utterly beyond its power to discover.

Of this changed outlook the growth of Symbolism is the most significant
literary expression. It was not confined to France, or to poetry. We
know how the drama of Ibsen became charged with ulterior meanings as the
fiery iconoclast passed into the poet of insoluble and ineluctable
doubt. But by the French symbolists it was pursued as a creed, as a
religion. If the dominant poetry of the third quarter of the century
reflected the prestige of science, the dominant poetry of the fourth
reflected the idealistic reactions against it, and Villiers de l'Ile
Adam, its founder, came forward proclaiming that 'Science was bankrupt'.
And so it might well seem to him, the visionary mystic inhabiting, as
he did, a world of strange beauty and invisible mystery which science
could not unlock. The symbolists had not all an explicit philosophy; but
they were all aware of potencies in the world or in themselves which
language cannot articulately express, and which are yet more vitally
real than the 'facts' which we can grasp and handle, and the
'respectable' people whom we can measure and reckon with. Sometimes
these potencies are vaguely mysterious, an impalpable spirit speaking
only by hints and tokens; sometimes they are felt as the pulsations of
an intoxicating beauty, breaking forth in every flower, but which can
only be possessed, not described; sometimes they are moods of the soul,
beyond analysis, and yet full of wonder and beauty, visions half
created, half perceived. Experiences like these might have been
described, as far as description would go, by brilliant artificers like
the Parnassians. Verlaine and Mallarmé did not discover, but they
applied with new daring, the fact that an experience may be communicated
by words which, instead of representing it, suggest it by their colour,
their cadences, their rhythm, their verbal echoes and inchoate phrases.
All the traditional artistry of French poetic speech was condemned as