I
Ulick Invern always declared that he was a New-Yorker born. This was a mild exaggeration; his mother—she had been a Bartlett before her marriage—was bred in the metropolis, but both her sons, Oswald, the elder, and Ulick, were born in Paris, where their father was Secretary at the American Legation. Needless to add, that under the American flag, they were registered as Americans. The elder Invern was the second son of a needy Irish peer, whose heir had retrieved the fallen fortunes of the family, an ancient one in Kerry, by marrying the only child of a wealthy Dublin iron-monger. Ulick's father through influence was sent to Washington where he served a few years in the British Embassy. But his marriage to Madge Bartlett, beautiful, brilliant girl, rich in her own right, caused a change of plans and her husband not only resigned his post, but in due course of time became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He entered the New York banking house of his father-in-law, who was not particularly impressed by his daughter's husband nor his capacity as a business man.
The elder Bartlett saw clearly. Handsome, like all the Inverns, Ulick Sr. became a pony-polo player of international renown; henceforward Wall Street and the bank only saw him when he dropped in to negotiate a domestic loan. No one could dislike this big, easy-going, young, blue-eyed Celt; even his father-in-law succumbed—after intervals of frigidity—to his personal charm. His wife adored him and wept over his gaming debts. He was a loose fish. Wine, women, and the wheel well nigh disrupted her family life. Paris offered him an escape from what he called the puritanism of New York—where, fancy! one's club shut down on you at 2 a.m.—and thus it happened that Ulick Invern, Jr., first saw the light in the French capital. With his brother, two years his senior, he received French training: The Ecole Normale, private tutors, ending with the Sorbonne. Oswald's painting talent soon manifested itself, and after eighteen the Paris of the Americans knew him no longer. He went to live on the Left Bank, in the Impasse du Maine, where, at his studio, he led the free, happy life of a monied artist. He had plenty of money, thanks to his indulgent mother, who, from time to time visited him, and, while he was on good terms with his brother, they didn't have much in common except their love for the Mater. They worshipped her. Their father they admired, but with well-defined reservations. He was a nee'r-do-well to the last, and died an aristocratic drunkard, leaving a malodorous memory, many mistresses and a cloud of debts. His widow never mentioned his name—that is, unless someone spoke disparagingly of him; then she betrayed resentment. The old chap was good form, but a charming black-guard, all the same—that was the verdict of his children, who speedily forgot him.
But his influence persisted beyond the grave, though the opposite of what might have been expected. Ulick told people who wondered over his abstinence that his father had drunk and smoked enough for a dozen families. So he let liquour and tobacco alone; besides, Oswald kept up the family tradition—a thirsty one. Following the mother's death, which occurred a few years after her husband's—there was heart malady in the history of the Bartletts—the two young men found themselves with a comfortable income, though not too rich. They saw little of one another. Tolerant as he was Ulick couldn't endure the sporting artistic crowd of the Latin Quarter atelier, and Oswald, on his side, found his brother a trifle pedantic, doctrinaire, even utopian. Wisely they kept asunder. A Frenchman in externals and by culture Ulick knew the men and women of the early nineties who made Paris a city of artistic and intellectual light. He was too young to have remembered Flaubert, but he visited Edmond de Goncourt at Auteuil and there encountered the group that had forsworn Zola and Naturalism. He admired the polished style of Edmond De Goncourt, a true aristocrat of letters; admired his Japonisme, his bibelots, pictures, and all that went to make the ensemble of that House Beautiful. A point of distain had begin to pierce the speech of the superb old gentleman, who confided to the sympathetic American youth that the younger generation didn't even knock at his door, that he and his dear dead brother, the illustrious Jules, had given those budding litterateurs a new opera-glass through which to view contemporary life. It was true. Dandys in their prose style, the De Goncourts had fashioned for themselves a personal vision and speech, feverish, staccato, intense. Their chief preoccupation was art, the pictorial, the tangible arts. No better book about artistic life has been written than Manette Salomon. And Madame Gervaisais is less an odyssey of a weak woman's soul, than an evocation of modern Rome. Alone, Edmond had written those exquisite notations of a girl's awakening consciousness to be found in the pages of Chérie. Ulick felt that he would not long tarry in that finely-filed, but chilly literature.
He had encountered at one of the reunions in the famous Concourt grenier, Henry James and also Joris-Karel Huysmans, whose names in baptism were Charles Marie-George. For this misanthropic writer he had shown such a preference that he attracted the attention of his idol and was invited to call upon him at his home in the rue de Sèvres on the rive gauche. A friendship began which greatly influenced the development of the younger man's character. His father had been what is facetiously called a "hickory" Catholic. He went to church when the spirit moved him. Yet, Irish-like, he never let the lustral week preceding Easter pass without confessing and communicating, usually going to the Trinity church on the boulevard Malsherbes, where he found a friend in a little Irish priest long stationed there for the convenience and edification of English-speaking residents. But Ulick's mother had been a High Church Episcopalian, and while she was not a fervent church woman she had consented to the baptism of her sons in the Roman Catholic religion. It is not so far away from my faith, she had told her fashionable English friends when they remonstrated with her over this backsliding from the principles of the Church of England. She, too, lacked true moral fibre though her association with her characterless husband may have been the chief contributing cause.
Ulick, however, was not of the temperament religious. He believed, of course, in a deity, an immanent deity; his was a pleasing sort of personal pantheism. Oswald was become a Manichean, a devil-worshipper. He did not repudiate the authority of the Church. But, then, Oswald drank absinthe, and long before that artists' apotheosis, he had hitched his artistic wagon to the saturnine canvases of Paul Cézanne. Ulick, on the contrary, never indulged in parti-pris. He was born, if such a thing were possible, with an indifferent temperament concerning any particular religion. All gods were divine to him, from the fetish of a South-Sea islander to the sublime doctrine of transubstantiation. He would have agreed with Baudelaire that it is neither permissible nor prudent to mock at any idol. A deity may have once made its abode in the wood or stone. Not cynical, Ulick was never convinced that any act of his could alter the inflexible law of causality. He had absorbed from Taine his deterministic leaning, luckily tempered by a sensible toleration. Whatever God is, he certainly can't exist outside of my brain-cells, argued Ulick. Each man creates a god after his own image. If I stop thinking of my particular deity-concept then he ceases to exist—for me; and that is the history of every god, every religion. All the rest is theology. Mother Church with her magnificent ceremonial, her liturgy, music, painting, sculpture, above all, architecture—for him, Gothic—appealed to his imagination, historic and aesthetic. Ulick was principally aesthetic; morals played a minor rôle in his existence.
But M. Huysmans had traversed the seven dolorous stations of his own crucified spirit and he at once made a searching examination into the conscience of his youthful admirer. He related, not without a certain muted pride, the advice of Barbey d'Aurevilly, the same advice Barbey had given Charles Baudelaire: that either the author of Là-Bas must prostrate himself at the feet of Jesus crucified, or else blow out his brains. "C'est fait," added Huysmans. It was shortly after the epoch of En route that he told Ulick of his conversion, not an unexpected one to those who knew the umbrageous, slender writer. Had it not been for the curiously beautiful literature it produced the various states of soul of M. Huysmans would not have riveted the fancy of Invern. The mordant epithet, picturesque phrase, the lenten rhythms of this multicolored prose, its sharp, savoury imagery—Huysmans' spiritual landscapes are painted with the gusto of a hungry man at a banquet where the plates are composed by a chef of genius—all these and the vision of a profoundly pessimistic soul, attracted him to Huysmans as to no other modern writer. Only to Petronius Arbiter among earlier penmen would he accord an equal value. Also to St. Augustine and Thomas à Kempis. He did not apologize for this versatility in tastes.
Huysmans prodded his conscience to such good effect that he accompanied the master to St. Sulpice, and also went with him when he made the rounds of the bookstalls along the Left Bank of the Seine. It was during one of these fascinating excursions in pursuit of ancient Latin hymnal literature that Ulick was presented to Remy de Gourmont, another of his favorite writers. A second friendship began, that long outlived the death of Huysmans. Maurice Barrès and his deification of the ego, was to be the third and principal étape in his moral development. There was one thing, nevertheless, that M. Huysmans could not persuade him to do; to make peace with his church. Urged to the confessional, there to cleanse his soul, to the communion-table to assuage his thirst for the infinite, Ulick would reply with a shoulder-shrug. The truth was that his sceptical analytical mind and his passion for women kept him from taking the final leap-off into piety and purity. My friend, Huysmans would insist, it is so easy! But if I relapse, as I am sure to do? would query Ulick. Then, he was assured that there was always further grace for the sinner. The waters of purification were always on tap. He could lave himself weekly—and begin over again; even the very next day. It's too easy, and it elevates religion to the dignity of a Turkish-bath, Ulick retorted. M. Huysmans, in turn, shrugged his shoulders, and the evening would end in tobacco smoke and furious discussions about art and literature.
And what evenings of ambrosia they were, mingled with the venom of the Master's critiques! He spared no one. He called Monseigneur d'Hulot, a bellicose booby, that same erudite and amiable churchman, who later wrote so discriminatingly of his bitter-tongued friend. An arsenal of opinions passed into the possession of the neophyte. But even at that early age, the formative period, his general culture was wider, more generous than the Master's. Ulick had been a student from the precocious age of seven when he was discovered by his nurse reading La Fontaine's Fables and Pickwick Papers. This bi-lingual training had produced admirable results. He knew two literatures thoroughly; in addition to a fair acquaintance with German and Italian. His mother had insisted on a German university and he selected Jena because of its propinquity to Weimar. Those four years in Germany had been the white stones in his studious career. There he had learned and loved Bach and Beethoven; there he learned to know Goethe, the greatest among moderns—he detested Bismarck and the hard positivism of the Prussian pan-Germanists; Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were to come later. His reactions to the system, or lack of system in the case of Nietzsche, was like a crisis in a dangerous fever. He alternated between languour and exaltation. Schopenhauer cooled off his naturally buoyant temperament, but Nietzsche gave him ecstasy as if poured from an overflowing goblet.