In the preface to his first novel, _Marthe: histoire d'une fille,_
thirty years ago, Huysmans defined his theory of art in this defiant
phrase: "I write what I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced,
and I write it as well as I can: that is all." Ten or twelve years
ago, he could still say, in answer to an interviewer who asked him his
opinion of Naturalism: "At bottom, there are writers who have talent
and others who have not; let them be Naturalists, Romantics, Decadents,
what you will, it is all the same to me: I only want to know if they
have talent." Such theoretical liberality, in a writer of original
talent, is a little disconcerting: it means that he is without a theory
of his own, that he is not yet conscious of having chosen his own way.
And, indeed, it is only with _En Route_ that Huysmans can be said to
have discovered the direction in which he had really been travelling
from the beginning.
In a preface written not long since for a limited edition of _A
Rebours,_ Huysmans confessed that he had never been conscious of the
direction in which he was travelling. "My life and my literature,"
he affirmed, "have undoubtedly a certain amount of passivity, of the
incalculable, of a direction not mine. I have simply obeyed; I have
been led by what are called 'mysterious ways.'" He is speaking of the
conversion which took him to La Trappe in 1892, but the words apply
to the whole course of his career as a man of letters. In _Là-Bas,_
which is a sort of false start, he had, indeed, realised, though for
himself at that time ineffectually, that "it is essential to preserve
the veracity of the document, the precision of detail, the fibrous and
nervous language of Realism, but it is equally essential to become
the well-digger of the soul, and not to attempt to explain what is
mysterious by mental maladies.... It is essential, in a word, to follow
the great road so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is necessary also to
trace a parallel pathway in the air, and to grapple with the within
and the after, to create, in a word, a spiritual Naturalism." This
is almost a definition of the art of _En Route,_ where this spiritual
realism is applied to the history of a soul, a consciousness; in _La
Cathédrale_ the method has still further developed, and Huysmans
becomes, in his own way, a Symbolist.
To the student of psychology few more interesting cases could be
presented than the development of Huysmans. From the first he has
been a man "for whom the visible world existed," indeed, but as the
scene of a slow martyrdom. The world has always appeared to him to
be a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, and ridiculous place; and
it has been a necessity of his temperament to examine it minutely,
with all the patience of disgust, and a necessity of his method to
record it with an almost ecstatic hatred. In his first book, _Le
Drageoir à Epices,_ published at the age of twenty-six, we find him
seeking his colour by preference in a drunkard's cheek or a carcase
outside a butcher's shop. _Marthe,_ published at Brussels in 1876,
anticipates _La Fille Élisa_ and _Nana,_ but it has a crude brutality
of observation in which there is hardly a touch of pity. _Les Sœurs
Vatard_ is a frame without a picture, but in _En Ménage_ the dreary
tedium of existence is chronicled in all its insignificance with a kind
of weary and aching hate. "We, too," is its conclusion, "by leave of
the everlasting stupidity of things, may, like our fellow-citizens,
live stupid and respected." The fantastic unreality, the exquisite
artificiality of _A Rebours,_ the breviary of the decadence, is the
first sign of that possible escape which Huysmans has always foreseen
in the direction of art, but which he is still unable to make into
more than an artificial paradise, in which beauty turns to a cruel
hallucination and imprisons the soul still more fatally. The end is
a cry of hopeless hope, in which Huysmans did not understand the
meaning till later: "Lord, have pity of the Christian who doubts, of
the sceptic who would fain believe, of the convict of life who sets
sail alone by night, under a firmament lighted only by the consoling
watch-lights of the old hope."
In _Là-Bas_ we are in yet another stage of this strange pilgrim's
progress. The disgust which once manifested itself in the merely
external revolt against the ugliness of streets, the imbecility of
faces, has become more and more internalised, and the attraction of
what is perverse in the unusual beauty of art has led, by some obscure
route, to the perilous halfway house of a corrupt mysticism. The book,
with its monstrous pictures of the Black Mass and of the spiritual
abominations of Satanism, is one step further in the direction of
the supernatural; and this, too, has its desperate, unlooked-for
conclusion: "Christian glory is a laughing-stock to our age; it
contaminates the supernatural and casts out the world to come." In
_Là-Bas_ we go down into the deepest gulf; _En Route_ sets us one stage
along a new way, and at this turning-point begins the later Huysmans.
The old conception of the novel as an amusing tale of adventures,
though it has still its apologists in England, has long since ceased
in France to mean anything more actual than powdered wigs and lace
ruffles. Like children who cry to their elders for "a story, a story,"
the English public still wants its plot, its heroine, its villain.
That the novel should be psychological was a discovery as early as
Benjamin Constant, whose _Adolphe_ anticipates _Le Rouge et le Noir,_
that rare, revealing, yet somewhat arid masterpiece of Stendhal.
But that psychology could be carried so far into the darkness of
the soul, that the flaming walls of the world themselves faded to a
glimmer, was a discovery which had been made by no novelist before
Huysmans wrote _En Route._ At once the novel showed itself capable
of competing, on their own ground, with poetry, with the great
"confessions," with philosophy. _En Route_ is perhaps the first novel
which does not et out with the aim of amusing its readers. It offers
you no more entertainment than _Paradise Lost_ or the _Confessions_
of St. Augustine, and it is possible to consider it on the same
level. The novel, which, after having chronicled the adventures of
the Vanity Fairs of this world, has set itself with admirable success
to analyse the amorous and ambitious and money-making intelligence of
the conscious and practical self, sets itself at last to the final
achievement: the revelation of the sub-conscious self, no longer the
intelligence, but the soul. Here, then, purged of the distraction of
incident, liberated from the bondage of a too realistic conversation,
in which the aim had been to convey the very gesture of breathing
life, internalised to a complete liberty, in which, just because it is
so absolutely free, art is able to accept, without limiting itself,
the expressive medium of a convention, we have in the novel a new
form, which may be at once a confession and a decoration, the soul
and a pattern. This story of a conversion is a new thing in modern
French; it is a confession, a self-auscultation of the soul; a kind
of thinking aloud. It fixes, in precise words, all the uncertainties,
the contradictions, the absurd unreasonableness and not less absurd
logic, which distract man's brain in the passing over him of sensation
and circumstance. And all this thinking is concentrated on one end,
is concerned with the working out, in his own singular way, of one
man's salvation. There is a certain dry hard casuistry, a subtlety and
closeness almost ecclesiastical, in the investigation of an obscure and
yet definite region, whose intellectual passions are as varied and as
tumultuous as those of the heart. Every step is taken deliberately,
is weighed, approved, condemned, viewed from this side and from that,
and at the same time one feels behind all this reasoning an impulsion
urging a soul onward against its will. In this astonishing passage,
through Satanism to faith, in which the cry, "I am so weary of myself,
so sick of my miserable existence," echoes through page after page,
until despair dies into conviction, the conviction of "the uselessness
of concerning oneself about anything but mysticism and the liturgy,
of thinking about anything but about, God," it is impossible not to
see the sincerity of an actual, unique experience. The force of mere
curiosity can go far, can penetrate to a certain depth; yet there is a
point at which mere curiosity, even that of genius, comes to an end;
and we are left to the individual soul's apprehension of what seems
to it the reality of spiritual things. Such a personal apprehension
comes to us out of this book, and at the same time, just as in the days
when he forced language to express, in a more coloured and pictorial
way than it had ever expressed before, the last escaping details of
material things, so, in this analysis of the aberrations and warfares,
the confessions and trials of the soul in penitence, Huysmans has found
words for even the most subtle and illusive aspects of that inner life
which he has come, at the last, to apprehend.
In _La Cathédrale_ we are still occupied with this sensitive,
lethargic, persevering soul, but with that soul in one of its longest
halts by the way, as it undergoes the slow, permeating influence of
_"la Cathédrale mystique par excellence,"_ the cathedral of Chartres.
And the greater part of the book is taken up with a study of this
cathedral, of that elaborate and profound symbolism by which "the soul
of sanctuaries" slowly reveals itself _(quel laconisme hermétique!)_
with a sort of parallel interpretation of the symbolism which the
Church of the Middle Ages concealed or revealed in colours, precious
stones, plants, animals, numbers, odours, and in the Bible itself, in
the setting together of the Old and New Testaments.
No doubt, to some extent this book is less interesting than _En
Route,_ in the exact proportion in which everything in the world is
less interesting than the human soul. There are times when Durtal is
almost forgotten, and, unjustly enough, it may seem as if we are given
this archæology, these bestiaries, for their own sake. To fall into
this error is to mistake the whole purpose of the book, the whole
extent of the discovery in art which Huysmans has been one of the first
to make.
For in _La Cathédrale_ Huysmans does but carry further the principle
which he had perceived in _En Route,_ showing, as he does, how inert
matter, the art of stones, the growth of plants, the unconscious life
of beasts, may be brought under the same law of the soul, may obtain,
through symbol, a spiritual existence. He is thus but extending the
domain of the soul while he may seem to be limiting or ignoring it;
and Durtal may well stand aside for a moment, in at least the energy
of contemplation, while he sees, with a new understanding, the very
sight of his eyes, the very staff of his thoughts, taking life before
him, a life of the same substance as his own. What is Symbolism if
not an establishing of the links which hold the world together, the
affirmation of an eternal, minute, intricate, almost invisible life,
which runs through the whole universe? Every age has its own symbols;
but a symbol once perfectly expressed, that symbol remains, as Gothic
architecture remains the very soul of the Middle Ages. To get at that
truth which is all but the deepest meaning of beauty, to find that
symbol which is its most adequate expression, is in itself a kind of
creation; and that is what Huysmans does for us in _La Cathédrale._
More and more he has put aside all the profane and accessible and
outward pomp of writing for an inner and more severe beauty of perfect
truth. He has come to realise that truth can be reached and revealed
only by symbol. Hence, all that description, that heaping up of detail,
that passionately patient elaboration: all means to an end, not, as you
may hastily incline to think, ends in themselves.
It is curious to observe how often an artist perfects a particular
means of expression long before he has any notion of what to do with
it. Huysmans began by acquiring so astonishing a mastery of description
that he could describe the inside of a cow hanging in a butcher's shop
as beautifully as if it were a casket of jewels. The little work-girls
of his early novels were taken for long walks, in which they would
have seen nothing but the arm on which they leant and the milliners'
shops which they passed; and what they did not see was described,
marvellously, in twenty pages.
Huysmans is a brain all eye, a brain which sees even ideas as if they
had a superficies. His style is always the same, whether he writes of
a butcher's shop or of a stained-glass window; it is the immediate
expression of a way of seeing, so minute and so intense that it
becomes too emphatic for elegance and too coloured for atmosphere
or composition, always ready to sacrifice euphony to either fact or
colour. He cares only to give you the thing seen, exactly as he sees
it, with all his love or hate, and with all the exaggeration which
that feeling brings into it. And he loves beauty as a bulldog loves
its mistress: by growling at all her enemies. He honours wisdom by
annihilating stupidity. His art of painting in words resembles Monet's
art of painting With his brush: there is the same power of rendering
a vivid effect, almost deceptively, with a crude and yet sensitive
realism. _"C'est pour la gourmandise de l'œil un gala de teintes"_
he says of the provision cellars at Hamburg; and this greed of the eye
has eaten up in him almost every other sense. Even of music he writes
as a deaf man with an eye for colour might write, to whom a musician
had explained certain technical means of expression in music. No one
has ever invented such barbarous and exact metaphors for the rendering
of visual sensations. Properly, there is no metaphor; the words say
exactly what they mean; they become figurative, as we call it, in their
insistence on being themselves! fact.
Huysmans knows that the motive force of, the sentence lies in the
verbs, and his verbs: are the most singular, precise, and expressive in
any language. But in subordinating, as he does, every quality to that
of sharp, telling truth, the truth of extremes, his style loses charm;
yet it can be dazzling; it has the solidity of those walls encrusted
with gems which are to be seen in a certain chapel in Prague; it blazes
with colour, and arabesques into a thousand fantastic patterns.
And now all that laboriously acquired mastery finds at last its use,
lending itself to the new spirit with a wonderful docility. At last the
idea which is beyond reality has been found, not where Des Esseintes
sought it, and a new meaning comes into what had once been scarcely
more than patient and wrathful observation. The idea is there, visible,
in his cathedral, like the sun which flashes into unity, into meaning,
into intelligible beauty the bewildering lozenges of colour, the
inextricable trails of lead, which go to make up the picture in one
of its painted windows. What, for instance, could be more precise in
its translation of the different aspects under which the cathedral of
Chartres can be seen, merely as colour, than this one sentence: "Seen
as a whole, under a clear sky, its grey silvers, and, if the sun shines
upon it, turns pale yellow and then golden; seen close, its skin is
like that of a nibbled biscuit, with its silicious limestone, eaten
into holes; sometimes, when the sun is setting, it turns crimson, and
rises up like a monstrous and delicate shrine, rose and green; and, at
twilight, turns blue, then seems to evaporate as it fades into violet."
Or, again, in a passage which comes nearer to the conventional idea
of eloquence, how absolute an avoidance of a conventional phrase, a
word used for its merely oratorical value: "High up, in space, like
salamanders, human beings, with burning faces and flaming robes, lived
in a firmament of fire; but these conflagrations were circumscribed,
limited by an incombustible frame of darker glass, which beat back the
clear young joy of the flames; by that kind of melancholy, that more
serious and more aged aspect, which is taken by the duller colours.
The hue and cry of reds, the limpid security of whites, the reiterated
halleluias of yellows, the virginal glory of blues, all the quivering
hearth-glow of painted glass, dies away as it came near this border
coloured with the rust of iron, with the russet of sauce, with the
harsh violet of sandstone, with bottle-green, with the brown of
touchwood, with sooty black, with ashen grey."
This, in its excess of exactitude (how mediæval a quality!)
becomes, on one page, a comparison of the tower without a spire to
an unsharpened pencil which cannot write the prayers of earth upon
the sky. But for the most part it is a consistent humanising of too
objectively visible things a disengaging of the sentiment which
exists in them, which is one of the secrets of their appeal to us,
but which for the most part we overlook as we set ourselves to add
up the shapes and colours which have enchanted us. To Huysmans this
artistic discovery has come, perhaps in the most effectual way, but
certainly in the way least probable in these days, through faith, a
definite religious faith; so that, beginning tentatively, he has come,
at last, to believe in the Catholic Church as a monk of the Middle Ages
believed in it. And there is no doubt that to Huysmans this abandonment
to religion has brought, among other gifts, a certain human charity
in which he was notably lacking, removing at once one of his artistic
limitations. It has softened his contempt of humanity; it has broadened
his outlook on the world. And the sense, diffused through the whole of
this book, of the living and beneficent reality of the Virgin, of her
real presence in the cathedral built in her honour and after her own
image, brings a strange and touching kind of poetry into these closely
and soberly woven pages.
From this time forward, until his death, Huysmans is seen purging
himself of his realism, coming closer and closer to that spiritual
Naturalism which he had invented, an art made out of an apprehension
of the inner meaning of those things which he still saw with the old
tenacity of vision. Nothing is changed in him and yet all is changed.
The disgust of the world deepens through _L'Oblat,_ which is the last
stage but one in the pilgrimage which begins with _En Route._ It
seeks an escape in poring, with a dreadful diligence, over a saint's
recorded miracles, in the life of _Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam,_ which
is mediæval in its precise acceptance of every horrible detail of the
story. _Les Foules de Lourdes_ has the same minute attentiveness to
horror, but with a new pity in it, and a way of giving thanks to the
Virgin, which is in Huysmans yet another escape from his disgust of
the world. But it is in the great chapter on Satan as the creator of
ugliness that his work seems to end where it had begun, in the service
of art, now come from a great way off to join itself with the service
of God, And the whole soul of Huysmans characterises itself in the turn
of a single phrase there: that "art is the only clean thing on earth,
except holiness."