Decadence, and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

by Remy de Gourmont

An historical psychology of humanity could be attempted by determining the precise degree of disassociation attained, in the course of the centuries, by a certain number of those truths which the orthodox agree to call primordial. This method ought even to form the base, and this determination the very aim, of history. Since everything in man comes back to the intelligence, everything in history ought to come back to psychology. It would be some excuse for the facts, were they found to admit of an explanation neither diplomatic nor strategic. What was the association of ideas, or the truth not yet disassociated, which favoured the accomplishment of the mission which Jeanne d'Arc believed to have been received from heaven? To answer this question, it would be necessary to discover certain ideas capable of uniting equally in French brains and in English, or a truth at that time indisputably admitted by all Christendom. Jeanne d'Arc was regarded, at once by her friends and by her enemies, as possessing a supernatural power. For the English, she was a very potent sorceress. Opinion is unanimous on this point, and there is abundant evidence. But for her partisans? For them she was doubtless a sorceress also, or rather, a magician. Magic is not necessarily diabolical. Supernatural beings, that were neither angels nor demons, but Powers which man's intelligence could bring under its dominion, were afloat in the imagination. The magician was the good sorcerer. Were this not so, would a man as wise and as saintly as Albertus Magnus have been taxed with magic? The soldier who followed Jeanne d'Arc, and the soldier who fought her, sorceress or magician, formed of her, quite probably, an idea identical in its dreadful absurdity. But if the English shouted the name of sorceress, the French withheld the name of "magician," doubtless for the same reason which so long protected the usurper Ta-Kiang through the marvellous adventures narrated by Judith Gautier in her admirable Dragon Impérial.

What idea, at any given moment, did each class of society form of the soldier? Would not the answer to this question contain a whole course in history? Coming down to our own time, it might be asked at what moment the idea of honour and the military idea became united in the common mind. Is the union a survival of the aristocratic conception of the army? Was the association formed as a result of the events of thirty years ago, when the people decided to exalt the soldier for its own encouragement? This idea of honour should be clearly understood. It contains several other ideas—ideas of bravery, of disinterestedness, of discipline, of sacrifice, of heroism, of probity, of loyalty, of frankness, of good humour, of openness, of simplicity, etc. The word itself would, in fine, be found to sum up the qualities of which the French race believes itself to be the expression. To determine its origin would be, then, to determine automatically the period when the Frenchman began to believe himself a compendium of all the manly virtues. The military man has remained in France, in spite of recent objections, the very type of the man of honour. The two ideas are united very energetically. They form a truth which is scarcely disputed to-day, except by individuals of slight authority or of doubtful sincerity. Its disassociation is, therefore, very little advanced as regards the nation as a whole. It was, however, for a moment at least, completely effected in certain minds. This involved, from the strictly intellectual point of view, a considerable effort of abstraction which we cannot but admire when we regard dispassionately the cerebral machine in its functioning. Doubtless the result achieved was not the product of normal reasoning. The disassociation was accomplished in a fit of fever. It was unconscious, and it was momentary; but it was, and that is the important point for the observer. The idea of honour, with all it implies, became separated from the military idea, which, in this instance, is the factual idea, the female idea, ready to receive all the modifiers, and it was perceived that, if there was a certain logical relation between them, this relation was not necessary. There is the decisive point. A truth is dead when it has been shown that the relations between the elements are habitual, and not necessary; and, as the death of a truth is a great benefit for mankind, this disassociation would have been very important if it had been definitive, if it had remained stable. Unfortunately, after the effort to attain the pure idea, the old mental habits resumed their sway. The former modifying element was instantly replaced by an element by no means new, less logical than the other, and even less necessary. The operation seemed to have miscarried. Association of ideas occurred again in the very same form as before, though one of the elements had now been turned inside out, like an old glove. For honour had been substituted dishonour, with all the adventitious ideas belonging to the old element transformed into cowardice, deceitfulness, lack of discipline, falseness, duplicity, wickedness, etc. This new association of ideas may have a destructive value, but it offers no intellectual interest.

The moral of this anecdote is that the ideas which seem to us the clearest, the most evident,—the most palpable, as it were—are, even so, not strong enough to impose themselves in all their nakedness upon the average mind. In order to assimilate the idea of the army, a contemporary brain must swathe it with elements which have only a chance or current relation with the main idea. A humble politician cannot, doubtless, be expected to adopt Napoleon's simple idea of an army as a sword. Very simple ideas lie within the reach of very complicated minds only. It seems, however, that it should not be absurd to regard the army merely as the exteriorized force of a nation, and then to demand of this particular force only those very qualities which are demanded of force in general. But perhaps even this is too simple?

What excellent opportunities the present offers for one who would study the mechanism of the association and disassociation of ideas! We often talk of ideas. We write on the evolution of ideas. Yet no word is vaguer or more ill-defined. There are naïve writers who hold forth on the Idea, with a capital I. There are co-operative societies that start out suddenly in quest of the Idea. There are people who devote themselves to the Idea, who live with their gaze fixed upon the Idea. Just what is meant by such rambling? That is what I have never been able to understand. Employed thus, alone, the word is perhaps a corruption of the word Ideal. Is the modifying term perhaps understood also? Is it a stray fragment of the Hegelian philosophy which the slow advance of the great social glacier has, in passing, deposited in certain heads, where it rolls and clatters about like a rock? No one knows. Employed as a relative, the word is not much clearer in ordinary phraseologies. Its primitive meaning is too far forgotten, as well as the fact that an idea is nothing but an image that has reached the state of abstraction, of notion; but it is forgotten also that, in order to be entitled to the name of idea, a notion must be free from all compromise with the contingent. A notion, reaching the estate of idea, has become indisputable. It is a cipher, a sign—one of the letters in the alphabet of thought.

Ideas cannot be classed as true and false. The idea is necessarily true. An idea that can be disputed is an idea mingled with concrete notions, that is to say, a truth. The work of disassociation tends, precisely, to free the truth from all its fragile part, in order to obtain the pure, one, and consequently unassailable idea. But if words were never used save in their unique and absolute sense, connected discourse would be difficult. There must be left a little of that vagueness and flexibility which usage has given them; and, in particular, too much stress must not be laid upon the gap separating the abstract from the concrete. There is an intermediate state between ice and water—that in which the latter begins to congeal, when it still cracks and yields under the pressure of the hand plunged into it. Perhaps we should not even demand that the words contained in philosophic handbooks should abdicate all pretension to ambiguity.

The idea of army, which aroused serious polemics, and which was liberated an instant, only to be obscured anew, is one of those that border on the concrete and cannot be spoken of without minute references to reality. The idea of justice, on the contrary, can be considered in itself, in abstracto. In the inquiry made by M. Ribot on the subject of general ideas, almost all those who heard the word Justice pronounced, saw, in their mind's eye, the legendary lady with the scales. There is, in this traditional representation of an abstract idea, a notion of the very origin of that idea.

The idea of justice is, in fact, nothing but the idea of equilibrium. Justice is the dead-point in a series of acts—the ideal point at which contrary forces neutralize each other to produce inertia. Life which had passed this dead-point of absolute justice could not longer live, since the idea of life, identical with that of a conflict of forces, is necessarily the idea of justice. The reign of justice could only be the reign of silence and of petrification. Mouths cease to speak—vain organs of stupefied brains—and arms uplifted in suspended gesture describe nothing further in the frozen air. Theologians situated justice beyond the world, in eternity. There only can it be conceived, and there only can it, without danger to life, exercise once and for all its tyranny which knows but one sort of decree, the decree of death. The idea of justice, then, clearly belongs to the series of ideas that are indisputable and undemonstrable. Nothing can be done with it in its pure state. It must be associated with some element of fact, or we must cease using a word which corresponds only to an inconceivable entity. To tell the truth, the idea of justice is perhaps here disassociated for the first time. Under this name men allege sometimes the idea of punishment, which is very familiar to them, sometimes the idea of non-punishment—a neutral idea, mere shadow of the former. It is question of punishing the guilty and of not disturbing the innocent—a distinction which, in order to be comprehensible, would immediately imply a definition of guilt and a definition of innocence. That is difficult, these words from the moral dictionary having to-day nothing but a dwindling and entirely relative significance. And why, it might be asked, should a guilty man be punished? It would seem, on the contrary, as if the innocent man, who is supposed to be healthy and normal, were much more capable of supporting punishment than the guilty man, who is sick and weakly. Why should not the imbecile, who has let himself be robbed, be punished instead of the robber, who has certain excuses to offer? That is what justice would decree if, instead of a theological conception, it were still, as at Sparta, an imitation of nature. Nothing exists save by virtue of disequilibrium, of injustice. Every existence is a theft practised upon other existences. No life flourishes except in a cemetery. If, instead of being the denier of natural laws, humanity wished to become their auxiliary, it would seek to protect the strong against the coalition of the weak, and give the people to the aristocrats as a footstool. It would seem, on the contrary, as if that which is to-day understood by justice were, simultaneously with the punishment of the guilty, the extermination of the strong, and, simultaneously with the non-punishment of the innocent, the exaltation of the humble. The origin of this complex, bastard, hypocritical idea should then be sought in the Gospel, in the "woe to the rich" of the Jewish demagogues. Thus understood, the idea of justice appears contaminated at once by hatred and by envy. It no longer retains anything of its original meaning, and one cannot attempt its analysis without danger of being duped by the vulgar meaning of the words. Yet, with a little care, it would be seen that the depreciation of this useful term arose originally from a confusion between the idea of right and the idea of punishment. The day when justice came to mean sometimes criminal justice, sometimes civil justice, the world confused these two practical notions, and the teachers of the people, incapable of a serious effort of disassociation, have come to magnify a misunderstanding which, moreover, serves their own interests. The real idea of justice appears then, finally, as quite non-existent in the very word which figures in the human vocabulary. This word resolves itself, on analysis, into elements which are still very complex, and among which may be distinguished the idea of right and the idea of punishment. But there is so much that is illogical in this curious coupling, that we should be inclined to doubt the accuracy of our operation, did not the social facts furnish its proof.

We might here examine this question: do abstract words really exist for the people, for the average man? Probably not. It would even seem as if the same word attained only graduated stages of abstraction, according to the degree of intellectual culture. The pure idea is more or less contaminated by concern for personal, caste or group interests, and the word justice, for example, thus clothes all sorts of particular and limited meanings under the weight of which its supreme sense disappears, overwhelmed.

The moment an idea is disassociated and it enters thus, quite naked, into circulation, it begins to pick up, in the course of its wanderings, all sorts of parasitic vegetations. Sometimes the original organism disappears entirely, devoured by the egoistic colonies which develop in it. A very amusing example of the way in which ideas are thus deflected was recently given by the corporation of house-painters, at the ceremony called the "Triumph of the Republic." These workmen carried a banner on which their demands for social justice were summed up in the cry: "Down with Ripolin!" The reader should know that Ripolin is a prepared paint which anyone can apply, in order to understand the full sincerity of this slogan as well as its artlessness. Ripolin here represents injustice and oppression. It is the enemy, the devil. We all have our ripolin with which we colour, according to our needs, the abstract ideas which otherwise would be of no personal use to us.

It is under one of these motleys that the idea of liberty is presented to us by the politicians. Hearing this word, we now perceive little other than the idea of political liberty, and it would seem as if all the liberties which man is capable of enjoying were summed up in this ambiguous expression. Moreover, it is the same with the pure idea of liberty, as with the pure idea of justice; it is of no use to us in the ordinary business of life. Neither man nor nature is free, any more than either is just. Reasoning has no hold upon such ideas. To express them is to assert them, but they would necessarily falsify every argument into which one might wish to introduce them. Reduced to its social significance, the idea of liberty is still incompletely disassociated. There is no general idea of liberty, and it is difficult to form one, since the liberty of an individual is exercised only at the expense of the liberty of others. Formerly liberty was called privilege. Taking everything into account, that is perhaps its true name. Even to-day one of our relative liberties—the liberty of the press—is an ensemble of privileges. Privileges also are the liberty of speech granted to lawyers, the liberty of trade unions, and, to-morrow, the liberty of association as it is now proposed to us. The idea of liberty is perhaps only an emphatic corruption of the idea of privilege. The Latins, who made great use of the word liberty, meant by it the privilege of the Roman citizen.