e to bow to the
intolerable mandate of the dry and sapless spirit of "specialisation."
He refuses to leave art to the artist, science to the scientist, religion
to the theologian, or the delicate art of natural casuistry to the
professional moralist. In the true humanistic temper he claims the
right to deal with all these matters, and to deal with them lightly,
freely, unscrupulously, irresponsibly, and with no "arriere pensee"
but the simple pleasure of the discussion.

He makes us forget Herbert Spencer and makes us think of Plato. He
is the wise sophist of our own age, unspoiled by any Socratic
"conceptualism," and ready, like Protagoras, to show us how man is
the measure of all things and how the individual is the measure of
man. The ardour of his intellectual curiosity burns with a clear
smokeless flame. He brings back to the touchstone of a sort of
distinguished common sense, free from every species of superstition,
all those great metaphysical and moral problems which have been
too often monopolised by the acrid and technical pedantry of the
schools.

He reminds one of the old-fashioned "gentleman of leisure" of the
eighteenth century, writing shrewdly and wisely upon every
question relating to human life, from punctuation and grammar to
the manner in which the monks of the Thebaid worshipped God. His
attitude is always that of the great amateur, never of the little
professional. He writes with suggestive imagination, not with
exhaustive authority. He takes up one subject after another that has
been, so to speak, closed and locked to the ordinary layman, and
opens it up again with some original thrust of wholesome scepticism,
and makes it flexible and porous. He indicates change and
fluctuation and malleableness and the organic capriciousness of life,
where the professors have shut themselves up in logical dilemmas.
When it comes to the matter of his actual approach to these things it
will be found that he plunges his hand boldly into the flowing
stream, in the way of a true essayist dispensing with all the tedious
logical paraphernalia of a writer of "serious treatises."

His genius is not only aristocratic in quality; it is essentially what
might be called, in a liberal use of the term, the genius of a
sensualist.

Remy de Gourmont's ultimate contribution to the art of criticism is
the disentangling, from among the more purely rational vehicles of
thought, of what we might regard as the sensual or sensuou