Remy de Gourmont

Remy de Gourmont – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Remy de Gourmont (4 April 1858 – 27 September 1915) was a French Symbolist novelist, poet, critic, and essayist whose explorations of style, sensuality, and intellectual freedom left a lasting mark on modern French literature.

Introduction

Remy de Gourmont stands among the more enigmatic and intellectually daring writers of late 19th– and early 20th-century France. Intersecting the realms of symbolism, aesthetic criticism, philosophy, and sensual prose, his work probed the relationship of language to thought, art to life, and the hidden currents of desire and individuality. Though he is less widely read today than some of his contemporaries, his influence—especially on literary criticism, the Imagist movement, and modern French letters—remains significant. Exploring his life, ideas, and quotations helps us recover a voice both delicate and generative, one that challenged conventional moral and aesthetic norms.

Early Life and Family

Remy de Gourmont was born on 4 April 1858 at the Château de La Motte in Bazoches-au-Houlme (Orne), Normandy, France.

In 1866, when Remy was about eight years old, the family moved to a manor near Villedieu in the Manche department.

Remy had a younger brother, Jean de Gourmont (born in January 1877).

Youth and Education

After secondary school, Gourmont moved to Caen to pursue legal studies.

After graduating, he relocated to Paris in 1879, settling into its literary and intellectual milieu. Bibliothèque nationale (the French national library), which offered him a stable base from which to engage with books, manuscripts, and scholarship. Le Monde and Le Contemporain.

Gourmont developed in parallel an interest in medieval Latin literature, philology, and aesthetic theory—fields that would later shape his critical and poetic voice. Joris-Karl Huysmans, to whom he dedicated works like Le Latin mystique.

Career and Achievements

Emergence & Literary Alliances

In the late 1880s, Gourmont became closely involved in the Symbolist movement. In 1889, he was one of the founders of the journal Mercure de France, which rapidly became a central organ for French symbolist and avant garde literary currents.

Between 1893 and 1894, he coedited (with Alfred Jarry) the magazine L’Ymagier, which focused on symbolism and image-based artistic forms such as woodcuts.

In 1891, Gourmont published the provocative pamphlet Le Joujou Patriotisme (“Patriotism, a toy”) in which he argued that France and Germany shared an aesthetic culture and called for rapprochement—a position sharply at odds with nationalist sentiment.

Throughout his career, he employed a polymathic range of interests — linguistics, philosophy, eroticism, psychology, medieval literature — and his output ranged across genres: poetry, essays, novels, lectures, and criticism.

Major Works & Intellectual Contributions

One of Gourmont’s most enduring critical works is Le Problème du Style (1902), an essay that explores how writers balance the life of thought and the demands of expression.

His novels include Sixtine (1890), which explores themes of subjectivity, sexuality, and artistic creativity; as well as Un Cœur Virginal (1907) and Une Nuit au Luxembourg (1906). poet, with works such as Litanies de la Rose (1892), Les Saintes du Paradis (1898), Hiéroglyphes (1894), Divertissements (1912), Oraisons mauvaises (1900), and others.

His Le Livre des Masques (1896) is a book of essays and portraits of writers and artists, blending criticism, reflection, and poetic sensibility.

Gourmont’s critical voice was often skeptical, iconoclastic, and provocative: he rejected rigid moral prescriptions, defended individual sensibility, and often claimed his work must stir both intellect and sensibility.

Later Years & Decline

In his adult life, Gourmont suffered from lupus vulgaris (a cutaneous form of tuberculosis), which gradually disfigured him and pushed him toward a more reclusive existence. locomotor ataxia, making walking increasingly difficult.

In 1910, he met Natalie Clifford Barney, to whom he addressed Lettres à l’Amazone (1914). Berthe de Courrière, a model and heir to the sculptor Clésinger, with whom he lived for many years.

The outbreak of World War I weighed on him deeply, intensifying his melancholic sensibility. 27 September 1915 in Paris, of cerebral congestion. Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Historical Milestones & Context

Gourmont’s life straddled the transition from the late 19th-century aesthetic and symbolist ferment into the modernist era. The Symbolist movement, with its emphasis on suggestion, musicality, the inner world, and symbolic resonance rather than direct realism, was an essential backdrop for his formation.

He was part of a wider milieu of French writers, artists, and critics—Joris-Karl Huysmans, Alfred Jarry, Stéphane Mallarmé, and others—who sought to challenge naturalism and positivism with a more reflexive, evocative, and self-aware literature.

Gourmont’s championing of style, his skepticism of moral dogmas, and his willingness to explore erotic and intellectual impulses positioned him at odds with both conservative and purely aestheticist tendencies of his time. His dismissal from the national library for political dissidence underscores how his literary provocations intersected with nationalist and cultural tensions in France.

In the early 20th century, French literature was evolving: symbolism gave way to modernism and imagism, and Gourmont’s critical thought and experiments in language influenced younger writers in France and abroad. In particular, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot recognized in him a “critical conscience” of his generation.

During the turbulent years leading into World War I, cultural fears, political polarization, and debates about national identity and art values made the intellectual stakes of writers like Gourmont more acute. His retreat into illness, solitude, and inward reflection mirrored, in some sense, the larger disorientation of Europe heading into catastrophe.

Legacy and Influence

Although Remy de Gourmont is less popularly known today, his legacy in French letters and literary theory is deep. He is often regarded as a bridge between symbolism and modernist criticism; his work influenced literary critics and writers in France and in the Anglophone sphere.

His critical works, especially Le Problème du Style, remain studied by scholars in French literature and poetics as among the more original meditations on style, expression, and the relationship between thought and language.

In English-speaking culture, his ideas helped inform the Imagist movement and shaped translator-critics’ approach to French symbolism. Eliot, Pound, Aldington, and others have referred to him, translated him, or framed their own work in relation to him.

In recent years, renewed scholarly interest and biographical work (e.g. Remy de Gourmont : une vie fin-de-siècle by Thierry Gillybœuf) have revived attention to the depth and complexity of his life and thought.

His approach—fusing erudition, sensibility, skepticism, erotic impulse, and a kind of literary modesty—makes him an exemplar for writers who resist both didacticism and mere ornamentation, seeking instead a literature that is alive, questioning, and permeable to mystery.

Personality and Talents

Gourmont was known as a person of dualities: erudite but sensual, scholarly yet provocative, reclusive yet socially connected in salons.

He embraced paradox: he often refused to claim lofty moral authority, instead asserting that art must retain ambivalence and allow the reader space to feel, dispute, and interpret.

His talents lay in a rare combination: philology, sensitivity to nuance, poetic imagery, critical acumen, and moral audacity. His writing navigates the subtle atmospheres of language, the hidden motions of desire, and the interplay between thought and sensation.

Famous Quotes of Remy de Gourmont

Below are several quotations attributed to Gourmont. (Note: French originals are often more resonant; these are rendered in translation.)

“Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.” “Man has made use of his intelligence; he invented stupidity.” “Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.” “If the secret of being a bore is to tell all, the secret of pleasing is to say just enough to be — not understood, but divined.” “We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.” “Two elements are needed to form a truth — a fact and an abstraction.”

From Le Problème du Style:

“All poetry is an affair of the body … literary style is the product of the total physiology.”

These lines reflect Gourmont’s belief that style is deeply embodied, that intelligence must remain entwined with sensibility, and that writing (and art more broadly) requires both concealment and invitation.

Lessons from Remy de Gourmont

1. Let style emerge organically. Gourmont insisted that style is not an imposition but the shaping breath of the writer’s thought and feeling—honed, but never rigid.

2. Preserve ambiguity and depth. He resisted simplistic moralizing; art must accommodate contradiction, uncertainty, and multiple resonances.

3. Connect feeling and intelligence. For Gourmont, writing is not only intellectual; it is sensual, embodied, and vulnerable.

4. Read widely, think freely. His erudition in medieval languages, philology, literature, and philosophy was not for show, but to expand the imaginative horizon of his critique.

5. Be willing to provoke. Gourmont did not shy from controversy, whether in his political pamphlets, boundary-pushing essays, or erotic explorations. He believed in the writer’s duty to question and disturb.

Conclusion

Remy de Gourmont was a singular voice in French literature: a thinker, critic, and poet whose subtle explorations of language, desire, and style anticipated many currents of modernism. Though his name is less familiar to general readers today, his legacy endures among those who seek a literature rooted in sensitivity, critical courage, and the layered tensions of thought and feeling.

If you’d like a deep dive into a particular work of his—Le Problème du Style, Sixtine, or Le Livre des Masques—I’d be happy to provide that too.