mitation de Notre-Dame
la Lune, wherein he asks--Mais ou sont les Lunes d'Antan. This Pierrot
lunaire, this buffoon of new and dusty eternities, wrote a sort of
vers libres, which, often breaking off with a smothered sob,
modulates into prose and sings the sorrows and complaints of a world
peopled by fantastic souls, clowns, somnambulists, satyrs, poets,
harlots, dainty girls, Cheret posters, pierrots, kings of pyschopathic
tastes, blithe birds, and sad-coloured cemeteries. The poet is a
mocking demon who rides on clouds dropping epigrams earthward, the
earth that grunts and sweats beneath the sun or cowers and weeps under
the stellar prairies. He mockingly calls himself "The Grand Chancellor
of Analysis." Like Nietzsche he dances when his heart is heavy, and
trills his roundelays and his gamut of rancorous flowers with an
enigmatic smile on his lips. It is a strange and disquieting music, a
pageantry of essences, this verse with its resonance of emerald.
Appearing in fugitive fashion, it was gathered into a single volume
through the efforts of friends and with the Moralites legendaires
comprises his life-work, for we can hardly include the Melanges
posthumes, which consist of scraps and fragments (published in 1903)
together with some letters, not a very weighty addition to the dead
poet's fame. His translations of Walt Whitman I've not seen. Perhaps
his verse is doomed; it was born with the hectic flush of early
dissolution, but it is safe to predict that as long as lovers of rare
literature exist the volume of prose will survive. It has for the
gourmet of style an unending charm, the charm en sourdine of its
creator, to whom a falling leaf or an empire in dissolution was of
equal value. "His work," wrote Mr. Symons, "has the fatal evasiveness
of those who shrink from remembering the one thing which they are
unable to forget. Coming as he does after Rimbaud, turning the
divination of the other into theories, into achieved results, he is
the eternally grown-up nature to the point of self-negation, as the
other is the eternal enfant terrible." Tout etait pour le vieux dans
le meilleur des mondes, Laforgue would have cried in the epigram of
Paul Bourget.

The prose of Jules Laforgue recalls to me his description of the
orchestra in Salome, the fourth of the Moralites legendaires. Sur un
mode allegre et fataliste, un orchestre aux instruments d'ivoire
improvisait une petite overture unanime. That his syllables are of
iv