Gourmont's literary career was particularly identified with the
notable French Review, the _Mercure de France_. How he came to join
the staff of that organ is interestingly recounted by Louis Dumur, in
the same obituary note from which the above quotation was translated.
Incidentally we obtain a glimpse of the young man just as he was
emerging into note.
"The great writer whom we have just lost," wrote M. Dumur, "was to us
more than a friend, better than a master: he seemed to us the most
complete representative, the very expression,--in all its aspects and
in all its complexity,--of our literary generation.
"When, in the autumn of 1889, the small group which proposed to found
the _Mercure de France_ thought first of adding several collaborators
to its number," while one went off in search of Jules Renard, another
invited Julien Leclercq and a third promised the assistance of
Albert Samain,--the late lamented Louis Denise, who was at that time
cataloguer of the Bibliothèque Nationale, said to us:
"There is at the Library an extraordinary man who knows everything. He
has already published ten volumes and a hundred articles upon every
conceivable subject."
"We don't need a scholar, nor a polygraph, but rather a writer who'll
be one of us."
"'All he asks is to be one of us,'" declared Denise. "'He is filled with
admiration for Mallarmé and swears only by Villiers de l'Isle Adam. At
the present moment he's writing a novel that will be a revelation.'
"'Bring along your prodigy.'
"That prodigy was Remy de Gourmont.
"We did not know him, not even by name, despite his vast literary
labors. He lived in seclusion. He did not frequent any of our literary
rendezvous. He was never seen at the François Ier, nor at the Vachette,
nor at the Voltaire, nor at the Chat-Noir, nor at the Nouvelle-Athènes.
He had not written for any of our little reviews, of which he was later
to become the well-informed historian. His signature had not appeared
in the columns of _Lutèce, la Vogue_, the _Decadent_, the _Symboliste_,
the _Scapin_, the _Ecrits pour l'Art_, nor in la _Pléiade_.
"But if we did not know him, he knew us all, together with the
Acadiens, the Lapons, the Italian verists, the English novelists, the
American humorists, the Jesuits, balloons, volcanos, the thousand
subjects upon which his learning and his curiosity had exercised
themselves. In publishing houses whose existence we did not suspect or
in papers we were hardly familiar with, we, too, in conjunction with
the still obscure and mysterious esthetic movement which we aspired
to represent, formed the object of his labors and his meditations.
This newcomer knew more about our interests than we did ourselves. He
had read our most insignificant essays. He shared our enthusiasms,
our antipathies, participated in our intellectual research, discerned
our tendencies, penetrated into our intentions, which already he
was arranging to formulate, and to formulate for us with as keen a
perspicuity and clarity as were permitted by the concerted imprecision
of our thought and the hazy, delicately shaded, sublimated art that we
had just established.
"From his very first pages in the _Mercure de France_,--those _Proses
moroses_ which were so perfect in form, so rare in expression and of
such singular subtlety,"--he revealed himself as an expert artist
in the new coloring, and produced exquisite models of the refined
genre which charmed us. In that same year, 1890, he published through
the firm of Savine the novel that Denise had spoken about to us,"
that _Sixtine_ which at once consecrated him as a coming master in
the exacting eyes of our cenacles. 'A novel of cerebral life,'--a
precious subtitle,--and one could find nothing better to suggest the
full significance of this book, which is of disturbing originality.
Nothing took place in it which the regular public calls by the name
of 'action'; everything in it, was, indeed, 'cerebral.' It was filled
with a minute, probing analysis. The hero did not love so much as
he observed himself in the process of loving. It was charming,
complicated, and marvellously written.
"At the times of its appearance the reaction against naturalism and
the so-called 'psychological' school of Bourget was at its height....
Symbolism had been born,--musical, suggestive, indirect. But if
symbolism had produced its work, it had not yet found its formulas.
There was interminable and indefatigable discussion as to just what
symbolism was. And it was Remy de Gourmont who undertook to define it.
He himself brought to it perfect and delicate products. Among these, in
poetry and prose, were _les Litanies de la Rose, Lilith, le Fantôme,
Fleurs de Jadis, Hieroglyphes_ and the dramatic poem _Théodat_, which
was given at the Théâtre d'Art at the same time as Maeterlinck's les
Aveugles, Laforgue's _le Concile féerique_ and that _Cantique des
Cantiques_ by Renaird, which was accompanied by a luminous, fragrant
musical score so that, by an appropriate harmony of sounds, voices,
colors and perfumes, all the senses might be conjointly struck by the
same symbol."
Of Gourmont's services to the movement into which he was thus
introduced Camille Mauclair, one of Mallarmé's intimate friends, has
written:
"The theories of the Symbolists were presented and condensed in
excellent fashion in the numerous books and critical articles by Remy
de Gourmont, who was not only a most original novelist and a perfect
artist in prose, but also one of the most remarkable essayists of
the nineteenth century, characterized by an astonishing wealth of
ideas, a rare erudition, and an intellectual flexibility that assured
him philosophical as well as esthetic culture. Moralist, logician,
poet, intuitive as well as deductive, passionate lover of ideas, Remy
de Gourmont possessed also the merit of being a voluntary recluse,
exceedingly proud, clinging tenaciously to his liberty, disdaining all
fame, living as a solitary spirit and as a man truly above all social
prejudices. His irony, which excluded neither emotion nor faith, was
but the effect of a deep scorn of mediocracy.... His whole life was
a model of independence.... Remy de Gourmont, better than any other,
formulated the idealism which was at the bottom of the Symbolist
doctrine."
Among these services to the new movement were Gourmont's penetrating
studies of such figures as Mallarmé and Verlaine, Huysmans and the
de Goncourts, Rimbaud, Corbière, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Barbey
d'Aurevilly, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Maurice de Guerin, Gerard de Nerval,
Aloysius Bertrand. Were it not for Gourmont, some of these would
perhaps never have been known, and it does little credit to our own
poetic advancement that some of them are still but names to American
readers. His two _Livres des Masques_ are regarded as the beginnings
of a history of the Symbolist period, which he never found time to
complete. Although many of the writers were, at the time Gourmont
considered them here, at the beginning of their careers, he seized
upon their distinguishing traits with a rare insight, and revealed
such coming celebrities as Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Régnier, Samain,
Vielé-Griffin, Tailhade, Paul Adam, Gide, Laforgue, Moréas, Merril,
Rachilde, Kahn, Jammes, Paul Fort, Mauclair, Claudel, Bataille, Ghil.
He had a discerning eye for the painters, too, and revealed as well as
defended Whistler, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and others.
Despite their modest titles, the _Promenades philosophiques_ and the
_Promenades littéraires_ have been called "without doubt the most
important critical works of our epoch." It is from the former that
the essays contained in this book are taken; they reveal, in striking
degree, the thought and the attitude of their famous author, and may
suggest, "though within the limits that all translation connotes,
particularly when dealing with so remarkable a stylist," the charm, the
simplicity, and the clarity of his writing.