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It was not merely to hear oneself talk that artists like Mallarmé held forth with distinction, that artists like de Regnier and Fort devote themselves, however secretly, or however openly to the sacred theme.
I inclined to give Soames the benefit of the doubt. I had read "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" without extracting a glimmer of meaning; yet Mallarme, of course, was a master. How was I to know that Soames wasn't another? There was a sort of music in his prose, not indeed, arresting, but perhaps, I thought, haunting, and laden, perhaps, with meanings as deep as Mallarme's own.
Much of his verse especially his later verse is to me, at least, as obscure as Mallarme. But Il pleut dans mon coeur Comme il pleut dans la rue can never be surpassed for the fidelity with which it renders the endless drip, drip of melancholia, unless it is by that other magical lyric: Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langueur Monotone.
Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don't you know, reading the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it. His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
He did as much as any one of his contemporaries to mould the literary art of our day, and in the prose of Baudelaire and Mallarmé he lives a life whose lustre the indifference of his compatriots will never dim. Whence comes it, this sedulous attention to style, which does honour to American literature?
Did he know a man capable of appreciating the fineness of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting, the quintessence of an idea, a man whose soul was delicate and exquisite enough to understand Mallarme and love Verlaine? Where and when must he search to discover a twin spirit, a soul detached from commonplaces, blessing silence as a benefit, ingratitude as a solace, contempt as a refuge and port?
Manet in the Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, and their weekly reception became a rallying centre for not only les Jeunes, but also for such men as Gambetta, Emile Ollivier, Clemenceau, Antonin Proust, De Banville, Baudelaire, Duranty with whom Manet fought a duel over a trifle Zola, Mallarmé, Abbé Hurel, Monet, and the impressionistic group. Edouard entertained great devotion for his mother.
March, 1909. and was buried two days later in a family vault in the Protestant graveyard of Mount Jerome, Harold's Cross, Dublin. He had been betrothed, but not married. One thing more needs to be said. People have stated that Synge's masters in art were the writers of the French Decadent school of the eighteen nineties, Verlaine, Mallarme, J. K. Huysmans, etc.
I don't know how true this may be; the same sort of thing was said of Mallarmé and Paul Cézanne and Richard Strauss, and was absolutely without foundation. Schoenberg is an autodidact, the lessons in composition from Alexander von Zemlinsky not affecting his future path-breaking propensities. His mission is to free harmony from all rules.
"Each time I paint," he said to Mallarmé, "I throw myself into the water to learn swimming." It is not surprising that such a man should have been unequal, and that one can distinguish in his work between experiments, exaggerations due to research, and efforts made to reject the prejudices of which we feel the weight no longer.
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