The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) (3 page)

Baudelaire’s miseries were further compounded by the fact that his work was not well-received by his contemporaries – at least, not openly.
He was a candidate for the Academy in 1861 but was forced to withdraw.
Sainte-Beuve, whom he idolized – in 1844 Baudelaire wrote an “epistle” in verse proclaiming that he had imported the story of Amaury into his heart, absorbing all its “miasmas” and “perfumes”, and that he had become a practitioner of the same “cruel art” – ignored him save for an off-hand remark condemning his work as “folly”.
Gautier, who understood him far better, carefully hoarded his own praise until after Baudelaire’s death, at which point he belatedly added an enthusiastic Notice to the 1868
Les Fleurs du Mal.
Others were openly scathing, including Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose own cynical dandyism was saved from being thoroughly Decadent only by his devout Catholicism; he remarked that the only two possibilities open to the man whose soul was revealed in
Les Fleurs du Mal
were conversion to Catholicism and suicide.
(Baudelaire had already wounded himself attempting suicide in 1845, and appears always to have regarded himself as an “incorrigible”, though permanently lapsed, Catholic.) It seems probable, in fact, that the only poet who gave Baudelaire a reasonable measure of moral support while he was alive was the only one who condescended to give an oration at his funeral: his long-time friend Théodore de Banville, the Parnassian inheritor of Gautier’s mantle as the
premier champion of art for art’s sake.

Given all this, it is not surprising that Baudelaire’s vivid verses and ornate poems in prose are so full of lamentations – but they are not mere cries of despair.
What is quintessentially Decadent about them is the way in which they harness personal tragedy to the greater context, attempting to use analysis of the personal predicament to reach a more perfect understanding and aesthetic appreciation of the state of the world.

It is easy enough to feel sorry for Baudelaire, but pity is out of place when contemplating the poets of Decadence; how could they have become poets of Decadence unless they were torn apart by the contradictions which others managed to avoid?
How, if Baudelaire had not had his comforts eked out, could he possibly have laid claim – as he did in the most celebrated of his several poems entitled “Spleen” – that he had more memories than if he had lived a thousand years, crowded as secrets in his unhappy brain?
How could he have likened himself to a graveyard churned about by worms of remorse?
And how, if he had only harboured such feelings for brief intervals of alienation, couldhe possibly have learned to savour the sensation as he did?
If he had made a better living, he would only have been one more Parnassian among many; as it was he became the primary inspiration of the whole Decadent Movement.

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GENIUS AND MADNESS:
THE ATTRACTIONS OF DECADENCE

Even when one accepts that Baudelaire would have been a less interesting poet had he not led such a tortured life it remains rather surprising that he became a role-model for an entire movement.
In order to understand this more fully, it is necessary to pay some attention to the other intellectual currents of the day.

Before the movement actually got under way in the 1880s the pessimism which the Decadents were to embrace was given an increased measure of respectability by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which was popularized in France by Théodule Ribot in 1874.
Schopenhauer argues that the world contains so much more misfortune than joy that life is fundamentally unhappy, tolerable only because the Will to Live persistently deceives us with unrealistic hopes.
The enlightened man, according to Schopenhauer, must replace this deceptive will with an honest Idea, whose contemplation is fundamentally aesthetic.
All this seemed to French aesthetes a significant underlining of what Baudelaire had attempted and achieved.

An even more striking and radical endorsement of the Decadent pose was, in addition, provided by contemporary fashions in proto-psychology, with which many writers were closely in touch.
The experiments with hashish and opium which were undertaken by Gautier and other members of the self-styled
Club de Haschichins
in the 1830s and 1840s were undertaken in a fairly careful spirit of exploration: the drugs were
frequently supplied by medical men who supervised and observed their use, and catalogued their effects.
The principaldoctor involved in Gautier’s hallucinatory adventures was Joseph Moreau, who liked to style himself “Moreau de Tours”.
Moreau’s interest in abnormal psychology was by no means confined to the study of psychotropic substances; he produced a whole series of books between 1835 and 1859 investigating the phenomena of “nervous disorders”.
His work exhibits two constant preoccupations which were of considerable potential interest to Decadents, and his personal acquaintance with both Gautier and Baudelaire must have ensured that they were thoroughly familiar with his ideas.
The first of these preoccupations was an intense interestin artistic genius as a species of neurosis; the second was a fascination with the alleged heredity of neurotic traits.
Moreau was by no means alone in these preoccupations, which were shared by several more prestigious figures, most importantly the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, whose book on the psychology of genius was translated into French at the height of the Decadent Movement, in 1884.

The emergent science of abnormal psychology was very heavily influenced by early evolutionist ideas, which made much of the contrary tendencies of “progress” and “degeneration” in searching for explanations of the palaeontological record.
In France, of course, evolutionist thinking continued to be dominated by Lamarckian ideas – including the proposition that acquired characteristics could be inherited – for some years after the first publication in England (in 1859) of Darwin’s ideas.
As the human sciences came uneasily into being analogies were constantly being drawn between society and biological organisms, so that the ills afflicting society could be explored by analogy with the pathology of
disease.
(It should be remembered that disease itself was not well-understood at this time; Pasteur did not develop the modern germ theory of disease until the 1860s and a considerable confusion of medical and moral attitudes persisted for some time afterwards.)

The evident correlation between sexual licence and venereal disease was echoed in proto-psychology by dark superstitions regarding the effects of habitual masturbation, and no one could be sure to what extent the sins of fathers might be visited upon their sons.
Montesquieu’s speculations about the decadence of the Romans were recapitulated and much amplified by theories of hereditary decadence which imagined aristocratic families devoted to luxury and vice becoming more effete and less sane with every generation that passed.

In consequence of these speculations there emerged in the proto-psychology of nineteenth century France and England a new myth: the myth of neurasthenia.
The neurasthenic was a physically weak and over-sensitive individual, likely also to be morally weak, permanently possessed by apathy and spiritual impotence.
His (or her – though females were more likely to be diagnosed as “hysteric”) condition was primarily the result of bad hereditary but could easily be inflamed by self-abuse and other bad habits.
The closeness of this image to the image of the Decadent personality is by no means entirely coincidental; the pseudoscientific theorists of degeneracy fed upon literary inspiration, and returned what they had borrowed with generous interest.

But the proto-psychologists went further than this, offering speculations which put the neurotic victim of bad heredity in a rather more romantic light.
Moreau and Lombroso were both concerned to argue that artistic genius was itself a species of neurosis, closely associated
with bad heredity and eccentric lifestyle.
The unfortunate victims were therefore offered a possible route to compensatory achievement; would-be Decadents were encouraged to believe that the madder and more miserable they were, the more justified they might be in thinking of themselves as men of genius.

Baudelaire, who was one of many nineteenth.
century writers to have his end hastened by the physical and mental corruptions of syphilis, was not the only striking example offering apparent support for this thesis.
Gerard de Nerval, a friend of Gautier’s who was notorious for having strolled in the gardens of the Palais Royal leading a lobster on a leash of pale blue ribbon, had not only gone insane and killed himself but had transmuted his mental disorder into disturbed literary forms – most notably his phantasmagoric novella
Aurelia
(1855), published posthumously in the year ofhis death.
Nerval’s poetry was not assembled into a collection until 1877, shortly before the heyday of Decadence.
It included a
supernaturaliste
group written
par désespoir:
a product of his madness which helped lay the groundwork for certain Decadent preoccupations.

The influence of proto-p sychology was by no means confined to writers of a Decadent stripe; indeed, the French writer who was most elaborately influenced by theories of hereditary degeneracy was Emile Zola, whose extensive analysis of the family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts is entirely based on such ideas.
Zola, like Saint-Beuve before him, was writing about Decadents and other victims ofbad heredity from a clinically objective standpoint; he saw himself as a quasi-scientific Naturalist, as did the Goncourts, whose techniques of characterization are similarly heavily “medicated”.
It is not surprising that such authors as these were in no hurry to associate themselves more closely with their
subject-matter; but nor is it surprising that others were bolder, entirely content to be mad, bad and dangerous to know, if such a condition were the red badge of courage which the authentic genius must wear.

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To what extent it is mere coincidence is difficult to judge, but it is certainly true that the two poets who followed Baudelaire in providing exemplary impetus to the Decadent Movement – Rimbaud and Verlaine – followed careers which were even more disordered than his.

Like Baudelaire, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud suffered a fatal break in his family relationships when he was six years old.
His father deserted his mother in 1860, unable any longer to tolerate the severity of her rectitude.
Rimbaud too was to rebel against this smothering domestic tyranny, embracing the revolutionary ideas of his teacher Georges Izambard and three times running away from school in 1870 and 1871.
In between these excursions he spent his time in the school library reading the most scandalous texts available, including books on alchemy, witchcraft and ritual magic as well as supposedly-indecent poetry and novels.
He became vehemently and aggressively atheistic, and wrote angry poems in profusion.

In 1870 Rimbaud sent several poems to Banville, who was then selecting material for the
Le Parnasse contemporain,
claiming to be seventeen and expressing his fervent desire to be a Parnassian, but they were not published.
Early in 1871 he laid out in a letter to his teacher Paul Demeny his new theory and philosophy of literature, attacking “egoists” and expressing his resolve to become a Promethean “seer”, which aim he expected to
attain by a “long, prodigious, and rational disordering of the senses”.
Foremost among the heroes whom he expected to follow and surpass was Baudelaire, who was in his estimation “the king of poets, a veritable God”.

In 1871 Rimbaud sent some poems to Paul Verlaine, who was then an obscure and only slightly effete Parnassian.
Verlaine, in one of the fits of reckless enthusiasm to which he was frequently subject, summoned the young acolyte to his side – much to the disgust and discomfort of the in-laws with whom he and his heavily-pregnant eighteen-year-old wife were living.
Rimbaud and Verlaine became enthusiastically involved in a mutual disordering of their experiences, which was certainly prodigious, though perhaps not so conspicuously rational.
They drank absin the and smoked hashish, and though both were later to deny in writing that there was anything sexual in their undoubtedly intimate liaison – well, they would have to say that, wouldn’t they?
The two lived in England for a while, probably smoking opium in the dens of Limehouse, before their stormy relationship came to a head in Brussels in 1873, when a drunken Verlaine fired a pistol at his infuriating friend, wounding him in the hand.
Despite Rimbaud’s attempts to exonerate him from all blame for this intemperate act, Verlaine was imprisoned for two years.

Rimbaud made few attempts to publish his work, and in 1874 he decided to renounce literature completely.
He responded one last time to an urgent summons from Verlaine following the latter’s release from prison, but found the elder poet in the grip of a reignited passion for the Catholic faith and turned his back on him forever.
He then undertook a much-interrupted journey to the East, ending up in charge of a trading-post in Abyssinia; but his life there ultimately proved too staid and he attempted, unsuccessfully, to take up a career as a gun-runner and
slave-trafficker.
His adventures were finally cut short early in 1891 when his leg was amputated because of a tumour; he did not survive the year.
Ironically, he had become famous in his native land during the period of his absence thanks to Verlaine’s inclusion of him in his study of “accursed poets”,
Poètes maudits
(1884), which was followed by belated publication of his most notable works,
Illuminations
and
Une saison en enfer
(incorrectly advertised as “posthumous”).
Rimbaud’s position as a central figure of the Decadent eighties was anachronistic, but the paradoxicality of it was entirely appropriate.

It was left to Verlaine himself to become the parent of the actual Decadent Movement.
Although his life probably presents a better exemplar of Decadence than anything he actually wrote, it is frequently argued that his sonnet “Langueur”, which appeared in the periodical
Le Chat Noir
in 1883, was the launching-pad for fashionable Decadence.
Verlaine was at that time still little-known as a poet, although his
Poèmes Saturniens
had appeared as long ago as 1866 (like most of his subsequent books its publication had been subsidised and its initial circulation limited), but he had his notoriety to assist his reputation, and his personal history made him a ready-made hero for aspiring Decadents.
He quickly established himself as an exemplar and an opinion-maker, and circles of Decadent poets rapidly formed around and alongside him.
New periodicals were issued to carry forward the crusade, though
Le Dècadent
itself, issued by Anatole Baju, did not appear until April 1886, and died a year later.

Verlaine apparently did not much like being labelled Decadent – which was understandable, in view of his reinvestment in religious faith – but he could do nothing to negate the image which he had acquired.
In the years which preceded the death which he had hastened
by his many misadventures he was frequently hospitalized, and spent the rest of his time shacked up with ageing prostitutes, living testimony to the neurotic quality of literary genius.

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With such examples as these before them, would-be Decadents were initially prepared to take great pains to cultivate their neurasthenia, or at the very least to be conscientious hypochondriacs.
They treasured their symptoms, not only as reflections of the unfortunate nature of the human condition but also as evidences of their intellectual superiority over the common herd.
The medication of the idea of Decadence is very obvious in the prose works of the Movement – most notably, of course, Joris-Karl Huysmans’
À Rebours
(1884; tr.
as
Against Nature),
which quickly became and remained the Bible of the Decadents in spite of its central character’s climactic repentance.