Against the Grain

I suppose all men of letters are like myself in this, that they never reread their works once they have appeared. Nothing in fact is more disenchanting, more painful than examine one’s phrases again after an interval of years. They have been in bottle, so to speak, and form a deposit at the bottom of the book; and, most times, volumes are not like wines which improve with age; once clarified in the fullness of time, the chapters grow flat and their bouquet evaporates.

Such is the impression certain bottles stacked in the Against the Grain bin made upon me when I had to uncork them.

Now, sadly enough, I endeavour to recall, as I turn over the pages, what precise state of mind I could have been in at the time I wrote them.

Naturalism was then at full tide; but that school, which was destined to perform the never-to-be-forgotten good service of showing real personages in accurate surroundings, was condemned to go on repeating itself, marking time forever on the same spot.

It would allow, in theory at any rate, almost no exception; it was therefore bound to limit its range to the delineation of everyday existence, forced, under pretext of making its characters alive, to create beings as like as they could possibly be made to the general average of people. This ideal was, in its class, realized in a masterpiece which has been, far more than L’Assommoir, the type and paragon of Naturalism, viz. the Education Sentimentale of Gustave Flaubert. This book was for all of us, men of the Soirées de Médan, a veritable Bible; but it brought little grist to our mill. It was done and ended, a thing not to be begun again even by Flaubert himself. Consequently we found ourselves reduced in those days to tack about, to prowl round all the countryside by roads more or less thoroughly explored before.

Virtue, being, we are compelled to admit, an exception here below, was for that very reason barred from the Naturalistic author’s scheme. Not possessing the orthodox Christian conception of the Temptation and Fall, we had no knowledge from what struggles and what tribulations it has arisen; the soul’s heroism, triumphant over snares and pitfalls, was inappreciable by us. It would never have occurred to us to describe this combat, with its ups and downs, its feints and flank attacks, not to speak of its skilled auxiliaries arming themselves very often far from the individual against whom the Evil One’s assault is directed, in the quiet of some remote Cloister; to us Virtue seemed the attribute of creatures devoid of intelligent curiosity or wanting in common sense—hardly a stimulating subject, in any case, to treat from the point of view of art. Remained the Vices; but here the area capable of cultivation was restricted. It was confined to the territories of the Seven Deadly Sins, and even of these seven, one only, that against the Sixth Commandment, was fairly accessible.

The rest had been cropped cruelly bare, and hardly a grape was left to pluck in those vineyards. Avarice, for instance, had been squeezed to the last drop of liquor by Balzac and Hello. Pride, Anger, Envy had played their parts in every publication of the Romantics, and as dramatic motifs had been so violently distorted by the abuse of stage exigencies that it would have called for a veritable genius to rejuvenate them in a book. As for Gluttony and Idleness, these seemed to lend themselves to realization rather in subsidiary characters, to be more suitable to supers than to leading actors or prima donnas in the novel of manners.

The truth is that Pride would have been the most magnificent of all sins to study, in its infernal ramifications of cruelty towards others and false humility, that Gluttony, towing in its wake Lust and Idleness, and Theft would have supplied subjects for surprising investigations, if only writers had examined these offences with the lamp and blowpipe of the Church and possessing Faith. But as a fact not one of us was qualified for the task. We were therefore driven to handle and re-handle the sin of all others most easily laid bare, Lust, in all its various manifestations; God knows we did our best, but this amusement was in the nature of things short-lived. Invent what one chose, the story could be summed up in half-a-dozen words, to wit, why did Monsieur So-and-So commit or not commit adultery with Madame This or That? If you wished to be distinguished and stand out as a writer of the most polite taste, you made the work of the flesh take place between a Marquise and a Count; if on the other hand, you wanted to pose as a popular author, a writer knowing what’s what, you chose a lover from the slums and the first street girl to hand. Only the frame was different. High life, it appears to me, has carried the day at present in the reader’s good graces, for I notice that for the moment he hardly cares to regale himself on plebeian or middle-class amours, but still continues to savour the scruples and hesitations of the Marquise on her way to meet her seducer at a dainty little flat, whose aspect changes according to the varying fashion in furniture. Will she fall? Will she not fall? This is called a study in Psychology. Well, I have no objection.

Nevertheless I must own that, if I happen to open a book and come upon this everlasting seduction and not less everlasting adultery, I make haste to shut it again, being in no sort of way anxious to know how the promised idyll will finish. Any volume that does not contain authenticated documents, any book that does not teach me something, loses all interest in my eyes.

At the date when Against the Grain was published, in 1884 that is to say, the state of things therefore was this: Naturalism was getting more and more out of breath by dint of turning the mill forever in the same round. The stock of observations that each writer had stored up by self scrutiny or study of his neighbours was getting exhausted. Zola, who was a first-rate scene-painter, got out of the difficulty by designing big, bold canvases more or less true to life; he suggested fairly well the illusion of movement and action; his heroes were devoid of soul, governed simply and solely by impulses and instincts, which greatly simplified the work of analysis. They moved about, carried out sundry summary activities, peopled the scene with tolerably convincing sketches of lay-figures that became the principal characters of his dramas. In this fashion he celebrated the Central Markets, and the big stores of Paris, the railways and mines of the country at large; and the human beings wandering lost amid these surroundings played no more than the part of utility men and supers therein. But Zola was Zola artist a trifle ponderous, but endowed with powerful lungs and massive fists.

The rest of us, less robust and concerned about a more subtle method and a truer art, were constrained to ask ourselves the question whether Naturalism was not marching up a blind alley and if we were not bound soon to knock up against an impassable wall.

To tell the truth, these reflections did not actually occur to me till much later. I was striving in vain to escape from a cul-de-sac in which I was suffocating, but I had no settled plan, and Against the Grain, which, by letting in fresh air, let me get away from a literature that had no door of escape, is a purely unpremeditated work, imagined without any preconceived ideas, without definite intentions for the future, without any predetermined plan whatever.

It had appeared to me at first in the light of a brief fantasy, under the form of an extravagant tale; I saw in it something like a pendant to À vau-l’eau transferred into another milieu; I pictured to myself a Monsieur Folantin, more cultured, more refined, more wealthy and who has discovered in artificiality a relief from the disgust inspired by the worries of life and the American habits of his time; I outlined him winging a swift flight to the land of dreams, seeking refuge in the illusion of extravagant fancies, living alone and aloof, remote from his own country, amid the association called up by memory of more cordial epochs, and less villainous surroundings.

The more I pondered over it, the more the subject grew and the more it seemed to demand long and patient researches. Each chapter became the extract of a speciality, the sublimate of a different art; I found it condensing into a “meat essence” of precious stones, of perfumes, of flowers, of literature religious and lay, of profane music and plainsong.

The strange thing was that, without having had an inkling of this at the beginning, I was led by the very nature of my task to study the Church under many aspects. It was in fact impossible to go back to the only really characteristic eras humanity has ever known, the Middle Ages that is, without realizing that She embraced everything, that art existed only in Her and by Her. Being outside the Faith, I looked upon Her with some suspicion, surprised at Her greatness and glory, asking myself how a Religion which seemed to me only made for children had been able to suggest such marvellous works.

I prowled a little round Her in a groping way, guessing more than I saw, reconstructing a whole for myself with the fragments I recovered in Museums and old books. And today as I skim, after more lengthy and more trustworthy investigations, the pages of Against the Grain, that deal with Catholicism and religious art, I note that that miniature panorama I then sketched on leaves of block-books, is accurate. What I depicted then was succinct, wanting elaboration, but it was veracious. I have confined myself subsequently to enlarging and developing my outline drawings. I might quite well sign my name at the present moment to the pages of Against the Grain relating to the Church, for they appear in very deed to have been written by a Catholic.

Yet I supposed myself far from Religion all the time! I did not dream that from Schopenhauer, whom I admired beyond all reason, to Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job was only a step. The premises as to Pessimism are identical, only when it comes to action, the Philosopher shirks away. I like his ideas on the horror of existence, on the stupidity of the world, on the harshness of fate; I like them just as well in the Holy Books. But Schopenhauer’s observations end in nothing; he leaves you, so to say, in the lurch; his aphorisms, in fact, are but a hortus siccus of lifeless specimens. The Church for her part explains origins and causes, certifies results, offers remedies; she is not satisfied with giving you a spiritual consultation, she treats you and cures you, while the German quack, after clearly showing you that the complaint you suffer from is incurable, turns his back on you with a sardonic grin.

His Pessimism is no different from that of the Scriptures from which he borrowed it. He has said no more than Solomon or than Job, no more even than the Imitation, which long before his day summed up his whole philosophy in a sentence: “Verily it is a wretched thing to be alive on the earth!”

Looked at from a distance, these similarities and dissimilarities stand out clearly, but at that period, if I saw them at all, I paid no heed; the necessity of coming to a conclusion did not appeal to me; the road laid down by Schopenhauer was practicable and offered diversified views, I travelled contentedly along it, without a thought of where it led. In those days I had no real illumination as to debts to be paid, no apprehension of penalties to be exacted; the mysteries of the Catechism struck me as childish; like the mass of Catholics, indeed, I was entirely ignorant of my religion; I failed to realize that everything is mysterious, that we live only in mystery, that if chance existed, chance would be yet more mysterious than Providence. I could not admit the fact of pain inflicted by a God, I persuaded myself that Pessimism could act as the consoler of lofty souls.

What foolishness! Of all notions this had the smallest basis of experience, was the least of a “human document,” use a phase dear to Naturalism. Never yet has Pessimism consoled either the sick of body or the afflicted of soul!

I smile when after so many years I reread the pages where these theories, determinedly false, are affirmed.

But what strikes me most forcibly in this perusal is another fact: all the romances I have written since Against the Grain are contained in embryo in that book. The successive chapters are nothing more nor less than the priming of the volumes that followed.

The chapter on the Latin Literature of the Decadence I have, if not developed, at any rate probed deeper into, when treating of the Liturgy in En Route and L’Oblat.

I shall now reprint it without any alteration save in connection with St. Ambrose, whose watery prose and turgid rhetoric I continue to dislike. I still think him what I called him then, a “tiresome Christian Cicero,” but, in compensation, as a poet he is charming; his hymns and those of his school are among the finest the Church has preserved. I will add that the literature, of a rather special sort it is true, of the Hymnary might well have found a place in the reserved compartment of that chapter.

No more than in 1884 am I at the present moment enamoured of the Classical Latin of Maro and the “Chickpea,” (Cicero); as in the days of Against the Grain, I prefer the language of the Vulgate to that of the Augustan Age, nay, even to that of the Decadent Period, more curious though it be with its gamey flavour and its discolourations as of over-high venison. The Church, which after disinfecting and rejuvenating it, created, to deal with an order of ideas hitherto unexpressed, a vocabulary of grandiloquent words and diminutives of exquisite tenderness, appears to me to have fashioned Herself a diction far superior to the dialect of Paganism, and Durtal still holds the same views on this point as did Des Esseintes.

The chapter on precious stones I have recapitulated in La Cathédrale, in the second case treating the matter from the point of view of the symbolism of gems. I have there given life to the dead stones of Against the Grain. Of course I do not deny that a fine emerald may be admired for the flashes that sparkle in the fire of its green depths, but, if we are ignorant of the idiom of symbols, is it not an unknown being, a stranger, a foreigner with whom no talk can be had and who has no word to say himself, because we do not understand his language? But he is surely something more and better than that.

Without admitting with an old writer of the sixteenth century, Estienne de Clave, that precious stones propagate their species, like human beings, with a seed disseminated in the womb of mother earth, we may truly say that they are minerals with a meaning, substances that talk—that in one word they are symbols. They have been regarded under this aspect from the remotest times and the tropology of gems is one branch of that Christian symbolism so absolutely forgotten by priests and laymen alike in our own day, and which I have endeavoured to reconstruct in its main features in my volume on the basilica of Chartres.

The chapter in Against the Grain is therefore only superficial, a flush-bezel setting, so to speak. It is not what it should be, a display ranging beyond the mere material stones, it is made up of caskets of jewels more or less well described, more or less artistically arranged in a showcase—but that is all, and that is not enough.

The painting of Gustave Moreau, the engravings of Luyken, the lithographs of Bresdin and Redon make the same impression on me now as then. I have no modification to make in the arrangement of the little collection.

As for the terrible Chapter VI, the number of which corresponds, without any preconceived purpose on my part, to the Commandment it offends against, as also for some portions of Chapter IX that may be classed with it, I should obviously not write them in the same vein again. They should at least have been accounted for, in a more studious spirit, by that diabolic perversity of the will which affects, especially in matters of sensual aberration, the exhausted brains of sick folk. It would seem, in fact, that nervous invalids expose fissures in the soul’s envelope whereby the Spirit of Evil effects an entrance. But this is a riddle that remains unsolved; the word hysteria explains nothing; it may suffice to define a material condition, to mark invincible disturbances of the senses, it does not account for the spiritual consequences attached to the phenomena and, more particularly, the sins of dissimulation and falsehood that are almost always engrafted on them. What are the details and attendant circumstances of this malady of sinfulness, in what degree is the responsibility diminished of the individual whose soul is attacked by a sort of demoniac possession that takes root in the disorganization of his unhappy body? None can tell: on this point Medicine talks mere folly, Theology holds her peace.

In default of a solution which manifestly he could not supply, Des Esseintes should have viewed the question from the point of view of sinfulness and expressed at any rate some regret. He refrained from abusing himself, and he did wrong; but then, though educated by the Jesuits, whose panegyrist he is, and a more ardent one than Durtal—he had grown subsequently so recalcitrant to the Divine constraints, so obstinately resolved to wallow in the mire of his carnal appetites!