nd chiefly the visual sensations. The
moral nature is ignored, the emotions resolve themselves for the most
part into a sordid ennui, rising at times into a rage at existence. The
protagonist of every book is not so much a character as a bundle of
impressions and sensations--the vague outline of a single consciousness,
his own. But it is that single consciousness--in this morbidly personal
writer--with which we are concerned. For Huysmans' novels, with all
their strangeness, their charm, their repulsion, typical too, as they
are, of much beside himself, are certainly the expression of a
personality as remarkable as that of any contemporary writer.

1892.

TWO SYMBOLISTS

_Un livre comme je ne les aime pas_, says Mallarme characteristically
(_ceux epars et prives d'architecture_) of this long expected first
volume of collected prose, _Divagations_, in which we find the prose
poems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; the
marvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and the
theatrical spectacle, comparatively early in date; _Richard Wagner:
reverie d'un Poete francais, Le Mystere dans les Lettres_; and, under
various titles, the surprising _Variations sur un Sujet_. The hesitation
of a lifetime having been, it would seem, overcome, we are at last able
to read Mallarme's 'doctrine,' if not altogether as he would have us
read it. And we are at last able, without too much injustice, to judge
him as a writer of prose.

In saying that this volume is the most beautiful and the most valuable
which has found its way into my hands for I know not how long, I shall
not pretend to have read it with ease, or to have understood every word
of it. _D'exhiber les choses a un imperturbable premier plan, en
camelots, actives par la pression de l'instant, d'accord--ecrire, dans
le cas pourquoi, indument, sauf pour etaler la banalite; plutot que
tendre le nuage, precieux, flottant sur l'intime gouffre de chaque
pensee, vu que vulgaire l'est ce a quoi on decerne, pas plus, un
caractere immediat._ No, it has always been to that _labyrinthe illumine
par des fleurs_ that Mallarme has felt it due to their own dignity to
invite his readers. To their own dignity, and also to his. Mallarme is
obscure, not so much because he writes differently as because he thinks
differently from other people. His mind is elliptical, and (relying on
t