Anne Margaret Daniel

In Literary Imagination Spring 2005

I saw him in the Café Royal,
Very old and very grand.
Modernistic shone the lamplight
There in London's fairyland.
Devill'd chicken, devill'd whitebait,
Devil if I understand
Where is Oscar? Where is Bosie?
Have I seen that man before?

When Arthur Symons died in January 1945, shortly before his eightieth birthday, the Times Literary Supplement did not mince words in its obituary. The "last of the eminent aesthetic writers was dead," but wartime England did not really care; the 1890s were "so long ago," and fin de siecle literary styles and definitions "fallen so far out of current speech" that even distinguishing among them was something of an irrelevancy. New Critics, followers of Auden, and the forthcoming angry young men--doubtless angry young teenagers at the time--had neither interest in nor patience for gilt-mailed, patchouli-scented poetry or prose. When John Betjeman saw Symons in the Brasserie of the Cafe Royal and drafted the lines on the "old poet" in the manager's autograph book, Betjeman later recalled that Symons was all alone: "He knew no one... I don't think anyone spoke to him." Symons, though he had continued to write and publish from the turn of the century until his death, was, and is, thought of as a writer, poet, and critic frozen in the Nineties. This is fair; after his terrible breakdown, the "thunderbolt from hell" of 1908, Symons's critical work was intermittent and tentative, his style even more self-referential and confessional, his opinions vastly changeable, and his poetry simply bad. What Symons had done, though, in the 1890s mattered more than most remember.

His book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900) has become known as Symons’s most valuable work. A collection of essays on French writers from Balzac to Verlaine, Rimbaud and Huysmans, with Symons's translations of selected poems appended, the book would be accorded great influence in the 1920s by many of the "high Modern" writers in English, like T.S. Eliot and Symons's old friend W.B. Yeats. However, Symons's far greater, but far less noted, contribution to literature was as an editor, not as an author. In 1895, Symons accepted Leonard Smithers's offer to found and edit a new literary and artistic magazine, and from the summer of 1895 until late 1896, Symons was almost solely in charge of an experiment called The Savoy. This magazine, at once a response and alternative to established journals and reviews as well as more avant-garde publications like The Yellow Book, was a popular failure (particularly after a bookseller's ban devastated its potential market), and died within the year. But thanks to Arthur Symons, some of the richest and strangest fin de siecle art and writing was published, and is preserved. Symons assembled in The Savoy a truly unique sample of fin de siecle culture, introducing young writers and artists soon to be canonical and forgotten alike, but giving them a chance. Like the Courtauld Gallery's collection, The Savoy's overall strength is not that it has all of anything, but that it has something of everything--excellent examples of everything from its times. The Savoy preserves and presents perfectly representative samples of the variety of literary forms--aesthetic, symbolist, decadent, realistic, and naturalistic--experimented with in English literature during the 1890s.

The Savoy's poetry and critical contents particularly reflect Symons's own ruling passions: symbolisme, and his complete obsession with the decadent (which continued until his death). He included in the magazine several of his own translations of his beloved Verlaine and Mallarme, and several critical essays on Verlaine. Most of the original poems appearing in The Savoy are of the (decadent) Dowsonian gone-with-the-wind and (symboliste) Yeatsian long-hair-and-mysterious-roses variety; not surprisingly, most are indeed by Dowson, Yeats, and Symons himself. These three men account for the lion's share of poetry in the magazine, and Yeats’s increasing output, as Symons got his next-door neighbor more involved in both writing for and helping to edit The Savoy, is a special aspect of the later numbers. Symons's own "Literary Causeries," which end these later issues, deal almost exclusively with French writers of the 1880s and 1890s. He continually urges the Goncourts, Huysmans, and Mallarme as inspiration to those writing stories and novels in English.

The Savoy's fiction and prose contents have more variety than any of the other literary and artistic genres in the magazine, but all the stories and essays are on subjects near and dear to Symons himself. His own Lucy Newcome stories, contributions by William "Fiona Macleod" Sharp, Hubert Crackanthorpe, and the anonymous author of "A Mere Man" are good examples of what soon came to be called psychological realism. Symons also chose for publication a work of more-than-Scandinavian naturalism entitled "The Idiots," a first published story by a young man writing under the name of Joseph Conrad. Symons also published many women writers in The Savoy. The 16-year-old Sarojini Chattopadhyay's "Eastern Dancers" and translations of the poems of Mathilde Blind are there; other Savoy contributions by women included an illustrated poem by Leila MacDonald, "Morag of the Glen" by "Fiona Macleod," and the novella "Beauty's Hour: A Phantasy," by one "O. Shakespear." Best known today as Yeats's mistress in 1896 and longtime friend thereafter, and Ezra Pound's mother-in-law, Olivia Shakespear published many novels (all long out of print) in the 1890s. "Beauty's Hour," a combination of Cinderella story and inversion of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), is an early and exceptional work by this forgotten author that stands out among The Savoy's fictions. Symons's selection of such works for The Savoy made possible the publication of young authors and artists, male and female, whose work had no other venue because they were not known, or were considered too controversial for other periodicals--and whose work might otherwise have gone unseen.

Notes: Roger Lhombreaud, Arthur Symons: A Critical Biography (London: Unicorn, 1963) 299-300 [quoting Guy Deghy and Keith Waterhouse, Café Royal: Ninety Years of Bohemia (Hutchinson, 1955) 150)].

Arthur Symons, Confessions: A Study in Pathology (New York: Jonathan Cape/​Harrison Smith, 1930)

The Arthur Symons Papers (hereinafter "Symons Collection") in the Rare Books collection of Princeton University Library consist of 28 boxes of material ranging from early sketches and reviews to drafts for works for The Savoy to idiosyncratic writings and artworks of Symons's later years. The decline in his writing is a sad one; neat manuscript drafts and carefully typeset, corrected proofs are replaced by erratically typed, misspelled and haphazardly hand-corrected material, much of it unpublished.

Symons, like his contemporaries, thought this reclusive Scots author was a woman. When he was dying in 1905, William Sharp confessed to his wife that he had written as "Fiona Macleod."

Copright Literary Imagination 2005.