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But then as Mr. Philip Hale asks: Why this timidity at being called decadent? What's in the name? Havelock Ellis in his masterly study of Joris Karl Huysmans, considers the much misunderstood phenomenon in art called decadence. "Technically a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic style.
Huysmans had not only preceded Nana by two years, but beat his master, with Marthe the Paris edition was quickly suppressed as it is a better-written and truer book than the story of the big blonde girl, who was later so wonderfully painted by Edouard Manet as she stood in her dressing-room at the theatre.
What Hugo did for French verse, Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola, and Huysmans have done for French prose. No more literary school than the realists has ever existed, and I do not except even the Elizabethans.
Now I think that every one will accept my excuses, and will acquit me of plagiarism. I see the Rougon-Macquart series, each volume presented to him by the author, Goncourt, Huysmans, Duranty, Ceard, Maupassant, Hennique, etc.; in a word, the works of those with whom I grew up, those who tied my first literary pinafore round my neck.
Meanwhile, Wolfen, a fat, good-hearted Teuton, with a face like a full moon in a fog, called upon me, and remarked in a squashy tone of voice, superinduced by too many years of lager beer, and its resultant adipose tissue, that he and Peter Huysmans, his neighbour, would feel very much hurt if we did not invite them to participate in the festivities.
At least, that is the reason which Nitocris gave to Lord Leighton and the Van Huysmans, and the few others to whom she thought it necessary to give any explanation at all.
J. K. Huysmans, then but at the outset of his slow and painful course through schools and experiments, was in time to sum up the new tendencies of a new period, as significantly as Maupassant summed up in his short and brilliant, and almost undeviating career, the tendencies of that period in which Taine and science seemed to have at last found out the physical basis of life.
Huysmans, the apologist of Gilles de Rais, there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on his forehead Huysmans somewhere in his description of the trial of the fifteenth-century monster, the prototype, so it is said, of the nursery tale of Blue Beard, speaks of the white soul of the Middle Ages; he must have had Verlaine on his mind, for Verlaine has spoken of himself as a mediaeval Catholic, that is to say a Catholic in whom sinning and repentance alternates regularly as night and day.
All of which is interesting, but proves nothing except that Maupassant wrote a marvellous collection of short stories, real, hyphenated short-stories, as Mr. Brander Matthews makes the delicate distinction, while Huysmans did not.
While this is primarily a volume of critical essays on painting, music, literature and life, it concludes with a series of seven short stories which serve as a postlude to Mr. Huneker's earlier volume, "Visionaries." They are chiefly interesting as the last dying glow of symbolism, derivative as they are from Huysmans and Mallarme.
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