Vers et prose, Perrin et C

hospitals, and prisons ; they drew for the « bourgeois » the disquieting sketch of a man, now dependent on public assistance, and now a victim of the laws relative to misdemeanors ; they represented him as a drunkard, a vagabond, almost as an assassin. The life of Mallarmé was too simple and modest to be related; so they brought forward his poetry:

Le vierge, le vivace et le bet aujourd’hui Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui ‘ !

What could a reformation he worth in the eyes of sensible men, wdiich placed itself under the standard of Verlaine, a shameful drunkard, or of Mallarmé, a maker of riddles ? — ■ a reformation extolled by so many unknowns with foreign names? These proud enemies of tradition, these Belgians Americans % Slaves '% Greeks®, and Jews — were these indeed competent doctors for French poetry and the French language? And were there no consequences to be feared from this assault delivered by all the nations at once upon the ancestral genius of our race?

Tn the nebulous enthusiasm and apocalyptic solemnity of the accounts given of their doctrine, one thing only was clearly shown, that all tliese reformers of poetry and verse did not agree with each other. Marie Krvsinska, René Ghil, Gustave Kahn, Jean Moréas, all worked in their own w-ay for the salvation of French poetry; and if Charles Morice crowned them all one after another, Robert de Souza condemned them all in a lump in tlie name of his own pet theory k wdiich he held to be the only true one ; and Jean Moréas, who had baptized symbolism, denied it, and in its place founded w hat he termed « la Poésie romane® ».

'1. See Briinctière, Revue des Deux Mondes, Nov. I, 1888.