Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

"Mais où s'installe l'irrécusable intervention du surnaturel, et le commencement de l'angoisse sous laquelle agonise mon esprit naguère seigneur, c'est quand je vis, levant les yeux, dans la rue des antiquaires instinctivement suivie, que j'étais devant la boutique d'un luthier vendeur de vieux instruments pendus au mur, et, à terre, des palmes jaunes et les ailes enfouies en l'ombre, d'oiseaux anciens. Je m'enfuis, bizarre, personne condamnée à porter probablement le deuil de l'inexplicable Pénultième."

As a translator, all the world must commend M. Mallarmé. He has put the poems of Poe into French in a way which is subtle almost without parallel. Each version is in simple prose, but so full, so reserved, so suavely mellifluous, that the metre and the rhymes continue to sing in an English ear. None could enter more tenderly than he into the strange charm of _Ulalume_, of _The Sleeper_, or of _The Raven_. It is rarely indeed that a word suggests that the melody of one, who was a symbolist and a weaver of enigmas like himself, has momentarily evaded the translator.

M. Mallarmé, who understands English so perfectly, has perhaps seen the poems of Sydney Dobell. He knows, it is possible, that thirty or forty years ago there was an English poet who cultivated the symbol, who deliquesced the language, as he himself does in French. Sydney Dobell wrote lovely, unintelligible things, that broke, every now and then, into rhapsodies of veritable beauty. But his whole system was violent. He became an eccentric cometary nebula, whirling away from our poetic system at a tangent. He whirled away, for all his sincere passion, into oblivion. This is what one fears for the Symbolists: that being read with so great an effort by their own generation, they may, by the next, not be read at all, and what is pure and genuine in their artistic impulses be lost. Something of M. Mallarmé will, however, always be turned back to with respect and perhaps with enthusiasm, for he is a true man of letters.

_1893._

TWO PASTELS