he inquired.  At first, with the immeasurable and vulgar tedium of Mr. Crosland’s popular books in my memory, I thought he was joking.  But he was not.  He was convinced than an early book by the slanger of suburbs contained as fine poetry as has been written in these days.  I was formally bound over to peruse the volume.  “And Alfred Douglas?” he said further.  (Not that he had shares or interest in the Academy!) Of course, I had to admit that Lord Alfred Douglas, before he began to cut capers in the hinterland of Fleet Street, had been a poet.  I have an early volume of his that, to speak mildly, I cherish.  I should surmise that scarcely one person in a million has the least idea of the identity of the artists by which the end of the twentieth century will remember the beginning.  The vital facts of to-day’s literature always lie buried beneath chatter of large editions and immense popularities.  I wouldn’t mind so much, were it not incontestable that at the end of the century I shall be dead.

MALLARME, BAZIN, SWINBURNE

[17 Dec. ’08]

The Mrs. Humphry Ward of France, M. Rene Bazin, has visited these shores, and has been interviewed.  In comparing him to Mrs. Humphry Ward, I am unfair to the lady in one sense and too generous in another.  M. Bazin writes perhaps slightly better than Mrs. Humphry Ward, but not much. Per contra, he is a finished master of the art of self-advertisement, whereas the public demeanour of Mrs. Humphry Ward is entirely beyond reproach.  M. Bazin did not get through his interview without giving some precise statistical information as to the vast sale of his novels.  I suppose that M. Bazin, Academician and apostle of literary correctitude, is just the type of official mediocrity that the Alliance Francaise was fated to invite to London as representative of French letters.  My only objection to the activities of M. Bazin is that, not content with a golden popularity, he cannot refrain from sneering at genuine artists.  Thus, to the interviewer, he referred to Stephane Mallarme as a “fumiste.”  No English word will render exactly this French slang; it may be roughly translated a practical joker with a trace of fraud.  There may be, and there are, two opinions as to the permanent value of Mallarme’s work, but there cannot be two informed and honest opinions as to his profound sincerity.  It is indubitable that he had one aim—­to produce the finest literature of which he was capable, and that to this aim he sacrificed everything else in his career.  A charming spectacle, this nuncio of mediocrity and of the Academie Francaise coming to London to assert that a distinguished writer like Mallarme was a “fumiste”!  If any one wishes to know what is thought of Mallarme by the younger French school, let him read the Mallarme chapter in Andre Gide’s “Pretextes.”  In this very able book will be found also some wonderful reminiscences of Oscar Wilde.