Decadence In English (and French) Literature - Part 3

However, when artificiality is forced upon an individual, the reality of multiple personae is far less glamorous. In a letter written to Philip Houghton in February 1894 Wilde admits:

To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely - it is not wise to show one`s heart to the world - and as a seriousness of manner is the disguise of the fool, folly in its exquisite modes of triviality and indifference and lack of care is the robe of the wise man. In so vulgar an age as this we all need masks.57

This discloses a sadder motivation for the performance of a multitude of personalities: a far cry from the artist of life who adopts numerous identities in a passionate attempt to wring from life every experience possible, it instead exposes Wilde`s vulnerability. The letter reveals his employment of disguises as a form of protection. The symbol of the social mask is far more ominous when it is needed, rather than being merely an entertaining, exhilarating choice. Wilde implies that underneath his effete, casual manner, there is a man who cares deeply about society`s opinion of him. Moreover, behind his role as father and husband, was a man who passionately loved other men, indulged in illicit sexual activities with persons of the same gender as himself and dined with male prostitutes - as he would later term it in De Profundis - `feasting with panthers` (p. 118). On the 25th May, 1895, just over a year after the above letter was written, Wilde would be sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour for `gross indecency`. In jail Wilde would be stripped of all artificial poses, because - as he explains in De Profundis - `[p]ain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask` (p. 89). Bereaved of all pretence, Wilde`s epistle to Lord Alfred Douglas places a great emphasis upon self-understanding and self-discovery: `know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge` (p. 111). That said, although Wilde states that `to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered` and claims that `such I think I have become` (p. 113), an idealisation of self-knowledge and self-exploration is very much evident in his works prior to De Profundis, before he has experienced the torment that he undergoes in jail. Henry informs Dorian, for example, that the `aim of life is self-development. To realise one`s nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for` (p. 18). Such a goal implies an unity of identity and suggests that each individual has an essential `nature` that is simply awaiting discovery. It also presumes that life has one fixed purpose (`that is what each of us is here for`). These beliefs appear to be at odds with the Decadent love of pose, disguise and multiple personalities; nevertheless they too are ideas that pervade Decadent literature. Indeed, Wilde`s `The Soul of Man Under Socialism` (1891) is an essay based entirely upon the argument that what is desperately lacking in England is a political system that will promote `the full development of life to its highest mode of perfection`, asserting that `[w]hat is needed is individualism` (p. 1080). It is notable that the political manifesto is brimming with natural imagery. For example, Wilde describes how Socialism would allow `the true personality of man` to `grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows` (p. 1084). Wilde`s simile is beautiful in its very simplicity, his plain diction reflecting the uncomplicated, organic process that it is describing. The benignity of this nature is a far cry from that which Vivian describes in `The Decay of Lying` - dismissing `nature`s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony` and `her absolutely unfinished condition` (p. 970). In addition, the notion of man`s growing organically directly contradicts the Decadents` love of fashioning their own identities and constructing their own artificial realities, as does Wilde`s reference to man`s one `true personality`. Indeed, the Decadent drive for new experiences and the stress that this places upon genuine emotion also seems to conflict with the Decadent cult of personal artifice. The infamous `Conclusion` to Walter Pater`s Studies in the History of The Renaissance (written in 1869 and published in 1873), a book that Wilde articulated to Yeats as being `the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded when it was written`,58 exemplifies the Aesthetic - and, in turn, Decadent - quest for a heightened existence, a life of intensity. Far from encouraging the adoption of social masks, for Pater the internal life of man - `the inward world of thought and feeling` - and his physical being are closely interwoven in the perpetual `whirlpool` of experience.59 Declaring that `we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve`,60 he claims that `our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love` and - if it definitely be passion - it `does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness`.61 He proclaims that to `burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life`.62 For, as Wilde laments in `The Soul of Man Under Socialism`, to `live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all` (p. 1084). With its highly charged, emotive diction (`ecstasy`, `passion`, `sorrow`), vivid imagery (`hard, gemlike flame`,`flowing stream`) and its many references to fast movement (`whirlpool`, `pulsations`, `flickering`), the `Conclusion` has an exuberant energy that can barely be contained within its long, fast-paced sentences. Pater`s employment of language is as exhilarating as his proposed method of living: both insist upon the emotional, visceral experience of being alive. In comparison, artifice seems empty and shallow. As Wilde would describe The Renaissance in a letter to Ernest Radford (quoting Algeron Charles Swinburne`s celebration of Théophile Gautier), it was `a golden book of spirit and sense`.63 Pater encourages the multiplication of sensation, rather than the multiplication of self. As a book that Wilde describes in De Profundis as having had `such a strange influence over my life` (p. 85), it is unsurprising that there are so many echoes of its philosophies in The Picture of Dorian Gray. For instance, Lord Henry asserts:

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. (p. 18) This attitude - promoting an intense, instinctive existence based on the satisfying of urges, a life crammed full of every pleasure, sensation and experience possible - is notably similar to Pater`s. However, Wilde employs the dangerously seductive character of Lord Henry to voice such a view, and adds his own debauched slant to the philosophy. He proceeds to elaborate that the `only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself` (p. 18). Seizing upon Pater`s belief that the whole scope of experience - `reduced to a swarm of impressions [.] ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality` - is ultimately `dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind`,64 the Decadent aristocrat declares that it is `in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place` (p. 18). The fact that Pater (in the words of Stephen Calloway, a `reticent and seemingly quite unrevolutionary don`65) omits the passage from the 1877 edition and then rewrites it for the 1888 version, fearing that the passage `might possibly have misled some of those young men into whose hands it might fall`,66 strongly suggests that he did not intend to promote the sinful hedonism that Lord Henry lauds, and is so often associated with the Decadent movement. Indeed, the hero of Pater`s novel, Marius the Epicurean, (published in 1885) rejects the `Epicurean style` of making pleasure the `sole motive of life`, attesting that he is not searching for `pleasure, but fullness of life`.67 Des Esseintes is similarly disenchanted with debauchees: `filled with an immense weariness by their excesses`, although he himself had `tasted the feasts of the flesh` (p. 7). Similarly, Wilde scorns Bosie`s `lust-withered garden` of `common desires` (p. 47), despite the fact that he too associated with prostitutes. His contempt stems not from his past lover`s attaining pleasure, but from Bosie`s `terrible lack of imagination`, the `fatal defect` of his character` (p. 47). In contrast, Wilde demonstrates the abundance of his own imagination in the very relating of his encounters with sex workers, expressing the exhilaration he felt around them through the use of vivid, exotic imagery: `I used to feel as a snake-charmer must feel when he lures the cobra to stir from the painted cloth` (De Profundis, p. 118). Similarly, it was his companions` acting with `no discrimination, with no feverish involvement, with no genuine, intense excitement of blood and nerves` (p. 7) that upset Des Esseintes. If Decadents` dress is a reflection of their philosophies, then so must be their pleasures. Wilde `deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation`, as he had grown `[t]ired of being on the heights` (De Profundis, p. 78). In De Profundis, he explains that he was once `King` of `that beautiful unreal world of art` and `would have remained King indeed`, if he had not let himself be `lured into the imperfect world of coarse uncompleted passion, of appetite without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed` (p. 72). Hence Wilde was `an artist in life` whilst he was at dinner with the `evil things of life`, because he found them `delightfully suggestive and stimulating` (p. 118), they fed his interest and so fed his art. It was when pleasure dominated him that he ceased to be King of Art, and so he also ceased to be King of Life. Thus the only fully successful Decadent artists of life - those who succeed in marrying a genuine passion for living with a love of artifice - are those who express their sensational, heightened experiences through another art form: they must be Artists of Art, as well as Artists of Life. Pure hedonists - such as Dorian Gray, Lord Alfred Douglas (as presented by Wilde in De Profundis) and Des Esseintes - who are only on a quest for sensation, with no perfected form in which to express their new experiences grow weary and restless. For, as Pater, so eloquently professes `art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments sake` and it is through artifice that fleeting impressions - `unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them`68 - are captured, refined and cherished.