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
_A's black; E, white; I, blue; O, red; V, yellow;_
_But purple seeks in vain a vowel-fellow._
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?
_Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,_
_Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nu_
_Son siècle épouvanté de n'avoir pas connu_
_Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!_
_Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'ange_
_Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu_
_Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu_
_Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange._
_Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!_
_Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief_
_Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s'orne_
_Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscur_
_Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne_
_Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur._
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
I
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet
A pretty little anthology might be made of poems by distinguished
writers who never for a moment professed to be poets, and who only
"swept, with hurried hand, the strings" when they thought nobody was
listening. The elegant technical people of the eighteenth century,
who never liked to be too abstruse to seem polite, would contribute
a great many of these flowers that were born to bloom unseen. It is
not everybody who is aware that the majestic Sir William Blackstone
was "guilty," as people put it, of a set of one hundred octosyllabic
verses which would do credit to any laurelled master on Parnassus. We
might, indeed, open our little volume with _The Lawyers Farewell to
his Muse_. Then, of course, there would be Bishop Berkeley's unique
poem, _Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way_; and Oldys,
the antiquary, would spare us his _Busy, curious, thirsty Fly_. We
should appeal to Burton for the prefatory verses in the _Anatomy of
Melancholy_, and to Bacon for _The World's Bubble_. If I had any finger
in that anthology, Smollett's _Ode to Leven Water_ should by no means
be omitted. It would be a false pride that would reject Holcroft's
_Gaffer Gray_, or Sydney Smith's _Receipt for a Salad_, which latter
Herrick might have been glad to sign. Hume's solitary poem should be
printed by itself, or with some of Carlyle's lyrics, and George Eliot's
sonnets, in an appendix, as an awful warning.
As we come down to recent times the task of editing our anthology would
grow difficult. In our day, the prose writers have either been coy
or copious with their verses. If Professor Tyndall has never essayed
the Lydian measure it is very surprising, but we have not yet been
admitted to hear his shell; nor has Mr. Walter Besant, to the best of
my belief, published an ode to anything. Let the shades of Berkeley and
Smollett administer reproof. Until quite lately, however, we should
have been contented to close our selection with "The bed was made, the
room was fit," from _Travels with a Donkey_. But Mr. Stevenson is now
ineligible--he has published books of poems.
That this departure is not quite a new one might be surmised by any one
who has followed closely the publications of the essayist and novelist
whom a better man than I am has called "the most exquisite and original
of our day." Though Mr. Stevenson's prose volumes are more than twelve
in number, and though he had been thought of essentially as a prose
writer, the ivory shoulder of the lyre has peeped out now and then. I
do not refer to his early collections of verse, to _Not I, and other
Poems_, to _Moral Emblems_, and to _The Graver and the Pen_. (I mention
these scarce publications of the Davos press in the hope of rousing
wicked passions in the breasts of other collectors, since my own set
of them is complete.) These volumes were decidedly occult. A man might
build upon them a reputation as a sage, but hardly as a poet. Their
stern morality came well from one whose mother's milk has been the
_Shorter Catechism;_ they are books which no one can read and not be
the better for; but as mere verse, they leave something to be desired.
_Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda_, if you happen to be lucky enough
to possess them, _e passa_. Where the careful reader has perceived
that Mr. Stevenson was likely to become openly a poet has been in
snatches of verse published here and there in periodicals, and of a
quality too good to be neglected. Nevertheless, the publication of _A
Child's Garden of Verses_ (Longmans, 1885) was something of a surprise,
and perhaps the new book of grown-up poems, _Underwoods_ (Chatto and
Windus, 1887) is more surprising still. There is no doubt about it any
longer. Mr. Stevenson is a candidate for the bays.
The _Child's Garden of Verses_ has now been published long enough to
enable us to make a calm consideration of its merits. When it was
fresh, opinion was divided, as it always is about a new strong thing,
between those who, in Mr. Longfellow's phrase about the little girl,
think it very, very good, and those who think it is horrid. After
reading the new book, the _Underwoods_, we come back to _A Child's
Garden_ with a clearer sense of the writer's intention, and a wider
experience of his poetical outlook upon life. The later book helps us
to comprehend the former; there is the same sincerity, the same buoyant
simplicity, the same curiously candid and confidential attitude
of mind. If any one doubted that Mr. Stevenson was putting his own
childish memories into verse in the first book, all doubt must cease in
reading the second book, where the experiences, although those of an
adult, have exactly the same convincing air of candour. The first thing
which struck the reader of _A Child's Garden_ was the extraordinary
clearness and precision with which the immature fancies of eager
childhood were reproduced in it. People whose own childish memories had
become very vague, and whose recollections of their games and dreams
were hazy in the extreme, asked themselves how far this poet's visions
were inspired by real memory and how far by invention. The new book
sets that question at rest; the same hand that gave us--
_My bed is like a little boat;_
_Nurse helps me in when I embark;_
_She girds me in my sailor's coat,_
_And starts me in the dark;_
and the even more delicious--
_Now, with my little gun, I crawl_
_All in the dark along the wall,_
_And follow round the forest-track_
_Away behind the sofa-back,--_
now gives us pictures like the following:
My house, _I say. But hark to the sunny doves,_
_That make my roof the arena of their loves_,
_That gyre about the gable all day long_
_And fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:_
Our house, _they say; and_ mine, _the cat declares,_
_And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;_
_And_ mine _the dog, and rises stiff with wrath_
_If any alien foot profane the path._
_So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces,_
_Our whilome gardener, called the garden his;_
_Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abode_
_And his late kingdom, only from the road._
We now perceive that it is not invention, but memory of an
extraordinarily vivid kind, patiently directed to little things, and
charged with imagination; and we turn back with increased interest
to _A Child's Garden_, assured that it gives us a unique thing, a
transcript of that child-mind which we have all possessed and enjoyed,
but of which no one, except Mr. Stevenson, seems to have carried away a
photograph. Long ago, in one of the very earliest, if I remember right,
of those essays by R. L. S. for which we used so eagerly to watch the
_Cornhill Magazine_ in Mr. Leslie Stephen's time, in the paper called
"Child Play," this retention of what is wiped off from the memories of
the rest of us was clearly displayed. Out of this rarely suggestive
essay I will quote a few lines, which might have been printed as an
introduction to _A Child's Garden_: