Gabriel Josipovici

SOURCE: "Modernism and Romanticism," in The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction, Macmillan Press, 1979, pp. 179-99.

[In the following excerpt, Josipovici studies the relationship between Modernism and the earlier artistic movement of Romanticism.]

[The] years between 1885 and 1914 saw the birth of the modern movement in the arts. What are the specific features of that movement and how are we to account for its emergence?

Two points need to be made before we start. First of all we must be clear that in one sense our inquiry is absurd. There is no physical entity called 'modernism' which we can extract from the variety of individual works of art and hold up for inspection. Every modern artist of any worth has achieved what he has precisely because he has found his own individual voice and because this voice is distinct from those around him. Yet it cannot be denied that something did happen to art, to all the arts, some time around the turn of the century, and that Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Klee, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, for all their manifest differences, do have something in common.

The second point is more in the nature of a reminder of a historical fact which, if rightly interpreted, should serve as a guide and a warning throughout this investigation. Although the First World War effectively marks the break between the world of the nineteenth century and our own, both in the minds of those who lived through it and for those of us who only read about it in the history books, the modern revolution in the arts did not take place during the war, or immediately after it, as one might have expected, but a decade or so before it. This should make us wary of too facile an identification of art with the culture and the society out of which it springs.

The modern movement in the arts cannot be understood in isolation. It must be seen as a reaction to the decadent Romanticism which was prevalent in Europe at the turn of the century. Some of the apologists of modernism, such as T. E. Hulme, tried to argue that the movement was nothing other than a wholesale rejection of Romanticism and all that that stood for, and a return to a new classicism. Looking back at those pre-war decades from our vantage point in the mid-century, however, we can now see that the situation was a good deal more complex than Hulme suggests; that it was more a question of redefining Romanticism, of stressing some of those aspects of it which the nineteenth century had neglected and discarding some of those it had most strongly emphasised, rather than rejecting it outright. If we are to understand what the founders of modern art were doing it will be necessary to try and grasp the premises and implications of Romanticism itself.

Romanticism was first and foremost a movement of liberation—liberation from religious tradition, from political absolutism, from a hierarchical social system and from a universe conceived on the model of the exact sciences. Reason and scientific laws, the Romantics felt, might allow man to control his environment, but they formed a sieve through which the living breathing individual slipped, leaving behind only the dead matter of generality. What man had in common with other men, what this landscape had in common with other landscapes, was the least important thing about them. What was important was the uniqueness of men and the uniqueness of each object in the world around us, be it a leaf, a sparrow or a mountain range. There were moments, they felt, when man is far from the distractions of the city and of society, and when the reasoning, conceptualising mind is still, when life seems suddenly to reveal itself in all its mystery and terror. In such moments man felt himself restored to his true self, able to grasp the meaning of life and of his own existence. It is to experience and express such moments, both in our lives and in our art, that we should perpetually strive, for these are the moments when we throw off the shackles of generality and are restored to our unique selves.

The function of art thus becomes that of exploring those areas of the mind and of the universe which lie beyond the confines of rational thought and of ordinary consciousness, and the hero of Romantic art becomes none other than the artist himself, who is both the explorer of this unknown realm and the priestly mediator between it and his audience. Something of this is suggested by August Wilhelm Schlegel, who was probably responsible for the introduction of the word 'Romantic' as a description of the age, when, in his lectures on dramatic art and literature of 1808-9, he made the following comparison:

Ancient poetry and art is a rhythmical nomos, a harmonious promulgation of the eternal legislation of a beautifully ordered world mirroring the eternal Ideas of things. Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression of a secret longing for the chaos… which lies hidden in the very womb of orderly creation.… [Greek art] is simpler, cleaner, more like nature in the independent perfection of its separate works; [Romantic art], in spite of its fragmentary appearance, is nearer to the mystery of the universe.

Schlegel, it is true, is not here talking only of the nineteenth century; he is contrasting the whole 'modern' or Christian era with the classical age of Greece and Rome. But his stress on the transcending impulse of Romanticism, on the aspiration towards the mystery of the universe, is taken up by Baudelaire several decades later when, in a discussion of the 'Salon' of 1846, he writes: 'Romanticism means modern art—that is to say, intimateness, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means known to art.' And yet already here a curious contradiction begins to emerge, a contradiction which lies at the heart of the whole Romantic endeavour, and whose nature was to determine its future course. Two quotations, the first from Rousseau and the second from Schleiermacher, will bring it out into the open. In his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire Rousseau tells how he came to after a minor accident to find himself lying in the middle of the countryside:

Night was falling. I perceived the sky, a few stars, and a little verdure. This first sensation was a wonderful moment; I could still only feel myself through it. In that instant I was born to life, and it seemed to me that I filled with my frail existence all the objects I perceived. Entirely within the present, I remembered nothing; I had no distinct notion of my individuality, not the least idea of what had just happened to me; I knew neither who nor where I was: I felt neither hurt, nor fear, nor anxiety.

And Schleiermacher, in his Speeches on Religion:

I am lying in the bosom of the infinite universe, I am at this moment its soul, because I feel all its force and its infinite life as my own. It is at this moment my own body, because I penetrate all its limbs as if they were my own, and its innermost nerves move like my own.… Try out of love for the universe to give up your own life. Strive already here to destroy your own individuality and to live in the One and in the All… fused with the Universe.…

Romanticism had begun as a movement of rebellion against the arbitrary authorities of the eighteenth century and its abstract laws, a rebellion undertaken in the name of the freedom of the individual. But this freedom, which of course involves the suppression of the tyrannical intellect, in fact turns out to be synonymous with the loss of individuality. 'In that instant I was born to life', writes Rousseau. The world around him soaks into his body, he becomes one with it and in so doing gains a sense of his own uniqueness, while Schleiermacher too feels the universe as if it were his own body. But this feeling is also one of the loss of self—'I did not know who I was', 'Strive already here to destroy your own individuality …'. The paradox is there: the ultimate freedom, according to the Romantic logic, can only be death.

Where consciousness itself is felt to be an imprisoning factor, keeping man from his true self, freedom must lie in the transcending of consciousness. Yet the only time we escape from it for more than a brief moment is in sleep, or under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or else in madness. And the only total escape is death. Hence the key place accorded by Romanticism to dreams, to various forms of addiction, to madness, and to the deathwish. And in all these cases the result is, of course, ambiguous. The freedom from consciousness and from the bonds of society may result in deeper insight, but it results also in rendering the individual more vulnerable, more prone to destruction from outside as well as from within. Hence the general tone of Romantic art and literature is one of melancholy gloom, for there seems to be no way of resolving the paradox.

This tension between freedom and annihilation is even easier to discern in the forms of art than in its contents. The task of the poet, as the Romantics saw it, was to communicate those moments of visionary intensity which he experienced, moments in which the meaning and value of life seemed to emerge. But the poet's only means of expression is language, and language belongs by definition to the realm of consciousness and social intercourse. For language, as Plato had already noted, only exists at a certain degree of abstraction and universality; it takes for granted that there is some sort of social agreement among the users of a language. But if you feel that what is important is the uniqueness of this tree or that man or this experience—then how are words going to help you to convey this uniqueness? This of course has always been one of the problems of art, but with the Romantics it comes right into the foreground of their consciousness. The Romantic poet finds himself struggling to express by means of language precisely that which it lies beyond the power of language to express. He becomes a man desperately striving to escape from his own shadow.

Only one poet in the nineteenth century was fully aware of the implications of the Romantic endeavour and was also prepared to accept and overcome them. In Rimbaud's famous letter to Paul Demeny of 15 May 1871 we can see that he had fully understood the problem and had decided on a radical solution:

Thus the poet is truly a stealer of fire.

He is the spokesman of humanity, even of the animals; he will have to make men feel, touch, hear his creations. If what he brings back from down there has form, he will bring forth form; if it is formless, he will bring forth formlessness. A language has to be found—for that matter, every word being an idea, the time of the universal language will come! One has to be an academician—deader than a fossil—to compile a dictionary in any language. Weak-minded men, starting by thinking about the first letter of the alphabet, would soon be overtaken by madness!

This [new] language will be of the soul, for the soul, summing up everything, smells, sounds, colours; thought latching on to thought and pulling. The poet would define the quantity of the unknown awakening in the universal soul in his time: he would produce more than the formulation of his thought, the measurement of his march towards Progressi An enormity who has become normal, absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplier of progressi

The failure of this ideal can be traced through the poems themselves, and it forms the explicit subject-matter of Une Saison en enfer. And, indeed, how could Rimbaud succeed? What he desires is not communication but communion, the direct and total contact of one person with another through a language so charged that it will act without needing to pass by way of the interpreting mind at all; in other words, a language that is not conventional but natural. But, as we have seen, such a wish can never be more than a Utopian dream, since to give words the meanings I want them to have regardless of their dictionary definitions is tantamount to abolishing language altogether. When Rimbaud recognised this, with admirable logic he gave up writing altogether.

But just because he was so ready to push the premises of Romanticism to their ultimate conclusion, Rimbaud remains one of the key figures of the nineteenth century, marking forever one of the two poles within which modern art is to move. His contemporaries, both in England and in France (Mallarmé excepted), chose a somewhat less arduous and therefore less interesting path. They tried to solve the problem by making their verse approximate as closely as possible to their conception of music, since music seemed to them to be the ideal artistic language, with none of the disadvantages of speech. To this end they made their verse as mellifluous as possible, stressing its incantatory qualities, smoothing out all harshness of diction, minimising its referential content, and rigidly excluding all forms of wit and humour for fear these would break their fragile spell. The result was aptly described by Eliot in his essay on Swinburne:

Language in a healthy state presents the object, is so close to the object that the two are identified. They are identified in the verse of Swinburne solely because the object has ceased to exist, because the meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric nourishment.

As with Rimbaud, the normal function of language is denied and words take on an independent meaning. But here the meaning is not just independent of general usage, it is no longer under the poet's control at all. The result is not revelation but empty cliché, not the articulation of what lies beyond the confines of consciousness and rationality but simple reflex, the verbal equivalent of the canine dribble:

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears;
Grief with a glass that ran.…

Or:

O Prêtresse élevant sous le laurieur verdâtre
Une eau d'antique pleurs dans le creux de tes
mains,
Tes yeux sacrés feront resplendir mes chemins,
Tes mains couronneront de cedre un jeune
prêtre.…

For language, as we have seen, has a way of getting its own back on those who try to step over it in this manner.

Just as the Romantic dreamer found that he escaped from the bonds of the intellect only at the cost of his sanity or his life, so the Romantic poet, trying to escape from the bonds of language, found himself its prisoner, uttering platitudes in the voice of a prophet.

But if the poets dreamt of living in a world freed from the stifling restrictions of language, and looked with envy at the composers, these, had the poets but known it, were in the same plight as themselves. For if language is not natural, if, that is, words are not inherently expressive, as Rimbaud had imagined, then the same is true of the language of music. Although E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote enthusiastically about the inherent qualities of the chord of A flat minor, the truth of the matter is that music is nearly as conventional a form of expression as speech. We find it difficult to grasp music which is distant from us in space or time (Indian or Japanese music, or Gregorian chant, for instance), to know when it is being 'cheerful', when 'sad'. Musical instruments too have different and highly specialised functions in other societies, and so are associated with different things; it is only through frequent hearings, through a familiarisation with its language that we can come to appreciate Indian music or the music of Bali. The composer, no less than the poet, works in a language which is largely the product of convention, and according to rules to which he voluntarily submits in order to create a meaningful work. Thus, when the initial heroic impetus of Romanticism starts to peter out, we find a development in music parallel to that which we traced in poetry: a slackening of formal control, a loosening of harmonic texture, and the emergence of a soulful, cliché-ridden style which strives to lull the listener into a state of trance while the music struggles to express the world of the infinite which Baudelaire had urged the artist to seek with every means at his disposal. Naturally enough the piano, instrument of the half-echo, the suggestive, the indefinite, becomes the favourite of composer and public alike. And in music, as in poetry, the attempt to express everything, the totality of experience, unfettered by the rules and limitations of conventions and consciousness, leads to self-destruction. More than any of the other arts, Romantic music is imbued with the melancholy which stems from the knowledge that to achieve its goal is to expire.

Wagner's operas, as all his contemporaries realised, form the apotheosis of Romantic art. These vast music-dramas seemed to them to be the perfect answer to Baudelaire's plea for a work of art that would make use of all the resources of all the arts, lifting the spectator into the realm of the infinite, into the very heart of the mystery of the universe. We are fortunate in possessing a critique of Wagner by one of the few men who really understood the implications of Romanticism because he was so much of a Romantic himself—Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's analysis of the 'decadent' style sums up many of the points we have already noted:

What is common to both Wagner and 'the others' consists in this: the decline of all organising power; the abuse of traditional means, without the capacity or the aim that would justify this. The counterfeit imitation of grand forms… excessive vitality in small details; passion at all costs; refinement as an expression of impoverished life, ever more nerves in the place of muscle.

This is extraordinarily perceptive. Nietzsche has put his finger on one of the main characteristics of expressionism: the richness of sensual detail, of the feel of things, allied to the poverty of overall form. And how could it be otherwise, once the dichotomy expressed by Thomas Hooker is accepted? We are left with either meaningless sensation (the traveller) or knowledge devoid of feeling (the historian, map-maker). Thus it becomes easy to trace even a historical connection between Luther, the Puritans, the German Romantics, the German expressionists, and a film-maker like Bergman. This has little to do with innate German or northern characteristics or geography and a great deal to do with cultural tradition.

But Nietzsche is not content with a simple catalogue of Wagner's characteristics; he wants to understand what lies behind them and to try and account for Wagner's enormous popularity. He sees first of all that for Wagner music is only a means to an end: 'As a matter of fact, his whole life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!… "Not music alone"—no musician would speak in this way.' And he explains what this 'more' is: 'Wagner pondered over nothing so deeply as over salvation: his opera is the opera of salvation.' And this, thinks Nietzsche, is the source of Wagner's power and popularity: what he offered was nothing less than the hope of personal salvation to a Europe—and especially a Germany—bewildered by the rapid social and technological changes of the previous half-century. 'How intimately related must Wagner be to the entire decadence of Europe for her not to have felt that he was decadent,' he writes in the same essay. And again: 'People actually kiss that which plunges them more quickly into the abyss.' We remember that Schlegel had already talked about a 'secret longing for the chaos… which lies hidden in the very womb of orderly creation', and that this longing was nothing other than the Romantic desire for an absolute freedom. Nietzsche's suggestion that with Wagner this longing spills out of the realm of art into that of politics allows us to glimpse the connection between decadent Romanticism and mass hysteria. The cataclysmic events of the first half of the present century would have occasioned him little surprise.

What Nietzsche particularly objects to in Wagner is precisely the fact that by trying to turn his music into a religion he debases both music and religion; by trying to turn the entire world into a music-drama, drawing the audience up into the music until they shed their dull everyday lives and enter the heart of the mystery, he dangerously distorts both the life of everyday and the true nature of art. By blurring the outlines between life and art he turns art into a tool and life into an aesthetic phenomenon—that is, into something which is to be judged entirely by aesthetic criteria and where the rules of morality therefore no longer apply.

Only one other thinker in the nineteenth century had seen as clearly as Nietzsche where the assumptions of Romanticism were leading, and that was Kierkegaard. In Either/ Or, written in 1843, he set out to analyse what he calls the aesthetic attitude to life, and from then on the category of the aesthetic or the 'interesting' occupied a key place in his writing. He noted that the point about a work of art is that we are not in any way committed to it. We can pick up a book and put it down again, turn from one picture to another in a gallery. We are surrounded by a growing number of works of art and we can move among them at will, sampling here or there according to our whim. Art makes no claims on us, and surely an attitude of disinterested contemplation is the correct one when we face a work of art. It so happens, however, that people carry this attitude over into their lives. A man will take up with one woman, for instance, because she 'interests' him, and when she begins to bore him he will turn to another. The philanderer, Don Juan, is the archetype of the aesthetic attitude to life, an attitude which depends on a complete surrender to the moment, the immediate, the sensual, and which for that reason is wholly amoral. That is why music is the most perfect medium for the aesthetic mode, and why, Kierkegaard argues, Mozart's Don Giovanni is the greatest work in that mode. But when we transfer this attitude from art to life its immediate implication is that no choices are binding. The person who lives in the category of the aesthetic never thinks in terms of 'either/or', but always of 'and/and'. Yet life, Kierkegaard argues, does not consist of a series of aesthetic moments. Choices are essential in life, and a genuine choice implies a genuine renunciation. That man is a creature who must make choices is evinced by his awareness of time. The aesthetic category does not know the meaning of time, but man is a creature of time, as can be seen from the fact that no absolute repetition is possible in life although it is perfectly possible in art. Repetition in life always implies change and difference, and so always forces us to recognise the fact that we do not exist in the category of the aesthetic.

The extension of the term 'aesthetic' to imply an attitude to life as well as to works of art allows Kierkegaard to show how much the European bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century had in common with the Romantic artists, just as Nietzsche had noted the close links between Wagner's art and the mentality of his patrons. But Kierkegaard was able to extend his insight into a critique of the prevalent philosophy of the time, Hegelianism. For Hegel, as he saw, was the supreme philosopher of aestheticism. He it was who had undertaken to show that all history should be contemplated as a work of art, the product of one great Mind, moving inevitably forward towards the completion of its pattern. But this view of history, though tempting, is also subtly distorting, as Kierkegaard noted. Luther or Cromwell or Napoleon, when confronted with a choice between one action and another, did not have the benefit of Hegel's vision of the totality of history to guide them. For them the future was open, their choice fraught with consequences they could not foretell. It is only by virtue of hindsight that a pattern emerges, and each of us lives life forwards rather than backwards. Hegel sees history as akin to the plot of some great novel, sees it, in fact, as an aesthetic object, to be contemplated and understood; whereas in fact history—and our own life—can almost be defined by the fact that it is not a book.

Kierkegaard's attacks on Hegel and on the 'aestheticism' of the society in which he lived were of course made in the name of his own particular brand of Christianity. But he felt that it was essential that he make them, if only to reveal to his readers the impossibility of his task. For how is he to convey the difference between life lived according to the religious or the ethical category and life lived according to the aesthetic category, when all he has at his command is his pen, an instrument good only for the creation of aesthetic objects? How can he bring home to each reader the uniqueness of his life and the irreversibility of his choices through the generalising medium of language and of philosophical discourse? The answer is of course that he can't, except by the roundabout way of drawing the reader's attention to the problem in the first place. That is why reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is such an uncomfortable activity, for they introduce us not to some foreign realm of experience, but to ourselves.

Kierkegaard's problems, and some of his solutions, are the problems and solutions of modernism. For even as Wagnerism swept through Europe and Nietzsche sank into his final madness, the reaction to Romantic decadence had begun. This did not take the form of a movement in the sense that, say, surrealism, was a movement, with polemical manifestos and self-appointed leaders and spokesmen; it was not even a movement of men who thought alike on such general topics as human freedom and the role of the artist in society, as Romanticism had been in its early stages. Proust and Joyce met once and did not take to each other; Schoenberg loathed Stravinsky; Eliot was more interested in Donne than in Mallarmé or Mann; Kafka ignored and was ignored by all the rest. Yet it is easy for us today to see that all these men were united by one common attitude, albeit a negative one: they all insisted on the limitations of art. More than that, they all stressed, in their art itself, that what they were creating were artifacts and not to be confused with life: that painting was first of all a series of brushstrokes on a flat canvas; music certain notes played by certain combinations of instruments; poetry the grouping of words on a page.

The Romantics had regarded art as simply a means to a transcendental end, and they therefore tended to see all art as more or less interchangeable—it didn't matter what train you caught since they all arrived at the same destination. The insistence on the part of the moderns that their work was art and not something else, their stress on the particular medium in which they were working, was not meant to be a denial of the importance of art. On the contrary, it was a reassertion of art's vital function. Art, they argued, was not a means of piercing the sensible veil of the universe, of getting at the 'unknown', as Rimbaud and others had claimed, for there was nothing beyond the world we see all around us. The whole mystery is there, in front of our eyes—only most of us are too blind or lazy to see it. What most of us tend to do in the face of the world, of ourselves, of works of art even, is to neutralise what is there in front of us by referring it to something we already know. Thus we are forever shut up inside our preconceived ideas, reacting only to that which makes no demands on us to see. As Giacometti wittily remarked:

Where do we find the greatest number of people? In front of the Sacre de Napoléon. Why do people look in particular at this painting? Because they imagine themselves to be present at the scene, participating in it. They become 'little Napoleons.' At the same time the spectacle becomes the equivalent of the reading of a novel.

In other words, it becomes an excuse for daydreaming. The modern artist, on the other hand, holds that the work of art is meaningful precisely because it reveals to us the 'otherness' of the world—it shocks us out of our natural sloth and the force of habit, and makes us see for the first time what we had looked at a hundred times but never seen. Art is not the key to the universe, as the Romantics had believed; it is merely a pair of spectacles. Valéry, echoing Proust's Elstir, points out:

In general we guess or anticipate more than we see, and the impressions that strike the eye are signs for us rather than singular presences, prior to all the patterns, the short cuts, the immediate substitutions, which a primary education has instilled in us.

Just as the thinker tries to defend himself against words and those ready-made expressions which protect people against any feeling of shock and thus make possible everyday practical activities, so the artist may, through the study of objects with a unique form [a lump of coal which is like no other, a handkerchief thrown anyhow onto a table, and so on], try to rediscover his own uniqueness.

Art, then, does not feed us information and it does not provide us with a passport to some higher realm of existence. What it does is to open our eyes by removing the film of habit which we normally carry around with us. The work of art does this by shocking us into awareness through its insistence on itself as an object in its own right, an irreducible singular presence. The cubist picture, for instance, teases the eye as we follow shape after shape on the canvas, always on the verge of understanding it, yet never quite allowed to do so. For understanding would mean fitting the picture into our preconceived world, in other words denying its uniqueness. And because we cannot step back and say: 'Ah yes, a mandolin, a glass of wine, a table…', we go on looking at the canvas and in time learn to accept its own reality instead of reducing it to our unthinking notion of what a mandolin or a glass of wine looks like. Thus Braque can say: 'The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared', and Valéry, elsewhere in the essay on Degas: 'To look means to forget the names of the things one is seeing.' Proust's whole novel, of course, can be seen as the attempt to substitute the object for the name, to render the uniqueness of existence by relentlessly destroying all the names by which we explain it to ourselves.

An art of this kind makes the spectator work. It does not, like Wagnerian opera, claim to hand him the key to salvation, or, like the 'Sacre de Napoléon', allow him simply to indulge his day-dreams. What it claims to do is to recreate within the willing listener or spectator the liberating experience of the artist himself as he makes the object. When Picasso said of his famous sculpture of the bull's head made out of the seat and handlebars of a bicycle that the whole point would be lost if the viewer, through excessive familiarity with it, were to see only a bull's head, he neatly illustrated this aspect of modern art. What is important is not the finished product, but the process. Picasso wants us to be aware of the fact that what is in front of us is not a bull's head but a man-made object. The product is not there to be contemplated for its own sake but to make the viewer re-enact the creative discovery for himself. What is important is to see the bull's head in the handlebars, and handlebars in every bull's head. It is the play of wit which turns a universe we had taken for granted into a source of infinite possibilities, and therefore wakes us up to the miraculous nature of everything that is. The object—the head/handlebars—is necessary, for wit is always the result of the transformation of what is given, never the creation of something totally new; but Picasso is not interested in bicycles or bulls as such, he does not want us to say: 'Now I understand what a bull is really like,' but, if anything: 'Now I understand that a bull is.' We must not rest with the object, but with the object-as-created-by-wit. In much the same way A la Recherche du temps perdu does not so much tell a story as create within the reader the possibility of telling the story Marcel is about to set down as the work ends. In this way me artist's acceptance of limitation, his open acknowledgment of the medium in which he is working, leads to the creation of an art that strikes more directly at the life of the reader or viewer than any art since the Middle Ages.

The modern revolution in the arts was a reaction to decadent Romanticism, but this reaction, we can now see, entailed a break with four centuries of me Western artistic tradition. Shifts in taste and in the forms of expression had of course occurred at regular intervals throughout these four centuries, but they were adjustments and alterations of emphasis within a fixed framework. Romanticism, by trying to give full and unfettered expression to the individual, burst this framework and so made it possible for the moderns to step out of me wreckage and discover that the frame only enclosed a small fraction of the universe. Or perhaps a more accurate way of describing the change would be to say that what the artists of the previous four centuries had taken for the universe was now seen to be nothing else than the universe as seen through the spectacles of Renaissance norms. It is not by chance mat the birth of the modern coincides with the discovery or rediscovery of Japanese graphics, Balinese music, African sculpture, Romanesque painting and the poetry of the troubadours. This is not simply a widening of the cultural horizons; it is the discovery of me relativity of artistic norms. Perspective and harmony, far from being a datum of experience, are suddenly seen to be as much the product of convention as the sonnet form, though, unlike the latter, they were clearly me product of certain metaphysical assumptions which began to emerge in the West in the years between 1350 and 1700.

All art, since the Renaissance, had been based on the twin concepts of expression and imitation. In some of the previous chapters I tried to suggest why the two should always go hand in hand and why they should have emerged as the primary criteria of art at a time when medieval notions of analogy were no longer acceptable. The Romantics, by stressing expression at the expense of imitation, helped to bring the hidden assumptions of both out into the open. Baudelaire, writing about the 'Salon' of 1846, quotes at some length from Hoffmann's Kreisleriana. The passage is central not only to Baudelaire's own aesthetic, but to that of Romanticism in general:

It is not only in dreams, or in that mild delirium which precedes sleep, but it is even awakened when I hear music—that perception of an analogy and an intimate connexion between colours, sounds and perfumes. It seems to me that all these things were created by one and the same ray of light, and that their combination must result in a wonderful concert of harmony. The smell of red and brown marigolds above all produces a magical effect on my being. It makes me fall into a deep reverie, in which I seem to hear the solemn, deep tones of the oboe in the distance.

The implicit belief behind this passage is mat individual sights, sounds, smells and tastes touch each one of us in the same way and are themselves interchangeable. There is an analogy here, but it is not between two sets of events, two orders of reality, but between the different senses. And this correspondence can find an echo in each one of us because the senses speak a natural language. The poet has simply to reach down into himself and express what he feels and it will immediately enter the soul of the reader. We have seen how this mistaken view of the poetic process led to the breakdown of art into a series of utterances so private that they no longer made sense, or turned into the banal expression not of vision but of cliché. This failure made it clear to the moderns that art is not the expression of inner feeling but the creation of a structure that will allow us to understand what it means to perceive, and will thus, in a sense, give us back the world. Already at the start of the Romantic movement, as though to spite the historian of ideas with his clear notions of historical change and development, Lichtenberg had written: 'To see something new we must make something new.' And this explains the insistence on the part of the moderns on the impersonality of the poet, that distinction between the man and the artist which forms the basis of the work of Proust, Valéry, Rilke and Eliot. For the artist, qua man, is no different from other men; the only difference lies in the fact that he is a craftsman, a man who makes objects which will refract reality in a way the tired eyes of habit never do. Thus St. Beuve's biographical method is not only useless as a critical tool, but misleading, since the artist has, if anything, a less interesting life than other men, since so much of it is given up to the making of artifacts. Robbe-Grillet expresses the extreme position with wit and elegance: 'The artist is a man with nothing to say.'

The Romantic artist claimed in some way to be a magician. Words and sounds, he implied, hid within themselves certain magical properties over which he alone had power. Through this power he could confer salvation on the rest of mankind; the reader or listener (I am thinking of Rimbaud and Wagner, different though they are in so many respects) had simply to submit to the words or sounds in order to shed the pains and frustrations of his daily life and to emerge into a free world where there was no conflict between desire and fulfilment, imagination and reality. The consequences of this view were quickly seen by Nietzsche, and the modern reaction to this notion of art as magic was to stress the idea of art as game. The work of art, said the moderns, does not offer permanent salvation to anyone. Its function is to increase the reader's powers of imagination, to make him see the world again cleansed of its stiff and stubborn man-locked set. This requires active participation rather than passive submission, and a willingness to play according to the rules laid down by the artist. At the same time the modern rediscovery of the hieratic and stylised arts of other periods went hand in hand with the rehabilitation of forms of art which had not been considered serious enough to form part of the mainstream of post-Renaissance art in Europe: the puppet play, the shadow-play, children's games, street games and ballads were all used by Jarry, Stravinsky, Picasso and Eliot, and all helped them to forge their own individual styles. In these archaic and popular forms of art there is no pretence at illusion. Art is a game and its creation involves making something that will be of pleasure to others.

This is a very different view of art from that held by the Romantics. But it is not perhaps all that far removed from art as it was known from the time of Homer down to the Renaissance. The acceptance by artist and audience of the rules of genre and rhetoric shows mat there was always an implicit awareness of the fact that for art to be true it must not pretend to be other than it is, a made thing, an object put together according to the rules of tradition and convention in order to satisfy. It is in fact only with the painting and the fiction which emerged from the Renaissance revolution in thought that the extraordinary belief grew up that art could do without rules altogether, that it could simply imitate external reality and tell the whole truth starting not from axioms but from observable facts.

But we have seen that the imitation of the external world, however detailed, does not really answer the questions: Why this bit of the world rather than that? Why should the artist paint this subject, include this detail, why should the novelist tell this story, recount this incident? Is it enough to say: Because he feels like it? Will he feel like it tomorrow? If there is no answer to these questions then the freedom of the artist to do what he likes is a meaningless freedom. The hero of Kafka's last novel, standing in the snow outside the inn, recognises the force of this paradox only too well:

It seemed to K. as if at last those people had broken off all relations with him, and as if now in reality he were freer than he had ever been, and at liberty to wait here in this place usually forbidden to him as long as he desired, and had won a freedom such as hardly anybody else had ever succeeded in winning, and as if nobody would dare to touch him or drive him away, or even speak to him; but—this conviction was at least equally strong—as if at the same time there was nothing more senseless, nothing more hopeless, than this freedom, this waiting, this inviolability.

The problem had already haunted the Romantics and we find it everywhere in their poetry. But so long as they held to an expressive theory of art they could never resolve it. We see them trying to blur the outlines of their fictions, their music, their painting, until the artifact almost merges with the surrounding world—but of course it never does completely or it would cease to be an artifact, and until it does so they are bound to remain unsatisfied. In music they try to slow down the forward thrust of their art so that it ceases to unfold in time according to the premises laid down at the start and spreads instead like a sluggish river in marshy country. This is particularly evident in the work of Bruckner and Mahler, but again, it is not till the entire nature of the medium is reconsidered that they can escape the inner contradictions of their art. Schönberg undertakes such a reconsideration, introducing a new, non-linear principle of composition to replace the subjective and time-bound principles of the sonata form, and in Webern we find the tradition reaching its logical conclusion, since in a three-minute work he can present us with the means of generating a hundred Mahler symphonies (just as a five-page work by Borges is capable of generating a hundred three-decker novels). In painting the decisive break comes with Cézanne, and his phrase 'Je pars neutre' is the key to this aspect of modernism. What he means by this is that in his painting he wishes to eliminate the personal slant in the choice of both subject-matter and treatment, and to seek instead to discover the general laws of light and space present in the scene before him—as in every other. Thus it is not so much that the artist refines himself out of existence as that he tries to establish the laws of perception and of the process of art itself. In a similar way Wittgenstein was to argue that he wished to develop not a new area of philosophical inquiry, but an investigation of the nature of that inquiry. This has led to the charge that his work is concerned with trivialities, since it is not concerned with 'life', a charge familiar enough to the ears of modern artists who are accused of wilfully shutting their eyes to the world by writing books on the writing of books and painting pictures whose subject-matter is the painting of pictures. Proust, whose design is similar to Cézanne's, comes back to this point again and again in Le Temps Retrouvé: he is not interested in imitating a flat reality, in writing one more book which tells one more story; what he wants to do is to draw out the laws inherent in love, in speech, in perception, in art. And, thinking perhaps of a Cézanne, and comparing it to one of those society portraits so popular at the time, he writes:

If, in the realm of painting, one portrait makes manifest certain truths concerning volume, light, movement, does that mean that it is necessarily inferior to another completely different portrait of the same person, in which a thousand details omitted in the first are minutely transcribed, from which second portrait one would conclude that the model was ravishingly beautiful while from the first one would have thought him or her ugly, a fact which may be of documentary, even of historical importance, but is not necessarily an artistic truth?

It might be thought that such an art, an art of total potentiality, of laws rather than subject-matter, would result in a dry abstraction. Many modern works certainly display this characteristic, though different people would have different works in mind as they made that statement. There is of course no legislation for art or for criticism, and membership of a school, whether it be Imagist or Nouveau Roman, does not confer automatic value. We are not really concerned with the countless imitations of the great modern masters, imitations no better or worse than those of the great classics. What is important is that such an art need be neither solemn nor cold. On the contrary, there has never been an art more joyous, or one that brings joy back to our response to older art, than that of Stravinsky, Picasso and Eliot. For the interest of these artists in the tradition is of course bound up with their search for laws rather than new subject-matter. Stravinsky has called Pulcinella 'the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course—the first of many love affairs in that direction—but it was a look in the mirror, too.' Such a love affair was Picasso's with Velasquez when, by producing dozens of imitations of 'Las Meninas', he made us see that picture anew by revealing the necessity of its particular being. Had 'Las Meninas' not been reworked by him we would have taken it for granted and thus in a sense failed to see it. By showing us all the things it might have been Picasso as it were freed it from the realm of the 'given' and revealed to us how all its elements were both chosen and necessary. And in a precisely similar way the greatest modern art, concentrating as it does on laws rather than on subject-matter, paradoxically gives us back the world we had lost through force of habit. Picasso, in conversation with his friend the photographer George Brassai, sums up the spirit of modernism as I have tried to sketch it in this chapter:

I always aim at the resemblance. An artist should observe nature but never confuse it with painting. It is only translatable into painting by signs But such signs are not invented. To arrive at the sign you have to concentrate hard on the resemblance. To me surreality is nothing and never has been anything but this profound resemblance, something deeper than the forms and colours in which objects present themselves.

J. Edward Chamberlain

SOURCE: "From High Decadence to High Modernism," in Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 4, Winter, 1980, pp. 591-610.

[In the following essay, Chamberlain links Modernism to the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement.]

"Sympathy with suffering," suggested Oscar Wilde, "is the joy of one leper meeting another leper on the road." Misery likes company; but as well as company decadence needs an audience. Indeed, the one thing which the celebrated decadents of the nineteenth century needed more than their absinthe, their indolence or their sometimes picturesque debauchery was a large middle class to be offended, a phalanx of bourgeois outrage. "To bewilder the middle class" might be, as Arthur Symons suggested, itself a thinly disguised middle-class occupation; but it was, as well, an appealing obligation for those who thrived on the deliciously self-righteous pleasures it afforded.

Wilde, more than anyone of his age, advertised the conspicuous consumption of decadent pleasures. He did not walk down a country lane with a lily in his hand, but down Picadilly, where he would be seen; and he wore his notorious green carnations in the buttonholes of his morning coat or his evening jacket, not of his dressing gown—unless, of course, he might be wearing a dressing gown to the theater. He set as one of his early ambitions to live up to the beauty of his blue and white china, but he certainly intended to do so in public. In more general terms, for which Wilde also provided a glossary, the virtues of clarity and openness were transformed by decadent instincts into the habits of confession and display.

Of course, decadence meant other things than floral decoration and fine porcelain. It meant a precious over-refinement in all things, an obsessive concentration on apparently useless detail, a preferring of the hot-house to the open air; it meant a cavalier refusal to take the broad and balanced view, and a corresponding susceptibility to a dog's breakfast of neuroses; it meant a nervous fascination with the forms of decay, a morbid interest in disease and death, a quixotic celebration of the unnatural and the artificial, a deliberate dalliance with the perverse. But most of all, decadence meant a flaunting of the conditions under which art and life become confused. Thus, ease or leisure, the otium that Virgil associated with the achievement of art, is transformed into the companion of life—into easeful death, idle tears, or foolish indolence, Baudelaire's "luxe, calme et volupté." Or the artistic instinct to embellish and decorate is transposed into an emphasis on style instead of substance, a cherishing of the human importance of display. The tactful notion that what is on the surface is not necessarily superficial was thereby taken to its extreme, and what is on the surface accepted as perhaps the only thing which is profound, or at the very least permanent. "One should so live that one becomes a form of fiction," Wilde advised. "To be a fact is to be a failure." To succeed in the way he hoped, it was necessary to extend the logic, and to celebrate the more general conditions under which the imagination competes with reality, or fancy with fact; the conditions under which form is detached from its function, and ethics dissociated from the appreciation of art. Writing of Thomas Chatterton, Wilde noted that "he did not have the moral conscience which is truth to fact [he was of course a forger, among other things] but had the artistic conscience which is truth to beauty." And Wilde would not let that paradox rest, insisting elsewhere that even in life "being natural is simply a pose, and one of the most irritating poses I know."

One of Wilde's provoking critical remarks, that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, gives witty form to this pattern of confusions.

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our street, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art… 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. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.

The critical argument that Wilde is making, that all perception is informed by the imagination—that the perceiver intends the perceived—this needs the exaggerated flourish that he provides if it is to hit its mark. For its aim is not exactly logical assent. Though he is declaring that nature imitates art, Wilde is not advising us to look to the pages of the newest journal of the arts for the last words on Arctic cold fronts or atmospheric inversions. Nor is he saying, as a scientist such as Darwin essentially did, that phenomena such as natural selection imitate, or at least are recognizable only following our familiarity with, such ingenious artifice as that practised by the selective domestic breeder. Instead, Wilde is after a conspiratorial complicity, a sense of brotherly blasphemy. We need to feel slightly wicked as we smile at Wilde's outrageous statement; for which feeling of course we need a sense of its outrageousness as well as of its truth. Wilde is much more anxious that we be initiated into a complex and subversive understanding than that we be convinced. We must know what it is to be silly before we can know what it is that we know. We must laugh with, or more precisely be serious with, Aubrey Beardsley, explaining that he caught a cold because he went out that morning and left the tassel off his cane. "One should spend one's days in saying what is incredible," Wilde advised, adding the less comfortable advice that we spend the evening doing the improbable.

But we pay the price for such silliness, for soon other people stop taking us seriously. So if we want to be taken seriously, we need to do more than amuse or bewilder, we need to give offence, to turn the screw, as it were, and be not only foolish but outrageous, and not only outrageous but perverse. Folly and vice are, the good people tell us, phases of a spiritual disease, something like (the same people tell us) marijuana and cocaine. Therefore, if we are concerned about the life of the spirit, as Wilde most certainly was; and if we are told that the self-satisfied mediocrity and pernicious puritanism that we see around us are manifestations of health, then we might well choose disease as the only salvation for our spirit, and follow its increasingly pathological or hysterical phases. Wilde's eccentric version of this logic was to assert that not goodness but sin is the essential element of progress.

One of the standard complaints about the literature and art of Wilde's generation was that it was "unhealthy," and the crowd feared that the disease might be contagious. As Dionysus moved from the country to the town, this was certainly a reasonable concern; and just as certainly, it was the hope of the afflicted. For if, like Wilde, we are instinctive evangelists, as so many in the nineteenth century seemed to be, then we want converts; and so we want our outrageouseness to be taken seriously, we want the contagion to spread. There is nothing quite like adversity to strengthen our resolve to hold to our principles, which are by now outrageous only to the uninitiated, diseased only to those who have not succumbed. Panic afflicts only those who have not already embraced the goat god. Furthermore, a combination of ignorance and belligerence on the part of the uninitiated or the disdainful makes us feel positively chosen to take a stand. "The capacity of finding temptations is the test of the culture of one's nation," Wilde proposed. "The capacity of yielding to temptation is the test of the strength of one's character." So the continuum from the foolish to the vicious offered a natural recourse to those who felt called to match complacency with effrontery, propriety with abandon, realism with artifice—especially if they could show that reality was most truly apprehended by the imagination, that an ennobling decorum could only be achieved by setting aside inhibitions, and that a bold confrontation with the mundane held more promise than a bland acceptance of it. Decadence was the obligation of the independent-minded, the open-hearted and the free-spirited; and since, as Wilde insisted, it is much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it—anybody can make history; it takes a great man to write it, he argued—most of Wilde's contemporaries chose the hard way, and talked and talked and talked about it. And they all, being quite genuinely silly, were confident that they knew what they were talking about. Some, such as Wilde, also knew that the game was anything but trivial. "Everything is a poison," he wrote. "But there are two kinds of poisons. There are the poisons that kill, and the poisons that keep alive. The last are the more terrible."

The decadence of the last decades of the nineteenth century clarified the conditions, and determined the limits, of the modernism of the first few decades of the twentieth. There was a sense of refined complicity about the literature and art of the period, a sense that they knew, or that they knew, what was going on; and that the conspiratorial nod, the furtive understanding, was all that was needed to carry the day. For the decadent artists, it was the secrecy of the secret that was crucial, the unexpressed and inexpressible agreement that it all mattered. They were like connoisseurs, assuming a shared sense that the wine cork needs to be sniffed. And they were up against those who liked to drink Cold Duck. With this connoisseurship went a certain egotistical detachment, and a corresponding inability to sympathize with different conditions. Dealings with others tended to be either conspiratorial or coercive; dealings with oneself tended to be relentlessly and paralyzingly candid. The possibilities of either engagement or transcendence became negligible, replaced by the high probability of "sterile introspection, infinite delay."

Nowhere was the issue joined more directly than in aesthetic matters. From the middle of the century, the idea had been about that art was an autonomous activity, independent of normal categories of experience (as well as of moral censure), and appealing to our aesthetic sense or sense of beauty alone. Théophile Gautier, who first elaborated this notion of art for art's sake, argued the case in his Preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), itself variously called "the Bible of the decadence" (because of the perverse sexual confusions upon which its story depends) and "the holy writ of beauty" (because, following an Aristotelian logic, it inspired the soul (in Swinburne's words) to "burn as an altar-fire/To the unknown God of unachieved desire"). That this desire was profane rather than sacred merely added to its exquisite charm.

Gautier insisted that "there is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet." The next step might be to insist that anything even as useful (and as mundane) as a water closet can by the imagination be rendered useless, and be transformed into a work of art. This step was taken by Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 submitted a urinal (entitled "Fountain") to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York.

By the time Duchamp submitted his urinal, both painting and poetry had accepted the radical redefinition of the idea of beauty which had begun almost a century earlier. Cubism in its disintegrated manner eliminated the traditional aesthetic values attached to the subject matter of painting, and along with abstract art defined a new attitude to beauty which was not easily reconciled with either classical or romantic verities. In poetry, Ford Madox Ford was affirming that poetry must be as well written as prose, must be also objective, clear, factual, contemporaneous. On another tack, Wallace Stevens was writing poems preferring crows "anointing the statues with their dirt" to the more conventional (and incidentally Yeatsian) swans. Hart Crane was talking about "making a grail of laughter of an empty ash can," while T. S. Eliot rejected the heroic prettiness of some of his contemporaries for a description of twilight as a patient etherized upon a table. The notion of beauty, obviously, had undergone more than a sea change, and this change had been part and parcel of the decadent ambition to confront propriety on its own ground. The trouble was that, whereas in former times it could be assumed that only the few might appreciate true beauty, English and European romanticism (and American transcendentalism) created the illusion in many minds that theirs, too, was an appreciation capable of apprehending the beautiful. Indeed, the apostles of beauty (of which Wilde for a time was chief) who took up the Pre-Raphaelite banner in the 1870s and 1880s operated from this assumption, but it was never a very comfortable campaign. Like most apostles, they soon concentrated on who to keep out of their circle, rather than how to get in. Beauty was becoming popular, "decreed in the marketplace" (as Ezra Pound put it), and this clearly would not do. So the increasingly decadent custodians of the central beauty bank simply withdrew some of the supply, to combat such tedious inflation. Decadence, in ways, became simply the signature of a new elite. To pick up our earlier figure, as soon as everyone claimed to be sick, then one needed to redefine disease. Even the ostentatiously unorthodox beauty which found a form in the grotesque had become much too comfortably domestic to be accepted by the decadent camp, in part because of Ruskin's enthusiastic and moralistic celebration of the savage and the grotesque as central to the honest appeal of Gothic architecture, the embodiment of the true north strong and free.

Two things happened. First of all, beauty (and truth, its counterpart) became individual and relative, so that Wilde could say that "a truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it," and Walter Pater could emphasize that "in aesthetic criticism the first step toward seeing the object as it really is [which is what Matthew Arnold had defined as the function of criticism] is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly"; and he also spoke of how "every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." Second, the conventionally beautiful or even the ruggedly grotesque were rejected in favor not just of the idiosyncratic but of the dangerously fantastic and the sinister grotesque, which were the most obvious sources of wonder in an age that had been raised on Gothic melodrama and Byronic romance, and in which the highest praise was of the sort that Victor Hugo had for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, that its author had "invented a new shudder."

Those who had a fondness for the old ways were not amused. Richard LeGallienne, a sometime friend, wrote of Wilde that "his face grew strangely sweet—As when a toad smiles. He dreamed of a new sin." Novelty as an instrument of revolt; sin as an element of progress. It was all nicely circular. Decadence, in short, appropriated the Johnsonian virtue of invention in art, often under the perennially dubious guise of novelty, but nonetheless with an emphasis on the demonstration of individuality that would become the modern hallmark of authenticity; as when F. R. Leavis took for one of the new bearings of English poetry "the need [for the poet] to communicate something of his own"—a new truth incorporated in a new beauty. "Make it new," announced Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams to each other. Or in decadent terms, seek "new perfumes, larger flowers, untried pleasures" (in words from Gustave Flaubert's La tentation de Saint Antoine [1874], words which were intensely admired by Des Esseintes, the hero of J.-K. Huysmans' novel A Rebours [1884], the model for the book which "poisoned" the soul of Wilde's Dorian Gray).

The difficulty of achieving this new and decadent kind of beauty in art was no greater than achieving beauty in art had ever been, and just as much subject to superficiality, but it was to a much more obviously initiated group that such art appealed. Part of the pleasure in being thrilled by what Yeats referred to as the "visionary beauty" of Beardsley's hauntingly grotesque drawing of "Salome with the Head of John the Baptist" was that one knew there was something dangerous about its compelling forms, its insinuations of sinister desire, and that most who saw it would be merely repulsed by the perversity of the content as well as the form. Beardsley commented to Yeats that such "beauty is the most difficult of things"; those who admired such beauty would recognize its rare charms, and feel as fortunate to be party to the rarity as to the charm. Ezra Pound gave an account of the process of realizing one's impression of a Beardsley grotesque, in one of his later Cantos (LXXX):

La beauté, "Beauty is difficult, Yeats" said Aubrey Beardsley

when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly

hence no more B-J in his product

So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult

"I am the torch" wrote Arthur "she saith"

"Arthur" was Arthur Symons, whose poem "Modern Beauty" began: "I am the torch, she saith, and what to me/If the moth die of me?" This is clearly a different beauty from "that fair lamp from whose celestial ray/That light proceeds which kindleth lover's fire," the beauty of which Edmund Spenser wrote and to which Ruskin referred in his central discussion of beauty in Modern Painters.

Beauty is difficult, certainly; but the beauty which appealed to the decadent artists is also dangerous, with its difficulty and its danger together constituting much of its appeal. It is a beauty, as Wallace Stevens insisted in one of his early poems ("Sunday Morning"), whose mother is death; and it may well need its own aesthetic, an "esthétique du mal" for the beautiful flowers of evil. Edgar Allan Poe had made a strong argument, which especially appealed to the French writers who were at the center of the nineteenth-century interest in symbolism, that beauty is the sole province of poetry, and that its most intense manifestation is through sorrow and melancholy. Furthermore, in Poe's view, such a melancholic tone is most exquisite when heightened by what he called "the human thirst of self-torture," by which he meant the delicious anguish of despair, of asking the raven more and more desperate questions about when one's beloved will return, questions to which one knows that the answer will always be "nevermore."

The paradoxical conjunction of beauty and despair, of joy and sorrow, is one which poetry has always employed, and it became a particular darling of the romantic poets. But the artists of the nineteenth century that were called decadent intensified this juxtaposition to a dangerous pitch, to the point that it became unclear whether the pleasure that one felt was in the beauty evoked or in the deliberate and often suicidal despair that accompanied its evocation. This confusion was compounded by the tendency to separate what was said or represented from the way in which it was presented, so that language approached incantation, and forms became abstract or decorative—in either case, relatively safe from the mediation of the moralist or the realist. As a result, the effect of the aesthetic forms—the language and its rhythms, in this case—was independent of and uncompromised (which in many cases could mean uncomforted) by a rational perspective. This attracted a generation that was becoming more and more suspicious of the tendency of language to distort, to establish irrelevant structures of meaning or intention. It was increasingly suspected that the only defence against such a tendency was to detach language from its syntactical forms and the compromised structures of meaning to which it refers, and to focus more upon its pure sounds, and upon the capacity of the carefully selected and detached word or phrase or image alone to capture the momentary sensation, the symbolic meaning. The plastic arts moved in a similar direction, towards abstraction. So when Mallarmé wrote in the early 1880s a sonnet on "The Tomb of Edgar Poe," he referred to Poe's attempt "donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu"—to give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe. Most of us are more familiar with this phrase from Eliot's remark in "Little Gidding" that "since our concern was speech… speech impelled us/To purify the dialect of the tribe."

Here, we touch once again on one of the central paradoxes linking decadence and modernism. Both, in ways that are congruent, were informed by an almost puritan zeal to maintain standards appropriate to what were received as the sacred values of art, and to protect these values against compromise. Just as one defense against large institutionalized religion was to break into small, decentralized groups of fellow worshippers, so a defence against the futile institutionalizing of language and other forms of communication was to break them down into their smaller constituent elements—images, words, sounds, and so forth. Decorative and other similarly abstract forms of art were in a way a defence of this sort against the perversions of representative art; just as symbolism, with its isolation of the elements of a numinous reality, was (in Arthur Symons' view) a defence against materialism. Art for art's sake was in some respects therefore not so much a preciously decadent affectation, and an indication of the loss of a sense of probity and responsibility by the artists who advocated it, as it was an element of the constant negotiation that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between the prerogatives of the poem or painting and those of its ostensible subject. Artists who worked on behalf of one side or the other were reviled as advocating a lively decadence or a deadly realism, and both were told by the custodians of the via media (which was to say, of the middle-class culture) to "drive their pigs to some other market."

All of this, in its indication of the intentions and expectations associated with uses of language in particular, has a surprisingly modern tone to it, as anthropologists of a certain bent argue that the structures of language underlie cultural and other social arrangements. On a more mundane level, writers—the most apparent users and abusers of language—are often identified as responsible for the maintaining of certain civilized values. One needs only attend to the ubiquitous and perennial rage displayed in letters to the editors of newspapers about shoddy uses of language, usually associated with a slipping of the standards that made the Empire, or whatever, what it was and could be again, if only people could learn not to split their infinitives.

And so we are back to the origins of decadence in the nineteenth century, to what Gautier referred to as the style of decadence, which is an

ingenious complicated style, full of shades and of research, constantly pushing back the boundaries of speech, borrowing from all the technical vocabularies, taking colour 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 confidence of neurosis, the dying confessions of passion grown depraved, and the strange hallucinations of the obsession which is turning to madness. The style of decadence is the ultimate utterance of the Word.

It was the sense of disintegration which most of all fascinated the stylists, as they employed analogies from science. (In this following case, the passage is from an essay by Havelock Ellis, in which he quotes the French critic Paul Bourget.)

If the energy of the cells becomes independent, the lesser organisms will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence of the whole… A similar law governs the development and decadence of that other organism we call language. A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word.

In a broader perspective, Roland Barthes defined (in Writing Degree Zero) "modern poetry" (written after the revolutionary year of 1848) as

distinguished from classical poetry and from any type of prose [in that it] destroys the spontaneously functional nature of language, and leaves standing only its lexical basis. It retains only the outward shape of relationships, their music, but not their reality. The Word shines forth above a line of relationships emptied of their content, grammar is bereft of its purpose, it becomes prosody and is no longer anything but an inflexion which lasts only to present the Word.

The decadent style, then, apparently like the modern style, is one in which the classical subordination of the individual parts to the unity and harmony of the whole is broken, in favor of a celebration of the constituent parts, an obsession with the part that in one sense may embody the whole and yet in another remain part of it—an obsession, that is to say, with the symbol. Those who understood such matters, those who were part of the conspiracy, if you wish, felt themselves to be part of a cabal. Thus, the separation of text from context becomes a special mission, which joins together the proponents of collage and cubism, of the new modern criticism, and of the gem-like flame which Pater argued that the momentary experience might afford. And when Symons associated the style of Mallarmé with "the kind of deprivation undergone by the Latin language in its decadence," and suggested that this deprivation was necessary to the kind of "exact noting of sensation" to which Mallarmé and his contemporaries aspired, he was also inviting Mallarmé's readers to fancy themselves ripe with the indulgence of Rome in its decline, in which any act is freed of its association with a motive, and instead attaches itself to an effect.

The disunity, the separateness, the disintegration, that seemed to define decadence both fascinated and bothered the artists who moved from decadence to modernism, and few escaped the ambivalence. Ezra Pound's pitiful (and representative) lament in the (late) Canto CXVI

I have brought the great ball of crystal;
who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere

has to be set in the context of a poetic career dedicated to splendidly rhyming patterns of incoherence. In the same way, Eliot's poetic celebration of a desperate state of mind which "can connect nothing with nothing" is the expression of a sensibility which delighted in shoring up the fragmentary with a very ambivalent expression of disdain.

There is a curious element in all of this, which it is easy to miss. From scientific analogies which were provided in the nineteenth century, there developed a recognition of some axioms in the study of biological (and by extension social and cultural) phenomena derived from direct observation: specifically, the axioms that there are "higher" and "lower" species, that the progression from lower to higher corresponds to a progression from less to more complex, and that there is an increase of complexity in the development of the heterogeneous from the homogeneous. That is, increased complexity constituted progress or development, the way forward. No one in the nineteenth century needed to be told that the alternative direction to forward was backward. So when Pater criticized Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, he did so on these terms: "To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr Wilde's heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development." Many forms of decadent behavior, in particular, were subjected to this type of analysis. Certain kinds of insanity were commonly understood to be the product of arrested development, as were various forms of sexual deviance and criminal behavior. And when Freud subtitled Totem and Taboo (1913) "some points of agreement between the mental life of savages and neurotics," he was specifically applying the theory of developmental arrests to support his theory of neuroses.

This leads to one of the most unsettling paradoxes associated with decadence, the notion mat it is a mark botti of progress and of decline, and can be taken to justify both optimism and pessimism. Wilde's remarks about sin being an element of progress were specifically intended to focus this paradox with a typically decadent flourish. The pessimistic line was straightforward enough, drawn by such encouraging figures as Schopenhauer and Max Nordau; the optimism, however, had two aspects. One view, which was really a kind of latter-day romanticism, perceived in the perversity of much decadent art an indication of the ungovernable (and thereby exhilarating) character of man's spirit. The other (and eventually more common) view was apocalyptic, and followed anything similar to Carlyle's dictum (from Past and Present [1843]) that "the eternal lights shine out again, as soon as it is dark enough." Yeats celebrated this most dramatically, but it had some specific origins in the nineteenth century, and in a broad tradition of western millennial speculation. And one cannot but think, for example, that anyone who listened to Colonel Maud'huy in France in 1912, addressing his assembled regiment (he later became commander of the Tenth Army in Artois during the Great War), must have expected or hoped that the limit of the intensely decadent inane had finally been reached, and that such obsession with form and style might best lead to some apocalyptic transformation of the ideas of utility and beauty: "Many men salute correctly, very rare are those who salute beautifully; those latter are necessarily the ones who have achieved complete suppleness and received a thorough physical and moral instruction; they are the elite. One could say that the salute is the hall-mark of education."

Ambivalence, then, was central to decadence. Wilde, in particular, celebrated the unnervingly ambiguous character of decadence, a character which abounds in modernism, as (for example) we accept the expression and embodiment of violence in art with an uneasy sense that our response is therapeutically vicarious and defensively detached at the same time—that is, that we both enjoy and abhor the violence, that it gives us both pain and pleasure. Writing of the style of the "poisonous book" that Dorian Gray read, for which the prototype was A Rebours, Wilde noted its

curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew whether one was reading the spiritual ecstacies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.

When Oscar Wilde went to trial in 1895, he defended himself from the accusations of homosexual debauchery that were made against him by referring to "the Love that dare not speak its name"—a love which, he reflected, the mediocre bourgeois mind of his contemporaries would be quite unable to understand. Punch magazine quickly picked up the phrase, and remarked that apparently the art which Wilde championed also "has a mission that may not be named/With scarlet sins to ennervate the age." As so often, Punch had an unerring instinct. Wilde and his cohorts—and here I do not refer to Wilde's lovers but to the literary and artistic circle of which he was part—acted in an almost comically conspiratorial manner, deploying a flurry of passwords, catch phrases and esoteric references which would make Tom Sawyer dizzy, and acting as though they belonged to subversive urban guerrilla cells, separate in their organization but mysteriously united in a high-minded purpose too pure and ideal (and too easily distorted) to set down in words. They had a sacred mission, they had their "scarlet sins," and they posed as an ennervated and ennervating lot, determined in their ennervation to subvert the virtues of industry and thrift which the age espoused, and to keep art away from utilitarian and moral ambitions.

The arts have often relied upon this sort of mystery and intrigue in a functional way, of course. The gothic tradition in the novel depended upon secret knowledge which was slowly and nervously disclosed; while one of the ancient sources of poetry is the riddle, and the riddling character of metaphor provides one of its central charms. The oracular inheritance of the poet is one to which poetry often refers with pride, especially when misunderstood (and it even invites misunderstanding in order to refer to this inheritance); and the image of the riddling Sphinx confirms this kind of fascination in its wide and consistent appeal in western art and literature. When Wilde returned from his tour of America in 1883, he went to Paris to do some writing. He was always very ambitious, and had obviously decided that the volume of poems he published a couple of years earlier, though it gave him some additional notoriety, had not made his literary mark. (He may have felt, however, that despite its derivative and imitative character, the volume marked him as a "bad influence"—just the sort of mark he might wish to embellish. The publication of Poems in 1881 precipitated at least one serious dispute of a personal nature, with Rev R. H. W. Miles, the father of Frank Miles, with whom Oscar had been living since his arrival in London from Oxford in 1879. Wilde and Rev Miles, who was a thoughtful and not especially narrow-minded man, had been on very good and familiar terms. Miles now insisted that Wilde should stay away from his son.) In any case, Wilde now set himself to write a play (The Duchess of Padua) because plays were the thing to get one's name in the lights; and he determined to write a poem of note. Poe's The Raven had been a staggering success, of which Wilde had been made particularly aware on his tour, and he decided to try a longish poem of a similar sort, which he called The Sphinx, and which would also play on the fascination with the mysteries of Egypt that such writers as Flaubert had developed. Though it was not published until a decade later, with as frontispiece the figure of Melancholy, and illustrated and designed by Charles Ricketts, it is a model of decadent motifs for the age, emphasizing pleasure in pain, beauty in the grotesque, the sinister in the sensuous, the erotic in the religious. Several reviewers said that it embodied the "new humour," a grim conjunction of incompatibles. One correspondent wrote to Wilde from Turkey asking what the new humor was, that he had not heard of it in Smyrna, from the regions of which it presumably derived some-thing of its inspiration.

The juxtapositions are deliberately perverse—the Christ child and the boy Antinous, darling of the Emperor Hadrian, for example—and the images are nightmarish, or as one wag remarked, positively asphynxiating. Finally, the poem relied upon a sense of the universal immediacy of arcane mysteries and sacred truths, which might in their startling and ineffable power replace the tatty methodistical conventions to which the middle class seemed bound. This appeal was carried on into the twentieth century by Yeats, with apocalyptic images of sphinxes slouching towards Bethlehem, or gyroscopic visions of human destiny; by Pound, with his fascination with eastern religion and Renaissance power and his compulsion to codify that fascination into his own kind of oriental ideogram; by Eliot, chanting "da, daya, dayadvham" and "shantih, shantih, shantih" at the end of a poem so incomprehensible in many of its details as to force our assent to the chant even if, as is almost certain on first reading, we have no idea what is going on, and at best can view the poem as (in Eliot's own words) "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." The words have been freed from their meanings, we have been freed from our petty expectations (of propriety, perhaps, or coherence, or meanings in words), and the art has been freed from its limitations. It takes a special knowledge to know this; not a knowledge of anything exactly, but a knowledge of the ways in which we must suspend our ignorant curiosity, detach ourselves from conventional notions of morality, utility, meaning, and wallow in wise unknowing, in graceful irrationality—a knowledge of the questions not to ask.

This is the signature both of modern art and of the kind of decadence for which Wilde at his best provided a focus. Art (and the life which imitates it) thereby becomes something illicit, something whispered in secret, something only the initiate understands—though its for-bidden character must for greater effect be announced from the rooftops. Wilde's importance is in part because he performed that office in a spectacular way during his trial and conviction. His is, if you will, the version from life of bringing John the Baptist's head out on a platter in a work of art. Beheading in private is butchery; in public, it becomes ritual, however decadent or perverse. The initiates to this kind of ritual are those in whom the aesthetic temperament is alive, and who recognize that art appeals to that temperament alone—not to the rational, moral or utilitarian instinct in us. Wilde used to emphasize that all art has its rites of initiation; tragedy, for example, has the Aristotelian process of catharsis, by which we are purged of our emotions of pity and terror, and consequently (and very oddly) can enjoy watching Othello smother Desdemona with a pillow. Decadent art went to the limit on this, and created conditions in which we might enjoy images of the most harrowing and depraved of human experiences. In going to this limit, it deliberately tested the character and conditions of aesthetic appeal—tested, furthermore, the basis of art, and its relationship to life, which is why the practices of the decadent artists so appealed to artists of the twentieth century.

It was much more than the fact that the decadent novelties of one age became the revolutionary traditions of the next. There was something about the sense of forbidden pleasure or illicit charm, something about shared secrets and inexpressible understandings, something about a siege mentality or a doomsday state of mind—something in all of these things which were part of the decadent spirit—that art found to its liking. Certainly, there was always the deliberate secrecy which paradox flaunted, or the conspiratorial energies of apolcalyptic vision, to feed the perennial appetite for that which is either hidden away or revealed only to a few, through the agency of the kind of "economy" which John Henry Newman had earlier defended with such success. And science had its intrigues, as Freud was just beginning to titillate the fancy with his distinctions between the manifest and the latent content of dreams.

Most pervasive of all, perhaps, was the shared and profoundly affecting secret that there was sorrow and sadness at the heart of life, and that we are at best (which is to say, at our most entertaining) "the zanies of sorrow, clowns whose hearts are broken," as Wilde said from his prison cell. It was little wonder that the mask of Pierrot was adopted by so many, with his sobbing quite audible behind his clowning. And nothing less than a deep sense of imaginative complicity could account for the extraordinary popularity and influence among late nineteenth-century writers and artists and musicians of such pantomimic charades as the "Pierrot assassin de sa femme" (1881) of Paul Margueritte, Mallarmé's nephew, in which a "subtle neurotic, cruel and ingenuous Pierrot, uniting in himself all contrasts, a veritable psychical Proteus" makes his wife die from laughing by tickling the soles of her feet.

Religion usually claims something of a corner on the trade in secrets, as well as on the bizarre, and in nineteenth-century England Roman Catholicism on the one hand and various occult movements on the other provided the most stodgy as well as the most discriminating with an arcane feast from which some choice yet awful truth, heretofore hidden from view, might be selected. But religion had no more monopoly on the truths which art was now revealing than it did on those of science. Wilde himself, in company with many of his adolescent contemporaries in the 1870s and 1880s, oscillated between the masonic temple and the scarlet woman, to be sure, but he also flitted between a number of other cabals, at the most trivial moving from the family secrets of the upper classes to the coterie secrets of the cafe, eventually (and typically for his time) inventing instead his own order to which only the true aesthete and the confirmed decadent might belong. Yeats a decade or so later wandered somewhere between the Celtic Twilight and the Golden Dawn trying to find a wearable cloak to mask the secrets which he intimated in the world around and beyond him. Once again, the arts provided the only durable form in which secrets could be shared, and perhaps it was inevitable that there would be a kind of surreptitious conspiracy about those who participated in its rituals.

In their turn, the arts of the early twentieth century either depended upon or referred to such a conspiratorial conspiracy. "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow," says William Carlos Williams, and we nod our heads with the same kind of furtive agreement that we might display in a church, the rituals of which we do not quite understand, but feel we should admire intensely. T. S. Eliot's earliest success in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" depends in large part on our sense of knowing, even if we could not say, the overwhelming question which he insistently evades, as well as on our sense of sharing a secret knowledge of depravity with some evil figures now suffering in Dante's Inferno, or in Eliot's London. Eliot's later embellishments in "Gerontion" rang the changes on this, as the suspicious mysteries of Easter are vaguely associated with Dionysian spring sacrifices, and with an unnervingly sinister communion involving Mr Silvero with the caressing hands, Hakagawa bowing among the Titians, Madame de Tornquist and Fräulein von Kulp, and the reader. Pound writes of the image which he celebrated that its precise definition "does not concern the public and would provoke useless discussion"; and as we read his haiku poems we feel sure that we do not need the definition anyway, and useless (or indeed any) discussion of "the apparition of these faces in a crowd;/Petals on a wet, black bough" was not at all on our minds. And so it goes—we are either in or out, and once in, we must only whisper. "Is there any secret in skulls,/The cattle skulls in the woods?/Do the drummers in black hoods/Rumble anything out of their drums?" asks Wallace Stevens in "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating," forcing us to deal with that challenge in the next breath from reading about how "the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round/And the clouds flew round with the clouds." Clearly, we are in particular company here.

Now all art requires a sense of complicity, whether it is Alexander Pope taking ostentatiously for granted the urbane understanding we share with him, or Wordsworth matter-of-factly assuming we know the sensation of the rural manic depressive, of dropping from the heights of joy to the depths of despair in the plash of a rabbit's foot, and just in time to greet the old leech-gatherer. Some romantic poets took this further, however, by developing a sense of complicity in inexpressible motives (such as the Ancient Mariner's) and unnamable (usually intimated as incestuous) acts (such as that of Byron's Manfred). The notion of the poem as an encounter is replaced by that of the poem as a nudge. With these refinements on the unspeakable, love and hate became incorrigibly intertwined, and the artists of the nineteenth century delighted in this unsettling confusion. This sense of entanglement easily slips into a fascination with the affiliations between saint and sinner, or between virtue and vice—particularly, between unnatural virtue and unnatural vice—affiliations with which Wilde certainly dallied, and which found one form in his play Salome.

The images of androgyny, the ubiquitous story of Tannhauser, the legend of Narcissus, the fascination with the dance, the Dionysian energies, the attractions of the femme fatale, the complex confusion of fear and desire—all of these are important to Wilde's play, and it is little wonder that Salome's strangely murderous passion for John the Baptist provided one of the most compelling motifs for the generation of artists following Wilde. Once again, there is a nice sense that only the initiated can understand such debauchery, such a disturbing fusion of the religious and the erotic. When Wilde sent Beardsley a copy of the Paris edition of Salome in 1893, he inscribed it: "For Aubrey: for the only artist, who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance." "He who knows the power of the dance," wrote Hugo von Hofmannsthal several years later, "knows that love kills." And unless we are incorrigibly mundane, we say "yes, we know that power"; and we watch Salome's dance with appropriately perverse fascination, unable to avoid a shivery sense that Salome embodies something to which we are mysteriously vulnerable, something like the inseparability of Beauty from Decay and Death. And we develop a set of strategies for maintaining ourselves in a kind of delicious moral and rational suspension in the face of this mystery. Paradoxically enough, Remy de Gourmont's expression about a "dissociation of sensibility" was intended to provide just such a strategy, though Eliot later employed the phrase in quite a different way.

All in all, there was an appropriate focus for much of this in the complex fusion of joy and sorrow, or (as Yeats would have it) the bitter and the gay, which informed both the life and the art of this period. The exquisitely anguished exhilaration which this created found an artistic form in structures of often precarious ambivalence, as the nineteenth-century artist (and his successors in the twentieth) shifted between the majestic and the maudlin, between the models of psychodrama and those of the melodrama, between introspection and evasion, between the literature of inscape and that of escape. As the line between art and life was deliberately (and in this case necessarily) obscured, we have once again the sense of an initiation into a new kind of knowledge. At worst, what resulted was the embodiment of convivial despair or mindless aspiration. At best, it produced a celebration of the word becoming flesh and dying. "In the actual life of man," Wilde argued, "sorrow is a passage to a lesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates." In modern art, Wilde affirmed, one hears the cry of Marsyas more clearly than the song of Apollo.

There were two related directions which late nineteenth-century art took to find a suitable form for the desperation that it sought to embody. One was an escape into images of blatantly trivial entertainments—such as the circus; or the amusements of cosmetics, costume and fancy dress, Eliot's realm of "strange, synthetic perfumes." From Baudelaire to Beerbohm, the nineteenth century relished the extremes of artifice, and flirted with the limits of art, suggesting that fine lace represented the ultimate spiritualization of the material, or that the rapid, elliptical effects of the circus and the music-hall provided specific analogies for the frenetic urban life which more and more people were experiencing. And so, with the advent of modernism, we have Wallace Stevens assuming the "complacencies of the peignoir" while Robert Coady, in his magazine The Soil (to which Stevens contributed), celebrates Toto, the Italian clown, as "the most creative artist that has visited [American] shores in many a day. He is a clown at the Hippodrome who has invented a bow which has given pleasure to thousands"—all of this contemporary with Duchamp's urinal and part of the American collaboration between Dada and the avant-garde, the modern apotheosis of high decadence. In fact, there are complex affinities between decadence and avant-garde, especially in an age when the idea of transition has a considerable appeal. And if decadence is characterized, as the Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov suggested in the early 1920s, by "the feeling, at once oppressive and exalting, of being the last in a series," then it fits nicely into a notion of the avant-garde as having a mission to pre-pare the way for or indeed inaugurate a new series, opening up new possibilities to excite an exhausted sensibility.

The other direction which art took to celebrate its despair involved a retreat into the self, eventually into a labyrinth of indolent gestures, psychic dead ends, emotional impasses—a world of dead souls, as Gogol had suggested. Pierrot, the laconic haunted fool out of Commedia del'Arte and Paris street theater by way of Gautier, Verlaine and Laforgue, provided one image which combined these elements, linking the lame reflectiveness of the would-be Hamlets of the time to figures from popular entertainment—circus performers, dancers, singers, actors, magicians. Fantasy and the fantastic, especially when juxtaposed with a failure of the will and a loss of a center of belief and meaning, offered to Wilde's contemporaries a sort of secular sublimity to replace that which had degenerated when beauty declined into syrupy prettiness and earnest realism. Under such conditions, as Wilde suggested, "the first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered." This notion arose in an age which was cultivating a fashionable pessimism to match the fashionable boredom it had inherited. Of course, there were always those, such as Carlyle and Ruskin and one's schoolmaster, who counselled that work was the answer to boredom, pessimism, the dangers of enchantment, and unnatural (or indeed natural) desires. But how dreary. No—anyone with a soul had to turn elsewhere for salvation. One had to stop listening to conventional pieties, and pick up Wilde's advice that the folly of youth contains more wisdom than the conviction of age. When life, as Strindberg said, is "like the tuning of an orchestra which never begins to play," then one is sorely tempted, perhaps even obliged, to take up an instrument oneself, to turn to art, to a world of illusion and artifice. As for living: as Yeats noted (taking a line from Villiers de L'Isle Adam), "our servants will do that for us." When F. R. Leavis quoted this in the 1930s in New Bearings in English Poetry, it was to castigate it as a futile, and not entirely genuine, gesture unworthy of the poet who would find his authentic voice in "the actual, waking world." Art as (in Pater's words) "a sort of cloistered refuge from a certain vulgarity in the actual world"; and the specific image of the poet in his ivory tower (which comes from a passage in a poem written by Charles Augustin SainteBeuve in 1837 about Alfred de Vigny)—these were the hallmarks of decadence to some.

The arts responded to the challenge which the dreariness and the desolation of life presented, and artists tried to achieve in their art what Wallace Stevens called its "essential gaudiness." And so we get perverse but entertaining exaggeration and excess, art on the verge, the counterpart to the trapeze artist's daring, the dancer's leap, the singer's high note, the magician's disappearance, the actor's final flourish—a kind of transcendence achieved by the flagrantly contrived, the final paradox of modernism. And we get the Crazy Janes and Emperors of Ice Cream and Sweeneys Erect of Yeats and Stevens and Eliot, Pound's Mauberley and Hart Crane's Charlie Chaplin—or, indeed, Charlie Chaplin's Charlie Chaplin. Or we get Pozzo and Lucky in Beckett's Waiting for Godot; or the compleat circus, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind. The world that these artists created was a world of what Paul Klee, who was much influenced, called "visible laughter and invisible tears," a world of nervous extremes, of ambiguous emotion, of covert feelings which floats apart from any specific individual or event, a world of anxious ecstasy and desperate exhibitionism, a world in which Dadaism found a home. It was a world of gallows humor and witty perversity, but also of zealous disenchantment and earnestly egotistical alienation. One of its manifestations was the dandy, the ultimate conjunction of art and life, a figure who had been on the scene for most of the nineteenth century. We meet him as Platon Mihailovitch Platonov in Gogol's Dead Souls, and as Alfred Mountchesney in Disraeli's novel Sibyl. "Nothing does me any good," says Alfred at the beginning of Disraeli's story. "I should be quite content if something could do me harm"; and he spends his time mourning the "extinction of excitement," and trying to revive the coals. The Monchenseys of T. S. Eliot's play The Family Reunion are his descendants, watching the final disintegration of Wishwood, the family seat—a genteel version of Poe, a kind of Fall of the House of Monchensey. The only way out, as Alfred surmises, is to find something that does one harm, and this way involves both an escape from and a return to or isolation of the self.

A Faustian pattern of escape into forbidden and dangerous knowledge was modulated throughout the nineteenth century into a pattern of encounter within the self, an exploration of the ways in which the self becomes divided, and a delineation of its double. The artificiality of this kind of enterprise gave a paradoxically appropriate accent to its naturalness, as Wilde discovered in The Picture of Dorian Gray. And so, the ambivalence that attached to the natural and the artificial transformed the standard melodramatic oppositions between the good and the evil into a more subtle succession of decadent juxta-positions: between rebellious sin and repentant yearning, the sphinx and the crucifix, beauty and decay, the mascu-line and the feminine. Even Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest displays a milder but still disconcerting array of oppositions, between the spirit and the flesh, the country and the town, the real and the imagined, truth and falsehood, and seriousness and triviality. Wilde's genius here was to focus on the language itself, magical and fatal at the same time, both to mask and reveal the secrets which intrigue the audience. But the play, like much decadent and much more modern art, develops around the difficulty of distinguishing between the important and the unimportant, of deciding whether cucumber sandwiches or the trivialities of Paterson or the discontinuous fragments shored against our ruin are to bear the burden of our spirit and sensitivity.

Wilde used to say that the Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated. Just so, the rituals to which one gives indolent allegiance become the rationale for one's life, as marrying for love or money belongs beside marrying the name Earnest. Nothing is sacred, or everything may be; and whatever the case, our instincts are by now to look upon everything as possibly replete with secret meaning. Ernest Newman, one of Wilde's contemporaries and a biographer of Richard Wagner, remarked in an essay on Wilde written in 1895 that "the function of a paradox is really the same as the function of religion—not to be believed." The paradoxes embodied in decadence, like those of modernism, have a similar function, as well as an opposite one.