The Columbia History of British Poetry (130 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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good on her own. . . . Art for art's sake first of all, and afterwards we may suppose all the rest shall be added to her" (Swinburne here suggests that any subject matter is suitable so long as it does not transform the poem into an instrument of instruction or propaganda). This challenge to the conventional Victorian aesthetic that art should provide moral indoctrination was increasingly ridiculed in the 1870s and 1880s as an effeminate devotion to beautyby
Punch's
satirical cartoons and skits, by Gilbert and Sullivan's
Patience
, by Wilde's aesthetic costume pressed into service on his lecture tour of America, and by Kipling's poem "Mary Gloster," in which the dying shipowner, Sir Anthony Gloster, says to his aesthetically inclined son: "For you muddled with books and pictures, an' china an' etchin's an' fans, / And your rooms at college were beastlymore like a whore's than a man's."
However, the serious Aesthetes, including Wilde, insisted that art must be resuscitated from its fallen state as the handmaid of Victorian pietieswhether religious, political, or socialand its outworn rhetoric abandoned. In addition, they rejected the materialism and utilitarianism of those who congratulated themselves on the extraordinary achievements of the British Empire. In the 1870s James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who championed art's autonomyalthough he rejected any implication that he was an
Aesthete
introduced a new visionary style of painting in a series of works using "nocturne," "arrangement," and "symphony" in their titles. Such a focus on the transposition of the arts as well as the elimination of anecdotes with moral implications had been suggested by Gautier in his "Symphony in White Major." (Walter Pater, a major influence on the fin-de-siècle Aesthetes, proposed in his
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
, 1873: ''
All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music
"that is, toward the elimination of any distinction between the "matter" and the "form" of art.) Wrote Whistler: "Art should be independent of all clap-trapshould stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. . . ."
Whistler's flair for public exposure in the service of an autonomous art deeply influenced many poets, among them Wilde, whose "Impression du Matin" suggests Whistlerian impressionism in the opening lines, which borrow one of Whistler's titles and eliminate the poet's presence: "The Thames nocturne of blue and gold / Changed to a Harmony in gray." Yet Wilde introduces the moralizing that Whistler had
 
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avoideda prostitute, a "pale woman all alone," loiters beneath the "gas-lamp's flare, / With lips of flame, and heart of stone." In the more successful "Symphony in Yellow" Wilde foreshadows later Imagism in clearly defined (perhaps un-Whistlerian) images and the absence of discourse, with a final image of the Thames: "And at my feet the pale green Thames / Lies like a rod of rippled jade."
Henley, generally scornful of the Aesthetes, was an admirer of Whistler, even naming four sections of
London Voluntaries
(1893) with musical terms and envisioning London as though a Whistler painting: "At night this City of Trees / Turns to a tryst of vague and strange / And monstrous Majesties." Arthur Symons also wrote three Whistler-inspired poems, entitled "Pastel," "Impression," and "Nocturne," the last evoking "The long Embankment with its lights / The pavement glittering with fallen rain / The magic and mystery that is night's.'' Likewise, Richard Le Gallienne's "Sunset in the City' captures similar magic: "Within the town the streets grow strange and haunted, / And, dark against the western lakes of green, / The buildings change to temples."
Following contemporary fashion, John Davidsonwho, T. S. Eliot later said, "impressed me deeply in my formative years between the ages of sixteen and twenty"wrote "Nocturne" and "Fog," the latter suggesting that "Doomsday somewhere dawns among / The systems and the galaxies" while we are "simply swallowed up / In London fog for evermore." In "Railway Stations: London Bridge" Davidson depicts a "human tide" flowing across the bridge "As callous as the glaciers that glide / A foot a day, but as a torrent swift." Such visions of London led the way to Modernist depictions of the modern world's spiritual deadness, as in T. S. Eliot's
Waste Land
: "Unreal City. . . ./ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had . . . undone so many."
The use of the dance as trope was another method of eliminating intellectual discourse from art. In "The World as Ballet" Symons remarks of the dance: "Nothing is stated"; the dancer is "all pure symbol . . . and her rhythm reveals to you the soul of her imagined being." Frank Kermode has called the dance "the most perfect emblem" of the "Romantic Image," which fuses movement with stillness, form with content, body with soul "in a higher order of existence, largely independent of intention, and of any form of ethical utility." Such Symons poems as "La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge""Before the mirror's dance of shadows / She dances in a dream"which Yeats called "one of the most
 
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perfect lyrics of our time," stimulated the use of the image in the nineties and, like the transposition of the arts, prepared the way for modernism, Yeats making brilliant use of the dance in his verse plays and poems, particularly later in "Among School Children."
Decadence and the Fin du Monde
In the preface to
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891) Wilde declares a central concept of nineteenth-century Aestheticism: "All art is quite useless," an antiutilitarian view of autonomous art also central to literary Decadence. In the novel, Wilde depicts Dorian's jaded sensibility as one that yearns for the end of the world,
fin du monde
: "Life is such a great disappointment"the Decadent pose of
taedium vitae
that repudiates Victorian activism but later functions as the motive for Dorian's self-destruction. His wish to experience the beauty of evil, which underscores the homoerotic subtext of the novel, also convinced reviewers, despite Dorian's death at the end, that Wilde's work was decadent (its lowercase denoting, at the time, decline or degeneration; but capitalized, a new mode of expression and a precursor of modernism).
In
Silverpoints
John Gray's daring poem "The Barber" reveals the darker impulses and startling images associated with such Decadence. The speaker, dreaming that he is a barberindeed, a Decadent artistemploys artifice in order to transcend nature by painting the eyebrows of "many a pleasant girl" and by placing gems on their thighs. Anticipating twentieth-century Surrealism, he experiences striking synesthetic effects: "My fingers bled / With wonder as I touched their awful limbs"the result of his sexual exploration: "I moulded with my hands / The mobile breasts, the valley." In the final lines, however, nature achieves its supremacy over artifice, albeit farcically, as the barber discovers his own impotence (''the blood of me stood cold"): "The breasts rose up and offered each a mouth. / And on the belly pallid blushes crept, / That maddened me, until I laughed and wept."
While Aubrey Beardsley's reputation as a Decadent artist rests on his drawings of a bizarre imaginative world, he was also the author of "The Ballad of a Barber," undoubtedly influenced by Gray's poem. Beardsley's barber, like Gray's, is an artist in artifice, employing "powders, paints, and subtle dyes" as though following Baudelaire's essay "Praise of Cosmetics." The epicene barber typifies what nineties critics regard-
 
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ed as a characteristically decadent preference for ambiguous gender and sexuality: "nobody had seen him show / A preference for either sex." In attempting to curl the young Princess's hair, he undergoes a sudden loss of control: "His fingers lost their cunning quite, / His ivory combs obeyed no more." With a broken bottle he cuts her throat and leaves on "pointed feet; / Smiling that things had gone so well." To be sure, the barber's death by hanging satisfies Victorian moral sensibilities. As Jerome H. Buckley remarks in
The Victorian Temper
, Beardsley's poem was "surely intended to convey a complete allegory of Decadence itself through the tale of the artist-barber . . . whose amoral art for art's sake crumbled forever on the intrusion of insane desire.''
The introduction of French Decadence into English poetry prompted Richard Le Galliennelike William Watson before himto launch a minor campaign against such foreign intrusions. Although, with his flowing hair and knee breeches, Le Gallienne looked like an Aesthete from Gilbert and Sullivan's
Patience
, he regarded Decadence as a Gallic threat to British culture. In his introductory poem to
English Poems
(1892) he charges that the sound of the English nightingale ("that for six hundred years / Sang to the world") has been usurped by the "new voice" (associated with the symbol of Decadence, the artificial green carnation, which Wilde and his friends wore on occasion to the theater and which was allegedly an emblem of homosexuality in Paris): "not of thee [the English nightingale] these strange green flowers that spring / From daisy roots and seem to bear a sting." The volume also contains his satire "The Decadent to His Soul," in which the Decadent asks his soul:
Poor useless thing, he said,
Why did God burden me with such as thou?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
His face grew strangely sweet
As when a toad smiles.
He dreamed of a new sin:
An incest 'twixt the body and the soul.
Responding to Le Gallienne's condemnation with a brilliant transvaluation of values, Arthur Symons's essay "The Decadent Movement in Literature" declares that "this representative literature of to-day, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful disease. Healthy we cannot call it, and healthy it does not wish to be considered." Decadence expressed, Symons said, "a spiritual and moral perversity." In
 
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Symons's
London Nights
(1895)called his most Decadent work, although it also includes Wordsworthian nature poemsharlotry and flesh are celebrated, as in "To One in Alienation" (modeled loosely after Baudelaire's poem in
Les Fleurs du mal
(Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse Juive""One night as I lay near a frightful Jewess"): " . . . I lay on the stranger's bed, / And clasped the stranger-woman I had hired."
However, the work that outraged many reviewers was "Stella Maris," for its title alludes to the Virgin Mary, while the poem depicts a chance meeting with a prostitute, "the Juliet of a night." The daring Swinburnian imagery, as in the following lines, provoked in the critics, said Symons, a "singular unanimity of abuse": "I feel your breast that heaves and dips, / Desiring my desirous lips." The reviewer in the
Pall Mall Gazette
(September 2, 1895), for example, ranted: ''Mr. Arthur Symons is a dirty-minded man, and his mind is reflected in the puddle of his bad verses. . . . By his own showing, his life's more like a pig-sty, and one dull below the ordinary at that."
Offensive to most reviewers at the time, the Decadent icon of the prostitute achieved notorious expression in Ernest Dowson's "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae" (the title taken from Horace's
Odes
: "I am not what once I was in Cynara's day"). The speaker, addressing Cynara, his true love, recalls: "Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine / There fell thy shadow, Cynara!" Though he is "desolate and sick of an old passion," he protests: "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion." The prostitute's kisses from her "bought red mouth were sweet," and though he "cried for madder music and for stronger wine," he insists on his faithfulness to Cynara in the refrain at the end of each stanza. Symons called this poem "one of the greatest lyrical poems of our time," and T. S. Eliot later wrote that, "by a slight shift in rhythm," Dowson liberated himself from current poetic convention.
In "The Harlot's House" Wilde depicts prostitutes as unliving things by using images perhaps inspired by Baudelaire's "Danse Macabre" in
Les Fleurs du mal
. The setting, dominated by moral vision, again indicates Wilde's difficulty in adhering to his own insistence on art for art's sake:
Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons,
Went sidling through the slow quadrille.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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