Read Online The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) by Brian Stableford - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Brian Stableford
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Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1895) his work toyed incessantly with Decadent images, but retained a measure of reserve which was echoed in real life when, after publication of the latter collection, he made a complete recovery from his illness. Lee-Hamilton went on to write a phantasmagorical historical novel, The Lord of the Dark Red Star (1903), whose vivid imagery recalls the French historical fantasies peripheral to the Decadent Movement; his half-sister Violet Paget, who signed herself Vernon Lee, incorporated similar elements into some of her own historical fantasies.
Those Rhymers most closely associated with Symons’ Decadent Crusade could lay claim to equally adequate neurotic symptoms, and they mostly contrived to die young as a result. Dowson died at 33, having spent his last years as an exile in France. Lionel Johnson was an alcoholic who eventually became a recluse and died at 35. Even Symons contrived to have a nervous breakdown in 1908 (when he was 43), was certified insane and was diagnosed as suffering from “general paralysis” (a term usually employed as a euphemism for syphillis); but he defied fate and his doctors by recovering and surviving to the ripe old age of 80.
Others whose fates might be added to this catalogue of misfortunes include John Davidson, who hurled himself from a cliff at 52, having been deeply affected by Nietzschean ideas of the redundancy of contemporary man, and a writer very heavily influenced by Davidson, James Elroy Flecker, who died of tuberculosis at 31. Flecker was born too late to be labelled a Decadent – his first volume of poems was published in 1907 – but his career followed a course mapped out by countless French writers, including a voyage to the Orient whose legacy had a powerful effect on his later work, and his novelette The Last Generation (1908) is a thoroughly Decadent piece of work in the futuristic mode into which British ideas of Decadence were mostly transplanted.
Despite all these stigmata the English Decadents never subscribed to a medicated theory of artistic creativity in the way that so many of the French Decadents came to do. They did have medical men associated with the movement – most notably Havelock Ellis, whose pre-Freudian investigations of the psychology of sex were a significant, if soon out-dated, contribution to the development of human science – but Ellis’s proto-psychology could not find room for the follies of Moreau de Tours and Lombroso, and his literary criticism was in any case much more closely associated with his philosophical interests; like Davidson, Ellis was fascinated by Nietzsche, who was too positive a thinker to licence any kind of languorous self-indulgence. When writing as a literary critic, Ellis was also enthusiastic to use the cautionary argument with which British Decadents habitually defended themselves against the pejorative implications of the word; his notable essay on Huysmans in Affirmations (1898) takes care to emphasize that Decadence ought to be viewed entirely as an aesthetic concept and not a moral one.
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This insistence that English literary Decadence did not intend to be subversive of moral standards, and had nothing to do with morality at all, was so frequently reiterated by its supporters as to constitute an Ophelian excess of protestation. One of the epigrammatic remarks prefacing Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) takes care to allege that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book – but Wilde was persuaded to admit privately that of course the novel was (and unashamedly set out to be) a powerful moral allegory.
Wilde visited Paris regularly in the early 1880s; he was acquainted with Decadent writers like Lorrain and theorists of Decadence like Paul Bourget and was a great admirer of the literary work then being done in France, but he knew well enough that its methods and concerns could not be imported into English literature without great difficulty. His
Those Rhymers most closely associated with Symons’ Decadent Crusade could lay claim to equally adequate neurotic symptoms, and they mostly contrived to die young as a result. Dowson died at 33, having spent his last years as an exile in France. Lionel Johnson was an alcoholic who eventually became a recluse and died at 35. Even Symons contrived to have a nervous breakdown in 1908 (when he was 43), was certified insane and was diagnosed as suffering from “general paralysis” (a term usually employed as a euphemism for syphillis); but he defied fate and his doctors by recovering and surviving to the ripe old age of 80.
Others whose fates might be added to this catalogue of misfortunes include John Davidson, who hurled himself from a cliff at 52, having been deeply affected by Nietzschean ideas of the redundancy of contemporary man, and a writer very heavily influenced by Davidson, James Elroy Flecker, who died of tuberculosis at 31. Flecker was born too late to be labelled a Decadent – his first volume of poems was published in 1907 – but his career followed a course mapped out by countless French writers, including a voyage to the Orient whose legacy had a powerful effect on his later work, and his novelette The Last Generation (1908) is a thoroughly Decadent piece of work in the futuristic mode into which British ideas of Decadence were mostly transplanted.
Despite all these stigmata the English Decadents never subscribed to a medicated theory of artistic creativity in the way that so many of the French Decadents came to do. They did have medical men associated with the movement – most notably Havelock Ellis, whose pre-Freudian investigations of the psychology of sex were a significant, if soon out-dated, contribution to the development of human science – but Ellis’s proto-psychology could not find room for the follies of Moreau de Tours and Lombroso, and his literary criticism was in any case much more closely associated with his philosophical interests; like Davidson, Ellis was fascinated by Nietzsche, who was too positive a thinker to licence any kind of languorous self-indulgence. When writing as a literary critic, Ellis was also enthusiastic to use the cautionary argument with which British Decadents habitually defended themselves against the pejorative implications of the word; his notable essay on Huysmans in Affirmations (1898) takes care to emphasize that Decadence ought to be viewed entirely as an aesthetic concept and not a moral one.
**********
This insistence that English literary Decadence did not intend to be subversive of moral standards, and had nothing to do with morality at all, was so frequently reiterated by its supporters as to constitute an Ophelian excess of protestation. One of the epigrammatic remarks prefacing Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) takes care to allege that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book – but Wilde was persuaded to admit privately that of course the novel was (and unashamedly set out to be) a powerful moral allegory.
Wilde visited Paris regularly in the early 1880s; he was acquainted with Decadent writers like Lorrain and theorists of Decadence like Paul Bourget and was a great admirer of the literary work then being done in France, but he knew well enough that its methods and concerns could not be imported into English literature without great difficulty. His
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