As Voltaire was a needed light in the 18th century, so in our time Fabre
and Frazer have been essentials in the mental furnishings of any
contemporary mind qualified to write of ethics or philosophy or that
mixed molasses religion. "The Golden Bough" has supplied the data which
Voltaire's incisions had shown to be lacking. It has been a positive
succeeding his negative. It is not necessary perhaps to read Fabre and
Frazer entire, but one must be aware of them; people unaware of them
invalidate all their own writing by simple ignorance, and their work
goes ultimately to the scrap heap.
"PHYSIQUE DE L'AMOUR" (1903) should be used as a text book of biology.
Between this biological basis in instinct, and the "Sequaire of
Goddeschalk" in "Le Latin Mystique" (1892) stretch Gourmont's studies of
amour and æsthetics. If in Diomède we find an Epicurean receptivity, a
certain aloofness, an observation of contacts and auditions, in contrast
to the Propertian attitude:
Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit,
this is perhaps balanced by
"Sans vous, je crois bien que je n'aimerais plus beaucoup et que je
n'aurais plus une extrème confiance ni dans la vie ni moi-même." (In
"Lettres à l'Amazone.")
But there is nothing more unsatisfactory than saying that de Gourmont
"had such and such ideas" or held "such and such views," the thing is
that he held ideas, intuitions, perceptions in a certain personal
exquisite manner. In a criticism of him, "criticism" being an over
violent word, in, let us say, an indication of him, one wants merely to
show that one has oneself made certain dissociations; as here, between
the æsthetic receptivity of tactile and magnetic values, of the
perception of beauty in these relationships, and the conception of love,
passion, emotion as an intellectual instigation; such as Propertius
claims it; such as we find it declared in the King of Navarre's
"De fine amor vient science et beauté";
and constantly in the troubadours.
(I cannot repeat too often that there was a profound psychological
knowledge in mediæval Provence, however Gothic its expression; that men,
concentrated on certain validities, attaining an exact and diversified
terminology, have there displayed considerable penetration; that this
was carried into early Italian poetry; and faded from it when metaphors
became decorative instead of interpretative; and that the age of Aquinas
would not have tolerated sloppy expression of psychology concurrent with
the exact expression of "mysticism." There is also great wisdom in Ovid.
_Passons!_)
De Gourmont's wisdom is not wholly unlike the wisdom which those
ignorant of Latin may, if the gods favor their understanding, derive
from Gelding's "Metamorphoses."