Translated into common language, then, the main design of M. Mallarmé and his friends seems to be to refresh the languid current of French style. They hold--and in this view no English critic can dare to join issue with them--that art is not a stable nor a definite thing, and that success for the future must lie along paths not exactly traversed in the immediate past. They are tired of the official versification of France, and they dream of new effects which all the handbooks tell them are impossible to French prosody. They make infinite experiments, they feel their way; and I have nothing to reproach them with except their undue haste (but M. Mallarmé has not been hasty) in publishing their "tentatives." Their aims are those of our own Areopagites of 1580, met "for the general surceasing and silence of bold Rymers, and also of the very best of them too"--"our new famous enterprise for the exchange of barbarous rymes for artificial verses." We must wish for the odd productions of these modern Parisian euphuists a better fate than befell the trimeter iambics of Master Drant and Master Preston. But the cause of their existence is plain enough. It is the exhaustion, the enervation of the language, following upon the activities of Victor Hugo and his contemporaries. It is, morever, a reaction towards freedom, directly consequent upon the strict and impersonal versification of the Parnassians. When the official verse has been burnished and chased to the metallic perfection of M. de Hérédia's sonnets, nothing but to withdraw to the wilderness in sheepskins is left to would-be poets of the next generation.