Part 7
M. de Gourmont almost immediately left the half-hearted realism of _Merlette_, and, just as in his scientific writings he is more profoundly scientific than the men of science, so in his works of this period he carried to their uttermost limits the doctrines of the symbolists. In his critical work the historian must look for the manifestoes and polemics of the group that gathered in Mallarmé's rooms in the Rue de Rome. The theories are in _Idéalisme_, published in 1893, and in such essays as his defence of Mallarmé, written in 1898, and included in the _Promenades Littéraires_. Of their practice he supplies plenty of examples. "Nommer un objet, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu; le suggérer voilà le rêve." Mallarmé wrote that in 1891, and during the 'nineties, Remy de Gourmont was publishing mysterious little books of poetry and prose, of which small limited editions were issued on rare paper, in curious covers, with lithographed decorations as reticent as the writing. There is the _Histoire tragique de la Princesse Phénissa expliquée en quatre épisodes_, a play whose action might be seen through seven veils, a play whose motive, never stated directly, is, perhaps, the destruction of the future for the sake of the present. There is _Le Fantôme_, the story of a liaison between a man and a woman if you will, between the intellect and the flesh if you will, that begins with such an anthem as might have been sung by some of those strange beings whom Poe took "into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets and heartsease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns." The man--is it a man?--who tells the story, ends with a regret for something too real to be visible, something that is seen because it is not visible:--"Je me sentais froid, j'avais peur--car je la voyais, sans pouvoir m'opposer? cette transformation douloureuse--je la voyais s'en aller rejoindre le groupe des femmes indécises d'où mon amour l'avait tirée--je la voyais redevenir le fantôme qu'elles sont toutes." There is _Le Livre des Litanies_, with its wonderful incantation, from which I take the beginning and end:--
"Fleur hypocrite, "Fleur du silence. "Rose couleur de cuivre, plus frauduleuse que nos joies, rose couleur de cuivre, embaume-nous dans tes mensonges, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.
* * * * *
"Rose améthyste, étoile matinale, tendresse épiscopale, rose améthyste, tu dors sur des poitrines dévotes et douillettes, gemme offerte à Marie, ô gemme sacristine, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.
"Rose cardinale, rose couleur du sang de l'Eglise romaine, rose cardinale, tu fais rêver les grands yeux des mignons et plus d'un t'épingla au noeud de sa jarretière, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.
"Rose papale, rose arrosée des mains qui bénissent le monde, rose papale, ton coeur d'or est en cuivre, et les larmes qui perlent sur ta vaine corolle, ce sont les pleurs du Christ, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.
"Fleur hypocrite,
"Fleur du silence."
III
These, and other things like them, made it possible for M. de Gourmont to proceed in the discovery of himself. He drank his mood to the dregs, leaving no untried experiment to clog his mind with a regret as he moved on. "I have always been excessive," he says; "I do not like to stop half-way." He follows each impulse as far as it will take him, lest, by chance, he should leave some flower untasted in a by-path he has seen but not explored. Unlike most authors, he never has to copy himself, and does not feel bound, because he has written one book whose prose is malachite green, to produce another of the same colour. "Un artiste," said Wilde, "ne recommence jamais deux fois la même chose ... ou bien c'est qu'il n'avait pas réussi." The surest way to fail in an experiment is to make it with a faint heart. M. de Gourmont always burns his boats.
Some preoccupations, however boldly attacked, are not to be conquered 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