There was only one spot where men might huddle together in safety—the church. There the blessed sound of the bells, the contact of holy water, the smell of incense, the sight of the Divine Flesh, wove a spiritual coat of mail over every sensory avenue to the soul. The winds of hell might rave, the birds of night dash themselves against the leaden spires of that fortress whence alone the sky seemed blue with hope.
Huysmans, notwithstanding a very high degree of intellectual subtlety, is by virtue of his special æsthetic and imaginative temperament carried back to the more childlike attitude of this earlier age. The whole universe appears to him as a process of living images; he cannot reason in abstractions, cannot rationalise; that indeed is why he is inevitably an artist. Thus he is a born leader in a certain modern emotional movement.
That movement, as we know, is one of a group of movements now peculiarly active. We see them on every hand, occultism, theosophy, spiritualism, all those vague forms on the borderland of the unknown which call to tired men weary of too much living, or never strong enough to live at all, to hide their faces from the sun of nature and grope into cool, delicious darkness, soothing the fever of life. It is foolish to resent this tendency; it has its rightness; it suits some, who may well cling to their private dream if life itself is but a dream. At the worst we may remember that, however repugnant such movements may be, to let fall remains a better way of putting Satan to flight than to cast away. And at the best one should know that this is part of the vital process by which the spiritual world moves on its axis, alternating between darkness and light.
Therefore soak yourself in mysticism, follow every intoxicating path to every impossible Beyond, be drunken with mediævalism, occultism, spiritualism, theosophy, and even, if you will, protestantism—the cup that cheers, possibly, but surely not inebriates—for the satisfaction that comes of all these is good while it lasts. Yet be sure that Nature is your home, and that from the farthest excursions you will return the more certainly to those fundamental instincts which are rooted in the zoological series at the summit of which we stand. For the whole spiritual cosmogony finally rests, not indeed on a tortoise, but on the emotional impulses of the mammal vertebrate which constitute us men.
Meanwhile we will not grieve because in the course of our pilgrimage on earth the sun sets. It has always risen again. We may lighten the darkness of the journey by admiring the beauty of night, plucking back the cowl if needs must we wear it.—Eia, fratres, pergamus.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] It may be gathered from the Preface he wrote at a later date for M. Remy de Gourmont’s delightful volume, Le Latin Mystique, that Huysmans would no longer draw a line at this point; for he here speaks with enthusiasm of the styles of St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas d’Aquinas.
[9] In the seventeenth century a great English man of science, Stephen Hales, had discovered the same truth, for we are told that “he could look even upon wicked men, and those who did him unkind offices, without any emotion of particular indignation, not from want of discernment or sensibility; but he used to consider them only like those experiments which, upon trial, he found could never be applied to any useful purpose, and which he therefore calmly and dispassionately laid aside.”