Arthur Symons
1865-1945

Arthur Symons was a poet, translator, critic and editor who captured Colbeck's attention like no other writer. Educated in Devonshire, Symons befriended many artists and writers of the nineties in England and France. He published several volumes of verse and criticism, notably "Symbolist Movement in Literature" (1899), contributed regularly to Athenaeum, Saturday, and Fortnightly reviews, wrote plays, edited, and translated from six languages (7).

Colbeck proclaimed: "Arthur Symon's prose writings fascinated me, an uncritical youth, more than sixty years ago. When I first read that remarkable essay 'Fact in Literature,' I realized I was in communion with a mind I would venerate and love always. Perhaps we could recapture the first paragraph of that work:

The invention of printing helped to destroy literature. Scribes, and memories not yet spoilt by over-cramming, preserved all the literature that was worth preserving. Books that had to be remembered by heart, or copied with slow, elaborate penmanship, were not thrown away on people who did not want them. They remained in the hands of people of taste. The first book pointed the way to the first newspaper, and a newspaper is a thing meant to be not only forgotten but destroyed. With the deliberate destruction of print, the respect for printed literature vanished, and a single term came to be used for the poem and the "news item." What had once been an art for the few became a trade for the many.
"Symons was a great deal more than a writer of the Nineties, and is completely mis-classified with poets of the Decadence. He had his brief moment with the Rhymer's Club, and, as editor of The Savoy appeared to dominate the scene for those few months of 1896, but he lived aside from any movement.


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"Symons was straightway in a distinguished company, and one can imagine the astonishment of his fellow editors, had they learned the age of the newcomer. Time passed, and Symons became a familiar of nearly all the writers of his time, accepted equally in Paris as in London, and found a ready market for his prose in the Quarterlies and Monthlys: but Editors, more often than not, returned his verse submissions with polite thanks, declining to publish. Days and Nights, 1889, his first book of poems, had a limited success, but Macmillans never had any call for a reprint; and his next three volumes of verse might not have seen the light of day but for the enterprise of a young, almost unknown, Leonard Smithers. Silhouettes and London Nights survived into second editions, each with a new preface which renders it permanently valuable, but it is true to say that the poet had no assured market for his work until the turn of the century, when a newly arrived publisher - William Heinemann - took him up (8).