atural religion and categorical morality; while the method
of appealing to the optimistic prejudices of shallow minds by the use
of colloquial and mystical images has of recent years been
introducing into European thought what might be called "Metaphysical
Americanism."

Against this tendency, a tendency peculiarly and especially
Anglo-Saxon, the ingrained _Latinity_ of de Gourmont's mind indignantly
revolts. His point of view is entirely and absolutely classical, in the
old French sense of that suggestive word and in accordance with the
great French traditions of Rabelais, Voltaire, Stendhal, Renan, and
Anatole France.

The new pseudo-philosophy, so vague, so popular, so optimistic, so
steeped in mystical morality, which one associates with the writings
of so many modern Americans and which finds a certain degree of
support in the work of Maeterlinck and Romain Rolland, leaves the
intelligence of Remy de Gourmont entirely untouched. He comes to
modern problems with the free, gay, mocking curiosity of a
twentieth century Lucian. Completely out of his vein and remote
from his method is that grave pedagogic tone which has become so
popular a note in recent ethical writing, and which, for all his slang
of the marketplace, underlies the psychological optimism of William
James.

One has only to read a few pages of Remy de Gourmont to be
conscious that one has entered once again the large, spacious, free,
irresponsible, _heathen_ atmosphere of the great writers of antiquity.
The lapse of time since those classic ages, the superficial changes of
human manners and speech, seem abolished, seem reduced to
something that does not count at all. We have nothing here of that
self-conscious modernity of tone, that fussy desire to be original and
popular, which spoils the charm of so many vigorous writers of our
age. It is as though some pleasant companion of Plato--some wise
and gay Athenian from the side of Agathon or Phaedrus or
Charmides--were risen from his tomb by the blue Ionian seas to
discourse to us upon the eternal ironies of nature and human life
under the lime trees and chestnuts of the Luxembourg gardens. It is
as though some philosophic friend of Catullus or Propertius had
returned from an age-long holiday within the olive groves of Sirmio
to wander with clear-eyed humorous curiosity along the banks of the
Seine or among the book-stalls of the Odeon.

Like a thick miasmic cloud, as we read this great pagan critic,