Christa Giles

172
Huysmans speaks approvingly of Whistler’s series of
˝harmonies˝ and ˝arrangements˝ named by different
colours:
…un village intitulé: vert et opale; une vue de
Dieppe: argent et violet; un site de Hollande:
gris et jaune; un pastel: bleu et nacre; puis des
duos de capucine et de rose, d’argent et de
mauve, de lilas et d’or; un solo enfin, chanté
par une boutique de bonbons sous ce titre:
note en orange. 453
Of course, it is not merely a question of surface, but also the
symbolic which that surface implies. For, in Wilde’s and
Huysmans’ view, beauty, being symbolic in and of itself,
reveals all while expressing nothing. 454 So the body in art,
Wilde and Huysmans maintain, is the soul made
incarnate, 455 and it is for this reason that Huysmans
constantly speaks of idioms – ˝l’idiome symbolique des
plantes˝ 456 the idiom of essences, the ˝language of scents. 457
Accordingly, ˝thought and language are to the artist
instruments of an art.˝ 458 Style becomes the means of
communicating the originality of the artist, which
paradoxically issues from the fact that the work of art is
autonomous because the artist has created an independent
life through the creation of a new idiom. In summation, art,
according to Wilde, addresses itself ˝not to the faculty of