How often, beneath the lamp that threw a low light on the silent chamber, had he not felt himself haunted by this Hérodiade who, in the work of Gustave Moreau, was now plunged in gloom revealing but a dim white statue in a brazier extinguished by stones.
The darkness concealed the blood, the reflections and the golds, hid the temple's farther sides, drowned the supernumeraries of the crime enshrouded in their dead colors, and, only sparing the aquerelle whites, revealed the woman's jewels and heightened her nudity.
At such times he was forced to gaze upon her unforgotten outlines; and she lived for him, her lips articulating those bizarre and delicate lines which Mallarmé makes her utter:
O miroir!
Eau froide par l'ennui dans ton cadre
gelée
Que de fois, et pendant les heures,
désolée
Des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs
qui sont
Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au
trou profond,
Je m'apparus en toi comme une ombre
lointaine!
Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta
sévère fontaine,
J'ai de mon rêve épars connu la nudité!
These lines he loved, as he loved the works of this poet who, in an age of democracy devoted to lucre, lived his solitary and literary life sheltered by his disdain from the encompassing stupidity, delighting, far from society, in the surprises of the intellect, in cerebral visions, refining on subtle ideas, grafting Byzantine delicacies upon them, perpetuating them in suggestions lightly connected by an almost imperceptible thread.
These twisted and precious ideas were bound together with an adhesive and secret language full of phrase contractions, ellipses and bold tropes.
Perceiving the remotest analogies, with a single term which by an effect of similitude at once gave the form, the perfume, the color and the quality, he described the object or being to which otherwise he would have been compelled to place numerous and different epithets so as to disengage all their facets and nuances, had he simply contented himself with indicating the technical name. Thus he succeeded in dispensing with the comparison, which formed in the reader's mind by analogy as soon as the symbol was understood. Neither was the attention of the reader diverted by the enumeration of the qualities which the juxtaposition of adjectives would have induced. Concentrating upon a single word, he produced, as for a picture, the ensemble, a unique and complete aspect.
It became a concentrated literature, an essential unity, a sublimate of art. This style was at first employed with restraint in his earlier works, but Mallarmé had boldly proclaimed it in a verse on Théophile Gautier and in l'Après-midi du faune, an eclogue where the subtleties of sensual joys are described in mysterious and caressing verses suddenly pierced by this wild, rending faun cry:
Alors m'éveillerai-je à la ferveur
première,
Droit et seul sous un flot antique de
lumière,
Lys! et l'un de vous tous pour
l'ingénuité.
That line with the monosyllable lys like a sprig, evoked the image of something rigid, slender and white; it rhymed with the substantive ingénuité, allegorically expressing, by a single term, the passion, the effervescence, the fugitive mood of a virgin faun amorously distracted by the sight of nymphs.