II
JAMES HUNEKER
"Oh, Satan, take pity on my long misery!" cried Charles Baudelaire in a perverse litany. And other poets, more orthodox, have apostrophized God in a similar strain. The whole of Huysmans's Durtal series, from Là-Bas to L'Oblat, is an agonized appeal to the Deity, done in bronzed enamel. (The De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine, of the Psalmist, of which Oscar Wilde bleats an anaemic echo.) But Huysmans was too much the dyspeptic for an Augustinian renascence; the gastric juice shackled him to earth. Verlaine pendulummed back and forth from adoration to debauch. In Lamennais and Hello we hear more resonant tones and an orotund ecstasy.
The author of Job (he suppresses his name) has assaulted Heaven with the pyrotechnics of an organ-lunged scepticism. He is not the first to doubt; Pascal had his abyss; Renan left St. Sulpice and never came back. Job is surrounded by smug Philistines whose drawing Daumier or George Bellows might have envied. They deluge the poor man with the turgid outpourings of their ignoble souls (Flaubert's façon basse de sentir). In the end, the thunderous voice of Jehovah silences both comforters and comfortee.
The style is a rich amalgam of purple sonorities; the speeches rise like stately gerbs studded with blue-green peacock's-tail eyes. One recalls the orchestrated cathedral windows of Huysmans's Chartres. The bitterness is that of a more mellifluous Swift. Less acrid than the splenetic Irishman, he is emotionally more dynamic and achieves the grandiose sweep of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Strauss's Tod und Verklärung. There is nothing here of the Erik Satie of the Pièces Froides and the Morceaux en Forme de Poire or even of the Satie of the Gymnopédies and the Gnossiennes—Satie that latest changeling in the Wagnerian cradle. But, after all, as Heraclitus says, "everything changes"!
