Laforge, in the course of a reading, sketched some notes regarding
Corbière which, though not printed, are nevertheless definitive, as for
instance:
"Bohemian of the Ocean--picaresque and tramp--breaking down, concise,
driving his verse with a whip--strident as the cry of gulls, and like
them never wearied--without aestheticism--nothing of poetry or verse,
hardly of literature--sensual, he never reveals the flesh--a blackguard
and Byronic creature--alway the crisp word--there is not another
artist in verse more freed of poetic language--he has a trade without
plastic interest--the interest, the effect is in the whip stroke,
the dry-point, the pun, the friskiness, the romantic abruptness--
he wishes to be indefinable, uncataloguable, to be neither loved nor
hated; in short, declassed from every latitude, every custom hither and
beyond the Pyrenees."
This doubtless is the truth: Corbière all his life was dominated
and led by the demon of contradiction. He supposed that one must be
differentiated from men by thoughts and acts exactly contrary to the
thoughts and acts of the mass of men; there is much of the willful in
his originality; he labored at it as women labor over their complexion
during long afternoons between sky and earth, and when he disembarked,
it was to draw broadsides of stupefaction. Dandyism à la Baudelaire.
But a nature cannot be developed except in the sense of its instincts
and inclinations. Corbière had inherently to be something of what he
became, the Don Juan of singularity; it is the only woman he loves; he
mocks the other with the clever phrase "the eterna madame."
Corbière has much wit, wit at the same time of the Montmartre wine-shop
and of the blade of past times. His talent is formed of the braggart
spirit, uncouth and humbug, of a bad impudent taste, of genius thrusts.
He has the drunken air, but he is only laboriously clumsy; to make
absurd chaplets, he shapes from miraculous, rolled pebbles works of a
secular patience, but in the dizaine he leaves the little stone of the
sea quite naked and rough, because at bottom he loves the sea with a
great naiveté and because his folly for paradoxical things gives way,
from time to time, to an intoxication of poetry and beauty.
Among the never ordinary verses of _Amours jaunes_, are many that are
admirable, but admirable with an air so equivocal, so specious, that
we do not always enjoy them at the first meeting; then we judge that
Tristan Corbière is, like Laforgue, a little his disciple, one of
those undeniable, unclassable talents which are strange and precious
exceptions in the history of literature--singular even in a gallery of
oddities.
Here are two little poems of Tristan Corbière, forgotten even by the
last publisher of the _Amours jaunes_: