It is not always true that the greatest poet of an age is the most representative of his age. All of the most interesting French poetry from the seventies of the last century to our own day is derivative from Baudelaire. Baudelaire was a great poet, and at his greatest is almost contradictory to his age; perhaps when a much longer span of time has elapsed, it will be possible to see him as representative, but certainly not of his own limited period of time as we can see it in this short perspective of the time since his death. “Whilst Verlaine and Rimbaud continued Baudelaire in the order of sentiment and sensation,” says Paul Valéry, “Mallarmé prolonged his work in the domain of perfection and poetic purity.” 2 We may add that Laforgue and Corbière prolonged his work in the domain of self-consciousness; and the disintegration and the strife between thought and feeling is more clearly visible in these minor men than in the master, who resisted the corrosion of his own time better than could the minor men.
Jules Laforgue was a young man who died at the age of twenty-seven in the year 1877. He was very poor, he became reader to a German princess, and during his residence in Berlin acquired the language and a good deal of German philosophy, especially Kant, Schopenhauer and Hartmann. He married a young English governess, and had, or acquired, some knowledge of her language and literature also. He was tuberculous, and died in poverty; I believe that his widow died not long after him. 3 I think that the first note about him in English was by Sir Edmund Gosse; though I was indebted to the attractive study by Mr. Arthur Symons in his book The Symbolist Movement. 4 His poetry, and even his prose, is of course immature. He was a young man of ardent feelings, of an active intellect fascinated by abstractions, and with a remarkable gift for metaphysical emotion. He had a passionate craving for order: that is, that every feeling should have its intellectual equivalent, its philosophical justification, and that every idea should have its emotional equivalent, its sentimental justification. The world which could have satisfied his nature, therefore, was Dante’s world; but there were no golden builders 5 of such a world in Paris or Berlin in the seventies. The disintegration of which I have spoken in connexion with Donne and Crashaw reached a much more advanced stage with Laforgue: for Laforgue, life was consciously divided into thought and feeling; but his feelings were such as required an intellectual completion, a beatitude, and the philosophical systems which he embraced were so much feltas to require a sensuous completion. The struggle of such a man as D. H. Lawrence might be expressed in somewhat the same terms, perhaps; though the two men were in themselves extremely different, and Lawrence’s way of salvation, or what he thought the way of salvation, could never have been Laforgue’s. It is only the world they lived in, and their affliction by it, that has any resemblance. The metaphysicality of Laforgue extends in two directions: the intellectualising of the sensibility and the emotionalising of the idea. Laforgue’s irony, as in his fine prose Hamletin the volume called Moralités Légendaires, an irony employed against himself, ensues from the conflict. – If (says Laertes when he meets Hamlet at the grave of Ophelia), you were not a wretched madman, and quite irresponsible according to the most recent investigations of medical science, you would be obliged to give me immediate satisfaction for the death of my honourable father and my sister-that highly accomplished young woman . . .
– O Laertes, that’s all one to me. But be sure that I allow for your point of view . . .
– Gracious Heaven, (says Laertes) what lack of any moral sense! . . . . They sent to search for the corpse...
