"Do you think so?" said the doctor, carelessly. "He loves you, you love him, you love each other. That is the essential thing to my mind. I hope that no scruple of bigotry is going to make you hesitate, now?"

She made no answer, but stood with bowed head.

"Do you account it a crime in this unlucky man to have allowed himself to be bamboozled when he was quite young, by an artful adventuress?"

"Oh, certainly not."

"Do you imagine it is right to push the principle of the inviolability of the conjugal vow so far as to force a man to live with a being he must despise and who has treated him outrageously?"

"I do not dare judge in such grave matters, but I think that nothing can oblige a husband to keep up his relations with a wife who has set at nought all her duties to him."

"You understand, then, that they must be separated?"

Constance inclined her head with an air of sadness and doubt.

"Well, then," said the doctor, triumphantly, "it is now only necessary that three years should have elapsed since such a separation; then on the demand of one of the parties, the separation can be turned into a divorce. De Glynne had not made use of the new law because he did not care to make another marriage, but after the explanation that took place between us, he hastened to fulfil the necessary formalities."

"What explanation, father?"

"One that took place after your departure, which looked a good deal like a flight. This flight excited his suspicions. He came here, he implored me to tell him if in any way he had been the cause of it, if he had involuntarily offended you in any way, if he displeased you in any way. I did not betray you. I did not let him see the

truth, but I could but suppose he partly guessed it. If you knew with what emotion he told me, 'I am ready to leave this country at a word from her, but she can also, by one word, keep me here forever.' Upon my word, I was quite overcome. Then we discussed the question frankly. His openness pleased me,-I made inquiries; all I heard about him inspired me with fresh confidence and esteem. In short, as I knew your secret, for why else were you taken so suddenly ill?—as I was sure of your consent if I gave mine, I said yes, when he asked me, in all due form, to give him your hand, after the divorce had been obtained. What could be more simple?"

It was indeed terribly simple; all the complications were lodged in the soul of Constance. In a voice almost too low to be heard, she said:

"There has been a mistake. I must speak to M. de Glynne to-morrow."

"To-morrow? I do not know how you will find a chance. You forget that to-morrow is Henriette's wedding day."

"Then as soon as possible-yes-the sooner the better."

She seemed about to go, but he prevented her.

"Listen to me, Constance; we must have no childishness. I am your father, I wish you only your good. Don't spoil your future by the foolish obstinacy of a young girl. You like each other and the law is in your favor. It permits you to live for each other, in all honor and honesty, well and safely married, and to bring up your children in a good position in the eyes of every one. What matters to you the opinion of a retrograde party, people who persist in opposing this benefit which legislation has conferred upon our country, and by which other countries have long profited?"

"Oh, the opinion of the world would be nothing to us."

"I think, father, I feel that it is the only real marriage, morally speaking."

"But, you foolish child, if you were contented to be married only in church, you would be, in the eyes of the law, not married at all, and would have no legal rights as a married woman!"

"I should have the blessing of God. But that has nothing to do with the question; every body submits to the custom of the ceremony at the Mairie." "Which you, on your part, seem to think very lightly of."

"No, it has its use, no doubt; it fixes the civil status of married persons, as the contract fixes that of their property."

"And this civil status is worth everything, it seems to me," said the doctor, lightly touching the cheek of his still arguing and persisting child. "What will you lack, when you have what satisfies your heart?"

"I want God's blessing," said Constance, gravely.

less likely to be faithful to you, that your union will be on a less firm basis?"

"I should have entire confidence in M. de Glynne, even if he had promised me nothing."

"That's right!"

"But an engagement over which religion does not preside is not real," resumed Constance, with inflexible obstinacy.

"Confound that baroness!" cried the doctor, wrathily. "Had it not been for her your mother would have stayed a Huguenot; you would not to-day have been making puerile objections, and the nuptial benediction you think so much of would have been given you by your uncle Duranton."

"Does my uncle know?" asked Constance, quickly.

"Your uncle does not even know that M. de Glynne has been married. I did not think it necessary to ask the advice of any one."

"Mine especially?" said Constance, in a tone almost severe.

"Do you dare to say that you would have refused what you know you have wished for, what you wish for still, more than anything else?"

"Father," demanded the young girl, lifting with a trembling hand one of the chamber candles that had been burning on the table while the two stood talking in a state of agitation almost equal,-he, red with anger, she, pale as death,-"Father, do you think that mamma, my poor dear mamma, who hears us now-I have faith in that -would have been willing to marry you without that formality of a relig ious ceremony which seems to you so insignificant?"

"The situation is not at all the same," replied the doctor, more embarrassed than before. "It cost me so little, we might argue till to-morrow without understanding each other," he added, breaking off the discussion.

I.

Stéphane Mallarmé was one of those who love literature too much to write it, except by fragments; in whom the desire of perfection brings its own defeat. With either more or less ambition he would have done more to achieve himself; he was always divided between an absolute aim at the absolute, that is, the unattainable, and a too logical disdain for the compromise by which, after all, literature is literature. Carry the theories of Mallarmé to a practical conclusion, multiply his powers in a direct ratio, and you have Wagner. It is his failure not to be Wagner. And, Wagner having existed, it was for him to be something more, to complete Wagner. Well, not being able to be that, it was a matter of sincere indifference to him whether he left one or two little, limited masterpieces of formal verse and prose, the more or the less. It was "the work" that he dreamed of, the new art, more than a new religion, whose precise form in the world he was never quite able to settle.

"Un auteur difficile," in the phrase of M. Catulle Mendès, it has always been to what he himself calls "a labyrinth illuminated by flowers" that Mallarmé has felt it due to their own dignity to invite his readers. To their own dignity, and also to his. Mallarmé was obscure, not so much because he wrote differently, as because he thought differently, from other people. His mind was elliptical, and, relying with undue confidence on the intelligence of his readers, he emphasized the effect of what was unlike other people in his mind, by resolutely ignoring even the

One paragraph, and a part of another, in this essay, are reproduced from an article on Mallarme's Divagations, in the Saturday Review of Jan. 30, 1897.

links of connection that did exist between them. Never having aimed at popularity, he never needed, as most writers need, to make the first advances. He made neither intrusion upon nor concession to, those who, after all, were not obliged to read him. And when he spoke, he considered it neither needful nor seemly to listen in order to hear whether he was heard. To the charge of obscurity he replied, with sufficient disdain, that there are many who do not know how to read,except the newspaper, he adds, in one of those disconcerting, oddly-printed parentheses, which make his work, to those who rightly apprehend it, so full of wise limitations, so safe from hasty or seemingly final conclusions. No one in our time has more significantly vindicated the supreme right of the artist in the aristocracy of letters; wil fully, perhaps, not always wisely, but nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk from that making of himself "a motley to the view," that handing over of his naked soul to the laughter of the multitude? But who, in our time, has wrought so subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick cloud on the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had the wisdom to hide their secrets in the obscurity of many meanings, or of what has seemed meaningless; and might it not, after all, be the finest epitaph for a self-respecting man of letters to be able to say, even after the writing of many books: "I have kept my secret, I have not betrayed myself to the multitude?"

Yet to Mallarmé, certainly, there might be applied the significant warning of Rossetti:

"But woe to thee if once thou yield Unto the act of doing nought."

After a life of persistent devotion to literature, he has left enough poems to make a single small volume (less, certainly, than a hundred poems in all), a single volume of prose, a few pamphlets, and a prose translation of the poems of Poe. It is because among these there are masterpieces, poems which are among the most beautiful poems written in our time, prose which has all the subtlest qualities of prose, that, quitting the abstract point of view, we are forced to regret the fatal enchantments, fatal for him, of theories which are so greatly needed by others, so valuable for our instruction, if we are only a little careful in putting them into practice.

In estimating the significance of Stéphane Mallarmé, it is necessary to take into account not only his verse and prose, but, almost more than these, the Tuesdays of the Rue de Rome, in which he gave himself freely to more than one generation. No one who has ever climbed those four flights of stairs will have forgotten the narrow, homely interior, elegant with a sort of scrupulous Dutch comfort; the heavy, carved furniture, the tall clock, the portraits, Manet's, Whistler's, on the walls; the table on which the china bowl, odorous with tobacco, was pushed from hand to hand; above all, the rockingchair, Mallarmé's, from which he would rise quietly, to stand leaning his elbow on the mantel-piece, while one hand, the hand which did not hold the cigarette, would sketch out one of those familiar gestures: "un peu de prêtre, un peu de danseuse" (in M. Rodenbach's admirable phrase), "avec lesquels il avait l'air chaque fois d'entrer dans la conversation, comme on entre en scène." One of the best talkers of our time, he was, unlike most other fine talkers, harmonious with his own theories in giving no monologues, in allowing every liberty to his guests, to

the conversation; in his perfect readiness to follow the slightest indication, to embroider upon any frame, with any material presented to him. There would have been something almost of the challenge of the improvisatore in this easily moved alertness of mental attitude, had it not been for the singular gentleness with which Mallarmé's intelligence moved, in these considerable feats, with the half-apologetic negligence of the perfect acrobat. He seemed to be no more than brushing the dust off your own ideas, settling, arranging them a little, before he gave them back to you, surprisingly luminous. It was only afterwards that you realized how small had been your own part in the matter, as well as what it meant to have enlightened without dazzling you. But there was always the feeling of comradeship, the comradeship of a master, whom, while you were there at least, you did not question; and that very feeling lifted you, in your own estimation, nearer to art.

Invaluable, it seems to me, those Tuesdays must have been to the young men of two generations who have been making French literature; they were unique, certainly, in the experience of the young Englishman who was always so cordially received there, with so flattering a cordiality. Here was a house in which art, literature, was the very atmosphere, a religious atmosphere; and the master of the house, in his just a little solemn simplicity, a priest. I never heard the price of a book mentioned, or the number of thousand francs which a popular author has been paid for his last volume; here, in this one literary house, literature was unknown as a trade. And, above all, the questions that were discussed were never, at least, in Mallarmé's treatment, in his guidance of them, other than essential questions, considerations of art in the abstract, of literature before it coagulates into