te and systematically created--the art of the
"symbolists." It is not here a question of criticism, of praise, or even
of appreciation, but merely of a consideration of it as a psychological
fact likely to instruct us in regard to the nature of the diffluent
imagination.

This form of art despises the clear and exact representation of the
outer world: it replaces it by a sort of music that aspires to express
the changing and fleeting inwardness of the human soul. It is the school
of the subject "who wants to know only mental states." To that end, it
makes use of a natural or artificial lack of precision: everything
floats in a dream, men as well as things, often without mark in time and
space. Something happens, one knows not where or when; it belongs to no
country, is of no period in time: it is _the_ forest, _the_ traveler,
_the_ city, _the_ knight, _the_ wood; less frequently, even _He_, _She_,
_It_. In short, all the vague and unstable characters of the pure,
content-less affective state. This process of "suggestion" sometimes
succeeds, sometimes fails.

The word is the sign _par excellence_. As, according to the symbolists,
it should give us emotions rather than representations, it is necessary
that it lose, partially, its intellectual function and undergo a new
adaptation.

A principal process consists of employing usual words and changing their
ordinary acceptation, or rather, associating them in such a way that
they lose their precise meaning, and appear vague and mysterious: these
are the words "written in the depths." The writers do not name--they
leave it for us to infer. "They banish commonplaces through lack of
precision, and leave to things only the power of moving." A rose is not
described by the particular sensations that it causes, but by the
general condition that it excites.

Another method is the employment of new words or words that have fallen
into disuse. Ordinary words retain, in spite of everything, somewhat of
their customary meaning, associations and thoughts condensed in them
through long habit; words forgotten during four or five centuries
escape this condition--they are coins without fixed value.

Lastly, a still more radical method is the attempt to give to words an
exclusively emotional valuation. Unconsciously or as the result of
reflection some symbolists have come to this extreme trial, which the
logic of events imposed upon them. Ordinarily, thought expresses itself
in words; fe