"Ah! Seigneur, donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon cœur et mon corps sans dégoût."
--BAUDELAIRE.
I
Joris-Karl Huysmans has been called mystic, naturalist, critic,
aristocrat of the intellect; he was all these, a mandarin of letters
and a pessimist besides--no matter what other qualities persist
throughout his work, pessimism is never absent; his firmament is
clotted with black stars. He had a mediæval monk's contempt for
existence, contempt for the mangy flock of mediocrity; yet his genius
drove him to describe its crass ugliness in phrases of incomparable
and enamelled prose. It is something of a paradox that this man of
picturesque piety should have lived to be the accredited interpreter,
the distiller of its quintessence, of that elusive quality,
"modernity." The "intensest vision of the modern world," as Havelock
Ellis puts it, Huysmans unites to the endowment of a painter the power
of a rare psychologist, superimposed upon a lycanthropic nature. A
collective title for his books might be borrowed from Zola: My Hatreds.
He hated life and its eternal _bêtise_. His theme, with variations,
is a strangling Ennui. With those devoted sons of Mother Church,
Charles Baudelaire, Barbey D'Aurevilly, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and
Paul Verlaine, eccentric sons whose actions so often dismayed their
fellow worshippers of less genius, Huysmans has been affiliated. He
was not a poet or, indeed, a man of overwhelming imagination. But he
had the verbal imagination. He did not possess the novelist's talent.
His was not the flamboyant genius of Barbey, nor had he the fantastic
invention of Villiers. He seems closer to Baudelaire, rather by reason
of his ironic, critical temperament than because of his creative gifts.
Baudelaire's oriflamme, embroidered with preciously devised letters of
gold, reads: Spleen and Ideal; upon the emblematic banner of Huysmans
this motto is Spleen. His work at times seems like a prolongation in
prose of Baudelaire's. And by reason of his exacerbated temper he
became the most personal writer of his generation. He belonged to no
school, and avoided, after his beginnings, all literary groups.
He is recording-secretary of the petty miseries and ironies of the
life about him. Over ugliness he becomes almost lyric. "The world
is a forest of differences." His pen, when he depicts an attack of
dyspepsia or neuralgia, or the nervous distaste of a hypochondriac
for meeting people, is like the triple sting of a hornet. He is
the prose singer of neurasthenia, a Hamlet doubting his digestion,
a Schopenhauer of the cook-shops. When he paints the _nuance_ of
rage and disgust that assails a middle-aged man at the sight of a
burnt mutton-chop, his phrases are unforgettable. The tragedy of
the gastric juices he has limned with a fulness of expression that
almost lifts pathology to the dignity of art. A descendant of Flemish
painters, sculptors, architects (Huysmans of Mechlin, the Antwerp-born
painter of the seventeenth century, is said to be a forebear), he
inherited their powers of envisaging exterior life; those painters
for whom flowers, vegetable markets, butcher-shops, tiny gentle Dutch
landscapes, gray skies, skies of rutilant flames, and homely details
were surfaces to be passionately and faithfully rendered. This vision
he has interpreted with pen instead of brush. He is a virtuoso of the
phrase. He is a performer on the single string of self. He knows the
sultry enharmonics of passion. He never improvises, he observes. All
is willed and conscious, the cold-fire scrutiny of a trained eye,
one keen to note the ignoble or any deviation from the normal. His
pages are often sterile and smell of the lamp, but he has the candour
of his chimera. Well has Remy de Gourmont called him an eye. In his
prose, he sacrifices rhythmic variety and tone to colour. His rhythms
are massive, his colour at times a furious fanfare of scarlet. Every
word, like a note in a musical score, has its value and position. He
intoxicates because of his marvellous speech, but he seldom charms.
It is a sort of sinister verbal magic that steals upon one as this
ancient mariner from the lower moral deeps of Paris fixes you with his
glittering eye, and in his strangely modulated language tells tales of
blasphemy and fish-wives' tales of a half-forgotten river below the bed
of the Seine, of dull cafés and dreary suburbs, of bored men and stupid
women, of sordid, opulent souls, souls spongy and voluptuous, mean
lives and meaner alleys--such an epic of ennui, mediocrity, bizarre
sins, and neurotic, superstitious creatures was never given the world
until Huysmans wrote Les Sœurs Vatard and A Rebours. Entire vanished
districts of Paris may be reconstructed from his chapters. Zola
declared, when Guy de Maupassant and Huysmans appeared side by side in
Les Soirées de Médan, that the latter was the realist.
The unity of form and substance in Huysmans is a distinguishing trait.
He had early mastered literary technique, and the handling of his
themes varies but little. There are, however, two or three typical
varieties of description which may be quoted as illustrations of his
etched and jewel-like prose. A cow hangs outside a butcher-shop:
As in a hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass.
Veins shot out on every side like the trails of bindweed; dishevelled
branch-work extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of
entrails unfurled their violent-tinted corollas, and big clusters of
fat stood out, a sharp white, against the red medley of quivering flesh.
Surely a subject for Snyders or Jan Steen.
Léon Bloy somewhere describes Huysmans's treatment of the French
language as "dragging his images by the heels or the hair up and down
the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax." Huysmans, in A Rebours,
had called M. Bloy "an enraged pamphleteer whose style was at once
exasperated and precious." And can magnificence of phrase in evoking a
picture go further than the following which shows us Gustave Moreau's
Salome:
In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of
this church, Salome, her left arm extended in a gesture of command,
her bent right arm holding on 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. With collected, almost anguished countenance,
she begins the lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses
of the aged Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of
the whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her
skin, her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal
robes sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold, the
jewelled breast-plate, whose every stitch is a precious stone, bursts
into flame, scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the ivory-toned,
tea-rose flesh, like splendid insects with dazzling wings, marbled with
carmine, dotted with morning gold, diapered with steel blue, streaked
with peacock green.
Gautier,--who was for Huysmans only a prodigious reflector--Flaubert,
Goncourt, could not have excelled this verbal painting, this bronze and
baroque prose, which is both precise and of a splendour. Huysmans can
describe a herring as would a great master of sumptuous still-life:
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.
Or this invocation when Huysmans had begun to experience that shifting
of moral emotion which we call his "conversion"--he was a Roman
Catholic born, therefore was not converted; he but reverted to his
early faith:
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.
His method is not the recital of events, but the description of a
situation; a scene, not a narration, but large tableaux. Action there
is little; he is more static than dynamic. His characters, like
Goncourt's, suffer from paralysis of the will, from hyperæsthesia.
The soul in its primordial darkness interests him, and he describes
it with the same penetrating prose as he does the carcass of an
animal. He is a luminous mystic who speaks in terms of extravagant
naturalism. A physiologist of the soul, at times his soul dwelt in
a boulevard. His violent, vivid style so excellent in setting forth
coloured sensations is equally admirable in the construction of
metaphors which make concrete the abstract. There is the element of
the grotesque, of the old, ribald Fleming, in Huysmans, though without
a trace of hearty Flemish humour. He once said that the memory of the
inventor of card-playing ought to be blessed, the game kept closed
the mouths of imbeciles. Nor is the pepper of sophistry absent. He
sculptures his ideas. He is both morose and fulgurating. He squanders
his emotions with polychromatic resignation unlike a Saint Augustine
or a Newman; yet we are not deeply moved by his soul-experiences. It
is not vibrating sincerity that we miss; it would be wrong to question
his return to Catholicism. He is more convincing than Tolstoy; for
one thing, there was no dissonance between his daily life and his
writings, after the publication of En Route. Lucid as is his manner,
clairvoyant as the exposition of his soul at the feet of God, there
is, nevertheless, an absence of unction, of tenderness, which repels.
Sympathy and tenderness are _bourgeois_ virtues for Huysmans. Too
complicated to admire, even recognise, the sane or the simple, he
remained the morbid carper after he entered La Trappe and Solesmes.
As an oblate, his fastidiousness was wounded by the minor annoyances
of a severe regimen; his stomach always ailed him. Perhaps to his weak
digestion and a neuralgic tendency we owe the bitterness and pessimism
of his art. He was not a normal man. He loathed the inevitable
discords of life with a startling intensity. The venomous salt of his
wit he sprinkles over the raw turpitude of men and women. Woman for
him was not of the planetary sex, but either a stupid or a vicious
creature; sometimes both. Impassible as he was, he could be shocked
into a species of sub-acid eloquence if the theme were the inutility
of mankind. No Hebraic prophet ever launched such poignant phrases of
disgust and horror at the world and its works. His favourite reading
was in the mystics, à Kempis, Saint Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and
the Flemish Ruysbroeck.
In a new edition of A Rebours he has told us that he was not pious as
a youth, having been educated not at a religious school. A Rebours
came out in 1884, and it was in July, 1892, at the age of forty-four,
that he went to La Trappe de Notre-Dame d'lgny, situated near Fismes,
and the Aisne and Marne. He confessed that he could not discover,
during the eight intervening years, why he swerved to the Church of
Rome. Diminution of vital energy was not the chief reason for his
reversion. The operations of divine grace in Huysmans's case may be
dated back to A Rebours. The modulation by the way of art was not a
difficult one. And he had the good taste of giving us his experiences
in the guise of art. It is the history of a conversion, though he is,
without doubt, the Durtal of the books. The final explosion of grace
after years of unconscious mining, the definite illumination on some
unknown Road to Damascus, took place between the appearance of Là Bas
and En Route. We are spared the _technique_ of faith reawakened. It had
become part of his cerebral tissue. We are shown a Durtal, believer;
also a Durtal profoundly disgusted with the oily, rancid food of La
Trappe, and with the faces of some of his companions, and a Durtal who
puffs surreptitious cigarettes. At Lourdes, in his last book, he is the
same Durtal-Huysmans, grumbling at the odours of unwashed bodies, at
the perspiring crowds, at the ignorance and cupidity of the shrine's
guardians. A pessimist to the end. And for that reason he has often
outraged the sensibilities of his coreligionists, who questioned his
sincerity after such an exclamation as: "How like a rind of lard I
must look!" uttered when he carried a dripping candle in a religious
procession. But through the dreary mists of doubtings and black fogs of
unfaith the lamp of the Church, a shining point, drew to it from his
chilly ecstasies this hedonist. Like Taine and Nietzsche, he craved for
some haven of refuge to escape the whirring wings of Wotan's ravens.
And in the pale woven air he saw the cross of Christ.
Leslie Stephen wrote of Pascal: "Eminent critics have puzzled
themselves as to whether Pascal was a sceptic or a genuine believer,
having, I suppose, convinced themselves, by some process not obvious
to me, that there is an incompatibility between the two characters."
Huysmans may have been both sceptic and believer, but the dry fervour
of the later books betrays a man who willingly humiliates and
depreciates the intellect for the greater glory of God. Abbé Mugnier
says that his sincerity is itself the form of his talent. His portrait
of Simon the swineherd in En Route is mortifying to humans with proud
stomachs; Huysmans penetrates the husks and filth and sees only a
God-intoxicated soul. Here is, indeed, the "treasure of the humble."
At first, religion with Durtal was æsthetic, the beauty of Gothic
architecture, the pyx that ardently shines, the bells that boom, the
odours of frankincense that rolled through the nave of some old vast
cathedral with flame-coloured windows. In L'Oblat the feeling has
widened and deepened. The walls of life have fallen asunder, the soul
glows in the twilight of the subliminal self, glows with a spiritual
phosphorescence. Huysmans is nearer, though not face to face with, God.
The object of his prayer is the Virgin Mary; to the hem of her robe he
clings like a frightened child at its mother's dress. All this may have
been auto-suggestion, or the result of the "will to believe," according
to the formula of Professor William James, yet it was satisfying to
Huysmans, whose life was singularly lonely.
He was born on February 5, 1848, in Paris, and died in that city on
May 12, 1907. Christened Charles-Marie-George, he signed his books
Joris-Karl. He was educated at the Lyceum Saint-Louis. His family
originally resided at Breda, Holland. His father was lithographer and
painter. His mother was of Burgundian stock and boasted a sculptor
in her ancestral line. Huysmans came fairly by his love of art. He
contemplated the profession of law; but, at the age of twenty, he
entered the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained until 1897,
a model, unassuming official, fond of first editions, posters, rare
prints, and a few intimates. He went then to live at Ligugé, but
returned to Paris after the expulsion of the Benedictines. He was
elected first president of the Academy Goncourt, April 7, 1900. He was
nominated chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and given the rosette
of officer by Briand, though Huysmans begged that he should have no
military honours at his funeral. It was for his excellent work as a
civil servant that he was decorated, and not as a man of letters. At
the time of his death, his reputation had suffered an eclipse; he was
distrusted both by Catholics and free-thinkers. But he never wavered.
Attacked by a cancerous malady, he suffered the atrocious martyrdom
of his favourite Saint Lydwine. Léon Daudet, François Coppée, and
Lucien Descaves were his unwearying attendants. At the last, he could
still read the prayers for the dying. He was buried in his Benedictine
habit. But what an artist perished in the making of an amateur monk!
"His face," said an English friend, "with the sensitive, luminous
eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire's portrait, the face of a resigned
and benevolent Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity of the
divine order, but has no wish to make improper use of his discovery.
He gave me the impression of a cat, courteous, perfectly polite, most
amiable, but all nerves, ready to shoot out his claws at the least
word." (Huysmans, like Baudelaire, was fond of cats). When I saw him
five years ago in Paris, I was struck by the essentially Semitic
contour of his head--some legacy of remote ancestors from the far-away
Meuse.