The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins)

by Brian Stableford

  The Comte de Villiers d’Isle Adam, whose Contes cruels (1883) were praised by Des Esseintes in À rebours would certainly be included with the Decadents were it not for an urgent Idealism in his work which kept ennui and impuissance from his literary agenda. The conte cruel sub-genre which he pioneered, and which was subsequently taken up by writers like Maurice Level, certainly contains some Decadent items, but it is also possessed by a strong sense of irony which is much less narrowly-focused than the irony of Mendès’ work. The Decadent aristocrat Lord Ewald in Villiers’ misogynistic fantasy L’Eve Future (1886) finds an extraordinary way to transcend his predicament, when the inventor Edison builds him a perfect woman, thus taking the cult of the artificial to a new extreme. In his own art-work, Villiers could never be content for long with apathetic accidie; some of his “cruel tales” exhibit an uneasy callousness which is perfectly Decadent, but they are not typical of his outlook; he went on to develop a conscientiously neo-Romantic extravagance in such visionary dramas as the posthumously-published Axel (1890).

  Insofar as Villiers de l’Isle Adam was a Decadent at all one could argue that a Decadent consciousness which he would dearly have wished to avoid was briefly thrust upon him by circumstance. He came from an aristocratic family in dire decline and failed utterly to redeem his position by making a useful marriage; small wonder, therefore, that he was occasionally possessed by splenetic hopelessness. He was not the only writer to be thus seized against his will; Gérard de Nerval was to prove an unfortunate prototype for a group of writers who were gradually toppled into the abyss of mental disorder – usually by the ravages of syphillis. Guy de Maupassant, who was a thoroughgoing realist in the greater part of his work, became increasingly fascinated by the effects of morbid hallucination as the spirochaete disordered his senses, and some of his work of the late eighties has a paranoid intensity. The fact that he was never able to accept the literal existence of ghosts did not stop him from exploring the psychology of fear in a scrupulous and intense fashion, and his work in this vein is sometimes very close in spirit to the supernatural stories of Jean Lorrain.

  Visionary drama of the kind developed by Villiers de L’Isle Adam was also the preferred medium of the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck, whose early work is very closely associated with the Decadent Movement, displaying passive characters helpless to defy the frankly mysterious forces which impel them towards their various dooms. From La Princesse Maleine (1889) to La mort de Tintagiles (1894) his work is thoroughly pessimistic, but his most famous work, L’oiseau bleu (1909; tr, as The Blue Bird) is a much more hopeful allegory in which the power of the dreamer becomes sufficiently assertive to control and defy the threat of nightmare.

  The theatre is not, in any case, a suitable medium for the Decadent consciousness, which requires more interiorization than drama can usually sustain, and more freedom from censorship than the stage usually allows. The dilution and divergence of the Decadent consciousness after 1890 is much better exemplified by a handful of poets and novelists who, although preoccupied with certain characteristic Decadent themes, avoided any wholehearted immersion in the Movement. All of them existed on the margins of Decadence, and were selective in those aspects of it which they elected to extrapolate.

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  All of Jules Laforgue’s work was published during the heyday of the Decadent Movement, and he was readily associated with it by contemporary critics, but his poetry and short fiction are saved from authentic Decadent consciousness by the fact that his sense of irony was far too powerful. Laforgue, like the poet Tristan Corbière before him, contrived to transform a fundamentally gloomy outlook by the power of ironic wit. He quickly developed a penchant for sparkling wordplay and pyrotechnic sarcasm, shown to best effect in his collection of six Moralités légendaires (1887), in which the pretensions of heroes like Perseus, Lohengrin and Hamlet are mercilessly deflated. There is a full enough measure of ennui and spleen in Laforgue’s work, and he certainly exhibited the customary Decadent traits in his private life – even to the extent of dying young of tuberculosis in 1887 – but the work which he completed in his final years gives every evidence of the fact that he had turned satirically against the Movement which had briefly involved him.

  Pierre Louÿs, by contrast, is not generally included in lists of Decadent writers, and understandably so – his use of Classical themes takes no account of Montesquieu’s theory of Roman decadence, being far more interested in the aesthetic glories of Greece than the tarnished grandeur of Rome. But he did translate Lucian’s teasing series of dialogues concerning the pragmatic ideology of the courtesan, and he devoted much effort to a quasi-Decadent celebration of Lesbianism in Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894). The glorification of Sapphic love is also a significant sub-text of his exotic historical novel Aphrodite (1896), which is set in Alexandria during the reign of Cleopatra’s elder sister Berenike. There is nothing particularly neurasthenic about the characters who figure in this tale of fatal infatuation, but it stands in a direct line of descent from Gautier and makes rather less concession than Gautier did to the saving grace of grand passion.

  Louÿs followed Aphrodite with Les Aventures de roi Pausole (1901), a Rabelaisian fantasy set in the imaginary realm of Tryphême – which, the author is careful to state, should not be mistaken for Utopia. Here the tone is deft and amusing; the eroticism is light-hearted, and literally pleads not to be taken seriously. In more earnest work Louÿs retained a deep suspicion of the redeeming quality of love, as evidenced by the quasi-masochistic tale of disappointments La Femme et le pantin (1898; tr. as The Woman and the Puppet) and the book which he could never bring himself to finish for publication, Psyche (issued posthumously, and incomplete, in 1925), and he spent the latter part of his life as a virtual recluse, but his incipient Decadence was compromised by a sentimentality which made him excessively regretful about the failure of sexual passion to live up to human hopes.

  Louÿs’ protegé Charles Bargone, who wrote under the pseudony Claude Farrére, might have been a much more enthusiastic Decadent than his mentor, but he was far too late coming upon the scene to get involved in the Movement itself and his Decadent affectations were soon nipped in the bud. He has the distinction, however, of having belatedly produced what probably deserves to be considered the ultimate study of the Decadent use and abuse of drugs, in his remarkable story-cycle Fumée d’Opium (1904; tr. as Black Opium). There had been many previous accounts of the careers of drug-users – notably Marcel Mallat’s La Comtesse Morphine (1885) – but most had followed Baudelaire’s example in being both recherché and censorious. Farrère’s story-cycle follows the example of Jules Boissière’s Les Fumeurs d’opium (1896) in paying much more attention to the exoticism of the lands from which opium comes, where its use confuses and blends exotic dream-experiences with exotic landscapes. It is, however, a more ornate and multi-faceted work than its predecessor, beginning with a group of “legends” and passing through “annals”, “ecstasies”, “doubts” and “phantoms” to a concluding “nightmare”.

  Farrére was to go on to produce many more works of an entirely un-Decadent stripe, most of which recall the upbeat exoticism of the sailor “Loti” (Julien Viaud). His reinvestment in optimism was aided by political commitment, but it is perhaps significant that his vivid futuristic fantasy Les condamnés a mort (1920; tr. as Useless Hands) features a hopeless revolution against technologically-sophisticated Capitalists whose comforts have robbed them of all moral sensibility.

  Political commitment of one kind or another kept many of the leading French writers of the 1880s away from Decadence altogether. When Anatole France abandoned the aristocratic values which he had inherited and turned against Catholicism he never paused to dally with Decadence but kept his hopes firmly invested in alternative visions of a better future. The same was very nearly true of Octave Mirbeau, but the anarchism to which Mirbeau was attracted was a less dogmatic creed than France’s communism, and his novels are correspondingly unfocused.r />
  Mirbeau’s work is too full of righteous wrath against the evils of the day to be reckoned properly neurasthenic (despite his use of the word in the title of one of his later books), but he was to produce in Le jardin des supplices (1899) a key work of quasi-Decadent fantasy. The character of Clara, who entrances the hero and deflects him from his semi-purposeful journey to the East, is both a descendant and marvellously grotesque exaggeration of Gautier’s Cleopatra or Rachilde’s Marquise de Sade. The allegorical tour of the garden of tortures which she takes in the company of the intimidated anti-hero is a portrait of the Decadent in search of distraction to end all such portraits, and represents the true culmination of that particular aspect of the Decadent adventure. Afterwards, there really was nowhere else to go in search of intensity-through-sin.

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  It is not easy to register a death-date for French Decadence as certain in its propriety as the birth-date which was registered by the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal. The notable works by Mirbeau and Farrère cited above are really distanced studies of the Decadent outlook, arguably more comparable with Sainte-Beuve’s Volupté than with the novels cited in the previous section, and it would be a distortion to select one of them as a kind of tombstone.

  Decadent style, in being supersededby Symbolism, was transformed rather than destroyed, and the same might be said of certain Decadent themes which were taken up in a flirtatious fashion by the first surrealists. Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire both deployed in their prose works ideas which had formerly preoccupied the Decadents, but they made a macabre comedy out of them. Jarry, in particular, occasionally came close to the Decadent spirit in Les jours et les nuits (1897), in which an unfit soldier seeks release from his predicament in hallucinations, and in his vivid historical melodrama Messaline (1900), set in decadent Rome.

  One can find such echoes wherever one cares to look; however quickly Decadence may have passed from fashion it had made an indelible impression on the heritage of French literature. The Decadent Movement was virtually extinct in France by 1900 (though some other nations had yet to produce their own quasi-Decadent literature at that time) but it left descendants to carry forward certain of its traits, and occasional throwbacks would be produced by those descendants for many years.

  There is, in any case, a certain ironic futility about any attempt to register a time of death in respect of Decadent literature; the very essence of the idea of decadence is that death is merely a passing moment within a continuing process of decay, and it is entirely appropriate that echoes of the Decadent consciousness should continue to crop up long into the Twentieth Century, sometimes at long distances from the point of origin in Paris. Baudelaire’s work, after all, remains very much alive, and though his celebrations of spleen and ennui have to be understood – if they are to be understood properly – in their proper historical context, they have nevertheless become immortal in the crystallizations of Decadent sensibility which are provided by Les Fleurs du Mal. The flowers of evil were not hardy perennials, but because they are poems and not real flowers they cannot entirely wither into dust.

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  6.

  THE YELLOW NINETIES:

  DECADENCE IN ENGLAND

  What passed for Decadence in England was but a pale shadow of French Decadence. In the eyes of upright Victorians all French literature seemed dreadfully decadent, and “decadent” was freely bandied about as a term of abuse which carried a distinctly xenophobic implication. The idea of historical and cultural decadence never acquired, in England, the same specific connotations which it had in France; despite Gibbon’s amplification of Montesquieu’ arguments the term was not tied to the idea of failing and falling empires; rather it was used-promiscuously, one might say – to refer to moral licence and moral laxness.

  Such was the English attitude to Paris that “French” and “decadent” were virtually synonymous in certain realms of discourse. The Rev. W. F. Barry contributed two articles to the Quarterly Review in 1890 and 1892 entitled “Realism and Decadence in French Literature” and “The French Decadence”, under which titles he subsumed discussion of writers as varied as Balzac, Zola, Maupassant and Daudet, all of whom he found morally suspect by the standards of British neo-Puritanism. The customary subject-matter of run-of-the-mill Decadent novels would have been considered so indecent by an British publisher as to be ruled out of the question. Poetry was granted more latitude, but an English writer who wrote in the manner of Baudelaire would have been regarded as hopelessly corrupt. Nevertheless, there were English poets whose attitude to Paris was different – who saw in the salons and Bohemian circles of Paris an enviable enthusiasm, freedom of expression and stylishness. They saw the importation of a modest measure of French Decadence as a desirable thing, but in order to keep the measure modest they were forced to import the style without the substance.

  The would-be champion of English Decadence was Arthur Symons, who was willing enough to wear the label until it became too great an embarrassment, and urged others to wear it too. His essay on “The Decadent Movement in Literature”, published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1893, begins by regretting the confusion of terms currently being deployed in the hope of capturing the essence of the major currents in European art, and admits that Decadence overlaps somewhat with Symbolism and Impressionism. Symons asserts, however, that the notion of Decadence best captures the temper of the work, which he is happy to accept as “a new and beautiful and interesting disease”. The character of the new art, he argues, echoes the character of the art produced by the Greek and Latin cultures in their senescence; his description of it includes: “intense self-consciousness … restless curiosity … an over subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity.”

  All of this Symons was initially enthusiastic to take aboard. The writer she offers as the most meritorious contemporary examplars of the Movement are Verlaine, Huysmans and Maeterlinck. In the first version of the essay Symons names Walter Pater and W. E. Henley as significant English proto-Decadents, but he removed the references for diplomatic reasons when the essay was reprinted in book form.

  Symons was a member of the Rhymers’ Club, which met at an eating house in Fleet Street; his fellow members included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson, Richard le Gallienne and William Butler Yeats. Some of these agreed with Symons sufficiently to allow a measure of Decadent influence into their work, and none of them entirely escaped guilt by association, but if it is to be reckoned as the spearhead of an English Decadent Movement their work is distinctly half-hearted. Fugitive Decadent elements are easy enough to find in the work of Johnson and Yeats but only Dowson, apart from Symons himself, was really significantly affected by the Decadent attitude. In Dowson’s case this influence was greatly assisted by his infection with the tuberculosis which drove both his parents to suicide, but the morbidity of his supposedly Decadent work is straight forwardly melancholy; the paradoxical thrill of perversity which so entranced the French Decadents is simply not there.

  None of the Rhymers ever lost sight, even temporarily, of aesthetic ideals which might give their work some kind of uplifting quality, and most retained religious faith as well. In addition, they exhibited a tendency, even when they took Decadence seriously, not to take it too seriously. Lionel Johnson’s essay on “The Cultured Faun” in the Anti-Jacobin (1891) offers a portrait of the contentedly neurasthenic artist which is nine parts parody, and the only English writer of the first rank who took care to flaunt his Decadent life-style, Oscar Wilde, relied constantly upon his elegant wit to excuse and explain himself.

  In the main, though, English Decadent poetry is simply listless, its impuissance unredeemed by any semblance of calculated intention. If one compares such poems by Symons as “The Opium-Smoker” (in Days and Nights, 1889) and “The Absinthe-Drinker” (in Silhouettes, 1892) with the rhapsodies of Gautier, Baudelaire and Farrère they seem dreadfully anemic. Although Symons did a considerable ser
vice in translating a good deal of French Decadent poetry into English, his translations of Baudelaire seem prettified to the modern reader.

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  Just as the French Decadents had inherited a doctrine of art for art’s sake from Gautier, so the Rhymers and their contemporaries inherited one from Walter Pater and Swinburne (whose masochistic streak moved some of his poems as close to the spirit of Decadence as any existing English material). But Pater’s exemplary Epicurean Marius is a man of far greater austerity, decorum and moral rectitude than the pagans of French fiction, and the English art which was done for English art’s sake was similarly constrained; the lush and gaudy extravagance of much French art was absent. Swinburne often achieved a fevered intensity, reflected in the rhythm as well as the imagery of his poems, but his work lacks a cutting edge.

  Like the most nearly-Decadent of the pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne was looked after by Theodore Watts-Dunton when his life style made him ill, and similar benevolence may have softened the splenetic tendencies of other beleaguered British poets. Eugene Lee-Hamilton, who certainly warrants inclusion among British proto-Decadents, spent twenty years as a chronic (possibly psychosomatic) invalid, but was apparently saved from undue bitterness by a thoroughly British expectation that it was simply not done to be too self-indulgent in one’s misery. From The New Medusa (1882) to Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1895) his work toyed incessantly with Decadent images, but retained a measure of reserve which was echoed in real life when, after publication of the latter collection, he made a complete recovery from his illness. Lee-Hamilton went on to write a phantasmagorical historical novel, The Lord of the Dark Red Star (1903), whose vivid imagery recalls the French historical fantasies peripheral to the Decadent Movement; his half-sister Violet Paget, who signed herself Vernon Lee, incorporated similar elements into some of her own historical fantasies.