The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

Chapter 2. The Politics of Appreciation: Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire

c h a p t e r 2 The Politics of Appreciation Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire I know of no sentiment more perplexing than admiration. —Charles Baudelaire, “Théophile Gautier” The Precursor In the introduction to his section on the decadents and aesthetes in Degeneration , Max Nordau offers a suggestive analogy for Baudelaire’s influence over later writers in the decadent movement. “As on the death of Alexander the Great,” he writes, “his generals fell on the conqueror’s empire, and each one seized a portion of land, so did the imitators that Baudelaire numbered among his contemporaries and the generation following—many even without waiting for his madness and death—take possession of some one of his peculiarities for literary exploitation.” With his typical blend of blindness and surprising insight, Nordau here identifies the remarkable extent to which the decadent movement defined itself through its reception of Baudelaire. For Nordau, Baudelaire’s less talented imitators merely pillage his works for their themes, rather than following their own talents (or lack thereof): Catulle Mendès takes his lasciviousness; the Symbolists develop his mystical theories; Paul Verlaine borrows his mixture of sensuality and pietism; Algernon Charles Swinburne appropriates his Sadism. Denigrating the originality of decadent writers is a veritable cottage industry in critical writings on the period. Decadence, as Arthur Symons—surely no ally of Nordau’s—writes in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), is the work of “lesser men,” 46 chapter 2 whose celebration of vice is a sheer pose. But imitation is also the sincerest form of flattery, and even the most servile expressions of admiration for Baudelaire, I argue in this chapter, are really forms of creative reception, the means by which later writers import the French poet’s vision of aesthetic community and the politics of taste into new national and sociohistorical contexts. Baudelaire’s rhetorical construction of an aesthetic elite united by taste and a devotion to beauty gives later writers a powerful heuristic for thinking about the political functions of artistic production and consumption. As we saw in the last chapter, Baudelaire argues that taste is a fundamentally political concept, evocative of the classical republican tradition of civic humanism. Beauty contributes to the life of the polis and provides new models of communal affiliation and political participation. Unlike the private interests that drive obviously public formations like laws and constitutions, beauty exists only for itself and thus serves the public good. Art is the true res publica of modernity. The decadent movement makes this claim about taste, beauty, and aesthetic sociability central to its reception of Baudelaire—no less so than it does his strikingly original poetic vision. Baudelaire, to adapt Nordau’s image, left behind a vast, ungovernable poetic territory, informed by a utopian vision of aesthetic community and sociality. Later writers developed this vision into an expansive critique of contemporary politics in large part by imitating and expressing admiration for Baudelaire himself. No figure was more widely imitated by later decadent writers than Baudelaire. They refer to him as master, father, progenitor, precursor, “Our Baptist”; he is apostrophized, plagiarized, made the subject of fulsome tributes and numberless purple patches; writers of all stripes claim to have found themselves through reading him. As Patricia Clements has observed, Baudelaire ’s influence readily crosses national boundaries, offering writers a potent alternative to native literary traditions. Beyond providing the decadent movement with many of its major themes and critical principles, Baudelaire also influences through his powerfully original relationship to the writers and artists who influenced him. He provides a model for being influenced, functioning as what Catherine Coquio calls an “accelerant,” whose expressions of appreciation allow other writers to find themselves in his works and in the works that influenced him, much as he found himself in the work of Poe. Declaring their discipleship to Baudelaire places his followers within a circle of admiration, a community of writers bound together by a chain of The Politics of Appreciation 47 reciprocal influences. Writers who admire Baudelaire in turn admire Poe, Wagner, Gautier, and others, borrowing from them as well as from Baudelaire himself. The chain extends beyond those writers Baudelaire actually admired to those Baudelaire’s admirers admire, on the more or less explicit presumption that Baudelaire would have appreciated them were he alive to read their works. The two most important...