"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 precocity1 as poet and master of fantastic prose has yet not the complexion2 of a Chatterton or a Keats. In his literary remains3, slender enough as to quantity, there is little to suggest a fuller development if he had lived. Like his protagonist4 Arthur Rimbaud—surely the most extraordinary poetic5 apparition6 of the nineteenth century—Jules Laforgue accomplished7 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 [Pg 33] saved him from the rotten-ripe maturity8 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, prostrate10 under him, draws him by the feet, that it may drag him down into the invisible." Like Watteau, Laforgue was "condemned11" from the beginning to "a green thought in a green shade." The spirit in him, the "shadow," devoured12 his soul, pulverised his will, made of him a Hamlet without a propelling cause, a doubter in a world of cheap certitudes and insolent13 fatuities14, but barred him proffering15 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 longing16 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 buffoon17; 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 extorted18 his homage19. [Pg 34] "All is relative," was his war-cry on schools and codes and generalisations. His urbanity never deserted20 him, though it was an exasperated21 urbanity. His was an art of the nerves. Arthur Symons has spoken of his "icy ecstasy22" 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 aurà of decay floats about their work; all three suffered from the nostalgia23 of the impossible. The morbid24 decadent25 aquafortist that is revealed in the corroding26 etchings of Laforgue is germane27 to men in whom irony28 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 infinity29. A cosmical jester, his badinage30 is well-nigh dolorous31. His verse and prose form a series of personal variations. The lyric32 in him is through some temperamental twist reversed. Fantastic dreams overflow33 his reality, and he always dreams with wide-open eyes. Watteau's l'Indifferent! A philosophical34 vaudevillist, he juggles35 with such themes as a metaphysical Armida, the moon and her minion36, Pierrot; with celestial37 spasms38 and the odour of mortality, or the universal sigh, the autumnal refrains of Chopin, and the monotony of love. "Life is quotidian39!" he has sung, and women are the very symbol of sameness, that is their tragedy—or [Pg 35] 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 witty40 abstraction when cornered. His prose is full of winged neologisms, his poetry heavy with the metaphysics of ennui41. Remy de Gourmont speaks of his magnificent work as the prelude42 to an oratorio43 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 frailness44 of his tenure45 on life, he sought azure46 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 essentially47 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 mighty48.
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 solitary49 exception—that his curious genius seems composed of a bundle of negatives. But behind the mind of every great writer there marches [Pg 36] a shadowy mob of phrases, which mimics50 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 Platonic51 phantoms52. The phrase of Laforgue has a timbre53 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 ?sthetic mysticism is allied54 with a semi-brutal frankness. Feathers fallen from the wings of peri adorn55 the heads of equivocal persons. Cosmogonies jostle evil farceurs, and the silvery voices of children chant blasphemies56. Laforgue could repeat with Arthur Rimbaud: "I accustomed myself to simple hallucinations: I saw, quite frankly57, a mosque58 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 vaudeville59 raised up horrors before me. Then I explained my magical sophisms by the hallucination of words! I ended by finding something sacred in the disorder60 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 disciple61 of Baudelaire and Gautier in his search for the hidden affinity62 of [Pg 37] 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, promenaded63 his incertitudes, to use a self-revealing phrase of Chopin's. An aristocrat64, 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 rabble65, 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 exuberance66. Without sentiment or romance, nevertheless, he does not suggest ossification67 of the spirit. To dart68 a lance at mythomania is his delight, while preserving the impassibility of a Parnassian. His travesties69 of Hamlet, Lohengrin, Salomé, Pan, Perseus enchant70, their plastic yet metallic71 prose denotes the unique artist; above all they are modern, they graze the hem9 of the contemporaneous. From the sublime72 to the arabesque73 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 à rebours. Old Fletcher sings:
"Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley, Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy74."
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1 precocity | |
n.早熟,早成 | |
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2 complexion | |
n.肤色;情况,局面;气质,性格 | |
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3 remains | |
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹 | |
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4 protagonist | |
n.(思想观念的)倡导者;主角,主人公 | |
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5 poetic | |
adj.富有诗意的,有诗人气质的,善于抒情的 | |
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6 apparition | |
n.幽灵,神奇的现象 | |
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7 accomplished | |
adj.有才艺的;有造诣的;达到了的 | |
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8 maturity | |
n.成熟;完成;(支票、债券等)到期 | |
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9 hem | |
n.贴边,镶边;vt.缝贴边;(in)包围,限制 | |
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10 prostrate | |
v.拜倒,平卧,衰竭;adj.拜倒的,平卧的,衰竭的 | |
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11 condemned | |
adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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12 devoured | |
吞没( devour的过去式和过去分词 ); 耗尽; 津津有味地看; 狼吞虎咽地吃光 | |
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13 insolent | |
adj.傲慢的,无理的 | |
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14 fatuities | |
n.愚昧,昏庸( fatuity的名词复数 );愚蠢的言行 | |
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15 proffering | |
v.提供,贡献,提出( proffer的现在分词 ) | |
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16 longing | |
n.(for)渴望 | |
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17 buffoon | |
n.演出时的丑角 | |
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18 extorted | |
v.敲诈( extort的过去式和过去分词 );曲解 | |
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19 homage | |
n.尊敬,敬意,崇敬 | |
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20 deserted | |
adj.荒芜的,荒废的,无人的,被遗弃的 | |
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21 exasperated | |
adj.恼怒的 | |
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22 ecstasy | |
n.狂喜,心醉神怡,入迷 | |
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23 nostalgia | |
n.怀乡病,留恋过去,怀旧 | |
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24 morbid | |
adj.病的;致病的;病态的;可怕的 | |
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25 decadent | |
adj.颓废的,衰落的,堕落的 | |
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26 corroding | |
使腐蚀,侵蚀( corrode的现在分词 ) | |
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27 germane | |
adj.关系密切的,恰当的 | |
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28 irony | |
n.反语,冷嘲;具有讽刺意味的事,嘲弄 | |
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29 infinity | |
n.无限,无穷,大量 | |
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30 badinage | |
n.开玩笑,打趣 | |
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31 dolorous | |
adj.悲伤的;忧愁的 | |
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32 lyric | |
n.抒情诗,歌词;adj.抒情的 | |
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33 overflow | |
v.(使)外溢,(使)溢出;溢出,流出,漫出 | |
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34 philosophical | |
adj.哲学家的,哲学上的,达观的 | |
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35 juggles | |
v.歪曲( juggle的第三人称单数 );耍弄;有效地组织;尽力同时应付(两个或两个以上的重要工作或活动) | |
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36 minion | |
n.宠仆;宠爱之人 | |
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37 celestial | |
adj.天体的;天上的 | |
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38 spasms | |
n.痉挛( spasm的名词复数 );抽搐;(能量、行为等的)突发;发作 | |
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39 quotidian | |
adj.每日的,平凡的 | |
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40 witty | |
adj.机智的,风趣的 | |
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41 ennui | |
n.怠倦,无聊 | |
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42 prelude | |
n.序言,前兆,序曲 | |
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43 oratorio | |
n.神剧,宗教剧,清唱剧 | |
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44 frailness | |
n.脆弱,不坚定 | |
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45 tenure | |
n.终身职位;任期;(土地)保有权,保有期 | |
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46 azure | |
adj.天蓝色的,蔚蓝色的 | |
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47 essentially | |
adv.本质上,实质上,基本上 | |
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48 mighty | |
adj.强有力的;巨大的 | |
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49 solitary | |
adj.孤独的,独立的,荒凉的;n.隐士 | |
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50 mimics | |
n.模仿名人言行的娱乐演员,滑稽剧演员( mimic的名词复数 );善于模仿的人或物v.(尤指为了逗乐而)模仿( mimic的第三人称单数 );酷似 | |
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51 platonic | |
adj.精神的;柏拉图(哲学)的 | |
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52 phantoms | |
n.鬼怪,幽灵( phantom的名词复数 ) | |
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53 timbre | |
n.音色,音质 | |
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54 allied | |
adj.协约国的;同盟国的 | |
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55 adorn | |
vt.使美化,装饰 | |
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56 blasphemies | |
n.对上帝的亵渎,亵渎的言词[行为]( blasphemy的名词复数 );侮慢的言词(或行为) | |
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57 frankly | |
adv.坦白地,直率地;坦率地说 | |
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58 mosque | |
n.清真寺 | |
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59 vaudeville | |
n.歌舞杂耍表演 | |
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60 disorder | |
n.紊乱,混乱;骚动,骚乱;疾病,失调 | |
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61 disciple | |
n.信徒,门徒,追随者 | |
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62 affinity | |
n.亲和力,密切关系 | |
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63 promenaded | |
v.兜风( promenade的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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64 aristocrat | |
n.贵族,有贵族气派的人,上层人物 | |
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65 rabble | |
n.乌合之众,暴民;下等人 | |
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66 exuberance | |
n.丰富;繁荣 | |
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67 ossification | |
n.骨化,(思想等的)僵化 | |
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68 dart | |
v.猛冲,投掷;n.飞镖,猛冲 | |
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69 travesties | |
n.拙劣的模仿作品,荒谬的模仿,歪曲( travesty的名词复数 ) | |
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70 enchant | |
vt.使陶醉,使入迷;使着魔,用妖术迷惑 | |
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71 metallic | |
adj.金属的;金属制的;含金属的;产金属的;像金属的 | |
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72 sublime | |
adj.崇高的,伟大的;极度的,不顾后果的 | |
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73 arabesque | |
n.阿拉伯式花饰;adj.阿拉伯式图案的 | |
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74 melancholy | |
n.忧郁,愁思;adj.令人感伤(沮丧)的,忧郁的 | |
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