XVIII.


THROUGH ART TO FAITH.

There are few books more difficult to estimate than those in which M.
Huysman sets forth the story of a conversion generally supposed to bear
no very distant resemblance to his own. It would be easy to find
excellent reasons for a somewhat sweeping condemnation of his work, and
others as excellent for a most cordial approval; and, indeed, we find
critics more than usually at variance with one another in its regard. To
be judged justly, these books must be judged slowly. The source of
perplexity is to be found in the fact that the author, who has recently
passed from negation to Catholicism, carries with him the language, the
modes of thought, the taste and temper of the literary school of which
he was, and, in so many of his sympathies, is still a pupil, a school
which regards M. Zola as one of its leading lights. _En Route_, and its
sequels, portray in the colours of realism, in the language of
decadence, the conversion of a realist, nay, of a decadent, to mysticism
and faith. "The voice indeed is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are
the hands of Esau," and according as the critic centres his attention
too exclusively on one or the other, such will his judgment be.

That his works have commanded attention, and awakened keen interest
among members of the most varying and opposite schools of thought, is an
undeniable fact which at all events proves them to be worth careful
consideration.

The story of a soul's passage from darkness to light, of its wanderings,