The Decadent Republic of Letters
THE DECADENT REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley
Matthew Potolsky
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney.
Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Potolsky, Matthew.
The decadent republic of letters : taste, politics, and cosmopolitan community from Baudelaire to Beardsley / Matthew Potolsky. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Haney Foundation series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4449-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Decadence (Literary movement)—England. 2. Decadence (Literary movement)—France. 3. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. French literature—19th century—History and criticism. 5. Literature and society—England—History—19th century. 6. Literature and society—France— History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series: Haney Foundation series.
PN56.D45P67 2013
809'.034—dc23
2012014203
To my family
CONTENTS
___________
Introduction. “Workers of the Final Hour”
Chapter 1. “Partisans Inconnus”: Aesthetic Community and the Public Good in Baudelaire
Chapter 2. The Politics of Appreciation: Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire
Chapter 3. Golden Books: Pater, Huysmans, and Decadent Canonization
Chapter 4. A Mirror for Teachers: Decadent Pedagogy and Public Education
Chapter 5. A Republic of (Nothing but) Letters: Some Versions of Decadent Community
Postscript. Public Works: Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
___________
“Workers of the Final Hour”
Community is made of what retreats from it.
—Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community
With surprisingly few exceptions, the history of the decadent movement has been told from the perspective of a single national tradition—with due acknowledgment of the French (most often), English, American, or German origin of this or that key figure or contributing intellectual thread. Written as part of a growing interest among scholars in cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and cross-Channel and transatlantic connections, The Decadent Republic of Letters regards decadence as fundamentally international in origin and orientation. The various names artists and critics have applied to fin-de-siècle literary movements tend to be identified with a single national tradition. Aestheticism was largely a British movement; Symbolism developed in France. Decadence, by contrast, was an international movement from the beginning, and had a lasting impact around the world well after the turn of the century. This book focuses chiefly on French and English writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, but the stylistic and thematic paradigms I tease out of the movement were adapted by writers from the United States, Latin America, Central Europe, and other regions.1 Defined by more than the familiar set of images, themes, and stylistic traits normally associated with the movement, decadence, as I present it here, is a characteristic mode of reception, a stance that writers take in relationship to their culture and to the cosmopolitan traditions that influence them.
This stance originates in a transatlantic encounter: Charles Baudelaire’s translations of and critical writings on Edgar Allan Poe. These texts provided later writers with a durable source of inspiration, but also, and more important, with a model of how to be influenced. Following Baudelaire, later decadent writers look enthusiastically to writers from other national traditions: Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote one of the earliest appreciations of Baudelaire in any language and was admired by advanced French poets; Paul Verlaine lived in England in the 1870s and was revered by the English decadents; Vernon Lee spent most of her life in Italy but wrote in English and published her works chiefly in England; Oscar Wilde composed Salomé in French and was regarded by French writers as a major theoretician of decadence; Friedrich Nietzsche imported his definition of decadence from Paul Bourget’s widely read 1881 essay on Baudelaire.2 The movement was disseminated through translations, imitations, and critical appreciations—all techniques designed to provide a new context for the foreign and unfamiliar.3 Essentially internationalist, decadent writing is a form of cultural production that begins with and recurrently thematizes the act of literary and artistic border crossing.
The radically syncretic and cosmopolitan texture of decadent writing accounts for the difficulty scholars have long had in defining the movement, or even fixing its major adherents. In his pioneering study of the fin de siècle, The Eighteen Nineties (1913), Holbrook Jackson identifies four characteristic elements of decadent writing: perversity, artificiality, egoism, and curiosity.4 Later scholars have added exoticism, morbidity, philosophical pessimism, and antifeminism, among other elements. None of these elements is exclusively decadent, however, in the way that the praise of nature is characteristic of Romanticism or the tracing of environmental influences on the individual is characteristic of Naturalism. Similarly, the major features of decadent style resemble forms of mannerism that extend into antiquity.5 The canon of decadent works and writers is equally unstable. Few of the writers I discuss in this book called themselves decadents. Wilde wrote canonically decadent books as well as society comedies; Baudelaire died before the decadent movement gained a clear identity, and was claimed by rival literary groups such as the Symbolists; Walter Pater resisted his association with the young decadents who championed his works; Michael Field abhorred the Yellow Book and its circle of contributors but read widely in the works of the French decadents. Noting the extreme difficulty of defining the term, Richard Gilman has suggested that decadence is nothing more than “the underside or logical complement of something else, coerced into taking its place in our vocabularies by the pressure of something that needs an opposite, an enemy.”6 He argues that the word should accordingly be expunged from the critical vocabulary. Yet the idea of decadence was central to the cultural politics of the nineteenth century, and dispensing with it, as Gilman advises, would distort our sense of the age. For artists, intellectuals, and the reading public in the period, decadence was a viable concept with real consequences. As a literary movement with a name and