Hannoosh - Laforgue - LT

The Poet as Art Critic: Laforgue's Aesthetic Theory
Author(s): Michele Hannoosh

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 79, No. 3 (Jul., 1984), pp. 553-569
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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THE POET AS ART CRITIC:
LAFORGUE'S AESTHETIC THEORY
'Enfin on verra, et vous verrez .... J'aurai du moins reve quej'etai

definitif.'1 Laforgue made this lighthearted and characteristically ir
letter to his friend and former employer Charles Ephrussi in Decem
irony, however, should be regarded more as a rhetorical defen
indication of his indifference in the matter, for the circumstances su
urgency than the words admit. Ephrussi was Laforgue's most import
contact with both the contemporary art world (academic and avant-g
world of art historical studies, and in matters concerning the visual a
to occupy the position of mentor. Ephrussi had not yet begun his ten
the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, but he already had great influence with
influence that he had frequently used to get Laforgue's critical essay
What Laforgue had to tell him in this letter involved what he consid
ambitious critical project to date: his venture into the domain of aesth
effort to formulate a comprehensive and systematic aesthetic theory.
In the same letter, he described the project thus:
Vous ai-je dit que dans ces vingt jours, enferme, cloitre dans ce chateau de
infiniment pense et travaille? J'ai relu les esthetiques diverses, Hegel, S
Leveque, Taine - dans un etat de cerveau inconnu depuis mes dix-huit
nationale.Je me suis recueilli, et dans une nuit, de o1 du soir a 4 du matin,
des Oliviers, SaintJean a Pathmos, Platon au cap Sunium, Bouddha sous l
j'ai ecrit en dix pages les principes metaphysiques de l'Esthetique nouvelle, u
s'accorde avec l'Inconscient de Hartmann, le transformisme de Darwi
Helmholtz.
Ma methode, ou plut6t ma divination est-elle enfantine, ou ai-je enfin la verite sur cette
eternelle question du Beau? - On le verra. En tout cas, c'est tres nouveau, ca touche aux
problemes derniers de la pensee humaine et ca n'est en desaccord ni avec la physiologie
optique moderne, ni avec les travaux de psychologie les plus avances, et ca explique le genie
spontane, ce sur quoi Taine se tait, etc. (0. C., v, 6-6 i)
The essay, entitled 'L'Art moderne en Allemagne', never made it into the presti-
gious Gazette, and in fact did not appear until 1895, twelve years after Laforgue wrote
it and eight years after he died, as one of his many posthumous papers that Felix
Feneon edited and published regularly over the course of several years in the various
reviews to which he contributed.3 Laforgue's posthumous papers included two other
documents relating to his art theory: I. Several pages of notes that can be identified
as reading-notes (of Renan's second Dialogue philosophique, 'Probabilites', and
1 Letter 80 to Ephrussi, I2 December 1883, in (Euvres completes dejules Laforgue, edited by GeorgesJean-
Aubry (Paris, 1925), v, 6I. This edition is referred to as O.C.
2 Laforgue had already published four articles in the Gazette and its supplement, La Chronique des arts et de
la curiosite.
3 Notably Entretiens politiques et littiraires, La Revue blanche, and La Revue anarchiste. 'L'Art moderne en
Allemagne' appeared in the Revue blanche, 9, no. 56 (i October 1895), 291-300. Camille Mauclair
reproduced it in the infamous Melanges posthumes volume of 903. See note 4.
554 Laforgue's Aesthetic Theory
Taine's De l'ideal dans l'art), rough jottings for 'L'Art moderne en Allemagne'; and
2. The better-known essay defending and justifying Impressionism.4
Some of the distinguished names that Laforgue cites suggest a formidable line of
predecessors, and his own theoretical writings do not suffice to win for him a place
among them. But he had read widely in philosophy and aesthetics, as the letter
acknowledges and his notes testify, and he had a passionate interest in the visual
arts, especially modern painting. These credentials, combined with a sensitive
critical intelligence, qualified him to some extent for such an ambitious undertaking.
Laforgue's views are frequently represented by the pithy phrases which occur
throughout the theoretical writings and which, removed from their context, suggest
a rather whimsical and slapdash aesthetic creed: 'Le principe esthetique est
l'anarchie meme de la vie: laissez faire, laissez passer;... l'Inconscient souffle oiu il
veut, le genie "saura reconnaitre les siens"', for example ('L'Art moderne en
Allemagne', pp. 295-96). But these formulas, by their obvious allusion to (and
distortion of) fixed literary models, call attention to themselves as the outrageous
rallying cries that they are, and they should not be taken for his whole theory.
Laforgue took his project more seriously than these fanciful phrases by themselves
imply, and he worked out a whole system that not only addressed some of the major
issues of his time but also provided one of the more interesting and perceptive
interpretations of Impressionism. He sought to do for aesthetic theory what his
model Hartmann had attempted more generally for philosophy, namely, to recon-
cile the two major strains of late nineteenth-century thought, the spiritual and the
scientific mentalities.
Laforgue's writings on art seem to have fared better with the few art historians
who have considered them than with literary critics, who have treated them with
some condescension. Linda Nochlin sees the essay on Impressionism as 'remarkable
... one of the earliest and most penetrating analyses of the Impressionist movement
and its implications . .. the first coherent expression of the modern view of art', and
Richard Shiffgives Laforgue credit for having formulated one of the more intelligent
theories of Impressionism. On the side of the literary critics, however, A. G.
Lehmann sees in the same essay 'glaring deficiencies' and 'one-sidedness'. Warren
Ramsey is slightly kinder but still considers the art theory interesting mainly in
terms of Laforgue's own poetry, although he does not discuss the relation between
them.Jose Argiielles allows Laforgue 'incredible depth and insight' but feels that his
thesis 'contains the seeds of its own destruction - the ultimate helplessness of
remaining a victim of the moment'. This last point also disturbs James Hiddleston,
who feels that Laforgue has replaced beauty with the 'actuel', making for a more
superficial art than that which pursues an absolute. He also calls Laforgue's theory
'hardly convincing' and makes the very accurate point that, as an art critic,
4 The notes appeared in the Revue blanche, I I, no. 84 (I December 1896), 48 -88, as 'Notes d'esth6tique'.
Feneon's publishing project was cut short before he got to the Impressionism essay, and thus it did not
appear until 1903, when Mauclair edited it for the Melanges posthumes volume. Mauclair's editing of
Laforgue's papers was, in all other instances, extremely sloppy and careless, and so I hesitate to accept his
version as definitive. He often omitted whole passages, rearranged others, added his own headings, and
made significant errors in transcription. Unfortunately, the manuscript ofthis essay has not been located,
although it still seems to exist, having appeared on the Paris market not long ago.
MICHELE HANNOOSH
555
Laforgue never attained the stature of Baudelaire.5 Laforgue's view

to certain objections in particular. For example, he seems to u
critical pluralism and to provide no means by which to judge a wo
on the new seems to discredit works of the past; his imperative of o
ignore the basic given of the artist's materials (paint and colour);
Unconscious seems contrived and inappropriate to his subject;
Lamarckian error of believing that acquired traits can be transmit
of the ephemeral seems to doom all artistic endeavour to absurdit
that these objections can be answered to some extent by an examina
not only in itself but also with respect to the theories that motivat
those ideas in relation to which he conceived and elaborated his ow
this light, his views appear coherent and consistent with one anot
satisfactory as a comprehensive theory of the beautiful; more imp
reveal a mind that was remarkably sensitive to the aesthetic
nineteenth century and to the first stirrings of modernism.
Laforgue has obligingly identified most of his sources in the let
cited above: the aesthetic writings of Hegel, Schelling, Saisset, Lev
and, more generally, the basic concepts of Hartmann, Darwin,
acknowledging such illustrious antecedents, he presents himself as
than he probably was, for in the ultimate design certain stran
prominently, and the others that he names merely relate in one w
them. Hartmann and Taine dominate his aesthetic thought, an
most of my attention to their ideas and to Laforgue's relation to
Schelling are sometimes perceptible, but usually they appear in
those of Hartmann, whose avowed debt to Schelling was enorm
Leveque have little importance for Laforgue's theory except for p
an idealist point of view with which he can take issue.7 On t
Helmholtz, by his work in the physiology of perception, furnishe
scientific and psychological support for his aesthetic argument.
5 Linda Nochlin makes these remarks in her introduction to the English trans
Impressionism essay published in the Sources and Documents series (Impressionism a
i874-9g04 (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), p. 15). I would here like to acknowledge Rich
'The End of Impressionism. A Study in Theories of Artistic Expression', Art Qu
I978), 338-78, not only for the comment on Laforgue cited here but also for hi
Impressionist theory. For the other quotations, see A. G. Lehmann's important The
France 1885-1895 (Oxford, 1968), p. I 9; Warren Ramsey,Jules Laforgue and the Ironic
1959), p. 9 ; Jose Argiielles, Charles Henry and the Formation of a Psychophysical Ae
pp. 72 and 75; andJames Hiddleston, Laforgue et Baudelaire (Lexington, Kentucky
92.
6 On the evidence of some pages of notes concerning Schelling, scholars have long maintained that
Laforgue had plans for an essay on him. The 'notes on Schelling', however, come mostly from passages
quoted in Hartmann, especially his Philosophie de l'Inconscient (Paris, 1877), I, 399. The 'Schelling' written
on the manuscript pages is in Mauclair's handwriting, not Laforgue's. Laforgue certainly read Schelling,
for he says as much in his letters, but I suspect that most of his views on Schelling came through the
intermediary of Hartmann.
7 Charles Leveque, La Science du beau (Paris, 186 I); Emile Saisset, L 'Ame et la vie, suivi d'un examen critique de
l'esthetiquefranfaise (Paris, I864). Of Leveque, Flaubert commented: 'Quel cretin! . . . Mais qu'ils sont
droles les universitaires, du moment qu'ils se melent de l'art' (Letter to Mme Roger des Genettes, 1872,
quoted in T. M. Mustoxidi, Histoire de l'esthetiquefranfaise I700-I90O (New York, 1968), p. I48).
Background: 'Je me suis amuse a en deduire une esthetique'8

Laforgue's thought in general owed much to the elaborate system constructed by
Eduard von Hartmann in his Philosophy of the Unconscious, and every essay on him
rightly mentions this debt.9 With respect to the arts in particular, Laforgue
fortunately did not adopt Hartmann's somewhat trite and in any case scanty
comments on aesthetics; rather, he saw in Hartmann's system certain aesthetic
implications, and he developed them into a theory of his own, bringing into play his
own visual sensibility and his understanding of the physiology of perception.
In an effort to reconcile traditional German philosophy with the scientific
discoveries of the nineteenth century, Hartmann sought to formulate and verify a
comprehensive metaphysics by means of scientific induction. His philosophy was
inspired by Schelling's theory of an unconscious activity out of which both nature
and human consciousness emerge. On this foundation he built his system with
material taken from the natural and historical sciences, both of which had advanced
considerably as fields of study in the preceding half-century. From his observation of
nature, he inferred an intelligent, teleological power governing all of life. This force,
although purposive (working toward a goal) and intelligent (aware of this goal), was
not present to human consciousness, yet it was at the same time the principle of
human consciousness. Thus he called it the Unconscious. Hartmann's term has
Freudian overtones for us, and so I feel compelled to stress that the Hartman
Unconscious was not only a psychological phenomenon but also - and m
importantly, in his view - a metaphysical one. Unlike Schopenhauer's Will, w
which concept it is most frequently allied, Hartmann's Unconscious is omniscient
and infallible rather than blind and evil. It has a plan that actualizes itself in histor
both human history and natural history, progressively moving toward its go
consciousness, the perfection of the species, the elimination of human misery.10
According to Hartmann, unconscious activity manifests itself in every aspect o
human experience, biological, sexual, social, religious, moral, aesthetic, and so on,
each of which strives in its own way toward the goal of the Unconscious.
examines all of these at length and gives painfully detailed examples from every lev
of organism and every relevant thinker. But with respect to aesthetic judgement an
artistic creation, he limits himself to evoking the familiar notions of aesthe
intuition and creative imagination, respectively, and ignores the more urgen
question of how these indeed contribute to the goal of the Unconscious. Laforgue'
theory addressed precisely this issue and described an evolutionary aesthetic that
tried tojustify both philosophically and scientifically.
Laforgue did not formulate his ideas in a coherent theory until three years after
initial reading of Hartmann, and his experience during that period helped to dire
and to focus his thoughts. One such experience, to which I have already alluded, w
8 Letter io to Kahn, 28 February I884, in Lettres a un ami i880-i886 (Paris, I94I), p. 60.
9 Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewufiten first appeared in Germany in 1869, and the French translat
in 1877. Laforgue read Hartmann in the winter of 880-8I. It is likely that he did soon the urging of
Bourget, who had read the work in 1879 and who had a great influence on Laforgue at this time.
anecdote that has him carrying the work around with him to cafes and parks is quaint but defini
suspect. Hartmann's two heavy, massive volumes are not easily portable!
10 This should not be confused with the nineteenth century's optimistic faith in progress. On
contrary, the 'progress' in question involves increasing pessimism. The illusion that happines
somehow attainable, in one's lifetime, in an afterlife, or in future generations, is gradually dispel
through the progress of pessimistic consciousness.
MICHELE HANNOOSH 557
his position as secretary to Ephrussi in I88I durin

book on Diirer, and through him, Laforgue's introd
criticism and to Impressionist painting. Ephrussi he
art world of the time and he was one of the first g
paintings. During Laforgue's first lonely days in Ge
in minute detail the treasures of Ephrussi's col
Laforgue's intellectual development during this
Charles Henry, whose system of scientific aesthetics
the neo-Impressionist group, especially Seurat and S
Laforgue met Henry during the time that he was r
of I880-81. Henry had extensive knowledge of
physicists, notably Fechner and Helmholtz, and
psychology and physiology of sensation. Laforgu
names in Hartmann, who mentions them a few tim
Henry would certainly have enhanced his understan
to mention Henry in his list of sources, an omissio
Henry did not write his aesthetic treatise until two
fact Henry should be understood in the mention
familiarity with Helmholtz's psychophysical theorie
in the letter as 'la physiologie optique moderne', cam
The relatively new science of psychophysics, descr
I860, studied the nature of perception, the relat
states of mind, that is to say, between an outer sti
reaction.12 Positivist psychology recognized the
proceeded to elaborate them, namely, that a phenom
observer and the thing observed, that the physical
ding functions of one another and two sides of a sin
impression, the fusion of external object and experie
experience, the primary truth, and the basis of all
this in detail with respect to sound and optics and
arts. His investigation of the mechanism by which
senses and is represented in the mind led him to
music and painting and prepared the way fo
Impressionism.
Helmholtz formulated a complex theory of vision t
perception, the process by which external impre
nerves to the brain. He furthered the theory of Th
three kinds of nerve fibres exist in the eye. One of t
waves and thus produces the sensation of red, anoth
11 See letter 9 to Ephrussi, 5 December i88i (O.C., v, 42). Lafor

lingers over each, evoking a colour, a subject, a style.
12 In his Impressionism notes, Laforgue parenthetically menti
impressions to the stimuli that elicit them: 'la loi de Fechner, la p
raison inverse des intensites' (Melanges posthumes, pp. 141-4
Helmholtz, who discusses it, or from Henry, if not from Fechne
13 The relationship between the positive psychologists and th
exemplified in the work of Theodule Ribot, one of the first F
virtually introduced the German psychophysicists to the Fren
allemande contemporaine (Paris, 1879), in which he described their
length and produces the sensation of green, and a third is sensitive to the shortest
light waves and produces the sensation of violet. The colour that light waves appear
is a function of their length, for this determines which nerve fibre will be affected by
them. The difference in our perceptions of colour depends on which kind of nerve
fibre is excited and activated.
Helmholtz applied his research in physiological optics to the procedure and the
effects of painting, and certain of his ideas relate closely to the Impressionist
manner. Laforgue's discussion, in his Impressionism essay, of the physiological
composition of the eye and its processes reflects a familiarity with some of Helm-
holtz's points. First, Helmholtz maintains that the most effective means of con-
veying depth is aerial perspective; relative distances and spatial relations can be
rendered by gradation of colour, because of the haziness of the atmosphere between
the viewer and the object viewed. As we shall see later, Laforgue proposes this
method in lieu of the abstraction of linear perspective.
Secondly, Helmholtz conceived of the artist as a kind of translator who does not
render a copy of the object but rather produces the same impression that the object
would have on an observer: 'An artist cannot copy nature; he must translate it.'14
The artist must try to convey, by the materials and the means at his disposal, the
impression that real objects produce. Since his materials do not have the intensity of
brightness and of colour that nature does, he must make adjustments in order to
compensate for this deficiency: thus Helmholtz cites the need for contrasting tones,
shading, and 'imitating the action of the light upon the eyes' (p. 3 3). Laforgue draws on
this argument when he justifies the Impressionists' technical innovations: he
maintains that the conventions of painting are a kind of language by which the artist
translates his impression; he argues that this language does not equal the reality that
it translates, and that it, being in this way a convention, is subject to revision.
Thirdly, Helmholtz calls attention to the importance of the artist's physiological
constitution in his perception of colour. Although different colours are real phe-
nomena, caused by differences in the composition of objects, the way that colours
appear depends chiefly on the constitution of the viewer's nervous system. This
applies not only to the general quality of the painter's optic nerve, but also to the
immediate condition of the eye. As an example, Helmholtz describes the phe-
nomenon of successive contrasts: as the artist changes the direction of his gaze, his
eye is affected by each colour that it encounters, and thus his perception of one
colour alters his perception of the next, and so on. Laforgue makes a similar
observation to support his argument that the artist's impression of the scene he
views is continuously changing.
Helmholtz's theory does not include the evolutionary theme that Laforgue's does,
but he does imply that the eye, although not a perfect instrument, has gradually
adapted to its principal function of analysing light. He suggests that the practical
adaptation of the eye might be studied in relation to Darwin's theory of the
progressive perfection of organisms.15 He does not speculate on this, but Charles
Henry later made it a foundation of his own system of aesthetics.
14 'The Relation of Optics to Painting', in Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, edited by Russell
Kahl (Middletown, Connecticut, I97 ), p. 328.
15 'Recent Progress in the Theory of Vision', in Selected Writings, p. I64.
MICHELE HANNOOSH
559
Henry combined Helmholtz's findings with his own world view,

Laforgue's and Hartmann's: he believed in the existence of a co
law whose goal was consciousness. A scientific understanding of th
would provide for a more advanced art, 'advanced' in so far as it w
evolution of the organism and thereby contribute to the evolution
ness. Henry carried his theory through and actually prescribed ce
colour combinations for achieving effects beneficial to the pr
Laforgue had too great a commitment to artistic tolerance to
consistently approached painting with the open mind that his more
rigorous, theory allowed. In any case, he had too refined an aesth
admit the validity of prescriptive formulas. He remained on t
freedom and originality and sought to justify his pluralism by el
kind of ideal that would allow it, an ideal that was itself in contin
Such a notion directly challenged the most prominent Frenc
Laforgue's time, Hippolyte Taine.
'Taine: pourtant le plus artiste de tous les estheticiens'16

Taine was at the height of his fame around 1880, and he had
influence during those years that any new aesthetic theory would
terms with his, which he had expounded principally in La Philosoph
sequel, De l'ideal dans l'art.17 Laforgue had attended Taine's course
Beaux-Arts during the year I88o-8 (and possibly the previous y
although he disagreed with hisjudgements and some of his method
had considerable respect for him.19 Perhaps for these reasons, Laf
his own theoretical essay - later to become Part I of'L'Art modern
- are a point-by-point critique of De l'ideal dans l'art. So much of
follows from this preliminary reasoning that it merits examination
Laforgue's criticism of Taine had little to do with the materialis
method for which Taine is usually denounced. In fact, Lafor
recourse to the 'race, milieu, moment' formula in some of his own
His objections to Taine's theory aimed less at the positivist method
value-judgements that Taine feltjustified in making as a result of
considered a violation of the method, and he was correct in d
l'ideal dans l'art was a controversial work precisely because it cont
positivist critical methods that he professed in all of his lectu
including the first section of this very work. The positivist critic, i
all works of art with equal curiosity and interest. He believes t
product of a particular sensibility at a given historical mome
determining the relationship between these two factors and the a
16 'Notes d'esthetique', p. 487.

17 La Philosophie de l'art (Paris, 1865) set forth the principles of Taine's ae
incorporated it (as Part I) into a larger work of the same title that united some
essays, including De I'ideal dans I'art, which became Part v. This work had origin
18 In one of his Paris chronicles for the Tarbesjournal, La Guepe, of the previous y
the opening of Taine's course after the summer holidays (Chronicle of 2 Novemb
J. L. Debauve in Les Pages de la Guepe (Paris, 1969), p. 50).
19 Besides the jotting quoted at the head of this section, see also letter 3 to Ka
(27 January i88 ), p. 30: 'Hier Taine ... a ete etonnant sur Angelico.'
work expresses: 'La science ne proscrit ni ne pardonne; elle constate et explique . . .

elle a des sympathies pour toutes les formes de l'art et pour toutes les ecoles, meme
pour celles qui semblent le plus opposees; elle les accepte comme autant de
manifestations de l'esprit humain .. .; elle juge que, plus elles sont nombreuses et
contraires, plus elles montrent l'esprit humain par des faces nouvelles et nom-
breuses.'20 The concept of an ideal form of art is both illegitimate and irrelevant in
this system. The various works of the human imagination, whatever the principle
that animates them and the tendencies that they manifest, find their place within the
domain of art. With all of this Laforgue would have agreed fully.
In his essay on the ideal, however, Taine feels the need to distinguish greater and
lesser degrees of artistic excellence, and so he places all works, movements, and
periods of the history of art in a fixed hierarchy of value according to three criteria of
judgement: importance of character, beneficence of character, and convergence of
effect. These criteria lead him to formulate an ideal standard of 'human equilib-
rium', that is to say, a combination of'moral nobility and physical perfection', which
he finds only in the art of ancient Greece, with the Italian Renaissance a close
second.
Laforgue's various arguments with Taine's theory derive from three main
contentions against it. First, Taine reaches his aesthetic principle by a non-aesthetic
path, namely morality; he uses moral criteria to measure aesthetic value. Second, his
theory is too narrow, for it does not account for the many different aesthetics that
have inspired art throughout history. To classify art on a scale of value is, for
Laforgue, absurd. There is no scale, there is only the multiplicity of forms and
manners, all necessary, all valuable, that constitutes the history of art and for which
no fixed ideal can possibly account: 'Le monde des arts humains depuis les premiers
jours jusqu'aux notres est aussi merveilleusement touffu et inextricable que la vie
elle-meme; et votre ideal y est bien vite magnifiquement submerge' ('Notes
d'esthetique', p. 488). Third, Taine fails to realize that his ideal is as momentary as
any of those that he derides for being historically limited and thus not universal.
Taine begins by stating the purpose of a work of art: 'rendre dominateur un
caractere notable', that is, to bring out an essential character of the object represen-
ted.21 The value of a work is greater or lesser according to the degree of importance
and beneficence of the notable character. With respect to the first, importance of
character, Taine follows the natural sciences and distinguishes two sorts of charac-
ters: on the one hand, essential and stable ones; on the other, accessory and
superficial ones. Taine concludes that those of the first kind have more importance
than those of the second: a character is more or less important according to its
greater or lesser stability. Therefore, in the visual arts, which represent man, the
nude has the greatest value, since the body is the essential, most unchangeable part
of the living form. The portrayal of fashionable dress ranks lowest, since fashion
changes so often and, like all dress for that matter, it is merely a 'cover' and thus not
essential. Laforgue's indignant reaction to this was surely inspired by his moder-
nist's love for 'the poetry of neckties and polished boots' and for the art of the dandy,
but he tried to refute Taine on more objective grounds.22 First of all, dress matters
20 Taine, La Philosophie de l'art (Paris, I92 ), I, I2-I3.

21 De l'ideal dans l'art, in La Philosophie de l'art, II, 237.
22 Baudelaire's famous phrase appears in his 'Salon de I845'.
MICHELE HANNOOSH
56i
aesthetically to the painter's eye as much as any other quality

represent. Second, dress is as 'essentially human' as the nude body,
fundamental part of human experience. Third, the requirement of
absurd and untenable conclusions, for instance that a stable landsc
is more beautiful than an evanescent impression of Monet's, or th
sky is the most beautiful one.23
Laforgue saved most of his fury for Taine's second, highly c
beneficence of character. In the visual arts, whose purpose it is to
man, a character is beneficent if it contributes to the preservation a
life. The most beneficent characters, then, are perfect health, wh
visually by the 'natural type', and moral nobility, represented in th
and expression of the figure. A work is more or less beautiful accor
to which it expresses these qualities. Thus the least valuable art in
calls 'flat realism', that is, distorted subjects, emaciated figures, d
duced by a particular profession or illness, and, once again, dress, s
the natural body. Laforgue must have been especially appalled to f
flat-chested medieval virgins singled out by Taine for this lowest
fearlessly criticizes some celebrated artists, such as Angelico a
grounds of this requirement, but he does feel some qualms when
genius as Rembrandt; his portrayal of ugliness and deformity,
admissible because it has a 'literary' interest. That is to say, the id
such a portrayal matters more than its purely plastic qualities
beneficence of character, the highest form of art again appears, a
in the works of the great age of Athens: the Parthenon statues, the
Juno of the Villa Ludovisi.
Laforgue picks apart Taine's argument bit by bit. For the first t
realize that much of the problem with Taine's theory lies in his in
that the purpose of the visual arts is to represent physical man. Laf
on the grounds that it is inadequate. A stained-glass window
Japanese ivory, a Whistler nocturne - all belong to the domain
and yet have nothing to do with physical man. Secondly, benefice
has no relation to the quality of the work; by Taine's standards, a w
or suggests death should rank lowest in value, and yet the hist
contradicts this. Thirdly, the association of beauty with health is
in aesthetic terms there is no such thing as 'sickness'. 'Apprenez q
connait pas la maladie.'25 Laforgue here explodes with a phra
Hartmann and introduces his own aesthetic principle, the evolutio
Unconscious. Lastly, Laforgue refuses to let Taine rational
23 Taine would undoubtedly have agreed with this first judgement, since h
Impressionism. Laforgue, incidentally, did not dislike Troyon. In some notes that
Gallery in Berlin, he mentions 'un bon Troyon' and 'deux excellents bceufs de T
I885', Mercure de France, 0o83 (i November 1953), 427).
24 Taine: 'I1 semble, a regarder les vitraux, les statues des cath6drales, les peintu
race humaine ait d6egener et que le sang humain se soit appauvri: saints 6tiques
vierges a la poitrine plate' (De l'ideal dans l'art, II, 303). Laforgue specifically sta
Memling's flat-chested virgins in a letter to Henry of 12 May I882: 'Aimez-vous
plates? Non pour la raison de Louis Bouilhet: "On est plus pres du coeur quand la p
par goit d6prav6 pour les maigreurs? Les vierges de Memling vous ont-elles parfois f
(Letter 38 to Henry (O.C., iv, 155-56)).
25 'Notes d'esth6tique', p. 485. Compare Hartmann, II, 3: 'L'Inconscient ne conna
Rembrandt by calling it literary. Laforgue admits that a Rembrandt painting may

have a literary or historical interest, but this is not what makes it a great painting. Its
value as a painting comes principally from the aesthetic qualities - form and colour
- that it possesses and imparts, and in which Rembrandt's incomparable genius
consists.
In his final section, Taine develops a detail of the earlier chapters by defining the
three stages of a school of art. In its primitive stages, it demonstrates great
enthusiasm but insufficient technical means; mature art exhibits a harmony of spirit
and technique, both of which express perfect balance; decadent art displays
advanced technical capacities but insufficient, unfocused, or perverted inspiration.
Decadence clearly has the least value in Taine's view, a judgement that Laforgue
considers aesthetically and historically unfounded, not only for the reasons already
given but also because of the particular value that he (following the principal analyst
of the post-I870 generation, Bourget) found in decadence: 'Si les citoyens d'une
decadence sont inferieurs comme ouvriers de la grandeur d'un pays, ne sont-ils pas
tres superieurs comme artistes de l'interieur de l'ame?' Laforgue chooses his
example well here and quotes Bourget's essay on that most 'decadent' and 'superior'
of poets, Baudelaire. As things turned out, the allusion was most appropriate, for
although Baudelaire had not yet, in the I88os, acquired the reputation that the
following century would bestow upon him, literary history would indeed confirm
Bourget's - and Laforgue's - claim.
Already in these reading notes Laforgue is sketching out his own aesthetic
argument founded, as I have suggested, on the principle of the Unconscious. He
formulates his theory most completely in 'L'Art moderne en Allemagne', the essay
to which he alludes in the letter to Ephrussi with which I began this essay. Here the
themes of the notes reappear, but consolidated, clarified, and arranged in a logical
expository form.
'Avez-vous recu mon cher article sur l'Art en Allemagne, vous savez, l'indigeste bouilli
esthetique?'26
According to Laforgue, the history of aesthetics has included two general systems:
the one, idealist, which classifies and judges according to a transcendent, 'ideal'
conception of beauty; the other, variously called determinist, positivist, empiricist,
and naturalist, which sorts and orders 'evidence' so as to distinguish the laws of the
whole. The first shows the 'why' of a work, the second the 'how'. For different
reasons, neither of these suffices as an aesthetic theory. He criticizes the idealists on a
couple of points. First, all the idealist aestheticians suffer from the same mistaken
assumption and the same insufficient breadth. They assume that the purpose of art
is to improve upon nature, as though, says Laforgue, there could be any other laws
of harmony than those that govern nature itself. By their limited view, they have
arrived at an ideal beauty of Greek or Christian origin and have not succeeded in
accounting for Oriental art, modern art, landscape, still life, polychrome sculpture,
in short, all of the various forms of art from all of the ages of humanity. To posit a
fixed Ideal, as they have done, is to try to fit all of art history on to a Procrustean bed.
On this point, Laforgue resembles his great predecessor in the line of poet-art critics,
26 Letter 87 to Ephrussi, 13 May I884 (O.C., v, 80).
Baudelaire, who, like Stendhal before him, had affirmed the

beauty and the absurdity of an absolute Ideal. Second, despi
'becoming' (devenir), the idealist aestheticians have failed to reali
a certain place within this process, a place that necessarily limits
determines their notion of the very Ideal that they call absolute
that a truly comprehensive aesthetic formula, applicable to the gi
open to the seeming incoherencies of the present and the surprise
come only from an Ideal placed, itself, within an indefinit
characterized that it can be somehow apprehended by a subjec
that his moment in evolution imposes upon him. The concept of
sought to resolve the problem that had bothered not only Laforg
as well: to find a system comprehensive and flexible enough
innumerable forms of beauty in life, and to discover a set of rules
could explain the element of novelty, of originality, of genius th
essence of true art.27
Laforgue finds in determinism two principal flaws. First, it fails
presence of a transcendent principle, which he feels is so obviousl
phenomenon of genius and, in the natural world, by natural select
his belief in a reality beyond the physical world, he invokes Sch
since thought does not exist apart from its object except by abst
cal knowledge implies a transcendent reality. Second, since the d
to consider the value or quality of a work, he is obliged to
indifferently, and therefore he cannot account for the fact that
survived over others to constitute what we call the history of art
To set out his own theory, Laforgue begins by noting that
beautiful differs from moment to moment within one same ind
vidual to individual, from generation to generation, and so on; in
as life itself. However, by a kind of aesthetic natural selection, t
periods, genres, artists, and ideals that make up the history of a
the evolution of a universal law which in fact inspires and produc
in perpetual becoming and thus escapes our efforts - limited as t
moment - to know it and to judge it, and yet we are part of it.
disclosed a world that is at once essential to man and outside his consciousness
(hence superior to him), has discovered the nature of this law and provided its name,
the Unconscious.
Laforgue describes the Hartmanian Unconscious to his projected Gazette des
Beaux-Arts readers as a universal, mystical principle, omnipresent, infallible, and in
evolution toward consciousness by virtue of the struggle of various forces - religion,
science, art, and so on. The changing forms of art and of beauty express ultimately
the development of this universal law, even if we do not understand how. Genius
appears beyond human understanding precisely because it is a direct manifestation
of the unconscious law, whose 'divinatory shudder' makes itself felt in the
human imagination.28 The age-old divine frenzy encounters the psychologic
27 Compare Baudelaire, 'Exposition universelle - 855', (Euvres completes, edited by Y.-G. Le Dante
and C. Pichois (Paris, 1961), pp. 955-56.
28 'Cette aspiration supreme a parfois des tressaillement divinatoires; et les genies surhumains, dont
nous voyons la caravane artistique de temps en temps fouett6e, en sont les echos elus' ('L'Art moderne e
Allemagne', p. 264).
preoccupations of the late nineteenth century, and the divine agent becomes an
essential part of the human psyche.
Having established that the Unconscious evolves toward consciousness by the
struggle of various forces, including aesthetics, Laforgue poses the all-important
question: how do the arts, in particular, relate to the divine purpose, that is to say,
how do they contribute to the evolution toward consciousness? At this point,
Laforgue plays his physiological, or more precisely psychophysical, card: the arts
contribute to the goal of the Unconscious by developing the sense organs to which
they appeal. Such refinement of the human organism is clearly part of the plan of the
Unconscious and will lead ultimately to the realization of its goal: the perfection of
the species and the transformation of the Unconscious into consciousness.
The role of the visual arts consists in developing the particular organ to which they
appeal, namely the eye. Once again, Laforgue delves into his scientific readings to
claim that each organ is in evolution. Since, in evolutionary terms, an organ is
modified only in response to necessity, art must create a new necessity. Thus the first
criterion in aesthetic judgement and the foremost objective of art consist in
originality, 'ce que l'instinct des ages a toujours exalte, en proclamant genies, selon
l'etymologie du mot, ceux et seulement ceux qui ont revele du nouveau et qui, par la,
font etape et ecole dans l'evolution artistique de l'humanite' ('L'Art moderne en
Allemagne', p. 295). The aesthetic of the Unconscious condemns only what, accor-
ding to Laforgue, true artists of all the ages have condemned, fixed conventions of
taste and beauty. It alone admits all the ideals and aesthetics that have motivated
works in the past and present alike, for they have represented necessary stages in
artistic evolution. Here Laforgue makes the ringing pronouncement that I quoted
earlier: 'Son principe est l'anarchie meme de la vie. Laissez faire, laissez passer ...
l'Inconscient souffle ou il veut, le genie "saura reconnaitre les siens"'. In character-
istic fashion, he playfully modifies two well-known formulas by substituting the
Unconscious for God. The epigraph to the essay- 'L'artiste s'agite, l'Inconscient le
mene' - does the same thing. Clearly such rhetoric is supposed to appear rhetorical.
The game serves his purpose well: the substitution is both ironic - for the
Unconscious comes into view only with the disappearance of God - and appropri-
ate, since it is the mystical principle that has replaced God in the modern world.29
'J'aifait . .. une explication physiologique esthetique de laformule impressionniste'30

The remainder of 'L'Art moderne en Allemagne' unexpectedly - and disappoin-
tingly - fails to illustrate the theoretical section that introduces it. For an
application of the theory, we must turn to the essay on Impressionism that Laforgue
was composing at the same time, on the occasion of the famous Impressionist
29 Laforgue's 'L'Inconscient souffle ou il veut' plays on the biblical 'L'esprit souffle ou il veut' (John
3.8). The second expression plays on the famous words of the Pope's legate during the Albigensian
crusade, 'Tuez-les tous! Dieu reconnaitra les siens.' And the epigraph transforms Fenelon's 'L'homme
s'agite et Dieu le mene' (Sermon pour la fte de l'Epiphanie).
30 Laforgue wrote this in the letter to Ephrussi cited above, O.C., v, 6o.
exhibition at the Gurlitt Gallery in Berlin in October of 883.31 The language of the
two texts is frequently identical, and they clearly belong together, having grown out of
a single preoccupation, at this time, with aesthetic questions.
Laforgue resumes his argument almost where 'L'Art moderne en Allemagne'
leaves off, that is, by emphasizing the role of the eye. As he did in that essay, he
maintains that art should create a new necessity by which the power of the eye can
develop to its full potential. In the Impressionism essay, he explains what he means by
this: in terms of painting, it involves taking into account the properties and
mechanism of vision.
Like Helmholtz, Laforgue describes the eye as an organ that responds to light
vibrations (as does the ear to sound vibrations), and which actually sees the world as
ever-moving variations of light (and reflected light, or colour). However, it has not
fully realized its capacities to do this, for this reason: since the primitive eye was not
refined enough to distinguish form by colour, it had recourse to the sense of touch, and
it thus 'saw' form and depth in terms of line and definite contours.32 Painters, seeking
to transpose what they saw onto the canvas, rendered form and depth by drawing and
linear perspective, which are actually illusions. Centuries of painting have reinforced
these two illusions and have fostered a third one, studio lighting, by making them
essentials of painting, thereby dictating a false conception of vision and retarding the
eye's development. On this point, Laforgue agrees with Th6odore Duret's 1878 essay
on Impressionism, which suggested that our manner of seeing and our criteria of
judgement had been formed and sustained by conventional painting, whence the
difficulty in understanding and appreciating the Impressionists.33
Impressionism, on the other hand, encourages the eye to realize its 'prismatic
sensibility', that is, to analyse light into colour vibrations, like a prism of which the
three optic fibres described by Thomas Young are the facets. Laforgue's knowledge of
Helmholtz, who had developed Young's theory further, seems to have informed his
conception of the eye's activity here. An Impressionist painting appears exaggerated
or incomprehensible because we have been trained to see 'reality' as fixed rather than
'alive', or 'decomposee, refract6e, reflechie par les etres et les choses, en incessantes
vibrations' (Melanges posthumes, p. 136).
For the linear convention of drawing, the Impressionist technique substitutes
colour 'vibrations' rendered by thousands of irregular brush strokes and colour
contrast. It establishes perspective not by placing objects in a given plane according to
31 Laforgue began to write the Impressionism essay in February of 1883 when he first learned that the
Gurlitt Gallery was arranging an exhibition of Impressionist paintings around those owned by his close
friend, Charles Bernstein. Laforgue's enthusiasm for the Impressionist painters had in fact inspired
Bernstein's interest in them, and had led him to acquire a good collection. Laforgue abandoned the essay,
though, until the exhibition was actually mounted in October, by which time he obviously had questions
of aesthetic theory on his mind. As I explained in note 4, the Impressionism article, as we have it, is not
really an article at all. Mauclair seems to have chopped it up, omitted certain parts, and, in characteristic
fashion, added his own headings to the paragraphs that he published. I have tried to reconstruct the
argument as I think it ought to be.
32 Here Laforgue seems to borrow and to distort a notion of Helmholtz. In 'Recent Progress in the
Theory of Vision', the latter describes the relationship, in our perception of depth and form, between the
sense of sight and the sense of touch, the latter correcting the former: 'We are continually controlling and
correcting the notions of spatial location derived from the eye by the help of the sense of touch' (Selected
Writings, p. 194). He does not, however, make this an attribute of the 'primitive eye', as does Laforgue.
33 Laforgue probably read Duret's pamphlet; at least, he asked Henry to send it to him (Letter 60 to
Henry, 12 February 883) (O. C., v, 8). Duret says: 'On nejuge les tableaux que par correspondance avec
le genre de peinture alors accepte et qui a faconn6 les yeux' (Histoire des peintres impressionnistes (Paris,
I919), p. 26).
a theoretical formula, but rather by using nuances of tone. This is the concept of
aerial perspective described by Helmholtz, in which gradation of colour is used to
represent form and depth, as colours and tone contrast are conditioned by the
density of the atmosphere in proportion to their distance from the observer.
Impressionism rejects the studio in favour of open-air or on-the-scene painting, thus
assuring the authenticity of the visual experience with respect to light. It renders
light not by white but by contrasting tones; it has revised the palette to suit its own
manner of expression, an act that Laforguejustifies on the grounds that, with respect
to reality, the language of the palette is a convention, anyway, and is thus subject to
enrichment and modification. As Helmholtz had done, he remarks that the intensity
of light in a painting can never approach that of reality: 'Comparez photometrique-
ment le soleil le plus eblouissant de Turner a la flamme de la plus triste chandelle.'34
A conventional relation exists between the 'visual sensation' of the landscape and
that of the pigments of the palette: 'C'est la langue proportionnelle du peintre qu'il
enrichit proportionnellement a la richesse du developpement de sa sensibilite
optique' (Melanges posthumes, p. I38). These procedures reveal an eye that has
reached the most advanced stage yet in the evolution of the organ, and they
stimulate the eye of the observer to achieve it also.
This said, the question of genius and the related issue of aesthetic emotion remain.
Laforgue has maintained vehemently that genius exists and that we experience
transcendent, almost mystical moments in our perception of it, and yet his defence of
Impressionism up to this point does not account for this. The fact that our eye sees -
or is stimulated to see - what it has hitherto missed does not ensure the transcen-
dent sentiments that we call genius and aesthetic emotion.
Here Laforgue reveals his uncommonly perceptive understanding of Impression-
ism, for he saw how the impression itself united in one image both perceiving subject
and perceived object, two seemingly irreconcilable entities. Like so many thinkers of
the nineteenth century, he conceived of the individual as a kind of keyboard on
which the outside world plays in a certain way, depending on factors such as his
moment in time, his racial and social milieu, his stage of personal development, and
so on. Each keyboard, or sensibility, is unique and all are legitimate. In the case of a
painter, his visual sensibility determines the way he sees and renders colour and
perspective. This visual sensibility depends not only on the general conditions
mentioned above, but also on other, more specific ones: the condition of his three
optic fibres, the kind of day he has just had, variations in the light that he observes,
conflicting perceptions, imperceptible distractions to his eye, and so on. Thus the
subject, the painter with his visual sensibility, is in perpetual movement. In so far as
the outer world is perceived as light vibrations, an infinite number of changing
reflections and refractions, it too is in continuous movement and varies from one
moment to the next. Furthermore, even after it has been completed, a painting will
continue to 'live', that is, to vary, according to the light and atmosphere of the
gallery in which it is displayed and the individual viewers, all with their particular
sensibilities, who observe it. A painting, then, will never fix fugitive reality, or even
transcribe it; rather, it will be the account of a certain unique visual sensibility at a
given moment in time that will never return, as it is stimulated by a landscape that
34 Melanges posthumes, p. I38. Helmholtz uses the example of a candle, though in comparison with
moonlight and in a more elaborate analogy, in 'The Relation of Optics to Painting', p. 309.
will never return with exactly the same quality of light and atmosphere. The
impression so conceived, in so far as it is the primary act of perception, unites subject
and object or, as Laforgue describes it here, marks the 'flash of identity' between two
living, ever-varying entities and constitutes the transcendent moment that distin-
guishes genius. The techniques of Impressionist painting enable this transcendent
moment to be provoked in the viewer in the form of aesthetic emotion, for the
painting, too, unites subject and object: it renders the artist's personal, subjective
vision objectively, in a way intelligible to all, in so far as it follows the physiological
and psychological laws of vision. The painter renders an original view of his subject
by means of a language - technique - that he has revised accordingly; but this
language is intelligible to everyone as expressive of an objective reality because of its
fidelity to the laws of vision. To the metaphysically-minded Laforgue, those flashes
of identity, in terms of both the original creative genius and the aesthetic emotion
that his creation elicits, occur through the agency of the Unconscious. He mentions
no 'divinatory shudder' in this, the more practical of the two essays, but the same
metaphysical view of art underlies it. In those flashes of identity lies the revelation of
the divine unconscious plan, a glimpse of truth in a world of ever-changing
appearances.
Laforgue concludes the essay on one of his more iconoclastic notes. He calls for
end to the official institutions that determine our tastes and our notions of beauty b
the content of their training and their systems of reward. The official salon, the
Institute, prize medals, in short everything that maintains an official beauty and
thereby inhibits creativity, must cease to exist. 'Que les artistes vivent dan
l'anarchie, qui est la vie', he says with customary flair (Melanges posthumes, p. I44
that is to say, each artist left to his own vision and his own powers, and not confin
by the conventional academic values and training that live on, and in some wa
violate, a past that, artistically, should continue to grow, to change, to live.
I feel that the preceding discussion enables us to address some of the questions th
other critics have raised and which I noted in the first section of this essay. First
Laforgue's system, although permissive, nevertheless provides for a very importa
criterion of judgement: does the work do something aesthetically new? By this he
understands both vision and form. Fads and gimmicks clearly do not apply, bo
because they are not truly original in Laforgue's sense and, more importantl
because they do not ultimately retain their place in the history of art, that is, in t
selection made by the Unconscious. He firmly believed that we cannot presume to
pass definitive judgement on a work, for in our reaction to it we are influenced, an
thus limited, by our own history, our own moment, and our own constitution. An
critical enterprise must be conscious of its own tenuousness.
In connexion with the limits of originality, the limitations placed on the artist by
his necessary reliance on certain materials, Laforgue makes the legitimate point th
the language of the palette is, like all language, a convention and, once accepted as
such, can be renewed, revised, revitalized. The colours of the palette will nev
approach the intensity of the colours that our senses perceive, but they will serve a
medium of expression that is, by its conventionality, intelligible to all and, by th
alterations that the artist makes in it, appropriate to the particular needs an
qualities of his art. Laforgue did not connect this to poetry, but his critics ha
wondered about its applicability there. I think that the theory will hold in th
instance, for far from undermining the meaning of ordinary words, Laforgue's e
to create a new language by means of neologisms and word-play was founded on
idea that the old informed the new and the new recreated the old. There is no
contradiction involved in his notion of originality. He understood that art is based
on convention because of the materials it uses. But originality consists, to some
extent, in grasping the expressive possibilities of those conventions for one's
particular artistic purposes and consequently adapting them to those special needs.
The other problem implied by Laforgue's insistence on originality and the new
involves his attitude towards works of the past. From this examination of his
aesthetic views, we can see, I think, with what respect he regarded past art. He has
said repeatedly that all great art, all art, in a sense, has been necessary for both the
history of art and the development of human sensibility. For this reason it is idle to
judge Leonardo 'better' than Angelico, and it is equally presumptuous to judge an
Impressionist 'better' than his predecessors in the history of art. Impressionism
could not have arisen without what came before, any more than Laforgue's Hamlet
could have arisen without Shakespeare's. One is not better than the other. The new
is simply the only appropriate creation for the new, that is to say the modern, world.
Problems in the theory certainly arise in connexion with its reliance on evolution
and teleology, notably the famous 'Lamarckian error'.35 This notion, however,
constitutes a relatively unimportant part of the theory, especially because Laforgue
has described another, empirical means by which the eye sees in given ways: our way
of seeing is determined and maintained by the representations with which we come
in contact and which the history of art provides for us. It is not unreasonable to hold
that a new manner will provoke new ways of seeing. Even if this is not transmitted
biologically, it will be sustained by the continued existence of the art that first
inspired it.
Finally, the objection to Laforgue's aesthetic of the ephemeral loses much of its
force if we take into account two implications of his theory. First, despite his alleged
pessimism and relativism, Laforgue still believed in a transcendent reality or truth
that he associated with aesthetic experience and that he located in the fleeting
moments of a human experience inevitably dependent on time. His aesthetic clearly
attempts to situate an ideal within the fragmentary world that was becoming part of
the mythology of late nineteenth-century modernism. Secondly, those who reproach
him for his persistence in associating the ideal with the momentary and his refusal to
posit an absolute ideal illustrate the very problem that he finds in idealist aesthe-
ticians: they use idealist criteria to measure and judge a view that places itself
manifestly outside the idealist one.
It seems to me that Laforgue's theory raises other, more serious questions that it
does not, and perhaps cannot, answer. The first of these involves the relation of his
aesthetic theory to the art that he himself favoured and chose to practice: poetry. I
am led to consider this issue by Laforgue's text itself, for in the Impressionism article
he specifically links Impressionist technique with contemporary developments in
poetry and the novel: 'Ce principe a ete non systematiquement, mais par genie
applique en poesie et dans le roman chez nous' (Melanges posthumes, p. I38). He
implies by this remark (which, incidentally, he does not explain) that his theory
might extend beyond painting to literature. Yet here we encounter difficulties: we
35 Various critics have pointed this out, notably W. Ramsey, p. 37.
can see that music appeals to the ear and painting to the eye, but to what particular
sense does literature appeal? Laforgue would most likely be obliged to say the
imagination, since he most often called this the special domain of the poet, but of
course the imagination is not a sense at all. With this crack in its foundation, the
theory as it is begins to crumble, for even if we consider it leniently and see the
purpose of literature as developing our sensibility, the physiological justification is
absent, and thus the theory loses the conciliatory quality that, to Laforgue's mind at
least, recommended it over previous ones. Laforgue's own literary criticism stresses,
as always, originality, but otherwise it does not follow the guidelines of the
theoretical writings.
The second question arises in connexion with Laforgue's own art criticism. Here
we are hindered by the state of the critical writings themselves: either they are
fragmentary and scattered notes, many of which remain unpublished, or they have
been so distorted by their editors as to make them unreliable examples of this
method.36 Still, in considering the more reliable publications, I find the same
emphasis on originality (of both form and vision) and a conspicuous absence of the
other ideas developed in the theoretical writings. Only the Impressionism essay
manifestly puts the theory in the service of the criticism, and this it does very well
indeed.
I think that this last problem can be resolved if we are willing to regard Laforgue's
theory not as a method of interpretation or even ofjudgement of a work, but rather as
a way of accounting for and justifying the very quality that he considered essential
not only to true art but to genius as well and which he made his principal criterion:
originality. His analysis of Impressionism does this brilliantly, and the theory might
work equally well if it were applied to other creative impulses of similar novelty. The
theory speaks eloquently for the new, for the original, certainly one of the motivating
forces in modernism but also, in Laforgue's sense, the chief factor in genius from all
the ages.
For all its faults, Laforgue's aesthetic theory seems to have lived up to the claims
he made for it in his letter to Ephrussi: more than the other theories of the time, it did
reconcile the latest advances in physiological optics and in psychology with
metaphysics, the domain to which aesthetics belonged. Perhaps its most important
aspects involve not its validity or its inaccuracy (for we can reasonably hold that no
aesthetic has ever sufficiently explained the nature of art and beauty) but rather its
extraordinary interest: historically, for its insights into late nineteenth-century
thought; artistically, for its explanation of Impressionism; and philosophically, for
its contribution to our understanding of the complex relation between the artist and
his subject, and the painting and its observer. Laforgue's aesthetic ideas reflect the
same extraordinary imagination that distinguishes him - for better and sometimes
for worse - in the history of modern poetry. MIHELE MICHELE
HANNOO HANNOOSH
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK
36 I have already mentioned Mauclair, but the problem existed even during Laforgue's lifetime. In his
letters, he complains repeatedly that the Gazette editors so changed his articles as to make them
unrecognizable to him, and he even went so far as to disclaim them.

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The Poet as Art Critic: Laforgue's Aesthetic Theory

Author(s): Michele Hannoosh

Modern Humanities Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve

LAFORGUE'S AESTHETIC THEORY

'Enfin on verra, et vous verrez .... J'aurai du moins reve quej'etai

Laforgue never attained the stature of Baudelaire.5 Laforgue's view

Background: 'Je me suis amuse a en deduire une esthetique'8

his position as secretary to Ephrussi in I88I durin

11 See letter 9 to Ephrussi, 5 December i88i (O.C., v, 42). Lafor

Henry combined Helmholtz's findings with his own world view,

'Taine: pourtant le plus artiste de tous les estheticiens'16

16 'Notes d'esthetique', p. 487.

work expresses: 'La science ne proscrit ni ne pardonne; elle constate et explique . . .

20 Taine, La Philosophie de l'art (Paris, I92 ), I, I2-I3.

aesthetically to the painter's eye as much as any other quality

Rembrandt by calling it literary. Laforgue admits that a Rembrandt painting may

26 Letter 87 to Ephrussi, 13 May I884 (O.C., v, 80).

Baudelaire, who, like Stendhal before him, had affirmed the

'J'aifait . .. une explication physiologique esthetique de laformule impressionniste'30

35 Various critics have pointed this out, notably W. Ramsey, p. 37.

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