t 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 man