Debussy: The Preludes 163
as it were, into their spiritual and human reality and sig-
nificance.
To be a symbolist, then, is to be an imagist and, more
important still, to be a master of suggestion who knows
how to throw into the background and, at times, even to
eliminate, by a subtle emphasis of their “color” and sound,
the too precise and circumscribed concepts which attach to
words.
Because of the ineffable mystery of his theme, the sym-
bolist, like Verlaine, dreams of writing “the grey song, in
which the precise and the indefinite meet”. He avoids, as
too harsh and crude, the ordinary uses of words. (“To
name an object is to destroy three-fourths of one’s pleasure
in it.”)11 He has an eye not so much to their actual, as to
their possible meanings and prizes them, above all else, for
their musicality,2 their color and sensuousness—in short
for their suggestive values.
Naturally, one must not look, in symbolist poetry, for
heroic moods, for long impassioned flights of lyricism nor
for the cumulative effects of “architecture” and “develop-
ment”.3 They inevitably have no part in an art which
moves in the realms of the subconscious and is based so
largely on the fleeting impressions of the senses. The
intensity and life of symbolist poetry lie rather in its vivid-
ness of imagery and suggestion and if it shuns “construc-
tion”, it does not, for that reason, become formless. It
has form and it has logic, but its logic is the logic of the
senses and its form, the form inherent in the natural se-
quence of sense impressions. In the nature of the case it
could not be otherwise.
1 Mallarmé.
““Music, first of all.” (De la Musique avant toute chose.) Verlaine.
a “Take eloquence and wring its neck.” (Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui
le cou.) Verlaine.