"At the times of its appearance the reaction against naturalism and the so-called 'psychological' school of Bourget was at its height.... Symbolism had been born,--musical, suggestive, indirect. But if symbolism had produced its work, it had not yet found its formulas. There was interminable and indefatigable discussion as to just what symbolism was. And it was Remy de Gourmont who undertook to define it. He himself brought to it perfect and delicate products. Among these, in poetry and prose, were _les Litanies de la Rose, Lilith, le Fantôme, Fleurs de Jadis, Hieroglyphes_ and the dramatic poem _Théodat_, which was given at the Théâtre d'Art at the same time as Maeterlinck's les Aveugles, Laforgue's _le Concile féerique_ and that _Cantique des Cantiques_ by Renaird, which was accompanied by a luminous, fragrant musical score so that, by an appropriate harmony of sounds, voices, colors and perfumes, all the senses might be conjointly struck by the same symbol." Of Gourmont's services to the movement into which he was thus introduced Camille Mauclair, one of Mallarmé's intimate friends, has written: "The theories of the Symbolists were presented and condensed in excellent fashion in the numerous books and critical articles by Remy de Gourmont, who was not only a most original novelist and a perfect artist in prose, but also one of the most remarkable essayists of the nineteenth century, characterized by an astonishing wealth of ideas, a rare erudition, and an intellectual flexibility that assured him philosophical as well as esthetic culture. Moralist, logician, poet, intuitive as well as deductive, passionate lover of ideas, Remy de Gourmont possessed also the merit of being a voluntary recluse, exceedingly proud, clinging tenaciously to his liberty, disdaining all fame, living as a solitary spirit and as a man truly above all social prejudices. His irony, which excluded neither emotion nor faith, was but the effect of a deep scorn of mediocracy.... His whole life was a model of independence.... Remy de Gourmont, better than any other, formulated the idealism which was at the bottom of the Symbolist doctrine."