Decadence In English (and French) Literature - Part 2

Indeed, the dress and personality of Wilde support Baudelaire`s statement: Wilde`s immaculate, lavish apparel reflects his refined aesthetic tastes and his highly fastidious discrimination in both life and art. It also feeds into the wider Decadent cult of the cultivation of the senses, as personified by Huysmans` anti-hero, Des Esseintes. The febrile aristocrat obsessively strives, for example, to `immerse` himself in perfume, believing that:

the sense of smell could experience pleasures equal to those of hearing and sight, since every sense was capable, through aptitude and expert cultivation, of apprehending new impressions, multiplying them many times over, co-ordinating them, and with them composing that whole which constitutes a work of art[.] (pp. 92-93).

As a Decadent connoisseur in perverse sensuality, it is through a thorough exploration of his senses that Des Esseintes attempts to satisfy his `feverish craving for the unknown`, his desire to `pass beyond the confines of thought, to cast about, without ever arriving at a certainty, in the misty reaches that lie beyond art` (p. 89). Des Esseintes` rigorous attention to the specificity of every sensation he experiences and Huysmans` incessant, extensive elaboration on every obscure detail, also corresponds with the Decadent attitude towards language. For instance, in `The Decadent Movement in Literature`, Symons describes the ideal of Decadence as being the ability of the writer to `fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul.`41 Such a passion for exactness, combined with a love of the senses, can certainly also be found in Wilde`s works. For example, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, he describes Lord Henry talking at a dinner party:

Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life [...] Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat`s black, dripping, sloping sides. (pp. 35-36).

This passage is a remarkable example of Wilde`s extraordinary ability to give abstract ideas a concrete immediacy. Through his use of personification and vivid language, he is able to depict the playful and exhilarating nature of Lord Henry`s speech without actually needing to relate the contents of the talk, or even the specific topic under discussion. Nevertheless, he captures its very essence. The diction that Wilde employs is engaging as he appeals to all of the reader`s senses: the image of Pleasure`s `wine-stained robe` is a striking one, recalling the taste and smell of the wine as well as its being attractive visually. Similarly, words such as `seething`, `bubbles` and `dripping` are powerful because they encourage the reader to imagine, and feel, the texture of that which is being described, whilst also having an onomatopoeic quality that is aurally evocative. His emphasis upon movement - `danced`, `trod`, `rose`, `crawled` - also adds to the vitality of the writing, and the verbs, combined with the carefully controlled shifting flow of the long sentences, are suggestive of the fluctuating pace at which the aristocrat is speaking. All these literary devices contribute to make Wilde`s descri ption of Lord Henry`s speech as engaging for his readers as the dandy`s speech is for his audience, which `charmed his listeners out of themselves` (p. 36). This passage is a sterling illustration of how Wilde achieves that which Lionel Johnson argues in his `A Note upon the Practice and Theory of Verse at the Present Time Obtaining in France` (1891) should be the chief aim of Decadent writers: `to catch the precise aspect of a thing, as you see or feel it; to express, not the obvious and barren fact, but the inner and fruitful force of it`.42 Hence Wilde`s flamboyant, luxurious dress is, of course, artificial, but it is also a reflection of his sensitised ability to recognise the value of beauty and his desire to cultivate it with a rare and refined passion. As Baudelaire asserts, dandies are beings who dedicate their entire lives to the development of `the idea of beauty in their persons`.43 He also claims that this `haughty and exclusive` sect`s doctrinal passion is `first and foremost the burning need to create for oneself a personal originality` and that dandyism is fundamentally a `kind of cult of the self`.44 Therefore, far from being opposed, artificiality and living life as an art appear to go hand in hand. Moreover, the ways in which Wilde relied upon artificiality to improve his life extended beyond his attire and astute manipulation of the public: it affected his very speech. In his autobiography, William Butler Yeats declares that his first meeting Wilde in 1888 was `an astonishment`:

I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous [.] I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I think all Wilde`s listeners have recorded came from the perfect rounding of the sentences and the deliberation that made that possible.45

Yeats suggests that the `extraordinary power and beauty` of Wilde`s talk, which sometimes left entranced auditors in tears,46 was not a natural talent, but one created through labour - the result of a careful and deliberate use of language. Perhaps inspired by John Ruskin`s mode of speech at Oxford University - a man who Max Müller claimed was one of those people that `seemed to take a real delight in building up their sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to make each deliverance a work of art`47 - Wilde also endeavoured to elevate his language to the sphere of art. Linda Dowling professes that Wilde `experimented with his own speech to test the limits of what could be perfectly said with neither affectation nor the lame gait of ordinary talk`.48 By doing so, he was thus able to marry Gilbert`s insistence in `The Critic as Artist` that `[w]e must return to the voice` (p. 1017) in literature with Vivian`s idealisation of `a language different from that of actual use, a language full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence` (p. 978) in `The Decay of Lying`. So, through the refinement of his own everyday speech, Wilde in turn expanded that which could be categorised as a language of `actual use`. Indeed, Yeats affirms that the `slow, carefully modulated cadence` of Wilde`s sentences `sounded natural to my ears`.49 Such a descri ption recalls Henry`s hypnotically `slow musical voice` (p. 140) - `musical words said with musical utterance` (p. 47) that would have such a powerful influence over Dorian - implying that the speech patterns of the Lord are based on those of his author, blurring the line between literary language and that of real life. The similarity also highlights the fact that just as Lord Henry`s linguistic likeness to Wilde may invite readers to see the dandy as a more realistic character, the comparison may simultaneously encourage them to perceive Wilde as a literary creation himself. Dowling goes so far as to extol Wilde`s contes parlés as the `solution to the post-philological problem of language`, claiming that `he restored language to its authentic spoken form without the loss either of richness or of "intense personality."`50 Although she also deplores the fact that Wilde`s `ideal of language` requires `enormous, self-depleting skill`,51 this factor simply renders his `solution` difficult to replicate, further augmenting his status as an extraordinary artist of both literature and life. Once more Wilde`s artificiality aids both his life-as-art, and his art. However, whilst Wilde artificially constructs the style of his speech, Johnson goes one step further and artificially constructs the content of his. As Yeats relates in his autobiography, Johnson recounted imaginary meetings with `famous men or beautiful women whose conversation, often wise, and always appropriate, he quoted often.`52 Hence Johnson created an artificial history for himself, peppered with occurrences that never actually happened. In `The Decay of Lying`, Vivian argues that art begins with:

purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent [.] Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. (p. 978)

By this definition Johnson is certainly an accomplished artist. In the formulation of his anecdotes he always draws upon his own life as `rough material` - the setting of a library in Oxford for his imagined talk with Gladstone, for example, with the added delightful detail of his being up a ladder at the time - before creating ideal scenarios which Yeats professes were `always admirable in their drama, but never too dramatic or even too polished to lose their casual accidental character`53 and so arouse suspicion. That Johnson`s reason for inventing falsehoods was to separate himself from reality with an `impenetrable barrier of beautiful style` and idealism is an idea supported by his poetry. For example, in his 1889 `Plato in London`, Johnson describes how his speaker`s reading of an `old and comely page` (l. 2) is transformed into a `converse with a treasured sage` (l. 4).54 The framing of the poem as a fictitious conversation with an eminent, intellectual figure clearly reflects Johnson`s own life. It is hence particularly notable that in it the speaker finds great solace in his imaginary encounter: the rhyming of `best` (l. 5) with `guest` (1. 6) in the first couplet of the poem serves both to emphasise the connection between the two words and to provide a comforting neatness to the lines. Moreover, the diction that Johnson employs in relation to Plato - `[s]eemly`, `fair` (l. 5), `beauty`, `strength` (l. 32) - all express the `true and clear` (l. 33) nature of the philosopher`s thoughts and are starkly juxtaposed to the hostile chaos of the `world of noise and cold` (l. 8) outside, with its `surging cries` (l. 27) and restless glare` (l. 28). Thus, in keeping with the Decadent love of artifice, Johnson implies - through both his poetry and the manner in which he lived his actual life - that an invented reality of his own creating is superior to the external, factual world in which he was thrust at birth. Far from being offended or outraged by his friend`s perpetual dishonesty, Yeats argues that Johnson`s `dreaming` was the `phantasmagoria through which his philosophy of life found its expression`.55 So convincing were Johnson`s inventions, that Yeats speculates whether Johnson himself believed in them `as firmly as did his friends`.56 Hence, entirely aided by artifice, Johnson is able to experience a fuller and more satisfying existence, meeting anybody and everybody that he wishes. This idea that lying is to be encouraged if it proves to be more interesting than life, is likewise found in Wilde`s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest. When asked in Act IV whether or not she believes Algernon, Cecily retorts that `I don`t. But that does not affect the wonderful beauty of his answer`, to which Gwendolen assents that in `matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing` (p. 371). Such an attitude once again prioritises the fascination and excitement of artifice - and the flexible, multifarious identities that it allows - over dull, predicable integrity. If `art for art`s sake` is the Aesthete`s mantra, then it so follows that `life for life`s sake` is the Decadent artist of life`s. As Dorian asks himself, is `insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities` (p. 113). For, as Vivian flippantly declares in `The Decay of Lying`, `what is interesting about people in good society [.] is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask` (p. 975).