Less an artistic movement than a state of mind, Symbolism appeared toward the middle of the 19th century. Its influence was greatest in those areas of Europe which combined two factors: Ivanced industrialisation and a predominantly Catholic population. e can circumscribe the Symbolist phenomenon by drawing a line linking Glasgow, Stockholm, Gdansk, Lodz, Trieste, Florence and Barcelona: the so-called "Europe of steam". Jean Moreas gave Symbolism name and an identity on 18 September 1886. Some thirty years later, expired amid the throes of the First World War.

  By then, Modernism had triumphed and Symbolism was in disgrace; some Symbolist artists were reclassified as proto-expressionists or proto-surrealists, others, such as Khnopff, Hodler, Segantini, and von Stuck, were summarily dispatched to the attic of history.

  Symbolism was swept away by the new watchwords of modernity. Some of these were movements which predated the First World War: Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Futurism. Others emerged in its wake, like Dada and Surrealism. The war had cut a swathe in the ranks f science, the arts and letters, and the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic came to complete this grim harvest. Survivors of the trenches, such as the Germans Otto Dix and George Grosz, were scarred for life.

The war had divided Europe not just politically but culturally. On the one side stood the triumphant allies, on the other, the losers - Germany and the remains of the Austrian Empire. The vast expanse of Russia drifted away under the influence of other historical currents again. True, the French Dadaists and Surrealists maintained some international connections, but the great network of scholars and artists that id covered pre-war Europe lay in ruins, to be partially restored only in the fifties.

  The hitherto serene ideal of beauty had itself undergone a radical transformation. As André Breton declared in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto: "Beauty will be convulsive - or will cease to be." The momentous convulsions of the age were to be reflected in its art. All the more reason why the modernist spirit should find the vestiges of the earlier period not merely inacceptable but incomprehensible. The Soviet Revolution brought to the fore many new or revived ideas; its insistence that people's needs be taken into account and a world be created to provide for them was so radical that people might truly think that the planet they red on was not the one their parents had known.

Under these circumstances, it was predictable that the theorists of art should be perplexed by the products of the previous decades. The prevailing mood of alienation and cynicism was hardly conducive to an appreciation of Symbolism's narrative and often sentimental art. There were, of course, artists and poets who could not easily forget the idiom in which they had been brought up. Guillaume Apollinaire loved the Symbolist poets and painters; Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, remained a devotee of Gustave Moreau; and the deeply ironical Marcel Duchamp spoke affectionately of the works of Arnold Bocklin. But modernism was implacable; it found little to say in favour of Symbolism, which it tended to dismiss as an aberration.

  There was a precedent for this view, which had already been held by the 19th century realist painters; the view extended even to an artist of anarchist leanings such as Camille Pissarro. This was not simply an artistic perspective. It was largely determined by the struggle between the militantly secular ideals of the Third Republic and an increasingly defensive French Catholic Church.

  For realism was, in 19th century France, the idiom of republican and anticlerical artists, the banner of a social consciousness attuned to the "real issues of the day". Those who painted imaginary subjects were condemned as reactionaries or tolerated as innocent dreamers blind to the issues of the day. This state of things was in marked contrast to English attitudes. There, realism was the idiom of the pious and right-minded who sought, like John Ruskin, to render homage to the Creator by imitating Creation as closely as possible.

  The reason for this difference is clear. England is a Protestant country, and the two most significant epithets in relation to Symbolism are those which appear in the second sentence of this book. Symbolism was a product of Catholic and of industrial Europe. Since these are unusual categories for a work of art history, let us consider them in depth.

  Let us begin by observing that elements of a feudal mentality survived in Europe until the end of the 19th century. Shaken but not overthrown by Enlightenment scepticism, the feudal world view had survived in rural areas. Georges Duby even suggests that the behaviour of the French peasantry had become increasingly formalised over the course of the 19th century as they made the medieval courtly style their model. Thus idealised, the dying tradition gained a new intensity, going out in a blaze of glory. But here we must adjust our metaphor. The fire went out because its fuel was scattered.
 
 The newly industrialised society had a tremendous appetite for manpower. It attracted vast numbers of men and women to the cities, into whose newly established railheads goods and raw materials incessantly flowed. The statistics are eloquent: during the period which concerns us, only one in seven persons born in the countryside remained there. One in seven emigrated to the New World or the colonies; five moved to the cities. In the half-century between 1850 and 1900, sixty million people left Europe. Still more were drawn to the cities and suburbs. The village reality had structured their private and social identity; in the city, there was no equivalent experience to give meaning and value to lives.

  Catholic societies seem to have felt these changes more profoundly, perhaps because Symbolism formed a greater and more integral part of their outlook. Perhaps, too, the Reformation, whose demands were those of the pragmatic, new financial and merchant classes, had better prepared Protestant minds for this event. At all events, the momentous social transformations of the industrial revolution brought a conflict between traditional, symbolic representations of the world and a new reality based on utterly different values.

  The changes brought about by industrialisation were generally not well received in Catholic countries. The issue was not merely the desperate poverty that resulted; this was the same everywhere. More than 50,000 children passed through the homes Doctor Barnardo established for the waifs of London. No, in Catholic countries, the emblematic representation of the world was shaken to the core, and with it everything which had, till then, served to distinguish good and evil. "The concept of the demonic," observed Walter Benjamin, "appears when modernity enters into conjunction with Catholicism."
 

Symbolism

(Encyclopedia Britannica)

Literary and artistic movement that originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to painting and the theatre, and influenced the European and American literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. Symbolist artists sought to express individual emotional experience through the subtle and suggestive use of highly symbolized language.


Symbolist literature

The principal Symbolist poets include the Frenchmen Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Henri de Régnier, René Ghil, and Gustave Kahn; the Belgians Émile Verhaeren and Georges Rodenbach; the Greek-born Jean Moréas; and Francis Viélé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, who were American by birth. Rémy de Gourmont was the principal Symbolist critic, while Symbolist criteria were applied most successfully to the novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans and to the theatre by the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. The French poets Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel are sometimes considered to be direct 20th-century heirs of the Symbolists.

Symbolism originated in the revolt of certain French poets against the rigid conventions governing both technique and theme in traditional French poetry, as evidenced in the precise description of Parnassian poetry. The Symbolists wished to liberate poetry from its expository functions and its formalized oratory in order to describe instead the fleeting, immediate sensations of man's inner life and experience. They attempted to evoke the ineffable intuitionsand sense impressions of man's inner life and to communicate the underlying mystery of existence through a free and highly personal use of metaphors and images that, though lacking in precise meaning, would nevertheless convey the state of the poet's mind and hint at the “dark and confused unity” of an inexpressible reality.

Such Symbolist forerunners as Verlaine and Rimbaud were greatly influenced by the poetry and thought of Charles Baudelaire, particularly by the poems in his Les Fleurs du mal (1857). They adopted Baudelaire's concept of the correspondances between the senses and combined this with the Wagnerian ideal of a synthesis of the arts to produce an original conception of the musical qualities of poetry. Thus, to the Symbolists, the theme within a poem could be developed and “orchestrated” by the sensitive manipulation of the harmonies, tones, and colours inherent in carefully chosen words. The Symbolists' attempt to emphasize the essential and innate qualities of the poetic medium was based on their conviction of the supremacy of art over all other means of expression or knowledge. This in turn was partly based on their idealistic conviction that underlying the materiality and individuality of the physical world was another reality whose essence could best be glimpsed through the subjective emotional responses contributing to and generated by the work of art.

Such masterpieces as Verlaine's Romances sans paroles (1874; Songs Without Words) and Mallarmé's L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876) sparked a growing interest in the nascent innovations of progressive French poets. The Symbolist manifesto itself was published by Jean Moréas in Le Figaro on Sept. 18, 1886; in it he attacked the descriptive tendencies of Realist theatre, Naturalistic novels, and Parnassian poetry. He also proposed replacing the term décadent, which was used to describe Baudelaire and others,with the terms symboliste and symbolisme. Many little Symbolist reviews and magazines sprang up in the late 1880s, their authors freely participating in the controversies generated by the attacks of hostile critics on the movement. Mallarmé became the leader of the Symbolists, and his Divagations (1897) remains the most valuable statement of the movement's aesthetics. In their efforts to escape rigid metrical patterns and to achieve freer poetic rhythms, many Symbolist poets resorted to the composition of prose poems and the use of vers libre (free verse), which has now become a fundamental form of contemporary poetry.

The Symbolist movement also spread to Russia, where Valery Bryusov published an anthology of Russian and French Symbolist poems in 1894–95. The revival of poetry in Russia stemming from this movement had as its leader Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. His poetry expressed a belief that the world was a system of symbols expressing metaphysical realities. The greatest poet of the movement was Aleksandr Blok, who in Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve) united the Russian Revolution and God in an apocalyptic vision in which 12 Red Army men became apostles of the New World, headed by Christ. Other Russian Symbolist poets were Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, Fyodor Sologub, Andrey Bely, and Nikolay Gumilyov.

The Symbolist movement in poetry reached its peak around 1890 and began to enter a precipitous decline in popularity around 1900. The atmospheric, unfocused imagery of Symbolist poetry eventually came to be seen as overrefined and affected, and the term décadent, which the Symbolists had once proudly flaunted, became with others a term of derision denoting mere fin-de-siècle preciosity. Symbolist works had a strong and lasting influence on much British and American literature in the 20th century, however. Their experimental techniques greatly enriched the technical repertoire of modern poetry, and Symbolist theories bore fruit both in the poetry of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot and in the modern novel as represented by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, in which word harmonies and patterns of images oftentake preeminence over the narrative.

One of the few successful Symbolist novels was À rebours (1884; Against Nature) by J.-K. Huysmans. The book relates the varied and surprisingly resourceful experiments in aesthetic decadence undertaken by a bored aristocrat. The 20th-century American critic Edmund Wilson's survey of the Symbolist movement, Axel's Castle (1931), is considered a classic of modern literary analysis and the authoritative study of the movement.


Symbolist painting

Symbolism in painting took its direction from the poets and literary theorists of the movement, but it also represented a reaction against the objectivist aims of Realism and the increasingly influential movement of Impressionism. In contrast to the relatively concrete representation these movements sought, Symbolist painters favoured works based on fantasy and the imagination. The Symbolist position in painting was authoritatively defined by the young critic Albert Aurier, an enthusiastic admirer of Gauguin Paul , in an article in the Mercure de France (1891). He elaborated on Moreas' contention that the purpose of art “is to clothe the idea in sensuous form” and stressed the subjective, symbolical, and decorative functions of an art that would give visual expression to the inner life. Symbolist painters turned to the mystical and even the occult in an attempt to evoke subjective states of mind by visual forms.

Such Postimpressionist painters as Gauguin and Vincent VanGogh as well as the Nabis may be regarded as Symbolists in certain aspects of their art. However, the painters who are truly representative of Symbolist aesthetic ideals include three principal figures: Moreau Gustave, Redon Odilon, and Puvis de Chavannes Pierre. Moreau was a figurative painter who created scenes based on legendary or ancient themes. His highly original style utilized brilliant, jewel-like colours to portray the ornate, sumptuous interiors of imaginary temples and palaces in which scantily clad figuresare caught in statuesque poses. His work is characterized by exotic eroticism and decorative splendour. Redon explored mystical, fantastic, and often macabre themes in his paintings and graphics. His paintings stress the poetics of colour in their delicate harmonies of hues, while his subject matter was highly personal in its mythical and dreamlike figures. Puvis de Chavannes is now remembered primarily as a muralist.


Symbolist theatre

Dramatists also took their lead from the French Symbolist poets, especially from Mallarme. As drama critic for La Dernière Mode during the 1870s, Mallarmé opposed the dominant Realist theatre and called for a poetic theatre that would evoke the hidden mystery of man and the universe. Drama, for Mallarme, should be a sacred rite in which the poet-dramatist revealed the correspondences between the visible and invisible worlds through the suggestive power of his poetic language. For the Symbolist playwright, the deeper truths of existence, known instinctively or intuitively,could not be directly expressed but only indirectly revealed through symbol, myth, and mood. The principal Symbolist playwrights were Maurice Maeterlinck in Belgium and Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and Paul Claudel in France. Also influenced by Symbolist beliefs were the Swedish playwright August Strindberg and the Irish poet and dramatist W.B. Yeats.

Noteworthy examples of Symbolist theatre include Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's Axël (first performed 1884; definitive edition 1890), Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), with its dreamlike atmosphere, and the highly satirical Ubu roi (1896) by Alfred Jarry. In 1890 the French poet Paul Fort founded the Theatre d'Art, where Symbolist dramas were presented along with readings from ancient and modern poetry. When Fort retired in 1892 Aurélien Lugné-Poë continued Symbolist production at his Théâtre de l'Oeuvre well into the 20th century. Though Symbolist theatre did not last long as a unified movement, its sharp break with the realistic tradition along with its reliance on fantasy, atmosphere, and mood influenced 20th-century playwrights and theatrical production.