Читать книгу Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas - Remy de Gourmont - Страница 4

How glory, first reserved for the kings and warriors sung by the poets, has come finally to be attributed to the poets themselves, even more than to the heroes of their poems, is an historic fact whose exact origin would be of little interest. It would be more curious to discover as a result of what change in the manners and customs, or through what enhancement of egoism and of vanity, the complicated idea of justice came to attach itself to the idea of the perennity of the name and of the work. At what epoch of Greek civilization, did an Athenian dramatist, whose play had been flouted by the public, have the boldness to appeal to posterity? Are any ancient texts known wherein such recriminations may be read? Sensibility has increased to such an extent that there exists to-day no scorned poetaster who does not dream of the justice of future generations. The exigi monumentum of Horace and Malherbe has become democratized; but how can we believe that the vanity of authors has ever had a beginning? The fact must be admitted, however, in order to keep within the logic of the successive developments of human character.

Literary glory was at first merely the sentiment of the future duration of the present reputation – a legitimate sentiment which accords fairly well with the facts; for absolute revivals are almost as rare as solid rehabilitations. To-day it is a scientific probability. Æschylus believed that the relation existing in his own lifetime between the Suppliants and public opinion would continue the same throughout the ages. Æschylus was right; but not if he cherished the same dream with regard to the Danaides and the Egyptians. Yet Pratinas saw himself, in the future, one of the rivals of Æschylus, and Pratinas is to-day but a word, scarcely a name. The idea of glory, even in its oldest and most legitimate form, would seem, therefore, to contain the idea of justice, at least by preterition, since its non-realization at once suggests to us the idea of injustice. But men of so ancient a civilization should not be made to reason in terms of our modern sensibility. Pratinas would, perhaps, have submitted to destiny. He would, perhaps, have called a fact, pure and simple, what we are pleased to name injustice.

The idea of justice, since it is subject, to the variations of sensibility, is of the most instable sort. Most of the facts that we class to-day in the category of injustice, were left by the Greeks in the category of destiny. For others, which we ditch under the name of misfortune, or of fatality, they strove to find a cure. In principle, when a people restricts the category "destiny" in favour of the category "injustice," the truth has begun to confess its decadence. The extreme state of sensibility to injustice is symbolized by the gag of Zaina, who breathed only through a veil, in order to destroy no life – a state of intellectual degradation towards which European humanity, with its mystic vegetarians, precursors of sentimental socialists, is also progressing to-day. Have we not already our "lower brothers," and are we not agreed to praise the machines that spare animals the exercise of their muscles? To weep over the slave who turns the wheel, or the poet who sings in the desert, is a sign of depravity; for the fact is that the slave who turns the wheel loves life more than he suffers from his labour, while the poet who croaks like a frog in his hole finds singing an agreeable physiological exercise.

The physical laws promulgated or established by scientists are confessions of ignorance. When they cannot explain a mechanism, they declare that its movements are due to a law. Bodies fall by virtue of the law of gravitation. This has precisely the same value, in the serious order, as the comic virtus dormitiva. Categories are confessions of impotence. To throw a fact into the abyss of destiny, or into the drawer of injustice, is to renounce the exercise of the most natural analytical faculties. The Lusiads was saved because Camoens was a good swimmer, and Newton's treatise on light and colours was lost because his little dog, Diamond, overturned a candle. Presented thus, these two events belong henceforth neither in the category Providence nor in the category Fatality. They are simple facts – facts like thousands of others that have occurred without men finding in them a pretext for enthusiasm or for anger. That Æschylus has survived and Pratinas is dead are accidents like those which happen in war. There are some more scandalous, but none should be judged in accordance with the puerile notion of a distributive justice. If justice is wounded because Florus keeps afloat in the shipwreck where Varius and Calvus perish, it is justice which is wrong. It was out of place there.

However, just as it has attached itself to the idea of paradise, so the idea of justice has become the parasite of the idea of glory. For the immortality for which Tahiti gambled heads or tails, has, with the best will in the world, been substituted providential immortality; but, so far as glory, at any rate, is concerned, we know that Providence, even if it does not determine the name of the elect by lot, is governed by motives that it would, perhaps, not dare to acknowledge. However unjust man may be, by nature and by taste, he is less unjust than the God he has created. Thus, as Ausonius has pertinently remarked, chaste men engender obscene literatures. So, also, the work of the veritable genius is always inferior to the brain which bore it. Civilization has put a little method into glory, provisionally.

Even in the spiritual order, men have almost always been at variance with the decisions of their gods. Most of the saints in the past were created by the people in spite of the priests. In the course of the centuries the catalogue of the saints and the catalogue of the great men have drawn so far apart that they will soon not have a single name in common. Almost all the really venerable men of this last century – almost all those whose clay contained veins or traces of gold – were outcasts. We live in the age of Prometheus. When Providence alone ruled the earth, during the interregnum of humanity, she caused such hecatombs that intelligence nearly perished. In the year 950, the son of a serf of Aurillac, young Gerbert, summed up almost the whole European tradition. He was, all by himself, civilization. What a moment in history! Men, by an admirable instinct, made him their master. He was Pope Sylvester II. When he died, there began to be built, on that column which had sustained the world, the legend destined to find its culmination in Goethe's Faust. Such is Glory, that Gerbert is unknown. But he is not unknown like Pythagoras. It has been possible to write his life, his writings have been preserved. If Gerbert is not one of our great men to-day, he will perhaps be to-morrow. He has kept intact all the possibilities of his resurrection. The reason is that, leaving aside the paradoxical idea of Providence, we have since Gerbert scarcely changed our civilization.

When the Christians came into power, they preserved, outside those few spared by chance, only the books necessary for school instruction. There has survived of Antiquity precisely what would have survived of the seventeenth century, if the professors of the old University, together with the Jesuits and the Minims, had possessed the power of life and death over books. Adding La Fontaine to Boileau's catalogue, they would have burned the rest. The Christians burned much, in spite of their professions of love; and what they did not burn they expurgated. It is to them that we owe the almost burlesque image of a chaste Virgil. The authentic incompletion of the Æneid afforded a good pretext for cuts and erasures. The booksellers charged with the task were, moreover, unintelligent and lazy. But the great cause of the disappearance of almost all pagan literature was more general. A day came when it was deemed of no interest. From the first centuries its circle had already begun to dwindle. Could a Saint Cecilia find any pleasure in Gallus? This delicious, heroic Roman woman (who was found last century lying in the dust, in her bloody robes) changed her heart with her religion. Women ceased to read Gallus, and Gallus has almost completely perished.

In his interesting book on this subject,6 M. Stapfer has not taken into account changes in civilization. He has thought only of chance to explain the loss of so many ancient books. Chance is a mask, and it is precisely the duty of the historian to lift this mask, or to tear it. Between the sixth century and our own day, there has been one further partial modification in civilization – in the fifteenth century. About that time, the old literature began to lose its hold upon the public. The novels, the miracles, the tales seemed suddenly to have aged. They were no longer copied or recited. They were seldom printed, a single manuscript having preserved for us Aucassin et Nicolette, which is something like the Daphnis and Chloe of the Middle Ages. Accidents frighten the poet – and even the critic, who is colder, whose logic is more rigorous – the moment the suggestion is made of separating the purely historical idea of literary survival from the sentimental idea of justice. Till now – and I allude once more to the conservative rôle of modern civilization – the printing-press has protected writers against destruction; but the serious rôle of printing affects as yet only four centuries. This distant invention will appear some day as if contemporary at once with Rabelais and with Victor Hugo. When a time equal to that which separates us from the birth of Æschylus – two thousand three hundred and seventy-five years, let us say – shall have elapsed between us and a given moment of the future, what influence will printing have had on the preservation of books? Perhaps none. Everything not worth the trouble of reprinting – that is to say everything, with the exception of a few fortunate fragments – will have disappeared, and the more rapidly that the material substance of books has become more precarious. Even the discovery of a durable paper would not give absolute assurance of survival, because of the temptation to employ this excessively strong paper for a thousand other purposes. Thus the value of the parchment has often led to the sacrifice of a manuscript, just as gold articles go necessarily to the smelting-pot once the style has changed. The best material for the preservation of books would be something unchanging, but fragile, slightly brittle, so that it would be good for nothing outside its binding. Would not such a discovery be a curse?