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comprehensible only to minds shaken, sharpened, and
rendered almost clairvoyant by neurosis.˝ 495 Both Wilde
and Huysmans identified this ˝mal de l’être˝ with
modernity. And certainly the pessimism which existed in
artistic circles at the time coloured Wilde’s and Huysmans’
view of the function of art:
The artist is like a stretched string, a sheet of
sensitized paper, or a chemical reagent, he is
bound to react sharply to all sounds, all
smells, to a sunbeam striking a wall, the
screech of an oar in its oarlock, the delicious
trail of fragrance left by a delicately
complexioned stranger in her wake . . . Hence
the habitual pessimism of most modern
French writers from Chateaubriand to
Gautier, from Flaubert to Huysmans. 496
In England, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and
Idea was translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp in 1883.
The first French translation did not appear until 1886 but
his ideas were disseminated in France in the 1870s and his
Aphorisms made a great impact in artistic circles when they
were first translated into French in 1880. Schopenhauer
perceived existence to be based upon the ineluctable
operation of the will which was represented by nature. All
man’s actions and desires are a function of the operation of