The Colonnade Volume 10 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ...confidence of white, the repeated Hallelujahs of yellow, and the virginal glory of blue." The masonry of the Cathedral melts in the warmth of symbolism, floral, faunal, Scriptural, while even odors assume their right to guide the soul to the Beyond. One may question the sincerity of Huysmans' aesthet icism; but one cannot thus neutralize the ideas peculiar to A Rebours and En Route. In such an age as ours, wherein practically all our soul-stuff has been pressed into the convenient forms of the obvious, the practical, and the immediate, the "absurdities" of Des Esseintes and Durtal tend to point out that reason may be ridiculous and utilitarianism useless. It is undeniable that we cannot sever the individual from nature and society; yet from such an obvious premise it does not follow that the natural and the social should constitute the chief attributes of humanity. Huysmans will have his Des Esseintes delivered from all lingering connection with the exterior order of both things and persons; the result of this aesthetical detachment gives the reader a view of the culture-hero in his maisonette in Fontenay. Far from advocating eugenics, which makes of man the more and more perfect animal, Huysmans delineates a character who has so reaped the harvest of ancestral immorality and inter-marriage as to stand forth in shadowy fashion as a young man whose anaemia and nervousness suggest more than one resemblance to his pale ancestor with the pointed beard. Such cerebral activity as Des Esseintes possesses is kept within the confines of his own personality: sensory faculties refuse to forth even toward the glories of Fontainbleau Forest, where nature has done her best for mankind; motor powers are not enticed toward the...