Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 46728-h.htm or 46728-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46728/46728-h/46728-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46728/46728-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/decadenceotheres00gouriala DECADENCE AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF IDEAS by REMY DE GOURMONT Authorized Translation by William Aspenwall Bradley London Grant Richards Ltd. St Martin's Street MDCCCCXXII [Illustration: REMY DE GOURMONT From a hitherto unpublished portrait by Hélène Dufau in the possession of Miss Barney.] CONTENTS I. The Disassociation of Ideas II. Glory and the Idea of Immortality III. Success and the Idea of Beauty IV. The Value of Education V. Women and Language VI. Stéphane Mallarmé and the Idea of Decadence VII. Of Style or Writing VIII. Subconscious Creation IX. The Roots of Idealism Note.--The first, sixth, seventh, and eighth essays are translated from La Culture des Idées; the ninth is from the Promenades Philosophiques; and the remaining essays are from Le Chemin de Velours. INTRODUCTION When, more than ten years ago, I wrote the first article on Remy de Gourmont which, so far as I know, appeared in America--North America, _bien entendu_, for the author of _La Culture des Idées_ and _Le Chemin de Velours_ was already well known and admired in such South American literary capitals as Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and La Plata--it was refused by one editor on the ground that he could not assume the responsibility of presenting a writer of Gourmont's dangerous, subversive, and immoral tendencies to the readers of his conservative and highly respectable journal. Gourmont's revenge--and mine--came a few years later when, at the time of his death, in 1915, the same paper paid him editorial tribute, recognizing the importance of the place he had occupied in the intellectual life of France for a quarter of a century.