REMY DE GOURMONT

The death of Remy de Gourmont is one of the greatest losses that

European literature has suffered since the death of Oscar Wilde. The

supreme critic is as rare as the supreme artist, and de Gourmont's

critical genius amounted to a miracle of clairvoyance.

He wrote of everything--from the etymological subtleties of the

French language down to the chaste reluctances of female moles. He

touched everything and he touched nothing that he did not adorn.

In America he is unfortunately far less well known than he deserves,

though an admirable translation of "A Night in the Luxembourg,"

published in Boston, and a charming and illuminating essay by Mr.

Robert Parker, have done something to remove this disgrace. As Mr.

Parker truly observes, the essence of de Gourmont's genius is to be

found in an insatiable curiosity which the absolute closing of any

vista of knowledge by the final and authoritative discovery of truth

would paralyse and petrify. He does not, as Mr. Parker justly says,

seek for truth with any hope or even any particular wish, to find it.

Truth found would be truth spoiled. He seeks it from sheer love of

the pursuit. In this respect he is precisely of the stuff out of which

great essayists are made. He is also placed in that special position

from which the illusive phenomena of this challenging world are

best caught, best analysed, and best interpreted, as we overtake them

in their dreamy passage from mystery to mystery.

The mere fact of his basic assumption that final truth in any

direction is undiscoverable--possibly undesirable also--sets him with

the wisest and sanest of all the most interesting writers. It sets him

"en rapport" with nature, too, in a very close and intimate affiliation.

It sets him at one spring at the very parting of the ways where all the

mysteries meet. Nature loves to reveal the most delicate side-lights

and the most illuminating glimpses to those who take this attitude.

Such disinterestedness brings its own reward.

To love truth for the sake of power or gain or pride or success is a

contemptible prostitution; to love it for its own sake is a tragic

foolishness. What is truth--in itself--that it should be loved? But to

love it for the pleasure of pursuing it, that is the temper dear to the

immortal gods. For this is indeed their own temper, the very way

they themselves--the shrewd undying ones--regard the dream

shadows of the great kaleidoscope.

It is a subtle and hard saying this, that truth must be played with

lightly to be freely won, but it has a profound and infinite

significance. Illuminating thoughts--thoughts with the bloom and

gloss and dew of life itself upon them--do not come to the person

who with puritanical austerity has grown lean in his wrestling. They

come when we have ceased to care whether they come or not. They

come when from the surface of the tide and under the indifferent

stars we are content to drift and listen, without distress, to the

humming waters.

As Goethe says, it is of little avail that we go forth with our screws

and our levers. Tugged at so and mauled, the magic of the universe

slips away from out of our very fingers. It is better to stroll

negligently along the highways of the world careless of everything

except "the pleasure which there is in life itself," and then, in

Goethe's own phrase, "Such thoughts will come of themselves and

cry like happy children--'Here we are.'"

There is indeed required--and herein may be found the secret of

Remy de Gourmont's evasive talent--a certain fundamental

_irresponsibility,_ if we are to become clairvoyant critics of life. As

soon as we grow responsible, or become conscious of responsibility,

something or other comes between us and the clear object of our

curiosity, blurring its outline and confusing its colours. Moral

scruples, for instance, as to how precisely this new fragment of

knowledge or this new aspect of art is likely to affect the

inclinations of the younger generation; religious scruples as to

whether this particular angle of cosmic vision will redound to the

glory of God or detract from it or diminish it; political or patriotic

scruples as to whether this particular "truth" we have come to

overtake will have a beneficial or injurious effect upon the fortunes

of our nation; domestic scruples as to whether we are justified In

emphasising some aspect of psychological discrimination that may

be dangerous to those stately and ideal illusions upon which the

more sacred of human institutions rest.

Looked at from this point of view it might seem as if it were almost

impossible for a thoroughly responsible or earnest-minded man to

become an ideal critic. Such a one keeps his mind so closely and

gravely fixed upon his ethical "point d'appui," that when he jumps

he misses the object altogether. In a certain sense every form of

responsibility is obscurantism. We are concerned with something

external to the actual thing under discussion; something to be gained

or lost or betrayed or guarded; and between the pure image of what

we are looking at and our own free souls, float a thousand distorting

mists.

The whole philosophical attitude of Remy de Gourmont is full of

interest and significance for those who are watching the deeper

movements of European thought. At one, in a limited sense, with

Bergson and William James in their protests against final or static

"truth," de Gourmont's writings, when taken as a whole, form a most

salutary and valuable counterpoise to the popular and vulgar

implications of this modern mysticism. That dangerous and

pernicious method of estimating the truth of things according to

what James calls somewhere their "cash-value" receives blow after

blow from his swift and ironic intelligence.

Things are what they are and their hidden causes are what they are,

quite apart from whether they produce a pleasant or unpleasant

effect upon individual lives. The sordid and utilitarian system of

judging the value of thoughts and ideas in proportion to their

efficiency in the world of practical exigencies does not appeal to this

rational and classical mind.

The pragmatism of William James and the instinct-doctrines of

Bergson have both been pounced upon by every kind of apologist

for supernatural religion and categorical morality; while the method

of appealing to the optimistic prejudices of shallow minds by the use

of colloquial and mystical images has of recent years been

introducing into European thought what might be called "Metaphysical

Americanism."

Against this tendency, a tendency peculiarly and especially

Anglo-Saxon, the ingrained _Latinity_ of de Gourmont's mind indignantly

revolts. His point of view is entirely and absolutely classical, in the

old French sense of that suggestive word and in accordance with the

great French traditions of Rabelais, Voltaire, Stendhal, Renan, and

Anatole France.

The new pseudo-philosophy, so vague, so popular, so optimistic, so

steeped in mystical morality, which one associates with the writings

of so many modern Americans and which finds a certain degree of

support in the work of Maeterlinck and Romain Rolland, leaves the

intelligence of Remy de Gourmont entirely untouched. He comes to

modern problems with the free, gay, mocking curiosity of a

twentieth century Lucian. Completely out of his vein and remote

from his method is that grave pedagogic tone which has become so

popular a note in recent ethical writing, and which, for all his slang

of the marketplace, underlies the psychological optimism of William

James.

One has only to read a few pages of Remy de Gourmont to be

conscious that one has entered once again the large, spacious, free,

irresponsible, _heathen_ atmosphere of the great writers of antiquity.

The lapse of time since those classic ages, the superficial changes of

human manners and speech, seem abolished, seem reduced to

something that does not count at all. We have nothing here of that

self-conscious modernity of tone, that fussy desire to be original and

popular, which spoils the charm of so many vigorous writers of our

age. It is as though some pleasant companion of Plato--some wise

and gay Athenian from the side of Agathon or Phaedrus or

Charmides--were risen from his tomb by the blue Ionian seas to

discourse to us upon the eternal ironies of nature and human life

under the lime trees and chestnuts of the Luxembourg gardens. It is

as though some philosophic friend of Catullus or Propertius had

returned from an age-long holiday within the olive groves of Sirmio

to wander with clear-eyed humorous curiosity along the banks of the

Seine or among the book-stalls of the Odéon.

Like a thick miasmic cloud, as we read this great pagan critic, all the

fogs and vapours of turgid hyperborean superstition are driven away

from the face of the warm sun. Once more what is permanent and

interesting in this mad complicated comedy of human life emerges

in bold and sharp relief.

Artists, novelists, poets, journalists, occultists, abnormalists,

essayists, scientists and even theologians, are treated with that

humorous and passionate curiosity, full of a spacious sense of the

amplitude of and diversity of life's possibilities, which we associate

with the classic tradition.

Only in France is the appearance of a writer of this kind possible at

all; because France alone of all the nations, and Paris alone of all the

cities, of the modern world, has kept in complete and continuous

touch with the "open secret" of the great civilisations.

There is no writer more required in America at this moment than

Remy de Gourmont, and for that very reason no writer less likely to

be received. Curiously enough, in spite of the huge influx of

foreigners into the harbour reigned over by the Statue of Liberty, not

even England itself is more enslaved by the dark fogs of puritanical

superstition than the United States; for there is no place in the world

where the brutal ignorance and complacent self-righteousness of the

commercial middle classes rampage and revel and trample upon

distinction and refinement more savagely than in America. The

blame for this must fall entirely upon the English race and upon the

descendants of the Puritans. Perhaps a time will come when all these

Jews and Slavs and Italians will assert their _intellectual_ as they are

beginning to assert their _economic,_ independence, and then no

doubt led by the cities of the West--the ones furthest from

Boston--there will be a Renaissance of European intelligence in this great

daughter of Europe such as will astonish even Paris itself. But this

event, as Sir Thomas More says so sadly of his Utopia, is rather to

be hoped for than expected.

One hears so often from the mouths of middle-class apologists for

the modern industrial system expressions of fear as to the loss of

what they call "initiative" under any conceivable socialistic state.

One is inclined to ask "initiative towards what"? Towards growing

unscrupulously rich, it must be supposed; certainly not towards

intellectual experiments and enterprises; for no possible

revolutionary regime could be less sympathetic to these things than

the one under which we live at present.

The Puritan rulers of America are very anxious to "educate"

foreigners in the free "institutions" of their new home. One can only

pray that the persons submitted to this process will find some

opportunity of adding to their "education" some cursory

acquaintance with their own classics; so that when the hour arrives

and we wake to find ourselves under the rule of trade-unions or

socialistic bureaucrats, our new authorities will know at least

something of the "institution," as Walt Whitman somewhere calls it,

of intellectual toleration.

Remy de Gourmont himself is very far from being a socialist. He

has imbibed with certain important differences, due to his

incorrigible Latin temperament, many of the doctrines of Nietzsche;

but Nietzsche himself could hardly be more inimical to any kind of

mob-rule than this exponent of "subjective idealism."

Remy de Gourmont does not interest himself greatly in political

changes. He does not interest himself in political revolutions. Like

Goethe, he considers the intellectual freedom of the artist and

philosopher best secured under a government that is stable and

lasting; better still under a government that confines itself rigidly to

its own sphere and leaves manners and morals to the taste of the

individual; best of all under that Utopian absence of any government,

whether of the many or of the few, whereof all free spirits dream.

Remy de Gourmont has written one immortal philosophical romance

in "A Night in the Luxembourg." He has written some exquisite

poetry full of a voluptuous and ironic charm; full of that remoteness

from sordid reality which befits a lonely and epicurean spirit, a spirit

pursuing its own way on the shadowy side of all human roads where

the old men dream their most interesting dreams and the young

maidens dance their most unreserved dances.

He has written many graceful and lovely prose poems--one hesitates

to call them "short stories"--in which the reader is transported away

beyond all modern surroundings into that delicate dream world so

dear to lovers of Watteau and Poussin, where the nymphs of Arcadia

gather, wondering and wistful, about the feet of wandering saints,

and where the symbols of Dionysian orgies blend with the symbols

of the redemption of humanity.

He has written admirable and unsurpassed criticism upon almost all

the contemporary figures of French literature--criticism which in

many cases contains a wisdom and a delicacy of feeling quite

beyond the reach of the particular figure that preoccupies him at the

moment. He has done all this and done it as no one else in Europe

could have done it. But in the last resort it does not seem as though

his reputation would rest either upon his poetry or his prose poetry

or even perhaps upon his "masks," as he calls them, of personal

appreciation.

It rather seems as though his best work--putting "A Night in the

Luxembourg" aside--were to be found in that long series of

psychological studies which he entitles "Promenades Litteraires,"

"Promenades Philosophiques" and "Epilogues." If we add to these

the volumes called "La culture des Idées," "Le chemin de Velours,"

and "Le Problème du style" we have a body of philosophical

analysis and speculation the value of which it would be impossible

to overrate in the present condition of European thought.

What we have offered to us in these illuminating essays is nothing

less than an inestimable mass of interpretative suggestion, dealing

with every kind of topic under the sun and throwing light upon

every species of open question and every degree of human mystery.

When one endeavours to distil from all this erudite mass of

criticism--of "criticism of life" in the true sense of that phrase--the

fundamental and quintessential aspects of thought, one finds the

attempt a much easier one than might be expected from the variety,

and in many cases from the occasional and transitory nature, of the

subjects discussed. It is this particular tone and temper of mind

diffused at large through a discussion of so immense a variety of

topics that in the last resort one feels is the man's real contribution to

the art of living upon the earth. And when in pursuing the

transformations of his protean intelligence through one critical

metamorphosis after another we finally catch him in his native and

original form, it is this form, with the features of the real Remy de

Gourmont, which will remain in our mind when many of its

incidental embodiments have ceased to interest us.

The man in his essential quality is precisely what our generation and

our race requires as its antipodal corrective. He is the precise

opposite of everything most characteristic of our puritan-souled and

commercial-minded Democracy. He is all that we are not--and we

are all that he is not.

For an average mind evolved by our system and subjected to our

influence--the mind and influence of modern English-speaking

America--the writings of Remy de Gourmont would be, if apprehended

in any true measure according to their real content and

significance, the most extreme intellectual and moral outrage that

could be inflicted upon us. Properly understood, or even

superficially understood, they would wound and shock and stagger

and perplex every one of our most sacred prejudices. They would

conflict with the whole method and aim of the education which we

have received, an education of which the professed object is to fit us

for an active, successful and energetic life in the sphere of industrial

or commercial or technical enterprises, and to make of us moral,

socially-minded, conventional and normal persons. Our education, I

mean our American education--for they still teach the classics in a

few schools in England--is, in true pragmatic manner, subordinate to

what is called one's "life work"; to the turning, as profitably to

ourselves as possible, of some well-oiled wheel in the industrial

machine.

Such an education, though it may produce brilliant brokers and

inspired financiers, with an efflorescence of preachers and base-ball

players, certainly cannot produce "humanists" of the old, wise

Epicurean type.

But it is not only our education which is at fault. Our whole spiritual

atmosphere is alien and antagonistic to the spiritual atmosphere of

Remy de Gourmont. He is serious where we are flippant, and we are

serious where he is ironical.

Any young person among us who imbibed the mental and moral

attitude of Remy de Gourmont would cause dismay and consternation

in the hearts of his friends. He would probably have a library.

He might even read Paul Claudel.

I speak lightly enough, but the point at issue is not a light one. It is

indeed nothing less than a parting of the ways between two

civilisations, or, shall we say, between a civilisation which has not

lost touch with Athens and Rome and a commercial barbarism

buttressed up with "modern improvements."

Remy de Gourmont's genius is in its essence an aristocratic one. He

has the reserve of the aristocrat; the aristocratic contempt for the

judgment of the common herd; the aristocrat's haughty indifference

to public opinion. Writing easily, urbanely, plausibly upon every

aspect of human life, he continues the great literary tradition of the

beautifully and appropriately named _"humanism"_ of the "Revival

of Letters."

As Mr. Parker hints, he is one of those who refuse to bow to the

intolerable mandate of the dry and sapless spirit of "specialisation."

He refuses to leave art to the artist, science to the scientist, religion

to the theologian, or the delicate art of natural casuistry to the

professional moralist. In the true humanistic temper he claims the

right to deal with all these matters, and to deal with them lightly,

freely, unscrupulously, irresponsibly, and with no "arrière pensée"

but the simple pleasure of the discussion.

He makes us forget Herbert Spencer and makes us think of Plato. He

is the wise sophist of our own age, unspoiled by any Socratic

"conceptualism," and ready, like Protagoras, to show us how man is

the measure of all things and how the individual is the measure of

man. The ardour of his intellectual curiosity burns with a clear

smokeless flame. He brings back to the touchstone of a sort of

distinguished common sense, free from every species of superstition,

all those great metaphysical and moral problems which have been

too often monopolised by the acrid and technical pedantry of the

schools.

He reminds one of the old-fashioned "gentleman of leisure" of the

eighteenth century, writing shrewdly and wisely upon every

question relating to human life, from punctuation and grammar to

the manner in which the monks of the Thebaid worshipped God. His

attitude is always that of the great amateur, never of the little

professional. He writes with suggestive imagination, not with

exhaustive authority. He takes up one subject after another that has

been, so to speak, closed and locked to the ordinary layman, and

opens it up again with some original thrust of wholesome scepticism,

and makes it flexible and porous. He indicates change and

fluctuation and malleableness and the organic capriciousness of life,

where the professors have shut themselves up in logical dilemmas.

When it comes to the matter of his actual approach to these things it

will be found that he plunges his hand boldly into the flowing

stream, in the way of a true essayist dispensing with all the tedious

logical paraphernalia of a writer of "serious treatises."

His genius is not only aristocratic in quality; it is essentially what

might be called, in a liberal use of the term, the genius of a

sensualist.

Remy de Gourmont's ultimate contribution to the art of criticism is

the disentangling, from among the more purely rational vehicles of

thought, of what we might regard as the sensual or sensuous

elements of human receptivity. No one can read his writings with

any degree of intelligence without becoming aware that, in his way

of handling life, ideas become sensations and sensations become

ideas.

More than any critic that ever lived, Remy de Gourmont has the

power of interesting us in his psychological discoveries with that

sort of thrilling vibrating interest which is almost like a physical

touch.

The thing to note in regard to this evocation of a pleasurable shock

of mental excitement is that in his case it does not seem produced so

much by the sonority or euphonious fall of the actual words--as in

the case of Oscar Wilde--or even by the subtler spiritual harmony of

rhythmically arranged thought--as in the case of Walter Pater--as by

the use of words to liberate and set free the underlying sensation

which gives body to the idea, or, if you will, the underlying idea

which gives soul to the sensation.

In reading him we seldom pause, as we do with Wilde or Pater, to

caress with the tip of our intellectual tongue the insidious bloom and

gloss and magical effluence of the actual phrases he uses. His

phrases seem, so to speak, to clear themselves out of the way--to

efface themselves and to retire in order that the sensational thought

beneath them may leap forward unimpeded.

Words become indeed to this great student of the subtleties of

human language mere talismans and entrance keys, by means of

which we enter into the purlieus of that psychological borderland

existing half way between the moving waters of sensibility and the

human shores of mental appreciation. Playing this part in his work it

becomes necessary that his words should divest themselves, as far as

it is humanly possible for them to do so without losing their

intelligible symbolic value, of all merely logical and abstract

connotation. It is necessary that his words should be light-footed and

airily winged, swift, sharp and sudden, so that they may throw the

attention of the reader away from themselves upon the actual

psychic and psychological thrill produced by each new and exciting

idea. They must be fluid and flexible, these words of his, free from

rigid or traditional fetters, and prepared at a moment's notice to take

new colour and shape from some unexpected and original thought

looming up in the twilight below.

They must be quick to turn green, blue, purple, violet--these

words--like the flowing waters of some sunlit sea, in order that the

mysterious reflections of the wonderful opalescent fish, swimming

to and fro in the dim depths, may reach the surface unimpeded by

any shadows.

But the chief point about the style of Remy de Gourmont is that it

precisely reflects his main fundamental principle, the principle that

ideas should strike us with the pleasurable shock of sensations, and

that sensations should be porous to and penetrated by ideas.

"En littérature, comme en tout, il faut que cesse la regne des mots

abstraits. Une ouvre d'art n'existe que par l'émotion qu'elle nous

donne; il suffira de determiner et de caracteriser la nature de cette

émotion; cela ira de la métaphysique à la sensualité, de l'idée pure au

plaisir physique."

"La métaphysique à la sensualité; l'idée pure au plaisir physique"; it

would be impossible to put more clearly than in those words the

purpose and aim of this great writer's work.

Contemptuously aloof from the idols of the market-place,

contemptuously indifferent to the tyranny of public opinion, with the

fixed principle in his mind--almost his only fixed principle--that the

majority is always wrong, Remy de Gourmont goes upon his way;

passionately tasting, like a great satin-bodied humming bird, every

exquisite flower in the garden of human ideas. The wings of his

thoughts, as he hovers, beat so quickly as to be almost invisible; and

thus it is that in reading him--great scholar of style as he is--we do

not think of his words but only of his thought, or rather only of the

sensation which his thought evokes.

When it comes to the actual philosophy of Remy de Gourmont we

indeed arrive at something which may well cause our Puritan

obscurants to open their mouths with amazement. He is perhaps the

only perfectly frank and unmitigated "hedonist" which European

literature at this hour offers.

He advocates pleasure as the legitimate and sole end of man's

endeavours and aspirations upon this earth. Pleasure imaginatively

dealt with indeed, and transformed from a purely physical into a

cerebral emotion; but pleasure frankly, candidly, shamelessly

accepted at its natural and obvious value.

Here, then, comes at last upon the scene a writer as free from the

moralistic aftermath of two thousand years of criminalising of

human instincts as he is free from the supernatural dogmas that have

given support to this darkening of the sunshine.

Nietzsche, of course, was before him with his formidable

philosophic hammer; but Nietzsche himself was by temperament too

spiritual, too cold, too aloof from the common instincts of humanity

to do more than hew out an opening through the gloomy thickets of

the ascetic forest. He was himself too entirely intellectual, too high

and icy and austere and imaginative ever to bring the actual feet of

the dancers, and the lutes and flutes of the wanton singers into the

sunlit path to which he pointed the way.

His cruel praise of the more predatory and rapacious among the

emancipated spirits gives, too, a somewhat harsh and sinister aspect

to the whole thing. The natural innocence of genuine pagan delight

draws back instinctively from the savage excesses of the

Nietzschean "blond beast." The poor fauns and dryads of the free

ancient world hesitate trembling and frightened on the very

threshold of their liberty when this great Zarathustra offers them a

choice between frozen Alpine peaks of heroic desolation and

bloodstained jungles frequented by Borgian tigers.

In his own heart Nietzsche was much more of a mediaeval saint than

a predatory "higher man," but the natural human instinct of any sane

and sun-loving pagan may well shrink back dismayed from any

contact with this savage "will to power," which, while destroying the

quiet cloistered gardens of monastic seclusion, hurls us into the path

of these new tyrants. The less rigorous "religious orders" of the faith

of Christendom would seem to offer to these poor dismayed

"revenants" from the ancient world a much quieter and happier

habitation than the mountain tops where blows the frozen wind of

"Eternal Recurrence," or the smouldering desert sands where stalk

the tawny lions of the "higher morality." The "Rule of Benedict"

would in this sense be a refuge for the timorous unbaptised, and the

"Weeds of Dominic" a protection for the gentle infidel.

After reading Remy de Gourmont, with his wise, friendly ironic

interest in every kind of human emotion, one is inclined to feel that,

after all, in the large and tolerant courts of some less zealous

traditional "order" there might be more pleasant air to breathe, more

peaceful sunshine, more fresh and dewy rose-gardens, than in a

world dominated by the Eagle and the Serpent of the Zarathustrian

Overman.

Remy de Gourmont would free us from the rule of dogmatist and

moralist, but he would free us from these without plunging us into a

yet sterner ascesis. The tone and temper advocated by him is one

eminently sane, peaceful, quiet, friendly and gay. He does not free

us from a dark responsibility to God to plunge us under the yoke of

a darker responsibility to posterity. He would free us from every

kind of responsibility. He would reduce our life to a beautiful

unrestricted "Abbey of Thelema," over the gates of which the great

Pantagruelian motto "Fay ce que vouldray" would be written in

letters of gold.

What one is brought to feel in reading Remy de Gourmont is that the

liberty of the individual to follow his intellectual and psychological

tastes unimpeded by any sort of external authority is much more

important for civilisation at large and much more conducive to the

interests of posterity than any inflexible rules, whether they be laid

upon us by ecclesiastical tradition, by puritanical heretics or by

prophetic supermen.

It is really _liberty_--first and last--in the full beautiful meaning of

that great human word, that Remy de Gourmont claims for us;

though he is perfectly aware that such liberty can never be enjoyed

except by those whose genuine intellectual emancipation renders

them fit to enjoy it. It is always for the liberty of _man_ as an

individual, never for _men_ as a herd, that he contends; as his

favourite phrase, "subjective idealism," constantly insists.

And, above all, it is perfect and untrammelled liberty for the artist

that he demands. One of his most suggestive and interesting essays

is upon the topic of the influence of the "young girl" upon

contemporary literature.

This is indeed carrying the war into the enemy's camp; for if the

"young girl" has interfered with the freedom of the artist in France,

what has she done in England and America? "What are they doing

here?" cried Goethe once, teased and fretted by the presence of this

restricting influence. "Why don't they keep them in their convents?"

And it is this very cry, the cry of the impatient artist longing to deal

freely and largely with every mortal aspect of human life, that Remy

de Gourmont echoes.

It is indeed a serious and difficult problem; and it is one of the

problems thrust inevitably upon us by the spread of education and

the consequent cheapening and vulgarising of education under the

influence of democracy.

But it can have only one answer, the great and memorable answer

given to all scrupulous protectors of virtue by John Milton in his

"Areopagitica." It is better that this or the other person should come

to harm by the bad use of a good book than that the life-blood of an

immortal spirit, embalmed in any beautiful work of art, should be

wasted upon the dust and never reach the verdict of posterity.

What are they doing here, these difficult young persons and their

still more difficult guardians? This--this sacred Elysian garden of the

great humanistic tradition of classic wisdom and classic art--must

not be invaded by clamorous babes and agitated elders, must not be

profaned either by the plaudits or the strictures of the unlettered mob.

Somewhere in human life, and where should it be if not in the

cloistered seclusion of noble literature?--there must be an escape

from the importunities of such people and from the responsibilities

of the ignorance they so jealously guard.

In the days when men wrote for men--and for women of the calibre

of Aspasia or Margaret of Navarre--this problem did not emerge. It

was not wise perhaps at Athens to abuse Cleon, though--heaven

knows--that was often enough done; nor in Rome to satirise Caesar,

though that too was now and again most prosperously achieved! It

was dangerous in the time of Rabelais to throw doubt on the

authority of the church. But this new tyranny, this new oppression of

letters, this unfortunate cult of the susceptible "young person," is far

more deadly to the interests of civilisation than any interference by

church or state. There was always to be found some wise and

classic-minded cardinal to whom one could appeal, some dilettante

Maecenas to whom one might dedicate one's work.

But now the flood-gates are open; the dam is up; and the great tide

of unmitigated philistinism, hounded on by dreadful protectors of

dreadful "young persons," invades the very citadel of civilisation

itself, and pours its terrible "pure" scum and its popular sentimental

mud over the altars of the defenceless immortals. No one asks that

these tyrannical young people and their anxious guardians should

read the classics or should read the works of such far-descended

inheritors of the classical tradition who, like Remy de Gourmont,

seek to keep the sacred fire alight. Let them hold their hands off! Let

them go back to their schools and their presbyteries.

Democracy may be a great improvement upon the past, just as

modern religion may be an improvement upon ancient religion. But

one thing democracy must not be allowed to do; it must not be

allowed to substitute the rule of a puritanical middle-class, led by

pietistic sentimentalists, for the despotism of a Caesar or a Sforza or

a Malatesta in the sphere of the intellect. The intellect of the race

must be held sacred, must be held intact; and its artists and writers

permitted to go their way and follow their "subjective idealism" as

they please, without let or hindrance.

What would be the use of persecuting genius into absolute sterility if

after years and years of suppression human instincts were left the

same, only with no subtle criticism or free creative art to give them

beauty, refinement, interpretation and the magic of a noble style?

Remy de Gourmont, like all the profoundest intelligences of our race,

like the great Goethe himself, is a spiritual anarchist.

Standing apart from popular idols and popular catch-words he

converses with the great withdrawn souls of his own and previous

ages, and hands on to posterity the large, free, urbane atmosphere of

humanistic wisdom.

On the whole perhaps it would be well to keep his writings out of

the New World. They might stir up pessimistic feelings. They might

make us dissatisfied with lecture rooms and moving picture shows.

They might undermine our interest in politics.

"La métaphysique à la sensualité--l'idée pure au plaisir physique!"

Such language has indeed a dangerous sound.

To be obsessed by a passionate and insatiable curiosity with regard

to every sensation known to human senses; to be anxious to give this

curiosity complete scope, so that nothing, literally nothing, shall

escape it; to be endowed with the power of putting the results of

these investigations into clear fascinating words, words that allure us

into passing through them and beyond and behind them into the

sensation of intellectual discovery which they conceal; this indeed,

in our democratic age, is to be a very dubious, a very questionable

writer!

For this shameless advocate of pleasure as the legitimate aim of the

human race, sex and everything connected with sex comes naturally

to be of paramount interest. Sex in every conceivable aspect, and

religion in its best aspect--that is to say in its ritualistic one--are the

things round which the cerebral passion of this versatile humanist

hovers most continually.

In his prose poems and in his poetry these two interests are

continually appearing, and, more often than not, they appear

together fatally and indissolubly united.

"The Book of Litanies" is the title, for instance, he is pleased to give

to one of his most characteristic experiments in verse; the one that

contains that amazing poem addressed to the rose, with its

melancholy and sinister refrain which troubles the memory like a

swift wicked look from a beautiful countenance that ought to be

pure and cold in death.

And how lovely and significant are those words "The Pilgrim of

Silence," which is the name he seems to select for his own

wandering and insatiable soul.

The Pilgrim of Silence! Pilgrim moving, aloof from the clamours of

men, from garden to garden of melancholy and sweet mystery;

pilgrim passing night by night along moon-lit parterres of

impossible roses; pilgrim seeking "wild sea-banks" where

strange-leaved glaucous plants whisper their secrets to the sharp salt

wind; pilgrim of silence, for whom the gentlest murmur of the troubled

senses of feverish humanity has its absorbing interest, every quiver

of those burning eyelids its secret intimation, every sigh of that

tremulous breast its burden of delicate confession; pilgrim of silence

moving aloof from the howls of the mob and the raucous voices of

the preachers, moving from garden to garden, from sea-shore to

sea-shore; cannot even you--oh pilgrim of the long, long quest--give us

the word, the clue, the signal, that shall answer the riddle of our days,

and make the twilight of our destiny roll back? Pilgrim of silence,

have you only silence to offer us at the last, after all your litanies to

all the gods living and dead? Is silence your last word too?

Thus we can imagine Simone, the tender companion of our

wanderer, questioning him as they walk together over the dead

memories of all the generations.

Ah yes! Simone may question her pilgrim--her pilgrim of silence

--even as, in his own "Nuit au Luxembourg," the youth to whom our

Lord discoursed so strangely, questioned the Master as to the

ultimate mystery and received so ambiguous a response.

And Simone likewise shall receive her answer, as we all--whether

we be descendants of the Puritans, crossing Boston Common, or

aliens of the sweat-shops of New York, crossing Washington Square,

or unemployed in Hyde Park, or nursery-maids in the Jardin des

Plantes--shall receive ours, as we walk over the dead leaves of the

centuries.

Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?

Quand le pied les écrase, elles pleurent comme des âmes,

Elle font un bruit d'ailes ou de robes de femme.

Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?

Viens; nous serons un jour de pauvres feuilles mortes.

Viens; déjà la nuit tombe et le vent nous emporte.

Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?

"Le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes"--such indeed must be, at

the last, the wisdom of this great harvester of human passions and

perversions.

"Feuilles mortes," and the sound of feet that go by; that go by and

return not again!

Remy de Gourmont leaves in us a bitter after-sense that we have not

altogether, or perhaps even nearly, sounded the stops of his mystery.

"The rest is silence" not only because he is dead, but because it

seems as if he mocked at us--he the Protean critic--until his last hour.

His remote epicurean life--the life of a passionate scholar of the

Renaissance--baffles and evades our curiosity.

To analyse Remy de Gourmont one would have to be a Remy de

Gourmont.

He is full of inconsistencies. Proudly individualistic, an intellectual

anarchist free from every scruple, he displays an objective patience

almost worthy of Goethe himself in his elaborate investigations into

the mysteries of life and the mysteries of the art that expresses life.

Furiously enamoured of thrilling aesthetic sensations he can yet

wander, as those who know his "Promenades" can testify, through

all manner of intricate and technical details.

Capable in his poetry and prose-poems of giving himself up to every

sort of ambiguous and abnormal caprice, he is yet in his calmer

hours able to fall back upon a sane, serene and sun-lit wisdom,

tolerant towards the superstitions of humanity, and full of the magic

of the universe. Never for a single moment in all of his writings are

we allowed to forget the essential wonder and mystery of sex. Sex,

in all its caprices and eccentricities, in all its psychological masks

and ritualistic symbols, interests him ultimately more than anything

else. It is this which inspires even his critical work with a sort of

physiological thrill, as though the encounter with a new creative

intelligence were an encounter between lover and beloved.

Remy de Gourmont would have sex and sex-emotions put frankly

into the fore-ground of everything, as far as art and letters are

concerned. He would take the timid hyperborean Muse of the

modern world and bathe her once more in the sun-lit waters of the

Heliconian Spring. He would paganize, Latinize and Mediterraneanize

the genius of Europe.

Much of his writing will fall into oblivion. It is too occasional, too

topical, too fretted by the necessity of clearing away the half-gods so

that the gods may arrive. But certain of his books will live forever;

assured of that smiling and amiable immortality, beyond the reach of

all vulgar malice, which the high invisible ones give to those who

have learnt the sacramental secret that; only through the senses do

we understand the soul, and only through the soul do we understand

the senses.