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, and chiefly the visual sensations. The moral nature is ignored, the emotions resolve themselves for the most part into a sordid ennui, rising at times into a rage at existence. The protagonist of every book is not so much a character as a bundle of impressions and sensations--the vague outline of a single consciousness, his own. But it is that single consciousness--in this morbidly personal writer--with which we are concerned. For Huysmans' novels, with all their strangeness, their charm, their repulsion, typical too, as they are, of much beside himself, are certainly the expression of a personality as remarkable as that of any contemporary writer. 1892. TWO SYMBOLISTS _Un livre comme je ne les aime pas_, says Mallarme characteristically (_ceux epars et prives d'architecture_) of this long expected first volume of collected prose, _Divagations_, in which we find the prose poems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; the marvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and the theatrical spectacle, comparatively early in date; _Richard Wagner: reverie d'un Poete francais, Le Mystere dans les Lettres_; and, under various titles, the surprising _Variations sur un Sujet_. The hesitation of a lifetime having been, it would seem, overcome, we are at last able to read Mallarme's 'doctrine,' if not altogether as he would have us read it. And we are at last able, without too much injustice, to judge him as a writer of prose.