The name which stands at the head of this essay is that of a writer who is at the present time more talked about, more ferociously attacked, more passionately beloved and defended, and at the same time less understood, than perhaps any other man of his intellectual rank in Europe. Even in the ferocious world of Parisian letters his purity of motive and dignity of attitude are respected. Benevolent to those younger than himself, exquisitely courteous and considerate in controversy, a master of that suavity and reserve the value of which literary persons so rarely appreciate, M. MallarmÉ, to one who from a distance gazes with curiosity into the Parisian hurly-burly, appeals first by the beautiful amenity of his manners—a dreamy Sir Launcelot riding through a forest of dragons to help the dolorous lady of Poesy from pain. In the incessant pamphlet-wars of his party, others seem to strike for themselves, M. MallarmÉ always for the cause; and when the battle is over, and the rest meet to carouse round a camp-fire, he is always found stealing back to the ivory tower of contemplation. Before we know the rights of the case, or have read a line of his verses, we are predisposed towards a figure so pure and so distinguished.

But though the personality of M. MallarmÉ is so attractive, and though he marches at the head of a very noisy rabble, exceedingly little seems to be clearly known about him in this country. Until now, he has published in such a rare and cryptic manner, that not half a dozen of any one of his books can have reached England. Two or three abstruse essays in prose, published in the National Observer, have lately amazed the Philistines. Not thus did Mr. Lillyvick understand that the French language was to be imparted to Morleena Kenwigs. Charming stories float about concerning Scotch mammas who subscribed to the National Observer for the use of their girls, and discovered that the articles were written in Moldo-Wallachian. M. MallarmÉ's theories have been ridiculed and travestied, his style parodied, his practice gravely rebuked; but what that practice and style and theories are, has scarcely been understood. M. MallarmÉ has been wrapped up in the general fog which enfolds our British notions of symbolists and impressionists. If the school has had a single friend in England, it has been Mr. Arthur Symons, one of the most brilliant of our younger poets; and even he has been interested, I think, more in M. Verlaine than in the Symbolists and DÉcadents proper.

It was in 1886 that the DÉcadents first began to be talked about. Then it was that Arthur Rimbaud's famous sonnet about the colours of the vowels flashed into celebrity, and everybody was telling everybody else that

Those were the days, already ancient now! of NoËl Loumo and Marius Tapera, when the inexpressible AdorÉ Floupette published Les DÉliquescences. Where are the deliquescents of yesteryear? Where is the once celebrated scene in the "boudoir oblong aux cycloÏdes bigarrures" which enlivened Le ThÉ chez Miranda of M. Jean MorÉas? These added to the gaiety of nations, and have been forgotten; brief life was here their portion. Fresh oddities come forward, poets in shoals and schools, Evolutivo-instrumentists, Cataclysmists, Trombonists—even while we speak, have they not faded away? But amidst all this world of phantasmagoria, among these fugitive apparitions and futile individualities, dancing once across the stereopticon and seen no more—one figure of a genuine man of letters remains, that of M. StÉphane MallarmÉ, the solitary name among those of the so-called DÉcadents which has hitherto proved its right to serious consideration.

If the dictionaries are to be trusted, M. MallarmÉ was born in 1842. His career seems to have been the most uneventful on record. He has always been, and I think still is, professor of English at the LycÉe Fontanes in Paris. About twenty years ago he paid a short visit to London, carrying with him, as I well remember, the vast portfolio of his translation of Poe's Raven, with Manet's singular illustrations. His life has been spent in a Buddhistic calm, in meditation. He has scarcely published anything, disliking, so it is said, the "exhibitionnisme" involved in bringing out a book, the banality of types and proofs and revises.

His revolutionary ideas with regard to style were formulated about 1875, when the Parnasse Contemporain, edited by the friends and co-evals of M. MallarmÉ, rejected his first important poem, L'AprÈs-Midi d'un Faune, which appeared at length in 1876, as a quarto pamphlet, illustrated by Manet. In the same year he gave his earliest example of the new prose in the shape of an essay prefixed to a beautiful reprint of Beckford's Vathek, a volume bound in vellum, tied with black and crimson silk, and produced in a very small edition. Ridicule was the only welcome vouchsafed to these two couriers of the DÉcadance. Perhaps M. MallarmÉ was somewhat discouraged, although absolutely unsubdued.

He remained long submerged, but with the growth of his school he was persuaded to reappear. In 1887 one fascicule only of his complete poems was brought out in an extraordinary form, photolithographed from the original manuscript. In 1888 followed a translation of the poems of Edgar Poe. But until 1893 the general reader has had no opportunity, even in France, of forming an opinion on the prose or verse of M. MallarmÉ. Meanwhile, his name has become one of the most notorious in contemporary literature. A thousand eccentricities, a thousand acts of revolt against tradition, have been perpetrated under the banner of his tacit encouragement. It is high time to try and understand what M. MallarmÉ's teaching really is, and what his practice.

To ridicule the DÉcadents, or to insist upon their extravagance, is so easy as to be unworthy of a serious critic. It would be quite simple for some crusty Christopher to show that the poems of master and scholars alike are monstrous, unintelligible, ludicrously inept, and preposterous. M. MallarmÉ has had hard words, not merely from the old classical critics such as M. BrunetiÈre, but from men from whom the extremity of sympathy might have been looked. Life-long friends like M. Leconte de Lisle confess that they understood him once, but, alas! understand him no longer; or, like M. FranÇois CoppÉe, avoid all discussion of his verses, and obstinately confine themselves to "son esprit ÉlevÉ, sa vie si pure, si belle." When such men as these profess themselves unable to comprehend a writer of their own age and language, it seems presumptuous for a foreigner to attempt to do so, nor do I pretend that in the formal and minute sense I am able to comprehend the poems of M. MallarmÉ. He remains, under the most loving scrutiny, a most difficult writer. But, at all events, I think that sympathy and study may avail to enable the critic to detect the spirit which inspires this strange and cryptic figure. Study and sympathy I have given, and I offer some results of them, not without diffidence.

Translated into common language, then, the main design of M. MallarmÉ and his friends seems to be to refresh the languid current of French style. They hold—and in this view no English critic can dare to join issue with them—that art is not a stable nor a definite thing, and that success for the future must lie along paths not exactly traversed in the immediate past. They are tired of the official versification of France, and they dream of new effects which all the handbooks tell them are impossible to French prosody. They make infinite experiments, they feel their way; and I have nothing to reproach them with except their undue haste (but M. MallarmÉ has not been hasty) in publishing their "tentatives." Their aims are those of our own Areopagites of 1580, met "for the general surceasing and silence of bold Rymers, and also of the very best of them too"—"our new famous enterprise for the exchange of barbarous rymes for artificial verses." We must wish for the odd productions of these modern Parisian euphuists a better fate than befell the trimeter iambics of Master Drant and Master Preston. But the cause of their existence is plain enough. It is the exhaustion, the enervation of the language, following upon the activities of Victor Hugo and his contemporaries. It is, morever, a reaction towards freedom, directly consequent upon the strict and impersonal versification of the Parnassians. When the official verse has been burnished and chased to the metallic perfection of M. de HÉrÉdia's sonnets, nothing but to withdraw to the wilderness in sheepskins is left to would-be poets of the next generation.

To pass from Symbolism generally to M. MallarmÉ and his particular series of theories, he presents himself to us above all as an individualist. The poets of the last generation were a flock of singing-birds, trained in a general aviary. They met, as on the marble pavement of some new Serapeum, to contend in public for the rewards of polished verse. In contrast with these rivalries and congregations M. MallarmÉ has always shown himself solitary and disengaged. As he has said: "The poet is a man who isolates himself that he may carve the sculptures of his own tomb." He refuses to obey that hierarchical tradition of which Victor Hugo was the most formidable pontiff. He finds the alexandrine, as employed in the intractable prosody of modern France, a rigid and puerile instrument, from which melodies can nowadays no more be extracted. So far as I comprehend the position, M. MallarmÉ does not propose, as do some of his disciples, to reject this noble verse-form altogether, and to slide into a sort of rhymed Walt Whitmanism. I cannot trace in his published poems a single instance of such a determination. But it is plain that he takes the twelve syllables of the line as forming, not six notes, but twelve, and he demands permission to form with these twelve as many combinations as he pleases. Melody, to be gained at any sacrifice of the old Jesuit laws, is what he desiderates: harmony of versification, obtained in new ways, by extracting the latent capabilities of the organ until now too conventionally employed.

So much, very briefly, for the prosodical innovation. For the language he demands an equal refreshment, by the rejection of the old worn phrases in favour of odd, exotic, and archaic terms. He takes up and adopts literally the idea of ThÉophile Gautier that words are precious stones, and should be so set as to flash and radiate from the page. More individually characteristic of M. MallarmÉ I find a certain preference for enigma. Language, to him, is given to conceal definite thought, to draw the eye away from the object. The Parnassians defined, described, analysed the object until it stood before us as in a coloured photograph. M. MallarmÉ avoids this as much as possible. He aims at allusion only; he wraps a mystery around his simplest utterance; the abstruse and the symbolic are his peculiar territory. His aim, or I greatly misunderstand him, is to use words in such harmonious combinations as will suggest to the reader a mood or a condition which is not mentioned in the text, but is nevertheless paramount in the poet's mind at the moment of composition. To the conscious aiming at this particular effect are, it appears to me, due the more curious characteristics of his style, and much of the utter bewilderment which it produces on the brain of an indolent reader debauched by the facilities of realism.

The longest and the most celebrated of the poems of M. MallarmÉ is L'AprÈs-Midi d'un Faune. It appears in the "florilÈge" which he has just published, and I have now read it again, as I have often read it before. To say that I understand it bit by bit, phrase by phrase, would be excessive. But if I am asked whether this famous miracle of unintelligibility gives me pleasure, I answer, cordially, Yes. I even fancy that I obtain from it as definite and as solid an impression as M. MallarmÉ desires to produce. This is what I read in it: A faun—a simple, sensuous, passionate being—wakens in the forest at daybreak and tries to recall his experience of the previous afternoon. Was he the fortunate recipient of an actual visit from nymphs, white and golden goddesses, divinely tender and indulgent? Or is the memory he seems to retain nothing but the shadow of a vision, no more substantial than the "arid rain" of notes from his own flute? He cannot tell. Yet surely there was, surely there is, an animal whiteness among the brown reeds of the lake that shines out yonder? Were they, are they, swans? No! But Naiads plunging? Perhaps!

Vaguer and vaguer grows the impression of this delicious experience. He would resign his woodland godship to retain it. A garden of lilies, golden-headed, white-stalked, behind the trellis of red roses? Ah! the effort is too great for his poor brain. Perhaps if he selects one lily from the garth of lilies, one benign and beneficent yielder of her cup to thirsty lips, the memory, the ever-receding memory, may be forced back. So, when he has glutted upon a bunch of grapes, he is wont to toss the empty skins into the air and blow them out in a visionary greediness. But no, the delicious hour grows vaguer; experience or dream, he will now never know which it was. The sun is warm, the grasses yielding; and he curls himself up again, after worshipping the efficacious star of wine, that he may pursue the dubious ecstasy into the more hopeful boskages of sleep.

This, then, is what I read in the so excessively obscure and unintelligible L'AprÈs-Midi d'un Faune; and, accompanied as it is with a perfect suavity of language and melody of rhythm, I know not what more a poem of eight pages could be expected to give. It supplies a simple and direct impression of physical beauty, of harmony, of colour; it is exceedingly mellifluous, when once the ear understands that the poet, instead of being the slave of the alexandrine, weaves his variations round it like a musical composer. Unfortunately, L'AprÈs-Midi was written fifteen years ago, and his theories have grown upon M. MallarmÉ as his have on Mr. George Meredith. In the new collection of Vers et Prose I miss some pieces which I used to admire—in particular, surely, Placet, and the delightful poem called Le Guignon. Perhaps these were too lucid for the worshippers. In return, we have certain allegories which are terribly abstruse, and some subfusc sonnets. I have read the following, called Le Tombeau d'Edgard Poe, over and over and over. I am very stupid, but I cannot tell what it says. In a certain vague and vitreous way I think I perceive what it means; and we are aided now by its being punctuated, which was not the case in the original form in which I met with it. But, "O my Brothers, ye the Workers," is it not still a little difficult?

Of the prose of M. MallarmÉ, I can here speak but briefly. He has not published very much of it; and it is all polished and cadenced like his verse, with strange transposed adjectives and exotic nouns fantastically employed. It is even more distinctly to be seen in his prose than in his verse that he descends directly from Baudelaire, and in the former that streak of Lamartine that marks his poems is lacking.

The book called Pages can naturally be compared with the PoÈmes en Prose of Baudelaire. Several of the sketches so named are now reprinted in Vers et Prose, and they strike me as the most distinguished and satisfactory of the published writings of M. MallarmÉ. They are difficult, but far more intelligible than the enigmas which he calls his sonnets. La Pipe, in which the sight of an old meerschaum brings up dreams of London and the solitary lodgings there; Le NÉnuphar Blanc, recording the vision of a lovely lady, visible for one tantalising moment to a rower in his boat; Frisson d'Hiver, the wholly fantastic and nebulous reverie of archaic elegances evoked by the ticking of a clock of Dresden china; each of these, and several more of these exquisite Pages, give just that impression of mystery and allusion which the author deems that style should give. They are exquisite—so far as they go—pure, distinguished, ingenious; and the fantastic oddity of their vocabulary seems in perfect accord with their general character.

Here is a fragment of La PÉnultiÈme, on which the reader may try his skill in comprehending the New French:

"Mais oÙ s'installe l'irrÉcusable intervention du surnaturel, et le commencement de l'angoisse sous laquelle agonise mon esprit naguÈre seigneur, c'est quand je vis, levant les yeux, dans la rue des antiquaires instinctivement suivie, que j'Étais devant la boutique d'un luthier vendeur de vieux instruments pendus au mur, et, À terre, des palmes jaunes et les ailes enfouies en l'ombre, d'oiseaux anciens. Je m'enfuis, bizarre, personne condamnÉe À porter probablement le deuil de l'inexplicable PÉnultiÈme."

As a translator, all the world must commend M. MallarmÉ. He has put the poems of Poe into French in a way which is subtle almost without parallel. Each version is in simple prose, but so full, so reserved, so suavely mellifluous, that the metre and the rhymes continue to sing in an English ear. None could enter more tenderly than he into the strange charm of Ulalume, of The Sleeper, or of The Raven. It is rarely indeed that a word suggests that the melody of one, who was a symbolist and a weaver of enigmas like himself, has momentarily evaded the translator.

M. MallarmÉ, who understands English so perfectly, has perhaps seen the poems of Sydney Dobell. He knows, it is possible, that thirty or forty years ago there was an English poet who cultivated the symbol, who deliquesced the language, as he himself does in French. Sydney Dobell wrote lovely, unintelligible things, that broke, every now and then, into rhapsodies of veritable beauty. But his whole system was violent. He became an eccentric cometary nebula, whirling away from our poetic system at a tangent. He whirled away, for all his sincere passion, into oblivion. This is what one fears for the Symbolists: that being read with so great an effort by their own generation, they may, by the next, not be read at all, and what is pure and genuine in their artistic impulses be lost. Something of M. MallarmÉ will, however, always be turned back to with respect and perhaps with enthusiasm, for he is a true man of letters.

1893.

TWO PASTELS