Preface (1924) to Jean Marie Matthias Philippe Auguste Count de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axel, tr. H. P. R. Finberg (1925)

Abstract

Before I went to Paris in 1894 I had read with great difficulty, for I had little French — almost as learned men read newly-discovered Babylonian cylinders — the Axel of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.¹ That play seemed all the more profound, all the more beautiful, because I was never quite certain that I had read a page correctly. I was quite certain, however, that it was about those things that most occupied my thought and the thought of my friends, for we were perpetually thinking and talking about the value of life, and sometimes one or other of us — Lionel Johnson perhaps — would say, like Axel, that it had no value.² It did not move me because I thought it a great masterpiece, but because it seemed part of a religious rite, the ceremony perhaps of some secret Order wherein my generation had been initiated. Even those strange sentences so much in the manner of my time — ‘as to living, our servants will do that for us’; ‘O to veil you with my hair where you will breathe the spirit of dead roses’ — did not seem so important as the symbols: the forest castle, the treasure, the lamp that had burned before Solomon.³ Now that I have read it all again in Mr Finberg’s translation and recalled that first impression, I can see how those symbols became a part of me, and for years to come dominated my imagination, and when I point out this fault or that — the monotonous piling-up of pictures in the last scene, the too abundant debates with the Commander or with Janus — I but discover there is no escape, that I am still dominated.