one of our dreams? Men, whom we believe real, are but the triste opacité de leurs spectres futurs. But the poet, beyond his vain physical existence, lives for us a high, imperishable life. The poet is a solemn agitation of words: the death of a poet purifies our fiction of him." He wrote this of Gautier.

"In a desolate cloister-cell an old monk transcribes patient writings. He has lived ignorant and chaste. He copies an ancient manuscript, it may be some naïf romance of Alexandria, in which two laughing children meet, and kiss timidly. And desire creeps into the empty, idle soul of the good monk. He summons the lovers to live for him their moods of tenderness and passion. And forthwith he himself comes to be this young and happy lover."

This is from the prose for "Des Esseintes." Is it a souvenir or a dream? Perhaps the fantastic hyperbole of a far-off recollection. The monk wishes in his cell to live the young and splendid life of love. And he lives it. He walks with the riant girl in familiar gardens. Touched with love, he sees a transfigured world. The flowers are

larger great lilies nod enchanted. He wanders in a radiant dream.

Then love

Then love passes, and the miracle is finished. He dreams again that he is a poor old

monk. Vainly he cries to the riant girl. He bends

again over his parchments, a phantom irked by an obscure destiny. He waits until this dream, too, shall be effaced, when the black pall falls and death is.

Mallarmé published this sonnet not long ago:

Surgi de la croupe et du bond
D'une verrerie éphémère,
Sans fleurir la veillée amère

Le col ignoré s'interrompt.

Je crois bien que deux bouches n'ont

Bu, ni son amant ni ma mère

Jamais à la même chimère

Moi, sylphe, de ce froid plafond!

Le pur vase d'aucun breuvage
Que l'inexhaustible veuvage
Agonise, mais ne consent,

Naif baiser des plus funèbres,
A rien expirer annonçant

Une rose dans les ténèbres.

It may be that in some such way as this he approached his symbol: There is on the table a vase, delicate, fragile, in which lately the flowers stood radiant. The poet perceives it. He considers its exquisite form, form, daintily turned; the shapely flanks which seem to throb. the neck rising gracefully to end in sudden interruption. Sadly the poet muses that no flower is there to console his bitter vigil. And here, I take

He observes

it, is the point of poetical departure. Why, then, cannot he find in himself, the poet, this flower which he desires? Can he not by his sovereign will evoke one flower? No doubt by his very birth he is condemned to this inefficiency: an antique and hereditary inertia cumbers him. No doubt his parents neglected to dower him with this power of evocation, neglected to drink at the fecund spring of chimera; and now the spring is dry. The poet agonizes, and in vain. The vase is empty. For him there is only sad vacuity, empty; and his revolt is empty. He cannot summon the dead.

And, finally, read this sonnet:—

Une dentelle s'abolit

Dans le doute du Jeu suprême

À n'entr'ouvrir, comme un blasphème,
Qu'absence éternelle de lit.

Cet unanime blanc conflit
D'une guirlande avec la même,
Enfui contre la vitre blême,
Flotte plus qu'il n'enselevit.

Mais chez qui du rêve se dore,
Tristement dort une mandore
Au creux néant musicien,

Telle que, vers quelque fenêtre,
Selon nul ventre que le sien,
Filial on aurait pu naître.

*

A lace curtain,- this is the subject, the symbol, the motif, the poet's point of departure. He sees the lace curtain hanging at his window. It suggests to him a nuptial couch. Then he perceives there is no bed under the swaying lace: this to him seems a blasphemy,-futile lace stretched across the pale and empty window. He watches the white, monotonous conflict of vague lines on the shadowy window-panes; but he cannot recover that fugitive impression of a nuptial couch. But now the Dream comes, and effaces his regret: because, in the soul of him who knows the Dream, a lute wakes eternally; because in the secret soul of him the magic mandora of phantasy wakes evermore. What matters, then, the absence of a bed under this lace? The poet conceives himself delivered of the Dream, child of this phantasy which dwells ever in the soul. The curving contour of the lute,- is it not the royal womb where grows, safe from the exasperations of daily existence, the intimate life, the patient immortal life of art?

And this lace, fluctuant, vague, is indeed the sumptuous curtain of a bed truly real,- bed where the poet himself is born.

To turn one of Mallarmé's golden symbols into even barren and sodden prose is at once difficult and absurd. It is as though one were to write out in drab words a Chopin étude.

My whole attempt has been to expose, in a slight measure, Mallarmé's technique,- his method of using the symbol. The familiar object is his point of departure: he passes thence to its poetical intention. And, again, his thematic development is carried on by certain chosen, premeditated words; for the rest there is only syllabic color and syllabic

tone.

Mallarmé was not the initiator of a new poetry, like Walt Whitman. He was the last and most perfect of an old school. He merely He merely pushed to their extreme consequences the principles which all the great French poets since the Renascence had admitted, and, indeed, championed. He followed more closely what he called the "instinct of elusive rhythms": he discerned more plainly the occult, significant, and mysterious symbol qui habite le commun; and that is all.