The Book of Masks: On Image and Metaphor: An Anthology of French Symbolist & Decadent Writing

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION AUTHORS PREFACE MAETERLINCK VERHAEREN DE REGNIER VIELE-GRIFFIN MALLARME SAMAIN QUILLARD HEROLD RETTE DE L'ISLE-ADAM TAILHADE RENARD DUMUR EEKHOUD ADAM LAUTREAMONT CORBIERE RIMBAUD POICTEVIN GIDE LOUYS RACHILDE HUYSMANS LAFORGUE MOREAS MERRILL SAINT-POL-ROUX DE MONTESQUIOU KAHN VERLAINE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT “Remy de Gourmont, like all the very great critics--Goethe, Ste. Beuve, Hazlitt, Jules Lemaitre--knew the creative instinct and exercised the creative faculty. Hence he understood, what the mere academician, the mere scholar, can never grasp, that literature is life grown flame-like and articulate; that, therefore, like life itself, it varies in aim and character, in form and color and savor and is the memorable record of and commentary upon each stage in that great process of change that we call the world. To write like the Greeks or the Elizabethans or the French classics is precisely what we must not do. It would be both presumptuous and futile. All that we have to contribute to mankind, what is it but just--our selves? If we were duplicates of our great-grandfathers we would be littering the narrow earth to no enriching purpose; all we have to contribute to literature is, again, our selves. This moment, this sensation, this pang, this thought--this little that is intimately our own is all we have of the unique and precious and incomparable. Let us express it beautifully, individually, memorably and it is all we can do; it is all that the classics did in their day. To imitate the classics--be one! That is to say, live widely, intensely, unsparingly and record your experience in some timeless form.” -Ludwig Lewisohn (from the Introduction)