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The pace was set for the writers of Decadent prose by Elémir Bourges’ lurid novel Le Crépuscule des dieux (1883), in which the evil mistress of an aristocrat of the Second Empire encourages his three children to taste the fruits of their inherited degeneracy, leading to an orgy of incest, murder, suicide and traumatic insanity. Having indulged these excesses, however, Bourges did not long remain a Decadent, having grander ambitions for his work; he rapidly recovered a sense of the heroic ideal, and his later tragedies, including Les oiseaux s’envolent et les fleurs tombent (1893), became increasingly pretentious.
Joséphin Péladan was infinitely more consistent than Bourges, but he too had grander ambitions. Though Decadence remained his subject-matter throughout the twenty-odd volumes of a series collectively entitled La Décadence latine, which began with Le Vice Suprême (1884) and ran until 1925, his intention was to deplore it. Péladan’s central thesis was that the Decadence of the Romans was caused by the decay of their religious sensibilities, and that the modern world was similarly threatened. His work would have been more tedious than it was had his recipe for salvation been more orthodox, but the faith which he recommended for investment was a mystical Rosicrucianism whose champions are superhuman mages; this added a note of endearing eccentricity to the series in question, though most critics still refer to it as “unreadable”. The success of the early editions was probably enhanced by the fact that they carried erotic frontispieces by Felicien Rops, the most celebrated illustrator associated with the Movement.
Péladan was not a particularly influential writer in France, but it is worth noting that the basic formula of his work, carefully sanitised by the removal of the specifically Decadent elements, is recapitulated in Marie Corelli’s absurd account of the failure of neurasthenia redeemed in A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), which set her on the path to becoming the best-selling English author of the 1890s. No one was ever such a diehard opponent of Decadence as Miss Corelli, but she was obviously prepared to study her enemy fairly closely, as evidenced by her feverish exposé of the absinthe dens of Paris, Wormwood (1890).
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Among the more wholehearted Decadents, there was none more wholehearted – at least on the printed page – than the one female contributor to the boom, Marguérite Eymery, who signed herself Raehilde. A frequent contributor to Le Décadent, she was proudly self-conscious of her own corruption by the allure of artifice and neurosis, having previously been an innocent and healthy country girl. Her protestations to this effect were not conspicuously backed up by her lifestyle – she married the editor of the Mercure de France, which was hardly a Decadent journal, and seems to have lived a perfectly respectable life as Madame Vallette – but her novels present a spirited defence of uninhibited eccentricity. They were considered indecent in her day, and it is only now – when she can be hailed as a rediscovered proto-feminist – that they are beginning to appear in English translation.
Rachilde’s novels offer a series of paradoxically forceful and conscientiously Decadent heroines, most of whom are triumphantly unredeemed even by death. Nono (1885) features a promiscuous female dandy prone to murdering inconvenient lovers. La Marquise de Sade (1887), embarks, as one would expect, on a career of orgiastic sadism. Monsieur Vénus (1889), as its title implies, has a somewhat androgynous heroine, who instals the mummified corpse of one of her lovers on a couch in her boudoir. La jongleuse (1900; tr. as The Juggler) is emotionally torn between two lovers, one of whom is a Greek vase.
Monsieur Vénus obtained for its author the by-then-rare accolade of being charged as a danger to public morals, and perhaps she was, if only because she helped to free literary representations of female sexuality from the morass of male pornographic fantasy – a crusade taken up by Colette while she was freeing herself from exploitative collaboration with her husband Willy. Although it is the grotesquerie and luridness of much of her work which first attracts attention to Rachilde she was not without a sense of humour, and her critical work includes some notable essays on Symbolist and Surrealist writers. Her career continued well into the twentieth century, and although she toned down the sexual bizarrerie of her books even Jeux d’artifice (1932) still preserves recognisable Decadent affiliations.
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Catulle Mendès was one of the few writers who had built a considerable literary reputation before getting involved with the Decadent movement (and who may have spoiled it in the eyes of some later critics by doing so). His Revue Fantaisiste had provided an early showcase for the Parnassians and his own verse in that vein had attracted some praise; he had also been briefly married to Gautier’s daughter. The novels of his Decadent period are, however, fairly close in spirit to Rachilde’s, showing a similar interest in the grotesque and an apparent determination to overlook nothing in rendering exhaustive analyses of the particular corruptions to be featured.
Mendès first Decadent novel Zo’har (1886), is a baroque study of incest. Méphistophéla (1890) offers an account of a Lesbian career far less dreamily Romantic than any treatment of the theme in the work of Baudelaire or Pierre Louÿs. La Première Maîtresse (1887) includes several excursions in which the central characters go hopefully into the Paris slums in search of new sins (but even the Decadent imagination was unequal to the task of discovering one which was really new).
A different side of Mendès is, however, displayed by his short fiction and brief essays offering advice on the game of love, many of which are collected in Lesbia (1887). Here the author parades a slick and archly humorous cynicism, which takes it for granted that deceit is the lifeblood of romance and presents a series of pointed examples of calculated insincerity. This is Decadence at its lightest and least serious, but it still contrives to provide a challenge to conventional representations of the inclinations of the human heart.
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The writer who searched more avidly than any other for new sins to add to the catalogue of Decadence was Jean Lorrain (Paul Duval), a prolific contributor of verse and prose to the Decadent periodicals, whose numerous short stories include many intense and striking evocations of Decadent sensibility. Lorrain was a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, and was instrumental in bringing Wilde into the circle of the French Decadent writers, thus securing an important link between the French and English Movements. He was never as popular with the reading public as Rachilde, but if anyone deserves to be considered the central figure and fulcrum of the Movement it was he.
Lorrain’s characters, like Rachilde’s, explore all the usual avenues of perverse self-indulgence, plus one or two rarely met elsewhere (hair-fetichism; visits to abattoirs for the purpose of supping blood; and marrying tubercular wives for the pleasure of watching them waste away) but his attitude to such adventures is rather more clinical. He was also – again like Rachilde – a great devotee of literary symbolism, constantly searching for new metaphors with which to illuminate the perversions of human desire.
Lorrain’s short fiction includes many psychological horror stories, akin to Maupassant’s but differently inspired. Attempts to cope with his perennially poor health gave him many opportunities to explore the fringe medicine of the day, and he became intimately familiar with the hallucinatory effects of ether. Few writers have ever been such scrupulous observers of their own paranoid nightmares.
Lorrain’s novels and collections of stories mostly did not escape from the periodicals into more permanent form until the fashionability of Decadence was on the decline, but they remain key examples of the Decadent sensibility. His best work is to be found in his collections, including Sonyeuse (1891) and Buveurs d’âmes (1893), but his novel Monsieur de Phocas (1901) is arguably the most significant extended study of the Decadent personality after À rebours.
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By comparison with the novels of Rachilde, Mendès and Lorrain, Remy de Gourmont’s work is much lighter in tone, but his lightness is quite distinct from the lightness of Mendès’ shorter pieces. Gourmont was th
e sentimentalist of the Movement, and his Decadent short fiction mostly consists of dreamy erotic fantasies which celebrate the faithlessness of lovers in a manner far more mystical than cynical. Gourmont is far more famous today as a critic than a writer, and those of his prose works which are still praised are not the ones most closely affiliated to the Decadent Movement, but he was as influential a figure as any during the Movement’s brief heyday. Though his experiments with prose style and his strong theoretical interest in mysticism served eventually to remove him from the mainstream of Decadence, they were in their inception essentially Decadent moves. His short novel Le Fantome (1891) is probably the most typically Decadent of his works, featuring the usual perversions, but it has a glossiness and essential charm which make it distinctive. The extended prose poems collected in Histoires Magiques (1912) are far closer in spirit to the works of Pierre Louÿs than to the short stories of Rachilde and Lorrain, but they are the most perfect representations of an aspect of the French Decadent consciousness which was just as important as Mendès’ cynical playfulness or Lorrain’s horror stories.
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In the midst of the lurid excess which seemed to contemporary observers to be the hallmark of the Decadent novel. À rebours – the book which was eventually canonised as the archetypal novel of Decadence – must have seemed rather restrained in its descriptions of sexual indulgence. However, it owes its archetypal status not to its extremity but to the highly scrupulous way in which it went about its psychological analysis of the Decadent state of mind; the greater delicacy of Huysmans’ prose is expressed in more than one way.
Huysmans conspicuously failed to make the grade as a wholehearted Decadent, but unlike Péladan he did seem to have made a very concerted effort. In À rebours he paraded himself (for few doubted that the anti-hero Des Esseintes was a thinly-disguised representation of the author) as a man who had plumbed the depths of Decadence much more thoroughly than mere poseurs like Rachilde, and had returned, not only to tell the tale but to deliver a verdict. Huysmans was seemingly brought by experience to the same conclusion that Barbey D’Aurevilly had reached by consideration of the logic of the argument, that the Decadent road had only two possible destinations: the foot of the cross or the suicide’s grave. Huysmans not only chose the former on his own account, but went on to write a series of novels which painstakingly conducted a fictional projection of himself along the same route.
The chief virtue which À rebours has is its plausibility. The effete aristocrat Des Esseintes has a fine record of perversions, but they are mostly behind him when the story – such as it is – begins. The lifestyle described by the text is close enough to the ordinary to make the character believable, and to make it possible for the reader to identify with him. Reading Rachilde or Jean Lorrain could only, in the final analysis, be a kind of textual voyeurism; in that sense if no other their novels are pornographic. By contrast, À rebours offered a central character whose sensibilities were Decadent through and through, but whose adventures in calculated perversity were as authentically impuissant as one might expect from a disorganised and apathetic person.
Des Esseintes’ Decadence is certainly elaborate, but it is mostly cerebral; he spends most of his time reading, eating and strolling, and all his self-indulgences are bordered by detached anxiety. A note of sour realism is eventually forced to intrude upon his search for exotic experience when he takes medical advice which assures him that he simply cannot carry on if he wishes to avoid pain, misery and death – and having received that advice he suffers an entirely plausible, if very un-Decadent, attack of common sense.
Des Esseintes observes himself constantly, becoming the ideal reader as well as the central character of the life-story whose narrative he laboriously constructs. He is more self-conscious than the other heroes of the Decadent boom, and his self-consciousness retains a suspicious hint of cold sanity which the likes of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Jean Lorrain were probably incapable of admitting to their work. À rebours is an essay feebly masquerading as a novel, and it is hardly surprising that it transcended the relatively tawdry genre of which it appeared to be a part to become a textbook of Decadence, and a handbook for those Decadents whose interest in the movement was more aesthetic than practical.
Huysmans did not, of course, conclude his analysis of Decadence with À rebours. His next work, too, can be regarded as an amplification of themes found in Barbey d’Aurevilly, who had explored the role of active evil in modern life in his misogynistic collection of stories Les Diaboliques (1874; tr. as The She-Devils). The series of novels with which Huysmans followed À rebours, chronicling the career of one Durtal, begins with a lurid examination of the temptations of Satanism, Là-Bas (1891).
Durtal, fed up to the back teeth with the awfulness of modern Paris, attempts to escape into dreams of a more vivid time (such pursuits of the artificial paradises of legend-encrusted history are a significant sub-theme of Decadent fantasy). While researching a biography of France’s most notorious monster, Gilles de Rais, he is drawn into contact with the Satanists of contemporary Paris – in particular with Mme. Chantelouve, in whose company he attends a Black Mass. Eventually, though, Durtal plumps for God instead of Satan, and is drawn in En route (1895) to the other extreme of life in a Trappist monastery, before going on in La Cathédrale (1898) and L’oblat (1903) to explore other facets of the religious life.
One recalls, of course, that Gilles de Rais sent the Churchmen of his day into paroxysms of triumphant delight with his eventual repentance of all his horrible sins; he delivered the most spectacular confession ever heard before going gladly to his death – and then, one presumes, to Heaven. The fact of his having been such a conscientious Decadent in his earlier days similarly enhanced the value of Huysmans’ conversion in the eyes of those who received him into the bosom of the Roman Church. Perhaps one should also recall, however, that Gibbon’s overview of the Decline and Fall of Rome saw the ancient empire’s conversion to Christianity merely as one more stage in its long decay. If we are to accept (on the evidence of its dubious pseudo-psychological underpinning) the conclusion that Decadence was really a species of silliness, we can hardly make out any better case for Catholicism. What Huysmans and Durtal – and all those who followed their example – mapped out was not really a road to salvation, but merely a path from frying pan to fire. On the other hand, it must remain a matter of opinion as to whether any of the other escapes from Decadent consciousness measured out by other writers were, in the end, any more satisfactory.
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It was not religious faith but the attractions of a Symbolist movement shorn of Decadent pessimism and impuissance which were to provide a refuge for the majority of fair-weather Decadents who found the going too tough. Some critics have, indeed, suggested that there was little more involved in the displacement of Decadence by Symbolism than a change of name.
Evidence to support this case includes the facts that Mallarmé’s reputation was substantially boosted by the revelation in À rebours that he was Des Esseintes’ favourite writer, and that Verlaine’s “Art poétique” (written in 1874 but not published until 1882) was adopted by the Symbolists as a key point of inspiration. Further evidence was supplied by the short-lived English Decadent Movement, whose promulgator Arthur Symons was quickly moved to protest, after the trial of Oscar Wilde, that it had really been a Symbolist Movement all along. In actuality, though, the two terms should by no means be regarded as synonyms; what the Symbolists inherited (or took) from the Decadents was style without substance. They were sympathetic to the Rimbaudian rational disordering of the senses and its careful avoidance of mundane description, but they were mostly uninterested in the anguish of the Decadents and its supportive apparatus of ideas.
Mallarmé’s achievement in producing Symbolism to eclipse Decadence was in contriving, after some initial dithering, to discover that which the Decadents thought impossible: a new poetic Ideal and a new quasi-religious poetic mission. Though Malla
rmé never actually produced the Grand Oeuvre about which he was always talking, it nevertheless sufficed as a hypothetical goal towards which all his work could be orientated. He lay down for his followers a manifesto for life and art which was less uncomfortable to follow and more attractive as an item of commitment. Mallarmé was, of course, a much happier man than Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Verlaine: he was more successful in love, and eventually succeded – as none of them had done – in providing himself with a good living and a sound reputation.
As the protopsychological theories which had briefly dignified their excesses fell into decline, it is hardly surprising that all but the hardiest of the Decadents deflected their careers into more promising literary territory, accepting Mallarmé’s offer of renewed hope and revitalised significance. Nevertheless, the legacy of Decadence lingered at least until the end of the century, and its impact was not insignificant even upon the work of those writers who must be considered to have been on its periphery.
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5.
FIN DE SIÉCLE:
THE DECADENCE OF DECADENCE
Barbey d’Aurevilly was wrong, of course, to argue that the only possible escape routes for the earnest Decadent were Catholicism and suicide. Religious faith is not the only ideal to which a man might commit himself in order to recover the sense of being and doing something worthwhile. Aesthetic and political creeds could both offer convenient exits for Decadents disenchanted with disenchantment, and did so; others could simply learn to look at themselves and their work more ironically, becoming self-mocking satirists.
In exactly the same way, there were many writers contemporary with the Decadent Movement whose unwillingness to give up some such commitment, or whose inability to become entirely earnest about Decadent themes, kept them on the periphery despite the influence of the same ideas and preoccupations which attracted the Decadents to Decadence. Some of these writers warrant discussion in the context of Decadence if only to assist in the marking out of its blurred boundaries, and one or two of them produced important Decadent texts among works of other kinds.
The Dedalus Book of Decadence, Volume 1: Moral Ruins Page 4