A comparison of Brunetière and Huysmans forces itself upon us. While Brunetière sought for ten years to find 'reason for belief,' Huysmans entered the domain of faith straightway with no beating about the bush. For, after all, the best reason for belief is faith. What happens to-day is rather curious. M. Brunetière's talent has been lauded to the skies, and far be it from us to criticise; from the moral point of view this man was a true saint. On the other hand, much ridicule has been hurled at Huysmans because he was an artist who let himself be guided by his sensations. But what is the result to-day? M. Brunetière, despite all his talent and his oratorical campaigns, only converts the converted. Not that he is at fault. Yet in addressing himself to philosophic reasoning he was addressing himself to that part of our mind which always wishes to reason, to the argumentative side. But reason destroys reason; the way to faith is not by the road of metaphysics. Huysmans, on the contrary, far more humble, had the feeling of the divine. His book En Route tells us how this feeling was reinforced, renewed, by frequenting churches, by the company of two or three friends, and by the intellectual struggles he underwent. No psychologist -be he believer or sceptic-can afford to neglect such a book. One realises in reading these pages that faith-in so far as it can be analysed-is above and before all a feeling, and such an imperious feeling that it becomes will. The distinction between will and feeling is purely imaginary—in the act of faith feeling and will become one. But then is added another element which Huysmans makes us understand perfectly, that element that for centuries has been known as Grace.' This word which has embittered so many theological quarrels expresses a reality; it means the support that the religious soul feels coming from outside. From this point of view Huysmans' book En Route is a psychological document of the highest importance, and when the quarrels of certain theologians have long lain forgotten we shall take up his book to watch the efforts and the sufferings of a human soul. To answer those questions of whence our coming and whither our going, what our progress, what our destiny and what the foundation of our morality, philosophers enough come with their contradictory replies. They ensure our taking pleasure in reading an artist, for Huysmans was a true artist, who did not trouble himself about the truth or name of one doctrine, but who reverently (yes, reverently, for aught one may say to the contrary) accepted all the Catholic faith, ordered his life in accordance with that doctrine, and died a saint's death after terrible suffering. As M. Henri d'Hennezel says: 'His death was the most perfect of his works . . . no complaint ever came from his lips, and during all those months of agony when he felt life slipping away from him, in the midst of unspeakable suffering, he spoke of his illness, only to submit its duration to the will of God.' Huysmans in his style is an extraordinary artist and innovator; in his ideas he seems like a man of the Middle Ages with his wonderful simplicity, a brother of that humble Siméon le porcher' of whom he draws such a vivid portrait in En Route. VI MAURICE ROLLINAT IN 1883 one of the 'sensations' of Paris was the poet Maurice Rollinat, then aged about thirty, already famous by reason of his two volumes of poems Dans les Brandes and Les Névroses, who in various salons sang his verses to the music he, himself, composed for them. His striking originality, his great gifts, poetic and musical, made him the fashion at one period. Ill-health, however, rendered it advisable for him not to live in Paris. Still the public approval he enjoyed was very pleasant, and he hesitated some time before following medical advice of retiring to the country. One night, so the story goes, after he had sung some of his verses in a salon with his usual energy and passion, an old general advanced and asked of him: 'Well, M. Rollinat, are you satisfied with your performance?' That decided Rollinat, and he left Paris next day for his native Chateauneuf. His friends, at first, believed this retirement to be a passing caprice, the outcome of pique, but the years went on and Rollinat never returned to Paris. He seems to have been quite content with his quiet provincial life and the pleasure that he found in trout-fishing, or (like his ancestress George Sand) in observation of the peasants living round him—a life which offers a contrast indeed to that of literary favourite, but in which he had the consolation of freedom from the petty jealousies of public life, and where, if the applause be lacking, so likewise is the sting of shifting favour. As he himself says: 'It is only the solitary fireside in some lost retreat, which is the mind's best paradise, turning its sadness to work, inspiring its sorrow, rendering fertile its idleness.' It was here that he wrote L'abîme (1886), La nature (1892), Les apparitions (1896), Paysages et paysans (1899), En Errant (1903), Ruminations (published in 1905). He died mad at Ivry in 1903. Rollinat is the most direct descendant of Baudelaire, a great disciple who, for some critics, surpasses his master. Like Baudelaire, like Poe, Rollinat loved to conjure up the horrible, to dwell on it; but for this his mind needed no artificial stimulant, his extraordinary imagination sufficed. Admitting Rollinat to be a disciple of Baudelaire, it follows at once he has a great admiration for Poe. His ideal in music (with Wagner) was Chopin, whom he did not hesitate to call the 'Farouche Edgar Poe of music.' Here is his poem on Poe : 'Edgar Poe fut démon ne voulant pas être ange, Au lieu du Rossignol il chanta le Corbeau, Il cisela son rêve effroyablement beau. Il cherchait dans le gouffre où la raison s'abîme Et son âme, où passait l'éclair sanglant du crime, Chaste, mystérieux, sardonique et féroce, Il raffine l'Intense, il aiguise l'Atroce; Son arbre est un cyprès, sa femme un revenant. Pour ce grand Ténébreux qu'on lit en frissonnant !' Rollinat, too, is a ténébreux; his mind is full of eerie fancies which have an endless fascination for him :'Mon crâne est un cachot plein d'horribles bouffées. Le fantôme du crime à travers ma raison Y rode pénétrant comme un regard de fées.' 1 See also Le Fantôme d'Ursule. M Fantôme du Crime.1 'Depuis que l'Horreur me fascine, Je crois toujours qu'on m'assassine, Qu'on m'empoisonne ou qu'on me pend.'--L'Angoisse. Sensations had created these ideas, and these ideas in their turn create sensations; they break through the ennui of existence which, after all, for Rollinat is made up of frissons-each emotion has its corresponding frisson : 'Un frisson gai naît de l'espoir, Mais la Peur est le frisson noir De la Pensée. La Peur qui met dans les chemins D'une carcasse ou d'un linceul, Qui fait trembler comme un aïeul, Et qui vous rend, quand on est seul, He would say with Gérard de Nerval1: 'Crains dans le mur aveugle un regard qui t'épie.' He puts this same spirit into his landscapes—for example in 'Le Pacage' from Dans les Brandes :— 'Couleuvre gigantesque, il s'allonge et se tord, ... Ses buissons où rôde un éternel chuchoteur Aussi l'œil du poète halluciné sans trêve Pour ce pâle voyant ce pacage est brouté Par un bétail magique et tout chargé de rêve. . . 1 Gérard de Nerval, a philosopher, has a pantheistic conception lacking in Rollinat. |