Remy De Gourmont
By Richard Aldington
Thework of Remy de Gourmont is known and read in all parts of the civilized world. Yet he has not a large circulation and a purely commercial writer would probably be disgusted at his profits, but he has an influence, especially over the younger and more adventuresome spirits, which few writers today possess. One can—or rather one could in the days before the war—hardly pick up any French review without finding some reference to his ideas or some criticism of his work. In Russia he appears to have a more considerable reputation than anywhere else outside France. For, though one sees criticism and translations of him even in languages like Hungarian and Roumanian, it is in Russia alone that a word of praise from Remy de Gourmont seems to make a man’s reputation. The English are far slower in their international appreciations, and the Americans—quick though they are to seize on new men—do not seem to have taken up de Gourmont with much understanding. Mr. Ransome’s translation ofUn Nuit au Luxembourgwas not received with either appreciation or enthusiasm by English and American critics. And though a savant like Mr. Havelock Ellis quotes from M. de Gourmont’s work, and has, I believe, a great admiration for his personal intellectual qualities; though Mr. Sturge Moore, in his book on Flaubert and Blake, quotes M. de Gourmont among the great critics of France, it must be admitted that few English-speaking critics have yet done him justice. I question if the larger public has heard more of him than a vague rumour of his name.
It may be that he is thought too “high-brow.” I suppose every man who gives his life up to the task of expressing his ideas, his character, and his genius in a purely disinterested manner is liable to this criticism. But there is so great a fascination in his work, whether it be criticism or fiction, philosophic dialogue or prose poem, that whenever he gains a reader it is not for an hour but for life. In America especially he should find readers, for America, whatever artistic faults and drawbacks it may have, has not, as England has, a “ring” of reviewers who unanimously “queer” any book whose originality or genius is any menace to their own stick-in-the-mud critical methods.
The Symbolist movement in France is now almost ancient history. Unanimists, Futurists, Paroxysts, Fantasists, and all the other “ists” so abundantly produced by this century now face the “ists” of Germany on the battlefield. And while they are there fighting out by bodily force and not by words the intellectual destinies of Europe we may perhaps consider with free minds the Symbolist poets and authors who are now too old to take the field for their country and can only sit at home “waiting for news.”
Some of the “children of Mallarmé” are dead; others are forgotten; a few still remain. Maeterlinck, Vielé-Griffin, Jammes, and Remy de Gourmont occur first to one’s mind as the best living representatives of the great Symbolist school, and of these the subtlest, the most fascinating, the most modern is Remy de Gourmont. Along with M. Anatole France, though very different from him, Remy de Gourmont is an example of the tradition of European culture. Less derivative than M. France, or perhaps deriving from less familiar sources, with as great an irony and with a faith that seems more sceptical than scepticism itself, he has extracted from the literature of each country and century that part which helped him to develop and train his own character. He presents in one person the manifold and often conflicting opinions and ideas of modern culture. Reading his books one sees that there is a mystical sort of beauty even in science and under his pen mysticism itself appears almost as exact as a science.
I said just now that M. de Gourmont was an example of the tradition of European culture, and since Paris, we are mostly agreed, is the centre of European culture, and since Remy de Gourmont is a Parisian of Parisians, we may count him, I think, as one of the best examples of Latin or West European culture now living. I rather dwell upon this aspect of Remy de Gourmont as the man of supreme culture since that quality has so suddenly and so startlingly come into public discussion. It is extremely difficult to say precisely what culture is; and a definition of culture naturally varies with differences of race and temperaments. John Addington Symonds, in his interesting and illuminating essay on this subject, defines culture as “the raising of previously-educated faculties to their highest potencies by the conscious effort of their possessors.” And it might be added to this excellent definition that the feature of Latin or West European culture which most distinguishes it from the culture of other countries is a wideness of interest, a great general “cultivating” of all the faculties of the mind and character as opposed to the extreme development of one single faculty.
Remy de Gourmont is indeed so admirable an example of the type of culture I have briefly indicated that it is difficult to think of any form of intellectual activity which has not at one time or another received his attention. He has been a founder of reviews—among them the famousMercure de France—and an editor of reviews. He has written prefaces for modern authors and for ancient authors—both poets and prose-writers. As a literary critic it is perhaps not too much to say that in his time and generation he ranks as Sainte-Beuve did in his. Under his name will be found five volumes ofPromenades Littéraires, collections of essays dealing with the widest possible range of literary subjects—from Petronius to Guillaume de Machaut, from the Goliardi to the latest “roman passionnel.” HisLivres des Masquesare one of the most considerable acquisitions to the criticism of French literature during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Inthese two books will be found amazingly penetrating studies of men so diverse as the de Goncourt brothers and Maeterlinck, while American readers should be especially interested in his studies of the two Franco-American poets, Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin. As an admirer of Huysmans, M. Remy de Gourmont was naturally interested in the mystic, Christian Latin poets. And the fruit of several years’ study of these authors was that notable and unique bookLe Latin Mystique. It is no exaggeration to say that hardly anyone else could have made these writers interesting to anyone but the specialist. One can almost imagine M. de Gourmont being challenged to produce a book which would appeal not only to savants but to the lover of general culture. This mystic Latin poetry had, until Huysmans’ day, been almost entirely neglected by students of beautiful things. But Remy de Gourmont, treating the subject as a poet in love with poetry—not as a pedant or a professor or a book-maker—has produced a work which is at once a criticism and an anthology of the literature produced during those thousand years which we ignorantly call the “Dark Ages.”
These investigations into an almost forgotten and strangely attractive literature were not without effect upon his purely creative work. This effect can be best seen in hisLitanies, a series of curious and, verbally, extremely beautiful prose-poems, full of assonances, of internal rhymes, of strange symbols, of sonorous rhythms and of fantastic images. Again in his prose, in works likeLe Pèlerin du SilenceandD’un Pays Lointain; in his poetry—especially inLes Saints du Paradis—this influence is most marked.
In books likeLa Physique de l’Amour,Le Chemin de Velours, the series ofPromenades PhilosophiquesandEpilogues, we have an entirely different kind of intellectual activity—lettered, it is true, but with that incisiveness and clarity of style and thought which mark French prose as the finest in the modern world. In these books problems of philosophy, of morals, of everyday conduct and national and international affairs, problems of music, of painting, of all the arts and sciences, are discussed with a brilliance and an originality not always palatable to the gloomier and duller elements of French society.
One must not ask for too clear a definition of M. de Gourmont’s philosophy. He is just sufficient of a mystic to enjoy being misunderstood, and of a nature so ironical that his most innocent-looking statements are traps for the unwary. He is an individualist—true to his type of culture. Perhaps if he were very closely questioned he would smile and say that he belonged to the “tradition des libres esprits.”
In addition to these many works, of so diverse a character that they might well be the result of the labours of several men rather than of one, he has written several novels, one or two of which at their appearance were the literary sensation of the hour; he has devoted much time to the study of aesthetic questions and has published two or three volumes on the subject; beyond all this he has produced a modern French rendering of Aucassinand Nicolette, a translation from the Spanish and a couple of original plays! And in his little flat on the rive gauche, not far from St. Sulpice, among his books, he still writes every day words of encouragement for anxious Paris, still finds time to observe and reflect and to let the rest of the world know what is happening in France.