As for the chapters on contemporary literature, lay and clerical, they still, in my opinion, remain, as does that on Latin literature, well founded. That dealing with profane writing has helped to set in due relief several poets very little known to the public of that day, Corbière, Mallarmé, Verlaine. I have nothing to retract in what I wrote nineteen years ago; I still keep my admiration for these authors; the admiration I professed for Verlaine has even increased. Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Laforgue would have well deserved to figure in Des Esseintes’ florilegium, but at that date they had not yet printed anything and it was only long after that their works saw the light.
I do not anticipate, on the other hand, that I shall ever come to appreciate the modern religious authors scourged in Against the Grain. Nothing will ever change my view that the criticism of the late lamented Nettement is idiotic and that Mme. Augustin Craven and Mlle. Eugénie de Guérin are bluestockings of a very lymphatic sort and pious pedants of a very barren kind. Their juleps strike me as insipid; Des Esseintes has passed his taste for spices on to Durtal, and I think they would come to a good understanding together, both of them, at the present moment, to prepare, in lieu of these emulsions, an essence savoury with the stimulating condiment of art.
Nor have I changed my mind about the literature of the confraternity of the Poujoulats and Genoudes, but I should be less severe nowadays on the Père Chocarne, named among a miscellaneous lot of pious scribblers, for he has at any rate composed some pithy pages on Mysticism in his introduction to the works of Saint Jean de la Croix; in the same way I should deal more gently with De Montalembert who, despite his lack of talent, has bestowed on the world a work, incoherent indeed and ill-arranged, but still moving, on the monastic orders. Above all I should not now describe the visions of Angèle de Foligno as silly, insipid stuff; the exact contrary is the truth, but I must plead in my excuse that I had then read them only in Hello’s translation. Now the latter was possessed with a mania for pruning, sugaring, softening down the mystics for fear of offending the mock modesty of Catholic readers. He has set under the press a work, strong and full of sap, to extract therefrom only a vapid and colourless juice, feebly warmed up again in a pipkin over the poor night-light of his style.
So much being allowed, that as a translator Hello showed himself a mollycoddle and a pious fraud, it is only fair to add that when he was working on original matter he was an originator of fresh ideas, a sagacious commentator, an analyst of true power. He was indeed, among the writers of his type, the only thinker; I came to the support of Aurévilly in commending the work of this writer, so incomplete, but so interesting, and Against the Grain has, I think, had some share in securing what little success his best book, L’Homme, won after his death.
The conclusion arrived at in this chapter on modern ecclesiastical literature was that among the geldings of religious art, there was only one stallion, to wit Barbey d’Aurévilly; and this opinion remains absolutely and entirely accurate. He was the one and only artist, in the proper sense of the word, that Catholicism produced at that period; he was a great prose stylist, an admirable novelist whose boldness set all beadledom screaming, enraged by the explosive vehemence of his phraseology.
To conclude the list, if ever chapter can be considered the starting point of other books, it is surely the one on plainchant which I afterwards amplified in all my publications, in En Route and above in L’Oblat.
As result of this brief review of each of the special articles exhibited in the showcases of Against the Grain the conclusion is forced upon us—the book was priming for my Catholic propaganda, which is implicit in it in its entirety, though in embryo.
Indeed the misunderstanding and stupidity of sundry pedants and agitated members of the priesthood strike me, yet once again, as unfathomable. Year after year they clamoured for the destruction of the book, the copyright of which, by the by, I do not own, without ever realizing that the mystic volumes that came after it are incomprehensible without being as it is, I reiterate the statement, the root from which they all sprang. Besides this, how is it possible to appreciate the work of an author in its entirety, if it is not taken from its first beginnings and followed up step by step; above all, how is it possible to realize the progress of God’s Grace in a soul, if the traces of its passage are neglected, if the first tokens left by its presence are effaced? One thing at any rate is certain, that Against the Grain marked a definite rupture with its predecessors, with Les Sœurs Vatard, En Ménage, À vau-l’eau, that with it I entered on a path the goal of which I did not so much as suspect.
More sagacious than the Catholics, Zola saw this clearly. I remember how, after the first appearance of À Rebours, I went to spend a few days at Médan. One afternoon when we were out walking, the two of us, in the country, he stopped suddenly, and his face grown dark, reproached me for having written the book, declaring I was dealing a terrible blow’at Naturalism, that I was leading the school astray, that, into the bargain, I was burning my ships with such a book, inasmuch as no class of literature was possible
