ces been so scrupulously, so unsparingly chronicled, as in
these two studies in the heroic degree of the commonplace. It happens to
Andre, at a certain epoch in his life, to take back an old servant who
had left him many years before. He finds that she has exactly the same
defects as before, and 'to find them there again,' comments the author,
'did not displease him. He had been expecting them all the time, he
saluted them as old acquaintances, yet with a certain surprise,
notwithstanding, to see them neither grown nor diminished. He noted for
himself with satisfaction that the stupidity of his servant had remained
stationary.' On another page, referring to the inventor of cards,
Huysmans defines him as one who 'did something towards suppressing the
free exchange of human imbecility.' Having to say in passing that a girl
has returned from a ball, 'she was at home again,' he observes, 'after
the half-dried sweat of the waltzes.' In this invariably sarcastic turn
of the phrase, this absoluteness of contempt, this insistence on the
disagreeable, we find the note of Huysmans, particularly at this point
in his career, when, like Flaubert, he forced himself to contemplate and
to analyse the more mediocre manifestations of _la betise humaine_.

There is a certain perversity in this furious contemplation of
stupidity, this fanatical insistence on the exasperating attraction of
the sordid and the disagreeable; and it is by such stages that we come
to _A Rebours_. But on the way we have to note a volume of _Croquis
Parisiens_ (1880), in which the virtuoso who is a part of the artist in
Huysmans has executed some of his most astonishing feats; and a volume
on _L'Art Moderne_ (1883), in which the most modern of artists in
literature has applied himself to the criticism--the revelation,
rather--of modernity in art. In the latter, Huysmans was the first to
declare the supremacy of Degas--'the greatest artist that we possess
to-day in France'--while announcing with no less fervour the remote,
reactionary, and intricate genius of Gustave Moreau. He was the first to
discover Raffaelli, 'the painter of poor people and the open sky--a sort
of Parisian Millet,' as he called him; the first to discover Forain, 'le
veritable peintre de la fille'; the first to discover Odilon Redon, to
do justice to Pissaro and Paul Gauguin. No literary artist since
Baudelaire has made so valuable a contribution to art criticism, and the
_Curiosites Esthetiques