Decadence: A very convenient word for ignorant
pedagogues; a vague word behind which our
laziness and lack of curiosity concerning the
law seek shelter.
BAUDELAIRE: Letter to Jules Janin.
I
Abruptly, about 1885, the idea of decadence entered French literature.
After serving to glorify or to ridicule a whole group of poets, it
had perched, as it were, upon a single head. Stéphane Mallarmé was
the prince of this ironical, almost injurious realm, as it would have
been, had the word itself been rightly understood and employed. But,
by an eccentricity which is a Latin trait, the academic world, in
keeping with its normal but unwholesome horror when confronted with
new tendencies, called thus the fever for originality which tormented
a generation. M. Mallarmé, rendered responsible for the acts of
rebellion which he had encouraged, appeared to the innocent ass-drivers
who accompany but do not conduct the caravan a redoubtable Aladdin,
assassin of the sound principles of universal imitation.
These are, after all, thoroughly literary habits. They have been
flourishing now for nearly three centuries, and the most celebrated
revolts have hardly lopped their branches--have never uprooted them. No
sooner had the Romantic insolences subsided than the poet was forced
to crawl, half-smothered, under the ancient greenwood which furnishes
ferules.
These habits are also thoroughly Latin. The Romans, so long as they
were Romans only, knew nothing of individualism. Their civilization
offers the spectacle of a fine social animality. Emulation with them
aimed at likeness, just as, with us, it aims at unlikeness. Once
they possessed five or six poets--successful off-shoots of Hellenic
grafting--they refused to admit any others, and it is quite possible
that, their social, racial instinct dominating the instinct of freedom
and individuality, no poet of fresh inspiration was born to them for
four or five centuries. They had the emperor and they had Virgil, and
they obeyed both equally until the Christian revolt and the barbarian
invasion joined hands above the Capitol. Literary liberty, like all
other liberties, is born of the union of consciousness and strength.
The day when Saint Ambrose, writing his hymns, disregarded the Horatian
principles should be memorable, for it marks unmistakably the birth of
a new mentality.
Just as the political history of the Romans has furnished us with the
conception of historical decadence, so the history of their literature
has furnished us with the conception of literary decadence--the
two faces of a single idea; for it has been easy to indicate the
coincidence of the two movements, and to inculcate the belief that
there was a necessary connection between the two. Montesquieu owes his
fame to the fact that he was particularly the dupe of this illusion.
Savages find it very difficult to admit the possibility of natural
death. For them, every death is a murder. They have not the slightest
sense of law; they live in the domain of the accidental. It has been
agreed to call this state of mind inferior, and it is inferior,
though the notion of rigid law is just as false and as dangerous as
its negation. The only absolutely necessary laws are natural laws,
which can neither vary nor change. In the case of social and political
evolution, not only are there no necessary laws, but there are no very
general laws even. Either these so-called laws, confused with the
facts which they explain, amount to nothing but wise and honourable
assertions, or else they declare, though over-emphatically, the very
principle of change. Empires, then, are born, grow and die. Social
combinations are unstable. Human groups have, at different epochs,
different powers of cohesion. New affinities appear and are propagated.
Here there would be the material for a treatise on social mechanics,
if the writer did not insist too rigorously on squaring his philosophy
with the reality of unexpected catastrophes. For the unexpected must
be left a place which is sometimes the throne whence irony flashes and
laughs. The idea of decadence is, then, merely the idea of natural
death. Historians admit no other. To explain the taking of Byzantium
by the Turks, they make us listen to the murmur of theological
quarrels, and the crack of the Blue's whip in the circus. Longchamps
leads to Sedan, no doubt, but Epsom leads to Waterloo also. The long
decadence of crumbling empires is one of the most singular illusions
in history. If certain empires have died of sickness or of old age,
the greater number, on the contrary, have succumbed to violent death,
in the plenitude of their physical power, in the full force of their
intellectual vigour.
Then, too, intelligence is personal, and no reasonable relation can
be established between the power of a people and the genius of an
individual. Neither Greek literature, nor the literatures of the Middle
Ages, correspond to stable and powerful political institutions, Greek,
Italian or French; and it is precisely now, when their material power
has become negligible, that the Scandinavian kingdoms have decked
themselves with original talents. It would, perhaps, be nearer the
truth to say that political decadence is the condition most favourable
for intellectual flowering. It is when a Gustavus Adolphus and a
Charles XII are no longer possible, that an Ibsen and a Björnson
appear. In the same way, the fall of Napoleon seemed a signal for
nature to clothe herself again joyously in green, and to put forth
her most magnificent growths. Goethe was the contemporary of his
country's ruin. In order to exercise and satisfy our tendencies towards
historical scepticism, we should not, however, fail to oppose to these
examples the phenomena of those doubly glorious epochs of which the
pompous century of Louis XIV is the venerated model. After this, a
few minutes' reflection will force us to adopt a somewhat different
opinion from that which passes current persistently in text-books and
in conversation.
Bossuet was the first to whom it occurred to judge universal
history--or what he naïvely regarded as such--in accordance with
the principles of Biblical Judaism. He saw the fall of all those
empires upon which Jehovah had laid his heavy hand. This is the idea
of decadence explained by that of punishment. Montesquieu's more
complicated philosophy is perhaps even more puerile. It is impossible
to name without a sort of disgust a historian who dates the decadence
of Rome from the dawn of those admirable centuries of world-peace
which, perhaps, constitute the one happy epoch of civilized humanity.
The meaning of the words must be scrutinized closely. Then it will be
perceived that they have no sense, and that memorable writers used them
all their lives without understanding them. But however debatable, or
at least however vague, it may be, the general idea of decadence is
clear and distinct compared with the more restricted notion of literary
decadence.
From Racine to Vigny, France produced no great poet. This is a fact.
Such a period is certainly one of literary decadence; yet we should
not go further than the fact itself, or attribute to it an absurd
character of logic and necessity. Poetry was asleep in the eighteenth
century, through lack of poets; but this failure is not the result of a
too free flowering prior to that period. It is what it is, and nothing
more. If we call it decadence, we admit the existence of a sort of
mysterious organism--a being, a woman--Poetry--who is born, brings
forth, and dies, at almost regular intervals, after the manner of human
beings. This is an agreeable conception--subject for a dissertation or
lecture--but one which should be omitted from a discussion, which aims
only at the anatomy of an idea.
The principal trait of eighteenth century poetry is its spirit of
imitation. That century was Roman in its cultivation of this spirit.
It imitated furiously, gracefully, tenderly, ironically, stupidly.
It was "Chinese" as well as Roman. There were "models." The word
was imperative. The poet was not obliged to describe the impression
produced upon him by life; he had to watch Racine and scale the
mountain. What a singular psychology! The same philosopher who sapped
the idea of respect in politics, replastered and whitewashed it anew
in literature. There were critics. While Goethe was writing _Werther_,
they were comparing Gilbert and Boileau. It was a degradation. Must
we seek a cause for it? That would be vain. To attempt to explain why
no poet was born in France for a hundred years, with the exception of
Delille[1] and of Chénier, would lead necessarily to explaining the
birth of Ronsard, Théophile or Racine also. We know nothing about it,
and nothing can be known. Stripped of its mysticism, its necessity, all
its historical genealogy, the idea of literary decadence is reduced to
a purely negative notion--to the simple idea of absence. This sounds
so simple that one scarcely dares to express it; but, when superior
intelligences are lacking at a given moment, the multiplication of
mediocrities makes itself acutely and actively felt; and, as the
mediocre man is an imitator, the epochs that have justly been called
decadent are nothing but epochs of imitation. In the last analysis, the
idea of decadence is identical with the idea of imitation.