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Decadence: And Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas
And Other Essays On The Culture Of Ideas is a book written by Remy De Gourmont and published in 1921. The book is a collection of essays that explore the theme of decadence in art and culture. Gourmont, a French writer and critic, examines the decline of traditional values and the rise of new ideas and movements, such as symbolism and aestheticism.The essays cover a range of topics, including literature, music, and philosophy. Gourmont argues that the decadent movement is not necessarily negative, but rather a necessary evolution in the development of culture. He explores the relationship between decadence and individualism, as well as the role of the artist in society.The book is written in a lyrical and poetic style, with Gourmont's prose often bordering on the surreal. He draws on a wide range of literary and artistic references to support his arguments, making the book a rich and thought-provoking read.Overall, And Other Essays On The Culture Of Ideas is a seminal work in the study of cultural history and aesthetics. It offers a unique and insightful perspective on the evolution of culture and the role of the artist in shaping society.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
- GenresPhilosophyEssays
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
About the author
Remy de Gourmont
398 books64 followersPeople widely read works of Symbolist poet, novelist, and critic Remy de Gourmont of France, an important influence on Blaise Cendrars, in his era.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 24, 2014
This fine collection of essays by Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915) features one real gem, ‘Success and the Idea of Beauty’ --- the focus of my review. The author views beauty, pleasure and aesthetics in purely biological and evolutionary terms and anticipates the modern day examination of the world of art and aesthetics by neuroscience, neuropsychology and biology. Armed with the findings of biology and animal behavior, de Gourmont goes on the attack against high-brow artistic elites who have conceited notions about art and who look down their noses at artistic works having a measure of popular success.
The author asks: What’s wrong with a work of art being successful? After all, he says, success enables a work to reach many people and the whole purpose of art is to please, thus success gives art more of a chance to please as many people as possible. And, he continues, if anybody thinks success compromises the artwork, this view is simply wrong – the work of art is the work of art and success doesn’t alter it in any way.
And when it comes to the ‘average person’, success has a momentum of its own. As de Gourmont says, “The public obeys success as dogs obey the sound of a whistle.” And when it comes to the way the mass of humanity views beauty, the author thinks things couldn’t be more clear. He writes: “The crowd can say: that pleases me, hence it is beautiful. It cannot say: that pleases me, yet it is not beautiful, or: that displeases me, yet it is beautiful.” Ah, the clean, uncomplicated connection between beauty and that which pleases. De Gourmont outlines the biological foundations of why this connection is so strong and so direct.
Indeed, for de Gourmont biology is the key to understanding what is happening in our human perception of beauty. We read: “The idea of beauty has an emotional origin, connected with the idea of generation. . . . Beauty is so sexual that the only generally accepted works of art are those which show the human body in its nakedness.” Perhaps this is a slight exaggeration, but we now have a mountain of documented research on how human perception finds certain qualities of faces and bodies (things like symmetry and flawless skin) most appealing and pleasing. And de Gourmont goes further in stating: “Aesthetic emotion puts us in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.” Hard to deny, particularly since the entire advertising industry and fashion world revolve around this connection.
Turning now to that high-brow artistic elite, the author speaks of how things can get very convoluted and complex very quickly. Why? De Gourmont points out in what manner refined aesthetic judgments of literary experts, artistic cognoscente and cultural authorities add a second layer to the equation: intelligence. So we not only have the raw, direct, honest pleasures men and women experience via their sensations, we now have to deal with an unending stream of concepts and categories. But, the author notes, concepts and categories and artistic values change over time – what the 17th century French elite valued in art and what the 18th century French elite valued in art differs widely from each other and both differ from the art considered great by the present-day elite. Thus, artistic values and aesthetic judgments are anything but absolute,
This lack of an absolute in the realm of art and aesthetics leads de Gourmont to assert: ”Let us leave men to seek their pleasure freely. . . . That which moves us is beautiful, but we can be moved only in the measure of our emotional receptivity, and according to the state of our nervous system.” In other words, leave people alone. If people want to read popular fiction instead of Wordsworth or Nabokov, if they want to watch popular movies instead of Shakespeare plays or listen to rock music instead of string quartets, they should jolly well be given the opportunity to do so.
You can try to force people into museums, concert hall or poetry readings, but ultimately such force-feeding will not help and could quite possible cause harm (Actually, nowadays this force-feeding comes not from high culture but from popular culture and the mass media). For, as Remy de Gourmont states, “Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.” I couldn’t agree more. In the end, we all want to engage with the art that we love.
The author asks: What’s wrong with a work of art being successful? After all, he says, success enables a work to reach many people and the whole purpose of art is to please, thus success gives art more of a chance to please as many people as possible. And, he continues, if anybody thinks success compromises the artwork, this view is simply wrong – the work of art is the work of art and success doesn’t alter it in any way.
And when it comes to the ‘average person’, success has a momentum of its own. As de Gourmont says, “The public obeys success as dogs obey the sound of a whistle.” And when it comes to the way the mass of humanity views beauty, the author thinks things couldn’t be more clear. He writes: “The crowd can say: that pleases me, hence it is beautiful. It cannot say: that pleases me, yet it is not beautiful, or: that displeases me, yet it is beautiful.” Ah, the clean, uncomplicated connection between beauty and that which pleases. De Gourmont outlines the biological foundations of why this connection is so strong and so direct.
Indeed, for de Gourmont biology is the key to understanding what is happening in our human perception of beauty. We read: “The idea of beauty has an emotional origin, connected with the idea of generation. . . . Beauty is so sexual that the only generally accepted works of art are those which show the human body in its nakedness.” Perhaps this is a slight exaggeration, but we now have a mountain of documented research on how human perception finds certain qualities of faces and bodies (things like symmetry and flawless skin) most appealing and pleasing. And de Gourmont goes further in stating: “Aesthetic emotion puts us in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.” Hard to deny, particularly since the entire advertising industry and fashion world revolve around this connection.
Turning now to that high-brow artistic elite, the author speaks of how things can get very convoluted and complex very quickly. Why? De Gourmont points out in what manner refined aesthetic judgments of literary experts, artistic cognoscente and cultural authorities add a second layer to the equation: intelligence. So we not only have the raw, direct, honest pleasures men and women experience via their sensations, we now have to deal with an unending stream of concepts and categories. But, the author notes, concepts and categories and artistic values change over time – what the 17th century French elite valued in art and what the 18th century French elite valued in art differs widely from each other and both differ from the art considered great by the present-day elite. Thus, artistic values and aesthetic judgments are anything but absolute,
This lack of an absolute in the realm of art and aesthetics leads de Gourmont to assert: ”Let us leave men to seek their pleasure freely. . . . That which moves us is beautiful, but we can be moved only in the measure of our emotional receptivity, and according to the state of our nervous system.” In other words, leave people alone. If people want to read popular fiction instead of Wordsworth or Nabokov, if they want to watch popular movies instead of Shakespeare plays or listen to rock music instead of string quartets, they should jolly well be given the opportunity to do so.
You can try to force people into museums, concert hall or poetry readings, but ultimately such force-feeding will not help and could quite possible cause harm (Actually, nowadays this force-feeding comes not from high culture but from popular culture and the mass media). For, as Remy de Gourmont states, “Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.” I couldn’t agree more. In the end, we all want to engage with the art that we love.
June 25, 2014
I really enjoyed the chapter on disassociations. I am reading Ulysses by James Joyce and I can see how this relates. I think a lot of times we are looking at a work in a positive light but our minds cannot help also disassociations that we make. So I appreciate his views on this. It broadened my thinking. Also I like deep thinkers! This man was the deep thinker of his day. Some of his ideas may seem dated when it comes to women, but in some ways i agree with him! I think that women have lost their power by going to work rather than influencing their sons and raising the leaders of tomorrow. Sorry but we have been deceived by the idea that men had it made. Women creating a family culture is an art form that needs to come back!
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April 27, 2026I do get the sense that he's another French pervert and sexist but he certainly had bars. He wrote a famous essay about style which is how I found him, and it's interesting enough to read, but I also found that I liked his style more than his substance. Just a few examples (he was unsurprisingly a poet as well as a critic):
- Success is like daylight and, once again, if it does not create the work, it completes it by rending the shadowy veil by which it is encompassed.
- I feel sure that the cup, whose brim has been rubbed with honey, goes back to the obscure ages of pre-Hippocratic medicine.
- There are two sorts of writers: the writers who write and the writers who do not write—just as there are voiceless singers and singers with voices.
This was also funny to read with the timestamp (the more that things change, the more they stay the same):
- The reason is that success, though organized by fraudulent means, possesses a powerful attraction for the throng, even the literary throng. Assuredly, the theatrical public was, in 1677, far superior, in point of intelligence, education and taste, to the average public to-day. Yet it is seen applauding decidedly commonplace plays, while disdaining those of the first quality. The reason is that success, and especially theatrical success, can spring spontaneously from an accident,—from the agreeable face of an actress, from a fine gesture, from a well-timed bit of applause, from the caprice or emotion of a small group of spectators. The herd follows—since all men who come together are herds—and history numbers one more name and date.
Also just noting his position on aesthetics because it's completely at odds with what others assert about body genres:
- But another fact, more obscure, though not less certain, permits us to bring the idea of beauty back by another route to the very idea of sexuality. This is, that all human emotions, whatever their order, nature or intensity, awaken a more or less marked response in the genital nervous system. Sexual pathology has thrown light upon this. Perfumes, as well as the smell or sight of blood, noise and heat, intellectual or muscular effort, repose and fatigue, drunkenness and abstinence—the most contradictory sensations all favour the sexual impulse. Others, like fear, cold, vexation, also react upon a neighbouring and intricate centre in the genital system. Read the first chapter of En Ménage, in which M. Huysmans describes the effect produced upon a gentle, nervous being by the discovery of a lover in his wife's arms. Among the emotions which reverberate most surely on every somewhat sensitive organism, aesthetic emotions must be placed in the first rank. And thus they return to their origin. That which inclines to love seems beautiful. That which seems beautiful inclines to love. There is between the two an undeniable relation. A man loves a woman because she is beautiful, and he deems her beautiful because he loves her. It is the same with everything that permits associations of sexual ideas, and with every emotion which reacts upon the genital system.
- Success is like daylight and, once again, if it does not create the work, it completes it by rending the shadowy veil by which it is encompassed.
- I feel sure that the cup, whose brim has been rubbed with honey, goes back to the obscure ages of pre-Hippocratic medicine.
- There are two sorts of writers: the writers who write and the writers who do not write—just as there are voiceless singers and singers with voices.
This was also funny to read with the timestamp (the more that things change, the more they stay the same):
- The reason is that success, though organized by fraudulent means, possesses a powerful attraction for the throng, even the literary throng. Assuredly, the theatrical public was, in 1677, far superior, in point of intelligence, education and taste, to the average public to-day. Yet it is seen applauding decidedly commonplace plays, while disdaining those of the first quality. The reason is that success, and especially theatrical success, can spring spontaneously from an accident,—from the agreeable face of an actress, from a fine gesture, from a well-timed bit of applause, from the caprice or emotion of a small group of spectators. The herd follows—since all men who come together are herds—and history numbers one more name and date.
Also just noting his position on aesthetics because it's completely at odds with what others assert about body genres:
- But another fact, more obscure, though not less certain, permits us to bring the idea of beauty back by another route to the very idea of sexuality. This is, that all human emotions, whatever their order, nature or intensity, awaken a more or less marked response in the genital nervous system. Sexual pathology has thrown light upon this. Perfumes, as well as the smell or sight of blood, noise and heat, intellectual or muscular effort, repose and fatigue, drunkenness and abstinence—the most contradictory sensations all favour the sexual impulse. Others, like fear, cold, vexation, also react upon a neighbouring and intricate centre in the genital system. Read the first chapter of En Ménage, in which M. Huysmans describes the effect produced upon a gentle, nervous being by the discovery of a lover in his wife's arms. Among the emotions which reverberate most surely on every somewhat sensitive organism, aesthetic emotions must be placed in the first rank. And thus they return to their origin. That which inclines to love seems beautiful. That which seems beautiful inclines to love. There is between the two an undeniable relation. A man loves a woman because she is beautiful, and he deems her beautiful because he loves her. It is the same with everything that permits associations of sexual ideas, and with every emotion which reacts upon the genital system.
January 12, 2014
Kitabın ön sözünde Gourmont'un hayatı anlatılmış ancak bunu kim yazmış acaba bu belirtilmemiş. Bu önsözde Gourmont için tanıtım yapıldıktan sonra Gourmont hakkında yorum ve eleştiri yapılmış. Bu eleştiriler de yenilir yutulur değil kavgada söylenmeyecek sözleri kitabın ön sözünde yazar hakkında söylemişler. Yani o önsözü okuduktan sonra insan noluyor diye bir kalıyor. Yazar tavsiye ve sav içerikli kitabına 1-0 yenik başlıyor.
Kitapta farklı konulara değinilmiş ;üslup , yazı , din , diller , genç bir yazara öğütler vs. Özellikle genç bir yazara öğütler kısmı oldukça ilginçti. Şan şöhret için başka yazarları karalayın beğenseniz bile onlara çamur atın tarzı ilginç fikirler vardı . Bunun yanında güzel fikirler de vardı. Ancak öyle dolu dolu fikirler savlar var diyemem.
Özellikle kitabın diline değinmek istiyorum. Kitap eski yıllarda basıldığından mı yoksa çevirmenden mi kaynaklanıyor bilmiyorum ama çok ağır bir dili var. Şu an dilimizde kullanılmadığına eminim diyebileceğim bir sürü kelime var kitapta. Bunlar da kitabın anlaşılmasını oldukça güçleştiriyor.
Genel anlamda beğenmediğim ifade eder ve kimseye tavsiye etmem..
Kitapta farklı konulara değinilmiş ;üslup , yazı , din , diller , genç bir yazara öğütler vs. Özellikle genç bir yazara öğütler kısmı oldukça ilginçti. Şan şöhret için başka yazarları karalayın beğenseniz bile onlara çamur atın tarzı ilginç fikirler vardı . Bunun yanında güzel fikirler de vardı. Ancak öyle dolu dolu fikirler savlar var diyemem.
Özellikle kitabın diline değinmek istiyorum. Kitap eski yıllarda basıldığından mı yoksa çevirmenden mi kaynaklanıyor bilmiyorum ama çok ağır bir dili var. Şu an dilimizde kullanılmadığına eminim diyebileceğim bir sürü kelime var kitapta. Bunlar da kitabın anlaşılmasını oldukça güçleştiriyor.
Genel anlamda beğenmediğim ifade eder ve kimseye tavsiye etmem..
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews