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No doubt, in so doing it weakens the odor exuded by Wilde's play. But if we must have an operatic "Salome," it is but reasonable to demand that the composer in his music express the sexual cruelty and frenzy symbolized in the figure of the dancer. And the Salome of Strauss's score is as little the Salome of Wilde as she is the Salome of Flaubert or Beardsley or Moreau or Huysmans.
I mean, for example, Gissing, a real extremist, who, it is now admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered beauty in forms of existence which hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to examine. And I mean Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no works have been more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel En Ménage and his book of descriptive essays De Tout.
In this same year, Guy de Maupassant, who had thrown in his lot with the Naturalist Novelists, contributed a short tale to the volume called Les Soirées de Médan, to which Zola, Huysmans, Hennique, Céard and Paul Alexis also affixed their names.
Alphabet Jones assures us that they are always "in two syllables with the accent on the first. Oyez: Homer, Sappho, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Hugo, Swinburne ... Balzac, Flaubert, Huysmans, Michelet, Renan." The reader is permitted to add ... "Saltus"! "Purple and Fine Women" is a misnamed book. It should be called "Philosophic Fables."
The curious may study the works of M. Huysmans to learn of the mystical propitiation of God, Who made heaven and earth, by the bedsores of hysterical girls. The future as I see it swarms with Durtals and Sister Teresas; countless ecstatic nuns, holding their Maker as it were in deliciæ, will shelter from the world in simple but costly refuges of refined austerity.
Huysmans would have found this suggestion sufficient inspiration for a romance the length of "Clarissa Harlowe." You will remember that the author of "En Route" meditated writing a novel about a man who left his house to go to his office. Perceiving that his shoes have not been polished he stops at a boot-black's and during the operation he reviews his affairs.
The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle. Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery. And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately assumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling, showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being.
To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in fixing the color of the symbolist movement in music. Some of his richer, dreamier songs, some of his finer bits of polishing, his rarer drops of essence, are indeed the musical counterpart of the goldsmith's work, the preciosity, of a Gustave Kahn or a Stuart Merrill. But a musical Huysmans, for instance, it was never in his power to become.
A sob tore its way through the Doctor's great frame. He rose up abruptly and hurried away. A deadly lassitude, both physical and mental, had settled down upon the men and women of the garrison. They knew that Brounckers had gone south, leaving General Huysmans in command of the investing forces.
Well, the letter was a blind; the bearer an agent of the firm of Huysmans and Eybel, sent to make certain of our weakest points before they put in the attack on the Barala town; and that's the man who committed the murder!" "The man who committed the murder?" Saxham's vivid eyes were intent upon the Major's face.
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