FROM "DECADENCE" TO "STYLE OF DECADENCE"

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Although most literary historians agree that the modern aesthetic idea of decadence originates from romanticism—an assertion that is basically correct—the romantics themselves did not consciously identify with anything like a well-articulated or even a vague program of decadence. Their occasional pronouncements on what ever aspects of decadence they might have observed in the life of con temporary society are largely irrelevant to our subject because the use of the concept in such instances had neither originality nor anticipatory value. Ironically, decadence was employed in a cultural and specifically aesthetic sense—even though it preserved its traditional derogatory connotations—by adversaries of romanticism. This happened in France, where neoclassicism was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century stronger than anywhere else in Western Europe.

The first to introduce the theoretical notion of a "style of de cadence," defined by a number of recognizable and recurrent characteristics, was the antiromantic and conservative French critic Desire

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Nisard. Without referring directly to the romantics, who were re belling against the strict rules of neoclassical poetics, Nisard wrote his Etudes de moeurs et de critique sur les poetes latins de la de cadence (published in Brussels in 1834) with what he considered the romantic excesses and abuses in mind. Although his book is ostensibly devoted to the poetry of the late Roman Empire, the actual target of his strictures is undoubtedly romanticism. Interestingly, Nisard's arguments—and especially his view that a "decadent style" of art places such emphasis on detail that the normal relationship of a work's parts to its whole is destroyed, the work disintegrating into a multitude of overwrought fragments—have been quite influential, even though the name of their originator has sunk into oblivion. It is indeed fascinating (for those who are interested in the strange life of ideas) to discover to what an extent Paul Bourget's famous description of "style de decadence (which, as is known, was readily borrowed by Nietzsche) is indebted to Nisard's approach half a century earlier.

The decadence and final collapse of the Roman Empire had long been a subject of meditation for historians, but it was not until the eighteenth century that it received a consistently modern (i.e., non- theological) treatment. The best example of this new, immanent approach (in the sense that it discounts the intervention in history of any transcendental factor) is Montesquieu's Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des romains et de leur decadence (1734). But in this essay, which lays the foundation for and in certain respects anticipates the vast synthesis ofL'Esprit des lois (1748), Montesquieu does not consider the literature of decadent Rome, but limits his analysis to the sociopolitical, moral, and military causes that led to the downfall of antiquity's most powerful empire.

In his Cahiers, however, when meditating on the issues of the Qucrelle des Anciens et des Modernes, Montesquieu came close to formulating a general law of decadence, seen in its paradoxical inter relationship with prosperity. This law would also apply to cultural decadence, and Montesquieu suggests that the very richness and

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diversity of the moderns' literary achievement might have been taken as a sign that decadence was in the offing: "In the history of empires, nothing is closer to decadence than great prosperity; likewise, in our literary republic, one worries lest prosperity lead to decadence. "8

In his Essai sur les moeurs et esprit des nations (1756), Voltaire also employs the term "decadence" in connection with the decline of the Roman Empire, elaborating on its causes (the advent of Christianity and the subsequent social turmoils that weakened the Empire in the face of growing barbarian threat, hut, like his predecessor, he gives no attention to the specifically literary forms of Roman decadence. Voltaire speaks of decadence in a literary sense only when he complains of the corruptions of taste in his own time as compared to the glorious achievements of the Siecle de Louis XIV

(1739—68).

During the eighteenth century. however, the idea emerged that an historical period (be it one of growth and progress or one of decadence) should he perceived as a "totality, and that sociopolitical phenomena and artistic manifestations are organically interrelated. This broader concept of history is central to Madamne de Stael's approach in De la litterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800). This work, which has sometimes been considered a document of early romanticism, is in fact little more than a synthesis of Enlightenment aesthetic ideology. In a most optimistic eighteenth—century fashion. Madame de Stael shares the belief in indefinite progress and is deeply convinced of the overall superiority of' the moderns over the ancients. Set in such a perspective, the decadence observed in certain past periods ap pears as an accidental phenomenon, to be explained by isolated deviations from the ideal and practice of freedom. Madame de Stael writes.

            It has been maintained that the decadence of arts, letters and empires
            comes necessarily after a certain period of splendor. This idea is
            wrong. The arts have a borderline beyond which. I believe, they

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            cannot advance; but they can keep up the level they have reached; and in all
            knowledge which lends itself to development, the moral nature tends to
            improve.9

Madame de Stael naturally mentions Roman decadence...whose main cause she assigns to tyranny--and admits that it resulted in the corruption of previous standards of taste. But even in such a period of decadence, she maintains, the principle of progress was subtly at work, and the Roman writers of the imperial period, being artistically inferior, "were, as thinkers, superior to those of the Augustan era." 10 As for her own time, Madame de Stael felt assured that, with the beneficial and irreversible influence of "les lumieres," there was no longer any threat of decadence. For her, decadence was exclusively a matter of the past:

            The decadence of empires is not more in the natural order than is that of letters
            and of enlightenment [lumieres]. . . . European civilization the establishment of
            Christianity scientific discoveries ' ' have. destroyed the ancient causes for
            barbarism. So the decadence of nations, and consequently of letters, is less to
            he feared nowadays 11

Like many of her eighteenth century predecessors, Madame de Stael did not dwell on the question at more length because she simply ruled out the possibility of any future decadence.

Nisard, the first critic to devote more sustained attention to literary decadence as a "style," was infinitely less optimistic than Madame de Stael. We have already noted that his preoccupation with the decadence of Latin literature had been prompted by con temporary issues, as perceived from the standpoint of an embattled defender of neoclassical values in a time favorable to romanticism. As he pointed out in the preface to the first edition of his Etudes, Nisard was interested in the recurring traits of literary decadencies:

            I offer a developed theory on the common characteristics of decadent
            poetries.... I try to explain what imperceptible successive needs have led the
            human spirit to this unusual state of exhaustion in which the richest imaginations
            can do nothing for true poetry, and are left with only the power to destroy
            languages scandalously. 12

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So we are not surprised to find Nisard applying his theory of decadence (only two years after the publication of his book on the Silver Age of Latin poetry) to the foremost French romantic poet, Victor Hugo. Earlier, in 1829, Nisard had been a champion of Hugo, but during the following years he underwent such a complete change of heart that in 1836 he became probably the most articulate, if not the most outspoken critic of the great poet. In his article "M. Victor Hugo in 1836," the author of Etudes discovers in Hugo's Chants du crepuscule all the main signs of decadence—the profuse use of description, the prominence of detail and, on a general plane, the elevation of the imaginative power, to the detriment of reason. Nisard's strictures against Hugo amount, theoretically, to an attack against imagination and novelty (the profound antimodern character of this attack can be better grasped if we compare it to Baudelaire's passionate praise of imagination. "the queen of faculties"). Nisard writes:

            When we say that [Victor Hugo] has been an innovator, we are not praising
            him. In France, a country of practical and reasonable literature, a writer who
            has only imagination though it be of the rarest sort, cannot be a great writer In
            him the imagination takes the place of everything ; imagination alone
            conceives and performs: it is a queen who governs unchecked Reason finds no
            place in his works. No practical or applicable ideas, nothing or next to nothing
            of real life; no philosophy, no morals, 13

Imagination. Nisard thinks, when it is no longer under the control of reason, loses sight of the whole of reality and of the actual hierarchy of things, focussing on details (in which, he is quite willing to con cede, Hugo excels). 14 Another noteworthy feature of Nisard's theory is that it stresses the dangerously deceptice character of decadent art, its power to seduce. The harmfulness of decadence is in direct proportion to its capacity for deception. Anticipating once again Nietzsche's view of decadence, as expressed in the latter's famous critique of Wagner Nisard calls Victor Hugo a "seducer."'5

The sense of decadence in the nineteenth century was certainly not restricted to France, but it was in that country, perhaps because

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of "the feeling that the nation's power and prestige in the world were declining, "16 that the theme of decadence not only became more compelling and obsessive hut also was charged with the in tensely contradictory meanings that define, culturally, a typical love-hate relationship. In other words, in France, to a larger extent than elsewhere, the idea of decadence, with all its old and new ambiguities, provided an occasion for cultural self-identification. The opening line of Verlaine's famous sonnet "Langueur" (1884)— Je suis l'empire a Ia fin de la decadence"—sums up poetically the feelings of a significant section of the French intelligentsia, especially after the failure of the 1848 Revolution and, with increased dramatism, after France's collapse in the 1870 Prussian War and the subsequent uprising that led to the ephemeral Paris Commune of 1871.

Obviously, a wide variety of attitudes and standards flourished among the numerous French intellectuals who shared an awareness of decadence. Some cultivated a "regenerationalist" concept of de cadence, decrying the effects of decline and believing in the possibility of a future "renascence," to which they were deeply committed. Others—and they are of primary interest to us—relished the feeling that the modern world was headed toward catastrophe. Most of the latter group were artists, conscious promoters of an aesthetic modernity that was, in spite of all its ambiguities, radically opposed to the other, essentially bourgeois, modernity, with its promises of indefinite progress, democracy, generalized sharing of the "com forts of civilization," etc. Such promises appeared to these "de cadent" artists as so many demagogical diversions from the terrible reality of in creasing spiritual alienation and dehumanization. To protest precisely such tactics, the "decadents" cultivated the con sciousness of their own alienation, both aesthetic and moral, and, in the face of the false and complacent humanism of the day's demagogues, resorted to something approaching the aggressive strategies of antihumanism and of what. as we have seen, Ortega y Gasset was to call a few decades later the "dehumanization of art." Furthermore, the "decadents" often upheld revolutionary beliefs (anarchism was

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particularly attractive to them) and so they were not unjustly perceived as representatives of the avant-garde. In the 1880s, literary decadentism and literary avant-gardism had come to be, if not completely synonymous, very closely related notions. We shall deal with this relationship later.

Resuming our historical account, we note that toward the middle of the nineteenth century an increasing number of French intellectuals, both within the Art for Art's Sake movement and outside it, speculate on literary decadence and, unlike the ultraconservative Nisard. feel inclined to reevaluate it. at least partially. Here the testimony of the young Ernest Renan is significant. Before becoming the passionate advocate of the idea of progress in his still youthful Avenir de la science (written in the late l84Os but not published until 1890), Renan had been preoccupied with the question of de cadence in the philosophical diary of his formative years, which is known under the title Cahicrs de jeunesse 1846—47). Periods of decadence, Renan argued. are inferior to classical periods only in sofar as the sheer power of imaginative creation is concerned, but they are clearly superior in critical ability: "These periods of de cadence are strong in criticism, often stronger than periods of great ness. Renan wrote, and defending the value of criticism, he de dared:

            In a sense, criticism is superior to comoposition. Till now criticism has adopted
            a humble role as a servant et pedis sequa perhaps the time has come for
            criticism to take stock of itself and to raise itself above those whom it judges.
            Thus this century is thin in producing fiction of the original classical type. Does
            this mean that the century is inferior? No. because it is more philosophical. 18

Renan also noted his time's special interest not only in past periods of decadence but also in periods of primitivism. The taste for both decadence and primitivism. Renan rightly observed, derived from a certain impatience with classicism as such:

            What a curious fact of literary history is the craze of our time for
            non-classical literatures. It is not that there is no interest in Creek,

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            Latin, and French literatures but it is mostly their pre-classical and
            post-classical periods that are studied. All interest lies in what is
            called the origins and the decadent eras.'9

Renan is probably the first to have been aware of the remarkable fact that the fascination with decadence. and the apparently contradictory fascination with origins and primitivism are actually two sides of one and the same phenomenon. The intimate relationship between the craze for the oversophisticated, excessively refined products of decadence, and the craze for the naive, awkward, immature manifestations of "primitive" creativeness has been demonstrated over and over again by the development of modern literature and art since the late nineteenth century.

The first entirely approhative and widely influential view of de cadence as a style occurs in the preface that Theophile Gautier wrote in 1868 for Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. A champion of Art for Art's Sake, Cautier had expressed his admiration for certain literary themes usually associated with decadence as early as 1836, when A!lle de Mau pin, with its famous preface, had been published. His application of the concept to Baudelaire's poetry remains, however, Cautier's crucial statement, although we note that he was not too happy with the term "decadence" itself (an important nuance that is all too often skipped over by students of decadence):

            The style inadequately called of decadence is nothing but art arrived at the
            point of extreme maturity yielded by the slanting suns of aged civilizations: an
            ingenious, complicated style, full of shades and of research, constantly pushing
            back the boundaries of speech, borrowing from all technical vocabularies,
            taking color from all palettes and notes from all keyboards, struggling to render
            what is most inexpressible in thought, what is vague and most elusive in the
            outlines of form, listening to translate the subtle confidences of neurosis, the
            dying confessions of passion grown depraved, and the strange hallucinations of
            the obsession which is turning to madness.20

The object of Cautier's article, Baudelaire himself, was not un acquainted with the new approach to the problem of decadence. It is true that Baudelaire sometimes openly rejects both the term and

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the concept, but at least as frequently he has something favorable to say about decadence. Let us consider, for instance, the curious note that, in the first edition of Lcs Fleurs du Mal (1857), accompanied the poem in medieval Latin. "Franciscae meae laudes." More than an explication, the note was meant to express Baudelaire's adherence to a certain style, which he defined as at once decadent, spiritual, and modern. The relationship established in the text among these three key notions is typical of Baudelaire's way of thinking:

            Does not the reader think, as I do. that the late Latin decadence—a supreme
            sigh of a robust person already transformed and prepared for spiritual life-is 
            uniquely appropriate for expressing passion such as the modern poetic world
            has understood and felt it? 21

Baudelaire, whose work was to serve as an example for various definitions of decadence from Gautier to Bourget and later, never addressed himself to the problem of developing a unified theory on the subject. His criticism, however. contains a number of insights that demonstrate their author's central role in the further promotion of the modern concept of artistic decadence. The young Baudelaire of the "Salon of 1846" makes use of the term 'decadence" to characterize Victor Hugo. This clearly reminds us of Nisard's earlier (1836) critique of Hugo. But Baudelaire. even though he retains some elements of Nisard's definition for instance, the idea that a poet of decadence will try to obtain by means of words effects characteristic of other artistic media, such as painting or music), is totally opposed to the main thrust of Nisard's antiromantic and anti-imaginative approach. When he compares Delacroix to Hugo. Baudelaire exalts the former as a true romantic (a creator endowed with "l'imagination la plus voyageuse"), while rejecting the usual characterization of Hugo in terms of romanticism. According to the author of the "Salon of 1846" Victor Hugo was "a workman more ingenious than inventive, a craftsman more industrious and correct than creative... . He is a composer of decadence \Ir. Hugo had been a natural member of the Academy even before being born. "22 Here, de cadence is equated with the sterility of academicism.

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More than a decade later, in the article entitled "L'Art philosophique" (written probably in 1859 but published posthu mously), Baudelaire speculates on decadence in more general terms and develops his earlier idea that the main characteristic of de cadence is its systematic attempt to break down the conventional boundaries between diverse arts. As in the 1857 note on "Franciscae meae laudes," Baudelaire establishes a direct connection between decadence and modernity. After centuries during which the history of art had tended toward an increasingly marked "separation of powers" and specialization (with the result that "there are subjects which belong to painting, others to music, others to literature"), Baudelaire observed the dominance in contemporary art of a directly opposite principle:

            Is it an inevitable result of decadence that every art today reveals a desire to
            encroach upon neighboring arts, and the painters introduce musical scales,
            sculptors use color, writers use the plastic means, and other artists, those who
            concern us today, display a kind of encyclopedic philosophy in the plastic arts
            themselves?23

Considering Baudelaire's commitment to modernity, and specifically his deep conviction regarding the essential unity of the arts, this view of decadence can hardly he regarded as a negative one. And the poet's acceptance of decadence—understood as a free interchange of means and procedures among the arts—becomes even clearer when we think of his open advocacy of "total" or "synthetic" art, and of the way he applied the two kindred principles of universal analogy and synaesthesia to his discussion of Richard Wagner. Speaking of Wagner in 1861, Baudelaire specifically praised the German composer for his conception of "dramatic art" as the "re union, the coincidence of several arts," that is, "l'art par excellence, le plus synthetique et le plus parfait. "24 To exemplify Wagner's drive toward a synthesis of the arts, Baudelaire lays special emphasis on the visual quality of Wagnerian music:

            No musician excels in painting space and background like
            Wagner.... It seems at times, listening to that ardent and despotic

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            music, that one discovers dizzy conceptions of opium painted on a
            background of half-lights, torn by revery.25

It may he interesting to point out here that Baudelaire's acknowledged master, Eugene Delacroix, was also sensitive to the phenomenon of decadence, as his Diary amply proves. Periods of decadence, Delacroix thought, are always more complex, more re fined, and more analytical than those that precede them. There seems to be an inevitable progression in man s consciousness of his own sentiments. For an artist, to go against the grain and cultivate some kind of archaicism would be simply ridiculous:

            The essence of my idea was the need to belong to out's time. There— fore,
            the foolishness of going against the tide and being old fashioned. Racine seems
            already refined in comparison to Corneille; and how much more refined have
            we become since Racine Our modern artists do not depict only feelings; they
            describe the external world and analyze everything.26

And in another entry made a few days later, on April 16, 1856, Delacroix goes on to establish a clear connection between de cadence and the need for refinement:

            On the need for refinement in times of decadence. The greatest spirits cannot
             avoid it. . . . The English. the Cermnanics have always pushed us in that
             direction. Shakespeare is very refined. Painting with a great depth feelings
            which ancient artists neglected or did not know, he discovered a small world  
            of emotions which all men in all times have experienced in a state of
            consfusion... 27

For the French writers and artists of the 1850s and 1860s, the idea of decadence is quite often related either directly to the notion of progress or indirectly to the effects of the "hysteria" of modern development on human consciousness. The Concourt brothers speak, in 1864. of a "modern melancholy," which they see as a result of the unbearable strain put on the mind by the demands of a society in a rage for "production" in all senses. It would be hard to find a view in sharper contrast to the optimistic Enlightenment concept of

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progress than the following passage from the Diary of the Concourt brothers, where progress and neurosis are one and the same thing:

            Since the time mankind exists, its progress, its acquisitions have all been of the
            order of sensibility. Each day, it becomes nervous, hysterical. And in regard to
            this activity... are you certain that modern melancholy does not result from it?
            Do you know if the sadness of the century does not come from overwork,
            movement, tremendous effort, furious labor, from its cerebral forces strained
            to the breaking point, from overproduction in every domain?28

Contemporaneously with the Goncourt brothers, Emile Zola spoke of a "sickness of progress," whose symptoms he discovered in all the manifestations of his time, literature included: "We are sick, that's certain, sick with progress. ... This triumph of nerves over blood has determined our ways, our literature, our entire epoch. "29

Terminologically, this increased consciousness of decadence ex plains the revival of the epithet "decadent," which had circulated in the French of the sixteenth centurv (Brantome) but had since been abandoned, probably because of its neologistic ring, which did not fit the purist demands of seventeenth-century neoclassicism. In England, the OED tells us, "decadent" was used as early as 1837 (in his famous History of the French Revolution, Carlyle spoke of "those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or blossoms"). It may be that Carlyle had come across this word during his research on the French Revolution; the fact is, however, that the major dictionaries of the French language (Littre, Hatzfeld, Robert) do not give any examples concerning the usage of the epithet during the first half of the nineteenth century. Even if it enjoyed some kind of sporadic circulation before the 1850s, it was, significantly, after that date that "decadent" underwent a process of semantic enrichment, which, during the 1880s, resulted in a series of new and sometimes ironical- fanciful coinages, such as the verb "decader," or the labels "decadisme" or "decadentisme." As we shall see later, only the latter term managed to survive and to become—not in its country of origin but in Italy—a major critical category ("decadentismo").

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The obsession with decadence and the growing circulation of words related to that notion account for a semantic occurrence un paralleled in the first half of the nineteenth century, namely, the formation, from the adjective, of the corresponding homonymous noun: "decadent" (one that is a decadent). This noun is used during the 1860s by the Goncourt brothers in their Journal—for instance, in the entry where Theophile Gautier is quoted as saying to the authors: "We three and two or three others, we are sick. We are not decadents [my italics], but rather primitives. No, still no, but strange, undefined, exalted individuals."30 During the early 188Os the Goncourt brothers themselves came to be regarded— and this was before the specifically "decadentist" movement started in 1886—as decadents. and even more than that, as the foremost representatives of contemporarv decadent style, as "des decadents de partipris"—decadents by their own choice.3'

Paul Bourget. who was responsible for this characterization of the Goncourt brothers, was the first French writer to accept unwaveringly (unlike Baudelaire or even Gautier) both the term and the fact of decadence, and to articulate this acceptance in a full-blown, philosophic and aesthetic theory of decadence as a style. Even though Bourget had almost certainly read Nisard,32 his view of de cadence was not only free from Nisard's too obviously conservative polemicism but was qualitatively different—by far more complex and profound, as a consequence, among other things, of his personal identification with the "terrible" reality of decadence. Bourget spoke of decadence from within, with unmistakably dramatic ac cents, in a manner that prefigured Nietzsche's treatment of de cadence a few years later. Even Bourget's earliest pronouncement on decadence (in 1876) conveys that sense of personal involvement:

            We accept.., this terrible word decadence.... It is decadence, but vigorous:
            with less accomplishment in its works. decadence is superior to organic
            periods because of the intensity of its geniuses. Its uneven, violent creation
            reveal more daring artists. and audacity is a virtue which despite ourselves
             elicits our sympathy. 33

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Bourget formulates a "Theorie de Ia de cadence" (his own phrase) in his article on Baudelaire, published in the Nouvelle revue (15 November 1881) and reprinted in Essais de psychologie con tern poraine (1883). His approach to decadence, before becoming specifically stylistic, is broadly sociological and obviously influenced by the prevailing scientific fashions of the time (the biological interpretation of social phenomena, evolutionism, the theory of heredity, etc.). There are, Bourget argues, "organic societies" (in which the energies of the components are subordinated to the goals and demands of the "total organism") and societies in decadence, which are characterized by a growing degree of "anarchy," by a gradual loosening of the hierarchical relationships among the various elements of the social structure. Decadent societies are highly individualistic:

"The social organism becomes decadent as soon as individual life becomes exaggeratedly important under the influence of acquired well-being and heredity" 34 So far nothing too original. Bourget's theory becomes truly interesting and fruifful only when he estab lishes an analogy between the social evolution toward individualism and the "individualistic" manifestations of artistic language, which are typical of "le style de decadence

            One law governs both the development and the decadence of that other
            organism which is language. A style of decadence is one in which the unity of
            the book breaks down to make place for the independence of the page, in
            which the page breaks down to make place for the independence of the
            sentence and ims which the sentence breaks down to make place for the
            independence of the word35

If we admit that the concept of individualism is central to any definition of decadence it is clear that, besides having their disadvantages from the point of view of nationalism and sheer military might, decadent periods should be favorable to the development of the arts and, more generally, should eventually bring about an aesthetic understanding of life itself. To prefer decadence to its radical opposite (that is, barbarism) appears, at least culturally, to be a legitimate choice. Thus, we are entitled, Bourget goes on to say,

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"to prefer the defeat of decadent Athens to the triumph of the violent Macedonian. "36 The same applies to literary decadence. Here the author takes on an almost evangelistic tone: "Let us then indulge in the unusualness of our ideal and form, even though we imprison ourselves in an unvisited solitude. Those who come to us will be truly our brothers, and why sacrifice what is most intimate, special and personal to others?"37 In Bourget, the borderline between intellectual recognition of the fact of decadence and aesthetic commitment to decadence as a cultural style becomes almost completely blurred. With him, we may say, the relativism of modernity has resulted in the theoretically unbounded, anarchic individualism of decadence, which, for all its socially paralyzing effects, is artistically beneficial. A style of decadence is simply a style favorable to the unrestricted manifestation of aesthetic individualism, a style that has done away with traditional authoritarian requirements such as unity, hierarchy, objectivity, etc. Decadence thus understood and modernity coincide in their rejection of the tyranny of tradition.