Figures of Several Centuries

Arthur Symons gathered twenty-three essays here, ranging from Saint Augustine and Villon to Ibsen, Huysmans, and the Indian poet Sarojini Naidu. The subjects are mostly writers, and the approach is never merely academic. Symons reads Donne as an intellectual adventurer who became a poet almost by accident, calls Villon the first modern poet, and devotes a long chapter to Casanova’s last years as librarian at Dux, drawn from six cases of manuscripts he examined at the Bohemian castle in 1899. Emily Brontë, Poe, Beddoes, Flaubert, Swinburne, Rossetti, Hardy, Baudelaire, and Walter Pater each get a turn. Published in 1916, the book shows the critic who introduced English readers to French Symbolism at his most assured. Symons wrote about literature by temperament and sympathy rather than by system, and the essays stay readable because of it.