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

but found the elder poet in the grip of a reignited passion for the Catholic faith and turned his back on him forever. He then undertook a much-interrupted journey to the East, ending up in charge of a trading-post in Abyssinia; but his life there ultimately proved too staid and he attempted, unsuccessfully, to take up a career as a gun-runner and slave-trafficker. His adventures were finally cut short early in 1891 when his leg was amputated because of a tumour; he did not survive the year. Ironically, he had become famous in his native land during the period of his absence thanks to Verlaine’s inclusion of him in his study of “accursed poets”, Poètes maudits (1884), which was followed by belated publication of his most notable works, Illuminations and Une saison en enfer (incorrectly advertised as “posthumous”). Rimbaud’s position as a central figure of the Decadent eighties was anachronistic, but the paradoxicality of it was entirely appropriate.
    It was left to Verlaine himself to become the parent of the actual Decadent Movement. Although his life probably presents a better exemplar of Decadence than anything he actually wrote, it is frequently argued that his sonnet “Langueur”, which appeared in the periodical Le Chat Noir in 1883, was the launching-pad for fashionable Decadence. Verlaine was at that time still little-known as a poet, although his Poèmes Saturniens had appeared as long ago as 1866 (like most of his subsequent books its publication had been subsidised and its initial circulation limited), but he had his notoriety to assist his reputation, and his personal history made him a ready-made hero for aspiring Decadents. He quickly established himself as an exemplar and an opinion-maker, and circles of Decadent poets rapidly formed around and alongside him. New periodicals were issued to carry forward the crusade, though Le Dècadent itself, issued by Anatole Baju, did not appear until April 1886, and died a year later.
    Verlaine apparently did not much like being labelled Decadent – which was understandable, in view of his reinvestment in religious faith – but he could do nothing to negate the image which he had acquired. In the years which preceded the death which he had hastened by his many misadventures he was frequently hospitalized, and spent the rest of his time shacked up with ageing prostitutes, living testimony to the neurotic quality of literary genius.
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    With such examples as these before them, would-be Decadents were initially prepared to take great pains to cultivate their neurasthenia, or at the very least to be conscientious hypochondriacs. They treasured their symptoms, not only as reflections of the unfortunate nature of the human condition but also as evidences of their intellectual superiority over the common herd. The medication of the idea of Decadence is very obvious in the prose works of the Movement – most notably, of course, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours (1884; tr. as Against Nature), which quickly became and remained the Bible of the Decadents in spite of its central character’s climactic repentance.
    This absorption of Decadence into pseudo-psychological theory became an important factor in the literary criticism which grew up alongside the movement. Paul Bourget, the most prestigious of the contemporary critics who dignified the idea of Decadence with serious consideration, was one of several writers who used quasi-psychiatric analysis to weld philosophical, historical and literary ideas of decadence together into a composite account of the predicament of modern man. His two series of Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883; 1885) analysed the supposed sickness of the age by reference to its great writers; it was, inevitably, from his contemplation of Baudelaire that he drew the “theory of decadence” which was to provide a manifesto for the later writers of the Movement.
    Inevitably, the kind of grand theorizing in which Bourget indulged