civilized artist--a great and wise man. He is Rabelaisian and
Voltairian, at the same time. His style has something of the urbanity,
the unction, the fine malice, of Renan; but it has also a quality
peculiar to its creator--a sort of transparent objectivity, lucid as
rarified air, and contemptuously cold as a fragment of antique marble.
Monsieur Bergeret, who appears in all four of the masterpieces devoted
to Contemporary France, is a creation worthy, as some one has said, of
the author of Tristram Shandy. One cannot forget that Anatole France
spent his childhood among the bookshops on the South side of the
Seine. We are conscious all the while in reading him of the wise,
tender, pitiful detachment of a true scholar of the classics,
contemplating the mad pell-mell of human life from a certain epicurean
remoteness, and loving and mocking the sons and daughters of men, as
if they were little children or comical small animals.



37. REMY DE GOURMONT. UNE NUIT AU LUXEMBOURG. _Translated with a
preface by Arthur Ransome, published by Luce, Boston_.

Remy de Gourmont's death must be regretted by all lovers of the rare
in art and the remote in character. As a poet his "Litany of the Rose"
has that strange, ambiguous, sinister, and lovely appeal, the full
appreciation of which is an initiation into all the "enclosed gardens"
of the world.

He is a great critic--perhaps the greatest since Walter Pater--and as
a philosopher his constant and frank advocacy of a noble and shameless
Hedonism has helped to clear the air in the track of Nietzsche's
thunder-bolts.