The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) (6 page)

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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 service 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.

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.