Christa Giles

174
˝What is true about music,˝ Wilde claimed, ˝is true about all
the arts. Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.
Beauty is the symbol of symbols.˝ 461 Of course this notion of
beauty is quite radical because whatever the artist chose to
make his province became beautiful. Further, as beauty
was a matter of style and form it became quite independent
of any obvious reproduction of nature. The Symbolist
painters similarly placed great emphasis on the importance
of form, colour, and structure independent of meaning. The
artist formed and arranged his work according to his desire
to evoke emotion and ideas. Moréas, in his ˝Symbolist
Manifesto˝ written two years after the publication of A
rebours, spoke of objectifying the subjective (the
externalization of the idea). In 1891 George Albert Aurier
referred to these new currents in painting in an article in
Mercure de France identifying Symbolist painting as ˝ideist,
symbolic, synthetist, subjective, and decorative.˝ 462 This
concern with surface would eventually lead to an extreme
self-consciousness, a calling of attention to itself in Art
Nouveau.
The focus upon experimentation with forms of
compositional arrangement, the importance of what Aurier
termed ˝ideistic,˝ is apparent in Huysmans’ and Wilde’s
thought. Even as the painter placed emphasis on style,