Jules Laforgue was born at Montevideo, of Breton parents, August 20, 1860. He died in Paris in 1887, two days before his twenty-seventh birthday. From 1880 to 1886 he had been reader to the Empress Augusta at Berlin. He married only a few months before his death. D’allures? says M. Gustave Kahn, fort correctes, de hauts gibus, des cravates sobres, des vestons anglais, des pardessus clergymans, et de par les nécessités, un parapluie immuablement placé sous le bras.* His portraits show us a clean-shaved, reticent face, betraying little. With such a personality anecdotes have but small chance of appropriating those details by which expansive natures express themselves to the world. We know nothing about Laforgue which his work is not better able to tell us, even now that we have all his notes, unfinished fragments, and the letters of an almost virginal naïveté which he wrote to the woman whom he was going to marry. His entire work, apart from these additions, is contained in two small volumes, one of prose, the Moralités Légendaires, the other of verse, Les Complaintes, L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, and a few other pieces, all published during the last three years of his life.

The prose and verse of Laforgue, scrupulously correct, but with a new manner of correctness, owe more than any one has realised to the half-unconscious prose and verse of Rimbaud. Verse and prose are alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious. It is really vers libre, but at the same time correct verse, before vers libre had been invented. And it carries, as far as that theory has ever been carried, the theory which demands an instantaneous notation (Whistler, let us say) of the figure or landscape which one has been accustomed to define with such rigorous exactitude. Verse, always elegant, is broken into a kind of mockery of prose.

he will say to us, with a familiarity of manner, as of one talking languidly, in a low voice, the lips always teased into a slightly bitter smile; and he will pass suddenly into the ironical lilt of

Hotel garni

De l’infini,

 

Sphinx et Joconde

Des défunts mondes;‡

and from that into this solemn and smiling end of one of his last poems, his own epitaph, if you will:

Il prit froid l’autre automne,

S’étant attardi vers les peines des cors,

Sur la fin d’un beau jour.

Oh! ce fut pour vos cors, et ce fut pour l’automne,

Qu’il nous montra qu’ ‘on meurt d’amour!’

On ne le verra plus aux fêtes nationales,

S’enfermer dans l’Histoire et tirer les verrous,

Il vint trop tard, il est reparti sans scandale;

O vous qui m’écoutez, rentrez chacun chez vous.§

The old cadences, the old eloquence, the ingenuous seriousness of poetry, are all banished, on a theory as self-denying as that which permitted Degas to dispense with recognisable beauty in his figures.1 Here, if ever, is modern verse, verse which dispenses with so many of the privileges of poetry, for an ideal quite of its own. It is, after all, a very self-conscious ideal, becoming artificial through its extreme naturalness; for in poetry it is not ‘natural’ to say things quite so much in the manner of the moment, with however ironical an intention.

The prose of the Moralités Légendaires is perhaps even more of a discovery. Finding its origin, as I have pointed out, in the experimental prose of Rimbaud, it carries that manner to a singular perfection. Disarticulated, abstract, mathematically lyrical, it gives expression, in its icy ecstasy, to a very subtle criticism of the universe, with a surprising irony of cosmical vision. We learn from books of mediaeval magic that the embraces of the devil are of a coldness so intense that it may be called, by an allowable figure of speech, fiery. Everything may be as strongly its opposite as itself, and that is why this balanced, chill, colloquial style of Laforgue has, in the paradox of its intensity, the essential heat of the most obviously emotional prose. The prose is more patient than the verse, with its more compassionate laughter at universal experience. It can laugh as seriously, as profoundly, as in that graveyard monologue of Hamlet, Laforgue’s Hamlet, who, Maeterlinck ventures to say, ‘is at moments more Hamlet than the Hamlet of Shakespeare.’2 Let me translate a few sentences from it.

Perhaps I have still twenty or thirty years to live, and I shall pass that way like the others. Like the others? O Totality, the misery of being there no longer! Ah! I would like to set out tomorrow, and search all through the world for the most adamantine processes of embalming. They, too, were the little people of History, learning to read, trimming their nails, lighting the dirty lamp every evening, in love, gluttonous, vain, fond of compliments, handshakes, and kisses, living on bell-tower gossip, saying, ‘What sort of weather shall we have tomorrow? Winter has really come …. We have had no plums this year.’ Ah! everything is good, if it would not come to an end. And thou, Silence, pardon the Earth; the little madcap hardly knows what she is doing; on the day of the great summing-up of consciousness before the Ideal, she will be labelled with a pitiful idem in the column of the miniature evolutions of the Unique Evolution, in the column of negligible quantities … To die! Evidently, one dies without knowing it, as, every night, one enters upon sleep. One has no consciousness of the passing of the last lucid thought into sleep, into swooning, into death. Evidently. But to be no more, to be here no more, to be ours no more! Not even to be able, any more, to press against one’s human heart, some idle afternoon, the ancient sadness contained in one little chord on the piano!

In these always ‘lunar’ parodies, Salomé, Lohengrin, Fils de Parsifal, Persée et Andromède, each a kind of metaphysical myth, he realises that la créature va hardiment à être cérébrale, anti-naturelle, and he has invented these fantastic puppets with an almost Japanese art of spiritual dislocation. They are, in part, a way of taking one’s revenge upon science, by an ironical borrowing of its very terms, which dance in his prose and verse, derisively, at the end of a string.

In his acceptance of the fragility of things as actually a principle of art, Laforgue is a sort of transformed Watteau, showing his disdain for the world which fascinates him, in quite a different way. He has constructed his own world, lunar and actual, speaking slang and astronomy, with a constant disengaging of the visionary aspect, under which frivolity becomes an escape from the arrogance of a still more temporary mode of being, the world as it appears to the sober majority. He is terribly conscious of daily life, cannot omit, mentally, a single hour of the day; and his flight to the moon is in sheer desperation. He sees what he calls l’Inconscient in every gesture, but he cannot see it without these gestures. And he sees, not only as an imposition, but as a conquest, the possibilities for art which come from the sickly modern being, with his clothes, his nerves: the mere fact that he flowers from the soil of his epoch.

It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys. There is in it all the restlessness of modern life, the haste to escape from whatever weighs too heavily on the liberty of the moment, that capricious liberty which demands only room enough to hurry itself weary. It is distressingly conscious of the unhappiness of mortality, but it plays, somewhat uneasily, at a disdainful indifference. And it is out of these elements of caprice, fear, contempt, linked together by an embracing laughter, that it makes its existence.

Il n’y a pas de type, il y a la vie, Laforgue replies to those who come to him with classical ideals. Votre idéal est bien vite magnifiquement submergé,|| in life itself, which should form its own art, an art deliberately ephemeral, with the attaching pathos of passing things. There is a great pity at the root of this art of Laforgue: self-pity, which extends, with the artistic sympathy, through mere clearness of vision, across the world. His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as ‘the laughter of the soul,’ is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, Pierrot lunaire, and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman’s patter. As it is part of his manner not to distinguish between irony and pity, or even belief, we need not attempt to do so. Heine should teach us to understand at least so much of a poet who could not otherwise resemble him less. In Laforgue, sentiment is squeezed out of the world before one begins to play at ball with it.

And so, of the two, he is the more hopeless. He has invented a new manner of being René or Werther: an inflexible politeness towards man, woman, and destiny.3 He composes love-poems hat in hand, and smiles with an exasperating tolerance before all the transformations of the eternal feminine. He is very conscious of death, but his blague of death is, above all things, gentlemanly. He will not permit himself, at any moment, the luxury of dropping the mask: not at any moment.

Read this Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot, with the singular pity of its cruelty, before such an imagined dropping of the mask.

Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!

     Nous lui dirons d’abord, de mon air le moins froid:

‘La somme des angles d’un triangle, chère âme,

        Est égale à deux droits.’

 

Et si ce cri lui part: ‘Dieu de Dieu que je t’aime!’

     – ‘Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.’ Ou piquée au vif:

– ‘Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu sera mon seul thème.’

         Moi: ‘Tout est relatif.’

 

De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:

    ‘Ah! tu ne m’aime[s] pas; tant d’autres sont jaloux!’

Et moi, d’un oeil qui vers l’Inconscient s’emballe:

         ‘Merci, pas mal; et vous?’

 

‘Jouons au plus fidèle!’ – A quoi bon, ô Nature!

    ‘Autant à qui perd gagne.’ Alors, autre couplet:

– ‘Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j’en suis sûr.’

         – ‘Après vous, s’il vous plaît.’

And yet one realises, if one but reads him attentively enough, how much suffering and despair, and resignation to what is, after all, the inevitable, are hidden away under this disguise, and also why this disguise is possible. Laforgue died at twenty-seven: he had been a dying man all his life, and his work has the fatal evasiveness of those who shrink from remembering the one thing which they are unable to forget. Coming as he does after Rimbaud, turning the divination of the other into theories, into achieved results, he is the eternally grown up, mature to the point of self-negation, as the other is the eternal enfant terrible. He thinks intensely about life, seeing what is automatic, pathetically ludicrous in it, almost as one might who has no part in the comedy. He has the double advantage, for his art, of being condemned to death, and of being, in the admirable phrase of Villiers, ‘one of those who come into the world with a ray of moonlight in their brains.’4

Notes

First published as ‘Jules L aforgue’, Saturday Review 86 (3 September 1898), pp. 305–306.

Symons’ note

Les Complaintes, 1885; L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, 1886; Le Concile Féerique, 1886; Moralités Légendaires, 1887; Derniers Vers, 1890 (a privately printed volume, containing Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté, Le Concile Féerique, and Derniers Vers); Poésies Complètes 1894, Oeuvres Complètes, Poésies, Moralités Légendaires, Mélanges Posthumes (3 vols.), 1902, 1903.

An edition of the Moralités Légendaires in two volumes was published in 1897, under the care of M. Lucien Pissarro, at the Sign of the Dial; it is printed in Mr. Ricketts’ admirable type, and makes one of the most beautiful books issued in French during this century. In 1896 M. Camille Mauclair, with his supple instinct for contemporary values, wrote a study, or rather an eulogy, of Laforgue, to which M. Maeterlinck contributed a few searching and delicate words by way of preface.

Annotations

1. Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was one of the most important French Impressionist artists, best known for his paintings of urban scenes of washerwomen and his fine studies of young ballet dancers. He was friends with Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry and had some small literary pretensions of his own.

2. Maeterlinck offered this observation in his ‘Introduction’ to Camille Mauclair, Jules Laforgue (1896).

3. René (1802) by François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) is a short novella about a passionate, sensitive young nobleman and his unhappy experiences in Louisana. Werther is the protagonist in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which tells of the unhappy love of an impassioned and impoverished young artist and his eventual suicide.

4. Tannucio describes himself in these terms in Act II of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s play Elën (1866).

* [‘His looks? … very correct, high-sided hats, plain ties, English jackets, clergyman’s overcoats, and – according to necessity, an umbrella immutably held beneath the arm.’ – Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui (1886).]

† [‘Another of my pierrots dead; / Dead from chronic orphanism; / He had the heart of a lunar dandy / And a funny little body’ – from ‘Locutions des Pierrots’, L’Imitation de Notre-Dame La Lune.]

‡ [‘The well-stocked hotel / Of infinity, // Sphinx and Mona Lisa / From outdated worlds’ – from ‘Litanies des derniers quartiers de la lune’, L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune.]

§ [‘He took cold last autumn, / Staying out late for the horns’ sufferings, / At the end of a fine day. / Oh! Because of your horns, and because of autumn, / He showed us that “one dies of love”. / You won’t see him any more on national holidays / Stuffing himself into History and turning the keys. / He came too late, he left again without a scandal; / O you who listen to me, go back to your own homes.’ – a slight misquotation from ‘Simple Agonie’ in Derniers vers (1890): ‘Il vint trop tard’ (he came too late) should read ‘Il vint trop tôt’ (he came too early).]

[‘the creature is boldly going to become cerebral, anti-natural’ – a slight misquotation from Laforgue’s ‘Notes d’esthetique’ [Notes on Aesthetics] in Mélanges posthumes (1902). Symons omits the word ‘purement’ before ‘cérébrale’ (‘The creature is boldly going to become purely cerebral’).]

|| [‘There is no type, there is life … And your ideal is very quickly drowned magnificently’ – from Mélanges posthumes.]

** [‘This one should bring me up to speed with Woman! / We say to her first, with my least cold air: / “The sum of the angles of a triangle, dear soul, / is equal to two right angles.” // And if this cry escapes her: “God of Gods how I love you!” / “God will recognise his own.” Or pricked to the quick: / “There’s feeling in my playing; you will be my only theme.” / Me: “Everything is relative.” // With all her eyes, then! feeling too banal: / “Ah! You don’t love me: so many others are jealous!” / And I, with an eye towards the Unconscious, lose it: / “Not bad, thank you; and you?” // “Let’s see who is most faithful” – “To what good, o Nature! / The loser wins.” And then, another couplet: / – “Ah, you’ll get tired first, I’m sure of it.” / “After you, if you please.” // Finally, if she dies in my books one evening, / Quiet; pretending not to trust my eyes yet, / I’d try: “Ah that, but we would have Something to Live For! / You were serious then?”’]