hundred years, but an elaborate analytical study by one of the foremost French novelists, of the successive steps taken by a soul in its pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Promised Land.

THE SUPREME INTEREST OF THE STORY.

Mr. Kegan Paul, who translates and publishes the book, hardly seems to realise its true spiritual significance, for he says:

The true interest in the book is its defence of the Monastic Orders, and the description of such a life as seen from very near. Here is, as it appears to us, the extraordinary value of the book for English readers.

It is quite true that there is much in the book that is very interesting and instructive about monastic orders; but that is a matter of purely literary or intellectual interest. Very few of us will have an opportunity of coming into personal touch with those who lead the monastic life; but all of us have souls to be saved and lives to be redeemed from the everencroaching grasp of the forces of evil within and without. The monastic part of the story is interesting only as indicating one of the methods by which Durtal was able to win his battle and discom. fit Apollyon; but the supreme interest in the story is the description which it gives of the way in which a soul convinced of sin is won by the paraphernalia of the Church of Rome, is helped to attain that mastery over itself, which is rightly described as salvation.

WORKING FROM WITHOUT TO WITHIN.

There is only one other observation which I shall make before summarising the story of Durtal's pilgrimage for my readers. To most Englishmen, especially those who have

desired end and bringing in the millennium was to reverse the process, and to begin on the outside. "For instance," she exclaimed with much vivacity, "I am prepared to maintain that, if the worst man in the world will but allow me to absolutely control the muscles of his face and the movements of his limbs, I will, within a certified period, convert him into a perfect saint. The body reacts upon the mind, and builds up a character within that conforms to its appearance without. It is impossible for you to perpetually adjust your face so as to produce a smile, and to retain bitterness or sourness in your heart. The muscles of your countenance will irresistibly transform the feeling of the heart."

e

THE DELSARTEISM OF

ROME.

There is a great deal of Delsarteism in the Church of Rome. Throughout the whole of Huysmans' story there is a perpetual operation from without designed to produce a corresponding change within. Whether all this paraphernalia of ceremony and ritual is the shortest way or not to the human heart, it cannot be denied that it is by this road that millions of the saints of God have found peace and joy in believing. It is not, therefore, for us to speak lightly of the Delsartean element in the Roman Church. It has its uses, and although it is possible that it may sometimes seem to approximate very nearly to the whirling prayer-mills of the good Thibetans, let us remember also that even prayer-mills themselves may not be without some efficacy, and certainly would never have come into such extended use if they had not at some time or other, in some way hidden to us, ministered to some of the imperious needs of the human heart. I.-DURTAL'S AWAKENING.

been reared in the spiritual environment more or less approximating to the austere simplicity of the Society of Friends, the chief impression which the book will leave upon the mind is one of sorrow, not to say disgust, at the extent to which the soul is taught to rely upon external agencies for the attainment of internal peace. Over and over again in reading "En Route" was I reminded of a charming zealous missionary of Delsarteism whom I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago in the room of an acquaintance who has this year held with distinction one of the most important posts in what may be called the subterranean world of Imperial politics. She assured me that the regeneration of the world had been sadly impeded because people would persist in attempting to regenerate mankind from within outward, whereas the true way of achieving the

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When Christian in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress makes his first appearance, he is clothed in rags, standing in a certain place with his face from his own house, a book in his hand and a great burden upon his back. He opened the book and read therein, and as he read he wept and trembled, and not being able longer to restrain it, broke out with a lamentable cry, saying, "What shall I do?"

Somewhat similar to this, although different in detail. is the story which Huysmans gives of the awakening of Durtal, the pilgrim of "En Route." Durtal was indeed clothed in filthy rags, morally speaking, and although his cry, "What shall I do?" was prompted by no reading

of the book which Bunyan saw in the hands of Christian, it may be said to have been due to his study of that larger Scripture that is written in the world in which he lived. But whereas Bunyan is content to describe the awakening of his pilgrim's conscience, Huysmans proceeds to discuss and analyse the causes which led to the awakening. His analysis and his discussion do not however, we must admit, advance us much further on the road. As Mr. Kegan Paul says, "The awakening of the soul is a mystery not to be explained in precise terms":

The exact process is as little explicable as the quickening of life in the womb. The soul awakes and says, "I believe," it has come about by the sudden irruption of Grace, and not by any statement of syllogisms, any admission of premisses, any conscious drawing of conclusions.

Durtal himself is equally unable to account for his sudden awakening to the higher life. Durtal is a dissolute and decadent man of letters who has just finished his history of Gilles de Rais, the abominable profligate and black magician who fought in the train of Jeanne d'Arc. When the story opens he is alone in the world; he had only two friends and they had both died; he had never married, but had wasted his manhood in every kind of excess. In his own words, "My heart is hardened and smoke-dried by dissipation, I am good for nothing."

Yet upon this hardened heart there had shone a light which convicted him of sin and made him ask, although in different phraseology from that of Bunyan's pilgrim, "What shall I do to be saved?" Durtal finds himself, without knowing it, converted to faith-that is to say, from being a rank unbeliever he has come to recognise the importance of his relations with the Infinite. How this came about, he says frankly, he does not know. No doubt the work had been prepared beforehand, but of the process himself he was unconscious. He says:

I know not in what this consists; it is something analogous to digestion in a stomach, which works though we do not feel it. There has been no road to Damascus, no events to bring about a crisis; nothing has happened, we awake some fine morning, and, without knowing how or why, the thing is done. No doubt I can distinguish here and there some landmarks on the road I have travelled: love of art, heredity, weariness of life; I can even recall some of the forgotten sensations of childhood, the subterranean workings of ideas excited by my visits to the churches: but I am unable to gather these threads together, and group them in a skein, I cannot understand the sudden and silent explosion of light which took place in me. When I seek to explain to myself how one evening an unbeliever, I became, without knowing it, on one night a believer, I can discover nothing, for the divine action has wanished and left no trace.

The first note of distinction between Durtal and Bunyan's Christian is that Durtal was not in the least moved at first by any remorse for sin. His recoil from his evil doing was an after-effect of his acceptance of the truth of the Christian religion, to which he was attracted by its externals far more than by any direct spiritual appeal which its message made to his conscience. Indeed, at first, although he was, as Mr. Kegan Paul says, converted to faith, he was very far from having reformed his life. He recoiled from the thought of prayer; but, he lamented:

I am haunted by Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and wax, I prowl about it, moved even to tears by its prayers, touched even to the marrow by its psalms and chants. I am thoroughly disgusted with my life, very tired of myself; but it is a far cry from that to leading a different existence!

This disgust which he felt at the life which he was leading was aggravated by his solitude and his idleness, for since he had finished the history of Gilles de Rais he had no other book on hand. In place of religion or of any moral sentiment, he had a great passion for art, especially for music and the plain chant of the Church service. "More even than his disgust for life, art had been the irresistible magnet that drew him to God." One day, partly out of curiosity and partly from a wish to kill time which lay heavy on his hands, he had entered a church after many years in which he had never darkened the sacred portals. As he heard the vespers for the dead "fall heavily, psalm after psalm, in antiphonal chant as the singers threw up as from ditches their shovels full of verse," his soul had been shaken to its depths. The work thus begun was continued by the ceremonies and music of Holy Week. Day after day he visited the churches which, filled with great crowds, seemed themselves to become enormous crosses, living, not crawling, silent and sombre. He kept on day after day until at last on the Thursday at nightfall, when the "Stabat Mater" was sung, all temptations to unbelief fled. Durtal left the church worn out with long services, but he had no further doubt. The eloquent splendour of the litanies and the dim sorrow of the voices appealed to him. He had begun the new life but half conscious of the change which had taken place in him. Neither did he by any means abandon his vices, but he went frequently to the Church of St. Severin, especially to high mass, where the singing of the plain chant deepened his conviction as to the truth of the Catholic creed. "It is impossible," he would say, "that the alluvial deposits of faith which have created this mystical certainty aro false."

He ended by being moved to the very marrow, choked by nervous tears, and all the bitterness of his life came up before him; full of vague fears, of confused prayers which stifled him, and found no words, he cursed the ignominy of his life and swore to master his carnal affections.

In fact, to sum up all, he might believe that St. Severin by its scent, and the delightful art of its old nave, St. Sulpice by its ceremonies and its chanting, had brought him back towards Christian art, which in its turn had directed him to God.

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.

Then when once urged on this way, he had pursued it, had left architecture and music, to wander in the mystic terri tories of the other arts, and his long visits to the Louvre, his researches into the breviaries, into the books of Ruysbrück, Angela da Foligno, Saint Teresa, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Magdalen of Pezzi, had confirmed him in his belief.

With Durtal, as with most Frenchmen, there are only two alternatives: unbelief or Catholicism. Recoiling from unbelief, he at once sought refuge in the Church:

Once I despised her, because I had a staff on which to lean when the great winds of weariness blew; I believed in my novels, I worked at my history, I had my art. I have come to recognise its absolute inadequacy, its complete incapacity to afford happiness. Then I understood that Pessimism was, at most, good to console those who had no real need of comfort; I understood that its theories, alluring when we are young, and rich, and well, become singularly weak and lamentably false, when age advances, when infirmities declare themselves, when all around is crumbling.

I went to the church, that hospital for souls. There, at least, they take you in, put you to bed and nurse you, they do not merely turn their backs on you as in the wards of Pessimism, and tell you the name of your disease.

II.-DURTAL'S EVANGELIST.

In "Pilgrim's Progress," when Christian, after a period of much misery, was walking in the fields reading his book, looking this way and that way as if he would run, yet standing still because he perceived he could not tell which way to go, he looked up and saw a man named Evangelist coming to him, who asked him, “ Wherefore dost thou cry?" The part played by the Evangelist in Huysmans' book is taken by an excellent and admirable old priest, a true mystic, the Abbé Gévresin. But whereas Evangelist points Bunyan's pilgrim to Christ as the wicket-gate, the abbé deals in much subtler fashion with Durtal. And herein lies the second broad distinction between the "Pilgrim's Progress" of the seventeenth century and this "Pilgrim's Progress" at the end of the nineteenth. Bunyan pointed the awakened sinner directly to the wicket-gate, whereas Huysmans, believing that the road lies through the sacraments of the Church, sets himself diligently to manoeuvre Durtal by a kind of sanctified strategy into the way of salvation. One of the most remarkable passages in a book which contains many notable chapters, is that in which Huysmans boldly asserts the efficacy of forms and ceremonies, even when they are performed in the most mechanical spirit. The occasion is one in which he describes a funeral service in the Madeleine over the bier of a rich man. The singing of the "Dies Ira" profoundly impresses him, although he is compelled to admit that from bottom to top the performers of the service put no heart into their task. He says:

The tenors and basses are careful of their effects, and admire themselves in the more or less rippled water of their voices; the choir boys dream of their scampers after mass; and, moreover, not one of them at all understands a word of the Latin they sing and abridge, as for instance the "Dies Iræ," of which they suppress a part of the stanzas. In its turn beadledom calculates the sum the dead man brings in, and even the priest, wearied with the prayers of which he has read so many, and needing his breakfast, prays mechanically from the lips outward, while the assistants are in a hurry that the mass to which they have not listened should come to an end, that they may shake hands with the relations, and leave the dead.

Notwithstanding all this, notwithstanding the unworthiness of the celibrants, a virtue remains indestructible in the music itself. He says:

There is absolute inattention, profound weariness; but by the external sound of the words, without the aid of contemplation, without even the help of thought, the Church aets. There it is, the miracle of her liturgy, the power of her word, the constantly renewed prodigy of phrases created by revolving time, of prayers arranged by ages which are dead. All has passed, nothing exists that was raised up in those bygone times. Yet those sequences remain intact, cried aloud by indifferent voices and cast out from empty hearts, plead, groan, and implore even with efficacy, by their virtual power, their talismanic might, their inalienable beauty by the almighty confidence of their faith. The Middle Ages have left us these to help us to save, if it may be, the soul of the modern and dead fine gentleman.

This, it may be objected, is very much like the belief of the Hindus in the muttering of magical mantrams, a faith which Theosophists have done something to render thinkable to us Westerns. Huysmans' reply would probably be that it is true, and that both in the muttering of the mantrams and in the intoning of the Liturgy there is a recognition of the same law. At any rate, it was by these means that he was convinced at the bottom of his soul of the certitude of true faith. The more he argued against it, the more he was convinced that all

the excuses he made for his unworthy life were odiously inadequate:

How doubt the truth of dogmas, how deny the divine power of the Church, for she commands assent?

First she has her superhuman art and her mysticism, then she is most wonderful in the persistent folly of conquered heresies. All since the world began have had the flesh as their springboard. Logically and humanly speaking they should have triumphed, for they allowed man and woman to satisfy their passions, saying to themselves there was no sin in these.

All have suffered shipwreck. The Church, unbending in this matter, has remained upright and entire. She orders the body to be silent, and the soul to suffer, and contrary to all probability, humanity listens to her, and sweeps away like a dung-heap the seductive joys proposed to her.

Again, the vitality of the Church is decision, which preserves her in spite of the unfathomable stupidity of her sons. She has resisted the disquieting folly of the clergy, and has not even been broken up by the awkwardness and lack of ability in her defenders, a very strong point.

"No, the more I think of her," he cried, "the more I think her prodigious, unique, the more I am convinced that she alone holds the truth, that outside her are only weaknesses of mind, impostures, scandals. The Church is the divine breeding ground, the heavenly dispensary of souls; she gives them suck, nourishes them, and heals them; she bids them understand, when the hour of sorrow comes, The that true life begins, not at birth, but at death. Church is indefectible, before all things admirable, she is great

"Yes, but then we must follow her directions and practise the sacraments she orders!"

From this obedience Durtal recoiled-he had the Sovereign contempt of the French freethinker for the clericals. Priests and devotees alike he regarded with supreme disdain. When his conscience told him if he recognised the authority of the Church he must do as she told him, he replied :

No indeed-for then I must bind myself to a heap of observances, bend to a series of rules, assist at mass on Sunday, abstain on Friday, live like a bigot, and look like a fool.

Nothing can be more contemptuous than the way in which he speaks of "the pious geese" who thronged the churches, and the wretchedly commonplace priests who were so lukewarm, and who never could rise above what he called their middle class ideal of a God. "They will try," he said, “to convince me that art is dangerous, will sermonise me with imbecile talk, and pour over me their flowing bowls of pious veal broth. Yet," said he, "I cannot approach the altar without the aid of an interpreter, without the bulwark of a priest." He had been converted, or rather awakened, without the help of anyone; now a priest was indispensable. The more he contemplated the possibility of kneeling in church before the altar, or of communicating, the more he recoiled from it. "Even if I decide to jump the ditch, to confess and communicate, I must determine to fly the lusts of the flesh and accept perpetual abstinence. I could never attain to that." The more near he drew to the Church, the more his unclean desires became frequent and persistent. Never had he been so tormented as since his conversion. That, the inner voice said to him, was because he prowled about the precincts instead of entering the sanctuary, and he was reluctantly compelled to admit that he did not practise his religion because he yielded to his baser instincts, and yielded to those instincts because he did not practise his religion. Distressed and weary of heart, he began to ask himself whether it was not possible to find a priest with whom he could

communicate without being repelled by commonplace

narrowness:

Perhaps the secular clergy are only the leavings, for the contemplative orders and the missionary army carry away every year the pick of the spiritual basket; the mystics, priests athirst for sorrows, drunk with sacrifice, bury themselves in cloisters or exile themselves among savages whom they teach.

It was while he was in this state he bethought himself of one Abbé Gévresin, whom he had once met in a bookseller's shop, and discussed with him the life of the blessed Lidwine, a Dutch saint of the fourteenth century. Of this abbé, who plays a most important role in the book, we know nothing excepting that he was a good mystic, who, on account of his great age and infirmity, was incapacitated for the regular duties of the priesthood. To him Durtal went, and submitted the troubles of his soul.

ILL-THROUGH THE SLOUGH OF REPENTANCE. When Christian was on his way to the wicket-gate, it will be remembered he fell into the Slough of Despond, in which he wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with dirt, and in which, no doubt, he narrowly escaped sinking because of the burden upon his back. Durtal had passed, not through the Slough of Despond, but through the mire of unclean thoughts which he had been diligently accumulating all through his past life:

His shameless senses rebelled at the contact of religious ideas. He floated like wreckage between Licentiousness and the Church; they each threw him back in turn.

Continually his mind reverted to the images of the women with whom he had sinned, especially that of one Florence, who had in the latter years acquired singular ascendency over his morbid taste. Even in church the memory of the girl rose up before him, and the subtle fascination of the temptress overcame all his aspirations for a higher life:-

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If only the sound of my vices consents to be silent, but I feel that they rise furiously within me. Ah, that Florence "and he thought of a woman to whose vagaries he was riveted"continues to walk about in my brain. I see her behind the lowered curtain of my eyes, and when I think of her I am a terrible coward."

He endeavoured once more to put her away, but his will was overcome at the sight of her,

He hated, despised, and even cursed her, but the madness of his illusions excited him; he left her disgusted with her and with himself; he swore he would never see her again, but did not keep his resolve.

He saw her now in vision extend her hand to him.

He recoiled, struggling to free himself; but his dream continued mingling her with the form of one of the sisters whose gentle profile he saw.

Suddenly he started, returned to the real world, and saw that he was at St. Sulpice, in the chapel. "It is disgusting that I should come here to soil the church with my horrible dreams; I had better go."

So when he went to the Abbé Gévresin, he told him frankly how impossible he found it to shake off the mire of his vices. The abbé asked him if he prayed; he urged him to pray in his own house, in church, everywhere, as much as he could, but especially in the early morning and late in the evening, and also specially urged him to attend the Church Notre Dame des Victoires. Durtal loved the church on account, it would seem, that it alone among the churches of Paris was always filled with a crowd of worshippers in more or less ecstatic devotion. He says:

Notre Dame des Victoires is worthless from the æsthetic point of view, and yet I go there from time to time, because

alone in Paris it has the irresistible attraction of true piety, it alone preserves intact the lost soul of the Time. At whatever hour one goes there people are praying there, prostrate, in absolute silence. It is full as soon as it is open, and full at its closing. There is a constant coming and going of pilgrims from all parts of Paris, arriving from the depths of the provinces, and it seems that each one, by the prayers that he brings, adds fuel to the immense brazier of Faith, whose flames break out again under the smoky arches like the thousands of tapers which constantly burn, and are renewed from morning till evening, before Our Lady.

But when the abbé urged him to attend Benediction in that church in order that he might come out cleansed and at peace, he replied:

"But, Monsieur l'Abbé, even were I to visit that sanctuary, and follow the offices in other churches, when temptations assail me, even were I to confess and draw near the Sacraments, how would that advantage me? I should meet as I came out the woman whose very sight inflames my senses, and it would be with me as after my leaving St. Severin all unnerved; the very feeling of tenderness which I had in the chapel would destroy me, and I should fall back into sin.” "What do you know about it?" and the priest suddenly rose, and took long strides through the room.

"You have no right to speak thus, for the virtue of the Sacrament is formal, the man who has communicated is no longer alone. He is armed against others and defended against himself.

"I tell you again I believe in the preventive virtue, the formal power of the Sacraments. I quite understand the system of Père Milleriot, who obliged those persons to communicate whom he thought would afterwards fall again into sin. For their only penance he obliged them to communicate again and again, and he ended by purifying them with the Sacred Species, taken in large doses. It is a doctrine at once realistic and exalted."

But the abbé refrained from prescribing this heroic treatment, and contented himself with pressing him to pray and to lose no opportunity of attending churches. This plan at first seemed to succeed :

The priest had evidently formed a plan; Durtal did not yet wholly understand it, but he was bound to admit that this discipline of temporizing, this constant call to thought always directed to God, by his daily visits to the churches, acted upon him at last, and little by little softened his soul. One fact proved it: that he who for so long a time had been unable to meditate in the morning, now prayed as soon as he awoke. Even in the afternoon he found himself on some days seized with the need of speaking humbly with God, with an irresistible desire to ask His pardon and implore His help.

He found himself all the better for this conduct, in that his visits to the churches, his prayers and readings occupied his objectless life, and he was no longer wearied.

"I have at least gained peacable evenings and quiet nights," he said to himself.

But the Evil One was not to be cast out so easily:Suddenly, after so many hours spent in the chapels, there was a reaction; the flesh extinguished under the cinders of prayers took fire, and the conflagration, springing up from below, became terrible.

Florence seemed present, to Durtal's imagination, at his lodgings, in the churches, in the street, everywhere, and he was constantly on the watch against her recurrent attractions. In his solitude, foul thoughts assailed him.

It was an obsession by thought, by vision, in all ways, and the haunting was all the more terrible that it was so special, that it never turned aside, but concentrated itself always on the same point, the face and figure of Florence.

Durtal resisted, then in distraction took to flight, tried to tire himself out by long walks, and to divert his mind by excursions, but the ignoble desire followed him in his course, sat before in the café, came between his eyes and the newspaper he strove to read, becoming ever more definite. He

ended, after hours of struggle, by giving way and going to see this woman; he left her overwhelmed, half dead with disgust and shame, almost in tears.

Nor did he thus find any solace in his struggle, but the contrary; far from escaping it, the hateful charm took more violent and tenacious possession of him. Then Durtal thought of and accepted a strange compromise, to visit another woman he knew, and in her society to break this nervous state, to put an end to this possession, this wearisome and remorse; and in doing so he strove to persuade himself that in thus acting he would be more pardonable, less sinful.

The clearest result of this attempt was to bring back the memory of Florence, and her vicious charm.

IV. THE DOCTRINE OF SUBSTITUTION. We are now approaching a branch of Durtal's experience which differs widely from anything that Christian went through. For the Abbé Gévresin said to Durtal, "Comfort yourself, go in peace and sin less. The greater part of your temptations will be remitted you; you can, if you choose, bear the remainder." There are orders like the Carmelites and the poor Clares who willingly accept the transfer to themselves of the temptations which we suffer. These convents take on their backs, so to speak, the diabolical expiations of those insolvent

He continued therefore his intimacy with her, and then he had, during a few days, such a revolt from his slavery, that he extricated himself from the sewer, and stood on firm ground. He succeeded in recovering and pulling himself together, and he loathed himself.

He went to the abbé and explained his trouble in veiled words with the tears in his eyes. "Now," said the abbé, "are you quite certain that you have not that repentance which you assure me you have not experienced up to this time?" The priest was right; Durtal, who hitherto had hardly experienced any genuine sorrow for sin, was now crushed and humbled; he admitted he was repentant, but said he, "What is the good of it when one is so weak that in spite of all efforts one is certain to be overthrown at the first assault?"

souls whose debts they pay to the full. The nuns chose by Our Lord as victims of expiation, as wholesale burnt offerings, unite and coalesce in order to bear, without turning, the weight of misdeeds which try them, for in order that a soul may bear alone the assaults of Satan, which are often terrible, it must indeed be assisted by the angels and the elect of God. The good abbé was one of the directors of those nuns who make reparation in their convents, hence he assured Durtal that the saints would enter into the lists to help him. "They will take the overplus of the assaults which you cannot conquer, without even knowing your name, from their secluded province. Nunneries and Carmelites and poor Clares will pray for you on receiving a letter from me." And, in fact, from that very day the most acute attacks