Remy de Gourmont

Remy de Gourmont (born April 4, 1858, Bazoches-en-Houlmes, France—died September 27, 1915, Paris) was a novelist, poet, playwright, and philosopher who was one of the most-penetrating contemporary critics of the French Symbolist movement. His prolific writings, many of which were translated into English, disseminated the Symbolist aesthetic doctrines.

Gourmont was born in the Chateau de La Motte, the scion of an aristocratic Norman family and descendant on his mother’s side of the French poet François de Malherbe. After studying law at Caen, Gourmont accepted a position in 1881 at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he developed his wide interests. He was dismissed from this position in 1891 for publishing an allegedly unpatriotic article in the Mercure de France, a journal he had helped to found. In his mid-20s he suffered from a painful skin disease (perhaps a form of extrapulmonary tuberculosis) that kept him a semi-recluse.

Nevertheless, he continued to pursue his interests in literature and art. From 1895 to 1896 he edited—initially with Alfred Jarry—a Symbolist art magazine called L’Ymagier. Most of Gourmont’s 50-some published works are collections of his critical essays. They include: (1) the multivolume Epilogues (1903–13), a running commentary on contemporary events and persons; (2) Promenades littéraires (1904–27; 7 vol.) and Promenades philosophiques (1905–09; 3 vol.), literary and philosophical essays; and (3) several books devoted to studies of style, language, and aesthetics. He is also known for his Lettres à l’Amazone (1914; Letters to the Amazon), his correspondence with the American-born Parisian salonist Natalie Clifford Barney. Gourmont’s novels include Sixtine (1890; Very Woman, Sixtine: A Cerebral Novel), Les Chevaux de Diomède (1897; The Horses of Diomedes), Le Songe d’une femme (1899; The Dream of a Woman), and Un Coeur virginal (1907; A Virgin Heart); critics considered their greatest weakness to be that the characters are presented as abstractions rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.

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Gourmont believed in the relativity of all truths; his strength as a critic was grounded in the completely aesthetic basis of his literary critiques. His approach to literature later influenced the 20th-century poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.