have a sad, consoling grace, with eternal avowals: forever on the same subject, Laforgue retells it in such fashion that it seems dreamed and confessed for the first time. And I think that what we must demand of the translator of dreams is, not to wish to fix forever the fugacity of a thought or air, but to sing the song of the present hour with such frank force that it seems the only one we could hear, the only one we could understand. In the end, perhaps, it is necessary to become reasonable and delight us with the present and with new flowers, indifferent, except as a botanist, to the faded fields. Every epoch of thought, art or sentiment should take a deep delight in itself and go down from the world with the egoism and languor of a superb lake which, smiling upon the old streams, receives them, calms them, and absorbs them.
There was no present for Laforgue, except among a group of friends. He died just as his Moralités Légendaires was coming to birth, but still offered to a minority, and he had just learned from some mouths that these pages consecrated him to live the life of glory among those whom the gods created in their image, they, too, gods and creators. It is a literature entirely new and disconcertingly unexpected, giving the curious sensation (specially rare) that we have never read anything like it; the grape with all its velvet hues in the morning light, but with curious reflections and an air as if the seeds within had become frozen by a breath of ironic wind come from some place farther than the pole.
On a copy of l'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, offered to Bourget (and since thrown among old papers in the quay) Laforgue wrote: "This is only an inter-mezzo. I pray you to wait yet awhile, and give me until my next book";—but he was of those who ever look forward to finding themselves in their next work, the noble unsatisfied who have too much to say ever to believe that they have said other things than prolegomenae and prefaces. If his interrupted work is but a preface, it belongs to those which counterbalance a finished work.
[JEAN MORÉAS]
Raymond de la Tailhède thus exalts Moréas:
Tout un silence d'or vibrant s'est abattu,
Près des sources que des satyres ont troublées,
Claire merveille éclose au profond des vallées,
Si l'oiselet chanteur du bocage s'est tu.
Oubli de flûte, heures de rêves sans alarmes,
Où tu as su trouver pour ton sang amoureux
La douceur d'habiter un séjour odoreux
De roses dont les dieux sylvains te font des armes
Là tu vas composant ces beaux livres, honneur
Du langage français et de la noble Athènes.
[(Tr. 48)]
These verses are romances, that is, of a poet to whom the romantic period is but a witch's night where unreal sonorous gnomes stir, of a poet (this one has talent) who concentrates his efforts to imitate the Greeks of the Anthology through Ronsard, and to steal from Ronsard the secret of his laborious phrase, his botanical epithets, and his sickly rhythm. As for what is exquisite in Ronsard, since that little has passed into tradition and memory, the Romantic school had to neglect it on pain of quickly losing what alone constitutes its originality. There is I know not what of provincialism, of steps against life's current, of the loiterer, in this care for imitation and restoration. Somewhere Moréas sings praise
De ce Sophocle, honneur de la Ferté-Milon,
[(Tr. 49)]