With all their differences, the works of the Symbolists have two features in common. They are vague often to the point of being unintelligible, and they are pious. Their vagueness is only to be expected, after all that has been said here about the peculiarities of mystic thought. Their piousness has attained to an importance which makes it necessary to consider it more in detail.
When, in the last few years, a large number of mysteries, passion plays, golden legends, and cantatas appeared, when one dozen after another of new poets and authors, in their first poems, novels, and treatises, made ardent confessions of faith, invoked the Virgin Mary, spoke with rapture of the sacrifice of the Mass, and knelt in fervent prayer, the cry arose amongst reactionists, who have a vested interest in diffusing a belief in a reversion of cultured humanity to the mental darkness of the past: ‘Behold, the youth, the hope, the future of the French people is turning away from science; “emancipation” is becoming bankrupt; souls are opening again to religion, and the Holy Catholic Church steps anew into its lofty office, as the teacher, comforter, and guide of civilized mankind.’ The Symbolistic tendency is designedly called ‘neo-Catholic,’ and certain critics pointed to its appearance and success as a proof that freethought was overthrown by faith. ‘Even the most superficial glance at the state of the world,’ writes Edouard Rod,[108] ‘shows us that we are on all sides in the full swing of reaction.’ And, further, ‘I believe in reaction in every sense of the word. How far this reaction will go is the secret of to-morrow.’
The jubilant heralds of the new reaction, in inquiring into the cause of this movement, find, with remarkable unanimity, this answer, viz.: The best and most cultivated minds return to faith, because they found out that science had deceived them, and not done for them what it had promised to do. ‘The man of this century,’ says M. Melchior de Vogüé,[109] ‘has acquired a very excusable confidence in himself.... The rational mechanism of the world has been revealed to him.... In the explanation of things the Divine order is wholly eliminated.... Besides, why follow after doubtful causes, when the operations of the universe and of humanity had become so clear to the physicist and physiologist?... The least wrong God ever wrought was that of being unnecessary. Great minds assured us of this, and all mediocre spirits were convinced of it. The eighteenth century had inaugurated the worship of Reason. The rapture of that millennium lasted but a moment. Then came eternal disillusion, the regularly recurring ruin of all that man had built upon the hollow basis of his reason.... He had to admit that, beyond the circle of acquired truths, the abyss of ignorance appeared again just as deep, just as disquieting.’