THE POE1'RY OF PAUL ELUARD
77
Surrealism has received little analytical discussion in English.
Because it cast back for exemplars through the 1870 generation in
France (Rimbaud and Lautreamont), to Baudelaire, it seemed to
gather up Symbolist functions, and, moreover, extend them by
adding Freudian theory to the Symbolist base. Actually, this widen–
ing and deepening never occurred, and Symbolism was contracted
rather than extended, by Surrealism. Since Eluard's poetry is so
symptomatic of one result of adherence to Surrealist theory, it is
necessary to outline briefly the nature of the Surrealist revolt
against Dada, and the uneven history of Symbolism (which did not
proceed in an unbroken line, as is generally supposed) after
Mallarme.
In 1898 Mallarme's chief pupil, Valery, entered the silence
which was to remain unbroken for twenty years. And although the
influence of Rimbaud was not entirely dead, it was subjected to
traditional distortions, chiefly at the hands of Claudel and Riviere,
who endeavoured to prove Rimbaud a Catholic character and an
embodiment of angelic (though fallen) innocence. A regression
toward convention and traditionalism had set
in.
Marcel Raymond
describes it in his
De Baudelaire
a
Surrealisme:
"Writers seemed prisoners of their culture. Psychological or
physiological drama, recitals of sociologists, physicians and
geographers, poems by archeologists or men of erudition, the
literary jests and
divertissements
of mandarins - all these
[pre-War] works rested on a base of positive knowledge, con·
sidered unshakable and untouchable. Literature was ... limed
in the mass of facts, laws and hypotheses which the remarkable
development of human knowledge had heaped up ... during the
19th century. The great majority of the works of the period pro·
posed to demonstrate something, whether by describing, analys·
ing, explaining individual or collective phenomena, or by decom·
posing them into rational elements. . .. These works were clear
and satisfied the needs of a simple logic.... All were determinist
or finalist. The creative freedom of the artist could not function
except between walls of truth, utility or good sense.... Poetry,
from the early epoch of Parnassianism, had been towed along
behind philosophy and history. Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Prud–
homme and Heredia had wished to condense in their verse a
world of ideas and facts. It is true that the Symbolists, coming
after the Parnassians, had . . . opened literary windows and
allowed the fog of mystery t:o come into the study of the man of
letters. But, after 1895, the Symbolists were violently attacked :
