Christa Giles

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the masses. However, he similarly held, in the Japanese
tradition, that a painting did not exist in isolation but had
its place on a wall; and therefore the interplay of colour,
shape, and form within the room also had to be taken into
consideration. These interests were expressed in A rebours,
where Des Esseintes, ˝a connoisseur of colours,˝ 489 scent,
and style, creates out of his house a refuge and an escape
through art. Indeed, the first chapter, which describes the
interior of the house Fontenay, ends by focussing on a
˝magnificent triptych˝ which contained three works by
Baudelaire: two sonnets and in the middle the prose poem
entitled, significantly, ˝Anywhere Out of the World.˝
That art took the place of religion, or at least was
man’s only means of salvation, was a commonplace in
Huysmans’ and Wilde’s work. Accordingly, they attempted
to escape reality by replacing it with art. The attempt to
find ultimate meaning in the world and the inability to
light upon such meaning resulted in an essentially ironic
perspective. Art became not only a refuge but a means of
re-creating life. ˝Actual life,˝ wrote Wilde, ˝was chaos, but
there was something terribly logical about the
imagination.˝ 490 Form and style therefore invests life with
meaning, order. Thus the two supreme and highest arts are
˝Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of