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[11] 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 not new but gathered from all the philosophers are given an aesthetic 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 springboard 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.