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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.

      This position of a calabash worshipped on bended knees he has attained by oral discourse. Every week he gathers round him embryonic poets and authors, and develops his art theories before them. He speaks just as Morice and Kahn write. He strings together obscure and wondrous words, at which his disciples become as stupid ‘as if a mill-wheel were going round in their heads,’ so that they leave him as if intoxicated, and with the impression that incomprehensible, superhuman disclosures have been made to them. If there is anything comprehensible in the incoherent flow of Mallarmé’s words, it is perhaps his admiration for the pre-Raphaelites. It was he who drew the attention of the Symbolists to this school, and enjoined imitation of it. It is through Mallarmé that the French mystics received their English mediævalism and neo-Catholicism. Finally, it may be mentioned that among the physical features of Mallarmé are ‘long pointed faun-like ears.’[135] After Darwin, who was the first to point out the apish character of this peculiarity, Hartmann,[136] Frigerio,[137] and Lombroso,[138] have firmly established the connection between immoderately long and pointed external ears and atavism and degeneration; and they have shown that this peculiarity is of especially frequent occurrence among criminals and lunatics.

      The third among the leading spirits of the Symbolists is Jean Moréas, a Franco-Greek poet, who at the completion of his thirty-sixth year (his friends assert, it may be in friendly malice, that he makes himself out to be very much younger than he is) has produced in toto three attenuated collections of verses, of hardly one hundred to one hundred and twenty pages, bearing the titles, Les Syrtes, Les Cantilènes, and Le Pélerin passionné. The importance of a literary performance does not, of course, depend upon its amplitude, if it is otherwise unusually significant. When, however, a man cackles during interminable café séances of the renewal of poetry and the unfolding of a new art of the future, and finally produces three little brochures of childish verses as the result of his world-stirring effort, then the material insignificance of the performance also becomes a subject for ridicule.

      Moréas is one of the inventors of the word ‘Symbolism.’ For some few years he was the high-priest of this secret doctrine, and administered the duties of his service with requisite seriousness. One day he suddenly abjured his self-founded faith, and declared that ‘Symbolism’ had always been meant only as a joke, to lead fools by the nose withal; and that the true salvation of poetry was in Romanism (romanisme). Under this new word he affirms a return to the language, versification and mode of feeling of the French poets at the close of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance period; but it were well to adopt his declarations with caution, since in two or three years he may be proclaiming his ‘romanisme’ as much a tap-room joke as his ‘symbolism.’ The appearance of the Pélerin passionné in 1891 was celebrated by the Symbolists as an event which was to be the beginning of a new era in poetry. They arranged a banquet in honour of Moréas, and in the after-dinner speeches he was worshipped as the deliverer from the shackles of ancient forms and notions, and as the saviour who was bringing in the kingdom of God of true poetry. And the same poets who sat at the table with Moréas, and delivered to him rapturous addresses or joined in the applause, a few weeks after this event overwhelmed him with contumely and contempt. ‘Moréas a Symbolist!’ cried Charles Vignier.[139] ‘Is he one through his ideas? He laughs at them himself! His thoughts! They don’t weigh much, these thoughts of Jean Moréas!’ ‘Moréas?’ asks Adrien Remacle,[140] ‘we have all been laughing at him. It is that which has made him famous.’ René Ghil calls his Pélerin passionné ‘doggerel written by a pedant,’ and Gustav Kahn[141] passes sentence on him thus: ‘Moréas has no talent. … He has never done anything worth mentioning. He has his own particular jargon.’ These expressions disclose to us the complete hollowness and falseness of the Symbolistic movement, which outside France is obstinately proclaimed as a serious matter by imbeciles and speculators, although its French inventors make themselves hoarse in trying to convince the world that they merely wanted to banter the Philistine with a tap-room jest and advertise themselves.

      After the verdict of his brethren in the Symbolist Parnassus, I may really spare myself the trouble of dwelling longer on Moréas; I will, however, cite a few examples from his Pélerin passionné, in order that the reader may form an idea of the softness of brain which displays itself in these verses.

      The poem Agnes[142] begins thus:

      ‘Il y avait des arcs où passaient des escortes

       Avec des bannières de deuil et du fer

       Lacé (?) des potentats de toutes sortes

      —Il y avait—dans la cité au bord de la mer.

       Les places étaient noires, et bien pavées, et les portes,

       Du côté de l’est et de l’ouest, hautes; et comme en hiver

       La forêt, dépérissaient les salles de palais, et les porches,

       Et les colonnades de belvéder.

      C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de ton

       adolescence.

      ‘Dans la cité au bord de la mer, la cape et la dague lourdes

       De pierres jaunes, et sur ton chapeau des plumes de perroquets,

       Tu t’en venais, devisant telles bourdes,

       Tu t’en venais entre tes deux laquais

       Si bouffis et tant sots—en verité, des happelourdes!—

       Dans la cité au bord de la mer tu t’en venais et tu vaguais

       Parmi de grands vieillards qui travaillaient aux felouques,

       Le long des môles et des quais.

      C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de ton

       adolescence.

      And thus the twaddle goes on through eight more stanzas, and in every line we find the characteristics of the language used by imbeciles and made notorious by Sollier (Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile), the ‘ruminating’ as it were, of the same expressions, the dreamy incoherence of the language, and the insertion of words which have no connection with the subject.

      Two Chansons[143] run thus:

      ‘Les courlis dans les roseaux!

       (Faut-il que je vous en parle,

       Des courlis dans les roseaux?)

       O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.

      ‘Le porcher et les pourceaux!

       (Faut-il que je vous en parle,

       Du porcher et des pourceaux?)

       O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.

      ‘Mon cœur pris en vos réseaux!

       (Faut-il que je vous en parle,

       De mon cœur en vos réseaux?)

       O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.

      ‘On a marché sur les fleurs au bord de la route,

       Et le vent d’automne les secoue si fort, en outre.

      ‘La malle-poste a renversé la vieille croix au bord de la route;

       Elle était vraiment si pourrie, en outre.

      ‘L’idiot (tu sais) est mort au bord de la route,

      

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