The Dedalus Book of English Decadence E-Book

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The most wide-ranging, important collection of English decadence.

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Leseprobe

THE EDITOR

The editor is a pale clerk who lives in East Anglia. He scours the country in search of lost and forgotten books.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editor would like to thank Eric Lane, Phil Baker and Robert Irwin for their invaluable help with compiling this book. Thanks are also due to Robert Bass, Peter Mornard, Jamie Reynolds, Dr John Byrne, Dr Paul Dawson, Professor John Woolford and Dr Malcolm Hicks.

The editor would like to thank the following for the use of copyright material:

Extracts from ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’ and ‘Enoch Soames’ by Sir Max Beerbohm are reprinted by permission of Marc Berlin.

‘Ennui’ by Lord Alfred Douglas is reprinted by permission of John Rubinstein and John Stratford.

‘The Decadent to his Soul’ by Richard Le Gallienne is reprinted by permission of the Society of Authors.

Passages from ‘The Great God Pan’ by Arthur Machen are reprinted by permission of A. M. Heath Author’s Agents & Co. Ltd.

‘In Bohemia’, ‘The Absinthe-Drinker’, ‘The Opium-Smoker’, and ‘Stella Maris’ are reprinted by permission of Brian Read, M. A.

This is for my family and for Gulay.

CONTENTS

TITLE

THE EDITOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. TAEDIUM VITAEOscar Wilde

2. Passages from THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIREEdward Gibbon

3. LINES WRITTEN DURING A PERIOD OF INSANITYWilliam Cowper

4. Extract from VATHEKWilliam Beckford

5. DARKNESSLord Byron

6. A DREAMBryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’)

7. Passages from THE STORY OF PRINCE ALASI AND THE PRINCESS FIROUZKAHWilliam Beckford

8. Verses from CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE: A ROMAUNTLord Byron

9. ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERYPercy Bysshe Shelley

10. Verses from ENDYMION: A POETIC ROMANCEJohn Keats

11. Verses from THE GIAOURLord Byron

12. Extract from CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATERThomas De Quincey

13. SONGThomas Lovell Beddoes

14. Verses from LAMIAJohn Keats

15. THOUGHTS DURING SICKNESS: II. SICKNESS LIKE NIGHTFelicia Dorothea Hemans

16. TITHONUSAlfred, Lord Tennyson

17. BODY’S BEAUTYDante Gabriel Rossetti

18. Verses from ANACTORIAAlgernon Charles Swinburne

19. Extract from the Conclusion to STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCEWalter Pater

20. IF YOU’RE ANXIOUS FOR TO SHINE IN THE HIGH AESTHETIC LINE from PATIENCESir W. S. Gilbert

21. DOLORESAlgernon Charles Swinburne

22. HÉLAS!Oscar Wilde

23. Passages from CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MANGeorge Moore

24. NIGHTMARE from THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHTJames Thomson

25. Passages from LESBIA BRANDONAlgernon Charles Swinburne

26. Passages from DENYS L’AUXERROISWalter Pater

27. Extract from THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAYOscar Wilde

28. A LAST WORDErnest Dowson

29. THE ABSINTHE-DRINKERArthur Symons

30. Passages from THE CULTURED FAUNLionel Johnson

31. THE DECADENT TO HIS SOULRichard Le Gallienne

32. Passages from A DEFENCE OF COSMETICSSir Max Beerbohm

33. DREGSErnest Dowson

34. NIHILISMLionel Johnson

35. THE OPIUM-SMOKERArthur Symons

36. Passages from THE GREAT GOD PANArthur Machen

37. POEMJohn Gray

38. ENNUILord Alfred Douglas

39. Passages from ENOCH SOAMESSir Max Beerbohm

40. STELLA MARISArthur Symons

41. ORCHIDSTheodore Wratislaw

42. Passages from THE STORY OF VENUS AND TANNHAUSERAubrey Beardsley

43. THE BARBERJohn Gray

44. THE DESTROYER OF A SOULJohn Davidson

45. LUCRETIAJames Elroy Flecker

46. Extract from THE DEAD WALLH. B. Marriott Watson

47. PASSIONRichard Garnett

48. AGAINST MY LADY BURTON: ON HER BURNING THE LAST WRITING OF HER DEAD HUSBANDErnest Dowson

49. IN BOHEMIAArthur Symons

APPENDIX: ENGLISH DECADENCE ELSEWHERE

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

Ah, what a divine celebration was the auto-da-fé of November 1707 – how charming and modest it must have been in its holy but gay simplicity. What a fine mixture of fireworks and of flames from burning Jews, of torments below and dancing above ground, of opera … Ah, happy times, if only they could return…

This is William Beckford, millionaire aesthete, plantation owner, author of Vathek, and the first true English decadent. On the death of his father in 1770, the nine year old Beckford inherited one of the largest fortunes in England, derived from the spoils of empire: West Indian sugar cane. Great wealth should have brought great responsibility, but he admirably ignored this all his life, pursuing instead a career of committed sensualism. Like Byron, he courted the scandal of adulterous and incestuous affairs; like Wilde, a furious aristocrat ruined his reputation. Beckford was the godfather of an English decadence that blossomed in the 1890s, but first emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

At first glance though, decadence may not appear particularly English at all. The nineteenth century looked to France for fiery poetry and prose, and with good reason. It was a time of unfettered imagination, the time of Théophile Gautier, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Octave Mirbeau. The French decadent was typically fatigued by a world-weariness, suspicious of all passion, and had settled for a life of bored debauchery. The modern English decadent though drew deeply from the aestheticism of John Keats, the Pre-Raphaelites and Walter Pater, and so insisted upon seeing a beauty in all things, no matter how revolting. From the mid-nineteenth century it has been understood that France was the genesis of all things decadent, while Victorian England could only stand by and look on, shaking its head.

In England however, and centuries earlier, the Renaissance dramatists bequeathed a popular culture of murder and monstrosity. Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus anticipated many of the pale, young dilettantes of damnation that emerged hundreds of years later. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy were unspeakably violent, but staged in a thoroughly entertaining manner. Sin was made fascinating, and depravity was disguised by great language.

Elsewhere in English history, ‘Bad’ King John expired from a surfeit of peaches and the composer Henry Purcell perished from alleged ‘chocolate poisoning’. Both were characters clearly consumed with the sensations of the (then) exotic and rare. The Georgian society figure George Augustus Selwyn obsessively attended criminal executions, demanding the intimate details of the criminal, the crime and method of execution. He thought little of voyaging to France to indulge his morbid interests; to escape recognition on some occasions Selwyn would readily dress in women’s clothing. More deviant than decadent, what all these characters have in common is that they make full use of the fruits of civilisation to indulge unwholesome appetites.

One of the earliest glimpses of English decadent writing is concerned with the extravagances of antiquity. In 1776 the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared, in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. At a point when English imperialism appeared to falter, Gibbon chose to document the collapse of empire as a concept. Things begin with Augustus halting the expansionism of Rome’s ongoing conquest of the earth, a policy that allowed succeeding emperors to delegate many of their military responsibilities elsewhere. For the degenerates that followed this gave them more opportunities to indulge themselves with the fruits of the world’s most flourishing economy; pursuits that quietly replaced the obligations of power. Augustus inaugurated an imperial climate much more tolerant of wayward, perverse and ultimately monstrous rulers.

Duly, a youth emerged from insurrection in Syria in A. D. 218 to become emperor of Rome, as Elagabalus, and one of history’s first and most remarkable decadents. Stories abound of his depravities: he apparently smothered his guests at a dinner party to death with rose petals dropped from above; he had an artificial vagina surgically inserted; he married a (male) charioteer. Gibbon is a little more circumspect. He tells of a portrait of the new emperor arriving in Rome a while before Elagabalus’s entry into the city, that horrified an already apprehensive senate. The picture showed an imperial head ‘covered with a lofty tiara’, with eyebrows ‘tinged with black, and his cheeks painted with an artificial red and white.’ What disturbed them most though was the prospect that Rome’s majesty was now to be ‘humbled beneath the effeminate luxury of Oriental despotism.’ The dandy was born.

Gibbon attracted fierce criticism when he treated the progress of Christianity in Rome as part of the process of an empire’s destruction. The account of Nero’s use of the ‘Galilæans’ to illuminate the night is particularly barbed: for this episode he quotes Tacitus, who more or less describes the victims as vermin that deserved it, regardless of guilt. Gibbon goes on to praise the source’s commitment to truth and accuracy, with only the faintest suggestion of mistaken judgment. Elsewhere he tells of the rumours of vampirism, infant sacrifice and orgiastic incest that dogged the early faithful because of their secretive worship. Worse still is the suggestion that Rome’s efforts at diplomacy with the Christians were met with contempt from zealots alarmingly fond of predicting imminent apocalypse. This was too much for church-going, eighteenth-century England, but the History was still a great success. Incidentally, Christendom went on to retain a curious relationship with decadence. It would provide a sanctity to desecrate and the penitence with which to confess: Baudelaire, Wilde and Huysmans all died recent converts to Catholicism.

Gibbon is not a name usually associated with decadent writers and their writing, but what he implies is that luxury corrupts, and that for any imperial society luxury is the most enduring of any achievement. Conquest of the Orient traditionally provided these luxuries (silks, gems, spices and the riches that these bring in trade): the child of empire becomes accustomed to abundance, and eventually bored by it, and then seeks more exotic matter to satisfy his curiosities. It is at this point that a decadence begins to stir. Gibbon celebrated the Orient both as one of the chief sources of Rome’s wealth and of its decay.

There is a classical precedent for all degenerate conquerors of the Orient: Dionysus. The illegitimate son of Zeus was torn apart by the Titans at birth, on the instruction of a jealous Hera, wife to the king of the gods. Rescued and nurtured in a cave by nymphs, Dionysus emerged as an effeminate and foppish adult before traversing the earth with his entourage of Maenads, in order to spread the cult of the vine. Mania and monstrosity were visited upon all opposition. He subdued India, sojourned in Egypt, and then returned to Europe, before ascending to Olympus. It would be some time before myth became modern history, and other powers looked greedily eastward.

In 1704 Arabian Nights Entertainment appeared, translated into French by Antoine Galland and more commonly known today as The Thousand and One Nights. It rendered European imaginations delirious with tales of the seraglio, evil viziers and the jinnee. It was immediately translated into English and has been in print ever since. There were delicious new words to tantalise the tongue (ifrit, bazaar, harem) and new, unusual names for heroes and heroines (Ali Baba, Scheherazade, Aladdin). Fascination with all things Oriental became an ingredient in Georgian fashion: the Prince of Wales replicated Eastern architecture with his pavilion at Brighton; material swathed around the head, a turban, became the essential accessory for ladies of society. A publishing explosion followed, and William Jones’s 1789 translation of Sacontala, by the Indian playwright Calidas, was to be an influence on much of the Romantic and decadent writing of the next century. It tells of an Oriental king spellbound by the part-peasant girl, part-nymph of the title. Yearning for an immortal, impossible ideal is central to Romanticism and to decadence, prominently in John Keats’ ‘Endymion’, and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s ‘Dolores’. Sacontala was this yearning eroticised, and after its translation it was westernised into a sensual, exotic and Oriental ideal.

All this proved irresistible to the more fevered minds of some English writers. The Eastern phantasmagoria of ‘Kubla Khan’ entered itself and its author, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, into the pantheon of literature; future poet laureate Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer made his name; even Sir Walter Scott wrote The Talisman. What came out of all this was a generation’s fascination with the Orient both as something remote and extraordinary, and yet somehow real and part of the empire. For most people, the East could only be read about in books, and mainly in translations of mythology: unsurprisingly, it was imagined as a region of magical creatures, grand palaces and the fantastical. Because of this, the exotic new beauties of the East could rather hazily merge with its exotic new horrors, such as its jinnee. The perverse appeal of the glorious and the grotesque here entered a modern, more extreme phase in England’s cultural consciousness. The Orient provided a theatre for the decadent imaginations of the Occident.

William Beckford could afford not only to visit the institutions that kept Oriental texts, but also their wholesale purchase, such as Gibbon’s library in Lausanne, along with artefacts, objets d’art and an education in Persian and Arabic. Vathek, his masterpiece, emerged in English in 1786, and shamelessly invested the Orient with the qualities of the gorgeous but horrid. Caliph Vathek is a prince utterly addicted to the pleasuring of the senses, but, like Beckford, he wants more, and to know more. His desire for knowledge and sensation becomes ever more insatiable: he ‘thinks that he sees in whatever is past and remote from him the ideal atmosphere for the contentment of his own senses’ (Praz, 1933). Vathek also delights with its rich language, retained in its translation from the original French by Samuel Henley. It is hypnotically alliterative, and exquisitely choice in vocabulary; ‘that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms’, as Dorian Gray might have described it. As with the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, pleasures are to be had from horrors in great costumes of language. Beckford wrote his decadent appetites into the monstrous Vathek, whose unhealthy pursuits do not provide a blueprint for the decadent lifestyle, like Huysmans’ À Rebours (‘Against Nature’), but instead a cautionary tale in the manner of Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, or Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Beckford’s Orient is both an exquisite and hideous experience.

Sacontala acclimatised Georgian literary tastes to an eroticised Orient; the emerging English decadence adulterated it into something much more unsavoury. The marriage of beauty and terror was initially Orientalised, as in Vathek: ‘Kubla Khan’ has its ‘woman wailing for her demon-lover’; Thomas De Quincey confesses that, whilst in opiate reverie, he found himself ‘kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles’. On the Continent femmes fatale moved eastward: Théophile Gautier produced Une Nuit de Cléopâtre after Mademoiselle De Maupin; Gustave Flaubert followed Madame Bovary with Salammbô. Charles Baudelaire translated his lust for his ‘Black Venus’ Jeanne Duval into any number of poems (‘Le Vampire’, ‘Duellum’, ‘Les Bijoux’ …). By the end of the century and back in England, the affair became fatal and all the more seductive for it: witness Wilde’s ‘Charmides’ and Salomé.

With regard to Coleridge and De Quincey, it is interesting to see how readily images of the East were appropriated by the ecstasies and desolations of opium. This is a drug that is horrifyingly appropriate for a philosophy that marries the painful and the pleasurable. Opium regularly appears in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and in ‘Ligeia’ its association with the East is clear: ‘Wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted, shadow-like, before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the sarcophagi…’

The peeled nerves of some of Coleridge’s poems and the horrors of his addiction (see ‘The Pains of Sleep’ and ‘A Fragment’ that precedes ‘Kubla Khan’) are unmistakably decadent. He was an ill man in every respect, and when you consider the extraordinary writing he was producing at the time, this illness can seem no longer tragic, but horribly interesting. A robust, healthy condition produces robust, healthy thought and writing; this holds no interest for the decadent, who prefers a languid or unhinged state of mind. Why? Because delirium and shattered nerves offer new, unfamiliar sensations and ways of looking at the world. Georgian poets William Cowper and Christopher Smart both suffered from lengthy periods of insanity, but kept on writing throughout. Smart underwent years of incarceration in an asylum, and, like Coleridge, only found a degree of peace in Christianity. This is from ‘Jubilate Agno’:

For I bless God the Postmaster general & all conveyancers of letters under his care especially Allen & Shelvock.

For my grounds in Canaan shall infinitely compensate for the flats & maynes of Staindrop Moor.

For the praise of God can give to a mute fish the notes of a nightingale.

This is the kind of distorted view of things that appeals to the decadent; unsurprisingly, some of Smart’s best works such as ‘A Song To David’ were not included in a 1791 collection, as deemed ‘not acceptable to the reader’ by editors. However unsettling this concept may be, the insane see things differently. Narcotics offered a fleeting glimpse of this. Opium, alcohol and laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) were the drugs of choice for many of the nineteenth-century’s writers. Oscar Wilde tried hashish in Egypt and favoured imported, opium-tinged Egyptian cigarettes back in London; Ernest Dowson experimented with hashish at university before alcoholic melancholy consumed him as an adult.

It is too easy an explanation, however, to say that the decadent demands to be anaesthetised from the everyday business of existence. Much of the writing produced after these experiences makes for unsettling reading, and cannot have been inspired by a blissful, mindless hour. No, the decadent seeks both paradise and horror in his pursuit of new, exotic sensations. The great Charles Baudelaire, avatar of the French decadence and seemingly read by anyone of note in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, would deferentially refer to and re-work passages from De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in ‘On Wine and Hashish’ (1851) and ‘The Poem of Hashish’ (1860). By unhappy accident, Coleridge and De Quincey established the model for generations to come of the young and intoxicated.

Georgian decadence concerned itself with arabesques of east and west, beauty and horror, eroticism and death. This proved dangerous. In the age of Romanticism the poet exalted himself as a martyr for his art: suddenly in England there was remarkable writing being brandished by equally remarkable characters. The writer was not only recognisable in his work, but was realised by it. The image of a pale and interesting young thing furiously at work upon a masterpiece was born in this time. In the Age of Revolution, as Thomas Paine named the latter half of the eighteenth century, absolute commitment to the cause, whatever the cause was, became compulsory.

Ideas of freedom formed in this era laid the foundation for all future decadent behaviour. The American and French Revolutions had been sparked from new ideas of liberty which resounded through the whole imperial world. First it was social, economic, and political thought that came under fire, and then it was the turn of religious, sexual and moral principles. William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and The Age of Reason were the key texts of the new forum on freedoms in England. With incredible irony, the Romantic generation that revolted against the decadence of their empire, which was founded on plutocratic democracy and slavery, managed to engineer the intellectual architecture for the decadence of the self.

This was achieved through decades of steady collapse in all forms of belief, before metamorphosing into a form of aestheticised nihilism. The Age of Revolution did not mark the end of the Age of Empire, however. Not all governments collapsed overnight, and neither were the new, liberal politics properly implemented, as witnessed by Napoleonic France’s descent into dictatorship. By the end of the century all Paine, Godwin and Bonaparte had achieved was the hollowing out of belief in anything, old or new. Any fin de siècle society experiences a nervous uncertainty of progress, celebration and apocalypse, the mood which gave rise to the great flowering of English decadence in the 1890s. So it is unsurprising that the closing decades of the eighteenth century resounded with the explosion of the Gothic novel. The ruins of castles, religions and innocence that feature in the writing of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis demonstrate the sense of living in a world falling down. When faith in the good of all things flounders, the individual looks elsewhere, anywhere, to pleasure, to oblivion; a decadence beckons.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote on this many decades later, in ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. His claim is that any desire for good needs to be ‘excited’ by knowing why not to do evil, from knowledge usually provided by law or religion. The ‘excitement’ may prove too much of course, and then ‘through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not … to do wrong for the wrong’s sake’. The decadent creed.

William Beckford appears from his life and letters as a man recklessly trying to live the life of his own doomed Caliph Vathek. His dangerous charisma and capricious passions for adultery proved horribly infectious to those around him, often resulting in scandal that they could not afford. This is from the correspondence of Louisa Beckford, wife of his cousin Peter, and a disregarded lover: ‘William, my lovely infernal! how gloriously you write of iniquities … like another Lucifer you would tempt Angels to forsake their coelestial abode, and sink with you into the black infernal gulph.’ At times Beckford seems the parody of the pale and distempered decadent, luxuriating in ill-health: ‘This morning I feel a universal malaise’, ‘My languor is such that I can write no more’, ‘I am still very languid.’ One episode in his life, however, proves him beyond doubt the godfather of all English decadence. At Christmas in 1781 Beckford and some companions, including a theatre pyrotechnician famed for his ‘necromantic’ lighting and effects, abandoned themselves to the vaulted intricacies of his family home’s halls and corridors. These had been transformed into a form of subterranean boudoir by ‘the vapour of wood aloes ascending in wreaths from cassolettes placed low on the silken carpets in porcelain salvers of the richest japan.’ Forty years later Beckford still talked in his letters of the, ‘delirium of delight into which our young and fervid bosoms were cast,’ by this, ‘Demon Temple deep beneath the earth set apart for tremendous mysteries’. This anticipated the fictional experiments in sensory disorder of Huysmans’ Des Esseintes by an entire century.

The damned of the underworld lend their stories to the three Episodes of Vathek, which were written as a continuation of Vathek. They were published only in 1912, as Beckford lost heart after initial fury at their removal from the unsanctioned, anonymous 1786 publication of his masterpiece. The Episodes gleefully parade incest, necrophilia, heresy, fratricide and despotism against a sumptuously Oriental backdrop. His letters refer to the fourth, unpublished, and perhaps unpublishable tale of ‘Motassem’, which he fears as too much for his readers, with extremities beyond extremities of, ‘the grandiose, the graceful, the whorish and the holy’. Beckford’s stories and debaucheries mark the origin of the decadent appetite for damnation, which came to a head a hundred years later in Oscar Wilde’s very willing fall from disgrace into utter destruction.

Caliph Vathek’s ferocious and dangerous pursuit of sensation anticipated entire generations of impressionable youth. These are the casualties of the age of Romanticism: Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned at thirty; Lord Byron was bled to death by his doctors in revolutionary Greece, at thirty-six; John Keats dead from consumption, at twenty-six. William Wordsworth lived on to become a respectable establishment poet: Shelley felt grief enough to address this lamentable failure to expire in verse (‘To Wordsworth’). Coleridge’s post-1800 poetry rarely lived up to his astonishing potential, after decades of drug addiction and Christianity. Decadents and Romantics alike were finished by ideas: Byron’s pursuit of doom and glory funded Greek resistance against Turkish rule; he died never having seen combat. Shelley put his fate into the hands of the elements, and perished in a storm.

The 1890s saw the most degenerate descendants of the Georgian era attract the name of, ‘The Tragic Generation’, a phrase coined by W. B. Yeats. Although due in the main to tuberculosis, this was exacerbated by riotously intemperate lifestyles. These are the victims of those years: Lionel Johnson dead at thirty-five, alcoholic and insomniac; Ernest Dowson cut down at thirty-three from T. B.; Oscar Wilde deceased at forty-six.

Byron in particular idolised Beckford, claiming Vathek as his personal Bible; the exotic ferocity of his own Eastern tales such as The Corsair and The Giaour only intensified the Georgian appetite for things Oriental. Byron is the most recognisable influence on the lifestyles of the 1890s. He made little distinction between his writing and himself, and insisted on taking nothing seriously. Why? Because behind a mask of insouciance, you can almost get away with … anything. Sensation was the force that extorted from him his relentless pursuit of new experience. Like Beckford, he was the quintessential child of empire, proudly aristocratic, and whose instantly gratified appetites became ever more perverse, particularly while on the Continent. In a letter he admits, ‘excessive susceptibility to immediate impressions’; the hero of Childe Harold claims addiction to, ‘revel and ungodly glee.’

Byron came of age in the era of Napoleon’s dictatorship, which was the final failure of belief in the Age of Revolution. Idealism had never surfaced in his writing before, and after this it never could. Everywhere he looked he saw boredom and disaster, and escape from this became his end in life, like a thorough decadent. ‘The great object of life is sensation – to feel that we exist – even in pain,’ he wrote in a letter: existence for him was a cultivated addiction to forbidden sensations, and eventually those of destruction. This is the core of Manfred and Cain; Don Juan celebrates an unending parade of experiences. The poet needed, ‘the feeling of fatality in order to appreciate the flow of life … like Satan, Byron wished to experience the feeling of being struck with full force by the vengeance of Heaven.’ (Praz, 1933) This was to be got by ultimate, ‘ambrosial’ sin. He was attracted to Augusta Leigh because of her startling resemblance to him; that she was his half-sister must have made her absolutely irresistible.

Others wrote the concerns of the times into a form of horticultural lyricism. John Keats suffused his verse with a voluptuousness which anticipated the perfume and luxury of the Pre-Raphaelite and decadent modes. Such a rich, narcotic style provided the decadent reader with a heady lexicon for studies in the exquisite, and latterly for prettifying the grotesque. With Keats the necessity for elegance in all things was established. His words intoxicate, most notably in the Odes, and the luscious paganisms of ‘Endymion’ and the ‘Hyperion’ fragments provided a model for Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the writers of the 1890s. Incidentally, veneration for the great texts of antiquity led some writers to Neoplatonism, and then onto their own ornate forms of paganism: Shelley, George Moore and Wilde. This abandonment of Christianity horrified others, however. Keats’ recital of ‘Hymn to Pan’ from Endymion elicited disgust from Wordsworth at, ‘The Immortal Dinner’ of 28 December, 1817. Keats inaugurated a new era of writing, and in a letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse he revealed his rather modern conceptions of the poetical faculty:

it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.

Effacement of self amidst sensation? Beauty in the ‘dark side of things’? Moral concerns eschewed for ‘speculation’? Keats had almost written a proto-decadent philosophy, and for this the writers of the fin de siècle regarded him with the greatest esteem. A July day in 1894 was to mark the unveiling of a new bust of Keats in Hampstead Church. For this ostensibly unremarkable occasion the congregation was unexpectedly swelled by what seemed the entire cultural firmament of the time. All literary London attended, including an evidently tubercular Aubrey Beardsley, who was observed stumbling about the graveyard.