An excerpt from the INTRODUCTION:
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 at being a reproduction." Originally, as he points
out, used by the Greeks to denote "the two halves of the
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."
It is in such a sense as this that the word Symbolism has been
used to describe a movement which, during the last generation,
has profoundly influenced the course of French literature. All
such words, used of anything so living, variable, and
irresponsible as literature, are, as symbols themselves must so
often be, mere compromises, mere indications. Symbolism, as seen
in the writers of our day, would have no value if it were not
seen also, under one disguise or another, in every great
imaginative writer. What distinguishes the Symbolism of our day
from the Symbolism of the past is that it has now become
conscious of itself, in a sense in which it was unconscious even
in Gérard de Nerval, to whom I trace the particular origin of the
literature which I call Symbolist, The forces which mould the
thought of men change, or men's resistance to them slackens; with
the change of men's thought comes a change of literature, alike
in its inmost essence and in its outward form: after the world
has starved its soul long enough in the contemplation and the
re-arrangement of material things, comes the turn of the soul;
and with it comes the literature of which I write in this volume,
a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality,
and the unseen world no longer a dream.