Symbolism and Mysticism: The Role of Maurice Maeterlinck in Arthur Symons's Critical Vision.

It has been little acknowledged that at the heart of Arthur Symons's influential ideas about Symbolism was an intense engagement with the work of the Belgian playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck. In The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), Symons contends that Symbolism is the inheritance of a mystical tradition, and that its use of symbols is not directed to any particular doctrine or truth, but rather to mystery itself, to the human condition of being surrounded by an unknown metaphysical darkness. Symons identifies an aesthetics which represents this mysterious darkness most with Maeterlinck's drama. This article traces their relationship from their first meeting in 1890 to Symons's disillusionment in the early years of the twentieth century with the playwright, whom he felt had abandoned his mystical aesthetic in favor of rhetoric and logical clarity. Even this disillusionment shows the importance that Maeterlinck held for Symons as aesthete of the mystical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]