igious book, that beautiful mosaic. Huysmans is quite right, ideas
are well enough until you are twenty, afterwards only words are bearable
... a new idea, what can be more insipid--fit for members of parliament....
Shall I go to bed? No.... I wish I had a volume of Verlaine, or something
of Mallarme's to read--Mallarme for preference. I remember Huysmans speaks
of Mallarme in "A Rebours." In hours like these a page of Huysmans is as a
dose of opium, a glass of some exquisite and powerful liqueur.

"The decadence of a literature irreparably attacked in its organism,
weakened by the age of ideas, overworn by the excess of syntax, sensible
only of the curiosity which fevers sick people, but nevertheless hastening
to explain everything in its decline, desirous of repairing all the
omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most subtle souvenirs of its
suffering on its deathbed, is incarnate in Mallarme in most consummate and
absolute fashion....

"The poem in prose is the form, above all others, they prefer; handled by
an alchemist of genius, it should contain in a state of meat the entire
strength of the novel, the long analysis and the superfluous description of
which it suppresses ... the adjective placed in such an ingenious and
definite way, that it could not be legally dispossessed of its place, would
open up such perspectives, that the reader would dream for whole weeks
together on its meaning at once precise and multiple, affirm the present,
reconstruct the past, divine the future of the souls of the characters
revealed by the light of the unique epithet. The novel thus understood,
thus condensed into one or two pages, would be a communion of thought
between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration by
consent between ten superior persons scattered through the universe, a
delectation offered to the most refined, and accessible only to them."

Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship;
there is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the
passion of the mural, of the window. Ah! in this hour of weariness for one
of Mallarme's prose poems! Stay, I remember I have some numbers of _La
Vogue_. One of the numbers contains, I know, "Forgotten Pages;" I will
translate word for word, preserving the very rhythm, one or two of these
miniature marvels of diction:--

FORGOTTEN PAGES

"Since Maria left me to go to another star--which? Orion, Altair, or