s
elements of human receptivity. No one can read his writings with
any degree of intelligence without becoming aware that, in his way
of handling life, ideas become sensations and sensations become
ideas.

More than any critic that ever lived, Remy de Gourmont has the
power of interesting us in his psychological discoveries with that
sort of thrilling vibrating interest which is almost like a physical
touch.

The thing to note in regard to this evocation of a pleasurable shock
of mental excitement is that in his case it does not seem produced so
much by the sonority or euphonious fall of the actual words--as in
the case of Oscar Wilde--or even by the subtler spiritual harmony of
rhythmically arranged thought--as in the case of Walter Pater--as by
the use of words to liberate and set free the underlying sensation
which gives body to the idea, or, if you will, the underlying idea
which gives soul to the sensation.

In reading him we seldom pause, as we do with Wilde or Pater, to
caress with the tip of our intellectual tongue the insidious bloom and
gloss and magical effluence of the actual phrases he uses. His
phrases seem, so to speak, to clear themselves out of the way--to
efface themselves and to retire in order that the sensational thought
beneath them may leap forward unimpeded.

Words become indeed to this great student of the subtleties of
human language mere talismans and entrance keys, by means of
which we enter into the purlieus of that psychological borderland
existing half way between the moving waters of sensibility and the
human shores of mental appreciation. Playing this part in his work it
becomes necessary that his words should divest themselves, as far as
it is humanly possible for them to do so without losing their
intelligible symbolic value, of all merely logical and abstract
connotation. It is necessary that his words should be light-footed and
airily winged, swift, sharp and sudden, so that they may throw the
attention of the reader away from themselves upon the actual
psychic and psychological thrill produced by each new and exciting
idea. They must be fluid and flexible, these words of his, free from
rigid or traditional fetters, and prepared at a moment's notice to take
new colour and shape from some unexpected and original thought
looming up in the twilight below.

They must be quick to turn green, blue, purple, violet--these
words--like the flowing waters of some sunlit sea, in order th