BOOKS

L'Art sans Poitrine

BY PETER QUENNELL ON the last day of December, 1886, at the Church of St. Barnabas, Addison Road, London, Jules Laforgue, the rising young Symbolist poet, then in his twenty-seventh year, Was married to a Miss Leah Lee, a youthful teacher of English whom he had met abroad— 'very thin [he wrote to his sister before the mar- riage], very, very English, with chestnut hair . . . a childish face, a mischievous smile and great tar-coloured, forever astonished eyes. . . .' Six decades later, the author of Four Quartets Chose to be married in the same building. A strange coincidence—and, that it was no more than a Coincidence I have been assured by Mr. Eliot him- self; for Laforgue was one of the literary ancestors who dominated his early poetic life; and, although he was beginning to outgrow Laforgue's influence at the time when he wrote The Waste Land, their relationship, while he was still producing such poems as Pru f rock, Portrait of a Lady, Conversa- tion Galante -arid La Figlia the Piange, was evi- dently very close indeed. Here it is worth, noticing that Eliot learned French, soon after he left Har- vard, from the exquisite novelist Alain-Fournier, and that Alain-Fournier belonged to the select band of those who cherished Jules Laforgue's memory. By comparison (he told Jacques Riviere) he regarded Rimbaud as an 'incomplete genius.' On almost every page of Laforgue's poems he found phrases that perfectly evoked a `vision'— a vision that exceeded and transcended the actual Words the visionary poet had employed.

Considering his influence on his later poets, Laforgue's life-span was pathetically brief. Born in 1860 of Breton parents at the capital of Uruguay, he returned to France in 1866 and was educated first of all at Tarbes, afterwards at a famous Parisian school. As a youth he attracted the attention of the well-known art-collector Charles Ephrussi (of whom. Proust appears, to have made some use while he was elaborating his memorable portrait of Swann); and Ephrussi, besides employing him as his secretary and re- search assistant, introduced him to the new Impressionist painters and, later, with the help of the fashionable storyteller Paul Bourget, recom- mended him for a more remunerative post. To- wards the end of 1881, Laforgue became French reader to the Empress Augusta of Germany, a somewhat fantastic and capricious personage, whom he continued to serve until 1886. But during that year he met Leah Lee and decided to aban- don his appointment and settle down again in Paris—marriage, he thought, would 'prevent waste of time, vague restless moods and create a citadel about the writer.' The following August, alas, he died in his sleep, carried off by an"obstinate cold' —caught, he believed, as he travelled home across the English Channel—which afterwards proved to be advanced tuberculosis. Latterly, he had been poor and harassed by debt. Leah Laforgue, who had also contracted the disease, died at Menton .n 1888. Such is the simple outline of an extraordinarily active and disinterested career. Unlike his fellow Symbolist Tristan Corbiere, Laforgue never com- posed his own epitaph; yet nearly everything he wrote was related to his immediate experience of his life, and many of his finest poems and tales have a vivid autobiographical colouring. Particu- larly characteristic is the mocking Avertisseinent with which he prefaced Des Flews de Bonne Volonte:

Mon p&e (un dur par limidite) Est mort avec un profil severe; J'avais presque pas cousin ma mere, Et donc vers vingi ans je suis reste.

Alars, jai fait•dla litterature,

Mais le Demon de la Verite

Siff lotait tour l'temps a mes cotes: 'Pauvre! as-tu fini tes ecritures. . .

A romantic inalgre lui and yet an intellectual cynic, a sensuous lover of life and yet a puritanical idealist, Laforgue did not profess to command an extensive range of literary themes. But those few themes he explores and re-explores with admir- able subtlety and pertinacity. He reverences litera- ture, but cannot lose sight of its inherent liniitations—he does not imagine, as Rimbaud imagined, that the power of words was capable of transfiguring the earth; he is deeply in love with the idea of love, but is conscious that the idea he cherishes has little reference to the naked physical fact. In his collection of tales, Moralites Legendaires, frustrated idealism is his favourite subject; and the best of these stories, Lohengrin, fils de Parsifal, gives the familiar legend an ingen- iously sardonic twist; for the Swan Knight, once he has rescued Elsa—a delicious young person, 'nubile a croquer'—finds that he is expected to marry his beloved, and their honeymoon proves to be an anti-climax that involves the spoliation of all his hopes and dreams. At length the devoted swan answers his desperate appeal, and Lohengrin rides through the window into the freedom of the sky, 'towards the Heights of Metaphysical Love, towards those glacier-mirrors that never a young girl can breathe upon and cloud, tracing with a finger in the steam her name and the date.'

For reasons that it might be interesting to trace but that cannot be discussed here, Laforgue has gained an especial hold over American writers of the present day. Five years ago we had Mr. Walren Ramsay's Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheri- tance; and that informative biography has now been succeeded by two courageous attempts at literal translation, Miss Patricia Terry's version of the Poems* (which she publishes with a parallel French text) and Mr. William Jay Smith's volume of Selected Writings.' Since it includes his prose, I prefer the,second of the two; for Laforgue's verse, in which he achieved his effects, as he mastered the technique of very libre, by using the idiom of com- mon speech and adapting and parodying the re-

frains of popular songs, sets even the most sensi- tive translator a practically insoluble problem. So much depends on the peculiar rhythm of his poems, with their melancholy individual music : on the mixture of tenderness and irony that characterises his view of the humdrum everyday world : lastly, on the poet's choice of subjects, from which he has banished nearly every theme dear to his Romantic predecessors, writing not of mountains and torrents, God, immortality and the fate of Man, but of the thousand-and-one petty joys and sorrows that make up the sum of ordinary human experience. Most poets inhabit a solitude.- Laforgue is doubly alone amid familiar sounds and sights—in a hotel room, listening to a distant piano, travelling along• a deserted high- road where the telegraph-wires sigh and whistle, in a provincial street when dusk has begun to fall, in a railway station or beside a quay from which train or lake-steamer has just departed. For it is in those surroundings that the modern Hamlet comes face to face with his own solitary image. and catches a glimpse of himself as he aspires to be, against the subfuse background of con- temporary life as it is: f aural passe ma vie le long des quaffs

A faillir neembarquer

Dans de hien funestes histoires, Tout cela pour l'amour De mon cur fort de la gloire d'amou?

0! qu'ils sons pittoresques les trains manques! . . .

• .

It is far less difficult to come to terms with his prose-writings, which provide an almost equally rewarding field; and, In addition to the sixteen poems that he translates, Mr. Jay Smith has rend- ered a large /number of Laforgue's essays—frag- ments of art-criticism, studies of contemporary poets, sketches of provincial landscapes and his fascinating records (which remained unpublished until 1922) of the curious life that he led at the German court. The two Moralites Legendaires that the translator has selected—Hamlet and Le Miracle des Roses—are, in my opinion, not the best. But enough of Laforgue has been translated to give the English reading public a genuine impression of the writer. Laforgue had an exquisite gift, though he worked within rather narrow limits. But then, the limitations of his talents were very often self-ordained. His literary ideal, he said, was 'Part sans poitrine'—slender, bosomless art,- without rhetorical flourishes or superfluous curves; his muse was to be a nymph, not an exuberant Wagnerian goddess. And it is by the standards he so carefully drew up for him- self that we should judge the verse and prose he bequeathed to posterity:

* POEMS OF JULES LAFOROUE. Translated by Patricia Terry. Foreword by Henri Peyre. (University of California Press and C.U.P., 13s. 6d.) t SELECTED WRITINGS OF JULES LAFORGUE. Edited and translated by William Jay Smith. (Grove Press_ New York : $1.75.)