MALLARME  , ST$PHANE (1842-1898),

French poet and theorist, was born at Paris, on the 18th of March 1842 . His life was simple and without event . His small income as professor of English in a French college was sufficient for his needs, and, with his wife and daughter, he divided the year between a fourth-floor flat in Paris and a cottage on the banks of the Seine . His Tuesday evening receptions, which did so much to form the thought of the more interesting of the younger French men of letters, were almost as important a part of his career as the few carefully elaborated books which he produced at long intervals . L'Apres-midi d'un faun (1876) and other fragments of his verse and prose had been known to a few people long before the publication of the Poesies completes of 1887, in a facsimile of his clear and elegant handwriting, and of the Pages of 1891 and the Vers et prose of 1893 . His remarkable translation of poems of Poe appeared in 1888, " The Raven " having been published as early as 1875, with illustrations by Manet . Divagations, his own final edition of his prose, was published in 1897, and a more or less complete edition of the Poesies, posthumously, in 1899 . He died at Valvins, Fontainebleau, on the 9th of September 1898 . All his life Mallarme was in search of a new aesthetics, and his discoveries by the way were often admirable . But he was too critical ever to create freely, and too limited ever to create abundantly . His great achievement remains unfinished, and all that he left towards it is not of equal value . There are a few poems and a few pieces of imaginative prose which have the haunting quality of Gustave Moreau's pictures, with the same jewelled magnificence, mysterious and yet definite .

His later

work became more and more obscure, as he seemed to himself to have abolished limit after limit which holds back speech from the expression of the absolute . Finally, he abandoned punctuation in verse, and invented a new punctuation, along with a new construction, for prose . Patience in the study of so difficult an authorhas its reward . No one in our time has vindicated with more pride the self-sufficiency of the artist in his struggle with the material world . To those who knew him only by his writings his conversation was startling in its clearness; it was always, like all his work, at the service of a few dignified and misunderstood ideas . See also Paul Verlaine, Les Poetes maudits (1884) ; J . Lemaitre, Les Contemporains (5th series, 1891) ; Albert Moekel, Stephan Mallarme, un heros (1899) ; E . W . Gosse, French Profiles (19o5) and A . Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900) . A complete bibliography is given in the Potes d'aujourd'hui (1880-1900, 1thed., 1905) of MM . A. van Bever and P .

Leautaud . (A .