Quelles réalités me donneront les saveurs que je rève à ce fruit de l'Inde et des songes, le myrobolan,--ou les couleurs royales dont je pare l'omphax, ou ses lointaines gloires?
Quelle musique est comparable à la sonorité pure des mots obscurs, ô cyclamor? Et quelle odeur à tes émanations vierges, ô sanguisorbe?
Stevenson--the R.L.S. of "Penny plain and Twopence coloured"--would have delighted in this.
Gourmont became tired of symbolism rather suddenly, and he buried it in two volumes which were the best he had yet published: the _Livres des Masques_ of 1896 and 1898. These have a lasting value as documents, and they mark the beginning of the author's permanent work as a critic of letters. In them he insisted on the warning not to let new genius pass ungreeted because it was eccentrically draped or unfamiliarly featured. These two volumes are a precious indication of what French independent literature was at the very close of the nineteenth century, and it is interesting after twenty years of development and change to note how few mistakes Remy de Gourmont made in his characterization of types. He took a central place among these symbolists, grouping around him the men of genuine talent, repulsing pretenders who were charlatans and discouraging mere imitators; marshalling, in short, a ferocious little army of genius in its attack upon the conventions and the traditions of the age. Time rolls its wheel, and it is amusing to notice that several of these fierce young revolutionaries are now members of the French Academy.
At the close of the century Remy de Gourmont abandoned symbolism, and the world of ideas took possession of him. He plunged deeper into the study of philosophy, grammar, and history, and he explored new provinces of knowledge, particularly in the direction of ethnography and biology. In the midst of this acquisitive labour he was stirred to the composition of one remarkable work after another, and to this period belong the four successive publications, which, in the whole of Gourmont's vast production, stand out as the most interesting and important which he has written. His reputation stands four-square on _L'Esthétique de la Langue Française_ (1899), _La Culture des Idées_ (1900), _Le Chemin de Velours_ (1902), and _Le Problème du Style_ (1902). During the thirteen years which followed he wrote incessantly, and the widening circle of his admirers always found much to praise in what he produced. But now that we see his life-work as a whole it seems more and more plain that he revealed his genius freshly and fully in these four books of his prime, and in a world so crowded as ours the reader who has much to attract him may be recommended to these as broad and perhaps sufficient exponents of the character of Gourmont's teaching.