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 incredibly 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 imbecility.
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 á 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 Elisa_ 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 Elisa 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 Soeurs 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 Soeurs 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, Rusbroeck 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 gold 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 from 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.