primarily that we think, his ideas that we remember. But his
work would have been impossible without Baudelaire and
would hardly have found recognition but for the more
popular form which Verlaine found for its principles. Despite
their obvious differences these poets had a common view of
life which marks them from their predecessors and accounts
to a large degree for their influence. In spite of its many
shapes Symbolism was united by a single creed which
determined the character of its poetry. Its inheritors and
successors, the men of the 'nineties, began by absorbing this
creed. Some abandoned it; others changed it into forms
almost past recognition or moved through it to new forms of
their own. All provide a commentary on the validity and
vitality of the Symbolist doctrines, and their work shows what
different results can be reached from a theory which might
seem narrow and temporary. In other lands and in other
languages a French doctrine has been put into practice. In
the variety of their experiments and the success which has
crowned them these poets show how important a theory may
be in the arts so long as it is not treated theoretically but used
as a basis for new performance.

Seen in retrospect the Symbolist Movement of the nine-
teenth century in France was fundamentally mystical. It
protested with noble eloquence against the scientific art of
an age which had lost much of its belief in traditional religion
and hoped to find a substitute in the search for truth. The
characteristic figures of the time were novelists like Zola, who
painted in ruthless detail large canvases of contemporary life,
and poets like Heredia, who composed impersonal vignettes
of past centuries and distant scenes. In this art mysticism
had no place. The Realists had no use for that belief in a
superior world above the senses which has been familiar in
Europe since Augustine absorbed the doctrines of Neo-
Platonism; they had a stern conviction that what mattered
was truth and that truth could be found empirically in this
world. Orthodox Christianity, of course, continued to exist
and to produce its own writers, but these were not representa-
tive of their time. In the third quarter of the nineteenth
century the Realists and the Parnassians held the field in
France, and even in England something of the same spirit
may be seen in the dramatic poems of Browning or those
poems of Tennyson like the "short, sweet idyll" of ThePrincess

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