The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence E-Book

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Decadence from Dedalus
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 467

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The Decadent Movement which flourished in the 1890s produced some of Europe's most striking and exotic works of literature. The Decadents, convinced that civilisation was in a state of terminal decline, refused to rebel as the Romantics had, but set forth instead to cultivate the pleasures of calculated perversity and to seek the artificial paradise of drug-induced hallucination.J.-K. Huysmans described Decadence as a 'black feast' and The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence offers a veritable banquet, with offerings from the major practitioners in France and England. It completes Brian Stableford seminal two-volume study of the decadent movement.

Leseprobe

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

24–26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

email: [email protected]

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 1 912868 69 8

ISBN ebook 978 1 912868 70 4

Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors, 15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248

email: [email protected]        wwww.scbdistributors.com

Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd.

58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W 2080

email: [email protected]

First published by Dedalus in 1992

New edition in 2021

Compilation & introductory essay copyright c Brian Stableford 1992

Translations(unless otherwise stated) copyright @ Francis Amery 1992

The right of Brian Stableford to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Printed by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, 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 CIP Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Decadence from Dedalus

Decadent anthologies

The Dedalus Book of Roman Decadence – ed. Geoffrey Farrington

The Dedalus Book of German Decadence – ed. Ray Furness

The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence – ed. Kirsten Lodge

The Dedalus Book of Decadence – ed. Brian Stableford

The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence – ed. Brian Stableford

The Dedalus Book of English Decadence – ed. James Willsher

Decadent fiction

Les Diaboliques – Barbey D’Aurevilly

Senso – Camillo Boito

The Fiery Angel – Valery Bruisov

The Dark Domain – Stefan Grabinski

Against Nature – J.-K. Huysmans

Là-Bas – J.-K. Huysmans

The Diary of a Chambermaid – Octave Mirbeau

Torture Garden – Octave Mirbeau

Lucio’s Confession – Sà-Carneiro

Autumn & Winter Sonatas – Valle Inclan

Spring & Summer Sonatas – Valle Inclan

THE EDITOR

Brian Stableford is one of Britain’s leading writers of science fiction and fantasy. He is the editor of The Dedalus Book of Decadence, The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence, The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy and Tales of the Wandering Jew.

He has translated for Dedalus, under the pseudonym of Francis Amery, Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorrain and The Angels of Perversity by Remy de Gourmont.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE PHILOSOPHY OF DECADENCE

1.    “AN INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE” by Charles Baudelaire

2.    THE DISCIPLE by Oscar Wilde

3.    DES ESSEINTES’ DREAM (from À REBOURS) by Joris-Karl Huysmans

4.    FAUSTINE by Algernon Charles Swinburne

5.    Verses from THE SONGS OF MALDOROR by the Comte de Lautréamont

6.    VIOL D’AMOR by Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock

7.    PÉHOR by Remy de Gourmont

8.    ROXANA RUNS LUNATICK by R. Murray Gilchrist

9.    Passages from A SEASON IN HELL by Arthur Rimbaud

10.  THE VIRGIN OF THE SEVEN DAGGERS by Vernon Lee

11.  THE FUTURE PHENOMENON by Stéphane Mallarmé

12.  THE TEACHER OF WISDOM by Oscar Wilde

13.  FUNERAL ORATION by Jean Lorrain

14.  AMOR PROFANUS by Ernest Dowson

15.  THE PORTALS OF OPIUM by Marcel Schwob

16.  THE SPHINX by Oscar Wilde

17.  SAINT SATYR by Anatole France

18.  DON JUAN DECLAIMS by James Elroy Flecker

19.  OCCULT MEMORIES by Villiers de l’Isle Adam

20.  THE TESTAMENT OF A VIVISECTOR by John Davidson

21.  CROWD SCENE by Octave Mirbeau

22.  BERENICE by Edgar Allan Poe

23.  THE CORD by Charles Baudelaire

24.  WITCH IN-GRAIN by R. Murray Gilchrist

25.  AUTUMNAL LAMENT by Stéphane Mallarmé

26.  DUKE VIRGIL by Richard Garnett

27.  THE SHUTTER by Pierre Louÿs

28.  THE DOER OF GOOD by Oscar Wilde

29.  THE VANQUISHED SHADOW by Catulle Mendès

30.  THE OUTCAST SPIRIT by Lady Dilke

31.  TO EACH HIS CHIMERA by Charles Baudelaire

32.  THE VISIT by Ernest Dowson

33.  BEATRICE by Marcel Schwob

34.  NARCISSUS by James Elroy Flecker

35.  A HEROIC DEATH by Charles Baudelaire

36.  AN ORIGINAL REVENGE by W. C. Morrow

37.  A POSTHUMOUS PROTEST by Jean Lorrain

38.  THE CONQUEROR WORM by Edgar Allan Poe

39.  THE TEMPTATIONS by Charles Baudelaire

40.  A WINE OF WIZARDRY by George Sterling

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

iiiiiivvii1234567891011121314151617181920212223242527282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120121122123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175176177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200201202203204205206207208209210211212213214215216217218219220221222223224225226227228229230231232233234235236237238239240241242243244245246247248249250251252253254255256257258259260261262263264265266267268269270271272273274275276277278279280281282283284285286287288

INTRODUCTION: THE PHILOSOPHY OF DECADENCE

The principal inspiration of the French Decadent Movement was Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel À rebours, first published in 1884. This was the text which identified a literary tradition of Decadent poetry and prose extending from the work of Baudelaire, and provided that tradition with its wider context. It became the Bible of would-be Decadents of all kinds: those who aspired to artistic Decadence, those who aspired to a Decadent lifestyle, and those who aspired to both. À rebours laid out the Decadent doctrine, and instructed the acolytes of the new creed as to what to read, how to appreciate what they read, and how to pass cynical judgment on the affairs of a world which they were fully entitled to despise. It sent people forth on quests for new experience, and offered a philosophical licence to all manner of self-indulgent fetishisms.

Although À rebours was not translated into English until 1922 its notoriety in England was assured by the famous passage in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891), which describes its profound effect upon the imagination of the young anti-hero. The book is not named in the passage, but its identity is unmistakable; were anyone in doubt, all possible confusion was cleared away when Wilde was asked to identify it at his trial and did so. The book’s potential audience in England was necessarily more select than its potential audience in France, but even those who could not read it for themselves could hear the details of its creed from others, given extra glamour by its esotericism. If we are to understand the philosophy which supported the Decadent Movements in France and England, therefore, we must begin with À rebours.

À rebours is a strange and unique book, more a meditation than a novel. It is an elaborate and intense character-study of a minor nobleman named Jean Des Esseintes, and it provides a detailed account of an experiment in lifestyle which he undertakes in the hope of discovering the perfect modus vivendi. Des Esseintes is to some extent a caricature—some of his tastes and mannerisms are borrowed, tongue-in-cheek, from the most celebrated of contemporary Parisian men-about-town, Comte Robert de Montesquiou—but he is also to some extent a fantastic self-projection of the author. It should not be forgotten that he is in part a comic figure, but it should not be forgotten either that behind the mask of absurd affectation there is an unmistakable depth of feeling.

The experiment which À rebours describes ends—as it is ironically foredoomed to do—in ignominious failure, but the underlying quest which motivates it reflects a genuine yearning. The catalogue of Des Esseintes’ follies and affectations is full of flamboyant jokes, but the gloss of humour cannot and does not attempt to conceal the authenticity of his petty hatreds and splenetic rejections of normality.

From the very outset—and there is no hope of understanding the true spirit of the Decadent Movements unless we understand this—À rebours accepts that an uncompromisingly Decadent world-view cannot actually work as a practical philosophy of life, but it insists that the Decadent’s view of life and art is far clearer, aesthetically and morally, than anything which passes for common sense or orthodox faith. Decadent pretensions are, if extrapolated to their logical extreme, admittedly and calculatedly ludicrous; but the distaste and disgust which Decadents feel for those very different aspirations which are tacitly expressed in the state of the world as it is, and as it is in the process of becoming, are perfectly authentic. Self-mockery is an intrinsic element in the pose which Des Esseintes adopts—just as it was in the pose which Oscar Wilde adopted in real life—but the insincerity of his view of himself is merely the velvet glove which overlies the steely sincerity of his mockery of the world.

In spite of the relentless march of technological progress, the world has not changed much since 1884 in any respect to which Decadent criticism has relevance. Decadent lifestyles have nowadays become so commonplace as to seem boring, especially in view of the fact that modern Decadents seem less able than Des Esseintes was to perceive the absurdity of their affectations, but all the things which the Decadents lamented, despised and loathed are still with us; if anything, we have become less able to perceive their stupidity and paradoxically. For this reason, it is still worth paying attention to Decadent art, and still worth paying heed to Decadent arguments.

The first thing the reader is told about Des Esseintes in À rebours, and the key to his entire enterprise, is that he is sick: sick in body, sick in mind and sick at heart. In accordance with the half-baked pseudoscience of the day, Huysmans attributes this sickness to hereditary degeneracy, caused by aristocratic inbreeding and the generations of cosseting which have made each of Des Esseintes’ forefathers more effete than his predecessor. This causal explanation of the hero’s condition is, in the light of modern knowledge, quite ridiculous, but that does not matter at all; it is the condition itself which is important. It would make no difference whatever to the argument of the book if Des Esseintes’ sickness were to be deemed entirely psychosomatic or if—as is certainly more likely and more pertinent—it were attributed by the gradual progression of a syphilitic infection.

It was not actually necessary for a fin-de-siècle intellectual to catch syphilis in order to embrace the Decadent philosophy, but it certainly helped. It is not necessary today, either, but the decay of the Decadent philosophy is probably not uncorrelated with the fact that it no longer helps. These days, syphilis can be cured by an injection; it had a very different existential significance in the days when there was no really effective treatment, and the standard prescription involved deliberate mercuric poisoning.

In the 1880s an intimate understanding of the consequences of catching syphilis could not help but alter a man’s attitude to the role of sexual passion in human affairs. Syphilis was a powerful antidote to the conventional mythology of love, and its afflictions could hardly help but blight a man’s chances of finding contentment and fulfilment in marriage. It was also more difficult for the syphilitic than for the unafflicted man to maintain his faith in the fundamental benevolence of God; prayer and repentance were as unavailing in his case as mercury. The syphilitic of the 1880s was forced by his condition to be an outsider; he was already damned, perhaps to madness and delusion as well as premature death—and he had reason enough to believe that the legacy of his sins might indeed be visited upon his descendants.

Antibiotics have saved modern men from such a plight, at least for a while, but it should not really require the recent advent of AIDS to make us take seriously a world-view which the sick find easier to accept than the healthy; we ought to be able to understand well enough how it might be the case that those who have been forced to stand aside from the common run of human affairs can look at them more objectively, more clinically and with more critical acumen than those who are still enmeshed by the drift-nets of normality.

We must, if we are to fully understand the origins and attractions of the Decadent way of thought, recognise two facts: syphilis, by virtue of its effects on the world-view of its more intellectually-inclined victims, was one of the chief progenitors of the Decadent philosophy; but this does not mean that the Decadent philosophy is mistaken in its claim to offer us a clearer sight of the condition of the world than is contained in the self-satisfied illusions of the healthy man.

By the time the story told in À rebours begins, Des Esseintes’ debility has already forced him to give up the kinds of activity which most easily qualify as “Decadent” in the vulgar mind. He has finished with all his mistresses, having passed through the various phases of fascination which took him from the stage-door to the gutter in search of deeper depravities. He has concluded his experiments in “unnatural” passion and “perverse” pleasures, and has never been able to get far with his experiments with drugs because they have unfortunately failed to transport him to paradisal dreams, and merely make him vomit. His one desire at the outset of the text is to isolate himself, to seek solace in adequately-furnished privacy.

This is the quest described in the novel: the story it tells is a curious kind of Robinsonade, in which the hero tries with all his might to maroon himself, albeit in luxury. His mission is to surround himself with appropriately delightful artifacts, which must be chosen with the utmost care, so that his relationships with them will not merely replace but vastly improve upon those relationships with actual persons which he has determined to sever.

It is vital to realise that the relationships which Des Esseintes sets out to establish with his surroundings are still, in the most important sense, human relationships, even though they are not relationships with persons. He still craves contact with the minds of men, but seeks to refine that contact into a particular kind of perfection by restricting himself to the finest works which the minds of men can produce: their books, their works of art, the incarnations of their occasional genius.

It is no part of Des Esseintes’ intention to remove himself from society in search of some mystical communion with God or Nature; he is definitely not that kind of hermit. In fact, Nature is what he loathes more than all else. He recognises and acknowledges the contributions made by the heritage of natural ingenuity to the hothouse flowers and perfumes of which he is a connoisseur, but they are for him primarily and essentially products of culture, crucially remoulded by human artifice. He is in love with the exotic, and for him exoticism is the quintessential manifestation of human imagination and human artistry.

Des Esseintes’ antipathy to the natural has as its entirely proper counterpart a similar antipathy to the realistic. He despises works of art which are representative, infinitely preferring those which reach out beyond the actual, seeking to transform and transcend ordinary experience rather than merely recapitulating it. This is one of the reasons why he hopes to find in the company of selected artifacts a sense of being at home which he has despaired of finding in the company of people. People are intrinsically ordinary, and there is something unavoidably tedious about their fleshly presence; it is only in their finest art-work that they really become worthwhile.

Given the nature of Des Esseintes’ quest, it is hardly surprising that many of the chapters of À rebours are devoted to exhaustive accounts of the choice of colour-schemes for his apartments, and of the authors which he admits to his library, and of the painters whose work he elects to hang on his walls. He occasionally devotes himself to extravagant indulgences of the imagination, especially when he goes out walking, but the only actual orgy described in the text is an olfactory one: a hyperbolically sensual account of an intoxicating riot of perfumes.

In furnishing his rooms, Des Esseintes desires to reconcile two seemingly-contradictory ends: comfort and escape. He desires that his home should become a perfect cocoon, protecting him from all the vicissitudes of life, but he desires also that it should be equipped with magic doorways which will admit him to rich and extraordinary experiences. By means of his collection of fishing-rods, his copy of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and his ability to reproduce all the appropriate odours, he expects to be able to reproduce the sensation of a long sea-voyage without actually needing to abandon his fireside. Only by artifice can the achievement of such a paradoxical miracle be hoped for; in reality, one would have to choose between ease and adventure. Des Esseintes’ experiment is a bold attempt to banish reality and obliterate its limitations.

Because of their subservience to this complex ambition, Des Esseintes’ tastes in art and literature are inevitably eccentric. Some of his declared passions may seem to the modern reader to be entirely expectable: his love of Moreau’s painting and Wagner’s music, his adulation of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and his preference for the later work of Verlaine over the earlier seem nowadays to be matters of course. His choices did not seem so obvious in 1884, and our modern consciousness of Moreau as the Decadent painter and of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé as the central figures of a particular literary movement owes much to the fact that they were so designated by Des Esseintes. We must not, however, overlook the close attention given by him to other literary works; the word “Decadence” is used in the text not to refer to the intellectual heirs of Baudelaire (although Gautier had long since licensed such a use of the term by posthumously labelling Baudelaire a Decadent) but in a far stricter sense, to the period of Rome’s decline. Des Esseintes favours us at an early stage of his narrative with a careful explanation of his preference for the Latin writers of the Decadence—especially Petronius and Lucius Apuleius—over more fashionable writers like Virgil and Horace, and this essay extends to a lengthy account of mostly-forgotten writers of the early Christian era.

At a later point in the text Des Esseintes picks up the thread of this curious literary history again, excusing the fascination with various obscure Catholic apologists which he maintains in parallel with his far more intimate and far more intense relationship with the prose-poetiy of Baudelaire and Mallarmé (he considers the prose poem to be the highest form of literary art). He has no affection at all for the mainstream of Christian philosophy and doctrinal elaboration, but there is in early Catholic writers a delicate hint of paganism which he finds attractive, and some later writers in that tradition have cultivated a visionary element which he can admire.

This tradition, as identified and described by Des Esseintes, culminates in the work of Barbey d’Aurevilly, whom Des Esseintes deems to have turned his attention to the Satanic element in the human character—something which appears in its purest state in the fiction and philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. Huysmans was later to carry forward this tradition himself, taking up where Barbey d’Aurevilly had left off in his own fascinated-but-disapproving study of Satanism, Là-Bas (1891). By the same token, it is something clearly akin to Des Esseintes’ more general fascination with Catholic lore which eventually led Huysmans to the renewal of faith expressed in such works as En Route (1895) and La Cathédrale (1898).

Barbey d’Aurevilly is still remembered today for his remark that for a man like Baudelaire—who was the best actual role-model for French Decadents, although he fell a little short of the Des Esseintean ideal—the only possible ends were suicide or the foot of the cross, and despite Baudelaire’s failure to make that judgment fully prophetic he was probably right (Oscar Wilde’s fate might be reckoned a vivid demonstration of that fact). Huysmans’ subsequent flirtation with avid faith was not such a terrible betrayal of the ideals of À rebours as it may seem at first sight. We must recognise and remember, though, the exoticism—both stylistic and thematic—of ideas which appeals to the true Decadent; it is the escapist potential of art and religion which he values: their capacity to act as the magical doorway which he so desperately needs.

When he was asked at his trial whether À rebours was a moral or an immoral book Oscar Wilde declined to comment, deeming the question impertinent and irrelevant. Elsewhere, of course, he had already expressed the opinion that books could not in any sensible way be classified as moral or immoral, but only as well-written or badly-written. In fact, one of the themes of À rebours is the absurdity of certain moral judgments, and Des Esseintes is often at pains to dismiss and ridicule conventional ideas of immorality. This inevitably confuses the question of the morality of the text, and might easily be held to render the question unanswerable, but it is easy enough to see why conventional moralists found certain sections of it very shocking; Huysmans set out to achieve precisely that effect.

In one of the passages best calculated to shock Des Esseintes recalls an earlier experiment of his, in which he took a sixteen-year-old youth to a brothel and then paid in advance for the boy to return for a limited number of fortnightly visits. His motive for doing this, as he recalls explaining to the brothel-keeper, was to turn the boy into a murderer; he reasoned that giving the boy a taste for pleasures he could ill afford would inevitably drive him to robbery, in the course of which career he would ultimately be forced by necessity to turn to violence. His reflection is intensely ironic, because he adds the observation that the boy let him down, never having been featured in the newspapers as the perpetrator of any horrible crime; but the real point of the story is contained in an afterword which construes it as a parable.

What he was doing, Des Esseintes claims, was constructing an allegory of modern education, which takes great care to open the eyes of the poor and underprivileged to that which lies beyond their means, thus sharpening their sense of deprivation. For this reason, he observes, the processes of education which notionally aim at refinement actually have the effect of increasing suffering, envy and hatred.

There is an element of black comedy about all of this, including the interpretation and the conclusion, and the text shows Des Esseintes instantly taking refuge from his bleak observation in an obscure Latin text, but the satirical challenge to our commonplace assumption is by no means ineffectual. A hundred years of universal education have certainly not brought about universal refinement, and one could easily make out a plausible case for their having increased the pain of deprivation— and, in consequence, crime and violence—in exactly the way that Des Esseintes alleges.

At a later point in the text Des Esseintes mourns the apparent decline in the number of brothels in Paris and the corresponding increase in the number of drinking-dens. He argues that there is in fact no difference between whores and barmaids save that a man’s relationships with the former are honestly artificial, whereas the latter carry an illusion of spontaneity; in either case the quest for sexual fulfilment has to be paid for, but the indirectness of the exchange which takes place in the tavern allows men to delude themselves that barmaids are conquests honourably won and that their favours are something freely given. His preference, needless to say, is for the honesty of the artifice rather than for the illusion—and in these observations too he finds a kind of allegory and a sign of the unfortunate way the world is going. Again, the passage is ironic, but again there is something in what he says, which still echoes today in a certain kind of feminist rhetoric which claims that the only honest women in the world are prostitutes.

Another homiletic meditation is occasioned by the sight of street-urchins fighting savagely over a shoddy crust daubed with cheese and garlic. This causes Des Esseintes to ask his servant to prepare an equally-disgusting concoction in order that he can throw it into the arena, thus prolonging the fight and increasing its violence. He expresses the hope that this will clearly demonstrate to the boys just what kind of world they are in and how they can expect it to serve them. While waiting for the snack to be prepared, Des Esseintes expresses his disgust at the appalling hypocrisy which suppresses contraception and abortion, and which makes such a virtue out of caring for orphan children, while simultaneously guaranteeing that the lives for which they are saved will be savage and miserable. Again, the passage is essentially black comedy, but the force of its argument can hardly be ignored in a world which has been brought to the brink of ecocatastrophe by overpopulation, and in which those children dutifully “taken into care” in the most highly-developed nations are eventually expelled to live wild in the streets as muggers and rent-boys.

If we are asked, in the light of passages like this, to judge whether À rebours is a moral or an immoral book, we can only say that it depends whose morality we are considering, and how effective we deem dark sarcasm to be as a rhetorical strategy. Decadent moralising is characteristically cast in an aggressively challenging mode which holds that nothing is unthinkable, and that much of what is ordinarily taken for granted is sicker than it seems.

The sardonic way of viewing the world which is displayed to such good effect in these little essays in cynical subversion is reflected in all Des Esseintes’ evaluative inversions. He is an irredeemably sick man, and so he is ever anxious to find signs of sickness in events and trends which other people consider healthily progressive; by the same token, he is always on the lookout for ways to dignify sickness. He is concerned to point out, for instance, that the hothouse flowers whose beauty he appreciates so keenly are, in fact, frail and sickly by comparison with their natural counterparts and that their lovely delicacy can be regarded as a kind of induced disease. He waxes lyrical, too, on the subject of the way in which their patterns and colours may mimic the pallors and rashes symptomatic of human diseases.

With the aid of such analogies, Des Esseintes is desirous of constructing a new aesthetic philosophy, in which the morbid and the beautiful are categories which will overlap considerably, and perhaps come close to fusion. This is tacitly evident in the early chapter which deals with his taste in visual art, which encompasses not only Moreau’s paintings of Salomé but a series of engravings by Jan Luyken depicting the multitudinous tortures inflicted in the cause of religious persecution; it becomes much more explicit in the later chapters which include his appraisals of such modern writers as Villiers de l’Isle Adam, the prolific producer of contes cruels, and his beloved Baudelaire.

Baudelaire’s great contribution to literature, according to Des Esseintes, had been to break a pattern by which literateurs had devoted their attention to the ordinary virtues and vices, which could be expected to be part of the everyday course of human affairs. Earlier writers had, he admitted, sometimes studied conventional monomanias like ambition or avarice, but in general their labours were analogous to those of botanists who restricted their attention to common wild flowers in their ordinary habitats. Baudelaire, by contrast, had dived into the murkiest depths of the soul, to the breeding-grounds of the truly interesting intellectual aberrations and moral diseases: to the psychological hothouses where ennui and spleen brought forth the most gorgeously warped blooms of desire and fascination.

In arguing thus, Huysmans sounded a clarion call for others to do likewise. He laid the ideative groundwork for a new generation of writers who would be unafraid to explore the possible horizons of human derangement. He demanded literary equivalents of the rarest and strangest hybrid flowers, and of the most exotic and intoxicating perfumes. He asked for a literature replete with artificiality, strangeness and delicacy, whose appearances might easily be seen as analogous to the symptoms of disease, in which traditional aesthetic and moral judgments would be casually inverted: a literature of prose poetry and contes cruels.

This was what the writers associated with the Decadent Movements in France and England set out to produce.

The last and oddest of all Des Esseintes’ inversions of normal expectation is the result of the failure of all previous remedies prescribed by his doctor to halt his decline. The idea itself arises out of a mistake he makes in passing on a prescription written by his doctor to his servant without glancing at it, assuming (wrongly) that it is a recipe for an enema. In fact, the doctor had specified a strength-building diet, but the perverse propriety of taking nourishment into the alimentary canal from the end opposite to that intended by nature is instantly recognised and warmly welcomed by the patient. Having become unable to obtain much nourishment from food or medicine taken by mouth, he derives real as well as aesthetic benefits as soon as he begins to take his sustenance by enema. He rejoices in the fact that although his stomach has always been so unaccommodating that he has never had the chance to become a gourmet, the culinary arts have at last been opened to the expression of his particular genius, and he sets out to plan his menus with enthusiasm.

This new dietary regime is so successful that for a while Des Esseintes believes that he is on the road to recovery, but he is not. At the end of the day, he simply is not fitted for the life he has tried so hard to adopt; like the ill-fated tortoise whose shell he decorates with jewels in an earlier chapter, he cannot stand the aesthetic intensity of his environment, and is doomed to die.

The assumption of the text that Des Esseintes is doomed is not itself objectionable. Any ending in which he were truly saved would be a blatantly dishonest deus ex machina (equally dishonest, of course, whether his condition is attributed to hereditary degeneracy or to syphilis). Nor can one really object to the analogy with the tortoise, and the depiction of his plight as that of a man dying of a surfeit of aesthetic riches, which is excusable hyperbole. Alas, such concessions do not save the conclusion of the story from seeming rather silly to the modern reader, who has the benefit of far more sophisticated medical knowledge than was available to Huysmans.

The doctor’s final and most brutal prognosis is that Des Esseintes must abandon his experiment and return to the society of his fellow men, or face imminent madness, consumption and death. Des Esseintes—unable to recognise that the doctor is a hopeless quack—is thrown into a quandary, believing the warning but hating the suggested remedy. He is thus presented with an unreasonably sharp dilemma, whose pressure forces him to an unfortunately extreme compromise.

Like the hero of Huysmans’ later novels, Durtal—and, for that matter, like Huysmans himself—Des Esseintes finds himself reluctantly drawn to the idea of becoming a monk, and finding seclusion within a community of recluses. He admits that he cannot take the Church entirely seriously, because of the way in which it has devalued itself by cheapening and compromising all its own ideals, most of which were wrong in the first place, but he can see no alternative. Fortunately, there is in the end one thing which can and does serve for him as a perfect justification of religious faith: the sheer impossibility of what that faith requires him to accept!

The modern reader ought not to sympathise with Des Esseintes’ absurd dalliance with reinvestment in faith (although the contemporary popularity of ridiculous cults testifies to the fact that such strategies are still popular with the idiotic and the desperate) but it may be worth repeating that it is not as inconsistent with his Decadent ideals as it may seem, and if properly understood might not need to be counted as a betrayal of them.

For the Decadent, who loathes Nature and realism, the fantastic idea of a life beyond death is attractive, because rather than in spite of the fact that he cannot sensibly believe in any such eventuality. It is precisely the fact that the hopeful belief in the immortality of the soul is a frail, sickly thing, easily regarded as a species of insanity, which requires the true Decadent to take it seriously and to hang on to it when all else is gone. After all, what other guiding light can there possibly be for a man who is sick in body, sick in mind and sick at heart, and for whom all material prescriptions have inevitably failed?

One hardly needs to add, even as a footnote, that the paradoxical move was a failure. What ultimately became of Des Esseintes we are never told, but Durtal—in L’Oblat (1903)—and Huysmans eventually found no solace in the monastic life. They both came to believe that there was no possible escape from life and death, and that suffering simply had to be borne, as the price of one’s sins.

Joris-Karl Huysmans died in 1907, at the age of 59, of cancer.

*    *    *

It is not until the tenth chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray that the young anti-hero receives from Lord Henry Wotton the “yellow book” which becomes the foundation-stone of his philosophy of life, but much of the groundwork for his conversion has already been laid. It is an earlier monologue of Lord Henry’s—a hymn to Beauty—which inspires the fateful wish which allows Dorian to exchange personalities with his portrait, so that the unfading and timeless work of art becomes an actor in the real world while the portrait withers and festers in its frame. In this monologue Lord Henry emphasises the full horror of what time will do to Dorian’s awesome beauty, and insists—in the absence of any possible remedy—that it must be exploited to the full while it lasts. He advises the boy not to allow conventional morality to be his guide, but rather to devote himself to the search for new sensations. A new Hedonism, he says, is what the world needs, and he opines that Dorian might, with effort, become its “visible symbol”.

That, indeed, is what Dorian—with effort—becomes.

A later passage in the text makes it clear that Lord Henry, like Des Esseintes, is essentially an experimenter; his opposition to all received wisdom is by way of subjecting it to a trial of fire, and his moulding of Dorian’s character is supposedly a clinical exploration of possibility—his role is to play Frankenstein to Dorian’s Monster rather than Mephistopheles to Dorian’s Faust. The precise parallel which Lord Henry draws in comparing himself to a natural scientist is particularly revealing; he represents himself as a vivisectionist of human life, and expands his analogy in a fashion which is very similar to the way in which Des Esseintes extrapolates some of his analogies:

It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one’s face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one! To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect—to observe where they met and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at discord—there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

The next paragraph of this discourse makes art—and especially the art of literature—part and parcel of this curious discipline of experimental human science. A further extrapolation of the argument might represent the arts as instruments of this hypothetical psychological science, just as telescopes and microscopes are instruments of astronomy and anatomy.

If Lord Henry’s viewpoint is accepted there can be nothing surprising in his subsequent musings about the total irrelevance of moral considerations to the business of literature and to the experiment of remaking the character of Dorian Gray. Dorian’s ill-fated love for the actress Sybil Vane—which briefly threatens him with salvation by convention—is regarded only as an “interesting phenomenon”, with no intrinsic value. In this harsh light the reason for the failure of that love becomes highly significant.

Dorian rejects Sybil before he reads the infamous yellow book; it is entirely his own action, and even Lord Henry is surprised and slightly disturbed by it. Dorian falls out of love with Sybil because she loses her ability to act; it makes not the slightest difference to him that the reason that she loses her ability is that her love for him has awakened her to the reality of the world, and forced her to see it clearly, making dissimulation and pretence impossible. This makes it clear that the beauty which Dorian briefly discovered in Sybil was entirely the product of her artifice—he can find nothing to admire in her authenticity, and when she achieves it she becomes worthless to him. This is less surprising when one recalls that he has already traded his own authenticity for the ageless artifice of his portrait.

In view of what Dorian has elected to do to himself and to Sybil, it is entirely to be expected that he should find À rebours so absorbing and so appealing, and that he should be so enchanted by its “metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour”. The yellow book is, Wilde’s text candidly admits, a “poisonous book”, which produces in its reader “a malady of dreaming”, but neither “poisonous” nor “malady” can here be construed as a simple insult. Dorian deals with the book as Des Esseintes might have dealt with one of his own favourite texts: he procures nine copies of the first edition printed on especially sumptuous paper, and has them bound in different colours so that they might better suit his various moods. He recognises in the story of Des Esseintes the story of his own life, which he has not yet lived.

There is, of course, one vital difference between Dorian and Des Esseintes: Dorian cannot exhibit the symptoms of sickness; he has delegated that misfortune to his portrait. He and he alone is fitted by his unique artifice successfully to live the Decadent life, untouchable by the ravages of incurable venereal disease. He is, of course, an impossible entity—every bit as impossible as that immortal soul in which Des Esseintes, Huysmans, Wilde and Dorian himself all felt compelled to believe— but that only serves to make him all the more fascinating while he exists.

There is a sense in which the conclusion of The Picture of Dorian Gray is every bit as disappointing to the modern reader as the ending of À rebours. There is no quack to alarm Dorian with falsely melodramatic prognoses, but it is foolishness nevertheless which drives him unnecessarily on to the sharp horns of his dilemma, determined to take a knife to his syphilitic image lest it should constitute “evidence” against him. His death provides a tidier, and undoubtedly more honest ending than the querulous and paradoxical commitment to faith which ends Des Esseintes’ story, but it is by no means obvious that tidiness and honesty are to be reckoned virtuous in a text of this kind. If the conclusion is to be commended at all, better perhaps that it be commended as a casual and thoroughly artificial flourish than a vindication of the vulgar opinion that natural law cannot in the end be cheated.

Oscar Wilde’s philosophy of art is more elaborately laid out in his essay on “The Decay of Lying” than it is in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but even cast in non-fictional form it is teasingly removed from direct expression. “The Decay of Lying” is a comic dialogue between two characters called Vivian and Cyril (Wilde’s two sons were named Cyril and Vyvyan); Vivian is writing an essay on “The Decay of Lying”, from which he quotes liberally and upon which he comments in a fashion so arch that the reader is obliged to suppose that Wilde is making fun of him, even though he must also suspect that there are serious points being made.

Such stylistic contortionism is, of course, entirely in character: Wilde never could decide how seriously he intended his own poses, and he could not in the end refrain from slashing so savagely at his own carefully-crafted self-portrait as to bring destruction upon himself (if each man really is fated to kill the thing he loves, a hopeless libel action is evidently as effective a weapon as any).

The argument which is flippantly displayed in “The Decay of Lying” begins, in true Decadent fashion, with an attack on Nature. Wilde’s sarcastic mouthpiece, Vivian, insists that Art has revealed to mankind the deficiencies of Nature: “[her] lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition”. Art, he alleges, “is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach nature her proper place.” He goes on to stress the uncomfortableness of Nature, and its antipathy towards Mind; thinking, he proposes, can be seen as a kind of unhealthiness, as fatal as any other disease.

When Vivian goes on to reveal the title of the essay he is writing, his commonsensical friend Cyril protests that he sees no reason to think that lying is in decline, and that politicians seem to be keeping the tradition very much alive. Vivian counters with the argument that what politicians, journalists and other everyday deceivers do is better regarded as mere misrepresentation; their efforts lack the magnitude and grandeur desirable in wholehearted lies. Lies, for Vivian, are a species of glorious fantasy which belong to the realm of Art, but for which contemporary artists have, alas, lost their appetite. Too many modern artists, Vivian laments, have fallen into slothful habits of truthfulness; their work has become representative instead of imaginative. Like Des Esseintes, he heaps scorn upon realism, with its tediously detailed studies of everyday vices and its insipid quest to expose “that dreadful universal thing called human nature”—and like Des Esseintes he is not afraid to name names and pulverise reputations.

Vivian continues to argue his case by documenting, in considerable detail, the oft-quoted Wildean claim that “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life”. Cyril challenges him to prove also that Nature imitates Art, and he rises instantly to the challenge, arguing that we must be taught to see such things as “landscapes” and “fogs” by artistic celebrations of the way they play with light and colour—and though he stops short of stating that our idea of “Nature” is itself a kind of fantasy it is not clear that he needs to.

Having said all this, Vivian returns to his argument that the art of lying is in a state of dereliction. The nineteenth century, he argues, is “the dullest and most prosaic century possible” (he had not experienced the twentieth!) and suggests that even the dreams which afflict the sleep of the middle classes have become tedious. He attacks the Church of England, as Des Esseintes attacks the Church of Rome, for losing sight of the supernatural and the mystical and becoming reasonable.

Some of Vivian’s subsequent prescriptions for reviving the art of lying are more tongue-in-cheek than his destructive arguments, commending the good work which is done at dinner-parties and in the ordinary processes of education, but insisting that there remains much room for further improvement. He is more serious, however, when he claims that it is in the Arts where the true Renaissance can and must be sought. On this subject Vivian waxes lyrical. He looks forward eagerly to the day when the commonplaceness of modern fiction has finally bored everyone to distraction, so that imagination will once again be compelled to take wing;

And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail around the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be.

Hard on the heels of this flight of fancy Vivian lays down, by way of summary, a series of formal doctrines for his new (or renewed) aesthetics. The first is that Art never expresses anything but itself: that it is not a reflective product of its age but something which evolves and moves according to its own innate whims. The second is that all bad art is inspired by attempts to make art more representative, and that any attempt by an artist to be true to Life or Nature is a mistake. The third restates the dictum that Life (and Nature) imitate Art rather than vice versa. The fourth, the quod erat demonstradum of the exercise, is that Lying—“the telling of beautiful untrue things”—is the proper aim of Art.

These claims are, of course, much more modest than those made by Lord Henry Wotton or Des Esseintes—who, being Lies themselves, were fully entitled to be more extravagant than the artists who created them. It might be noted, however, that Oscar Wilde made a more strenuous effort to live by his philosophy than Joris-Karl Huysmans ever did; and that his determination to live as a work of art, unfettered by realism of outlook or any particular respect for the dictates of nature, cut tragically short his dazzlingly brilliant career as a Liar par excellence, and landed him in Reading Gaol.

A few brief addenda to Wilde’s views on art—which may be taken to reflect his final recorded thoughts upon the matter—can be found in Laurence Housman’s book Echo de Paris (1923), which recalls a conversation between Wilde, Housman and two other friends which took place in Paris in the autumn of 1899. Here we find Wilde advising one of his acolytes to learn life only by inexperience, so that it will always be unexpected and delightful; “never realise” is, he suggests, the ideal dictum. We also find him ready to associate the beauty of failure and the nobility of exile, on the grounds that only by tasting utter failure, with or without a leavening of intermediate success, can an artist perceive his own soul—and, within his own soul, the world entire.

These comments are easily read in isolation as a melancholy but superficial comedy, which attempts to make a virtue of disaster by the same strategy of casual inversion which marked all Wilde’s most famous epigrams, and which matches his temperament so closely to that of Des Esseintes. The notion of the artist perceiving his own soul is, however, twice elaborated and re-emphasised later in the conversation. The first time the issue is raised again is to clear up a misconception. Wilde finds it necessary to insist that he spoke of perception and not of knowledge, and to state frankly that understanding of oneself, or the world, is impossible: that the soul is always a stranger, and a hostile one. He had said much the same thing in what is perhaps the best of his many fantasies, “The Fisherman and his Soul”, and he reiterates it yet again here in the second of two brief tales which he volunteers to tell his hearers (because he knows that he will never write them down). This allegorical prose poem explains how a man sells his burdensome soul for its proper price—thirty pieces of silver—but becomes miserable because he is no longer capable of sin; after searching the world in the hope of finding and regaining his soul he finally buys it back at what is now its proper price—his body—but finds it unutterably foul.

This allegory serves to remind us that Vivian’s flight of fancy regarding the rewards of a renaissance of Lying is deliberately optimistic. The power of the imagination does not merely reveal wonders, but also horrors. That clear sight which penetrates the sham of realism finds all manner of chimerical monsters. The true Decadent knows this, and never forgets it.

If we combine Wilde’s fragmentary prescriptions with Huysmans’—or rather, because it is not quite the same thing, with Des Esseintes’—we can obtain a reasonably complete manifesto for Decadent literature.

It is, first and foremost, a literature which is not representative; it does not desire to be true to commonplace conceptions of “Life” or to “Nature”, both of which it despises and makes every attempt to de-mythologise. Decadent literature points instead the way to an opposite ideal, wherein life and nature would become entirely subject to every kind of clever artifice. Because this ideal is incapable of attainment in practice, Decadent literature is essentially pessimistic, and sometimes brutally horrific, but this makes it all the more ruthless in demolishing the pretensions of rival philosophies, which it mocks mercilessly, taking delight in turning everything which is ordinarily taken for granted topsy-turvy.

Decadent literature is rich in fantasies, and sympathetic to everything which encourages the cultivation of fantasy; it is for this reason (and this reason only) that it is generally in favour of opium, hashish and other psychotropics, even though it recognises quite clearly that such substances are ultimately mind-rotting and life-consuming. It applauds those who have sufficient power of imagination not to require artificial aids, but is prepared to take an intense clinical interest even in the most hazardous derangements of the senses—for instance, those induced by ether or by tertiary syphilis. Decadent literature is ever eager to make its fantasies as gorgeous as possible, but its exponents know well enough that those who undertake Odysseys in Exotica will encounter all manner of chimeras.

The true Decadent, knowing the futility of taking refuge in the commonplace, desires to confront all these chimeras, to see them clearly even though no understanding of them or reconciliation with them is possible. He desires this, in part, because he has an avid hunger for sensation, which can sometimes override the oversimple distinctions which are normally drawn between the pleasant and the unpleasant; he knows that horror is a stimulant. But he desires it for another reason too, which is that he feels that there is some essential truth in horror: that the world is sick at heart, and that acceptance of that truth demands that even the most obvious of evils—pain, death, and disease—may require aesthetic re-evaluation, and at the very least deserve to be more thoroughly and conscientiously explored.

We should not ask whether Decadent literature is moral or immoral; that is a question fit only for lawyers to raise. It is, intrinsically and proudly, a literature of moral challenge; it is sceptical, cynical and satirical. It recognises that everyday morality does not work either in practical or in psychological terms, and is therefore a sham, but that ideal morality is—perhaps, but not necessarily, unfortunately—unattainable. The moral of a Decadent prose poem or conte cruel, if it has a moral at all, is likely to recommend that we should make the best compromises we can, recognise that they are compromises, and refuse to be ashamed of them. Decadent literature is, however, a literature dedicated to the smashing of icons and idols, and it is always ready to attack stern moralists of every stripe; it is fiercely intolerant of intolerance and revels in the paradoxicality of such a stance.

*    *    *

For some time now it has been difficult to take the Decadent pose entirely seriously. Antibiotics have dramatically reduced the horrors of venereal disease, and in so doing have devastated the pattern of symbols, metaphors and analogies that lies at the heart of À rebours.