The New Statesman

28 April 1923

HUYSMANS

Saint Lydwine of Schiedam. By J. K. HUYSMANS. Translated by AGNES HASTINGS. Kegan Paul. 6s. 6d.

Though not one of the most important of Huysmans’ books Saint Lydwine holds an interesting position. In it the primary naturalist and the imposed Catholic have come full circle and realism and mysticism join hands in common abnegation of reason. "Huysmans is an eye," said Remy de Gourmont, and might have added the four other senses in varying degrees. It is, in effect, the impression of a sensual alertness one receives from his books, of a sensitiveness oppressed and exacerbated by the world of gross vulgarity. His progress as a writer and as a moral being was determined by the search for a form which would more clearly allow the expression of his personality. There is little resemblance to the novel in his mature works. They are the record of the passage through certain states of sensibility and only objectified so far as to make a presentable whole. His development consists in the refection, first of the naturalist formula, which confined him to the normal and the impersonal, and later of the philosophical parent of naturalism, positive science, which reduced him to a phenomenon of infinite banality. The only way in which he could regain the very necessary sense of self-importance was by rehabilitating the theological ethic and metaphysic. It was also, no doubt, an effective way of putting out his tongue at the respectable infidelity of his century. There need be no question of his sincerity; but the old Adam was hard to kill, and it is the brusque reappearance of this harsh and arrogant but finely perceptive egoist which make the later works of edification readable from no such specialist point of view. It is a very old friend who says in Saint Lydwine, "Faith seemed expiring, and was destined, after dragging on for two centuries, to perish in that sewer disinterred by Paganism, and known as the Renaissance." At the conclusion of her incredible biography he says, that it will "no doubt rejoice the pious and distress the numerous Catholics who, in weakness of faith or in ignorance, would relegate the mystic to the lunatic asylum, and the miracles to the region of superstition and legend. For these the expurgated biographies of the Jansenites (sic) would suffice, if they had not at the present time a whole school of hagiographers ready to satisfy their hatred of the supernatural by fabricating histories of Saints confined to this earth and forbidden to escape from it; of Saints who are not Saints." The same voice speaks through des Esseintes, of the Religion which "se défiait des gens de talent, tels que Veuillot, tels que Hello, parce qu’ils ne lui semblaient encore ni assez asservis ni assez plats." Huysmans was to be, in his turn, an equally embarrassing champion. His own early books were like those expurgated biographies of which he speaks; the supernatural (or abnormal) was strictly excluded and the "roman type" of this period, "A Vau l’Eau," recounts the embarrassments of a little bureaucrat in assuring himself a tolerable dinner; only the distinctive tang which clings to anything Huysmans wrote makes it tolerable. At the same time he suffered ferociously frombeing "confined to this earth and forbidden to escape from it." The little jumps he had attempted in his prose poems did not carry him very far, and it was not till "A Rebours" that he spread his wings and soared out of the clutch of Zola. In that precious and fantastic volume he attempts to escape through the refinement of the sensibility, but des Esseintes, shut up on the outskirts of Paris with his Moreau’s and Redon’s, his scent-organ and unique poets, naturally overtaxes his nerves and is obliged to return to the miserable deceptions of ordinary life. In :Là-bas," the successor, Huysmans, now and henceforward Durtal, plunges into the unnatural, and the book is a skilfully woven tissue, which recounts the atrocities of Gilles de Rais, a type of Bluebeard, and the author’s adventure with a woman, who is a religious pervert, and introduces him to a celebration of the Black Mass. This is the ripest of his books, the plumpest fruit of his inquisitive and greedy palate, and contains some most delicate renderings of those moods of absolute boredom peculiar to the condition of stagnation his mind had then reached. If some depravity of his mistress or curious acquisition of knowledge seems to tear its velvelty surface, it is only to reveal for a moment the black hopelessness beneath. "En Route" records the reaction set up by his disgust at his experience of anti-Christianity; as the title implies, he is moving towards a return to the Catholic Church. The exquisite analysis of his sensation is carried here to its finest degree because there is little external action to interrupt the mental development, which is its entire interest. In "La Cathédrale" the sensibility is petrified into a magnificent but inanimate form. His culinary fastidiousness is still active and his curiosity delights in the religious symbolism of flowers and gems, and his gross Flemish sensuality in the odours of sanctity and of the malevolent one; but he is a servant of the Church and that is not without its effect.

Barbey d’Aurevilly, reviewing "A Rebours," aid that the author must choose betwen the mouth of a pistol and the foot of the cross. He had previously offered Baudeliare the alternatives of blowing his brains out or becoming a Christian. The poet did not accept the limitation, Huysmans did, and Saint Lydwine shows the supreme humiliation of his reason and the triumph of faith. Lydwine, a Flemish girl of poor parents, who lived in the foureenth century, was ordained to be a receptacle of pain, what is technically known as a "saint of reparation," suffering the torments of those too weak to bear their own. At the age of fifteen she was courted for her charming appearance, but she already knew that she must vow her virginity to Christ. Her fear of her beautiful body ("which was destined to become, before burial, something monstrous and without form") is typical of the medieval theology, whic still sends out blanched and subterranean shoots. She was glad when she became ugly "and implored God to help her to love Him alone." Here follows a typical passage"

Then He began to cultivate her, to root out all thoughts that could displease Him, to hoe her soul, to rake it till the blood flowed. And He did more; for as if to attest the justice of the saying of St. Hildegarde, at once so terrible and consoling: "God dwells not in bodies that are whole," He attacked her health. This young and charming body with which He had clothed her seemed suddenly irksome to Him, and He cut it in all directions, that He might better seize and mould the soul it contained."

The fascination of Huysmans’ style is in its fecundity of metaphor; though he is an adept at the art of pure plastic representation, he is most distinctively himself in this squeezing out of the juice of words. He pounds them in the mortar of his rich memory with hungry sensationism, and he is not content till, crushed between the two terms of the comparison, the pungent aroma of his meaning is disengaged.

A limited number of themes are continually cropping up, elaborated or reduced, in his successive works, and Saint Lydwine is in a sense a development and sublimation of the charming chapter on flowers in "A Rebours." There he assembles the most outrageous productions of nature, imitating, in their foliage and blossoms, flesh gnawed by disease, speckled with the rash of an hereditary taint. The body of Lydwine is such a flower, the real climax to that chapter. She was afflicted with every conceivable disease, except leprosy, as that would have entailed her segregation, and for thirty years lived in a condition of such unequalled misery that her mere existence proved the divine origin of her torments. Her spiritual exultations were of corresponding intensity and seh was on several occasions rapt into Paradise and on others her Heavenly Spouse communicated with her in person. "The sum of her maladies continued to overwhelm her and she was attacked by a furious recrudescence of disease. Her stomach finally burst like a ripe fruit, and they had to apply a woollen cushion to press back her entrails and prevent them from leaving her body." But she still lived. Huysmans is not a tepid hagiographer; once he believed he stopped at nothing and delighted to drag into the light evidence of the Divine Justice, which more responsible spokesmen might prefer, in concession to modern criticism, to leave in obscurity. Huysmans despised modern criticism, and his books are the débris of his hatred. Saint Lydwine is only less interesting than some of them because the subject is not the man himself. When he has himself for subject he is superb and in some degree anticipates Proust, especially in his analysis of ill-defined states of emotion. It is curious, too, that in spite, perhaps because, of his intense revulsion from the modern, he is through Baudelaire and Guys the authentic "peintre de la vie moderne." He would have been shocked by the younger generation’s excessive veneration of modernity, and he might not have quite appreciated their cosmopolitanism, but he encouraged them to exploit the fantastic brutality of Paris.

J. E. B.