THE OPINIONS OF J.-K. HUYSMANS
A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of
playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free
exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huysmans, who wrote this
charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable. He was the
most unpleasant among the world's great writers; for as a great
master of prose he ranks high in the literature of his country. His
detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like
Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition,
Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the ardour of a sportsman
tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appealed to him must be
left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same
class, but Swift enjoyed scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not.
Nor for that matter did Flaubert. The De Goncourts have told us in
their copious confidences the agony they endured when digging for
documents. Germinie Lacerteux was painful travail, not alone because
of the tortuous style it demanded, but also because of the author's
natural repugnance to such vulgar material. They were aristocrats.
Huysmans came of a solid bourgeois family; Dutch on the paternal
side, his father hailed from Breda, and Parisian on the distaff.
Therefore he might have described his modest surroundings with less
acerbity than the irritable De Goncourts. Such was not the case. He
loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps
the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful incentive,
forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and
religion aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed from life
to his marvellously written pages. His was a veritable AEsthetic of
the Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the
pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue
sensibility with a repelling misanthropy.
In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K.
Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some
intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social
ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries;
indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes
contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which
is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a
roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the
account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an unassuming
and industrious functionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and
even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and
Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable
phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life
and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled
bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a
literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured
the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a
model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the
Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for
his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour,
yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the
irascible among decorated philistines!
"Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a
stupid woman; as he speaks the book looms up before one, becomes
monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility;
the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your
eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes,
but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a
touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every
sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or
an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, and amused
look of contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for
human imbecility." This tiny etched portrait is by Mr. Arthur
Symons, who practically introduced Huysmans to English-speaking
letters.
Pitiless he was, as pitiless to himself as to others. Yet Coquiot
found him entertaining betimes, while De Gourmont scoffs at his
tales of stomachic woe. Huysmans, he says, ate heartily in the very
restaurants he so viciously abuses throughout that Iliad of
indigestion, A Vau-l'Eau. He was the M. Folantin, the unheroic hero;
as he was the unpatriotic hero of The Knapsack--published in Zola's
collection, Les Soirees de Medan. In all his books he figures. Jules
Lemaitre describes them collectively as: a young man with the
dysentery; a young man who disliked single blessedness--the critic
used a stronger expression; a man who couldn't get a beefsteak in
Paris cooked as he wanted it, and a man who liked to read the chaste
chronicle of Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as the sadistic
Bluebeard--these comprise the characters of Huysmans. After his
conversion he made amends, though he was always the atrabilious
faultfinder.
No matter. One of the most notable of art critics in a city
abundantly supplied with criticism was this same Huysmans. His
critical achievement may outlive his fiction and his religious
confessions. He preferred Certains to his other books. It is written
in his most astounding and captivating style. The portraits of
certain artists in this unique volume recite the history of the
critic's acuity and clairvoyance. He first announced Edgar Degas as
the "greatest artist we possess to-day in France." He discovered
Odilon Redon, Raffaelli, Forain, and wrote of Gustave Moreau in
enamelled prose. Whistler, Cheret, Pissarro, Gauguin were praised by
him before they had attracted the pontifical disdain of academic
criticism. To Rops he consecrated some extraordinary pages, for
Huysmans was a verbal virtuoso superior to any of the artists he
praised and later he cynically confessed to Coquiot that he didn't
highly estimate the Belgian etcher, but found in him excellent
pasture for his own picture-making pen. In a word, the erotic Rops
attracted him more than Rops the every-day craftsman, and rightly
enough. With the Japanese this erotic side of Rops is only for the
connoisseur.
Huysmans said some just things of Whistler, and he was the first
critic to salute the rising star of Paul Cezanne, who, he asserts,
contributed more to the impressionist movement than Manet; and one
who also discovered the prodromes of a new art. (This was as early
as 1877.) He found the Cezanne still-life brutally real; above all,
a preoccupation with forms and "edges," that betrayed this painter's
tendency toward a novel synthesis. But according to Coquiot,
Huysmans saw through the hole in the Cezanne millstone. The
Provencal was a ruse, an intrigant, and a money-grubber in his old
age, and proved his plebeian ancestry. His father began barber,
ended banker, shaved faces as well as notes, bled his clientele in
both professions.
American collectors of art Huysmans treated as brigands. In the
matter of the classical painters and sculptors he manifested himself
intransigent. He adored the Flemish primitives, the School of
Cologne and a few of the Italian primitives, but with the exception
of Fra Angelico found their types detestingly androgynous. (He
employed a more pungent term.) In the Low Countries are the true
primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism is that of John of
the Cross and Saint Teresa. Matthias Gruenewald's Crucifixion is his
idol. Huysmans's opinion of Puvis de Chavannes in Certains is
stimulating though inconclusive. For him Puvis tries to dance a
rigaudon at a Requiem mass! But as a descendant of Cornelis
Huysmans, the Parisian sees with almost an abnormal vision, and in
prose paints like a veritable Fleming. Little wonder De Gourmont
called him an "eye." His prose is addressed to the eye, rather than
to the ear. Sumptuous in colouring, its rhythmic movement is
pompous, its tone hieratic; and he so manipulated it that it was a
perfect medium to depict the Paris of his time.
Huysmans did not think too highly of his brothers under the same
literary yoke. His opinions are concise. Coquiot prints them.
Despite his affiliations with Zola and the naturalistic group,
Huysmans soon tired of his chief, tired of his theories, his crude
notions of art and life. He definitely broke away from him in his
famous preface to La Bas. And it should not be forgotten that he was
the first to celebrate in fiction, if celebration it may be called,
the prostitute of modern Paris. Marthe appeared a year earlier than
either Nana or La Fille Elise, the latter by Edmond de Goncourt. But
he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive deeper in the mediaeval
vileness of La Bas. He met Goncourt through the offices of Leon
Cladel, a writer little known to our generation. Huysmans was a
friend in need to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and frequented the
eccentric company of Barbey d'Aurevilly, in whose apartment he said
that Paul Bourget was apt to pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did
not care for that "Cherubin of the Duchesses of the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine."
Of Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Dante, Schiller, and Goethe he spoke
with ill-concealed contempt. Raseurs, all these "solemn pontiffs."
His major detestation was Voltaire. Balzac, the prodigious novelist,
left him unstirred. "Not an artistic epithet" in his edition, fifty
volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread. Theophile Gautier
did not attract him; he found the impeccable master cold and
diluted; so many pages published to say nothing! Huysmans believed
in "saying something," and for him it usually meant something
disagreeable, or else contrary to accepted belief. He hated the
theatre and his opinions of Scribe, Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou,
Feuillet, and of the "old pedant" Sarcey, are savage. He had no
feeling for the footlights, and not possessing much imagination and
deficient in what are called "general ideas" (that is, the
stereotyped commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate "thinkers"),
he revolted at the lean or hysterical stuff manufactured by
dramatists; plays that are neither life nor literature, nor even
theatrical.
Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul-explorers in the poetical
Parnassus of that period, appealed to Huysmans. He admired, as
well he might, Flaubert, but found his company intolerable. That
giant from Normandy was too healthy for the slender overwrought
Parisian. He had, so said Huysmans, the manners of a traveling
salesman--Balzac's Gaudissart--and would play his own Homais, being
addicted to punning and disconcerting joking. Poor Flaubert! Poorer
Huysmans! Such sensibility as his must have been a daily torture.
Victor Hugo was "an incomparable trumpet, an epic of the garde
nationale."
From Edmond de Goncourt with his condescending airs of "un vieux
maitre," he escaped by flight; and Turgenev, most amiable of great
men, was a tedious Russian, "a spigot of tepid water always
flowing." If Verlaine had been penned up in hospital or prison it
would have been for the greater glory of French poetry. Jules
Laforgue, "Quelle joie!" Remy de Gourmont: "I wrote a preface to one
of his books" (Le Latin mystique). "That says enough." Marcel
Provost: "Le jeune premier des romans de Georges Ohnet," which isn't
bad. He rather evades a definite judgment of Anatole France: "Il s'y
connait, le gaillard; mais ce qu'il se defile!" The style and
thought of these two remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls
Maurice Barres "Lord Beaconsfield," a high compliment to that
exquisite writer's political attainments. He sums up Ferdinand
Brunetiere as "constipe," a sound definition of a shrewd,
unsympathetic critic. Naturally women writers, "little geese," are
not spared by this waspish misogynist, whose intense, pessimistic
vision deformed ideas as well as objects.
In A Rebours there is the account of a trip to London by the anaemic
hero, Des Esseintes. He gets no further than one of the English
taverns opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. It is risible, this episode;
Huysmans could display verve and a sort of grim humour when he
wished. Brunetiere, who was serious to solemnity, and lacked a funny
bone, declared that Huysmans borrowed the incident from a popular
vaudeville, Le Voyage a Dieppe, by Fulgence and Wafflard. He need
not have gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaire by the
Crepets (Eugene and Jacques) there is the genesis of the story. To
become better acquainted with English speech and manners, Baudelaire
frequented an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, where he drank
whisky, read _Punch_, and also sought the company of English grooms
in the Faubourg Saint-Honore. Huysmans loved Baudelaire as much as
Brunetiere detested him. There is no doubt he knew this thoroughly
Baudelairian anecdote. A perverse comet in the firmament of French
literature, Joris-Karl Huysmans will always be more admired than
loved.