_ are, after all, less exact in their actual
study, less revolutionary, and less really significant in their critical
judgments, than _L'Art Moderne_. The _Croquis Parisiens_, which, in its
first edition, was illustrated by etchings of Forain and Raffaelli, is
simply the attempt to do in words what those artists have done in
aquafortis or in pastel. There are the same Parisian types--the
omnibus-conductor, the washerwoman, the man who sells hot chestnuts--the
same impressions of a sick and sorry landscape, La Bievre, for
preference, in all its desolate and lamentable attraction; there is a
marvellously minute series of studies of that typically Parisian
music-hall, the Folies-Bergere. Huysmans' faculty of description is here
seen at its fullest stretch of agility; precise, suggestive, with all
the outline and colour of actual brush-work, it might even be compared
with the art of Degas, only there is just that last touch wanting, that
breath of palpitating life, which is what we always get in Degas, what
we never get in Huysmans.

In _L'Art Moderne_, speaking of the water-colours of Forain, Huysmans
attributes to them 'a specious and _cherche_ art, demanding, for its
appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense.' To realise
the full value, the real charm, of _A Rebours_, some such initiation
might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its exquisite
artificiality, it is the natural sequel of _En Menage_ and _A
Vau-l'Eau_, which are so much more acutely sordid than the most sordid
kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred and horror
of human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence, which we have
seen to be the special form of Huysmans' _nevrose_. The motto, taken
from a thirteenth-century mystic, Rusbroeck the Admirable, is a cry for
escape, for the 'something in the world that is there in no satisfying
measure, or not at all': _Il faut que je me rejouisse au-dessus du temps
... quoique le monde ait horreur de ma joie et que sa grossierete ne
sache pas ce que je veux dire_. And the book is the history of a
_Thebaide raffinee_--a voluntary exile from the world in a new kind of
'Palace of Art.' Des Esseintes, the vague but typical hero, is one of
those half-pathological cases which help us to understand the full
meaning of the word _decadence_, which they partly represent. The last
descendant of an ancient family, his impoverished blood tainted by all
sorts of excesses, De