When, more than ten years ago, I wrote the first article on Remy de
Gourmont which, so far as I know, appeared in America--North America,
_bien entendu_, for the author of _La Culture des Idées_ and _Le Chemin
de Velours_ was already well known and admired in such South American
literary capitals as Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and La Plata--it
was refused by one editor on the ground that he could not assume
the responsibility of presenting a writer of Gourmont's dangerous,
subversive, and immoral tendencies to the readers of his conservative
and highly respectable journal. Gourmont's revenge--and mine--came a
few years later when, at the time of his death, in 1915, the same paper
paid him editorial tribute, recognizing the importance of the place
he had occupied in the intellectual life of France for a quarter of a
century.
What was this place precisely? An attempt has been made to define it
by a recent French writer, M. Jules Sageret, who speaks of Gourmont as
having represented in our time the _encyclopédiste honnête homme_ of
the eighteenth century, and this is sufficiently accurate, in spite
of the fact that Gourmont was no deist, and that he made a much more
extended application of that _esprit critique_ which he inherited from
Diderot and Voltaire. He himself notes the paradox presented by the
latter, who, while combating the principle of authority so violently
in one field--that of dogmatic theology--accepted it so absolutely
and unquestioningly in another--that of poetic art, as stated once
and for all by Boileau. Gourmont recognized no such limits of the
critic's function. He was, in fact, a fearless, uncompromising, and
universal free-thinker--_libertin_--who, endowed with a restless
scientific curiosity, a profound irrespect, and an extraordinarily
sharp and supple analytical intelligence, confronted all affirmations,
all dogmas, in the fixed intent of liberating the life imprisoned in
them. "I dislike prisons of any sort," he declared in the preface to
_Le Problème du Style_, and he scouted the claims of those who, having
constructed a cell, claimed to cabin the truth.
Even the pursuit of truth seemed, to this convinced sceptic of the race
of Montaigne, an idle undertaking, unworthy of any truly philosophic
intelligence. "It is as absurd to seek the truth--and to find it--once
we have reached the age of reason, as to put our shoes on the hearth
Christmas Eve." And he cites "one of the creators of a new science,"
who said to him, "At the present moment we can establish no theory, but
we are in a position to demolish any theory that may be established."
He adds, summing up: "We must seek to rest always at this stage; the
only fruitful quest is the quest of the non-true." Yet Gourmont himself
was carried beyond it in his destructive zeal, when he snatched,
somewhat hastily, at the theories of his friend René Quinton, the
biologist, to which the fates have not proved altogether kind since
they were first stated. For there is usually a positive flaw in the
armour of even the most discreet "sower of doubts," and how could
Gourmont, who took Pierre Bayle's famous profession as his own device,
resist the temptation to avail himself of so formidable an arsenal
against the pretentions of the human reason to impose its frail and
arbitrary laws upon the universe?
"Reason," he says, writing of Kant's method in _Promenades
Philosophiques_, "is only a word--expression of the most convenient
ways of comprehending the multiple relations which unite the varied
elements of nature. The reason is only a unity of measure, though a
necessary unit, and one without which there would be such differences
between men's judgments that no society would be possible. But this
necessity is not anterior to life; it is posterior to it. What is
necessary, what is reasonable, is what is; but any other mode of
being, as soon as it was, would be equally necessary and reasonable."
Instead of any rationalistic system whatsoever, we need "a flat-footed
philosophy, familiar and scientific, always provisional, always at the
disposal of the new fact which will necessarily arise, a philosophy
which is merely a commentary on life, but on life as a whole. Man
separated from the rest of nature is a pure mystery. To understand
something of our own constitution, we must plunge ourselves, humbly,
into the vital milieu whence religious pride has withdrawn us, in order
to raise us to the dignity of jumping-jacks of the ideal."
It was thus that, in his essay on _La Physique de l'Amour_, Gourmont,
in order to disassociate the idea of love, which, rationalized, has
itself become a sort of religion, with poets for priests, sought
to "situate" man's sexual experience in the vast vital milieu of
universal sexuality, and such were the aim and method of all his
disassociations. In them he reveals himself as perhaps the most potent
corrosive intellectual agent of our time, after Nietzsche, to whom
he owed a certain élan, and whom he helped to make known in France.
All he offers is, in accordance with his own requirement, a simple
commentary on life--on life as a whole--when it is not, more simply
still, as in his literary criticism, a mere record of his sensations;
but this commentary is so shot through with the light of his searching
intelligence, and with his sensual irony, that there is little in
the ramshackle structure of accepted truth capable of resisting its
implications. To taste it to the full, one needs, no doubt, a certain
preliminary preparation in disillusion, but, for those who have already
had this, no intellectual poison is more subtly stimulating--or more
salutary, either.
Where, as in the case of Gourmont, the wealth to draw upon is so
great, a book of selections is particularly difficult. A word may be
added here as to the plan of the present volume. In the preface to _La
Culture des Idées_, which gave him his first reputation, and which
remains the cornerstone of his critical achievement, Gourmont refers
to the incoherence in its composition, which "no preface can either
correct or palliate."
"What good is it for me to pretend, for example," he asks, "that these
miscellaneous articles are closely bound together by a common idea?
Doubtless some of them hang together fairly well, and seem even to
grow one out of the other; but, in its ensemble, the book is merely a
collection of articles. When Voltaire wanted to give his opinion on a
current topic, he published a pamphlet. We, to-day, publish an article
in a review or a journal. But Voltaire, at the end of the year, did
not gather his various pamphlets into a volume. He let them follow
their destiny separately. They were collected only in his complete
works, where, then, it was possible, grouping them according to their
affinities, to avoid that variegated air necessarily assumed by our
collections of articles."
What has here been attempted is a first _triage_ of a part--the
essential part--of Gourmont's work, and its logical rearrangement. At
the head of the volume I have placed that article on _La Dissociation
des Idées_, which Gourmont himself regarded as having "perhaps a little
more importance than the others" in _La Culture des Idées_, since in
it he exposes his method; and this I have followed with four articles
from _Le Chemin de Velours_, which are there grouped together under
the general head of _Nouvelles Dissociations_, and which form its
natural suite or sequence. In this way I feel I have been able, not
only to offer a book more homogeneous than either of the two from which
its contents have been taken, but also, in a measure, to realize for
Gourmont a project which, as he explained, the conditions of modern
publishing alone prevented him from realizing. So far as I know, this
is the first English translation of his essays authorized by Gourmont
or his personal representatives.
For the hitherto unpublished portrait of Gourmont which appears as
frontispiece to this volume, I am indebted to the very great kindness
of Miss Natalie Clifford Barney, of Paris.