IV.

As Voltaire was a needed light in the 18th century, so in our time Fabre and Frazer have been essentials in the mental furnishings of any contemporary mind qualified to write of ethics or philosophy or that mixed molasses religion. "The Golden Bough" has supplied the data which Voltaire's incisions had shown to be lacking. It has been a positive succeeding his negative. It is not necessary perhaps to read Fabre and Frazer entire, but one must be aware of them; people unaware of them invalidate all their own writing by simple ignorance, and their work goes ultimately to the scrap heap.

"PHYSIQUE DE L'AMOUR" (1903) should be used as a text book of biology. Between this biological basis in instinct, and the "Sequaire of Goddeschalk" in "Le Latin Mystique" (1892) stretch Gourmont's studies of amour and æsthetics. If in Diomède we find an Epicurean receptivity, a certain aloofness, an observation of contacts and auditions, in contrast to the Propertian attitude:

Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit,

this is perhaps balanced by

"Sans vous, je crois bien que je n'aimerais plus beaucoup et que je n'aurais plus une extrème confiance ni dans la vie ni moi-même." (In "Lettres à l'Amazone.")

But there is nothing more unsatisfactory than saying that de Gourmont "had such and such ideas" or held "such and such views," the thing is that he held ideas, intuitions, perceptions in a certain personal exquisite manner. In a criticism of him, "criticism" being an over violent word, in, let us say, an indication of him, one wants merely to show that one has oneself made certain dissociations; as here, between the æsthetic receptivity of tactile and magnetic values, of the perception of beauty in these relationships, and the conception of love, passion, emotion as an intellectual instigation; such as Propertius claims it; such as we find it declared in the King of Navarre's

"De fine amor vient science et beauté";

and constantly in the troubadours.

(I cannot repeat too often that there was a profound psychological knowledge in mediæval Provence, however Gothic its expression; that men, concentrated on certain validities, attaining an exact and diversified terminology, have there displayed considerable penetration; that this was carried into early Italian poetry; and faded from it when metaphors became decorative instead of interpretative; and that the age of Aquinas would not have tolerated sloppy expression of psychology concurrent with the exact expression of "mysticism." There is also great wisdom in Ovid. _Passons!_)

De Gourmont's wisdom is not wholly unlike the wisdom which those ignorant of Latin may, if the gods favor their understanding, derive from Gelding's "Metamorphoses."