Moréas’ Symbolism

 

Translations from Moréas are my own.  See endnotes for the original French.

 

     Like most of the manifestoes written during the great procession of modern art movements, Jean Moréas’ “Le Symbolisme” [1] is stronger when treated as an imaginative text than as a theoretical statement.  There was no stable and organized Symbolist group though Moréas did publish a short-lived journal called Le Symboliste; some of his ideas were shared with others often identified as Symbolists, others are his alone.  Indeed, the essay imagines Symbolism as not quite realized.  “the Supreme Enchantment has not yet come: a stubborn and jealous job of work awaits newcomers.” [2]  Far from setting out a coherent program, the essay sails on the high winds of the author’s animated spirits, charged with polemical energy, expressing total confidence against the background of a dazzling display of pyrotechnic rhetoric. 

     Moréas opens with an idea that implies no stable set of literary recommendations.  He proposes a cyclic and organic concept of art in which each movement is born, ages, and then declines as the next arises. [3]  The sole imperative is that proclaimed by Ezra Pound: “Make it new.” [4]  Culture follows an inexorable recurring pattern in which “that which had been novel and spontaneous turns cliched and commonplace.”  Thus “after the classical cliché, there came the romantic cliché.” [5] 

     Such ideas are widespread – one thinks of the neoterics of the first century C. E. or Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Nova Poetria of the early thirteenth, but they are hardly universal.  Defenders of imitation of the masters and strict adherence to convention are always available to assert an opposite tendency, thus creating a dynamic tension on both sides.  In “Le Symbolisme” this role is filled by the Intermezzo character called “un détracteur” who is prone to such utterances as “but the caesura, the caesura! They violate the caesura!!” and “Horrors!  Not to respect the alternation of rhymes!” [6] 

     Moréas proceeds to the alternatives to Symbolism as the mode of the coming generation.   He concedes Naturalism a certain value as novelty as a counterweight to the banality of a Romanticism “sunk in senility.”  Such innovation, while “legitimate” is “ill-considered” and “naïve.”  “One can,” he sniffs, “only seriously value the work of the Naturalist writer as a cry of protest.” [7]  The basis for his reaction against Naturalism is his rejection of the Platonic concept of art as imitation.  According to Moréas, his “simple and exceedingly succinct point of departure” is the principle that “art cannot be faithful to the objective”.  [8]  There could scarcely be a more energetic challenge to any realistic style that aims at imitating lived experience.  While language cannot reproduce reality for Moréas, it can reflect subjectivity.

     Another competitor for the leading role in art is the school identified as Decadent.  Having asserted that impressions are all that exist, it is unsurprising that Moréas’ strictures on the Decadents are unashamedly subjective.  Such writers are “tough and stringy” like an ill-prepared beefsteak, as well as “frightened and groveling” like despicable weaklings. [9]  The reader can only speculate about just what he means.  There is little clue to the specific characteristics of the Decadent group or to Moréas’ objections, but it makes for lively reading. 

     He does propose Symbolism as the “reasonable” alternative corresponding to “the actual spirit of the creator in art” [10], and he does sketch out some characteristics of the sort of new writing he would approve.  He energetically defends obscurity and ambiguity and declares Symbolism the “enemy of didacticism, declamation, false sensibility, and,” Moréas concludes climactically, “objective description.”  He declares that “the essential character of symbolist art consists in never aiming at the conception of the idea in itself,” but rather in assuring that the idea “never lets itself be seen without the sumptuous gowns of extraneous associations.” [11]  A certain extravagance is implied by the adjectives “sumptuous” and “extraneous.”  The delight in verbal collage, in resonant if in part arbitrary and improvisatory imagery, is implied by the sentiment and reinforced by the out-of-the-way choice of “simarre” rather than “manteau” or “robe” for “gown.”  The Symbolist will make use of “perceivable appearances” not to reconstruct reality on the page, but to suggest “esoteric affinities with primordial ideas,” [12] though just what those ideas are remains intentionally enigmatic.

     Moréas offers to provide an “exact translation“ of just what his theory means in  practice: “unpolluted words,” “arching and periodic phrases intermixed with waves of its absence,” “meaningful pleonasms,” “mysterious omissions,” “anaculothia held in suspense,” indeed “all bold and polysemous tropes.”  His emphasis here, far from prescribing a particular style, is to endorse enthusiasm and showy rhetoric.  The passage itself goes on to recommend language that is “good and luxuriant and frisky” and ends with a delicious and gratuitous reference to certain archers of antiquity: “free writers who let fly their barbed language much like the sinuous arrows of the Toxotes of Thrace.” [10]  

          Moréas lets the cat altogether out of the bag eventually when he imagines this art of the future inn this bravura passage, replete like Rabelais’ catalogues, as decadent as Huysmans on Silver Latin, as crankishly bookish as Baron Corvo.

 

At times mythic phantasms are evoked from old Demogorgon to Belial, from the Cabeiris to the nigromantes [necromancers] lavishly turned out on Caliban’s rock or by Titania’s forest to the mixolydian music of barbitons and octochords. [11]

 

One could disentangle some of the elements so gleefully thrown together here beginning perhaps with the echoes of the demiurge in neo-Platonism, Spenser, and Shelley (who associated it with the French Revolution).  The reader, though, has hardly a moment to consider before this initial figure is succeeded by another and then another.  After half a dozen allusions, Moréas concludes the display with three rare ancient Greek words. 

     Surely this is recreational language, meant less to be understood than to create a tone, a mood, a curious symbolic pattern that involves the reader in an experience rather than inviting exegesis.  Far from a meticulous structure where every mot is juste, this is a bricolage, looking as though it has been constructed from whatever happened to be at hand.   

     Summing up the characteristics of Symbolist writing, Moréas notes, “The very truth of lyric poetry is found in seeming disorder, luminous madness, and passionate grandiloquence.”  He advocates running the risk of an “excess of rhetorical figures and colorful expressions.” [12] 

     With such energy and improvisatory enthusiasm, Moréas’ reader feels at some distance from the Symbolism of Mallarmé and Valéry whose magisterial, even still-Parnassian, tone suggested a cool composure as opposed to Moréas’ excitement.  Their thoughtful lexical precision contrasts with his eruptions of exuberant words.  Though Moréas insisted that his images would aim at “primordial ideas,” in practice he cares little for such moorings, letting his words float freely like a skyful of clouds. While both Mallarmé and Valéry stuck to alexandrines and sonnets until the very end, Moréas recommended a looser prosody which in his description sounds rather like syncopated jazz.  “An alexandrine with multiple and mobile caesurae, the primary task of certain numbers -- seven, nine, eleven, thirteen – resolute in many rhythmic permutations of which they are the sum.” 

     Moréas then might be considered less as the inspiration of the French poets generally identified as Symbolist and of their American cousins Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, perhaps in more recent years, than he is of freer word-slinging rhetoricians from Apollinaire to Gregory Corso.  Though Moréas had posed as the herald of the new Symbolist movement, a few years later he had changed direction and began to advocate neo-Classicism,  the “école romane,” a taste that persisted to the end of the poet’s life.   This group became associated with nationalism, reactionary views, anti-Semitism, and, through Maurras, the formation of the fascist Action Française.  In this way a writer who had been a young radical came in time to be a monarchist, a writer who had shouted for novelty came to idealize past masters, and a rebel became a defender of privilege.  The scheme of generational evolution Moréas had outlined gained, at least in his own case, a sort of ironic truth as he abandoned the provocative and exhilarating coruscations of “Le Symbolisme.”

 

  

1.      Published in Le Figaro for December 18, 1886.  A twenty-first century American can only feel nostalgia for those long-ago days when a newspaper of general circulation would publish aesthetic polemics and people would discuss such issues in the cafes.

 

2.      “Cependant le Suprême Enchantement n'est pas encore consommé : un labeur opiniâtre et jaloux sollicite les nouveaux venus.”  The extravagance of the capitalized “Supreme Enchantment” is a giveaway of the self-indulgences to come.

 

3.      Darwin was surely an influence in Moréas’ time.  Similar ideas have been advanced by Vico in the eighteenth century and in the twentieth by Harold Bloom with the addition of an overlay of neurotic guilt in descriptions of the “anxiety of influence.” 

 

4.     Make it New was the title of Pound’s 1934 book of essays, but he had earlier used the phrase, in fact a translation of M. G. Pauthier’s French version of the Chinese, in his 1928 translation of the Confucian text he titled Ta Hio: The Great Learning.  

 

5.      “ce qui fut le neuf et le spontané devient le poncif et le lieu-commun.” “et qu'après les poncifs classiques, il y a eu des poncifs romantiques.”

 

6.      In the original “Mais la césure, la césure! On viole la césure!!” and “Horreur! Ne pas respecter l'alternance des rimes!”

 

7.      In the French “tombé en enfance,” “légitime mais mal avisée,” “la méthode puérile du naturalisme,” “on ne peut accorder sérieusement qu'une valeur de protestation.”  Moréas exempts Zola who was miraculously “saved by his wonderful writer’s instinct” (“sauvé par un merveilleux instinct d'écrivain”).

 

8.      In the original “un simple point de départ extrêmement succinct”  “l'art ne saurait chercher en l'objectif.”

 

9.      “Les littératures décadentes se révèlent essentiellement coriaces, filandreuses, timorées et serviles.”

 

10.   “Nous avons déjà proposé la dénomination de Symbolisme comme la seule capable de désigner raisonnablement la tendance actuelle de l'esprit créateur en art.”

 

11.   “ennemie de "l'enseignement, la déclamation, la fausse sensibilité, la description objective" “le caractère essentiel de l'art symbolique consiste à ne jamais aller jusqu'à la conception de l'Idée en soi.” “L'Idée, à son tour, ne doit point se laisser voir privée des somptueuses simarres des analogies extérieures.”

 

12.   “des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales”

 

13.   I left “sinueuse” as “sinuous” to preserve its oddity.  The entire passage in French: Pour la traduction exacte de sa synthèse, il faut au symbolisme un style archétype et complexe : d'impollués vocables, la période qui s'arcboute alternant avec la période aux défaillances ondulées, les pléonasmes significatifs, les mystérieuses ellipses, l'anacoluthe en suspens, tout trope hardi et multiforme ; enfin la bonne langue – instaurée et modernisée – la bonne et luxuriante et fringante langue française d'avant les Vaugelas et les Boileau-Despréaux, la langue de François Rabelais et de Philippe de Commines, de Villon, de Rutebœuf et de tant d'autres écrivains libres et dardant le terme acut du langage, tels des toxotes de Thrace leurs flèches sinueuses.

 

14.   “Tantôt de mythiques phantasmes évoqués, depuis l'antique Démogorgôn jusques à Bélial, depuis les Kabires jusques aux Nigromans, apparaissent fastueusement atournés sur le roc de Caliban ou par la forêt de Titania aux modes mixolydiens des barbitons et des octocordes.”

 

15.   “Le désordre apparent, la démence éclatante, l'emphase passionnée sont la vérité même de la poésie lyrique. Tomber dans l'excès des figures et de la couleur, le mal n'est pas grand et ce n'est pas par là que périra notre littérature.”   

 

16.   “l'alexandrin à arrêts multiples et mobiles ; l'emploi de certains nombres premiers – sept, neuf, onze, treize – résolus en les diverses combinaisons rythmiques dont ils sont les sommes.”es sommes.”