g of the psychological kind,
which would fain make up for a faulty product by ostentatiously parading
the processes of production. Had he once got free--as more than once it
seemed that he might--from the fatal conventionalities of his
unconventionalism, from the trammels of his obtrusive negations, there
is hardly a height in prose fiction which he might not have attained. As
it is, he gave us in verse _Au bord de l'eau_, which is nearly the
"farthest possible" in a certain expression, of a certain mood of youth,
and not of youth only; in prose _Boule de Suif_, _Monsieur Parent_,
_Pierre et Jean_, which are all in their way masterpieces, and a hundred
things hardly inferior. And so he put himself in the company of "Les
Phares"--a light-giver at once and a warner of danger, as well as a part
of

cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'age en age,
Et vient mourir au bord de _notre_ eternite.[517]

[Sidenote: Huysmans.]

The Naturalist rank and file are so far below Zola and Maupassant that
they cannot now, whatever they might have done twenty years ago, claim
much notice in such a history as this. The most remarkable of them was
probably J. K. Huysmans. It has been charitably suggested or admitted
above that his contribution to the _Soirees de Medan_--a deeply felt
story, showing the extreme disadvantage, when, as Mr. De la Pluche
delicately put it, "your midlands are out of order," of wandering
quarters and vicissitudes in the country, and the intense relief
experienced on return to your own comfortable chambers in town,--that
this _may_ have been written in the spirit of a _farceur_, reducing the
Goncourtian and Zolaesque principle to the lowest terms of the absurd.
But I am by no means sure that it was so, though this suspicion of
parody pursues the earlier work of Huysmans to such an extent that a
certain class of critic might take his later developments as evidence of
design in it. _Les Soeurs Vatard_ is a sort of _apodiabolosis_ of the
Goncourts and Zola--a history of entirely uninteresting persons (the
"sisters" are work-girls in a printing-house, and their companions suit
them) doing entirely uninteresting things, in an atmosphere of foul
smells, on a scene littered with garbage, cheered by wine which is red
ink, and brandy which is vitriol. _A Rebours_, not really a novel at
all, is the history of a certain M. Des Esseintes, who is a sort of
transposed "Bouvard et Pecuchet" in one--trying all arts and sens