MALLANWAN, a town in Hardoi district, the United Provinces, India. Pop. (1901), 11,158. Under native rule the town possessed considerable political importance, and upon the British annexation of Oudh it was selected as the headquarters of the district, but was abandoned in favour of Hardoi after the Mutiny. Saltpetre and brass utensils are manufactured.
MALLARMÉ, FRANÇOIS RENÉ AUGUSTE (1755–1835),
French Revolutionist, the son of a lawyer, was born at Nancy
on the 25th of February 1755. He was brought up in his father’s
profession, and was appointed procureur-syndic of the district
of Pont-à-Mousson. During the Revolution he was elected by
the department of Meurthe deputy to the Legislative Assembly
and the Convention, where he attached himself to the Mountain
and voted for the death of Louis XVI. He was elected president
of the Convention on the 30th of May 1793, and by his weakness
during the crisis of the following day contributed much to the
success of the insurrection against the Girondists. He took an
active part in the levée-en-masse, and in November 1793 was
given the task of establishing the revolutionary government in
the departments of Meuse and Moselle, where he gained an
unenviable notoriety by ordering the execution of the sentence
of death decreed by the revolutionary tribunal on some young
girls at Verdun who had offered flowers to the Prussians when
they entered the town. After the fall of Robespierre he joined
the group of “Thermidorians” and was sent on mission to the
south of France, where he closed the Jacobin club at Toulouse
and set free a number of imprisoned “suspects.” On the 1st
of June 1795 he was denounced and arrested, but was soon set
at liberty. In 1796 he was appointed by the Directory commissioner
for the organization of the departments of Dyle and
Mont-Tonnerre. Under the empire he was receiver of the droits
réunis at Nancy, and lost his money in 1814 in raising a levy of
volunteers. Appointed sub-prefect of Avesnes during the Hundred
Days, he was imprisoned by the Prussians in revenge for
the death of the maidens of Verdun, and lived in exile during
the Restoration. He returned to France after the revolution
of 1830, and died at Richemont (Seine-Inférieure) on the 25th
of July 1835.
MALLARMÉ, STÉPHANE (1842–1898), French poet and
theorist, was born at Paris, on the 18th of March 1842. His
life was simple and without event. His small income as professor
of English in a French college was sufficient for his needs,
and, with his wife and daughter, he divided the year between
a fourth-floor flat in Paris and a cottage on the banks of the
Seine. His Tuesday evening receptions, which did so much to
form the thought of the more interesting of the younger French
men of letters, were almost as important a part of his career as
the few carefully elaborated books which he produced at long
intervals. L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876) and other fragments
of his verse and prose had been known to a few people long
before the publication of the Poésies complètes of 1887, in a
facsimile of his clear and elegant handwriting, and of the Pages
of 1891 and the Vers et prose of 1893. His remarkable translation
of poems of Poe appeared in 1888, “The Raven” having
been published as early as 1875, with illustrations by Manet.
Divagations, his own final edition of his prose, was published in
1897, and a more or less complete edition of the Poésies, posthumously,
in 1899. He died at Valvins, Fontainebleau, on the
9th of September 1898. All his life Mallarmé was in search of
a new aesthetics, and his discoveries by the way were often
admirable. But he was too critical ever to create freely, and
too limited ever to create abundantly. His great achievement
remains unfinished, and all that he left towards it is not
of equal value. There are a few poems and a few pieces of
imaginative prose which have the haunting quality of Gustave
Moreau’s pictures, with the same jewelled magnificence, mysterious
and yet definite. His later work became more and more
obscure, as he seemed to himself to have abolished limit after
limit which holds back speech from the expression of the
absolute. Finally, he abandoned punctuation in verse, and
invented a new punctuation, along with a new construction,
for prose. Patience in the study of so difficult an author
has its reward. No one in our time has vindicated with more
pride the self-sufficiency of the artist in his struggle with the
material world. To those who knew him only by his writings
his conversation was startling in its clearness; it was always,
like all his work, at the service of a few dignified and misunderstood
ideas.
See also Paul Verlaine, Les Poètes maudits (1884); J. Lemaître, Les Contemporains (5th series, 1891); Albert Moekel, Stéphane Mallarmé, un héros (1899); E. W. Gosse, French Profiles (1905) and A. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900). A complete bibliography is given in the Poètes d’aujourd’hui (1880–1900, 11th ed., 1905) of MM. A. van Bever and P. Léautaud. (A. Sy.)
MALLECO, a province of southern Chile, once a part of the
Indian territory of Araucania (q.v.), lying between the provinces
of Bio-Bio on the N. and E., Cautin on the S. and Arauco on the
W. Area, 2973 sq. m. Pop. (1895), 98,032. It belongs to the
rainy, forested region of southern Chile, and is thinly populated,
a considerable part of its population being Araucanian Indians,
who occupy districts in the Andean foothills. Gold placer
mining has attracted some attention, but the output is small.
The principal industries are cattle and wheat raising and timber-cutting.
The capital is Angol (pop., 7056 in 1895; estimated at
7638 in 1902), a small town in the northern part of the province,
on the Malleco river, and a station on the Traiguen branch of the
state railway. Traiguen (pop., 5732 in 1895; estimated at 7099
in 1902) in the southern part of the province is the second town in
importance, and Victoria (pop., 6989 in 1895; estimated at
10,002 in 1902), about 20 m. E. of the last-named town, was for
a time the terminal station of the main line of the railway.
MALLEMUCK, from the German rendering of the Dutch
Mallemugge (which originally meant small flies or midges that
madly whirl round a light), a name given by the early Dutch
Arctic voyagers to the Fulmar (q.v.), of which the English form
is nowadays most commonly applied by our sailors to the smaller
albatrosses, of about the size of a goose, met with in the Southern
Ocean—corrupted into “molly mawk,” or “mollymauk.” A
number of species have been identified. Diomedea irrorata of
West Peru is sooty-brown with white mottlings and a white head;
D. migripes of the North Pacific is similar in colour but with
white only near the eye and at the base of the tail and bill; D.
immutabilis of Japan is darker but has a white head. D. melanophrys
of the southern oceans has been found in summer both
in California, in England, and as far north as the Faeroes. According
to J. Gould the latter is the commonest species of albatross
inhabiting the Southern Ocean, and its gregarious habits and
familiar disposition make it well known to every voyager to or
from Australia, for it is equally common in the Atlantic as well
as the Pacific. The back, wings and tail are of a blackish-grey,
but all the rest of the plumage is white, except a dusky superciliary
streak, whence its name of black-browed albatross, as also
its scientific epithet, are taken. The bill of the adult is of an
ochreous-yellow, while that of the young is dark. This species
breeds on the Falkland Islands. D. bulleri of the New Zealand
seas is greyish-brown, with white underparts and rump and ashy
head. Diomedea (or Thalassogeron) culminata and chlororhyncha
of the southern seas, D. (or T.) cauta of Tasmania, salvini of New
Zealand and layardi of the Cape resemble D. bulleri, but have a
strip of naked skin between the plates of the maxilla towards its
base. H. N. Moseley (Notes of a Naturalist, 130) describes
D. culminata as making a cylindrical nest of grass, sedge and
clay, with a shallow basin atop and an overhanging rim—the
whole being about 14 in. in diameter and 10 in height. The bird
lays a single white egg, which is held in a sort of pouch, formed
by the skin of the abdomen, while she is incubating. The feet
of D. bulleri are red, of D. chlororhyncha flesh-coloured, of the
others yellow. (A. N.)
MALLESON, GEORGE BRUCE (1825–1898), Indian officer
and author, was born at Wimbledon, on the 8th of May 1825. Educated at Winchester, he obtained a cadetship in the Bengal infantry in 1842, and served through the second Burmese War. His subsequent appointments were in the civil line, the last being that of guardian to the young maharaja of Mysore. He retired
