"Je ne suis qu'un viveur lunaire
Qui faits des ronds dans les bassins
Et cela, sans autre dessin
Que devenir un legendaire...."
Sings our poet in the silver-fire verse of L'Imitation de Notre-Dame
la Lune, wherein he asks--Mais ou sont les Lunes d'Antan. This Pierrot
lunaire, this buffoon of new and dusty eternities, wrote a sort of
vers libres, which, often breaking off with a smothered sob,
modulates into prose and sings the sorrows and complaints of a world
peopled by fantastic souls, clowns, somnambulists, satyrs, poets,
harlots, dainty girls, Cheret posters, pierrots, kings of pyschopathic
tastes, blithe birds, and sad-coloured cemeteries. The poet is a
mocking demon who rides on clouds dropping epigrams earthward, the
earth that grunts and sweats beneath the sun or cowers and weeps under
the stellar prairies. He mockingly calls himself "The Grand Chancellor
of Analysis." Like Nietzsche he dances when his heart is heavy, and
trills his roundelays and his gamut of rancorous flowers with an
enigmatic smile on his lips. It is a strange and disquieting music, a
pageantry of essences, this verse with its resonance of emerald.
Appearing in fugitive fashion, it was gathered into a single volume
through the efforts of friends and with the Moralites legendaires
comprises his life-work, for we can hardly include the Melanges
posthumes, which consist of scraps and fragments (published in 1903)
together with some letters, not a very weighty addition to the dead
poet's fame. His translations of Walt Whitman I've not seen. Perhaps
his verse is doomed; it was born with the hectic flush of early
dissolution, but it is safe to predict that as long as lovers of rare
literature exist the volume of prose will survive. It has for the
gourmet of style an unending charm, the charm en sourdine of its
creator, to whom a falling leaf or an empire in dissolution was of
equal value. "His work," wrote Mr. Symons, "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 nature to the point of self-negation, as the
other is the eternal enfant terrible." Tout etait pour le vieux dans
le meilleur des mondes, Laforgue would have cried in the epigram of
Paul Bourget.
The prose of Jules Laforgue recalls to me his description of the
orchestra in Salome, the fourth of the Moralites legendaires. Sur un
mode allegre et fataliste, un orchestre aux instruments d'ivoire
improvisait une petite overture unanime. That his syllables are of
ivory I feel, and improvised, but his themes are pluralistic, the
immedicable and colossal ennui of life the chiefest. Woman--the
"Eternal Madame," as Baudelaire calls her--is a being both magical and
mediocre; she is also an escape from the universal world-pain. La fin
de l'homme est proche ... Antigone va passer du menage de la famille
au menage de la planete (prophetic words). But when lovely woman
begins to talk of the propagation of the ideal she only means the
human species. With Lessing he believes: "There is, at most, but one
disagreeable woman in the world; a pity then that every man gets her
for himself."
It is rather singular to observe in the writings of Marinetti, the
self-elected leader of the so-called Futurists, the hopeless
deliquescence of the form invented by Louis Bertrand in his Gaspard de
la Nuit, and developed with almost miraculous results in Baudelaire
and terminating with Huysmans, Maeterlinck, and Francis Poictevin
("Paysages"). Rimbaud had intervened. In his Illuminations we read
that "so soon as the Idea of the Deluge had sunk back into its place,
a rabbit halted amid the sainfoin and the small swinging bells, and
said its prayers to the rainbow through the spider's web. Oh! The
precious stones in hiding, the flowers already looking out ... Madame
X established a piano in the Alps.... The caravans started. And the
Splendid Hotel was erected upon the chaos of ice and night of the
Pole" (from the translation by Aline Gorren). This, apparently mad
sequence of words and dissociation of ideas, has been deciphered by M.
Kahn, and need not daunt any one who has patience and ingenuity. I
confess I prefer Laforgue, who at his most cryptic is never so wildly
tantalising as Rimbaud.
Moralites legendaires contains six sections. I don't know which to
admire the most, the Hamlet or the Lohengrin, the Salome or the Persee
et Andromede. Le Miracle des Roses is of an exceeding charm, though
dealing with the obvious, while Pan et la Syrinx has a quality which I
can recall nowhere else in literature; perhaps in the cadences
charged with the magic and irony of Chopin, or in the half-dreams of
Watteau, colour and golden sadness intermingled, may evoke the
spiritual parodies of Laforgue, but in literature there is no
analogue, though Pan is of classic flavour despite his very modern
Weltanschauung. Syrinx is a woodland creature nebulous and exquisite.
Pursued by Pan--the Eternal Male in rut--she does not succumb to his
pipes, and after she has vanished in the lingering wind, he blows
sweeter music through his seven reeds. The symbol is not difficult to
decipher. And who would not succumb to the languorous melancholy of
Andromede, not chained to a rock but living on the best of terms with
her monster, who calls her Bebe! The sea bores her profoundly. She
looks for Perseus, who doesn't come; the sea, always the sea without a
moment's weakness; in brief, not the stuff of which friends are made!
When the knight appears and kills her monster, he loses his halo for
Andromede, who cherishes her monstrous guardian. Perseus, a prig
disgusted by the fickleness of the Young Person, flees, and the death
of the monster brings to life a lovely youth--put under the spell of
malignant powers--who promptly weds his ward. In Lohengrin, Son of
Parsifal, the whole machinery of the Wagner opera is transposed to the
key of lunar parody. What ambrosia from the Walhalla of topsyturvy is
this Elsa with her "eyes hymeneally illumined" as she awaits her
saviour. He appears and they are married. Alas! The pillow of the
nuptial couch becomes a swan that carries off Lohengrin weary of the
tart queries made by his little bride concerning love and sex and
other unimportant questions of daily life. This Elsa is a sensual
goose. She is also a stubborn believer in the biblical injunction:
"Crescite et multiplicamini," and she would willingly allow the
glittering stranger Knight to brise le sceau de ses petites solitudes,
as the Vicar of Diane-Artemis phrases it. The landscapes of these
tales are fantastically beautiful, and scattered through the narrative
are fragments of verse, vagrant and witty, that light up the stories
with a glowworm phosphorescence.
Salome and her celebrated eyebrows is a spiritual sister of Flaubert's
damsel, as Elsa is nearly related to his Salammbo. She dwells in the
far-off Iles Blanches Esoteriques, and she, too, is annoyed by the
stupidity of the sea, always new, always respectable! She is the first
of the Salomes since Flaubert who has caught some of her prototype's
fragrance. (Oscar Wilde's attempt proved mediocre. He introduced a
discordant pathological note, but the music of Richard Strauss may
save his pasticcio. It interprets the exotic prose of the Irishman
with tongues of fire; it laps up the text, encircles it, underlines,
amplifies, comments, and in nodules of luminosity, makes clear that
which is dark, ennobles much that is vain, withal it never insists on
leading; the composer appears to follow the poet.) Laforgue's Salome
tries to sport with the head of John the Baptist, stumbles, loses her
footing, and falls from the machicolated wall on jagged rocks below,
as the head floats out to sea, miraculously alight. There are wit and
philosophy and the hint of high thoughts in Salome, though her heart
like glass is cold, empty, and crystalline.
The subtitle of Hamlet, which heads the volume, is--Or, the Results of
Filial Devotion--and the story, as Mr. Hale asserts, is Laforgue's
masterpiece. Here is a Hamlet for you, a prince whose antics are
enough to disturb the dust of Shakespeare and make the angels on high
weep with hysterical laughter. Not remotely hinting at burlesque, the
character is delicately etched. By the subtle withdrawal of certain
traits, this Hamlet behaves as a man would who has been trepanned and
his moral nature removed by an analytical surgeon. He is irony
personified and is the most delightful company for one weary of the
Great Good Game around and about us, the game of deceit, treachery,
politics, love, social intercourse, religion, and commerce. Laforgue's
Hamlet sees through the hole in the mundane millstone and his every
phrase is like the flash of a scimitar.
It is the irony of his position, the irony of his knowledge that he is
Shakespeare's creation and must live up to his artistic paternity;
the irony that he is au fond a cabotin, a footlight strutter, a
mouther of phrases metaphysical and a despiser of Ophelia (chere
petite glu he names her) that are all so appealing. Intellectual
braggart, this Hamlet resides after his father Horwendill's "irregular
decease" in a tower hard by the Sound, from which Helsingborg may be
seen. An old, stagnant canal is beneath his windows. In his chamber
are waxen figures of his mother, Gerutha, and his uncle-father, Fengo.
He daily pierces their hearts with needles after a bad old-fashioned
mediaeval formula of witchcraft. But it avails naught. With a fine
touch he seeks for his revenge by having enacted before their
Majesties of Denmark his own play. They incontinently collapse in
mortal nausea, for they are excellent critics.
Such a play scene, withal Shakespearian! "Stability thy name is
woman!" he exclaims bitterly, for he fears love with the compromising
domesticity of marriage. It is his rigorous transvaluation of all
moral values and conventionalities that proclaims this Hamlet a man of
the future. No half-way treaties with the obvious in life, no crooking
the pregnant hinges of his opinions to the powers that be. An anarch,
pure and complex, he despises all methods. What soliloquies, replete
with the biting, cynical wisdom of a disillusionised soul!
"Ah," he sighs, "there are no longer young girls, they are all nurses.
Ophelia loves me because, as Hobbes claims: 'Nothing is more
agreeable in our ownership of goods than the thought that they are
superior to the goods of others.' Now I am socially and morally
superior to the 'goods' of her little friends. She wishes to make me,
Hamlet, comfortable. Ah, if I could only have met Helen of Narbonne!"
A Hamlet who quotes the author of The Leviathan is a Hamlet with a
vengeance.
To him enter the players William and Kate. He reads them his play.
Kate's stage name is Ophelia. "Comment!" cries Hamlet, "encore une
Ophelia dans ma potion!" William doesn't like the play because his
part is not "sympathetic." After they retire Hamlet indulges in a
passionate outburst reproaching the times with its hypocrisy and des
hypocrites et routinieres jeunes filles. If women but knew they would
prostrate themselves before him as did the weeping ones upon the body
of the dead Adonis! The key of this discourse is high-pitched and
cutting. Laforgue, a philosopher, a pessimist, makes his art the
canvas for his ironic temperament. The Prince's interview with Ophelia
is full of soundless mirth. And how he lavishes upon his own deranged
head offensive abuse: "Piteous provincial! Cabotin! Pedicure!" This
last is his topmost term of contempt.
His parleying with the grave-diggers is another stroke of wit. One of
them tells him that Polonius is carried off by apoplexy--a bust has
been erected to his memory bearing the inscription, "Words! Words!
Words!" He also learns that Yorick was his half-brother, the son of a
gipsy woman. Ophelia dies--he hears this with mixed feelings--and he
is informed that the young Prince Hamlet is quite mad. The
grave-digger is a philosopher, he thinks that Fortinbras is at hand,
that the best investment for his money will be in Norwegian bonds. The
funeral cortege approaches. Hamlet hides.
His soliloquy upon the skull of Yorick has been partly done into
English by Mr. Symons.
"Alas, poor Yorick! As one seems to hear in this little shell, the
multitudinous roar of the ocean, so I hear the whole quenchless
symphony of the universal soul, of whose echoes this box was its
cross-roads. There's a solid idea!... Perhaps I have twenty or thirty
years to live, and I shall pass away 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-town 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
before the Ideal, she will be labelled with a piteous _idem_ in the
column of the miniature evolutions of the Unique Evolution, in the
column of negligible quantities.... To die! Evidently, one does
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!"
And this "secular sadness" pursues the heartless Hamlet to the
cemetery; he returns after dark in company with the buxom actress
Kate. They have eloped.
But the fatal irresolution again overtakes him. He would see Ophelia's
tomb for the last time, and as he attempts to decipher its
inscription, Laertes--idiot d'humanite, the average sensible
man--approaches and the pair hold converse. It is a revelation of the
face of foolishness. Laertes reproaches Hamlet. He has by his trifling
with Ophelia caused her death. Laertes calls him a poor demented one,
exclaims over his lack of moral sense, and winds up by bidding the
crazy Prince leave the cemetery. Quand on finit par folie, c'est qu'on
a commence par le cabotinage. (Which is a consoling axiom for an
actor.) Hamlet with his naive irony calmly inquires:
"And thy sister!" This is too much for the distracted brother, who
poignards the Prince. Hamlet expires with Nero's cry on his lips:
"Ah! Ah! _Qualis ... artifex ... pereo!_" And, as the author remarks:
"He rendered to immutable nature his Hamletic soul." William enters
and, discovering his Kate, gives her a sound beating; not the first or
the last, as she apprises us. The poem ends with this motto: Un Hamlet
de moins; la race n'en est pas perdue, qu'on se le dise! Which is
chilly truth.
The artistic beauty of the prose, its haunting assonance, its supple
rhythms make this Hamlet impossible save in French. Nor can the fine
edge of its wit, its multiple though masked ironies, its astounding
transposition of Shakespearian humour and philosophy be aught else
than loosely paraphrased. Laforgue's Hamlet is of to-morrow, for every
epoch orchestrates anew its own vision of Hamlet. The eighteenth
century had one; the nineteenth had another; and our generation a
fresher. But we know of none so vital as this fantastic thinker of
Laforgue's. He must have had his ear close to the Time Spirit, so
aptly has he caught the vibrations of his whirring loom, so closely to
these vibrations has he attuned the key-note of his twentieth-century
Hamlet.