Those Rhymers most closely associated with Symons’ Decadent Crusade could lay claim to equally adequate neurotic symptoms, and they mostly contrived to die young as a result. Dowson died at 33, having spent his last years as an exile in France. Lionel Johnson was an alcoholic who eventually became a recluse and died at 35. Even Symons contrived to have a nervous breakdown in 1908 (when he was 43), was certified insane and was diagnosed as suffering from “general paralysis” (a term usually employed as a euphemism for syphillis); but he defied fate and his doctors by recovering and surviving to the ripe old age of 80.
Others whose fates might be added to this catalogue of misfortunes include John Davidson, who hurled himself from a cliff at 52, having been deeply affected by Nietzschean ideas of the redundancy of contemporary man, and a writer very heavily influenced by Davidson, James Elroy Flecker, who died of tuberculosis at 31. Flecker was born too late to be labelled a Decadent – his first volume of poems was published in 1907 – but his career followed a course mapped out by countless French writers, including a voyage to the Orient whose legacy had a powerful effect on his later work, and his novelette The Last Generation (1908) is a thoroughly Decadent piece of work in the futuristic mode into which British ideas of Decadence were mostly transplanted.
Despite all these stigmata the English Decadents never subscribed to a medicated theory of artistic creativity in the way that so many of the French Decadents came to do. They did have medical men associated with the movement – most notably Havelock Ellis, whose pre-Freudian investigations of the psychology of sex were a significant, if soon out-dated, contribution to the development of human science – but Ellis’s proto-psychology could not find room for the follies of Moreau de Tours and Lombroso, and his literary criticism was in any case much more closely associated with his philosophical interests; like Davidson, Ellis was fascinated by Nietzsche, who was too positive a thinker to licence any kind of languorous self-indulgence. When writing as a literary critic, Ellis was also enthusiastic to use the cautionary argument with which British Decadents habitually defended themselves against the pejorative implications of the word; his notable essay on Huysmans in Affirmations (1898) takes care to emphasize that Decadence ought to be viewed entirely as an aesthetic concept and not a moral one.
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This insistence that English literary Decadence did not intend to be subversive of moral standards, and had nothing to do with morality at all, was so frequently reiterated by its supporters as to constitute an Ophelian excess of protestation. One of the epigrammatic remarks prefacing Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) takes care to allege that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book – but Wilde was persuaded to admit privately that of course the novel was (and unashamedly set out to be) a powerful moral allegory.
Wilde visited Paris regularly in the early 1880s; he was acquainted with Decadent writers like Lorrain and theorists of Decadence like Paul Bourget and was a great admirer of the literary work then being done in France, but he knew well enough that its methods and concerns could not be imported into English literature without great difficulty. His most calculatedly Decadent work, the play Salomé, was written in French, and subsequently banned from the London stage by the Lord Chamberlain.
Despite that he was the target of the crusade which effectively assassinated the English Decadent Movement, Wilde wrote relatively little Decadent material, and all of it is much more moralistic than it could possibly have been if he really had been the narcissistic and quasi-demonic character he appeared to his enemies to be. A close inspection of Wilde’s work reveals that his philosophical affiliation to Decadence was much more apparent than real. Dorian Gray, having taken a full measure of inspiration from À rebours, reaches a far more frustrating impasse than des Esseintes, and must ultimately pay a dire price for the privilege of having lived the life of a work of art while his portrait accepted the burdens and penalties of actual Decadence.
It is significant that the most contemplative and rhetorically effective works which Wilde ever produced are not his fervent essay on “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” and his bitter letter “De Profundis”, and certainly not his plays; they are in fact the four stories, ostensibly written for children, which make up The House of Pomegranates (1891), which are somewhat Gautieresque in style but much bleaker and more thoughtful in outlook. These heartfelt and rather harrowing tales, especially “The Fisherman and his Soul” and “The Star Child”, express a resistance to Decadent self-indulgence which makes a complete nonsense of the notion that Wilde had much in common intellectually with Johnson’s Cultured Fauns. His public poses continually flirted with the outrage of his enemies, but his own defence of unconventional moral values-unlike Sir Henry Wootton’s in The Picture of Dorian Gray – is not founded in any celebration of their defiance of Nature, but rather in deep complaints against the standards of natural and social justice alike.
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In going beyond Decadence to search for new and better ideals Wilde was certainly not alone. Even for French writers Decadence was mostly a phase through which they passed – for English ones it tended rather to be a matter which they contemplated, and then side-stepped or reinterpreted to their own convenience. It is hardly surprising that when it ceased to be convenient the English writers who had been called Decadent wasted no time in renouncing the label altogether.
To the extent that Decadence caught on among the poets of England it caught on as a fairly restrained and entirely superficial stylistic affectation. There is more genuine Decadence to be found in the work of Russian writers who would mostly have preferred to be known as Symbolists. When Wilde’s trial sent Symons and the rest scurrying in search of a less embarrassing label they were quick to argue that no Englishman had ever meant anything by the word except a kind of style, and although that claim is not really supportable by Symons’ essay, it is borne out by the literary material.
For a brief period before Wilde’s trial the idea of Decadence did become fashionable enough in London to generate its own periodical press, whose flagship was John Lane’s quarterly Yellow Book, launched in 1894. By far the most famous (or notorious) contributor to the Yellow Book, however, was not a writer but an illustrator – the art editor Aubrey Beardsley, who had also designed the cover which united the works in Lane’s “Keynotes” series, in which several notable Decadent works were featured. It is Beardsley’s illustrative work rather than any production in poetry or prose which provided English Decadence with a memorable image. His astonishing decorations for Lord Alfred Douglas’s English translation of Wilde’s Salomé (1894) were far more original, exotic and daring than any other products of the Movement. The evidence of his incomplete baroque romance Under the Hill (1897), suggests that Beardsley might have become a genuine Decadent writer too, but he was given no opportunity to do so, dying of tuberculosis in 1898.
The early issues of the Yellow Book did endeavour to provide Beardsley’s art-work with some appropriate textual support, but the poetry was essentially staid and the most interesting item – Max Beerbohm’s ironically flippant commentary on the cult of artificiality, “A Defence of Cosmetics” – only proved controversial because some readers did not realise that it was a joke. A similar flippancy was exhibited by a series of “Stories Toto Told Me” which was contributed by the colourful con-man “Baron Corvo” (Frederick W. Rolfe).
Any pretensions to authentic Decadence which the Yellow Book may have had were instantly jettisoned in the wake of the Wilde trial, though Wilde had never actually been a contributor to it. Beardsley was sacked for having (innocently) kept such bad company, and though he was promptly hired by Arthur Symons to work on The Savoy, a new periodical which was supposed to take up where the Yellow Book left off, the hastily-dropped torch of English Decadence proved too hot to handle. The Savoy lasted only eight issues, closing with a December 1896 issue in which all the text was supplied by Symons and all the illustrations by an ailing Beardsley; when i
t died, the English Decadent Movement, such as it had been, died too. A book by Symons which had already been advertised under the title The Decadent Movement in Literature was ultimately to appear in 1899 under the more diplomatic title of The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
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The body of English work which was produced with the Decadent label actually in mind is understandably thin, given that the term was in vogue for little more than three years, and the work to which the label can be attached at second hand is not much larger. The most intensely lurid products of English Decadence can be found in a small group of short story collections issued between 1893 and 1896: Count Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death (1893); R. Murray Gilchrist’s The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances (1894); and three “Keynotes” volumes: Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (1894); and M. P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski (1895) and Shapes in the Fire (1896).
Stenbock, who was by far the most enthusiastic Decadent in London, was not an Englishman by birth, though he had studied at Oxford and wrote in English; because he was a foreigner his conspicuous indulgence of the Decadent life-style was deemed understandable, if not forgivable. He lived amid absurd decorations, addicted to drink and drugs, and was more flamboyantly homosexual than Oscar Wilde. His mostly self-published poems had long been ignored, and he must have greeted the advent of an English Decadent Movement gladly, hopeful that he might now be discovered. Alas, though Symons did condescend to notice Stenbock, he did not shirk from describing him as “inhuman”. As it turned out, Studies of Death was his last work, though he probably would have soldiered on unrepentantly had he not died (his end hurried by contributory negligence) in 1895.
Gilchrist, Machen and Shiel, by contrast, were all writers at the beginning of their careers. Although, as in Stenbock’s case, the collections named above are remembered today mainly because the supernatural stories in them are sometimes reprinted in collections of horror stories, all three went on to produce an abundance of work in a less Decadent vein. Two of the three, though, had been marked deeply enough by their flirtation with Decadence that they never quite shook off its legacy. Gilchrist, the odd one out, died in 1917, but Machen and Shiel both survived until 1947, when they were both in their eighties. Though neither of them was subsequently to write anything quite as over-wrought as “The Great God Pan” or the stories in Shapes in the Fire they retained certain Decadent motifs and stylistic sympathies well into the twentieth century.
Machen’s best novel, The Hill of Dreams (written 1897; published 1907), is a story of escape into the past more extreme and more determined than Huysmans’ Là-Bas, and presents a memorable account of splenetic civilization-phobia. Shiel’s best novel, The Purple Cloud (1901), has the last man alive in the world giving extravagant vent to his anguish amist the ruins. Machen and Shiel both sought philosophical foundations for their sustained Decadent consciousness, Machen in mysticism and Shiel in a quasi-Nietzschean conviction that the coming of the übermensch was vital to a renewal of the cause of progress.
It is no coincidence that all four of these short story writers made extravagant use of the supernatural, nor that they did so in a more straightforwardly horrific way than either Gautier or Farrère. The English attitude to Decadence, even among its practitioners, was always spiced with a revulsion which lent itself readily to the construction of stories which are both macabre and morbid. “The Great God Pan”, one of the most nasty-minded stories ever written, extrapolates and displays this element of revulsion very cleverly. Machen, like Yeats, was very interested in contemporary occultism, and not merely as source material (which is how Rimbaud and Huysmans treated their readings in alchemy and satanism). Both were briefly associated with the Order of the Golden Dawn, which supported life-style fantasies combining Decadent elements with pretentions to esoteric Enlightenment, and it might be argued that the most wholehearted of all English Decadents was the one-time star of the Order, Aleister Crowley.
Like his Decadent countrymen Crowley selected out that part of the Decadent apparatus which suited him (drugs, sexual perversion and charismatic wickedness) and left behind that which did not (neurasthenia and pessimism) but he proved less repentant in the face of popular scandal than any of those who needed a broader audience for their work – though he was ultimately forced into exile as a result. His poetry and his prose fiction are of some relevance but slight merit.
There were other, much better, English writers whose life-styles tended towards what was popularly regarded as Decadent, and whose lives – for that reason – were spent mostly in exile. One was the lesbian Vernon Lee whose excellent supernatural short fiction plays lovingly with some Decadent motifs; another was Norman Douglas, whose novel They Went (1920) is an interesting late addition to the ironic tradition of English Decadence. Baron Corvo, who died in Venice, might also be added to the list, though the fact that he was persona non grata almost everywhere had as much to do with his sponging as any marginally-Decadent affectations he had once harboured. And, of course, Wilde too died in exile – in Paris, the one and only true home of all true Decadents.
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Supernatural fiction was not the only genre into which the Decadent elements of English fiction could be safely transplanted. Shiel has the distinction of having penned the only collection of Decadent detective stories in his Keynotes series volume Prince Zaleski (1895) but he made more extravagant use of futuristic settings, as in The Purple Cloud. The idea of futuristic decadence as a probable – perhaps inevitable – fate for the human species is very noticeable in British fiction, and recurs obsessively in the work which H. G. Wells did during the brief period when the idea was fashionable in Britain, as in his evocation of “The Man of the Year Million” (1893) and the image of the decadent Eloi besieged by brutal Morlocks is the central motif of The Time Machine (1895). Future decadence came to be seen as a particularly horrible threat by the writers of scientific romance, who devoted much imaginative effort to the quest for ahappier fate without ever quite putting the nightmare behind them.
The manner in which the future decadence of mankind became a favourite bugbear of writers of imaginative fiction is, of course, symptomatic of a hostility deeply embedded in English culture – a hostility which is peculiarly revealing. Its force was given to it by Victorian moralism but its fury testifies to the essential corruption of that very moralism. From a modern standpoint we cannot help but take the side of Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensbery, not simply because Wilde was a great writer while Queensbery was an intellectual nonentity, but also because we can now appreciate that the Marquess’s stern repression of his own homoerotic tendencies into a fondness for watching semi-naked men beat one another half to death was no more laudable than Wilde’s addiction to the services of rent boys.
On the day after the abandonment of the libel action which Wilde unwisely launched against Queensbery the National Observer published a leading article which asserted that: “There is not a man or woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the Marquess of Queensbery for destroying the High Priest of the Decadents. The obscene imposter, whose prominence has been a social outrage ever since he transferred from Trinity Dublin to Oxford his vices, his follies and his vanities, has been exposed, and that thoroughly at last. But to the exposure there must be legal and social sequels … and of the Decadents, of their hideous conceptions of the meaning of Art, of their worse than Eleusinian mysteries, there must be an absolute end.” Given such strength of feeling it is hardly surprising that the label was instantly abandoned by those who had briefly adopted it, and ardently denied in retrospect by all those who had never made the mistake of admitting to it. Art, whether wrought for art’s sake or not, was compelled to make its obeisance before the altar of morality like a reluctant heretic in the shadow of the Inquisition.
Such an acute sense of danger speaks of a more than ordinary fear. It speaks,
in fact, of an acute awareness of crisis. The English writers of Decadent poetry and fiction refrained from calling the British Empire decadent, and refused to think of the future as a hopeless condition – but their enemies, reacting as if they had, gave the game away. The Empire was in a state of irreversible decline, and what the future held was not a war to end war which would secure Anglo-Saxon hegemony for all time but a great orgy of stupid butchery which would test almost to destruction every optimistic philosophy of progress which could be rallied against its apocalyptic implications, whether religious, political or technophilic. The crucifixion of Oscar Wilde by the rampant spirit of imperial vanity proved to be the prelude to the crucifixion of an entire generation, sent to die in the muddied fields of northern France.
We do not think of the English poets of World War I as Decadents, nor do we attach any such label to the futuristic writers of the period between the wars who foresaw another war which would put an end to civilization, and of course they had none of the affectations of the aesthetic Decadent – no impuissant neurasthenia, no splenetic interest in opium or perversity – but such writers certainly had what the French Decadents had initially failed to export to England: a sense of hopelessness; a haunting suspicion that all that was left for men to do was fiddle while Rome burned.
And then, of course, came a new wave of mad emperors.…
The only possible conclusion which the modern commentator can come to, in looking back at the English Decadents, is that they were not nearly Decadent enough. Though they wrote horror stories and stories fearful of a far future decline into comfortable impuissance, modesty forbade them seeing anything horrible enough to awaken them or their readers to the historical peril in which they actually stood.
The Dedalus Book of Decadence, Volume 1: Moral Ruins Page 6