The French are one of the most ascetic races in the world; and that is
perhaps the reason why the meaning they give to the word "volupté" is
free from the vulgarity of our "voluptuousness." The latter suggests to
most people a cross-legged sultan in a fat seraglio; "volupté" means the
intangible charm that imagination extracts from things tangible.
"Volupté" means the "Ode to the Nightingale" and the "Ode to a Grecian
Urn;" it means Romeo and Juliet as well as Antony and Cleopatra. But if
we have the thing, one may ask, what does the word matter? Every
language is always losing word-values, even where the sense of the word
survives.
The answer is that the French sense of "volupté" is found only
exceptionally in the Anglo-Saxon imagination, whereas it is part of the
imaginative make-up of the whole French race. One turns to Shakespeare
or Keats to find it formulated in our speech; in France it underlies the
whole view of life. And this brings one, of course, to the inevitable
conclusion that the French are a race of creative artists, and that
artistic creativeness requires first a free play of the mind on all the
facts of life, and secondly the sensuous sensibility that sees beyond
tangible beauty to the aura surrounding it.
The French possess the quality and have always claimed the privilege.
And from their freedom of view combined with their sensuous sensibility
they have extracted the sensation they call "le plaisir," which is
something so much more definite and more evocative than what we mean
when we speak of pleasure. "Le plaisir" stands for the frankly
permitted, the freely taken, delight of the senses, the direct enjoyment
of the fruit of the tree called golden. No suggestions of furtive vice
degrade or coarsen it, because it has, like love, its open place in
speech and practice. It has found its expression in English also, but
only on the lips of genius: for instance, in the "bursting of joy's
grape" in the "Ode to Melancholy" (it is always in Keats that one seeks
such utterances); whereas to the French it is part of the general
fearless and joyful contact with life. And that is why it has kept its
finer meaning, instead of being debased by incomprehension.