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 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 work 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 aesthetic 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 brainless 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 dye 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-pêcheur 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.