The Dedalus Book of Decadence Moral Ruins E-Book

Brian Stableford

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 391

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Seminal study of decadence in Europe and America with texts.

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Leseprobe

For Jane

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

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ISBN   printed book 978 1 873982 01 3

ISBN   ebook 978 1 907650 49 9

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Publishing History

First published by Dedalus in December 1990

Second edition with minor corrections in May 1993

Reprinted 2011

First ebook edition in 2011

Compilation, essay and French translations (unless otherwise stated) c copyright

Brian Stableford 1990

La Panthere, Les Vendages de Sodome c copyright Mercure de France 1900

Printed in Finland by Bookwell Ltd

Typeset by Refine Catch Ltd

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. MAD EMPERORS:

    THE EVOLUTION OF AN IDEA

2. RENEGADE ROMANTICS:

    THE BIRTH OF DECADENCE

3. GENIUS AND MADNESS:

    THE ATTRACTIONS OF DECADENCE

4. AGAINST NATURE:

    DECADENCE À LA MODE

5. FIN DE SIÈCLE:

    THE DECADENCE OF DECADENCE

6. THE YELLOW NINETIES:

    DECADENCE IN ENGLAND

7. INFLUENCES:

    DECADENCE IN OTHER NATIONS

8. ECHOES:

    THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF DECADENCE

A SAMPLER OF FRENCH DECADENT TEXTS

1. TO THE READER by Charles Baudelaire

2. THE GLASS OF BLOOD by Jean Lorrain

3. LANGUOR by Paul Verlaine

4. THE GRAPE-GATHERERS OF SODOM by Rachilde

5. AFTER THE DELUGE by Arthur Rimbaud

6. DANAETTE by Remy de Gourmont

7. LITANY TO SATAN by Charles Baudelaire

8. THE BLACK NIGHTGOWN by Catulle Mendès

9. THE DOUBLE ROOM by Charles Baudelaire

10. THE POSSESSED by Jean Lorrain

11. SPLEEN by Paul Verlaine

12. THE FAUN by Remy de Gourmont

13. THE DRUNKEN BOAT by Arthur Rimbaud

14. THE PANTHER by Rachilde

15. SPLEEN by Charles Baudelaire

16. OLD FURNITURE by Catulle Mendès

17. DON JUAN IN HELL by Charles Baudelaire

18. DON JUAN’S SECRET by Remy de Gourmont

A SAMPLER OF ENGLISH DECADENT TEXTS

1. THEORETIKOS by Oscar Wilde

2. THE COURT OF VENUS by Aubrey Beardsley

3. SATIA DE SANGUINE by Algernon Charles Swinburne

4. THE DYING OF FRANCIS DONNE by Ernest Dowson

5. BAUDELAIRE by Eugene Lee-Hamilton

6. THE BASILISK by R. Murray Gilchrist

7. MAGIC by Lionel Johnson

8. THE OTHER SIDE by Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock

9. NON SUM QUALIS ERAM BONAE SUB REGNO CYNARAE by Ernest Dowson

10. A SOMEWHAT SURPRISING CHAPTER by John Davidson

11. THE TRANSLATOR AND THE CHILDREN by James Elroy Flecker

12. POPE JACYNTH by Vernon Lee

13. INSOMNIA by John Davidson

14. THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE ROSE by Oscar Wilde.

15. VINUM DAEMONUM by Lionel Johnson

16. ABSINTHIA TAETRA by Ernest Dowson

17. THE RING OF FAUSTUS by Eugene Lee-Hamilton

18. THE LAST GENERATION by James Elroy Flecker

INTRODUCTION

1.

MAD EMPERORS:THE EVOLUTION OF AN IDEA

The English word “decadence”, and its French counterpart décadence, derive from the Latin cadere, to fall. But the kind of fall indicated thereby is a special one, as signified by the verbs to which the nouns are parent: the obsolete decair in Old French and “decay” in English. To decay is to rot, to fall away from a state of health into a gradual ruination which is punctuated, but not begun or ended, by death.

A complete account of the evolution of the concept of decadence is unnecessary for the purposes of this introduction; there is a single crucial moment which can be appropriated as a starting point. In 1734 Charles-Louis le Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, published his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. The essay was marred by a certain disregard for the full extent and exact implication of the factual evidence, but it was nevertheless an important work in that it sought to discover some kind of theoretical basis for historical explanation. For Montesquieu, the slow disintegration of the Roman Empire was not to be seen as a series of unhappy accidents, but as the inevitable unfolding of a pattern governed by a quasi-scientific law.

Whatever its faults as proto-social science, Montesquieu’s work was rightly acclaimed as a bold adventure of the intellect, and the case which he put forward was instantly enshrined as a modern myth. Rome, it was henceforth accepted, had fallen because all empires must fall, and the map of that fall – which was also to serve as an explanation – was to be found in its décadence: in the simultaneous rotting of its cultural life and its military might.

The chief anti-hero of this new myth was Nero, who allowed the political fabric of the empire to become corrupt while he entertained his court with extended examples of his (imagined) literary genius. Nero – according to legend, at least – was prepared to fiddle while the city burned; and the decadence of his morals was readily revealed by the fact that his mimicry of the affectations of the Greeks extended as far as marriage to a castrated male slave.

Montesquieu, in claiming that there was an underlying logic to the fate of Rome, implied that some such pattern would be repeated in other empires. Civilization, in his view, carried the seeds of its own inevitable destruction, because a secure, rich and comfortable aristocracy was bound to be slowly enervated by addiction to luxury, until the time finally arrived when the barbarians without could no longer be kept at bay.

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The first translator of Montesquieu’s work into English did not retain the word “decadence” in its title, choosing to render décadence as “declension”, but the term had its effect nevertheless. The British were passionately interested in Rome, on the grounds that they were by far the most successful of modern Imperialists, and it is hardly surprising that it was an Englishman, Edward Gibbon, who undertook to repair the factual inadequacies of Montesquieu’s work and to offer a far more minute and scrupulous analysis of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The first volume of Gibbon’s work, published in 1776, quickly achieved notoriety because of the uncharitable treatment afforded to the birth and early evolution of Christianity by its concluding chapters; he saw the conversion of the crumbling empire to the new religion simply as one more stage of its declension. For Gibbon, Rome had briefly achieved an altogether admirable ideal, and his account of its decline is redolent with a special sense of tragedy; for all its cynicism his was essentially a Jeremiad: a Book of Lamentations. Thus was the myth of Rome’s decadence amplified and set in stone.

The British, of course refused to believe the lesson which Montesquieu’s science of history was trying to teach them, and would not accept that just as the Roman Empire had fallen, so in its time would theirs. The French, by contrast were much more ready to believe in the inevitability of their own decline. “Après nous, le déluge!” as Louis XV was widely misreported to have said, became and remained a popular catch-phrase.

Gibbon died in 1794, four weeks after Napoleon Bonaparte took Toulon for the Revolutionary forces and set himself on the road which would lead to a fabulous (and doomed) adventure in European Imperialism. For ten years, between his promotion to the rank of Emperor in 1804 and his exile to Elba in 1814 Napoleon was the modern Julius Caesar and Paris the new Rome; hope was briefly renewed again in 1815 but quickly foundered at Waterloo. The ancien régime, whose corruption had been a favourite topic of the Revolutionists, was restored – decadence and all.

Europe’s year of revolutions, 1848, brought another Napoleon, but he too met his Waterloo at Sedan in 1870; in the following year Paris fell briefly under the control of the Commune, which revisited the city with a second dose of post-Revolutionary Terror. In the aftermath of all this it became very easy to believe that the nation and all it had once represented was half-way down a slippery slope. The time was ripe for a cultural movement which not only recognised and owned up to the decadence of the times, but accepted its inevitability and was unashamed.

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A certain dissatisfaction with the forms and mores of contemporary civilization had long been manifest in the world of French letters, most extravagantly exemplified and encouraged by the mid-eighteenth century writings of Jean-Jaques Rousseau.

Rousseau argued that men were naturally good, but that their goodness had been warped and corrupted by civilized life. He became a fervent champion of Nature and the Noble Savage; he advised his fellows to beware of sophistication and put their trust instead in the moral influence of nature and the spontaneity of natural feeling. He was not a particularly good advertisement for his own ideas, abandoning all his children to die in the foundling home, but he became the guru of the cult of sensibilité and an early hero of the Romantic movement in the arts.

The Romantics may have considered the crass civilization which has spawned them to be decadent, but they were careful to exclude themselves from their indictments. The Romantics and their heroes were rebels against decadence who were perfectly certain that there was a better way. By means of their reverence for Nature and their carefully nurtured “sensibility” they sought to discover a new Utopia instead of a Dark Age; they could not believe that modern men were doomed to repeat the worst errors of their Roman forbears.

Though Romanticism set itself against the kind of conservative resistance to decadence which led to Victorianism in Britain, it shared some of the same nightmares. Such deserters as there were from the common ground where Romanticism and Classicism overlapped seemed, initially, to be every bit as mad and monstrous as Nero; prominent among them was the infamous Marquis de Sade. The Divine Marquis, ever generous with his hatreds, was no less contemptuous of Rousseau and his admirers than he was of the champions of official morality who comprised the twin hierarchies of Church and State.

Sade argued that just as the protestations of the godly were false and stupid, so too were Rousseauesque pleas on behalf of Natural Virtue; it was plain to anyone who cared to inspect the evidence that Nature had not an atom of in built virtue, and must sensibly be reckoned the enemy of mankind, more unreasonably oppressive than any mere political tyranny. The only man who might be reckoned truly human, according to Sade, was a man bold enough to outrage Nature and Morality alike, who would dare to cultivate perversity and learn to love that which other men consider horrible. How seriously one can take the constructive part of Sade’s argument is highly debatable, but the force of its destructive edge is undeniable. Rousseau was indeed quite wrong; the Utopian hopes of the cult of sensibility were always fatuous.

It is entirely reasonable, therefore, that there should have grown up in opposition to the cult of the natural a cult of the artificial, which set out to denigrate everything which Rousseau’s followers revered. The adherents of that cult of artificiality were prepared to accept that the luxuries of civilization were indeed enervating, but argued that such luxuries were nevertheless very succulent, and must be savoured rather than denied. In that proposition can be found the underlying philosophy of literary Decadence.

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In spite of the poverty of some of its philosophical pretensions, Romanticism flourished in the early part of the nineteenth century. It had the good fortune to take up arms against an established order whose flaws were easily seen, while never having to make any practical demonstration of its own potential as a promoter of the common weal. It offered an attractive cocktail of righteous wrath and numinous hope, whose power as a secular substitute for religious faith was quite sufficient to sustain itself against ordinary scepticism.

Inevitably, though, there were among those who embraced Romantic Ideals most ardently a few who found that those Ideals were impotent to deliver the goods. These dissenters were in an awkward position, confounded by a double negation which had first accepted the corruption and decadence of civilization and had then acknowledged the failure of Romantic rebellion against that corruption. The cult of artificiality offered an exit route from the double bind.

As second-rate comedians are fond of pointing out, no one was ever hurt by a fall, however steep; the abrupt halt at the end does all the damage. Since the invention of the parachute, in fact, it has been possible for the adventurously-inclined to make a sport out of free-falling, to savour the aesthetics of descent. This, in metaphorical terms, was the strategy of those writers we now call Decadent; they accepted that their Imperially-ambitious societies were in a state of irrevocable decline, but they sought no scope for or virtue in Romantic rebellion, electing instead to explore and advertise the aesthetics of cultural free-fall. But this intellectual move was not without its costs.

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The true Decadent believes that faith in any kind of progress is misplaced; there is no better world to come, which is still to be made by yet another revolution. He accepts also that salvation is highly unlikely to be found at the personal level; the quest for ideal love cannot succeed because people are not naturally loving and monogamous at all, but fundamentally duplicitous, ever ready to betray those whom they claim to love. Thus, the wholehearted Decadent renounces eutopia, euchronia and euspychia alike, and contents himself with making what adjustment he can to their irrevocable loss.

Decadence is not a happy state, and the Decadent does not bother to seek the trivial goal of contentment, whose price is wilful blindness to the true state of the world. Instead, he must become a connoisseur of his own psychic malaise (which mirrors, of course, the malaise of his society). He is the victim of various ills, whose labels become the key terms of Decadent rhetoric: ennui (world-weariness); spleen (an angry subspecies of melancholy); impuissance (powerlessness).

Gripped by these disorders, the Decadent is thoroughly apathetic, but his apathy is not so much a failing as a kind of curse visited upon him by the times in which he must live. If it is to be reckoned as a king of sin – and we must remember that what we would nowadays call “clinical depression” was once reckoned by the Catholic Church to be the sin of accidie – then it is a sin from which conventional morality offers no hope of redemption. If the flame of his ashen spirit is to be reignited he must have recourse to new and more dangerous sensations: the essentially artificial paradises of the imagination. He is likely to seek such artificial paradises by means of drugs – particularly opium and hashish, but also absinthe and ether – but he remains well aware that the greatest artifice of all is, of course, Art itself.

The Decadent is a pessimist, in both historical and personal terms, but he acknowledges that in the comfortable and luxurious artifices of civilization, no matter how hollow they may be, a good deal of pleasure is to be found. He is therefore an unrepentant sensualist, albeit of a peculiarly cynical kind. Such meagre rewards as life has to offer the honest and sensitive man, he thinks, are to be sought by means of a languid hedonism which is contemptuous of arbitrary and tyrannical rules of conduct and scornful of all higher aspirations.

Not all the writers called Decadent conform to this ideal type in every particular, of course, but the extent to which they resemble it – in the advocacy of their work and in the examples set by their private lives – is the extent to which they are worthy of the title.

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When one attempts to record the literary history of Decadence one inevitably runs into acute problems of delineation. There was a definite self-defined Decadent Movement in France in the 1880s and a short-lived echo of it in England in the 1890s. An analogous phenomenon can be observed in Russia shortly after the turn of the century, and there were writers in one or two other nations who were happy enough to be labelled Decadent (at least for a while). In addition to the handful of writers who were proud to accept the label, however, there were dozens of others identified by critics and historians whose inclusion must depend on externally – imposed rules of definition.

Critics, as is their wont, have conspicuously failed to agree on these difficult matters of definition. According to some, French Decadence flourished for a few years, but then it was displaced and overtaken by a distinct and separate Symbolist Movement; but according to others the terms Decadent and Symbolist are very nearly synonymous. In England, the concept of Decadence was considerably diluted and swiftly discredited, encouraging critics and historians to dissolve the short-lived English Decadent Movement into the Aesthetic Movement which preceded it and the Symbolist Movement which replaced it. In most other nations, which had the English example before them, “decadent” was used entirely as a term of abuse and never accepted by any of the writers threatened by the label, who frequently named themselves Symbolists in self-defence.

It is certainly true that Decadent literature overlaps several other genres and movements, and that many of its key works can equally well be discussed under other labels. At least some of the Decadents were interested in Symbolism and helped to develop its techniques; others were on the fringes of Naturalism, espousing a cynical and somewhat grotesque version of seedy realism. It is also the case that the great majority of writers who produced Decadent works also produced work of very different kinds, many temporarily adopting a Decadent sensibility by way of experiment only.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that there are some interesting literary accounts of the Decadent personality which were set down, with horrified disapproval, by writers who were anything but Decadent in their own outlook. There were also writers for whom Decadence itself was a matter of pure artifice, who championed all manner of lurid perversion in their work while living entirely respectable private lives. The most wholehearted Decadents were, of course, those whose lifestyles were as Decadent as their works, but they constitute the nucleus of a much larger phenomenon whose edges are very blurred indeed.

The ideal type of the Decadent personality is an artist who rejoices in his power to analyse and display his own curious situation; life itself must become for him a kind of art-work – an exercise in style – because there is nothing else it can be. This ideal type is rare enough, however, that one might easily make a case for its non-existence in the purest possible form. This is not entirely surprising, given the inherent self-destructiveness of the philosophy.

There is a sharply ironic paradox in the fact that a creed which puts such a heavy emphasis on the comforts of artificiality proved to be desperately uncomfortable for all of its most fervent adherents. Many of them did indeed destroy themselves, aided by the scorn of their enemies; others set out more-or-less hastily on various roads to Damascus in search of magical renewals of faith which would restore the layers of spiritual insulation they had earlier discarded. While braver Decadents perished the more cowardly relented, but either way a Decadent Movement could not help but be a short-lived affair.

History cannot offer us a single example of a thoroughly successful Decadent career, but this is hardly surprising, given that the philosophy of Decadence has so little room in it for success. It was almost de rigeur for a writer to die young, in miserable circumstances, before he could be considered seriously as a true champion of Decadentideas. The work which the Decadents produced, however, contains a challenge to commonplace ideas of health, beauty and goodness which deserves to be carefully weighed and taken seriously. Any idea for which people have been willing to mortify themselves deserves that much, even if we eventually come to the conclusion that they were fools to do it.

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2.

RENEGADE ROMANTICS:THE BIRTH OF DECADENCE

The whims of fashionability are such that literary movements hardly have time to be born before someone is reacting against them and someone else is trying to transcend them. So it was with French Romanticism, whose triumphant arrival in Paris was trumpeted by the claque which turned out at the first night of victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830. Prominent among these enthusiasts was the young Théophile Gautier, who had made certain that he would not pass unnoticed by wearing a shocking pink waistcoat. Gautier, born in 1811, was to follow up this coup de theatre by becoming the most fervent and extravagant of the French Romantics, and the author of the (inevitably) unfinished Histoire de romantisme. He was also the writer whose wildest experiments in Romanticism tested the optimism of the Romantic outlook to destruction.

Dissenters from the Romantic Movement were legion, but in respect of the subsequent emergence of the Decadents two are of particular importance. One was Anatole Barbier, whose scathing attacks on political corruption and other assorted social evils influenced Hugo, but who had too little faith in the rewards of idealism to become a Romantic himself. The other was Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve, whose association with Hugo was close enough at one time to allow him to fall hopelessly in love with the elder poet’s wife, but whose subsequent adventures in literary criticism led him to denigrate his former idols.

Barbier’s three most important collections, Iambes (1831), Il pianto (1833) and Lazare (1837), while condemning life in modern Paris and lamenting the sad decline of Italy from its glorious past, popularized two terms which were later to become central to the Decadents’ philosophy: ennui and spleen. Barbier was no Decadent himself; he was dead set against the enervation and debauchery arising from ennui and had not the slightest sympathy with its capricious and spiteful extension. Men of a splenetic disposition, according to Barbier, inevitably go completely to the bad, under the influence of drugs, drink and sexual perversion. But Barbier’s attack on the Decadent personality was satirical, and it left open the possibility of removing the sarcastic tone and converting demolition into celebration. Barbier laid the groundwork for the so-called Parnassian poets who could not stand the emotional heat of Romanticism, electing instead to adopt a more detached and studious approach to its typical imaginative products; but the echoes of his work, deformed and transmogrified, also resound in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, the foundation-stone of Decadent sensibility.

Saint-Beuve deserted Romanticism for a species of critical eclecticism which regarded a poet’s work as a map of his personality; his criticism became a form of psychological portraiture. Though founded on the principle that a writer’s work should always be approached sympathetically, this manner of procedure led inevitably to a situation where the critic found himself condemning the work of men whose morals he did not much like. Before he embarked upon this path, however, Saint-Beuve produced a curious and condemnatory self-analytical work of his own: the novel Volupté (1834), which became an important model of the contradictory impulses out of which Decadent sensibility might easily grow. The disastrously apathetic hero of the novel, Amaury, is caught between his ideal passion for the unattainable Mme. de Couaën and his lustful adventures with the whores of Paris. Unable to sustain the philosophical tensions in his life, he eventually renounces his uncomfortable scepticism, recommits himself to the Catholic faith, and emigrates. This account of temporary flirtation with the possibilities of Decadence, followed by reinvestment in the old values, foreshadowed the actual career of many a Decadent writer – most notably Huysmans.

The plight of Saint-Beuve’s Amaury is frequently reflected, usually in much lighter tones, in one of Gautier’s favourite plots. Gautier never tired of writing delicate fantasies in which idealistic young men, frustrated by the crassness of the modern world, escape into liaisons with fabulous supernatural women: the eponymous courtesans in “Omphale” (1834) and “Arria Marcella” (1852), and the Egyptian Princess Hermonthis in “Le pied de momie” (1840; tr. as “The Mummy’s Foot”). Even when the attentions of these femmes fatales promise to be literally fatal, as in the case of the hectic affair between a novice priest and a vampire in “La morte amoureuse” (1836; tr. as “Clarimonde”), the loss of supernatural ecstasy is regarded as a tragedy of matchless proportions.

Gautier himself seems to have lived in uneasy suspension between the allure of ideal love and the second-rate consolations of real-life sex; he nursed a determinedly high-minded passion for the dancer Carlotta Grisi while making a mistress of her sister Ernesta. In his art and his life alike he revealed the hopeless folly of the Romantic idealization of love and its promise of eupsychian fulfilment. Only one of Gautier’s fantasies – Spirite (1865), which he wrote specifically for Carlotta Grisi – concludes with a satisfactory consummation, but it is (necessarily) postponed until the afterlife.

Gautier’s importance as a precursor of Decadence is secured by three works: Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834); Fortunio (1837) and “Une nuit de Cléopâtre” (1838; tr. as “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”). All three provide portraits of characters who are recognisably Decadent and whose Decadence is treated sympathetically.

Mademoiselle de Maupin is a long and teasing essay in studied eroticism in which the hero’s search for ideal passion is confused by his confrontation with the eponymous heroine in male disguise; his arguments in justification of the presumed homoerotic attraction are then applied to the heroine’s seduction, while in male guise, of a page who also turns out to be a girl in male clothing. The flirtatiousness of the novel, augmented by its careful prefatory essay supporting the doctrine of art for art’s sake, saved it from demolition by the charges of indecency which were inevitably brought against it, and allowed it to prepare the ground for the more intense celebrations of homoeroticism to be found in the works of Verlaine and Lorrain, and for the paeans of praise for Lesbianism which were to be sung by Baudelaire and Pierre Louÿs.

In Fortunio, whose eponymous hero comes to Paris from the East, establishing for himself an exotic microcosm where tropical lushness is simulated by cunning artifice, we see for the first time the Decadent flourishing in his unnatural habitat, more-or-less content to drift on the tides of ennui, buoyed up by the elaborate contrivances of artifice. Like Gautier’s fabulous femmes fatales he is only a dream which cannot persist, but he is – or is supposed to be – a powerfully attractive dream. Equally magnetic is Gautier’s Cleopatra, who similarly enjoys an existence made almost unbearable by comfort and luxury, and seeks momentary distraction in the arms of a lover who is then put to death; his execution is incorporated into the aesthetic experience, making it whole. Unlike the author, this particular heroine has no delusions at all about the value of ideal love, and is happy to savour her own callousness in a fashion which was later to be recapitulated and intensively recomplicated by Octave Mirbeau in Le jardin des supplices.

Charles-Pierre Baudelaire’s early novella La Fanfarlo (1847) fits readily enough into this tradition of prose fiction; its Amauryesque central character is the victim of a similar apathy and takes a similar delight in impossible dreams, but his attitude to his own status as the corrupt child of a corrupt age is very different from Amaury’s, and far beyond anything Gautier could bring himself to endorse. He is fascinated by his own state of mind and the tendencies enshrined therein, morbidly delighted by his perverse inclinations. This was the step which carried Baudelaire over the edge of the precipice into free fall, and made him the first true Decadent.

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If one particular moment can be set aside to mark the birth of Decadent literature, it occurred in 1857, when the first edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal was issued. It is not simply the contents of the book which determines this, but the reaction which it caused. The pump of scandal had been primed by those poems which had previously been published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1855 and the publication of the book was the signal for legal action to proceed. The Court imposed heavy fines and ruled that six of the hundred-and-one poems were to be suppressed as obscene.

It is in retrospect possible to recognise this action as a tribute to the collection’s effectiveness, but one can easily understand that the author found it impossible to rejoice. Opposition increased his feelings of alienation but weakened his Decadent resolve, and though some of his most brilliant productions were yet to be penned he never quite recovered the full impetus of that first bouquet of flowers of evil. The use of the courts to suppress Decadence was, of course, to be repeated with much greater success in England, where Oscar Wilde would presumably have been hung, drawn and quartered had the law still permitted that extent of judicial persecution.

The fact that these prosecutions were carried forward so swiftly, and in the absence of any genune injury, is the best testimony we have to the real force of the Decadent challenge to alternative moralities and ideologies. As Wilde himself observed, one can measure a man far more accurately by his enemies than his friends: friendship is frequently false but enmity never is, and one can always be certain that while half one’s friends are certain to desert one in a time of crisis, not a single enemy will refrain from gloating. The merit of the Decadent’s assault upon the society in which he found himself, and the honesty of his response to its aspirations, is proven by the fierceness with which his ideas were condemned.

Baudelaire became the first writer to express the Decadent sensibility in such wholehearted and uncompromising terms because he was the first to experience it so fully and so sharply. The cruelly paradoxical forces which thus shaped his character are easy to read in his biography. His father, born in 1759, and his mother, born in 1793, came from different worlds. From his father – who had been tutor to an aristocratic family and had absorbed enough of their elegance and refinement to have sided with them against the Revolutionists – Baudelaire inherited refined tastes and the expectation of a considerable legacy of money which, though long anticipated and partly spent, was ultimately withheld from him (save for an inadequate dole) by his step-father and half-brother, whose standards of respectability he had begun to disappoint while he was still a clever but troublesome schoolboy. When he expressed his intention to be a writer he was packed off to India in the hope of removing him from evil influences, but he never reached his destination, returning to France in 1842 after spending a few weeks in Mauritius. This seems to have been construed by his relatives as evidence of his irresponsibility, which was soon compounded by the extravagant lifestyle which he attempted to take up on his return to Paris; they quickly took measures to ensure that he spent the rest of his life in unnecessary poverty. His attempts to make a consistent living with his pen were always resentfully half-hearted.

Baudelaire’s relationships with women provided little solace and much heartache, and the love-poems which he wrote are redolent with pain and frustration, whether they refer to his sexual liaison with the “Black Venus” Jeanne Duval, or to his attempts to pursue sanitized Platonic love with the uncaringly capricious actress Marie Daubrun and the Salon-keeper Mme. Sabatier. Nor could he find any real release from his misery in his experiments with drugs; Flaubert complained of his book on hashish and opium, Les Paradis artificiels (1860), that what had begun as a pioneering exercise in natural science had been sidetracked by a preoccupation with the spirit of evil supposedly incarnate in these substances, and Gautier later commented that Baudelaire had been initially reluctant to involve himself in the “experiments” undertaken by “le Club de Haschichins” – which included Gerard de Nerval as well as Gautier – on the grounds that a flight from necessary sorrow must be inherently Satanic. Baudelaire declared on his own account that he wrote Les Paradis artificiels to demonstrate that seekers after artificial paradises inevitably create private hells.

Baudelaire’s miseries were further compounded by the fact that his work was not well-received by his contemporaries – at least, not openly. He was a candidate for the Academy in 1861 but was forced to withdraw. Sainte-Beuve, whom he idolized – in 1844 Baudelaire wrote an “epistle” in verse proclaiming that he had imported the story of Amaury into his heart, absorbing all its “miasmas” and “perfumes”, and that he had become a practitioner of the same “cruel art” – ignored him save for an off-hand remark condemning his work as “folly”. Gautier, who understood him far better, carefully hoarded his own praise until after Baudelaire’s death, at which point he belatedly added an enthusiastic Notice to the 1868 Les Fleurs du Mal. Others were openly scathing, including Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose own cynical dandyism was saved from being thoroughly Decadent only by his devout Catholicism; he remarked that the only two possibilities open to the man whose soul was revealed in Les Fleurs du Mal were conversion to Catholicism and suicide. (Baudelaire had already wounded himself attempting suicide in 1845, and appears always to have regarded himself as an “incorrigible”, though permanently lapsed, Catholic.) It seems probable, in fact, that the only poet who gave Baudelaire a reasonable measure of moral support while he was alive was the only one who condescended to give an oration at his funeral: his long-time friend Théodore de Banville, the Parnassian inheritor of Gautier’s mantle as the premier champion of art for art’s sake.

Given all this, it is not surprising that Baudelaire’s vivid verses and ornate poems in prose are so full of lamentations – but they are not mere cries of despair. What is quintessentially Decadent about them is the way in which they harness personal tragedy to the greater context, attempting to use analysis of the personal predicament to reach a more perfect understanding and aesthetic appreciation of the state of the world.

It is easy enough to feel sorry for Baudelaire, but pity is out of place when contemplating the poets of Decadence; how could they have become poets of Decadence unless they were torn apart by the contradictions which others managed to avoid? How, if Baudelaire had not had his comforts eked out, could he possibly have laid claim – as he did in the most celebrated of his several poems entitled “Spleen” – that he had more memories than if he had lived a thousand years, crowded as secrets in his unhappy brain? How could he have likened himself to a graveyard churned about by worms of remorse? And how, if he had only harboured such feelings for brief intervals of alienation, couldhe possibly have learned to savour the sensation as he did? If he had made a better living, he would only have been one more Parnassian among many; as it was he became the primary inspiration of the whole Decadent Movement.

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3.

GENIUS AND MADNESS:THE ATTRACTIONS OF DECADENCE

Even when one accepts that Baudelaire would have been a less interesting poet had he not led such a tortured life it remains rather surprising that he became a role-model for an entire movement. In order to understand this more fully, it is necessary to pay some attention to the other intellectual currents of the day.

Before the movement actually got under way in the 1880s the pessimism which the Decadents were to embrace was given an increased measure of respectability by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which was popularized in France by Théodule Ribot in 1874. Schopenhauer argues that the world contains so much more misfortune than joy that life is fundamentally unhappy, tolerable only because the Will to Live persistently deceives us with unrealistic hopes. The enlightened man, according to Schopenhauer, must replace this deceptive will with an honest Idea, whose contemplation is fundamentally aesthetic. All this seemed to French aesthetes a significant underlining of what Baudelaire had attempted and achieved.

An even more striking and radical endorsement of the Decadent pose was, in addition, provided by contemporary fashions in proto-psychology, with which many writers were closely in touch. The experiments with hashish and opium which were undertaken by Gautier and other members of the self-styled Club de Haschichins in the 1830s and 1840s were undertaken in a fairly careful spirit of exploration: the drugs were frequently supplied by medical men who supervised and observed their use, and catalogued their effects. The principaldoctor involved in Gautier’s hallucinatory adventures was Joseph Moreau, who liked to style himself “Moreau de Tours”. Moreau’s interest in abnormal psychology was by no means confined to the study of psychotropic substances; he produced a whole series of books between 1835 and 1859 investigating the phenomena of “nervous disorders”. His work exhibits two constant preoccupations which were of considerable potential interest to Decadents, and his personal acquaintance with both Gautier and Baudelaire must have ensured that they were thoroughly familiar with his ideas. The first of these preoccupations was an intense interestin artistic genius as a species of neurosis; the second was a fascination with the alleged heredity of neurotic traits. Moreau was by no means alone in these preoccupations, which were shared by several more prestigious figures, most importantly the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, whose book on the psychology of genius was translated into French at the height of the Decadent Movement, in 1884.

The emergent science of abnormal psychology was very heavily influenced by early evolutionist ideas, which made much of the contrary tendencies of “progress” and “degeneration” in searching for explanations of the palaeontological record. In France, of course, evolutionist thinking continued to be dominated by Lamarckian ideas – including the proposition that acquired characteristics could be inherited – for some years after the first publication in England (in 1859) of Darwin’s ideas. As the human sciences came uneasily into being analogies were constantly being drawn between society and biological organisms, so that the ills afflicting society could be explored by analogy with the pathology of disease. (It should be remembered that disease itself was not well-understood at this time; Pasteur did not develop the modern germ theory of disease until the 1860s and a considerable confusion of medical and moral attitudes persisted for some time afterwards.)

The evident correlation between sexual licence and venereal disease was echoed in proto-psychology by dark superstitions regarding the effects of habitual masturbation, and no one could be sure to what extent the sins of fathers might be visited upon their sons. Montesquieu’s speculations about the decadence of the Romans were recapitulated and much amplified by theories of hereditary decadence which imagined aristocratic families devoted to luxury and vice becoming more effete and less sane with every generation that passed.

In consequence of these speculations there emerged in the proto-psychology of nineteenth century France and England a new myth: the myth of neurasthenia. The neurasthenic was a physically weak and over-sensitive individual, likely also to be morally weak, permanently possessed by apathy and spiritual impotence. His (or her – though females were more likely to be diagnosed as “hysteric”) condition was primarily the result of bad hereditary but could easily be inflamed by self-abuse and other bad habits. The closeness of this image to the image of the Decadent personality is by no means entirely coincidental; the pseudoscientific theorists of degeneracy fed upon literary inspiration, and returned what they had borrowed with generous interest.

But the proto-psychologists went further than this, offering speculations which put the neurotic victim of bad heredity in a rather more romantic light. Moreau and Lombroso were both concerned to argue that artistic genius was itself a species of neurosis, closely associated with bad heredity and eccentric lifestyle. The unfortunate victims were therefore offered a possible route to compensatory achievement; would-be Decadents were encouraged to believe that the madder and more miserable they were, the more justified they might be in thinking of themselves as men of genius.

Baudelaire, who was one of many nineteenth. century writers to have his end hastened by the physical and mental corruptions of syphilis, was not the only striking example offering apparent support for this thesis. Gerard de Nerval, a friend of Gautier’s who was notorious for having strolled in the gardens of the Palais Royal leading a lobster on a leash of pale blue ribbon, had not only gone insane and killed himself but had transmuted his mental disorder into disturbed literary forms – most notably his phantasmagoric novella Aurelia (1855), published posthumously in the year ofhis death. Nerval’s poetry was not assembled into a collection until 1877, shortly before the heyday of Decadence. It included a supernaturaliste group written par désespoir: a product of his madness which helped lay the groundwork for certain Decadent preoccupations.

The influence of proto-p sychology was by no means confined to writers of a Decadent stripe; indeed, the French writer who was most elaborately influenced by theories of hereditary degeneracy was Emile Zola, whose extensive analysis of the family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts is entirely based on such ideas. Zola, like Saint-Beuve before him, was writing about Decadents and other victims ofbad heredity from a clinically objective standpoint; he saw himself as a quasi-scientific Naturalist, as did the Goncourts, whose techniques of characterization are similarly heavily “medicated”. It is not surprising that such authors as these were in no hurry to associate themselves more closely with their subject-matter; but nor is it surprising that others were bolder, entirely content to be mad, bad and dangerous to know, if such a condition were the red badge of courage which the authentic genius must wear.

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To what extent it is mere coincidence is difficult to judge, but it is certainly true that the two poets who followed Baudelaire in providing exemplary impetus to the Decadent Movement – Rimbaud and Verlaine – followed careers which were even more disordered than his.

Like Baudelaire, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud suffered a fatal break in his family relationships when he was six years old. His father deserted his mother in 1860, unable any longer to tolerate the severity of her rectitude. Rimbaud too was to rebel against this smothering domestic tyranny, embracing the revolutionary ideas of his teacher Georges Izambard and three times running away from school in 1870 and 1871. In between these excursions he spent his time in the school library reading the most scandalous texts available, including books on alchemy, witchcraft and ritual magic as well as supposedly-indecent poetry and novels. He became vehemently and aggressively atheistic, and wrote angry poems in profusion.

In 1870 Rimbaud sent several poems to Banville, who was then selecting material for the Le Parnasse contemporain, claiming to be seventeen and expressing his fervent desire to be a Parnassian, but they were not published. Early in 1871 he laid out in a letter to his teacher Paul Demeny his new theory and philosophy of literature, attacking “egoists” and expressing his resolve to become a Promethean “seer”, which aim he expected to attain by a “long, prodigious, and rational disordering of the senses”. Foremost among the heroes whom he expected to follow and surpass was Baudelaire, who was in his estimation “the king of poets, a veritable God”.

In 1871 Rimbaud sent some poems to Paul Verlaine, who was then an obscure and only slightly effete Parnassian. Verlaine, in one of the fits of reckless enthusiasm to which he was frequently subject, summoned the young acolyte to his side – much to the disgust and discomfort of the in-laws with whom he and his heavily-pregnant eighteen-year-old wife were living. Rimbaud and Verlaine became enthusiastically involved in a mutual disordering of their experiences, which was certainly prodigious, though perhaps not so conspicuously rational. They drank absin the and smoked hashish, and though both were later to deny in writing that there was anything sexual in their undoubtedly intimate liaison – well, they would have to say that, wouldn’t they? The two lived in England for a while, probably smoking opium in the dens of Limehouse, before their stormy relationship came to a head in Brussels in 1873, when a drunken Verlaine fired a pistol at his infuriating friend, wounding him in the hand. Despite Rimbaud’s attempts to exonerate him from all blame for this intemperate act, Verlaine was imprisoned for two years.

Rimbaud made few attempts to publish his work, and in 1874 he decided to renounce literature completely. He responded one last time to an urgent summons from Verlaine following the latter’s release from prison, but found the elder poet in the grip of a reignited passion for the Catholic faith and turned his back on him forever. He then undertook a much-interrupted journey to the East, ending up in charge of a trading-post in Abyssinia; but his life there ultimately proved too staid and he attempted, unsuccessfully, to take up a career as a gun-runner and slave-trafficker. His adventures were finally cut short early in 1891 when his leg was amputated because of a tumour; he did not survive the year. Ironically, he had become famous in his native land during the period of his absence thanks to Verlaine’s inclusion of him in his study of “accursed poets”, Poètes maudits (1884), which was followed by belated publication of his most notable works, Illuminations and Une saison en enfer (incorrectly advertised as “posthumous”). Rimbaud’s position as a central figure of the Decadent eighties was anachronistic, but the paradoxicality of it was entirely appropriate.

It was left to Verlaine himself to become the parent of the actual Decadent Movement. Although his life probably presents a better exemplar of Decadence than anything he actually wrote, it is frequently argued that his sonnet “Langueur”, which appeared in the periodical Le Chat Noir in 1883, was the launching-pad for fashionable Decadence. Verlaine was at that time still little-known as a poet, although his Poèmes Saturniens