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 thoughtis now beginning to be recognized among thinkers of every continent.During his own life he was a figure apart and aloof even from hisconfrères; his reputation was a matter more of intensity than ofextensive acclaim, although subtly it made its way, as did that ofthe Symbolist school in general, to many nations. Now, however, he isbeginning to receive that wider recognition which during his life heactually shunned. He belongs with the notable few who have devised andlived a philosophy of continuous adaptation to the new knowledge thatthe new day brings forth; he is a daring, independent, unostentatious,extremely personal neo-Epicurean, too individualistic to have beenheld long within the circle of a school, too sensitive not to haveresponded to the multifarious influences of a complex age. Yet just ashis individualism was not the ignorant self-proclamation of blatantmediocrity, so was his response to the contemporary world far more thanan aimless dashing about hither and thither in a snobbish attempt tobe ahead of the times. The man's essentially dynamic personality hasa genuine strain of the classic in it; he possesses a rare repose,an intellectual poise, that serves as a most admirable complement tohis vibrant ideas. Few writers have ever so well combined matter andmanner, which to Gourmont were but two aspects of one and the samething,—the original thought. He is not, and never will be, a writerfor the crowd; he was, by heredity and by choice, an aristocraticspirit, yet as he lived grew to recognize and to admit the importanceof true democracy.
His chief importance, historically, was as the recognized interpreterof the Symbolistic movement in French poetry; but behind thatmovement lay a genealogy of ideas which ramified into such seeminglydivergent directions as the pre-Raphaelites in England, the Hegelianidealists in Germany, and thus formed a modern manifestation ofprimary significance. De Gourmont, like more than one of theSymbolists, outgrew the movement, which from the first was composed ofpersonalities too strong to form a mere school. He was, in the wordsof one of his commentators, "among the first, if not the first, torealize the insufficiency of Symbolism, in all that did