Identifying the Decadent Fiction of the Eighteen-Nineties

IDENTIFYING THE DECADENT FICTION OF THE EIGHTEEN-NINETI ES By Wendell V. Harris (University of Colorado) In a passage from an essay which has been more often cited than any portion of his fiction, Hubert Crackanthorpe pointed to the wildly irresponsible use of the word decadence at the end of the nineteenth century in England. As alarmed observers seemed to descry deteriorating literary and moral standards on all sides, a "weird word" was called upon "to explain the whole business." Decadence, decadence: you are all decadent nowadays. Ibsen, Degas, and the New English Art Club; Zola, Oscar Wilde and the Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Mr. Richard Le Gal Henne is hoist with his own petard; even the British playwright has not escaped the taint. Ah, what a hideous spectacle. All whirling towards one common end.' As Crackanthorpe insists, and as the book reviews and critical essays of the time give evidence, decadence did service throughout the eighteen-nineties as a word by which one could designate whatever currents in the literature of the time seemed new, strange, disquieting, or immoral. It was largely Arthur Symons who was responsible for the term's lavish currency, but it is important to realize that Symons was merely profiting from the broadness of meaning that decadence had already acquired in France. By 1893 when Symons, looking to France as the primary source of the new impulses which he felt acting on all genres of the literature of the time, sought a comprehensive term under which to subsume these forces, Verlaine, Gautier, Bourget, Barres, Huysmans and the Goncourts had all found, or were reputed to have found, inspiration in the decadent vision. Symons formulated his well-known definition of the term as "an intuitive selfconsciousness , a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity."2 Vague as this definition is, its meaning became even more vague as Symons variously applied it to poetry, fiction and drama. In essence, he used the opprobrious connotations of the term as a means of flaunting traditional sensibilities and attracting attention , while at the same time utilizing the word as a blanket term of approbation for every contemporary writer and every contemporary tendency of which he approved. The undiscriminating broadness with which he uses decadence is indicated by his subsumption under it of both impressionism and symbolism, and his inclusion as examples of the movement the work of Whistler, the brothers Goncourt, Verlaine, Mallarmé", Maeterlinck, Husymans, D'Annunzio, Ibsen, Pater, and Henley. And, of course, soon after Symons began applying the word as an honorific reference to all that he approved, it was being applied in a violently pejorative sense to roughly the same range of literary phenomena. Elizabeth Chapman's comment in MARRIAGE QUESTIONS IN MODERN FICTION (1897) is a good example of the manner in which all aspects of the contemporary literature which were found repugnant could be- resolved into symptoms of a single morbid state of mind: For it is only by the speedy adoption of a resolute, militant, and uncompromising attitude that there can be hope for a generation which has, in so many directions, strayed so far from the paths of sanity; a generation which has shown itself so easily duped by the infirmity of will, the depravity of taste, the unhealthiness of imagination, and the degeneracy of brain implied in the term "decadence "; a generation which tolerates the Rougon-Macquart novels; which exonerates Verlaine; which accepts Walt Whitman as poet, Maeterlinck as dramatist, and Nietzsche as philosopher.3 Numerous attempts were made to restrict the meaning of the term even in the I890's. As is well-known, by 1899 Symons himself had apparently found that he could no longer hold fast to this prodigal employment of the concept; at that time he retrenched his argument and confined decadence to style alone.^ Richard Le Gallienne's several discussions of decadence define it as "any point of view, seriously taken, which ignores the complete view"; for him it derives from concentration on isolated fragments of experience.5 John Addington Symonds, even before Symons' first pronouncements , had explained literary decadence as a necessary stage in a cultural evolutionary cycle, the...