Decadent Romanticism: 1780-1914

Kostas Boyiopoulos, Mark Sandy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317154112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

For Decadent authors, Romanticism was a source of powerful imaginative revisionism, perversion, transition, and partial negation. But for all these strong Decadent reactions against the period, the cultural phenomenon of Decadence shared with Romanticism a mutual distrust of the philosophy of utilitarianism and the aesthetics of neo-Classicism. Reflecting on the interstices between Romantic and Decadent literature, Decadent Romanticism reassesses the diverse and creative reactions of Decadent authors to Romanticism between 1780 and 1914, while also remaining alert to the prescience of the Romantic imagination to envisage its own distorted, darker, perverted, other self. Creative pairings include William Blake and his Decadent critics, the recurring figure of the sphinx in the work of Thomas De Quincey and Decadent writers, and Percy Shelley with both Mathilde Blind and Swinburne. Not surprisingly, John Keats's works are a particular focus, in essays that explore Keats's literary and visual legacies and his resonance for writers who considered him an icon of art for art's sake. Crucial to this critical reassessment are the shared obsessions of Romanticism and Decadence with subjectivity, isolation, addiction, fragmentation, representation, romance, and voyeurism, as well as a poetics of desire and anxieties over the purpose of aestheticism.

Chapter 1 Perverse Forms: Reading Blake's Decadence

Anna Barton

DOI: 10.4324/9781315576077-2

All that was accepted for art, all that was taken for poetry, he rejected as barren symbols. ¹

¹ A.C. Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay (London: Hotton, 1866), p. 3. Hereafter WB.

The most enduring critical legacy of William Blake’s rediscovery in the second half of the nineteenth century is the identification of Blake as Symbolist. ‘Symbolism’ is not a word that Blake uses, ² nor is it deployed with any regularity in the handful of reviews and notes on Blake that were written during his lifetime, ³ and yet throughout the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, critics have found it hard to read Blake without recourse to a theorization of the Blakean text as symbol. From Leopold Damrosch’s analysis of Blake’s ‘symbolic thinking’ to Kathleen Raine’s reading of Blake in the context of the neo-Platonic ‘type and symbol’, to Northrop Frye’s more cautious consideration of the ‘new intensity of symbolism’ that transfigures Blake’s poetic language, Blake criticism both charts and participates in the transmission and development of symbolism as an aesthetic category in the modern academy. ⁴ Romantic Image, Frank Kermode’s seminal essay on Romantic aesthetics, traces the critical genealogy of Blake’s symbolism to the turn of the century and to Arthur Symons and W.B. Yeats: readers who describe Blake as their poetic and, more specifically, symbolic forebear. Arguing that Blake’s recognition that ‘only the imagination can make [the object] live as symbol … anticipates much modern aesthetic’, ⁵ Kermode legitimates the Symbolist movement’s attempt to lay claim to Blake, securing his identity as a modern poet born a century too soon.

² Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947), p. 107. Hereafter FS. ³ Coleridge provides an exception to this rule, commenting on Songs of Experience in a letter of 1818: ‘Title page and the following emblem contain all the faults of the Drawings with as few beauties, as could be in the compositions of a man who was capable of such faults + such beauties. – The faults – despotism in symbols, amounting in the Title page to the odium, and, occasionally, irregular and unmodified Lines of the Inanimate, sometimes as the effect of rigidity and sometimes of exossation – like a wet tendon,’ in G.E. Bentley Jr., ed., William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 55. ⁴ Leopold Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), p. 7; Kathleen Raine, Blake and Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 4; Frye, FS, p. 8. ⁵ Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 121.

However, Blake the Symbolist is only the last of a sequence of versions of Blake described by his Victorian editors and biographers who tend to read Blake as an exemplar of their own aesthetic, political, and spiritual values. Over the course of the nineteenth century Blake is transformed from William Gilchrist’s poet of earnest spirituality, to the medievalist, Gothic poet described by D.G. and W.M. Rossetti, to the ‘rebel artist’ that looks out from the pages of Swinburne’s extended critical essay, finally arriving at the Yeats Ellis edition of 1893, from which Blake ‘emerged as the aesthete’s Blake with a mystical symbolist superimposed’. ⁶ Deborah Dorfman’s detailed account of the posthumous publication and reception of Blake’s work in the mid to late nineteenth century resists a teleological reading of Blake’s critical progress, suggesting that the Symbolist Blake that so dominated the critical landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century was more the result of accident than design. Nevertheless there remains something to be said about the way that the history of Blake’s reception in the nineteenth-century, which culminates in his lasting construction as Symbolist poet, coincides with, and provides a metonymic account of, the rise of the Symbolist movement at the fin de siècle and, in particular, its relationship with the Decadent Movement of which it was the direct and more powerful successor. Focusing on William Blake: A Critical Essay (1866) by A.C. Swinburne, the herald of British Decadence, this chapter both attempts to recover Blake’s Decadence and to consider how a decadent Blake might productively complicate the poet’s Symbolic legacy for a modern readership.

⁶ Deborah Dorfman, Blake in the Nineteenth Century: His Reputation as a Poet from Gilchrist to Yeats (New Haven; London: Yale UP, 1969), p. 192.

The erasure of Blake’s Decadence at the hands of Symons and Yeats is characteristic of the short life enjoyed by the Decadent Movement before it was succeeded by Symbolism. ⁷ This succession is documented by Symons in his essay ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, which was first published in 1893 and then later revised and expanded for republication as The Symbolist Movement in Literature in 1899. In the later essay, Symons celebrates Symbolism’s coming-of-age in literature’s conscious recognition of the inherent symbolism of language, a recognition that, Symons argues, liberates literature into authenticity, making of it ‘a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual’. ⁸ In Symons’s revised account, the maturity that Symbolism achieves for literature is compared with ‘something which is vaguely called Decadence’, a movement of ‘unsatisfied virtue, masquerading as uncomprehending vice’ that ‘could but have been a straying aside from the road of literature’. ⁹ As Holbrook Jackson observes, ‘in the earlier essay [Symons] certainly saw more to Decadence than mere novelty of style’, but the poet appears keen to forget or to correct his own critical lapse into Decadence in order to establish more securely the new true faith of Symbolism. ¹⁰

⁷ See, for example, Symons’s assertion that ‘Blake is the only poet who sees temporal things under the form of eternity. To him reality is merely a symbol’ (Arthur Symons, William Blake (London: Constable, 1907), p. 50); and Yeats, ‘He was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols’ (W.B. Yeats, ‘William Blake and the Imagination’, W.B. Yeats: The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), p. 353. Hereafter WBI). A full account of Blake’s appropriation by the Symbolist Movement is beyond the scope of this chapter and has already been the subject of a good deal of critical attention, most famously from Harold Bloom in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in the Romantic Tradition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971). ⁸ Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, rev. ed. (London: Heinemann, 1899), p. 10. Hereafter TSM. This is also the way Yeats defines Blake’s symbolism: ‘He announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world he knew’ (Yeats, WBI, p. 352). ⁹ Symons, TSM, p. 6. ¹⁰ Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (1913; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 56. Hereafter TEN.

By framing Decadence as a false step on the road to Symbolism, Symons follows a line of reasoning suggested by his own earlier association of Decadence with perversity. As Joseph Bristow has shown, ‘it is perversity that, more than any other word in Symons’s vocabulary oscillates uneasily between the aesthetic preoccupations of late Victorian Decadence’. ¹¹ ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ makes repeated reference to the idea of the perverse: literary Decadence, like the ends of all great periods, is characterized by ‘a spiritual and moral perversity’; the Decadent hero of Huysmans’s À rebours is the product of ‘the perverse art that he adores’; and, writes Symons, as the conclusion to his essay, ‘elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans’ work … comes to represent … the main tendencies, the chief results of the Decadent Movement in literature’. ¹² However, by the time he comes to write The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Symons is only fleetingly concerned with the idea of perversity that had so preoccupied him six years earlier:

¹¹ Joseph Bristow, ‘“Sterile Ecstasies”: The Perversity of the Decadent Movement’, The Ending of Epochs: Essays and Studies, ed. Laurel Brake (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), p. 67. Hereafter SE. Bristow attributes the fruitful uneasiness of perversity to the new associations with sex and sexuality that it accrued in the 1890s, arguing that perversity, a word that, until the end of the century, was most frequently deployed as a description of style, provides a way to conceptualize the interrelation between form and ideology that was crucial to Decadent poetics. See also Holbrook Jackson, who identifies perversity as one of four chief characteristics of Decadence (Jackson, TEN, p. 64). ¹² Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivian J. Rundle (Ontario: Broadview, 1999), pp. 1405, 1410, 1412.

No doubt perversity of form and perversity of matter are often found together, and, among the lesser men especially, experiment was carried far, not only in the direction of style. ¹³

¹³ Symons, TSM, p. 8.

The newfound distaste for the perverse experiments of Decadence that Symons here implies (adopting a tone that is uncharacteristically prudish), is noted without recourse to the author’s earlier fascination for the idea, suggesting that he has effected a return from perversity that he regards as unremarkable. Perversity, like the Decadence it describes, is, according to Symons’s account, inevitably fleeting, eventually reinforcing the correct order of things from which it briefly deviates. This understanding of perversity finds illuminating context in the history of the term, which, as Bristow demonstrates, ‘rests on a long history of ideas – many of them theological – about deviating from the right path, suggesting that such deviation is necessitated by what in fact condemns it’. ¹⁴ A word the Latin derivation of which means to turn away or to turn from, perversity therefore conceptualizes Decadence in such a way as to make inevitable its own obsolescence, making available the spatial or geographical understanding of an inevitable progress, or turn back towards Symbolism that Symons develops in the second essay.

¹⁴ Bristow, SE, p. 72.

In 1874, two decades before Symons claimed it for the Decadent Movement, W.M. Rossetti identified a much earlier instance of literary perversity:

Blake was the most perverse of mortals, except to his own ideals, his own inspiration. To these he was loyal beyond praise and beyond words: to aught else equally impenetrable and contumacious.… If those who urged him to do lofty things by common processes were in the right, then Blake was not only in the wrong but perverse, a ‘son of perdition’. If Blake on the other hand was essentially right as to his aims and methods, then the rugged gradient of his perversity was also an ascending plain of heroism. ¹⁵

¹⁵ W.M. Rossetti, ‘Prefatory Memoir’, The Poetical Works of William Blake, Lyrical and Miscellaneous (London: George Bell, 1909), pp. x–xi.

Rossetti offers two, apparently mutually exclusive, readings of Blake: viewed through the eyes of his contemporaries, Blake is perverse (and it is worth noting that Rossetti chooses to link perversity with perdition, linking Blake with Judas Iscariot in a way not dissimilar from Blake’s own reading of a satanic Milton); viewed from his own perspective, the perspective that Rossetti encourages the reader to adopt, Blake is a hero. However, the term takes on a life of its own within the opening paragraph of Rossetti’s preface, perverting it from its apparent course. The heroic Blake is unable to shake off the charge of perversity, which again takes on a topographical aspect, its gradient forming part of the poet’s heroic progress. Blake’s perversity, like the perversity of Decadence, is figured as both a fleeting and a fundamental aspect of his poetry, working to achieve that which it momentarily turns f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Decadent Romantics, Romantic Decadents
• 1 Perverse Forms: Reading Blake's Decadence
• 2 Incest on the Romantic Stage: Baillie, Byron, and the Shelleys
• 3 Wordsworth's and Byron's Links with British and French Decadence
• 4 ‘Enchanted wine': Symons, Dowson, and Keats’s Intoxications
• 5 Keats's Visual Legacy in Book Illustration at the Turn of the Century
• 6 Enigmatic Intertexts: Decadence, De Quincey, and the Sphinx
• 7 ‘Stars Caught in My Branches': Swinburne and Shelley
• 8 Mathilde Blind: A Decadent Shelleyan
• 9 ‘The Last Great Romantic': Nietzsche’s Romanticism Out of the Spirit of Decadence
• 10 Decadence and the Fate of the Romantic Sublime
• 11 ‘Phantoms of Delight': Amy Levy and Romantic Men
• 12 Soldiers of the Queen: The War Poetry of Kipling and Newbolt
• Selected Bibliography
• Index