MALLARMÉ, STÉPHANE (1842-1898), French poet and theorist, was born at Paris, on the 18th of March 1842. His life was simple and without event. His small income as professor of English in a French college was sufficient for his needs, and, with his wife and daughter, he divided the year between a fourth-floor flat in Paris and a cottage on the banks of the Seine. His Tuesday evening receptions, which did so much to form the thought of the more interesting of the younger French men of letters, were almost as important a part of his career as the few carefully elaborated books which he produced at long intervals. L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876) and other fragments of his verse and prose had been known to a few people long before the publication of the Poésies complètes of 1887, in a facsimile of his clear and elegant handwriting, and of the Pages of 1891 and the Vers et prose of 1893. His remarkable translation of poems of Poe appeared in 1888, “The Raven” having been published as early as 1875, with illustrations by Manet. Divagations, his own final edition of his prose, was published in 1897, and a more or less complete edition of the Poésies, posthumously, in 1899. He died at Valvins, Fontainebleau, on the 9th of September 1898. All his life Mallarmé was in search of a new aesthetics, and his discoveries by the way were often admirable. But he was too critical ever to create freely, and too limited ever to create abundantly. His great achievement remains unfinished, and all that he left towards it is not of equal value. There are a few poems and a few pieces of imaginative prose which have the haunting quality of Gustave Moreau’s pictures, with the same jewelled magnificence, mysterious and yet definite. His later work became more and more obscure, as he seemed to himself to have abolished limit after limit which holds back speech from the expression of the absolute. Finally, he abandoned punctuation in verse, and invented a new punctuation, along with a new construction, for prose. Patience in the study of so difficult an author has its reward. No one in our time has vindicated with more pride the self-sufficiency of the artist in his struggle with the material world. To those who knew him only by his writings his conversation was startling in its clearness; it was always, like all his work, at the service of a few dignified and misunderstood ideas.
See also Paul Verlaine, Les Poètes maudits (1884); J. Lemaître, Les Contemporains (5th series, 1891); Albert Moekel, Stéphane Mallarmé, un héros (1899); E. W. Gosse, French Profiles (1905) and A. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900). A complete bibliography is given in the Poètes d’aujourd’hui (1880-1900, 11th ed., 1905) of MM. A. van Bever and P. Léautaud.
(A. Sy.)
MALLECO, a province of southern Chile, once a part of the Indian territory of Araucania (q.v.), lying between the provinces of Bio-Bio on the N. and E., Cautin on the S. and Arauco on the W. Area, 2973 sq. m. Pop. (1895), 98,032. It belongs to the rainy, forested region of southern Chile, and is thinly populated, a considerable part of its population being Araucanian Indians, who occupy districts in the Andean foothills. Gold placer mining has attracted some attention, but the output is small. The principal industries are cattle and wheat raising and timber-cutting. The capital is Angol (pop., 7056 in 1895; estimated at 7638 in 1902), a small town in the northern part of the province, on the Malleco river, and a station on the Traiguen branch of the state railway. Traiguen (pop., 5732 in 1895; estimated at 7099 in 1902) in the southern part of the province is the second town in importance, and Victoria (pop., 6989 in 1895; estimated at 10,002 in 1902), about 20 m. E. of the last-named town, was for a time the terminal station of the main line of the railway.
MALLEMUCK, from the German rendering of the Dutch Mallemugge (which originally meant small flies or midges that madly whirl round a light), a name given by the early Dutch Arctic voyagers to the Fulmar (q.v.), of which the English form is nowadays most commonly applied by our sailors to the smaller albatrosses, of about the size of a goose, met with in the Southern Ocean—corrupted into “molly mawk,” or “mollymauk.” A number of species have been identified. Diomedea irrorata of West Peru is sooty-brown with white mottlings and a white head; D. migripes of the North Pacific is similar in colour but with white only near the eye and at the base of the tail and bill; D. immutabilis of Japan is darker but has a white head. D. melanophrys of the southern oceans has been found in summer both in California, in England, and as far north as the Faeroes. According to J. Gould the latter is the commonest species of albatross inhabiting the Southern Ocean, and its gregarious habits and familiar disposition make it well known to every voyager to or from Australia, for it is equally common in the Atlantic as well as the Pacific. The back, wings and tail are of a blackish-grey, but all the rest of the plumage is white, except a dusky superciliary streak, whence its name of black-browed albatross, as also its scientific epithet, are taken. The bill of the adult is of an ochreous-yellow, while that of the young is dark. This species breeds on the Falkland Islands. D. bulleri of the New Zealand seas is greyish-brown, with white underparts and rump and ashy head. Diomedea (or Thalassogeron) culminata and chlororhyncha of the southern seas, D. (or T.) cauta of Tasmania, salvini of New Zealand and layardi of the Cape resemble D. bulleri, but have a strip of naked skin between the plates of the maxilla towards its base. H. N. Moseley (Notes of a Naturalist, 130) describes D. culminata as making a cylindrical nest of grass, sedge and clay, with a shallow basin atop and an overhanging rim—the whole being about 14 in. in diameter and 10 in height. The bird lays a single white egg, which is held in a sort of pouch, formed by the skin of the abdomen, while she is incubating. The feet of D. bulleri are red, of D. chlororhyncha flesh-coloured, of the others yellow.
(A. N.)
MALLESON, GEORGE BRUCE (1825-1898), Indian officer and author, was born at Wimbledon, on the 8th of May 1825. Educated at Winchester, he obtained a cadetship in the Bengal infantry in 1842, and served through the second Burmese War. His subsequent appointments were in the civil line, the last being that of guardian to the young maharaja of Mysore. He retired with the rank of colonel in 1877, having been created C.S.I. in 1872. He died at Kensington, on the 1st of March 1898. He was a voluminous writer, his first work to attract attention being the famous “Red Pamphlet,” published at Calcutta in 1857, when the Mutiny was at its height. He continued, and considerably rewrote the History of the Indian Mutiny (6 vols., 1878-1880), which was begun but left unfinished by Sir John Kaye. Among his other books the most valuable are History of the French in India (2nd ed., 1893) and The Decisive Battles of India (3rd ed., 1888).