III
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."