The Academy

19 February 1898.

DECADENT, MYSTIC, CATHOLIC.

La Cathédral. Par J. K. Huysmans. (Paris: P. V. Stock.)

THIS long-expected book is out at last, and bids fair to attract as much attention as its predecessors. Although not published till the beginning of the present month, it is already in its seventh edition, and arrangements have been made for its appearance in English dress. It is, however, so unlike any ordinary novel in form and conception that it is hardly possible to appreciate it without some acquaintance with M. Huysmans’ own career and with his earlier works.

Joris Karl Huysmans is one of a distinguished family of artists, for some generations domiciled in Paris and a descendant of Huysman de Malines, whose works belong to the Flemish school of the seventeenth century. Born in the Bohemian life of the capital, he early preferred literature to design, and made his bow to the public at the age of twenty-six with a small volume of poems only too plainly inspired by Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. Later, he became a disciple of Zola, and published, in 1876, his first novel, Marthe, wherein he describes the life of a courtesan of the lower class with such pronounced realism that the book had to be published in Brussels. Then followed in quick succession Les Soeurs Vatard, the history of two factory girls; En Ménage, a study in divorce, and several other works of which it is only necessary to mention here A Rebours ("The Wrong Way"). In this, surely one of the most tedious books ever written, M. Huysmans describes with wearisome minuteness the vagaries of a debauchee of good family, who, worn out with excess at the age of thirty, buys with the sale of his ancestral property a house in the suburbs of Paris, and sets seriously to work to console himself, like Pope’s Sporus, with the pleasures of taste. So exquisite is his sensibility that he secludes himself not only from society, but from Nature herself, and lives only by artificial light in rooms decorated in extraordinary colours, fitted instead of windows with aquariums filled with coloured water and clockwork fish, and perfumed by an apparatus on which he can compose "symphonies" of scent instead of sound. Had M. Huysmans ever shown a spark of humour in any of his writings, we might here suspect him of a satire after the fashion of The Colonel or Patience upon the aesthete of his time. But the book is inspired by a different motive, and when its hero is dragged back by his doctors to Paris with a digestion ruined by a dietary of liqueurs, strange teas and other nastinesses, he utters the cry:

"Lord, have pity on a Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who wishes to believe, on the convict for life embarking alone and in darkness under a sky which the cheering signal-lights of an ancient hope no longer lighten."

It is with the answer to this prayer that M. Huysmans concerns himself in the series of which La Cathédrale is the last example.

So far, M. Huysmans had made no more ambitious appeal to the public than the dozens of Parisian novelists whom the institution of the feuilleton enables to turn out romances as if by machinery for the delectation of the newspaper-reading public. His earlier critics, while giving him credit for a strength not apparent to English eyes, seem to have noted in him only two peculiarities — viz., a passion for trivial details and a tendency to dwell upon the revolting. Both these failings they attributed, perhaps with reason, to his Flemish extraction, while his excursion into the eccentric in A Rebours must have seemed to many to have been inspired by the love of cabotinage or play-acting for its own sake from which no Parisian is ever entirely free. But with Là-Bas, the opening volume of his new venture, M. Huysmans bounded clear of the ruck of his fellow-craftsmen and became at once, if his publishers’ figures are in anyway to be trusted, one of the most popular writers in France. In this most daring book M. Huysmans shows us M. Durtal, a blasé man of letters, in whom some see the hero of A Rebours grown older, engaged in writing a history of the monster Gilles de Rais, once the brother-in-arms of Joan of Arc, whose many crimes are detailed by Mr. Baring Gould in his Book of Werewolves. Durtal, while chronicling the insane atrocities of this wretch, receives the advances of Mme. Chantelouve, a member of the upper middle class of Parisian Catholic society, but a secret adherent of the supposed sect of devil-worshippers. By her he is taken to a disused chapel in the heart of Paris, where Satan is formally invoked by an apostate priest, and a horrible parody of the mass is celebrated, followed by an orgy of hysterical lust. But all this disgusting machinery is, so to speak, but the drum beaten outside the booth to draw the crowd to the show inside; and the real purpose of the book is shown in certain conversations which take place round the dinner-table of Carhaix, a bell-ringer of St. Sulpice. Carhaix and his wife are both Bretons, pious with the piety of Catholics who have never known doubt, and Durtal’s fellow-guests are a doctor who apparently represents the scientific negation of the supernatural, and an astrologer who exhibits in his own person the absurdity of an over-credulous belief in it. As may be guessed, the simple faith of Carhaix shines by the side of the doctor’s cold scepticism and Durtal’s mental unrest, and the book ends with his prophecy to the latter.

"Here below," he says, "all is decomposed, all is dead — but above! Oh, I admit that the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, the advent of the Divine Paraclete may be delayed! But the texts which announced it are inspired, and the future may be counted upon. The dawn will be clear."

M. Huysman’s next book, En Route, the only one which has yet been translated into English, unfolds another chapter in the history of Durtal’s soul. Shocked by the sudden deaths of Carhaix and the doctor, he slips back rather than is reconverted to the religion of his youth, and spends a week in retreat at a Trappist monastery, where, after terrible mental struggles, he is fully reconciled to the Church, and returns to Paris a sincere and professing Catholic. And so we come at last to the volume before us, which is as simple in construction and as barren of incident as its forerunners. The scene is laid at Chartres, whose cathedral gives its title to the book. Hither come before the volume opens Durtal, the old priest under whose direction he took his first steps towards reconciliation, and a new character in the shape of a pious woman who acts as the priest’s housekeeper. Here, too, these three meet a certain Abbé Plomb, an antiquarian canon of Chartres, and the four indulge in several exquisite discussions after the fashion of Carhaix and his guests, but this time on the symbolism of the cathedral and on sublime points of mysticism arising out of the lives of the saints. These discussions and Durtal’s soliloquies take up the greater part of the book; but spiritual matters are not neglected. The religious ceremonies at which Durtal assists are described with much fervour and wealth of detail, and both the priests are represented as busying themselves with his state of mind and with the melancholy which perpetually besets him. Finally, they prevail upon him to undertake another retreat, this time to the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, and we leave him on the way thither; but this, though it ends the book, does not exhaust the series. Already two more volumes are in preparation, and from hints dropped in the former volumes we can pronounce one of them to be the life of St. Lydwine or Lidwine (M. Huysmans seems himself uncertain as to the spelling), who apparently played a considerable part in Durtal’s conversion; while the other will deal with his reception in some Benedictine house as an "oblate" — i.e., a sort of lay monk, who is subject to the Rule, but does not take the irrevocable vows of the Order. We sincerely hope that M. Huysmans will leave his hero in peace when he gets him there. Five volumes on the history of one soul should satisfy even Mr. Arthur Balfour.

On the whole, we are a little disappointed with La Cathédrale. Durtal does not, indeed, improve on acquaintance. His struggles with the flesh at La Trappe, his terrible conflict with himself over his first confession, and his doubts and fears about receiving the Eucharist, were depicted for us in so lifelike a manner as to move the most thoughtless. It was impossible, in fact, to read En Route without feeling as one would at the sight of a man struggling with a rushing stream for his life. But with Durtal at Chartres it is much more difficult to sympathise. His conversion has brought him no peace of mind, and he goes through the process which Kingsley described as "fingering his spiritual muscles to see if they are growing," with the most irritating frequency. Moreover, though the superiority of the mystic over the ordinary believer is vaunted on almost every page, Durtal does not seem to be making progress towards the conscious union of the soul with the Deity, which is said by all mystics to be the goal at which they aim. Although we are told he has been set at La Trappe, on the road to the Mystic City, and even to have "perceived its confines on the horizon," he is in no hurry to continue his course. Instead, he devotes himself to much maundering about the symbolical meanings of certain colours, gems, and even beasts, birds, and plants, only worthy of a medieval Cabalist or of the modern Parisian society of the Rose Croix. And with all this, he shows an asperity and an intolerance which says little for his charity. The thought of pious founders perpetuating their names on the churches they build fills him with horror, while some remarks on the use to be made of the Eucharist lead him to anticipate the outcry that they would provoke "in the gang of grocers of the Temple, and in the sacred band of devotees who have their luxurious prie-Dieus and reserved seats near the altar, like theatre stalls in the house of all." As for the literary world of Paris, he expresses himself about it in most vitriolic language.

"To see much of these subaltern scribblers and oneself remain clean is," he says, "impossible. One must choose between their company and that of honest folk, between speaking evil and holding one’s tongue. For their speciality is to prune you of all charitable ideas, and to case you of friendship in the twinkling of an eye."

It is, perhaps, fidelity to his art which makes M. Huysmans represent his hero as attacked by one of the most ordinary failings of religious people, but one cannot help feeling a wish to thump M. Durtal into a less Pharisaical frame of mind. It appears, therefore, likely that M. Huysmans’ reputation is still in the making and that he must do better than in La Cathédrale if his future place in literature is to be as great as his present popularity. His contemporaries’ judgment on his work is still abundantly justified, and it is its likeness to that of the Dutch painters whom lie worships which is at once its strength and its weakness. As Teniers or Gerard Dow would expend the same painful care upon the presentment of a pot or a pan as upon the principal figure of the picture, so M. Huysmans must describe every unimportant detail with the same wealth of epithet and illustration in which he would set forth the main incidents of his story, did he condescend to incidents. Not content with telling us that the country folk who received the new bishop at Chartres wore old-fashioned clothes, he must needs describe them. Their coats, their hats, all pass under review, and we have to be told that they wore "white gloves cleaned with petroleum and rubbed with india-rubber and breadcrumbs." When he wishes to say that the wind was sweeping the streets of Chartres, he thus concludes a page of description:

"Some belated ecclesiastics hurried on grasping with one hand their skirts, which swelled like balloons, squeezing on their hats with the other, and only letting go to recover the breviary slipping from under their arms, hiding their faces, pressing them upon their breasts, and leaping forward to cleave the north wind with red ears and eyes blinded with tears, hanging on desperately the while to umbrellas which surged above their heads threatening to carry them away and shaking them all over."

Nor is his grossness less marked than formerly. It follows him into his description of the cathedral, and while he twice goes out of his way to mention that a prudish sacristan has decorated a statue of the infant Jesus with a paper apron, he dwells upon certain peculiarities of the furniture of the choir boys’ dormitory not generally noticed. Yet this is nothing compared to the morbid delight which he feels in recalling loathsome images. As Wouvermans is said never to have painted a picture without introducing a man or an animal in some of the ignoble situations imposed upon us by our common nature, so M. Huysmans will make a nasty allusion if he can. He describes the walls of the Abbé Plomb’s lodging as "suffering from the cutaneous disease of plaster gnawed with leprosy and damasked with pustules"; while he concludes his description of literary circles with this far-fetched simile:

"Yes! Imitating the homeopathic pharmacopoeia which still makes use of horrible substances, the juice of woodlice, the poison of snakes, the pressings of cockchafers, the secretion of polecats, and the pus of small-pox, all coated with sugar of milk to conceal the smell and appearance, the world of letters, also, grinds down the most disgusting matters in the hope of getting them absorbed without retching. It is one incessant manipulation of neighbourly jealousies and the cackle of porters’ lodges, the whole made into a globule with a treacherous coating of good manners to hide its odour and taste."

He even mentions a bad chromolithograph of the Sacred Heart, in which "Christ shows with an amiable air a heart badly cooked, bleeding into streams of yellow sauce."

Even these errors of taste, however, are venial compared with the manner in which M. Huysmans has succumbed in his latest book to his school’s besetting sin, which is affectation. In him this takes the form of an eager search after the recondite and the unusual. Durtal, in the finicking spirit proper to the successor of the effeminate des Esseintes finds some churches so ugly that he cannot pray in them without shutting his eyes, and wearies his hearers with passages from the lives of saints like St. Lydwine of Schiedam and Jeanne de Matel, their great merit in his eyes being, apparently, that their very names "remain unknown to the majority of Catholics." At other times he sweeps the libraries of scarce books of devotion, and delights in worshipping at the shrines of Madonnas abandoned by their devotees. And when M. Huysmans speaks in his own person he shows the same desperate straining after originality. His favourite poets are Baudelaire and Verlaine, his chosen romancer Edgar Allen Poe, and above all English artists he sets Hogarth and Rowlandson. In each case his choice seems to be largely due to the unpopularity or neglect of his favourite, and when he notices a living artist like "Wisthler" — it is thus that he inverts the letters of the immortal name — he thinks that he has bestowed the highest praise upon him by saying that his pictures remind him of opium dreams. That this is a studied affectation more than any unnatural perversion of taste is shown clearly enough by the extraordinary vocabulary which he has lately adopted, of which the main feature is its substitution of out-of-the-way technical terms for those in common use. Thus for "in this fashion" he uses the words en ce gabarit, the last being the word used by shipbuilders for the models or patterns used in their trade; he speaks of the character of a penitent moulded by his director as being malaxé, a word used by chemists for the rolling of a pill; and he cannot speak of anything being put on one side, save as mise au rencart, a provincialism the derivation of which is unknown. His stock of ordinary technical words increases with each new book that he writes; and to the medical terms of Là-Bas and the cloister phrase of En Route, he has now added the language of architecture. Unless he returns to common speech, it will soon be impossible to read him without a glossary.

These, then, are the faults which compel us to think that M. Huysmans’ popularity rests as yet upon no assured basis; yet, having said this, it would be idle to deny that he presents some of the characteristics of a great artist. The term is used advisedly, for his subjective mode of treatment lends itself to word-painting, and few can bring before us a person or a scene more vividly or with firmer strokes of the brush.

We have space for but one more quotation. We wish we could give the long, but not too long, description of the new bishop’s entry into Chartres, and his reception by the old-fashioned country folk and pensioners of the place, which is presented in the vivid and grotesque manner of Hogarth’s ’March of the Guards thro’ Finchley.’ Let us take instead the scene where Durtal sees the dawn break over the cathedral, the great spear-shaped windows, with their central group of the black St. Anne surrounded by Jewish kings, appearing in the dim light like hiltless swords.

"And, when he looked to right and left, he saw, at immense heights on each side, a gigantic trophy hung on the walls of darkness and composed of a colossal shield covered with dents above five large swords without guards or hilts, with blades damaseened in vague tracery and confused méllo-work.

Gradually the groping wintry sun pierced through the mist, which became bluer and more vaporous; and first, the trophy hung on Durtal’s left towards the north awoke to life. Red embers and spirituous flames took light within the hollows of the shield, while beneath on the middle blade arose in the steel spear-head the giant face of a negress clothed in a green robe and brown mantle; the head, wrapped in a blue kerchief, was surrounded by a golden aureole, and she gazed, hieratic and shy, straight before her with widely-opened eyes, all white.

And this sphinx-like black held on her knees a little negro whose eyeballs stood forth like balls of snow from a black face.

Around her slowly the other still shadowy swords grew clear, and blood trickled from their points reddened as with recent slaughter. And these purple streams disclosed the outlines of beings from the banks of some distant Ganges, on the one side a king playing on a harp of gold, and on the other a monarch raising a sceptre ending in the turquoise petals of a strange lily..."

This is excellent work. It has lost much by translation, but in the original M. Huysmans’ picture of the cathedral stands out with the force and delicacy of a nocturne by his friend Mr. Whistler.