The work of Remy de Gourmont is known and read in all parts of the civilized world. Yet he has not a large circulation and a purely commercial writer would probably be disgusted at his profits, but he has an influence, especially over the younger and more adventuresome spirits, which few writers today possess. One can—or rather one could in the days before the war—hardly pick up any French review without finding some reference to his ideas or some criticism of his work. In Russia he appears to have a more considerable reputation than anywhere else outside France. For, though one sees criticism and translations of him even in languages like Hungarian and Roumanian, it is in Russia alone that a word of praise from Remy de Gourmont seems to make a man’s reputation. The English are far slower in their international appreciations, and the Americans—quick though they are to seize on new men—do not seem to have taken up de Gourmont with much understanding. Mr. Ransome’s translation of _Un Nuit au Luxembourg_ was not received with either appreciation or enthusiasm by English and American critics. And though a savant like Mr. Havelock Ellis quotes from M. de Gourmont’s work, and has, I believe, a great admiration for his personal intellectual qualities; though Mr. Sturge Moore, in his book on Flaubert and Blake, quotes M. de Gourmont among the great critics of France, it must be admitted that few English-speaking critics have yet done him justice. I question if the larger public has heard more of him than a vague rumour of his name. It may be that he is thought too “high-brow.” I suppose every man who gives his life up to the task of expressing his ideas, his character, and his genius in a purely disinterested manner is liable to this criticism. But there is so great a fascination in his work, whether it be criticism or fiction, philosophic dialogue or prose poem, that whenever he gains a reader it is not for an hour but for life. In America especially he should find readers, for America, whatever artistic faults and drawbacks it may have, has not, as England has, a “ring” of reviewers who unanimously “queer” any book whose originality or genius is any menace to their own stick-in-the-mud critical methods. The Symbolist movement in France is now almost ancient history. Unanimists, Futurists, Paroxysts, Fantasists, and all the other “ists” so abundantly produced by this century now face the “ists” of Germany on the battlefield. And while they are there fighting out by bodily force and not by words the intellectual destinies of Europe we may perhaps consider with free minds the Symbolist poets and authors who are now too old to take the field for their country and can only sit at home “waiting for news.”