Christa Giles

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in the hands of a unique temperament, according to Wilde
and Huysmans, enabled the artist to achieve a ˝modern
vision.˝ Style became the complete expression of
personality, a means of ordering, organising, creating form,
and imposing it upon one’s material. The aim was not
reconstitution of the external world but rather the creation
of a pictorial one. In Maurice Denis’ words:
The Symbolist viewpoint asks us to consider
the work of art as an equivalent of a sensation
received; thus nature can be, for the artist,
only a state of his own subjectivity. And what
we call subjective distortion is virtually
style. 586
These words echo Wilde’s; a step beyond is the Symbolists’
idea of evoking sensation by means of form and colour
which leads towards abstraction. This was a step which
Wilde and Huysrnans did not take, although in some
respects they pointed the way.
In A rebours, Huysmans’ assessment of Mallarmé
suggests that the route language took was comparable to
that of painting at the time:
Sensitive to the remotest affinities, he would
often use a term that by analogy suggested at
once form, scent, colour, quality, and