Chapter V: Preface (5)

All our great poets and novelists from Chaucer to Fielding wrote sincerely and heroically concerning the great facts of life. That is why they are great, robustly sane, radiantly immortal. It is a mistake to suppose that no heroism was involved in their case; for though no doubt they had a freer general speech on their side they went beyond their time in daring to mould that speech to the ends of art, in bringing literature closer to life. It was so even with Chaucer; compare him with his contemporaries and successors; observe how he seeks to soothe the susceptibilities of his readers and to deprecate the protests of the “precious folk.” There is no great art at any epoch without heroism, though one epoch may be more favourable than another to the exercise of such heroism in literature. In our own age and country daring has passed out of the channels of art into those of commerce, to find exercise, foolish enough sometimes, in the remotest corners of the earth. It is because our literature is not heroic, but has been confined within the stifling atmosphere of the drawing-room, that English poets and novelists have ceased to be a power in the world and are almost unknown outside the parlours and nurseries of our own country. It is because in France there have never ceased to be writers here and there who have dared to face life heroically and weld it into art that the literature of France is a power in the world wherever there are men intelligent enough to recognise its achievements. When literature that is not only fine but also great appears in England we shall know it as such by its heroism, if by no other mark.

Language has its immense significance because it is the final incarnation of a man’s most intimate ideals. Zola’s style and method are monotonous--with a monotony which makes his books unreadable when we have once mastered his secret--and the burden they express is ever the same: the energy of natural life. Whatever is robust, whatever is wholesomely exuberant, whatever, wholesomely or not, is possessed by the devouring fury of life--of such things Zola can never have enough. The admirable opening of _La Terre_, in which a young girl drives the cow, wild for the male, to the farm where the stockbull is kept, then leading the appeased animal home again, symbolises Zola’s whole view of the world. All the forces of Nature, it seems to him, are raging in the fury of generative desire or reposing in the fulness of swelling maturity. The very earth itself, in the impressive pages with which _Germinal_ closes, is impregnated with men, germinating beneath the soil, one day to burst through the furrows and renew the old world’s failing life. In this conception of the natural energies of the world--as manifested in men and animals, in machines, in every form of matter--perpetually conceiving and generating, Zola reaches his most impressive effects, though these effects are woven together of elements that are separately of no very exquisite beauty, or subtle insight, or radical novelty.

In considering Zola, we are indeed constantly brought back to the fact that most of the things that he has tried to do have been better done by more accomplished artists. The Goncourts have extended the sphere of language, even in the direction of slang, and have faced many of the matters that Zola has faced, and with far more delicate, though usually more shadowy, art; Balzac has created as large and vivid a world of people, though drawing more of it from his own imagination; Huysmans has greater skill in stamping the vision of strange or sordid things on the brain; Tolstoi gives a deeper realisation of life; Flaubert is as audaciously naturalistic, and has, as well, that perfect self-control which should always accompany audacity. And in Flaubert, too, we find something of the same irony as in Zola.

This irony, however, is a personal and characteristic feature of Zola’s work. It is irony alone which gives it distinction and poignant incisiveness. Irony may be called the soul of Zola’s work, the embodiment of his moral attitude towards life. It has its source, doubtless, like so much else that is characteristic, in his early days of poverty and aloofness from the experiences of life. There is a fierce impartiality--the impartiality of one who is outside and shut off--in this manner of presenting the brutalities and egoisms and pettinesses of men. The fury of his irony is here equalled by his self-restraint. He concentrates it into a word, a smile, a gesture. Zola believes, undoubtedly, in a reformed, even perhaps a revolutionised, future of society, but he has no illusions. He sets down things as he sees them. He has no tendernesses for the working-classes, no pictures of rough diamonds. We may see this very clearly in _Germinal_. Here every side of the problem of modern capitalism is presented: the gentle-natured shareholding class unable to realise a state of society in which people should not live on dividends and give charity; the official class with their correct authoritative views, very sure that they will always be needed to control labour and maintain social order; and the workers, some brutalised, some suffering like dumb beasts, some cringing to the bosses, some rebelling madly, a few striving blindly for justice.

There is no loophole in Zola’s impartiality; the gradual development of the seeming hero of _Germinal_, Etienne Lantier, the agitator, honest in his revolt against oppression, but with an unconscious bourgeois ideal at his heart, seems unerringly right. All are the victims of an evil social system, as Zola sees the world, the enslaved workers as much as the overfed masters; the only logical outcome is a clean sweep--the burning up of the chaff and straw, the fresh furrowing of the earth, the new spring of a sweet and vigorous race. That is the logical outcome of Zola’s attitude, the attitude of one who regards our present society as a thoroughly vicious circle. His pity for men and women is boundless; his disdain is equally boundless. It is only towards animals that his tenderness is untouched by contempt; some of his most memorable passages are concerned with the sufferings of animals. The New Jerusalem may be fitted up, but the Montsou miners will never reach it; they will fight for the first small, stuffy, middle-class villa they meet on the way. And Zola pours out the stream of his pitiful, pitiless irony on the weak, helpless, erring children of men. It is this moral energy, combined with his volcanic exuberance, which lifts him to a position of influence above the greater artists with whom we may compare him.

It is by no means probable that the world will continue to read Zola much longer. His work is already done; but when the nineteenth century is well past it may be that he will still have his interest. There will be plenty of material, especially in the newspapers, for the future historian to reconstruct the social life of the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the material is so vast that these historians will possibly be even more biassed and one-sided than our own. For a vivid, impartial picture--on the whole a faithful picture--of certain of the most characteristic aspects of this period, seen indeed from the outside, but drawn by a contemporary in all its intimate and even repulsive details, the reader of a future age can best go to Zola. What would we not give for a thirteenth century Zola! We should read with painful, absorbed interest a narrative of the Black Death as exact as that of nineteenth century alcoholism in _L’Assommoir_. The story of how the serf lived, as fully told as in _La Terre_, would be of incomparable value. The early merchant and usurer would be a less dim figure if _L’Argent_ had been written about him. The abbeys and churches of those days have in part come down to us, but no _Germinal_ remains to tell of the lives and thoughts of the men who hewed those stones, and piled them, and carved them. How precious such record would have been we may realise when we recall the incomparable charm of Chaucer’s prologue to _The Canterbury Tales_. But our children’s children, with the same passions alive at their hearts under incalculably different circumstances, will in the pages of the Rougon-Macquart series find themselves back again among all the strange remote details of a vanished world. What a fantastic and terrible page of old-world romance!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: “Mes souvenirs,” he told a psychological interviewer, “ont une puissance, un relief extraordinaire; ma mémoire est énorme, prodigieuse, elle me gêne; quand j’évoque les objets que j’ai vus, je les revois tels qu’ils sont réellement avec leurs lignes, leurs formes, leurs couleurs, leurs odeurs, leurs sons; _c’est une matérialisation à outrance_; le soleil qui les éclaire m’éblouit presque; l’odeur me suffoque, les détails s’accrochent à moi et m’empêchent de voir l’ensemble. Aussi pour le ressaisir me faut-il attendre un certain temps. Cette possibilité d’évocation ne dure pas très longtemps; le relief de l’image est d’une exactitude, d’une intensité inouïes, puis l’image s’efface, disparaît, cela s’en va.” This description suggests myopia, and it is a fact that Zola has been short-sighted from youth; he first realised it at sixteen. His other senses, especially smell, are very keen--largely, however, as an outcome of attention or practice. Thus while his tactile sensibility and sensibility to pain are acute, his olfactory keenness is rather qualitative than quantitative; that is to say that it mainly consists in a marked memory for odours, a tendency to be emotionally impressed by them, and an ability to distinguish them in which he resembles professional perfumers. All these and many other facts have been very precisely ascertained by means of the full psychological and anthropological study of M. Zola which has been carried out by experts under the superintendence of Dr. Toulouse.]

HUYSMANS.

IN trying to represent the man who wrote the extraordinary books grouped around _A Rebours_ and _En Route_, I find myself carried back to the decline of the Latin world. I recall those restless Africans who were drawn into the vortex of decadent Rome, who absorbed its corruptions with all the barbaric fervour of their race, and then with a more natural impetus of that youthful fervour threw themselves into the young current of Christianity, yet retaining in their flesh the brand of an exotic culture. Tertullian, Augustine, and the rest gained much of their power, as well as their charm, because they incarnated a fantastic mingling of youth and age, of decayed Latinity, of tumultuously youthful Christianity. Huysmans, too, incarnates the old and the new, but with a curious, a very vital difference. To-day the _rôles_ are reversed; it is another culture that is now young, with its aspirations after human perfection and social solidarity, while Christianity has exchanged the robust beauty of youth for the subtler beauty of age. “The most perfect analogy to our time which I can find,” wrote Renan to his sister amid the tumults of Paris in 1848, a few weeks after Huysmans had been born in the same city, “is the moment when Christianity and paganism stood face to face.” Huysmans had wandered from ancestral haunts of mediæval peace into the forefront of the struggles of our day, bringing the clear, refined perceptions of old culture to the intensest vision of the modern world yet attained, but never at rest, never once grasping except on the purely æsthetic side the significance of the new age, always haunted by the memory of the past and perpetually feeling his way back to what seems to him the home of his soul.--The fervent seeker of those early days, indeed, but _à rebours_!

This is scarcely a mere impression; one might be tempted to say that it is strictly the formula of this complex and interesting personality. Coming on the maternal side from an ordinary Parisian bourgeois stock, though there chanced to be a sculptor even along this line, on the paternal side he belongs to an alien aristocracy of art. From father to son his ancestors were painters, of whom at least one, Cornelius Huysmans, still figures honourably in our public galleries, while the last of them left Breda to take up his domicile in Paris. Here his son, Joris Karl, has been the first of the race to use the pen instead of the brush, yet retaining precisely those characters of “veracity of imitation, jewel-like richness of colour, perfection of finish, emphasis of character,” which their historian finds in the painters of his land from the fourteenth century onwards. Where the Meuse approaches the Rhine valley we find the home of the men who, almost alone in the north, created painting and the arts that are grouped around painting, and evolved religious music. On the side of art the Church had found its chief builders in the men of these valleys, and even on the spiritual side also, for here is the northern home of mysticism. Their latest child has fixed his attention on the feverish activities of Paris with the concentrated gaze of a stranger in a strange land, held by a fascination which is more than half repulsion, always missing something, he scarcely knows what. He has ever been seeking the satisfaction he had missed, sometimes in the æsthetic vision of common things, sometimes in the refined Thebaid of his own visions, at length more joyfully in the survivals of mediæval mysticism. Yet as those early Africans still retained their acquired Roman instincts, and that fantastic style which could not be shaken off, so Huysmans will surely retain to the last the tincture of Parisian modernity.

Yet we can by no means altogether account for Huysmans by race and environment. Every man of genius is a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth, unlike other men, seeing everything as it were at a different angle, mirroring the world in his mind as in those concave or convex mirrors which elongate or abbreviate absurdly all who approach them. No one ever had a keener sense of the distressing absurdity of human affairs than M. Huysmans. The Trocadero is not a beautiful building, but to no one else probably has it appeared as an old hag lying on her back and elevating her spindle shanks towards the sky. Such images of men’s works and ways abound in Huysmans’ books, and they express his unaffected vision of life, his disgust for men and things, a shuddering disgust, yet patient, half-amused. I can well recall an evening spent some years ago in M. Huysmans’ company. His face, with the sensitive, luminous eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire’s portraits, the face of a resigned and benevolent Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity of the Divine order but has no wish to make any improper use of his discovery. He talked in low and even tones, never eagerly, without any emphasis or gesture, not addressing any special person; human imbecility was the burden of nearly all that he said, while a faint twinkle of amused wonderment lit up his eyes. And throughout all his books until almost the last “l’éternelle bêtise de l’humanité” is the ever-recurring refrain.

Always leading a retired life, and specially abhorring the society and conversation of the average literary man, M. Huysmans has for many years been a government servant--a model official, it is said--at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here, like our own officials at Whitehall, he serves his country in dignified leisure--on the only occasion on which I have seen him in his large and pleasant _bureau_, he was gazing affectionately at Chéret’s latest _affiche_, which a lady of his acquaintance had just brought to show him--and such duties of routine, with the close contact with practical affairs they involve, must always be beneficial in preserving the sane equipoise of an imaginative temperament. In this matter Huysmans has been more fortunate than his intimate friend Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who had wandered so far into the world of dreams that he lost touch with the external world and ceased to distinguish them clearly. One is at first a little surprised to hear of the patient tact and diplomacy which the author of _A Rebours_ spent round the death-bed of the author of _Contes Cruels_ to obtain the dying dreamer’s consent to a ceremony of marriage which would legitimate his child. But Huysmans’ sensitive nervous system and extravagant imagination have ever been under the control of a sane and forceful intellect; his very idealism has been nourished by the contemplation of a world which he has seen too vividly ever to ignore. We may read that in the reflective deliberation of his grave and courteous bearing, somewhat recalling, as more than one observer has noted, his own favourite animal, the cat, whose outward repose of Buddhistic contemplation envelops a highly-strung nervous system, while its capacity to enjoy the refinements of human civilisation comports a large measure of spiritual freedom and ferocity. Like many another man of letters, Huysmans suffers from neuralgia and dyspepsia; but no novelist has described so persistently and so poignantly the pangs of toothache or the miseries of _maux d’estomac_, a curious proof of the peculiarly personal character of Huysmans’ work throughout. His sole pre-occupation has been with his own impressions. He possessed no native genius for the novel. But with a very sound instinct he set himself, almost at the outset of his career, to describe intimately and faithfully the crudest things of life, the things most remote from his own esoteric tastes but at that time counted peculiarly “real.” There could be no better discipline for an idealist. Step by step he has left the region of vulgar actualities to attain his proper sphere, but the marvellous and slowly won power of expressing the spiritually impalpable in concrete imagery is the fruit of that laborious apprenticeship. He was influenced in his novels at first by Goncourt, afterwards a little by Zola, as he sought to reproduce his own vivid and personal vision of the world. This vision is like that of a man with an intense exaltation of the senses, especially the senses of sight and smell. Essentially Huysmans is less a novelist than a poet, with an instinct to use not verse but prose as his medium. Thus he early fell under the influence of Baudelaire’s prose-poems. His small and slight first volume, _Le Drageoir à Epices_, bears witness to this influence, while yet revealing a personality clearly distinct from Baudelaire’s. This personality is already wholly revealed in the quaint audacity of the little prose-poem entitled “L’Extase.” Here, at the very outset of Huysmans’ career, we catch an unconscious echo of mediæval asceticism, the voice, it might be, of Odo of Cluny, who nearly a thousand years before had shrunk with horror from embracing a “sack of dung;” “quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus!” “L’Extase” describes how the lover lies in the wood clasping the hand of the beloved and bathed in a rapture of blissful emotion; “suddenly she rose, disengaged her hand, disappeared in the bushes, and I heard as it were the rustling of rain on the leaves;” at once the delicious dream fled and the lover awakes to the reality of commonplace human things. That is a parable of the high-strung idealism, having only contempt for whatever breaks in on its ideal, which has ever been the mark of Huysmans. His sensitive ear is alive to the gentlest ripple of nature, and it jars on him; it becomes the deafening Niagara of “the incessant deluge of human foolishness;” all his art is the research for a Heaven where the voice of Nature shall no more be heard. Baudelaire was also such a hyperæsthetic idealist, but the human tenderness which vibrates beneath the surface of Baudelaire’s work has been the last quality to make itself more than casually felt in Huysmans. It is the defect which vitiated his early work in the novel, when he was still oscillating between the prose-poem and the novel, clearly conscious that while the first suited him best only in the second could mastery be won. His early novels are sometimes portentously dull, with a lack of interest, or even attempt to interest, which itself almost makes them interesting, as frank ugliness is. They are realistic with a veracious and courageously abject realism, never, like Zola’s, carefully calculated for its pictorial effectiveness, but dealing simply with the trivialest and sordidest human miseries. His first novel _Marthe_--which inaugurated the long series of novels devoted to state-regulated prostitution in those slaughter-houses of love, as Huysmans later described them, where Desire is slain at a single stroke,--sufficiently repulsive on the whole, is not without flashes of insight which reveal the future artist, and to some readers indeed make it more interesting than _La Fille Elisa_, which the Goncourts published shortly afterwards. Unlike the crude and awkward _Marthe_--though that book reveals the influence of the Goncourts--_La Fille Elisa_ shows the hand of an accomplished artist, but it is also the work of a philanthropist writing with an avowed object, and of a fine gentleman ostentatiously anxious not to touch pitch with more than a finger-tip. The Preface to _Marthe_ contains a declaration which remains true for the whole of Huysmans’ work: “I set down what I see, what I feel, what I have lived, writing it as well as I am able, _et voilà tout_!” But it has ever been a dangerous task to set down what one sees and feels and has lived; for no obvious reason, except the subject, _Marthe_ was immediately suppressed by the police. This first novel remains the least personal of Huysmans’ books; in his next novel, _Les Sœurs Vatard_--a study of Parisian workgirls and their lovers--a more characteristic vision of the world begins to be revealed, and from that time forward there is a continuous though irregular development both in intellectual grip and artistic mastery. “Sac au Dos,” which appeared in the _Soirées de Médan_, represents a notable stage in this development, for here, as he has since acknowledged, Huysmans’ hero is himself. It is the story of a young student who serves during the great war in the Garde Mobile of the Seine, and is invalided with dysentery before reaching the front. There is no story, no striking impression to record--nothing to compare with Guy de Maupassant’s incomparably more brilliant “Boule-de-Suif,” also dealing with the fringe of war, which appears in the same volume--no opportunity for literary display, nothing but a record of individual feelings with which the writer seems satisfied because they are interesting to himself. It is, in fact, the germ of that method which Huysmans has since carried to so brilliant a climax in _En Route_. All the glamour of war and the enthusiasm of patriotism are here--long before Zola wrote his _Débâcle_--reduced to their simplest terms in the miseries of the individual soldier whose chief aspiration it becomes at last to return to a home where the necessities of nature may be satisfied in comfort and peace. At that time Huysmans’ lack of patriotic enthusiasm seemed almost scandalous; but when we bear in mind his racial affinities it is natural that he should, as he once remarked to an interviewer, “prefer a Leipzig man to a Marseilles man,” “the big, phlegmatic, taciturn Germans” to the gesticulating and rhetorical people of the French south. In _Là-Bas_, at a later date, through the mouth of one of his characters, Huysmans goes so far as to regret the intervention of Joan of Arc in French history, for had it not been for Joan France and England would have been restored to their racial and prehistoric unity, consolidated into one great kingdom under Norman Plantagenets, instead of being given up to the southerners of Latin race who surrounded Charles VII.

The best of Huysmans’ early novels is undoubtedly _En Ménage_. It is the intimate history of a young literary man who, having married a wife whom he shortly afterwards finds unfaithful, leaves her, returns to his bachelor life, and in the end becomes reconciled to her. This picture of a studious man who goes away with his books to fight over again the petty battles of bachelorhood with the _bonne_ and the _concierge_ and his own cravings for womanly love and companionship, reveals clearly for the first time Huysmans’ power of analysing states of mind that are at once simple and subtle. Perhaps no writer surprises us more by his revealing insight into the commonplace experiences which all a novelist’s traditions lead him to idealise or ignore. As a whole, however, _En Ménage_ is scarcely yet a master’s work, a little laboured, with labour which cannot yet achieve splendour of effect. Nor can a much slighter story, _A Vau l’Eau_, which appeared a little later, be said to mark a further stage in development, though it is a characteristic study, this sordid history of Folantin, the poor, lame, discontented, middle-aged clerk. Cheated and bullied on every side, falling a prey to the vulgar woman of the street who boisterously takes possession of him in the climax of the story, all the time feeling poignantly the whole absurdity of the situation, there is yet one spot where hope seems possible. He has no religious faith; “and yet,” he reflects, “yet mysticism alone could heal the wound that tortures me.” Thus Folantin, though like André in _En Ménage_ he resigns himself to the inevitable stupidity of life, yet stretches out his hands towards the Durtal of Huysmans’ latest work.

In all these novels we feel that Huysmans has not attained to full self-expression. Intellectual mastery, indeed, he is attaining, but scarcely yet the expression of his own personal ideals. The poet in Huysmans, the painter enamoured of beauty and seeking it in unfamiliar places, has little scope in these detailed pictures of sordid or commonplace life. At this early period it is still in prose-poems, especially in _Croquis Parisiens_, that this craving finds satisfaction. Des Esseintes, the hero of _A Rebours_, who on so many matters is Huysmans’ mouthpiece, of all forms of literature preferred the prose-poem when, in the hands of an alchemist of genius, it reveals a novel concentrated into a few pages or a few lines, the concrete juice, the essential oil of art. It was “a communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration among a dozen superior persons scattered throughout the world, a delectation offered to the finest wits, and to them alone accessible.” Huysmans took up this form where Baudelaire and Mallarmé had left it, and sought to carry it yet further. In that he was scarcely successful. The excess of tension in the tortured language with which he elaborates his effects too often holds him back from the goal of perfection. We must yet value in _Croquis Parisiens_ its highly wrought and individual effects of rhythm and colour and form. In France, at all events, Huysmans is held to inaugurate the poetic treatment of modern things--a characteristic already traceable in _Les Sœurs Vatard_--and this book deals with the æsthetic aspects of latter-day Paris, with the things that are “ugly and superb, outrageous and yet exquisite,” as a type of which he selects the Folies-Bergère, at that time the most characteristic of Parisian music-halls, and he was thus the first to discuss the æsthetic value of the variety stage which has been made cheaper since. For the most part, however, these _Croquis_ are of the simplest and most commonplace things--the forlorn Bièvre district, the poor man’s _café_, the roast-chestnut seller--extracting the beauty or pathos or strangeness of all these things. “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.” The humble bloater has surely never before been sung in language which recalls the Beloved of the “Song of Songs.” Huysmans has carried to an even extravagant degree that re-valuation of the world’s good in which genius has ever found its chief function. To abase the mighty and exalt the humble seems to man the divinest of prerogatives, for it is that which he himself exercises in his moments of finest inspiration. To find a new vision of the world, a new path to truth, is the instinct of the artist or the thinker. He changes the whole system of our organised perceptions. That is why he seems to us at first an incarnate paradox, a scoffer at our most sacred verities, making mountains of our mole-hills and counting as mere mole-hills our everlasting mountains, always keeping time to a music that clashes with ours, at our hilarity _tristis, in tristitia hilaris_.

In 1889 _A Rebours_ appeared. Not perhaps his greatest achievement, it must ever remain the central work in which he has most powerfully concentrated his whole vision of life. It sums up the progress he had already made, foretells the progress he was afterwards to make, in a style that is always individual, always masterly in its individuality. Technically, it may be said that the power of _A Rebours_ lies in the fact that here for the first time Huysmans has succeeded in uniting the two lines of his literary development: the austere analysis in the novels of commonplace things mostly alien to the writer, and the freer elaboration in the prose-poems of his own more intimate personal impressions. In their union the two streams attain a new power and a more intimately personal note. Des Esseintes, the hero of this book, may possibly have been at a few points suggested by a much less interesting real personage in contemporary Paris, the Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac, but in the main he was certainly created by Huysmans’ own brain, as the representative of his author’s hyperæsthetic experience of the world and the mouthpiece of his most personal judgments. The victim of over-wrought nerves, of neuralgia and dyspepsia, Des Esseintes retires for a season from Paris to the solitude of his country house at Fontenay, which he has fitted up, on almost cloistral methods, to soothe his fantasy and to gratify his complex æsthetic sensations, his love of reading and contemplation. The finest pictures of Gustave Moreau hang on the walls, with the fantastic engravings of Luyken, and the strange visions of Odilon Redon. He has a tortoise curiously inlaid with precious stones; he delights in all those exotic plants which reveal Nature’s most unnatural freaks; he is a sensitive amateur of perfumes, and considers that the pleasures of smell are equal to those of sight or sound; he possesses a row of little barrels of liqueurs so arranged that he can blend in infinite variety the contents of this instrument, his “mouth-organ” he calls it, and produce harmonies which seem to him comparable to those yielded by a musical orchestra. But the solitary pleasures of this palace of art only increase the nervous strain he is suffering from; and at the urgent bidding of his doctor Des Esseintes returns to the society of his abhorred fellow-beings in Paris, himself opening the dyke that admitted the “waves of human mediocrity” to engulf his refuge. And this wonderful confession of æsthetic faith--with its long series of deliberately searching and decisive affirmations on life, religion, literature, art--ends with a sudden solemn invocation that is surprisingly tremulous: “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.”

“He who carries his own most intimate emotions to their highest point becomes the first in file of a long series of men;” that saying is peculiarly true of Huysmans. But to be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men. Huysmans’ attitude towards his readers was somewhat like that of Thoreau, who spoke with lofty disdain of such writers as “would fain have one reader before they die.” As he has since remarked, Huysmans wrote _A Rebours_ for a dozen persons, and was himself more surprised than any one at the wide interest it evoked. Yet that interest was no accident. Certain æsthetic ideals of the latter half of the nineteenth century are more quintessentially expressed in _A Rebours_ than in any other book. Intensely personal, audaciously independent, it yet sums up a movement which has scarcely now worked itself out. We may read it and re-read, not only for the light which it casts on that movement, but upon every similar period of acute æsthetic perception in the past.

II.

The æsthetic attitude towards art which _A Rebours_ illuminates is that commonly called decadent. Decadence in art, though a fairly simple phenomenon, and world-wide as art itself, is still so ill understood that it may be worth while to discuss briefly its precise nature, more especially as manifested in literature.

Technically, a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts. Among our own early prose-writers Sir Thomas Browne represents the type of decadence in style. Swift’s prose is classic, Pater’s decadent. Hume and Gibbon are classic, Emerson and Carlyle decadent. In architecture, which is the key to all the arts, we see the distinction between the classic and the decadent visibly demonstrated; Roman architecture is classic, to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and St. Mark’s is the perfected type of decadence in art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic in the highest degree because it shows an absolute subordination of detail to the bold harmonies of structure, while later Gothic, grown weary of the commonplaces of structure and predominantly interested in beauty of detail, is again decadent. In each case the earlier and classic manner--for the classic manner, being more closely related to the ends of utility, must always be earlier--subordinates the parts to the whole, and strives after those virtues which the whole may best express; the later manner depreciates the importance of the whole for the benefit of its parts, and strives after the virtues of individualism. All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes.

Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, decay. If we walk down a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act than when we walked up it. But if it is a figurative hill then we view Hell at the bottom. The word “corruption”--used in a precise and technical sense to indicate the breaking up of the whole for the benefit of its parts--serves also to indicate a period or manner of decadence in art. This makes confusion worse, for here the moralist feels that surely he is on safe ground. But as Nietzsche, with his usual acuteness in cutting at the root of vulgar prejudice, has well remarked (in _Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_), even as regards what is called the period of “corruption” in the evolution of societies, we are apt to overlook the fact that the energy which in more primitive times marked the operations of the community as a whole has now simply been transferred to the individuals themselves, and this aggrandisement of the individual really produces an even greater amount of energy. The individual has gained more than the community has lost. An age of social decadence is not only the age of sinners and degenerates, but of saints and martyrs, and decadent Rome produced an Antoninus as well as a Heliogabalus. No doubt social “corruption” and literary “corruption” tend to go together; an age of individualism is usually an age of artistic decadence, and we may note that the chief literary artists of America--Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman--are for the most part in the technical sense decadents.

Rome supplies the first clear types of classic and decadent literature, and the small group of recent French writers to whom the term has been more specifically applied were for the most part peculiarly attracted by later Latin literature. So far as I can make out, it is to the profound and penetrating genius of Baudelaire that we owe the first clear apprehension of the legitimate part which decadence plays in literature. We may trace it, indeed, in his own style, clear, pure, and correct as that style always remains, as well as in his literary preferences. He was a good Latinist, and his favourite Latin authors were Apuleius, Juvenal, Petronius, Saint Augustine, Tertullian, and other writers in prose and verse of the early Christian Church. He himself wrote a love-poem in rhymed Latin verse, adding to it a note concerning the late Latin decadence regarded as “the supreme sigh of a vigorous person already transformed and prepared for the spiritual life,” and specially apt to express passion as the modern world feels it, one pole of the magnet at the opposite end of which are Catullus and his band. “In this marvellous tongue,” he added, “solecism and barbarism seem to me to render the forced negligences of a passion which forgets itself and mocks at rules. Words taken in a new meaning reveal the charming awkwardness of the northern barbarian kneeling before the Roman beauty.” But the best early statement of the meaning of decadence in style--though doubtless inspired by Baudelaire--was furnished by Gautier in 1868 in the course of the essay on Baudelaire which is probably the most interesting piece of criticism he ever achieved. The passage is long, but so precise and accurate that it must here in part be quoted: “The poet of the _Fleurs du Mal_ loved what is improperly called the style of decadence, and which is nothing else but art arrived at that point of extreme maturity yielded by the slanting suns of aged civilisations: an ingenious complicated style, full of shades and of research, constantly pushing back the boundaries of speech, borrowing from all the technical vocabularies, taking colour from all palettes and notes from all key-boards, struggling to render what is most inexpressible in thought, what is vague and most elusive in the outlines of form, listening to translate the subtle confidences of neurosis, the dying confessions of passion grown depraved, and the strange hallucinations of the obsession which is turning to madness. The style of decadence is the ultimate utterance of the Word, summoned to final expression and driven to its last hiding-place. One may recall in this connection the language of the later Roman Empire, already marbled with the greenness of decomposition, and, so to speak, gamy, and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine school, the last forms of Greek art falling into deliquescence. Such indeed is the necessary and inevitable idiom of peoples and civilisations in which factitious life has replaced natural life, and developed unknown wants in men. It is, besides, no easy thing, this style disdained of pedants, for it expresses new ideas in new forms, and in words which have not yet been heard. Unlike the classic style it admits shadow.... One may well imagine that the fourteen hundred words of the Racinian vocabulary scarcely suffice the author who has undertaken the laborious task of rendering modern ideas and things in their infinite complexity and multiple colouration.”

Some fifteen years later, Bourget, again in an essay on Baudelaire (_Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine_), continued the exposition of the theory of decadence, elaborating the analogy to the social organism which enters the state of decadence as soon as the individual life of the parts is no longer subordinated to the whole. “A similar law governs the development and decadence of that other organism which we call language. A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word.” It was at this time (about 1884) that the term “decadent” seems first to have been applied by Barrès and others to the group of which Verlaine, Huysmans, Mallarmé were the most distinguished members, and in so far as it signified an ardent and elaborate search for perfection of detail beyond that attained by Parnassian classicality it was tolerated or accepted. Verlaine, indeed, was for the most part indifferent to labels, neither accepting nor rejecting them, and his work was not bound up with any theory. But Huysmans, with the intellectual passion of the pioneer in art, deliberate and relentless, has carried both the theory and the practice of decadence in style to the farthest point. In practice he goes beyond Baudelaire, who, however enamoured he may have been of what he called the phosphorescence of putrescence, always retained in his own style much of what is best in the classic manner. Huysmans’ vocabulary is vast, his images, whether remote or familiar, always daring,--“dragged,” in the words of one critic, “by the hair or by the feet, down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax,”--but a heart-felt pulse of emotion is restrained beneath the sombre and extravagant magnificence of this style, and imparts at the best that modulated surge of life which only the great masters can control.

Des Esseintes’s predilections in literature are elaborated through several chapters, and without question he faithfully reflects his creator’s impressions. He was indifferent or contemptuous towards the writers of the Latin Augustan age; Virgil seemed to him thin and mechanical, Horace a detestable clown; the fat redundancy of Cicero, we are told, and the dry constipation of Cæsar alike disgusted him; Sallust, Livy, Juvenal, even Tacitus and Plautus, though for these he had words of praise, seemed to him for the most part merely the delights of pseudo-literary readers. Latin only began to be interesting to Des Esseintes in Lucan, for here at least, in spite of the underlying hollowness, it became expressive and studded with brilliant jewels. The author whom above all he delighted in was Petronius--who reminded Des Esseintes of the modern French novelists he most admired--and several eloquent pages are devoted to that profound observer, delicate analyst, and marvellous painter who modelled his own vivid and precise style out of all the idioms and slang of his day. After Petronius there was a gap in his collection of Latin authors until the second century of our own era is reached with Apuleius and the sterner Christian contemporaries of that jovial pagan, Tertullian and the rest, in whose hands the tongue that in Petronius had reached supreme maturity now began to dissolve. For Tertullian he had little admiration, and none for Augustine, though sympathising with his _City of God_ and his general disgust for the world. But the special odour which the Christians had by the fourth century imparted to decomposing pagan Latin was delightful to him in such authors as Commodian of Gaza, whose tawny, sombre, and tortuous style he even preferred to Claudian’s sonorous blasts, in which the trumpet of paganism was last heard in the world. He was also able to maintain interest in Prudentius, Sedulius, and a host of unknown Christians who combined Catholic fervour with a Latinity which had become, as it were, completely putrid, leaving but a few shreds of torn flesh for the Christians to “marinate in the brine of their new tongue.” His shelves continued to show Latin books of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, among which he found special pleasure in the Anglo-Saxon writers, and only finally ceased at the beginning of the tenth century, when “the curiosity, the complicated _naïveté_” of the earlier tongue were finally lost in scholastic philosophy and mere cartalaries and chronicles.[8] Then, with a formidable leap of ten centuries, his Latin books gave place to nineteenth century French books.

Des Esseintes is no admirer of Rabelais or Molière, of Voltaire or Rousseau. Among the older French writers he read only Villon, D’Aubigné, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Nicole, and especially Pascal. Putting these aside, his French library began with Baudelaire, whose works he had printed in an edition of one copy, in episcopal letters, in large missal _format_, bound in flesh-coloured pig-skin; he found an unspeakable delight in reading this poet who, “in an age when verse only served to express the external aspects of things, had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible, by virtue of a muscular and sinewy speech which more than any other possessed the marvellous power of fixing with strange sanity of expression the most morbid, fleeting, tremulous states of weary brains and sorrowful souls.” After Baudelaire the few French books on Des Esseintes’s shelves fall into two groups, one religious, one secular. Most of the French clerical writers he disregarded, for they yield a pale flux of words which seemed to him to come from a school-girl in a convent. Lacordaire he regarded as an exception, for his language had been fused and moulded by ardent eloquence, but for the most part the Catholic writers he preferred were outside the Church. For Hello’s _Homme_, especially, he cherished profound admiration, and an inevitable sympathy for its author, who seemed to him “a cunning engineer of the soul, a skilful watchmaker of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of a passion and to explain the play of the wheelwork,” and yet united to this power of analysis all the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet, and the tortured ingenuity of a master of style--an ill-balanced, incoherent, yet subtle personality. But above all he delighted in Barbey d’Aurevilly, shut out from the Church as an unclean and pestiferous heretic, yet glorying to sing her praises, insinuating into that praise a note of almost sadistic sacrilege, a writer at once devout and impious, altogether after Des Esseintes’s own heart, so that a special copy of the _Diaboliques_, in episcopal violet and cardinal purple, printed on sanctified vellum with initials adorned by satanic tails, formed one of his most cherished possessions. In D’Aurevilly’s style alone he truly recognised the same gaminess, the speckled morbidity, the flavour as of a sleepy pear which he loved in decadent Latin and the monastic writers of old time. Of contemporary secular books he possessed not many; by force of passing them through the screw-press of his brain few were finally found solid enough to emerge intact and bear rereading, and in this process he had accelerated “the incurable conflict which existed between his ideas and those of the world into which by chance he had been born.” Certain selected works of the three great French novelists of his time--Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola--still remained, for in all three he found in various forms that “nostalgie des au-delà” by which he was himself haunted; and with Baudelaire, these three were, in modern profane literature, the authors by whom he had chiefly been moulded. The scanty collection also included Verlaine, Mallarmé, Poe, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whose firm fantastic style and poignantly ironic attitude towards the utilitarian modern world he found entirely to his taste. Finally, there only remained the little anthology of prose-poems. Des Esseintes thought it improbable that he would ever make any additions to his library; it seemed impossible to him that a decadent language--“struggling on its death-bed to repair all the omissions of joy and bequeath the subtlest memories of pain”--would ever go beyond Mallarmé. This brief summary of the three chapters, all full of keen if wayward critical insight, which describe Des Esseintes’s library, may serve at once both to indicate the chief moulding influences on Huysmans’ own style and to illustrate the precise nature of decadence in art and the fundamental part it plays.

We have to recognise that decadence is an æsthetic and not a moral conception. The power of words is great, but they need not befool us. The classic herring should suggest no moral superiority over the decadent bloater. We are not called upon to air our moral indignation over the bass end of the musical clef. All confusion of intellectual substances is foolish, and one may well sympathise with that fervid unknown metaphysician to whom we owe the Athanasian creed when he went so far as to assert that it is damnable. It is not least so in the weak-headed decadent who falls into the moralist’s snare and complacently admits his own exceeding wickedness. We may well reserve our finest admiration for the classic in art, for therein are included the largest and most imposing works of human skill; but our admiration is of little worth if it is founded on incapacity to appreciate the decadent. Each has its virtues, each is equally right and necessary. One ignorant of plants might well say, on gazing at a seed-capsule with its seeds disposed in harmonious rows, that there was the eternally natural and wholesome order of things, and on seeing the same capsule wither and cast abroad its seeds to germinate at random in the earth, that here was an unwholesome and deplorable period of decay. But he would know little of the transmutations of life. And we have to recognise that those persons who bring the same crude notions into the field of art know as little of the life of the spirit.

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.