I
M. de Gourmont lives on the fourth floor of an old house in the Rue des Saints-Pères. A copper chain hangs as bell-rope to his door. The rare visitor, for it is well known that for many years he has been a solitary and seldom receives even his friends, pulls the chain and waits. The door opens a few inches, ready to be closed immediately, by a man of middle size, in a monk’s brown robe, with a small, round, grey felt cap. The robe is fastened with silver buckles, in which are set large blue stones. The admitted visitor walks through a passage into a room whose walls are covered with books. In the shadow at the back of the room is a loaded table. Another table, with a sloping desk upon it, juts out from the window. M. de Gourmont sits in a big chair before the desk, placing his visitor on the opposite side of the table, with the light falling on his face so that he can observe his slightest expression. In conversation he often disguises his face with his hand, but now and again looks openly and directly at his visitor. His eyes are always questioning, and almost always kindly. His face was beautiful in the youth of the flesh, and is now beautiful in the age of the mind, for there is no dead line in it, no wrinkle, no minute feature not vitalised by intellectual activity. The nose is full and sensitive, with markedly curved nostrils. There is a little satiric beard. The eyebrows lift towards the temples, as in most men of imagination. The eyes are weighted below, as in most men of critical thought. The two characteristics are, in M. de Gourmont, as in his work, most noticeable together. The lower lip, very full, does not pout, but falls curtain-like towards the chin. It is the lip of a sensualist, and yet of one whose sensuality has not clogged but stimulated the digestive processes of his brain. Omar might have had such a lip, if he had been capable not only of his garlands of roses, but also of the essays of Montaigne.
He was born in a château in Normandy on 4th April 1858. Among his ancestors was Gilles de Gourmont, a learned printer and engraver of the fifteenth century. He has himself collected old woodcuts, and in L’Ymagier amused himself by setting the most ancient specimens of the craft, among which he is proud to show some examples of the work of his family, side by side with drawings by Whistler and Gauguin. He came to Paris in 1883, when he obtained a post in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Huysmans was “sous-chef de bureau à la direction de la Sûreté générale,” and M. de Gourmont, who made his acquaintance through the dedication of a book, used to call for him between four and five of the afternoon, and walk with him across the river to a café, that has since disappeared, where he listened to the older man’s rather savage characterisations of men, women, movements and books. A few years later he was held to be lacking in patriotism, and relieved of his post on account of an article urging the necessity of Franco-German agreement. He wrote incessantly. Merlette, a rather naïve and awkward little novel, published in 1886, did not promise the work he was to do. It was no more than an exercise, well done, but no more, the work of a good brain as yet uncertain of its personal impulse. But about this time he was caught in the stream of a movement for which he had been waiting, for which, indeed, the art of his time had been waiting, the movement that was introduced to English readers by Mr. Arthur Symons’s admirable series of critical portraits.[10] In 1890 he published Sixtine, dedicated to Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who had died the year before. In 1892 appeared Le Latin Mystique, a book on the Latin poets of the Middle Ages. He has always been “a delicate amateur of the curiosities of beauty,” though the character that Mr. Symons gave him has since become very inadequate. He edited Gérard de Nerval, Aucassin et Nicolette, and Rutebeuf’s La Miracle de Théophile, and wrote Lilith, 1892, and Théodat, a dramatic poem in prose that was produced by my friend M. Paul Fort at the Théâtre d’Art on December 11th of the same year. Several other curious works of this period were united later in Le Pèlerin du Silence. I extract from the bibliography by M. van Bever, printed in Poètes d’aujourd’hui, a list of the more important books that have followed these very various beginnings: Le Livre des Masques, 1896; Les Chevaux de Diomède, 1897; Le IIme Livre des Masques, 1898; Esthétique de la langue française, 1899; La Culture des Idées, 1900; Le Chemin de Velours, 1902; Le Problème du Style, 1902; Physique de l’Amour, 1903; Une Nuit au Luxembourg, 1906; besides four volumes of literary and philosophical criticism, and four volumes of comment on contemporary events.
All this mass of work is vitalised by a single motive. Even the divisions of criticism and creation (whose border line is very dim) are made actually one by a desire common to both of them, a desire not expressed in them, but satisfied, a desire for intellectual freedom. The motto for the whole is written in Une Nuit au Luxembourg: “L’exercice de la pensée est un jeu, mais il faut que ce jeu soit libre et harmonieux.” I am reminded of this sentence again and again in thinking of M. de Gourmont and his books. There must be no loss of self-command, none of the grimaces and the awkward movements of the fanatic, the man with whom thought plays. The thinker must be superior to his thought. He must make it his plaything instead of being sport for it. His eyes must be clear, not hallucinated; his arms his own, not swung with the exaggerated gestures of the preacher moved beyond himself by his own words. M. de Gourmont seems less an artist than a man determined to conquer his obsessions, working them out one by one as they assail him, in order to regain his freedom. It is a fortunate accident that he works them out by expressing them, twisting into garlands the brambles that impede his way.