Chadwick - Symbolism

to NOB

This volume is one of a series of short studies, each dealing with a single key item, or a group of two or three key items, in our critical vocabulary. The purpose of the series differs from that served by the standard glossaries of literary terms. Many terms are adequately defined for the needs of students by the brief entries in these glossaries, and such terms will not be the subjects of studies in the present series. But there are other terms which cannot be made familiar by means of compact definitions. Students need to grow accustomed to them through simple and straightforward but reasonably full discussions of them. The purpose of this series is to provide such discussions.

Some of the terms in question refer to literary movements (e.g., Romanticism, Aestheticism, etc.), others to literary kinds (e.g., Comedy, Epic, etc.), and still others to stylistic features (e.g., Irony, The Conceit, etc.). Because of this diversity of subject-matter, no attempt has been made to impose a uniform pattern upon the studies. But all authors have tried to provide as full illustrative quotation as possible, to make reference whenever appropriate to more than one literature, and to compose their studies in such a way as to guide readers towards the short bibliographies in which they have made suggestions for further reading.

John D. Jump

University of Manchester

Spelt with a small initial letter the word symbolism, like the words romanticism and classicism, can have an extremely wide meaning. It can be used to describe any mode of expression which, instead of referring to something directly, refers to it indirectly through the medium of something else. Clearly, therefore, the meaning of the word symbolism must be narrowed down if it is to have any significance as a critical term.

A first stage in this process would be to agree that it is not the mere substitution of one object for another comparing, for example, as Milton does, Satans defeated legions to the autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa but the use of concrete imagery to express abstract ideas and emotions. This still, however, leaves its meaning very wide since, as T. S. Eliot pointed out in an essay on Hamlet, the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding what he calls, not a symbol, but an objective correlative, that is a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion. Stphane Mallarm had said something of the same sort thirty years before in 1891 when he had defined Symbolism as the art of evoking an object little by little so as to reveal a mood or, conversely, the art of choosing an object and extracting from it an tat dme (Oeuvres Compltes, p. 869). But he had added that this mood should be extracted par une srie de dchiffrements by a series of decipherings and in the previous half of his definition it is important to note that he had talked of evoking an object little by little. Both these phrases imply that the objective correlative and its associated mood should not be revealed openly and clearly but should merely be hinted at. This is, in fact, a point which Mallarm emphasizes elsewhere in the same passage where he contends that to name an object is to banish the major part of the enjoyment derived from a poem, since this enjoyment consists in a process of gradual revelation. The object, he claims, should merely be suggested suggrer, voil le rve and he concludes that it is the perfect practice of this mysterious process which constitutes Symbolism cest le parfait usage de ce mystre qui constitue le symbole.

Mallarms disciple, Henri de Rgnier, made much the same point when he defined the term symbol as being a comparison between the abstract and the concrete with one of the terms of the comparison being merely suggested une comparaison de labstrait au concret dont un des termes reste sous-entendu. And, as Rgnier further pointed out, because the symbol thus frequently stands alone, with the reader being given little or no indication as to what is being symbolized, Symbolist poetry inevitably has a certain built-in obscurity. Mallarm is reputed to have said that he had banished the words as and like from his vocabulary, and although some of his earlier poems are clearly divided into an opening image followed by a section interpreting the image, in his later poems, as we shall see, he tends more and more to omit, or at least to play down the interpretation and to leave the symbol virtually unexplained. Similarly, the sad and mournful landscapes of Mallarms contemporary, Paul Verlaine, are intended to convey to the reader the poets profound melancholy though his poems rarely state explicitly that this is their purpose.