Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons (b. 1865–d. 1945) was arguably the most representative British author of the long fin de siècle. Best known as an outstanding late-Victorian poet, he was also a critic of literature and art, writer of fiction, journalist, and journal editor, and played a pivotal role in codifying and spreading Decadence and Symbolism throughout his country. This was largely attributable to his groundbreaking essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), which he later expanded into the even more influential The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). Symons’s retitling and reworking was also an effort to distance himself from the negative connotations of Decadence in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s trials. The 1899 publication thus reflected Symons’s simultaneous ambition to be recognized as an innovative artist while avoiding the risks posed to his status through association with fin-de-siècle radicalism. Symons’s literary career began in 1884 with a critical contribution to Quaritch’s Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles series. Two years later, he published his first essay “An Introduction to the Study of Browning.” Poetry, another early interest, became his principal and enduring focus, beginning with Days and Nights (1889) and the participation in the London-based Rhymers’ Club—the circle of fin-de-siècle male writers who met to discuss their verse in 1890–1894 and published two poetry anthologies—and continuing with more than a dozen collections over the years. His editorship of the signature fin-de-siècle magazine The Savoy (1896) can hardly be underestimated, nor can his collaboration with The Yellow Book (1894–1897) and an array of journals, where he published articles and reviews which helped shape contemporary literary tastes. His “Editorial” for the first issue of The Savoy encapsulated the inter-art poetics and elitism characteristic of Decadence and Symbolism and heralded forward-looking experimentations in both form and content. Expectations for greater literary success were frustrated in 1908, when Symons suffered a mental breakdown. This has traditionally been viewed as a turning point for the lowest point in his life and writing, although recent criticism has proved less trenchant. It is, however, undeniable that his reputation was affected, although he kept on publishing to the last and played a mentoring role for Modernist writers, who were indebted to his introduction of Symbolism and French culture—in particular Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine—to Britain. Symons was a fine translator from French and Italian, and an unrivaled mediator between his country’s and European literary traditions. His xenophilia, especially his penchant for Italy, found expression in numerous books of travel writing. The flâneur way of urban traveling formed the subject of London. A Book of Aspects (1908), in which prose sketches interact with the photographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn. His short-story collection Spiritual Adventures (1905), admittedly based on Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1887), typically appears (auto)biographical and genre-exploratory. Pater also inspired Studies in Seven Arts (1906), a collection of essays on the manifestations of beauty which anticipates avant-garde inter-art practices and their challenging of aesthetic hierarchies. As a figure of both cultural liminality and negotiation, Symons occupies a unique position in the transition between aestheticism and modernism: a role that has never been questioned, even when his fortune suffered setbacks due to the biased male viewpoint in his works, or their stereotypical Decadent motifs.