Healthy we can not call it, and healthy it does not wish to be considered. The Goncourts, in their prefaces, in their _Journal_, are always insisting on their own pet malady, _la névrose._ It is in their work too, that Huysmans notes with delight _le style tacheté et faisandé_--high-flavored and spotted with corruption--which he himself possesses in the highest degree. "Having desire without light, curiosity, without wisdom, seeking God by strange ways, by ways traced by the hands of men; offering rash incense upon the high places to an unknown God, who is the God of darkness"--that is how Ernest Hello, in one of his apocalyptic moments, characterizes the nineteenth century. And this unreason of the soul--of which Hello himself is so curious a victim--this unstable equilibrium, which has overbalanced so many brilliant intelligences into one form or another of spiritual confusion, is but another form of the _maladie fin de siècle._ For its very disease of form, this literature is certainly typical of a civilization grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct. It reflects all the moods, all the manners, of a sophisticated society; its very artificiality is a way of I being true to nature: simplicity, sanity, proportion--the classic qualities--how much do we possess them in our life, our surroundings, that we should look to find them in our literature--so evidently the literature of a decadence?