The Symbolist Movement in Literature

INTRODUCTION BALZAC PROSPER MÉRIMÉE GÉRARD DE NERVAL THÉOPHILE GAUTIER GUSTAVE FLAUBERT CHARLES BAUDELAIRE EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT VLLLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM LÉON CLADEL A NOT...

This visionary, then, who had apprehended for himself an idea of God, set himself to interpret human life more elaborately than any one else. He has been praised for his patient...

Stendhal has left us a picture of Mérimée as "a young man in a grey frock-coat, very ugly, and with a turned-up nose.... This young man had something insolent and extremely unpl...

Look, for instance, at his longest, far from his best work, _La Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._ Like so much of his work, it has something of the air of a _tour de force,_ no...

The madness of Gérard de Nerval, whatever physiological reasons may be rightly given for its outbreak, subsidence, and return, I take to have been essentially due to the weaknes...

And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can give a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time a definition of the merit which sets _Salammb...

_Aujourd'hui,_ they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to _Germinie Lacerteux, que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante...

In the sense in which that word is ordinarily used, Villiers has no pathos. This is enough to explain why he can never, in the phrase he would have disliked so greatly, "touch t...

And it is here that I would complain, not as a matter of morals, but as a matter of art, of Zola's obsession by what is grossly, uninterestingly filthy. There is a certain simil...

Between these characteristic, clear and beautiful poems, in verse and in prose, and the opaque darkness of the later writings, come one or two poems, perhaps the finest of all,...

as he cries, in his famous _Art Poétique._ Take, then, his susceptibility of the senses, an emotional susceptibility not less delicate; a life sufficiently troubled to draw out...

The descendant of a long line of Dutch painters--one of whom, Cornelius Huysmans, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape men of the great period--Joris-Karl Huysmans was...

It is in such a "Palace of Art" that Des Esseintes would recreate his already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion is only once broken by a single excu...

Huysmans knows that the motive force of, the sentence lies in the verbs, and his verbs: are the most singular, precise, and expressive in any language. But in subordinating, as...

The prose and verse of Laforgue, scrupulously correct, but with a new manner of correctness, owe more than any one has realised to the half-unconscious prose and verse of Rimbau...

Jacob Boehme has said, very subtly, "that man does not perceive the truth but God perceives the truth in man"; that is, that whatever we perceive or do is not perceived or done...

Among works announced, but never published, it may be interesting to mention: _Seid, William de Strally, Faust, Poésies Nouvelles (Intermèdes; Gog; Ave, Mater Victa; Poésies div...

M. Maeterlinck has had the good or bad fortune to be more promptly, and more violently, praised at the beginning of his career than at all events any other writer of whom I have...

Pale dawn delicately Over earth has spun The sad melancholy Of the setting sun. Sad melancholy Brings oblivion In sad songs to me With the setting sun. And the strangest dreams,...