Style and Sensation

Decadence is an extreme form of Aestheticism, the cultivation of a type of ‘artistic’ sensibility in conflict with traditional values: a sensibility outside the framework of respectable ‘culture’. To some decadence may appear as a form of hedonism, to others this hedonism, this ‘art for art’s sake’, has the sinister aspect of relativism, materialism, subversion, even nihilism.

In a letter from prison (known as De Profundis), Oscar Wilde referred to a book: ‘that book which has had such a strange influence over my life.’ The book in question was The Renaissance (1873) by Walter Pater the ‘Conclusion’ to which had caused a minor scandal on its first publication. George Eliot, among others, rushed to condemn as ‘quite poisonous’ its ‘false principles of criticism’ and its ‘false conception of life’. This literary scandal gained the author a notoriety that damaged his career, but it also ensured his writings became a cuase celebre, the object of a cult for all those who, like Wilde, aspired to a radical artistic outlook suitable for new skeptical age. It seemed that Pater was advocating, in the most poetic prose, a form of rarified ‘impressionism’ of sensations. For art, he wrote, ‘comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moment’s sake.’ In the same essay he referred to ‘a quickened and multiplied consciousness’ and to the ‘ecstasy’ of the soul that burns always with a ‘hard gem like flame’.

Like Wilde, many of the subsequent generation, the generation of the fin-de-siecle era, seemed to assimilate this refined form of aesthetic outlook. They molded this ‘strange influence’ into a characteristic sub-culture; an informal ‘movement’, or international tendency, that might legitimately be termed ‘decadent’ – the synthesis of style and sensation. Generally the movement was closely identified with various other trends called Naturalism, Impress­ionism, Symbolism, Expressionism or, in the decorative and applied arts, the national variants of ‘modern style’ Art Nouveau.

In England the decadent movement was at the centre of a tangle of trends including Aestheticism, Naturalism and Impressionism. The Celtic Twilight displayed links with magical-hermetic occultism (The Order of the Golden Dawn) and pioneered an interest in folklore and mythology. Decadent religiosity and neo-Catholicism rubbed shoulders with an enthusiasm for certain authors of ancient Rome: Catullus, Horace, Propertius and Petronius (The Satyricon). Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley established a cult of modernity and ephemerality. George Moore and Hubert Crackenthorpe promoted Naturalism in the manner of Zola and Maupassant. This in turn was complemented by Nietzschean atheism espoused by the poet John Davidson.

Wilde moved from Aestheticism to Decadence with his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and his ‘Byzantine’ play, Salome (1892) the London production of which (starring Sarah Berhardt) was banned while in rehearsal. Wilde, as is well known, became the centre of a nationwide scandal when his homosexuality was exposed in 1895. However, after his release from jail he continued to be a focal figure for European writers, living in France and Italy under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth (the eponymous anti-hero of Maturin’s Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer) until his death in Paris in 1900.

The Rhymers Club (active 1891-1894) included among its members W. B. Yeats, Ernest Rhys, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, John Davidson, John Gray, Oscar Wilde, Richard Le Galliene and Francis Thompson. These formed the nucleus of the ‘Tragic Generation’ of the English ‘Yellow Nineties’ – the first wave of ‘decadent’ Francophile modernism in English art and literature. The name of the period refers to the magazine The Yellow Book (1894) which showcased the work of Decadent poets and artists. Edited by Aubrey Beardsley and Henry Harland, The Yellow Book was an instants controversial success, cocking a snook at the pro-establishment ‘muscular’ imperialism of late Victorian England.

The critic and poet Arthur Symons was a typical representative of the progressive Decadent trend. Literary journalist and member of the Rhymer’s club Symons was born in Pembrokeshire in 1865. From about 1890 he was based in London and wrote criticism and poems of modernistic, urban, impressionism. Several of his poems, like ‘Stella Maris’ which appeared in The Yellow Book I in January 1894 caused some controversy. Elsewhere, he once claimed his life was ‘like a Music Hall’ and often wrote about the various dancers he saw and admired in both London and Paris. For example he eulogized the iconic Jane Avril (known as La Melinite) and Nini Patte-en-l’Air of the Casino de Paris who he dubbed ‘The Maenad of the Decadence’ in a poem written in 1892. For him Nini exemplified ‘The art of knowing how to be/ Part lewd, aesthetical in part/ And fin de siècle essentially.’

His survey The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), preceded by the essay The Decadent Movement in Literature (1893) was one of the first English language surveys of current French literature introducing Nerval, Laforgue, Huysmans and Mallarme to those of his contemporary colleagues who looked the Continent for inspiration. The English writers demanded more freedom of choice in artistic subject matter. They cultivated the short ‘musical’ poem inspired by Verlaine.

In the visual arts Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) developed his inimitable iconography of depraved Elizabethan Arcadias, ‘Japonesque’ linearism (Salome illustrations, 1894) and Eighteen-the century libertinism which evoked the atmosphere of Laclos. He produced an erotic novel called Under the Hill (1896, unfinished) and died of tuberculosis in Menton in March 1898. His influence in the graphic arts both in Europe and America has been immense. Together with Edward Burne-Jones and the artists of The Glasgow School (Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret MacDonald, Jessie M King) he counts as one of the great originators and stylists of Art Nouveau.

The horror of life is a reaction to the basic instability and uncertainty of existence.

This horror, translated into anxiety in all its manifestations and forms, pervaded the fin-de-siecle Yellow Nineties era and its culture. One has only to read the strictures of Xenophanes and Plato against the extravagance and immorality of ancient poets to come to the conclusion that ‘decadence’ is nothing new – yet, in the late nineteenth century, this ubiquitous malaise was amplified by wider social trends.

These trends included a massive expansion of the mass media, a far reaching extension of systems of transportation, and the growth of urban life in vast metropolitan cities like London (a modern Babylon according to Disraeli), Berlin and Paris. Many commentators identified urbanization as the common cause of numerous pathological tendencies including effeminacy and the neurotic ‘genius’ of artists whose degraded eyesight was the clinical basis of Impressionist imagery. By locating the causes of human volition and motivation in subsurface structures, in unconscious impulses, or in primal biological phenomena beyond the grasp of conscious awareness, intellectual and scientific currents, such as those represented by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Durkheim, provoked hostility from the guardians of tradition.

Naturally the new art of the time, from the fluid brush strokes of the Impressionists, to the ‘unhealthy’ subject matter and expressionistic linearity of Edvard Munch, seemed to encapsulate this state of disruption and decline; a breakdown of traditional modes of representation. Such artists fused the principles of style and sensation in subversive works – literary, theatrical, musical and visual – causing a sequence of scandals and controversies among those who saw any departure from bland academic conventions as a threat to the established order.

The prototype of the modern literary-artistic scandal was the prosecution, in 1857 of  Baudelaire for his ‘decadent’ collection of poems Les Fleurs du Mal, but numerous other cases emerged throughout the period. These included attacks on the writings of Walter Pater, Whistler, the Impressionists and the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1870s, the furore over Klimt’s Vienna University Paintings in 1893 and the arrest of Egon Schiele in 1912. This kind of moral panic directed at shocking ‘yellow’ novels, at plays such as Ibsen’s Ghosts or Wilde’s Salome, or at paintings such as L’Absinthe by Degas, become symptomatic of a perceived moral crisis of decline, extrapolated to engulf the entire West. This notion may well appear vindicated by the cataclysmic political events of 1914, although subsequent decades have seen a continuation of the same perennial mythology of depravity, decline and terminal collapse.

Such reactions disclose the anxiety that underlies all moralistic diatribes against ‘decadence’ in the arts of any age. However, in the fin-de-siecle era (a period no longer dominated by the clergy or the aristocracy) the fusion of style and sensation in pursuit of a radical new aesthetic exposed many to a particularly modern form of unease – a disquiet that still haunts the modern world.

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A C Evans

illustration: Beardsley ‘The Peacock Skirt’ from Salome (1894)