As a critic of painting Huysmans revealed himself the possessor of
a temperament that was positively ferocious in the presence of an
unsympathetic canvas. His vocabulary and peculiar gift of invective
were then exercised with astounding verbal if not critical results.
Singularly narrow in his judgments for a man of his general culture,
his intensity of vision concentrated itself upon a few painters
and etchers; during the latter part of his life only religious art
interested him, as had the exotic and monstrous in earlier years. And
even in the former sphere he restricted his admiration, rather say
idolatry, to a few men; he sought for character, an ascetic type of
character, the lean and meagre Saviours and saints of the Flemish
primitives arousing in him a fire almost fanatical. Between a Roger Van
der Weyden and a Giorgione there would be little doubt as to Huysmans's
choice; the golden colour-music of the great Venetian harmonist would
have reached deaf ears. His Flemish ancestry told in his æsthetic
tastes. He once said that he preferred a Leipsic man to a Marseilles
man, "the big, phlegmatic, taciturn Germans to the gesticulating and
rhetorical people of the south."
Huysmans never betrayed the slightest interest in doctrines of
equality; for him, as for Baudelaire, socialism, the education of the
masses, or democratic prophylactics were hateful. The virus of the
"exceptional soul" was in his veins. Nothing was more horrible to
him than the idea of universal religion, universal speech, universal
government, with their concomitant universal monotony. The world is
ugly enough without the ugliness of universal sameness. Variety alone
makes this globe bearable. He did not believe in art for the multitude,
and the tableau of a billion humans bellowing to the moon the hymn of
universal brotherhood made him shiver--as well it might. Tolstoy and
his semi-idiotic mujik, to whom Beethoven was impossible, aroused in
Huysmans righteous indignation. Art is for those who have the brains
and patience to understand it. It is not a free port of entry for poet
and philistine alike. To it, though many are called, few are chosen. So
is it with religion. That marvellous specimen of psychology, En Route,
gave more offence to Roman Catholics than it did to sectarians of other
faiths. Huysmans was a mystic, and to his temperament, as taut as a
finely attuned fiddle, the easy-going methods of the average worshipper
were absolutely blasphemous. So he could write in En Route: "And
he--Durtal--called to mind orators petted like tenors, Monsabré, Didon,
those Coquelins of the Church, and, lower yet than those products of
the Catholic training school, that bellicose booby the Abbé d'Hulst."
That same abbé lived to see the writer repentant and, himself, not only
to forgive, but to write eulogistic words of the man who had abused him.
L'Art Moderne was published between covers in 1883. It deals with
the official salons of 1879, 1880-81 and the exposition of the
Independents, 1880-81. The appendix, 1882, contains thumbnail sketches
of Caillebotte, whose bequest to the Luxembourg of impressionistic
paintings, including Manet's Olympe, stirred all artistic and
inartistic Paris; Gauguin, Mlle. Morisot, Guillaumin, Renoir, Pissaro,
Sisley, Claude Monet, "the marine painter _par excellence_"; Manet,
Roll, Redon, all men then fighting the stream of popular and academic
disfavour. Since Charles Baudelaire's Salons, no volume on the current
Paris exhibitions has appeared of such solid knowledge and literary
power as Huysmans's. Admitting his marked prejudices, his numerous
dogmatic utterances, there is nevertheless an attractive artistic
quality backed up by the writer's stubborn convictions that persuade
where the more liberal and brilliant Théophile Gautier never does.
"Théo," who said that if he pitched his sentences in the air they
always fell on their feet, like a cat, leaned heavily on his verbal
magic. But even in that particular he is no match for Huysmans, who,
boasting the blood of Fleming painters, sculptors, and architects, uses
his pen as an artist his brush. Take another bit from his study of
Moreau's Salome:
"A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath innumerable
arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman pillars, enamelled
with varicoloured bricks, set with mosaics, encrusted 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 altars, 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, parchmentlike, annulated with wrinkles,
withered by age; his long beard floated like a 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 sun-rays fallen from the dome."... And of Salome he writes:
"In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des
Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman
Salome that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing girl ...
she had become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess
of immortal Hysteria; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,
insensible Beast, poisoning like Helen of old all that go near her, all
that look upon her, all that she touches."
Not only is there an evocation of material splendour in the above
passages taken from A Rebours, but a note of cenobitic contempt for
woman's beauty, which sounds throughout the books of Huysmans. It may
be heard at its deepest in his study of Félicien Rops, the Belgian
etcher and painter, who interpreted Baudelaire's _femmes damnées_.
Rops, too, regarded woman in the light of a destroyer, a being banned
by the early fathers of the Church, the matrix of sin. Huysmans's
incomparable study of Rops--whose great powers have never been fully
recognized because of his erotic and diabolic subjects--may be found in
his Certains (1889).
In his description of the Independent exposition (1880) to which
Degas, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, Forain, and others sent
canvases, Huysmans drifts into literary criticism; he saw analogies
between the paintings of the realists, impressionists, and the modern
men of fiction, Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola. "Have not," he asks, "the
Goncourts fixed in a style deliberate and personal, the most ephemeral
of sensations, the most fugacious of _nuances_?" So, too, have Manet,
Monet, Pissaro, Raffaelli. Nor does he hesitate to make the avowal,
still incomprehensible for those who are deceived by the prodigious
blaring of critical trumpets, that Baudelaire is a true poet of genius;
and that the _chef d'œuvre_ of fiction is Flaubert's L'Education
Sentimentale. Naturally Edgar Degas is the only psychological
interpreter of latter-day life. There is also a careful analysis
of Manet's masterpiece, the Bar at the Folies-Bergères. Huysmans
recognised Manet's indebtedness to Goya.
Certains is a valuable volume. Therein are Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave
Moreau, Degas, Bartholomé, Raffaelli, Stevens, Tissot, Wagner--the
painter, not the composer; Huysmans admits but one form in music, the
Plain Chant--Cézanne, Chéret, Whistler--which true to the tradition
of Parisian carelessness is spelled "Wisthler," as Liszt years before
was called "Litz"--Rops, Jan Luyken, Millet, Goya, Turner, Bianchi,
and other men. He gives to Millet his just meed of praise, no more--he
views him as a designer rather than as a great painter. We get Huysmans
in his quintessence. Scattered through his novels--if one may dare to
ascribe this title to such an amorphous form--there are eloquent and
burning pages devoted to various painters, but not with the amplitude
and cool science displayed in his studies of Degas, Moreau, Rops, The
Monster in Art--a monstrous subject masterfully handled--and Whistler.
He literally discovered Degas, and in future books on rhetoric surely
Huysmans's descriptions of Degas's old workwomen sponging their creased
backs cannot be excluded without doing violence to the expressive
powers of the French language. His eye mirrored the most minute
details--in that he was Dutch-Flemish; the same merciless scrutiny
is pursued in the life of the soul--he was Flemish and Spanish:
Ruysbroeck and St. John of the Cross, mystics both, with an amazing
sense of the realistic.
Without a spacious imagination, Huysmans was a man of the subtlest
sensibilities. There is a wealth of critical divination in his studies
of Moreau and Whistler. Twenty or thirty years ago it was not so easy
to range these two enigmas. Huysmans did so, and, in company with Degas
and Rops, placed them so definitely that critics have paraphrased his
ideas ever since. Baudelaire had recognised the glacial genius of
Rops; Huysmans definitely consecrated it in Certains. For Huysmans the
theme of love aroused his mordant wit--Flaubert, Goncourt, Baudelaire
were all summoned at one time or another in their respective careers
to answer the charge of poisoning public morals! And what malicious
commentaries were drawn and etched by the versatile Rops.
Extraordinary as are Rops's delineations of Satan, the prose of
Huysmans is not less graphic in interpreting the etched plate. In
De Tout (1901) there is, literally, a little about everything. Not
only are several unknown quarters of Paris sketched with a surprising
freshness, but Huysmans goes far afield for his themes. He studies
sleeping-cars and the sleepy city Bruges, the aquarium at Berlin--"most
fastidious and most ugly"--the Gobelins, Quentin Matsys at Antwerp;
but whether in illustrating with his pen the mobs at Lourdes or the
intimate habits of a Parisian café, he never fails to achieve the exact
phrase that illuminates. Nor is it all crass realism. His eye, the eye
of a visionary as well as of a painter, penetrates to the marrow of the
soul.
A Rebours is the history of a decadent soul in search of an earthly
paradise. His palace of art is near Paris, and in it the Duc des
Esseintes assembles all that is rare, perverse, beautiful, morbid, and
crazy in modern art and literature. A Rebours is in reality a very
precious work of criticism by a distinguished critical temperament,
written in a prose jewelled and shining, sharp as a Damascene dagger.
This French writer's admiration for Moreau has been mentioned. Luyken
comes in for his share; the bizarre Luyken of Amsterdam (1649-1712).
Odilon Redon, the lithographer and illustrator of Poe, is lauded by Des
Esseintes. Redon's work is not lacking in subtlety, and it is sometimes
disagreeable; possibly the latter quality is aimed at by the painter.
Redon certainly had in Poe a congenial subject; in Baudelaire also, for
he has accomplished some shivering plates commemorating Fleurs du Mal.
Not such intractable reading as L'Oblat, withal difficult enough,
is The Cathedral, which abounds in glorious chapters devoted to
ecclesiastical painting, sculpture, and architecture. "It"--the
Cathedral--"was as slender and colourless as Roger Van der Weyden's
Virgins, who are so fragile, so ethereal, that they might blow away
were they not held down to earth by the weight of their brocades
and trains," is a passage in this storehouse of curious liturgical
learning. Matsys, Memling, Dierck Bouts, Van der Weyden, painted great
religious pictures because they possessed a naïve faith. Nowadays your
painter has no faith; better, then, stick like Degas to ballet-girls
and not soil canvas with profane burlesques. Always extreme, Huysmans
jumped from the worldly audacities of Manet to the rebellious Christ
of Grünewald. Van Eyck touched him where Van Dyck did not. He
disliked the "supersensual and sublimated Virgins of Cologne," and
pronounced Botticelli's Virgins masquerading Venuses. The Van der
Weyden triptych of the Nativity in the old museum, Berlin, filled him
with raptures, pious and æsthetic. The "theatrical crucifixions, the
fleshly coarseness of Rubens" are naught when compared to the early
Flemings. His pages on Rembrandt are admirable reading, "Rembrandt,
who had the soul of a Judaising Protestant ... with his serious but
fervid wit, his genius for concentration, for getting a spot of the
essence of sunlight into the heart of darkness ... has accomplished
great results; and in his Biblical scenes has spoken a language which
no one before him had attempted to lisp." As Huysmans loathed the
rancid and voluptuous "sacred" music of Gounod and other comic-opera
writers of masses and hymns in the Church, so he abominated the modern
"sacred" painters. James Tissot and Munkacsy come in for a critical
flagellation. What could be more dazzling than his account of a certain
stained-glass window in his beloved Cathedral at Chartres:
"Up there high in the air, as they might be Salamanders, human beings,
with faces ablaze and robes on fire, dwelt in a firmament of glory;
but these conflagrations were enclosed and limited by an incombustible
frame of darker glass which set off the youthful and radiant joy of
the flames by the contrast of melancholy, the suggestion of the more
serious and aged aspect presented by gloomy colouring. The bugle-cry
of red, the limpid confidence of white, the repeated hallelujahs of
yellow, the virginal glory of blue, all the quivering crucible of glass
was dimmed as it neared this border dyed with rusty red, the tawny
hues of sauces, the harsh purples of sandstone, bottle green, tinder
brown, fuliginous blacks, and ashy grays." Not even Arthur Rimbaud,
in his half-jesting sonnet on the "Vowels," indulged in such daring
colour symbolism as Huysmans. For a specimen of his most fulgurating
style read his Camïeu in Red, in a little volume edited by Mr. Howells
entitled Pastels in Prose, and translated by Stuart Merrill.
"To be rich, very rich, and found in Paris in face of the triumphal
ambulance, the Luxembourg, a public museum of contemporary painting!"
he cries in one of his essays. He was the critic of Modernity, as
Degas is its painter, Goncourt its exponent in fiction, Paul Bourget
its psychologist. He lashes himself into a fine rage over the enormous
prices paid some years ago by New York millionaires for the work of
such artists as Bouguereau, Dubufe, Gérôme, Constant, Rosa Bonheur,
Knaus, Meissonier. The Christ before Pilate, sold for 600,000 francs,
sets him fulminating against its painter. "Cet indigent décor brossé
par le Brésilien de la piété, par le rastaquouère de la peinture, par
Munkacsy."
Joris-Karl Huysmans should have been a painter; his indubitable gift
for form and colour were by some trick of nature or circumstance
transposed to literature. So he brought to the criticism of pictures an
eye abnormal in its keenness, and to this was superadded an abnormal
power of expression.
After reading his Three Primitives you may be tempted to visit Colmar,
where hang in the museum several paintings by Mathias Grünewald, who is
the chief theme of the French writer's book. Colmar is not difficult
to reach if you are in Paris, or pass through Strasburg. It is a town
of over 35,000 inhabitants, the capital of Upper Alsace and about
forty miles from Strasburg. There are several admirable specimens of
the Rhenish school there, Van Eyck and Martin Schongauer (born 1450
in Colmar), the great engraver. His statue by Bartholdi is in the
town, and, as Huysmans rather delicately puts it, is an "emetic for
the eyes." He always wrote what he thought, and notwithstanding the
odour of sanctity in which he departed this life, his name and his
books are still anathema to many of his fellow Catholics. But as to the
quality of this last study there can be no mistake. It is masterly,
revealing the various Huysmanses we admire: the mystic, the realist,
the penetrating critic of art, and the magnificent tamer of language.
Hallucinated by his phrases, you see cathedrals arise from the mist
and swim so close to you that you discern every detail before the
vision vanishes; or some cruel and bloody canvas of the semi-demoniacal
Grünewald, on which a hideous Christ is crucified, surrounded by
scowling faces. The swiftness in executing the verbal portrait allows
you no time to wonder over the method; the evocation is complete, and
afterward you realise the magic of Huysmans.
In his Là Bas he described the Grünewald Crucifixion, once in the
Cassel Museum, now at Carlsruhe. A tragic realism invests this work of
Grünewald, who is otherwise a very unequal painter. Huysmans puzzled
over the Bavarian, who was probably born at Aschaffenburg. Sundvart,
Waagen, Goutzwiller, and Passavant have written of him. He was born
about 1450 and died about 1530. He lived his later years in Mayence,
lonely and misanthropic. Every one speaks of Dürer, the Cranachs,
Schongauer, Holbein, but even during his lifetime Grünewald was not
famous. To-day he is esteemed by those for whom the German and Belgian
Primitives mean more than all Italian art. There is a bitterness, a
pessimism, a delight in torture for the sake of torture in Grünewald's
treatment of sacred subjects that must have shocked his more easy-going
contemporaries. Huysmans, as is his wont, does not spare us in his
recital of the horrors of that Colmar Crucifixion. For me the one now
at Carlsruhe suffices. It causes a shudder, and some echo of the agony
of the Passion permeates that solemn scene. Grünewald must have been a
painter of fierce and exalted temperament. His Christs are ugly--the
ugliness symbolical of the sins of the world;--this doctrine was upheld
by Tertullian and Cyprian, Cyril and St. Justin.
And the cadaverous flesh tones! Such is his fidelity, a fidelity
almost pathologic, that two such eminent men as Charcot and Richet
testified, after study, to the too painful verity of this early
German's brushwork. He depicted with shocking realism the malady known
as St. Anthony's Fire, and a still more pathological interpretation
by Huysmans follows. But he warmly praises the fainting mother,
one of the noble figures in German art. We allude now to the Colmar
Crucifixion, with its curious introduction of St. John the Baptist in
Golgotha, and the dark landscape through which runs a gloomy river.
Fainting Mary, the mother of Christ, is upheld by the disciple John.
There is a mysterious figure of a girl, an ugly but sorrowful face, and
the lamb bearing the cross is at the foot of the cross. Audacious is
the entire composition. It wounds the soul, and that is what Grünewald
wished. His harsh nature saw in the crucifixion not a pious symbol but
the death of a god, an unjust death. So he fulminates upon his canvas
his hatred of the outrage. How tender he can be we see in this Virgin.
On the back of this polyptique are a Resurrection and Annunciation.
The latter is bad. The former is a dynamic picture representing Christ
in a vast aureole arising to the sky, His guards tumbled over at the
side of the tomb. There is an explosion of luminosity. Christ's face
is radiant; He displays his palms upward, pierced by the nails. The
floating aerial effect and the draperies are wonderfully handled. The
museum wherein hang these works was formerly a convent of nuns, founded
in 1232, and in 1849 turned into a museum. Huysmans rages, of course,
over the change.
He finds among the Grünewalds at Colmar--there are nine in all--a St.
Anthony bearded, that reminds him of a Father Hecker born in Holland.
What a simile, made by a man who probably never saw the American
priest, except pictured!
He visits Frankfort-on-the-Main, and afterward, characteristically
pouring his vials of wrath upon this New Jerusalem, he visits the
Staedel Museum and goes into ecstasies over that lovely head of a young
woman called the Florentine, by an unknown master. Though he admires
the Van der Weyden, the Bouts, and the Virgin of Van Eyck, he really
has eyes only for this exquisite, vicious androgynous creature and
for the Virgin by the Master of Flémalle. After a vivid description
of the Florentine Cybele he inquires into her artistic paternity,
waving aside the suggestion that one of the Venezianos painted her.
But which one? There are over eleven, according to Lanzi. Huysmans
will not allow Botticelli's name to be mentioned, though he discerns
certain Botticellian qualities. But he has never forgiven Botticelli
for painting the Virgin looking like the Venus, and he hates the
paganism of the Renaissance with an early Christian fervour. (Fancy the
later Joris-Karl Huysmans and the early Walter Pater in a discussion
about the Renaissance.) Huysmans himself was a Primitive. Much that he
wrote would have been understood in the Middle Ages. The old Adam in
this Fleming, however, comes to the surface as he conjectures the name
of the enigmatic heroine. Is it that Giulia Farnese, called "Giulia
la bella"--_puritas impuritatis_--who became the favourite of Pope
Alexander VI.? If it is--and then Huysmans writes some pages of perfect
prose which suggest joyful depravity, as depraved as the people he
paints with such marvellous colour and precision. It is a peep behind
the scenes of a pagan Christian Rome.
The Master of Flémalle, whose Virgin he describes at the close of this
volume, was the Jacques Daret born in the early years of the fifteenth
century, a fellow student of Roger van der Weyden under Campin at
Tournay. We confess that, while we enjoy the verbal rhapsodies of the
author, we were not carried away by this stately Virgin and Child by
Daret, though there are many Darets that once passed as the work of
Roger van der Weyden. It has not the sweet melancholy, this picture,
of Hans Memlinc's Madonnas, and the Van Eyck in the same gallery,
as well as the Van der Weyden, are both worth a trip across Europe
to gaze upon. However, on the note of a rapt devotion Huysmans ends
his book. The first edition, illustrated, was published in 1905, by
Vanier-Messein. But there is a new (1908) edition, published by Plon,
at Paris, and called Trois Eglises et Trois Primitifs. This latter is
not illustrated. The three churches discussed are Notre Dame de Paris
and its symbolism, Saint Germain-l'Auxerrois, and Saint Merry.
Poor, unhappy, suffering Huysmans! He trod the Road to Damascus on foot
and not in a pleasant motor-car like several of his successors. The
intimate side of the man, so hidden by him, is now being revealed to us
by his friends. Recently, in the _Revue de Paris_, Mme. Myriam Harry,
the writer of The Conquest of Jerusalem, tells us of her friendship
with Huysmans, with a rather sentimental anecdote about his weeping
over a dead love. When she met him he was already attainted with
the malady which tortured him to the end. A lifetime sufferer from
neuralgia and dyspepsia, he was half blind for a few months before
his death. He touchingly alludes to his illness as both a punishment
and a reparation for things he wrote in his Lourdes. In a letter
dated January 5, 1907, he avows that nothing is more dangerous than
to celebrate sorrow; all his books celebrate the physical miseries of
life, the sorrows of the soul. Humbly this great writer admits that he
must pay for the pages of that cruel book, the life of Sainte-Lydwine.
The disease he so often described came to him at last and slew him.