II
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.