I think I understand, though I cannot claim his own authority for my supposition, the
way in which Mallarme wrote verse, and the reason why it became more and more abstruse,
more and more unintelligible. Remember his principle: that to name is to destroy,
to suggest is to create.
Symbolism, implicit in all literature from the
beginning, as it is implicit in the very words we use, comes to us now, at last
quite conscious of itself, offering us the only escape from our many
imprisonments. We find a new, an older, sense in the so worn-out forms of
things; the world, which we can no longer believe in as the satisfying material
object it was to our grandparents, becomes transfigured with a new light;
words, which long usage had darkened almost out of recognition, take fresh
lustre. And it is on the lines of that spiritualising of the word, that perfecting
of form in its capacity for allusion and suggestion, that confidence in the
eternal correspondences between the visible and the invisible universe, which
Mallarme taught, and too intermittently practised, that literature must now
move, if it is in any sense to move forward.
