The æsthetic attitude towards art which _A Rebours_ illuminates is
that commonly called decadent. Decadence in art, though a fairly simple
phenomenon, and world-wide as art itself, is still so ill understood
that it may be worth while to discuss briefly its precise nature, more
especially as manifested in literature.
Technically, a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic
style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further
specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian phraseology, having
become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are
subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole
is subordinated to the parts. Among our own early prose-writers Sir
Thomas Browne represents the type of decadence in style. Swift’s prose
is classic, Pater’s decadent. Hume and Gibbon are classic, Emerson and
Carlyle decadent. In architecture, which is the key to all the arts,
we see the distinction between the classic and the decadent visibly
demonstrated; Roman architecture is classic, to become in its Byzantine
developments completely decadent, and St. Mark’s is the perfected type
of decadence in art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic
in the highest degree because it shows an absolute subordination of
detail to the bold harmonies of structure, while later Gothic, grown
weary of the commonplaces of structure and predominantly interested
in beauty of detail, is again decadent. In each case the earlier and
classic manner--for the classic manner, being more closely related
to the ends of utility, must always be earlier--subordinates the
parts to the whole, and strives after those virtues which the whole
may best express; the later manner depreciates the importance of the
whole for the benefit of its parts, and strives after the virtues of
individualism. All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a
rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes.
Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, decay. If we walk down
a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act than when
we walked up it. But if it is a figurative hill then we view Hell at
the bottom. The word “corruption”--used in a precise and technical
sense to indicate the breaking up of the whole for the benefit of its
parts--serves also to indicate a period or manner of decadence in art.
This makes confusion worse, for here the moralist feels that surely
he is on safe ground. But as Nietzsche, with his usual acuteness
in cutting at the root of vulgar prejudice, has well remarked (in
_Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_), even as regards what is called
the period of “corruption” in the evolution of societies, we are apt
to overlook the fact that the energy which in more primitive times
marked the operations of the community as a whole has now simply been
transferred to the individuals themselves, and this aggrandisement
of the individual really produces an even greater amount of energy.
The individual has gained more than the community has lost. An age
of social decadence is not only the age of sinners and degenerates,
but of saints and martyrs, and decadent Rome produced an Antoninus
as well as a Heliogabalus. No doubt social “corruption” and literary
“corruption” tend to go together; an age of individualism is usually
an age of artistic decadence, and we may note that the chief literary
artists of America--Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman--are for the most part in
the technical sense decadents.
Rome supplies the first clear types of classic and decadent literature,
and the small group of recent French writers to whom the term has been
more specifically applied were for the most part peculiarly attracted
by later Latin literature. So far as I can make out, it is to the
profound and penetrating genius of Baudelaire that we owe the first
clear apprehension of the legitimate part which decadence plays in
literature. We may trace it, indeed, in his own style, clear, pure,
and correct as that style always remains, as well as in his literary
preferences. He was a good Latinist, and his favourite Latin authors
were Apuleius, Juvenal, Petronius, Saint Augustine, Tertullian, and
other writers in prose and verse of the early Christian Church. He
himself wrote a love-poem in rhymed Latin verse, adding to it a note
concerning the late Latin decadence regarded as “the supreme sigh of
a vigorous person already transformed and prepared for the spiritual
life,” and specially apt to express passion as the modern world feels
it, one pole of the magnet at the opposite end of which are Catullus
and his band. “In this marvellous tongue,” he added, “solecism and
barbarism seem to me to render the forced negligences of a passion
which forgets itself and mocks at rules. Words taken in a new meaning
reveal the charming awkwardness of the northern barbarian kneeling
before the Roman beauty.” But the best early statement of the meaning
of decadence in style--though doubtless inspired by Baudelaire--was
furnished by Gautier in 1868 in the course of the essay on Baudelaire
which is probably the most interesting piece of criticism he ever
achieved. The passage is long, but so precise and accurate that it must
here in part be quoted: “The poet of the _Fleurs du Mal_ loved
what is improperly called the style of decadence, and which is nothing
else but art arrived at that point of extreme maturity yielded by the
slanting suns of aged civilisations: an ingenious complicated style,
full of shades and of research, constantly pushing back the boundaries
of speech, borrowing from all the technical vocabularies, taking colour
from all palettes and notes from all key-boards, struggling to render
what is most inexpressible in thought, what is vague and most elusive
in the outlines of form, listening to translate the subtle confidences
of neurosis, the dying confessions of passion grown depraved, and the
strange hallucinations of the obsession which is turning to madness.
The style of decadence is the ultimate utterance of the Word, summoned
to final expression and driven to its last hiding-place. One may recall
in this connection the language of the later Roman Empire, already
marbled with the greenness of decomposition, and, so to speak, gamy,
and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine school, the last forms
of Greek art falling into deliquescence. Such indeed is the necessary
and inevitable idiom of peoples and civilisations in which factitious
life has replaced natural life, and developed unknown wants in men.
It is, besides, no easy thing, this style disdained of pedants, for
it expresses new ideas in new forms, and in words which have not yet
been heard. Unlike the classic style it admits shadow.... One may well
imagine that the fourteen hundred words of the Racinian vocabulary
scarcely suffice the author who has undertaken the laborious task of
rendering modern ideas and things in their infinite complexity and
multiple colouration.”
Some fifteen years later, Bourget, again in an essay on Baudelaire
(_Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine_), continued the exposition
of the theory of decadence, elaborating the analogy to the social
organism which enters the state of decadence as soon as the individual
life of the parts is no longer subordinated to the whole. “A similar
law governs the development and decadence of that other organism which
we call language. A style of decadence is one in which the unity of
the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page,
in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of
the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the
word.” It was at this time (about 1884) that the term “decadent” seems
first to have been applied by Barrès and others to the group of which
Verlaine, Huysmans, Mallarmé were the most distinguished members,
and in so far as it signified an ardent and elaborate search for
perfection of detail beyond that attained by Parnassian classicality
it was tolerated or accepted. Verlaine, indeed, was for the most part
indifferent to labels, neither accepting nor rejecting them, and
his work was not bound up with any theory. But Huysmans, with the
intellectual passion of the pioneer in art, deliberate and relentless,
has carried both the theory and the practice of decadence in style to
the farthest point. In practice he goes beyond Baudelaire, who, however
enamoured he may have been of what he called the phosphorescence of
putrescence, always retained in his own style much of what is best in
the classic manner. Huysmans’ vocabulary is vast, his images, whether
remote or familiar, always daring,--“dragged,” in the words of one
critic, “by the hair or by the feet, down the worm-eaten staircase of
terrified Syntax,”--but a heart-felt pulse of emotion is restrained
beneath the sombre and extravagant magnificence of this style, and
imparts at the best that modulated surge of life which only the great
masters can control.
Des Esseintes’s predilections in literature are elaborated through
several chapters, and without question he faithfully reflects his
creator’s impressions. He was indifferent or contemptuous towards
the writers of the Latin Augustan age; Virgil seemed to him thin and
mechanical, Horace a detestable clown; the fat redundancy of Cicero,
we are told, and the dry constipation of Cæsar alike disgusted him;
Sallust, Livy, Juvenal, even Tacitus and Plautus, though for these
he had words of praise, seemed to him for the most part merely
the delights of pseudo-literary readers. Latin only began to be
interesting to Des Esseintes in Lucan, for here at least, in spite
of the underlying hollowness, it became expressive and studded with
brilliant jewels. The author whom above all he delighted in was
Petronius--who reminded Des Esseintes of the modern French novelists he
most admired--and several eloquent pages are devoted to that profound
observer, delicate analyst, and marvellous painter who modelled his own
vivid and precise style out of all the idioms and slang of his day.
After Petronius there was a gap in his collection of Latin authors
until the second century of our own era is reached with Apuleius and
the sterner Christian contemporaries of that jovial pagan, Tertullian
and the rest, in whose hands the tongue that in Petronius had reached
supreme maturity now began to dissolve. For Tertullian he had little
admiration, and none for Augustine, though sympathising with his
_City of God_ and his general disgust for the world. But the
special odour which the Christians had by the fourth century imparted
to decomposing pagan Latin was delightful to him in such authors as
Commodian of Gaza, whose tawny, sombre, and tortuous style he even
preferred to Claudian’s sonorous blasts, in which the trumpet of
paganism was last heard in the world. He was also able to maintain
interest in Prudentius, Sedulius, and a host of unknown Christians
who combined Catholic fervour with a Latinity which had become, as it
were, completely putrid, leaving but a few shreds of torn flesh for
the Christians to “marinate in the brine of their new tongue.” His
shelves continued to show Latin books of the sixth, seventh, and eighth
centuries, among which he found special pleasure in the Anglo-Saxon
writers, and only finally ceased at the beginning of the tenth century,
when “the curiosity, the complicated _naïveté_” of the earlier
tongue were finally lost in scholastic philosophy and mere cartalaries
and chronicles.[8] Then, with a formidable leap of ten centuries, his
Latin books gave place to nineteenth century French books.
Des Esseintes is no admirer of Rabelais or Molière, of Voltaire
or Rousseau. Among the older French writers he read only Villon,
D’Aubigné, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Nicole, and especially Pascal. Putting
these aside, his French library began with Baudelaire, whose works he
had printed in an edition of one copy, in episcopal letters, in large
missal _format_, bound in flesh-coloured pig-skin; he found an
unspeakable delight in reading this poet who, “in an age when verse
only served to express the external aspects of things, had succeeded
in expressing the inexpressible, by virtue of a muscular and sinewy
speech which more than any other possessed the marvellous power of
fixing with strange sanity of expression the most morbid, fleeting,
tremulous states of weary brains and sorrowful souls.” After Baudelaire
the few French books on Des Esseintes’s shelves fall into two groups,
one religious, one secular. Most of the French clerical writers he
disregarded, for they yield a pale flux of words which seemed to him
to come from a school-girl in a convent. Lacordaire he regarded as
an exception, for his language had been fused and moulded by ardent
eloquence, but for the most part the Catholic writers he preferred were
outside the Church. For Hello’s _Homme_, especially, he cherished
profound admiration, and an inevitable sympathy for its author, who
seemed to him “a cunning engineer of the soul, a skilful watchmaker
of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of a passion and to
explain the play of the wheelwork,” and yet united to this power of
analysis all the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet, and the tortured
ingenuity of a master of style--an ill-balanced, incoherent, yet subtle
personality. But above all he delighted in Barbey d’Aurevilly, shut
out from the Church as an unclean and pestiferous heretic, yet glorying
to sing her praises, insinuating into that praise a note of almost
sadistic sacrilege, a writer at once devout and impious, altogether
after Des Esseintes’s own heart, so that a special copy of the
_Diaboliques_, in episcopal violet and cardinal purple, printed
on sanctified vellum with initials adorned by satanic tails, formed
one of his most cherished possessions. In D’Aurevilly’s style alone he
truly recognised the same gaminess, the speckled morbidity, the flavour
as of a sleepy pear which he loved in decadent Latin and the monastic
writers of old time. Of contemporary secular books he possessed not
many; by force of passing them through the screw-press of his brain few
were finally found solid enough to emerge intact and bear rereading,
and in this process he had accelerated “the incurable conflict which
existed between his ideas and those of the world into which by chance
he had been born.” Certain selected works of the three great French
novelists of his time--Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola--still remained,
for in all three he found in various forms that “nostalgie des au-delà”
by which he was himself haunted; and with Baudelaire, these three were,
in modern profane literature, the authors by whom he had chiefly been
moulded. The scanty collection also included Verlaine, Mallarmé, Poe,
and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whose firm fantastic style and poignantly
ironic attitude towards the utilitarian modern world he found entirely
to his taste. Finally, there only remained the little anthology of
prose-poems. Des Esseintes thought it improbable that he would ever
make any additions to his library; it seemed impossible to him that
a decadent language--“struggling on its death-bed to repair all the
omissions of joy and bequeath the subtlest memories of pain”--would
ever go beyond Mallarmé. This brief summary of the three chapters,
all full of keen if wayward critical insight, which describe Des
Esseintes’s library, may serve at once both to indicate the chief
moulding influences on Huysmans’ own style and to illustrate the
precise nature of decadence in art and the fundamental part it plays.
We have to recognise that decadence is an æsthetic and not a moral
conception. The power of words is great, but they need not befool
us. The classic herring should suggest no moral superiority over the
decadent bloater. We are not called upon to air our moral indignation
over the bass end of the musical clef. All confusion of intellectual
substances is foolish, and one may well sympathise with that fervid
unknown metaphysician to whom we owe the Athanasian creed when he
went so far as to assert that it is damnable. It is not least so in
the weak-headed decadent who falls into the moralist’s snare and
complacently admits his own exceeding wickedness. We may well reserve
our finest admiration for the classic in art, for therein are included
the largest and most imposing works of human skill; but our admiration
is of little worth if it is founded on incapacity to appreciate the
decadent. Each has its virtues, each is equally right and necessary.
One ignorant of plants might well say, on gazing at a seed-capsule with
its seeds disposed in harmonious rows, that there was the eternally
natural and wholesome order of things, and on seeing the same capsule
wither and cast abroad its seeds to germinate at random in the earth,
that here was an unwholesome and deplorable period of decay. But
he would know little of the transmutations of life. And we have to
recognise that those persons who bring the same crude notions into the
field of art know as little of the life of the spirit.