Of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Dante, Schiller, and Goethe he spoke with ill-concealed contempt. Raseurs, all these "solemn pontiffs." His major detestation was Voltaire. Balzac, the prodigious novelist, left him unstirred. "Not an artistic epithet" in his edition, fifty volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread. Théophile Gautier did not attract him; he found the impeccable master cold and diluted; so many pages published to say nothing! Huysmans believed in "saying something," and for him it usually meant something disagreeable, or else contrary to accepted belief. He hated the theatre and his opinions of Scribe, Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou, Feuillet, and of the "old pedant" Sarcey, are savage. He had no feeling for the footlights, and not possessing much imagination and deficient in what are called "general ideas" (that is, the stereotyped commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate "thinkers"), he revolted at the lean or hysterical stuff manufactured by dramatists; plays that are neither life nor literature, nor even theatrical.
Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul-explorers in the poetical Parnassus of that period, appealed to Huysmans. He admired, as well he might, Flaubert, but found his company intolerable. That giant from Normandy was too healthy for the slender overwrought Parisian. He had, so said Huysmans, the manners of a traveling salesman--Balzac's Gaudissart--and would play his own Homais, being addicted to punning and disconcerting joking. Poor Flaubert! Poorer Huysmans! Such sensibility as his must have been a daily torture. Victor Hugo was "an incomparable trumpet, an epic of the garde nationale."
From Edmond de Goncourt with his condescending airs of "un vieux maître," he escaped by flight; and Turgenev, most amiable of great men, was a tedious Russian, "a spigot of tepid water always flowing." If Verlaine had been penned up in hospital or prison it would have been for the greater glory of French poetry. Jules Laforgue, "Quelle joie!" Remy de Gourmont: "I wrote a preface to one of his books" (Le Latin mystique). "That says enough." Marcel Provost: "Le jeune premier des romans de Georges Ohnet," which isn't bad. He rather evades a definite judgment of Anatole France: "Il s'y connaît, le gaillard; mais ce qu'il se défile!" The style and thought of these two remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls Maurice Barrès "Lord Beaconsfield," a high compliment to that exquisite writer's political attainments. He sums up Ferdinand Brunetière as "constipé," a sound definition of a shrewd, unsympathetic critic. Naturally women writers, "little geese," are not spared by this waspish misogynist, whose intense, pessimistic vision deformed ideas as well as objects.