te
appropriately his dying word was le mot de Cambronne. It was the last
victory of an organ over an organism. And he was a gay old pagan who
never called a sin a sin when it was a pleasure.

III

THE BUFFOON OF THE NEW ETERNITIES: JULES LAFORGUE

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