Je ne suis pas "ce gaillard-là!" ni Le Superbe!
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his is not the strident and satiric voice of Corbière, calling Hugo"_Garde National épique_," and Lamartine "_Lacrymatoire d'abonnés_." Itis not Tailhade drawing with rough strokes the people he sees daily inParis, and bursting with guffaws over the Japanese in theirmackintoshes, the West Indian mulatto behind the bar in the Quartier. Itis not Georges Fourest burlesquing in a café; Fourest's guffaw ismagnificent, he is hardly satirical. Tailhade draws from life andindulges in occasional squabbles. Laforgue was a better artist than any of these men save Corbière. He wasnot in the least of their sort. Beardsley's "Under the Hill" was until recently the only successfulattempt to produce "anything like Laforgue" in our tongue. "Under theHill" was issued in a limited edition. Laforgue's _MoralitésLégendaires_ was issued in England by the Ricketts and Hacon press in alimited edition, and there the thing has remained. Laforgue can neverbecome a popular cult because tyros can not imitate him. One may discriminate between Laforgue's tone and that of hiscontemporary French satirists. He is the finest wrought; he is most"verbalist." Bad verbalism is rhetoric, or the use of _cliché_unconsciously, or a mere playing with phrases. But there is goodverbalism, distinct from lyricism or imagism, and in this Laforgue is amaster. He writes not the popular language of any country, but aninternational tongue common to the excessively cultivated, and to thosemore or less familiar with French literature of the first three-fourthsof the nineteenth century. He has done, sketchily and brilliantly, for French literature a work notincomparable to what Flaubert was doing for "France" in _Bouvard andPécuchet_, if one may compare the flight of the butterfly with theprogress of an ox, both proceeding toward the same point of the compass.He has dipped his wings in the dye of scientific terminology. Pierrot_imberbe_ has
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