"Ever since Maria left me, for another star--which? Orion, Altair, or
thou, green Venus?--I have always cherished solitude. How many long
days I have passed, alone with my cat! By _alone,_ I mean without a
material being, and my cat is a mystical companion, a spirit. I may
say, then, that I have passed long days alone with my cat, and alone,
with one of the last writers of the Roman decadence; for since the
white creature is no more, strangely and singularly, I have loved
all that may be summed up in the word: fall. Thus, in the year, my
favourite season is during those last languid summer days which come
just before the autumn; and, in the day, the hour when I take my
walk is the hour when the sun lingers before fading, with rays of
copper-yellow on the grey walls, and of copper-red on the window-panes.
And, just so, the literature from which my soul demands delight
must be the poetry dying out of the last moments of Rome, provided,
nevertheless, that it breathes nothing of the rejuvenating approach of
the Barbarians, and does not stammer the infantile Latin of the first
Christian prose.
"I read, then, one of those beloved poems (whose streaks of rouge have
more charm for me than the fresh cheek of youth), and buried my hand
in the fur of the pure animal, when a barrel-organ began to sing,
languishingly and melancholy, under my window. It played in the long
alley of poplars, whose leaves seem mournful to me even in spring,
since Maria passed that way with the tapers, for the last time. Yes,
sad people's instrument, truly: the piano glitters, the violin brings
one's torn fibres to the light, but the barrel-organ, in the twilight
of memory, has set me despairingly dreaming. While it murmured a gaily
vulgar air, such as puts mirth into the heart of the suburbs, an
old-fashioned, an empty air, how came it that its refrain went to my
very soul, and made me weep like a romantic ballad? I drank it in, and
I did not throw a penny out of the window, for fear of disturbing my
own impression, and of perceiving that the instrument was not singing
by itself."
Between these characteristic, clear and beautiful poems, in verse and
in prose, and the opaque darkness of the later writings, come one or
two poems, perhaps the finest of all, in which already clearness is
"a secondary grace," but in which a subtle rapture finds incomparable
expression. _L'Après-midi d'un Faune_ and _Hérodiade_ have already
been introduced, in different ways, to English readers: the former by
Mr. Gosse, in a detailed analysis; the latter by a translation into
verse. And Debussy, in his new music, has taken _L'Après-midi d'un
Faune_ almost for his new point of departure, interpreting it, at
all events, faultlessly. In these two poems I find Mallarmé at the
moment when his own desire achieves itself; when he attains Wagner's
ideal, that "the most complete work of the poet should be that which,
in its final achievement, becomes a perfect music": every word is a
jewel, scattering and recapturing sudden fire, every image is a symbol,
and the whole poem is visible music. After this point began that
fatal "last period" which comes to most artists who have thought too
curiously, or dreamed too remote dreams, or followed a too wandering
beauty. Mallarmé had long been too conscious that all publication is
"almost a speculation, on one's modesty, for one's silence"; that "to
unclench the fists, breaking one's sedentary dream, for a ruffling face
to face with the idea," was after all unnecessary to his own conception
of himself, a mere way of convincing the public that one exists; and
having achieved, as he thought, "the right to abstain from doing
anything exceptional," he devoted himself, doubly, to silence. Seldom
condescending to write, he wrote now only for himself, and in a manner
which certainly saved him from intrusion. Some of Meredith's poems,
and occasional passages of his prose, can alone give in English some
faint idea of the later prose and verse of Mallarmé. The verse could
not, I think, be translated; of the prose, in which an extreme lucidity
of thought comes to us but glimmeringly through the entanglements of a
construction, part Latin, part English, I shall endeavour to translate
some fragments, in speaking of the theoretic writings, contained in the
two volumes of _Vers et Prose_ and _Divagations._
3
It is the distinction of Mallarmé to have aspired after an impossible
liberation of the soul of literature from what is fretting and
constraining in "the body of that death," which is the mere literature
of words. Words, he has realised, are of value only as a notation of
the free breath of the spirit; words, therefore, must be employed with
an extreme care, in their choice and adjustment, in setting them to
reflect and chime upon one another; yet least of all for their own
sake, for what they can never, except by suggestion, express. "Every
soul is a melody," he has said, "which needs to be readjusted; and for
that are the flute or viol of each." The word, treated indeed with
a kind of "adoration," as he says, is so regarded in a magnificent
sense, in which it is apprehended as a living thing, itself the vision
rather than the reality; at least the philtre of the evocation. The
word, chosen as he chooses it, is for him a liberating principle, by
which the spirit is extracted from matter; takes form, perhaps assumes
immortality. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use of words, that
seeming artificiality which comes from using words as if they had
never been used before, that chimerical search after the virginity of
language, is but the paradoxical outward sign of an extreme discontent
with even the best of their service. Writers who use words fluently,
seeming to disregard their importance, do so from an unconscious
confidence in their expressiveness, which the scrupulous thinker, the
precise dreamer, can never place in the most carefully chosen among
them. To evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of language,
without the formality of an after all impossible description; to be,
rather than to express: that is what Mallarmé has consistently, and
from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has sought this
wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of dreams, over
more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the depths of
many forests, far from the sunlight. To say that he has found what he
sought is impossible; but (is it possible to avoid saying?) how heroic
a search, and what marvellous discoveries by the way!
I think I understand, though; I cannot claim his own authority for my
supposition, the way in which Mallarmé wrote verse, and the reason
why it became more and more abstruse, more and more unintelligible.
Remember his principle: that to name is to destroy, to suggest is to
create. Note, further, that he condemns the inclusion in verse of
anything but, "for example, the horror of the forest, or the silent
thunder afloat in the leaves; not the intrinsic, dense wood of the
trees." He has received, then, a mental sensation: let it be the
horror of the forest. This sensation begins to form in his brain,
at first probably no more than a rhythm, absolutely without words.
Gradually thought begins to concentrate itself (but with an extreme
care, lest it should break the tension on which all depends) upon
the sensation, already struggling to find its own consciousness.
Delicately, stealthily, with infinitely timid precaution, words present
themselves, at first in silence. Every word seems like a desecration,
seems, the clearer it is, to throw back the original sensation farther
and farther into the darkness. But, guided always by the rhythm,
which is the executive soul (as, in Aristotle's definition, the soul
is the form of the body), words come slowly, one by one, shaping the
message. Imagine the poem already written down, at least composed. In
its very imperfection, it is clear, it shows the links by which it
has been riveted together; the whole process of its construction can
be studied. Now most writers would be content; but with Mallarmé the
work has only begun. In the final result there must be no sign of the
making, there must be only the thing made. He works over it, word by
word, changing a word here, for its colour, which is not precisely the
colour required, a word there, for the break it makes in the music. A
new image occurs to him, rarer, subtler, than the one he has used; the
image is transferred. By the time the poem has reached, as it seems
to him, a flawless unity, the steps of the progress have been only
too effectually effaced; and while the poet, who has seen the thing
from the beginning, still sees the relation of point to point, the
reader, who comes to it only in its final stage, finds himself in a not
unnatural bewilderment. Pursue this manner of writing to its ultimate
development; start with an enigma, and then withdraw the key of the
enigma; and you arrive, easily at the frozen impenetrability of those
latest sonnets, in which the absence of all punctuation is scarcely a
recognisable hindrance.
That, I fancy to myself, was his actual way of writing; here, in what
I prefer to give as a corollary, is the theory. "Symbolist, Decadent,
or Mystic, the schools thus called by themselves, or thus hastily
labelled by our information-press, adopt, for meeting-place, the point
of an Idealism which (similarly as in fugues, in sonatas) rejects
the 'natural' materials, and, as brutal, a direct thought ordering
them; to retain no more than suggestion. To be instituted, a relation
between images, exact; and that therefrom should detach itself a third
aspect, fusible and clear, offered to the divination. Abolished, the
pretension, æsthetically an error, despite its dominion over almost all
the masterpieces, to enclose within the subtle paper other than, for
example, the horror of the forest, or the silent thunder afloat in the
leaves; not the intrinsic, dense wood of the trees. Some few bursts of
personal pride, veridically trumpeted, awaken the architecture of the
palace, alone habitable; not of stone, on which the pages would close
but ill." For example (it is his own): "I say: a flower! and out of the
oblivion to which my voice consigns every contour, so far as anything
save the known calyx, musically arises, idea, and exquisite, the one
flower absent from all bouquets." "The pure work," then, "implies the
elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields place to the words,
immobilised by the shock of their inequality; they take light from
mutual reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,
replacing the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic personal direction
of the phrase." "The verse which out of many vocables remakes an entire
word, new, unknown to the language, and as if magical, attains this
isolation of speech." Whence, it being "music which rejoins verse,
to form, since Wagner, Poetry," the final conclusion: "That we are
now precisely at the moment of seeking, before that breaking up of
the large rhythms of literature, and their scattering in articulate,
almost instrumental, nervous waves, an art which shall complete the
transposition, into the Book, of the symphony or simply recapture
our own: for, it is not in elementary sonorities of brass, strings,
wood, unquestionably, but in the intellectual word at its utmost,
that, fully and evidently, we should find, drawing to itself all the
correspondences of the universe, the supreme Music."
Here, literally translated, in exactly the arrangement of the original,
are some passages out of the theoretic writings, which I have brought
together, to indicate what seem to me the main lines of Mallarmé's
doctrine. It is the doctrine which, as I have already said, had been
divined by Gérard de Nerval; but what, in Gérard, was pure vision,
becomes in Mallarmé a logical sequence of meditation. Mallarmé was
not a mystic, to whom anything came unconsciously; he was a thinker,
in whom an extraordinary subtlety of mind was exercised on always
explicit, though by no means the common, problems. "A seeker after
something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not
at all," he pursued his search with unwearying persistence with a sharp
mental division of dream and idea, certainly very lucid to himself,
however he may have failed to render his expression clear to others.
And I, for one, cannot doubt that he was, for the most part, entirely
right in his statement and analysis of the new conditions under which
we are now privileged or condemned to write. His obscurity was partly
his failure to carry out the spirit of his own directions; but, apart
from obscurity, which we may all be fortunate enough to escape, is it
possible for a writer, at the present day, to be quite simple, with
the old, objective simplicity, in either thought or expression? To be
_naif,_ to be archaic, is not to be either natural or simple; I affirm
that it is not natural to be what is called "natural" any longer. We
have no longer the mental attitude of those to whom a story was but a
story, and all stories good; we have realised since it was proved to
us by Poe, not merely that the age of epics is past, but that no long
poem was ever written; the finest long poem in the world being but a
series of short poems linked together by prose. And, naturally, we can
no longer write what we can no longer accept. Symbolism, implicit in
all literature from the beginning, as it is implicit in the very words
we use, comes to us now, at last quite conscious of itself, offering us
the only escape from our many imprisonments. We find a new, an older,
sense in the so worn-out forms of things; the world, which we can no
longer believe in as the satisfying material object it was to our
grandparents, becomes transfigured with a new light; words, which long
usage had darkened almost out of recognition, take fresh lustre. And
it is on the lines of that spiritualising of the word, that perfecting
of form in its capacity for allusion and suggestion, that confidence
in the eternal correspondences between the visible and the invisible
universe, which Mallarmé taught, and too intermittently practised, that
literature must now move, if it is in any sense to move forward.