Remy de Gourmont, ‘Kissing’ (1910–15)

Nothing is as amusing to read as a diatribe against kissing in a stupidly scientific journal (for one of science’s properties is to increase human stupidity). Every paradox is unleashed. There are persons who will calmly inform you that kissing is an unhygienic practice. I am quite willing to believe it; but it does not bother me, nor, I suppose, almost anyone else. In truth, everything is unhygienic; everything is unclean, even life itself; but some things are agreeably unclean and others disagreeably unclean. To live according to the precepts of this imbecile science, one must avoid the first as much as the second. Truly, one would do better to cleave to the old common notion of cleanliness, which shades into the notion of decency, while, in all other things, indulging bravely in one’s instincts. That is what makes man civilized; and that is what he will always do as he mocks scientific pedagogues, who, in mentality, are very like of one of Molière’s medical men. Lovers kiss on the lips and a professor of hygiene pops up: ‘Poor things! What are you doing? Don’t you know that saliva contains some microbe or other, not to mention these others that are even more dangerous? Look but don’t touch, especially not with the lips. Science will protect you.’ I do not believe the day will come when lovers, frightened and obedient, will turn from this pleasure. ‘But men are so stupid and so frightened!’ Not to that extent, no. Lovers will always answer: ‘Our love is stronger than fear. Our desire is stronger than life.’ And thus, sensibility, which created civilization, will protect it from the tyranny of dogmatic scientism.

Remy de Gourmont, ‘Horses and Women’ (1921)

Apparently, the other day, a horse-dealer took his client for a ride and sold him a horse with a gutta-percha hoof. The horse-dealer is famous for his trickery. There is no horse-sickness he does not know how to disguise, no coat he cannot imitate, no gait he cannot force on a beast. Like woman, the horse is generally a counterfeit animal. We force him into the hypocrisy that woman forces herself into in order to trick man, her perpetual desire and perpetual enemy. So, somewhere or other, there is sure to be a saying of this sort: ‘Trust in neither horse nor woman.’ The horse no longer interests us much, having fallen out of fashion; but woman is always in fashion. The dexterity of horse-dealers notwithstanding, a horse is sold naked: there is a limit to his trickery; but to the trickery of woman, who sells herself clothed, there is no limit. An almost entirely artificial woman can inflame the covetousness of the connoisseur, not least because a woman made up by dressmakers and hairdressers, dentists and corset-makers almost always offers a fairer prospect than a natural woman. Artificiality goes deeper than the skin: wigs are not only for the head! How many lovers have caressed magnificent blonde tresses not long dead on the head of a hospitalized phthisic? How many lovers have been troubled by the finely-wrought rhythm of a breast they have seen before, but mute, then, in the rubber-merchant’s window? Her modesty, her ferocious modesty, compounds an artificial woman’s charm. Undressing, she defends herself despairingly. She is not one to let her gutta-percha slip like the poor, innocent horse!

Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche and Princess Bovary” (1903/05)

Draft translation of “Nietzsche et la princesse Bovary,” Épilogues: Réflexions sur la vie: 1902–1904 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), p. 131, dated February 1903. A caustic portrait of pretension to Nietzschean worldliness.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

 

It was said she read Nietzsche, that lamentable little princess whose ideal was to resemble those unhinged and idiotically perverse little bourgeois girls; and that her husband deplored her frequenting a stupefying moralist. These words were written; had they been said, Prince Bovary would be a fool. But there is no doubt that he has not read Nietzsche himself; and certainly if his wife has read him, she has understood nothing of him. Otherwise she would have stayed at home, would have disguised her vices, presented her people with at least the appearance of an aristocratic superiority. Nietzsche never counselled anyone with weakness; but to princes and to masters he preached hardness, towards themselves first of all. Had she read her Nietzsche, she would have learnt that the search for happiness (the happiness of romance and roman) is the blatant sign of a slave-sensibility, and that, of all lapses, the worst is that of the privileged who abdicate their power or merely renounce its outermost expressions. Nietzsche’s power is not stupefying; but, like alcohol, it may be too stiff a brew for stupefied organisms.

Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche’s Death” (1900/04)

Draft translation of “La Mort de Nietzsche,” Épilogues: Réflexions sur la vie: 1899–1901 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904), pp. 185–91, dated October 1900. A eulogy of the recently-departed Nietzsche. As in “Nietzsche on the Mountain,” Gourmont is convinced of Nietzsche’s world-historical importance as early as 1900: so before Fascism, psychoanalysis or postmodernism.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

 

It is a non-event, since the man of the highest and freest intelligence of the century fell, ten years ago, into the deep shadows of unintelligence. A contrast that would enliven the discourse of a rhetorician: the very same by whom the mind was liberated has died the prisoner of stupidity, whether an unfortunate heredity is to blame, or whether Nietzsche abused his own intellectual energy. To endeavour to understand everything, to feel everything, to judge everything—and not according to the common principles of everyday philosophy, but according to personal and quite new ideas and methods—is not without its dangers. And it also happens that the bravest is seized by fear upon finding himself alone in his opinion. But what do causes matter, when that is a matter of an unending chain; when all is determined; when the genius of a Nietzsche, no less than the stupidity of the man in the street, are bound to a psychological state? And what does even that madness or that ultimate stupor matter if, throughout his years of activity, Nietzsche unleashed a superior intellectual force? Ought sickness lead us to disregard the forerunning years of health and vigour; or ought the smith’s wrist that softens and flops keep us from the fact that he, in the fulness of his virility, melted and mastered iron?

Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche and the Affair” (1899/1904)

Draft translation of “Nietzsche et l’affaire,” Épilogues: Réflexions sur la vie: 1899–1901 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904), pp. 90–2, dated October 1899. Gourmont advances an ironically antidreyfusard position: Dreyfus’ guilty verdict is “favourable to civilization,” to the “mechanism of social conventions” understood as “forces”; “Right” or “Justice” do not enter into it.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

 

I do not know if we can say that, in the present Affair, Force has triumphed over Right, even if we retain the common senses of these words, such as Mr. Havet might understand, on a good day; but if we suppose as much, the spectacle would be salutary and opportune. Every right being founded upon force, it would be no bad thing if this mechanism of social conventions were sometimes set in motion before the astounded populace, and if we were to witness the brutal motion of causes in the open air. But there is no Right opposed to Force. There are forces; and in this case it is the force of cohesion that has prevailed over the force of disaggregation. The Dreyfus Affair is a problem of mechanics; it has been provisionally resolved in a manner extremely favourable to civilization [1].

Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche and Love” (1904/13)

Draft translation. “Nietzsche et l’amour,” Promenades littéraires, second ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1922) pp. 89–95, dated 1904. Gourmont critiques the shallowness and meanness of Nietzsche’s view of women; though his own perspective could by no means be called feminist. Rather, the text expresses a certain psycho-sexual attitude I like to think of as “Gourmontism” (by analogy with Sadism, Masochism, Retifism, etc.): that is, sexual attraction to intelligent women.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

 

Nietzsche had little experience of love. One might even say that he never had more than friendly relations with a woman. He wrote on love and on woman nonetheless, like every good philosopher. One day, at Sorrento, he confided Malwida von Meysenbug with a handwritten notebook containing the aphorisms on woman later published in the first part of Human, All-too-human. Malwida took the notebook, read it, and returned it to Nietzsche, smiling. He demanded an explanation for the smile. “Do not publish this,” said Mrs. von Meysenbug. Nietzsche seemed ruffled. He added the notebook to the rest of the manuscript and sent the lot to his publisher.

Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche on the Mountain” (1902/13)

Draft translation. “Nietzsche sur le montagne,” Promenades philosophiques, tenth ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913), pp. 176–7, dated 1902. Gourmont was far- and deep-sighted to have seen, already in 1902, the extent to which Nietzsche would determine the twentieth century.

PDF at academia.edu.

 

The last century, if one admit this slice of time, began with the literary Catholicism of Chateaubriand; it ends with the mystic Protestantism of Tolstoy. This was a placidly religious century; wise like a wise child, it never slipped its hand from the hand of its grandmother, Religion. This dame, truth be told, old, tired, but always the coquette, very often changed her costume and jewellery. She was Romantic, philosophical, humanitarian, socialist, nationalist, bellicose or pacific, ironical or lachrymose, moralistic, mystic or sensual, and even literary, and even scientific—and even arty: under all her hats and all her wigs, her eyeshadow and her blusher, she remained the same; and her grip did not ease for a second from the bruised wrist of the little child, even grown into a sad old man.