y a one who turned away
from life, he only turned away from the rabble, 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 exuberance. Without
sentiment or romance, nevertheless, he does not suggest ossification
of the spirit. To dart a lance at mythomania is his delight, while
preserving the impassibility of a Parnassian. His travesties of
Hamlet, Lohengrin, Salome, Pan, Perseus enchant, their plastic yet
metallic prose denotes the unique artist; above all they are modern,
they graze the hem of the contemporaneous. From the sublime to the
arabesque 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 a rebours. Old Fletcher sings:

"Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley,
Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."

II

He seems to have been of an umbrageous character. His life was sad and
simple. He was born August 20, 1860, at Montevideo--"Ville en
amphitheatre, toits en terrasses, rues en daumiers, rade enorme"--of
Breton parentage. He died at Paris, 1887. Gustave Kahn, the symbolist
poet, describes Laforgue in his Symbolistes and Decadents as a serious
young man, with sober English manners and an extreme rectitude in the
matter of clothes. Not the metaphysical Narcissus that was once
Maurice Barres--whose early books show the influence of Laforgue. He
adored the philosophy of the Unconscious as set forth by Von Hartmann,
was erudite, collected delicate art, thought much, read widely, and
was an ardent advocate of the Impressionistic painters. I have a
pamphlet by Mederic Dufour, entitled Etude sur l'AEthetique de Jules
Laforgue: une Philosophie de l'Impressionisme, which is interesting,
though far from conclusive, being an attack on the determinism of
Taine, and a defence of Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley. But then we only
formulate our preferences into laws. The best thing in it is the
phrase: "There are no types, there is only humanity," to the wisdom of
which we must heartily subscribe. From 1880 to 1886 Laforgue was
reader to the Empress Augusta at Berlin and was admired by the
cultivated court circle, as his letters to his sister and M.
Ephruss