Philosophic Nights in Paris
Remy de Gourmont
Philosophic Nights
In Paris
BY REMY DE GOURMONT
BEING SELECTIONS
FROM
PROMENADES PHILOSOPHIQUES
Translated by
ISAAC GOLDBERG
JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY
BOSTON MCMXX
Introduction
Helvétius and the Philosophy of Happiness
The Player's Illusion
The Beyond
The Question of Free Will
The Insurrection of the Vertebrates
The Pessimism of Leopardi
The Colors of Life
The Art of Seeing
The Rivers of France
The Fall of Days
Insinuations
Footprints on the Sand
INTRODUCTION
The importance of Remy de Gourmont to the universal world of thought is now beginning to be recognized among thinkers of every continent. During his own life he was a figure apart and aloof even from his confrères; his reputation was a matter more of intensity than of extensive acclaim, although subtly it made its way, as did that of the Symbolist school in general, to many nations. Now, however, he is beginning to receive that wider recognition which during his life he actually shunned. He belongs with the notable few who have devised and lived a philosophy of continuous adaptation to the new knowledge that the new day brings forth; he is a daring, independent, unostentatious, extremely personal neo-Epicurean, too individualistic to have been held long within the circle of a school, too sensitive not to have responded to the multifarious influences of a complex age. Yet just as his individualism was not the ignorant self-proclamation of blatant mediocrity, so was his response to the contemporary world far more than an aimless dashing about hither and thither in a snobbish attempt to be ahead of the times. The man's essentially dynamic personality has a genuine strain of the classic in it; he possesses a rare repose, an intellectual poise, that serves as a most admirable complement to his vibrant ideas. Few writers have ever so well combined matter and manner, which to Gourmont were but two aspects of one and the same thing,—the original thought. He is not, and never will be, a writer for the crowd; he was, by heredity and by choice, an aristocratic spirit, yet as he lived grew to recognize and to admit the importance of true democracy.
His chief importance, historically, was as the recognized interpreter of the Symbolistic movement in French poetry; but behind that movement lay a genealogy of ideas which ramified into such seemingly divergent directions as the pre-Raphaelites in England, the Hegelian idealists in Germany, and thus formed a modern manifestation of primary significance. De Gourmont, like more than one of the Symbolists, outgrew the movement, which from the first was composed of personalities too strong to form a mere school. He was, in the words of one of his commentators, "among the first, if not the first, to realize the insufficiency of Symbolism, in all that did not confine itself amidst the proud ivory walls of an uncompromising lyricism. If he did not combat it, because he had too complaisantly exalted it, he none the less abandoned it more and more, to surrender himself,—with no other discipline than his personal taste and his keen sense of the French genius,—to the fecundity of his nature, retaining of the old verbal magic only that which might contribute to his personal expansion,—notably that precious gift of image and analogies which imparts such poetry, such flexibility, variety and charm to his style. But henceforth the idea (i.e., rather than the word) assumed in him a preponderant importance, and now he was to play with ideas.... as he had previously played with words and images."
II
Gourmont's literary career was particularly identified with the notable French Review, the Mercure de France. How he came to join the staff of that organ is interestingly recounted by Louis Dumur, in the same obituary note from which the above quotation was translated. Incidentally we obtain a glimpse of the young man just as he was emerging into note.
"The great writer whom we have just lost," wrote M. Dumur, "was to us more than a friend, better than a master: he seemed to us the most complete representative, the very expression,—in all its aspects and in all its complexity,—of our literary generation.
"When, in the autumn of 1889, the small group which proposed to found the Mercure de France thought first of adding several collaborators to its number," while one went off in search of Jules Renard, another invited Julien Leclercq and a third promised the assistance of Albert Samain,—the late lamented Louis Denise, who was at that time cataloguer of the Bibliothèque Nationale, said to us:
"There is at the Library an extraordinary man who knows everything. He has already published ten volumes and a hundred articles upon every conceivable subject."
"We don't need a scholar, nor a polygraph, but rather a writer who'll be one of us."
"'All he asks is to be one of us,'" declared Denise. "'He is filled with admiration for Mallarmé and swears only by Villiers de l'Isle Adam. At the present moment he's writing a novel that will be a revelation.'
"'Bring along your prodigy.
"That prodigy was Remy de Gourmont.
"We did not know him, not even by name, despite his vast literary labors. He lived in seclusion. He did not frequent any of our literary rendezvous. He was never seen at the François Ier, nor at the Vachette, nor at the Voltaire, nor at the Chat-Noir, nor at the Nouvelle-Athènes. He had not written for any of our little reviews, of which he was later to become the well-informed historian. His signature had not appeared in the columns of Lutèce, la Vogue, the Decadent, the Symboliste, the Scapin, the Ecrits pour l'Art, nor in la Pléiade.
"But if we did not know him, he knew us all, together with the Acadiens, the Lapons, the Italian verists, the English novelists, the American humorists, the Jesuits, balloons, volcanos, the thousand subjects upon which his learning and his curiosity had exercised themselves. In publishing houses whose existence we did not suspect or in papers we were hardly familiar with, we, too, in conjunction with the still obscure and mysterious esthetic movement which we aspired to represent, formed the object of his labors and his meditations. This newcomer knew more about our interests than we did ourselves. He had read our most insignificant essays. He shared our enthusiasms, our antipathies, participated in our intellectual research, discerned our tendencies, penetrated into our intentions, which already he was arranging to formulate, and to formulate for us with as keen a perspicuity and clarity as were permitted by the concerted imprecision of our thought and the hazy, delicately shaded, sublimated art that we had just established.
"From his very first pages in the Mercure de France,"—those Proses moroses which were so perfect in form, so rare in expression and of such singular subtlety,"—he revealed himself as an expert artist in the new coloring, and produced exquisite models of the refined genre which charmed us. In that same year, 1890, he published through the firm of Savine the novel that Denise had spoken about to us," that Sixtine which at once consecrated him as a coming master in the exacting eyes of our cenacles. 'A novel of cerebral life,'—a precious subtitle,—and one could find nothing better to suggest the full significance of this book, which is of disturbing originality. Nothing took place in it which the regular public calls by the name of 'action'; everything in it, was, indeed, 'cerebral.' It was filled with a minute, probing analysis. The hero did not love so much as he observed himself in the process of loving. It was charming, complicated, and marvellously written.
"At the times of its appearance the reaction against naturalism and the so-called 'psychological' school of Bourget was at its height.... Symbolism had been born,—musical, suggestive, indirect. But if symbolism had produced its work, it had not yet found its formulas. There was interminable and indefatigable discussion as to just what symbolism was. And it was Remy de Gourmont who undertook to define it. He himself brought to it perfect and delicate products. Among these, in poetry and prose, were les Litanies de la Rose, Lilith, le Fantôme, Fleurs de Jadis, Hieroglyphes and the dramatic poem Théodat, which was given at the Théâtre d'Art at the same time as Maeterlinck's les Aveugles, Laforgue's le Concile féerique and that Cantique des Cantiques by Renaird, which was accompanied by a luminous, fragrant musical score so that, by an appropriate harmony of sounds, voices, colors and perfumes, all the senses might be conjointly struck by the same symbol."
Of Gourmont's services to the movement into which he was thus introduced Camille Mauclair, one of Mallarmé's intimate friends, has written:
"The theories of the Symbolists were presented and condensed in excellent fashion in the numerous books and critical articles by Remy de Gourmont, who was not only a most original novelist and a perfect artist in prose, but also one of the most remarkable essayists of the nineteenth century, characterized by an astonishing wealth of ideas, a rare erudition, and an intellectual flexibility that assured him philosophical as well as esthetic culture. Moralist, logician, poet, intuitive as well as deductive, passionate lover of ideas, Remy de Gourmont possessed also the merit of being a voluntary recluse, exceedingly proud, clinging tenaciously to his liberty, disdaining all fame, living as a solitary spirit and as a man truly above all social prejudices. His irony, which excluded neither emotion nor faith, was but the effect of a deep scorn of mediocracy.... His whole life was a model of independence.... Remy de Gourmont, better than any other, formulated the idealism which was at the bottom of the Symbolist doctrine."
Among these services to the new movement were Gourmont's penetrating studies of such figures as Mallarmé and Verlaine, Huysmans and the de Goncourts, Rimbaud, Corbière, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Maurice de Guerin, Gerard de Nerval, Aloysius Bertrand. Were it not for Gourmont, some of these would perhaps never have been known, and it does little credit to our own poetic advancement that some of them are still but names to American readers. His two Livres des Masques are regarded as the beginnings of a history of the Symbolist period, which he never found time to complete. Although many of the writers were, at the time Gourmont considered them here, at the beginning of their careers, he seized upon their distinguishing traits with a rare insight, and revealed such coming celebrities as Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Régnier, Samain, Vielé-Griffin, Tailhade, Paul Adam, Gide, Laforgue, Moréas, Merril, Rachilde, Kahn, Jammes, Paul Fort, Mauclair, Claudel, Bataille, Ghil. He had a discerning eye for the painters, too, and revealed as well as defended Whistler, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and others.
Despite their modest titles, the Promenades philosophiques and the Promenades littéraires have been called "without doubt the most important critical works of our epoch." It is from the former that the essays contained in this book are taken; they reveal, in striking degree, the thought and the attitude of their famous author, and may suggest, "though within the limits that all translation connotes, particularly when dealing with so remarkable a stylist," the charm, the simplicity, and the clarity of his writing.
III
Despite the fact that his funeral services occurred during the height of the war—he was born on April 4, 1858 and died on September 27, 1915—they were attended by a numerous gathering of mourners who, in their very cosmopolitan nature seemed to symbolize the universal influence of the departed genius. Tributes were paid by M. Henri de Régnier, of the French Academy, who spoke for the Mercure de France, by M. Georges Lecomte, President of the Société des Gens de Lettres, who spoke in the name of that society, by M. Maurice Ajam, for the newspaper La France, by M. Fernand Mazade, in the name of la Depêche de Toulouse, to which Remy de Gourmont was a contributor, by Xavier Carvalho, in the name of the Portuguese and Brazilian press, and by M. Juliot Piquet, in the name of the great Buenos Aires daily La Nación for which Gourmont wrote.
Régnier paid particular attention to the critical labors of the deceased. Gourmont, he said, "was an incomparable critic, in turn a scholar untainted by pedantry, deep without obscurity, ingenious to the point of paradox, sincere to the point of contradiction, but ever mindful of the truth,—a critic in the manner of Montaigne, of inexhaustible variety of means, of the most candid independence,—a critic who is polemist, dilettante, imaginative spirit and poet, and above all, a man, exceedingly human in his alternations of skepticism and faith." Lecomte pointed out the nobility of the man's origin, and the significance of his ancestral connection with François Malherbe, the great stylist of a former age. Ajam, like most who have commented on the man at all, was struck with his paradoxical nature. "A democrat of aristocratic cast, an atheist filled with devotion, an anarchist characterized by order, an agitated spirit infused with calm, he was a human and a divine paradox."
The tributes by Carvalho and Piquet are of particular significance. At a rime when even Spain, the mother country, was indifferent to and ignorant of the literary accomplishments of its American colonies, Remy de Gourmont had lent himself to the interpretation and the revelation of the new literary world across the seas. He translated, criticised and supported an almost unknown continental literature. He even went so far as to invent the term neo-espagnol (neo-Spanish) for the modified Spanish spoken in the various republics of the New World,—a proceeding which though philologists may consider it rash, may yet be considered premature rather than totally mistaken. And in any event it shows the man's ready response to new currents in speech and thought, whether native or foreign. "By his precious writings for the reviews and the great dailies of Argentina and Brazil," said Carvalho, "he rendered lasting service to the neo-Latin literatures." M. Piquet's speech was short, yet pithy in its evidence of an entire continent's appreciation.
"I should not venture to approach this tomb if I did not possess in this solemn moment the impersonality of a symbol.
"A few words will suffice for me to fulfil in its formal character the dolorous and too burdensome task that accident has imposed upon me. I come, in the name of the journal La Nación of Buenos Ayres, to pay the last respects to its former contributor Remy de Gourmont, the writer, the thinker who, for many years, helped in powerful measure to maintain, on the distant shores of the La Plata, admiration and love for the land of clarity and moderation, justice and liberty, of which he was one of the purest glories."
IV
The complete works of Remy de Gourmont cover almost every form of intellectual activity. He seems equally at home in criticism, in creative effort, "novel, play, poem," philosophy (Nietzsche owes much to him for his intellectual acclimatization in France), in the transvaluation of moral values, in social criticism, in certain aspects of science, in philology, in the renovation of rhetoric. "In his divers attitudes and in his varied researches," says Dumur, "he was the expression of our instable epoch.... When the most distant posterity shall wish to form an idea of what we were between the years of yesterday's estheticism and tomorrow's neo-classic realism, of what our immense literary production was, of what the generation was which bridged the conflict of 1870 and the great war which began in 1914, the page it will have to read will be signed Remy de Gourmont."
The importance of this writer, however, cannot be limited to France; by token of his broad, tolerant humanism and his dynamic method he belongs to the literature that abolishes boundaries and epochs.
HELVÉTIUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HAPPINESS
"M. Helvétius, in his youth," says Chamfort, "was as handsome as love itself. One evening, as he was seated very peacefully before an open fire, at the side of Mile. Gaussin, a renowned financier came and whispered into this actress's ear, loud enough for Helvétius to hear: 'Mademoiselle, would it be agreeable to you to accept six hundred louis in exchange for a few favors?'—'Monsieur,' she replied, loud enough to be heard by Helvétius, and pointing to him at the same time, 'I'll give you two hundred of them if you will kindly call on me tomorrow morning with that fellow over there.'"
Helvétius was not content with being very handsome. He was also exceedingly wise, very rich, and very happy. No mortal, perhaps, received so many gifts from the gods, the rarest of which was Mme. Helvétius, one of the most charming and gifted women of the eighteenth century. Like her husband, she was very beautiful,—so beautiful that persons paused, struck with admiration, to look at her. There is, in this connection,—quoting again from Chamfort, a very pretty anecdote:
"M. de Fontenelle, aged ninety-seven, having just uttered to Mme. Helvétius, young, beautiful and newly wed, a thousand amiable and gallant remarks, passed by her to take his place at table, without raising his eyes to her. 'You can see,' said Mme. Helvétius, 'how much stock I may take in your compliments; you pass me by without so much as looking at me.' 'Madame,' replied the old man, 'if I had looked at you, I would not have passed by.'"
Happiness is often egotistical. It is even a question whether a certain egotism is not necessary to the acquirement of a certain happiness. Helvétius gave a peremptory denial to these sorry notions. Happy himself, he had but one passion: the happiness of humanity. He noticed, in his observation of mankind, that the natural desire to be happy, which each of us bears within, is opposed by a thousand prejudices, the most terrible of which are the religious prejudices, and he determined to combat them with all his strength. M. Albert Keim, who knows Helvétius better than any other man in France, has just republished certain notes written in the philosopher's hand; the first of which runs thus:
"Prejudices. They are to the mind what ministers are to monarchs. The latter prevent their rivals from approaching the king, and in the same way prejudices prevent truths from reaching the mind, for fear of losing the power they usurp over it."
One of the most widespread prejudices is that which considers it impossible to attain happiness; as that does not prevent us from desiring it, such an idea corrupts life and often renders it unbearable. Priests have believed that they could remedy this by inventing a second life, where the person who has consented to be quite unhappy in the first will find at last a sort of equivocal happiness, little calculated to tempt one of intelligence. The people, nevertheless, snap at this bait and accept, in view of future recompense, the direst tribulations of the present life. Thus a frightful slavery is perpetuated, for it is very evident that all this is nothing but a hoax and an imposition. Whoever wishes to taste happiness, if this word stands for anything more than a dream, should set about it in this life, since the other one is but a chimera, lucrative for the clergy alone. But how be happy? Through virtue? Very well, what is virtue?
"Virtue," replies Helvétius, "is only the wisdom which harmonizes passion with reason and pleasure with duty."
He assigns a large place in life to pleasures and passions; but he does not consider them only as elements of happiness; he makes of them sources of activity. Man instinctively seeks pleasure. When he has experienced it, and later loses it, he will work with all his might to win it anew. All forms of pleasure, then, are easily reconcilable to virtue. Who knows whether pleasure taken in wise moderation is not virtue itself? And he dares to write this maxim, which will perhaps frighten some: One is never guilty when one is happy. Helvétius, who was a very gentle and kind person, is often, in his writings, rashly bold. His intimate notes are violent, impassioned, even brutal. He speaks in them of love with magnificent frankness, and one readily divines that it is chiefly in the exercise of this amiable virtue that he found happiness.
I am not at all writing here a study of Helvétius, one of the most skilful demolishers of the ancient regime; I am running through a portfolio of private notes, printed at first in a few copies, and the reading of which will reveal at once an ingenious philosopher and the most spirited of poets. He is, on the subject of love, inexhaustible; he is in turn tender, subtle, passionate, raving. His delirious attacks are of a beautiful candor; the majority of his thoughts are charming and most seductive: "Each moment of pleasure is a gift of the gods."
This verse, which would be greatly admired and celebrated if it had been found in André Chenier,—does it truly come from the pen of Helvétius? This is what M. Albert Keim asks himself. That is a query to propound to the erudite spirits of l'Intermédiaire, who have read all the old authors; in the meantime I consider it as being highly characteristic of the philosophy and the poetry of the author of Bonheur (Happiness). One can imagine nothing more pagan, more gently anti-Christian. And anti-Christianism is the real basis of Helvétius' philosophy. He oversteps the bounds a trifle when he adds: "Pleasure is the sole occupation of life." The ardor of this young man is excessive. He himself will soon learn and declare that life has other employments, such, for example, as composing a philosophy.
His second motto will be: "Minerva and Venus in turn," which is wisdom itself; he will devote himself to plucking at once "the fruits of reason and the fruits of pleasure." He is forever recurring to voluptuousness, whose images pursue him: "Who takes all pleasures takes very few of them." Love to him is the most noble of passions because it is the fecund passion and mother of life. This is what makes him say: "It is not, moreover, without a certain secret melancholy," for, he avers, "The flower that one plucks is ready to wither."
Do you wish to see him in his rôle of a serious philosopher? He will say, as if he foresaw the war against science, in which, in our own days, we have seen the Veuillots and the Brunetières distinguish themselves: "There are things over which the veil of skepticism should be spread; but, in the matter of science, it would be necessary, in order to win the right of skepticism, to know all that the human mind may learn: then one might permit himself to declare that science is nothing." Like the modern positivists, like Renan, remarks M. Keim, Helvétius had the greatest confidence in science. He is forever celebrating the triumphs of human intelligence. He believes in progress, in the transformation of society by the scientific mind. Thus he launched a powerful attack against Rousseau's thesis upon the ills of civilization. Yet at times one notes in him a little discouragement, and he will confess: "Almost all philosophical views are worthless. Not that they are not excellent, but because there are too few persons who can understand them."
The number of persons who can understand Helvétius has greatly increased, and besides, it is not so difficult as he believed; all one needs is a little common sense. It is a good sign of our intellectual health that Helvétius is coming back into fashion. Tomorrow it will be d'Holbach, d'Alembert, Tracy, the master of Stendhal,—all those eighteenth-century philosophers who are so clear, so simple, so human. The absurd German metaphysics has annihilated them for sixty years, but it seems that the day of their revenge has come. The dry notion of abstract duty according to Kant has outlived its day. It is beginning to be understood that man's first duty is to be happy. Otherwise, what is the use of living?
THE PLAYER'S ILLUSION
The player at games of skill is always tempted to attribute to himself a capacity superior to his real power. Such is the theorem advanced in a curious study, half psychological and half algebraic, by an Algerian engineer, Monsieur V. Cornetz. The player's desire to win, the recollection of his past successes, his confidence in himself, necessarily cause him, at a given moment, to think himself stronger than he really is. So that, if he wins, he is not surprised; but if he loses, he will tell himself: "I could have done better; I didn't do my best, I didn't concentrate all my attention." For such an estimate of himself to be just, it would be necessary for the player to base the idea of his strength not only upon the average of his previous victories, but also of his defeats. Self-conceit, however, prevents unsuccessful contests from coming to his mind to counterbalance the remembrance of his winnings. It comes about, then, that the player constantly overrates himself, and in all good faith. Whatever be his character, he is never tempted to attribute to himself a value less than his real worth. The modesty of certain players is all upon the surface and the mistrust of themselves, which they proclaim, is transformed into excessive confidence as soon as the game has begun. A player is a man who always compares himself to other men. He judges himself, not as an individual independent of his surroundings, but under the pressure of a vanity that is ever egged on by the presence of rival vanities. The moment two such vanities clash, each of necessity seeks victory, and begins by attributing to itself, without the least regard for reality, the strength necessary for success. To accept the combat is in itself, is it not, to believe that one is the stronger?
Monsieur Cornetz deals particularly with the chess-player, but his observations, as he himself says in his preface, are applicable to all games that are not purely games of chance, and even to athletic contests, fencing matches, and one might add, military operations, even of the most serious nature. To wage battle is to play a game. This psychology of the player is also that of the general. How many battles have been lost because the general overestimated himself. How many governments even have fallen because they were abandoned to the illusions of their self-conceit! Does not Napoleon III gayly setting out for the frontier provide the spectacle par excellence of the player who overrates himself? There is no such thing as a disinterested contest; the dullest game of cards excites in the opponents a certain desire to win. The very persons who boasted of their entire detachment are often the most eager to win once the game has started; they enter into it excitedly and when worsted keep watching for a favorable opening. Those players who believe that they play the game for the sole interest of its combinations, its emotions, are then, admitting their good faith, the victims of an illusion: they judge themselves to be other than they are. This is a rather common attitude in life. We all of us believe ourselves more or less to be other than we really are; so much so that an ingenious philosopher, M. Jules de Gaultier, has created a special term by which to denominate this universal penchant. He calls it Bovarysm, referring to the heroine of Flaubert's novel, who thought herself a grande amoureuse when she was really nothing but a poor little sick woman. The player who pretends that he plays without any interest in victory is afflicted with Bovarysm. But perhaps he is also intent upon shielding his self-conceit in case of failure. Beaten, he will vow that he had as good a time as if he had won. This is a manner of self-consolation that does not lack a certain elegance. The fox who found the grapes too sour has furnished us with a charming example of this disdainful attitude. M. Cornetz has seen, in Algiers, on an old Arabian chess-board, this motto: "The loser always has his excuse." The basis of these excuses is this: "I should have played otherwise. If I had used such and such a pawn, or queen, or card, I would doubtless have won." Who has not been present at those post mortems where the players forget only this, that they know, at the moment of discussion, things that they did not know while the game was in full swing? The truth is that at a given moment, when one is seriously playing the game, one is playing as well as he can, no more and no less. The loser has an excuse; very well. But it is precisely because he is the loser. The winner needs none. To be winner is a fact; to be loser is another. There is in facts a logic, and the reason of the strongest is always the best. To believe, when one has been beaten, that one might not have been, is by that very fact to suppose that one might, at that moment, have been another person, which is absurd. But perhaps this illusion is due to inevitable causes. The chief point is, as I have already said, that at the moment when we have been beaten we recall, not our former defeats, but rather our former victories, and the victories only. We attribute to ourselves a general capability, a capability that is a matter of principle, and which may not be shaken by an accidental momentary inferiority. It never occurs to us, "our vanity prevents it," that our real worth is probably but a fairly equitable composite of equally accidental inferiorities and superiorities. The balance will always incline toward the side of our self-conceit.