The novels of Huysmans, however we may regard them as novels,
are, at all events, the sincere and complete expression of a very
remarkable personality. From _Marthe_ to _Là-Bas_ every story, every
volume, disengages the same atmosphere--the atmosphere of a London
November, when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little
miseries of life loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable
grotesqueness. Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is
mere sensation--and sensation, after all, is the one certainty in
a world which may be well or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes,
but which is certainly, for each of us, what each of us feels it to
be. To Huysmans the world appears to be a profoundly uncomfortable,
unpleasant, ridiculous place, with a certain solace in various forms
of art, and certain possibilities of at least temporary escape. Part
of his work presents to us a picture of ordinary life as he conceives
it, in its uniform trivial wretchedness; in another part he has
made experiment in directions which have seemed to promise escape,
relief; in yet other portions he has allowed himself the delight of
his sole enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of art. He himself would be the
first to acknowledge--indeed, practically, he has acknowledged that
the particular way in which he sees life is a matter of personal
temperament and constitution, a matter of nerves. The Goncourts have
never tired of insisting on the fact of their _névrose,_ of pointing
out its importance in connection with the form and structure of their
work, their touch on style, even. To them the _maladie fin de siècle_
has come delicately, as to the chlorotic fine ladies of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain: it has sharpened their senses to a point of morbid
acuteness, it has given their work a certain feverish beauty. To
Huysmans it has given the exaggerated horror of whatever is ugly and
unpleasant, with the fatal instinct of discovering, the fatal necessity
of contemplating, every flaw and every discomfort that a somewhat
imperfect world can offer for inspection. It is the transposition
of the ideal. Relative values are lost, for it is the sense of the
disagreeable only that is heightened; and the world, in this strange
disorder of vision, assumes an aspect which can only be compared with
that of a drop of impure water under the microscope. "Nature seen
through a temperament" is Zola's definition of all art. Nothing,
certainly, could be more exact and expressive as a definition of the
art of Huysmans.
To realise how faithfully and how completely Huysmans has revealed
himself in all he has written, it is necessary to know the man. "He
gave me the impression of a cat," some interviewer once wrote of him;
"courteous, perfectly polite, almost amiable, but all nerves, ready to
shoot out his claws at the least word." And indeed, there is something
of his favourite animal about him. The face is grey, wearily alert,
with a look of benevolent malice. At first sight it is commonplace,
the features are ordinary, one seems to have seen it at the Bourse or
the Stock Exchange. But gradually that strange, unvarying expression,
that look of benevolent malice, grows upon you as the influence of the
man makes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office--he is an
employé in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employé; I have
seen him in a café, in various houses; but I always see him in memory
as I used to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans
back on the sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive
fingers, looking at no one and at nothing, while Madame X moves about
with solid vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of
_bric-à-brac._ The spoils of all the world are there, in that ncredibly
tiny _salon;_ they lie underfoot, they climb up walls, they cling to
screens, brackets, and tables; one of your elbows menaces a Japanese
toy, the other a Dresden china shepherdess; all the colours of the
rainbow clash in a barbaric discord of notes. And in a corner of this
fantastic room, Huysmans lies back indifferently on the sofa, with the
air of one perfectly resigned to the boredom of life. Something is
said by my learned friend who is to write for the new periodical, or
perhaps it is the young editor of the new periodical who speaks, or
(if that were not impossible) the taciturn Englishman who accompanies
me; and Huysmans, without looking up, and without taking the trouble
to speak very distinctly, picks up the phrase, transforms it, more
likely transpierces it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of
impromptu elaboration. Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one
has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up
before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle
of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror
before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he
seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings
a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every
sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an
idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of
contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for human inbecility.
Yes, that is the true Huysmans, the Huysmans of _A Rebours,_ and it is
just such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality.
With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this
passion for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so
exclusively an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work
which, being produced to please himself, and being entirely typical
of himself, would be, in a way, the quintessence of contemporary
Decadence. And it is precisely such a book that Huysmans has written,
in the extravagant, astonishing _A Rebours._ All his other books
are a sort of unconscious preparation for this one book, a sort of
inevitable and scarcely necessary sequel to it. They range themselves
along the line of a somewhat erratic development, from Baudelaire,
through Goncourt, by way of Zola, to the surprising originality of so
disconcerting an exception to any and every order of things.
The descendant of a long line of Dutch painters--one of whom, Cornelius
Huysmans, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape men of the
great period--Joris-Karl Huysmans was born at Paris, February 5, 1848.
His first book, _Le Drageoir à Epices,_ published at the age of
twenty-six, is a _pasticcio_ of prose poems, done after Baudelaire, of
little sketches, done after Dutch artists, together with a few studies
of Parisian landscape, done after nature. It shows us the careful,
laboured work of a really artistic temperament; it betrays here and
there, the spirit of acrimonious observation which is to count for so
much with Huysmans--in the crude malice of _L'Extase,_ for example, in
the notation of the "richness of tone," the "superb colouring," of an
old drunkard. And one sees already something of the novelty and the
precision of his description, the novelty and the unpleasantness of the
subjects which he chooses to describe, in this vividly exact picture
of the carcass of a cow hung up outside a butcher's shop: "As in a
hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shot
out on every side like trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work
extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurled
their violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a
sharp white, against the red medley of quivering flesh."
In _Marthe: histoire d'une fille,_ which followed in 1876, two years
later, Huysmans is almost as far from actual achievement as in _Le
Drageoir à Epices,_ but the book, in its crude attempt to deal
realistically, and somewhat after the manner of Goncourt, with the life
of a prostitute of the lowest depths, marks a considerable advance upon
the somewhat casual experiments of his earlier manner. It is important
to remember that _Marthe_ preceded _La Fille Élisa_ and _Nana._ "I
write what I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced," says the
brief and defiant preface, "and I write it as well as I can: that is
all. This explanation is not an excuse, it is simply the statement of
the aim that I pursue in art." Explanation or excuse notwithstanding,
the book was forbidden to be sold in France. It is Naturalism in its
earliest and most pitiless stage--Naturalism which commits the error
of evoking no sort of interest in this unhappy creature who rises a
little from her native gutter, only to fall back more woefully into the
gutter again. Goncourt's Élisa at least interests us; Zola's Nana at
all events appeals to our senses. But Marthe is a mere document, like
her story. Notes have been taken--no doubt _sur le vif_--they have been
strung together, and here they are with only an interesting brutality,
a curious sordidness to note, in these descriptions that do duty for
psychology and incident alike, in the general flatness of character,
the general dislocation of episode.
_Les Sœurs Vatard,_ published in 1879, and the short story _Sac au
Dos,_ which appeared in 1880 in the famous Zolaist manifesto, _Les
Soirées de Médan,_ show the influence of _Les Rougon-Macquart_ rather
than of _Germinie Lacerteux._ For the time the "formula" of Zola
has been accepted: the result is, a remarkable piece of work, but a
story without a story, a frame without a picture. With Zola, there
is at all events a beginning and an end, a chain of events, a play
of character upon incident. But in _Les Sœurs Vatard_ there is no
reason for the narrative ever beginning or ending; there are miracles
of description--the workroom, the rue de Sèvres, the locomotives, the
_Foire du pain d'épice_--which lead to nothing; there are interiors,
there are interviews, there are the two work-girls, Céline and Désirée,
and their lovers; there is what Zola himself described as _tout
ce milieu ouvrier, ce coin de misère et d'ignorance, de tranquille
ordure et d'air naturellement empesté._ And with it all there is a
heavy sense of stagnancy, a dreary lifelessness. All that is good in
the book reappears, in vastly better company, in _En Ménage_ (1881),
a novel which is, perhaps, more in the direct line of heritage from
_L'Education Sentimentale_--the starting-point of the Naturalistic
novel--than any other novel of the Naturalists.
_En Ménage_ is the story of _"Monsieur Tout-le-monde,_ an insignificant
personality, one of those poor creatures who have not even the
supreme consolation of being able to complain of any injustice in
their fate, for an injustice supposes at all events a misunderstood
merit, a force." André is the reduction to the bourgeois formula of
the invariable hero of Huysmans. He is just enough removed from the
commonplace to suffer from it with acuteness. He cannot get on either
with or without a woman in his establishment. Betrayed by his wife, he
consoles himself with a mistress, and finally goes back to the wife.
And the moral of it all is: "Let us be stupidly comfortable, if we
can, in any way we can: but it is almost certain that we cannot." In
_A Vau-l'Eau,_ a less interesting story which followed _En Ménage,_
the daily misery of the respectable M. Folantin, the government
employé, consists in the impossible search for a decent restaurant,
a satisfactory dinner: for M. Folantin, too, there is only the same
counsel of a desperate, an inevitable resignation. Never has the
intolerable monotony of small inconveniences been so scrupulously, so
unsparingly chronicled, as in these two studies in the heroic degree
of the commonplace. It happens to André, at a certain epoch in his
life, to take back an old servant who had left him many years before.
He finds that she has exactly the same defects as before, and "to find
them there again," comments the author, "did not displease him. He had
been expecting them all the time, he saluted them as old acquaintances,
yet with a certain surprise, notwithstanding, to see them neither
grown nor diminished. He noted for himself with satisfaction that
the stupidity of his servant had remained stationary." On another
page, referring to the inventor of cards, Huysmans defines him as one
who "did something towards suppressing the free exchange of human
imbecility." Having to say in passing that a girl has returned from a
ball, "she was at home again," he observes, "after the half-dried sweat
of the waltzes." In this invariably sarcastic turn of the phrase, this
absoluteness of contempt, this insistence on the disagreeable, we find
the note of Huysmans, particularly at this point in his career, when,
like Flaubert, he forced himself to contemplate and to analyse the more
mediocre manifestations of _la bêtise humaine._
There is a certain perversity in this furious contemplation of
stupidity, this fanatical insistence on the exasperating attraction of
the sordid and the disagreeable; and it is by such stages that we come
to _A Rebours._ But on the way we have to note a volume of _Croquis
Parisiens_ (1880), in which the virtuoso who is a part of the artist
in Huysmans has executed some of his most astonishing feats; and a
volume on L'_Art Moderne_ (1883), in which the most modern of artists
in literature has applied himself to the criticism--the revelation,
rather--of modernity in art. In the latter, Huysmans was the first
to declare the supremacy of Degas--"the greatest artist that we
possess to-day in France"--while announcing with no less fervour the
remote, reactionary, and intricate genius of Gustave Moreau. He was
the first to discover Raffaëlli, "the painter of poor people and the
open sky--a sort of Parisian Millet," as he called him; the first to
discover Forain, _"le véritable peintre de la fille"_; the first to
discover Odilon Redon, to do justice to Pissaro and Paul Gauguin. No
literary artist since Baudelaire has made so valuable a contribution
to art criticism, and the _Curiosités Esthétiques_ are, after all,
less exact in their actual study, less revolutionary, and less really
significant in their critical judgments, than L'_Art Moderne._ The
_Croquis Parisiens,_ which, in its first edition, was illustrated
by etchings of Forain and Raffaëlli, is simply the attempt to do in
words what those artists have done in aquafortis or in pastel. There
are the same Parisian types--the omnibus-conductor, the washerwoman,
the man who sells hot chestnuts--the same impressions of a sick and
sorry landscape, La Bièvre, for preference, in all its desolate and
lamentable attraction; there is a marvellously minute series of
studies of that typically Parisian music-hall, the Folies-Bergère.
Huysmans' faculty of description is here seen at its fullest stretch of
agility; precise, suggestive, with all the outline and colour of actual
brush-work, it might even be compared with the art of Degas, only there
is just that last touch wanting, that breath of palpitating life, which
is what we always get in Degas, what we never get in Huysmans.
In _L'Art Moderne,_ speaking of the water-colours of Forain, Huysmans
attributes to them "a specious and _cherché_ art, demanding, for its
appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense." To
realise the full value, the real charm, of _A Rebours,_ some such
initiation might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its
exquisite artificiality, it is the natural sequel of _En Ménage_ and
_A Vau-l'Eau,_ which are so much more acutely sordid than the most
sordid kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred
and horror of human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence,
which we have seen to be the special form of Huysmans' _névrose._ The
motto, taken from a thirteenth-century mystic, Ruysbroeck the Admirable,
is a cry for escape, for the "something in the world that is there in
no satisfying measure, or not at all": _Il faut que je me réjouisse
au-dessus du temps ... quoique le monde ait horreur de ma joie et
que sa grossièreté ne sache pas ce que je veux dire._ And the book
is the history of a _Thebaïde raffinée_--a voluntary exile from the
world in a new kind of "Palace of Art." Des Esseintes, the vague but
typical hero, is one of those half-pathological cases which help us to
understand the full meaning of the word _décadence,_ which they partly
represent. The last descendant of an ancient family, his impoverished
blood tainted by all sorts of excesses, Des Esseintes finds himself
at thirty _sur le chemin, dégrisé, seul, abominablement lassé._ He
has already realised that "the world is divided, in great part, into
swaggerers and simpletons." His one desire is to "hide himself away,
far from the world, in some retreat, where he might deaden the sound
of the loud rumbling of inflexible life, as one covers the street with
straw, for sick people." This retreat he discovers, just far enough
from Paris to be safe from disturbance, just near enough to be saved
from the nostalgia of the unattainable. He succeeds in making his house
a paradise of the artificial, choosing the tones of colour that go
best with candle-light, for it need scarcely be said that Des Esseintes
has effected a simple transposition of night and day. His disappearance
from the world has been complete; it seems to him that the "comfortable
desert" of his exile need never cease to be just such a luxurious
solitude; it seems to him that he has attained his desire, that he has
attained to happiness.
Disturbing physical symptoms harass him from time to time, but they
pass. It is an effect of nerves that now and again he is haunted by
remembrance; the recurrence of a perfume, the reading of a book, brings
back a period of life when his deliberate perversity was exercised
actively in matters of the senses. There are his fantastic banquets,
his fantastic amours: the _repas de deuil,_ Miss Urania the acrobat,
the episode of the ventriloquist-woman and the reincarnation of the
Sphinx and the Chimæra of Flaubert, the episode of the boy _chez_
Madame Laure. A casual recollection brings up the schooldays of his
childhood with the Jesuits, and with that the beliefs of childhood,
the fantasies of the Church, the Catholic abnegation of the _Imitatio_
joining so strangely with the final philosophy of Schopenhauer.
At times his brain is haunted by social theories--his dull hatred
of the ordinary in life taking form in the region of ideas. But in
the main he feeds himself, with something of the satisfaction of
success, on the strange food for the sensations with which he has so
laboriously furnished himself. There are his books, and among these a
special library of the Latin writers of the Decadence. Exasperated by
Virgil, profoundly contemptuous of Horace, he tolerates Lucan (which
is surprising), adores Petronius (as well he might), and delights
in the neologisms and the exotic novelty of Apuleius. His curiosity
extends to the later Christian poets--from the coloured verse of
Claudian down to the verse which is scarcely verse of the incoherent
ninth century. He is, of course, an amateur of exquisite printing, of
beautiful bindings, and possesses an incomparable Baudelaire _(édition
tirée à un exemplaire),_ a unique Mallarmé. Catholicism being the
adopted religion of the Decadence--for its venerable age, valuable in
such matters as the age of an old wine, its vague excitation of the
senses, its mystical picturesqueness--Des Esseintes has a curious
collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and
the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find their place side by
side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a
monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality, Barbey d'Aurevilly.
His collection of "profane" writers is small, but it is selected for
the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be his only care in
art--for the somewhat diseased, or the somewhat artificial beauty
that alone can strike, a responsive thrill from his exacting nerves.
"Considering within himself, he realised that a work of art, in order
to attract him, must come to him with that quality of strangeness
demanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route,
and sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated
deliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over which
he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or
of solid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. He
delighted in a work of art both for what it was in itself and for
what it could lend him; he would fain go along with it, thanks to it,
as though sustained by an adjuvant, as though borne in a vehicle,
into a sphere where his sublimated sensations would wake in him an
unaccustomed stir, the cause of which he would long and vainly seek
to determine." So he comes to care supremely for Baudelaire, "who,
more than any other, possessed the marvellous power of rendering,
with a strange sanity of expression, the most fleeting, the most
wavering morbid states of exhausted minds, of desolate souls." In
Flaubert he prefers _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine;_ in Goncourt, _La
Faustin;_ in Zola, _La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret-_ the exceptional, the
most remote and _recherché_ outcome of each temperament. And of the
three it is the novel of Goncourt that appeals to him with special
intimacy--that novel which, more than any other, seems to express, in
its exquisitely perverse charm, all that decadent civilisation of which
Des Esseintes is the type and symbol. In poetry he has discovered the
fine perfume, the evanescent charm, of Paul Verlaine, and near that
great poet (forgetting, strangely, Arthur Rimbaud) he places two poets
who are curious--the disconcerting, tumultuous Tristan Corbière, and
the painted and bejewelled Théodore Hannon. With Edgar Poe he has
the instinctive sympathy which drew Baudelaire to the enigmatically
perverse Decadent of America; he delights, sooner than all the world,
in the astonishing, unbalanced, unachieved genius of Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it is in Stéphane Mallarmé that he finds the
incarnation of "the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in
its organism, weakened in its ideas by age, exhausted by the excesses
of syntax, sensitive only to the curiosity which fevers sick people,
and yet hastening to say everything, now at the end, torn by the wish
_to_ atone for all its omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest
memories of sorrow on its death-bed."
But it is not on books alone that Des Esseintes nurses his sick and
craving fancy. He pushes his delight in the artificial to the last
limits, and diverts himself with a bouquet of jewels, a concert of
flowers, an orchestra of liqueurs, an orchestra of perfumes. In flowers
he prefers the real flowers that imitate artificial ones. It is the
monstrosities of nature, the offspring of unnatural adulteries, that
he cherishes in the barbarically coloured flowers, the plants with
barbaric names, the carnivorous plants of the Antilles--morbid horrors
of vegetation, chosen, not for their beauty, but for their strangeness.
And his imagination plays harmonies on the sense of taste, like
combinations of music, from the flute-like sweetness of anisette, the
trumpet-note of kirsch, the eager yet velvety sharpness of curaçao, the
clarionet. He combines scents, weaving them into odorous melodies, with
effects like those of the refrains of certain poems, employing, for
example, the method of Baudelaire in _L'Irréparable_ and _Le Balcon,_
where the last line of the stanza is the echo of the first, in the
languorous progression of the melody. And above all he has his few,
carefully chosen pictures, with their diverse notes of strange beauty
and strange terror--the two Salomés of Gustave Moreau, the "Religious
Persecutions" of Jan Luyken, the opium-dreams of Odilon Redon. His
favourite artist is Gustave Moreau, and it is on this superb and
disquieting picture that he cares chiefly to dwell.
A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath innumerable
arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman pillars, enamelled
with vari-coloured bricks, set with mosaics, incrusted with lapis
lazuli and sardonyx, In a palace like the basilica of an architecture
at once Mussulman and Byzantine. In the centre of the tabernacle
surmounting the altar, fronted with rows of circular steps, sat the
Tetrarch Herod, the tiara on his head, his legs pressed together, his
hands on his knees. His face was yellow, parchment-like, annulated
with wrinkles, withered with age; his long beard floated like a white
cloud on the jewelled stars that constellated the robe of netted old
across his breast. Around this statue, motionless, frozen in the
sacred pose of a Hindu god, perfumes burned, throwing out clouds of
vapour, pierced, as by the phosphorescent eyes of animals, by the fire
of precious stones set in the sides of the throne; then the vapour
mounted, unrolling itself beneath arches where the blue smoke mingled
with the powdered gold of great sunrays, fallen jrom the domes.
In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of this
church, Salomé, her left arm extended in a gesture of command, her bent
right arm holding at the level of the face a great lotus, advances
slowly to the sound of a guitar, thrummed by a woman who crouches on
the floor.
With collected, solemn, almost august countenance, she begins the
lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses of the aged
Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of the
whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her skin,
her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal robe,
sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold, the jewelled
breastplate, whose every stitch is a precious stone, bursts into flame,
scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the ivory-toned, tea-rose flesh,
like splendid insects with dazzling wings, marbled with carmine,
dotted with morning gold, diapered with steel-blue, streaked with
peacock-green. . . . . . . . . In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived
on no Scriptural data, Des Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the
strange, superhuman Salomé that he had dreamed. She was no more the
mere dancing-girl who, with the corrupt torsion of her limbs, tears
a cry of desire from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her
palpitating body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the
will, of a king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible
Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen
among, many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has
hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,
insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near to
her, all that look upon her, all that she touches.
It is in such a "Palace of Art" that Des Esseintes would recreate his
already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion
is only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. This
one episode of action, this one touch of realism in a book given over
to the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projected
voyage to London, a voyage that never occurs. Des Esseintes has been
reading Dickens, idly, to quiet his nerves, and the violent colours
of those ultra-British scenes and characters have imposed themselves
upon his imagination. Days of rain and fog complete the picture of
that _pays de brume et de bone,_ and suddenly, stung by the unwonted
desire for change, he takes the train to Paris, resolved to distract
himself by a visit to London. Arrived in Paris before his time, he
takes a cab to the office of _Galignani's Messenger,_ fancying himself,
as the rain-drops rattle on the roof and the mud splashes against the
windows, already in the midst of the immense city, its smoke and dirt.
He reaches _Galignani's Messenger,_ and there, turning over Baedekers
and Mur-rays, loses himself in dreams of an imagined London. He buys a
Baedeker, and, to pass the time, enters the "Bodéga" at the corner of
the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Castiglione. The wine-cellar is crowded
with Englishmen: he sees, as he drinks his port, and listens to the
unfamiliar accents, all the characters of Dickens--a whole England
of caricature; as he drinks his Amontillado, the recollection of Poe
puts a new horror into the good-humoured faces about him. Leaving the
"Bodéga," he steps out again into the rain-swept street, regains his
cab, and drives to the English tavern of the Rue d'Amsterdam. He has
just time for dinner, and he finds a place beside the _insulaires,_
with "their porcelain eyes, their crimson cheeks," and orders a heavy
English dinner, which he washes down with ale and porter, seasoning
his coffee, as he imagines we do in England, with gin. As time passes,
and the hour of the train draws near, he begins to reflect vaguely on
his project; he recalls the disillusion of the visit he had once paid
to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion await him in London? "Why
travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a chair? Was he not at
London already, since its odours, its atmosphere, its inhabitants, its
food, its utensils, were all about him?" The train is due, but he does
not stir. "I have felt and seen," he says to himself, "what I wanted
to feel and see. I have been saturated with English life all this
time; it would be madness to lose, by a clumsy change of place, these
imperishable sensations." So he gathers together his luggage, and goes
home again, resolving never to abandon the "docile phantasmagoria of
the brain" for the mere realities of the actual world. But his nervous
malady, one of whose symptoms had driven him forth and brought him back
so spasmodically, is on the increase. He is seized by hallucinations,
haunted by sounds: the hysteria of Schumann, the morbid exaltation of
Berlioz, communicate themselves to him in the music that besieges his
brain. Obliged at last to send for a doctor, we find him, at the end
of the book, ordered back to Paris, to the normal life, the normal
conditions, with just that chance of escape from death or madness.
So suggestively, so instructively, closes the record of a strange,
attractive folly--in itself partly a serious ideal (which indeed is
Huysmans' own), partly the caricature of that ideal. Des Esseintes,
though studied from a real man, who is known to those who know a
certain kind of society in Paris, is a type rather than a man: he is
the offspring of the Decadent art that he adores, and this book a
sort of breviary for its worshippers. It has a place of its own in
the literature of the day, for it sums up, not only a talent, but a
spiritual epoch.
_A Rebours_ is a book that can only be written once, and since that
date Huysmans has published a short story, _Un Dilemme_ (1887), which
is merely a somewhat lengthy anecdote; two novels, _En Rade_(1887)
and _Là-Bas_(1891), both of which are interesting experiments, but
neither of them an entire success; and a volume of art criticism,
_Certains_ (1890), notable for a single splendid essay, that on
Félicien Rops, the etcher of the fantastically erotic. _En Rade_ is a
sort of deliberately exaggerated record--vision rather then record--of
the disillusions of a country sojourn, as they affect the disordered
nerves of a town _névrose._ The narrative is punctuated by nightmares,
marvellously woven out of nothing, and with no psychological value--the
human part of the book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best,
the representation of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the
tragic ennui of the country. There is a cat which becomes interesting
in its agonies; but the long boredom of the man and woman is only
too faithfully shared with the reader. _Là-Bas_ is a more artistic
creation, on a more solid foundation. It is a study of Satanism,
a dexterous interweaving of the history of Gilles de Retz (the
traditional Bluebeard) with the contemporary manifestations of the
Black Art. "The execration of impotence, the hate of the mediocre--that
is perhaps one of the most indulgent definitions of Diabolism," says
Huysmans, somewhere in the book, and it is on this side that one finds
the link of connection with the others of that series of pessimist
studies in life. _Un naturalisme spiritualiste,_ he defines his own
art at this point in its development; and it is in somewhat the
"documentary" manner that he applies himself to the study of these
strange problems, half of hysteria, half of a real mystical corruption
that does actually exist in our midst. I do not know whether the
monstrous tableau of the Black Mass--so marvellously, so revoltingly
described in the central episode of the book--is still enacted in our
days, but I do know that all but the most horrible practices of the
sacrilegious magic of the Middle Ages are yet performed, from time
to time, in a secrecy which is all but absolute. The character of
Madame Chantelouve is an attempt, probably the first in literature,
to diagnose a case of Sadism in a woman. To say that it is successful
would be to assume that the thing is possible, which one hesitates to
do. The book is even more disquieting, to the normal mind, than _A
Rebours._ But it is not, like that, the study of an exception which has
become a type. It is the study of an exception which does not profess
to be anything but a disease.
Huysmans' place in contemporary literature is not quite easy to
estimate. There is a danger of being too much attracted, or too much
repelled, by those qualities of deliberate singularity which make
his work, sincere expression as it is of his own personality, so
artificial and _recherché_ in itself. With his pronounced, exceptional
characteristics, it would have been impossible for him to write fiction
impersonally, or to range himself, for long, in any school, under any
master. Interrogated one day as to his opinion of Naturalism, he had
but to say in reply: _Au fond, il y a des écrivains qui out du talent
et d'autres qui n'en out pas, qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques,
décadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, ça m'est égal! il s'agit pour
moi d'avoir du talent, et voilà tout!_ But, as we have seen, he has
undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first
he has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and,
even in _Le Drageoir à Epices,_ we find such daring combinations as
this _(Camaïeu Rouge)--Cette fanfare de rouge m'étourdissait; cette
gamme d'une intensité furieuse, d'une violence inouïe, m'aveuglait._
Working upon the foundation of Flaubert and of Goncourt, the two
great modern stylists, he has developed an intensely personal style
of his own, in which the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the
sense of colour. He manipulates the French language with a freedom
sometimes barbarous, "dragging his images by the heels or the hair"
(in the admirable phrase of Léon Bloy) "up and down the worm-eaten
staircase of terrified syntax," gaining, certainly, the effects at
which he aims. He possesses, in the highest degree, that _style tacheté
et faisandé_--high-flavoured and spotted with corruption--that he
attributes to Goncourt and Verlaine. And with this audacious and
barbaric profusion of words--chosen always for their colour and their
vividly expressive quality--he is able to describe the essentially
modern aspects of things as no one had ever described them before. No
one before him had ever so realised the perverse charm of the sordid,
the perverse charm of the artificial. Exceptional always, it is for
such qualities as these, rather than for the ordinary qualities of the
novelist, that he is remarkable. His stories are without incident,
they are constructed to go on until they stop, they are almost without
characters. His psychology is a matter of the sensations, and chiefly
the visual sensations. The moral nature is ignored, the emotions
resolve themselves for the most part into a sordid ennui, rising at
times into a rage at existence. The protagonist of every book is not
so much a character as a bundle of impressions and sensations--the
vague outline of a single consciousness, his own. But it is that single
consciousness--in this morbidly personal writer--with which we are
concerned. For Huysmans' novels, with all their strangeness, their
charm, their repulsion, typical too, as they are, of much beside
himself, are certainly the expression of a personality as remarkable as
that of any contemporary writer.
1892.