INTRODUCTION
In an age when democratic ideas, levelling processes and the popularization of thought are in vogue, the phenomenon of a Remy de Gourmont emphasizing the aristocratic virtues, drawing attention to the perfect detachment demanded by literature and art, makes one pause as though transported to a different world, to a less nervous existence.
Gourmont, the aristocrat of letters, the thinker who could shrug his shoulders amusedly at current acceptances of progress, modernity and evolution, never for an instant ceased battling for a more discriminate attitude towards life and letters. He permitted none of his carefully reared mansions of the intellect to be sullied by aught that could not pass the tests of “relative” truth and sincerity,—the very truth and sincerity which the delightful dissociator of ideas loved to mock, when the whim seized him. His was the mechanism of a brain “heedless to please other than by the originality of thought and charm of style.”
It matters not what subject Gourmont attacks or woos. He can be depended upon to take a view the opposite of the conventionally accepted one. Whether the subject under treatment be women, art, religion, style or customs, his piercing mind shrewdly discovers the accumulations of prejudice and stupidity, scrapes off the patina of rust from the medals of time.
He has said: “I do not love prisons of any sort.” His whole life was a fight for intellectual freedom, waged in the seclusion of his study with his army of ideas continually engaged against the enemy. He early found that the only fruitful research was the research of the non-true. This quest occupied him during his lifetime.
He achieved this by the methods of paradox and dissociation. Yet, after having seen himself praised or blamed for this first quality, he felt free to disclaim the gift. “I have done wrong,” he writes, “to give the impression to the malicious that my mind has a turn for the paradox. I never pursued it deliberately. Besides, I do not pretend to dictate judgments concerning me. A mind of any toughness will always seem paradoxical to timorous spirits.”
Gourmont’s individualism was pronounced to an unusual degree. Individualism with most men is usually a rhetorically graceful gesture, a toying attitude, a hesitant attempt at sincerity hindered by the fear of public opprobrium; there are always the consequences of social ostracism or worse. It leads effectually to antinomianism, the violation of ethical codes. It becomes a harmless pose, belied by the very words or acts of those who profess it as the basis of their lives. Gourmont’s sincerity is testified by the tough boldness, the crystal consistency of his writings. The best way, he always believed, to ennoble the world is by self-development. “True charity is the act of the conscious man living according to his own personality and the rules of his inner and individual logic. Such a man gives what he has and is.... He offers only the natural opulence of a generous egotism, conforming to the divine rhythm and adequate to the divine movements.” And the world would be much better for all, he writes elsewhere, if one admitted the idea that society is made for the individual and not the individual for society. “The individual is the important thing.”
The rich diversity of life made him realize how useless it was to attempt to be oracular, to utter the indisputable, final truths of the master. No two leaves are alike; no two human beings are alike. This premise led to his indifference to absolutes, to the doctrines with which men like to be fooled and entertained. He began and ended with the idealistic, Schopenhaurian formula: “the world is my representation.” Not what is, but what seems to be, seen through the lens of my mind, is what I can depend upon. It followed, as a matter of course, that he could be lenient toward many points of view, and his Catholicism of mind is seen to advantage in The Book of Masks where he has enthusiastic, appreciative words for writers united by nothing but the name of “Symbolisme.” A further corollary was the need of tolerance to other men’s truths. But some truths are absurd. Shall I, Remy de Gourmont, be receptive to ugliness and hypocrisy? A puzzling problem! Either I must be receptive to all perceptions, good or bad, all beliefs, sincere or dissembled, or I must be suspicious of everything. Irony and pity are the roads to freedom. What is the use of being bellicose and vengeful toward what, in the end, does not matter? So, in his most serious onslaughts, there is something of the amused playboy.
One cannot help admiring his eclecticism. He saw that symbolism was but a loose name joining many diverse talents. He took pains to show that the popularly accepted meaning of decadence is pure trash, since it is applied to writers whose virtues of originality and creativeness contradict the true meaning of a down-hill movement, of imitation and conceited artificiality. He had a good word, the proper word invariably, for the mysticism of Maeterlinck, the obscurity of Mallarmé’s ineffable poems, the clanging strength of Verhaeren, the velvety dreaminess of Samain, the startling genius of Rimbaud, the anti-democratic idealism of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the paganism of Louys, the jeweled fatuity of Montesquiou. He permitted no hard and fast rules to interfere with the sensitive apparatus of his mind. Receptivity was a prerequisite. As a result, he is a critic sympathetic to the core, appreciative of all works partaking of distinction and charm.
He has given French literature something new. Never before has there been anything like his novels, where the brilliant youths “denude themselves with a proud candor.” All his characters are expressions of the complete life of a superior brain; they have one thing in common, scepticism. But as André de Fresnois says, it is “a scepticism necessitated by the richness of an infinitely supple sensibility, and not the frozen scepticism of a worldly lecturer; a scepticism that is disdain, pity, intelligence especially, and not impotence.”
Amy Lowell speaks of his preoccupation with sex which has robbed his books, she thinks, of the large view they might have had, and says that he is therefore one for whom English readers will have little sympathy. Whether true or not, it is beside the question of art. Sincerity first, is his credo. In a brief essay on “The Role of Art,” he writes:
“Art has a special and altogether egotistic end: it is an end in itself. It does not willingly assume any mission, whether religious, social, or moral. It is humanity’s supreme game; it is the sign of man; it affirms the divine; it tends to depart from contingencies; it desires to be free, useless, absurd, that is to say in disaccord with the very forces of nature which hold man in a narrow servitude.”
And as “art is not made for the people nor the people for art,” and further, as “art is a perpetual exception,” he felt himself free to create men who console themselves for their inability to harmonize their thoughts with the workaday world, by trifling, delicate love affairs. But his characters turn away weariedly even from their amours. That is a preoccupation with coarseness which his sensitive creations cannot long endure. They are martyrs to their ideas, men who have sought happiness so long and uselessly that they abandon the quest as hopeless and betake themselves to art and café conversations. His men reflect so much that they cannot act. Gourmont makes one of his persons say: “Although I may be the dupe of my pride, I much prefer this to being the dupe of my feelings.”
They have personality, but no character, amoral beings reflecting the complexity of Gourmont himself. “I do not wish to believe, to suffer, to be happy, to be duped. I regard, I observe, I judge, I smile.” Yes, it is a tired smile his imaginary personages have, a smile of disillusionment from knowing too much, a smile of mingled helplessness and power. It is because they live in their fortresses of thought and are so helpless when they wish to transfer their ideas to life. Each one, like his creator, inhabits a tour d’ivoire. Thought is so fertile in possibilities that his characters live a complete life within their brains, and like Des Esseintes, in Huysman’s A Rebours, have a contemptuous disgust for the compromises of the world. But unlike Des Esseintes, they will wander from their elaborately constructed esthetic prisons. The Gourmontian characters are strong when detached from life and the need to act; they have recourse to brilliant talk that scintillates with cynicism and conceals their childish incapacity to meet the world on its own terms.
His men are hurled into abysms of doubt through their superior sophistication. Hubert D’Entragues devotes himself by taste, rather than need, to the craft of letters, and spends his mornings developing elaborate sequence poems after the manner of the medieval latinists, inventing situations for imaginary characters, constructing a symbolistic novel to parallel his futile love affair with Sixtine, the young widow. He lives for himself; the world does not exist; like Gourmont, he is a philosophic idealist. But the ghost of contradiction leaves its shroud and haunts the exquisite scorner. He confides his doubts to a friend:
“We are not mummers and applause does not make us blush with joy. But if we write neither for universal suffrage nor to earn money, we become truly incomprehensible.”
“Write for your mistress.”
“I have none.”
“Write for Botticelli’s Madonna.”
“That is what I am doing.”
Truly an unsatisfactory conclusion, this writing for the Madonna of Botticelli, but following logically from the axiom that art is the mark of intellectual disinterestedness. The audience is to be scorned since art and the people are incompatible. Another retrenchment in the solid ivory tower, but not without its loneliness. This engenders a cynicism: no laws are valid other than those I choose to make. So the divine sanction of love vanishes, the state and the validity of all ethics made by society. To be spiritual in matters of the body is a confession of adolescence or of a warped mind. The characters of Gourmont consider women as flowers of the hedge to be plucked for their beauty and fragrance, to be inserted in one’s buttonhole while the day is still delightful, and to be replaced by another flower on the morrow. But women, more gifted than the eglantine, have a choice: “They can wield the menace of their thorns, if they are averse to be plucked,” Diomède says. In love, his men are gentle cynics, a little tired and moody and speculative, and the women, when not jeunes filles, follow their whims, finding sufficient excuse, in the pleasures of the flesh, for the act of surrender. Love is not transcendental, according to Gourmont, it is a divine exercise of the senses. “The soul is body and the body is spirit. The existence or the permanence of the one depends upon the indestructibility of the other.” Soul, what we call soul, becomes a blend of dream and act, thought and sensuality.
All this can be seen to advantage in Mr. Antiphilos, Satyr. The unbelievably naive creature of wood and dell is brought to civilization. He is Desire, its purest essence. He knows only hunger, fear of peasants’ pitchforks, weariness, sexual desire. Life is these things and they represent life. Happiness comes with satisfaction of these needs; misery from lack of satisfaction. Here is the epitome of our animal natures. It is the animal in us,—the healthy, normal animal. Whatever is added is superfluous; the addition is civilization. Gourmont, himself so sophisticated, ever turns a loving, kindly eye to men who are insistently natural, that is to say animal in their outlook, and who are brave or simple enough to consider the other sex in this light. Antiphilos has a try at civilization, and the result disgusts him; we see in his abnegation the shrug of mild disgust with which his creator views the world of men and women. Here, too, his women are personifications of instinct, without mixture of reason and restraint.
To every department of literature which Gourmont essayed, he brings his supple intelligence, lighting up his subject with a clear brilliance. Irony he used as a surgical instrument to lance the sores of society. In his study, isolated and removed from the bustle of Parisian life, he boldly dispelled the mists of ridicule and slander with which the young writers were covered. A great master, his influence on French literature was tremendous. The high standards Gourmont demanded of himself and others, his cultivated taste are required wherever there is a tendency to the facile and the common. His Olympian serenity, too, is a needed antidote to the febrile, nervous note. To read him critically is to renounce forever the false gods which are being worshipped in literature. He gives one a delicious draught of sanity; he is pure mind, unadulterated by muddy emotionalism or didacticism. The things he attacked are not dead; there remain the same problems of art and morality. Gourmont, the supremely civilized man, brings a cynicism, a perfect detachment and poise to the task of analyzing current and eternal values; he helps us to understand and solve these problems.
J. L.