The graphomaniac Morice (of whose crazy and distorted style of expression this literally translated example gives a very good idea) assumes that perhaps Mallarmé will yet create his ‘unprecedented work.’ Mallarmé himself, however, denies us the right to any such hope. ‘The delicious Mallarmé,’ Paul Hervieu relates,[133] ‘told me one day ... he could not understand that anyone should let himself appear in print. Such a proceeding gave him the impression of an indecency, an aberration, resembling that form of mental disease called “exhibitionism.” Moreover, no one has been so discreet with his soul as this incomparable thinker.’[134]
So, then, this ‘incomparable thinker’ shows ‘a complete discretion as regards his soul.’ At one time he bases his silence on a sort of shamed timidity at publicity; at another, on the fact that he ‘cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create,’ two reasons for that matter reciprocally precluding each other. He is approaching the evening of his life, and beyond a few brochures, such as _Les Dieux de la Grèce_ and _L’après-midi d’un Faune_, together with some verses and literary and theatrical criticisms, scattered in periodicals, the lot barely sufficing for a volume, he has published nothing but some translations from the English and a few school-books (M. Mallarmé is a teacher of English in a Parisian lycée), and yet there are some who admire him as a great poet, as the one exclusive poet, and they overwhelm the ‘blockheads’ and the ‘fools’ who laugh at him with all the expressions of scorn that the force of imagination in a diseased mind can display. Is not this one of the wonders of our day? Lessing makes Conti, in _Emilia Galotti_, say that ‘Raphael would have been the greatest genius in painting, even if he had unfortunately been born without hands.’ In M. Mallarmé we have a man who is revered as a great poet, although ‘he has unfortunately been born without hands,’ although he produces nothing, although he does not pursue the art he professes. During the period when in London a great number of bubble-company swindles were being promoted, when all the world went mad for the possession of the least scrap of Stock Exchange paper, it happened that a few sharp individuals advertised in the newspapers, inviting people to subscribe for shares in a company of which the object was kept a secret. There really were men who brought their money to these lively promoters, and the historian of the City crisis regards this fact as inconceivable. Inconceivable as it is, Paris sees it repeated. Some persons demand unbounded admiration for a poet whose works are his own secret, and will probably remain such, and others trustingly and humbly bring their admiration as required. The sorcerers of the Senegal negroes offer their congregation baskets and calabashes for veneration, in which they assert that a mighty fetich is enclosed. As a matter of fact they contain nothing; but the negroes regard the empty vessels with holy dread, and show them and their possessors divine honours. Exactly thus is empty Mallarmé the fetich of the Symbolists, who, it must be admitted, are intellectually far below the Senegal negroes.
