Instigations Part 2

Aussi, bientot, se joueront-elles De plus exactes ritournelles.

"--Seul oreiller!

Mur familier!

"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses, Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas, Que ne suis-je morte a la messe!

O mois, o linges, o repas!"

The journalist and his papers exist by reason of their "protective coloring." They must think as their readers think at a given moment.

It is impossible that Jules Laforgue should have written his poems in America in "the eighties." He was born in 1860, died in 1887 of _la misere_, of consumption and abject poverty in Paris. The vaunted sensitiveness of French perception, and the fact that he knew a reasonable number of wealthy and influential people, did nothing to prevent this. He had published two small volumes, one edition of each.

The seventh edition of his collected poems is dated 1913, and doubtless they have been reprinted since then with increasing celerity.

Un couchant des Cosmogonies!

Ah! que la Vie est quotidienne....

Et, du plus vrai qu'on se souvienne, Comme on fut pietre et sans genie....

What is the man in the street to make of this, or of the _Complainte des Bons Menages_!

L'Art sans poitrine m'a trop longtemps berce dupe.

Si ses labours sont fiers, que ses bles decevants!

Tiens, laisse-moi beler tout aux plis de ta jupe Qui fleure le couvent.

Delicate irony, the citadel of the intelligent, has a curious effect on these people. They wish always to be exhorted, at all times no matter how incongruous and unsuitable, to do those things which almost any one will and does do whenever suitable opportunity is presented. As Henry James has said, "It was a period when writers besought the deep blue sea 'to roll.'"

The ironist is one who suggests that the reader should think, and this process being unnatural to the majority of mankind, the way of the ironical is beset with snares and with furze-bushes.

Laforgue was a purge and a critic. He laughed out the errors of Flaubert, i.e., the clogging and c.u.mbrous historical detail. He left _Cur Simple, L'Education, Madame Bovary, Bouvard_. His _Salome_ makes game of the rest. The short story has become vapid because sixty thousand story writers have all set themselves to imitating De Maupa.s.sant, perhaps a thousand from the original.

Laforgue implies definitely that certain things in prose were at an end, and I think he marks the next phase after Gautier in French poetry. It seems to me that without a familiarity with Laforgue one can not appreciate--i.e., determine the value of--certain positives and certain negatives in French poetry since 1890.

He deals for the most part with literary poses and _cliches_, yet he makes them a vehicle for the expression of his own very personal emotions; of his own unperturbed sincerity.

Je ne suis pas "ce gaillard-la!" ni Le Superbe!

Mais mon ame, qu'un cri un peu cru exacerbe, Est au fond distinguee et franche comme une herbe.

This is not the strident and satiric voice of Corbiere, calling Hugo "_Garde National epique_," and Lamartine "_Lacrymatoire d'abonnes_." It is not Tailhade drawing with rough strokes the people he sees daily in Paris, and bursting with guffaws over the j.a.panese in their mackintoshes, the West Indian mulatto behind the bar in the Quartier. It is not Georges Fourest burlesquing in a cafe; Fourest's guffaw is magnificent, he is hardly satirical. Tailhade draws from life and indulges in occasional squabbles.

Laforgue was a better artist than any of these men save Corbiere. He was not in the least of their sort.

Beardsley's "Under the Hill" was until recently the only successful attempt to produce "anything like Laforgue" in our tongue. "Under the Hill" was issued in a limited edition. Laforgue's _Moralites Legendaires_ was issued in England by the Ricketts and Hacon press in a limited edition, and there the thing has remained. Laforgue can never become a popular cult because tyros can not imitate him.

One may discriminate between Laforgue's tone and that of his contemporary French satirists. He is the finest wrought; he is most "verbalist." Bad verbalism is rhetoric, or the use of _cliche_ unconsciously, or a mere playing with phrases. But there is good verbalism, distinct from lyricism or imagism, and in this Laforgue is a master. He writes not the popular language of any country, but an international tongue common to the excessively cultivated, and to those more or less familiar with French literature of the first three-fourths of the nineteenth century.

He has done, sketchily and brilliantly, for French literature a work not incomparable to what Flaubert was doing for "France" in _Bouvard and Pecuchet_, if one may compare the flight of the b.u.t.terfly with the progress of an ox, both proceeding toward the same point of the compa.s.s.

He has dipped his wings in the dye of scientific terminology. Pierrot _imberbe_ has

Un air d'hydrocephale asperge.

The tyro can not play about with such things. Verbalism demands a set form used with irreproachable skill. Satire needs, usually, the form of cutting rhymes to drive it home.

Chautauquas, Mrs. Eddy, Dr. Dowies, Comstocks, Societies for the Prevention of All Human Activities, are impossible in the wake of Laforgue. And he is therefore an exquisite poet, a deliverer of the nations, a Numa Pompilius, a father of light. And to many people this mystery, the mystery why such force should reside in so fragile a book, why such power should coincide with so great a nonchalance of manner, will remain forever a mystery.

Que loin l'ame type Qui m'a dit adieu Parce que mes yeux Manquaient de principes!

Elle, en ce moment.

Elle, si pain tendre, Oh! peut-etre engendre Quelque garnement.

Car on l'a unie Avec un monsieur, Ce qu'il y a de mieux, Mais pauvre en genie.

Laforgue is incontrovertible. The "strong silent man" of the kinema has not monopolized all the cert.i.tudes.

TRISTAN CORBIERE

(1841-1875)

Corbiere seems to me the greatest poet of the period. "La Rapsode Foraine et le Pardon de Sainte-Anne" is, to my mind, beyond all comment.

He first published in '73, remained practically unknown until Verlaine's essay in '84, and was hardly known to "the public" until the Messein edition of his work in '91.

LA RAPSODE FORAINE ET LE PARDON DE SAINTE-ANNE

La Palud, 27 aot, jour du Pardon.

Benite est l'infertile plage Ou, comme la mer, tout est nud.

Sainte est la chapelle sauvage De Sainte-Anne-de-la-Palud....

De la Bonne Femme Sainte Anne, Grand'tante du pet.i.t Jesus, En bois pourri dans sa soutane Riche ... plus riche que Cresus!

Contre elle la pet.i.te Vierge, Fuseau frele, attend l'_Angelus_; Au coin, Joseph, tenant son cierge, Niche, en saint qu'on ne fete plus...

C'est le Pardon.--Liesse et mysteres-- Deja l'herbe rase a des poux....

_Sainte Anne, Onguent des belles-meres!_ _Consolation des epoux!_

Des paroisses environnantes: De Plougastel et Loc-Tudy, Ils viennent tous planter leurs tentes, Trois nuits, trois jours,--jusqu'au lundi.

Trois jours, trois nuits, la palud grogne, Selon l'antique rituel, --Chur seraphique et chant d'ivrogne-- LE CANTIQUE SPIRITUEL.

_Mere taillee a coups de hache,_ _Tout cur de chene dur et bon;_ _Sous l'or de ta robe se cache_ _L'ame en piece d'un franc Breton!_