It has been said that Mr. Symons stands for ‘a Pagan revolt against Puritanism.’ It is argued, because he was nurtured in nonconformity, art came to him with something of the hysteria a revelation comes to a revivalist meeting. This may be true, but I cannot help thinking that no writer amid all these French influences which he had so eagerly sought out yet remains so typical of the English spirit. It may be heresy, but I always see in mind the gaiety of a Nice carnival in a certain drawing with one solid, solemn face surveying the scene over a starched front. Beneath it is written: ‘Find the Englishman.’
Like the American critic, James Huneker, Mr. Arthur Symons has also occasionally written short imaginative prose studies. One thinks, too, in this respect of Walter Pater’s wonderful _Imaginary Portraits_ and particularly his glorious study of Watteau, and I rather think that this success must have moved the spirit of the two later critics to a noble rivalry. The best, indeed, of Mr. Symons’s _Spiritual Adventures_ are probably those studies which are mostly attached to some theme of art which has been after all the all-engrossing motive of this delightful critic’s life. _An Autumn City_ and _The Death of Peter Waydelin_: the first, a sensitive’s great love for Arles, whither he brings his unresponsive bride; the other, a study quaintly suggestive of a certain painter’s life: both of these sketches are unquestionably more moving than Mr. Symons’s studies of nonconformists quivering at the thought of hell-fire. To them one might add, perhaps, _Esther Kahn_, the history of the psychological development of an actress after the style of _La Faustine_.
Mr. Symons’s favourite word is ‘escape’; his favourite phrase ‘escape from life.’ Now the one and now the other reappear continually in all kinds of connections. Of John Addington Symonds, for example, he writes: ‘All his work was in part an escape, an escape from himself.’ Of Ernest Dowson’s indulgence in the squalid debaucheries of the Brussels kermesse he writes: ‘It was his own way of escape from life.’ Passages of like tenor abound in his writings; and, in one of his papers on _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, he explains his meaning more precisely: