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.
VI
“Il ne faut pas chercher la vérité; mais devant un homme comprendre quelle est sa vérité.” We must not seek in a man’s work for the truth, since there are as many truths as brains; but it is worth while to define an answer here and an answer there out of the many. What is the answer of Remy de Gourmont? Quelle est sa vérité? Of what kind is his truth? Does he bring rosemary for remembrance or poppy for oblivion? Not in what he says, but in the point from which he says it, we must look for our indications. His life, like Sixtine, is a “roman de la vie cérébrale.” It is the spectacle of a man whose conquests are won by understanding. For him the escape of mysticism was inadequate, and an invitation to cowardice. He would not abdicate, but, since those empires are unstable whose boundaries are fixed, conquer continually. The conquests of the mind are not won by neglect. It is not sufficient to refuse to see. The conqueror must see so clearly that life blushes before his sober eyes, and, understood, no longer dominates. Remy de Gourmont has suffered and conquered his suffering in understanding it. He would extend this dominion. He would realise all that happens to him, books, a chance visitor, a meeting in the street, the liquid bars of light across the muddy Seine. He would transmute all into the mercurial matter of thought, until, at last impregnable, he should see life from above, having trained his digestive powers to the same perfection as his powers of reception. Although one of the Symbolists, he has moved far from the starting-point assigned to that school by Mr. Symons. His books are not “escapes from the thought of death.” The thought of death is to him like any other thought, a rude playfellow to be mastered and trained to fitness for that free and harmonious game. The life of the brain, the noblest of all battles, that of a mind against the universe which it creates, has come to seem more important to him than the curiosities of beauty of which he was once enamoured. It has, perhaps, made him more of a thinker than an artist. In his desire to conquer his obsessions he has sometimes lost sight of the unity that is essential to art, a happy accident in thought. His later books have been the by-products of a more intimate labour. He has left them by the road whose end he has not hoped to reach, whose pursuit suffices him. They wake in the reader a desire which has nothing to do with art. This desire—a desire for intellectual honesty—and with that, perhaps, for intellectual gaiety, is the characteristic gift of his work. It is never offered alone. He accompanies it with criticism, with witty epilogues, serious dissertations, and licentious little stories; but it is not so much for the sake of these things as for the stimulus of that desire that we turn, and seldom in vain, to M. de Gourmont’s books.
1911.
THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI
THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI
So-shi, a Chinese philosopher, dreamed that he was a butterfly, and, in the moment of waking, asked himself: “Are you So-shi who has dreamed that he was a butterfly, or are you a butterfly who is dreaming that he is So-shi?” That question is continually repeated in the works of Yone Noguchi, who seems, indeed, to have the freedom of two worlds, and to find reality as often in one as in the other. Noguchi is for ever in doubt of his own existence, suspicious of appearances, and searching for the reality in things beyond touch or description. “My soul,” he writes: