HUYSMANS, JORIS KARL, a French naturalistic novelist, born in Paris, February 5, 1848. His father and grandfather were noted painters; and among his ancestors was Cornelius Huysmans, whose works are admired by visitors to the Louvre. He studied law; was for a while in the Department of the Interior; and about 1874 he began to devote himself to literature. In that year he published his Drageoir aux Épices; and the following year he issued Marthe. These first works showed the naturalistic tendencies of the writer; and the disciple of the Zola school is clearly seen in his later novels: Sac au Dos (1878); Saurs Vatard (1879); Les Croquis Parisiens (1880); En Ménage (1881); À Vau l'Eau (1883). A reaction toward a kind of indefinite spiritualism is seen in À Rebours (1885); En Rade (1887); Là Bas (1889); En Route (1895).

Speaking of this latter work, Professor Wells says the author "has joined those pessimists' who have grown tired of the devil and are trying a reconciliation with God,' and has given us a study of monastic dilettanteism, which leads his hero to the weary conclusion that he is 'too much a man of letters to be a monk, and has already too much of the monk to live with men of letters;' and one turns gladly from such perversions of genius." But few of his works have been translated into English.

FRANCE AND MYSTICISM.

All exalted writers are foreigners. Saint Denys the Areopagite was a Greek; Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Sister Emmerich, were Germans : Ruysbröck came from Flanders; Saint Teresa; Saint John of the Cross, Saint Marie d'Agreda, were Spaniards; Father Faber was English; Saint Bonaventure, Angela of Foligno, Magdalen of Pazzi, Catherine of Genoa, Jacopo de Voragine, were Italians. France can count religious authors, more or less celebrated, but very few mystical writers properly so called. It cannot be denied, the genius of our race cannot easily follow and explain how God acts when he works in the central depths of the soul, which is the ovary of thought, the very source of conception. It is refractory at explaining, by the expressive power of words, the crash or the silence of grace. Bursting forth in the domain which is wasted by sin it is inapt at extracting from that secret world such works of psychology as those of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, such works of art as those of Voragine and Sister Emmerich. Besides that our field is scarcely arable and our soil harsh, where shall we find the laborer who sows and harrows it; who prepares, not indeed a mystical harvest, but even any spiritual fruit capable of assuaging the hunger of the few who stray and are lost, and fall from inanition in the icy desert of our time?-From En Route; translated by C. KEGAN PAUL.

FUL. XIV.

IBSEN, HENRIK, a Norwegian poet and dramatist, was born at Skien, a small village on Langesund Fjord, Norway, March 20, 1828. While in his twentieth year he became an apothecary's clerk in the village of Grimstad, during which period he wrote several poems which were published in country papers, and of which but one, Til Ungarn, survives. While preparing for Christiania University he wrote a drama, entitled Catalina, which was rejected by the theatres and publishers, and was printed at last at the expense of a friend, the total sales being but thirty copies. The same year he entered Christiania University and began writing for the daily and other periodicals, and he closed the year by obtaining the presentation of a one-act play, Kjaempehöjen, at the Christiania Theatre. At this period Ibsen was a Radical and a pronounced Socialist, a contributor to the famous Michael Thrane's paper, and one of a party of students who made an organized protest against the expulsion of another leading agitator from the country. Ibsen narrowly escaped imprisonment with Thrane when the latter was arrested and his paper suppressed. Ibsen also afterward joined two other young Radicals in founding the weekly, Andhrimner. His Christiania career was cut short by the offer of the post of theatre director and dramatic author for the theatre at Bergen, the second city of Norway, with a