SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Decadence was 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, even nihilism.

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 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, 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 impressionistic 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 of Baudelaire in 1857 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 Flaubert (Madame Bovary, also prosecuted in 1857),  Walter Pater, the art of 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; a dogma that underpins a continuing hybrid culture war against the Western Elites and all aspects of modern life.

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: Baudelaire in 1861, from a photo by Carjat

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