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FRANK KERMODE
and time alike, and of which the influence, powerful over all,
ravishes in one common ecstasy the proud and the humble." And
Mauclair also said that here MallarmC's dream came true.
It was in February, 1893, that Mallarme went to the Folies–
Bergere to see Lore Fuller. It was an historic evening. Andre
Levinson, complaining in the early 'twenties of the- exaggerated
deference paid in literary circles to the music hall, credits the
Goncourts and Huysmans with beginning the vogue, but goes on:
"one day Stephane Mallarme, aesthetician of the absolute, was
seen pencilling, in his seat at the Folies-Bergere, his luminoUf
aperfus
on the so-called serpentine dances of Lore Fuller. Since
then the whole world has followed.. .." What Mallarme was
writing emerged as a passage of prose notably difficult even for
him; but it is the center, and indeed in most cases the source of
contemporary poetic comment on Fuller.
There is dispute among students of Mallarme as to the place
of dancing in his unsystematic system, and less attention than
might be expected is paid to this tribute to Loie Fuller. But there
seems to be no very good reason for discounting what it says:
that she represented for him at least the spirit of an unborn
aesthetic; that she represents a kind of spatial equivalent of
Music; that she stands for the victory of what he called the Con–
stellation over what he called Chance,
Hie couronnement du
ia'beur humain
JJ
as Bonniet calls it in his Preface to
Igitur.
Like
the archetype of Art, the Book, Fuller eliminated
hasard.
Thi–
baudet, indeed, believed that the whole concept of the book
owed something to Mallarme's meditations on the dance; so did
Levinson, arguing that Mallarme glimpsed in the ballet "a
revelation of the definitive
Oeuvre
which would sum up and
transcend man"; so, more recently, does M. Guy Delfel. The
fitness of the dance as an emblem of true poetry is clear. Valery
was expanding the views of Mallarme when he made his famous
comparison between them (poetry is to prose as dancing is to
walking). Mallarme's growing concern for syntax, so surprisingly
and irrefutably demonstrated by
L.
J.
Austin, dof'.8 not militate
