The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) (8 page)

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.

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INFLUENCES:
DECADENCE IN OTHER NATIONS

No other nation except for France and England had a recognisable and self-declared Decadent Movement; there were, nevertheless, many individual writers in various other countries who came under the influence of the French Decadents and echoed the themes and methods of Decadent writing in their own work.
However one cares to construct a definition of Decadence one will inevitably discover that some of the most interesting examples can be found in languages other than French or English.

The nation which came closest to producing a Movement akin to those of France and England was Russia, which had more than its fair share of neurotic writers.
Indeed, some of the main themes of French Decadent fiction had already been anticipated in Russia in the work of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev.
While the novelists of Decadence were first becoming busy in France the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin, while going mad himself, was producing, “The Red Flower” (1883), in which a patient in a lunatic asylum “discovers” that all the world’s evil is contained in three poppies growing in a garden and must lay an elaborate plan for their destruction.
A similar interest in morbid states of mind can be found in the work of writers heavily influenced by Dostoyevsky, including M.
N.
Albov and Prince Golitzyn Muravlin, the latter of whom took as his project the identification of the principal pathological types of the decaying aristocracy.

Many of the younger Russian writers of the
fin de siècle
period found themselves gathered together by the anchorage of Maxim Gorky’s publishing house, Znanie.
Most of these writers were politically radical champions of realism, but there nevertheless grew up in their midst a Symbolist Movement which took its inspiration from France and – like the English Movement – took aboard a selective measure of Decadence as well.
They came to prominence somewhat later than the equivalent English writers but enjoyed a similarly brief vogue after the demoralizing Russo-Japanese War and the consequent Revolution of 1905.

The most successful writer of this period in Russia was Leonid Andreyev, who did not belong to the Symbolist group but who influenced and shared certain concerns with them.
Like Baudelaire, Andreyev was a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, and was inordinately impressed by the power of Poe’s studies of abnormal states of mind; he also followed Poe in becoming intensely interested in metaphysical matters.
In many of his later stories Andreyev is concerned to draw links between the encroachments of madness and discovery of the meaninglessness and hopelessness of the human condition; such stories as “Thought” (1902),
The Red Laugh
(1904), “Eleazer” (1907) and “Darkness” (1908) all present harsh statements of the emptiness of existence which begin the stretching of Decadent sensibility in the direction of the bleaker extremes of existentialist
angst
.
Very similar themes are extensively developed in the work of Sergey Sergeyev-Tsensky, whose most notable story in terms of its relationship to Decadence is “Babayev”, which deals with a neurasthenic officer’s obsessive desire to commit a crime.
Alexander Kuprin, though primarily a realist, also produced some short stories in this morbid vein.

The Russian Symbolists were far more interested in matters metaphysical than their French and English counterparts, becoming very preoccupied with the idea of the world as a vast network of symbols.
The Movement’s most notable prose writers – although all three wrote poetry as well – were Valery Bryusov, Andrey Bely and Fedor Sologub.
Bryusov, who had collaborated on a book on
Russian Symbolists
as early as 1894 took charge of a publishing house in 1900 which then became the focal point of the Movement, issuing a journal called
Vesy
(“The Scales”) from 1904-09.
His most famous short story is a remarkable futuristic fantasy about an epidemic of madness in a Utopian state, “The Republic of the Southern Cross”.

Although the word “decadent” was not bandied about as freely in Russia as it had been in Britain by those intending denigration, Bryusov was so charged and so was Bely.
The latter was condemned partly for his ironic sensibility – though he could not really be accused of not taking the metaphysical matters which fascinated him seriously.
The prolific Sologub did not suffer from any lack of seriousness, despite casting many of his short tales in a fairy-tale mode, and took great pains to extrapolate his sense of disappointment with the universe.
Some of his phantasmagoric allegories are very striking, and such tales as “The Lady in Fetters” are very close indeed to the spirit of French Decadent prose.
Sologub’s most successful novel was
Mekli Bes
(1907; tr.
as
The Little Demon
).
The other important members of the Symbolist school were the poets Vyacheslav Ivanov and Alexander Blok; the latter took his place alongside Bryusov as an important promoter of the movement and eventually became its most prestigious member – such poems as “Danse Macabre” encapsulate Decadent consciousness neatly and wholeheartedly.

The history of Russian Symbolism – and of its Decadent inclusions – might have extended over a longer period had it not been for the intervention of the Revolutions of 1917, which ushered in a new era of heavily politicized art.
It was not enough for Symbolists and others to convert to Communism; they had also to adjust their philosophies of art.
It was not merely Decadence which had become decadent in the eyes of the State, but everything which was not Socialist Realism.

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Because it had the city of Rome within its bound Italy might, in principle, have been reasonably fertile ground for the philosophy of decadence and a consequent literary movement, but the historical moment was not ideal.
The Kingdom of Italy had been proclaimed as recently as 1861, following Garibaldi’s unification, and the newness of the city’s role as the capital of a modern nation state was an inhibition to the notion that it was decadent, despite the antiquity and continuing decline of the Roman Church.
Nevertheless, Italy did produce one writer of considerable note – indeed, the foremost Italian writer of his day – who was entirely happy to dabble in the Decadent style as soon as it became fashionable in France; this was Gabriele D’Annunzio.

D’Annunzio was by no means possessed of a Decadent personality, though the prolific turnover of his mistresses called his morality into question and eventually landed him with syphilis.
He was a man of great energy, ambition and patriotism who looked constantly towards the future; he fought duels over his women, distinguished himself in the Great War, and took a Vernian delight in the technology of transportation.
His work was equally wide-ranging, but it is the early
poetry and novels, which most clearly show the influence of contemporary French writing, which are today best remembered.

D’Annunzio’s first venture in the Decadent style-was the poetry collection
Intermezzo di rime
(1883), which declared its intentions with a motto taken from the passage in the Apocalypse which refers to the Harlot of Babylon and was printed on pink paper.
It includes, among other items, twelve sonnets celebrating the exploits of famous adulterers, four “nude studies” and various poems of a vaguely sacrilegious character.
Two more collections in the same vein followed but D’Annunzio then seemed to tire of being an
enfant terrible
(as he tired of most things) and moved back in the direction of realism.
Decadent elements were combined with this new thrust, however, in his two most important novels:
Il piacere
(1889; tr.
as
The Child of Pleasure
) and
Il trionfo della morte
(1894; tr.
as The Triumph of Death
).
Both drew heavily on his own experiences and his own obsessions with beautiful women, and his vivid depiction of the city of Rome reflects the wide-eyed view of an upwardly mobile country-boy with a hunger for luxury, in much the same way that Rachilde’s novels express her similar attitude to Paris.
Il trionfo della morte
is particularly extravagant in deploying Decadent imagery, possessed by a fascination with depravity which converts the central love story into a danse macabre haunted by spectres of the past.

Like some of the English Decadents, D’Annunzio became fascinated with the works of Nietzsche, whose influence combined with that of the Symbolists in
Le vergini delle rocce
(1895; tr.
as
The Virgins of the Rocks
), which he wrote for
Il Convito
, a periodical of his own in which he intended to emulate such foreign productions as the
Yellow Book.
Concentrating as it does on the
grotesque life of an aristocratic family which has withdrawn from the world, it comes as close as any other novel of the period to producing an image of social decadence in the Decadent style.
D’Annunzio’s subsequent involvement with the famous actress Eleanor Duse, who built a great reputation for herself as a Decadent performer, inspired further works in celebration of erotic freedom, but after the turn of the century Decadence gradually drained out of his work just as it dwindled away in France.

Almost all of D’Annunzio’s Italian contemporariesleaned more towards the realism of Giovanni Vergarather than his own heated example.
Federico de Roberto’snovel of an aristocratic Sicilian family in decline,
I vicerè
(1894; tr.
as
The Viceroys),
scrupulously avoids theDecadent style, having none of the baroque decoration of
Le vergini delle rocce.
Luigi Pirandello, on the otherhand, was taken beyond his early realism by therepercussions of a personal tragedy – the insanity of hiswife.
He developed a fiercely ironic view of life and apreoccupation with the fallibility of understanding andcommunication which sometimes encourages critics tofind Decadent elements in his work, but his more obviousaffinities are with the French Theatre of the Absurd.Critics have also found Decadent tendencies in theintrospective and
impuissant
work of Italo Svevo, whopublished his early novels at the same time as D’Annunziobut had to wait thirty years to be “discovered”.
TheDecadent Movement itself probably had more influence,albeit of a negative kind, on Filippo Marinetti’s shortlived Futurist Movement, which sought to integrate theDecadent’ suspicion of tradition into a far morerevolutionary and forward-looking manifesto.
If D’Annunzio was not the only Italian Decadent, therefore,he certainly deserves to be considered as the onlyimportant one.

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Despite being the home of Nietzsche, who was an important influence on several notable Decadent writers, Germany produced no Decadent Movement of its own in the nineteenth century, and such traces of Decadent attitude and style which can be found in German writers before the Great War are few and fugitive.
As in Italy, the German nation-state was of recent provenance – it was not finally clarified until 1866 – and no German city could begin to compare with Paris and Rome.
German censorship was more rigid even than English censorship where matters of moral indecency were concerned, and this too was a strong deterrent to authors tempted by the charm of the Decadent style; Otto Bierbaum’
avant garde
literary journal
Pan
(founded 1894) was, in consequence, rather less ambitious than the
Yellow Book.
In addition, the temper of German Romanticism and the subsequent reaction against it had been markedly different from that of French Romanticism.
The influence which Nietzsche had on writers who were already familiar with Rousseau was not the same as the influence which he had on those reared on Hegel or Schopenhauer.

Although Nietzsche had certain ideas which appealed strongly to the Decadent consciousness – including the idea that the modern world had been made rotten by the dominance of a cowardly “ethic of the herd” – he was by no means a Decadent himself.
His notion of when and where the rot of historical decadence had first set in was radically different from Montesquieu’s, pointing the accusing finger not at the mad emperors of Rome but at Euripides and Socrates, who had previously been thought of as the great heroes of Greek cultural magnificence and Enlightenment.
There was nothing at
all in Nietzsche to give an atom of encouragement to a cult of artificiality (which accounts for his greater influence on the English Decadents, who could not take such a cult.seriously) and he had not time at all for
impuissance,
dedicating his later work to a lyrical celebration of the “will to power” which must convert man into
übermensch.
Even those German writers who could not contrive a similar hopefulness – Thomas Mann remained a doubter whose work is haunted by the idea of society possessed by an incurable sickness – were nevertheless deflected away from French Decadent consciousness.