all these periods had mislaid the light of the XVIIIth century; though in the symbolistes Gourmont had his beginning.
II.
In contradiction to, in wholly antipodal distinction from, Henry James, de Gourmont was an artist of the nude. He was an intelligence almost more than an artist; when he portrays, he is concerned with hardly more than the permanent human elements. His people are only by accident of any particular era. He is poet, more by possessing a certain quality of mind than by virtue of having written fine poems; you could scarcely contend that he was a novelist.
He was intensely aware of the differences of emotional timbre; and as a man's message is precisely his façon de voir, his modality of apperception, this particular awareness was his "message."
Where James is concerned with the social tone of his subjects, with their entourage, with their superstes of dogmatized "form," ethic, etc., de Gourmont is concerned with their modality and resonance in emotion.
Mauve, Fanette, Neobelle, La Vierge aux Plâtres, are all studies in different permanent kinds of people; they are not the results of environments or of "social causes," their circumstance is an accident and is on the whole scarcely alluded to. Gourmont differentiates his characters by the modes of their sensibility, not by sub-degrees of their state of civilization.
He recognizes the right of individuals to feel differently. Confucian, Epicurean, a considérer and entertainer of ideas, this complicated sensuous wisdom is almost the one ubiquitous element, the "self" which keeps his superficially heterogeneous work vaguely "unified."
The study of emotion does not follow a set chronological arc; it extends from the "Physique de l'Amour" to "Le Latin Mystique"; from the condensation of Fabre's knowledge of insects to
"Amas ut facias pulchram"
in the Sequaire of Goddeschalk
(in "Le Latin Mystique").