In A Rebours there is the account of a trip to London by the anæmic hero, Des Esseintes. He gets no further than one of the English taverns opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. It is risible, this episode; Huysmans could display verve and a sort of grim humour when he wished. Brunetière, who was serious to solemnity, and lacked a funny bone, declared that Huysmans borrowed the incident from a popular vaudeville, Le Voyage à Dieppe, by Fulgence and Wafflard. He need not have gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaire by the Crépets (Eugène and Jacques) there is the genesis of the story. To become better acquainted with English speech and manners, Baudelaire frequented an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, where he drank whisky, read _Punch_, and also sought the company of English grooms in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Huysmans loved Baudelaire as much as Brunetière detested him. There is no doubt he knew this thoroughly Baudelairian anecdote. A perverse comet in the firmament of French literature, Joris-Karl Huysmans will always be more admired than loved. CHAPTER XI STYLE AND RHYTHM IN ENGLISH PROSE I Stylists in prose are privileged persons. They may write nonsense and escape the castigation of prudish pedants; or, dealing with cryptic subjects, they can win the favour of the unthinking; witness, in the brain-carpentry of metaphysics, say, the verbal man[oe]uvres of three such lucid though disparate thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and William James. The names of these three writers are adduced as evidence that it is not necessary to be foggy of style even when dealing with abstract ideas. And Germany has long been the Nibelheim of philosophy; need we mention Hegel, whose commentators have made his meanings thrice-confounded? Style in literature is an antiseptic. It may embalm foolish flies in its amber, and it is a brevet of immortality--that is, as immortality goes; a brief thing, but a man's boast. When the shoeblack part of the affair is over and done with, the grammar, which was made for schoolmarms in male garb, and the shining rhetoric, what remains? The answer is eternal: Style cannot be taught. A good style is direct, plain, and simple. The writer's keyboard is that humble camel the dictionary. Style, being concerned with the process of movement, has nothing to do with results, says one authority. And an impertinent collusion on the part of the writer with his own individuality does not always constitute style; for individual opinion is virtually private opinion, notwithstanding its appearance in editions half a hundred long; Sainte-Beuve and De Quincey here occur to the memory. Men change; mankind never.