_Qu'on attend dans les Quartiers Aisés_
Menez l'âme que les Lettres ont bien nourrie,
Les pianos, les pianos, dans les quartiers aisés!
Premiers soirs, sans pardessus, chaste flânerie,
Aux complaintes des nerfs incompris ou brisés.
Ces enfants, à quoi rêvent-elles,
Dans les ennuis des ritournelles?
--"Préaux des soirs,
Christs des dortoirs!
"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas,
Défaire et refaire ses tresses,
Broder d'éternels canevas."
Jolie ou vague? triste ou sage? encore pure?
O jours, tout m'est egal? ou, monde, moi je veux?
Et si vierge, du moins, de la bonne blessure,
Sachant quels gras couchants ont les plus blancs aveux
Mon Dieu, a quoi done rêvent-elles?
A des Roland, à des dentelles?
--"Cœurs en prison,
Lentes saisons!
"Tu t'en vas et tu nous quittes,
Tu nous quitt's et tu t'en vas!
Couvents gris, chœurs de Sulamites,
Sur nos seins nuls croisons nos bras."
Fatales clés de l'être un beau jour apparues;
Psitt! aux hérédités en ponctuels ferments,
Dans le bal incessant de nos étranges rues;
Ah! pensionnats, théâtres, journaux, romans!
Allez, stériles ritournelles,
La vie est vraie et criminelle.
--"Rideaux tirés,
Peut-on entrer?
"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas,
La source des frais rosiers baisse.
Vraiment! Et lui qui ne vient pas...."
Il viendra! Vous serez les pauvres cœurs en faute,
Fiancés au remords comme aux essais sans fond,
Et les suffisants cœurs cossus, n'ayant d'autre hôte
Qu'un train-train pavoisé d'estime et de chiffons
Mourir? peut-être brodent-elles,
Pour un oncle à dot, des bretelles?
--"Jamais! Jamais!
Si tu savais!
Tu t'en vas et tu nous quittes,
Tu nous quitt's et tu t'en vas,
Mais tu nous reviendras bien vite
Guérir mon beau mal, n'est-ce pas?"
Et c'est vrai! l'Idéal les fait divaguer toutes;
Vigne bohème, même en ces quartiers aisés.
La vie est là; le pur flacon des vives gouttes
Sera, _comme il convient_, d'eau propre baptisé.
Aussi, bientôt, se joueront-elles
De plus exactes ritournelles.
"--Seul oreiller!
Mur familier!
"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas,
Que ne suis-je morte à la messe!
O mois, ô linges, ô repas!"
The journalist and his papers exist by reason of their "protective
coloring." They must think as their readers think at a given moment.
It is impossible that Jules Laforgue should have written his poems in
America in "the eighties." He was born in 1860, died in 1887 of _la
misère_, of consumption and abject poverty in Paris. The vaunted
sensitiveness of French perception, and the fact that he knew a
reasonable number of wealthy and influential people, did nothing to
prevent this. He had published two small volumes, one edition of each.
The seventh edition of his collected poems is dated 1913, and doubtless
they have been reprinted since then with increasing celerity.
Un couchant des Cosmogonies!
Ah! que la Vie est quotidienne....
Et, du plus vrai qu'on se souvienne,
Comme on fut piètre et sans génie....
What is the man in the street to make of this, or of the _Complainte des
Bons Ménages_!
L'Art sans poitrine m'a trop longtemps bercé dupe.
Si ses labours sont fiers, que ses blés décevants!
Tiens, laisse-moi bêler tout aux plis de ta jupe
Qui fleure le couvent.
Delicate irony, the citadel of the intelligent, has a curious effect on
these people. They wish always to be exhorted, at all times no matter
how incongruous and unsuitable, to do those things which almost any one
will and does do whenever suitable opportunity is presented. As Henry
James has said, "It was a period when writers besought the deep blue sea
'to roll.'"
The ironist is one who suggests that the reader should think, and this
process being unnatural to the majority of mankind, the way of the
ironical is beset with snares and with furze-bushes.
Laforgue was a purge and a critic. He laughed out the errors of
Flaubert, i.e., the clogging and cumbrous historical detail. He left
_Cœur Simple, L'Education, Madame Bovary, Bouvard_. His _Salome_
makes game of the rest. The short story has become vapid because sixty
thousand story writers have all set themselves to imitating De
Maupassant, perhaps a thousand from the original.
Laforgue implies definitely that certain things in prose were at an end,
and I think he marks the next phase after Gautier in French poetry. It
seems to me that without a familiarity with Laforgue one can not
appreciate--i.e., determine the value of--certain positives and certain
negatives in French poetry since 1890.
He deals for the most part with literary poses and _clichés_, yet he
makes them a vehicle for the expression of his own very personal
emotions; of his own unperturbed sincerity.
Je ne suis pas "ce gaillard-là!" ni Le Superbe!
Mais mon âme, qu'un cri un peu cru exacerbe,
Est au fond distinguée et franche comme une herbe.
This is not the strident and satiric voice of Corbière, calling Hugo
"_Garde National épique_," and Lamartine "_Lacrymatoire d'abonnés_." It
is not Tailhade drawing with rough strokes the people he sees daily in
Paris, and bursting with guffaws over the Japanese in their
mackintoshes, the West Indian mulatto behind the bar in the Quartier. It
is not Georges Fourest burlesquing in a café; Fourest's guffaw is
magnificent, he is hardly satirical. Tailhade draws from life and
indulges in occasional squabbles.
Laforgue was a better artist than any of these men save Corbière. He was
not in the least of their sort.
Beardsley's "Under the Hill" was until recently the only successful
attempt to produce "anything like Laforgue" in our tongue. "Under the
Hill" was issued in a limited edition. Laforgue's _Moralités
Légendaires_ was issued in England by the Ricketts and Hacon press in a
limited edition, and there the thing has remained. Laforgue can never
become a popular cult because tyros can not imitate him.
One may discriminate between Laforgue's tone and that of his
contemporary French satirists. He is the finest wrought; he is most
"verbalist." Bad verbalism is rhetoric, or the use of _cliché_
unconsciously, or a mere playing with phrases. But there is good
verbalism, distinct from lyricism or imagism, and in this Laforgue is a
master. He writes not the popular language of any country, but an
international tongue common to the excessively cultivated, and to those
more or less familiar with French literature of the first three-fourths
of the nineteenth century.
He has done, sketchily and brilliantly, for French literature a work not
incomparable to what Flaubert was doing for "France" in _Bouvard and
Pécuchet_, if one may compare the flight of the butterfly with the
progress of an ox, both proceeding toward the same point of the compass.
He has dipped his wings in the dye of scientific terminology. Pierrot
_imberbe_ has
Un air d'hydrocéphale asperge.
The tyro can not play about with such things. Verbalism demands a set
form used with irreproachable skill. Satire needs, usually, the form of
cutting rhymes to drive it home.
Chautauquas, Mrs. Eddy, Dr. Dowies, Comstocks, Societies for the
Prevention of All Human Activities, are impossible in the wake of
Laforgue. And he is therefore an exquisite poet, a deliverer of the
nations, a Numa Pompilius, a father of light. And to many people this
mystery, the mystery why such force should reside in so fragile a book,
why such power should coincide with so great a nonchalance of manner,
will remain forever a mystery.
Que loin l'âme type
Qui m'a dit adieu
Parce que mes yeux
Manquaient de principes!
Elle, en ce moment.
Elle, si pain tendre,
Oh! peut-être engendre
Quelque garnement.
Car on l'a unie
Avec un monsieur,
Ce qu'il y a de mieux,
Mais pauvre en génie.
Laforgue is incontrovertible. The "strong silent man" of the kinema has
not monopolized all the certitudes.