ST. MALLARME
291
HE.-Do
you approve of his depreciating the real to the great–
er glory of the imaginary?
I.-No,
certainly not, but....
i-IE.-And
of his taste for, his strange hankering after ob–
scurity?
/.-Doubtless not as an aim in itself, but I approve of it when
it leads to poems as luminous and glorious as Mallarme's. He made
great demands on the reader. That is what this dedication expresses
in an exquisite manner:
Attendu qu'il y met du sien,
Vous feuillets de papier frigide
Exaltez-moi, musicien,
Pour l'ame attentive de Gide!
HE.-Then poetry, in your estimation, should tend toward the
esoteric?
/.-Poetry should tend, or pretend, only to perfection. Obscurity
is something that the true poet should neither seek nor fear. What he
should fear is affectation. Mallarme's obscurity has yielded to the
commentators. But I did not have to wait for the explications of
Royere, Thibaudet, Dr. Mondor, Emilie Noulet or Mauron, how–
ever excellent these may be, to fall in love with his poems.
HE.-Does
this mean that you understood them perfectly with–
out assistance?
/.-No; but rather that I did not feel the need to understand
them perfectly; and that their meaning, which gained rather than
lost by remaining a little imprecise, mattered a great deal less than
the almost religious emotion aroused in me by their mystery. Their
sonorous and incantatory power was such that they preserved the
strange charm of this mystery, in spite of the explications I afterwards
received. Lovelier verses I have never read.
That poetry, to quote the learned Florentine quattrocentist, Mar–
silio Ficino, might "by its very nature be filled with enigmas" is a
truth that was scarcely admitted in the seventeenth and eighteenth
2. This inscription for Mallarme's young friend might read in English verse :
Because he also does his part,
White paper in your frigid sheets,
Inspire the musician to new feats
For Andre Gide's attentive heart.
Mallarme is the musician; it is Gide as the listener who "also does his
part."-Tr.
