extreme
discontent with even the best of their service. Writers who use words
fluently, seeming to disregard their importance, do so from an
unconscious confidence in their expressiveness, which the scrupulous
thinker, the precise dreamer, can never place in the most carefully
chosen among them. To evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of
language, without the formality of an after all impossible description;
to be, in fact, rather than to express; that is what Mallarme has
consistently, and from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has
sought this wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of
dreams, over more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the
depths of many forests, far from the sunlight. He would be the last to
permit me to say that he has found what he sought; but (is it possible
to avoid saying?) how heroic a search, and what marvellous discoveries,
by the way!

Yes, all these, he admits perhaps proudly, are divagations, and the
secret, eternal, and only beauty is not yet found. Is it, perhaps, in a
mood, a momentary mood, really of discouragement, that he has consented
to the publication--the 'showing off,' within covers, as of goods in a
shop-window: it is his own image--of these fragmentary suggestions
towards a complete AEsthetic? Beautiful and invaluable I find them; here
and there final; and always, in form, hieratic.

Certain writers, in whom the artist's contempt for common things has
been carried to its utmost limit, should only be read in books of
beautiful and slightly unusual form. Perhaps of all modern writers
Villiers and Mallarme have most carefully sought the most remote ideal,
and seem most to require some elaborate presentation to the reader.
Mallarme, indeed, delighted in heaping up obstacles in the reader's way,
not only in the concealment of his meaning by style, but in a furtive,
fragmentary, and only too luxurious method of publication, which made it
difficult for most people to get his books at all, even for unlimited
money. Villiers, on the contrary, after publishing his first book, the
_Premieres Poesies_ of 1859, in the delicate type of Perrin of Lyons, on
ribbed paper, with old gold covers, became careless as to how his books
appeared, and has to be read in a disorderly crowd of volumes, some of
them as hideous as the original edition of _L'Eve Future_, with its red
stars and streaks, its Apollo and Cupid and grey city landscape. It is
ther