Arthur Symons and Impressionism

I

THE cessation of Mr. Arthur Symons’s writing has brought poignantly to mind the fact of a peculiarly self-contained and self-conscious æsthetic personality. As a perfected instrument for impressionism he was unique, perhaps, among writers of English. To have used that instrument is to have made ourselves debtors to his wisdom — and still more at times to his divine folly.

There are few of Symons’s readers who would willingly have missed either his wisdom or unwisdom. To have read his Cities, especially his Seville and Moscow, is to have learned the pleasures of broken lights in the emotions, to have traversed the long road from the genius loci of the ancients to the sentiments des places of the modern French psychologist. To have read his Plays, Acting and Music is to have enjoyed to the last degree that versatility as well as refinement of appreciation toward which the modern spirit moves, its exacting skepticism, its sad inconsequence and glorious irresponsibility. And finally, to have read his poems — is not that to have felt the temper of the instrument itself, the residual moods of a life of impressions, themselves inexpressible in prose; to have read his Spiritual Adventures — is not that to have learned also how such an instrument of impressions is formed: the heats and colds alike, the exclusions as well as the affirmations? Sidelights on the quest for beauty, they show forth the transports of the abstraction of beauty from life, but also its revenges.

No one who has read Symons at all widely will doubt the propriety of describing his métier as the abstraction of beauty from life. He is always conscious of himself as an instrument of sensation. The words ‘abstract’ and ‘disengage’ are constantly on his lips. Whether it be a moment of his own experience or a glimpse of nature, whether the mood of a man or of a city, in any case it is some quintessential soul of things that he will disengage, drop by drop, from the passing moments. It is in no wise different in his criticism. Apparently it is, if anything, with preference that he applies his delicate powers to that form of experience which, as Plato said, is thrice removed from reality. In art, whether it be the unconscious collective art of a city, or the conscious sacrificial and individual art of a genius, he finds the processes of distillation at least twice performed, once by the action of life experience, and once by the reconstructions of the artist. In these sublimations of life he is at home, the instinctive sloth of his temperament — for there can be no other word — predisposing him to this parasitical relation to life. In art, to use his own words, ‘reality already has an atmosphere,’ and in the disengaging of the atmosphere from the thing he finds his highest joy.

Symons seeks, and can find, an adventure among these lordly if diaphanous mansions of the soul. Indeed the possibility of adventure is extraordinarily great; his facility and breadth of appreciation are marvels of cultivation, no less than of original endowment. But one is impressed with an equally extraordinary limitation. While no contemporary English critic has played the light of his temperament over a wider range of arts and experiences, none, it is curious to note, is so abstracted and monotonous in his standpoint. A hatred of the commonplace has driven him far afield, but by a curious paradox he finds, not ‘native’ moments, but always the predestined commonplaces of his own soul. In his search for beauty he has looked at life from every angle; strangeness has been sought rather than refused; there has been an arduous and discreet cultivation of the continual slight novelty. But as soon as he gets these strangenesses and exotics into his hands, they all take on the same color. Amid all the variety of his appreciations there is a persistent monotony of realization.

This curious monotony is perhaps the most striking note of his verse. I know of no two volumes of poems in which the titles exhibit a wider range of subjects, or subjects more stimulating to the imagination. I also know of none where the imagination is so circumscribed by a certain unity of mood. If his Silhouettes are indeed but the outline and the black and white of poetry, it is not because the objects and experiences of which he writes are themselves colorless and without the vital suggestions of the rounded form. As native moments they are full of color and rich in the promise of emotion. It is rather because in passing through his soul they have undergone a process of abstraction which leaves them but the achromatic thinness of a mood. If his London Nights are all pitched to one key, so that to have read one is in a sense to have read them all, it is not because the phantoms that flit through those restless nights are without variety. Here also there is that arduous, if not always discreet, cultivation of the continual slight novelty. It is rather that all are predetermined to resolve themselves into one ground tone — and that, too, a tone singularly like the recurrent mood of a dream. In the Loom of Dreams, — so one of t he poems of the collection is called,— there is, as he himself becomes finally aware, a fatal magic which, no matter how varied and many-colored the threads of life may be, always weaves the same pattern.

I have emphasized this curious effect of monotony, not because it is necessarily opposed either to beauty or to æsthetic effectiveness. In its way Symons’s verse is both beautiful and effective. There is indeed something to be said for his own opinion that a certain monotony is essential to art, — for his feeling that the Russian landscape as one approaches Moscow, with its almost unbearable vastness and monotony, gives rise to a mood akin to that produced by the greatest art. Great beauty is never afraid of singleness of heart; one of the secrets of effectiveness is reiteration. Nor have I emphasized such monotony as something undesired and wholly unsought. That Symons, in fact, desired it secretly, with a strange sympathetic submission, even though it was closely followed by the shadows of ennui and monomania, one easily learns from that marvelous ‘impression,’ An Autumn City : that city of Arles in which the ‘ soul of autumn made itself a body,’ that city whose pleasing monotony he contrasts with the variety of the empty sunlight and the obvious sea of Marseilles. Here the single tone of the dripping rain, the one air of the cathedral repeated over and over again, the single unchanging odor of the place, and the repetition of primitive peasant faces — all fuse into a unity of mood singularly pleasing to the nerves.

Neither as unbeautiful, therefore, nor yet as undesired, does this monotony impress itself upon us, but rather as something inevitable and inexorable. For this fundamental sameness of realization, amid the greatest variety of appreciations, is, if I mistake not, one of the marks of impressionism, of that attitude of mind and will peculiar to the cult of the æsthetic instrument. In place of simplicity of conception there is this sameness of realization; for the unity of creative passion, there is the unity of the relaxed mood. The genus, it is true, may have many species, the fundamental mood may have a variety of emotional accompaniments and overtones. It may have all the cloying sweetness of William Morris’s Earthly Paradise; it may be toned with the wistful speculation of Walter Pater’s prose; it may have the bitter-sweet of Rossetti, or the sterile, dogged joys of Symons himself, — but in any case there is the same reiterated undertone, the sense of a will moving about in worlds unrealized. Dreamers they all are, wandering in a dreamless day. Whether then, retaining the one generous belief that nothing that has ever interested the human mind can wholly lose its worth, they may seek to extract from the past a timeless value; or, once deceived by the too facile consolations of romance, they may snatch enjoyment from the soulless appearances of the moment; in either case it is the enjoyment of the mood after the dogma about which it has formed is gone, the sad residuum of an indeterminate idealism.

II

Symons’s collection of poems, London Nights, is dedicated to Paul Verlaine; his Days and Nights to Walter Pater. If he has learned much of his art from the former, some of whose poems he has translated, it is safe to say that he has got much of his philosophy from the latter. The former may have taught him the technical secrets of a most delicate detachment of appearance from reality; the latter has given him the theory of that detachment.

To be sure, Symons practices his master’s creed with a difference, his temperament allowing him to extract from nature the essences of many things which Pater’s coldness will not let him touch. Yet in both there is that same fastidiousness of taste that finds nature tasteless, and that will not allow them to take the raw emotion, ‘the big, foolish, dirty thing,’ just as it is. In both there is the same sedate and sombre lack of humor, a necessary consequence of their finding nature tasteless. In both, and back of all, there is the same deep-seated and instinctive hatred of the commonplace, which, whether congenital or acquired, is the source of both the philosophy and the practice of the æsthete and the impressionist.

As it happens, one may find in Pater a statement of this very creed; a statement not only exquisite in the accuracy of its self-revelation, but also serving as the superscription for almost everything that Symons has written. ‘ It is easy,’ so Pater tells us in his essay on Winckelmann, ‘to indulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of the things that we must renounce if we mean to mould our lives to æsthetic perfection. Philosophy,’ he continues, ‘serves culture, not by a fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passions, the strangenesses, the contrasts of life.’

In these two articles of his creed, — not only the denial of the instinct for the real behind appearance, for this and this only is the metaphysical instinct at bottom, but also the perverted use of this instinct to stimulate the passions, the strangenesses, the contrasts of life, — the ‘ perfect æsthete ’ stands revealed. With true insight the hater of the commonplace denies the metaphysical instinct in all its forms, for it is not only commonplace, but is the most common of all things. It is the feeling for the roots of reality, for the solidarity of instinct, of which the several instincts are but feeble anticipations; it is the primal lust. Denial, frustration of this primal lust is the philosophy of impressionism. In the matter of the elemental and common instincts of life, the perfect æsthete will, as Symons confesses in the matter of love, ‘cultivate diverse imaginings, strange reticences, only that the one vulgar final act remain an unadmitted fact.’ In some obscure way it is always the vulgar final fact of realization, in short the metaphysical instinct, from which such an one shrinks.

With Pater this vulgar instinct for the real back of appearance is to be renounced. With others, as with Symons himself, there is rather a perverse and inevitable frustration of the instinct. In the first chapter of his Spiritual Adventures, entitled ‘A Prelude to Life,’ he not only confesses an early — almost congenital — hatred of the elemental and commonplace, but in his ‘impressions’ of his early self reveals a form of experience that amounts almost to a dissociation of appearance and reality. In that mere chain of unconnected emotions and sensations, so obscure and meaningless at first, one finally receives an impression of extraordinary lucidity and outrightness. One comes to see that of just these detached, abstracted moments, was his life composed. The singular sensitiveness to life’s impressions combined with an equally singular impenetrability to life’s interests, — this, one comes to see, is not a pose but a prepossession.

The tales which make up the body of the Adventures are studies in just such æsthetic dissociations. In Christian Trevalga the bondage to the passing sensation is one of tones. For him music becomes the only reality. Something more than the soul of humanity expressing itself in melody; it is a real thing that may be hurt. Cut off from the vulgar but full and resonant emotions of humanity, the musician comes to find unearthly feelings in the tones themselves.

All this, it is true, does not take place without a struggle. Trevalga tries to find himself, to become real again by falling in love, and in this experience for a time he again touches real things. But his master is imperious and, reality again receding, the mastery of appearances passes over into a permanent hallucination.

In The Death of Peter Waydelin it is the tragedy of the lust and dominance of the eye. An initial slightly novel way of seeing things, an obscure facility for abstracting color, light, and shade from its meanings, passes finally into a permanent set of the eye in which all things are seen with a monotonous tinge of green, and into a distortion of the soul in which all things are bathed in illusion.

In these two studies of ‘art for art’s sake’ there are indeed striking hints of the psychology of the musician and painter, but even more interesting is the philosophy of impressionism that emerges. ‘There had been, it was clear to me,’ the fictitious observer of Waydelin remarks, ‘some obscure martyrdom going on, not the less for art’s sake because it came out of the very necessity of things.’

Such a creed is apparently inevitable at some stage of the development of the artist. The affinity for impressionism and unreality is inherent in the artistic temperament. In the diary which he kept at Venice, Wagner speaks of the magical effect of the square of St. Mark’s, as of ‘a wholly distant outlived world’ admirably fitting his wish for solitude. ‘Nothing to strike one as directly real life. Everything is objective like a work of art.’ He speaks of its ‘thoroughly theatrical suggestion, through its absolute uniqueness and its sea of utter strangers void of all concern for me — merely distracting one’s fancy.’ Half-æsthetic states of still another type are eagerly sought by the artist to prolong the isolation, ‘the instant made eternity’; those of the ‘Absinthe-Drinker,’ who, as in the poem of Symons of that name, gently waves the visible world away, or of his ‘Opium Smoker’ who is engulfed and drowned, deliciously swathed with the cerements of eternity. Whether as the unasked gift of the moment, or as the artificial widening and deepening of the specious present, it is such experiences, so congenial to the artistic temperament, that lead to the belief that ‘the complete and perfect artist is from all eternity separated from reality.’

For many this is but a phase of experience; ‘tired of eternal unreality, they reach out into that very thing that is forbidden them.’ For others again, as for Symons himself, the contradiction in the artist’s temperament remains permanent. Thus it is that the obscure martyrdom of the artist is a part of Symons’s creed, — for him there must be no longer merely the conscious denial of the metaphysical instinct, but some fatal and inexorable frustration of the commonplace instinct for reality itself; no longer merely a sense of æsthetic perfection, but a prescience of the monotony of sterile realizations. This it is that pervades the Spiritual Adventures, this is the burden of his critical philosophy of beauty.

In his Romantic Movement, written with the avowed intention of exalting the work of Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley as the final criterion of poetry, Symons speaks of Shelley as ‘an enchanter who never mistakes the images he calls up for realities,’ and yet he immediately adds, with a contradiction that would be inexplicable were it not involved in his whole philosophy, ‘that Prometheus is a cloudy procession of phantoms seen in a divine hallucination!’ In his own experience, accordingly, this contradiction is never resolved. Condemned to the unreality of existences that he has transformed to mere appearances, he is yet constantly aware of a mystical reality that has escaped him in the process. He complains that he is ‘too much possessed by the apparent and unreal.’ He regrets the corporeal and worldly limitations that shut him out from the mystical. In short — if you are vouchsafed the divine hallucination, you will have absolute poetry; if, on the other hand, as he confesses in his own case, this be not attained, you will have— well, impressionism! In any case— and this is the sum of the matter — the blood of the martyrs is the seed of beauty.

III

Abstraction, disengagement of beauty from life — such is Symons’s conscious goal. An obscure, though none the less real, martyrdom of sense and sentiment is its recognized condition. One would like to know just what this beauty, this æsthetic perfection is, and by what it is to be known. Such a definition is not to be found in Symons’s writings; though not without his standards, he never defines them directly. One finds, it is true, certain secondary qualities that are fairly constant, — the strangeness that romanticism adds to beauty, the monotony that accompanies the greatest art. It is only between the lines that one learns to read, and finally to formulate to himself, a certain obscure ideal of pure beauty, of beauty pure and undefiled, not without its tone of curious asceticism.

Pater somewhere speaks of a transparent, diaphanous type of soul that would value every single experience at its timeless worth, not caring to add to or abstract from it. What he seems to mean is that in such a soul, each experience, freed from its pragmatic reality, could will its own intention with uninhibited purity. The solidarity of sense and instinct being broken up, the demands of the thing, of our own and other wills being denied, the absoluteness of each experience would be purchased by its unreality. In this artificial suppression of all relations would lie the veritable unreality of the life that art thus offers us, but also its supreme beauty. Some such purity of appreciation, the result of the inhibition of thought-relations, constitutes the æsthetic perfection.

Purity of impression has a well-defined meaning for the impressionist of ear and eye. Has purity of appreciation a similar intent for the virtuoso of feeling and mood? For the former, as we have seen in Symons’s studies of the martyrs of these two senses, it is in just this freedom of the color or tone from its pragmatic reality, this freedom in which it wills its own intention with uninhibited purity, that beauty is to be found. The light and color of things, so the impressionist in painting would say, are to be given in art as they are intrinsically for consciousness, not as they are as instruments of knowledge — before they have begun to serve as means of knowledge, or after they have ceased thus to function. In so far as they enter into the subjective feeling of the individual, sensations are pleasant or unpleasant; in so far as they serve the purposes of knowledge, they are true or false; in so far as in and for themselves they are appreciated and brought to expression, they are æsthetically true or untrue, and therefore beautiful or ugly.

Not essentially different is the ideal of the virtuoso of the soul. Here, too, as Symons indeed tells us, the purpose of art is to show man what he is to himself alone, and his feeling as it is for itself alone. As in the case of the sensations, art is to ignore those special demands of pragmatic reality, through which they are changed and improved, so in the case of feelings and emotions, she is to remove all those moral purposes, all the limitations which spring from the complexity of the social life, or from the rigidity of individual character, allowing the feeling to live itself out in individual purity. A violent passion, a profound melancholy, sweeps over the soul. A thousand different elements meet and interpenetrate, without precise contours, without the least tendency to become externalized, to take the commonplace mould of social habit or moral form. This is the price of their originality. Description, as ordinarily understood, means just this: to give them this form and mould; but then, instead of describing our feelings, we have really taken from them their unique color and aroma, and have substituted a juxtaposition of inert states translated into social counters. But beauty is the opposite of all this; not thus, but rather by a reversal of this process, is the disengagement of beauty from life to be attained.

Thus, an essential similarity of intention, as of realization, belongs (pace the New Laocoon!) alike to the impressionist of sense and of sentiment. They also share a common weakness — a disregard for the structural elements of reality. It has been said of a Manet or a Monet, that in their passion for atmosphere, the mere object becomes indifferent—‘just enough suggestion of form to supply solar reflections and to hang saturated vapors upon, sufficed them.’ May it not also be said of a Symons, that in his passion for nuances of experience, the soul itself becomes indifferent; that he seeks just enough suggestion of character to supply the reflections of passions or to serve as a peg upon which to hang detached and vaporous emotions? If it may be said of the impressionists of color that, for the purposes of their studies, they come to cease to work except in the face of a sensation, and lose the power of deliberate construction, may it not be said of these impressionists of the soul that to them is finally very little more left than a power to vibrate with wonderful promptness to any transient sensation or emotion? The very delicacy and tremulous fluency of Symons’s touch is but an outward and visible sign of this inner emotionalism. The deliberate disregard of all those rigid qualities, whether prejudice or obligation, that constitute the form of the soul, results in a fluidity of values which, while not without a unique quality of beauty, represents an excessive sacrifice to the ideal of perfected appreciation.

IV

The poets of romance are always singing of love; the realists of novel and drama never cease to think and talk of sex. Both of these we may call morbid valuations; yet in some obscure way all the extensions of the metaphysical instinct seem to find their roots here. Doubtless it is not wholly true that, as Symons has put it into the mouth of ‘Lust’ to say, —

doubtless it is not entirely true that all the refractions of the infinite, in morals, in art, in religion, are but ‘broken lights’ of love. Nevertheless it must be recognized that all the tragic possibilities of the human will may be seen reflected in this one dark pool. Certainly the morbid frustration of the metaphysical instinct, half deliberate violence, half obscure martyrdom, the whole tragedy of abstraction of beauty from life, is at its deepest point in the poem from which these lines are taken.

The possibilities of delight and scorn are for Symons varied indeed, as varied as his London Nights, but the ground tones resolve themselves into two ultimate moods, both sterile, half-scornful joys of a vicious abstraction. In one mood he hails the simplicity of pure lust. He finds, in a poem such as ‘ Idealism,’ an inexpressible delight in the knowledge that the woman has no soul, no possibilities of mind or heart, but is merely ‘this masterpiece of flesh.’ Again in ‘Liber Amoris ’ he finds a rapture in the thought of love sinking from the infinite — and just enough to last one night.

In quite another mood, however, and one almost as frequent, he seeks all the subtleties, diverse imaginings, and strange reticences of love, ‘only that the one final vulgar act remain an unadmitted fact.’

In either case it is a vicious abstractionism, turning realities into appearances, a lust for realization moving about in worlds unrealized.

To this sophisticated use of the metaphysical instinct the philosophy of impressionism naturally gravitates. And the end thereof is decadence. Frustration of this instinct for the real is of necessity followed by perversion and sterilization of the emotions. For all these emotions which the artist seeks to detect, and in which he luxuriates, presuppose the absolute reality of their objects. A passion by its very nature is a claim to absoluteness, a projection into infinity. The tragic is impossible without certain fixed prepossessions or prejudices concerning the real. The sentiment of sublimity appears only where the absolute shows itself for a moment, where an elevation above or descent below the milieu of experience causes it to show its face.

All these emotions, to be rich and full, must presuppose the structural elements of the soul which the impressionist disregards. To feel them one must assume the rigid prepossessions, the absolutes, on which they live and from which they draw their blood. All these must be intensely real. But it is as a spiritual parasite, clinging to life by the tentacles of make-believe, that the impressionist and illusionist live, and luxuriate in their emotions. Tragedy, strangeness, even sublimity of a kind — all are there, but somehow they are substitutes, unreal, and without heart, frustrate ghosts of passions that are spent.

There is, in fact, in Symons’s writings, especially in his poetry, a certain curious tone, — not unrelated to the monotony of which we have spoken,— describable only as a sort of parasitic sublimity. It flashes out here and there in his shorter poems, but it is felt most surely in the longer ones, such as ‘The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins’ and ‘Faust and Helena.’ One need not deny the thrill of these poems to recognize that it is specious; one need not deny the sublimity of vices raised to the infinite, to realize that this very sublimity is achieved only by a morbid contrast with the really structural elements of life. The sentiment is there, but it is parasitic. It lives only in the world of morbid valuations, only so long as the sentiment of the absolute is lent to images and ideas that will not bear its weight.

Nowhere does Symons show this specious, perverted sublimity more completely than when he touches religious emotion, as in ‘Seward Lackland.’ If his frequent enjoyment of religious images and emotions without their dogmatic core of belief is an unpleasant travesty of religion, this picture of enjoyment of the sacrifice of one’s soul for the glory of God, this orgy of morbid valuations, becomes well-nigh unbearable.

One wishes that the æsthetic would leave God out of the business; that, as Laplace in his phenomenalism, so Symons in his impressionism, should say, ‘I have no need of this hypothesis.’ But no! He does need it, precisely for his inverted sublimities. One almost feels that, like the décadent in one of Jokai’s novels, he might easily use a night of debauchery as an exquisite preparation for the enjoyment of Gregorian tones.

After all, then, Symons does indulge the metaphysical instinct. Indeed he explicitly says that ‘poetry and metaphysics are alike a disengaging, though for different ends, of the absolute element in things.’ And if, again, with Pater and the other impressionists, he holds that music is the most metaphysical of the arts, it is because, for him at least, ‘it comes to us with a divine hallucination, chills us a little with its airs from heaven and elsewhere, and breaks down for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us the gulf.’_

It is all a question of the end. And his end is to feel and to show the gulf! He is metaphysical for the same reason that he is anything else — for the sake of the sensation. Would he not, one is constrained to ask, rather find the gulf than the solid platform of the world? Is it not just the chill of the gulf that he finds delightful, perhaps because of his very fever and restlessness?

V

In the Prelude to Life Symons speaks of his feverish delight in the mere seeing of London. ‘I grasped at all these sights,’ so the account runs, ‘with the same futile energy as a dog that I once saw standing in an Irish stream, and snapping at the bubbles that ran continually past him on the water. Life ran past me continually and I tried to make all the bubbles my own.’ Doubtless all this began with a mere delight in appearances, the sheer joy of living, the animal fondness for sparkle and movement. But it ended in being a desperately serious, if futile occupation. It became a kind of spiritual avarice. Symons has indeed, a curious soul-affinity for the miser, whose passion he seems to understand. That which is least comprehensible to most men, the hoarding of the mere empty counters of exchange, is for him full of a real if perverted poetry. He speaks of the respect for money as for the most serious thing in the world: ‘the symbol of a physical necessity,’ it is true, but ‘a thing having no real existence in itself, no importance to the mind that refuses to realize its existence.’ Only the miser really possesses it in itself, for the miser is the idealist, the poet of gold! Symons’s spiritual avarice is greedy of the poetry of the passing moment, the golden moments through which life passes on its way. Nothing that he has written has such convincing personal reality as his picture of Avarice in ‘The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins,’— that Avarice which

Surely we have here what the philosophers call the bad Infinite, and the sterile, ugly Absolute. It is a trick a vicious abstractionism can play in life, as well as in philosophy.

One of the romanticists to whom Symons devotes a short section, a certain Darly, says of himself, ‘My whole life has been an abstraction — such must be my work.’ It is not strange that Symons finds ‘every word’ of the short letter in which this sentence occurs, ‘a revelation.’ It was a revelation precisely because it revealed a truth that was also personal. I am not sure but that he would have called his own life an extraction, rather than an abstraction, if one may be suffered this play with words, — one long process of extracting the essence or quintessence of beauty from life and its moments; from men and from cities; from music and from plays; from the soul and from the flesh; never, however, taking the thing as it was, but rather in that morbid valuation in which one seeks to render moments of sensation and emotion absolute, to widen instants to eternities, and in which one finds only the bare identities of love, the sameness of London Nights, and finally a life that is but a dream.

Yet with it all, this avarice remains his one abiding passion. In ‘Satiety’ he tells us, —

(the futile energy with which he snapped at the passing moment has changed to another mood),—

In contrast to all this there come to mind the words of a splendid little spendthrift of life; words which, although they may shock us with their vulgar freshness, seem almost made to throw into the face of such as Mr. Symons: —

’I don’t care a rap for remembering,’ she cries; ‘ I care for you. This moment could n’t be better until the next moment comes. That’s how it takes me. Why should we hoard? We are n’t going out presently like Japanese lanterns in a gale. It’s the poor dears who do, who know they will, who can’t keep it up, who need to clutch at wayside flowers and put ’em in little books for remembrance. Flattened flowers are n’t for the likes of us. Moments, indeed! We like each other fresh and fresh. It is n’t illusion for us. We, too, just love each other — the real identical other all the time.’

Is this mere bravado — this carelessness and extravagance? Or is it the fruit of a discipline that Symons seems never to have known? Perhaps it is but that deeper metaphysical instinct which he deliberately frustrated and renounced.