Back Aa

Unicorns

Close

<h2>CHAPTER X</h2> <h2>THE OPINIONS OF J.-K. HUYSMANS</h2> A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huysmans, who wrote this charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable. He was the most unpleasant among the world's great writers; for as a great master of prose he ranks high in the literature of his country. His detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition, Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the ardour of a sportsman tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appealed to him must be left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same class, but Swift enjoyed scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not. Nor for that matter did Flaubert. The De Goncourts have told us in their copious confidences the agony they endured when digging for documents. Germinie Lacerteux was painful travail, not alone because of the tortuous style it demanded, but also because of the author's natural repugnance to such vulgar [Pg 112] material. They were aristocrats. Huysmans came of a solid bourgeois family; Dutch on the paternal side, his father hailed from Breda, and Parisian on the distaff. Therefore he might have described his modest surroundings with less acerbity than the irritable De Goncourts. Such was not the case. He loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful incentive, forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and religion aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed from life to his marvellously written pages. His was a veritable Æsthetic of the Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue sensibility with a repelling <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: misanthrophy" id="tnote8">misanthropy</ins>. In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K. Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries; indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an unassuming and industrious [Pg 113] functionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour, yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the irascible among decorated philistines! "Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks the book looms up before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, and amused look of contempt, so profound [Pg 114] that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility." This tiny etched portrait is by Mr. Arthur Symons, who practically introduced Huysmans to English-speaking letters. Pitiless he was, as pitiless to himself as to others. Yet Coquiot found him entertaining betimes, while De Gourmont scoffs at his tales of stomachic woe. Huysmans, he says, ate heartily in the very restaurants he so viciously abuses throughout that Iliad of indigestion, A Vau-l'Eau. He was the M. Folantin, the unheroic hero; as he was the unpatriotic hero of The Knapsack—published in Zola's collection, Les Soirées de Medan. In all his books he figures. Jules Lemaître describes them collectively as: a young man with the dysentery; a young man who disliked single blessedness—the critic used a stronger expression; a man who couldn't get a beefsteak in Paris cooked as he wanted it, and a man who liked to read the chaste chronicle of Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as the sadistic Bluebeard—these comprise the characters of Huysmans. After his conversion he made amends, though he was always the atrabilious faultfinder. No matter. One of the most notable of art critics in a city abundantly supplied with criticism was this same Huysmans. His critical achievement may outlive his fiction and his religious confessions. He preferred Certains to his other books. It is written in his most astounding and captivating style. The portraits [Pg 115] of certain artists in this unique volume recite the history of the critic's acuity and clairvoyance. He first announced Edgar Degas as the "greatest artist we possess to-day in France." He discovered Odilon Redon, Raffaelli, Forain, and wrote of Gustave Moreau in enamelled prose. Whistler, Chéret, Pissarro, Gauguin were praised by him before they had attracted the pontifical disdain of academic criticism. To Rops he consecrated some extraordinary pages, for Huysmans was a verbal virtuoso superior to any of the artists he praised and later he cynically confessed to Coquiot that he didn't highly estimate the Belgian etcher, but found in him excellent pasture for his own picture-making pen. In a word, the erotic Rops attracted him more than Rops the every-day craftsman, and rightly enough. With the Japanese this erotic side of Rops is only for the connoisseur. Huysmans said some just things of Whistler, and he was the first critic to salute the rising star of Paul Cézanne, who, he asserts, contributed more to the impressionist movement than Manet; and one who also discovered the prodromes of a new art. (This was as early as 1877.) He found the Cézanne still-life brutally real; above all, a preoccupation with forms and "edges," that betrayed this painter's tendency toward a novel synthesis. But according to Coquiot, Huysmans saw through the hole in the Cézanne millstone. The Provençal [Pg 116] was a rusé, an intrigant, and a money-grubber in his old age, and proved his plebeian ancestry. His father began barber, ended banker, shaved faces as well as notes, bled his clientèle in both professions. American collectors of art Huysmans treated as brigands. In the matter of the classical painters and sculptors he manifested himself intransigent. He adored the Flemish primitives, the School of Cologne and a few of the Italian primitives, but with the exception of Fra Angelico found their types detestingly androgynous. (He employed a more pungent term.) In the Low Countries are the true primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism is that of John of the Cross and Saint Teresa. Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion is his idol. <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Huysman's" id="tnote9">Huysmans's</ins> opinion of Puvis de Chavannes in Certains is stimulating though inconclusive. For him Puvis tries to dance a rigaudon at a Requiem mass! But as a descendant of Cornelis Huysmans, the Parisian sees with almost an abnormal vision, and in prose paints like a veritable Fleming. Little wonder De Gourmont called him an "eye." His prose is addressed to the eye, rather than to the ear. Sumptuous in colouring, its rhythmic movement is pompous, its tone hieratic; and he so manipulated it that it was a perfect medium to depict the Paris of his time. Huysmans did not think too highly of his brothers under the same literary yoke. His [Pg 117] opinions are concise. Coquiot prints them. Despite his affiliations with Zola and the naturalistic group, Huysmans soon tired of his chief, tired of his theories, his crude notions of art and life. He definitely broke away from him in his famous preface to Là Bas. And it should not be forgotten that he was the first to celebrate in fiction, if celebration it may be called, the prostitute of modern Paris. Marthe appeared a year earlier than either Nana or La Fille Elise, the latter by Edmond de Goncourt. But he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive deeper in the mediæval vileness of Là Bas. He met Goncourt through the offices of Léon Cladel, a writer little known to our generation. Huysmans was a friend in need to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and frequented the eccentric company of <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Barbey d'Aurevilly" id="tnote10">Barbey d'Aurévilly</ins>, in whose apartment he said that Paul Bourget was apt to pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did not care for that "Cherubin of the Duchesses of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine." Of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Dante, Schiller, and Goethe he spoke with ill-concealed contempt. Raseurs, all these "solemn pontiffs." His major detestation was Voltaire. Balzac, the prodigious novelist, left him unstirred. "Not an artistic epithet" in his edition, fifty volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread. Théophile Gautier did not attract him; he found the impeccable master cold and diluted; so many pages published to say nothing! Huysmans [Pg 118] believed in "saying something," and for him it usually meant something disagreeable, or else contrary to accepted belief. He hated the theatre and his opinions of Scribe, Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou, Feuillet, and of the "old pedant" Sarcey, are savage. He had no feeling for the footlights, and not possessing much imagination and deficient in what are called "general ideas" (that is, the stereotyped commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate "thinkers"), he revolted at the lean or hysterical stuff manufactured by dramatists; plays that are neither life nor literature, nor even theatrical. Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul-explorers in the poetical Parnassus of that period, appealed to Huysmans. He admired, as well he might, Flaubert, but found his company intolerable. That giant from Normandy was too healthy for the slender overwrought Parisian. He had, so said Huysmans, the manners of a traveling salesman—Balzac's Gaudissart—and would play his own Homais, being addicted to punning and disconcerting joking. Poor Flaubert! Poorer Huysmans! Such sensibility as his must have been a daily torture. Victor Hugo was "an incomparable trumpet, an epic of the garde nationale." From Edmond de Goncourt with his condescending airs of "un vieux maître," he escaped by flight; and Turgenev, most amiable of great men, was a tedious Russian, "a spigot of tepid [Pg 119] water always flowing." If Verlaine had been penned up in hospital or prison it would have been for the greater glory of French poetry. Jules Laforgue, "Quelle joie!" Remy de Gourmont: "I wrote a preface to one of his books" (Le Latin mystique). "That says enough." Marcel Provost: "Le jeune premier des romans de Georges Ohnet," which isn't bad. He rather evades a definite judgment of Anatole France: "Il s'y connaît, le gaillard; mais ce qu'il se défile!" The style and thought of these two remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls Maurice Barrès "Lord Beaconsfield," a high compliment to that exquisite writer's political attainments. He sums up Ferdinand Brunetière as "constipé," a sound definition of a shrewd, unsympathetic critic. Naturally women writers, "little geese," are not spared by this waspish misogynist, whose intense, pessimistic vision deformed ideas as well as objects. In A Rebours there is the account of a trip to London by the anæmic hero, Des Esseintes. He gets no further than one of the English taverns opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. It is risible, this episode; Huysmans could display verve and a sort of grim humour when he wished. Brunetière, who was serious to solemnity, and lacked a funny bone, declared that Huysmans borrowed the incident from a popular vaudeville, Le Voyage à Dieppe, by Fulgence and Wafflard. He need not have gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaire [Pg 120] by the Crépets (Eugène and Jacques) there is the genesis of the story. To become better acquainted with English speech and manners, Baudelaire frequented an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, where he drank whisky, read Punch, and also sought the company of English grooms in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Huysmans loved Baudelaire as much as Brunetière detested him. There is no doubt he knew this thoroughly Baudelairian anecdote. A perverse comet in the firmament of French literature, Joris-Karl Huysmans will always be more admired than loved. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 121] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2