Decadence, and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

by Remy de Gourmont

The idea of beauty has an emotional origin, connected with the idea of generation. The female who is to be the mother must conform to the racial type. That is, she must be beautiful.[4] Woman is less exacting, perhaps because man transmits very little of himself to his offspring. The first standard of beauty was, then, woman and, in general, the human body. Beauty, in the case of an animal, an object, is possession of something human in the form, in the character. A landscape can be described in terms almost all of which would apply to the beauty of a woman, and marble has her whiteness, sapphires are her eyes, coral is her lips. We have here a whole vocabulary of poetic commonplaces. To be sure, some of them should be corrected, and it should be noted that it is ebony which is black as black hair, and the swan which has a woman's neck. Beauty is so sexual that the only generally accepted works of art are those which show, quite simply, the human body in its nakedness. By his persistence in remaining purely sexual, the Greek sculptor has placed himself above all discussion for eternity. It is beautiful, because it is a beautiful human body, such as every man or every woman would like to unite with for the perpetuation of the race.

But another fact, more obscure, though not less certain, permits us to bring the idea of beauty back by another route to the very idea of sexuality. This is, that all human emotions, whatever their order, nature or intensity, awaken a more or less marked response in the genital nervous system. Sexual pathology has thrown light upon this. Perfumes, as well as the smell or sight of blood, noise and heat, intellectual or muscular effort, repose and fatigue, drunkenness and abstinence—the most contradictory sensations all favour the sexual impulse. Others, like fear, cold, vexation, also react upon a neighbouring and intricate centre in the genital system. Read the first chapter of En Ménage, in which M. Huysmans describes the effect produced upon a gentle, nervous being by the discovery of a lover in his wife's arms. Among the emotions which reverberate most surely on every somewhat sensitive organism, aesthetic emotions must be placed in the first rank. And thus they return to their origin. That which inclines to love seems beautiful. That which seems beautiful inclines to love. There is between the two an undeniable relation. A man loves a woman because she is beautiful, and he deems her beautiful because he loves her. It is the same with everything that permits associations of sexual ideas, and with every emotion which reacts upon the genital system.

But it is not at all necessary for a work of art to present a sensual picture in order to awaken ideas of love. It is enough for it to be beautiful, captivating. It stirs passion. Where shall we seek the seat of this passion? The brain is merely a centre of transmission. It is not a terminus. It is a happy and praiseworthy error to have made man's brain his absolute centre, but it is an error. The sole natural end of man is reproduction. If his activity had another goal, he would no longer be an animal, and we fall back into Christianity, to be confronted again by the soul, demerit and all the jargon employed by spiritualistic quacks. Emotion becomes conscious at the very moment of its passing, but it merely passes, leaving its image, and descends to the loins. This manner of speaking is perhaps figurative, and, moreover, I am not speaking of intense and strongly localized excitations. What is meant is merely that aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favourable to the reception of erotic emotion. This state is communicated to some by music, to others by painting, the drama. I have known a man—of a certain age, it is true—who could cheat a sexual desire by glancing at engravings. The reverse example would, doubtless, be less paradoxical. Aesthetic emotion is that from which man lets himself be most easily diverted by love, so easy, almost fatal, is the passage from one to the other. This intimate union between art and love is, moreover, the sole explanation of art. Without it—without this genital repercussion—it would never have been born; and, without it, it would not be perpetuated. Nothing is useless in deep-seated human habits. Everything which has lasted is, for that reason, necessary. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away, and there is no longer art. Take art away, and love becomes merely a physiological need.

But it is less here art itself that is concerned than its emotional power, and there must therefore be grouped under the name of art everything in the nature of spectacle or sport—every diversion enjoyed in public, or with regard to which one communicates to himself his impressions. Fireworks can thrill quite as much as a tragedy. The sole hierarchy is that of intensity; but there is no doubt that the success of a work of art greatly increases its emotional power upon men in general. Hence, for the crowd, the quite natural belief that every successful work is beautiful, and that failure and scorn are always merited. In short, what the caste calls beauty, the people call success; but they have learned from the aristocrats this word truly devoid of meaning for them, and employ it to enhance the quality of their pleasures. That is not entirely illegitimate, success and beauty having a common origin in the emotions, their sole difference being the difference of the nervous systems in which they have evolved.

But very few men are capable of an original aesthetic emotion. Most of those who believe they experience it are like the people themselves, merely obeying the suggestion of a master, the bidding of their memories, the influence of their environment, the fashion. There is a passing beauty as precarious as popular success. A work of art extolled by the caste to-day will be despised by the caste to-morrow, and less trace of it will perhaps remain than of the work rejected by the caste and acclaimed by the people. For success is a fact whose importance increases with the dust it raises, with the number of the faithful come to accompany the cortège. The emotions of the caste and the emotions of the people are destined to the same end. Nature, which makes no leaps, makes no choice either. It is a question of making children. The sense of smell (or an analogous sense) is so highly developed in the emperor-moth, that a female egg of that rare butterfly attracts a throng of males to the spot where not one was seen before. This acuteness would be absurd if it merely served the emperor-moth to select a more delicate repast in the flowery flock or, in one way or another, to increase its pleasure and its spiritual advancement, the culture of its intelligence. It is an aid to the emperor-moth in making love. It is its aesthetic sense.

However, there are human natures, less diffuse or more refractory, in which the emotions do not react upon the centre of major sensibility, either because this centre is atrophied, or because the emotional current has encountered in its course an obstacle, a dyke, an impervious barrier. Let us, without examining too closely the aptness of the analogy, avail ourselves of the commonest and most striking comparisons. An electric current is thrown into a wire for the purpose of creating motion. The wire falls supported by a bit of wood and, instead of motion, heat is generated. The train which was to have been propelled burns. So the emotion, on its way towards the genital sense which it is meant to awaken, encounters a centre of resistance. It is broken, twists back upon itself, but becomes installed; and all the emotions of the same order, which pass by the same centre, will share the same fate. A wheel was to be turned, and we have fireworks. The species was to be preserved, and we have born the idea of beauty. Aesthetic emotion, even in its purest, most disinterested form, is, then, merely a deviation of the genital emotion. Aphrodite, who urged us to her cult, no longer troubles us. The woman has vanished. Noble forms are left, agreeable lines; but a horse also is beautiful, and a lion, and an ox. Fortunate short-circuit which has permitted us to reflect, to compare, to judge! The current hurled us on towards the sister of the goddess. Now it turns us from her, for she is less fair! It might be supposed that it is in the region of the intelligence the emotional current has become diffused, thus forming that mixture of emotion and intelligence which gives us the aesthetic sense. Intelligence is an accident. Genius is a catastrophe. We must carefully avoid even dreaming of a social state where health, equilibrium, equity, moderation, order would reign uniformly, where catastrophes would be impossible, and accidents very rare. Human intelligence is certainly the consequence of what we naïvely call evil. If the threads did not become cut and knotted, if emotion always attained its goal, men would be stronger and handsomer, and their houses would be as perfect as ant-hills. Only, the world would not exist.

III

Before returning to our point of departure, here is a résumé:

Two sorts of emotions share in the shaping of the aesthetic sense: emotions of a genesial nature, and all the other emotions whatsoever, in a proportion which varies infinitely with each man. The first are those which we feel when confronted with the perfect representation of our racial type. Apollo is beautiful, because he is the human male in all its purity. For the majority of men, every adventitious idea being rigorously excluded, the sight of the marble is agreeable because it evokes desire, either directly or, according to the sex, by counter-evocation. Stendhal's saying will be remembered: "Beauty is a promise of happiness." The sensualistic philosophy which enabled him to make this definition was not stupid. We shall be obliged to return to it, with science as a point of support. In short, it was then for the purpose of describing the "promise of happiness," that the word "beauty" was invented. And this word has been successively applied to everything that promised men the realization of one of their increasingly numerous and complex desires. Later, the emotional need having become extremely developed, it was also applied to all causes of emotion, even terrible or sanguinary; but these varied emotions, which make up the very life of man, have a goal—like the sense of smell in the emperor-moth. They penetrate us to make us remember that our one duty, as living creatures, is to conserve the species. Whatever sense they may have struck first, they recoil from it towards the centre of general sensibility. I think of those romantic lovers seen enveloped by the storm, possessing each other furiously, or of the gentle emotion of Tibullus, quam juvat immites.... The horrible, stupid, savage tragedies which delighted the Greeks and the French of the ancien régime were philters, and nothing more. If the great poets (like women, great poets have neither taste nor sense of disgust) had not taken the trouble to rethink the stories of Orestes, of Thyestes, of Polynices, we would deem these to be the delirious ravings of a society in its infancy or in its final decay. Not one of Racine's tragedies but has been played a hundred times in the criminal court by loathsome actors. You will find, if you look for them, in the special treatises of Ball and of Binet, and in popular works, examples of the transformation of any sensation whatsoever into sexual act. Here there are no categories, the field is unlimited. Men have been known for whom the smell of rotten apples gave strong and necessarily sexual emotions. Schiller always kept a stock in his table drawer; but, as he possessed a refractory passage in which the emotional currents were in large part broken, he made verses, when he had inhaled them, instead of making love.

Here, then, we have a whole class of men in whom the emotions, arrested halfway, are transformed into intelligence, into aesthetic taste, into religious feeling, into morality, into cruelty, according to the environment and the circumstances, and according to an exceedingly obscure system of dynamics. It may even be said that this transformation of the emotions takes place, more or less, in all men. The emotions may chance also to react almost equally in all directions, a notable part travelling towards the genital centres while enough remains en route to produce a great philosopher, a great artist, a great criminal. Love seems peculiarly connected with cruelty, either by its absence or by its excess. The mimetic of cruelty is precisely that of sexual love. Duchenne of Boulogne has proved that by his experiments. In types of men like Torquemada or Robespierre, the emotions do not reach the genital sense. They encounter an obstacle which shunts them off towards another centre. Instead of being transformed into the need for reproduction, they are transformed into the need for destruction. But there is the Neronian type and there is the Sadie type, in which sexuality and cruelty become exasperated simultaneously and are intertangled. There are men capable of stronger emotional shocks than other men. Though divided and distributed towards two goals, the current remains strong enough to produce acts of great intensity. The same phenomenon, though in a less sinister form, appears when intellectual power comes into play simultaneously with genital power. Every man capable of emotion is capable of love, and at the same time, either of cruelty, of intellectuality, or of religious sentiment; but the emotional current is sometimes entirely absorbed by one of the human activities, and we have one variety of extreme types, the other variety being furnished by men of a great emotional receptivity and, consequently, of a great diversity of aptitudes.