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EN ROUTE

by

J. K. HUYSMANS

Translated by W. Fleming







EN ROUTE.

CHAPTER I.


During the first week in November, the week within the Octave of All
Souls, Durtal entered St. Sulpice, at eight o'clock in the evening. He
often chose to turn into that church, because there was a trained choir,
and because he could there examine himself at peace, apart from the
crowd. The ugliness of the nave, with its heavy vaulting, vanished at
night, the aisles were often empty, it was ill-lighted by a few
lamps--it was possible for a man to chide his soul in secret, as if at
home.

Durtal sat down behind the high altar, on the left, in the aisle along
the Rue de St. Sulpice; the lamps of the choir organ were lighted. Far
off, in the almost empty nave, an ecclesiastic was preaching. He
recognized, by the unctuousness of his delivery, and his oily accent, a
well-fed priest who poured on his audience, according to his wont, his
best known commonplaces.

"Why are they so devoid of eloquence?" thought Durtal. "I have had the
curiosity to listen to many of them, and they are much the same. They
only vary in the tones of their voice. According to their temperament,
some are bruised down in vinegar, others steeped in oil. There is no
such thing as a clever combination." And he called to mind orators
petted like tenors, Monsabre, Didon, those Coquelins of the Church, and
lower yet than those products of the Catholic training school, that
bellicose booby the Abbe d'Hulst.

"Afterwards," he continued, "come the mediocrities, each puffed by the
handful of devotees who listen to them. If those cooks of the soul had
any skill, if they served their clients with delicate meats, theological
essences, gravies of prayer, concentrated sauces of ideas, they would
vegetate misunderstood by their flocks. So, on the whole, it is all for
the best. The low-water mark of the clergy must conform to the level of
the faithful, and indeed Providence has provided carefully for this."

A stamping of shoes, then the movement of chairs grinding on the flags
interrupted him. The sermon was over.

Then a great stillness was broken by a prelude from the organ, which
dropped to a low tone, a mere accompaniment to the voices.

A slow and mournful chant arose, the "De Profundis." The blended voices
sounded under the arches, intermingling with the somewhat raw sounds of
the harmonicas, like the sharp tones of breaking glass.

Resting on the low accompaniment of the organ, aided by basses so hollow
that they seemed to have descended into themselves, as it were
underground, they sprang out, chanting the verse "De profundis ad te
clamavi, Do--" and then stopped in fatigue, letting the last syllables
"mine" fall like a heavy tear; then these voices of children, near
breaking, took up the second verse of the psalm, "Domine exaudi vocem
meam," and the second half of the last word again remained in suspense,
but instead of separating, and falling to the ground, there to be
crushed out like a drop, it seemed to gather itself together with a
supreme effort, and fling to heaven the anguished cry of the
disincarnate soul, cast naked, and in tears before God.

And after a pause, the organ, aided by two double-basses, bellowed out,
carrying all the voices in its torrent--baritones, tenors, basses, not
now serving only as sheaths to the sharp blades of the urchin voices,
but openly with full throated sound--yet the dash of the little soprani
pierced them through all at once like a crystal arrow.

Then a fresh pause, and in the silence of the church, the verses mourned
out anew, thrown up by the organ, as by a spring board. As he listened
with attention endeavouring to resolve the sounds, closing his eyes,
Durtal saw them at first almost horizontal, then rising little by
little, then raising themselves upright, then quivering in tears, before
their final breaking.

Suddenly at the end of the psalm, when the response of the antiphon
came--"Et lux perpetua luceat eis"--the children's voices broke into a
sad, silken cry, a sharp sob, trembling on the word "eis," which
remained suspended in the void.

These children's voices stretched to breaking, these clear sharp voices
threw into the darkness of the chant some whiteness of the dawn, joining
their pure, soft sounds to the resonant tones of the basses, piercing as
with a jet of living silver the sombre cataract of the deeper singers;
they sharpened the wailing, strengthened and embittered the burning salt
of tears, but they insinuated also a sort of protecting caress, balsamic
freshness, lustral help; they lighted in the darkness those brief gleams
which tinkle in the Angelus at dawn of day; they called up, anticipating
the prophecies of the text, the compassionate image of the Virgin,
passing, in the pale light of their tones, into the darkness of that
sequence.

The "De Profundis" so chanted was incomparably beautiful. That sublime
prayer ending in sobs, at the moment when the soul of the voices was
about to overpass human limits, gave a wrench to Durtal's nerves, and
made his heart beat. Then he wished to abstract himself, and cling
especially to the meaning of that sorrowful plaint, in which the fallen
being calls upon its God with groans and lamentations. Those cries of
the third verse came back to him, wherein calling on his Saviour in
despair from the bottom of the abyss, man, now that he knows he is
heard, hesitates ashamed, knowing not what to say. The excuses he has
prepared appear to him vain, the arguments he has arranged seem to him
of no effect, and he stammers forth; "If Thou, O Lord, shalt observe
iniquities, Lord, who shall endure it?"

"It is a pity," said Durtal to himself, "that this psalm, which in its
first verses chants so magnificently the despair of humanity, becomes in
those which follow more personal to King David. I know well," he went
on, "that we must accept the symbolic sense of this pleading, admit that
the despot confounds his own cause with that of God, that his
adversaries are the unbelievers and the wicked, that he himself,
according to the doctors of the Church, prefigures the person of Christ;
but yet the memory of his fleshly desires, and the presumptuous praise
he gives to his incorrigible people, contracts the scope of the poem.
Happily the melody has a life apart from the text, a life of its own,
not arising out of mere tribal dissensions, but extending to all the
earth, chanting the anguish of the time to be born, as well as of the
present day, and of the ages which are no more."

The "De Profundis" had ceased; after a silence, the choir intoned a
motet of the eighteenth century, but Durtal was only moderately
interested in human music in churches. What seemed to him superior to
the most vaunted works of theatrical or worldly music, was the old plain
chant, that even and naked melody, at once ethereal and of the tomb, the
solemn cry of sadness and lofty shout of joy, those grandiose hymns of
human faith, which seem to well up in the cathedrals, like irresistible
geysers, at the very foot of the Romanesque columns. What music, however
ample, sorrowful or tender, is worth the "De Profundis" chanted in
unison, the solemnity of the "Magnificat," the splendid warmth of the
"Lauda Sion," the enthusiasm of the "Salve Regina," the sorrow of the
"Miserere," and the "Stabat Mater," the majestic omnipotence of the "Te
Deum"? Artists of genius have set themselves to translate the sacred
texts: Vittoria, Josquin de Pres, Palestrina, Orlando Lasso, Handel,
Bach, Haydn, have written wonderful pages; often indeed they have been
uplifted by the mystic effluence, the very emanation of the Middle Ages,
for ever lost; and yet their works have retained a certain pomp, and in
spite of all are pretentious, as opposed to the humble magnificence, the
sober splendour of the Gregorian chant--with them the whole thing came
to an end, for composers no longer believed.

Yet in modern times some religious pieces may be cited of Lesueur,
Wagner, Berlioz, and Caesar Franck, and in these again we are conscious
of the artist underlying his work, the artist determined to show his
skill, thinking to exalt his own glory, and therefore leaving God out.
We feel ourselves in the presence of superior men, but men with their
weaknesses, their inseparable vanity, and even the vice of their senses.
In the liturgical chant, created almost always anonymously in the depth
of the cloisters, was an extraterrestrial well, without taint of sin or
trace of art. It was an uprising of souls already freed from the slavery
of the flesh, an explosion of elevated tenderness and pure joy, it was
also the idiom of the Church, a musical gospel appealing like the Gospel
itself at once to the most refined and the most humble.

Ah! the true proof of Catholicism was that art which it had founded, an
art which has never been surpassed; in painting and sculpture the Early
Masters, mystics in poetry and in prose, in music plain chant, in
architecture the Romanesque and Gothic styles. And all this held
together and blazed in one sheaf, on one and the same altar; all was
reconciled in one unique cluster of thoughts: to revere, adore and serve
the Dispenser, showing to Him reflected in the soul of His creature, as
in a faithful mirror, the still immaculate treasure of His gifts.

Then in those marvellous Middle Ages, wherein Art, foster-child of the
Church, encroached on death and advanced to the threshold of Eternity,
and to God, the divine concept and the heavenly form were guessed and
half-perceived, for the first and perhaps for the last time by man. They
answered and echoed each other--art calling to art.

The Virgins had faces almond-shaped, elongated like those ogives which
the Gothic style contrived in order to distribute an ascetic light, a
virginal dawn in the mysterious shrine of its naves. In the pictures of
the Early Masters the complexion of holy women becomes transparent as
Paschal wax, and their hair is pale as golden grains of frankincense,
their childlike bosoms scarcely swell, their brows are rounded like the
glass of the pyx, their fingers taper, their bodies shoot upwards like
delicate columns. Their beauty becomes, as it were, liturgical. They
seem to live in the fire of stained glass, borrowing from the flaming
whirlwind of the rose-windows the circles of their aureoles. The ardent
blue of their eyes, the dying embers of their lips, keeping for their
garments the colours they disdain for their flesh, stripping them of
their light, changing them, when they transfer them to stuffs, into
opaque tones which aid still more by their contrast to declare the
seraphic clearness of their look, the grievous paleness of the mouth, to
which, according to the Proper of the season, the scent of the lily of
the Canticles or the penitential fragrance of myrrh in the Psalms lend
their perfume.

Then among artists was a coalition of brains, a welding together of
souls. Painters associated themselves in the same ideal of beauty with
architects, they united in an indestructible relation cathedrals and
saints, only reversing the usual process--they framed the jewel
according to the shrine, and modelled the relics for the reliquary.

On their side the sequences chanted by the Church had subtle affinities
with the canvases of the Early Painters.

Vittoria's responses for Tenebrae are of a like inspiration and an equal
loftiness with those of Quentin Matsys' great work, the Entombment of
Christ. The "Regina Coeli" of the Flemish musician Lasso has the same
good faith, the same simple and strange attraction, as certain statues
of a reredos, or religious pictures of the elder Breughel. Lastly, the
Miserere of Josquin de Pres, choirmaster of Louis XII., has, like the
panels of the Early Masters of Burgundy and Flanders, a patient
intention, a stiff, threadlike simplicity, but also it exhales like them
a truly mystical savour, and its awkwardness of outline is very
touching.

The ideal of all these works is the same and attained by different
means.

As for plain chant, the agreement of its melody with architecture is
also certain; it also bends from time to time like the sombre Romanesque
arcades, and rises, shadowy and pensive, like complete vaulting. The "De
Profundis," for instance, curves in on itself like those great groins
which form the smoky skeleton of the bays; it is like them slow and
dark, extends itself only in obscurity and moves only in the shadow of
the crypts.

Sometimes, on the other hand, the Gregorian chant seems to borrow from
Gothic its flowery tendrils, its scattered pinnacles, its gauzy rolls,
its tremulous lace, its trimmings light and thin as the voices of
children. Then it passes from one extreme to another, from the amplitude
of sorrow to an infinite joy; at other times again, the plain music, and
the Christian music to which it gave birth, lend themselves, like
sculpture, to the gaiety of the people, associate themselves with simple
gladness, and the sculptured merriment of the ancient porches; they take
the popular rhythm of the crowd, as in the Christmas carol "Adeste
Fideles" and in the Paschal hymn "O Filii et Filiae;" they become trivial
and familiar like the Gospels, submitting themselves to the humble
wishes of the poor, lending them a holiday tune easy to catch, a
running melody which carries them into pure regions where these simple
souls can cast themselves at the indulgent feet of Christ.

Born of the Church, and bred up by her in the choir-schools of the
Middle Ages, plain chant is the aerial and mobile paraphrase of the
immovable structure of the cathedrals; it is the immaterial and fluid
interpretation of the canvases of the Early Painters; it is a winged
translation, but also the strict and unbending stole of those Latin
sequences, which the monks built up or hewed out in the cloisters in the
far-off olden time.

Now it is changed and disconnected, foolishly overwhelmed by the crash
of organs, and is chanted, God knows how!

Most choirs when they intone it, like to imitate the rumbling and
gurgling of water-pipes, others the grating of rattles, the creaking of
pullies, the grinding of a crane, but, in spite of all, its beauty
remains, unextinguished, dulled though it be, by the wild bellowing of
the singers.

The sudden silence in the church roused Durtal. He rose and looked about
him; in his corner was no one save two poor women, asleep, their feet on
the bars of chairs, their heads on their knees. Leaning forward a
little, he saw, hanging above him in a dark chapel, the light of a lamp,
like a ruby in its red glass; no sound save the military tread of the
Suisse, making his round in the distance.

Durtal sat down again; the sweetness of his solitude was enhanced by the
aromatic perfume of wax, and the memories, now faint, of incense, but it
was suddenly broken. As the first chords crashed on the organ Durtal
recognized the "Dies irae," that despairing hymn of the Middle Ages;
instinctively he bowed his head and listened.

This was no more as in the "De Profundis" an humble supplication, a
suffering which believes it has been heard, and discerns a path of light
to guide it in the darkness, no longer the prayer which has hope enough
not to tremble; it was the cry of absolute desolation and of terror.

And, indeed, the wrath divine breathed tempestuously through these
stanzas. They seemed addressed less to the God of mercy, to the Son who
listens to prayer, than to the inflexible Father, to Him whom the Old
Testament shows us, overcome with anger, scarcely appeased by the smoke
of the pyres, the inconceivable attractions of burnt-offerings. In this
chant it asserted itself still more savagely, for it threatened to
strike the waters, and break in pieces the mountains, and to rend
asunder the depths of heaven by thunder-bolts. And the earth, alarmed,
cried out in fear.

A crystalline voice, a clear child's voice, proclaimed in the nave the
tidings of these cataclysms, and after this the choir chanted new
strophes wherein the implacable judge came with shattering blare of
trumpet, to purify by fire the rottenness of the world.

Then, in its turn, a bass, deep as a vault, as though issuing from the
crypt, accentuated the horror of these prophecies, made these threats
more overwhelming, and after a short strain by the choir, an alto
repeated them in yet more detail. Then, so soon as the awful poem had
exhausted the enumeration of chastisement and suffering, in shrill
tones--the falsetto of