directly, as Zola would have done: to describe streets, squares, monuments, gas-burners, ink-like darkness, feverish animation under the gaze of immobile stars – undoubtedly, he will achieve an artistic effect, but there will be no trace of Symbolism. However, he can gradually infuse the same image into the reader’s imagination, having said, for example: ‘This is a gigantic cryptogram, the key to which is lost,’ – and then, without any descriptions and enumeration, he will find room in one phrase for the entire Paris – its light, darkness, and magnificence”.[4]
Only the chosen one, only a lone artist is capable to create the abstracted from actual reality, generalised, symbolic image. Quoting Mallarmé, “This is the person, intentionally secluding himself in order to sculpt his own gravestone”.[5] Symbolists create something like the cult of the chosen loner. Listing the qualities inherent in Symbolism, Remy de Gourmont first of all names individualism, creative freedom, the renunciation of studied formulae, the aspiration for everything new, unusual, even strange. “Symbolism… is nothing else than the expression of artistic individualism”,[6] he wrote in The Book of Masks, illustrating his thesis by the brilliant literary portraits of poet-Symbolists.
Jacek Malczewski, Thanatos I, 1898.
Oil on canvas, 134 × 74 cm.
The National Museum, Warsaw.
Edgard Maxence, The Concert of Angels, 1897.
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