Arthur Symons

It pleased some young men in various countries to call themselves Decadents, with all the thrill of unsatisfied virtue masquerading as uncomprehended vice.

Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. London: Archibald Constable, 1908. p. 6.


The artist who is above all things an artist cultivates a little choice corner of himself with elaborate care; he brings miraculous flowers to growth there, but the rest of the garden is but mown grass or tangled bushes. That is why many excellent writers, very many painters, and most musicians are so tedious on any subject but their own.

 

Is it not tempting, does it not seem a devotion, rather than a superstition, to worship the golden chalice in which the wine has been made God, as if the chalice  were the reality, and the Real Presence the symbol? The artist, who is only an artist, circumscribes his intelligence into almost such a fiction, as he reverences the work of his own hands.


Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. London: Archibald Constable, 1908. p. 65-66.

And so this seeker after the absolute leaves but a broken medley of fragments, into each of which he has put a little of his personality [...] having suggested, with some impatience, half the things that his own and the next generation are to busy themselves with developing, [...]

[...] a very young, very crude, very defiant and sometimes very masterly sense of just those real things which are too close to us to be seen by most people with any clearness. [...] 

And he kneaded prose as he kneaded verse, making it a disarticulated, abstract, mathematically lyrical thing. 


Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. London: Archibald Constable, 1908. p. 71-73. [My emphasis]


To say that he has found what he sought is impossible; but (is it possible to avoid saying?) how heroic a search, and what marvellous discoveries by the way!


Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. London: Archibald Constable, 1908. p. 128.