‘A capital fellow, full of vivacity & good talk’: Arthur Symons and Gabriel Sarrazin

Abstract

Arthur Symons is currently regarded as a cultural mediator of the cosmopolitan fin de siècle. He stands at the crossroads of distinctive journalistic and literary networks, and of translations in different languages. In the mid-1880s Symons, who had just published An Introduction to the Study of Browning, was regarded as a budding critic with a strong interest in French poets and prose writers. From the start of his journalistic career he had taken an interest in French regional and avant-garde literature, praising them in British magazines, before translating poems in Days and Nights (1889). Such an interest opened the door of French publications for him through the mediation of the French critic Gabriel Sarrazin (1853-1935), nowadays as neglected as Symons once was. In La Renaissance de la poésie anglaise, 1798-1889: Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman (1890), Sarrazin favourably discussed A Study of Browning and was one of the first French littérateurs to consider Symons as a critic of British modern poetry, at the time translated and disseminated in France along with the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and A. C. Swinburne.