He speculates continually, and, if questions are insoluble, is not content until he has so posed them as to show the reason of their insolubility. He prefers a calm question mark to the more emotional mark of exclamation, and is always happy when he can turn the second into the first. He is extraordinarily thorough, moving always in mass and taking everything with him, so that he has no footsteps to retrace in order to pick up baggage left behind. Unlike Theseus, he unrolls no clue of thread when he enters the cavern of the Minotaur. He will come out by a different way or not at all. The most powerful Minotaur of our day does not dismay him. Confident in his own probity, he will walk calmly among the men of science and bring an _Esthétique de la langue française_, or a _Physique de l'Amour_, meat of unaccustomed richness, to lay before their husk-fed deity. In criticism, as in creation, he does not like things half-done. The story of the origin of one of these books is the story of them all. There is a foolish little book by M. Albalat, which professes to teach style in twenty-seven lessons. M. de Gourmont read it and smiled; he wrote an article, and still found something to smile at; he wrote a book, _Le Problème du Style_, in which, mocking M. Albalat through a hundred and fifty-two courteous pages, he showed, besides many other things, that style is not to be taught in twenty-seven lessons, and, indeed, is not to be taught at all. Then he felt free to smile at something else. M. de Gourmont is careful to say that he brought to the _Esthétique de la langue française_, "ni lois, ni règles, ni principes peut-être; je n'apporte rien qu'un sentiment esthétique assez violent et quelques notions historiques: voilà ce que je jette au hasard dans la grande cuve où fermente la langue de demain." An æsthetic feeling and some historical notions were sufficiently needed in the fermenting vat where the old French language, in which there is hardly any Greek, is being horribly adulterated with grainless translations of good French made by Hellenists of the dictionary. M. de Gourmont is in love with his language, but knows that she is rather vain and ready to wear all kinds of borrowed plumes, whether or not they suit her. He would take from her her imitation ostrich feathers, and would hide also all ribbons from the London market, unless she first dyes them until they fall without discord into the scheme of colour that centuries have made her own. Why write "high life," for example, or "five o'clock," or "sleeping"? Why shock French and English alike by writing "Le Club de Rugby" on a gate in Tours? A kingfisher in England flies very happily as martin-pècheur in France, and the language is not so sterile as to be unable to breed words from its own stock for whatever needs a name.