I
"Jules Laforgue: Quelle joie!"
--J.-K.-HUYSMANS.
All victories are alike; defeat alone displays an individual profile.
And the case of Jules Laforgue wears this special aspect. Dying on the
threshold of his twenty-seventh year, coming too old into a world too
young, his precocity as poet and master of fantastic prose has yet not
the complexion of a Chatterton or a Keats. In his literary remains,
slender enough as to quantity, there is little to suggest a fuller
development if he had lived. Like his protagonist Arthur
Rimbaud--surely the most extraordinary poetic apparition of the
nineteenth century--Jules Laforgue accomplished his destiny during the
period when most poets are moulding their wings preparatory to flight.
He flew in youth, flew moonward, for his patron goddess was Selene, he
her faithful worshipper, a true lunalogue. His transcendental
indifferentism saved him from the rotten-ripe maturity of them that
are born "with a ray of moonlight in their brains," as Villiers de
l'Isle Adam hath it. And Villiers has also written: "When the forehead
alone contains the existence of a man, that man is enlightened only
from above his head; then his jealous shadow, prostrate under him,
draws him by the feet, that it may drag him down into the invisible."
Like Watteau, Laforgue was "condemned" from the beginning to "a green
thought in a green shade." The spirit in him, the "shadow," devoured
his soul, pulverised his will, made of him a Hamlet without a
propelling cause, a doubter in a world of cheap certitudes and
insolent fatuities, but barred him proffering his pearls to pigs. He
came before Nietzsche, yet could he have said with Zarathustra: "I
love the great despisers because they are the great adorers, they are
arrows of longing for the other shore." Now Laforgue was a great
despiser.
But he made merry over the ivory, apes, and peacocks of existence. He
seems less French than he is in his self-mockery, yet he is a true son
of his time and of his country. This young Hamlet, who doubted the
constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new
buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a
buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a
metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was who extorted
his homage. "All is relative," was his war-cry on schools and codes
and generalisations. His urbanity never deserted him, though it was an
exasperated urbanity. His was an art of the nerves. Arthur Symons has
spoken of his "icy ecstasy" and Maurice Maeterlinck described his
laughter as "laughter of the soul." Like Chopin or Watteau, he danced
on roses and thorns. All three were consumptives and the aura of decay
floats about their work; all three suffered from the nostalgia of the
impossible. The morbid decadent aquafortist that is revealed in the
corroding etchings of Laforgue is germane to men in whom irony and
pity are perpetually disputing. We think of Heine and his
bitter-sweetness. Again with Zarathustra, Laforgue could say: "I do
not give alms. I am not poor enough for that." He possesses the sixth
sense of infinity. A cosmical jester, his badinage is well-nigh
dolorous. His verse and prose form a series of personal variations.
The lyric in him is through some temperamental twist reversed.
Fantastic dreams overflow his reality, and he always dreams with
wide-open eyes. Watteau's l'Indifferent! A philosophical vaudevillist,
he juggles with such themes as a metaphysical Armida, the moon and her
minion, Pierrot; with celestial spasms and the odour of mortality, or
the universal sigh, the autumnal refrains of Chopin, and the monotony
of love. "Life is quotidian!" he has sung, and women are the very
symbol of sameness, that is their tragedy--or comedy. "Stability thy
name is Woman!" exclaims the Hamlet of this most spiritual among
parodists.
One never gets him with his back to the wall. He vanishes in the
shining cloud of a witty abstraction when cornered. His prose is full
of winged neologisms, his poetry heavy with the metaphysics of ennui.
Remy de Gourmont speaks of his magnificent work as the prelude to an
oratorio achieved in silence. Laforgue, himself, called it an
intermezzo, and in truth it is little more. His intellectual
sensibility and his elemental soul make for mystifications. As if he
knew the frailness of his tenure on life, he sought azure and
elliptical routes. He would have welcomed Maeterlinck's test question:
"Are you of those who name or those who only repeat names?" Laforgue
was essentially a namer--with Gallic glee he would have enjoyed
renaming the animals as they left the Noachian ark; yes, and
nicknaming the humans, for he is a terrible disrespecter of persons
and rank and of the seats of the mighty.
Some one has said that a criticism is negative if it searches for what
a writer lacks instead of what he possesses. We should soon reach a
zero if we only registered the absence of "necessary" traits in our
poet. He is so unlike his contemporaries--with a solitary
exception--that his curious genius seems composed of a bundle of
negatives. But behind the mind of every great writer there marches a
shadowy mob of phrases, which mimics his written words, and makes them
untrue indices of his thoughts. These shadows are the unexpressed
ideas of which the visible sentences are only eidolons; a cave filled
with Platonic phantoms. The phrase of Laforgue has a timbre capable of
infinite prolongations in the memory. It is not alone what he says,
nor the manner, but his power of arousing overtones from his keyboard.
His aesthetic mysticism is allied with a semi-brutal frankness.
Feathers fallen from the wings of peri adorn the heads of equivocal
persons. Cosmogonies jostle evil farceurs, and the silvery voices of
children chant blasphemies. Laforgue could repeat with Arthur Rimbaud:
"I accustomed myself to simple hallucinations: I saw, quite frankly, a
mosque in place of a factory, a school of drums kept by the angels;
post-chaises on the road to heaven, a drawing-room at the bottom of a
lake; the title of a vaudeville raised up horrors before me. Then I
explained my magical sophisms by the hallucination of words! I ended
by finding something sacred in the disorder of my mind" [translation
by Arthur Symons]. But while Laforgue with all his "spiritual
dislocation" would not deny the "sacred" disorder, he saw life in too
glacial a manner to admit that his were merely hallucinations. Rather,
correspondences, he would say, for he was as much a disciple of
Baudelaire and Gautier in his search for the hidden affinity of
things as he was a lover of the antique splendours in Flaubert's
Asiatic visions. He, too, dreamed of quintessentials, of the sheer
power of golden vocables and the secret alchemy of art. He, too,
promenaded his incertitudes, to use a self-revealing phrase of
Chopin's. An aristocrat, he knew that in the country of the idiot the
imbecile always will be king, and, "like many a one who turned away
from life, he only turned away from the rabble, and cared not to share
with them well and fire and fruit." His Kingdom of Green was consumed
and became grey by the regard of his coldly measuring eye. For him
modern man is an animal who bores himself. Laforgue is an essayist who
is also a causeur. His abundance is never exuberance. Without
sentiment or romance, nevertheless, he does not suggest ossification
of the spirit. To dart a lance at mythomania is his delight, while
preserving the impassibility of a Parnassian. His travesties of
Hamlet, Lohengrin, Salome, Pan, Perseus enchant, their plastic yet
metallic prose denotes the unique artist; above all they are modern,
they graze the hem of the contemporaneous. From the sublime to the
arabesque is but a semitone in his antic mind. Undulating in his
desire to escape the automatic, doubting even his own scepticism,
Jules Laforgue is a Hamlet a rebours. Old Fletcher sings:
"Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley,
Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."