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,
Limitation 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 up into a kind of mockery of prose.
Encore un de mes pierrots mort;
Mort d'un chronique orphelinisme;
C'était un cœur plein de dandysme
Lunaire, en un drôle de corps;
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.
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 mediæval 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." 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 to-morrow, 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 to-morrow? 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 négligeable 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. 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 out du cœur, tu sera mon seul thème."
Moi' "Tout est relatif."
De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:
"Ah! tu ne m'aime pas; tant d'autres sont jaloux!"
Et moi, d'un œil 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 sûre."
"Après vous, s'il vous plaît."
Enfins, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,
Douce; feignant de n'en pas croire encor mes yeux,
J'aurai un: "Ah çà, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!
C'était donc sérieux?"
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."