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.
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.
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,
and it is just that: the Romantic school always has the air of coming from Ferté-Milon.
But Jean Moréas, who has met his friends on the road, started from somewhere farther away, introduces himself more proudly.
Arrived in Paris like any other Wallachian or Eastern student, and already full of love for the French language, Moréas betook himself to the school of the old poets and frequented the society of Jacot de Forest and Benoit de Sainte-Maure. He wished to take the road to which every clever youth should vow himself who is ambitious to become a good harper; he swore to accomplish the complete pilgrimage: At this hour, having set out from the _Chanson de Saint-Léger_, he has, it is said, reached the seventeenth century, and this in less than ten years. It is not as discouraging as one supposes. And now that texts are more familiar, the road shortens: from now on less halts. Moréas will camp under the old Hugo oak, and, if he perseveres, we shall see him achieve the aim of his voyage, which doubtless is to catch up with himself. Then, casting aside the staff, often changed and cut from such diverse copses, he will lean on his own genius and we will be able to judge him, if that be our whim, with a certain security.