At this moment there is a little movement of neo-paganism, of sensual
naturalism and erotism at once mystic and materialistic, a springtime
of those purely carnal religions where woman is adored even for the
very ugliness of her sex, for by means of metaphors we can idealize
the imperfect and deify the illusive. A novel of Marcel Batilliat, a
young unknown man, is, despite its serious faults, perhaps the most
curious specimen of this erotic religiosity which zealous hearts are
cultivating as dreams or ideals. But there is a famous manifestation,
the _Aphrodite_ of Pierre Louys, whose success, doubtless, henceforth
will stifle as under roses, all other claims of sexual romanticism.
It is not, although its appearance has deceived young and old critics,
a historical novel, such as _Salammbô_ or even _Thaïs._ The perfect
knowledge which Pierre Louys possesses of Alexandrian religions
and customs has allowed him to clothe his personages with names
and garbs veraciously ancient, but the book must be read divested
of those precautions which are not there, just as in more than one
eighteenth century novel, where the customs, gestures and desires of an
incontestable today are at play behind the embroidered screen work of
hieratic phallophores.
By the vulgarizing of art, love finally has returned to us naked. It
is in the epoch of the flowering of Calvinism that the nude began
to be banned from manners and that it sought refuge in art, which
alone treasured the tradition of it. Formerly, and even in the time
of Charles the Fifth, there were no public celebrations without
speculations regarding lovely nude women; the nude was so little
dreaded that adulterous women were driven stark naked through the
towns. It is beyond a doubt that, in the mysteries, such roles as Adam
and Eve were acted by persons free of fleshings,--monstrous display.
To love the nude, and first of all femininity with its graces and
insolences, is traditional in those races which hard reform has not
altogether terrorized. The idea of the nude being admitted, costume can
be modified to take in floating loose robe, manners can be softened,
and something of splendor illume the gloom of our hypocricies. By its
vogue, _Aphrodite_ has signalled the possible return to manners where
there will be a bit of freedom; coming from that period, this book has
the value of an antidote.
But how fallacious is such a literature. All these women, all this
flesh, the cries, the luxury so animal, so empty and so cruel! The
females gnaw at the brains; thought flies horror-stricken; woman's soul
oozes away as by the action of rain, and all these copulations engender
nothingness, disgust and death.
Pierre Louys has felt that his fleshly book logically must end in
death: _Aphrodite_ closes in a scene of death, with obsequies.
It is the end of _Atala_ (Chateaubriand invisibly hovers over our
whole literature), but gracefully refashioned and renewed with art
and tenderness,--so well that the idea of death comes to join itself
with the idea of beauty; the two images, entwined like two courtisans,
slowly fades into the night.