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 bypath 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 building 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 its 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 a 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 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 anaesthetic 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.