European truth. And he set forth that truth ceaselessly, without cosmetics, without reticence or omission. The truth—that hard and unpleasant other side of the shield of illusion. “Je ne ferai que dire la vérité,” said Flaubert, “mais elle sera horrible, cruelle et nue.” One who takes the vows of obedience to such truth loses all right to earthly beatitude, loses all hope of swift glory, all sympathy. From the days of Socrates to those of Nietzsche, the man who analyzes and dissociates, the man who breaks through the surface of useful and convenient beliefs to reveal the fierce and injurious truths that lie beneath, has been ostracized and condemned as an enemy to the State and to the gods.
Remy de Gourmont was of this ill-regarded family. Less serene and profound than Socrates, less violent and grand than Nietzsche, he resembled more closely the great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century. He had the malice of Voltaire (with Voltaire’s apparently innocent narrative simplicity); he had d’Alembert’s passion for disinterested exactness; he had the good-natured frivolity of Fontenelle; he had the branching curiosity of Bayle. But the man he most closely resembles is Diderot, who has always seemed to me the most complete and vigorous genius among the Encyclopedists. In Diderot, as in Remy de Gourmont, one may find a natural inclination toward general ideas, an enjoyment
