at the
mysterious reflections of the wonderful opalescent fish, swimming
to and fro in the dim depths, may reach the surface unimpeded by
any shadows.

But the chief point about the style of Remy de Gourmont is that it
precisely reflects his main fundamental principle, the principle that
ideas should strike us with the pleasurable shock of sensations, and
that sensations should be porous to and penetrated by ideas.

"En litterature, comme en tout, il faut que cesse la regne des mots
abstraits. Une ouvre d'art n'existe que par l'emotion qu'elle nous
donne; il suffira de determiner et de caracteriser la nature de cette
emotion; cela ira de la metaphysique a la sensualite, de l'idee pure au
plaisir physique."

"La metaphysique a la sensualite; l'idee pure au plaisir physique"; it
would be impossible to put more clearly than in those words the
purpose and aim of this great writer's work.

Contemptuously aloof from the idols of the market-place,
contemptuously indifferent to the tyranny of public opinion, with the
fixed principle in his mind--almost his only fixed principle--that the
majority is always wrong, Remy de Gourmont goes upon his way;
passionately tasting, like a great satin-bodied humming bird, every
exquisite flower in the garden of human ideas. The wings of his
thoughts, as he hovers, beat so quickly as to be almost invisible; and
thus it is that in reading him--great scholar of style as he is--we do
not think of his words but only of his thought, or rather only of the
sensation which his thought evokes.

When it comes to the actual philosophy of Remy de Gourmont we
indeed arrive at something which may well cause our Puritan
obscurants to open their mouths with amazement. He is perhaps the
only perfectly frank and unmitigated "hedonist" which European
literature at this hour offers.

He advocates pleasure as the legitimate and sole end of man's
endeavours and aspirations upon this earth. Pleasure imaginatively
dealt with indeed, and transformed from a purely physical into a
cerebral emotion; but pleasure frankly, candidly, shamelessly
accepted at its natural and obvious value.

Here, then, comes at last upon the scene a writer as free from the
moralistic aftermath of two thousand years of criminalising of
human instincts as he is free from the supernatural dogmas that have
given support to this darkening of the sunshine.

Nietzsche, of course, was before him with his formidable
philosophic hammer; bu