"Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds." -- Remy de Gourmont
Remy de Gourmont (April 4, 1858, Bazoches-au-Houlme, Orne - September 27, 1915) was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars. (The spelling Rémy de Gourmont is incorrect, albeit common and used by Ezra Pound in translations of his work.)
"Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.""Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.""Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.""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.""In order to understand life it is not only necessary not to be indifferent to men, but not to be indifferent to flocks, to trees. One should be indifferent to nothing.""Industry has operated against the artisan in favor of the idler, and also in favor of capital and against labor. Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war.""Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness.""Man associates ideas not according to logic or verifiable exactitude, but according to his pleasure and interests. It is for this reason that most truths are nothing but prejudices.""Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.""Man is the inventor of stupidity.""Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.""The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.""The woman who loves always smells good.""Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same time.""Try to put well in practice what you already know. In so doing, you will, in good time, discover the hidden things you now inquire about.""Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction.""Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.""We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.""Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last."
De Gourmont came from a publishing family from Cotentin. He was the son of count Auguste-Marie de Gourmont and his countess, born Mathilde de Montfort. In 1866 he moved to a manor close to Villedieu near La Manche. He studied law at Caen, and was awarded a bachelor's degree in law in 1879; upon his graduation he moved to Paris.
In 1881, de Gourmont was employed by the Bibliothèque Nationale. He began to write for general circulation periodicals such as Le Monde and Le Contemporain. He took an interest in ancient literature, following the footsteps of Gustave Kahn. During this period, he also met Berthe Courrière, model and heir of the sculptor Auguste Clésinger, which whom he struck a lifelong attachment. The two lived together for the rest of their lives.
De Gourmont also began a literary alliance with Joris-Karl Huysmans, to whom he dedicated his prose work le Latin mystique ("Mystical Latin"). In 1889 de Gourmont became one of the founders of the Mercure de France. Between 1893 and 1894 he was the co-editor, along with Alfred Jarry, of L'Ymagier, a magazine dedicated to symbolist wood carvings. In 1891 he published a political polemic called Le Joujou Patriotisme ("Patriotism - a toy") which argued that France and Germany shared an aesthetic culture and urged a rapprochement between the two countries, contrary to the wishes of nationalists in the French government. The fallout from this political essay led to his losing his job at the Bibliothèque Nationale, in despite of Octave Mirbeau's chronicles.
During this same period, de Gourmont was stricken with the disease lupus vulgaris. Disfigured by this illness, he largely retired from public view, appearing only at the offices of the Mercure de France. In 1910, de Gourmont met Natalie Clifford Barney, to whom he dedicated his Lettres à l'Amazone ("Letters to the Amazon").
However, de Gourmont's health continued to decline during this period, and he began to suffer from locomotor ataxia and be increasingly unable to walk. He was deeply depressed by the outbreak of World War I as well, and died of cerebral congestion in 1915. Berthe Courrière was his sole heir; she inherited a substantial body of unpublished work from him, which she sent to his brother Jean de Gourmont; she died within a year of his death. De Gourmont is buried in Père-Lachaise.
His poetic works include Litanies de la rose (1892), Les Saintes du paradis (1898), and Divertissements (1912). His poems plunge from perhaps ironic piety to equally ironic blasphemy; they reflect, more than anything else, his interest in mediæval Latin literature, and his works led to a fad for late Latin literature among authors like Joris-Karl Huysmans. He was also a literary critic of great importance, and was admired by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in that capacity.
