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Updated: June 24, 2025
He wrote: "Tolstoy, comme créateur, comme romancier, comme poète épique, pour mieux dire, est un des quatre ou cinq plus grands génies de notre siècle. Comme penseur, il est un des plus faibles esprits de l'Europe." Not all that, replies Remy de Gourmont; Tolstoy may be wildly mistaken, but he is never weak-minded.
One never gets him with his back to the wall. He vanishes in the shining cloud of a witty abstraction when cornered. His prose is full of winged neologisms, his poetry heavy with the metaphysics of ennui. Remy de Gourmont speaks of his magnificent work as the prelude to an oratorio achieved in silence. Laforgue, himself, called it an intermezzo, and in truth it is little more.
As Remy de Gourmont wrote: "There has been no question of forming a party or issuing orders; no crusade was organised; it is individually that we have separated ourselves, horror stricken, from a literature the baseness of which made us sick."
And when such a woman breaks out: 'You want me, but you cannot caress me, you cannot tell what I want, then that man is judged." Love is indeed, as Remy de Gourmont remarks, a delicate art, for which, as for painting or music, only some are apt.
And his intellectual guides, first Shaw, and then, when Shaw became vieux jeu, De Gourmont, favored that conclusion. Then came the war, which at a stroke destroyed his sense of security and with that his respect for the older generation that had guaranteed his world.
"Every well-written novel," I find Remy de Gourmont stating, "seems immoral." A paradox? By no means; Gourmont, the finest of living critics, is not a paradox-monger.
His Platonic insistence, too, on the more spiritual aspects of love separates his anti-Christian "immorality" from the easy-going, pleasant hedonism of such a bold individualist as Remy de Gourmont. Shelley's individualism is always a thing with open doors; a thing with corridors into Eternity.
From the moment when Erasmus, back from Italy in the early summer of 1509, is hidden from view in the house of More, to write the Praise of Folly, until nearly two years later when he comes to view again on the road to Paris to have the book printed by Gilles Gourmont, every trace of his life has been obliterated.
From the beginning, his style has attracted the attention of the few and no one, I am sure, has ever written a three line review of a book by Saltus without referring to it. Mme. Amélie Rives has quoted Oscar Wilde as saying to her one night at dinner, "In Edgar Saltus's work passion struggles with grammar on every page!" Percival Pollard has dubbed him a "prose paranoiac," and Elbert Hubbard says, "He writes so well that he grows enamoured of his own style and is subdued like the dyer's hand; he becomes intoxicated on the lure of lines and the roll of phrases. He is woozy on words locoed by syntax and prosody. The libation he pours is flavoured with euphues. It is all like a cherry in a morning Martini." A phrase which Remy de Gourmont uses to describe Villiers de l'Isle Adam might be applied with equal success to the author of "The Lords of the Ghostland": "L'idéalisme de Villiers était un véritable idéalisme verbal, c'est-
So fine a critic of art as Remy de Gourmont finds it difficult, to his own regret, to admire Shakespeare on the stage, at all events in France in French translations.
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