THE DECADENCE
No English writer has a better claim to recognition as an interpreter
of the decadence in recent English literature than Arthur Symons. He
of all the critics in the Eighteen Nineties was sufficiently intimate
with the modern movement to hold, and sufficiently removed from it
in his later attitude to express, an opinion which should be at once
sympathetic and reasonably balanced without pretending to colourless
impartiality. But during the earlier phase his vision of the decadent
idea was certainly clearer than it was some years later, when he strove
to differentiate decadence and symbolism.
“The most representative literature of the day,” he wrote in 1893,
“the writing which appeals to, which has done so much to form, the
younger generation, is certainly not classic, nor has it any relation
to that old antithesis of the classic, the romantic. After a fashion
it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end
of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin,
decadence; an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in
research, an over-subtilising refinement upon refinement, a spiritual
and moral perversity. If what we call the classic is indeed the supreme
art--those qualities of perfect simplicity, perfect sanity, perfect
proportion, the supreme qualities--then this representative literature
of to-day, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and
beautiful and interesting disease.”[3]
Six years later Arthur Symons, like so many of the writers of the
period, was beginning to turn his eyes from the “new and beautiful and
interesting disease,” and to look inwardly for spiritual consolation.
In the “Dedication” to _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_ he
told W. B. Yeats that he was “uncertainly but inevitably” finding his
way towards that mystical acceptation of reality which had always been
the attitude of the Irish poet. And further on in the same book, as
though forgetting the very definite interpretation of decadence given
by him in the article of 1893, he writes of it as “something which is
vaguely called Decadence,” a term, he said, used as a reproach or a
defiance:
“It pleased some young men in various countries to call
themselves Decadents, with all the thrill of unsatisfied
virtue masquerading as uncomprehended vice. As a matter of
fact, the term is in its place only when applied to style, to
that ingenious deformation of the language, in Mallarmé, for
instance, which can be compared with what we are accustomed to
call the Greek and Latin of the Decadence. No doubt perversity
of form and perversity of matter are often found together, and,
among the lesser men especially, experiment was carried far, not
only in the direction of style. But a movement which in this
sense might be called Decadent could but have been a straying
aside from the main road of literature.... The interlude, half
a mock-interlude, of Decadence, diverted the attention of the
critics while something more serious was in preparation. That
something more serious has crystallised, for the time, under
the form of Symbolism, in which art returns to the one pathway,
leading through beautiful things to the eternal beauty.”
In the earlier essay he certainly saw more in decadence than mere
novelty of style, and rightly so, for style can no more be separated
from idea than from personality. The truth of the matter, however,
lies probably between the two views. What was really decadent in the
Eighteen Nineties did seem to weed itself out into mere tricks of style
and idiosyncrasies of sensation; and whilst doing so it was pleased to
adopt the term decadence, originally used as a term of reproach, as a
badge. But with the passing of time the term has come to stand for a
definite phase of artistic consciousness, and that phase is precisely
what Arthur Symons described it to be in his earlier article, an
endeavour “to fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to
fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a
human soul; that is the ideal of Decadence.”
The decadent movement in English art was the final outcome of the
romantic movement which began near the dawn of the nineteenth century.
It was the mortal ripening of that flower which blossomed upon the
ruins of the French Revolution, heralding not only the rights of man,
which was an abstraction savouring more of the classic ideal, but
the rights of personality, of unique, varied and varying men. The
French romanticists, led by Victor Hugo, recognised this in their
glorification of Napoleon; but fear and hatred of the great Emperor
generated in the hearts of the ruling classes in this country and
propagated among the people prevented the idea from gaining acceptance
here. At the same time decadence was neither romantic nor classic;
its existence in so far as it was dependent upon either of those art
traditions was dependent upon both. The decadents were romantic in
their antagonism to current forms, but they were classic in their
insistence upon new. And it must not be forgotten that far from being
nihilistic in aim they always clung, at times with desperation, to
one already established art-form or another. The French artists of
the first revolutionary period depended as much upon the traditions
of republican Greece and Rome as those of the revolution of July, and
the poets of Britain, led by Walter Scott and Byron, depended upon
the traditions of mediæval feudalism. Romanticism was a reshuffling
of ideals and ideas and a recreation of forms; it was renascent and
novel. It could be both degenerate and regenerate, and contain at the
same time many more contradictions, because at bottom it was a revolt
of the spirit against formal subservience to mere reason. It is true
that there is ultimately an explanation for all things, a reason for
everything, but it was left for romance to discover a reason for
unreason. It was the romantic spirit in the art of Sir Walter Scott
which saw no inconsistency between the folk-soul and the ideals of
chivalry and nobility; that taught Wordsworth to reveal simplicity as,
in Oscar Wilde’s words, “the last refuge of complexity”; that inspired
John Keats with a new classicism in _Endymion_ brighter than
anything since _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, and _Comus_,
and a new mediævalism in _The Eve of St Agnes_ fairer than
“all Olympus’ faded hierarchy.” It taught Shelley that the most
strenuous and the most exalted individual emphasis was not necessarily
antagonistic to a balanced communal feeling, and that the heart of
Dionysos could throb and burn in the form of Apollo; and above all it
taught Samuel Taylor Coleridge that mystery lurked in common things and
that mysticism was not merely a cloistral property.
Though all of these tendencies of thought and expression went to the
making of the decadence in England, the influence, with the exception
of that of Keats, was indirect and foreign. In that it was native the
impulsion came directly from the Pre-Raphaelites, and more particularly
from the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne. But the chief
influences came from France, and partially for that reason the English
decadents always remained spiritual foreigners in our midst; they were
not a product of England but of cosmopolitan London. It is certain
Oscar Wilde (hounded out of England to die in Paris), Aubrey Beardsley
(admittedly more at home in the _brasserie_ of the Café Royale
than elsewhere in London) and Ernest Dowson (who spent so much of his
time in Soho) would each have felt more at home in Paris or Dieppe
than, say, in Leeds or Margate. The modern decadence in England was an
echo of the French movement which began with Théophile Gautier (who was
really the bridge between the romanticists of the Victor Hugo school
and the decadents who received their inspiration from Edmond and Jules
de Goncourt), Paul Verlaine and Joris Karl Huysmans. In short, Gautier,
favourite disciple of Victor Hugo, represented the consummation
of the old romanticism, and he did this by inaugurating that new
romanticism, which had for apostles the Parnassiens, Symbolists and
Decadents. French romanticism begins with _Hernani_, and ends
with _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. Decadence properly begins with
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ and closes with _À Rebours_. In
England it began by accident with Walter Pater’s Studies in Art and
Poetry, The _Renaissance_, which was not entirely decadent, and
it ended with Oscar Wilde’s _Picture of Dorian Gray_ and Aubrey
Beardsley’s romance, _Under the Hill_, which were nothing if not
decadent.
The accident by which Pater became a decadent influence in English
literature was due to a misapprehension of the precise meaning of the
famous “Conclusion” to the first edition of the volume originally
issued in 1873, which led the author to omit the chapter from the
second edition (1877). “I conceived it might possibly mislead some of
those young men into whose hands it might fall,” he wrote, when he
reintroduced it with some slight modifications, bringing it closer to
his original meaning, into the third edition of the book, in 1888.
Nevertheless there was sufficient material in the revised version to
stimulate certain minds in a direction only very remotely connected
with that austere philosophy of sensations briefly referred to in The
_Renaissance_ and afterwards developed by Walter Pater under the
idea of a “New Cyrenaicism” in _Marius the Epicurean_ (1885). To
those seeking a native sanction for their decadence, passages even
in _Marius_ read like invitations. “With the Cyrenaics of all
ages, he would at least fill up the measure of that present with vivid
sensations, and such intellectual apprehensions as, in strength and
directness and their immediately realised values at the bar of an
actual experience, are most like sensations.” Such passages seemed in
the eyes of the decadents to give a perverse twist to the æsthetic
Puritanism of the intellectual evolution of Marius, and to fill with a
new naughtiness that high discipline of exquisite taste to which the
young pagan subjected himself. It is not surprising then to find even
the revised version of the famous “Conclusion” acting as a spark to the
tinder of the new acceptance of life.
“The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the
human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager
observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or
face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the
rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement
is irresistibly real and attractive for us,--for that moment
only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is
the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a
variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is
to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass
most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the
focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their
purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to
maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might
even be said that our failure is to form habits; for, after
all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it
is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons,
things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet,
we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution
to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit
free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes,
strange colours and curious odours, or work of the artist’s
hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every
moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in
the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces
on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to
sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our
experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into
one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have
time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What
we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions
and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile
orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical
theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism,
may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded
by us. ‘Philosophy is the microscope of thought.’ The theory or
idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part
of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which
we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified
with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim
upon us.”
But misappropriation of the teaching of Walter Pater was only an
incident in the progress of decadence in England. By the dawn of the
last decade of the century susceptible thought had reverted to the
original French path of decadent evolution which manifested itself from
Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire through the brothers Goncourt,
Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, to Huysmans, with a
growing tendency towards little secret raids over the German frontier
where the aristocratic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche was looted and
made to flash approval of intentions and ideas which that philosopher,
like Pater, had lived and worked to supersede. The publication of
_The Picture of Dorian Gray_ in 1891 revealed the main influence
quite definitely, for, apart from the fact that Wilde’s novel bears
many obvious echoes of the most remarkable of French decadent novels,
the _À Rebours_ of J. K. Huysmans, which Arthur Symons has called
“the breviary of the decadence,” it contains the following passage
which, although _À Rebours_ is not named, is generally understood
to refer to that book, even if the fact were not otherwise obvious:--
“His eyes fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent
him. What was it, he wondered. He went towards the little
pearl-coloured octagonal stand, that had always looked to
him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought
in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an
arm-chair, and began to turn over the leaves. After a few
minutes he became absorbed.
“It was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him
that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes,
the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him.
Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real
to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually
revealed.
“It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character,
being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young
Parisian who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth
century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged
to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were,
in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit
had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those
renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue as much as
those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style
in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid
and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms,
of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that
characterises the work of some of the finest artists of the
French school of symbolists. There were in it metaphors as
monstrous as orchids and as evil in colour. The life of the
senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One
hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual
ecstasies of some mediæval saint or the morbid confessions of
a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of
incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the
brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of
their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements
elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he
passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of
dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and the
creeping shadows.”
This book so revealed Dorian Gray to himself that he became frankly the
Duc Jean des Esseintes of English literature. There are differences, to
be sure, and the sensations and ideas of Dorian Gray are not elaborated
so scientifically as those of des Esseintes, but there is something
more than coincidence in the resemblance of their attitudes towards
life.
Jean des Esseintes and Dorian Gray are the authentic decadent types.
Extreme they are, as a matter of course, but their prototypes did exist
in real life, and minus those incidents wherein extreme decadence
expresses itself in serious crime, such as murder or incitement to
murder, those prototypes had recognisable corporeal being.
In the Eighteen Nineties two such types were Oscar Wilde and Aubrey
Beardsley, each of whom approximated, if not in action, then in mind
and idea to des Esseintes and Dorian Gray. There was in both a typical
perversity of thought, which in Wilde’s case led to a contravention
of morality evoking the revenge of society and a tragic ending to a
radiant career. Both preferred the artificial to the natural. “The
first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible,” said Oscar
Wilde, adding, “what the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”
The business of art as he understood it was to put Nature in her proper
place. To be natural was to be obvious, and to be obvious was to be
inartistic. Aubrey Beardsley invented a new artificiality in black and
white art, and in his romance, _Under the Hill_, only a carefully
expurgated edition of which has been made generally accessible to the
public, he created an _À Rebours_ of sexuality. And both possessed
an exaggerated curiosity as to emotional and other experiences combined
with that precocity which is characteristic of all decadents. The
curiosity and precocity of the decadence were revealed in an English
writer before the Eighteen Nineties by the publication, in 1886, of
the _Confessions of a Young Man_, by George Moore; but apart from
the fact that the author who shocked the moral susceptibilities of
the people who control lending libraries, with _Esther Waters_,
loved the limelight and passed through enthusiasms for all modern
art movements, he was as far removed from the typical decadent as
the latter is removed from the average smoking-room citizen who
satisfies an age-long taste for forbidden fruit with a _risqué_
story. George Moore played at decadence for a little while, but the
real influences of his life were Flaubert and the naturalists on the
one side, and their corollaries in the graphic arts, Manet and the
impressionists, on the other. For the rest he insisted upon England
accepting the impressionists; abandoned realism; introduced into this
country the work of Verlaine and Rimbaud, and the autobiography of
indiscretion; flirted with the Irish Literary Movement, and its vague
mysticism--and remained George Moore.
The chief characteristics of the decadence were (1) Perversity, (2)
Artificiality, (3) Egoism and (4) Curiosity, and these characteristics
are not at all inconsistent with a sincere desire “to find the last
fine shade, the quintessence of things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a
disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul.” Indeed, when
wrought into the metal of a soul impelled to adventure at whatever
hazard, for sheer love of expanding the boundaries of human experience
and knowledge and power, these characteristics become, as it were, the
senses by which the soul may test the flavour and determine the quality
of its progress. In that light they are not decadent at all, they are
at one with all great endeavour since the dawn of human consciousness.
What, after all, is human consciousness when compared with Nature but a
perversity--the self turning from Nature to contemplate itself? And is
not civilisation artifice’s conspiracy against what is uncivilised and
natural? As for egoism, we ought to have learnt by this time that it is
not sufficient for a being to say “I am.” He is not a factor in life
until he can add to that primal affirmation a consummating “I will.”
“To be” and “to will” exercised together necessitate action, which in
turn involves experience, and experience, not innocence, is the mother
of curiosity. Not even a child has curiosity until it has experienced
something; all inquisitiveness is in the nature of life asking for
more, and all so-called decadence is civilisation rejecting, through
certain specialised persons, the accumulated experiences and sensations
of the race. It is a demand for wider ranges, newer emotional and
spiritual territories, fresh woods and pastures new for the soul.
If you will, it is a form of imperialism of the spirit, ambitious,
arrogant, aggressive, waving the flag of human power over an ever wider
and wider territory. And it is interesting to recollect that decadent
art periods have often coincided with such waves of imperial patriotism
as passed over the British Empire and various European countries during
the Eighteen Nineties.
It is, of course, permissible to say that such outbreaks of curiosity
and expansion are the result of decay, a sign of a world grown
_blasé_, tired, played-out; but it should not be forgotten that
the effort demanded by even the most ill-directed phases of decadent
action suggests a liveliness of energy which is quite contrary to
the traditions of senile decay. During the Eighteen Nineties such
liveliness was obvious to all, and even in its decadent phases the
period possessed tonic qualities. But the common-sense of the matter
is that where the so-called decadence made for a fuller and brighter
life, demanding ever more and more power and keener sensibilities from
its units, it was not decadent. The decadence was decadent only when
it removed energy from the common life and set its eyes in the ends
of the earth whether those ends were pictures, blue and white china,
or colonies. True decadence was therefore degeneration arising not
out of senility, for there is nothing old under the sun, but out of
surfeit, out of the ease with which life was maintained and desires
satisfied. To kill a desire, as you can, by satisfying it, is to
create a new desire. The decadents always did that, with the result
that they demanded of life not repetition of old but opportunities for
new experiences. The whole attitude of the decadence is contained in
Ernest Dowson’s best-known poem: “Non sum qualis eram bonæ sub regno
Cynaræ,” with that insatiate demand of a soul surfeited with the food
that nourishes not, and finding what relief it can in a rapture of
desolation:
“I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished, and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion!”
In that poem we have a sort of parable of the decadent soul. Cynara is
a symbol of the unattained and perhaps unattainable joy and peace which
is the eternal dream of man. The decadents of the Nineties, to do them
justice, were not so degenerate as either to have lost hope in future
joy or to have had full faith in their attainment of it. Coming late in
a century of material pressure and scientific attainment they embodied
a tired mood, rejected hope, beyond the moment, and took a subtle joy
in playing with fire and calling it sin; in scourging themselves for
an unholy delight, in tasting the bitter-sweet of actions potent with
remorse. They loved the cleanliness in unclean things, the sweetness
in unsavoury alliances; they did not actually kiss Cynara, they kissed
her by the proxy of some “bought red mouth.” It was as though they had
grown tired of being good, in the old accepted way, they wanted to
experience the piquancy of being good after a debauch. They realised
that a merited kiss was not half so sweet as a kiss of forgiveness,
and this subtle voluptuousness eventually taught them that the road
called decadence also led to Rome. The old romanticism began by being
Catholic; Théophile Gautier strove to make it pagan, and succeeded for
a time, but with Huysmans romanticism in the form of decadence reverted
to Rome. In England the artists who represented the renaissance of the
Nineties were either Catholics like Francis Thompson and Henry Harland
or prospective converts to Rome, like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley,
Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson. If Catholicism did not claim them
some other form of mysticism did, and W. B. Yeats and George Russell
(A.E.) became Theosophists. The one who persistently hardened himself
against the mystical influences of his period, John Davidson, committed
suicide.
The general public first realised the existence of the decadence
with the arrest and trial of Oscar Wilde, and, collecting its wits
and its memories of _The Yellow Book_, the drawings of Aubrey
Beardsley, and the wilful and perverse epigrams of _A Woman of No
Importance_, it shook its head knowingly and intimated that this
sort of thing must be stopped. And the suddenness with which the
decadent movement in English literature and art ceased, from that time,
proves, if it proves nothing else, the tremendous power of outraged
public opinion in this country. But it also proves that English
thought and English morality, however superficial on the one hand
and however hypocritical on the other, would neither understand nor
tolerate the curious exotic growth which had flowered in its midst.
The passing of the decadence in England had been prepared by
the satires of Robert Hichens and G. S. Street, in _The Green
Carnation_ and _The Autobiography of a Boy_, just as its
earlier phase, the Æsthetic Movement, had been laughed out of
any popularity it might have won by W. H. Mallock in _The New
Republic_, W. S. Gilbert in _Patience_, and by George du
Maurier in a famous series of humorous drawings in _Punch_.
The weakness of _The Green Carnation_ is that satire sails so
perilously near reality as, at times, to lose itself in a wave of fact.
At times the book reads more like an indiscretion than a satire, but no
other writer has realised so well the fatuous side of the “exquisite”
and “brilliant” corner in decadence which Oscar Wilde made his own:
“‘Oh! he has not changed,’ said Mr Amarinth. ‘That is so
wonderful. He never develops at all. He alone understands the
beauty of rigidity, the exquisite severity of the statuesque
nature. Men always fall into the absurdity of endeavouring to
develop the mind, to push it violently forward in this direction
or in that. The mind should be receptive, a harp waiting to
catch the winds, a pool ready to be ruffled, not a bustling
busybody, for ever trotting about on the pavement looking for a
new bun shop. It should not deliberately run to seek sensations,
but it should never avoid one; it should never be afraid of one;
it should never put one aside from an absurd sense of right and
wrong. Every sensation is valuable. Sensations are the details
that build up the stories of our lives.’
“‘But if we do not choose our sensations carefully, the stories
may be sad, may even end tragically,’ said Lady Locke.
“‘Oh! I don’t think that matters at all, do you, Mrs Windsor?’
said Reggie. ‘If we choose carefully, we become deliberate at
once; and nothing is so fatal to personality as deliberation.
When I am good, it is my mood to be good; when I am what is
called wicked, it is my mood to be evil. I never know what I
shall be at a particular moment. Sometimes I like to sit at home
after dinner and read _The Dream of Gerontius_. I love
lentils and cold water. At other times I must drink absinthe,
and hang the night hours with scarlet embroideries. I must have
music, and the sins that march to music. There are moments
when I desire squalor, sinister, mean surroundings, dreariness
and misery. The great unwashed mood is upon me. Then I go out
from luxury. The mind has its West End and its Whitechapel.
The thoughts sit in the park sometimes, but sometimes they go
slumming. They enter narrow courts and rookeries. They rest in
unimaginable dens seeking contrast, and they like the ruffians
whom they meet there, and they hate the notion of policemen
keeping order. The mind governs the body. I never know how I
shall spend an evening till the evening has come. I wait for my
mood.’”
There is satire so guarded, and lacking just so very dainty a touch of
humour, that the uninitiated might miss the point. But that cannot be
said of the more humorous touch of the author of _The Autobiography
of a Boy_. Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reginald Hastings are cold,
satirical echoes of Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray, or such
prototypes as they may have had in actuality; but the delightful Tubby
of the autobiography is an unforgettably comic exaggeration which might
laugh the veriest and most convinced of decadents back to sanity. The
introduction to the reader is masterly in its sly humour.
“He was expelled from two private and one public school; but
his private tutor gave him an excellent character, proving that
the rough and ready methods of schoolmasters’ appreciation were
unsuited to the fineness of his nature. As a young boy he was
not remarkable for distinction of the ordinary sort--at his
prescribed studies and at games involving muscular strength and
activity. But in very early life the infinite indulgence of his
smile was famous, and as in after years was often misunderstood;
it was even thought by his schoolfellows that its effect at a
crisis in his career was largely responsible for the rigour
with which he was treated by the authorities; ‘they were not
men of the world,’ was the harshest comment he himself was ever
known to make on them. He spoke with invariable kindness also
of the dons at Oxford (who sent him down in his third year),
complaining only that they had not absorbed the true atmosphere
of the place, which he loved. He was thought eccentric there,
and was well known only in a small and very exclusive set. But
a certain amount of general popularity was secured to him by
the disfavour of the powers, his reputation for wickedness, and
the supposed magnitude of his debts. His theory of life also
compelled him to be sometimes drunk. In his first year he was a
severe ritualist, in his second an anarchist and an atheist, in
his third wearily indifferent to all things, in which attitude
he remained for the two years since he left the university until
now when he is gone from us. His humour of being carried in a
sedan chair, swathed in blankets and reading a Latin poet, from
his rooms to the Turkish bath, is still remembered in college.”
_The Autobiography of a Boy_ is not, like _The Green Carnation_, a
satire upon the leaders of the decadence; it is a satire upon the
innumerable hangers-on to the movement--who were perhaps the only
real degenerates. Perhaps the Tubby type will be always with us, and
so long as we have our dominions beyond the seas, to which irate
fathers may pack them, all may be well, especially if they depart with
such superbly futile resolves as this Tubby made on the eve of his
emigration to Canada. “My father,” he writes towards the close of his
autobiography, “spoke of an agent whom I was to see on my arrival:
I think he wants me to go into a bank out there. But I shall make
straight for the forests, or the mountains, or whatever they are, and
try to forget. I believe people shoot one another there; I have never
killed a man, and it may be an experience--the lust for slaughter.
They dress picturesquely; probably a red sash will be the keynote of my
scheme.”
The decadence proper, in this country, was only one of the expressions
of the liveliness of the times. It was the mood of a minority, and of
a minority, perhaps, that was concerned more about its own moods than
about the meaning of life and the use of life. At its worst it was
degenerate in the literal sense--that is to say, weak, invalid, hectic,
trotting with rather sad joy into the _cul de sac_ of conventional
wickedness and peacocking itself with fine phrases and professions of
whimsical daring. As such it was open to satire; as such it would have
suppressed itself sooner or later without the intervention of public
opinion. At its best, even when that best was most artificial and most
exotic, it realised much, if it accomplished little. True it was a
movement of elderly youths who wrote themselves out in a slender volume
or so of hot verse or ornate prose, and slipped away to die in taverns
or gutters--but some of those verses and that prose are woven into the
fabric of English literature. And if it was a movement always being
converted, or on the point of being converted, to the most permanent
form of Christianity, even though its reasons were æsthetic, or due
entirely to a yearning soul-weariness, it succeeded in checking a
brazen rationalism which was beginning to haunt art and life with the
cold shadow of logic. Ernest Dowson’s cry for “Madder music and for
stronger wine,” Arthur Symons’ assertion that “there is no necessary
difference in artistic value between a good poem about a flower in the
hedge and a good poem about the scent in a sachet,” and Oscar Wilde’s
re-assertion of Gautier’s _l’art pour l’art_ (with possibilities
undreamt of by Gautier) are all something more than mere protests
against a stupid philistinism; fundamentally they are expressions not
so much of art as of vision, and as such nothing less than a demand
for that uniting ecstasy which is the essence of human and every other
phase of life. All the cynicisms and petulances and flippancies of
the decadence, the febrile self-assertion, the voluptuousness, the
perversity were, consciously or unconsciously, efforts towards the
rehabilitation of spiritual power. “I see, indeed,” wrote W. B. Yeats,
“in the arts of every country those faint lights and faint colours and
faint outlines and faint energies which many call ‘the decadence,’
and which I, because I believe that the arts lie dreaming of things
to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body. An Irish poet, whose
rhythms are like the cry of a sea-bird in autumn twilight, has told
its meaning in the line, ‘the very sunlight’s weary, and it’s time to
quit the plough.’ Its importance is great because it comes to us at
the moment when we are beginning to be interested in many things which
positive science, the interpreter of exterior law, has always denied:
communion of mind with mind in thought and without words, foreknowledge
in dreams and in visions, and the coming among us of the dead, and of
much else. We are, it may be, at a crowning crisis of the world, at
the moment when man is about to ascend, with the wealth he has been so
long gathering upon his shoulders, the stairway he has been descending
from the first days.” So it may be that this movement, which accepted
as a badge the reproach of decadence, is the first hot flush of the
only ascendant movement of our times; and that the strange and bizarre
artists who lived tragic lives and made tragic end of their lives, are
the mad priests of that new romanticism whose aim was the transmutation
of vision into personal power.