Remy de Gourmont

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French family of artists.

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• Jean de Gourmont
• Jean de Gourmont

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The French author Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915) was the most brilliant French critic and essayist of the period from 1900 to the outbreak of World War I.

Remy de Gourmont was born on April 4, 1858, at the Château de La Motte in Normandy, the son of an old Norman family of minor nobility. He went to school at Coutances and studied law at the University of Caen before moving to Paris to take a post at the National Library at the age of 25. Once in Paris he came under the influence of the Decadent writers the Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and J. K. Huysmans, and his early work is marked by a similar decadentism, extreme preciosity of style, and interest in the occult. In his mid-20s Gourmont fell victim to lupus, a skin disease which disfigured his face so badly that for some years he scarcely dared go out; his natural bent toward solitude was powerfully reinforced by this cruel experience and by his dismissal from his post as a librarian in 1891 for having published an attack on what he considered the excessively patriotic and nationalistic sentiment of the time.

In the meantime Gourmont's literary career had already begun, with a novel, Merlette, in 1886 and his collaboration as one of the founding members of the literary review Mercure de France in 1889. This review rapidly became a keen supporter of the symbolist movement in literature, largely through Gourmont's influence, and he remained one of its most important contributors for the rest of his life. In the next few years he published, in elegant, limited editions, several volumes of stories, poetry, and a play, all in the symbolist manner and dealing with the fantastic or supernatural; the best-known of these is the novel Sixtine (1890).

Gourmont as a writer of fiction is largely known for his cerebral qualities, combining mysticism, sensuality, and a highly artificial style. But he is better remembered today as critic and essayist: his Livre des masques (1896; The Book of Masks), criticism of the symbolist poets, various works on language and style, and above all the collected essays in Promenades littéraires (7 vols., 1904-1927) and in Promenades philosophiques (3 vols., 1905-1909). During his lifetime he published over 60 books of various kinds.

As a critic, Gourmont was distinguished by an inquiring mind and extremely wide tastes, claiming that "a work of art exists only through the emotion it gives us." The result is impressionistic criticism with keen insight. His interest in language and style also produced ideas of lasting influence, in particular on the poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Gourmont was saddened and impoverished by the outbreak of war in 1914, and his remaining time was unhappy; he died of a stroke on Sept. 27, 1915.

Further Reading

The best of the English translations of Gourmont's works is Richard Aldington, Remy de Gourmont: Selections from All His Works (1928). Aldington also wrote Remy de Gourmont: A Modern Man of Letters (1928). Other studies include Paul Emile Jacob, Remy de Gourmont (1931), and Glenn S. Burne, Remy de Gourmont: His Ideas and Influence in England and America (1963).

Gourmont, Remy de (1858–1915), French writer and critic. He identified Marie de France's Lais as a source for the French fairy tradition. His Histoires magiques (Magic Stories, 1894) includes several fantastic tales. The symbolist work ‘Le Château singulier’ (‘The Singular Castle’) reflects Gourmont's idealist philosophy as a princess tests her suitors, accepting only the one who can forgo sexuality; the others will be condemned to a life of physical drudgery. In ‘L'Étable’ (‘The Stable’, in D'un pays lointain, 1930) a serving girl also passes a test to become a prince's bride.

— Amy Ransom

Gourmont, Remy de (1858-1915). Described by T. S. Eliot as ‘the critical conscience of his generation’, this French poet, novelist, essayist, and cofounder of Symbolist reviews ( Mercure de France, 1890; L'Ymagier, 1894) was one of the most wideranging representatives of late 19th-c. intellectual trends. He was the foremost spokesman within the Symbolist movement for Schopenhaurian Idealism, with its emphasis on individual subjectivity. His novels (notably Sixtine, 1890, and Lilith, 1892) explore this theme within Decadent variations on the relationship between sexuality and artistic creativity. Of more lasting impact, however, was his critical writing (notably Livres des masques, 1896-8; Esthétique de la langue française, 1899; and Le Problème du style, 1902), in which his concept of the subjectivity of writer and critic resulted in a theory of creative or poetic criticism which became an essential strand in Anglo-American New Criticism.

[James Kearns]

Quotes:

"The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble."

"We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence."

"Nothing exists except by virtue of a disequilibrium, an injustice. All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery."

"Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds"

"Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him."

"Industry has operated against the artisan in favor of the idler, and also in favor of capital and against labor. Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war."

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