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Jessica Gossling
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International Scholar of Decadence
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![W.B. Yeats described fellow poet Arthur Symons as “a scholar in music halls as another man might be a Greek scholar or an authority on the age of Chaucer.” Under the pen name ‘Silhouette’, Symons reviewed music hall performances for ‘The Star’ from 1892 to 1902, and this milieu also formed the raw material for much of his early poetry. The title of his second collection, ‘Silhouettes’ [1892], reflects his nom de plume and also gestures to the book’s impressionistic poems featuring the silhouetted figures of the gaslit stages. Shown here is a copy of the second edition of that book [1896], inscribed by Symons to the foremost ‘vedette’ of the Parisian café-concert scene, Yvette Guilbert, who was herself famous partly for having fashioned herself (as she later described) into an instantly recognisable “silhouette that would be in contrast to everything that had been done before, [a] silhouette [which] has never been forgotten by people who saw it”.
Guilbert, the famous “diseuse fin de siècle”, was a performer whom Symons particularly admired, having first seen her in Paris in the late 1880s, following which he had dedicated a poem (‘At the Ambassadeurs’) to her in his 1889 collection ‘Days and Nights’ [swipe]. The two eventually formed a long-lasting friendship and there are 17 letters from Guilbert to Symons in the Rylands Library, but Symons’s biographer believed that none of Symons’s letters to Guilbert had survived. In fact, shown here are two such letters, in the first of which (dated 1892) Symons introduces himself and mentions an article about her that he had recently published in ‘The St James’s Gazette’. The second letter, dated 35 years later, acknowledges receipt of her recent memoir, offers to translate it, pays tribute to her “sinister and macabre genius”, and otherwise demonstrates both the closeness and length of their friendship. Indeed, Symons’s last recorded trip to London was to attend a concert by Guilbert in 1938 and he described her as “the most wonderful person in the world“.
[continued in comments]](https://s11.imginn.com/687176720_17951380518138790_163073949426702031_n.jpg?t51.82787-15/687176720_17951380518138790_163073949426702031_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpegr_e35_p1290x1290_tt6&_nc_cat=109&ig_cache_key=Mzg5MTE3MzUzNTMxODAzMjg5NA%3D%3D.3-ccb7-5&ccb=7-5&_nc_sid=58cdad&efg=eyJ2ZW5jb2RlX3RhZyI6IkNBUk9VU0VMX0lURU0ueHBpZHMuMTQ0MC5oZHIucmVndWxhcl9waG90by5DMyJ9&_nc_ohc=9sPdZgtN0LkQ7kNvwFVAwQ0&_nc_oc=AdryjTqtSf4aVcE_gq9FV8lTRHN8QTo4iMzG9MA8ss5b6C3EECDg2JP_xIwTmXDxcqnsH2wvTjScAaGpdc4Wcdze&_nc_ad=z-m&_nc_cid=0&_nc_zt=23&se=-1&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_gid=7aCOrWP51t2ZJqRIXvt-lQ&_nc_ss=7a20f&oh=00_AQNgYRo0cXk-_GbH_x8FPhAxiaJzef5nQiQOl1TjYJVmTA&oe=6AE5D521)
