








A NIGHT IN THE LUXEMBOURG

BY

REMY DE GOURMONT

WITH PREFACE

AND APPENDIX

BY ARTHUR RANSOME

JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY

BOSTON  MCMXII




CONTENTS


TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. By Arthur Ransome

A Night in the Luxembourg. By Remy de Gourmont

Preface

A Night in the Luxembourg

Final Note

APPENDIX: REMY de GOURMONT. By Arthur Ransome

AUTOGRAPHS--

KOPH

Reduced facsimile of the last page of M. Rose's Manuscript




TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE


A general, but necessarily inadequate, account of the personality
and works of one of the finest intellects of his generation will be
found in the Appendix. I am here concerned only with _Une Nuit au
Luxembourg_, which, though it is widely read in almost every other
European language, is now for the first time translated into English.

This book, at once criticism and romance, is the best introduction
to M. de Gourmont's very various works. It created a "sensation" in
France. I think it may do as much in England, but I am anxious lest
this "sensation" should be of a kind honourable neither to us nor to
the author of a remarkable book. I do not wish a delicate and subtle
artist, a very noble philosopher, noble even if smiling, nobler
perhaps because he smiles, to be greeted with accusations of indecency
and blasphemy. But I cannot help recognising that in England, as in
many other countries, these accusations are often brought against such
philosophers as discuss in a manner other than traditional the subjects
of God and woman. These two subjects, with many others, are here the
motives of a book no less delightful than profound.

The duty of a translator is not comprised in mere fidelity. He must
reproduce as nearly as he can the spirit and form of his original, and,
since in a work of art spirit and form are one, his first care must be
to preserve as accurately as possible the contours and the shading of
his model. But he must remember (and beg his readers to remember) that
the intellectual background on which the work will appear in its new
language is different from that against which it was conceived. When
the new background is as different from the old as English from French,
he cannot but recognise that it disturbs the chiaroscuro of his work
with a quite incalculable light. It gives the contours a new quality
and the shadows a new texture. His own accuracy may thus give his work
an atmosphere not that which its original author designed.

I have been placed in such a dilemma in translating this book. Certain
phrases and descriptions were, in the French, no more than delightful
sporting of the intellect with the flesh that is its master. In the
English, for us, less accustomed to plain-speaking, and far less
accustomed to a playful attitude towards matters of which we never
speak unless with great solemnity, they became wilful parades of the
indecent. It is important to remember that they were not so in the
French, but were such things as might well be heard in a story told in
general conversation--if the talkers were Frenchmen of genius.

There is no ugliness in the frank acceptance of the flesh, that is a
motive, one among many, in this book, and perhaps more noticeable by us
than the author intended. No doubt it never occurred to M. de Gourmont
that he was writing for the English. We are only fortunate listeners
to a monologue, and must not presume upon our position to ask him to
remember we are there.

The character of that monologue is such, I think, as to justify me
in tampering very little with its design. Not only is _Une Nuit au
Luxembourg_ not a book for children or young persons--if it were,
the question would be altogether different--but it is not a book for
fools, or even for quite ordinary people. I think that no reader who
can enjoy the philosophical discussion that is its greater part will
quarrel with its Epicurean interludes. He will either forgive those
passages of which I am speaking as the pardonable idiosyncrasy of a
great man, or recognise that they are themselves illustrations of his
philosophy, essential to its exposition, and raised by that fact into
an intellectual light that justifies their retention.

The prurient minds who might otherwise peer at these passages, and
enjoy the caricatures that their own dark lanterns would throw on
the muddy wall of their comprehension, will, I think, be repelled by
the nobility of the book's philosophy. They will seek their truffles
elsewhere, and find plenty.

M. de Gourmont is perhaps more likely to be attacked for blasphemy, but
only by those who do not observe his piety towards the thing that he
most reverences, the purity and the clarity of thought. He worships in
a temple not easy to approach, a temple where the worshippers are few,
and the worship difficult. It is impossible not to respect a mind that,
in its consuming desire for liberty, strips away not fetters only but
supports. Fetters bind at first, but later it is hard to stand without
them.

His book is not a polemic against Christianity, in the same sense as
Nietzsche's _Anti-Christ_, though it does propose an ethic and an
ideal very different from those we have come to consider Christian.
When he smiles at the Acts of the Apostles as at a fairy tale, he adds
a sentence of incomparable praise and profound criticism: "These men
touch God with their hands." It may shock some people to find that the
principal speaker in the book is a god who claims to have inspired,
not Christ alone, but Pythagoras, Epicurus, Lucretius, St. Paul and
Spinoza with the most valuable of their doctrines. It will not, I
think, shock any student of comparative religion. He will find it no
more than a poet's statement of an idea that has long ceased to disturb
the devout, the idea that all religions are the same, or translations
of the same religion. We recognise in the sayings of Confucius some
of the loveliest of the sayings of Christ, and we find them again in
Mohammed. Why not admit that the same voice whispered in their ears,
for this, unless we think that the Devil can give advice as good as
God's, we cannot help but believe. And that other idea, that the gods
die, though their lives are long, should not shock those who know of
Odin, notice the lessening Christian reverence for the Jewish Jehovah,
and remember the story, so often and so sweetly told, of the voices
on the Grecian coast, with their cry, "Great Pan is dead! Great Pan
is dead!" Turning from particular ideas to the rule of life that the
book proposes, we find a crystal-line Epicureanism. Virtue is, to be
happy; and sin is, where we put it. "Human wisdom is to live as if one
were never to die, and to gather the present minute as if it were to
be eternal." This is no doctrine that is easy to follow. The god does
not offer it to the first comer, but to one who has schooled his mind
to see hard things, and, having seen them, to rise above them. M. de
Gourmont will tell no lies that he can avoid, especially when speaking
to himself, but, if he burn himself, Phoenix-like, in the ashes of a
sentimental universe, he has at least the hope of rising from the pyre
with stronger wings and more triumphant flight. He will start with no
more than the assumption that the universe as we know it is the product
of a series of accidents. He will not persuade himself that man is the
climax of a carefully planned mechanical process of evolution, nor will
he hide his origin in imagery like that of Genesis, or like that which
certain modern scientists are quite unable to avoid. He turns science
against the scientists with the irrefutable remark that only a change
in the temperature saved us from the dominion of ants. Instinct for him
is arrested intellect, and he is ready to imagine man in the future
doing mechanically what now he does by intention. Such ideas would
crush a feeble brain or bind it with despair. They lead him to the
Epicureanism that is the only philosophy that they do not overthrow.
Our roses and our women make us the equals of the gods, and even envied
by them.

All his criticism, not of one or two ideas alone, but of the history of
philosophy, the history of woman, the history of man and the history
of religion, is made with a mastery so absolute as to dare to be
playful. The winter night was changed to a spring morning as the god
walked in the Luxembourg, and the wintry cold of nineteenth-century
science melts in the warmth of a spring-time no less magical. The book
might be grim. It is clear-eyed and sparkling with dew, like a sonnet
by Ronsard.

"Comme on voit sur une branche au mois de mai la rose,"

so one sees the philosophy of M. de Gourmont, not quarried stone, but
a flower, so light, so delicate, as to make us forget the worlds that
have been overthrown in its manufacture.

I remember near the end of _The Pilgrim's Progress_ there is a passage
of dancing. Giant Despair has been killed, and Doubting Castle
demolished. The pilgrims were "very jocund and merry." "Now Christiana,
if need was, could play upon the viol, and her daughter Mercy upon the
lute; so, since they were so merry disposed, she played them a lesson,
and Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Despondency's daughter,
Much-afraid, by the hand, and to dancing they went in the road. True,
he could not dance without one crutch in his hand; but I promise you he
footed it well; also the girl was to be commended, for she answered the
music handsomely." Just so, in this book, on a journey no less perilous
among ideas, there is an atmosphere of genial entertainment, a delight
in the things of the senses illumined by a delight in the things of the
mind. And in this there is no irreverence. Only those who have ceased
to believe have forgotten how to dance in the presence of their God.

Perhaps the technician alone will observe the skill with which M.
de Gourmont has handled the most difficult of literary forms. In
translating a book one becomes fairly intimate with it, and not the
least pleasure of my intimacy with _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_ has been
to notice the ease and the grace with which its author turns, always
at the right moment, from ideas to images, from romance to thought.
"The exercise of thought is a game," he says, "but this game must be
free and harmonious." And the outward impression given by this subtly
constructed book is that of an intellect playing harmoniously with
itself in a state of joyful liberty. M. de Gourmont is a master of
his moods, knowing how to serve them; and no less admirable than the
loftiest moment of the discussion, is the Callot-like grotesque of the
three goddesses, seen not as divinities but as sins, or the Virgilian
breakfast under the trees.

It is possible that _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_ may be for a few in
our generation what _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ was for a few in the
generation of Swinburne, a "golden book of spirit and sense." Ideas are
dangerous metal in which to mould romances, because from time to time
they tarnish. Voltaire has had his moments of being dull, and Gautier's
ideas do not excite us now. M. de Gourmont's may not move us to-morrow.
Let us enjoy them to-day, and share the pleasure that the people of the
day after to-morrow will certainly not refuse.

ARTHUR RANSOME.




BY REMY DE GOURMONT




PREFACE


There appeared in _Le Temps_ of the 13th of February, 1906:--

"OBITUARY

"We have just learned of the sudden death of one of our confreres on
the foreign press, M. James Sandy Rose, deceased yesterday, Sunday,
in his rooms at 14 Rue de Medicis. Notwithstanding this English name,
he was a Frenchman; born at Nantes in 1865, his true name was Louis
Delacolombe. He was brought up in the United States, returned to France
ten years ago, and from that time till his death was the highly valued
correspondent of the _Northern Atlantic Herald._"

On the following day, the 14th of February, the same journal printed
this note among its miscellaneous news:--

"THE MYSTERY OF THE RUE DE MEDICIS

"We announced yesterday the sudden death of M. James Sandy Rose, our
confrere on the foreign press. His death seems to have taken place
under suspicious circumstances. At present a woman of the Latin
Quarter, Blanche B----, is strongly suspected of having been at least
an accomplice to it. This woman is known for her habit of dressing in
very light colours, even in mid-winter, and it was this that made the
concierge notice her. She lives, moreover, behind the house of the
crime--assuming that there has been a crime--in the Rue de Vaugirard.
This is what is said to have happened:--

"Because M. J. S. Rose, who was of fairly regular habits, had not been
seen for some days, his door was broken open, and he was discovered
inanimate. He had been dead for a few hours only, a fact which does
not agree with the length of time during which he had remained
invisible, and still further complicates the question. It is supposed
that the woman B----, after passing the night with him, put him to
sleep by means of a narcotic (from which the unhappy man did not
awake), or strangled him