pietistic sentimentalists, for the despotism of a Caesar or a Sforza or
a Malatesta in the sphere of the intellect. The intellect of the race
must be held sacred, must be held intact; and its artists and writers
permitted to go their way and follow their "subjective idealism" as
they please, without let or hindrance.

What would be the use of persecuting genius into absolute sterility if
after years and years of suppression human instincts were left the
same, only with no subtle criticism or free creative art to give them
beauty, refinement, interpretation and the magic of a noble style?

Remy de Gourmont, like all the profoundest intelligences of our race,
like the great Goethe himself, is a spiritual anarchist.

Standing apart from popular idols and popular catch-words he
converses with the great withdrawn souls of his own and previous
ages, and hands on to posterity the large, free, urbane atmosphere of
humanistic wisdom.

On the whole perhaps it would be well to keep his writings out of
the New World. They might stir up pessimistic feelings. They might
make us dissatisfied with lecture rooms and moving picture shows.
They might undermine our interest in politics.

"La metaphysique a la sensualite--l'idee pure au plaisir physique!"
Such language has indeed a dangerous sound.

To be obsessed by a passionate and insatiable curiosity with regard
to every sensation known to human senses; to be anxious to give this
curiosity complete scope, so that nothing, literally nothing, shall
escape it; to be endowed with the power of putting the results of
these investigations into clear fascinating words, words that allure us
into passing through them and beyond and behind them into the
sensation of intellectual discovery which they conceal; this indeed,
in our democratic age, is to be a very dubious, a very questionable
writer!

For this shameless advocate of pleasure as the legitimate aim of the
human race, sex and everything connected with sex comes naturally
to be of paramount interest. Sex in every conceivable aspect, and
religion in its best aspect--that is to say in its ritualistic one--are the
things round which the cerebral passion of this versatile humanist
hovers most continually.

In his prose poems and in his poetry these two interests are
continually appearing, and, more often than not, they appear
together fatally and indissolubly united.

"The Book of Litanies" is the title, for instance, he is pleased