"Le Romanée and Chambertin, Clos-Vougeot and Corton made the abbatial
pomps, princely fetes, opulences of vestments figured in gold, aglow
with light, pass before him. The Clos-Vougeot especially dazzled him.
To him that wine seemed the syrup of great dignitaries. The etiquette
glittered before his eyes, like glories surrounded by beams, placed in
churches, behind the occiput of Virgins."
The writer who in 1881, in the midst of the naturalistic morass, had,
before a name read on a wine list, such a vision, although ironic,
of evoked splendors, must have puzzled his friends and made them
suspect an approaching defection. In fact, several years later, the
unexpected _A Rebours_ appeared, and it was not a point of departure,
but the consecration of a new literature. No longer was it so much a
question of forcing a brutal externality to enter the domains of Art
by representation, as of drawing from this very representation motives
for dreams and interior revaluations. _En Rade_ further developed
this system whose fruitfulness is limitless,--while the naturalistic
method proved itself still more sterile than even its enemies had dared
hope,--a system of strictest logic and of such marvelous suppleness
that it permits, without forfeiting anything to likelihood, to
intercalate in exact scenes of rustic life, pages like "Esther" or like
the "_voyage sélénien_."
The architecture of _Là-Bas_ is based on an analogous plan, but the
license profitably finds itself restrained by the unity of subject,
which remains absolute beneath its multiple faces: the Christ of
Gunewald, in his extreme mystic violence, his startling and consoling
hideousness, is not a fugue without line, nor are the demoniac forest
of Tiffauges, the cruel Black Mass, or any of the "fragments" displaced
or inharmonious; nevertheless, before the freedom of the novel, they
had been criticized, not in themselves, but as not rigorously necessary
to the advance of the book. Fortunately the novel is finally free, and
to say more, the novel, as still conceived by Zola or Bourget, to us
appears a conception as superannuated as the epic poem or the tragedy.
Only, the old frame is still able to serve; it sometimes is necessary
to entice the public to very arduous subjects, to simulate vague
romantic intrigues, which the author unravels at his own will, after he
has said all he wished to say. But the essential of yesterday is become
the accessory, and an accessory more and more scorned: quite rare at
the present hour are those writers who are clever or strong enough to
confine themselves to a demolished genre, to spur the fatigued cavalry
of sentimentalities and adulteries.
Moreover, aesthetics tends to specialization in as many forms as there
are talents: among many vanities are admissible arrogances to which
we cannot refuse the right to create into normal characters. Huysmans
is of those; he no longer writes novels, he makes books, and he plans
them according to an original arrangement; I believe that is one of
the reasons why some persons still take issue with his literature and
find it immoral. This last point is easy to explain by a single word:
for the non-artist, art is always immoral. As soon as one wishes, for
example, to translate sexual relations into a new language, he is
immoral because he discloses, fatally, acts which, treated by ordinary
procedures, would remain unperceived, lost in the mist of common
things. Thus it is that an artist, not at all erotic, can be accused of
stupid outrages by the foolish or the mischievous, before the public.
It, nevertheless, does not seem that the facts of love or rather of
aberration related in _Là-Bas_ at all entice the simplicity of virginal
ignorance. This book rather gives disgust or horror of sensuality in
that it does not invite to foolish experiences or even to permissible
unions. Will not immorality, if we behold it from a particular and
peculiarly religious point of view, consist, on the contrary, in the
insistence upon the exquisiteness of carnal love and the vaunting of
the delights of legitimate copulation?
The Middle Age knew not: our hypocrisies. It was not at all ignorant
of the eternal turpitudes, but it knew how to hate them. It had no
use for our conduct, nor for our refinements; it published the vices,
sculped them on its cathedral portals and spread them in the verses of
its poets. It had less regard for refraining from terrifying the fears
of mummied souls than for tearing apart the robes and revealing the
man, and showing to man, so as to make him ashamed, all the ugliness of
his low animality. But it did not make the brute wallow in his vice;
it placed him on his knees and made him lift his head. Huysmans has
understood all this, and it was difficult to conquer. After the horrors
of the satanic debauch, before the earthly punishment, he has, like
the noble weeping people he evokes, forgiven even the most frightful
slayers of infants, the basest sadist, the most monstrous fool that
ever was.
Having absolved such a man, he could without pharisaism absolve
himself, and with the aid of God, some more humble and quite brotherly
succor, of helpful reading, visitations to gentle conventual chapels,
Huysmans one day found himself converted to mysticism, and wrote
_En Route_, that book which is like a statue of stone that suddenly
begins to weep. It is a mysticism a little raucous and hard, but like
his phrases, his epithets, Huysmans is hard. Mysticism first came
to him through the eyes rather than through the soul. He observed
religious facts with the fear of being their dupe and the hope
that they would be absurd; he was caught in the very meshes of the
_credo-quia-absurdum_,--happy victim of his curiosity.
Now, fatigued at having watched men's hypocritical faces, he watches
the stones, preparing a supreme book on "The Cathedral." There, if it
is a question of feeling and understanding, is it especially a question
of sight. He will see as no other person has seen, for no one other
person has seen, no one ever was gifted with a glance so sharp, so
boring, so frank and so skilled in insinuating himself into the very
wrinkles of faces, rose-windows and masks.
Huysmans is an eye.