Arthur Rimbaud was, it is true, first in the field with these pleasant and genial theories; but M. Ghil informs us that Rimbaud was mistaken in many things, particularly in coupling the sound of the vowel u with the colour green instead of with the colour yellow.  M. Ghil has corrected this very stupid blunder and many others; and his instrumentation in his last volume, “Le Geste Ingenu,” may be considered as complete and definitive.  The work is dedicated to Mallarme, “Pere et seigneur des ors, des pierreries, et des poissons,” and other works are to follow:—­the six tomes of “Legendes de Reves et de Sangs,” the innumerable tomes of “La Glose,” and the single tome of “La Loi.”

And that man Gustave Kahn, who takes the French language as a violin, and lets the bow of his emotion run at wild will upon it producing strange acute strains, unpremeditated harmonies comparable to nothing that I know of but some Hungarian rhapsody; verses of seventeen syllables interwoven with verses of eight, and even nine, masculine rhymes, seeking strange union with feminine rhymes in the middle of the line—­a music sweet, subtil, and epicene; the half-note, the inflexion, but not the full tone—­as “se fondre, o souvenir, des lys acres delices.”

    Se penchant vers les dahlias,
    Des paons cabrient des rosace lunaire
    L’assoupissement des branches venere
    Son pale visage aux mourants dahlias.

    Elle ecoute au loin les breves musiques
    Nuit claire aux ramures d’accords,
    Et la lassitude a berce son corps
    Au rhythme odorant des pures musiques.

    Les paons out dresse la rampe occellee
    Pour la descente de ses yeux vers le tapis
      De choses et de sens
    Qui va vers l’horizon, parure vemiculee
      De son corps alangui
      En ame se tapit
    Le flou desir molli de recits et d’encens.

I laughed at these verbal eccentricities, but they were not without their effect, and that effect was a demoralising one; for in me they aggravated the fever of the unknown, and whetted my appetite for the strange, abnormal and unhealthy in art.  Hence all pallidities of thought and desire were eagerly welcomed, and Verlaine became my poet.  Never shall I forget the first enchantment of “Les Fetes Galantes.”  Here all is twilight.

The royal magnificences of the sunset have passed, the solemn beatitude of the night is at hand but not yet here; the ways are veiled with shadow, and lit with dresses, white, that the hour has touched with blue, yellow, green, mauve, and undecided purple; the voices? strange contraltos; the forms? not those of men or women, but mystic, hybrid creatures, with hands nervous and pale, and eyes charged with eager and fitful light ... “un soir equivoque d’automne,” ... “les belles pendent reveuses a nos bras” ... and they whisper “les mots speciaux et tout bas.”