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he classed himself as an "amateur" in relation to his hero. But Ray–
mond apparently took this for sheer modesty, and is guilty of this
howling injustice:
"If
the 'pure' attitude has as much attraction for
him as for his master, things and emotions obviously seduce him far
more than they did Mallarme. He relates the pleasures they create in
him to real objects, not to lifeless Platonic effigies, 'pure and suave
ideas,' less present than absent." To speak of Mallarme's images,
which usually each embody a scale or chord of reality from the level
of violent eroticism on up, as "lifeless," is singularly obtuse. History,
being less gentle than reviewers, has already begun to make Monsieur
Raymond pay for this remark, to judge by recent signs from France.
(The cliche "platonic" promises to turn on its abusers in like fashion.)
Of the two poets, it is Valery who is incomparably the more subjective,
in the romantic,
allzumenschlich
sense: poems like the
Narcisses
and
La Jeune Parque
contain line after line of rhetoric-fearfully often
accompanied by exclamation marks-for the likes of which you will
search in vain not only in Mallarme's poems but even in the purest prose
of his
Divagations.
This is not to dispute Valery's excellence as a poet
and thinker but rather to assign him, along with his arch-admirer Eliot
(and Perse into the bargain) to a proper place vis-a-vis the "peaks."
These revaluations imply, perhaps, an Einsteinian conception of criticism
according to which everything is related to one provisionally unsur–
passable quantity, and such an approach has very definite disadvantages.
The only way to avoid these, however, is by skirting the giants and not
pretending, as Leavis so foolishly does, to be able to throw them around
as one pleases.
Lack of space prevents me from going into the full implications of
Raymond's remarks on Mallarme, such as the gross misconception that
Un coup de des
is a "pathetic admission of failure." For this error,
twentieth century criticism in general, particularly French, must bear
the responsibility.
It
would seem that, as in other well-known cases, a
creative summit is followed by a dark valley critically, and subsequent
literary history records successive levels of rising appreciation. The
half-century just traversed has seen Mallarme's reputation climb from
almost complete obscurity to a position, even in the
lycees,
neighboring
Baudelaire's. This upward curve is parallelled in curiously graphic
fashion by the movement of the spotlight from his earliest poems to
those of the middle period, e.g.
Toast funebre,
and the most accessible
of the late sonnets. During the 1948 cinquentennial celebration a con–
certed spurt brought the avant-garde almost up to the level of
19itur
