visions half
created, half perceived. Experiences like these might have been
described, as far as description would go, by brilliant artificers like
the Parnassians. Verlaine and Mallarme did not discover, but they
applied with new daring, the fact that an experience may be communicated
by words which, instead of representing it, suggest it by their colour,
their cadences, their rhythm, their verbal echoes and inchoate phrases.
All the traditional artistry of French poetic speech was condemned as
both inadequate and insincere. 'Take eloquence and wring her neck!
Nothing but music and the nuance--all the rest is "Literature", mere
writing--futile verbosity!' that was the famous watchword of Verlaine's
creed.[12]

The strength of symbolism lay in this demand for a complete sincerity of
utterance. Its revolt against science was at the same time a vindication
of truth, an effort to get nearer to reality both by shedding off the
incrustations of habitual phrase and by calling into play the obscure
affinities by which it can be magically evoked. In the subtleties of
suggestion latent in sensations the symbolists were real discoverers.
But the way had already been pointed in famous verses by Baudelaire:

'Earth is a Temple, from whose pillared mazes
Murmurs confused of living utterance rise;
Therein Man thro' a forest of symbols paces,
That contemplate him with familiar eyes.

As prolonged echoes, wandering on and on,
At last in one far tenebrous depth unite,
Impalpable as darkness, and as light,
Scents, sounds, and colours meet in unison.'

There Baudelaire had touched a chord that was to sound loud and long;
for what else than this thought of all the senses meeting in union
inspired the music drama of Wagner?--only one of his points of kinship,
as we shall see, with symbolism.

Thus the symbolists, in quest of reality, touched it only through the
inner life. There they are, in their fashion, realists. 'A landscape',
said Albert Samain, 'is a state of soul.' The landscape may be false,
but the state of soul is veracious. What interests them in life is the
image of life, not lucidly reflected but exquisitely transformed. Yet
the vision of the world caught in that transforming mirror was not
without strange revealing glimpses, invisible, like stars mirrored in a
well, to the plain observer. They could hear the music of the spheres;
or in the language of Samain's sonnet

'Feel flowing