THE ATTRACTIONS OF DECADENCE
Even when one accepts that Baudelaire would have been a less interesting poet had he not led such a tortured life it remains rather surprising that he became a role-model for an entire movement. In order to understand this more fully, it is necessary to pay some attention to the other intellectual currents of the day.
Before the movement actually got under way in the 1880s the pessimism which the Decadents were to embrace was given an increased measure of respectability by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which was popularized in France by Théodule Ribot in 1874. Schopenhauer argues that the world contains so much more misfortune than joy that life is fundamentally unhappy, tolerable only because the Will to Live persistently deceives us with unrealistic hopes. The enlightened man, according to Schopenhauer, must replace this deceptive will with an honest Idea, whose contemplation is fundamentally aesthetic. All this seemed to French aesthetes a significant underlining of what Baudelaire had attempted and achieved.
An even more striking and radical endorsement of the Decadent pose was, in addition, provided by contemporary fashions in proto-psychology, with which many writers were closely in touch. The experiments with hashish and opium which were undertaken by Gautier and other members of the self-styled Club de Haschichins in the 1830s and 1840s were undertaken in a fairly careful spirit of exploration: the drugs were frequently supplied by medical men who supervised and observed their use, and catalogued their effects. The principaldoctor involved in Gautier’s hallucinatory adventures was Joseph Moreau, who liked to style himself “Moreau de Tours”. Moreau’s interest in abnormal psychology was by no means confined to the study of psychotropic substances; he produced a whole series of books between 1835 and 1859 investigating the phenomena of “nervous disorders”. His work exhibits two constant preoccupations which were of considerable potential interest to Decadents, and his personal acquaintance with both Gautier and Baudelaire must have ensured that they were thoroughly familiar with his ideas. The first of these preoccupations was an intense interestin artistic genius as a species of neurosis; the second was a fascination with the alleged heredity of neurotic traits. Moreau was by no means alone in these preoccupations, which were shared by several more prestigious figures, most importantly the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, whose book on the psychology of genius was translated into French at the height of the Decadent Movement, in 1884.
The emergent science of abnormal psychology was very heavily influenced by early evolutionist ideas, which made much of the contrary tendencies of “progress” and “degeneration” in searching for explanations of the palaeontological record. In France, of course, evolutionist thinking continued to be dominated by Lamarckian ideas – including the proposition that acquired characteristics could be inherited – for some years after the first publication in England (in 1859) of Darwin’s ideas. As the human sciences came uneasily into being analogies were constantly being drawn between society and biological organisms, so that the ills afflicting society could be explored by analogy with the pathology of disease. (It should be remembered that disease itself was not well-understood at this time; Pasteur did not develop the modern germ theory of disease until the 1860s and a considerable confusion of medical and moral attitudes persisted for some time afterwards.)
The evident correlation between sexual licence and venereal disease was echoed in proto-psychology by dark superstitions regarding the effects of habitual masturbation, and no one could be sure to what extent the sins of fathers might be visited upon their sons. Montesquieu’s speculations about the decadence of the Romans were recapitulated and much amplified by theories of hereditary decadence which imagined aristocratic families devoted to luxury and vice becoming more effete and less sane with every generation that passed.
In consequence of these speculations there emerged in the proto-psychology of nineteenth century France and England a new myth: the myth of neurasthenia. The neurasthenic was a physically weak and over-sensitive individual, likely also to be morally weak, permanently possessed by apathy and spiritual impotence. His (or her – though females were more likely to be diagnosed as “hysteric”) condition was primarily the result of bad hereditary but could easily be inflamed by self-abuse and other bad habits. The closeness of this image to the image of the Decadent personality is by no means entirely coincidental; the pseudoscientific theorists of degeneracy fed upon literary inspiration, and returned what they had borrowed with generous interest.
But the proto-psychologists went further than this, offering speculations which put the neurotic victim of bad heredity in a rather more romantic light. Moreau and Lombroso were both concerned to argue that artistic genius was itself a species of neurosis, closely associated with bad heredity and eccentric lifestyle. The unfortunate victims were therefore offered a possible route to compensatory achievement; would-be Decadents were encouraged to believe that the madder and more miserable they were, the more justified they might be in thinking of themselves as men of genius.
Baudelaire, who was one of many nineteenth. century writers to have his end hastened by the physical and mental corruptions of syphilis, was not the only striking example offering apparent support for this thesis. Gerard de Nerval, a friend of Gautier’s who was notorious for having strolled in the gardens of the Palais Royal leading a lobster on a leash of pale blue ribbon, had not only gone insane and killed himself but had transmuted his mental disorder into disturbed literary forms – most notably his phantasmagoric novella Aurelia (1855), published posthumously in the year ofhis death. Nerval’s poetry was not assembled into a collection until 1877, shortly before the heyday of Decadence. It included a supernaturaliste group written par désespoir: a product of his madness which helped lay the groundwork for certain Decadent preoccupations.
The influence of proto-p sychology was by no means confined to writers of a Decadent stripe; indeed, the French writer who was most elaborately influenced by theories of hereditary degeneracy was Emile Zola, whose extensive analysis of the family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts is entirely based on such ideas. Zola, like Saint-Beuve before him, was writing about Decadents and other victims ofbad heredity from a clinically objective standpoint; he saw himself as a quasi-scientific Naturalist, as did the Goncourts, whose techniques of characterization are similarly heavily “medicated”. It is not surprising that such authors as these were in no hurry to associate themselves more closely with their subject-matter; but nor is it surprising that others were bolder, entirely content to be mad, bad and dangerous to know, if such a condition were the red badge of courage which the authentic genius must wear.
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To what extent it is mere coincidence is difficult to judge, but it is certainly true that the two poets who followed Baudelaire in providing exemplary impetus to the Decadent Movement – Rimbaud and Verlaine – followed careers which were even more disordered than his.
Like Baudelaire, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud suffered a fatal break in his family relationships when he was six years old. His father deserted his mother in 1860, unable any longer to tolerate the severity of her rectitude. Rimbaud too was to rebel against this smothering domestic tyranny, embracing the revolutionary ideas of his teacher Georges Izambard and three times running away from school in 1870 and 1871. In between these excursions he spent his time in the school library reading the most scandalous texts available, including books on alchemy, witchcraft and ritual magic as well as supposedly-indecent poetry and novels. He became vehemently and aggressively atheistic, and wrote angry poems in profusion.
In 1870 Rimbaud sent several poems to Banville, who was then selecting material for the Le Parnasse contemporain, claiming to be seventeen and expressing his fervent desire to be a Parnassian, but they were not published. Early in 1871 he laid out in a letter to his teacher Paul Demeny his new theory and philosophy of literature, attacking “egoists” and expressing his resolve to become a Promethean “seer”, which aim he expected to attain by a “long, pro
digious, and rational disordering of the senses”. Foremost among the heroes whom he expected to follow and surpass was Baudelaire, who was in his estimation “the king of poets, a veritable God”.
In 1871 Rimbaud sent some poems to Paul Verlaine, who was then an obscure and only slightly effete Parnassian. Verlaine, in one of the fits of reckless enthusiasm to which he was frequently subject, summoned the young acolyte to his side – much to the disgust and discomfort of the in-laws with whom he and his heavily-pregnant eighteen-year-old wife were living. Rimbaud and Verlaine became enthusiastically involved in a mutual disordering of their experiences, which was certainly prodigious, though perhaps not so conspicuously rational. They drank absin the and smoked hashish, and though both were later to deny in writing that there was anything sexual in their undoubtedly intimate liaison – well, they would have to say that, wouldn’t they? The two lived in England for a while, probably smoking opium in the dens of Limehouse, before their stormy relationship came to a head in Brussels in 1873, when a drunken Verlaine fired a pistol at his infuriating friend, wounding him in the hand. Despite Rimbaud’s attempts to exonerate him from all blame for this intemperate act, Verlaine was imprisoned for two years.
Rimbaud made few attempts to publish his work, and in 1874 he decided to renounce literature completely. He responded one last time to an urgent summons from Verlaine following the latter’s release from prison, but found the elder poet in the grip of a reignited passion for the Catholic faith and turned his back on him forever. He then undertook a much-interrupted journey to the East, ending up in charge of a trading-post in Abyssinia; but his life there ultimately proved too staid and he attempted, unsuccessfully, to take up a career as a gun-runner and slave-trafficker. His adventures were finally cut short early in 1891 when his leg was amputated because of a tumour; he did not survive the year. Ironically, he had become famous in his native land during the period of his absence thanks to Verlaine’s inclusion of him in his study of “accursed poets”, Poètes maudits (1884), which was followed by belated publication of his most notable works, Illuminations and Une saison en enfer (incorrectly advertised as “posthumous”). Rimbaud’s position as a central figure of the Decadent eighties was anachronistic, but the paradoxicality of it was entirely appropriate.
It was left to Verlaine himself to become the parent of the actual Decadent Movement. Although his life probably presents a better exemplar of Decadence than anything he actually wrote, it is frequently argued that his sonnet “Langueur”, which appeared in the periodical Le Chat Noir in 1883, was the launching-pad for fashionable Decadence. Verlaine was at that time still little-known as a poet, although his Poèmes Saturniens had appeared as long ago as 1866 (like most of his subsequent books its publication had been subsidised and its initial circulation limited), but he had his notoriety to assist his reputation, and his personal history made him a ready-made hero for aspiring Decadents. He quickly established himself as an exemplar and an opinion-maker, and circles of Decadent poets rapidly formed around and alongside him. New periodicals were issued to carry forward the crusade, though Le Dècadent itself, issued by Anatole Baju, did not appear until April 1886, and died a year later.
Verlaine apparently did not much like being labelled Decadent – which was understandable, in view of his reinvestment in religious faith – but he could do nothing to negate the image which he had acquired. In the years which preceded the death which he had hastened by his many misadventures he was frequently hospitalized, and spent the rest of his time shacked up with ageing prostitutes, living testimony to the neurotic quality of literary genius.
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With such examples as these before them, would-be Decadents were initially prepared to take great pains to cultivate their neurasthenia, or at the very least to be conscientious hypochondriacs. They treasured their symptoms, not only as reflections of the unfortunate nature of the human condition but also as evidences of their intellectual superiority over the common herd. The medication of the idea of Decadence is very obvious in the prose works of the Movement – most notably, of course, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours (1884; tr. as Against Nature), which quickly became and remained the Bible of the Decadents in spite of its central character’s climactic repentance.
This absorption of Decadence into pseudo-psychological theory became an important factor in the literary criticism which grew up alongside the movement. Paul Bourget, the most prestigious of the contemporary critics who dignified the idea of Decadence with serious consideration, was one of several writers who used quasi-psychiatric analysis to weld philosophical, historical and literary ideas of decadence together into a composite account of the predicament of modern man. His two series of Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883; 1885) analysed the supposed sickness of the age by reference to its great writers; it was, inevitably, from his contemplation of Baudelaire that he drew the “theory of decadence” which was to provide a manifesto for the later writers of the Movement.
Inevitably, the kind of grand theorizing in which Bourget indulged could not be content with a handful of French writers as key exemplars; it had to demonstrate its universality by showing that there were kindred spirits in other civilized nations. Baudelaire had, of course, been particularly fascinated by the American Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories of haunted neurasthenic aristocrats, like “Morella”, “Berenice” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” were easily accommodated. Bourget also made pilgrimages to Britain to immerse himself in the heritage of Coleridge, de Quincey and the Pre-Raphaelites, who were all numbered among the influences of French and English Decadents; those who followed in his footsteps cast their net ever more widely. Thus, angst-ridden Germanic pessimists and gloomy Russian nihilists were quickly absorbed by later writers into the expanding canon of literary Decadence, and so were those Italian writers who turned a jaundiced eye on the reduced circumstances of contemporary Rome.
This kind of expansion of perspective tends to happen whenever the existence of a Movement is announced; although the participants in a Movement must distinguish themselves from what everyone else has done and is doing, they must also claim to constitute the leading edge of a tidal wave, which they tend to do by claiming kinship with as many of the great and good as they can. Forging links to trends in various arenas of extra-literary activity is always useful as a rhetorical device for the boosting of one’s own importance. The tying together of the literary idea of decadence with the theories of protopsychology did, however, carry a risk of deflation. Ideas of historical decadence like those promulgated by Montesquieu were sufficiently numinous to be insulated against the possibility of falsification, but the theories of Moreau de Tours and Lombroso aspired to, and required, empirical support which conspicuously failed to appear.
The theories of neurasthenia and neurotic genius were a farrago of nonsense, and the tide of opinion soon turned against them. Even in the France of Lamarck and Bergson, the triumphs of Darwinism eventually persuaded thinking men that acquired characteristics could not be inherited and that hereditary degeneracy was an essentially silly idea. That silliness inevitably rubbed off on the literary Decadent, whose status as a tragic figure was severely compromised.
It is unsurprising, in view of this, that the novelists of Decadence – who found difficulty, in any case, in recapturing the fervent intensity and intimate sensibility of Decadent poetry – soon became defensively ironic and satirical. It is unsurprising too that Decadent fiction did not long survive the turn of the century; the serious-minded Decadent had ample defences against the scorn of his enemies, but he had none against their laughter.
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4.
AGAINST NATURE:
DECADENCE À LA MODE
During the brief period of fashionability which it enjoyed after 1883 the decadent consciousness was extrapolated in a great deal of poetry and a flood of novels and short stories. With only a few exceptions these works and their authors have been relegated from the first division
of literary fame. The writers of the period who now seem most important – Stéphane Mallarmé is the most obvious example – tend to be discussed under other headings even when they were considered to be Decadents at the time. The influential critic Remy de Gourmont made Mallarmé the central figure of the Movement in his contemporary essay, but he is now deemed to have been the pioneer of Symbolism – and if Remy de Gourmont’s own fiction and poetry are ever commended they too tend to be reckoned Symbolist, though the author certainly thought of many of his works as Decadent.
This process of relegation has much to do with moral attitudes to the way in which Decadent writers revelled in the morbid spectacles which they presented. Huysmans was spared such relegation not simply because he was a better writer – although À rebours presents such a perfect image of the Decadent anti-hero that it is hardly necessary to preserve others – but also because he recanted so conspicuously and transferred himself to the side of the angels. This was an option not open to all; Jean Lorrain’s literary indulgence of homoerotic themes was correlated with a more-or-less open acknowledgement of his own homosexuality from which there was no going back.
It should be noted, though, that a generalized moral disapproval of Decadence (such as one still finds in some historians of the Movement) is insensitive to certain aspects of Decadent fiction, and tars some very different writers with the same brush. A good deal of Decadent prose is far from earnest; some is exuberantly playful and some of it very witty. Many of the authors who adopted the Decadent pose in the mid-80s were content to wear it flippantly as a gaudy costume. It was for some a thoroughly liberating kind of fiction, which allowed them to escape from the straitjacket of conventional moral expectations to celebrate infidelity instead of fidelity, lust instead of love, and idiosyncratic fantasy instead of sanctified desire. For some, this was an opportunity to cultivate a new intensity, but for others it was an amusing game – nor were these two alternatives entirely incompatible.
The Dedalus Book of Decadence, Volume 1: Moral Ruins Page 3