The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) Read Online Free PDF Page A

helped lay the groundwork for certain Decadent preoccupations.
    The influence of proto-p sychology was by no means confined to writers of a Decadent stripe; indeed, the French writer who was most elaborately influenced by theories of hereditary degeneracy was Emile Zola, whose extensive analysis of the family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts is entirely based on such ideas. Zola, like Saint-Beuve before him, was writing about Decadents and other victims ofbad heredity from a clinically objective standpoint; he saw himself as a quasi-scientific Naturalist, as did the Goncourts, whose techniques of characterization are similarly heavily “medicated”. It is not surprising that such authors as these were in no hurry to associate themselves more closely with their subject-matter; but nor is it surprising that others were bolder, entirely content to be mad, bad and dangerous to know, if such a condition were the red badge of courage which the authentic genius must wear.
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    To what extent it is mere coincidence is difficult to judge, but it is certainly true that the two poets who followed Baudelaire in providing exemplary impetus to the Decadent Movement – Rimbaud and Verlaine – followed careers which were even more disordered than his.
    Like Baudelaire, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud suffered a fatal break in his family relationships when he was six years old. His father deserted his mother in 1860, unable any longer to tolerate the severity of her rectitude. Rimbaud too was to rebel against this smothering domestic tyranny, embracing the revolutionary ideas of his teacher Georges Izambard and three times running away from school in 1870 and 1871. In between these excursions he spent his time in the school library reading the most scandalous texts available, including books on alchemy, witchcraft and ritual magic as well as supposedly-indecent poetry and novels. He became vehemently and aggressively atheistic, and wrote angry poems in profusion.
    In 1870 Rimbaud sent several poems to Banville, who was then selecting material for the Le Parnasse contemporain, claiming to be seventeen and expressing his fervent desire to be a Parnassian, but they were not published. Early in 1871 he laid out in a letter to his teacher Paul Demeny his new theory and philosophy of literature, attacking “egoists” and expressing his resolve to become a Promethean “seer”, which aim he expected to attain by a “long, prodigious, and rational disordering of the senses”. Foremost among the heroes whom he expected to follow and surpass was Baudelaire, who was in his estimation “the king of poets, a veritable God”.
    In 1871 Rimbaud sent some poems to Paul Verlaine, who was then an obscure and only slightly effete Parnassian. Verlaine, in one of the fits of reckless enthusiasm to which he was frequently subject, summoned the young acolyte to his side – much to the disgust and discomfort of the in-laws with whom he and his heavily-pregnant eighteen-year-old wife were living. Rimbaud and Verlaine became enthusiastically involved in a mutual disordering of their experiences, which was certainly prodigious, though perhaps not so conspicuously rational. They drank absin the and smoked hashish, and though both were later to deny in writing that there was anything sexual in their undoubtedly intimate liaison – well, they would have to say that, wouldn’t they? The two lived in England for a while, probably smoking opium in the dens of Limehouse, before their stormy relationship came to a head in Brussels in 1873, when a drunken Verlaine fired a pistol at his infuriating friend, wounding him in the hand. Despite Rimbaud’s attempts to exonerate him from all blame for this intemperate act, Verlaine was imprisoned for two years.
    Rimbaud made few attempts to publish his work, and in 1874 he decided to renounce literature completely. He responded one last time to an urgent summons from Verlaine following the latter’s release from prison,