[Fowlie is one of the most respected and versatile critics of French literature. His works include translations of major dramatists and poets of France as well as critical studies of the major figures and movements of French letters. In the following excerpt, Fowlie discusses the nature of parody and the treatment of women and love in Moral Tales.]

A deep sentimental impulse is behind Laforgue's poetry, but a sense of modesty keeps him from revealing himself directly. What might be confession and pure sentiment is always being converted into something else by irony. He is close to Baudelaire in his initial impulse to confess, but he developed, for self-protection, a far more prevalent use of irony than Baudelaire. His first twenty-nine poems, published after his death as Le Sanglot de la Terre, are the easiest to read and the most familiar to readers of Baudelaire in their litanies of "spleen" and the various exorcisms he practices to recover from the spleens. There are many pictures of Paris, more localized and less universal than Baudelaire's, and cosmological visions in which the Earth is seen as some abysmal mediocrity, a dying star in the vertigoes of universes. The central image is of the heart—the heart of a solitary man, amassing so much remorse and adoration that it burns and bleeds like a rose window in a cathedral (cf. Rosace en vitrail). The poet comes to read into this symbol of the hypertrophied heart the illusion of life. Laforgue is really considering the heart of the Earth and his poem is the passion of the Earth, but his intelligence keeps a careful watch over his heart. No matter how cosmic his vision becomes, he always ends by parodying his own anguish. He is the type of passionate intellectual, of a "Hamlet without a sword," as Camille Mauclair called him, who refuses to take himself seriously and whose most heartfelt cries are always silenced by the clown's grimace. Not even the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer which he read in Paris, and that of Hartmann which he read later in Germany, prevented his writing verse which is essentially a parody of his sensibility. . . .

The parody of his own sensibility becomes, in Laforgue's Moralités Légendaires, the parody of some of the great myths of humanity. He recapitulates the stories of the masters: Shakespeare's Hamlet, Wagner's Lohengrin, Mallarmé's Pan, Flaubert's Salomé, and alters them in order to infuse new meanings into them. No such thing as a pure hero exists for Laforgue. He sees the so-called heroes as ordinary creatures, and gives them psychological characteristics of his Pierrots: nervousness, anxiety, an ephemeral existence. By parody and by anachronism he creates new characters out of the old. Each "morality" defines a concentrated action, a single crisis, which gives it a highly dramatic tone. Will Lohengrin make up his mind to submit to love? This is the question propounded in one of the moralités, where the landscape, moonlit and chaste, is in itself a symbol of renunciation.

The legend of Hamlet is the best known of the volume and the one in which Laforgue has perhaps described himself the most accurately. He has preserved some of the exterior Shakespearean elements: the players' scene and the graveyard scene, for example. Laforgue the poet and Shakespeare's Hamlet are alike in their propensity for dreaming and in their unadaptableness to life because of their metaphysics. Montaigne exists in Hamlet, as Schopenhauer and Hartmann, in Laforgue. Such a sense of the infinite lives in both of them that they found it hard to take the world seriously and to face action with any feelings other than those of grave uncertainty. Both are so wise in their capacity for pure analysis, that they spend all their time perceiving the causes of evil without considering the remedies. The traits of the contemplative thinker and the ironist in both Laforgue and Hamlet are so strong that even their dreams are fictionalized and become elaborate means by which to avoid any save purely gratuitous actions, such as Lafcadio in Gide's Caves du Vatican might commit. Hamlet, invested with Pierrot's traits, turns into a serious clown, macabre, half-insane, who, in his actor's cavortings, unites irony and metaphysics.

Les Moralités Légendaires reveal much more than the melancholy musings of Laforgue in exile. They are a new literary genre, the "tales of Voltaire of symbolism," as Mallarmé called them, and the testament of a combined intellectual-sentimental life. Hamlet, as he undertakes to write his drama of revenge, is caught by a sense of literary ambition. He gives up being Hamlet in order to become the poet and watch himself live during his preoccupation with literary vanity. This is the legend also of Jules Laforgue, whose exterior life appears so reduced, so devoid of the usual adventures and activities, and so obscured by his sombre costume and by the bad fortune which accompanied him.

The most deeply hidden theme in his work, and probably the most important for an understanding of Laforgue as man and poet, is that of woman and love. He never concealed the anguish he felt over his celibacy. The word itself célibat occurs in his verse, but he makes almost no real confidences, no personal remarks that could help an understanding of his condition. He was a recluse and always depressed by his solitude. He feared, not love, but the deceit of love. He worried for fear that love was always a deceit of nature and denounced what he believed to be the false myth of woman—very much the same myth which Mme Simone de Beauvoir denounced recently in her study, Le Deuxième Sexe, in which she quotes Laforgue. He speaks against the divinization of woman, against the mystery with which she has been surrounded. Either he vituperates against what he believes her falseness, or regrets plaintively the disappearance of man's comradeship with woman, of a simple natural relationship between the sexes. In his associations with woman, Laforgue unquestionably feared failure and disgust, so he often turned against women, hurting and wounding them. Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia is quite in keeping with Laforgue's. Many of his heroines in Moralités Légendaires are young girls, characterized by innocency and tenderness: Ophélie, Elsa, Salomé, Syrinx, who announce the young girl heroines of Giraudoux.

With Rimbaud, but to a lesser degree, Laforgue is the innovator of a modern poetic sensibility which is present in the work of such poets as Léon-Paul Fargue, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Cocteau. Before T. S. Eliot called attention to Laforgue, by acknowledging the major poetic debt he owed him, George Moore and Arthur Symons had written of him, in 1891 and 1897 respectively. On the whole, the surrealists disapproved of Laforgue. Lisez Rimbaud. Ne lisez pas Laforgue, is their admonition, reprinted in the volume of Documents Surréalistes of 1948. Jean Cocteau, in his recent book, La Difficulté d'Etre, tells the story of Picasso, Max Jacob and Apollinaire once shouting in the streets of Montmartre: Vive Rimbaud. A bas Laforgue! Jean-Louis Barrault played Laforgue's Hamlet in a version adapted for the stage in 1939. And today theses are being written on Laforgue at the Sorbonne, especially by English and American scholars. Miss Enid Starkie, the British scholar and critic, who has already published works on Rimbaud and Baudelaire, is now preparing one on Laforgue. His particular sensibility is too delicate, too "precious" perhaps, to influence the younger French poets today. Rimbaud's revolt was more total and more effective, and his influence is still the stronger.