Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
CWSA 27
Fragment ID: 6985
Mallarmé [2]
Please read pages 19 – 21 of this book.1 The editor speaks of Mallarmé as an acknowledged master and of his great influence on contemporary poetry.
He can’t deny such an obvious fact, I suppose – but he would like to.
He says, “A purely intellectual artist, convinced that sentiment was an inferior element of art, Mallarmé never evokes emotion, but only thought about thought; and the thoughts called forth in his mind by the symbol are generally so subtle and elliptical that they find no echo in the mind of the ordinary mortal.” [pp. 19 – 20] Do you agree?
Certainly not – this man is a mere pedant; his remarks are unintelligent, commonplace, often perfectly imbecile.
He continues: “Obscurity was part of his doctrine and he wrote for the select few only and exclusively ... ” [p. 20]
Rubbish! His doctrine is perfectly tenable and intelligible. It is true that the finest things in art and poetry are appreciated only by the few and he chose therefore not to sacrifice the truth of his mystic (impressionist, symbolist) expression in order to be easily understood by the multitude, including this professor.
“Another cause of his obscurity is that he chose his words and phrases for their evocative value alone, and here again the verbal sonorities suggested by the tortuous trend of his mind make no appeal except to the initiated.” [p. 20] (I suppose here he means what you meant about the limitedness of the French language?)
Not only that – his will to arrive at a true and deep, instead of a superficial and intellectual language. I gave two reasons for Mallarmé’s unusual style and not this one of the limitedness of the French language only.
“His life-long endeavour to achieve an impossible ideal accounts for his sterility (he has left some sixty poems only, most of them quite short) and the darkness of his later work, though he did write, before he had fallen a victim to his own theories, a few poems of great beauty and perfectly intelligible.” [p. 20]
60 poems if they have beauty are as good as 600. It is not the mass of the poet’s work that determines his greatness. Gray and Catullus wrote little; we have only seven plays of Sophocles and seven of Aeschylus (though they wrote more), but these seven put them still in the front rank of poets.
He says that “Mallarmé’s verse is acquired and intricate” i.e. a thing not of spontaneity, but of intellectualisation. Saying that Verlaine is an inspired poet, he seems to imply the contrary about Mallarmé.
If these two magnificent poems (the last two)2 are not inspired, then there is no such thing as inspiration. It is rubbish to say of a man who refused to limit himself by intellectual expression, that he was an intellectual artist. Symbolism, impressionism go beyond intellect to pure sight – and Mallarmé was the creator of symbolism.
Nolini says that in poetry simplicity leads to beauty. Applied to Mallarmé, would this mean that due to his acrobatics with words, his poems are not beautiful.
Only Nolini can say what he meant, but to refuse beauty to Mallarmé’s poetry would be itself an acrobacy of the intellect. For what then is beauty? Simplicity and beauty are not convertible terms, there can be a difficult beauty. What about Aeschylus then? or Blake?
“According to Mallarmé’s own definition, the poet’s mission is either ‘to evoke gradually an object in order to suggest a mood, or, inversely, to choose an object as a symbol and disengage from it a mood by a series of decipherments’.” [p. 19]
It is a very good description of the impressionist method in literature. Verlaine and others do the same, even if they do not hold the theory.
I do not understand what Mallarmé means here, but it seems different from what Housman says, that the poet’s mission is to transfuse emotion – of which Mallarmé had none!
I do not know what you mean by emotion. If you mean the surface vital joy and grief of outer life, these poems of Mallarmé do not contain it. But if emotion can include also the deeper spiritual or inner feeling which does not weep or shout, then they are here in these two poems. The Swan [in “Le vierge ... ”] is to my understanding not merely the poet who has not sung in the higher spaces of the consciousness, which is already a fine idea, but the soul that has not risen there and found its higher expression, said poet being, if Mallarmé thought of that specially, only a signal instance of this spiritual frustration. There can be no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness, than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned Swan as developed by Mallarmé.
I do not say that the spiritual or the occult cannot be given an easier expression or that if one can arrive at that without 
minimising the inner significance, it is not perhaps the greatest achievement. (That is, I suppose, Nolini’s contention.) But there is room for more than one kind of spiritual or mystic poetry. One has to avoid mere mistiness or vagueness, one has to be true, vivid, profound in one’s images; but, that given, I feel free to write either as in Nirvana or
Transformation, giving a clear mental indication along with the image or I can suppress the mental indication and give the image only with the content suggested in the language but not expressed so that even those can superficially understand who are unable to read behind the mental idea – that is what I have done in The Bird of Fire. It seems to me that both methods are legitimate.
16 December 1936
1 L. E. Kastner, ed., A Book of French Verse: From Marot to Mallarmé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936).
2 “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” (see page 404 below), and Les fleurs. – Ed.