BIOGRAPHIES.
Saint Lydwine of Schiedam. By J. K. Huysmans. (Kegan Paul. 6s. 6d.) Long before Huysmans' return to the Roman Catholic Church he had been attracted as an artist by the artless perfection of the Lives of the Saints. Though he is generally termed a Naturalist, the style of his novels is that of a man intensely imaginative in a narrow range ; he produces his effects by an astonishing wealth of unexpected associations. In this biography of Saint Lydwine, however, he lays aside his mundane genius and presents as starkly as possible the records of her tormented life. Though it contains less of Huysmans himself than En Route or La Cathedrale (to mention the two translations issued by the same publisher), the interest of this book is not only to the devout and the literary. It presents a very remarkable but not uncommon phenomenon which the materialist would dismiss as hallucination. More significant is the glimpse it gives into the mental life of the fourteenth century, when the supernatural was the most natural thing in the world.
Previous page
