Christa Giles

218
Manifestly, then, Wilde and Huysmans deemed that
whatever the middle classes considered ugly was beautiful:
A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely
distasteful to them, and whenever it appears
they get so angry and bewildered that they
always use two stupid expressions – one is
that the work of art is grossly unintelligible;
the other, that the work of art is grossly
immoral. What they mean by these words
seems to me to be this. When they say a work
is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the
artist has said or made a beautiful thing that
is new; when they describe a work as grossly
immoral, they mean that the artist has said or
made a beautiful thing that is true. 558
Husymans came to a similar conclusion when he said that
the exquisiteness of Degas’ sculpture remained
unintelligible for this public. He too stressed the
importance of a new and fresh mode of approach in his
criticism, praising such artists as Manet for their ˝mépris
des conventions adoptées depuis des siècles˝ 559 and
rejecting a public ˝qui se pique de marcher de l’avant et que
toute tentative effraye.˝ 560
As moral categories were perceived to be obsolete,
and as art rather than nature was the repository of all