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.
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."