disease.

Huysmans' place in contemporary literature is not quite easy to
estimate. There is a danger of being too much attracted, or too much
repelled, by those qualities of deliberate singularity which make his
work, sincere expression as it is of his own personality, so artificial
and _recherche_ in itself. With his pronounced, exceptional
characteristics, it would have been impossible for him to write fiction
impersonally, or to range himself, for long, in any school, under any
master. Interrogated one day as to his opinion of Naturalism, he had but
to say in reply: _Au fond, il y a des ecrivains qui ont du talent et
d'autres qui n'en ont pas, qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques,
decadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, ca m'est egal! il s'agit pour moi
d'avoir du talent, et voila tout!_ But, as we have seen, he has
undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first he
has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and, even in
_Le Drageoir a Epices_, we find such daring combinations as this
(_Camaieu Rouge_)--_Cette fanfare de rouge m'etourdissait; cette gamme
d'une intensite furieuse, d'une violence inouie, m'aveuglait._ Working
upon the foundation of Flaubert and of Goncourt, the two great modern
stylists, he has developed an intensely personal style of his own, in
which the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the sense of colour.
He manipulates the French language with a freedom sometimes barbarous,
'dragging his images by the heels or the hair' (in the admirable phrase
of Leon Bloy) 'up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified
syntax,' gaining, certainly, the effects at which he aims. He possesses,
in the highest degree, that _style tachete et faisande_--high-flavoured
and spotted with corruption--that he attributes to Goncourt and
Verlaine. And with this audacious and barbaric profusion of
words--chosen always for their colour and their vividly expressive
quality--he is able to describe the essentially modern aspects of things
as no one had ever described them before. No one before him had ever so
realised the perverse charm of the sordid, the perverse charm of the
artificial. Exceptional always, it is for such qualities as these,
rather than for the ordinary qualities of the novelist, that he is
remarkable. His stories are without incident, they are constructed to go
on until they stop, they are almost without characters. His psychology
is a matter of the sensations, a