Remy De Gourmont eBooks
eBooks di Remy De Gourmont editi da Skyline
Philosophic Nights in Paris. E-book. Formato EPUB Remy De Gourmont - Skyline, 2017 -
Posterity is a schoolboy who is condemned to learn a hundred verses by heart. He learns ten of them and mumbles a few syllables of the rest. The ten are glory; the rest is literary history. Traditions? Of course, tradition. But do you not believe that there is a beginning to everything, even to tradition? Anti-clericalism works for the benefit of the dissident sect. In England, religious radicalism recruits Catholics; in France it recruits Protestants. Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank. Many a time have I written the word "beauty," but almost never without being conscious of writing down an absurdity. There are beautiful things, but there is no such thing as Beauty: that is an abridged expression. It cannot be taken in an absolute sense; there is no Absolute.
The Book of Masks. E-book. Formato EPUB Remy De Gourmont - Skyline, 2017 -
It is difficult to characterize a literary evolution in the hour when the fruits are still uncertain and the very blossoming in the orchard unconsummated. Precocious trees, slow-developing and dubious trees which one would not care, however, to call sterile: the orchard is very diverse and rich, too rich. The thickness of the leaves brings shadow, and the shadow discolors the flowers and dulls the hues of the fruit. We will stroll through this rich, dark orchard and sit down for a moment at the foot of the strongest, fairest, and most agreeable trees. Literary evolutions receive a name when they merit it by importance, necessity and fitness. Quite often, this name has no precise meaning, but is useful in serving as a rallying sign to all who accept it, and as the aiming point for those who attack it. Thus the battle is fought around a purely verbal labarum. What is the meaning of Romanticism? It is easier to feel than to explain it. What is the meaning of Symbolism? Practically nothing, if we adhere to the narrow etymological sense. If we pass beyond, it may mean individualism in literature, liberty in art, abandonment of taught formulas, tendencies towards the new and strange, or even towards the bizarre. It may also mean idealism, a contempt for the social anecdote, anti-naturalism, a propensity to seize only the characteristic details of life, to emphasize only those acts that distinguish one man from another, to strive to achieve essentials; finally, for the poets symbolism seems allied to free verse, that is, to unswathed verse whose young body may frolic at ease, liberated from embarrassments of swaddling clothes and straps.
The Natural Philosophy of Love. E-book. Formato EPUB Remy De Gourmont - Skyline, 2017 -
This book, which is only an essay, because its subject matter is so immense, represents, nevertheless, an ambition: one wanted to enlarge the general psychology of love, starting it in the very beginning of male and female activity, and giving man's sexual life its place in the one plan of universal sexuality. Certain moralists have, undeniably, pretended to talk about "love in relation to natural causes," but they were profoundly ignorant of these natural causes: thus Sénancour, whose book, blotted though it be with ideology, remains the boldest work on a subject so essential that nothing can drag it to triviality. If Sénancour had been acquainted with the science of his time, if he had only read Réaumur and Bonnet, Buffon and Lamarck; if he had been able to merge the two ideas, man and animal into one, he, being a man without insurmountable prejudices, might have produced a still readable book. The moment would have been favorable. People were beginning to have some exact knowledge of animals' habits. Bonnet had proved the startling relationships of animal and vegetable reproduction; the essential principle of physiology had been found; the science of life was brief enough to be clear; one might have ventured a theory as to the psychological unity of the animal series.