Remy de Gourmont

“ ELISE
So reality always deceives you. How do you manage to be happy?
I
We have desire.
I had spoken like a man, and not like one whose mistress is an immortal. Elise seemed indifferent to the obscure sorrow that darkened my words.
My nature now was double. When I thought of my master, of Elise, of the hours passed in the garden, I felt that I was caressed and upheld by warm waves of joy; when I considered the things of earth, I was cold, and I was sorrowful. ”

“ Hence the need of material progress, which is only grandiose vanity. At the end of the swiftest journeys, the man and the woman meet face to face, seeking in each other's eyes the motive of living, that is to say happiness.
Earth has become a narrow cage for you. However, birds that you are, it is your cage, and you are forbidden to leave it. You can paint it in the tenderest colours; it is a cage, and it is your cage. You will no longer go to heaven, the stars have fallen. If this heaven of which the childhood of humanity dreamed is a paradise, all the seats in it are taken. ”

“ They lead him to the Epicureanism that is the only philosophy that they do not overthrow. Our roses and our women make us the equals of the gods, and even envied by them.
All his criticism, not of one or two ideas alone, but of the history of philosophy, the history of woman, the history of man and the history of religion, is made with a mastery so absolute as to dare to be playful. The winter night was changed to a spring morning as the god walked in the Luxembourg, and the wintry cold of nineteenth-century science melts in the warmth of a spring-time no less magical. ”

“ His natural and more genial sensibility produced, under my breath, a more beautiful intellectual flower. He knew one part of wisdom, and was not the dupe of analogies. Intelligent, he did not go and suppose a universal intelligence, inventing systems, poems, and useful practices for the happiness of man; he did not go and suppose a supreme creator. He understood that the temperaments of men are diverse, and did not advise a uniform pleasure. He taught pleasure, that is to say the art of being happy according to one's nature. I loved Epicurus. ”

“ She has told me that perfect pleasure is a gift too common among the gods much to excite their gratitude. They walk under the trees of the orchard, and pluck the gilded fruit whose weight bends them within reach of their hands. More lively and more sensitive, the divine females feel now and then some vexation at being unable to knot their arms about the conquered male; there is sometimes melancholy in their eyes, at seeing light shoulders moving away that happiness has not crushed, and knees that gratitude has not bowed. ”

“ The Greeks, with their adventures of the gods among us, also divined a little of the truth that had just been revealed to me in these two mythological nights. I understood that men do not invent, but remember. How I rejoiced at sharing in these mysteries! What moments! how express their odour, how paint their brilliance and their beauty?
I shall continue every morning to keep the journal of the happiness of my heart and the satisfactions of my intellect. Lover of an immortal, I see the Arcana open at last before my one-time sorrowful desire. ”

“ Man, who is always making a pretence of revolt, is the most obedient of domesticated animals. He has accepted the most infamous prescriptions of all the moralities in turn, and among you it has always been a title to honour to kneel before a decalogue and receive blows from a rope on the back. The great hypocrites have always been your chosen masters, and one still hears you neigh at the idea of sacrifice. Your sensibility has flowered ill; your intelligence is inadequate. It has always shown itself the dupe of the directors of conscience who have succeeded each other on your shoulders. ”

“ One can more easily retain in them the illusion of liberty. We are all of us, men and gods, in the power of destiny, and nothing happens that is not the logical and necessary consequence of previous movements of eternal matter. We are vessels fitfully carried by winds and currents towards an unknown end; but it is one thing to descend the unconquerable stream steering between the rocks, and another to spin rudderless and derelict. Thought is a rudder that must never be loosed nor entrusted to unworthy hands. ”

“ Illusion had doubtless buried us all alike in a rain of roses, and the magician had not escaped his own magic.
The great happiness I felt quickened my intelligence. When our master began to speak again, I felt that a soft beam of sunlight was falling upon me.
HE
I told you that the religion of the ancient Greeks was that which translated with least ugliness and least falsity the true state of the world which is invisible to you. There are gods, that is to say, a race of men as superior to other men as you are superior to the most intelligent or the best domesticated animals. ”

“ The god does not offer it to the first comer, but to one who has schooled his mind to see hard things, and, having seen them, to rise above them. M. de Gourmont will tell no lies that he can avoid, especially when speaking to himself, but, if he burn himself, Phoenix-like, in the ashes of a sentimental universe, he has at least the hope of rising from the pyre with stronger wings and more triumphant flight. He will start with no more than the assumption that the universe as we know it is the product of a series of accidents. ”

“ The surest way to fail in an experiment is to make it with a faint heart. M. de Gourmont always burns his boats.
Some preoccupations, however boldly attacked, are not to be conquered at a blow. The preoccupation of sex is unlike that of a theory of art. Conquered again and again by expression, it returns with a new face, a new mystery, a new power of binding the intellect, a new Gorgon to be seen in the mirror of art and decapitated. As the man changes, so does Medusa vary her attack, and so must he vary the manner of her death. ”

“ The Ancients knew the religion of beauty and pleasure, you know that of grace and tenderness. I scorn your philosophies, which are only adroit intellectual structures; I have never been able to scorn your legends and your superstitions, the traditional obeisance that your mind makes to your sensibility. But this is the field reserved for the exercises of the populace, children and timorous women. There are no noble human creatures but those who are in love with themselves and study to extract from their natures all the vain happiness contained in them. ”

“ In Une Nuit au Luxembourg, the thinker is now and then a little contemptuous of the artist. The reader is moved by something beside a purely æsthetic emotion. Beside the breath of loveliness that blows fitfully, almost carelessly, through those flowering trees, there is a sturdier wind that compels a bracing of the shoulders and an opening of the chest. The spectacle of that mind, playing with gods and worlds, so certain of its own balance, wakes a feeling of emulation which has nothing to do with art. ”

“ Spinoza found happiness in asceticism; Epicurus, in pleasure. They both lived smiling. I regretted them equally. There are two masters for mankind, and nearer to mankind than myself.
I remember one of Spinoza's propositions: "Each man necessarily desires or repulses, according to the laws of his nature, what he considers good or bad." That means: every one naturally desires to be happy. Great commonplace, and great truth: there is no other philosophy, there is no other method. Virtue is, to be happy. ”

“ However, in that supreme moment, I consoled her with a thought, for she had earned it by her constancy. What she wrote herself is not without interest for mankind, but the priests, who set themselves to excite her genius, inspired her with many follies, such as her vision of hell. I shall not tell you, my friend, who are the women I have most loved. Scarcely one of them has left a name among you. A woman who is loved and loves does not pass her time, like the illustrious Teresa, in describing the stations of love. She lives and she dies, and that is all. ”

“ Humanity has never lived but in error, and, besides, there is no truth, since the world is perpetually changing. You have acquired the notion of evolution, which, within certain limits, is correct, but you have wished at the same time to preserve the notion of truth: that is contradictory. If you were to succeed in constructing, in your intellect, a true image of the world, it would be already untrue for your grandchildren. For, if the world evolves, you likewise evolve, and man, from one generation to another, is not the same man. ”

“ The thinker must be superior to his thought. He must make it his plaything instead of being sport for it. His eyes must be clear, not hallucinated; his arms his own, not swung with the exaggerated gestures of the preacher moved beyond himself by his own words. M. de Gourmont seems less an artist than a man determined to conquer his obsessions, working them out one by one as they assail him, in order to regain his freedom. It is a fortunate accident that he works them out by expressing them, twisting into garlands the brambles that impede his way. ”

“ They are neither without attraction nor without utility, but they are games. Drunkenness is to be found in them, but not happiness. Now, happiness is the important matter. One must be happy. Let us, then, limit ourselves to the affirmation that the world is not governed by an intelligence at once infinite and conscious. For lack of another word, let us stop at the idea of chance, as in the time of my dear Epicurus. Nothing has been found more beautiful, more clear, nothing that better satisfies the mind of a man or the mind of a god. ”

“ Ruled, like you, by destiny, we contemplate the eternal movement of things, with a more perspicacious eye, but as powerless to alter their course.
None the less, I am not pitiless. Physical evil breaks my heart, and it is precisely that which is altogether beyond my power, that which is without a remedy. Life eternally devours itself. Every organism is a prey. The living is eaten alive. Every animal is a feast, and every animal is a guest. The healthy state is to be a feast. The gods do not escape this dilemma; they are so organised as to be a durable feast, that is all. ”

“ And are you not already on the way to spoil woman? Have you not already succeeded in insinuating into her heart the shameful principles of Jewish morality? Have you not resolved, in your narrow masculine pride, to undo the work of your ancestors and to reduce to the position of mean and lesser men these creatures who used to dominate you with all their beauty and with all their tenderness? You educate them; you teach them the useless stupidities that make your own brains ugly ”

“ Oneself may cover a world. The brutes are the only solitaries. A man's sensibility is a surface whose extent he alone is capable of measuring. One being often includes many beings. If it does not include at least two, it is not human, perhaps not animal; it is one of the stones in the road under the feet of other men. True selfishness is a harmony.
But this harmony must be composed by oneself, and woven with one's own hands. To receive happiness ready-made would be offering one's neck to the rope. Christianity found a very beautiful formula:—to work out one's salvation. ”

“ There are things of which mankind have always appeared to be ignorant. When you have heard them from my lips you will, in that moment, have received the courage to repeat them, and that will win you an eternal glory, a glory that will last as long as the earth itself, perhaps as long as the civilisation of which you are a part.
I
Is there not another eternity, a true eternity?
My master—for I now felt that this old friend was my master still more than my friend—my master was kind enough to smile, looking at me with tender irony, but he did not answer my question. ”

“ What infatuation, to believe oneself in possession of the truth, and, then, what childishness, to believe that the truth is necessarily useful! My friend, what is true is true, and what is beautiful is beautiful, and between these terms, and between all that could be inserted, there is no necessary relation. I smile at human illusions, but I would not make them one in a single and compulsory illusion.
You love Elise; obey your desires even if they seem absurd to you. ”

“ If I have sometimes come to visit men, it has been for love of their women. Not that, like the gods whose stories are written by the poets, I desire a multiplicity of embraces. I come less to love than to let myself be loved. I belong to those who wish to make me theirs, and I make myself for their hearts the ideal man whom earth refuses them.
For you have created woman, you men, and you have remained inferior to your creation. You have not known how to acquire the gifts that would have completed the miracle, and your loves are always lame. ”