The Development of Maurice Maeterlinck and other sketches of foreign writers

Grant Richards, 1904.

W L Courtney

HUYSMANS’ The Cathedral

IT is melancholy to reflect on the fate which has overtaken M. Zola’s School of Naturalism. There was once a band of ardent young writers who accepted as their literary task the description of things as they are — the production of human documents steeped in all their original vulgarity and narrated without pity and without remorse. Of course, M. Zola was in the front rank of this movement, but under his orders were several talented French novelists, prepared to carry on the crusade to its furthest length.

Anyone can see whot akes up the litle book Soirées de Medan, that, at that time, some fifteen years ago, men like Maupassant and Huysmans, Henry Céard and Paul Alexis wore the colours of the regiment, and were prepared to march wherever they were told. But what has now become both of the leader and his followers? M. Zola wrote a book on Paris which, if it meant anything, assuredly illustrated the ruinous effect of Anarchism both in politics and in literature. Maupassant — well, we know the doom which awaited that bright but ill-regulated genius; and as to Loris (sic) Karl Huysmans, we have in The Cathedral, excellently translated by Miss Clara Bell, a characteristic example of the course of his mental evolution. Of naturalism, as a literary theory, there remains in this last writer nothing but a passionate love for detail, applied no longer to the sordid elements of Parisian or provincial life, but to the minutiae of a mystical devotion to our Lady of Chartres. The man who graduated as a materialist has caught the fine flavour of mediaeval spiritualism, has become a symbolist, an allegorist, and I know not what else besides that is vague, elusive, and baffling.

The history of L. K. Huysmans is itself a parable which he who runs may read. In it are depicted all the oscillations of a highly nervous sentimentalism, perpetually in extremes either at one end of the scale or the other. He will give you at the outset pictures of Dutch-like fidelity, as, indeed, befits the race from which he springs. His acuteness of vision, his appreciation of light and shade, his resolute realism, remind us, as M. Mourey has recently suggested, of a Teniers or an Ostarde. But, in obedience to a particular theory of his own, in such works as En Ménage, and Les Soeurs Vatard, he will be intensely interested in the vulgar, the mean, and the sordid, or rather he will seek to make himself so, for the predominant impression is — theory or no theory — one of immeasureable disgust. Only fifteen years ago he signed a sort of profession of materialism, possibly under the influence of Zola, perhaps because one of the strongest characteristics in him was a passion to understand, an insatiable and unwearied curiosity. At this stage the Prodigal Son was filling himself with the husks which the swine do not eat; there had not yet dawned for him a sudden and overmastering illumination, a wild desire to return to his father.

The change begins in the latter part of 1884, although at first it assumes a curiously repellent form. Of few books of our contemporary era can it be said that they reveal the evolution or the conversion of a soul, in the simplest sense of the term, more vividly and picturesquely than those three novels, Là Bas, En Route, and La Cathédrale, which will be always associated with the strange history of Huysmans — a nervous, subtle, highly sensitive, and excitable nature, passionately relapsing from one ideal to its exact opposite, and throughout with the one predominant attribute of intense curiosity. If Naturalism and Materialism have failed him, why should he not see whether they could not be refined, or, perhaps, symbolised, by some kind of spiritualism? You cannot eat swine’s husks for ever without your stomach rising at such food. You must pretend tha the husks stand for and represent something else, swome wonderful caricature of bread and wine, or even ambrosia and nepenthe. And so the storm-driven artist depicts a hero called Durtal, who, in the first stage of his progress, revels in black magic, and tries to connect mediaeval superstition in its basest forms with that curious product of nineteenth century magic called, in Paris, Satanism or Diabolism. Là Bas is one of the most hideous books that has ever been composed on a repulsive theme, for in it is drawn for us the deliberate attempt which a baffled sensualist makes to provide himself with new and exquisite sensations, not only by an apparatus of scents and sights, pictorial art and music, but by recourse to hidden and obscene rites of magic. In a simpler and less terrible way one can see much the same characteristics in modern society. Fashionable people, with some profession of scepticism and much devotion to the materialistic idea of wealth, seek to satisfy the imaginative and romantic side of their nature by going to séances, consulting spiritualistic mediums, or lending an attentive ear to the attractive theories of Esoteric Buddhism or the glowing pages of Mr Myers’ ’Human Personality.’

Perhaps some of them, or at least the more earnest of them, will accompany Huysmans’ hero Durtal in his further transformations. When once the mystical dream has commenced, when the hunger for imaginative symbols, for something, at all events, different from the dry bones of materialism, has taken them captive, men and women who are sentimental and emotional will be led somewhere near the portals of The Cathedral. After Là Bas comes En Route, one of the most striking pictures ever penned of the struggles of a vacillating and self-tormented soul between the competing claims or reason and faith. But as Madame de Montespan long ago declared, "reason is for reasonable people," not for dreaming sentimentalists. Durtal engages in a tremendous conflict, renewing within himself the contrast between the life he means to leave, the life of the senses, and the existence which he intends to try, the refuge of a convent. It may be called a combat between Reason and Faith, but in reality it is nothing of the kind. The man has never attempted to guide his life in accordance with an intellectual standard. He has always been the victim of his senses and his emotions; if he had been a reasonable human creature he would not have attempted to find satisfaction in mediaeval black magic, just as if he had been a true artist he would have discovered long ago the essential ugliness of Naturalism. The real battle for such a man is between two kinds of sensationalism — the one which is occupied with his bodily senses, the other which is engrossed with his emotional moods. And when the one ideal fails him he naturally turns to the other. Reason has nothing to do with the question, because the essence of the rational life is self-control, which the hero of En Route possesses no more than the hero of Là Bas.

Least of all does J. K. Huysmans himself possess the saving grace of self-control or its external equivalent, a sense of humour, when he introduces us to The Cathedral. Durtal, who has tried La Trappe and found the discipline too austere, goes to Chartres, and in that gorgeous example of Gothic art, the Cathedral of Chartres, discovers the gentle and appealing mediaevalism which suits his dreamy temperament. Never has there been a more wonderful picture given, complete in all its details, of the inner meaning of Gothic architecture, than is portrayed for us in the pages of The Cathedral. It is not so much, however, archeology and architecture which interest the author, it is the symbolic meaning of ecclesiastic decoration and ritual, the hidden signification of beats and birds, of glass windows and crypts, which run riot in this curious book. There are only four characters, Durtal himself, the Abbé Gevrésin, the Abbé Plomb, and Madame Celeste Bavoil, the housekeeper of one of the priests. Just as the hero, filling page after page, pours out before us the most extraordinary stores of knowledge, dealing with every phase and stage of mediaeval architecture, so, too, does the artist, forgetting that the first characteristic of art is selection, overpower us with a mass of detail, presenting the most incongruous and shapeless work which a reader has ever been invited to study. There is an immense power of description, picturesque passages here and there, a scrupulous literary style, a boundless curiosity, a great apparent sincerity, and a seemingly intense conviction of the truth of it all; but the sovereign conception which should guide the artist’s hand in subordinating all his profuse data to one paramount end — this is what is wholly lacking.

Doubtless to a man interested in mediaeval lore, or to a writer seeking to recommend the claims of the Roman Catholic Church as the one panacea for human ills, such faults as these are not patent or are obscured by the excellence of the author’s intentions. Others will apply to this work a different standard from that of the devout mystic. It is incontestably an eloquent hymn to the beauty of holiness, but holiness only of one kind. We have nothing here to do with the religion which helps our daily life of struggle and stress; we are bidden to accept the religion which begins by turning its back on mundane problems, and telling us at all hazards to save our individual souls. Durtal himself, recommended to the care of Our Lady of the Pillar and Virgin of the Crypt, is going to be shown us in a succeeding volume as an oblate at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, where, of course, the existence of a gentle, weak, and worn-out creature, who has not conquered the world, but allowed the world to drive him into exile is delineated with all the author’s skill. But for the English reader the interst of M. Huysmans’ work does not lie in the fact that he gives us the solution of a world-problem, but that he paints the only kind of solution open to the modern neuropath. When the whirligig of time brings in its revenges it will be found almost universally tue that the sentimental libertine, who has imagination and is tormented by nerves, does exceedingly well for himself and for the world by hiding himself in a cloister. Durtal is a poor creature. Let him leave to stouter hearts that arena in which he has not the strength and masculine fibre to wage war.