Huysmans Against Nature Quotes

Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.

Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.

I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures.

His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar.

…he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.

(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.

Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: 'If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness would rend my heart.

...he shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror,--a detestation which had reacted strongly on his literary and artistic tastes; he refused, as far as possible, to have anything to do with pictures and books whose subjects were in any way connected with modern existence.

The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ - all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been more obstinate in its pursuit.

He cared little for commonly experienced emotions, for everyday associations of ideas, now that the closing of his mind had grown more pronounced, and he allowed access only to the most highly refined sensations, to crises of faith and to violent disorders of the senses.

Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It was possible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurd desires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the object of one's wishes.

Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.

The pleasure of travel - existing as it largely does only in recollection and almost never in the present, at the actual moment when it is taking place- Besides, he considered travel to be pointless, believing that the imagination could easily compensate for the vulgar reality of actual experience.

He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves. Solitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic. After having strained and enervated it, his mind had fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his plans, broke his will power and invoked a cortège of vague reveries to which he passively submitted. The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life.

No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, - a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.

And yet the point of view from which his ideas on art had sprung was a simple one: for him, literary schools did not exist; the only thing that mattered was the temperament of the artist; the only thing of interest was the way his brain worked, regardless of the subject he was treating.

En effet, lorsque l'époque où un homme de talent est obligé de vivre est plate et bête, l'artiste est, à son insu même, hanté par la nostalgie d'un autre siècle.

At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future.

Last but not least, he hated with all the hatred that was in him the rising generation, the appalling boors who find it necessary to talk and laugh at the top of their voices in restaurants and cafes, who jostle you in the street without a word of apology, and who, without expressing or even indicating regret, drive the wheels of a baby-carriage into your legs.

What he wanted was colours which would appear stronger and clearer in artificial light. He did not particularly care if they looked crude or insipid in daylight, for he lived most of his life at night, holding that night afforded greater intimacy and isolation and that the mind was truly roused and stimulated only by awareness of the dark; moreover he derived a peculiar pleasure from being in a well-lighted room when all the surrounding houses were wrapped in sleep and darkness, a sort of enjoyment in which vanity may have played some small part, a very special feeling of satisfaction familiar to those who sometimes work late at night and draw aside the curtains to find that all around them the world is dark, silent and dead.

There is not one single invention of (Nature's), however subtle or impressive it may be thought to be, that the human spirit cannot create; no forest of Fontainebleu or moonlit scene that cannot be produced with a floodlit stage set; no waterfall that hydraulics cannot imitate so perfectly as to be indistinguishable from the original; no rock that papier-mâché cannot copy; no flower that specious taffetas and delicately painted papers cannot rival! There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface.

After the aristocracy of birth had come the aristocracy of money.

It was here that she was indeed Woman, for here she gave rein to her ardent and cruel temperament. She was living, more refined and savage, more execrable and exquisite. She more energetically awakened the dulled senses of man, more surely bewitched and subdued his power of will, with the charm of a tall venereal flower, on sacrilegious beds, in impious hothouses.

He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive to patiently and even vainly to analyse.

Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.

and if it be true that the loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own, the work of art which does not remain indifferent to the spurious artists, which is not contested by fools, and which is not satisfied with awakening the enthusiasm of the few, by this very fact becomes profaned, trite, almost repulsive to the initiate. This promiscuity in admiration, furthermore, was one of the greatest sources of regret in his life. Incomprehensible successes had forever spoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear. Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects to him, and he rejected them, wondering meanwhile if his perceptions were not growing blunted.

literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations; in short, the discoveries of these anaylists of human nature stopped short at the speculations good or bad, classified by the church; their efforts amounted to no more than the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil.

From black-rimmed plates they ate turtle soup and eaten Russian rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, salted mullet-roe, smoked Frankfurt black puddings, game in gravies the colour of liquorice and boot-blacking truffled sauces, chocolate caramel creams, plum puddings, nectarines, preserved fruits, mulberries and heart-cherries; from dark coloured glasses they drank the wines of Limagne and Rousillon, of Tenedoes, Val de Peñas and Oporto, and, after the coffee and the walnut cordial they enjoyed kvass, porters and stouts.

Now God refused to come down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable fact.

And whenever they came back to his lips, these exquisite, funereal laments conjured up, in his mind, a place on the outskirts of a city, a mean and voiceless place where silently, in the distance, lines of men and women, wearied and bowed down by life, were disappearing into the twilight, while he himself, surfeited with bitterness and replete with disgust, felt himself alone, utterly alone, in the midst of a tearful Nature, overwhelmed by an inexpressible melancholy, by a relentless anguish, the mysterious intensity of which precluded all consolation, all pity, all repose.

He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.

The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life.

and, indeed, just as the most charming tune in the world becomes vulgar, intolerable, as soon as the general public is humming it, as soon as the street - organs have taken it up, the work for which charlatan art fanciers do not remain indifferent, the work which nitwits do not challenge, which is not satisfied with arousing the enthusiasm of the few, also becomes, by virtue of that very fact, corrupted, banal, almost repellent to the initiated.

Now it was all over. Once it had done its job, the plebs had been bled white in the interests of public hygiene, while the jovial bourgeois lorded it over the country, putting his trust in the power of his money and the contagiousness of his stupidity.

The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.

The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of ancient faith.

Had he not outlawed himself from society? Had he heard of anybody else who was trying to organize a life like his, a life of dreamy contemplation? Did he know a single individual who was capable of appreciating the delicacy of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting, the quintessence of an idea, or whose soul was sensitive enough to understand...

The doctors spoke of amusements and distractions; but with whom, and with what, could they possibly suppose that he might amuse or enjoy himself? Had he not outlawed himself from society? Did he know one man capable of trying to lead a life such as his own, a life entirely confined to contemplation and to dreams? Did he know one man capable of appreciating the delicacy of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting, the quintessence of an idea, one man whose soul was sufficiently finely crafted to understand Mallarmé and to love Verlaine?

More often than not, all that would be needed to complete the cure would be for the sick man to show a little imagination.

And on the whole the future was the same for every man, and neither the rich nor the poor, if he possessed any modicum of common sense, had any cause to envy his fellow.

C'était le grand bagne de l'Amérique transporté sur notre continent.

This imbecile sentimentality, combined with a ferociously practical sense, represented the dominant motive of the age.

At bottom, one might say that human wisdom consisted in the protraction of all things, in saying "no" before saying "yes," for one could manage people only by trifling with them.

He desired a troubled indecision on which he might brood until he could shape it at will to a more vague or determinate form, according to the momentary state of his soul.

In fact, when the period in which a man of talent is obliged to live is dull and stupid, the artist, though unconsciously, is haunted by a nostalgia of some past century.

While a hidden orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears.

Such an inveterate stupidity, such a scorn for literature and art, such a hatred for all the ideas he worshipped, were implanted and anchored in these merchant minds, exclusively preoccupied with the business of swindling and money-making, and accessible only to ideas of politics--that base distraction of mediocrities--that he returned enraged to his home and locked himself in with his books.

If Baudelaire had made out among the hieroglyphics of the soul the critical age of thought and feeling, it was Poe who, in the sphere of morbid psychology, had carried out the closest scrutiny of the will.

describing the beauties of the seaside resort where you would like to be; by letting yourself be lulled by the waves created in your bath by the backwash of the paddle-steamers passing close to the pontoon;

he felt a glow of pleasure at the idea that here he would be too far out for the tidal wave of Parisian life to reach him, and yet near enough for the proximity of the capital to strengthen him in his solitude.

Seigneur, prenez pitié du chrétien qui doute, de l'incrédule qui voudrait croire, du forçat de la vie qui s'embarque seul, dans la nuit, sous un firmament que n'éclairent plus les consolants fanaux du vieil espoir !

In his opinion, it was possible to appease certain desires reputed to be the most difficult to satisfy under normal conditions – and that, what’s more, by a subtle subterfuge, by an approximate simulation of the object of those very desires.

Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish.

Et, perdu dans sa contemplation, il scrutait les origines de ce grand artiste, de ce païen mystique, de cet illuminé qui pouvait s'abstraire assez du monde pour voir, en plein Paris, resplendir les cruelles visions, les féeriques apothéoses des autres âges.

He was searching his memory when suddenly a strange figure appeared in front of them, on horseback, trotted for a moment, then turned round in the saddle. His blood froze; he remained rooted to the spot in horror. That equivocal, sexless face was green, with terrible eyes of an icy light blue beneath purple lids; postules encircled its mouth; extraordinarily thin arms, bare from the elbows down and shaking with fever, emerged from ragged sleeves, and the fleshless thighs shivered in high boots which were far too large. The dreadful gaze was fixed on Des Esseintes, boring into him, chilling him to the marrow, while the bulldog woman, now in even greater panic, clung to him with her head thrown back on her rigid neck, screaming blue murder. And instantly he grasped the meaning of the horrifying vision. He was looking at the figure of the Pox.

Amid the solitude in which he lived, without new nourishment, without any fresh experiences, without any renovation of thought, without that exchange of sensations common to society, in this unnatural confinement in which he persisted, all the questionings forgotten during his stay in Paris were revived as active irritants.

Chez les uns, c'est un retour aux âge consommés, aux civilisations disparues, aux temps morts ; Chez les autres, c'est un élancement vers le fantastique et vers le rêve, c'est une vision plus ou moins intense d'un temps à éclore dont l'image reproduit, sans qu'il le sache, par un effet d'atavisme, celle des époques révolues.

The fact is that ,pain being one of the consequences of education,in that it grows greater and sharper with the growth of ideas ,it follows that the more we try to polish the minds and refine the nervous system of the under-privileged , the more we shall be developing in their hearts the atrociously active germs of hatred and moral suffering.

since it needs a singularly large dose of goodwill to believe that the governing classes are respectable and that the lower classes are worthy of assistance or compassion, it seems to me,’ des Esseintes concluded, ‘to be neither ridiculous nor insane to ask of my fellow man a sum total of illusion barely equal to that which he spends each day on his idiotic purposes,

Elle devenait en quelque sorte, la déité symbolique de l'indestructible Luxure, la déesse de l'immortelle Hystérie, la beauté maudite, élue entre toutes par la catalepsie qui lui raidit les chairs et lui durcit les muscles; la Bête monstrueuse, indifférente, irresponsable, insensible, empoisonnant, de même que l’Hélène antique, tout ce qui l'approche, tout ce qui la voit, tout ce qu'elle touche.

et, en effet, si le plus bel air du monde devient vulgaire, insupportable, dès que le public le fredonne, dès que les orgues s'en emparent, l'œuvre d'art qui ne demeure pas indifférente aux faux artistes, qui n'est point contestée par les sots, qui ne se contente pas de susciter l'enthousiasme de quelques-uns, devient, elle aussi, par cela même, pour les initiés, polluée, banale, presque repoussante.

The bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to its wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession to power had been the destruction of all intelligence, the negation of all honesty, the death of all art, and, in fact, the debased artists had fallen on their knees, and they eagerly kissed the dirty feet of the eminent jobbers and low satraps whose alms permitted them to live.

Ainsi comprise, elle appartenait aux théogonies de l''Extrême-Orient; elle ne relevait plus des traditions bibliques, ne pouvait même plus être assimilé à la vivante image de Babylone, à la royale Prostituée de l'Apocalypse, accoutrée, comme elle, de joyaux et de pourpre, fardée comme elle ; car celle-là n’était pas jetée par une puissance fatidique, par une force suprême, dans les attirantes abjections de la débauche.

Yet his literary opinions had started from a very simple point of view. For him, there were no such things as schools;1 the only thing that mattered to him was the writer’s personality, and the only thing that interested him was the working of the writer’s brain, no matter what subject he was tackling. Unfortunately this criterion of appreciation, so obviously just, was practically impossible to apply, for the simple reason that, however much a reader wants to rid himself of prejudice and refrain from passion, he naturally prefers those works which correspond most intimately with his own personality, and ends by relegating all the rest to limbo.

Par curiosité, par désœuvrement, par politesse, des Esseintes fréquenta cette famille et il subit, plusieurs fois, dans son hôtel de la rue de la Chaise, d’écrasantes soirées où des parentes, antiques comme le monde, s’entretenaient de quartiers de noblesse, de lunes héraldiques, de cérémoniaux surannés. Plus que ces douairières, les hommes rassemblés autour d’un whist, se révélaient ainsi que des êtres immuables et nuls ; là, les descendants des anciens preux, les dernières branches des races féodales, apparurent à des Esseintes sous les traits de vieillards catarrheux et maniaques, rabâchant d’insipides discours, de centenaires phrases. De même que dans la tige coupée d’une fougère, une fleur de lis semblait seule empreinte dans la pulpe ramollie de ces vieux crânes.

He liked to compare a horticulturist’s shop to a microcosm in which all the categories of society were represented: the flowers that are poor and coarse, the flowers of the slum, which are not truly at home unless reposing on a garret window sill, their roots jammed into a milk bottle or an old pot, the sunflower for example; the pretentious, conformist, stupid flowers, like the rose, which belong exclusively in porcelain holders painted by young girls; finally the flowers of high lineage such as orchids, delicate and charming and quiveringly sensitive to cold, exotic flowers exiled in Paris to the warmth of glass palaces, princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living a segregated life, having no longer anything in common with the plants of the street or the flora of the middle class.

Oh! Schopenhauer alone had done the right thing! He did not intend to cure anything, offered the sick person no compensation, no hope; but his theory of pessimism was basically the great comforter of the chosen spirits, of all sublime souls. It revealed society as it is, it emphasized the innate stupidity of women, showed the beaten paths, saved people from disappointment, urged them to limit their hopes as much as possible, and if the strength is enough not to cherish any ... These considerations relieved the duke of a heavy burden. This great German banished his shudder of thoughts and, through the points of contact between his two doctrines, brought him to the point where he could not forget this poetic and touching Catholicism in which he was raised and of which he had soaked in the essence in all pores in his youth.

Under these circumstances the most anodyne book was a source of danger from the simple fact that love was alluded to, and woman depicted as an attractive creature; and this was enough to account for all—for the inherent ignorance of Catholics, since it was proclaimed as the preventive cure for temptations—for the instinctive horror of art, since to these craven souls every written and studied work was in its nature a vehicle of sin and an incitement to fall. Would it not really be far more sensible and judicious to open the windows, to air the rooms, to treat these souls as manly beings, to teach them not to be so much afraid of their own flesh, to inculcate the firmness and courage needed for resistance? For really it is rather like a dog which barks at your heels and snaps at your legs if you are afraid of him, but who beats a retreat if you turn on him boldly and drive him off. The fact remains that these schemes of education have resulted, on the one hand, in the triumph of the flesh in the greater number of men who have been thus brought up and then thrown into a worldly life, and on the other, in a wide diffusion of folly and fear, an abandonment of the possessions of the intellect and the capitulation of the Catholic army surrendering without a blow to the inroads of profane literature, which takes possession of territory that it has not even had the trouble of conquering. This really was madness! The Church had created art, had cherished it for centuries; and now by the effeteness of her sons she was cast into a corner. All the great movements of our day, one after the other—romanticism, naturalism—had been effected independently of her, or even against her will. If a book were not restricted to the simplest tales, or pleasing fiction ending in virtue rewarded and vice punished, that was enough; the propriety of beadledom was at once ready to bray. As soon as the most modern form of art, the most malleable and the broadest—the Novel—touched on scenes of real life, depicted passion, became a psychological study, an effort of analysis, the army of bigots fell back all along the line. The Catholic force, which might have been thought better prepared than any others to contest the ground which theology had long since explored, retired in good order, satisfied to cover its retreat by firing from a safe distance, with its old-fashioned match-lock blunderbusses, on works it had neither inspired nor written. The Church party, centuries behind the time, and having made no attempt to follow the evolution of style in the course of ages, now turned to the rustic who can scarcely read; it did not understand more than half of the words used by modern writers, and had become, it must be said, a camp of the illiterate. Incapable of distinguishing the good from the bad, it included in one condemnation the filth of pornography and real works of art; in short, it ended by emitting such folly and talking such preposterous nonsense, that it fell into utter discredit and ceased to count at all. And it would have been so easy for it to work on a little way, to try to keep up with the times, and to understand, to convince itself whether in any given work the author was writing up the Flesh, glorifying it, praising it, and nothing more, or whether, on the contrary, he depicted it merely to buffet it—hating it. And, again, it would have done well to convince itself that there is a chaste as well as a prurient nude, and that it should not cry shame on every picture in which the nude is shown. Above all, it ought to have recognized that vices may well be depicted and studied with a view to exciting disgust of them and showing their horrors.

It all comes down to syphilis in the end.

All this activity was taking place on the waterfront, and in vast warehouses washed by the dark, scummy waters of an imaginary Thames, amid a forest of masts, a thicket of beams which pierced the sky’s leaden clouds; high up, on the skyline, trains were racing along at full speed, and down below, in the sewers, other trains were running, emitting hideous shrieks and belching forth clouds of smoke through the shaft openings, while along all the boulevards and streets—where, in an eternal twilight, blazed the monstrous, garish depravities of advertising—streams of carriages flowed between two columns of silent, preoccupied pedestrians who stared straight ahead as they walked, their elbows pressed to their sides.

and indeed the artists in their degradation were down on their knees, showering ardent kisses on the foul-smelling feet of the high-placed chisellers and low-born despots on whose charity they lived!