Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/259

Remy de Gourmont apparent rather than stated—that no formula can stand between man and life; or rather that no creed, no dogma, can protect the thinking man from looking at life directly, forming his own thought from his own sensuous contact and from his contact with thoughts.

Nietzsche has done no harm in France because France has understood that thought can exist apart from action; that it is perfectly fitting and expedient clearly to think certain things which it is neither fitting nor expedient to "spoil by action."

"Spoil by action" is perhaps a bad memory of the phrase; but just as Dante was able to consider two thoughts as blending and giving off music, so Diomedes in De Gourmont's story is able to think things which translation into action would spoil. As for Diomedes' career, I am perfectly willing to accept Robert Frost's statement that "there is nothing like it in New England." What there is in all provincial places is an attempt to suppress part of the evidence, to present life out of proportion with itself, squared to fit some local formula of respectability.

Remy de Gourmont had written all his life in absolute single-mindedness; it was to express his thought, his delicate, subtle, quiet and absolutely untrammeled revery, with no regard whatsoever for existing belief, with no after-thought or beside-thought either to conform or to avoid conforming. That is the sainthood of literature.

I think I can show what I mean almost by a single sentence. In the midst of the present whirlwind of abuse he said