_followed by notes_
The mind of Remy de Gourmont was less like the mind of Henry James than
any contemporary mind I can think of. James' drawing of _mœurs
contemporaines_ was so circumstantial, so concerned with the setting,
with detail, nuance, social aroma, that his transcripts were "out of
date" almost before his books had gone into a second edition; out of
date that is, in the sense that his interpretations of society could
never serve as a guide to such supposititious utilitarian members of the
next generation as might so desire to use them.
He has left his scene and his characters, unalterable as the little
paper flowers permanently visible inside the lumpy glass paperweights.
He was a great man of letters, a great artist in portrayal; he was
concerned with mental temperatures, circumvolvulous social pressures,
the clash of contending conventions, as Hogarth with the cut of
contemporary coats.
On no occasion would any man of my generation have broached an intimate
idea to H.J., or to Thomas Hardy, O.M., or, years since, to Swinburne,
or even to Mr. Yeats with any feeling that the said idea was likely to
be received, grasped, comprehended. However much one may have admired
Yeats' poetry; however much one may have been admonished by Henry James'
prose works, one has never thought of agreeing with either.
You could, on the other hand, have said to De Gourmont anything that
came into your head; you could have sent him anything you had written
with a reasonable assurance that he would have known what you were
driving at. If this distinction is purely my own, and subjective, and
even if it be wholly untrue, one will be very hard pressed to find any
other man born in the "fifties" of whom it is even suggestible.
De Gourmont prepared our era; behind him there stretches a limitless
darkness; there _was_ the counter-reformation, still extant in the
English printer; there _was_ the restoration of the Inquisition by the
Catholic Roman Church, holy and apostolic, in the year of grace 1824;
there was the Mephistopheles period, morals of the opera left over from
the Spanish XVIIth century plays of "capa y espada"; Don Juan for
subject matter, etc.; there was the period of English Christian bigotry,
Saml. Smiles, exhibition of '51 ("Centennial of '76"), machine-made
building "ornament," etc., enduring in the people who did not read Saml.
Butler; there was the Emerson-Tennysonian plus optimism period; there
was the "æsthetic" era during which people "wrought" as the impeccable
Beerbohm has noted; there was the period of funny symboliste trappings,
"sin," satanism, rosy cross, heavy lilies, Jersey Lilies, etc.,
"Ch'hanno perduto il ben del intelletto"
all these periods had mislaid the light of the XVIIIth century; though
in the symbolistes Gourmont had his beginning.