ory I feel, and improvised, but his themes are pluralistic, the
immedicable and colossal ennui of life the chiefest. Woman--the
"Eternal Madame," as Baudelaire calls her--is a being both magical and
mediocre; she is also an escape from the universal world-pain. La fin
de l'homme est proche ... Antigone va passer du menage de la famille
au menage de la planete (prophetic words). But when lovely woman
begins to talk of the propagation of the ideal she only means the
human species. With Lessing he believes: "There is, at most, but one
disagreeable woman in the world; a pity then that every man gets her
for himself."

It is rather singular to observe in the writings of Marinetti, the
self-elected leader of the so-called Futurists, the hopeless
deliquescence of the form invented by Louis Bertrand in his Gaspard de
la Nuit, and developed with almost miraculous results in Baudelaire
and terminating with Huysmans, Maeterlinck, and Francis Poictevin
("Paysages"). Rimbaud had intervened. In his Illuminations we read
that "so soon as the Idea of the Deluge had sunk back into its place,
a rabbit halted amid the sainfoin and the small swinging bells, and
said its prayers to the rainbow through the spider's web. Oh! The
precious stones in hiding, the flowers already looking out ... Madame
X established a piano in the Alps.... The caravans started. And the
Splendid Hotel was erected upon the chaos of ice and night of the
Pole" (from the translation by Aline Gorren). This, apparently mad
sequence of words and dissociation of ideas, has been deciphered by M.
Kahn, and need not daunt any one who has patience and ingenuity. I
confess I prefer Laforgue, who at his most cryptic is never so wildly
tantalising as Rimbaud.

Moralites legendaires contains six sections. I don't know which to
admire the most, the Hamlet or the Lohengrin, the Salome or the Persee
et Andromede. Le Miracle des Roses is of an exceeding charm, though
dealing with the obvious, while Pan et la Syrinx has a quality which I
can recall nowhere else in literature; perhaps in the cadences
charged with the magic and irony of Chopin, or in the half-dreams of
Watteau, colour and golden sadness intermingled, may evoke the
spiritual parodies of Laforgue, but in literature there is no
analogue, though Pan is of classic flavour despite his very modern
Weltanschauung. Syrinx is a woodland creature nebulous and exquisite.
Pursued by Pan--the Eternal Male in rut--she does not succum