For some years after the appearance of _A Rebours_ Huysmans
produced nothing of any magnitude. _En Rade_, his next novel,
the experience of a Parisian married couple who, under the stress of
temporary pecuniary difficulties, go into the country to stay at an
uncle’s farm, dwells in the memory chiefly by virtue of two vividly
naturalistic episodes, the birth of a calf and the death of a cat.
More interesting, more intimately personal, are the two volumes of art
criticism, _L’Art Moderne_ and _Certains_, which Huysmans
published at about this period. Degas, Rops, Raffaelli, Odilon Redon
are among the artists of very various temperament whom Huysmans
either discovered, or at all events first appreciated in their full
significance, and when he writes of them it is not alone critical
insight which he reveals, but his own personal vision of the world.
To Huysmans the world has ever been above all a vision; it was no
accident that the art that appeals most purely to the eyes is that
of which he has been the finest critic. One is tempted, indeed,
to suggest that this aptitude is the outcome of heredity, of long
generations devoted to laborious watchfulness of the desire of the eye
in the external world, not indeed by actual accumulation of acquired
qualities, but by the passing on of a nervous organism long found so
apt for this task. He has ever been intensely preoccupied with the
effort to express those visible aspects of things which the arts of
design were made to express, which the art of speech can perhaps
never express. The tortured elaboration of his style is chiefly due to
this perpetual effort to squeeze tones and colours out of this foreign
medium. The painter’s brain holds only a pen and cannot rest until it
has wrung from it a brush’s work. But not only is the sense of vision
marked in Huysmans. We are conscious of a general hyperæsthesia, an
intense alertness to the inrush of sensations, which we might well term
morbid if it were not so completely intellectualised and controlled.
Hearing, indeed, appears to be less acutely sensitive than sight, the
poet is subordinated to the painter, though that sense still makes
itself felt, and the heavy multicoloured paragraphs often fall at
the close into a melancholy and poignant rhythm laden with sighs. It
is the sense of smell which Huysmans’ work would lead us to regard
as most highly developed after that of sight. The serious way in
which Des Esseintes treats perfumes is characteristic, and one of the
most curious and elaborate of the _Croquis Parisiens_ is “Le
Gousset,” in which the capacities of language are strained to define
and differentiate the odours of feminine arm-pits. Again, earlier, in
a preface written for Hannon’s _Rimes de Joie_, Huysmans points
out that that writer--who failed to fulfil his early promise--alone
of contemporary poets possessed “la curiosité des parfums,” and
that his chief poem was written in honour of what Huysmans called
“the libertine virtues of that glorious perfume,” opoponax. This
sensitiveness to odour is less marked in Huysmans’ later work, but the
dominance of vision remains.
The two volumes of essays on art incidentally serve to throw
considerable light on Huysmans’ conception of life. For special
illustration we may take his attitude towards women, whom in his
novels he usually treats, from a rather conventionally sexual point of
view, as a fact in man’s life rather than as a subject for independent
analysis. In these essays we may trace the development of his own
personal point of view, and in comparing the earlier with the later
volume we find a change which is significant of the general evolution
of Huysmans’ attitude towards life. He is at once the ultra-modern
child of a refined civilisation and the victim of nostalgia for an
ascetic mediævalism; his originality lies in the fact that in him these
two tendencies are not opposed but harmonious, although the second
has only of late reached full development. In a notable passage in
_En Rade_, Jacques, the hero, confesses that he can see nothing
really great or beautiful in a harvest field, with its anodyne toil,
as compared with a workshop or a steamboat, “the horrible magnificence
of machines, that one beauty which the modern world has been able to
create.” It is so that Huysmans views women also; he is as indifferent
to the feminine ideals of classic art as to its literary ideals. In
_L’Art Moderne_, speaking with admiration of a study of the nude
by Gauguin, he proceeds to lament that no one has painted the unclothed
modern woman without falsification or premeditated arrangement, real,
alive in her own intimate personality, with her own joys and pains
incarnated in the curves of her flesh, and the lash of childbirth
traceable on her flanks. We go to the Louvre to learn how to paint,
he remarks, forgetting that “beauty is not uniform and invariable,
but changes with the age and the climate, that the Venus of Milo,
for instance, is now not more beautiful and interesting than those
ancient statues of the New World, streaked and tattooed and adorned
with feathers; that both are but diverse manifestations of the same
ideal of beauty pursued by different races; that at the present date
there can be no question of reaching the beautiful by Venetian, Greek,
Dutch, or Flemish rites; but only by striving to disengage it from
contemporary life, from the world that surrounds us.” “Un nu fatigué,
délicat, affiné, vibrant” can alone conform to our own time; and he
adds that no one has truly painted the nude since Rembrandt. It is
instructive to turn from this essay to that on Degas, written some six
years later. It may fairly be said that to Degas belongs the honour of
taking up the study of the nude at the point where Rembrandt left it;
and like Rembrandt, he has realised that the nude can only be rightly
represented in those movements, postures, and avocations by which it is
naturally and habitually exposed. It is scarcely surprising, therefore,
that Huysmans at once grasped the full significance of the painter’s
achievement. But he has nothing now to say of the beauty that lies
beneath the confinement of modern garments, “the delicious charm of
youth, grown languid, rendered as it were divine by the debilitating
air of cities.” On the contrary, he emphasises the vision which Degas
presents of women at the bath-tub revealing in every “frog-like and
simian attitude” their pitiful homeliness, “the humid horror of a body
which no washing can purify.” Such a glorified contempt of the flesh,
he adds, has never been achieved since the Middle Ages. There we catch
what had now become the dominant tone in Huysmans’ vision; the most
modern things in art now suggest to him, they seem to merge into, the
most mediæval and ascetic. And if we turn to the essay on Félicien Rops
in the same volume--the most masterly of his essays--we find the same
point developed to the utmost. Rops in his own way is as modern and as
daring an artist of the nude as Degas. But, as Huysmans perceives, in
delineating the essentially modern he is scarcely a supreme artist,
is even inferior to Forain, who in his own circumscribed region is
insurpassable. Rops, as Huysmans points out, is the great artist of
the symbolical rather than the naturalistic modern, a great artist
who furnishes the counterpart to Memlinc and Fra Angelico. All art,
Huysmans proceeds, “must gravitate, like humanity which has given birth
to it and the earth which carries it, between the two poles of Purity
and Wantonness, the Heaven and the Hell of art.” Rops has taken the
latter pole, in no vulgar nymphomaniacal shapes, but “to divulge its
causes, to summarise it Catholically, if one may say so, in ardent and
sorrowful images”; he has drawn women who are “diabolical Theresas,
satanised saints.” Following in the path initiated by Baudelaire and
Barbey D’Aurevilly, Huysmans concludes, Rops has restored Wantonness to
her ancient and Catholic dignity. Thus is Huysmans almost imperceptibly
led back to the old standpoint from which woman and the Devil are one.
_Certains_ was immediately followed by _Là-bas_. This novel
is mainly a study of Satanism, in which Huysmans interested himself
long before it attracted the general attention it has since received
in France. There are, however, three lines of interest in the book,
the story of Gilles de Rais and his Sadism, the discussion of Satanism
culminating in an extraordinary description of a modern celebration
of the Black Mass, and the narration of Durtal’s _liaison_ with
Madame Chantelouve, wherein Huysmans reaches, by firm precision and
triumphant audacity, the highest point he has attained in the analysis
of the secrets of passion. But though full of excellent matter,
the book loses in impressiveness from the multiplicity of these
insufficiently compacted elements of interest.
While not among his finest achievements, however, it serves to mark
the definite attainment of a new stage in both the spirit and the
method of his work. Hitherto he had been a realist, in method if
not in spirit, and had conquered the finest secrets of naturalistic
art; by the help of _En Ménage_ alone, as Hennequin, one of
his earliest and best critics has said, “it will always be possible
to restore the exact physiognomy of Paris to-day.” At the outset of
_Là-bas_ there is a discussion concerning the naturalistic novel
and its functions which makes plain the standpoint to which Huysmans
had now attained. Pondering the matter, Durtal, the hero of the book,
considers that we need, on the one hand, the veracity of document, the
precision of detail, the nervous strength of language, which realism
has supplied; but also, on the other hand, we must draw water from
the wells of the soul. We cannot explain everything by sexuality and
insanity; we need the soul and the body in their natural reactions,
their conflict and their union. “We must, in short, follow the great
high-way so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a
parallel path in the air, another road by which we may reach the Beyond
and the Afterward, to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic
naturalism.” Dostoievsky comes nearest to this achievement, he remarks,
and the real psychologist of the century is not Stendhal but Hello. In
another form of art the early painters--Italian, German, especially
Flemish--realised this ideal. Durtal sees a consummate revelation
of such spiritual naturalism in Matthæus Grünewald’s crucifixion at
Cassel--the Christ who was at once a putrid and unaureoled corpse and
yet a manifest god bathed in invisible light, the union of outrageous
realism and outrageous idealism. “Thus from triumphal ordure Grünewald
extracted the finest mints of dilection, the sharpest essences of
tears.” One may say that the tendency Huysmans here so clearly asserts
had ever been present in his work. But in his previous novels his own
native impulse was always a little unduly oppressed by the naturalistic
formulas of Goncourt and Zola. The methods of these great masters had
laid a burden on his work, and although the work developed beneath, and
because of, that burden, a sense of laborious pain and obscurity too
often resulted. Henceforth this disappears. Huysmans retains his own
complexity of style, but he has won a certain measure of simplicity
and lucidity. It was a natural development, no doubt furthered also
by the position which Huysmans had now won in the world of letters.
_A Rebours_, which he had written for his own pleasure, had
found an echo in thousands of readers, and the consciousness of an
audience inspired a certain clarity of speech. From this time we
miss the insults directed at the _bêtise_ of humanity. These
characteristics clearly mark Huysmans’ next and perhaps greatest book,
in which the writer who had conquered all the secrets of decadent art
now sets his face towards the ideals of classic art.
In _En Route_, indeed, these new qualities of simplicity,
lucidity, humanity, and intensity of interest attain so high a degree
that the book has reached a vast number of readers who could not
realise the marvellous liberation from slavery to its material which
the slow elaboration of art has here reached. In _A Rebours_
Huysmans succeeded in taking up the prose-poem into his novel form,
while at the same time certainly sacrificing something of the fine
analysis of familiar things which he had developed in _En Ménage_.
In _En Route_ he takes the novel from the point he had reached in
_A Rebours_, incorporates into it that power of analysis which
has now reached incomparable simplicity and acuity, and thus wields the
whole of the artistic means which he has acquired during a quarter of
a century to one end, the presentation of a spiritual state which has
become of absorbing personal interest to himself.
I well remember hearing M. Huysmans, many years ago, tell how a
muddle-headed person had wished to commission him to paint a head of
Christ. It seemed then a deliciously absurd request to make of the
author of _A Rebours_, and his face wore the patient smile which
the spectacle of human stupidity was wont to evoke, but I have since
thought that that muddle-headed person was wiser than he knew. As we
look back on Huysmans’ earlier work it is now easy to see how he has
steadily progressed towards his present standpoint. _En Route_
does not represent, as some might imagine, the reaction of an exhausted
debauchee or even the self-deception of a disappointed man of the
world. The temperament of Durtal is that of André and Folantin and Des
Esseintes; from the first, in the _Drageoir à Epices_, Huysmans
has been an idealist and a seeker, by no means an ascetic, rather a man
whose inquisitive senses and restless imagination had led him to taste
of every forbidden fruit, but never one to whom the vulgar pleasures
of life could offer any abiding satisfaction. The more precise record
of Des Esseintes’s early sexual life may help us here; while for
the penultimate stage Durtal’s relations with Madame Chantelouve in
_Là-bas_, and the mingled attraction and repulsion which he felt
for her, are certainly significant. In _En Route_ Durtal magnifies
his own wickedness, as Bunyan did in his _Grace Abounding_; the
saints have always striven to magnify their wickedness, leaving to the
sinners the congenial function of playing at righteousness. To trace
the real permanence of Huysmans’ attitude towards religion it is enough
to turn back to _A Rebours_. Des Esseintes had been educated by
the Jesuits, and it sometimes seemed to him that that education had put
into him some extra-terrestrial ferment which never after ceased to
work, driving him in search of a new world and impossible ideals. He
could find no earthly place of rest; he sought to build for himself a
“refined Thebaid” as a warm and comfortable ark wherein to find shelter
from the flood of human imbecility. He was already drawn towards the
Church by many bonds, by his predilection for early Christian Latinity,
by the exquisite beauty of the ecclesiastical art of the Middle Ages,
by his love for monastic mediæval music, “that emaciated music which
acted instinctively on his nerves” and seemed to him precious beyond
all other. Just as Nietzsche was always haunted by the desire for a
monastery for freethinkers, so Des Esseintes dreamed of a hermitage,
of the advantages of the cloistered life of convents, wherein men are
persecuted by the world for meting out to it the just contempt of
silence.
Des Esseintes, and even the Durtal of _Là-bas_, always put aside
these thoughts with the reflection that, after all, the Church is
only an out-worn legend, a magnificent imposture. In _En Route_
Durtal has taken a decisive step. He has undergone that psychological
experience commonly called “conversion.” It is only of recent years
that the phenomena of conversion have been seriously studied, but we
know at all events that it is not intellectual, not even necessarily
moral transformation, though it may react in either direction, but
primarily an emotional phenomenon; and that it occurs especially in
those who have undergone long and torturing disquietude, coming at
last as the spontaneous resolution of all their doubts, the eruption
of a soothing flood of peace, the silent explosion of inner light. The
insight with which this state is described in _En Route_ seems to
testify to a real knowledge of it. No obvious moral or intellectual
change is effected in Durtal, but he receives a new experience of
reposeful faith, a conviction deeper than all argument. It is really
the sudden emergence into consciousness of a very gradual process, and
the concrete artistic temperament which had been subjected to the
process reacts in its own way. A more abstract intelligence would have
asked: “But, after all, is my faith true?” Durtal, in the presence of
the growing structure of sensory and imaginative forms within him,
which has become as it were a home, feels that the question of its
truth has fallen into the background. Its perfect fitness has become
the affirmation of its truth. Henceforth it is the task of his life to
learn how best to adapt himself to what he recognises as his eternal
home. _En Route_ represents a stage in this adaptation.
By a rare chance--a happier chance than befell Tolstoi under somewhat
similar circumstances--a new development in artistic achievement has
here run parallel, and in exquisite harmony, with the new spiritual
development. The growing simplicity of Huysmans’ work has reached a
point beyond which it could not perhaps be carried without injury to
his vivid and concrete style. And the new simplicity of spirit, of
which it is the reflection, marks the final retreat into the background
of that unreasonable contempt for humanity which ran through nearly
all the previous books, and now at last passes even into an ecstasy
of adoration in the passages concerning old Simon, the monastery
swine-herd. Huysmans has chiefly shown his art, however, by relying
almost solely for the interest of his book on his now consummate power
of analysis. This power, which we may perhaps first clearly trace in
“Sac au Dos,” had developed in _En Ménage_ into a wonderful skill
to light up the unexplored corners of the soul and to lay bare those
terrible thoughts which are, as he has somewhere said, the lamentable
incarnation of “the unconscious ignominy of pure souls.” In his earlier
masterpiece, _A Rebours_, however, it is little seen, having
mostly passed into æsthetic criticism. The finest episode of emotional
analysis here is the admirable chapter in which Des Esseintes’s attempt
to visit London is narrated. All his life he had wished to see two
countries, Holland and England. (And here we may recall that the former
is Huysmans’ own ancestral land, and that his French critics find in
his work a distinct flavour of English humour.) He had actually been to
Holland, and with visions won from the pictures of Rembrandt, Steen,
and Teniers he had returned disillusioned. Now he went to Galignani’s,
bought an English Baedeker, entered the bodega in the Rue de Rivoli
to drink of that port which the English love, and then proceeded to
a tavern opposite the Gare St. Lazare to eat what he imagined to be
a characteristic English meal, surrounded by English people, and
haunted by memories of Dickens. And as time went by he continued to
sit still, while all the sensations of England seemed to pass along
his nerves, still sat until at last the London mail had started. “Why
stir,” he asked himself, “when one can travel so magnificently in a
chair?... Besides, what can one expect save fresh disillusionment, as
in Holland?... And then I have experienced and seen what I wanted to
experience and see. I have saturated myself with English life; it would
be madness to lose by an awkward change of place these imperishable
sensations.... He called a cab and returned with his portmanteaus,
parcels, valises, rugs, umbrellas, and sticks to Fontenay, feeling the
physical and mental fatigue of a man who returns home after a long and
perilous journey.” There could be no happier picture of the imaginative
life of the artistic temperament. But in _En Route_ analysis is
the prime element of interest; from first to last there is nothing to
hold us but this searching and poignant analysis of the fluctuations of
Durtal’s soul through the small section which he here travels in the
road towards spiritual peace. And on the way, lightly, as by chance,
the author drops the finest appreciations of liturgical æsthetics, of
plain-chant, of the way of the Church with the soul, of the everlasting
struggle with the Evil One. There could, for instance, be no better
statement than this of one of the mystic’s secrets: “There are two
ways of ridding ourselves of a thing which burdens us, casting it away
or letting it fall. To cast away requires an effort of which we may not
be capable, to let fall imposes no labour, is simpler, without peril,
within reach of all. To cast away, again, implies a certain interest,
a certain animation, even a certain fear; to let fall is absolute
indifference, absolute contempt; believe me, use this method, and Satan
will flee.” How many forms of Satan there are in the world before which
we may profitably meditate on these words! To strive or cry in the face
of human stupidity is not the way to set it to flight; that is the
lesson which Des Esseintes would never listen to, which Durtal has at
last learnt.[9]
_En Route_ is the first of a trilogy, and the names of the succeeding
volumes, _La Cathédrale_ and _L’Oblat_, sufficiently indicate the end
of the path on which Durtal, if not indeed his creator, has started.
But however that may prove, whatever Huysmans’ own final stage may be,
there can be little doubt that he is the greatest master of style, and
within his own limits the subtlest thinker and the acutest psychologist
who in France to-day uses the medium of the novel. Only Zola can be
compared with him, and between them there can be no kind of rivalry.
Zola, with his immense and exuberant temperament, his sanity and
width of view, his robust and plebeian art, has his own place on the
high-road of modern literature. Huysmans, an intellectual and æsthetic
aristocrat, has followed with unflinching sincerity the by-path
along which his own more high-strung and exceptional temperament has
led him, and his place, if seemingly a smaller one, is at least as
sure; wherever men occupy themselves with the literature of the late
nineteenth century they will certainly sometimes talk about Zola,
sometimes read Huysmans. Zola’s cyclopean architecture can only be
seen as a whole when we have completed the weary task of investigating
it in detail; in Huysmans we seek the expressiveness of the page,
the sentence, the word. Strange as it may seem to some, it is the
so-called realist who has given us the more idealised rendering of
life; the concentrated vision of the idealist in his own smaller sphere
has revealed not alone mysteries of the soul, but even the exterior
secrets of life. True it is that Huysmans has passed by with serene
indifference, or else with contempt, the things which through the ages
we have slowly learnt to count beautiful. But on the other hand, he has
helped to enlarge the sphere of our delight by a new vision of beauty
where before to our eyes there was no beauty, exercising the proper
function of the artist who ever chooses the base and despised things of
the world, even the things that are not, to put to nought the things
that are. Therein the decadent has his justification. And while we
may accept the pioneer’s new vision of beauty, we are not called upon
to reject those old familiar visions for which he has no eyes, only
because his gaze must be fixed upon that unfamiliar height towards
which he is leading the men who come after.