The complete works of Remy de Gourmont cover almost every form of
intellectual activity. He seems equally at home in criticism, in
creative effort, "novel, play, poem," philosophy (Nietzsche owes
much to him for his intellectual acclimatization in France), in the
transvaluation of moral values, in social criticism, in certain
aspects of science, in philology, in the renovation of rhetoric. "In
his divers attitudes and in his varied researches," says Dumur, "he
was the expression of our instable epoch.... When the most distant
posterity shall wish to form an idea of what we were between the years
of yesterday's estheticism and tomorrow's neo-classic realism, of what
our immense literary production was, of what the generation was which
bridged the conflict of 1870 and the great war which began in 1914, the
page it will have to read will be signed Remy de Gourmont."
The importance of this writer, however, cannot be limited to France; by
token of his broad, tolerant humanism and his dynamic method he belongs
to the literature that abolishes boundaries and epochs.