Against the Grain

DES ESSEINTES Courtesy of VVeylie, N. V. Copyright, 1922, By LIEBER & LEWIS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AGAINST THE GRAIN — jN trying to represent the man who wrote the extraordinary books grouped around A Rebours and En Route, I find myself carried back to the decline of the Latin world. I recall those restless Africans who were drawn into the vortex of decadent Rome, who ab- sorbed its corruptions with all the barbaric fervour of their race, and then with a more natural impetus of that youthful fervour threw themselves into the young current of Christianity, yet retaining in their flesh the brand of an exotic culture. Tertullian, Augus- tine, and the rest gained much of their power, as well as their charm, because they incarnated a fantastic min- gling of youth and age, of decayed Latinity, of tumult- uously youthful Christianity. Huysmans, too, incarnates the old and the new, but with a curious, a very vital difference. Today the roles are reversed; it is another culture that is now young, with its aspirations after human perfection and social solidarity, while Christian- ity has exchanged the robust beauty of youth for the subtler beauty of age. "The most perfect analogy to our time which I can find," wrote Renan to his sister amid the tumults of Paris in 1848, a few weeks after Huysmans had been born in the same city, "is the moment when Christianity and paganism stood face to face." Huysmans had wandered from ancestral haunts of mediaeval peace into the forefront of the struggles of our day, bringing the clear, refined perceptions of old culture to the in- tensest vision of the modern world yet attained, but never at rest, never once grasping except on the purely aesthetic side the significance of the new age, always haunted by the memory of the past and perpetually feeling his way back to what seems to him the home of hb soul. The fervent seeker of those early days, indeed, but a rebours! VI INTRODUCTION This is scarcely a mere impression; one might be tempted to say that it is strictly the formula of this complex and interesting personality. Coming on the mater- nal side from an ordinary Parisian bourgeois stock, though there chanced to be a sculptor even along this line, on the paternal side he belongs to an alien aristoc- racy of art. From father to son his ancestors were painters, of whom at least one, Cornelius Huysmans, still figures honourably in our public galleries, while the last of them left Breda to take up his domicile in Paris. Here his son, Joris Karl, has been the first of the race to use the pen instead of the brush, yet retaining precisely those characters of "veracity of imitation, jewel-like richness of colour, perfection of finish, emphasis of character," which their historian finds in the painters of his land from the fourteenth century onwards. Where the Meuse approaches the Rhine valley we find the home of the men who, almost alone in the north, created painting and the arts that are grouped around painting, and evolved relig- ious music. On the side of art the Church had found its chief builders in the men of these valleys, and even on the spiritual side also, for here is the northern home of mysticism. Their latest child has fixed his attention on the feverish activities of Paris with the concentrated gaze of a stranger in a strange land, held by a fascination which is more than half repulsion, always missing some- thing, he scarcely knows what. He has ever been seek- ing the satisfaction he had missed, sometimes in the aesthetic vision of common things, sometimes in the refined Thebaid of his own visions, at length more joy- fully in the survivals of mediaeval mysticism. Yet as those early Africans still retained their acquired Roman instincts, and that fantastic style which could not be shaken off, so Huysmans will surely retain to the last the tincture of Parisian modernity. Yet we can by no means altogether account for Huys- mans by race and environment. Every man of genius is a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth, unlike other men, seeing everything as it were at a different angle, INTRODUCTION Vll mirroring the world in his mind as in those concave or convex mirrors which elongate or abbreviate absurdly all who approach them. No one ever had a keener sense of the distressing absurdity of human affairs than Huysmans. The Trocadero is not a beautiful building, but to no one else probably has it appeared as an old hag lying on her back and elevating her spindle shanks towards the sky. Such images of men's works and ways abound in Huysmans' books, and they express his un- affected vision of life, his disgust for men and things, a shuddering disgust, yet patient, half-amused. I can well recall an evening spent some years ago in Huys- mans' company. His face, with the sensitive, luminous eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire's portraits, the face of a resigned and benevolent Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity of the Divine order but has no wish to make an improper use of his discovery. He talked in low and even tones, never eagerly, without any emphasis or gesture, not addressing any special person; human imbecility was the burden of nearly all that he said, while a faint twinkle of amused wonderment lit up his eyes. And throughout all his books until almost the last "I'eternelle betise de I'humanite" is the ever-recur- ring refrain. In 1889 A RebouTS appeared. Not perhaps his great- est achievement, it must ever remain the central work in which he has most powerfully concentrated his whole vision of life. It sums up the progress he had already made, foretells the progress he was afterward to make, in a style that is always individual, always masterly in in- dividuality. Technically, it may be said that the power of A RebouTs lies in the fact that here for the first time Huysmans has succeeded in uniting the two lines of his literary development; the austere analysis in the novels of commonplace things mostly alien to the writer, and the freer elaboration in the prose-poems of his own more intimate personal impressions. In their union the two streams attain a new power and more intimately personal note. Des Esseintes, the hero of this book, may possibly ; viii INTRODUCTION have been at a few points suggested by a much less interesting real personage in contemporary Paris, the Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac, but in the main he was cer- tainly created by Huysmans' own brain, as the repre- sentative of his author's hyperaesthetic experience of the world and the mouthpiece of his most personal judg- ments. The victim of over-wrought nerves, of neuralgia and dyspepsia, Des Esseintes retires for a season from Paris to the solitude of his country house at Fontenay, which he has fitted up, on almost cloistral methods, to soothe his fantasy and to gratify his complex aesthetic sensations, his love of reading and contemplation. The finest pictures of Gustave Moreau hang on the walls, with the fantastic engravings of Luyken, and the strange visions of Odilon Redon. He has a tortoise curiously inlaid with precious stones; he delights in all those exotic plants which reveal Nature's most unnatural freaks he is a sensitive amateur of perfumes, and considers that the pleasures of smell are equal to those of sight or sound; he possesses a row of little barrels of liqueurs so arranged that he can blend in infinite variety the contents of this instrument, his "mouth-organ" he calls it, and produce harmonies which seem to him comparable to those yielded by a musical orchestra. But the solitary pleasures of this palace of art only increase the nervous strain he is suffering from; and at the urgent bidding of his doctor Des Esseintes returns to the society of his ab- horred fellow-beings in Paris, himself opening the dyke that admitted the "waves of human mediocrity" to en- gulf his refuge. And this wonderful confession of aesthetic faith—with its long series of deliberately search- ing and decisive aflSrmations on life, religion, literature, art—ends with a sudden solemn invocation that is sur- prisingly tremendous: "Take pity, Lord, on the Chris- tian who doubts, on the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the night beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient faith." "He who carries his own most intimate emotions to INTRODUCTION ix their highest point becomes the first in file of a long series of men:" that saying is peculiarly true of Huys- mans. But to be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men. Huysmans' attitude towards his readers was somewhat like that of Thoreau, who spoke with lofty disdain of such writers as "would fain have one reader before they die." As he has since remarked, Huysmans wrote A Rebours for a dozen persons, and was himself more surprised than any one at the wide interest it evoked. Yet that interest was no accident. Certain aesthetic ideals of the latter half of the nineteenth century are more quintessentially expressed in A Rebours than in any other book. Intensely personal, audaciously independent, it yet sums up a movement which has scarcely now worked itself out. We may read it and re-read, not only for the light which it casts on that movement, but upon every similar period of acute aesthetic perception in the past.

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