The Symbolist Movement in Literature

Cities of Italy, Plays, Acting and Music, The Romantic Movement in English Literature, Studies in Seven Arts, Colour Studies in Paris, etc. REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION
CONTENTS
It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it highest. Carlyle
Without symbolism there can be no literature; indeed, not even language. What are words themselves but symbols, almost as arbitrary as the letters which compose them, mere sounds of the voice to which we have agreed to give certain significations, as we have agreed to translate these sounds by those combinations of letters? Symbolism began with the first words uttered by the first man, as he named every living thing; or before them, in heaven, when God named the world into being. And we see, in these beginnings, precisely what Symbolism in literature really is: a form of expression, at the best but approximate, essentially but arbitrary, until it has obtained the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness. It is sometimes permitted to us to hope that our convention is indeed the reflection rather than merely the sign of that unseen reality. We have done much if we have found a recognisable sign.
A symbol, says Comte Goblet d'Alviella, in his book on The Migration of Symbols, might be defined as a representation which does not aim at being a reproduction. Originally, as he points out, used by the Greeks to denote the two halves of the tablet they divided between themselves as a pledge of hospitality, it came to be used of every sign, formula, or rite by which those initiated in any mystery made themselves secretly known to one another. Gradually the word extended its meaning, until it came to denote every conventional representation of idea by form, of the unseen by the visible. In a Symbol, says Carlyle, there is concealment and yet revelation: hence, therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance. And, in that fine chapter of Sartor Resartus, he goes further, vindicating for the word its full value: In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there.