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
