To traverse the books of Huysmans is a true pessimistic progress; from
Le Drageoir aux Epices (1874) to Les Foules de Lourdes (1906), the
note, at times shrill, often profound, is never one of dulcification.
The first book, a veritable little box of spices, was modelled on
Baudelaire's Poèmes en Prose, but revealed to the acute critic a new
personal shade. Its plainness is Gallic. That amusing, ironic sketch,
L'Extase, gives us a key-note to the writer's disillusioned soul.
Marthe (1876) caused a sensation. It was speedily suppressed. La
Fille Elise and Nana the public could endure; but the cold-blooded
delineation of vice in this first novel was too much for the Parisian,
who likes a display of sentiment or sympathy in the treatment of
unsavoury themes. Now, sympathy for sin or suffering is missing in
Huysmans. Slow veils of pity never descend upon his sufferers. Like
a surgeon who will show you a "beautiful disease," a "classic case,"
he exposed the life of the wretched Marthe, and, while he called a
cat a cat, he forgot that certain truths are unfit for polite ears
accustomed to the rotten-ripe Dumas _fils_, or the thrice-brutal Zola.
It was in Marthe that Huysmans proclaimed his adherence to naturalism
in these memorable words: "I write what I see, what I feel, and what I
have experienced, and I write it as well as I can: that is all." This
rubric he adhered to his life long, despite his change of spiritual
base. He also said that there are writers who have talent, and others
who have not talent. All schools, groups, cliques, whether romantic or
naturalistic or decadent, need not count.
It was 1880 before Huysmans was again heard from, this time in
collaboration with Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique,
and Paul Alexis. Les Soirées de Médan was the inappropriate title of
a book of interesting tales. Huysmans's contribution, Sac au Dos, is
a story of the Franco-Prussian war that would have pleased Stendhal
by its sardonic humour. The hero never reaches the front, but spends
his time in hospitals, and the nearest he gets to the glory of war
is a chronic stomach-ache. The variations on this ignoble motive
showed the malice of Huysmans. War is not hell, he says in effect, but
dysentery is; how often a petty ailing has unmade a heroic soul. Yet in
the Brussels edition of this story there was published the following
verse--the author seldom wrote poetry; he was hardly a poet, but as
indicating certain religious preoccupations it is worth repeating:
"O croix qui veux l'austère, ô chair qui veux le doux,
O monde, ô évangile, immortels adversaires,
Les plus grands ennemis sont plus d'accord que vous,
Et les pôles du ciel ne sont pas plus contraires.
On monte dans le ciel par un chemin de pleurs,
Mais, que leur amertume a de douceurs divines!
On descend aux enfers par un chemin de fleurs,
Mais hélas! que ces fleurs nous préparent d'épines!
La fleur qui, dans un jour, sèche et s'épanouit,
Les bulles d'air et d'eau qu'un petit souffle casse,
Une ombre qui paraît et qui s'évanouit
Nous représentent bien comme le monde passe."
Naturally, in the face of Maupassant's brilliant Boule de Suif,
Huysmans's sly attack on patriotism was overlooked. Croquis Parisiens
(1880) contains specimens of Huysmans's astounding virtuosity.
No one before has ever described sundry aspects of Paris with
such verisimilitude--that Paris he said was, because of the
Americans, fast becoming a "sinister Chicago." Balls, cafés, bars,
omnibus-conductors, washerwomen, chestnut-sellers, hairdressers,
remote landscapes and corners of the city, cabarets, la Bièvre,
the underground river, with prose paraphrases of music, perfumes,
flowers--Huysmans astonishes by his prodigality of epithet and justness
of observation. What Manet, Pissaro, Raffaelli, Forain, were doing
with oil and pastel and pencil, he accomplished with his pen. A Vau
l'Eau followed in 1882. It is considered the typical Huysmans tale,
and some see in Jean Folantin its unhappy hero, obsessed by the desire
for a juicy beefsteak, the prototype of Durtal. Folantin is a poor
employee in the Ministry who must exist on his annual salary of fifteen
hundred francs. He haunts cheap restaurants, lives in cheap lodgings,
is seedy and sour, with the nerves of a voluptuary. His sense of smell
makes his life a nightmare. The sordid recital would be comical but
that it is so villainously real. It is an Odyssey of a dyspeptic.
Dickens would have set us laughing over the woes of this Folantin,
or Dostoïevsky would have made us weep--as he did in Poor Folk. But
Huysmans has no time for tears or laughter; he must register his truth,
and at the end an odor of stale cheese exhales from the printed page.
Wretched Monsieur Folantin. Of the official life so clearly presented
in some of Maupassant's tales, we get little; Huysmans is too much
preoccupied with Folantin's stomach troubles. In the same volume,
though published first in 1887, is Un Dilemme, which is a pitiful
tale of a girl abandoned. Huysmans, while he came under the influence
of L'Education Sentimentale, seems to have taken as a _leit motiv_
the idiotic antics of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet. This pair of
mediocre maniacs were his models for mankind at large. Les Sœurs
Vatard (1879), praised so warmly by Zola in The Experimental Novel,
is not a novel, but kaleidoscopic Parisian pictures of intimate low
life, executed with consummate finish, and closeness to fact. The two
sisters Vatard, Céline and Désirée, with their love affairs, fill a
large volume. There are minute descriptions of proletarian interiors,
sewing-shops full of perspiring girls, railroad-yards, locomotives, and
a gingerbread fair. The men are impudent scamps, bullies, _souteneurs_,
the women either weak or vulgar. Veracity there often is and an air
of reality--though these swaggerers and simpletons are silhouettes,
not half as vital as Zola's Lise or Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux. But
atmosphere, _toujours_ atmosphere--of that Huysmans is the compeller.
Not a disagreeable scene, smell, or sound does he spare his readers.
And how many _genre_ pictures he paints for us in this book.
We reach _bourgeois_ life with En Ménage (1881). André and Cyprien the
novelist and painter are not so individual as, say, old _père_ Vatard
in the preceding story. They but serve as stalking horses for Huysmans
to show the stupid miseries of the married state; that whether a man
is or is not married he will regret it. Love is the supreme poison of
life. André is deceived by his wife, Cyprien lives lawlessly. Neither
one is contented. The novel is careful in workmanship; it is like
Goncourt and Flaubert, both gray and masterful. But it leaves a bad
taste in the mouth. Like the early Christian fathers, Huysmans had a
conception of Woman, "the eternal feminine of the eternal simpleton,"
which is hardly ennobling. The painter Cyprien is said to be a portrait
of the author.
A Rebours appeared at the psychologic moment. Decadence was in the
air. Either you were a decadent or violently opposed to the movement.
Verlaine had consecrated the word--hardly an expressive one. The
depraved young Jean, Duke of Esseintes, greedy of exotic sensations,
who figures as the hero of this gorgeous prose mosaic, is said to be
the portrait of a Parisian poet, and a fashionable dilettante of art
painted by Whistler. But there is more of Huysmans--the exquisite
literary critic that is Huysmans--in the work. If, as Henry James
remarks: "When you have no taste you have no discretion--which is
the conscience of taste," then Huysmans must be acclaimed a man of
unexampled tact. His handling of a well-nigh impossible theme, his
"technical heroism," above all, his soul-searching tactics in that
wonderful Chapter VII, when Des Esseintes, suffering from the malady
of the infinite, proceeds to examine his conscience and portrays for
us the most fluctuating shades of belief and feeling--his touch here
is sure, and casuistically immoral, as "all art is immoral for the
inartistic." The chief value of the book for future generations of
critics lies in Chapters XII and XIV. Huysmans's literary and artistic
preferences are catalogued with delicacy and erudition. More Byzantine
than Byzance, A Rebours is a storehouse of art treasures, and it was
once the battle-field of the literary élite. It is a history of the
artistic decadent, the man of disdainful inquietudes who searches for
an earthly artificial paradise. The mouth orchestra which, by the
aid of various liquors, gives to the tongue sensations analogous to
music; the flowers and perfume concerts, the mechanical landscape,
the mock sea--all these are mystifications. Huysmans the _farceur_,
the Jules Verne of æsthetics, is enjoying himself. His liquor
symphony he borrowed from La Chimie du Goût by Polycarpe Poncelet;
from Zola, perhaps, his concert of flowers. As for the originality
of these diversions, we may turn to Goethe and find in his Triumph
der Empfindsamkeit the mechanical landscape of the Prince, who can
enjoy sunlight or moonlight at will. He has also a doll to whom he
sighs, rhapsodises, and passes in its silent company hours of rapture.
Villiers de l'Isle Adam evidently read Goethe: see his Eve of the
Future. All of which shows the folly of certain critics who recognise
in Huysmans the prime exemplar of the decadent--that much misunderstood
word. But how about Goethe? A Rebours, notwithstanding Huysmans's
later pilgrimage to Canossa, he never excelled. It is his most personal
achievement. It also contains the most beautiful writing of this
Paganini of prose.
En Rade (1887) did not attract much attention. It is not dull; on
the contrary, it is very Huysmansish. But it is not a subject that
enthralls. Jacques Maries and his wife have lost their money. They go
into the country to live cheaply. The author's detestation of nature
was apparently the motive for writing the book. There are fantastic
dreams worthy of H. G. Wells, and realistic descriptions of a calf's
birth and a cat's agony; the last two named prove the one-time disciple
of Zola had not lost his vision; the truth is, Zola's method is
melodramatic, romantic, vague, when compared to Huysmans's implacable
manner of etching petty facts.
But in Là-Bas he takes a leap across the ditch of naturalism and
reaches another, if not more delectable, territory. This was in 1891.
A new manifesto must be made--the Goncourts had printed a bookful.
Symbolism, not naturalism, is now the shibboleth. Huysmans declares
that:
It is essential to preserve the veracity of the document,
the precision of detail, the fibrous and nervous language
of Realism, but it is equally essential to become the
well-digger of the soul, and not to attempt to explain
what is mysterious by mental maladies.... It is essential,
in a word, to follow the great toad so deeply dug out
by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a parallel
pathway in the air, another road by which we may reach the
Beyond, to achieve thus a Spiritual naturalism.
And by a curious, a bizarre route Durtal, the everlasting Durtal,
sought to achieve spiritually--a spirituality _à rebours_, for it was
by devil-worship and the study of Gilles de Rais of ill-fame, that
he reached his goal. We also study church bells, _incubi_, satanism,
demons, witches, sacrileges of a _raffiné_ sort; indeed, an enormous
amount of occult lumber is dumped into the book, which is indigestible
on that account. Diabolic lore _à la_ Jules Dubois and other modern
magi is profuse. That wicked lady, who is far from credible, Madame
Chantelouve, flits through various chapters. Her final disappearance,
one hopes "below"--like the devils in the pantomime--is received by
Durtal and the reader with a sigh of relief. She is quite the vilest
character in French fiction, and, as Stendhal would say, her only
excuse is that she never existed. The Black Mass is painted by an
artist adroit in the manipulation of the sombre and magnificent.
Là-Bas proved a prophetic weather-vane. En Route in 1895 did not
astonish those who had been studying the spiritual fluctuations of
Huysmans. Behold the miracle! He is a believing Christian. Wisely the
antecedent causes were tacitly avoided. "I believe," said Durtal,
simply. Of superior interest is his struggle up the ladder to
perfection. This painful feat is slowly accomplished in La Cathédrale
(1898), L'Oblat (1903), and Lourdes (1906). And it must be confessed
that the more pious grew Huysmans the less artist he--as might have
been expected. What is his art to a man who is concerned not with the
things of this world? He never lost his acerbity, or his faculty for
the phrase magical, though his sense of proportion gradually vanished.
Luckily, he is not saccharine like the majority of writers on religious
topics. Ferdinand Brunetière complained that Flaubert was unbearably
erudite in his three short stories--echoing what Sainte-Beuve had said
of Salammbô years before. What must he have thought of that astonishing
Cathedral, with its chapters on the symbolism of architecture,
sculpture, gems, flowers (Sir Thomas Browne and his quincunxes are
fairly beaten from the field), vestments, sacred vessels of the
altar, and a multitude of mysterious things, hieroglyphics, and dark
liturgical riddles? There are ravishing pages, though none so solemn
and moving as the description of the _De profundis_ and _Dies iræ_ in
En Route.
It may prove profitable for the student after reading La Cathédrale to
take up Walter Pater's unfinished story, Gaston De Latour, and read
the description therein of the Chartres Cathedral. There are pages of
exquisitely felt prose, but Huysmans sees more and tells what he sees
in less musical though more lapidary phrases.
For anyone except the trailer after strange souls The Oblate is an
affliction. Madame Bavoil, with her _notre ami_, is a chattering
nuisance, withal a worthy creature. Durtal is always in the dumps. He
speaks much of interior peace, but he gives the impression of a man
sitting painfully amidst spiritual brambles. Perhaps he felt that for
him after his Golgotha are the sweet-singing flames of Purgatory. We
are not sorry when he returns to Paris. As for the book on Lourdes, it
is like an open wound. A whiff from the operating-room of a hospital
comes to you. We are edified by the childlike faith with which Huysmans
accepts the report of cures that would stagger the most perfervid
Christian Scientist. His Saint-Lydwine is hard reading, written by a
man whose mysticism was a matter of rigid definition, a thing to be
weighed and felt and verbally proved. Fleming-like, he is less melodist
than harmonist--and such acrid harmonies, polyphonic variations, and
fuguelike flights to the other side of good and evil.
George Moore was the first English critic to recognise Huysmans. He
wrote that "a page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of
exquisite and powerful liquor." Frankly, it was his conversion that
focussed upon Huysmans so much attention. No one may remain isolated
in his century. He has never been a favourite with the larger Parisian
public; rather, a curiosity, a spiritual ogre turned saint. And the
saintship has been hotly disputed. Abbé Mugnier and Dom A. du Bourg,
the prior of Sainte-Marie, since his death, have written eloquently
about his conversion, his life as an oblate, and his edifying death.
Huysmans refused anæsthetics because he wished to suffer for his life
of sin, above all suffer for his early writings. Need it be added that,
like Tolstoy, he repudiated absolutely his first books? Huysmans Intime
is the title of the recollections of both Dom du Bourg and Henry Céard.
His literary executors destroyed many manuscripts. He left his money
principally to charities.
Huysmans was not a man possessing what are so vaguely denominated
"general ideas." He was never interested in the chess-play of
metaphysics, politics, or science. He was a specialist, one who
had ransacked libraries for curious details, despoiled perfumers'
catalogues for their odourous vocables, pored over technical
dictionaries for odd-coloured words, and studied cook-books for savoury
terms. His gamut of sensations began at the violet ray. He was a
perverse aristocrat who descended to the gutter there to analyse the
various stratifications of filth; when he returned to his ivory cell,
he had discovered, not humanity, but an anodyne, the love of God.
Thenceforth, he was interested in one thing--the saving of the soul of
Joris-Karl Huysmans, and being a marvellous verbal artist, his recital
of the event startled us, fascinated us. Renan once wrote of Amiel: "He
speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion, as if these
things were realities." Let us rather imitate Sainte-Beuve, who said:
"You may not cease to be a sceptic after reading Pascal, but you must
cease to treat believers with contempt." And this injunction is not
difficult to obey in the case of Huysmans, for whom the things derided
by Renan were the profoundest realities of his troubled life.