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