at a blow. The preoccupation of sex is unlike that of a theory of art.
Conquered again and again by expression, it returns with a new face, a
new mystery, a new power of binding the intellect, a new Gorgon to be
seen in the mirror of art and decapitated. As the man changes, so does
Medusa vary her attack, and so must he vary the manner of her death.
Now he will write a _Physique de l'Amour_, and, like Schopenhauer,
relieve himself of the problem of sex by reducing it to lowest terms.
Now he will conquer it by the lyrical and concrete expression of a
novel or a poem. Sex continually disturbs him, but the disturbance
of the flesh is always, sooner or later, pacified by the mind. All
his later novels are, like _Sixtine_, "romans de la vie cérébrale."
_Sixtine_ is the story of a writer's courtship of a woman no more
subtle than himself, but far more ready with her subtlety. It displays
the workings of the man's mind and the states of emotion through
which he passes, by including in the text, as they were written, the
stories and poems composed under the influence of the events. The man
is intensely analytic, afterwards. Emotion blurs the windows of his
brain, and cleans hers to a greater lucidity. He always knows what
he ought to have done. "Nul n'avait à un plus haut degré la présence
d'esprit du bas de l'escalier." More than once the woman was his, if
he had known it before he left her. Finally, she is carried off by a
rival whose method he has himself suggested. The book is a tragedy
of self-consciousness, whose self-conscious heroine is a prize for
the only man who is ignorant of himself, and, in the blindness of
that ignorance, is able to act. But there is no need to analyse the
frameworks of M. de Gourmont's novels. Frameworks matter very little.
They are all vitalised by an almost impatient knowledge of the subtlety
of a woman's mind in moments of pursuit or flight, and of the impotence
of a man whose brain seeks to be an honest mediator between itself and
his flesh. His men do not love like the heroes of ordinary books, and
are not in the least likely to suggest impossible ideals to maidens.
They are unfaithful in the flesh nearly always. They use one experience
as an anæsthetic for the pain they are undergoing in another. They
seek to be masters of themselves by knowledge, and are unhappy without
thinking of suicide on that account. Unhappiness no less than joy is
a thing to be known. They fail, not getting what they want, and are
victorious in understanding, with smiling lips, their non-success.
IV
One afternoon, in the Rue des Saints-Pères, M. de Gourmont confirmed
the impression already given me by his books and his eyebrows. "I
have always been both _romanesque_ and _critique._ Side by side he
has built separate piles of books. While writing the curiosities of
symbolism that are collected in Le Pèlerin du Silence, he was preparing
the Livres des Masques, two series of short critical portraits of the
writers of his time, which, in the case of those who survive, are as
true to-day as when they were written. It has been so throughout.
In the one pile are little volumes of poetry like _Les Saintes du
Paradis_, and such romances as those we have been discussing; in the
other are works of science like the _Physique de l'Amour_, books
benevolently polemical like _Le Problème du Style_, and collections of
criticism in which an agile intelligence collaborates with a wakeful
sense of beauty.
In this critical work, as in what is more easily recognised as
creative, M. de Gourmont builds for freedom. He will be bound
neither by his own preoccupations nor by other men's thoughts. It is
characteristic of him that his most personal essays in criticism are
"Dissociations of Ideas." The dissociation of ideas is a method of
thought that separates the ideas put into double harness by tradition,
just as the chemist turns water into hydrogen and oxygen, with which,
severally, he can make other compounds. This, like most questions of
thought, is a question of words. Words are the liberators of ideas,
since without them ideas cannot escape from the flux of feeling into
independent life. They are also their gaolers, since they are terribly
cohesive, and married words cling together, binding in a lover's knot
the ideas they represent. All men using words in combination abet
these marriages, though in doing so they are making bars of iron for
the prisons in which they speculate on the torn fragment of sky that
their window lets them perceive. Nothing is easier than, by taking
words and their associations as they are commonly used, to strengthen
the adherence of ideas to each other. Nothing needs a more awakened
intelligence than to weaken the bonds of such ideas by separating
the words that bind them. That is the method of M. de Gourmont. He
separates, for example, the idea of Stéphane Mallarmé and that of
"decadence," the idea of glory and that of immortality, the idea
of success and that of beauty. It is, too, a dissociation of ideas
when he inquires into the value of education, these two ideas of
worth and knowledge being commonly allied. The method, or rather the
consciousness of the method, is fruitful in material for discussion,
though this advantage cannot weigh much with M. de Gourmont, whose
brain lacks neither motive power nor grist to grind. It is, for him, no
more than a recurrent cleaning of the glasses through which he looks at
the subjects of his speculation.
He speculates continually, and, if questions are insoluble, is not
content until he has so posed them as to show the reason of their
insolubility. He prefers a calm question mark to the more emotional
mark of exclamation, and is always happy when he can turn the second
into the first. He is extraordinarily thorough, moving always in mass
and taking everything with him, so that he has no footsteps to retrace
in order to pick up baggage left behind. Unlike Theseus, he unrolls no
clue of thread when he enters the cavern of the Minotaur. He will come
out by a different way or not at all. The most powerful Minotaur of our
day does not dismay him. Confident in his own probity, he will walk
calmly among the men of science and bring an _Esthétique de la langue
française_, or a _Physique de l'Amour_, meat of unaccustomed richness,
to lay before their husk-fed deity.
In criticism, as in creation, he does not like things half-done. The
story of the origin of one of these books is the story of them all.
There is a foolish little book by M. Albalat, which professes to teach
style in twenty-seven lessons. M. de Gourmont read it and smiled; he
wrote an article, and still found something to smile at; he wrote a
book, _Le Problème du Style_, in which, mocking M. Albalat through a
hundred and fifty-two courteous pages, he showed, besides many other
things, that style is not to be taught in twenty-seven lessons, and,
indeed, is not to be taught at all. Then he felt free to smile at
something else.
M. de Gourmont is careful to say that he brought to the _Esthétique de
la langue française_, "ni lois, ni règles, ni principes peut-être; je
n'apporte rien qu'un sentiment esthétique assez violent et quelques
notions historiques: voilà ce que je jette au hasard dans la grande
cuve où fermente la langue de demain." An æsthetic feeling and some
historical notions were sufficiently needed in the fermenting vat where
the old French language, in which there is hardly any Greek, is being
horribly adulterated with grainless translations of good French made
by Hellenists of the dictionary. M. de Gourmont is in love with his
language, but knows that she is rather vain and ready to wear all kinds
of borrowed plumes, whether or not they suit her. He would take from
her her imitation ostrich feathers, and would hide also all ribbons
from the London market, unless she first dyes them until they fall
without discord into the scheme of colour that centuries have made
her own. Why write "high life," for example, or "five o'clock," or
"sleeping"?
Why shock French and English alike by writing "Le Club de Rugby"
on a gate in Tours? A kingfisher in England flies very happily as
martin-pècheur in France, and the language is not so sterile as to be
unable to breed words from its own stock for whatever needs a name.
_Physique de l'Amour; Essai sur l'instinct sexuel_, "qui n'est qu'un
essai, parce que la matière de son idée est immense, représente
pourtant une ambition: on voudrait agrandir la psychologie générale de
l'amour, la faire commencer au commencement même de l'activité mâle
et femelle, situer la vie sexuelle de l'homme dans le plan unique de
la sexualité universelle." It is a book full of illustration, a vast
collection of facts, and throws into another fermenting vat than that
of language some sufficiently valuable ideas. It lessens the pride
of man, and, at the same time, gives him a desperate courage, as it
shows him that even in the eccentricities of his love-making he is
not alone, that the modesty of his women is a faint hesitation beside
the terrified flight of the she-mole, that his own superiority is but
an accident, and that he must hold himself fortunate in that nature
does not treat him like the male bee, and toss his mangled body
disdainfully to earth as soon as he has done her work. M. de Gourmont's
books do not flatter humanity. They clear the eyes of the strong, and
anger the weak who cannot bear to listen to unpalatable truths. This
book is in its eighth edition in France, and has been published in all
European languages except our own.
V
M. de Gourmont's most obvious quality is versatility, and though, as I
have tried to point out, it is not difficult to find a unity of cause
or intention in his most various expressions, his lofty and careless
pursuit of his inclinations, his life of thought for its own sake, has
probably cost him a wide and immediate recognition. That loss is not
his, but is borne by those who depend for their reading on the names
that float upward from the crowd. Even his admirers complain: some that
he has not given them more poems; others that his _Physique de l'Amour_
stands alone on its shelf; others that a critic such as he should have
spent time on romances; others, again, that a writer of such romances
should have used any of his magnificent power in what they cannot see
to be creative work. M. de Gourmont is indifferent to all alike, and
sits aloft in the Rue des Saints-Pères, indulging his mind with free
and harmonious play.
In one of his books, far more than in the others, two at least of
his apparently opposite activities have come to work in unison. All
his romances, after and including _Sixtine_, are vitalised by a
never-sleeping intellect; but one in particular is a book whose essence
is both critical and romantic, a book of thought coloured like a poem
and moving with a delicate grace of narrative. _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_
was published in 1906, and is the book that opens most vistas in M.
de Gourmont's work. A god walks in the gardens behind the Odéon, and
a winter's night is a summer's morning, on which the young journalist
who has dared to say "My friend" to the luminous unknown in the church
of Saint-Sulpice, hears him proclaim the forgotten truth that in one
age his mother has been Mary, and in another Latona, and the new truth
that the gods are not immortal though their lives are long. Flowers
are in bloom where they walk, and three beautiful girls greet them
with divine amity. Most of the book is written in dialogue, and in
this ancient form, never filled with subtler essences, doubts are
born and become beliefs, beliefs become doubts and die, while the sun
shines, flowers are sweet, and girls' lips soft to kiss. Where there
is God he will not have Love absent, and where Love is he finds the
most stimulating exercise for his brain. Ideas are given an æsthetic
rather than a scientific value, and are used like the tints on a
palette. Indeed, the book is a balanced composition in which each
colour has its complement. Epicurus, Lucretius, St. Paul, Christianity,
the replenishment of the earth by the Jews; it is impossible to close
the book at any page without finding the mind as it were upon a
spring-board and ready to launch itself in delightful flight. There
are many books that give a specious sensation of intellectual business
while we read them. There are very few that leave, long after they are
laid aside, stimuli to independent activity.
APPENDIX
VI
"Il ne faut pas chercher la vérité; mais devant un homme comprendre
quelle est sa vérité." We must not seek in a man's work for the truth,
since there are as many truths as brains; but it is worth while to
define an answer here and an answer there out of the many. What is the
answer of Remy de Gourmont? _Quelle est sa vérité?_ Of what kind is his
truth? Does he bring rosemary for remembrance or poppy for oblivion?
Not in what he says, but in the point from which he says it, we must
look for our indications. His life, like _Sixtine_, is a "roman de la
vie cérébrale." It is the spectacle of a man whose conquests are won
by understanding. For him the escape of mysticism was inadequate, and
an invitation to cowardice. He would not abdicate, but, since those
empires are unstable whose boundaries are fixed, conquer continually.
The conquests of the mind are not won by neglect. It is not sufficient
to refuse to see. The conqueror must see so clearly that life blushes
before his sober eyes, and, understood, no longer dominates. Remy de
Gourmont has suffered and conquered his suffering in understanding
it. He would extend this dominion. He would realise all that happens
to him, books, a chance visitor, a meeting in the street, the liquid
bars of light across the muddy Seine. He would transmute all into the
mercurial matter of thought, until, at last impregnable, he should
see life from above, having trained his digestive powers to the same
perfection as his powers of reception. Although one of the Symbolists,
he has moved far from the starting-point assigned to that school by
Mr. Symons. His books are not "escapes from the thought of death." The
thought of death is to him like any other thought, a rude playfellow
to be mastered and trained to fitness for that free and harmonious
game. The life of the brain, the noblest of all battles, that of a mind
against the universe which it creates, has come to seem more important
to him than the curiosities of beauty of which he was once enamoured.
It has, perhaps, made him more of a thinker than an artist. In his
desire to conquer his obsessions he has sometimes lost sight of the
unity that is essential to art, a happy accident in thought. His later
books have been the by-products of a more intimate labour. He has left
them by the road whose end he has not hoped to reach, whose pursuit
suffices him. In _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_, the thinker is now and then
a little contemptuous of the artist. The reader is moved by something
beside a purely æsthetic emotion. Beside the breath of loveliness that
blows fitfully, almost carelessly, through those flowering trees,
there is a sturdier wind that compels a bracing of the shoulders and
an opening of the chest. The spectacle of that mind, playing with gods
and worlds, so certain of its own balance, wakes a feeling of emulation
which has nothing to do with art. This feeling of emulation, never
far from a feeling of beauty, is the characteristic gift of M. de
Gourmont's work. There was an artist; there was a thinker; there is a
philosopher whose thought loses nothing through being beautiful, whose
art loses little through being the pathway of the most daring, the
surest-footed thought.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Night in the Luxembourg, by Remy De Gourmont