“The poem in prose is the form, above all others, they prefer; handled by an alchemist of genius, it should contain in a state of meat the entire strength of the novel, the long analysis and the superfluous description of which it suppresses ... the adjective placed in such an ingenious and definite way, that it could not be legally dispossessed of its place, would open up such perspectives, that the reader would dream for whole weeks together on its meaning at once precise and multiple, affirm the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the souls of the characters revealed by the light of the unique epithet.  The novel thus understood, thus condensed into one or two pages, would be a communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration by consent between ten superior persons scattered through the universe, a delectation offered to the most refined, and accessible only to them.”

Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship; there is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the mural, of the window.  Ah! in this hour of weariness for one of Mallarme’s prose poems!  Stay, I remember I have some numbers of La Vogue.  One of the numbers contains, I know, “Forgotten Pages;” I will translate word for word, preserving the very rhythm, one or two of these miniature marvels of diction:—­

FORGOTTEN PAGES

“Since Maria left me to go to another star—­which?  Orion, Altair, or thou, green Venus?  I have always cherished solitude.  What long days I have passed alone with my cat.  By alone, I mean without a material being, and my cat is a mystical companion—­a spirit.  I can, therefore, say that I have passed whole days alone with my cat, and, alone with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence; for since that white creature is no more, strangely and singularly I have loved all that the word fall expresses.  In such wise that my favourite season of the year is the last weary days of summer, which immediately precede autumn, and the hour I choose to walk in is when the sun rests before disappearing, with rays of yellow copper on the grey walls and red copper on the tiles.  In the same way the literature that my soul demands—­a sad voluptuousness—­is the dying poetry of the last moments of Rome, but before it has breathed at all the rejuvenating approach of the barbarians, or has begun to stammer the infantile Latin of the first Christian poetry.

“I was reading, therefore, one of those dear poems (whose paint has more charm for me than the blush of youth), had plunged one hand into the fur of the pure animal, when a barrel organ sang languidly and melancholy beneath my window.  It played in the great alley of poplars, whose leaves appear to me yellow, even in the spring-tide, since Maria passed there with the tall candles for the last time.