Four and Twenty Minds/Chapter 14
XIV
REMY DE GOURMONT[1]
I
He too is dead. He was the most intelligent man in France, and one of the keenest intellects in the whole world. His brain was an instrument of precision. His thought had the lucidity of distilled alcohol, as clear as the water of a mountain spring, yet drawn from purple clusters, and carrying the inebriation, the vertigo, the wild fancy of a year’s experience compressed into a single hour.
He died several days ago. The Parisian paragraphers said of him, as they would say of the meanest scribbler of a mean Matin, that “les lettres françaises ont perdu un estimable écrivain et un homme de goût.”
His death was little heeded—because of the war, and because he did not die at the front. There was much talk about the death of Péguy, because Péguy was more the man of the hour, was more vivid, of a fresher fame, of more serious and more reassuring features—and because Péguy was killed by a Prussian bullet in the defense of the fields and the rights of France.
There was much talk even about Fabre, the friend of Mistral and of insects, who died, full of days and honors, at almost the same time. But an observer of insects is nearer the level of our journalists than an observer of men. Especially if the observer of men is a poet as well, and does not live on the ideas of Monsieur Delarue. It was Remy de Gourmont who uttered these profound and bitter words: “Il faut flatter les imbéciles et les flatter dans leurs facultés les moins nocives. C’est peut-être un instinct de conservation qui pousse la société à conférer provisoirement la gloire à tant de médiocres esprits.” Provisionally. Let us hope for the ultimate revision.
II
Remy de Gourmont died too soon. He was only fifty-seven years of age, and he had never swung incense before any fool. Modest and alone in a great dark house full of books—how well I remember a luminous morning in November, 1906, in the Rue des Saints Pères!—he read books, read men and women, read the ancients and the moderns and les jeunes, and sought truth, clear French truth, pitiless contemporary European truth. And he set forth that truth ceaselessly, without cosmetics, without reticence or omission. The truth—that hard and unpleasant other side of the shield of illusion. “Je ne ferai que dire la vérité,” said Flaubert, “mais elle sera horrible, cruelle et nue.” One who takes the vows of obedience to such truth loses all right to earthly beatitude, loses all hope of swift glory, all sympathy. From the days of Socrates to those of Nietzsche, the man who analyzes and dissociates, the man who breaks through the surface of useful and convenient beliefs to reveal the fierce and injurious truths that lie beneath, has been ostracized and condemned as an enemy to the State and to the gods.
Remy de Gourmont was of this ill-regarded family. Less serene and profound than Socrates, less violent and grand than Nietzsche, he resembled more closely the great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century. He had the malice of Voltaire (with Voltaire’s apparently innocent narrative simplicity); he had d’Alembert’s passion for disinterested exactness; he had the good-natured frivolity of Fontenelle; he had the branching curiosity of Bayle. But the man he most closely resembles is Diderot, who has always seemed to me the most complete and vigorous genius among the Encyclopedists. In Diderot, as in Remy de Gourmont, one may find a natural inclination toward general ideas, an enjoyment of specific facts and scientific theories, a happy, spontaneous interweaving of art and philosophy, of myth and thought, of type and paradox, a common dilettanteism in criticism and in painting.
It goes without saying that Remy de Gourmont was not merely a repetition of Diderot, for no man, least of all a man of genius, is a repetition of a predecessor. Between the one and the other there lies a century of corrective and advancing culture. Romanticism has not been in vain. Stendhal and Taine have left their impress on brains formed after 1870.
The intellectual life of Remy de Gourmont—his only real life—began thirty years ago. His first book, Merlette, was published in 1886. That was the time of the beginnings of Symbolism. He was at once convinced of the importance of that movement, which was so long berated by the critics, and is now finding a little affectionate justice. Remy de Gourmont was one of the first of the Symbolist theorists and poets. As artist he worked in the vanguard. Novel, drama, lyric: he set himself free; he sought to find himself.
I do not intend to attempt here an estimate of Gourmont as a creative artist. In Sixtine there is new and fine psychology; in Lilith there is a harmonious luxury of fancy; in the Pèlerin du Silence and in the Proses Moroses there are capricious and terrible inventions worthy of Villiers de l’Isle Adam at his best; in the Divertissements (in which the Hieroglyphics, examples of the most artificial Symbolism, are republished) there is the sensitiveness of a wise spirit bursting at times into poetry. But the greatness of Remy de Gourmont, to my mind, does not lie in these old works of his.
With the keenness of his intelligence and the exquisite refinement of his taste, he succeeded in creating a group of poems which at first sight might be classed with those of Mallarmé. But his creative works will not stand repeated reading. You miss the pulse of life in that magnificent play of words, cleverly sought out and cleverly strung together. In his prose works, even in those of artistic character, the best passages are those in which psychological discoveries or unusual thoughts are stated in surprising form. In view of the wideness of his reading and the aristocracy of his culture, it was easy for him to catch the method of the trade and to give to his bookish imagination a certain electric semblance of life. But his genius did not lie in this field. Art requires intelligence, but it requires something more. Intelligence may discipline and purify inspiration, and it may even imitate it, to the confusion of the incompetent. But it does not suffice for the creation of strong and permanent works.
Remy de Gourmont was born to understand and to enjoy. His famous book on the Latin Mystique (1892), almost a masterpiece, revealed his bent for criticism—understood in the broadest sense of the word and of the idea. From then on, while he continued to write stories and poems from time to time, his richest and most important books, the books that perfectly express him, were his books of criticism. One who desires to know and love him should read the two Livres des Masques (1896 and 1898), L’Esthétique de la Langue Française (1889), La Culture des Idées (1900), Le Chemin de Velours (1902), Le Problème du Style (1902), and the several volumes in which he collected his extensive contributions to the Mercure de France; the Promenades Littéraires, the Promenades Philosophiques, the Epilogues, the Dialogues des Amateurs.
Thousands and thousands of pages; hundreds and hundreds of subjects and of thoughts: one motive, one man, with kindly, mobile, piercing eyes.
III
The dominant principle of Gourmont’s great inquiry is to be sought in the essay on the Dissociation des idées, in the book called La Culture des idées.
I do not mean to imply that the whole of Gourmont is to be found in this passionless dismantling and divorcing of ideas. He deals in nuances; he may feign to believe, and to let himself be carried on by the regular and accepted currents. But the secret of his liberating power lies precisely in that delicate virtuosity which applies itself to the decomposition of thoughts that are apparently simple, to the separation of pairs which had been thought indissoluble, to the reëstablishment of harmonies and relationships between ideas which had been regarded as heterogeneous and distant, to the search for bits of truth amid the refuse of prejudice, to the gentle denuding of the most solemn truths, revealing, to startled eyes, the bare bones of contradiction. There is in his work a continual testing and experimenting; a knocking with the knuckles to find out what is empty and what is full; a search this way and that to discover the multiform paths of existence; a sounding of the stagnant wells of life and of the troubled seas of philosophy to find a sunken fragment, a lonely island. There is a turning and tossing on the pillow of doubt; a tenacious and joyous effort toward elemental reality (a reality ignoble, to be sure, but sincere); a polygonal assault upon the strongest fortresses of scientific and moral and metaphysical religion; a mania for examining, elucidating, purifying; and, finally, a delight, at times merely sterile, in giving utterly free play to an intelligence that finds rest and satisfaction only in itself, even though it be on the edge of the abyss.
And there are traces of pleasant dilettanteism, of purposeless irony, of facile journalism, of sportive surface literature. Remy de Gourmont wrote so much—and not always of his own free will or for his own pleasure—that one naturally finds passages which do not rest on thought, improvisations without structure. But if one follows the main brie of his thought, even in his fantastic deviations, even in the weary efforts of piece-work, one can trace a penetrating certainty, a thread woven of eagerly disinterested meditation, a sad and personal profundity under a surface so clear that there seems to be no substance beneath, a passionate pursuit of truth amid a nomadism that has the look of vagabondage. And such traits may well lead us to regard Remy de Gourmont as one of the greatest soldiers and heroes of pure thought.
Amid the battles, death has interrupted, but has not killed, his work. The best spirits of Europe have watched it, and must continue it.
IV
Facts for those who want them. He was born in Normandy, in the Castle of La Motte at Bazoches-en-Houlme (Orne), on the fourth of April, 1858, of an old and noble family of painters, engravers, and printers. He went to Paris in 1883, and obtained a position in the Bibliothèque Nationale, but was dismissed after two or three years because of an article—Joujou Patriotisme—in which he proposed an alliance between France and Germany. He was on the editorial staff of the Mercure de France, for which he wrote to his last days. Before the war he had created a magnificent type of the Philistine, M. Croquant. When I saw him for the first time, in 1906, he gave me the impression of a weary friar smothered in books, with two great vivid eyes and a thick-lipped mouth. I saw him for the last time in 1914, at the Café de Flore, on the Boulevard Saint Germain, with his friend Apollinaire. He had been very sick, and could hardly speak. A sort of lupus disfigured one side of his face, but he kept up his thinking and his writing with a marvelous and obstinate courage. An article every day for La France; a dialogue every fortnight for the Mercure.
In Italy he ought to be well known. He wrote for several Italian reviews: for the Rassegna Internazionale, the Marzocco and Lacerba of Florence, and for the Flegrea of Naples. Sem Benelli wrote of him in the Emporium, Giuseppe Vorluni in the Flegrea.
Today the troubles of the world are leading us back to religion and to humility, and Remy de Gourmont might seem to have outlived his time. But his time would have returned. And it will return.
Every death is a summons for payment. All those who knew him should pay their debts of affection. This is the beginning of my tribute.
- ↑ Written in 1915.