In contradiction to, in wholly antipodal distinction from, Henry James,
de Gourmont was an artist of the nude. He was an intelligence almost
more than an artist; when he portrays, he is concerned with hardly more
than the permanent human elements. His people are only by accident of
any particular era. He is poet, more by possessing a certain quality of
mind than by virtue of having written fine poems; you could scarcely
contend that he was a novelist.
He was intensely aware of the differences of emotional timbre; and as a
man's message is precisely his _façon de voir_, his modality of
apperception, this particular awareness was his "message."
Where James is concerned with the social tone of his subjects, with
their entourage, with their _superstes_ of dogmatized "form," ethic,
etc., de Gourmont is concerned with their modality and resonance in
emotion.
Mauve, Fanette, Neobelle, La Vierge aux Plâtres, are all studies in
different _permanent_ kinds of people; they are not the results of
environments or of "social causes," their circumstance is an accident
and is on the whole scarcely alluded to. Gourmont differentiates his
characters by the modes of their sensibility, not by sub-degrees of
their state of civilization.
He recognizes the right of individuals to _feel_ differently. Confucian,
Epicurean, a considérer and entertainer of ideas, this complicated
sensuous wisdom is almost the one ubiquitous element, the "self" which
keeps his superficially heterogeneous work vaguely "unified."
The study of emotion does not follow a set chronological arc; it extends
from the "Physique de l'Amour" to "Le Latin Mystique"; from the
condensation of Fabre's knowledge of insects to
"Amas ut facias pulchram"
in the Sequaire of Goddeschalk
(in "Le Latin Mystique").
He had passed the point where people take abstract statement of dogma
for "enlightenment." An "idea" has little value apart from the modality
of the mind which receives it. It is a railway from one state to
another, and as dull as steel rails in a desert.
The emotions are equal before the æsthetic judgment. He does not grant
the duality of body and soul, or at least suggests that this mediæval
duality is unsatisfactory; there is an interpénétration, an osmosis of
body and soul, at least for hypothesis. "My words are the unspoken words
of my body."
And in all his exquisite treatment of all emotion he will satisfy many
whom August Strindberg, for egregious example, will not. From the
studies of insects to Christine evoked from the thoughts of Diomède, sex
is not a monstrosity or an exclusively German study.[1] And the entire
race is not bound to the habits of the _mantis_ or of other insects
equally melodramatic. Sex, in so far as it is not a purely physiological
reproductive mechanism, lies in the domain of æsthetics, the junction of
tactile and magnetic senses; as some people have accurate ears both for
rhythm and for pitch, and as some are tone deaf, some impervious to
rhythmic subtlety and variety, so in this other field of the senses some
desire the trivial, some the processional, the stately, the master-work.
As some people are good judges of music, and insensible to painting and
sculpture, so the fineness of one sense entails no corresponding
fineness in another, or at least no corresponding critical perception of
differences.