Decadence and Other Essays On the Culture of Ideas

Example in this ebook. 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?. To be continue in this ebook..................................................................................