BOVARYSM The Art-Philosophy of Jules de Gaultier
by Wilmot E. Ellis
introduction by Benjamin DeCasseres

Available from: Underworld Amusments

Mr. Ellis has been a student of the philosophy of Jules De Gaultier for many years, and in this brochure he has given to the English-speaking world for the first time a complete survey, of the Frenchman’s philosophy of Bovarysm and his great doctrine of universal illusion as the condition of life, together with an exposition of his cosmic aesthetic: life is justified by its spectacular and dazzling beauty without beginning, without end, without ethical purpose.
Hence Mr. Ellis’ compound word, “art-philosophy.” “De Gaultier,” says Mr. Ellis, “retains the intellectualism and the disillusioned joy of living of Nietzsche, his Apollinism and his Dionysism. With De Gaultier, the sadness of life is transformed into an aesthetic sensibility, eager to perpetuate the spectacle, to evoke it, to describe it.” His score of books sustain an altitude as high and as serene—serene, above all, when viewing the catastrophes of Man—as Spinoza or Shakespeare. The Beethoven who will put in symphonic form the core of De Gaultier’s vision of God as Supreme Artist of Chance and Beauty, unallied to messianic hopes, has not yet been born.
—Benjamin DeCasseres