Poe, Baudelaire, and the symbolists. People who hear painting, see
music, enjoy odorous poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are
now classed by the omnipotent psychical police as decadents, though
such notions are as old as literature. Suarez de Mendoza in his
L'Audition Colorée has said that the sensation of colour hearing, the
faculty of associating tones and colours, is often a consequence of an
association of ideas established in youth. The coloured vowels of
Arthur Rimbaud, which must be taken as a poet's crazy prank; the
elaborate treatises by René Ghil, which are terribly earnest; the
remarks that one often hears, such as "scarlet is like a trumpet
blast"; certain pages of Huysmans, all furnish examples of this
curious muddling of the senses and mixing of genres. Naturally, it has
invaded criticism, which, limited in imagery, sometimes seeks to
transfer the technical terms of one art to another.

Whistler with his nocturnes, notes, symphonies in rose and silver, his
colour-sonatas, boldly annexed well-worn musical phrases, that in
their new estate took on fresher meanings even if remaining knee-deep
in the kingdom of the nebulous. It must be confessed modern composers
have retaliated. Musical impressionism is having its vogue, while
poets are desperately pictorial. Soul landscapes and etched sonnets
are not unpleasing to the ear. What if they do not mean much? There
was a time when to say a "sweet voice" would arouse a smile. What has
sugar to do with sound? It may be erratic symbolism, this confusing of
terminologies; yet, once in a while, it strikes sparks. There is a
deeply rooted feeling in us that the arts have a common matrix, that
they are emotionally akin. "Her slow smile" in fiction has had marked
success with young people, but a "slow landscape" is still regarded
suspiciously. The bravest critic of art was Huysmans. He pitched
pell-mell into the hell-broth of his criticism any image that