Romanticism verses Decadence
Romanticism reaches. Decadence arrives late, knows it, and refines the lateness. Decadence inherits the Romantic self and the Romantic quarrel with the bourgeois world, then drops the hope that nature, revolution, or vision will renew anything.
Romanticism, from the 1790s to about mid-century, is a revolt against Enlightenment measure and against the new industrial flatness. Feeling is evidence. Imagination is a way of knowing, not a way of decorating. Nature is alive and corrective. The past, especially the medieval and the folk past, is a reservoir rather than a ruin to be savoured. The artist is a prophet or an outlaw, and the outlaw can still be a hero: Blake’s Satan, Byron’s, Shelley’s. The typical movement is outward and upward. The mountain, the storm, the infinite in the particular, the self expanded until it touches something larger. Even the Gothic side of it, Maturin’s wanderer, Mary Shelley’s creature, still treats the cost as tragic. Something was attempted. The attempt mattered.
Decadence, crystallised in the 1880s and 1890s with Baudelaire as the educator of the generation before it, keeps the intensity and throws out the renewal. Paul Bourget’s 1881 essay on Baudelaire is the cleanest definition: a decadent style is one in which the unity of the book decomposes so the page can be independent, the page decomposes so the sentence can be independent, the sentence so the word can be independent. The part prevails over the whole. He meant it as a social diagnosis as well as a literary one, and he did not think it ruled out masterpieces. Arthur Symons, in “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), listed the marks as intense self-consciousness, restless curiosity, refinement upon refinement, and a spiritual perversity. The qualities of the end of a period, set against classic simplicity and proportion. He was also clear that this writing had broken with the old antithesis. It was not Classic, and it was no longer Romantic.
The inversions are concrete.
Nature against artifice. The Romantic goes out. The Decadent stays in and builds an artificial paradise: hothouse, collection, cosmetics, the carefully poisoned interior of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes in À rebours. Symons’s own poem “Maquillage” is a cult of the made-up face. Wilde’s Dorian is a portrait that takes the life so the body can stay a work.
Hope against lateness. The Romantic is early to his own century and thinks the future can be induced. Baudelaire, in Bourget’s reading, knows he has arrived late in an ageing civilisation and is honoured by the tardiness. Verlaine’s “Langueur” plays the same role as a bored Roman at the end of the empire. Decline is not a problem to be solved. It is the climate in which exquisite work becomes possible.
Sincerity against pose. Romantic feeling wants to be believed. Decadent feeling is studied, ironic, often bored with itself. The dandy is the opposite of the Romantic prophet: same refusal of the crowd, no gospel.
Energy against languor. Romantic passion spends itself on a cause, a beloved, a vision, a damnation that still has scale. Decadent passion is a sensation to be prolonged, repeated, and aestheticised until it thins. Spleen replaces the sublime. The sublime needed a cliff. Spleen needs a room.
They share the anti-bourgeois nerve, the privilege of the exceptional self, and the occult appetite. That is why they get collapsed. Baudelaire comes out of Poe and out of Romantic Satanism; Wilde comes out of Pater and Keats; the Gothic pact-tale runs from Melmoth to Là-Bas without a break in furniture. The break is in the wager. Romantic occultism still thinks vision might renew the world, or at least the seer. Decadent occultism researches the beyond because ordinary life is already over, and because blasphemy, rarity, and decline are interesting. Huysmans investigates Parisian Satanism and then converts. The investigation was never a programme.
Set against the two objects from before: the Hollow Ones book still wants the Romantic wager, romance as a living claim that how a thing is done matters. Estrus sits on the Decadent side of the line. Artifice, heat, the made face, feelings with no solution, a fertility that is also a clock running down. The triangle does not point at a mountain. It points down, into the room.