It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys. There is in it all the restlessness of modern life, the haste to escape from whatever weighs too heavily on the liberty of the moment, that capricious liberty which demands only room enough to hurry itself weary. It is distressingly conscious of the unhappiness of mortality, but it plays, somewhat uneasily, at a disdainful indifference. And it is out of these elements of caprice, fear, contempt, linked together by an embracing laughter, that it makes its existence. _Il n'y a pas de type, il y a la vie,_ Laforgue replies to those who come to him with classical ideals. _Votre idéal est bien vite magnifiquement submergé,_ in life itself, which should form its own art, an art deliberately ephemeral, with the attaching pathos of passing things. There is a great pity at the root of this art of Laforgue: self-pity, which extends, with the artistic sympathy, through mere clearness of vision, across the world. His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as "the laughter of the soul," is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, _Pierrot lunaire,_ and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman's patter. As it is part of his manner not to distinguish between irony and pity, or even belief, we need not attempt to do so. Heine should teach us to understand at least so much of a poet who could not otherwise resemble him less. In Laforgue, sentiment is squeezed out of the world before one begins to play at ball with it. And so, of the two, he is the more hopeless. He has invented a new manner of being René or Werther: an inflexible politeness towards man, woman, and destiny. He composes love-poems hat in hand, and smiles with an exasperating tolerance before all the transformations of the eternal feminine. He is very conscious of death, but his _blague_ of death is, above all things, gentlemanly. He will not permit himself, at any moment, the luxury of dropping the mask: not at any moment. Read this _Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot,_ with the singular pity of its cruelty, before such an imagined dropping of the mask: Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme! Nous lui dirons d'abord, de mon air le moins froid: "La somme des angles d'un triangle, chère âme, Est égale à deux droits." Et si ce cri lui part: "Dieu de Dieu que je t'aime!" "Dieu reconnaîtra les siens." Ou piquée au vif: "Mes claviers out du cœur, tu sera mon seul thème." Moi' "Tout est relatif." De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale: "Ah! tu ne m'aime pas; tant d'autres sont jaloux!" Et moi, d'un œil qui vers l'Inconscient s'emballe: "Merci, pas mal; et vous?