Huysmans very exquisitely represents one aspect of the complex modern
soul, that aspect which shrinks from the grosser forces of Nature,
from the bare simplicity of the naked sky or the naked body, the
“incessant deluge of human foolishness,” the eternal oppression of
the commonplace, to find a sedative for its exasperated nerves in the
contemplation of esoteric beauty and the difficult search for the
mystic peace which passes all understanding. “Needs must I rejoice
beyond the age,” runs the motto from the old Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck
set on the front of _A Rebours_, “though the world has horror of
my joy and its grossness cannot understand what I would say.” Such is
decadence; such, indeed, is religion, in the wide and true sense of
the word. Christianity itself, as we know it in the western church,
sprang from the baptism of young barbarism into Latin decadence. Pagan
art and its clear serenity, science, rationalism, the bright, rough
vigour of the sun and the sea, the adorable mystery of common life and
commonplace human love, are left to make up the spirit that in any age
we call “classic.”
Thus what we call classic corresponds on the spiritual side to the love
of natural things, and what we call decadent to the research for the
things which seem to lie beyond Nature. “Corporea pulchritudo in pelle
solummodo constat. Nam si viderent homines hoc quod subtus pellem est,
sicut lynces in Beotia cernere interiore dicuntur, mulieres videre
nausearent. Iste decor in flegmate et sanguine et humore ac felle
constitit.” That is St. Odo of Cluny’s acute analysis of woman, who
for man is ever the symbol of Nature: beauty is skin-deep, drowned in
excretions which we should scarcely care to touch with the finger’s
tip. And for the classic vision of Nature, listen to that fantastic
and gigantic Englishman, Sir Kenelm Digby, whose _Memoirs_,
whose whole personality, embodied the final efflorescence of the
pagan English Renaissance. He has been admitted by her maids to the
bedchamber of Venetia Stanley, the famous beauty who afterwards became
his wife; she is still sleeping, and he cannot resist the temptation to
undress and lie gently and reverently beside her, as half disturbed in
her slumber she rolled on to her side from beneath the clothes; “and
her smock was so twisted about her fair body that all her legs and the
best part of her thighs were naked, which lay so one over the other
that they made a deep shadow where the never-satisfied eyes wished for
the greatest light. A natural ruddiness did shine through the skin, as
the sunbeams do through crystal or water, and ascertained him that it
was flesh that he gazed upon, which yet he durst not touch for fear
of melting it, so like snow it looked. Her belly was covered with her
smock, which it raised up with a gentle swelling, and expressed the
perfect figure of it through the folds of that discourteous veil.
Her paps were like two globes--wherein the glories of the heaven
and the earth were designed, and the azure veins seemed to divide
constellations and kingdoms--between both which began the milky way
which leadeth lovers to their Paradise, somewhat shadowed by the
yielding downwards of the uppermost of them as she lay upon her side,
and out of that darkness did glisten a few drops of sweat like diamond
sparks, and a more fragrant odour than the violets or primroses, whose
season was nearly passed, to give way to the warmer sun and the longest
days.” They play with the same counters, you observe, these two, Odo
and Digby, with skin, sweat, and so forth, each placing upon them his
own values. Idealists both of them, the one idealises along the line
of death, the other along the line of life which the whole race has
followed, and both on their own grounds are irrefutable, the logic
of life and the logic of death, alike solidly founded in the very
structure of the world, of which man is the measuring-rod.
The classic party of Nature seems, indeed, the stronger--in seeming
only, and one recalls that, of the two witnesses just cited, the abbot
of Cluny was the most venerated man of his age, while no one troubled
even to publish Digby’s _Memoirs_ until our own century--but
it carries weakness in its very strength, the weakness of a great
political party formed by coalition. It has not alone idealists on its
side, but for the most part also the blind forces of robust vulgarity.
So that the more fine-strung spirits are sometimes driven to a reaction
against Nature and rationalism, like that of which Huysmans, from
“L’Extase” onwards, has been the consistent representative. At the
present moment such a reaction has attained a certain ascendency.
Christianity once fitted nearly every person born into the European
world; there must needs be some to whom, in no modern devitalised
form but in its purest essence, it is still the one refuge possible.
No doubt conditions have changed; the very world itself is not what
it was to the mediæval man. One has to recognise that the modern
European differs in this from his mediæval ancestor that now we know
how largely the world is of our own making. The sense of interiority,
as the psychologists say, is of much later development than the sense
of exteriority. For the mediæval man,--as still to-day for the child in
the darkness,--his dreams and his fancies, every organic thrill in eye
or ear, seemed to be flashed on him from a world of angels and demons
without. In a sense which is scarcely true to-day the average man of
those days--not the finer or the coarser natures, it may well be--might
be said to be the victim of a species of madness, a paranoia, a
systematised persecutional delusion. He could not look serenely in the
face of the stars or lie at rest among the fir-cones in the wood, for
who knew what ambush of the Enemy might not lurk behind these things?
Even in flowers, as St. Cyprian said, the Enemy lay hidden.
“Nil jocundum, nil amœnum,
Nil salubre, nil serenum,
Nihil dulce, nihil plenum.”
There was only one spot where men might huddle together in safety--the
church. There the blessed sound of the bells, the contact of holy
water, the smell of incense, the sight of the Divine Flesh, wove a
spiritual coat of mail over every sensory avenue to the soul. The winds
of hell might rave, the birds of night dash themselves against the
leaden spires of that fortress whence alone the sky seemed blue with
hope.
Huysmans, notwithstanding a very high degree of intellectual subtlety,
is by virtue of his special æsthetic and imaginative temperament
carried back to the more childlike attitude of this earlier age. The
whole universe appears to him as a process of living images; he cannot
reason in abstractions, cannot _rationalise_; that indeed is why
he is inevitably an artist. Thus he is a born leader in a certain
modern emotional movement.
That movement, as we know, is one of a group of movements now
peculiarly active. We see them on every hand, occultism, theosophy,
spiritualism, all those vague forms on the borderland of the unknown
which call to tired men weary of too much living, or never strong
enough to live at all, to hide their faces from the sun of nature and
grope into cool, delicious darkness, soothing the fever of life. It
is foolish to resent this tendency; it has its rightness; it suits
some, who may well cling to their private dream if life itself is but
a dream. At the worst we may remember that, however repugnant such
movements may be, to let fall remains a better way of putting Satan to
flight than to cast away. And at the best one should know that this is
part of the vital process by which the spiritual world moves on its
axis, alternating between darkness and light.
Therefore soak yourself in mysticism, follow every intoxicating path
to every impossible Beyond, be drunken with mediævalism, occultism,
spiritualism, theosophy, and even, if you will, protestantism--the cup
that cheers, possibly, but surely not inebriates--for the satisfaction
that comes of all these is good while it lasts. Yet be sure that Nature
is your home, and that from the farthest excursions you will return
the more certainly to those fundamental instincts which are rooted in
the zoological series at the summit of which we stand. For the whole
spiritual cosmogony finally rests, not indeed on a tortoise, but on the
emotional impulses of the mammal vertebrate which constitute us men.
Meanwhile we will not grieve because in the course of our pilgrimage
on earth the sun sets. It has always risen again. We may lighten the
darkness of the journey by admiring the beauty of night, plucking back
the cowl if needs must we wear it.--_Eia, fratres, pergamus._