Huysmans' place in contemporary literature is not quite easy to estimate. There is a danger of being too much attracted, or too much repelled, by those qualities of deliberate singularity which make his work, sincere expression as it is of his own personality, so artificial and _recherché_ in itself. With his pronounced, exceptional characteristics, it would have been impossible for him to write fiction impersonally, or to range himself, for long, in any school, under any master. Interrogated one day as to his opinion of Naturalism, he had but to say in reply: _Au fond, il y a des écrivains qui out du talent et d'autres qui n'en out pas, qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques, décadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, ça m'est égal! il s'agit pour moi d'avoir du talent, et voilà tout!_ But, as we have seen, he has undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first he has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and, even in _Le Drageoir à Epices,_ we find such daring combinations as this _(Camaïeu Rouge)--Cette fanfare de rouge m'étourdissait; cette gamme d'une intensité furieuse, d'une violence inouïe, m'aveuglait._ Working upon the foundation of Flaubert and of Goncourt, the two great modern stylists, he has developed an intensely personal style of his own, in which the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the sense of colour. He manipulates the French language with a freedom sometimes barbarous, "dragging his images by the heels or the hair" (in the admirable phrase of Léon Bloy) "up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax," gaining, certainly, the effects at which he aims. He possesses, in the highest degree, that _style tacheté et faisandé_--high-flavoured and spotted with corruption--that he attributes to Goncourt and Verlaine. And with this audacious and barbaric profusion of words--chosen always for their colour and their vividly expressive quality--he is able to describe the essentially modern aspects of things as no one had ever described them before. No one before him had ever so realised the perverse charm of the sordid, the perverse charm of the artificial. Exceptional always, it is for such qualities as these, rather than for the ordinary qualities of the novelist, that he is remarkable. 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