Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/257

Remy de Gourmont

Remy de Gourmont is dead and the worlds light is darkened. This is another of the crimes of the war, for M. de Gourmont was only fifty-seven, and if he had not been worried to death, if he had not been grieved to death by the cessation of all that has been "life" as he understood it, there was no reason why we should not have had more of his work and his company.

He is as much "dead of the war" as if he had died in the trenches, and he left with almost the same words on his lips. "Nothing is being done in Paris, nothing can be done, faute de combatants." There was an elegy on current writing by him in the Mercure. It was almost the same tone in which Gaudier-Brzeska wrote to me a few days before he was shot at Neuville Sr. Vaast: "Is anything of importance or even of interest going on in the world—I mean the 'artistic London?

M. de Gourmont is irreplaceable. I think I do not write for myself alone when I say no other Frenchman could have died leaving so personal a sense of loss in the minds of many young men who had never laid eyes on him. Some fames and reputations are like that; Mallarmé is almost a mantram, a word for conjuring. A critique of M. de Gourmont's poetry would be by no means a critique of M. de Gourmont's influence. For, again, I think that every young man in London whose work is worth considering at all, has felt that in Paris existed this gracious presence, this final and kindly tribunal where all work would stand on its merits.