Landscapes of Decadence

Alex Murray. Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. vi + 230 pp. $99.00

ALEX MURRAY opens his study of what he calls the "landscapes" of Decadence with a less than obvious choice, that of the county of Cornwall. The occasion which he chooses is the visit made to Carbis Bay in 1893 by Arthur Symons, Henry Havelock Ellis, and his wife Edith—not a location, Murray concedes, one immediately associates with a decadent sensibility, although the development by the Great Western Railway of a line to and through the Cornish peninsula two decades earlier was to lead to the popularity of Cornwall as a tourist destination and ultimately to the development of St. Ives, with the famous quality of its light, to become an artists' colony, one well-known to Virginia Woolf early in the next century and which she used in To the Lighthouse. Murray goes on to discuss in more general terms the significance of landscape for the literary and artistic imagination over the course of the nineteenth century, most importantly for Wordsworth and then for Ruskin. In Murray's view, the work of the first can be seen in terms of "an ideal index for the debates around the meaning and practice of landscape art and writing in the period." This might be an over-emphatic way of putting matters, but it is true that there is a continuum between those lines in "Tintern Abbey" where Wordsworth distinguishes between what he calls "the mighty world / Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, / And what perceive" and the paradoxical arguments which Wilde puts into the mouth of his character Vivian in "The Decay of Lying" in Intentions. In a famous passage Wilde suggests that "at present people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. But … no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them."

Of course the connection between the physical world—that is, place—and imagined worlds and the significance of memory is one central in the work of many late-nineteenth-century writers—for example, in A. E. Housman's "blue remembered hills" in A Shropshire Lad, or Thomas Hardy's various representations of his imaginary Wessex. Indeed both locations did exist principally in the memory or in the imagination of their authors; equally significant is the fact that Housman and Hardy are only briefly mentioned by Murray.

Murray's book has many merits. It is engagingly written, has a wide and eclectic range of reference, and is organized through a variety of tropes and metaphors that are informative and often witty. Principal examples of these are the conceit that allows the construction of the book's argument to be described in terms of a physical journey, and consequently the range of Murray's argument to be seen in terms of map-making—the narrative development of his book is described by him as a species of cartography. So after his brief account of Cornwall, Murray's itinerary takes him south to Naples. He then charts what he calls a northwestern journey, to Paris and London, and then New York, although on the way he does also discuss the cultural importance of other locations, such as Wales, Oxford and the countryside around Cumnor, then a village, now virtually a suburb of the city. Murray is also to be praised for his ability to describe and document the works of canonical and non-canonical writers alike without any sense of the possible incongruity of his choices. But this very virtue exacts a price. For example, his discussion of Conal Holmes O'Connell O'Riordan(F. Norreys Connell) does not persuade me to disinter that particular writer's literary remains. Indeed this objection leads to a more important reservation. On occasions I found it difficult to escape the suspicion that Murray's examples are chosen to add ballast to his thesis: the thesis, that is, has not been prompted by evidence; rather it has dictated in advance the nature of the evidence which Murray adduces—a point to which I shall return.

As I was reading Murray's book, it was reservations such as these that led me to think that he could have been more precise both in his argument and in some of the terms he uses. "Landscape" is a word he uses to cover both what modern geographers would call the "built" and the "natural" environment. So what exactly is the relationship between townscape and landscape—in Murray's terms, the very built environment of Naples and the more natural (although, of course, still to some extent man-made) environment of Wordsworth's Lake District? This is an important distinction, because as Murray cautions early in his work, landscape is a morally neutral term. To predicate of it moral qualities, such as "decadence," is virtually meaningless (although exactly this or similar attributions of value are to be found throughout the course of the nineteenth century).

Murray begins his account of Naples with a discussion of the importance of that city and the values which were attributed to it by the (northern European) Decadent imagination:

Naples was very different from the other great Italian cities—Venice, Rome, Florence—in that it left a great many visitors repulsed by what they perceived as a literal and symbolic air of disease and pestilence. Late-Victorian Naples appeared to be quintessentially "decadent" in the pejorative sense of the term: one of the great Italian cities that had suffered a calamitous decline; physically decayed and dishevelled; stricken by disease and blighted by poverty; notorious for sexual excess.… Arthur Symons's response to Naples was one of unambiguous disgust … "no city filled me with as much terror as Naples."

(Murray is quoting Symons's Cities and Sea Coasts.)

Murray's account of Naples involves first the use made of it by Vernon Lee, by the little-read John Meade Falkner, and finally by John Addington Symonds, by then an acknowledged authority on the Italian Renaissance as well as being a critic habitually bracketed with his more discreet contemporary, Walter Pater. Murray rounds off this chapter (albeit a rather brief one, amounting to a mere 27 pages) with a kind of coda of only a couple of paragraphs on Henry James's Italian Hours. Using suggestions made by James, Murray summarizes these accounts of Italy as the "spectral incursions" of a northern European sensibility into "southern climes," actions which "were designed to delineate the moral from the immoral, the degenerate from the healthy."

There are some further observations to be made here. The first concerns the adequacy of Murray's account of Naples. Unlike the impressive range of examples exhibited in other chapters of his book, at this juncture Murray's survey disappoints. Goethe, whose Italian Journey was an important point of reference for many visitors to Italy in the nineteenth century, is given just three brief mentions. However, my second observation is perhaps more relevant to Murray's thesis. We might want to ask "Why Naples?" In his rather truncated or compressed history of Italy (in which the familiar "Victorian reinvention of the Italian Renaissance" and "the rise of the Thomas Cook Company and the Murray and Baedeker guidebooks" occupy centre stage), Murray suggests that the city had a reputation in Britain for all manner of moral or physical corruption. This is certainly true, but documenting it needs a little more example or substance than the rather summary history which Murray gives us. Why not adduce and discuss more specific evidence, such as details of Lord Rosebery being alerted to the presence of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas in Posilippo (near Naples) in 1897. As early as 1985 Joseph O. Baylen and Robert L. McBath printed a letter from Eustace Neville-Rolfe, the British consul for southern Italy, to Rosebery, then the British prime minister, describing Wilde's and Douglas's activities in and around Naples. Neville-Rolfe was known to be gay; in Britain Rosebery's homosexuality was widely suspected, most importantly by Douglas's overbearing and oafish father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Queensberry was convinced that Rosebery was implicated in the death (which was most likely suicide in order to avoid scandal) of his son the Viscount Drumlanrig (Douglas's brother, Francis). While a modern sensibility might be dismissive of the "decadence" of Naples, to many in positions of power in contemporary Britain, however, it was real enough. The problem is that these details would not have undermined Murray's central argument; indeed they would have helpfully reinforced his thesis that place is as much a cultural invention as it is a geographical location.

The most familiar nineteenth-century surveys of Italy tend to move from its second-century Antonine splendour (described most famously by Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) to what was perceived to be its contemporary squalor and poverty. We can see this taking place as early as 1885 in Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885). There the second-century "Rome" of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus is not just Rome; as Pater himself observed, it is also unmistakably an allusive account of nineteenth-century London. To be fair, Murray makes precisely this point himself when he observes in his first chapter: "Place itself becomes secondary to the means and modes of representing it, drawing the reader or viewer into a relationship with the canvas or the page rather than using these as some means of accessing a location." We can add to this the fact that ideas or implications of decadence in places in Italy appear constantly in nineteenth-century accounts of that country and its culture. If this is true, then are we not entitled to ask once again the question I posed earlier: "Why or more exactly, "Why just Naples?" Certainly other Italian cities figured as much or more prominently in the cultural imagination of northern Europeans. So, for example, in Murray's cultural geography, what has happened to Venice as a location irresistibly attractive to the decadent imagination? Wilde certainly thought it central when he has one of his characters in his 1887 story "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" go to Venice after thinking he has committed a murder. So did James in The Aspern Papers, a novella whose subject is the relationship between an author and surviving details of his biography. In James's Venice, place, secrecy, and the role of the creative imagination are intimately connected. More significantly, a little later in 1912, Thomas Mann also thought in writing Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) that Venice was a symbolically important city and so its decadence is troped in terms of a plague of cholera. Indeed versions of the trope are everywhere—persisting into E. M. Forster's first forays into fiction in the first years of the twentieth century.

All of this takes us back to Murray's caveat that "place itself becomes secondary to the means and modes of representing it." Once again it is Wilde who is helpful in allowing us to see both the implications and the limitations of this observation. In his and Karl Beckson's 2000 edition of Oscar Wilde's poetry, Bobby Fong notes a number of textual variants in the early poems which tend to undermine Murray's thesis about Wilde. Two examples are revealing. In its earliest printing, the early work "Sonnet on Approaching Italy" (first appearing in the 1877 Irish Monthly with the title "Salve Saturnia Tellus"), carries the postscript "Genoa." Wilde's sense of the specificity of that Italian city must have been less than fully considered, for in the 1880 Biography and Review reprinting of the same poem, "Genoa" became "Turin." Interestingly, in an appendix Fong and Beckson reproduce elements of a scrapbook assembled by Wilde which includes lines from the poem cut out of the Irish Monthly version. In it Wilde has added the following comment in manuscript: "Written after coming out of the Monte Cenis Tunnel into Italy. March 1877." Like the Monte Bianco (Mont Blanc) tunnel, the Monte Cenis tunnel, which had opened in 1871, allowed easy access from France to northern Italy. Turin and Genoa (on the Mediterranean coast) are not too distant, but they stand in quite different geographies, and more importantly the sense that they give of "approaching" Italy is quite different: one under mountains, the other over the sea.

A similar situation seems to have occurred with Wilde's slightly later poem entitled "Sonnet. On hearing the Dies Irae sung in the Sistine Chapel." The earliest embodiment of the poem carries the postscript "Magdalen College / Oxford"—the location where Wilde did indeed hear a performance of what we can presume was Mozart's fragmentary D minor Mass (K. 626). Place, then, seems to have been important to Wilde, but not important enough for him to be factually precise about it. It goes without saying that the Sistine Chapel and Magdalen College Chapel in Oxford are in quite different geographical locations; but the architectural, cultural, historical, and liturgical freight they are required to support is also quite distinct, so much so that the transfer of feelings evoked by one place to be subsequently placed upon another either seems contrived, or it denies completely the significance of the poem's place of composition.

From Naples we are taken, via Paris and London, to Oxford. From the enormous range of writers at his disposal, Murray chooses a select—and perhaps eclectic—few: in order to document the importance of Paris, Murray sees it principally through the work of the British and Irish writers Arthur Symons, George Moore, and, as I have already suggested, less understandably, Conal Holmes O'Connell O'Riordan. Why these particular writers are taken to be representative of large cultural attitudes is never made clear. The choice of French writers used to document the values of their own capital city is equally difficult to understand.

The most successful chapters in the book are the next two, one on Oxford and the next on Wales. The first centres on the importance of Catholicism to three writers associated for different reasons with Oxford: Wilde, Lionel Johnson, and Louise Imogen Guiney, and the interplay between matters of belief and the role of place in their work. The second discusses the various reactions to place, and particularly the landscapes of Wales, briefly in the work of Housman, more fully in that of William Sharp / Fiona MacLeod, Ernest Rhys, Johnson once again, and finally Arthur Machen. The success of these chapters may have something to do with the sharpened focus given by Murray's principal subjects, those of the significance of faith and the politics of national identity or nationalism, all which are of course much larger components of nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual life than decadence.

It is sad, then, to note in conclusion that the overall effect of Murray's interesting and ambitious study is occasionally jeopardized by careless copy-editing or proof reading. On page 61 Moore and Wilde become "English" writers, an identification which would have startled both, especially in the light of Wilde's frequent assertions that he was to be judged as an Irish writer; a little later Catulle Mendès becomes "Cattule Mendes"; within the space of two pages (125–26), A. E. Housman's name is given an extra letter (to become "Houseman"). By contrast, Richard Ellmann's name is robbed of a letter to become "Ellman" (99); likewise that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who becomes "Shelly" (103). Of course, none of this mars what is an interesting and often persuasive book, but it is treatment which Murray's work does not deserve.