efore with singular pleasure that one finds the two beautiful books
which have lately been published by M. Deman, the well-known publisher
of Rops: one, the fullest collection of Mallarme's poems which has ever
been published, the other a selection of twenty stories by Villiers. The
Mallarme is white and red, the poems printed in italics, a frontispiece
by Rops; the Villiers is a large square volume in shimmering dark green
and gold, with headpieces and tailpieces, in two tints, by Th. van
Rysselberghe. These scrolls and titles are done with a sort of reverent
self-suppression, as if, for once, decoration existed for a book and not
the book for the decoration, which is hardly the quality for which
modern decorators are most conspicuous.

In the _Poesies_ we have, no doubt, Mallarme's final selection from his
own poems. Some of it is even new. The magnificent and mysterious
fragment of _Herodiade_, his masterpiece, perhaps, is, though not indeed
completed, more than doubled in length by the addition of a long passage
on which he was at work almost to the time of his death. It is curious
to note that the new passage is written in exactly the style of the
older passage, though in the interval between the writing of the one and
the writing of the other Mallarme had completely changed his style. By
an effort of will he had thought himself back into an earlier style, and
the two fragments join without an apparent seam. There were, it appears,
still a hymn or lyric spoken by St. John and a concluding monologue, to
be added to the poem; but we have at least the whole of the dialogue
between Herodiade and the Nurse, certainly a poem sufficiently complete
in itself. The other new pieces are in the latest manner, mainly without
punctuation; they would scarcely be alluring, one imagines, even if
punctuated. In the course of a few centuries, I am convinced, every line
of Mallarme will have become perfectly clear, as a corrupt Greek text
becomes clear in time. Even now a learned commentator could probably do
much to explain them, at the cost of a life-long labour; but scholars
only give up their lives to the difficult authors of a remote past.
Mallarme can afford to wait; he will not be forgotten; and for us of the
present there are the clear and lovely early poems, so delightfully
brought together in the white and red book.

_L'insensibilite de l'azur et des pierres_: a serene and gem-like
quality, entirely his own, is in all these