Read Online The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) by Brian Stableford - Free Book Online
Authors: Brian Stableford
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over subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity.”
All of this Symons was initially enthusiastic to take aboard. The writer she offers as the most meritorious contemporary examplars of the Movement are Verlaine, Huysmans and Maeterlinck. In the first version of the essay Symons names Walter Pater and W. E. Henley as significant English proto-Decadents, but he removed the references for diplomatic reasons when the essay was reprinted in book form.
Symons was a member of the Rhymers’ Club, which met at an eating house in Fleet Street; his fellow members included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson, Richard le Gallienne and William Butler Yeats. Some of these agreed with Symons sufficiently to allow a measure of Decadent influence into their work, and none of them entirely escaped guilt by association, but if it is to be reckoned as the spearhead of an English Decadent Movement their work is distinctly half-hearted. Fugitive Decadent elements are easy enough to find in the work of Johnson and Yeats but only Dowson, apart from Symons himself, was really significantly affected by the Decadent attitude. In Dowson’s case this influence was greatly assisted by his infection with the tuberculosis which drove both his parents to suicide, but the morbidity of his supposedly Decadent work is straight forwardly melancholy; the paradoxical thrill of perversity which so entranced the French Decadents is simply not there.
None of the Rhymers ever lost sight, even temporarily, of aesthetic ideals which might give their work some kind of uplifting quality, and most retained religious faith as well. In addition, they exhibited a tendency, even when they took Decadence seriously, not to take it too seriously. Lionel Johnson’s essay on “The Cultured Faun” in the Anti-Jacobin (1891) offers a portrait of the contentedly neurasthenic artist which is nine parts parody, and the only English writer of the first rank who took care to flaunt his Decadent life-style, Oscar Wilde, relied constantly upon his elegant wit to excuse and explain himself.
In the main, though, English Decadent poetry is simply listless, its impuissance unredeemed by any semblance of calculated intention. If one compares such poems by Symons as “The Opium-Smoker” (in Days and Nights, 1889) and “The Absinthe-Drinker” (in Silhouettes, 1892) with the rhapsodies of Gautier, Baudelaire and Farrère they seem dreadfully anemic. Although Symons did a considerable service in translating a good deal of French Decadent poetry into English, his translations of Baudelaire seem prettified to the modern reader.
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Just as the French Decadents had inherited a doctrine of art for art’s sake from Gautier, so the Rhymers and their contemporaries inherited one from Walter Pater and Swinburne (whose masochistic streak moved some of his poems as close to the spirit of Decadence as any existing English material). But Pater’s exemplary Epicurean Marius is a man of far greater austerity, decorum and moral rectitude than the pagans of French fiction, and the English art which was done for English art’s sake was similarly constrained; the lush and gaudy extravagance of much French art was absent. Swinburne often achieved a fevered intensity, reflected in the rhythm as well as the imagery of his poems, but his work lacks a cutting edge.
Like the most nearly-Decadent of the pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne was looked after by Theodore Watts-Dunton when his life style made him ill, and similar benevolence may have softened the splenetic tendencies of other beleaguered British poets. Eugene Lee-Hamilton, who certainly warrants inclusion among British proto-Decadents, spent twenty years as a chronic (possibly psychosomatic) invalid, but was apparently saved from undue bitterness by a thoroughly British expectation that it was simply not done to be too self-indulgent in one’s misery. From The New Medusa (1882) to
All of this Symons was initially enthusiastic to take aboard. The writer she offers as the most meritorious contemporary examplars of the Movement are Verlaine, Huysmans and Maeterlinck. In the first version of the essay Symons names Walter Pater and W. E. Henley as significant English proto-Decadents, but he removed the references for diplomatic reasons when the essay was reprinted in book form.
Symons was a member of the Rhymers’ Club, which met at an eating house in Fleet Street; his fellow members included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson, Richard le Gallienne and William Butler Yeats. Some of these agreed with Symons sufficiently to allow a measure of Decadent influence into their work, and none of them entirely escaped guilt by association, but if it is to be reckoned as the spearhead of an English Decadent Movement their work is distinctly half-hearted. Fugitive Decadent elements are easy enough to find in the work of Johnson and Yeats but only Dowson, apart from Symons himself, was really significantly affected by the Decadent attitude. In Dowson’s case this influence was greatly assisted by his infection with the tuberculosis which drove both his parents to suicide, but the morbidity of his supposedly Decadent work is straight forwardly melancholy; the paradoxical thrill of perversity which so entranced the French Decadents is simply not there.
None of the Rhymers ever lost sight, even temporarily, of aesthetic ideals which might give their work some kind of uplifting quality, and most retained religious faith as well. In addition, they exhibited a tendency, even when they took Decadence seriously, not to take it too seriously. Lionel Johnson’s essay on “The Cultured Faun” in the Anti-Jacobin (1891) offers a portrait of the contentedly neurasthenic artist which is nine parts parody, and the only English writer of the first rank who took care to flaunt his Decadent life-style, Oscar Wilde, relied constantly upon his elegant wit to excuse and explain himself.
In the main, though, English Decadent poetry is simply listless, its impuissance unredeemed by any semblance of calculated intention. If one compares such poems by Symons as “The Opium-Smoker” (in Days and Nights, 1889) and “The Absinthe-Drinker” (in Silhouettes, 1892) with the rhapsodies of Gautier, Baudelaire and Farrère they seem dreadfully anemic. Although Symons did a considerable service in translating a good deal of French Decadent poetry into English, his translations of Baudelaire seem prettified to the modern reader.
**********
Just as the French Decadents had inherited a doctrine of art for art’s sake from Gautier, so the Rhymers and their contemporaries inherited one from Walter Pater and Swinburne (whose masochistic streak moved some of his poems as close to the spirit of Decadence as any existing English material). But Pater’s exemplary Epicurean Marius is a man of far greater austerity, decorum and moral rectitude than the pagans of French fiction, and the English art which was done for English art’s sake was similarly constrained; the lush and gaudy extravagance of much French art was absent. Swinburne often achieved a fevered intensity, reflected in the rhythm as well as the imagery of his poems, but his work lacks a cutting edge.
Like the most nearly-Decadent of the pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne was looked after by Theodore Watts-Dunton when his life style made him ill, and similar benevolence may have softened the splenetic tendencies of other beleaguered British poets. Eugene Lee-Hamilton, who certainly warrants inclusion among British proto-Decadents, spent twenty years as a chronic (possibly psychosomatic) invalid, but was apparently saved from undue bitterness by a thoroughly British expectation that it was simply not done to be too self-indulgent in one’s misery. From The New Medusa (1882) to
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