Divagation première, Verset prose, p

2. « Le grand ciel étoilé révolve dans la nuit », Viélé-Grilfin, Poèmes et Poésies, p. 170.

ÉTUDES LITTÉRAIRES

The French language was the language of the intelligence ; they wanted to make it the language of sentiment. « To paint and define », to trace exact images and precise ideas, to order the images and ideas according to the real relations of nature or the abstract relations of logic, — ■ tin’s was all the art of the classic writer. Romanticists and the Parnassians had « painted » rallier than « defined », hut they had hardly encroached upon the intellectual and analytical phraseology that the eigliteenth century had carried to parfection. The symbolists, on the contrary, have no care either for « painting » or « defining ». Tliey haughtily reject tlie picturesque precision of the Parnassians. « Abolished tlie pretention, aesthetically an error, notwithstanding it rules almost all the masterpieces, of enclosing within the subtile leaves of the book anything else, for example, than tlie horror of the forest, the mute thunder scattered through the foliage ; not the essential and dense wood of the trees f » That is, poetry should give up striving in rivalry, not merely with nature, but with painting and sculpture. Poetry has neither color not relief, nor three dimensions, nor even two, nor one ; it has only words, which are the tokens and modifiers of the soul. Consequently it may not imitate things ; it invokes and suggests the impressions of things.

Thus, the poet will give preference to tlie sentimental rather than to the picturesque vocabulary, even in creating a landscaped He will transpose all the words of the soul to the things; he will substitute for their perceptible shape our affective relations to them :

Le son da cor s’afflige vers les bois D’une douleur on veut croire orpheline...

Tant il fait doux par ce soir monotone Où se dorlote un paysage lent^.

This procedure intimately mingles lhe soul with things ; it flows naturally in the ways of feeling that 1 have defined

t. Mallarmé, Divagation première, Vers et prose, p. 185.

2. Lamartine has said, « Assis aux bords deserts d’un lac mélancolique. » This is the foundation of the process of the symbolists and its simplest aj)[ilication.