INTRODUCTION
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.
THE DISASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
There
are two ways of thinking. One can either accept current ideas and
associations of ideas, just as they are, or else undertake, on his
own account, new associations or, what is rarer, original
disassociations. The intelligence capable of such efforts is, more or
less, according to the degree, or according to the abundance and
variety of its other gifts, a creative intelligence. It is a question
either of inventing new relations between old ideas, old images, or
of separating old ideas, old images united by tradition, of
considering them one by one, free to work them over and arrange an
infinite number of new couples which a fresh operation will disunite
once more, and so on till new ties, always fragile and doubtful, are
formed.
