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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In march of 1890, after a preparatory experience with Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, W. B. Yeats joined the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. Like Joris-Karl Huysmans, who at about this time became interested in the activities of the French counterpart of the Golden Dawn, “Le Grand Ordre Kabbalistique du Rose Croix,” Yeats's interests were largely aroused by the willingness of the members of the group to experiment with magical practices. Where Yeats, however, committed himself by oaths and rituals to a cult which pretended to be the guardian of ancient insights into the super-sensory life, Huysmans stood apart, first skeptical, then fascinated, and finally outraged. The eccentric MacGregor Mathers headed the London Rosicrucians, and he and his French wife, the sister of Henri Bergson, were acquainted with all the principal figures involved with the slightly older French order. The latter had been founded in 1888 by Sâr Joséphin Péladan and the self-styled nobleman Stanislas de Guaita. The French group existed on the shady fringe of clerical politics in the hostile rationalism of the early Third Republic, and it was in search of documentary material for a novel about this fantastic circle of clerical Royalists that Huysmans was first drawn to them. Like Saul who only sought lost asses, this quest led him, as he came to believe, to God's grace.
Before he became a Catholic Huysmans was, in effect, something of a Manichean. As Yeats did, he sought experimental evidence to confirm the existence of opposing forces of good and evil, and when he had this evidence he rejected forcefully the Devil through whom he had found God. Yeats was more equivocal. The inversion of values in Huysmans' A rebours, and of ritual in his Là-bas never confounded or reconciled the opposition of good and evil and of false and true worship, as Yeats tried to do in his Rosicrucian stories of 1896. But then Huysmans was never so deeply involved as Yeats in constructing out of the farrago of late nineteenth-century occult beliefs a systematic basis for his life. The Rosicrucian Golden Dawn did provide the beginnings for such a systematic basis, and in his three stories of 1896, “The Tables of the Law,” “Rosa Alchemica,” and “The Adoration of the Magi,” Yeats draws on the beliefs and rituals of his cult. It seems to me that there are elements in the first two of these Rosicrucian stories which have curious affinities to the writings of Huysmans, and these become significant in the context of other relations between the two writers.
1 1890 was the year in which Madame Blavatsky asked Yeats to resign from her Society. Later he confused the date of his initiation in the Golden Dawn with that of his earlier entry into Madame Blavatsky's Society. See W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London, 1926), p. 227, and Virginia Moore, The Unicorn (New York, 1954), p. 27.
2 Paris, 1947, p. 212.
3 Yeats met Péladan in Paris. H. S. Krans, in W. B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival (New York, 1903), p. 46, says Yeats met Péladan in 1890. This seems unlikely since there is no evidence Yeats visited Paris before 1894. Mathers was then living in Paris and it was there that Yeats also met Stanislas de Guaita. (Autobiographies, p. 46). Through de Guaita, whom he visited at his home, Yeats undoubtedly met other French Rosicrucians. These men had not only been attacked by Huysmans in Là-bas, but in a scandal over the death of Huysmans' friend, the occultist Abbé Boullan, Huysmans publicly charged that Boullan had been magically murdered by de Guaita. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote of the quarrel between Huysmans and the Rosicrucians in The National Observer (Jan. 28, 1893, pp. 263-264) to which Yeats also contributed. It seems likely that as Richard Ellmann believes Yeats must have read Mallarmé's article. See Ellmann, Yeats: The Man And The Masks (New York, 1948), p. 90.
4 See Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford, 1955) p. 149.
5 My Rosicrucian Adventures (Chicago, 1936), pp. 80-81.
6 “William Blake And His Illustrations To The Divine Comedy,” Savoy (London, Aug. 1896), p. 26. This is the first of three essays under this title in the Savoy.
7 “A rebours,” in Le Constitutionnel, 28 July 1884.
8 Letters of William Butler Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (London, 1954), p. 280.
9 Yeats: The Man And The Masks, pp. 82-98 et passim.
10 This story appeared in the Nov. 1896 issue of the Savoy. In the previous July issue Yeats's friend Lionel Johnson had published Munster: A.D. 1534, a poem expressing the antinomian animus of the frenzied millennarian Anabaptists who with swords in their hands had sought to usher in the age of the Holy Spirit. It seems likely that the first line of the last stanza suggested to Yeats the title and, partially, the theme of his story. Speaking for the Anabaptists Johnson wrote :
Our hands have torn in twain the Tables of the Law; Sons of the Spirit, we know nothing more of sin.
Curiously enough Johnson was probably the nearest thing that generation in England had to a des Esseintes and in the Autobiographies (pp. 378-379) Yeats related how Johnson once told him that whereas Yeats needed ten years in a library he, Johnson, needed ten years in a wilderness. Of this Yeats remarked: “When he said ‘Wilderness’ I am certain, however, that he thought of some historical, some bookish desert, a Thebiade [sic], or the lands about the Mareotic sea.” It is significant that in A rebours (p. 9) des Esseintes' ideal of escape had been phrased by Huysmans in so much the same terms: “Déjà il rêvait à une thébaïde raffinée, à un désert confortable, à une arche immobile et tiède ou il se réfugierait loin de l'incessant déluge de la sottise humaine.”
11 This passage is not found in quite this form in the Savoy, nor is it at all present in the revised version of the story which Yeats printed in his Early Poems and Stories (New York, 1925). The passage cited here is from the version in the Collected Works (Stratford on Avon, 1908), vu, 146-147.
12 Savoy (April 1896), p. 56.
13 This passage particularly reflects pp. 186-188 of A rebours in the edition cited.
14 The resemblance of Owen Aheme in the opening of this story to des Esseintes has been noted in passing by John Senior in “The Occult in Nineteenth-Century Symbolist Literature,” unpubl. diss. (Columbia, 1957), p. 243. This work contains valuable independent studies of Yeats, and of Huysmans, who is taken as a sort of paradigm of the manner in which literature and occultism were intermingled in the 19th century.
15 Wade, Letters, p. 440.
16 Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1930), xii, 157-172.
17 Ibid., xii, 190.
18 Wade, Letters, p. 280.
19 Symons' essays on Huysmans appeared in 1892, 1894, 1897, 1899, 1901, 1908, and later. Some of these were only reprints. The essay of 1899 was in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York, 1908) which Symons dedicated to Yeats.
20 “J.-K. Huysmans,” Fortnightly Rev., O.S., lvii (March 1892) 412-413.
21 The Symbolist Movement in Literature, p. 152.
22 Dramatis Personae, 1896-1902 (New York, 1936), p. 55.
23 Des Esseintes corrupts a young boy of the streets in the hope of turning him into a criminal by first introducing him to expensive debaucheries, and then by depriving him of the money necessary to continue the indulgence of habituated vices. (See A rebours, pp. 93-97.)
24 “The Symbolism of W. B. Yeats,” in The Permanence of Yeats, ed. James Hall and Martin Steinmann (New York, 1950), p. 265.
25 Ibid, pp. 268-269. John Senior (“The Occult in Nineteenth-Century Symbolist Literature,” pp. 226-227) suggests that a larger allowance for direct French influence upon Yeats may be made if we grant that his limited knowledge of the language was compensated by some knowledge of the matter he was reading. Such a knowledge of a number of French works, including that of Huysmans, was undoubtedly supplied by Symons. Yeats's well-known susceptibilities could be sufficiently engaged by such a combination of means.
26 A rebours, it will be recalled, was “the yellow book” Lord Henry gave to Dorian and which had a profound effect upon him. In des Esseintes Dorian had seen a prefiguring type of himself as well as a compelling model of what he might become.