Christa Giles

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suggested the breakdown of barriers between the arts. The
artist moved into the ˝forêts de symboles˝ and used the
hieroglyphic language of colour, form, and style to express
himself. In Aurier’s words, the artist uses the ˝mysterious
meanings of lines ... light, and shadows˝ so that they
function ˝like the letters in an alphabet, to write the beautiful
poem of their dreams and ideas.˝ 471 Des Esseintes admires
Mallarmé for this reason. He found him to be ˝sensitive to
the remotest affinities, he would often use a term that by
analogy suggested at once form, scent, colour, quality, and
brilliance to indicate a creature or a thing.˝ 472 Thus formal
equivalents can represent but do not merely imitate:
The whole history of these arts in Europe is
the record of the struggle between
Orientalism, with its frank rejection of
imitation, its love of artistic convention, its
dislike to the actual representation of any
object in Nature, and our own imitative
spirit. 473
Wilde goes on to say the art which has transformed ˝the
visible things of life˝ into artistic convention is valuable.
But slavish representation of life and nature has resulted in
work which is ˝vulgar, common and uninteresting.˝ He
maintained that formal equivalents were the crystallisation