Stephane Mallarme.

M. de Regnier's fourth lecture yesterday was devoted especially to Stephane Mallarme and to the relation between music and poetry which Mallarme exemplified.

Mallarme was conspicuous for his love of music, which he called a "sacred pleasure," and he never missed the Sunday concerts conducted by Lamourdux. His charming conversation was another prominent characteristic and for fifteen years he received at his house on Tuesday evenings all the best poets of our time, who came to enjoy his strong and witty conversation. He was always better understood on such occasions than in his written prose, and this fact irritated him not a little. He always wrote, even the lectures he delivered in Belgium and England, in a very rich but difficult prose which gave him the reputation of being obscure.

His life was a simple, quiet and meditative one. He re-edited and made known in France Beckford's Vatheck and Translated the poems of Poe. He was professor of English first at Avignon and then at Paris almost until his sudden death in 1898.

The new and singular boldness, of his work was not understood by all was qualified as strange and extravagant, but his poems have triumphed over the attacks upon them. If everyone does not consider them as masterpieces, they are at least conceded to have been written by one of the most interesting and ingenuous spirits of these days.

Mallarme is obscure but he is not the only writer who possesses this defect and he is incomprehensible only to those who will not take the trouble to read him. The obscurity of his works is but the consequence of his aesthetics. Mallarme coined for himself a distinctive language and his poetry as a musical art, writing poems with the aim of creating an emotion by the same means by which music moves us.

He died without achieving the work for which he had been gathering the elements, leaving behind him some very good poems: "Herodiade", "L'apres Midid'un Fauvre", poems in prose as good as "Phenomene Futur", and "Nenufar Blanc".