Despite the fact that his funeral services occurred during the height
of the war--he was born on April 4, 1858 and died on September 27,
1915--they were attended by a numerous gathering of mourners who,
in their very cosmopolitan nature seemed to symbolize the universal
influence of the departed genius. Tributes were paid by M. Henri de
Régnier, of the French Academy, who spoke for the _Mercure de France_,
by M. Georges Lecomte, President of the Société des Gens de Lettres,
who spoke in the name of that society, by M. Maurice Ajam, for the
newspaper La France, by M. Fernand Mazade, in the name of la _Depêche
de Toulouse_, to which Remy de Gourmont was a contributor, by Xavier
Carvalho, in the name of the Portuguese and Brazilian press, and by M.
Juliot Piquet, in the name of the great Buenos Aires daily _La Nación_
for which Gourmont wrote.
Régnier paid particular attention to the critical labors of the
deceased. Gourmont, he said, "was an incomparable critic, in turn
a scholar untainted by pedantry, deep without obscurity, ingenious
to the point of paradox, sincere to the point of contradiction, but
ever mindful of the truth,--a critic in the manner of Montaigne, of
inexhaustible variety of means, of the most candid independence,--a
critic who is polemist, dilettante, imaginative spirit and poet, and
above all, a man, exceedingly human in his alternations of skepticism
and faith." Lecomte pointed out the nobility of the man's origin, and
the significance of his ancestral connection with François Malherbe,
the great stylist of a former age. Ajam, like most who have commented
on the man at all, was struck with his paradoxical nature. "A democrat
of aristocratic cast, an atheist filled with devotion, an anarchist
characterized by order, an agitated spirit infused with calm, he was a
human and a divine paradox."
The tributes by Carvalho and Piquet are of particular significance.
At a rime when even Spain, the mother country, was indifferent to and
ignorant of the literary accomplishments of its American colonies, Remy
de Gourmont had lent himself to the interpretation and the revelation
of the new literary world across the seas. He translated, criticised
and supported an almost unknown continental literature. He even went so
far as to invent the term neo-espagnol (neo-Spanish) for the modified
Spanish spoken in the various republics of the New World,--a proceeding
which though philologists may consider it rash, may yet be considered
premature rather than totally mistaken. And in any event it shows the
man's ready response to new currents in speech and thought, whether
native or foreign. "By his precious writings for the reviews and the
great dailies of Argentina and Brazil," said Carvalho, "he rendered
lasting service to the neo-Latin literatures." M. Piquet's speech was
short, yet pithy in its evidence of an entire continent's appreciation.
"I should not venture to approach this tomb if I did not possess in
this solemn moment the impersonality of a symbol.
"A few words will suffice for me to fulfil in its formal character the
dolorous and too burdensome task that accident has imposed upon me.
I come, in the name of the journal _La Nación_ of Buenos Ayres, to
pay the last respects to its former contributor Remy de Gourmont, the
writer, the thinker who, for many years, helped in powerful measure to
maintain, on the distant shores of the La Plata, admiration and love
for the land of clarity and moderation, justice and liberty, of which
he was one of the purest glories."