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 sensuous elements of human receptivity. No one can read his writings with any degree of intelligence without becoming aware that, in his way of handling life, ideas become sensations and sensations become ideas. More than any critic that ever lived, Remy de Gourmont has the power of interesting us in his psychological discoveries with that sort of thrilling vibrating interest which is almost like a physical touch. The thing to note in regard to this evocation of a pleasurable shock of mental excitement is that in his case it does not seem produced so much by the sonority or euphonious fall of the actual words--as in the case of Oscar Wilde--or even by the subtler spiritual harmony of rhythmically arranged thought--as in the case of Walter Pater--as by the use of words to liberate and set free the underlying sensation which gives body to the idea, or, if you will, the underlying idea which gives soul to the sensation. In reading him we seldom pause, as we do with Wilde or Pater, to caress with the tip of our intellectual tongue the insidious bloom and gloss and magical effluence of the actual phrases he uses. His phrases seem, so to speak, to clear themselves out of the way--to efface themselves and to retire in order that the sensational thought beneath them may leap forward unimpeded.