Pierre Louys
At this moment there is a little movement of neo-paganism, of sensual naturalism and erotism at once mystic and materialistic, a springtime of those purely carnal religions where woman is adored even for the very ugliness of her sex, for by means of metaphors we can idealize the imperfect and deify the illusive. A novel of Marcel Batilliat, a young unknown man, is, despite its serious faults, perhaps the most curious specimen of this erotic religiosity which zealous hearts are cultivating as dreams or ideals. But there is a famous manifestation, the Aphrodite of Pierre Louys, whose success, doubtless, henceforth will stifle as under roses, all other claims of sexual romanticism.
It is not, although its appearance has deceived young and old critics, a historical novel, such as Salammbô or even Thaïs. The perfect knowledge which Pierre Louys possesses of Alexandrian religions and customs has allowed him to clothe his personages with names and garbs veraciously ancient, but the book must be read divested of those precautions which are not there, just as in more than one eighteenth century novel, where the customs, gestures and desires of an incontestable today are at play behind the embroidered screen work of hieratic phallophores.
By the vulgarizing of art, love finally has returned to us naked. It is in the epoch of the flowering of Calvinism that the nude began to be banned from manners and that it sought refuge in art, which alone treasured the tradition of it. Formerly, and even in the time of Charles the Fifth, there were no public celebrations without speculations regarding lovely nude women; the nude was so little dreaded that adulterous women were driven stark naked through the towns. It is beyond a doubt that, in the mysteries, such roles as Adam and Eve were acted by persons free of fleshings,—monstrous display. To love the nude, and first of all femininity with its graces and insolences, is traditional in those races which hard reform has not altogether terrorized. The idea of the nude being admitted, costume can be modified to take in floating loose robe, manners can be softened, and something of splendor illume the gloom of our hypocricies. By its vogue, Aphrodite has signalled the possible return to manners where there will be a bit of freedom; coming from that period, this book has the value of an antidote.
But how fallacious is such a literature. All these women, all this flesh, the cries, the luxury so animal, so empty and so cruel! The females gnaw at the brains; thought flies horror-stricken; woman’s soul oozes away as by the action of rain, and all these copulations engender nothingness, disgust and death.
Pierre Louys has felt that his fleshly book logically must end in death: Aphrodite closes in a scene of death, with obsequies.
It is the end of Atala (Chateaubriand invisibly hovers over our whole literature), but gracefully refashioned and renewed with art and tenderness,—so well that the idea of death comes to join itself with the idea of beauty; the two images, entwined like two courtisans, slowly fades into the night.