There is a certain perversity in this furious contemplation of stupidity, this fanatical insistence on the exasperating attraction of the sordid and the disagreeable; and it is by such stages that we come to _A Rebours._ But on the way we have to note a volume of _Croquis Parisiens_ (1880), in which the virtuoso who is a part of the artist in Huysmans has executed some of his most astonishing feats; and a volume on L'_Art Moderne_ (1883), in which the most modern of artists in literature has applied himself to the criticism--the revelation, rather--of modernity in art. In the latter, Huysmans was the first to declare the supremacy of Degas--"the greatest artist that we possess to-day in France"--while announcing with no less fervour the remote, reactionary, and intricate genius of Gustave Moreau. He was the first to discover Raffaëlli, "the painter of poor people and the open sky--a sort of Parisian Millet," as he called him; the first to discover Forain, _"le véritable peintre de la fille"_; the first to discover Odilon Redon, to do justice to Pissaro and Paul Gauguin. No literary artist since Baudelaire has made so valuable a contribution to art criticism, and the _Curiosités Esthétiques_ are, after all, less exact in their actual study, less revolutionary, and less really significant in their critical judgments, than L'_Art Moderne._ The _Croquis Parisiens,_ which, in its first edition, was illustrated by etchings of Forain and Raffaëlli, is simply the attempt to do in words what those artists have done in aquafortis or in pastel. There are the same Parisian types--the omnibus-conductor, the washerwoman, the man who sells hot chestnuts--the same impressions of a sick and sorry landscape, La Bièvre, for preference, in all its desolate and lamentable attraction; there is a marvellously minute series of studies of that typically Parisian music-hall, the Folies-Bergère. Huysmans' faculty of description is here seen at its fullest stretch of agility; precise, suggestive, with all the outline and colour of actual brush-work, it might even be compared with the art of Degas, only there is just that last touch wanting, that breath of palpitating life, which is what we always get in Degas, what we never get in Huysmans.