Notes
Symons was one of the first “to utilize London as a Symbolist image”, Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons. A Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, 88.
See for instance George Sims, How the Poor Live (1883), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1897) and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903). Symons’s indebtedness to Blake’s “London” and De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” is also obvious.
Nicholas Freeman, Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art 1870-1914, Oxford: OUP, 2007, 3.
Also present in F. Madox Ford’s narrative, The Soul of London: A Survey (1905), not to mention another text also illustrated by A. Langdon Coburn, London by G.K. Chesterton (1913) describing the Inner Circle Line route which a provincial woman is unable to exit. Coburn took pictures of Mansion House, the Tower, Blackfriars, the Temple and Westminster Bridge stations.
The Soul of London: A Survey by Ford Madox Hueffer, London: Alston Rivers, 1905.
A. Symons, London: A Book of Aspects, Minneapolis: Privately Printed for Edmund D. Brooks and His Friends 1909, 2. All references are to this edition.
A. Symons, “Mr Henley’s Poetry”, Fortnightly Review (August 1892), rpt. Studies in Two Literatures, London: Leonard Smithers, 1897, 186-203.
“[…] les idées sont dans l’air, elles vous sourient au coin d’une rue, elles s’élancent sous une roue de cabriolet avec un jet de boue.” H. de Balzac, Scènes de la vie de province, tome 2, Les Célibataires.
According to Freeman, writers developed three discourses in line with contemporary artistic and, to a lesser extent, scientific innovations. “Empiricist” London derives from a positivist belief that the city can be mapped and understood by a process of investigation and analysis, giving rise to sociological enquiry and certain types of realist fiction; “impressionist” London is a city that can only be known fleetingly from a wholly subjective position; and “symbolist” London is mystical metropolis seen as either a portion of eternity too big for the eye of man, or as a series of secret patterns discernible only to the initiated, when they simply could not be deciphered by the neophyte. Symons partly embraced a symbolist discourse (Freeman 12-13).
Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, trans. Freddy Perlman, London: Black & Red, 1977. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm (last accessed 7 February, 2016).
Other studies on visuality in the Victorian and early modernist times include Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1990, and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.
For a gender analysis of Symons’s London poems, see Michelle Spie, “Romancing the City: Arthur Symons and the Spatial Politics of Aesthetics in 1890s London”, Imagined Londons, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert, New York: Suny Press, 2002, 69-84.
Another parallel can be made between Symons’s anthropological analysis and Simmel’s analysis of modern sociability: “This world of sociability, the only one in which a democracy of equals is possible without friction, is an artificial world made up of beings who have renounced both the objective and the purely personal features of the intensity and extensiveness of life in order to bring about among themselves a pure interaction, free of any disturbing material accent.” G. Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability”, Simmel on Culture, eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, London: Sage, 1997, 124.
A. Symons, “Mr Henley’s Poetry”, 188.
William Sharp, “London and nineteenth-century poetry”, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London, ed. Lawrence Manley, Cambridge: CUP, 2011, 120.
According to Michel de Certeau, the city gives rise to two experiences: the rational, ordered topographical city observed from a bird’s-eye view, and the experience of the street, dangerous, ambiguous and unsettled. The first one is that of the city seen from above by geographers, and the second one is the city seen from below by walkers: “a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning.” The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: The U of California P, 1988, 105.
M. Parr & G. Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol.I, London: Phaidon Press, 2004, 74.
London: A Book of Aspects by Arthur Symons with Twenty Photogravures by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Minneapolis: Privately Printed for Edmund D. Brooks and His Friends, 1914. Museum of English Rural Life and Special Collections Service, University of Reading. I thank Professor Nicholas Freeman who alerted me to the existence of that edition.
The history of the text and the book composition, design and layout remains undocumented.
A.L. Coburn, London, London & New York: Duckworth & Brentano’s, 1909. Most of the photogravures designed for A Book of Aspects appeared there. Some can be seen on http://www.photogravure.com/history/keyfigures_coburn.html (last accessed on 7 February, 2016).
For instance Coburn published his picture of Saint Paul’s in the Daily Graphic on 29 October 1909. On Langdon Coburn, see M. Weaver, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Symbolist Photographer 1882-1966: Beyond the Craft, New York: Aperture, 1986.
In his essay “The World as Ballet”, Symons already wanted to “look at the dance, on the stage, a mere spectator” to see “a bouquet of living flowers, which have all the glitterings of artificial ones”, The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Life and Art in the 1890s, ed. Karl Beckson, University Park and London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1977, 245.
Such a position contrasts with Peter Bailey’s analysis of the music hall “both [as] a public and private place where the multiple intimacies of its crowd […] paradoxically afforded a kind of privacy”, Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1986, xvii.
In the 1970s Debord carefully distinguished spectators, bourgeois and bureaucrats whom he opposed to the proletariat and subsequently to autonomous subjects rejecting the society of spectacle.
In “Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli”, the preface to Silhouettes (1896), Symons had vindicated his preference for artificiality: “Only, personally, I prefer town to country; and in the town we have to find for ourselves, as best as we may, the décor which is the town’s equivalent of the great natural décor of fields and hills. Here it is that artificiality comes in; and if anyone sees not beauty in the effects of artificial light, in all the variable, most human, yet most factitious town landscape, I can only pity him, and go my own way”, Silhouettes, second edition revised and enlarged, London: Leonard Smithers, 1896, xv.
“I still think that there is a poetry in this world of illusion, not less genuine of its kind than that more easily apprehended poetry of a world, so little more real […]. It is part of the poetry of cities, and it waits for us in London” (59). Earlier, Symons had credited Walt Whitman as the creator of “a vital poetry of cities” (48).
For an analysis of Fountain Court as both literary heart and “domestic retreat” (80) from the city, see Spie.
Interestingly, Symons had described his stay at the Willards’ in Berlin in a Letter to Ernest Rhys: “We employed much of the time in social studies, and are prepared to write a scientific work in large 8vo on ‘The Cafés of Berlin from 10.30 PM to 6 AM, sociologically considered. With Portraits and Autographs.’” A. Symons, Selected Letters 1880-1935, ed. Karl Beckson, London: Macmillan, 1989, 83.
Unnamed are Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson whom Symons accompanied as an observer of their artificial experience of life. In “East and West End Silhouettes” Symons describes his chance encounters with friends and other intellectuals, and notes that the multitude of others and the indecipherable crowd have become a source of disillusionment dehumanizing human relations. In “Music Halls and Ballet Girls” (1890s), the places where an artist lives and eats “provide keys to his psyche as well as his artistic style”, A. Symons, The Memoirs of Arthur Symons, 112.
“[…] la dérive se définit comme une technique du passage hâtif à travers des ambiances variées […] ce qui l’oppose en tous points aux notions classiques de voyage et de promenade.” “Théorie de la dérive” (1953), G. Debord, Œuvres, Paris: Gallimard, 2004, 251.
“[…] l’étude des lois exactes et des effets précis du milieu géographique, consciemment aménagé ou non, agissant directement sur le comportement affectif des individus.” G. Debord, “Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine” (1955), Œuvres, 204.
As J. Lyon notes, Symons became interested in the Gypsies and published “In Praise of Gypsies” in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, which was revived in 1907 along with the Gypsy Society with the aim of collecting and preserving the “genuine” Romani cultural lore, but also included histories of political persecutions. In his 1908 article Symons identified with the figure of the wandering gypsy: “[Gypsies] are the symbol of our aspirations, and we do not know it; they stand for the will for freedom, for friendship with nature, for the open air, for change and the sight of many lands; for all in us that protests against progress. Progress is a heavy wheel, turned backwards upon us.” “In Praise of Gypsies”, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 1 (1908), 296. J. Lyon demonstrates how the Gypsy culture was construed by Symons and others “as an eccentric bulwark against rationalist modernity”, especially in the matrix of London. See Janet Lyon, “Sociability in the Metropole: Modernism Bohemian Salons”, ELH 76.3 (Fall 2009) 701.
“Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or”, Charles Baudelaire, “Ébauche d’un Épilogue pour la 2e édition”, Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 2nd ed., 1996, 250.
“[…] in London, it is the atmosphere that makes the picture, an atmosphere like Turner, revealing every form through the ecstasy of its colour” (5).
For an alternative reading see Freeman 188.
Émile Zola, L’Assommoir, trans. Arthur Symons, London: The Lutetian Society, 1894.
“[Gypsies] have the lawlessness, the abandonment, the natural physical grace in form and gesture, of animals; only a stealthy and wary something in their eyes makes them human”, A. Symons, “In Praise of Gypsies”, 296.
“We live by touching buttons and ringing bells” (15).
A. Symons, “In Praise of Gypsies”, 296.
One man’s exclamation heard by chance—“Twelve o’clock! We may be all dead by twelve o’clock!” (75)—summarizes the indifferent philosophy of the crowd Symons confronts.
Such a negative vision also appears albeit from a more ethnographical perspective in F. Madox Ford.
A. Symons, Cities and Seacoasts and Islands, New York: Brentano’s 1919. Chapters include Spain, London, Britain, Ireland and Cornwall.
Cornish country places elicit “the sentiment, not of real things, but of a picture.” A. Symons, “A Valley in Cornwall” (1904), Cities and Seacoasts and Islands, 245.
A. Symons, “At the Land’s End” (1904), Cities and Seacoasts and Islands, 285.
“At the Land’s End”, 265.
“At the Land’s End”, 268.
H. James described his aborted project on “London Town” to Gosse in those terms. See The Notebooks of Henry James, Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1981, 325.
Symons noted: “London was for a long time my supreme sensation, and to roam in the streets, especially after the lamps were lighted, my chief pleasure” (30).
Guy Debord: “[…] de ma vie, je ne suis apparu nulle part”, Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici (1988), Œuvres, 1550.
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