rned friend who is to write for the new periodical, or perhaps it is
the young editor of the new periodical who speaks, or (if that were not
impossible) the taciturn Englishman who accompanies me; and Huysmans,
without looking up, and without taking the trouble to speak very
distinctly, picks up the phrase, transforms it, more likely transpierces
it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of impromptu elaboration.
Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a
stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomes
monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle of imbecility; the
unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It
is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the
intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the
sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an
epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks
with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of contempt, so
profound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility.

Yes, that is the true Huysmans, the Huysmans of _A Rebours_, and it is
just such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality.
With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passion
for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusively
an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, being
produced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, would
be, in a way, the quintessence of contemporary Decadence. And it is
precisely such a book that Huysmans has written, in the extravagant,
astonishing _A Rebours_. All his other books are a sort of unconscious
preparation for this one book, a sort of inevitable and scarcely
necessary sequel to it. They range themselves along the line of a
somewhat erratic development, from Baudelaire, through Goncourt, by way
of Zola, to the surprising originality of so disconcerting an exception
to any and every order of things.

The descendant of a long line of Dutch painters--one of whom, Cornelius
Huysmans, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape men of the great
period--Joris-Karl Huysmans was born at Paris, February 5, 1848. His
first book, _Le Drageoir a Epices_, published at the age of twenty-six,
is a _pasticcio_ of prose poems, done after Baudelaire, of little
sketches, done after Dutch artists, together with a few stu