An Excellent Study of the Decadent Imagination

252 a clue that this study often pursues to great advantage. How far can an author go in exploring a character's need for independence? The need to satisfy one's self - linked to the author's obligation to treat an individual 's unique needs and possibilities - seems paramount. Let others suffer for one person's destructive drives. Unable to conceive what might happen to Jude's children, Hardy is driven to such "crudities in the novel," says Dr. Sumner, as the "over-insistent symbolism of Little Father Time." The thesis of Dr. Sumner's work is clear. Hardy's characters, the products of their own personalities, dictate the structure of a novel and reflect the author's understanding of society. His principal characters endure psychological difficulties resulting from the "loss of instinctive harmony between soul and body." Whatever disproportion marks Hardy's selected exponents of this theme rises out of abnormal instincts. Carefully organized, neatly argued, and convincingly documented, Thomas Hardy : Psychological Novelist is consistently attentive to its thesis without straying from the route set forth in the introductory chapter. Hardy's own speculations and judgments about the novel form blend with the conclusions that his characters and situations express. Joseph J. Wolff Loyola University of Chicago 3, An Excellent Study of the Decadent Imagination Jean Pierrot. The Decadent Imagination, 1880-1900. Trans. Derek Coltman . (Chicago and Lond: University of Chicago P1 1981). $22.50. In I900, Andrew Lang facetiously described the "typical" Decadent: "By kicking holes in his boots, crushing in his hat and avoiding soap, any young man may achieve a comfortable degree of sordidness, and then, if his verses are immaterial, and his life suicidal, he may regard himself as a Decadent indeed." Lang's image may have been partly drawn from Arthur Symons' noted description of Ernest Dowson that had first appeared in Savoy (August I896) and reappeared in Athenaeum (March I900) as Dowson 's obituary: "Without a certain sordidness in his surroundings, he was never quite comfortable, never quite himself. . . . That curious love of the sordid, so common an affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so expressively genuine, grew upon him, and dragged him into yet more sorry corners of a life which was never exactly 'gay' to him." Whether one deplores the use of "Decadent" to refer to life as well as to art, Symons' famous attempt in 1893 to define the Decadent Movement in his essay that appeared in Harper's New Monthly Maga ζ ine (and reprinted , revised, in his Dramatis Personae, 1923Ί contains a good concise description : ". . .an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an oversubtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity." Symons stresses the Decadent's "unreason of the soul"; artifice; Decadence as "a new and beautiful disease"; and the "ideal of Decadence: to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul." In his excellent study of the Decadent imagination, Pierrot focuses pri- 253 marily upon the themes, images, and devices used by the Decadents to express their vision. Though Pierrot is concerned primarily with French literature (indeed, the title of his volume should have reflected this limitation), he devotes some attention to such figures as Wilde, De Quincy, and Poe as important influences and reflections. No mention, however , is made of Arthur Symons, an odd omission since he was a major publicist of French writers in England and knew virtually every important avant-garde writer in France. Early in his study, Pierrot clarifies the relationship between Decadence and Symbolism (terms which he does not capitalize but which I do to designate a specific "movement" in the late nineteenth century). He refutes the traditional notion, in French criticism, that Decadence preceded Symbolism by some1 seven years and that the self-preoccupied Decadent reaction to impersonal Parnassianism and naturalism was itself replaced by Symbolist transcendentalism with its system of occult correspondences, as suggested by Baudelaire's sonnet "Correspondances." But, as Pierrot states, there was much confusion and disagreement among the Symbolists themseives over Symbolist doctrine and technique; and, indeed, during the fin-de-siècle period there was additional confusion since many writers preferred to call themselves "Symbolists" because of the...