Against Nature, in the words of the author, exploded 'like a meteorite' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day.

A single passion, woman, might have restrained him in the universal contempt that gripped him, but she, too, had palled. A point in Gray's corruption is punctuated by the gift of a novel from one of his mentors; a small yellow book that ruins what's left of Dorian's conscious.The novel follows a young aristocrat named Jean Des Essientes who retreats from busy city life to a home in the country to spend the rest of his days pursuing aesthetic philosophy. Huysmans initially tried to placate him by claiming the book was still in the Naturalist style and that Des Esseintes's opinions and tastes were not his own. However, he certainly likes them fancy duds, to judge by some of the descriptions - "suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoasts," for example.

He is an insufferable elitist snob, hating everyone in the world and all they do, despising the majority of art and literature and liking only a very few painters and authors. Europeans Are Kinky: Apart from some major-league womanising in his younger days, which ultimately bored him and turned him towards an aesthetic lifestyle, des Esseintes at one point seduces a female circus acrobat and also a woman who turns him on by using her skills as a professional ventriloquist to pretend that her husband is about to break in on them. In painting, there was a deluge of lifeless inanities, in literature, an excess of stylistic vapidity and intellectual cowardice, because they had to impute honesty to shady businessmen, virtue to the swindler…and chastity to the anti-clerical…the immesurable vulgarity of the financier…chanting its immoral canticles of praise before the ungodly tabernacle of the Bank. As critics from all sides lambasted this book, and him for writing such a wretched thing, one critic stood out to him by simply saying, "After such a book, it only remains for the author to choose between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross.Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmans's À rebours. Lastly…the younger generation, that class of frightful louts who feel the need to speak and laugh at the top of their voices in restaurants and cafes, who knock you off the pavement without saying sorry, and who, without even an excuse me, without even noticing you, ram the wheels of their baby carriages against your legs. His novel The Last Hundred Days was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award, and his second novel, Throw me to the Wolves , won the 2020 Encore Award. He finally came to the conclusion that, for the most part, the world was composed of bullies and imbeciles. The leading figures of the movement included the two French men, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin, but Symbolism was not limited to France with other practitioners including the Norwegian Edvard Munch, the Austrian Gustav Klimt and the British Aubrey Beardsley.