ABSTRACT
In 1899, Arthur Symons published his influential study of The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which provided the first account in English of the radical changes that had been taking place in French literature since mid-century. Rodger L. Tarr has remarked in his introduction to Sartor Resartus that Alexander Carlyle 'anticipated by fifty years the Symbolist Movement' and that his conception of the 'symbol' can be found in many places in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Anglophone writers of the first four decades of the twentieth century absorbed Carlyle's influence through their reading of The Symbolist Movement in Literature. The context of Carlyle's assertion of the significance of the 'symbol' is his development of the idealism of German post-Kantian philosophy, and particularly the work of F. W. J. Schelling. He regarded Germanic idealism as an antidote to the constrictive and 'mechanical' conceptions of the working of the mind in the Scottish tradition.
