There are books which, after all, are but books—as cinematograph films are but films. And who ever yearned to probe the heart of the film producer, though our pockets bulge with photographs of film stars? But there are also books which are almost primarily letters of introduction to their authors. Such, in England, are the slim volumes which immortalize Lionel Johnson : such, in France, are the novels—for so we must call them—of Joris Karl Huysmans.

His is a lonely soul. Perhaps the best summaries of it are the quotations his title-pages almost always bear emblazoned on them : for these are armigerous books, even those which do not flaunt St. Benedict’s Cross for their crest. Of the rest the keynote is perhaps furnished by the sentence of Blessed John Ruysbroeck which introduces A Reborns: Il faut que je me rejouisse au-dessus de mon temps . . . quoique le monde ait horrem de ma foie, et que sa grossièreté ne sache pas ce que je veux dire. Ruysbroeck, writing them, knew the echo : to Huysmans it came later : Sed confidite, ego vici mundum.

Another of these blazonries tells us Catholics the raison d'être of the man. It is the shield of La Cathédrale—perhaps the only epic which has made another epic its hero : Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et locum habitationis gloriae tuae . . . Ne perdas cum impiis, Deus, animam meam. And in this book most of all Huysmans shows us the way to live out of an age of which so many of us are weary.