he intelligence of his readers) he emphasises the effect of what is
unlike other people in his mind by resolutely ignoring even the links of
connection that exist between them. Never having aimed at popularity, he
has never needed, as most writers need, to make the first advances. He
has made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who after all
need not read him. And when he has spoken he has not considered it
needful or seemly to listen in order that he might hear whether he was
heard. To the charge of obscurity he replies, with sufficient disdain,
that there are many who do not know how to read--except the newspapers,
he adds, in one of those disconcerting, oddly printed parentheses, which
make his work, to those who can rightly apprehend it, so full of wise
limitations, so safe from hasty or seemingly final conclusions. No one
in our time has more significantly vindicated the supreme right of the
artist in the aristocracy of letters; wilfully, perhaps, not always
wisely, but nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk from that
making of himself 'a motley to the view,' that handing over of his naked
soul to the laughter of the multitude? but who in our time has wrought
so subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick cloud
on the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had the wisdom
to hide their secret in the obscurity of double meanings or of what has
seemed meaningless; and might it not after all be the finest epitaph for
a self-respecting man of letters to be able to say, even after the
writing of many books: I have kept my secret, I have not betrayed myself
to the crowd?

It has been the distinction of Mallarme that he has always aspired after
an impossible liberation of the soul of literature from what is fretting
and constraining in 'the body of that death,' which is the mere
literature of words. Words, he has realised, are of value only as
notations of the free breath of the spirit; words, therefore, must be
employed with an extreme care in their choice and adjustment, in setting
them to reflect and chime upon one another; yet least of all things for
their own sake, for the sake of what they can never, except by
suggestion, express. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use of
words--that seeming artificiality which comes from using words as if
they had never been used before, that chimerical search after the
virginity of language--is but the paradoxical outward sign of an