at work now in the world,
interpreting women to themselves, helping to make the women of the
future. He has peopled a new world. But the inhabitants of this new
world, before they begin to transgress its laws and so lose their own
citizenship there, are so faithfully copied from the people about us
that they share their dumbness, that dumbness to which it is the power
and privilege of poetry to give speech. Given the character and the
situation, what Ibsen asks at the moment of crisis is: What would this
man be most likely to say? not, What would be the finest, the most
deeply revealing thing that he could say? In that difference lies all
the difference between prose and poetry.

1906.

JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS

The novels of Huysmans, however we may regard them as novels, are, at
all events, the sincere and complete expression of a very remarkable
personality. From _Marthe_ to _La-Bas_ every story, every volume,
disengages the same atmosphere--the atmosphere of a London November,
when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little miseries of
life loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable grotesqueness.
Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation--and
sensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be well
or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for each
of us, what each of us feels it to be. To Huysmans the world appears to
be a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, ridiculous place, with a
certain solace in various forms of art, and certain possibilities of at
least temporary escape. Part of his work presents to us a picture of
ordinary life as he conceives it, in its uniform trivial wretchedness;
in another part he has made experiment in directions which have seemed
to promise escape, relief; in yet other portions he has allowed himself
the delight of his sole enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of art. He himself
would be the first to acknowledge--indeed, practically, he has
acknowledged--that the particular way in which he sees life is a matter
of personal temperament and constitution, a matter of nerves. The
Goncourts have never tired of insisting on the fact of their _nevrose_,
of pointing out its importance in connection with the form and structure
of their work, their touch on style, even. To them the _maladie fin de
siecle_ has come delicately, as to the chlorotic fine ladies of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain: it has sharpened their sense