REMY DE GOURMONT
HIS IDEAS. THE COLOUR OF HIS MIND
"Je dis ce que je pense"--R. DE G.
I
Those were days marked by a white stone when arrived in the familiar
yellow cover a new book, with card enclosed from "Remy de Gourmont,
71, rue des Saints-Peres, Paris." Sometimes I received as many as
two in a year. But they always found me eager and grateful, did
those precious little volumes bearing the imprint of the _Mercure de
France_, with whose history the name of De Gourmont is so happily
linked. And there were post-cards too in his delicate handwriting on
which were traced sense and sentiment; yes, this man of genius
possessed sentiment, but abhorred sentimentality. His personal charm
transpired in a friendly salutation hastily pencilled. He played
exquisitely upon his intellectual instrument, and knew the value of
time and space. So his post-cards are souvenirs of his courtesy, and
it was through one, which unexpectedly fell from the sky in 1897, I
began my friendship with this distinguished French critic. His
sudden death in 1915 at Paris (he was born 1858), caused by
apoplexy, was the heroic ending of a man of letters. Like Flaubert
he was stricken while at his desk. I can conceive no more fitting
end for a valiant soldier of literature. He was a moral hero and the
victim of his prolonged technical heroism.
De Gourmont was incomparable. Thought, not action, was his chosen
sphere, but ranging up and down the vague and vast territory of
ideas he encountered countless cerebral adventures; the most
dangerous of all. An aristocrat born, he was, nevertheless, a
convinced democrat. The latch was always lifted on the front door of
his ivory tower. He did live in a certain sense a cloistered
existence, a Benedictine of arts and letters; but he was not, as has
been said, a sour hermit nursing morose fancies in solitude. De
Gourmont, true pagan, enjoyed the gifts the gods provide, and had,
despite the dualism of his nature, an epicurean soul. But of a
complexity. He never sympathised with the disproportionate fuss
raised by the metaphysicians about Instinct and Intelligence, yet
his own magnificent cerebral apparatus was a battle-field over which
swept the opposing hosts of Instinct and Intelligence, and in a
half-hundred volumes the history of this conflict is faithfully set
down. As personal as Maurice Barres, without his egoism, as subtle
as Anatole France, De Gourmont saw life steadier and broader than
either of these two contemporaries. He was one who said "vast things
simply." He was the profoundest philosopher of the three, and never,
after his beginnings, exhibited a trace of the dilettante. Life soon
became something more than a mere spectacle for him. He was a
meliorist in theory and practice, though he asserted that
Christianity, an Oriental-born religion, has not become spiritually
acclimated among Occidental peoples. But he missed its consoling
function; religion, the poetry of the poor, never had for him the
prime significance that it had for William James; a legend, vague,
vast, and delicious.
Old frontiers have disappeared in science and art and literature. We
have Maeterlinck, a poet writing of bees, Poincare, a mathematician
opening our eyes to the mystic gulfs of space; solid matters
resolved into mist, and the law of gravitation questioned. The new
horizons beckon ardent youth bent on conquering the secrets of life.
And there are more false beacon-lights than true. But if this is an
age of specialists a man occasionally emerges who contradicts the
formula. De Gourmont was at base a poet; also a dramatist, novelist,
raconteur, man of science, critic, moralist of erudition, and,
lastly, a philosopher. Both formidable and bewildering were his
accomplishments. He is a poet in his Hieroglyphes, Oraisons
mauvaises, Le Livre des Litanies, Les Saintes du Paradis, Simone,
Divertissements--his last appearance in singing robes (1914); he is
a raconteur--and such tales--in Histoires magiques, Prose moroses,
Le Pelerin du silence, D'un Pays lointain, Couleurs; a novelist in
Merlette--his first book--Sixtine, Le Fantome, les Chevaux de
Diomede, Le Songe d'une Femme, Une Nuit au Luxembourg, Un C[oe]ur
virginal; dramatist in Theodat, Phenissa, Le vieux Roi, Lilith; as
master critic of the aesthetics of the French language his supremacy
is indisputable; it is hardly necessary to refer here to Le Livre
des Masques, in two volumes, the five volumes of Promenades
litteraires, the three of Promenades philosophiques; as moralist he
has signed such works as l'Idealisme, La Culture des Idees, Le
Chemin de Velours; historian and humanist, he has given us Le Latin
mystique; grammarian and philologist, he displays his learning in Le
Probleme du Style, and Esthetique de la Langue francaise, and
incidentally flays an unhappy pedagogue who proposed to impart the
secret of style in twenty lessons. He edited many classics of French
literature.
His chief contribution to science, apart from his botanical and
entomological researches, is Physique de l'Amour, in which he
reveals himself as a patient, thorough observer in an almost new
country. And what shall we say to his incursions into the actual,
into the field of politics, sociology and hourly happenings of Paris
life; his Epilogues (three volumes), Dialogues des Amateurs, the
collected pages from his monthly contributions to _Mercure de
France_? Nothing human was alien to him, nor inhuman, for he
rejected as quite meaningless the latter vocable, as he rejected
such cliches as "organic and inorganic." Years before we heard of a
pluralistic universe De Gourmont was a pragmatist, though an
idealist in his conception of the world as a personal picture.
Intensely interested in ideas, as he was in words, he might have
fulfilled Lord Acton's wish that some one would write a History of
Ideas. At the time of his death the French thinker was composing a
work entitled La Physique des M[oe]urs, in which he contemplated a
demonstration of his law of intellectual constancy.
A spiritual cosmopolitan, he was like most Frenchmen an ardent
patriot. The little squabble in the early eighties over a skit of
his, Le Jou-jou--patriotisme (1883), cost him his post at the
National Library in Paris. As a philosopher he deprecated war; as a
man, though too old to fight, he urged his countrymen to victory, as
may be noted in his last book, Pendant l'Orage (1916). But the
philosopher persists in such a sorrowful sentence as: "In the
tragedy of man peace is but an entr'acte." To show his mental
balance at a time when literary men, artists, and even philosophers,
indulged in unseemly abuse, we read in Jugements his calm admission
that the war has not destroyed for him the intellectual values of
Goethe, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche. He owes much to their thought as
they owed much to French thought; Goethe has said as much; and of
Voltaire and Chamfort, Schopenhauer was a disciple. Without being a
practical musician, De Gourmont was a lover of Beethoven and Wagner.
He paid his compliments to Romain Rolland, whose style, both chalky
and mucilaginous, he dislikes in that overrated and spun-out series
Jean-Christophe. Another little volume, La Belgique litteraire, was
published in 1915, which, while it contains nothing particularly new
about Georges Rodenbach, Emile Verhaeren, Van Lerberghe, Camille
Lemonnier, and Maurice Maeterlinck, is excellent reading. The French
critic was also editor of the _Revue des Idees_, and judging from
the bibliography compiled by Pierre de Querlon as long ago as 1903,
he was a collaborator of numerous magazines. He wrote on Emerson,
English humour, or Thomas a Kempis with the same facility as he
dissected the mystic Latin writers of the early centuries after
Christ. Indeed, such versatility was viewed askance by the plodding
crowd of college professors, his general adversaries. But his
erudition could not be challenged; only two other men matched his
scholarship, Anatole France and the late Marcel Schwob. And we have
only skimmed the surface of his accomplishments. Remy de Gourmont is
the Admirable Crichton of French letters.
II
Prodigious incoherence might be reasonably expected from this
diversity of interests, yet the result is quite the reverse. The
artist in this complicated man banished confusion. He has told us
that because of the diversity of his aptitudes man is distinguished
from his fellow animals, and the variety in his labours is a proof
positive of his superiority to such fellow critics as the mentally
constipated Brunetiere, the impressionistic Anatole France, the
agile and graceful Lemaitre, and the pedantic philistine Faguet. But
if De Gourmont always attains clarity with no loss of depth, he
sometimes mixes his genres; that is, the poet peeps out in his
reports of the psychic life of insects, as the philosopher lords it
over the pages of his fiction. A mystic betimes, he is a
crystal-clear thinker. And consider the catholicity evinced in Le
Livre des Masques. He wrote of such widely diverging talents as
Maeterlinck, Mallarme, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Paul Adam; of
Henri de Regnier and Jules Renard; of Huysmans and Jules Laforgue;
the mysticism of Francis Poictevin's style and the imagery of
Saint-Pol-Roux he defined, and he displays an understanding of the
first symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, while disliking the
personality of that abnormal youth. But why recite this litany of
new talent literally made visible and vocal by our critic? It is a
pleasure to record the fact that most of his swans remained swans
and did not degenerate into tame geese. In this book he shows
himself a profound psychologist.
Insatiably curious, he yet contrived to drive his chimeras in double
harness and safely. His best fiction is Sixtine and Une Nuit au
Luxembourg, if fiction they may be called. Never will their author
be registered among best-sellers. Sixtine deals with the adventures
of a masculine brain. Ideas are the hero. In Un C[oe]ur virginal we
touch earth, fleshly and spiritually. This story shocked its
readers. It may be considered as a sequel to Physique de l'Amour. It
shows mankind as a gigantic insect indulging in the same apparently
blind pursuit of sex sensation as a beetle, and also shows us the
"female of our species" endowed with less capacity for modesty than
the lady mole, the most chaste of all animals. Disconcerting, too,
is the psychology of the heroine's virginal soul, not, however,
cynical; cynicism is the irony of vice, and De Gourmont is never
cynical. But a master of irony.
Une Nuit au Luxembourg has been done into English. It handles with
delicacy and frankness themes that in the hands of a lesser artist
would be banished as brutal and blasphemous. The author knows that
all our felicity is founded on a compromise between the dream and
reality, and for that reason while he signals the illusion he never
mocks it; he is too much an idealist. In the elaborately carved
cups of his tales, foaming over with exquisite perfumes and nectar,
there lurks the bitter drop of truth. He could never have said with
Proudhon that woman is the desolation of the just; for him woman is
often an obsession. Yet, captain of his instincts, he sees her
justly; he is not subdued by sex. With a gesture he destroys the
sentimental scaffolding of the sensualist and marches on to new
intellectual conquests.
In Lilith, an Adamitic Morality, he reveals his Talmudic lore. The
first wife of our common ancestor is a beautiful hell-hag, the
accomplice of Satan in the corruption of the human race. Thus
mediaeval play is epical in its Rabelaisian plainness of speech.
Perhaps the Manichean in De Gourmont fabricated its revolting
images. He had traversed the Baudelairian steppes of blasphemy and
black pessimism; Baudelaire, a poet who was a great critic. Odi
profanum vulgus! was De Gourmont's motto, but his soul was
responsive to so many contacts that he emerged, as Barres emerged, a
citizen of the world. Anarchy as a working philosophy did not long
content him, although he never relinquished his detached attitude of
proud individualism. He saw through the sentimental equality of J.J.
Rousseau. Rousseau it was who said that thinking man was a depraved
animal. Perhaps he was not far from the truth. Man is an affective
animal more interested in the immediate testimony of his senses than
in his intellectual processes. His metaphysic may be but the
reverberation of his sensations on the shore of his subliminal self,
the echo of the sounding shell he calls his soul. And our critic had
his scientific studies to console him for the inevitable sterility
of soul that follows egoism and a barren debauch of the sensations.
He did not tarry long in the valley of excess. His artistic
sensibility was his saviour.
Without being a dogmatist, De Gourmont was an antagonist of
absolutism. A determinist, (which may be dogmatism a rebours), a
relativist, he holds that mankind is not a specially favoured
species of the animal scale; thought is only an accident, possibly
the result of rich nutrition. An automaton, man has no free will,
but it is better for him to imagine that he has; it is a sounder
working hypothesis for the average human. The universe had no
beginning, it will have no end. There is no first link or last in
the chain of causality. Everything must submit to the law of
causality; to explain a blade of grass we must dismount the stars.
Nevertheless, De Gourmont no more than Renan, had the mania of
certitude. Humbly he interrogates the sphinx. There are no isolated
phenomena in time or space. The mass of matter is eternal. Man is an
animal submitting to the same laws that govern crystals or brutes.
He is the expression of matter in physique and chemistry. Repetition
is the law of life. Thought is a physiological product;
intelligence the secretion of matter and is amenable to the law of
causality. (This sounds like Taine's famous definition of virtue and
vice.) And who shall deny it all in the psychochemical laboratories?
It is not the rigid old-fashioned materialism, but a return to the
more plastic theories of Lamarck and the transformism of the Dutch
botanist, Hugo de Vries. For De Gourmont the Darwinian notion that
man is at the topmost notch of creation is as antique and absurd as
most cosmogonies; indeed, it is the Asiatic egocentric idea of
creation. Jacob's ladder repainted in Darwinian symbols. Voila
l'ennemi! said De Gourmont and put on his controversial armour. What
blows, what sudden deadly attacks were his!
Quinton has demonstrated to the satisfaction of many scientists that
bird life came later on our globe than the primates from whom we
stem. The law of thermal constancy proves it by the interior
temperature of birds. Man preceded the carnivorous and ruminating
animals, of whom the bodily temperature is lower than that of birds.
The ants and bees and beavers are not a whit more automatic than
mankind. Automatism, says Ribot, is the rule. Thought is not free,
wrote William James, when to it an affirmation is added; then it is
but the affirmation of a preference. "L'homme," asserts De Gourmont,
"varie a l'infini sa mimique. Sa superiorite, c'est la diversite
immense de ses aptitudes." He welcomed Jules de Gaultier and his
theory of Bovaryisme; of the vital lie, because of which we pretend
to be what we are not. That way spells security, if not progress.
The idea of progress is another necessary illusion, for it provokes
a multiplicity of activities. Our so-called free will is naught but
the faculty of making a decision determined by a great and varied
number of motives. As for morality, it is the outcome of tribal
taboos; the insect and animal world shows deepest-dyed immorality,
revolting cruelty, and sex perversity. Rabbits and earthworms
through no fault of their own suffer from horrible maladies. From
all of which our critic deduces his law of intellectual constancy.
The human brain since prehistoric times has been neither diminished
nor augmented; it has remained like a sponge, which can be dry or
saturated, but still remains itself. It is a constant. In a
favourable environment it is enriched. The greatest moment in the
history of the human family was the discovery of fire by an
anthropoid of genius. Prometheus then should be our god. Without him
we should have remained more or less simian, and probably of
arboreal habits.
III
A synthetic brain is De Gourmont's, a sower of doubts, though not a
No-Sayer to the universe. He delights in challenging accepted
"truths." Of all modern thinkers a master of Vues d'ensembles, he
smiles at the pretensions, usually a mask for poverty of ideas, of
so-called "general ideas." He dissociates such conventional grouping
of ideas as Glory, Justice, Decadence. The shining ribs of
disillusion shine through his psychology; a psychology of nuance and
finesse. Disillusioning reflections, these. Not to be put in any
philosophical pigeonhole, he is as far removed from the eclecticism
of Victor Cousin as from the verbal jugglery and metaphysical
murmurings of Henri Bergson. The world is his dream; but it is a
tangible dream, charged with meaning, order, logic. The truest
reality is thought. Action spoils. (Goethe said: "Thought expands,
action narrows.") Our abstract ideas are metaphysical idols, says
Jules de Gaultier. The image of the concrete is De Gourmont's
touchstone. Theophile Gautier declared that he was a man for whom
the visible world existed. He misjudged his capacity for
apprehending reality. The human brain, excellent instrument in a
priori combinations is inept at perceiving realities. The "Sultan of
the Epithet," as De Goncourt nicknamed "le bon Theo," was not the
"Emperor of Thought," according to Henry James, and for him it was a
romantic fiction spun in the rich web of his fancy. A vaster, greyer
world is adumbrated in the books of De Gourmont. He never allowed
symbolism to deform his representation of sober, every-day life. He
pictured the future domain of art and ideas as a fair and shining
landscape no longer a series of little gardens with high walls. A
hater of formulas, sects, schools, he teaches that the capital crime
of the artist, the writer, the thinker, is conformity. (Yet how
serenely this critic swims in classic currents!) The artist's work
should reflect his personality, a magnified reflection. He must
create his own aesthetic. There are no schools, only individuals. And
of consistency he might have said that it is oftener a mule than a
jewel.
Sceptical in all matters, though never the fascinating sophist that
is Anatole France, De Gourmont criticised the thirty-six dramatic
situations, reducing the number to four. Man as centre in relation
to himself; in relation to other men; in relation to the other sex;
in relation to God, or Nature. His ecclesiastical _fond_ may be
recognised in Le Chemin de Velours with its sympathetic exposition
of Jesuit doctrine, and the acuity of its judgments on Pascal and
the Jansenists. The latter section is as an illuminating foot-note
to the history of Port-Royal by Sainte-Beuve. The younger critic has
the supple intellect of the supplest-minded Jesuit. His bias toward
the order is unmistakable. There are few books I reread with more
pleasure than this Path of Velvet. Certain passages in it are as
silky and sonorous as the sound of Eugene Ysaye's violin.
The colour of De Gourmont's mind is stained by his artistic
sensibility. A maker of images, his vocabulary astounding as befits
both a poet and philologist, one avid of beautiful words, has
variety. The temper of his mind is tolerant, a quality that has
informed the finer intellects of France since Montaigne. His
literary equipment is unusual. A style as brilliant, sinuous, and
personal as his thought; flexible or massive, continent or coloured,
he discourses at ease in all the gamuts and modes major, minor, and
mixed. A swift, weighty style, the style of a Latinist; a classic,
not a romantic style. His formal sense is admirable. The tenderness
of Anatole France is absent, except in his verse, which is less
spontaneous than volitional. A pioneer in new aesthetic pastures, De
Gourmont is a poet for poets. He has virtuosity, though the gift of
tears nature--possibly jealous because of her prodigality--has
denied him. But in the curves of his overarching intellect there may
be found wit, gaiety, humour, the Gallic attributes, allied with
poetic fancy, profundity of thought, and a many-sided comprehension
of life, art, and letters. He is in the best tradition of French
criticism only more versatile than either Sainte-Beuve or Taine; as
versatile as Doctor Brandes or Arthur Symons, and that is saying
much. With Anatole France he could have exclaimed: "The longer I
contemplate human life, the more I believe that we must give it, for
witnesses and judges, Irony and Pity...."