The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) (4 page)

This absorption of Decadence into pseudo-psychological theory became an important factor in the literary criticism which grew up alongside the movement.
Paul Bourget, the most prestigious of the contemporary critics who dignified the idea of Decadence with serious consideration, was one of several writers who used quasi-psychiatric analysis to weld philosophical, historical and literary ideas of decadence together into a composite account of the predicament of modern man.
His two series of
Essais de psychologie contemporaine
(1883; 1885) analysed the supposed sickness of the age by reference to its great writers; it was, inevitably, from his contemplation of Baudelaire that he drew the “theory of decadence” which was to provide a manifesto for the later writers of the Movement.

Inevitably, the kind of grand theorizing in which Bourget indulged could not be content with a handful of French writers as key exemplars; it had to demonstrate its universality by showing that there were kindred spirits in other civilized nations.
Baudelaire had, of course, been particularly fascinated by the American Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories of haunted neurasthenic aristocrats, like “Morella”, “Berenice” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” were easily accommodated.
Bourget also made pilgrimages to Britain to immerse himself in the heritage of Coleridge, de Quincey and the Pre-Raphaelites, who were all numbered among the influences of French and English Decadents; those who followed in his footsteps cast their net ever more widely.
Thus,
angst
-ridden Germanic pessimists and gloomy Russian nihilists were quickly absorbed by later writers into the expanding canon of literary Decadence, and so were those Italian writers who turned a jaundiced eye on the reduced circumstances of contemporary Rome.

This kind of expansion of perspective tends to happen whenever the existence of a Movement is announced; although the participants in a Movement must distinguish themselves from what everyone else has done and is doing, they must also claim to constitute the leading edge of a tidal wave, which they tend to do by claiming kinship with as many of the great and good as they can.
Forging links to trends in various arenas of extra-literary activity is always useful as a rhetorical device for the boosting of one’s own importance.
The tying together of the literary idea of decadence with the theories of protopsychology did, however, carry a risk of deflation.
Ideas of historical decadence like those promulgated by Montesquieu were sufficiently numinous to be insulated against the possibility of falsification, but the theories of Moreau de Tours and Lombroso aspired
to, and required, empirical support which conspicuously failed to appear.

The theories of neurasthenia and neurotic genius were a farrago of nonsense, and the tide of opinion soon turned against them.
Even in the France of Lamarck and Bergson, the triumphs of Darwinism eventually persuaded thinking men that acquired characteristics could not be inherited and that hereditary degeneracy was an essentially silly idea.
That silliness inevitably rubbed off on the literary Decadent, whose status as a tragic figure was severely compromised.

It is unsurprising, in view of this, that the novelists of Decadence – who found difficulty, in any case, in recapturing the fervent intensity and intimate sensibility of Decadent poetry – soon became defensively ironic and satirical.
It is unsurprising too that Decadent fiction did not long survive the turn of the century; the serious-minded Decadent had ample defences against the scorn of his enemies, but he had none against their laughter.

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AGAINST NATURE:
DECADENCE À LA MODE

During the brief period of fashionability which it enjoyed after 1883 the decadent consciousness was extrapolated in a great deal of poetry and a flood of novels and short stories.
With only a few exceptions these works and their authors have been relegated from the first division of literary fame.
The writers of the period who now seem most important – Stéphane Mallarmé is the most obvious example – tend to be discussed under other headings even when they were considered to be Decadents at the time.
The influential critic Remy de Gourmont made Mallarmé the central figure of the Movement in his contemporary essay, but he is now deemed to have been the pioneer of Symbolism – and if Remy de Gourmont’s own fiction and poetry are ever commended they too tend to be reckoned Symbolist, though the author certainly thought of many of his works as Decadent.

This process of relegation has much to do with moral attitudes to the way in which Decadent writers revelled in the morbid spectacles which they presented.
Huysmans was spared such relegation not simply because he was a better writer – although
À rebours
presents such a perfect image of the Decadent anti-hero that it is hardly necessary to preserve others – but also because he recanted so conspicuously and transferred himself to the side of the angels.
This was an option not open to all; Jean Lorrain’s literary indulgence of homoerotic themes was correlated with a more-or-less open acknowledgement of his own homosexuality from which there was no going
back.

It should be noted, though, that a generalized moral disapproval of Decadence (such as one still finds in some historians of the Movement) is insensitive to certain aspects of Decadent fiction, and tars some very different writers with the same brush.
A good deal of Decadent prose is far from earnest; some is exuberantly playful and some of it very witty.
Many of the authors who adopted the Decadent pose in the mid-80s were content to wear it flippantly as a gaudy costume.
It was for some a thoroughly liberating kind of fiction, which allowed them to escape from the straitjacket of conventional moral expectations to celebrate infidelity instead of fidelity, lust instead of love, and idiosyncratic fantasy instead of sanctified desire.
For some, this was an opportunity to cultivate a new intensity, but for others it was an amusing game – nor were these two alternatives entirely incompatible.

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The pace was set for the writers of Decadent prose by Elémir Bourges’ lurid novel
Le Crépuscule des dieux
(1883), in which the evil mistress of an aristocrat of the Second Empire encourages his three children to taste the fruits of their inherited degeneracy, leading to an orgy of incest, murder, suicide and traumatic insanity.
Having indulged these excesses, however, Bourges did not long remain a Decadent, having grander ambitions for his work; he rapidly recovered a sense of the heroic ideal, and his later tragedies, including
Les oiseaux s’envolent et les fleurs tombent
(1893), became increasingly pretentious.

Joséphin Péladan was infinitely more consistent than Bourges, but he too had grander ambitions.
Though Decadence remained his subject-matter throughout the
twenty-odd volumes of a series collectively entitled
La Décadence latine
, which began with
Le Vice Suprême
(1884) and ran until 1925, his intention was to deplore it.
Péladan’s central thesis was that the Decadence of the Romans was caused by the decay of their religious sensibilities, and that the modern world was similarly threatened.
His work would have been more tedious than it was had his recipe for salvation been more orthodox, but the faith which he recommended for investment was a mystical Rosicrucianism whose champions are superhuman mages; this added a note of endearing eccentricity to the series in question, though most critics still refer to it as “unreadable”.
The success of the early editions was probably enhanced by the fact that they carried erotic frontispieces by Felicien Rops, the most celebrated illustrator associated with the Movement.

Péladan was not a particularly influential writer in France, but it is worth noting that the basic formula of his work, carefully sanitised by the removal of the specifically Decadent elements, is recapitulated in Marie Corelli’s absurd account of the failure of neurasthenia redeemed in
A Romance of Two Worlds
(1886), which set her on the path to becoming the best-selling English author of the 1890s.
No one was ever such a diehard opponent of Decadence as Miss Corelli, but she was obviously prepared to study her enemy fairly closely, as evidenced by her feverish exposé of the absinthe dens of Paris,
Wormwood
(1890).

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Among the more wholehearted Decadents, there was none more wholehearted – at least on the printed page – than the one female contributor to the boom,
Marguérite Eymery, who signed herself Raehilde.
A frequent contributor to
Le Décadent
, she was proudly self-conscious of her own corruption by the allure of artifice and neurosis, having previously been an innocent and healthy country girl.
Her protestations to this effect were not conspicuously backed up by her lifestyle – she married the editor of the
Mercure de France
, which was hardly a Decadent journal, and seems to have lived a perfectly respectable life as Madame Vallette – but her novels present a spirited defence of uninhibited eccentricity.
They were considered indecent in her day, and it is only now – when she can be hailed as a rediscovered proto-feminist – that they are beginning to appear in English translation.

Rachilde’s novels offer a series of paradoxically forceful and conscientiously Decadent heroines, most of whom are triumphantly unredeemed even by death.
Nono
(1885) features a promiscuous female dandy prone to murdering inconvenient lovers.
La Marquise de Sade
(1887), embarks, as one would expect, on a career of orgiastic sadism.
Monsieur Vénus
(1889), as its title implies, has a somewhat androgynous heroine, who instals the mummified corpse of one of her lovers on a couch in her boudoir.
La jongleuse
(1900; tr.
as
The Juggler
) is emotionally torn between two lovers, one of whom is a Greek vase.

Monsieur Vénus
obtained for its author the by-then-rare accolade of being charged as a danger to public morals, and perhaps she was, if only because she helped to free literary representations of female sexuality from the morass of male pornographic fantasy – a crusade taken up by Colette while she was freeing herself from exploitative collaboration with her husband Willy.
Although it is the grotesquerie and luridness of much of her work which first attracts attention to Rachilde she
was not without a sense of humour, and her critical work includes some notable essays on Symbolist and Surrealist writers.
Her career continued well into the twentieth century, and although she toned down the sexual bizarrerie of her books even
Jeux d’artifice
(1932) still preserves recognisable Decadent affiliations.

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Catulle Mendès was one of the few writers who had built a considerable literary reputation before getting involved with the Decadent movement (and who may have spoiled it in the eyes of some later critics by doing so).
His
Revue Fantaisiste
had provided an early showcase for the Parnassians and his own verse in that vein had attracted some praise; he had also been briefly married to Gautier’s daughter.
The novels of his Decadent period are, however, fairly close in spirit to Rachilde’s, showing a similar interest in the grotesque and an apparent determination to overlook nothing in rendering exhaustive analyses of the particular corruptions to be featured.

Mendès first Decadent novel
Zo’har
(1886), is a baroque study of incest.
Méphistophéla
(1890) offers an account of a Lesbian career far less dreamily Romantic than any treatment of the theme in the work of Baudelaire or Pierre Louÿs.
La Première Maîtresse
(1887) includes several excursions in which the central characters go hopefully into the Paris slums in search of new sins (but even the Decadent imagination was unequal to the task of discovering one which was really new).

A different side of Mendès is, however, displayed by his short fiction and brief essays offering advice on the game of love, many of which are collected in
Lesbia
(1887).
Here the author parades a slick and archly
humorous cynicism, which takes it for granted that deceit is the lifeblood of romance and presents a series of pointed examples of calculated insincerity.
This is Decadence at its lightest and least serious, but it still contrives to provide a challenge to conventional representations of the inclinations of the human heart.

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The writer who searched more avidly than any other for new sins to add to the catalogue of Decadence was Jean Lorrain (Paul Duval), a prolific contributor of verse and prose to the Decadent periodicals, whose numerous short stories include many intense and striking evocations of Decadent sensibility.
Lorrain was a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, and was instrumental in bringing Wilde into the circle of the French Decadent writers, thus securing an important link between the French and English Movements.
He was never as popular with the reading public as Rachilde, but if anyone deserves to be considered the central figure and fulcrum of the Movement it was he.

Lorrain’s characters, like Rachilde’s, explore all the usual avenues of perverse self-indulgence, plus one or two rarely met elsewhere (hair-fetichism; visits to abattoirs for the purpose of supping blood; and marrying tubercular wives for the pleasure of watching them waste away) but his attitude to such adventures is rather more clinical.
He was also – again like Rachilde – a great devotee of literary symbolism, constantly searching for new metaphors with which to illuminate the perversions of human desire.

Lorrain’s short fiction includes many psychological horror stories, akin to Maupassant’s but differently inspired.
Attempts to cope with his perennially poor
health gave him many opportunities to explore the fringe medicine of the day, and he became intimately familiar with the hallucinatory effects of ether.
Few writers have ever been such scrupulous observers of their own paranoid nightmares.

Lorrain’s novels and collections of stories mostly did not escape from the periodicals into more permanent form until the fashionability of Decadence was on the decline, but they remain key examples of the Decadent sensibility.
His best work is to be found in his collections, including
Sonyeuse
(1891) and
Buveurs d’âmes
(1893), but his novel
Monsieur de Phocas
(1901) is arguably the most significant extended study of the Decadent personality after
À rebours.

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By comparison with the novels of Rachilde, Mendès and Lorrain, Remy de Gourmont’s work is much lighter in tone, but his lightness is quite distinct from the lightness of Mendès’ shorter pieces.
Gourmont was the sentimentalist of the Movement, and his Decadent short fiction mostly consists of dreamy erotic fantasies which celebrate the faithlessness of lovers in a manner far more mystical than cynical.
Gourmont is far more famous today as a critic than a writer, and those of his prose works which are still praised are not the ones most closely affiliated to the Decadent Movement, but he was as influential a figure as any during the Movement’s brief heyday.
Though his experiments with prose style and his strong theoretical interest in mysticism served eventually to remove him from the mainstream of Decadence, they were in their inception essentially Decadent moves.
His short novel
Le Fantome
(1891) is probably the most typically Decadent of his works,
featuring the usual perversions, but it has a glossiness and essential charm which make it distinctive.
The extended prose poems collected in
Histoires Magiques
(1912) are far closer in spirit to the works of Pierre Louÿs than to the short stories of Rachilde and Lorrain, but they are the most perfect representations of an aspect of the French Decadent consciousness which was just as important as Mendès’ cynical playfulness or Lorrain’s horror stories.

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In the midst of the lurid excess which seemed to contemporary observers to be the hallmark of the Decadent novel.
À rebours
– the book which was eventually canonised as the archetypal novel of Decadence – must have seemed rather restrained in its descriptions of sexual indulgence.
However, it owes its archetypal status not to its extremity but to the highly scrupulous way in which it went about its psychological analysis of the Decadent state of mind; the greater delicacy of Huysmans’ prose is expressed in more than one way.