all the
fogs and vapours of turgid hyperborean superstition are driven away
from the face of the warm sun. Once more what is permanent and
interesting in this mad complicated comedy of human life emerges
in bold and sharp relief.

Artists, novelists, poets, journalists, occultists, abnormalists,
essayists, scientists and even theologians, are treated with that
humorous and passionate curiosity, full of a spacious sense of the
amplitude of and diversity of life's possibilities, which we associate
with the classic tradition.

Only in France is the appearance of a writer of this kind possible at
all; because France alone of all the nations, and Paris alone of all the
cities, of the modern world, has kept in complete and continuous
touch with the "open secret" of the great civilisations.

There is no writer more required in America at this moment than
Remy de Gourmont, and for that very reason no writer less likely to
be received. Curiously enough, in spite of the huge influx of
foreigners into the harbour reigned over by the Statue of Liberty, not
even England itself is more enslaved by the dark fogs of puritanical
superstition than the United States; for there is no place in the world
where the brutal ignorance and complacent self-righteousness of the
commercial middle classes rampage and revel and trample upon
distinction and refinement more savagely than in America. The
blame for this must fall entirely upon the English race and upon the
descendants of the Puritans. Perhaps a time will come when all these
Jews and Slavs and Italians will assert their _intellectual_ as they are
beginning to assert their _economic,_ independence, and then no
doubt led by the cities of the West--the ones furthest from
Boston--there will be a Renaissance of European intelligence in this great
daughter of Europe such as will astonish even Paris itself. But this
event, as Sir Thomas More says so sadly of his Utopia, is rather to
be hoped for than expected.

One hears so often from the mouths of middle-class apologists for
the modern industrial system expressions of fear as to the loss of
what they call "initiative" under any conceivable socialistic state.
One is inclined to ask "initiative towards what"? Towards growing
unscrupulously rich, it must be supposed; certainly not towards
intellectual experiments and enterprises; for no possible
revolutionary regime could be less sympathetic to these things than
the one under which we live at