Decadence, and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

by Remy de Gourmont

I

Abruptly, about 1885, the idea of decadence entered French literature. After serving to glorify or to ridicule a whole group of poets, it had perched, as it were, upon a single head. Stéphane Mallarmé was the prince of this ironical, almost injurious realm, as it would have been, had the word itself been rightly understood and employed. But, by an eccentricity which is a Latin trait, the academic world, in keeping with its normal but unwholesome horror when confronted with new tendencies, called thus the fever for originality which tormented a generation. M. Mallarmé, rendered responsible for the acts of rebellion which he had encouraged, appeared to the innocent ass-drivers who accompany but do not conduct the caravan a redoubtable Aladdin, assassin of the sound principles of universal imitation.

These are, after all, thoroughly literary habits. They have been flourishing now for nearly three centuries, and the most celebrated revolts have hardly lopped their branches—have never uprooted them. No sooner had the Romantic insolences subsided than the poet was forced to crawl, half-smothered, under the ancient greenwood which furnishes ferules.

These habits are also thoroughly Latin. The Romans, so long as they were Romans only, knew nothing of individualism. Their civilization offers the spectacle of a fine social animality. Emulation with them aimed at likeness, just as, with us, it aims at unlikeness. Once they possessed five or six poets—successful off-shoots of Hellenic grafting—they refused to admit any others, and it is quite possible that, their social, racial instinct dominating the instinct of freedom and individuality, no poet of fresh inspiration was born to them for four or five centuries. They had the emperor and they had Virgil, and they obeyed both equally until the Christian revolt and the barbarian invasion joined hands above the Capitol. Literary liberty, like all other liberties, is born of the union of consciousness and strength. The day when Saint Ambrose, writing his hymns, disregarded the Horatian principles should be memorable, for it marks unmistakably the birth of a new mentality.

Just as the political history of the Romans has furnished us with the conception of historical decadence, so the history of their literature has furnished us with the conception of literary decadence—the two faces of a single idea; for it has been easy to indicate the coincidence of the two movements, and to inculcate the belief that there was a necessary connection between the two. Montesquieu owes his fame to the fact that he was particularly the dupe of this illusion.

Savages find it very difficult to admit the possibility of natural death. For them, every death is a murder. They have not the slightest sense of law; they live in the domain of the accidental. It has been agreed to call this state of mind inferior, and it is inferior, though the notion of rigid law is just as false and as dangerous as its negation. The only absolutely necessary laws are natural laws, which can neither vary nor change. In the case of social and political evolution, not only are there no necessary laws, but there are no very general laws even. Either these so-called laws, confused with the facts which they explain, amount to nothing but wise and honourable assertions, or else they declare, though over-emphatically, the very principle of change. Empires, then, are born, grow and die. Social combinations are unstable. Human groups have, at different epochs, different powers of cohesion. New affinities appear and are propagated. Here there would be the material for a treatise on social mechanics, if the writer did not insist too rigorously on squaring his philosophy with the reality of unexpected catastrophes. For the unexpected must be left a place which is sometimes the throne whence irony flashes and laughs. The idea of decadence is, then, merely the idea of natural death. Historians admit no other. To explain the taking of Byzantium by the Turks, they make us listen to the murmur of theological quarrels, and the crack of the Blue's whip in the circus. Longchamps leads to Sedan, no doubt, but Epsom leads to Waterloo also. The long decadence of crumbling empires is one of the most singular illusions in history. If certain empires have died of sickness or of old age, the greater number, on the contrary, have succumbed to violent death, in the plenitude of their physical power, in the full force of their intellectual vigour.

Then, too, intelligence is personal, and no reasonable relation can be established between the power of a people and the genius of an individual. Neither Greek literature, nor the literatures of the Middle Ages, correspond to stable and powerful political institutions, Greek, Italian or French; and it is precisely now, when their material power has become negligible, that the Scandinavian kingdoms have decked themselves with original talents. It would, perhaps, be nearer the truth to say that political decadence is the condition most favourable for intellectual flowering. It is when a Gustavus Adolphus and a Charles XII are no longer possible, that an Ibsen and a Björnson appear. In the same way, the fall of Napoleon seemed a signal for nature to clothe herself again joyously in green, and to put forth her most magnificent growths. Goethe was the contemporary of his country's ruin. In order to exercise and satisfy our tendencies towards historical scepticism, we should not, however, fail to oppose to these examples the phenomena of those doubly glorious epochs of which the pompous century of Louis XIV is the venerated model. After this, a few minutes' reflection will force us to adopt a somewhat different opinion from that which passes current persistently in text-books and in conversation.

Bossuet was the first to whom it occurred to judge universal history—or what he naïvely regarded as such—in accordance with the principles of Biblical Judaism. He saw the fall of all those empires upon which Jehovah had laid his heavy hand. This is the idea of decadence explained by that of punishment. Montesquieu's more complicated philosophy is perhaps even more puerile. It is impossible to name without a sort of disgust a historian who dates the decadence of Rome from the dawn of those admirable centuries of world-peace which, perhaps, constitute the one happy epoch of civilized humanity. The meaning of the words must be scrutinized closely. Then it will be perceived that they have no sense, and that memorable writers used them all their lives without understanding them. But however debatable, or at least however vague, it may be, the general idea of decadence is clear and distinct compared with the more restricted notion of literary decadence.

From Racine to Vigny, France produced no great poet. This is a fact. Such a period is certainly one of literary decadence; yet we should not go further than the fact itself, or attribute to it an absurd character of logic and necessity. Poetry was asleep in the eighteenth century, through lack of poets; but this failure is not the result of a too free flowering prior to that period. It is what it is, and nothing more. If we call it decadence, we admit the existence of a sort of mysterious organism—a being, a woman—Poetry—who is born, brings forth, and dies, at almost regular intervals, after the manner of human beings. This is an agreeable conception—subject for a dissertation or lecture—but one which should be omitted from a discussion, which aims only at the anatomy of an idea.

The principal trait of eighteenth century poetry is its spirit of imitation. That century was Roman in its cultivation of this spirit. It imitated furiously, gracefully, tenderly, ironically, stupidly. It was "Chinese" as well as Roman. There were "models." The word was imperative. The poet was not obliged to describe the impression produced upon him by life; he had to watch Racine and scale the mountain. What a singular psychology! The same philosopher who sapped the idea of respect in politics, replastered and whitewashed it anew in literature. There were critics. While Goethe was writing Werther, they were comparing Gilbert and Boileau. It was a degradation. Must we seek a cause for it? That would be vain. To attempt to explain why no poet was born in France for a hundred years, with the exception of Delille[1] and of Chénier, would lead necessarily to explaining the birth of Ronsard, Théophile or Racine also. We know nothing about it, and nothing can be known. Stripped of its mysticism, its necessity, all its historical genealogy, the idea of literary decadence is reduced to a purely negative notion—to the simple idea of absence. This sounds so simple that one scarcely dares to express it; but, when superior intelligences are lacking at a given moment, the multiplication of mediocrities makes itself acutely and actively felt; and, as the mediocre man is an imitator, the epochs that have justly been called decadent are nothing but epochs of imitation. In the last analysis, the idea of decadence is identical with the idea of imitation.