IN trying to represent the man who wrote the extraordinary books
grouped around _A Rebours_ and _En Route_, I find myself
carried back to the decline of the Latin world. I recall those restless
Africans who were drawn into the vortex of decadent Rome, who absorbed
its corruptions with all the barbaric fervour of their race, and then
with a more natural impetus of that youthful fervour threw themselves
into the young current of Christianity, yet retaining in their flesh
the brand of an exotic culture. Tertullian, Augustine, and the rest
gained much of their power, as well as their charm, because they
incarnated a fantastic mingling of youth and age, of decayed Latinity,
of tumultuously youthful Christianity. Huysmans, too, incarnates the
old and the new, but with a curious, a very vital difference. To-day
the _rôles_ are reversed; it is another culture that is now young,
with its aspirations after human perfection and social solidarity,
while Christianity has exchanged the robust beauty of youth for the
subtler beauty of age. “The most perfect analogy to our time which I
can find,” wrote Renan to his sister amid the tumults of Paris in 1848,
a few weeks after Huysmans had been born in the same city, “is the
moment when Christianity and paganism stood face to face.” Huysmans had
wandered from ancestral haunts of mediæval peace into the forefront of
the struggles of our day, bringing the clear, refined perceptions of
old culture to the intensest vision of the modern world yet attained,
but never at rest, never once grasping except on the purely æsthetic
side the significance of the new age, always haunted by the memory of
the past and perpetually feeling his way back to what seems to him the
home of his soul.--The fervent seeker of those early days, indeed, but
_à rebours_!
This is scarcely a mere impression; one might be tempted to say that it
is strictly the formula of this complex and interesting personality.
Coming on the maternal side from an ordinary Parisian bourgeois stock,
though there chanced to be a sculptor even along this line, on the
paternal side he belongs to an alien aristocracy of art. From father
to son his ancestors were painters, of whom at least one, Cornelius
Huysmans, still figures honourably in our public galleries, while
the last of them left Breda to take up his domicile in Paris. Here
his son, Joris Karl, has been the first of the race to use the pen
instead of the brush, yet retaining precisely those characters of
“veracity of imitation, jewel-like richness of colour, perfection of
finish, emphasis of character,” which their historian finds in the
painters of his land from the fourteenth century onwards. Where the
Meuse approaches the Rhine valley we find the home of the men who,
almost alone in the north, created painting and the arts that are
grouped around painting, and evolved religious music. On the side
of art the Church had found its chief builders in the men of these
valleys, and even on the spiritual side also, for here is the northern
home of mysticism. Their latest child has fixed his attention on the
feverish activities of Paris with the concentrated gaze of a stranger
in a strange land, held by a fascination which is more than half
repulsion, always missing something, he scarcely knows what. He has
ever been seeking the satisfaction he had missed, sometimes in the
æsthetic vision of common things, sometimes in the refined Thebaid of
his own visions, at length more joyfully in the survivals of mediæval
mysticism. Yet as those early Africans still retained their acquired
Roman instincts, and that fantastic style which could not be shaken
off, so Huysmans will surely retain to the last the tincture of
Parisian modernity.
Yet we can by no means altogether account for Huysmans by race and
environment. Every man of genius is a stranger and a pilgrim on the
earth, unlike other men, seeing everything as it were at a different
angle, mirroring the world in his mind as in those concave or convex
mirrors which elongate or abbreviate absurdly all who approach them.
No one ever had a keener sense of the distressing absurdity of human
affairs than M. Huysmans. The Trocadero is not a beautiful building,
but to no one else probably has it appeared as an old hag lying on her
back and elevating her spindle shanks towards the sky. Such images of
men’s works and ways abound in Huysmans’ books, and they express his
unaffected vision of life, his disgust for men and things, a shuddering
disgust, yet patient, half-amused. I can well recall an evening spent
some years ago in M. Huysmans’ company. His face, with the sensitive,
luminous eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire’s portraits, the face of a
resigned and benevolent Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity
of the Divine order but has no wish to make any improper use of his
discovery. He talked in low and even tones, never eagerly, without
any emphasis or gesture, not addressing any special person; human
imbecility was the burden of nearly all that he said, while a faint
twinkle of amused wonderment lit up his eyes. And throughout all his
books until almost the last “l’éternelle bêtise de l’humanité” is the
ever-recurring refrain.
Always leading a retired life, and specially abhorring the society and
conversation of the average literary man, M. Huysmans has for many
years been a government servant--a model official, it is said--at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here, like our own officials at Whitehall,
he serves his country in dignified leisure--on the only occasion on
which I have seen him in his large and pleasant _bureau_, he
was gazing affectionately at Chéret’s latest _affiche_, which
a lady of his acquaintance had just brought to show him--and such
duties of routine, with the close contact with practical affairs they
involve, must always be beneficial in preserving the sane equipoise
of an imaginative temperament. In this matter Huysmans has been more
fortunate than his intimate friend Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who had
wandered so far into the world of dreams that he lost touch with the
external world and ceased to distinguish them clearly. One is at
first a little surprised to hear of the patient tact and diplomacy
which the author of _A Rebours_ spent round the death-bed of
the author of _Contes Cruels_ to obtain the dying dreamer’s
consent to a ceremony of marriage which would legitimate his child.
But Huysmans’ sensitive nervous system and extravagant imagination
have ever been under the control of a sane and forceful intellect;
his very idealism has been nourished by the contemplation of a world
which he has seen too vividly ever to ignore. We may read that in the
reflective deliberation of his grave and courteous bearing, somewhat
recalling, as more than one observer has noted, his own favourite
animal, the cat, whose outward repose of Buddhistic contemplation
envelops a highly-strung nervous system, while its capacity to enjoy
the refinements of human civilisation comports a large measure of
spiritual freedom and ferocity. Like many another man of letters,
Huysmans suffers from neuralgia and dyspepsia; but no novelist has
described so persistently and so poignantly the pangs of toothache
or the miseries of _maux d’estomac_, a curious proof of the
peculiarly personal character of Huysmans’ work throughout. His sole
pre-occupation has been with his own impressions. He possessed no
native genius for the novel. But with a very sound instinct he set
himself, almost at the outset of his career, to describe intimately
and faithfully the crudest things of life, the things most remote from
his own esoteric tastes but at that time counted peculiarly “real.”
There could be no better discipline for an idealist. Step by step he
has left the region of vulgar actualities to attain his proper sphere,
but the marvellous and slowly won power of expressing the spiritually
impalpable in concrete imagery is the fruit of that laborious
apprenticeship. He was influenced in his novels at first by Goncourt,
afterwards a little by Zola, as he sought to reproduce his own vivid
and personal vision of the world. This vision is like that of a man
with an intense exaltation of the senses, especially the senses of
sight and smell. Essentially Huysmans is less a novelist than a poet,
with an instinct to use not verse but prose as his medium. Thus he
early fell under the influence of Baudelaire’s prose-poems. His small
and slight first volume, _Le Drageoir à Epices_, bears witness
to this influence, while yet revealing a personality clearly distinct
from Baudelaire’s. This personality is already wholly revealed in the
quaint audacity of the little prose-poem entitled “L’Extase.” Here,
at the very outset of Huysmans’ career, we catch an unconscious echo
of mediæval asceticism, the voice, it might be, of Odo of Cluny, who
nearly a thousand years before had shrunk with horror from embracing a
“sack of dung;” “quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus!”
“L’Extase” describes how the lover lies in the wood clasping the hand
of the beloved and bathed in a rapture of blissful emotion; “suddenly
she rose, disengaged her hand, disappeared in the bushes, and I heard
as it were the rustling of rain on the leaves;” at once the delicious
dream fled and the lover awakes to the reality of commonplace human
things. That is a parable of the high-strung idealism, having only
contempt for whatever breaks in on its ideal, which has ever been the
mark of Huysmans. His sensitive ear is alive to the gentlest ripple of
nature, and it jars on him; it becomes the deafening Niagara of “the
incessant deluge of human foolishness;” all his art is the research for
a Heaven where the voice of Nature shall no more be heard. Baudelaire
was also such a hyperæsthetic idealist, but the human tenderness
which vibrates beneath the surface of Baudelaire’s work has been the
last quality to make itself more than casually felt in Huysmans. It
is the defect which vitiated his early work in the novel, when he
was still oscillating between the prose-poem and the novel, clearly
conscious that while the first suited him best only in the second
could mastery be won. His early novels are sometimes portentously
dull, with a lack of interest, or even attempt to interest, which
itself almost makes them interesting, as frank ugliness is. They are
realistic with a veracious and courageously abject realism, never,
like Zola’s, carefully calculated for its pictorial effectiveness, but
dealing simply with the trivialest and sordidest human miseries. His
first novel _Marthe_--which inaugurated the long series of novels
devoted to state-regulated prostitution in those slaughter-houses of
love, as Huysmans later described them, where Desire is slain at a
single stroke,--sufficiently repulsive on the whole, is not without
flashes of insight which reveal the future artist, and to some readers
indeed make it more interesting than _La Fille Elisa_, which
the Goncourts published shortly afterwards. Unlike the crude and
awkward _Marthe_--though that book reveals the influence of the
Goncourts--_La Fille Elisa_ shows the hand of an accomplished
artist, but it is also the work of a philanthropist writing with an
avowed object, and of a fine gentleman ostentatiously anxious not to
touch pitch with more than a finger-tip. The Preface to _Marthe_
contains a declaration which remains true for the whole of Huysmans’
work: “I set down what I see, what I feel, what I have lived, writing
it as well as I am able, _et voilà tout_!” But it has ever been a
dangerous task to set down what one sees and feels and has lived; for
no obvious reason, except the subject, _Marthe_ was immediately
suppressed by the police. This first novel remains the least personal
of Huysmans’ books; in his next novel, _Les Sœurs Vatard_--a study
of Parisian workgirls and their lovers--a more characteristic vision
of the world begins to be revealed, and from that time forward there
is a continuous though irregular development both in intellectual grip
and artistic mastery. “Sac au Dos,” which appeared in the _Soirées
de Médan_, represents a notable stage in this development, for
here, as he has since acknowledged, Huysmans’ hero is himself. It is
the story of a young student who serves during the great war in the
Garde Mobile of the Seine, and is invalided with dysentery before
reaching the front. There is no story, no striking impression to
record--nothing to compare with Guy de Maupassant’s incomparably more
brilliant “Boule-de-Suif,” also dealing with the fringe of war, which
appears in the same volume--no opportunity for literary display,
nothing but a record of individual feelings with which the writer
seems satisfied because they are interesting to himself. It is, in
fact, the germ of that method which Huysmans has since carried to so
brilliant a climax in _En Route_. All the glamour of war and
the enthusiasm of patriotism are here--long before Zola wrote his
_Débâcle_--reduced to their simplest terms in the miseries of the
individual soldier whose chief aspiration it becomes at last to return
to a home where the necessities of nature may be satisfied in comfort
and peace. At that time Huysmans’ lack of patriotic enthusiasm seemed
almost scandalous; but when we bear in mind his racial affinities it is
natural that he should, as he once remarked to an interviewer, “prefer
a Leipzig man to a Marseilles man,” “the big, phlegmatic, taciturn
Germans” to the gesticulating and rhetorical people of the French
south. In _Là-Bas_, at a later date, through the mouth of one of
his characters, Huysmans goes so far as to regret the intervention of
Joan of Arc in French history, for had it not been for Joan France and
England would have been restored to their racial and prehistoric unity,
consolidated into one great kingdom under Norman Plantagenets, instead
of being given up to the southerners of Latin race who surrounded
Charles VII.
The best of Huysmans’ early novels is undoubtedly _En Ménage_. It
is the intimate history of a young literary man who, having married a
wife whom he shortly afterwards finds unfaithful, leaves her, returns
to his bachelor life, and in the end becomes reconciled to her. This
picture of a studious man who goes away with his books to fight
over again the petty battles of bachelorhood with the _bonne_
and the _concierge_ and his own cravings for womanly love and
companionship, reveals clearly for the first time Huysmans’ power
of analysing states of mind that are at once simple and subtle.
Perhaps no writer surprises us more by his revealing insight into the
commonplace experiences which all a novelist’s traditions lead him to
idealise or ignore. As a whole, however, _En Ménage_ is scarcely
yet a master’s work, a little laboured, with labour which cannot yet
achieve splendour of effect. Nor can a much slighter story, _A Vau
l’Eau_, which appeared a little later, be said to mark a further
stage in development, though it is a characteristic study, this sordid
history of Folantin, the poor, lame, discontented, middle-aged clerk.
Cheated and bullied on every side, falling a prey to the vulgar woman
of the street who boisterously takes possession of him in the climax
of the story, all the time feeling poignantly the whole absurdity of
the situation, there is yet one spot where hope seems possible. He has
no religious faith; “and yet,” he reflects, “yet mysticism alone could
heal the wound that tortures me.” Thus Folantin, though like André
in _En Ménage_ he resigns himself to the inevitable stupidity
of life, yet stretches out his hands towards the Durtal of Huysmans’
latest work.
In all these novels we feel that Huysmans has not attained to full
self-expression. Intellectual mastery, indeed, he is attaining, but
scarcely yet the expression of his own personal ideals. The poet in
Huysmans, the painter enamoured of beauty and seeking it in unfamiliar
places, has little scope in these detailed pictures of sordid or
commonplace life. At this early period it is still in prose-poems,
especially in _Croquis Parisiens_, that this craving finds
satisfaction. Des Esseintes, the hero of _A Rebours_, who on
so many matters is Huysmans’ mouthpiece, of all forms of literature
preferred the prose-poem when, in the hands of an alchemist of genius,
it reveals a novel concentrated into a few pages or a few lines, the
concrete juice, the essential oil of art. It was “a communion of
thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual
collaboration among a dozen superior persons scattered throughout
the world, a delectation offered to the finest wits, and to them
alone accessible.” Huysmans took up this form where Baudelaire and
Mallarmé had left it, and sought to carry it yet further. In that
he was scarcely successful. The excess of tension in the tortured
language with which he elaborates his effects too often holds him
back from the goal of perfection. We must yet value in _Croquis
Parisiens_ its highly wrought and individual effects of rhythm
and colour and form. In France, at all events, Huysmans is held to
inaugurate the poetic treatment of modern things--a characteristic
already traceable in _Les Sœurs Vatard_--and this book deals with
the æsthetic aspects of latter-day Paris, with the things that are
“ugly and superb, outrageous and yet exquisite,” as a type of which
he selects the Folies-Bergère, at that time the most characteristic
of Parisian music-halls, and he was thus the first to discuss the
æsthetic value of the variety stage which has been made cheaper since.
For the most part, however, these _Croquis_ are of the simplest
and most commonplace things--the forlorn Bièvre district, the poor
man’s _café_, the roast-chestnut seller--extracting the beauty or
pathos or strangeness of all these things. “Thy garment is the palette
of setting suns, the rust of old copper, the brown gilt of Cordovan
leather, the sandal and saffron tints of the autumn foliage.... When
I contemplate thy coat of mail I think of Rembrandt’s pictures, I see
again his superb heads, his sunny flesh, his gleaming jewels on black
velvet. I see again his rays of light in the night, his trailing gold
in the shade, the dawning of suns through dark arches.” The humble
bloater has surely never before been sung in language which recalls
the Beloved of the “Song of Songs.” Huysmans has carried to an even
extravagant degree that re-valuation of the world’s good in which
genius has ever found its chief function. To abase the mighty and exalt
the humble seems to man the divinest of prerogatives, for it is that
which he himself exercises in his moments of finest inspiration. To
find a new vision of the world, a new path to truth, is the instinct
of the artist or the thinker. He changes the whole system of our
organised perceptions. That is why he seems to us at first an incarnate
paradox, a scoffer at our most sacred verities, making mountains of our
mole-hills and counting as mere mole-hills our everlasting mountains,
always keeping time to a music that clashes with ours, at our hilarity
_tristis, in tristitia hilaris_.
In 1889 _A Rebours_ appeared. Not perhaps his greatest
achievement, it must ever remain the central work in which he has
most powerfully concentrated his whole vision of life. It sums up the
progress he had already made, foretells the progress he was afterwards
to make, in a style that is always individual, always masterly in its
individuality. Technically, it may be said that the power of _A
Rebours_ lies in the fact that here for the first time Huysmans has
succeeded in uniting the two lines of his literary development: the
austere analysis in the novels of commonplace things mostly alien to
the writer, and the freer elaboration in the prose-poems of his own
more intimate personal impressions. In their union the two streams
attain a new power and a more intimately personal note. Des Esseintes,
the hero of this book, may possibly have been at a few points suggested
by a much less interesting real personage in contemporary Paris,
the Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac, but in the main he was certainly
created by Huysmans’ own brain, as the representative of his author’s
hyperæsthetic experience of the world and the mouthpiece of his most
personal judgments. The victim of over-wrought nerves, of neuralgia
and dyspepsia, Des Esseintes retires for a season from Paris to the
solitude of his country house at Fontenay, which he has fitted up, on
almost cloistral methods, to soothe his fantasy and to gratify his
complex æsthetic sensations, his love of reading and contemplation. The
finest pictures of Gustave Moreau hang on the walls, with the fantastic
engravings of Luyken, and the strange visions of Odilon Redon. He has
a tortoise curiously inlaid with precious stones; he delights in all
those exotic plants which reveal Nature’s most unnatural freaks; he
is a sensitive amateur of perfumes, and considers that the pleasures
of smell are equal to those of sight or sound; he possesses a row of
little barrels of liqueurs so arranged that he can blend in infinite
variety the contents of this instrument, his “mouth-organ” he calls
it, and produce harmonies which seem to him comparable to those
yielded by a musical orchestra. But the solitary pleasures of this
palace of art only increase the nervous strain he is suffering from;
and at the urgent bidding of his doctor Des Esseintes returns to the
society of his abhorred fellow-beings in Paris, himself opening the
dyke that admitted the “waves of human mediocrity” to engulf his
refuge. And this wonderful confession of æsthetic faith--with its long
series of deliberately searching and decisive affirmations on life,
religion, literature, art--ends with a sudden solemn invocation that
is surprisingly tremulous: “Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who
doubts, on the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict of life
who embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky no longer lit by the
consoling beacons of ancient faith.”
“He who carries his own most intimate emotions to their highest point
becomes the first in file of a long series of men;” that saying is
peculiarly true of Huysmans. But to be a leader of men one must turn
one’s back on men. Huysmans’ attitude towards his readers was somewhat
like that of Thoreau, who spoke with lofty disdain of such writers as
“would fain have one reader before they die.” As he has since remarked,
Huysmans wrote _A Rebours_ for a dozen persons, and was himself
more surprised than any one at the wide interest it evoked. Yet that
interest was no accident. Certain æsthetic ideals of the latter half
of the nineteenth century are more quintessentially expressed in _A
Rebours_ than in any other book. Intensely personal, audaciously
independent, it yet sums up a movement which has scarcely now worked
itself out. We may read it and re-read, not only for the light which it
casts on that movement, but upon every similar period of acute æsthetic
perception in the past.