les milliers_," thousands of what? of letters of course. We have heard a
great deal in England of Browning obscurity. The "Red Cotton Nightcap
Country" is a child at play compared to a sonnet by such a determined
symbolist as Mallarmé, or better still his disciple Ghil who has added
to the infirmities of symbolism those of poetic instrumentation. For
according to M. Ghil and his organ _Les Ecrits pour l'Art,_ it would
appear that the syllables of the French language evoke in us the
sensations of different colours; consequently the timbre of the
different instruments. The vowel _u_ corresponds to the colour yellow,
and therefore to the sound of flutes. 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
Ingénu," may be considered as complete and definitive. The work is
dedicated to Mallarmé, "Père et seigneur des ors, des pierreries, et des
poisons," and other works are to follow:--the six tomes of "Légendes de
Rêves et de Sang," 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 âcres
délices_."