Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas. Remy de Gourmont

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СКАЧАТЬ has created. Thus, as Ausonius has pertinently remarked, chaste men engender obscene literatures. So, also, the work of the veritable genius is always inferior to the brain which bore it. Civilization has put a little method into glory, provisionally.

      Even in the spiritual order, men have almost always been at variance with the decisions of their gods. Most of the saints in the past were created by the people in spite of the priests. In the course of the centuries the catalogue of the saints and the catalogue of the great men have drawn so far apart that they will soon not have a single name in common. Almost all the really venerable men of this last century – almost all those whose clay contained veins or traces of gold – were outcasts. We live in the age of Prometheus. When Providence alone ruled the earth, during the interregnum of humanity, she caused such hecatombs that intelligence nearly perished. In the year 950, the son of a serf of Aurillac, young Gerbert, summed up almost the whole European tradition. He was, all by himself, civilization. What a moment in history! Men, by an admirable instinct, made him their master. He was Pope Sylvester II. When he died, there began to be built, on that column which had sustained the world, the legend destined to find its culmination in Goethe's Faust. Such is Glory, that Gerbert is unknown. But he is not unknown like Pythagoras. It has been possible to write his life, his writings have been preserved. If Gerbert is not one of our great men to-day, he will perhaps be to-morrow. He has kept intact all the possibilities of his resurrection. The reason is that, leaving aside the paradoxical idea of Providence, we have since Gerbert scarcely changed our civilization.

      When the Christians came into power, they preserved, outside those few spared by chance, only the books necessary for school instruction. There has survived of Antiquity precisely what would have survived of the seventeenth century, if the professors of the old University, together with the Jesuits and the Minims, had possessed the power of life and death over books. Adding La Fontaine to Boileau's catalogue, they would have burned the rest. The Christians burned much, in spite of their professions of love; and what they did not burn they expurgated. It is to them that we owe the almost burlesque image of a chaste Virgil. The authentic incompletion of the Æneid afforded a good pretext for cuts and erasures. The booksellers charged with the task were, moreover, unintelligent and lazy. But the great cause of the disappearance of almost all pagan literature was more general. A day came when it was deemed of no interest. From the first centuries its circle had already begun to dwindle. Could a Saint Cecilia find any pleasure in Gallus? This delicious, heroic Roman woman (who was found last century lying in the dust, in her bloody robes) changed her heart with her religion. Women ceased to read Gallus, and Gallus has almost completely perished.

      In his interesting book on this subject,6 M. Stapfer has not taken into account changes in civilization. He has thought only of chance to explain the loss of so many ancient books. Chance is a mask, and it is precisely the duty of the historian to lift this mask, or to tear it. Between the sixth century and our own day, there has been one further partial modification in civilization – in the fifteenth century. About that time, the old literature began to lose its hold upon the public. The novels, the miracles, the tales seemed suddenly to have aged. They were no longer copied or recited. They were seldom printed, a single manuscript having preserved for us Aucassin et Nicolette, which is something like the Daphnis and Chloe of the Middle Ages. Accidents frighten the poet – and even the critic, who is colder, whose logic is more rigorous – the moment the suggestion is made of separating the purely historical idea of literary survival from the sentimental idea of justice. Till now – and I allude once more to the conservative rôle of modern civilization – the printing-press has protected writers against destruction; but the serious rôle of printing affects as yet only four centuries. This distant invention will appear some day as if contemporary at once with Rabelais and with Victor Hugo. When a time equal to that which separates us from the birth of Æschylus – two thousand three hundred and seventy-five years, let us say – shall have elapsed between us and a given moment of the future, what influence will printing have had on the preservation of books? Perhaps none. Everything not worth the trouble of reprinting – that is to say everything, with the exception of a few fortunate fragments – will have disappeared, and the more rapidly that the material substance of books has become more precarious. Even the discovery of a durable paper would not give absolute assurance of survival, because of the temptation to employ this excessively strong paper for a thousand other purposes. Thus the value of the parchment has often led to the sacrifice of a manuscript, just as gold articles go necessarily to the smelting-pot once the style has changed. The best material for the preservation of books would be something unchanging, but fragile, slightly brittle, so that it would be good for nothing outside its binding. Would not such a discovery be a curse?

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      1

      Les Travailleurs de la Mer, 2nd part, 1st Book, VII.

      2

      Technical term.

      3

      Communication à l'Académie des Sciences (13 Avril 1896), certified and rendered more precise by later investigations which M. Quinton has explained to me. Here, without scientific apparatus, is what, as a result of pr

1

Les Travailleurs de la Mer, 2nd part, 1st Book, VII.

2

Technical term.

3

Communication à l'Académie des Sciences (13 Avril 1896), certified and rendered more precise by later investigations which M. Quinton has explained to me. Here, without scientific apparatus, is what, as a result of precious conservations, would appear to be the general order in which the animals appeared, beginning with the fishes, and taking account only of those which have yet been covered:

The bearing of this list upon any question whatsoever of general philosophy is evident for all who know how to disassociate ideas. It would have thrilled Voltaire. For the rest, I claim the honour of having been the first to announce to the larger public these new scientific views, which will, logically, have a magnificent wealth of consequences. I have already made a less precise allusion to them, notably in the Wiener Rundschau, May 1899.

4

Intelligence can thus be conceived as an initial form of instinct, in which case the human intelligence would be destined to crystallize into instinct, as has occurred in the case of other animal species. Consciousness would disappear, leaving complete liberty to the unconscious act, necessarily perfect in the limits of its intention. The conscious man is a scholar who will reveal himself a master the moment he has become a delicate but unerring machine, like bee and beaver.

5

La Survivance de l'Ame et l'idée de justice chez les СКАЧАТЬ