His chief importance, historically, was as the recognized interpreter of the Symbolistic movement in French poetry; but behind that movement lay a genealogy of ideas which ramified into such seemingly divergent directions as the pre-Raphaelites in England, the Hegelian idealists in Germany, and thus formed a modern manifestation of primary significance. De Gourmont, like more than one of the Symbolists, outgrew the movement, which from the first was composed of personalities too strong to form a mere school. He was, in the words of one of his commentators, "among the first, if not the first, to realize the insufficiency of Symbolism, in all that did not confine itself amidst the proud ivory walls of an uncompromising lyricism. If he did not combat it, because he had too complaisantly exalted it, he none the less abandoned it more and more, to surrender himself,--with no other discipline than his personal taste and his keen sense of the French genius,--to the fecundity of his nature, retaining of the old verbal magic only that which might contribute to his personal expansion,--notably that precious gift of image and analogies which imparts such poetry, such flexibility, variety and charm to his style. But henceforth the idea (i.e., rather than the word) assumed in him a preponderant importance, and now he was to play with ideas.... as he had previously played with words and images." II Gourmont's literary career was particularly identified with the notable French Review, the _Mercure de France_. How he came to join the staff of that organ is interestingly recounted by Louis Dumur, in the same obituary note from which the above quotation was translated. Incidentally we obtain a glimpse of the young man just as he was emerging into note. "The great writer whom we have just lost," wrote M. Dumur, "was to us more than a friend, better than a master: he seemed to us the most complete representative, the very expression,--in all its aspects and in all its complexity,--of our literary generation. "When, in the autumn of 1889, the small group which proposed to found the _Mercure de France_ thought first of adding several collaborators to its number," while one went off in search of Jules Renard, another invited Julien Leclercq and a third promised the assistance of Albert Samain,--the late lamented Louis Denise, who was at that time cataloguer of the Bibliothèque Nationale, said to us: "There is at the Library an extraordinary man who knows everything. He has already published ten volumes and a hundred articles upon every conceivable subject." "We don't need a scholar, nor a polygraph, but rather a writer who'll be one of us." "'All he asks is to be one of us,'" declared Denise. "'He is filled with admiration for Mallarmé and swears only by Villiers de l'Isle Adam. At the present moment he's writing a novel that will be a revelation.' "'Bring along your prodigy.' "That prodigy was Remy de Gourmont.