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.
His audacity in placing an exposition of the very principles of
Epicurean Hedonism, touched with Spinozistic equanimity, into the
mouth of our Lord, wandering through the Luxembourg Gardens, may
perhaps startle certain gentle souls, but the Dorian delicacy of what
might for a moment appear blasphemous robs this charming Idyll of any
gross or merely popular profanity. It is a book for those who have
passed through more than one intellectual Renaissance. Like the
"Golden Ass" of Apuleius it has a philosophical justification for its
mythological audacity.
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