the later Christian poets--from the
coloured verse of Claudian down to the verse which is scarcely verse of
the incoherent ninth century. He is, of course, an amateur of exquisite
printing, of beautiful bindings, and possesses an incomparable
Baudelaire (_edition tiree a un exemplaire_), a unique Mallarme.
Catholicism being the adopted religion of the Decadence--for its
venerable age, valuable in such matters as the age of an old wine, its
vague excitation of the senses, its mystical picturesqueness--Des
Esseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature,
where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find
their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello,
the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality,
Barbey d'Aurevilly. His collection of 'profane' writers is small, but it
is selected for the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be his
only care in art--for the somewhat diseased, or the somewhat artificial
beauty that alone can strike a responsive thrill from his exacting
nerves. 'Considering within himself, he realised that a work of art, in
order to attract him, must come to him with that quality of strangeness
demanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route, and
sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated
deliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over which
he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or of
solid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. He
delighted in a work of art, both for what it was in itself and for what
it could lend him; he would fain go along with it, thanks to it, as
though sustained by an adjuvant, as though borne in a vehicle, into a
sphere where his sublimated sensations would wake in him an unaccustomed
stir, the cause of which he would long and vainly seek to determine.' So
he comes to care supremely for Baudelaire, 'who, more than any other,
possessed the marvellous power of rendering, with a strange sanity of
expression, the most fleeting, the most wavering morbid states of
exhausted minds, of desolate souls.' In Flaubert he prefers _La
Tentation de Saint-Antoine_; in Goncourt, _La Faustin_; in Zola, _La
Faute de l'Abbe Mouret_--the exceptional, the most remote and
_recherche_ outcome of each temperament. And of the three it is the
novel of Goncourt that appeals to him with special intimacy--that novel
which, more