III.

For some years after the appearance of _A Rebours_ Huysmans produced nothing of any magnitude. _En Rade_, his next novel, the experience of a Parisian married couple who, under the stress of temporary pecuniary difficulties, go into the country to stay at an uncle’s farm, dwells in the memory chiefly by virtue of two vividly naturalistic episodes, the birth of a calf and the death of a cat. More interesting, more intimately personal, are the two volumes of art criticism, _L’Art Moderne_ and _Certains_, which Huysmans published at about this period. Degas, Rops, Raffaelli, Odilon Redon are among the artists of very various temperament whom Huysmans either discovered, or at all events first appreciated in their full significance, and when he writes of them it is not alone critical insight which he reveals, but his own personal vision of the world.

To Huysmans the world has ever been above all a vision; it was no accident that the art that appeals most purely to the eyes is that of which he has been the finest critic. One is tempted, indeed, to suggest that this aptitude is the outcome of heredity, of long generations devoted to laborious watchfulness of the desire of the eye in the external world, not indeed by actual accumulation of acquired qualities, but by the passing on of a nervous organism long found so apt for this task. He has ever been intensely preoccupied with the effort to express those visible aspects of things which the arts of design were made to express, which the art of speech can perhaps never express. The tortured elaboration of his style is chiefly due to this perpetual effort to squeeze tones and colours out of this foreign medium. The painter’s brain holds only a pen and cannot rest until it has wrung from it a brush’s work. But not only is the sense of vision marked in Huysmans. We are conscious of a general hyperæsthesia, an intense alertness to the inrush of sensations, which we might well term morbid if it were not so completely intellectualised and controlled. Hearing, indeed, appears to be less acutely sensitive than sight, the poet is subordinated to the painter, though that sense still makes itself felt, and the heavy multicoloured paragraphs often fall at the close into a melancholy and poignant rhythm laden with sighs. It is the sense of smell which Huysmans’ work would lead us to regard as most highly developed after that of sight. The serious way in which Des Esseintes treats perfumes is characteristic, and one of the most curious and elaborate of the _Croquis Parisiens_ is “Le Gousset,” in which the capacities of language are strained to define and differentiate the odours of feminine arm-pits. Again, earlier, in a preface written for Hannon’s _Rimes de Joie_, Huysmans points out that that writer--who failed to fulfil his early promise--alone of contemporary poets possessed “la curiosité des parfums,” and that his chief poem was written in honour of what Huysmans called “the libertine virtues of that glorious perfume,” opoponax. This sensitiveness to odour is less marked in Huysmans’ later work, but the dominance of vision remains.

The two volumes of essays on art incidentally serve to throw considerable light on Huysmans’ conception of life. For special illustration we may take his attitude towards women, whom in his novels he usually treats, from a rather conventionally sexual point of view, as a fact in man’s life rather than as a subject for independent analysis. In these essays we may trace the development of his own personal point of view, and in comparing the earlier with the later volume we find a change which is significant of the general evolution of Huysmans’ attitude towards life. He is at once the ultra-modern child of a refined civilisation and the victim of nostalgia for an ascetic mediævalism; his originality lies in the fact that in him these two tendencies are not opposed but harmonious, although the second has only of late reached full development. In a notable passage in _En Rade_, Jacques, the hero, confesses that he can see nothing really great or beautiful in a harvest field, with its anodyne toil, as compared with a workshop or a steamboat, “the horrible magnificence of machines, that one beauty which the modern world has been able to create.” It is so that Huysmans views women also; he is as indifferent to the feminine ideals of classic art as to its literary ideals. In _L’Art Moderne_, speaking with admiration of a study of the nude by Gauguin, he proceeds to lament that no one has painted the unclothed modern woman without falsification or premeditated arrangement, real, alive in her own intimate personality, with her own joys and pains incarnated in the curves of her flesh, and the lash of childbirth traceable on her flanks. We go to the Louvre to learn how to paint, he remarks, forgetting that “beauty is not uniform and invariable, but changes with the age and the climate, that the Venus of Milo, for instance, is now not more beautiful and interesting than those ancient statues of the New World, streaked and tattooed and adorned with feathers; that both are but diverse manifestations of the same ideal of beauty pursued by different races; that at the present date there can be no question of reaching the beautiful by Venetian, Greek, Dutch, or Flemish rites; but only by striving to disengage it from contemporary life, from the world that surrounds us.” “Un nu fatigué, délicat, affiné, vibrant” can alone conform to our own time; and he adds that no one has truly painted the nude since Rembrandt. It is instructive to turn from this essay to that on Degas, written some six years later. It may fairly be said that to Degas belongs the honour of taking up the study of the nude at the point where Rembrandt left it; and like Rembrandt, he has realised that the nude can only be rightly represented in those movements, postures, and avocations by which it is naturally and habitually exposed. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that Huysmans at once grasped the full significance of the painter’s achievement. But he has nothing now to say of the beauty that lies beneath the confinement of modern garments, “the delicious charm of youth, grown languid, rendered as it were divine by the debilitating air of cities.” On the contrary, he emphasises the vision which Degas presents of women at the bath-tub revealing in every “frog-like and simian attitude” their pitiful homeliness, “the humid horror of a body which no washing can purify.” Such a glorified contempt of the flesh, he adds, has never been achieved since the Middle Ages. There we catch what had now become the dominant tone in Huysmans’ vision; the most modern things in art now suggest to him, they seem to merge into, the most mediæval and ascetic. And if we turn to the essay on Félicien Rops in the same volume--the most masterly of his essays--we find the same point developed to the utmost. Rops in his own way is as modern and as daring an artist of the nude as Degas. But, as Huysmans perceives, in delineating the essentially modern he is scarcely a supreme artist, is even inferior to Forain, who in his own circumscribed region is insurpassable. Rops, as Huysmans points out, is the great artist of the symbolical rather than the naturalistic modern, a great artist who furnishes the counterpart to Memlinc and Fra Angelico. All art, Huysmans proceeds, “must gravitate, like humanity which has given birth to it and the earth which carries it, between the two poles of Purity and Wantonness, the Heaven and the Hell of art.” Rops has taken the latter pole, in no vulgar nymphomaniacal shapes, but “to divulge its causes, to summarise it Catholically, if one may say so, in ardent and sorrowful images”; he has drawn women who are “diabolical Theresas, satanised saints.” Following in the path initiated by Baudelaire and Barbey D’Aurevilly, Huysmans concludes, Rops has restored Wantonness to her ancient and Catholic dignity. Thus is Huysmans almost imperceptibly led back to the old standpoint from which woman and the Devil are one.

_Certains_ was immediately followed by _Là-bas_. This novel is mainly a study of Satanism, in which Huysmans interested himself long before it attracted the general attention it has since received in France. There are, however, three lines of interest in the book, the story of Gilles de Rais and his Sadism, the discussion of Satanism culminating in an extraordinary description of a modern celebration of the Black Mass, and the narration of Durtal’s _liaison_ with Madame Chantelouve, wherein Huysmans reaches, by firm precision and triumphant audacity, the highest point he has attained in the analysis of the secrets of passion. But though full of excellent matter, the book loses in impressiveness from the multiplicity of these insufficiently compacted elements of interest.

While not among his finest achievements, however, it serves to mark the definite attainment of a new stage in both the spirit and the method of his work. Hitherto he had been a realist, in method if not in spirit, and had conquered the finest secrets of naturalistic art; by the help of _En Ménage_ alone, as Hennequin, one of his earliest and best critics has said, “it will always be possible to restore the exact physiognomy of Paris to-day.” At the outset of _Là-bas_ there is a discussion concerning the naturalistic novel and its functions which makes plain the standpoint to which Huysmans had now attained. Pondering the matter, Durtal, the hero of the book, considers that we need, on the one hand, the veracity of document, the precision of detail, the nervous strength of language, which realism has supplied; but also, on the other hand, we must draw water from the wells of the soul. We cannot explain everything by sexuality and insanity; we need the soul and the body in their natural reactions, their conflict and their union. “We must, in short, follow the great high-way so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a parallel path in the air, another road by which we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic naturalism.” Dostoievsky comes nearest to this achievement, he remarks, and the real psychologist of the century is not Stendhal but Hello. In another form of art the early painters--Italian, German, especially Flemish--realised this ideal. Durtal sees a consummate revelation of such spiritual naturalism in Matthæus Grünewald’s crucifixion at Cassel--the Christ who was at once a putrid and unaureoled corpse and yet a manifest god bathed in invisible light, the union of outrageous realism and outrageous idealism. “Thus from triumphal ordure Grünewald extracted the finest mints of dilection, the sharpest essences of tears.” One may say that the tendency Huysmans here so clearly asserts had ever been present in his work. But in his previous novels his own native impulse was always a little unduly oppressed by the naturalistic formulas of Goncourt and Zola. The methods of these great masters had laid a burden on his work, and although the work developed beneath, and because of, that burden, a sense of laborious pain and obscurity too often resulted. Henceforth this disappears. Huysmans retains his own complexity of style, but he has won a certain measure of simplicity and lucidity. It was a natural development, no doubt furthered also by the position which Huysmans had now won in the world of letters. _A Rebours_, which he had written for his own pleasure, had found an echo in thousands of readers, and the consciousness of an audience inspired a certain clarity of speech. From this time we miss the insults directed at the _bêtise_ of humanity. These characteristics clearly mark Huysmans’ next and perhaps greatest book, in which the writer who had conquered all the secrets of decadent art now sets his face towards the ideals of classic art.

In _En Route_, indeed, these new qualities of simplicity, lucidity, humanity, and intensity of interest attain so high a degree that the book has reached a vast number of readers who could not realise the marvellous liberation from slavery to its material which the slow elaboration of art has here reached. In _A Rebours_ Huysmans succeeded in taking up the prose-poem into his novel form, while at the same time certainly sacrificing something of the fine analysis of familiar things which he had developed in _En Ménage_. In _En Route_ he takes the novel from the point he had reached in _A Rebours_, incorporates into it that power of analysis which has now reached incomparable simplicity and acuity, and thus wields the whole of the artistic means which he has acquired during a quarter of a century to one end, the presentation of a spiritual state which has become of absorbing personal interest to himself.

I well remember hearing M. Huysmans, many years ago, tell how a muddle-headed person had wished to commission him to paint a head of Christ. It seemed then a deliciously absurd request to make of the author of _A Rebours_, and his face wore the patient smile which the spectacle of human stupidity was wont to evoke, but I have since thought that that muddle-headed person was wiser than he knew. As we look back on Huysmans’ earlier work it is now easy to see how he has steadily progressed towards his present standpoint. _En Route_ does not represent, as some might imagine, the reaction of an exhausted debauchee or even the self-deception of a disappointed man of the world. The temperament of Durtal is that of André and Folantin and Des Esseintes; from the first, in the _Drageoir à Epices_, Huysmans has been an idealist and a seeker, by no means an ascetic, rather a man whose inquisitive senses and restless imagination had led him to taste of every forbidden fruit, but never one to whom the vulgar pleasures of life could offer any abiding satisfaction. The more precise record of Des Esseintes’s early sexual life may help us here; while for the penultimate stage Durtal’s relations with Madame Chantelouve in _Là-bas_, and the mingled attraction and repulsion which he felt for her, are certainly significant. In _En Route_ Durtal magnifies his own wickedness, as Bunyan did in his _Grace Abounding_; the saints have always striven to magnify their wickedness, leaving to the sinners the congenial function of playing at righteousness. To trace the real permanence of Huysmans’ attitude towards religion it is enough to turn back to _A Rebours_. Des Esseintes had been educated by the Jesuits, and it sometimes seemed to him that that education had put into him some extra-terrestrial ferment which never after ceased to work, driving him in search of a new world and impossible ideals. He could find no earthly place of rest; he sought to build for himself a “refined Thebaid” as a warm and comfortable ark wherein to find shelter from the flood of human imbecility. He was already drawn towards the Church by many bonds, by his predilection for early Christian Latinity, by the exquisite beauty of the ecclesiastical art of the Middle Ages, by his love for monastic mediæval music, “that emaciated music which acted instinctively on his nerves” and seemed to him precious beyond all other. Just as Nietzsche was always haunted by the desire for a monastery for freethinkers, so Des Esseintes dreamed of a hermitage, of the advantages of the cloistered life of convents, wherein men are persecuted by the world for meting out to it the just contempt of silence.

Des Esseintes, and even the Durtal of _Là-bas_, always put aside these thoughts with the reflection that, after all, the Church is only an out-worn legend, a magnificent imposture. In _En Route_ Durtal has taken a decisive step. He has undergone that psychological experience commonly called “conversion.” It is only of recent years that the phenomena of conversion have been seriously studied, but we know at all events that it is not intellectual, not even necessarily moral transformation, though it may react in either direction, but primarily an emotional phenomenon; and that it occurs especially in those who have undergone long and torturing disquietude, coming at last as the spontaneous resolution of all their doubts, the eruption of a soothing flood of peace, the silent explosion of inner light. The insight with which this state is described in _En Route_ seems to testify to a real knowledge of it. No obvious moral or intellectual change is effected in Durtal, but he receives a new experience of reposeful faith, a conviction deeper than all argument. It is really the sudden emergence into consciousness of a very gradual process, and the concrete artistic temperament which had been subjected to the process reacts in its own way. A more abstract intelligence would have asked: “But, after all, is my faith true?” Durtal, in the presence of the growing structure of sensory and imaginative forms within him, which has become as it were a home, feels that the question of its truth has fallen into the background. Its perfect fitness has become the affirmation of its truth. Henceforth it is the task of his life to learn how best to adapt himself to what he recognises as his eternal home. _En Route_ represents a stage in this adaptation.

By a rare chance--a happier chance than befell Tolstoi under somewhat similar circumstances--a new development in artistic achievement has here run parallel, and in exquisite harmony, with the new spiritual development. The growing simplicity of Huysmans’ work has reached a point beyond which it could not perhaps be carried without injury to his vivid and concrete style. And the new simplicity of spirit, of which it is the reflection, marks the final retreat into the background of that unreasonable contempt for humanity which ran through nearly all the previous books, and now at last passes even into an ecstasy of adoration in the passages concerning old Simon, the monastery swine-herd. Huysmans has chiefly shown his art, however, by relying almost solely for the interest of his book on his now consummate power of analysis. This power, which we may perhaps first clearly trace in “Sac au Dos,” had developed in _En Ménage_ into a wonderful skill to light up the unexplored corners of the soul and to lay bare those terrible thoughts which are, as he has somewhere said, the lamentable incarnation of “the unconscious ignominy of pure souls.” In his earlier masterpiece, _A Rebours_, however, it is little seen, having mostly passed into æsthetic criticism. The finest episode of emotional analysis here is the admirable chapter in which Des Esseintes’s attempt to visit London is narrated. All his life he had wished to see two countries, Holland and England. (And here we may recall that the former is Huysmans’ own ancestral land, and that his French critics find in his work a distinct flavour of English humour.) He had actually been to Holland, and with visions won from the pictures of Rembrandt, Steen, and Teniers he had returned disillusioned. Now he went to Galignani’s, bought an English Baedeker, entered the bodega in the Rue de Rivoli to drink of that port which the English love, and then proceeded to a tavern opposite the Gare St. Lazare to eat what he imagined to be a characteristic English meal, surrounded by English people, and haunted by memories of Dickens. And as time went by he continued to sit still, while all the sensations of England seemed to pass along his nerves, still sat until at last the London mail had started. “Why stir,” he asked himself, “when one can travel so magnificently in a chair?... Besides, what can one expect save fresh disillusionment, as in Holland?... And then I have experienced and seen what I wanted to experience and see. I have saturated myself with English life; it would be madness to lose by an awkward change of place these imperishable sensations.... He called a cab and returned with his portmanteaus, parcels, valises, rugs, umbrellas, and sticks to Fontenay, feeling the physical and mental fatigue of a man who returns home after a long and perilous journey.” There could be no happier picture of the imaginative life of the artistic temperament. But in _En Route_ analysis is the prime element of interest; from first to last there is nothing to hold us but this searching and poignant analysis of the fluctuations of Durtal’s soul through the small section which he here travels in the road towards spiritual peace. And on the way, lightly, as by chance, the author drops the finest appreciations of liturgical æsthetics, of plain-chant, of the way of the Church with the soul, of the everlasting struggle with the Evil One. There could, for instance, be no better statement than this of one of the mystic’s secrets: “There are two ways of ridding ourselves of a thing which burdens us, casting it away or letting it fall. To cast away requires an effort of which we may not be capable, to let fall imposes no labour, is simpler, without peril, within reach of all. To cast away, again, implies a certain interest, a certain animation, even a certain fear; to let fall is absolute indifference, absolute contempt; believe me, use this method, and Satan will flee.” How many forms of Satan there are in the world before which we may profitably meditate on these words! To strive or cry in the face of human stupidity is not the way to set it to flight; that is the lesson which Des Esseintes would never listen to, which Durtal has at last learnt.[9]

_En Route_ is the first of a trilogy, and the names of the succeeding volumes, _La Cathédrale_ and _L’Oblat_, sufficiently indicate the end of the path on which Durtal, if not indeed his creator, has started. But however that may prove, whatever Huysmans’ own final stage may be, there can be little doubt that he is the greatest master of style, and within his own limits the subtlest thinker and the acutest psychologist who in France to-day uses the medium of the novel. Only Zola can be compared with him, and between them there can be no kind of rivalry. Zola, with his immense and exuberant temperament, his sanity and width of view, his robust and plebeian art, has his own place on the high-road of modern literature. Huysmans, an intellectual and æsthetic aristocrat, has followed with unflinching sincerity the by-path along which his own more high-strung and exceptional temperament has led him, and his place, if seemingly a smaller one, is at least as sure; wherever men occupy themselves with the literature of the late nineteenth century they will certainly sometimes talk about Zola, sometimes read Huysmans. Zola’s cyclopean architecture can only be seen as a whole when we have completed the weary task of investigating it in detail; in Huysmans we seek the expressiveness of the page, the sentence, the word. Strange as it may seem to some, it is the so-called realist who has given us the more idealised rendering of life; the concentrated vision of the idealist in his own smaller sphere has revealed not alone mysteries of the soul, but even the exterior secrets of life. True it is that Huysmans has passed by with serene indifference, or else with contempt, the things which through the ages we have slowly learnt to count beautiful. But on the other hand, he has helped to enlarge the sphere of our delight by a new vision of beauty where before to our eyes there was no beauty, exercising the proper function of the artist who ever chooses the base and despised things of the world, even the things that are not, to put to nought the things that are. Therein the decadent has his justification. And while we may accept the pioneer’s new vision of beauty, we are not called upon to reject those old familiar visions for which he has no eyes, only because his gaze must be fixed upon that unfamiliar height towards which he is leading the men who come after.