Decadence & Catholicism

BOOK REVIEWS ultimately makes a point of distinguishing his aesthetic-ethical love of form from the trivial formalisms he associated with "Philistines." Yet none of these aesthetic dimensions of the letter are discussed by Brown, only a late twentieth-century preoccupation with binarisms, dualisms, and unnuanced distinctions between ethics and aesthetics. If we are to take Brown's as an example of the New Formalism, or New Aesthetics, as WiUard Spiegelman's blurb on the dust jacket intimates, that will correct too much localism and politics in literary matters, then we should like to see a little more rigor in its philosophy. Regenia Gagnier ________________ University of Exeter Decadence & Catholicism Ellis Hanson. Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. χ + 403 pp. Cloth $45.00 Paper $19.95 DURING THE 1880s and thel890s, the Roman Catholic Church in England emerged from the isolated, defensive, and ultra-conservative position it had held since the Reformation. A good number of poets and artists turned toward Rome. Their attraction to the Old Faith was a consequence of multiple factors. Concurrent with their desire to join a religious institution that had a medieval ambience and stretched back to the days of ancient Rome was the aesthetic appeal of ritual—especially Solemn Benediction and the traditional High Mass. Prominent among the more famous converts were Wilde and Beardsley, John Gray, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson, Frederick Rolfe and Henry Harland. These Decadent converts, recalling Carlyle, were further taken with the image of the artist as priest and prophet. Tennyson, too, provided an impetus, for they knew that he had claimed that he often felt like "a priest who can never leave the sanctuary and whose every word must be consecrated to the service of Him who had touched his lips with fire----" Taking a lead from Carlyle and Tennyson, Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature emphasized the priest-poet's sacerdotal dedication and self-imposed isolation: "The artist... has no more part in society than a monk in domestic life; he cannot be judged by its rules___It is the poet against society, society against the poet." Karl Beckson in "The Religion of Art" (in The 1890s: An Encyclopedia of British Literature, Art and Culture, 1993) summed up the matter of the Decadents and religion well: "The myth of the priestly artist presiding over the Mystery of Transubstantiation —the creation of eternal beauty from the transitory im475 ELT 41 : 4 1998 pressions of this world—was associated... with the idea of an alienated elite whose arcane, private art is beyond society's understanding." To one degree or another, biographers of the Decadents who developed an affinity with Rome have treated their conversions. Wilde, for one, brought his singular synthesis of Catholicism, aestheticism, and eroticism to much of what he wrote and died a death-bed Catholic in Paris in 1900. Beardsley, who confided to Symons that he had had a mystical experience after gazing upon a crucifix, embraced the Faith in 1897 shortly before he died of consumption. Gray, who underwent a conversion in 1890, after which, as he put it, "a course of sin compared with which my previous life was innocence" followed, and then converted again and went on to seek ordination at Scots College in Rome in 1898. Johnson's conversion in 1891 seemed to hold rather well, unlike that of Dowson's in the same year that was deflected by alcoholism. And so it went with other Decadents whose unique spiritual journeys are prerequisite to a fuller understanding of their work. Ellis Hanson in his introduction to Decadence and Catholicism confirms that Roman Catholicism was central to both the stylistic peculiarities and the thematic preoccupations of the figures he has chosen to write about. His provocative study is meant to examine "the cultural and historical significance of the connections the decedents drew between aestheticism, sexuality, and Catholicism" (26). Most of what he writes is stimulating, but all too often his approach to the Decadents and Catholicism is troubling. He begins by rehearsing the many attempts that have been made to explain Decadence, to express it in general terms, to detect in it some bizarre formula, to avoid vagueness and historical limitations...