Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

30

P. Stapfer, Des Réputations littéraires, Paris, 1891.

31

A genre which has degenerated into the complaint. But the complaint has had its great period. The oldest poem in the French language is a complaint and inspired, precisely, by one of the poems of Prudentius.

32

On the importance and influence of Protestantism at this time, see the work of E. Hugues, pilfered by Protestant writers for the last twenty-five years: Histoire de la Restauration du Protestantisme en France au XVIIIe siècle (1872).

33

A book so little known and disfigured in its pious editions. Nothing could be less pious, however, or less edifying, after the first volume, than this curious and confused encyclopedia, where we find René and statistical tables, Atala and a catalogue of Greek painters. It is a universal history of civilization and a plan of social reconstruction.

34

In speaking of the eighteenth century, exception must always be made of the grandiose and solitary Buffon, in his tower at Montbard, who was, in the modern sense of these words, a scientist, a philosopher, and a poet.

35

An attempt will be made some day in a study in the World of Words, to determine whether words have really a meaning – that is to say, a constant value.

36

De l'Enseignement de notre langue.

37

See the chapter on the cliché, in my book, L'Esthétique de la Langue française.

38

L'Art d'écrire, p. 138.

39

Or rather, had them copied by his secretaries. He afterwards reworked the clean copy. There is a whole volume on this subject: Les Manuscrits de Buffon, by P. Flourens, Paris, Garnier, 1860.

40

There is, on this point, a pretty passage from Quintilian, quoted by M. Albalat, p. 213.

41

I take it for granted that the reader no longer believes that the Homeric poems were composed at haphazard by a multitude of rhapsodists of genius, and that it was enough to string these improvisations together to get the Iliad and the Odyssey.

42

Suggested by Physiologie cérébrale: Le Subconscient chez les artistes, les savants, et les écrivains, by Dr. Paul Chabaneix, Paris, J. – B. Baillière. This study was already written when M. Ribot's masterly work, L'Imagination créatrice (July, 1900), appeared.

43

See in a dream related by Maury (Le Sommeil et les Rêves) the word jardin causing the dreamer to visit Persia, then to read L'Ane mort (Jardin, Chardin, Janin); and in another dream, the syllable lo conducting the mind from the word kilomètre to loto, viâ Gilolo, lobélia, Lopez. However, the poet (by reason of rhyme or alliteration) experiences similar associations, but he must have the ability to render them logical, a thing which rarely happens in dreams pure and simple. Victor Hugo, a veritable incarnation of the Subconscious, rioted in these associations, which were at first involuntary.

44

With regard to dreams, M. Chabaneix says (p. 17) that those who often think in visual images are subject to dreams in which the images are objectified in amplified form. A personal observation contradicts this, but in mentioning it I am only opposing a single observation to many observations. I refer to a writer who, although besieged, when awake, by internal visual images, sees images but rarely in dreams and never has any characteristic hallucinations. Recently, having reread Maury's book during the day, he experienced that night, for the first time, two or three vague hypnotic hallucinations, caused doubtless by the desire or fear of knowing this state… This case may serve to explain the contagion of hallucination by books. – He saw kaleidoscopic flashes, then grinning heads, finally a figure clad in green, of life size, of whom the dreamer, looking out of the corner of his right eye, saw only one-half. At this moment, he was awaking. The figure evidently came from an illustrated history of Italian painting, which he had glanced at in the forenoon.

45

Le Subconscient, p. 11.

46

Letter to W. von Humboldt, 17 March, 1832 (Le Subconscient, p. 16). Goethe was then eighty-three; he died five days later. The whole letter is quoted by Eckermann.

47

Le Subconscient, p. 24.

48

Preface to Le Subconscient.

49

Jahm, quoted in Le Subconscient, p. 93.

50

Psychologie des Sentiments. – W. von Humboldt said: "Reason combines, modifies and directs; it cannot create, because the vital principle is not in it" (Ideas on the New French Constitution).