and female dancer, and male sculptor and female model. The "radiant intelligence" of Duncan's dancer of the future is one which applies both to the command of her body and her mind.… [Duncan's] art is self-begotten, and she is at once both dancer and choreographer, artist and work of art.

The outcome of all this, Østermark-Johansen concludes, is that Symons proved himself to be "at least one step removed from the truly cutting edge of the avant-garde," a claim which is corroborated by a number of the succeeding essays, particularly those by John Stokes and Nicholas Freeman. Indeed in the last pages of Østermark-Johansen's excellent and informative essay, Symons virtually disappears from view: the figure of the new female dancer, rather than Symons...