The importance of Remy de Gourmont to the universal world of thought
is now beginning to be recognized among thinkers of every continent.
During his own life he was a figure apart and aloof even from his
confrères; his reputation was a matter more of intensity than of
extensive acclaim, although subtly it made its way, as did that of
the Symbolist school in general, to many nations. Now, however, he is
beginning to receive that wider recognition which during his life he
actually shunned. He belongs with the notable few who have devised and
lived a philosophy of continuous adaptation to the new knowledge that
the new day brings forth; he is a daring, independent, unostentatious,
extremely personal neo-Epicurean, too individualistic to have been
held long within the circle of a school, too sensitive not to have
responded to the multifarious influences of a complex age. Yet just as
his individualism was not the ignorant self-proclamation of blatant
mediocrity, so was his response to the contemporary world far more than
an aimless dashing about hither and thither in a snobbish attempt to
be ahead of the times. The man's essentially dynamic personality has
a genuine strain of the classic in it; he possesses a rare repose,
an intellectual poise, that serves as a most admirable complement to
his vibrant ideas. Few writers have ever so well combined matter and
manner, which to Gourmont were but two aspects of one and the same
thing,--the original thought. He is not, and never will be, a writer
for the crowd; he was, by heredity and by choice, an aristocratic
spirit, yet as he lived grew to recognize and to admit the importance
of true democracy.
His chief importance, historically, was as the recognized interpreter
of the Symbolistic movement in French poetry; but behind that
movement lay a genealogy of ideas which ramified into such seemingly
divergent directions as the pre-Raphaelites in England, the Hegelian
idealists in Germany, and thus formed a modern manifestation of
primary significance. De Gourmont, like more than one of the
Symbolists, outgrew the movement, which from the first was composed of
personalities too strong to form a mere school. He was, in the words
of one of his commentators, "among the first, if not the first, to
realize the insufficiency of Symbolism, in all that did not confine
itself amidst the proud ivory walls of an uncompromising lyricism. If
he did not combat it, because he had too complaisantly exalted it, he
none the less abandoned it more and more, to surrender himself,--with
no other discipline than his personal taste and his keen sense of the
French genius,--to the fecundity of his nature, retaining of the
old verbal magic only that which might contribute to his personal
expansion,--notably that precious gift of image and analogies which
imparts such poetry, such flexibility, variety and charm to his style.
But henceforth the idea (i.e., rather than the word) assumed in him a
preponderant importance, and now he was to play with ideas.... as he
had previously played with words and images."