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"The decadence of a literature irreparably attacked in its organism, weakened by the age of ideas, overworn by the excess of syntax, sensible only of the curiosity which fevers sick people, but nevertheless hastening to explain everything in its decline, desirous of repairing all the omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most subtle souvenirs of its suffering on its deathbed, is incarnate in Mallarmé in most consummate and absolute fashion....
His marbles do not represent but present emotion, are the evocation of emotion itself; as in music, form and substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé, arouse "the silent thunder afloat in the leaves," he can summon from the vasty deep the spirits of love, hate, pain, despair, sin, beauty, ecstasy; above all, ecstasy. Now the primal gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few.
The French really discovered him as a poet, just as Mallarmé discovered Poe; some of them used that parallel. And the girls he was a matinée idol and a cult even the French girls. We went into that classroom thrilling as we never went to any ball. I worked that winter for him harder than I had ever worked in my life, and about Easter he began to single me out for the most merciless fault-finding.
The books he liked were queer; sometimes I would find him poring over the poems of Mallarme, and he read them as a child reads, forming the words with his lips, and I wondered what strange emotion he got from those subtle cadences and obscure phrases; and again I found him absorbed in the detective novels of Gaboriau.
Pensivement was replaced by some similar four-syllable adverb, Elle tirait nonchalamment les bas de soie, etc. It was the beginning of the end. I read the French poets of the modern school Coppée, Mendès, Léon Diex, Verlaine, José Maria Heredia, Mallarmé, Rechepin, Villiers de l'Isle Adam.
At such times he was forced to gaze upon her unforgotten outlines; and she lived for him, her lips articulating those bizarre and delicate lines which Mallarme makes her utter: O miroir!
In the French language, no lapse of time, no succession of ages had taken place; the stained and superb style of the de Goncourts and the gamy style of Verlaine and Mallarme jostled in Paris, living in the same period, epoch and century.
While this is primarily a volume of critical essays on painting, music, literature and life, it concludes with a series of seven short stories which serve as a postlude to Mr. Huneker's earlier volume, "Visionaries." They are chiefly interesting as the last dying glow of symbolism, derivative as they are from Huysmans and Mallarme.
With the exception of the works of these poets and of Stephane Mallarme, which his servant was told to place to one side so that he might classify them separately, Des Esseintes was but slightly attracted towards the poets.
The dates of composition of his principal works are: "Miroirs," 1905; "Sonatine," 1905; "Gaspard de la Nuit," 1908; "Valses nobles et sentimentales," 1911; "Ma Mère l'Oye," 1908; "Histoires naturelles," 1906; "Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques," 1907; "Trois Poèmes de Mallarmé," 1913; "Quatuor
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