Symbolism and M. Stéphane Mallarmé
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
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.