The poet is at the Alhambra or Empire Ballet: like an impressionist picture a poem disengages the last fine shade of the scene. He wanders at twilight in autumn through the mist-enfolded lanes:
Night creeps across the darkening vale;
On the horizon tree by tree
Fades into shadowy skies as pale,
As moonlight on a shadowy sea.
The vision remains like an etching. The poet is on the seashore at sunset:
The sea lies quietest beneath
The after-sunset flush,
That leaves upon the heaped gray clouds
The grape’s faint purple blush.
It lingers like a water-colour in one’s memory. He sees a girl at a restaurant and his poem is at once an impression as vivid as a painter’s work. In a phrase he can cage a mood, in a quatrain a scene. Where does this ability come from? The answer is, perhaps, given by the one name Verlaine, whose genius Mr. Symons has done so much to hail.
In the gay days of the early nineties before black tragedy had clouded the heavens there was no more daring secessionist from the tedious old ways than the editor of The Savoy. To those days, like Dowson’s lover of Cynara, he has ‘been faithful in his fashion.’ If the interest is now not so vivid in his work it is because the centre of art has shifted. If Mr. Symons has not shifted his centre too, but remained faithful to the old dead Gods, it is no crime. It only means that we, when we wish to see him as one of the figures of his group, must shut up his volumes of criticism, forget his views on Toulouse Lautrec and Gerard Nerval, and William Blake, put aside his later verses and his widow’s cruse of writer’s recollections, and turn with assurance to the débonnaire poet of Silhouettes and London Nights.
It has been said that Mr. Symons stands for ‘a Pagan revolt against Puritanism.’ It is argued, because he was nurtured in nonconformity, art came to him with something of the hysteria a revelation comes to a revivalist meeting. This may be true, but I cannot help thinking that no writer amid all these French influences which he had so eagerly sought out yet remains so typical of the English spirit. It may be heresy, but I always see in mind the gaiety of a Nice carnival in a certain drawing with one solid, solemn face surveying the scene over a starched front. Beneath it is written: ‘Find the Englishman.’
Like the American critic, James Huneker, Mr. Arthur Symons has also occasionally written short imaginative prose studies. One thinks, too, in this respect of Walter Pater’s wonderful Imaginary Portraits and particularly his glorious study of Watteau, and I rather think that this success must have moved the spirit of the two later critics to a noble rivalry. The best, indeed, of Mr. Symons’s Spiritual Adventures are probably those studies which are mostly attached to some theme of art which has been after all the all-engrossing motive of this delightful critic’s life. An Autumn City and The Death of Peter Waydelin: the first, a sensitive’s great love for Arles, whither he brings his unresponsive bride; the other, a study quaintly suggestive of a certain painter’s life: both of these sketches are unquestionably more moving than Mr. Symons’s studies of nonconformists quivering at the thought of hell-fire. To them one might add, perhaps, Esther Kahn, the history of the psychological development of an actress after the style of La Faustine.
Mr. Symons’s favourite word is ‘escape’; his favourite phrase ‘escape from life.’ Now the one and now the other reappear continually in all kinds of connections. Of John Addington Symonds, for example, he writes: ‘All his work was in part an escape, an escape from himself.’ Of Ernest Dowson’s indulgence in the squalid debaucheries of the Brussels kermesse he writes: ‘It was his own way of escape from life.’ Passages of like tenor abound in his writings; and, in one of his papers on The Symbolist Movement in Literature, he explains his meaning more precisely:
Our only chance, in this world, of a complete happiness, lies in the measure of our success in shutting the eyes of the mind, and deadening its sense of hearing, and dulling the keenness of its apprehension of the unknown.... As the present passes from us, hardly to be enjoyed except as memory or as hope, and only with an at best partial recognition of the uncertainty or inutility of both, it is with a kind of terror that we wake up, every now and then, to the whole knowledge of our ignorance, and to some perception of where it is leading us. To live through a single day with that overpowering consciousness of our real position, which, in the moments in which alone it mercifully comes, is like blinding light or the thrust of a flaming sword, would drive any man out of his senses.... And so there is a great silent conspiracy between us to forget death; all our lives are spent in busily forgetting death. That is why we are so active about so many things which we know to be unimportant, why we are so afraid of solitude, and so thankful for the company of our fellow creatures. Allowing ourselves for the most part to be vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality, in many dreams, in religion, passion, art; each a forgetfulness, each a symbol of creation.... Each is a kind of sublime selfishness, the saint, the lover, and the artist having each an incommunicable ecstasy which he esteems as his ultimate attainment; however, in his lower moments, he may serve God in action, or do the will of his mistress, or minister to men by showing them a little beauty. But it is before all things an escape.