Instigations Part 25

He had pa.s.sed the point where people take abstract statement of dogma for "enlightenment." An "idea" has little value apart from the modality of the mind which receives it. It is a railway from one state to another, and as dull as steel rails in a desert.

The emotions are equal before the aesthetic judgment. He does not grant the duality of body and soul, or at least suggests that this mediaeval duality is unsatisfactory; there is an interpenetration, an osmosis of body and soul, at least for hypothesis. "My words are the unspoken words of my body."

And in all his exquisite treatment of all emotion he will satisfy many whom August Strindberg, for egregious example, will not. From the studies of insects to Christine evoked from the thoughts of Diomede, s.e.x is not a monstrosity or an exclusively German study.[1] And the entire race is not bound to the habits of the _mantis_ or of other insects equally melodramatic. s.e.x, in so far as it is not a purely physiological reproductive mechanism, lies in the domain of aesthetics, the junction of tactile and magnetic senses; as some people have accurate ears both for rhythm and for pitch, and as some are tone deaf, some impervious to rhythmic subtlety and variety, so in this other field of the senses some desire the trivial, some the processional, the stately, the master-work.

As some people are good judges of music, and insensible to painting and sculpture, so the fineness of one sense entails no corresponding fineness in another, or at least no corresponding critical perception of differences.

III.

Emotions to Henry James were more or less things that other people had and that one didn't go into; at any rate not in drawing rooms. The G.o.ds had not visited James, and the Muse, whom he so frequently mentions, appeared doubtless in corsage, the narrow waist, the sleeves puffed at the shoulders, a la mode 1890-2.

De Gourmont is interested in hardly anything save emotions, and the ideas that will go into them, or take life in emotional application.

(Apperceptive rather than active.)

One reads LES CHEVAUX DE DIOMeDE (1897) as one would have listened to incense in the old Imperial court. There are many spirits incapable. De Gourmont calls it a "romance of possible adventures"; it might be called equally an aroma, the fragrance of roses and poplars, the savor of wisdoms, not part of the canon of literature, a book like "Daphnis and Chloe" or like Marcel Schwob's "Livre de Monelle"; not a solidarity like Flaubert; but an osmosis, a pervasion.

"My true life is in the unspoken words of my body."

In "UNE NUIT AU LUXEMBOURG," the characters talk at more length, and the movement is less convincing. "Diomede" was de Gourmont's own favorite and we may take it as the best of his art, as the most complete expression of his particular "facon d'apercevoir"; if, even in it, the characters do little but talk philosophy, or rather drift into philosophic expression out of a haze of images, they are for all that very real. It is the climax of his method of presenting characters differentiated by emotional timbre, a process which had begun in "HISTOIRES MAGIQUES" (1895); and in "D'UN PAYS LOINTAIN" (published 1898, in reprint from periodicals of 1892-4).

"SONGE D'UNE FEMME" (1899) is a novel of modern life, de Gourmont's s.e.xual intelligence, as contrasted to Strindberg's s.e.xual stupidity well in evidence. The work is untranslatable into English, but should be used before 30 by young men who have been during their undergraduate days too deeply inebriated with the Vita Nuova.

"Tout ce qui se pa.s.se dans la vie, c'est de la mauvaise litterature."

"La vraie terre natale est celle ou on a eu sa premiere emotion forte."

"La virginite n'est pas une vertu, c'est un etat; c'est une sous-division des couleurs."

_Livres de chevet_ for those whom the Strindbergian school will always leave aloof.

"Les imbeciles ont choisi le beau comme les oiseaux choisissent ce qui est gras. La betise leur sert de cornes."

"CUR VIRGINAL" (1907) is a light novel, amusing, and accurate in its psychology.

I do not think it possible to overemphasize Gourmont's sense of beauty.

The mist clings to the lacquer. His spirit was the spirit of Omakitsu; his _pays natal_ was near to the peach-blossom-fountain of the untranslatable poem. If the life of Diomede is overdone and done badly in modern Paris, the wisdom of the book is not thereby invalidated. It may be that Paris has need of some more Spartan corrective, but for the descendants of witch-burners Diomede is a needful communication.

IV.

As Voltaire was a needed light in the 18th century, so in our time Fabre and Frazer have been essentials in the mental furnishings of any contemporary mind qualified to write of ethics or philosophy or that mixed mola.s.ses religion. "The Golden Bough" has supplied the data which Voltaire's incisions had shown to be lacking. It has been a positive succeeding his negative. It is not necessary perhaps to read Fabre and Frazer entire, but one must be aware of them; people unaware of them invalidate all their own writing by simple ignorance, and their work goes ultimately to the sc.r.a.p heap.

"PHYSIQUE DE L'AMOUR" (1903) should be used as a text book of biology.

Between this biological basis in instinct, and the "Sequaire of G.o.ddeschalk" in "Le Latin Mystique" (1892) stretch Gourmont's studies of amour and aesthetics. If in Diomede we find an Epicurean receptivity, a certain aloofness, an observation of contacts and auditions, in contrast to the Propertian att.i.tude:

Ingenium n.o.bis ipsa puella facit,

this is perhaps balanced by

"Sans vous, je crois bien que je n'aimerais plus beaucoup et que je n'aurais plus une extreme confiance ni dans la vie ni moi-meme." (In "Lettres a l'Amazone.")

But there is nothing more unsatisfactory than saying that de Gourmont "had such and such ideas" or held "such and such views," the thing is that he held ideas, intuitions, perceptions in a certain personal exquisite manner. In a criticism of him, "criticism" being an over violent word, in, let us say, an indication of him, one wants merely to show that one has oneself made certain dissociations; as here, between the aesthetic receptivity of tactile and magnetic values, of the perception of beauty in these relationships, and the conception of love, pa.s.sion, emotion as an intellectual instigation; such as Propertius claims it; such as we find it declared in the King of Navarre's

"De fine amor vient science et beaute";

and constantly in the troubadours.

(I cannot repeat too often that there was a profound psychological knowledge in mediaeval Provence, however Gothic its expression; that men, concentrated on certain validities, attaining an exact and diversified terminology, have there displayed considerable penetration; that this was carried into early Italian poetry; and faded from it when metaphors became decorative instead of interpretative; and that the age of Aquinas would not have tolerated sloppy expression of psychology concurrent with the exact expression of "mysticism." There is also great wisdom in Ovid.

_Pa.s.sons!_)

De Gourmont's wisdom is not wholly unlike the wisdom which those ignorant of Latin may, if the G.o.ds favor their understanding, derive from Gelding's "Metamorphoses."

V.

Barbarian ethics proceed by general taboos. Gourmont's essays collected into various volumes, "Promenades," "Epilogues," etc., are perhaps the best introduction to the ideas of our time that any unfortunate, suddenly emerging from Peru, Peoria, Oshkosh, Iceland, Kochin, or other out-of-the-way lost continent could desire. A set of Landor's collected works will go further towards civilizing a man than any university education now on the market. Montaigne condensed Renaissance awareness.

Even so small a collection as Lionel Johnson's "Post Liminium" might save a man from utter barbarity.

But if, for example, a raw graduate were contemplating a burst into intellectual company, he would be less likely to utter unutterable _betisses, gaffes_, etc., after reading Gourmont than before. One cannot of course create intelligence in a numbskull.

Needless to say, Gourmont's essays are of uneven value as the necessary subject matter is of uneven value. Taken together, proportionately placed in his work, they are a portrait of the civilized mind. I incline to think them the best portrait available, the best record that is, of the civilized mind from 1885-1915.

There are plenty of people who do not know what the civilized mind is like, just as there were plenty of mules in England who did not read Landor contemporaneously, or who did not in his day read Montaigne.

Civilization is individual.

Gourmont arouses the senses of the imagination, preparing the mind for receptivities. His wisdom, if not of the senses, is at any rate via the senses. We base our "science" on perceptions, but our ethics have not yet attained this palpable basis.

In 1898, "PAYS LOINTAIN" (reprinted from magazine publication of 1892-4), de Gourmont was beginning his method:

"Douze crimes pour l'honneur de l'infini."

He treats the special case, cases as special as any of James', but segregated on different demarcative lines. His style had attained the vividness of

"Sa vocation etait de paraitre malheureuse, de pa.s.ser dans la vie comme une ombre gemissante, d'inspirer de la pitie, du doute et de l'inquietude. Elle avait toujours l'air de porter des fleurs vers une tombe abandonnee."

_La Femme en Noir._

In "HISTOIRES MAGIQUES" (1894): "La Robe Blanche," "Yeux d'eau,"

"Marguerite Rouge," "Sur de Sylvie," "Danaette," are all of them special cases, already showing his perception of nevrosis, of hyperaesthesia. His mind is still running on tonal variations in "Les Litanies de la Rose."

"Pourtant il y a des yeux au bout des doigts."

"Femmes, conservatrices des traditions milesiennes."