La Cathédrale (1898)

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Literature

March 26, 1898.

The Cathedral. By J. K. Huysmans. Translated from the French by Clara Bell. Edited by C. Kegan Paul. 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 in., xi.+339pp. London, 1898. Kegan Paul. 6/-


M. J. K. Huysmans is certainly one of the most remarkable figures and "The Cathedral" one of the most remarkable books in contemporary literature. The interest of the book is so autobiographical that no review of it would be complete which did not contain some mention of the author’s literary record. The most caustic and rather vulgar criticism of the modern novel which Durtal delivers in "The Cathedral" applies in every way to "Marthe" and one or two more of M. Huysmans’ early works. They are indeed "pills of foulness" (grains d’ordure). M. Huysmans’ picture of the Parisian rake and debauchee in "À Rebours" is so appallingly complete in every detail that it reads like a catalogue of monstrosities. Durtal, the hero of the trilogy of novels, of which "The Cathedral" is the second volume, makes his first appearance in "Là-Bas," a book which for gruesomeness and horror it would be hard to equal in the whole realm of modern literature. Durtal fathoms the very abyss of iniquity, and at the end of the book he appears as a weary, disgusted, hopeless man, who has stripped bare the tree of earthly knowledge, stretching out his hands in despair towards the unseen and incomprehensible. In the subsequent trilogy we are given the history of Durtal’s "salvation." "En Route," which is available for English readers in an excellent translation by Mr. C. Kegan Paul, tells of his awful fight with himself and his past, and his final victory in a Trappist monastery; " La Cathédrale" of his religious education by means of symbolism and mysticism, and of his fruitless search for peace; "L’Oblat" of his life in a cell of the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes. What becomes of him in the end no one but M. Huysmans can say, for "L’Oblat" exists as yet only in the brain of its author.

"The Cathedral" is utterly devoid of incident and movement, more opposed to the general laws of fiction than even "En Route." It is, indeed, a treatise, pure and simple, set forth in the form of a long and disjointed monologue, with here and there a few words from one of the bystanders — the two priests and an old servant. It is, moreover, devoid of personal interest, for throughout the volume Durtal undergoes no change, passes through no new phase of his "salvation." One has always to be cautious of reading the author into his hero, but in the present instance there is no room for a shadow of doubt. M.Huysmans only makes use of Durtal as a convenient substitute for the personal pronoun. "The Cathedral" is, then, merely a disquisition on symbolism and mysticism. It contains little that is new or suggestive to the well-read student. It is rather a résumé of the literature of mysticism, a catalogue, revised and annotated, of symbolic meanings. There are pages on symbolic flora and fauna, chapters devoted to the symbolism of architecture, with special reference to the cathedral of Chartres and its magnificent stained glass, with numberless short lives of the less known mystics and a detailed biography of St. Lydwine and Ste. Jeanne de Martel, with ecclesiastical catechisms and criticisms of Church government. All this is interesting and instructive, but why M. Huysmans should have put himself to the trouble of cloaking his philosophy and his history in the garb of fiction we fail to understand. Why, for instance, when in the course of his researches he comes to study the symbolic meanings of plants should he bother himself to describe his visit to his friend’s cabbages, which first suggested the subject to his mind? Or why, when he wishes to discuss religious art, should he be forced into the clumsy expedient of reading aloud an article on Fra Angelico’s "The Coronation of the Virgin," which he has just written for a magazine? What the reader really wants to know — and what he is not told — is how this obsession of mysticism acted on Durtal, the man who had just broken from the fetters of the world, the flesh, and the devil. We seem to leave Durtal at the end of the book very much as we found him at the beginning. He is still suffering from spiritual anaemia, still morbidly impatient with life. Above all, he is still filled with a fearful hankering after the unclean, the loathsome, the unpleasant, for his mind always dwells with relish on the most revolting details in the history of the saints of old. He is, in sum, still a useless unit in the war of the worlds. Mysticism and symbolism have utterly failed to give him peace, or hope, or power.

M. Huysmans’ style has not improved. It is becoming more and more "precious," and the pose is more and more exaggerated. There is in his work a total lack of that broad, virile touch which carries conviction, or at least commands sympathy; all is finicking and overburdened with fastidious detail. There are one or two magnificent pieces of descriptive writing, and the picture of daybreak in the cathedral of Chartres with which the book opens is a beautiful piece of work. But M. Huysmans has yet to learn that a catalogue of colours and monuments does not bring the cathedral to a reader with any vividness. In one of Taine’s note-books there is a very short chapter on the cathedral of Bourges which makes the reader realize in all its fulness the splendour of architecture. If you have been in Chartres, M. Huysmans helps you to recall the wonder that came to you at sight of the cathedral; it you have never seen that magnificent structure, he can call up no definite image in your mind.

A good many of M. Huysmans’ peculiarities are lost in translation, but this is rather a gain than otherwise, for, in the original, "The Cathedral" is so full of strange technical expressions and antiquated diction that at times even a French reader is baffled. Mrs. Clara Bell has done her work well, and her translation of a very difficult book is, all things considered, remarkably satisfactory. Of Mr. Kegan Paul’s "prefatory note," we cannot say the same. It contains an altogether irrelevant attack on French Protestants, "whose theology is, in fact," he says, "Unitarian, and has no more to do with the life of the French nation than that small community of Protestant Dissenters has to do with our own religious life!" Both of these statements are, to put it mildly, quite incorrect.