1
Stéphane Mallarmé was one of those who love literature too much to
write it except by fragments; in whom the desire of perfection brings
its own defeat. With either more or less ambition he would have done
more to achieve himself; he was always divided between an absolute aim
at the absolute, that is, the unattainable, and a too logical disdain
for the compromise by which, after all, literature is literature.
Carry the theories of Mallarmé to a practical conclusion, multiply
his powers in a direct ratio, and you have Wagner. It is his failure
not to be Wagner. And, Wagner having existed, it was for him to be
something more, to complete Wagner. Well, not being able to be that, it
was a matter of sincere indifference to him whether he left one or two
little, limited masterpieces of formal verse and prose, the more or
the less. It was "the work" that he dreamed of, the new art, more than
a new religion, whose precise form in the world he was never quite able
to settle.
_Un auteur difficile,_ in the phrase of M. Catulle Mendès, it has
always been to what he himself calls "a labyrinth illuminated by
flowers" that Mallarmé has felt it due to their own dignity to invite
his readers. To their own dignity, and also to his. Mallarmé was
obscure, not so much because he wrote differently, as because he
thought differently, from other people. His mind was elliptical, and,
relying with undue confidence on the intelligence of his readers, he
emphasised the effect of what was unlike other people in his mind by
resolutely ignoring even the links of connection that existed between
them. Never having aimed at popularity, he never needed, as most
writers need, to make the first advances. He made neither intrusion
upon nor concession to those who, after all, were not obliged to read
him. And when he spoke, he considered it neither needful nor seemly
to listen in order to hear whether he was heard. To the charge of
obscurity he replied, with sufficient disdain, that there are many
who do not know how to read--except the newspaper, he adds, in one of
those disconcerting, oddly-printed parentheses, which make his work,
to those who rightly apprehend it, so full of wise limitations, so
safe from hasty or seemingly final conclusions. No one in our time
has more significantly vindicated the supreme right of the artist in
the aristocracy of letters; wilfully, perhaps, not always wisely, but
nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk from that making of
himself "a motley to the view," that handing over of his naked soul
to the laughter of the multitude? But who, in our time, has wrought
so subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick
cloud on the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had
the wisdom to hide their secrets in the obscurity of many meanings, or
of what has seemed meaningless; and might it not, after all, be the
finest epitaph for a self-respecting man of letters to be able to say,
even after the writing of many books: I have kept my secret, I have not
betrayed myself to the multitude?
But to Mallarmé, certainly, there might be applied the significant
warning of Rossetti:
Yet woe to thee if once thou yield
Unto the act of doing nought!
After a life of persistent devotion to literature, he has left enough
poems to make a single small volume (less, certainly, than a hundred
poems in all), a single volume of prose, a few pamphlets, and a prose
translation of the poems of Poe. It is because among these there are
masterpieces, poems which are among the most beautiful poems written in
our time, prose which has all the subtlest qualities of prose, that,
quitting the abstract point of view, we are forced to regret the fatal
enchantments, fatal for him, of theories which are so greatly needed
by others, so valuable for our instruction, if we are only a little
careful in putting them into practice.
In estimating the significance of Stéphane Mallarmé, it is necessary
to take into account not only his verse and prose, but, almost more
than these, the Tuesdays of the Rue de Rome, in which he gave himself
freely to more than one generation. No one who has ever climbed
those four flights of stairs will have forgotten the narrow, homely
interior, elegant with a sort of scrupulous Dutch comfort; the heavy,
carved furniture, the tall clock, the portraits, Manet's, Whistler's,
on the walls; the table on which the china bowl, odorous with
tobacco, was pushed from hand to hand; above all, the rocking-chair,
Mallarmé's, from which he would rise quietly, to stand leaning his
elbow on the mantelpiece, while one hand, the hand which did not
hold the cigarette, would sketch out one of those familiar gestures:
_un peu de prêtre, un peu de danseuse_ (in M. Rodenbach's admirable
phrase), _avec lesquels il avait l'air chaque fois d'entrer dans la
conversation, comme on entre en scène._ One of the best talkers of
our time, he was, unlike most other fine talkers, harmonious with his
own theories in giving no monologues, in allowing every liberty to
his guests, to the conversation; in his perfect readiness to follow
the slightest indication, to embroider upon any frame, with any
material presented to him. There would have been something almost of
the challenge of the improvisatore in this, easily moved alertness of
mental attitude, had it not been for the singular gentleness with
which Mallarmé's intelligence moved, in these considerable feats, with
the half-apologetic negligence of the perfect acrobat. He seemed to be
no more than brushing the dust off your own ideas, settling, arranging
them a little, before he gave them back to you, surprisingly luminous.
It was only afterwards that you realised how small had been your own
part in the matter, as well as what it meant to have enlightened
without dazzling you. But there was always the feeling of comradeship,
the comradeship of a master, whom, while you were there at least,
you did not question; and that very feeling lifted you, in your own
estimation, nearer to art.
Invaluable, it seems to me, those Tuesdays must have been to the young
men of two generations who have been making French literature; they
were unique, certainly, in the experience of the young Englishman
who was always so cordially received there, with so flattering a
cordiality. Here was a house in which art, literature, was the very
atmosphere, a religious atmosphere; and the master of the house, in his
just a little solemn simplicity, a priest. I never heard the price
of a book mentioned, or the number of thousand francs which a popular
author had been paid for his last volume; here, in this one literary
house, literature was unknown as a trade. And, above all, the questions
that were discussed were never, at least, in Mallarmé's treatment, in
his guidance of them, other than essential questions, considerations
of art in the abstract of literature before it coagulates into a book,
of life as its amusing and various web spins the stuff of art. When,
indeed, the conversation, by some untimely hazard, drifted too near to
one, became for a moment, perhaps inconveniently, practical, it was
Mallarmé's solicitous politeness to wait, a little constrained, almost
uneasy, rolling his cigarette in silence, until the disturbing moment
had passed.
There were other disturbing moments, sometimes. I remember one night,
rather late, the sudden irruption of M. de Heredia, coming on after a
dinner-party, and seating himself in his well-filled evening dress,
precisely in Mallarmé's favourite chair. He was intensely amusing,
voluble, floridly vehement; Mallarmé, I am sure, was delighted to see
him; but the loud voice was a little trying to his nerves, and then he
did not know what to do without his chair. He was like a cat that has
been turned out of its favourite corner, as he roamed uneasily about
the room, resting an unaccustomed elbow on the sideboard, visibly at a
disadvantage.
For the attitude of those young men, some of them no longer exactly
young, who frequented the Tuesdays, was certainly the attitude of
the disciple. Mallarmé never exacted it, he seemed never to notice
it; yet it meant to him, all the same, a good deal; as it meant, and
in the best sense, a good deal to them. He loved art with a supreme
disinterestedness, and it was for the sake of art that he wished to
be really a master. For he knew that he had something to teach, that
he had found out some secrets worth knowing, that he had discovered a
point of view which he could to some degree perpetuate in those young
men who listened to him. And to them this free kind of apprenticeship
was, beyond all that it gave in direct counsels, in the pattern of
work, a noble influence. Mallarmé's quiet, laborious life was for
some of them the only counterpoise to the Bohemian example of the
_d'Harcourt_ or the _Taverne,_ where art is loved, but with something
of haste, in a very changing devotion. It was impossible to come away
from Mallarmé's without some tranquillising influence from that quiet
place, some impersonal ambition towards excellence, the resolve, at
least, to write a sonnet, a page of prose, that should be in its own
way as perfect as one could make it, worthy of Mallarmé.
2
"Poetry," said Mallarmé, "is the language of a state of crisis"; and
all his poems are the evocation of a passing ecstasy, arrested in
mid-flight. This ecstasy is never the mere instinctive cry of the
heart, the simple human joy or sorrow, which, like the Parnassians,
but for not quite the same reason, he did not admit in poetry. It is a
mental transposition of emotion or sensation, veiled with atmosphere,
and becoming, as it becomes a poem, pure beauty. Here, for instance,
in a poem, which I have translated line for line, and almost word
for word, a delicate emotion, a figure vaguely divined, a landscape
magically evoked, blend in a single effect.