Talks on Poetry

TALK TWENTY-SIX

Mallarme was the queerest bird in the sky of poetry. Many poets, almost all, are queer birds of one kind or another. Some of them have even been regarded as being off their chump: Blake was to most of his contemporaries a mad man. And two or three were actually inmates or at least temporary residents of Lunatic Asylums: Cowper, Christopher Smart and the Frenchman Gerard de Nerval. But in defence of the Poetic Art I may declare that in the case of these it was not poetry which drove them mad nor is it that they wrote poetry only in a state of madness. Nerval who was twice in and out of an Asylum made a memorably mysterious line for his experience. And if we examine it in the context of its two successors we shall perhaps guess what led to his madness and thus exonerate his art from the suspicion of having pushed him over the brink. The three lines close his famous sonnet El Desdichado, meaning in Spanish "The Disinherited", which seems to anticipate something of the crypticism of Mallarme's symbols. Here they are:

Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traverse l'Acheron:

Modulant tour a tour sur la lyre d'Orphee

Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fee.

(Twice Acheron I've crossed, victorious,

Modulating by turns on the lyre of Orpheus

The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fay.)

Acheron is a river of the underworld in Greek mythology. Nerval makes it stand for the crise de folie through which he passed twice before writing the poem. The legend of Orpheus trying to bring back his beloved Eurydice from the underworld becomes for Nerval significant of his own affaire du coeur. he pictures himself as having gone to the underworld in search of his own Eurydice. It seems Nerval was in love with two women — Adrienne who, becoming a nun (la sainte), died to the world and Jenny Colon, the actress (la fee), who actually died in 1842. His first spell of madness came in 1841 after 5 years of infatuation with Jenny and the sonnet was written in November 1853 just after emerging from the second lapse. The linking of Acheron with love-affairs is a pointer to the forces that unhinged his mind. His being a poet had nothing

Page 222

directly to do with the unhingement. I think anybody, poet or no, would lose his head if he lost his heart to two women!

The purely poetic madness is a thing apart and must not be confused with the common kind: otherwise I would have a chance only to address a Poetry Class in a Mental Home and not in this University. For I suppose I am thoroughly bitten with poetic lunacy. But my saying so is exactly the great difference between the loony poet and the loony non-poet. The former knows that he is mad, the latter believes that everybody else has a tile loose. I once visited a Lunatic Asylum to see if anybody really looked and acted like me. I was startled to find myself an object of ridicule and almost boycott except by one chap who condescended to come quite close to me and then gave a tremendous grunt like a super-pig! Perhaps it expressed more clearly than the behaviour of his friends the general opinion about me in that company.

Poetic madness is a certain state of hypersensitivity of imagination and of what I may call "word-sense". And this hypersensitivity does at times lead to a bit of unusual behaviour, like looking intently at things as if waiting for a door of light to open in them or as if they might start talking to one out of the very nucleus of their most central atom. It involves also occasionally humming to one-self, saying the same phrase over and over again to create a kind of magnetic field into which phrases with the same inspirational wave-length might be attracted from God-knows-where. In the matter of humming I think I was already poetically mad at the age of six when, as I have said, I was taken to Europe. Once, in Paris, we visited the famous Galeries Lafayette. What was to be seen there did not interest me much. But the name of the place haunted me for hours. My papa told me that at various times of the night he found me ecstatically repeating to myself, "Lafayette, Lafayette, Galeries Lafayette."

There are some words which either for their visual suggestion or for their sound-evocation keep recurring in the works of particular poets. "Ethereal", "pavilion" and "crystalline" are three of Shelley's favourites and you may note that he stresses "crystalline" rather unusually in the second syllable, instead of the first as your Dictionary does. For example,

Greece and her foundations are

Built below the tide of war,

Page 223

Rooted in the crystalline sea

Of thought and its eternity —

or the phrase from the Ode to the West Wind about the "blue Mediterranean as he lay"

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams.

By the way, the word "coil" which is used here is mostly misunderstood not only by Indians but also by Englishmen. They think it connotes here a winding or labyrinthine movement, and they think that in Shakespeare's line —

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

there is a reference to our body as being the earthly shell or cover in which our souls are enclosed. But "coil" in both the above quotations means nothing of the sort. It is an archaic and poetic term signifying "disturbance, noise, turmoil". Shakespeare's "mortal coil" means "turmoil of life" and Shelley's "coil of crystalline streams" means the insistent sound of limpid moving waters.

Mallarme was preoccupied with words more than any other poet and he was not just attached to a few special words, though he had his preferences: he was interested in words in a sense in which even poets in general are not. I shall come to this topic presently Let me first introduce Mallarme to you as a man. A contrast may immediately be noted between his works which most of his con-v temporaries regarded as the complicated mystifications of a madcap and his personal appearance and conduct. Let me begin with a rough sketch of him on the blackboard.... There he is, as he looked to his friends during those celebrated weekly evenings — Tuesday evenings — on the fourth floor at 89 rue de Rome. He was of middle stature, had greying brown hair, wide-opening brilliant eyes, a large straight nose, ears tipped like a Faun's, long but orderly moustaches, a short pointed beard, a refined gentle expression that yet had reserves of power, gestures graceful and precise, a voice trailing away at the end of a phrase, the whole face crossed by wisps of cigarette smoke by which, as he said, he put some distance between the world and himself. He used to stand with his back to the mantlepiece of his fireplace and with a che-

Page 224

quered shawl thrown over his shoulders. Among those who at-tended the Tuesday-soirees were the most famous or promising writers and painters of his day. Three-fourths of the time Mallarme talked — nearly three hours of the most wonderful monologue.

There have been very few talkers in literary history who left such a bespelled memory behind of their way with words and ideas. Socrates was the one who perhaps talked the most and his talk has also influenced the thought of Europe more than any other man's. It is embalmed for all time in the Dialogues of Plato. About the contents of these Dialogues it has been remarked that all subsequent philosophy is only a number of footnotes to what Socrates said. About their form, their style, it has been stated: "If Zeus were to speak in the language of mortals, he would do so in the Greek of Plato."

To find another colossal talker we have to jump over nearly two thousand years and come to Dr. Samuel Johnson of eighteenth-century England. He laid down the law in matters of literature and in all other matters brought up by his circle of eminent friends — Reynolds the painter, Burke the politician-orator, Sheridan the playwright, Garrick the actor, Goldsmith the poet, Boswell the future immortal writer of his friend's biography and the biggest fool of the company with the exception of Goldsmith who, Garrick reported,

Wrote like an Angel and talked like poor Poll.

("Poll" is the conventional proper name of the parrot — "Pretty Polly", as you surely know.) Johnson was a master of common-sense uncommonly expressed and of argument that was unanswer-able. He was a fighter who never let go: it was said of him that if he missed you with the fire of his pistol he would knock you down with the butt-end of it. And much of his argumentation was brought on by the questions of Boswell who at times did not refrain from even asking preposterous things like: "Sir, what would you do if you were locked up in the Tower of London with a baby three-months old?" Johnson would grow a trifle testy. And occasionally he would lose his temper. He was a somewhat irri-table old guy: he once knocked down a bookseller with a big Bible picked up from that chap's own counter. Socrates was just the opposite. He thought irritability the complete negation of the

Page 225

philosophic mood. The philosopher must be master of his nerves: circumstances belonging to the shadowy phenomenal world should never affect the poised intellect contemplating the Eternal Ideas of a world beyond time and space and mutability. Socrates was perhaps the most tested, though the least testy, of all philosophers. For he was married to a woman who has become as famous for her nagging ways as he for his equanimity. Her name was Xanthippe. I'll tell you of one incident in their eventful married life. Once Xanthippe, for some reason or perhaps no reason, started shout-ing at her husband. She made such a noise that Socrates went downstairs and out of the house and sat exhausted at his own doorstep. Just then Xanthippe emptied a bucket of dirty water over his head from the first-floor window. Socrates took the compulsory shower-bath quietly. A passerby who witnessed the ablution asked him: "Don't you feel annoyed?" Socrates replied: "Friend, we must accept Nature's phenomena with composure. After a lot of thunder such as I heard upstairs, what can one expect but a rain-storm?"

I don't know whether Johnson would have borne so patiently with his wife. Perhaps he would have — but only with her and never with anybody else. He chose his wife with great care. She was a somewhat tipsy widow of nearly 50 — 20 years older than Johnson himself! She could easily have called him with perfect appropriateness: "John-son." He very fondly gave her the name "Tetty". And all his friends were obliged for his sake to admire her non-existent beauty and her rather dim intelligence. But one thing may be said in her favour: she wasn't much of a talker and left tongue-wagging to Johnson who, as I have told you, wagged it wonderfully well.

To match him we have to go to another Englishman — the inimitable S.T.C.: Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was intoxicated with philosophical ideas and made of philosophical talk a poetic feast which Wordsworth and others enjoyed and which stimulated them in various ways. All the marvels and all the curiosities of knowledge were in his words, for he had read everything written by anybody of note. But occasionally he was difficult to endure because of his interminableness. Especially difficult was he when he insisted on discussing philosophy even when suffering from a roaring cold. He would keep chattering of "omjective" and "sum-jective" — which are "objective" and "subjective" spoken when

Page 226

the nose is completely blocked with mucous matter. He would also be somewhat of an embarrassment when you were in a hurry. Charles Lamb was once on his way to his office when Coleridge caught him and drew him to a quiet corner in the street. He started a brilliant discourse. Lamb was charmed for five minutes, tolerant at ten, impatient at fifteen, thoroughly fidgetty after twenty and absolutely bewildered and desperate at the end of twenty-five. The biggest trouble was that Coleridge had caught him by one of his coat-buttons and was holding forth on his interminable theme. Lamb was a Government servant and couldn't afford to be late. Already he was behind time. And there was no prospect of interrupting Coleridge and getting away. To attempt it was like trying to get a word in with the Niagara Falls in order to persuade them not to fall so much. So Lamb thought of a novel means of effecting his escape. He whisked out a pen-knife and cut off the button chaining him to Coleridge. Quietly he slipped away, leaving S.T.C. lecturing. An hour and a half later he left his office and was going home for lunch. There, at the quiet corner in the street, Coleridge was still standing, his eye rolling at the sky, his hand grasping the button, his lips spouting his poetic philosophy. Lamb went up to him and stood where he had been 90 minutes earlier and gently tapped his friend on the shoulder. Somehow the trick worked. Coleridge came out of his splendid soliloquy, smiled, looked at the button in his hand, apologised for unintentionally pulling it off Lamb's coat and assured him that he would have it restitched by his efficient wife Sarah. Lamb set his mind at ease, turned him round to face the opposite direction and ran off to his lunch.

The next talker in history is Oscar Wilde. It is strange that England should have supplied three of the greatest conversationalists of modern times. Of course Wilde was by nationality an Irishman, though domiciled in England; but Johnson and Coleridge were pukka English. The English people are rather tongue-tied and do not like to say anything more than "Yes" or "No" and the utmost eloquence they indulge in every day is a remark about the weather — more or less the same remark because English weather is fairly uniform — a uniform dullness just as English cookery is a uniform tastelessness. But you must be aware that though the Englishman is very non-communicative his literature is the finest in modern times in the matter of the most sustainedly

Page 227

sensitive communication, the communication of poetry. Once we dwelt on this peculiar paradox. We shan't repeat ourselves: digressions are strictly forbidden in this Class! Well, to come straight to Oscar Wilde. He was a friend of Mallarme's and even attended several of the Tuesday-soirees. He must have been rather young and raw at the time, for otherwise Mallarme would have got no chance to talk. Wilde would have flooded the company with his own witty and rainbow-tinted fancies. And he was a bit of a pushing fellow, quite unlike Mallarme who was timid in his manner, retiring in his disposition and did not have the quality of a conversationalist playboy that Wilde had in plenty. Many of Wilde's witticisms have become famous. Some of them must have been mighty disconcerting. When he was introduced in Paris to the Comtesse de Noailles who had a charming mind but a very far from charming face, the Comtesse remarked: "Monsieur Wilde, I have the reputation of being the ugliest woman in Paris." Wilde immediately bowed and with a most chivalrous wave of his hand said: "Oh no, Madame — in the whole world!" Wilde kept his wit even when he himself was in an unfortunate position. He had the ill-luck of being sent to jail for a social offence. A friend visited him there and found him stitching gunny-bags. He hailed Wilde with the words: "Oscar, sewing?" Wilde at once replied: "No, reaping."

I don't know whether Mallarme was as much of a wit as Wilde, but his talk was said to exert a deep influence on all his listeners. It is likely that the cult of the artistic which flourished in England during Wilde's day had a lot to do with Mallarme and his doc-trines, doctrines mostly inculcated in the Tuesday-talks. But Wilde and Mallarme were cultists of the artistic in rather different ways. Wilde was flamboyant: he wore strikingly coloured clothes, flaunted a huge sunflower in his button-hole and became a public figure in no time: he also believed in living unconventionally and shock-ing people. He made of Art a gorgeous public show. Something of his temper was in the pre-Mallarmean semi-Symbolist Nerval who became notorious for parading the boulevards of Paris with a pet lobster led on a crimson string. Mallarme dressed quite simply, behaved unobstrusively and had no love of the limelight. To him Art was a most serious vocation, he was like a high-priest dedicated to his Art and whoever came into contact with him thought that he incarnated the doctrine he talked about: he was Symbolism

Page 228

embodied: a mysterious atmosphere was round him without any showiness: his mind was steeped in and, as it were, radiated the incomprehensible, the ineffable, the invisible. These three things are what I arrived at last time as a result of my digressions. I'll take them up as I go along to Mallarme's Poetry. I summed them up as: Non-sense, Silence, Absence. At the moment I'll say a few things more on his life.

He was, like his intensest admirer in present-day India, a professor — but a professor whose work was really a burden to him, as no doubt it is to many professors. Oh, no, I am not meaning myself. I am rather happy, for I avoid giving homework and getting a heap of exercise-books to correct. But I know how such drudgeries make T sigh and N groan and R say "Ooff". They would have made me shout "Damn" in all the eight different notes of a musically frantic reaction. Mallarme must have had nearly fifty exercise-books to correct twice a week. He was teaching English — and he did not himself know the language any too well. Also, he was not cut out to be a teacher at school. His students were noisy and unruly and he could neither scold nor cane them and his voice too was not loud enough to rise above the clamour and shout down the shouters. It is a great tragedy that creative spirits like his should be tied to a job for which they have no aptitude and which stands so much in the way of their own true work. He was a most conscientious and slow worker at poetry. He believed also that most of the verse written by the world's great poets was superfluous stuff. Real poetry existed more or less in droplets, according to him. And he himself wrote very little, lest anything should be a mixture of poetry and non-poetry. You will be surprised to hear that his collected works comprise no more than about sixty poems, and only three of them go beyond a page or so. At all times he was a quintessentialist, a distiller of absolute nectar, and if he had not been hampered so much by compulsory schoolmastering he would certainly have given us at least ten or twenty little masterpieces extra. He died at the age of 51, which is just one year less than Shakespeare's age at the time of his death. The whole life-work of Mallarme is not equal in length to even half of a single play of Shakespeare's out of his thirty-six. But Mallarme's marvellousness lies precisely in the fact that in spite of so exiguous an output he ranks so high and in the fact that, while everything that poets had said in Europe up to the end of the

Page 229

nineteenth century could be found in some form or other anticipated by Shakespeare, Mallarme wrote a few things that Shakespeare never dreamt of. Shakespeare was the boldest poet in his handling of images as well as words. But Mallarme had a way with both images and words which, though not bolder than Shakespeare's, was stranger than the English poet's. When he writes, for instance —

Le chair est triste, helas! et j'ai lu tous les livres

(The flesh is sad, alas! and I've read all books) —

or,

Coure le froid avec ses silences de faulx

(Let the cold course with scything silences) —

or even,

Je suis hante: l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur!

(I am haunted: Azure! Azure! Azure! Azure!) —

he does not shoot beyond the world of Shakespeare's imaginative lordship over language, but a curious turn is felt of matter and manner which takes us to the verge of some new poetic sense. Shakespeare could have thought and felt along such lines if his interests had lain in that direction — the direction and not quite the mode of feeling and visioning seems novel. However, when Mallarme comes with a verse like

Pour la Rose et le Lys le mystere d'un nom

(For Rose and Lily the mystery of a name),

we are almost putting, for all the apparent simplicity of the statement, Shakespeare on his head, for Shakespeare spoke of the poet's pen giving

to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name,

Page 230

whereas Mallarme speaks of converting by means of a name a concrete something into an airiness without local habitation. All the more, unShakespeareanly enigmatic is Mallarme's:

Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui

(The transparent glacier of flights unflown),

and we are in a dimension utterly unknown to Shakespeare and fusing the mystical and the metaphysical when we hear Mallarme on the dead Edgar Allan Poe:

Tel qu'en Lui-meme enfin l'eternite le change...

(At last to Himself he is changed by eternity...)

Page 231