moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new
buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a
buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a
metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was who extorted
his homage. "All is relative," was his war-cry on schools and codes
and generalisations. His urbanity never deserted him, though it was an
exasperated urbanity. His was an art of the nerves. Arthur Symons has
spoken of his "icy ecstasy" and Maurice Maeterlinck described his
laughter as "laughter of the soul." Like Chopin or Watteau, he danced
on roses and thorns. All three were consumptives and the aura of decay
floats about their work; all three suffered from the nostalgia of the
impossible. The morbid decadent aquafortist that is revealed in the
corroding etchings of Laforgue is germane to men in whom irony and
pity are perpetually disputing. We think of Heine and his
bitter-sweetness. Again with Zarathustra, Laforgue could say: "I do
not give alms. I am not poor enough for that." He possesses the sixth
sense of infinity. A cosmical jester, his badinage is well-nigh
dolorous. His verse and prose form a series of personal variations.
The lyric in him is through some temperamental twist reversed.
Fantastic dreams overflow his reality, and he always dreams with
wide-open eyes. Watteau's l'Indifferent! A philosophical vaudevillist,
he juggles with such themes as a metaphysical Armida, the moon and her
minion, Pierrot; with celestial spasms and the odour of mortality, or
the universal sigh, the autumnal refrains of Chopin, and the monotony
of love. "Life is quotidian!" he has sung, and women are the very
symbol of sameness, that is their tragedy--or comedy. "Stability thy
name is Woman!" exclaims the Hamlet of this most spiritual among
parodists.

One never gets him with his back to the wall. He vanishes in the
shining cloud of a witty abstraction when cornered. His prose is full
of winged neologisms, his poetry heavy with the metaphysics of ennui.
Remy de Gourmont speaks of his magnificent work as the prelude to an
oratorio achieved in silence. Laforgue, himself, called it an
intermezzo, and in truth it is little more. His intellectual
sensibility and his elemental soul make for mystifications. As if he
knew the frailness of his tenure on life, he sought azure and
elliptical routes. He would have welcomed Maeterlinck's test question:
"Are you of those who name or those who only repea