In Our Time - The Decadent Movement

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British phase of a movement that spread across Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and by Walter Pater, these Decadents rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose, and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde was at its heart, Aubrey Beardsley adorned it with his illustrations and they, with others, provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy. After burning brightly, the movement soon lost its energy in Britain yet it has proved influential.The illustration above, by Beardsley, is from the cover of the first edition of The Yellow Book in April 1894.WithNeil Sammells Professor of English and Irish Literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa UniversityKate Hext Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of ExeterAndAlex Murray Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, BelfastProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in the 1890s, the decadent movement flickered with a bright green flame in British culture, with Oscar Wilde at its heart. The decadence rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose,

and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art's sake. Wild Aubrey Beardsley and others provoke moral panic with their supposed degeneracy, and the movement was soon snuffed out, yet its influence has been felt ever since. We've meant to discuss the decadent movement in Britain are Alex Murray, Senior Lecturer in English at Queen's University of Belfast,

Kate Hex, Senior Lecture in English Literature at the University of Exeter, and Neil Samuels, Professor of English, and Irish literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa University. Neil Samuels, there are several influences behind this movement. Can you tell us first about what's been going on in France in particular? I think it's impossible to imagine English decadence developing without the really profound influence of Charles Baudelaire. He's central to the development of a particular sensibility, a sensibility which prizes the gifted individual, the extraordinary individual, the artist,

standing out against what he regarded as the common herd and the filthy modern tide of democracy. He's central to the development of a dandyism, an attitude, a style by which the artist represented themselves to others, but is also central to literary developments. The critical text is his collection of poems, Flowers of Evil, which he published in 18, 57, which is really an exploration of heightened states of mental awareness, of subject matter that is

rooted in a new urban experience. And Terfiel Gautier, who's another really critical figure in this, described him as the first poet of a new decadence, working with what he called a gangrenous style and that gangrenness style that that embracing of a form of literary expression which to mainstream readers would appear to be perverse and unhealthy i think is really very very important in the development of decadence on both sides of the channel what was important about walter pater in in oxford writing in 1873 two things i think are important about pater pater pater peter developed, he's that book, the studies

in the history of the Renaissance, is a discussion of Renaissance painters Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo in particular. And it became notorious for its conclusion. What Peter was in a sense misread as saying was that our duty

is to live a life of pleasure seeking, to seek out and wring out the pleasure from fleeting moments. And this was denounced by, no less than George Elliott, but also from the pulpit, as being a potentially corrupting influence and young men. And another phrase was to burn always with a hard, gem-like flame. Yes, to burn always with this hard gem-like flame was his injunction. But I think we must remember that as important as what Peter said was how he said it, a voluptuous, seductive prose,

which George Moore, the Irish novelist, described as having the odour of dead roses. So the style in which Peter expressed his ideas was as important as the ideas themselves, which I think were trivialised and misrepresented, because he was really arguing for a complex form of epicureanism, not simply reckless hedonism and pleasure-seeking. His influence was strongly felt at the beginning at Oxford. He was barred from teaching young men. for fear of deleterious effects on them, on their moral nature.

Yes, I'm not sure how deleterious effects would be, because I think Peter was a somewhat oppressive, repressed individual. But he was barred from teaching young men at Oxford. It was a big thing to happen at that time, at any time, actually. And that was, as I understand it, the reason given. It didn't stop wild from introducing himself to Peter. The friendship, I think, deteriorated over. a time. But Pater was a really significant influence on Wild and others. And in a sense, he imported

some of Baudelaire's attitudes into an English context and brought them into conjunction with an aestheticism that we might associate with Ruskin in a rather earlier generation. And that confluence of Baudelaire, Pater and Ruskin is, I think central to what we now understand as decadence in English culture. Thank you. Kate, in Kate Hext, in the decade or so after Peter wrote that, who took up this injunction to burn with a gem-like flame? Peter's hedonistic call took on a life of its own. And what he was saying was somewhat more sophisticated, as Neil says,

and people read him as being. But in a sense, it didn't matter. Of course, that wasn't the only facet of Peter's work to exert an influence. And we may come back to others. but that was the one that resonated, at least for the people who would become the decadence, because in this idea of burning with a hard flame and maintaining this ecstasy is a new vision of what it was to be an individual, one that puts sensual pleasure. How are people going to burn with a gem-like flame?

How did they do? What happened in their daily lives that they did that? They felt intense pleasure and intense sensations as being the ends of their lives rather than moral or social or political duties and ends. So the ends of life or the things that make life meaningful are very, very different for Peter. Of course, he saw it in less hedonistic ways than other people did. I think his pleasures were quite simple. But young undergraduates and a random assortment of aspirants were enraptured. And others, some of them, Peter's friends, were shocked, but the enraptured ones did indeed include Wilde, who as a teenager, as was noted before,

wrote to Peter from Dublin in the late 1870s, wrote fan mail to Peter and referred to the Renaissance as his golden book as the very flower of decadence. And another, the poet Arthur Simmons, who 30 years later recalled feeling the ribbed paper of the Renaissance in his fingers. He said, I still have the feel of it in my fingers. The Renaissance comes in because Peter is writing about the Renaissance. That's what you're referring to. From the beginning, this appears to be dominated by men, and women associated with it in any significant way.

Women didn't play a central role in the movement. What we think, when we tend to think of Fendiseach decadence, we tend to think of them as wealthy men reclining on chaise, long as in West London drawing rooms. And that's not entirely wrong. And yet, we really can't grasp British decadence if we think of it as purely a homosocial movement. There was significant practical involvement of female writers, novelists. For example, the female novelist and writer Wieda had a salon at the Langham Hotel,

which was attended by Wilde and Swinburne and Malay, amongst others. Ella Darcy, who became the unofficial deputy editor of the Yellow Book and published a lot of female writers who, otherwise would not have had their writing published because it was immoral or it would have been considered immoral. And in short story after short story, especially when we get into the 1890s, we see women writers employing the same narrative conceits and devices as decadent writers, experimenting with dramatic persona, ironic voices, flirting with stories of women who transgress without suffering consequences. And they did that in order to question the place of women.

in society. Alex Murray, this was more a loose collection of people than a focused movement, perhaps. How did Arthur Simmons help to crystallise ideas in 1893? So in 18903, Arthur Simmons writes a very influential essay called The Decadent Movement in Literature, which is published in an American periodical called Harper's Monthly magazine,

and in it he tries to introduce to an English-language audience the latest in French decadent writing, writers like Stefan Malameh and Paul Verlaine. And he also tries to translate this into English literary style as well. So it's a very, very curious essay which is filled with its own sort of florid language. And he describes decadence as being a beautiful and interesting disease. Why do you think he used the word disease? I think he used that word disease because he thought he recognized that he was living in an age,

which was one of decline, one of disease. and the literature that was being written at that time should really reflect that. It should be really just a representation of that time period's moral malaise. And so he took that up, but it's also defamiliarizing. He wants people to think of a beautiful and interesting disease. It's obviously a very strange image or a strange concept. And so he wants to use language to really sort of trip his reader up and to make them think about what literature is.

And one of the most striking things about the essay is that he introduces to English language writers as being represented, of decadence in England. And they are Walter Pater, which is no great surprise, as we've already heard. He was strongly identified with decadence. But the other one was W.E. Henley, who was altogether a much more curious choice. Henley was himself, a far more conservative and traditional riser, and he would have been, I'm sure, thoroughly appalled by the idea that he was a decadent. In fact, he was one of the people who would publish some of the most awful attacks on Wilde in 1895 after his trials. And so Henley is someone who is,

It was certainly not a decadent, but Simmons is trying to really say that decadence is a thing, and it's here in England, and we should really embrace it. If you had to pick up a work by a decadent writer, if you had picked up a work by a decadent writer, what would have made it stand apart in the 1890s from the mainstream of writers from the solid Victorian novel and the well, very well made Victorian poetry of Hardy and so and so forth? Is it his style or subject matter that would have said, ah, yes, this is something different? I think it's both style and subject matters. So in terms of style, Paul Bourget is a very, very famous French literary critic, and he has this theory that decadence is about the sort of decomposition of the sort of book into the chapter, the chapter to the page, the page to the paragraph. He means that literature is no longer concerned with unity, with wholeness,

but is more concerned with moments of beauty, with moments of sort of exquisite language. And so it has no sort of sense of... So does it mean that it has no central narrative? Is that what you're saying? Very often no central narrative. So famous decadent novels like Joris Karl Huismunds against nature is exceptionally dull. Its narrative is not particularly important. It's more about this is a vehicle for really talking about art and artifice

and really trying to use style as a sort of, you know, it's something almost kind of musical rather than actually trying to convey any real meaning. How did this take on or take off? The response by the public and by conservative literary critics to decadence was very, very, very, hostile. It was hostile for a number of reasons, probably not its style so much as its content. Its content was often far more sexually explicit than Victorians may have been expecting. And it was also tending towards to the examination of sort of solipsistic young men who really were not willing to sort of go out and work. They were not willing to sort of have families.

These were people who were themselves idle and exhausted and really not a great series of role models. Neil Niel Samuels, the Dundee enters the frame now. How does he relate to decadence? Again, we have to go back to Baudelaire, who I think establishes the archetypal dandy posture. It's variously attributed to him and to Gerard de Neval, and that is the flannur, promenading through the Parisian boulevards with a lobster on a lead,

turning himself into a piece of performance art, inviting ridicule, inviting the gaze of spectators. He summed up dandyism as the proud satisfaction of astonishing and never being astonished, which is about as succinct a definition of what it is to be cool as I can think of. For him, dandyism is the cult of the ego, but it's also the last gleam of heroism in the age of decadence. It's a way for the gifted, the different individual to stand out and from the common herd to compose himself into an image that can be admired, but also ridiculed. I think this is very interesting because decadence treads a thin line really and it jumps and falls over into ridicule and self-ridicule in a number of occasions.

So the dandy, I think, can be traced back to Baudelaire, but dandyism is picked up by wild, And indeed by Aubrey Beardley, Beardley who wore dove grey suits, a yellow kid gloves, and had a green tinge to his hair, a kind of proto-punk way of confronting the spectator. How many people are we talking about? How are we talking about half a dozen or a dozen that the three of people like you three are rescued from history? Are we talking about something that's on the street? We're talking in terms of people who behaved in a dandy-esque fashion, I think we're talking about a very small number, but the dandy becomes a figure in the literature of the time, most obviously in Wilde and in his novel, The Picture of Doring Gray,

but also on stage in his society comedies. But Wilde recognised that dandyism was a way by which people could manipulate social, social drama to place themselves at the centre. His dandy's Lord Ellingworth, for instance, in a woman of no importance, is of low birth, but through his use of dandyism becomes a kind of natural aristocrat. Dandism could be a way of becoming socially mobile. But I think it again, it's impossible to imagine decadence in the 1880s and 1890s without dandyism. because it's a way for the artist to confront the public

and to invite both admiration and ridicule and contempt and to make sure that the Wad, for instance, said if he couldn't be famous, he would be notorious. Well, in fact, it was both. Kate, one of the works most associated with Deccans is the Yellow Book. Why did that make such an impact? Well, the Yellow Book was published quarterly between April 1894 and, April 1897 and it was edited by the American impresario Henry Harland and the radical young artist Aubrey Beardsley just mentioned

and the thing you really need to know about it is that it was designed to announce a new mode of literature and art it appeared literally physically appeared between mustard yellow cloth covers with bold black line drawings by Beardsley on the front and inside readers found short fiction poems pictures essays that were provocative and immoral, animated by style and sensuality. It really was a sort of climax of the decadent movement in many ways. It was animated not by social conscience, not by religious faith, or not by family values, and it was decidedly modern and contrary.

And that's encapsulated by that physical appearance that I mentioned. And there are two main facets of that. First of all, the yellowness of the yellow book is really important. Alex mentioned a little while ago about the disease of decadence and the beautiful disease that Arthur Simmons noted as being the epitome of decadence. This yellow colour was the colour of illness. It was the colour of so-called yellow peril. It was also the colour of the French novels, the French decadent novels published in yellow covers. and the colour of the ostentatious sunflowers, which Wild was parodied wearing.

The self-proclaimed yellow book reclaimed the colour yellow from those negative associations of immoral for an influence and illness. And in reclaiming it celebrated what the cultural establishment saw as degeneracy and dangerous. The second thing is Beardsley. Beardsley was a phenomenon. When the yellow book was first published, he was just 21. and his style was striking, indebted to Luttrecht and Japanese woodcuts. His pictures were two-tone black and white images with voluptuous lines and suggestive curbs.

So the front cover, the first front cover of the Yellow Book gives us an example. It shows a woman wearing a Venetian mask, grinning toward the viewer. And behind her is a masked androgynous figure, bending with full lips as if a bit about to kiss the woman in the foreground on the shoulder. While on the other side of the woman, there is an erect, tapered candle burning bright. The subject matter is typical Beardsley. It's subversive. It's sexually charged. It has ambiguous gender dynamics and a transgression.

It's also worth remembering that in Dorian Gray, Dorian is corrupted by a book in yellow covers, which is a version of Huismans against nature. Do you mind if we come to that when we talk about Dorian Gray, very soon. I just want to bring Alex in at this point. Now, we just want to round this up and ask Alex about what part poetry played in the decadence and in the yellow book. I think poetry played a huge role in decadence. In some ways, their poetry was far more decadent and far more innovative than their prose works. Can you give us examples?

Sure. So one of those famous poems is Ernest Dowson's Nonsomqualis Arambunet, Sub-Regno, Kinare. and this is a poem where the speaker is all sort of exhausted eroticism. There's been too much sex, too many boozy nights, and they can no longer be aroused. And so they announce, I have forgot much, Karnara, gone with the wind, flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng, dancing to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind. I've cried for madder music and for stronger wine. So this idea that you've always, you've tried to have these experiences, you've tried to really live this voluptuous life,

but you can no longer be aroused, and so it's this of exhaustion and ennui. And so that's one of the great sort of classic, decadent poems, but it does, I think, mislead us and to think that it's a bunch of men who are writing poems often about women who are there as sort of sex objects, and you get some really fascinating poetry

by female writers. My favourite is Michael Fields, which is the pen name of Catherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who were aunt and niece, who were intimate life partners for 30 years. And they have these sort of amazingly erotic charged poems. My favourite is called Tiger Lilies. And it's a brilliantly clever address to a flower

that's clearly standing in for the female body. And the poem begins, Lilies, are you come? I quare before you as your buds upswell. It is the miracle of fire and sculptor in your brazen urns that strikes me dumb. And so what you get in, and this is really interesting playing around

with gender identity of the speaker and the addressie, as well as with poetic form to create poetry that's still alive with ambiguity and erotic charge today. And so much of the power of decadent poetry comes, I think, from the fact that they're trying to translate French verse forms and also French poetic content into an English idiom. And it makes their poetry, as I say, innovative and experimental, but often to our ears, sometimes a little bit clunky. Neil, Neil Samus, Oscar Wyn, let's come to the picture of Dorian Gray, which is all of the dominating books. texts, if you want to use that word, at the time and the decadent movement. Why did it make such a stir? It made such a stir because in the character of Dorian,

we have someone who appears to be living the life that Peter outlined in his book on the Renaissance. Dorian is a complex and multiform individual in wild terms. He's a drug addict. He's a murderer. He's also the most charming and beautiful man in London. London. What the book explores is dandyism in two forms. We have Lord Henry Wooten who talks the talk, and Dorian Gray, who is many shades of grey, who walks the walk. And what Wilde shows us,

because he said that the moral of the book, and he said having a moral was the only artistic failure in the book, incidentally, is that all excess as well as all renunciation brings its own punishment and that's a curious form of morality because it takes opposites excess and renunciation and collapses them into each other. When it was first published in Libbingot's monthly, in a rather shortened form to the novel which followed the year later, the homoerotic subtext was rather too close to the surface even for Wilde's liking. And when he published the novel version, He toned that down a bit. What the novel does is flirt with the idea of disclosure, really, disclosing Wilde's own sexual preferences because he's distributed across the novel.

He's distributed in the form of Lord Henry Wooten, in Dorian and in Basil Hallwood, because there's this home erotic triangle at the centre of the novel. It's very interesting that Wilde knew what he was doing, but he had to keep to, he. he had to tread that fine line because he said when the book was condemned if this book is coerced and condemned by a Tory government the public will no doubt rush to it and read it so again he's flirting with notoriety and condemnation and at that time Wilde himself

has become a sort of standard bearer for decadence hasn't he? Yeah he'd been the poster boy for aestheticism in the 1880s and he was now the poster boy for decadence in the 1890s. But I think there's a really interesting symbiotic relationship between Wilde and his detractors. So he was caricatured in Punch, for instance, through the cartoons of George de Morier back in the 1880s

and indeed in the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera patients. But they were partly creating an image that he could live up to. He was trying to manipulate the way he was seen, to his own advantage. So there's this symbiotic relationship between what Wilde is trying to do and those who are trying to make fun of him. I think he worked out, rather before Adamant did,

that ridicule is nothing to be scared of. Kate, what was the breadth and depth of moral outrage against the Deccan movement? I'll be exaggerating it in this programme. Can you give us some instances of how outraged, or how morally outraged people were? Well, for some years, the moral outrage such as it was took the form of light parody.

As Neil's mentioned, George Numerier and Punch lampooned the estates and Gilbert and Sullivan. Impatience created a kind of comical East-Eat, Bunthorn. But at the same time, these were figures of fun and vague suspicions, but the suspicions were quite vague. At the same time, decadence was also being commodified in the homes of the new bourgeoisie. who bought blue china and sunflower images and William Morris wallpaper, while Wilde's plays were repackaging decadent ideas for the masses. It's only really in 1895 that things take a darker turn.

The sort of latent discomfort in many quarters with decadences challenges to sexual norms and Victorian values become moral opprobrium with the arrest and subsequent conviction for acts of gross indecency of Oscar Wilde. And the newspapers had a field day. Wilde was reported to have been arrested carrying the yellow book, reading the yellow book and went to the police station carrying it under his arm. It wasn't true, but it didn't matter. It was all about the appearance, this identification of wild and sexual deviance

with the yellow book, everything that the decadent movement was now perceived to have been standing for all the time. Alex Murray, can you develop that? It was branded degenerate. The Yellow Book and Wild were the middle of that. What made that decadence so threatening? I think its threateningness comes from largely, as Kate has already said, from sex and sexuality. But I think we shouldn't over-determine.

the role that sort of queer sexuality played, often a lot of the moral outrage was to do with the explicit exploration of heterosexuality. So Arthur Simmons's poems, they almost all to me seem to sort of involve post-coital moments of voluptuousness that are being recalled or write it like George Edgerton. You're at exploring female sexual psychology. And so she's labelled an erosomaniac, and it's called neuropathic fiction.

So this idea that literature that's exploring sexuality, is shocking, and it really does shock a lot of the literary establishment. I think it's also the foreignness of decadence, so it's often being dismissed as being French, a sort of curiously French contagion that is coming over to England and is really threatening to corrupt young men. I guess it's also its moral didacticism, or its lack of moral didacticism, is something that people find deeply concerning. The idea that literature is not here to teach us something, is not here to uphold values,

but only has an obligation to and of itself. And then I think it's also decadence as egoism and it's solipsism. The resistance the decadence has to all forms of collective identity, particularly forms maybe of national identity. And so this celebration of the individual and the individual who's going to do exactly what they wants and is not going to be told by anyone else how to live their lives, this I think is still deeply threatening to a Victorian culture

that really wants or sort of craves a certain sort of homogeneity. Neil Samuels, do you see a direct connection between the Oscar Wilde trial and conviction and the end of the movement? Absolutely. And just to go back to pick up Alex's point, the Daily Telegraph, and I guess this is barely credible, condemned Wilde after his trial for importing a pagan plague that was French. There's a great deal of xenophobia at play because of the self-identification of many of the decadence with a European cosmopolitan, which the Telegraph, amongst other publications, found somewhat troubling to English masculinity. After the trial, Wilde is now mad, bad and dangerous to know. And I think there was a real sense among some of his circle that they might be hit by collateral damage. And sent to Reading Jail for hard labour for two years. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Two years for hard labour. And if we think about what Justice Wills, who handed down the sentence, said to him, it's really quite extraordinary. He said, this is the worst case I have ever heard. And that people who could do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, which certainly suggests that he himself had a rather untypical English public school education, if this came such a shock to him. Wilde's behaviour had been bringing this to a crisis.

In the previous few years, feasting with Panthers, as he called it, his behaviour had become more and more indiscreet. He was flaunting his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, almost provoking Douglas's mad father into the actions which precipitated Wilde's downfall. It really is a high water mark. Something we need to remember, though, about that trial. Wilde did not see himself in any sense as a gay martyr. Wilde saw himself as a martyr to individualism and to art as the highest form of individualism. But after the trial, well, decadence as a movement starts to fizzle out because people start to die.

Beardsley died, I think, when he was 25. Johnson and Dawson were dead by the time. time they were into their early 30s. There was what Yates called a tragic generation. The way he put it was that after 1900, nobody drank absinthe with their black coffee anymore, nobody went mad and nobody committed suicide. His point being that there was a kind of narrative around the lives of decadent writers, which they all contrived to live up to. A narrative, a narrative of of failure and tragic loss. Kate, Kate Hex, what are the ways in which the movement

was empowering for women? Can we bring that theme in again? Have you any evidence for that? It was both empowering and undermining for women. As I mentioned a little while ago, there was a current of misogyny that ran through key works of decadence. And Dorian Gray is a prime example of that.

Lord Henry, who espouses those the most paterian lines, taken to the nth degree to Dorian, also speaks the novel's most misogynistic lines, saying that no woman is a genius and women are charmingly artificial but have no sense of art. At the same time, the dream of decadence,

this dream of living for exquisite sensations, was an aspiration. The whole idea of being able to live for beauty is the dream of a future possibility and for women, a future possibility not constrained by marriage or motherhood or society's expectations at all. And that was a dream of future possibility not only for women,

but also for the many really not very wealthy young men who wrote decadent poems and short stories and could only dream of the kind of wealth that would enable them to really be decadent, truly decadent. Alex, can I come back to you? What, in your view, finally did, we've been talking about the wild case. What about the Boer War?

What about the resurrection, as it were, of military men and empires and which had been seen to be on the decline? Did that have a part to play? I think it really did. I mean, I think in some ways you could say this was a literary fad in a fashion that petered out like all literary fads and fashions do. They never really last. And by 1890, Simmons has rebranded himself as a symbolist

and is talking about the symbolist movement in literature and is really sort of distancing himself from decadence. but I think fundamentally the cultural climate in Britain had changed dramatically. So I think you've got the jingoism that greets Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee of 1897 is really one important moments. But arguably it's the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Bore War in the summer of 1899 that really does do for decadence. Patriotism sweeps the nation, and decadent riders really get caught up in this,

and some of the most strikingly original decadent writers turn to writing the most kind of awful jingoistic dog rules. So Algern and Charles Swinburne writes an absolutely terrible poem attacking the boars. John Davidson, who was previously publishing the Yellow Book and writing a very sort of sexually realist literature. He is suddenly turned into this sort of prophet of empire and even Michael Field are writing this terrible war sonnets. And in 1913 when Francis Gribble looked back at the 1890s, Francis Gribble said that it was the brutal realities of the bore war that are diverted men's admiration from the ideal of art for art's sake to that of fighting for fighting sake. And so I think you really see this sort of change in cultures

people really embrace the sort of military masculinity and decadence is no longer something that anyone really wants to be involved in. So certainly by the time you get to 1900, 1901, there are very few people who are out there as decadence. But you still have decant writers who are writing decadent literature, someone like Arthur Mackin, as the great prose work of British decadence, which is the Hill of Dreams in 1907. And you've also got a new generation of young men at Oxford and Cambridge who are developing what we think of as neo-decedence,

a sort of light, modernist form of decadence that's really indebted to the 1890s, but taking it in new directions. Neil Samuze, had decadence then become a rather toxic brand? Oh, I'm sure it had. I mean, Alex just pointed out how Simmons rebranded, minded himself as a symbolist for fear of collateral damage, I think. The interesting thing is that symbolism and decadence are really very much intertwined.

What do you mean by symbolism? What would you tell the listeners symbolism stood for? Symbolism, it was, I think was an artistic movement which tried to explore the extent to which art could give us access to alternative or higher realities. It was fundamentally a rejection of realism and naturalism. I think some of its most powerful forms are theatrical. I think that Wilde's Salome, for instance, anticipated and fed off some of the symbolist theatre

that was being experimented with in Europe at the time, the theatre of MetaLink, for instance. symbolism was something that Yates embraced in the 1890s. It was an... The interesting difference, I think, between decadence and symbolism, although they're intertwined threads, was that decadence was an attempt to squeeze everything out of the present moment, everything about the here and now, the transitory, the fleeting,

to recognise the value in moments that might become epiphanies. Although it is very, very closely related to decadence, and writers like Malame and Verlaine are important to the development of both decadence and symbolism was trying to take us to a higher plane. Decadence was about enjoying as much of the here and now, quotidian reality. Kate, would it be possible to say, or would it be sensible to say, that what had been overturned or what was being overturned was the dominance of the idea that truth was in nature and the, arrival of the idea that you look for truth everywhere, but particularly in cities. Yeah, I think that you could say that. I mean, the decadent movements were to a large extent indebted, looking back to romanticism, but they were also harbingers of a new kind of literature

and a new way of being in the world, harbingers of modernity, rebellion, a new sensual way of life. When we get to the early 1900s, the decadents aren't out and proud. They're not a movement, but they're there, and they kind of go global. So Neil and Alex are, of course, quite right that decadence sort of disbands in some ways.

But at the same time, we have the influence felt in Britain through the early work of T.S. Eliot, though he tried to disavow it and said that Walter Pater was responsible for some rather untidy lives. Ezra Pound, Ronald Furbank. But then decadence begins to exert a more vital influence, I think, in the United States, and particularly amongst journalists, so the journalists who went out west to Hollywood and started writing early films.

Why did that happen? And which films you're talking about? Deccadence, and particularly Simmons and why. Wild and Beardsley, had this kind of cachet, a sort of countercultural cachet in the 2010s and 1920s in the US, particularly amongst the journalists working in the cities in the US. Those were the same people who went out west during the Hollywood boom to become the writers, directors, producers of early Hollywood cinema. They adapted because a lot of early silent films are adaptations. They adapted the picture of Dorian Gray, Lady. Windermere's fan, Salome, but they also took inspiration when the talkies came about,

inspiration from Wilde's aphorisms, from the way he taught people how to speak on stage in a fundamentally different way. Alex, we're towards the end of the programme now. Is there a longer term legacy of the decadent movement? I think there really is. I mean, as Kate sort of says, decadence has taken up in America in the 19 teens and 20s. And in Britain, I think things go rather quiet after the 1920s, and decadence really isn't very important in the 30s, 40s and 50s. So in 1954, to celebrate the centenary

of Wilde's birth, there's a very modest series of events, including unveiling of a plaque on his tight street house. But once the 1960s comes around, a new generation have discovered decadence for themselves. And a much more permissive culture really does embrace decadence. So in 1965, the comedian Barry Humphreys, published as Bazaar, which is this compendium of the odd and the outrageous where he's combining decadent works with surrealist art to create this sort of new transgressive art work. And then you've also got, in 1966,

a big Beardsley retrospective at the V&A, which brings Beardsley to a whole new generation in 1966. You've got the opening of Granny Takes the Trip Boutique in London, which sees Beersley's work influence psychedelic stuff. In 1967 you've got the BBC choosing not to play the Rolling Stones promotional film clip for We Love You on top of the pops. And that film clip included Jagger as Wild, Marianne Faithful as Boise and Richards as Queensbury. And so you've got this sort of interest that pop stars and rock and roll stars have with decadence. And that really carries through right on to today.

You could think of David Bowie or Morrissey, fans of Oscar Wild and decadence. And so decadence still, I think, exerts a very, very strong pull on the eye. arts, but I think more broadly on the idea of sort of of the artist as the rebel who was pushing back against social conformism. This is something I think that the decadence crystallised in the 1890s and becomes one of the sort of dominance cultural images of the 20th century. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Kate Hext, Neil Samuels and Alex Murray, and to our studio engineer Donald MacDonald. Next week, it's Plato's dialogue, Georges, on the true nature of and freedom and whether might you can ever be right.

Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I think we could have said a bit more about Beardley, actually, because I think he's such an interesting figure. And I'm thinking about the unfinished novel Under the Hill, which was published in the Savoy, which was the successor to the yellow book.

It's really an exercise in mock decadence. It's a point at which decadence spills over into ridiculing itself. I mean, the linguistic games he plays are very redolent of Ronald Furbank later. And so although Kate talked about the sophistication of his drawings, and I think that's absolutely right, the thing that strikes me about Beardsley is that there's something magnificently juvenile about him. There's something

the way he embraces the obscene and the pornographic is, well, it feels more like a counterculture magazine like Oz from the 1960s. So I think Alex's point about him being rediscovered is really

important. There's a real coming together as sensibilities there. And I think, you know, Beersley is this extraordinary dandy figure, immensely gifted, immensely talented, but dead, I think, by the time he was 25, I think, the most tragic of the tragic generation, possibly the most gifted of the tragic generation if we lead wild out of the equation. Yeah, I agree. On Beardsley, I mean, I agree, I'm not as taken with the schoolboy

humor as you are, Neil. That's just my tastes. I think if we'd had a more, time. I think the thing I find quite interesting is the way that decadence really wasn't part of the literary teaching until quite recently, till the last couple of decades. And I think that allowed decadence and decadent writers to retain this kind of image as the bad boys and bad girls of literature. I think the fact that that people like Wild weren't claimed by the burgeoning English literature degree programmes in the 1960s and in the 1970s and not until the 1980s allowed them this kind of this kind of image as being outside the establishment allowed that to persist. So I think that the fact that they've been kind of brought into the cultural

establishment only latterly is interesting and important for how we see them. I was rather surprised you left out evil in war in the 20th. I think he flirted with decadence or with his characters did anyway. Well, he did. You see, a lot of people flirted with decadence. So that's why, sorry, Neil, but I disagree with you. I don't think that it's just a few people. It's loads of people because it was like a spirit of the age, right?

It was like a burgeoning spirit of the age from the 1880s through to figures exactly right, like war. And there were other people too. I mean like Kenneth Graham, famous as the writer of Wind and the Willows who published in the Yellow Book, writers like E. Nesbitt, famous for the railway children, who also kind of picked up the kind of styles and concerns of decadence in order to be in with the cool crowd. And these people, they weren't paid up decadence, they weren't.

But what they did was to kind of, they read the fashion and they became part of that movement. in the 1890s. That is really interesting what Kate's just said. And I think that something that we perhaps could have thought a little bit more about

is why there's less decadent, there's not much by way of decadent novel writing. It's basically poetry and essays writing about decadence. Dorian Gray is the only novel that we still read.

I mean, Max Beerbom's Zulika Dobson is really a satire on decadence. So as a literary movement, it's really Dorian Gray, Salomey on the stage, and the poetry. But the movement continues, as you, I think you pointed out in your eyes,

it's really taken up by the pop group movement in the, say, 70s and 80s, 90s. You picked out Bowie particularly. I did. But I think I really disagree with Neil that there's only one decadent novel. I think there are lots of decadent novels in English. And I think that Arthur Mackins, The Hill of Dreams, which I mentioned, is the great decadent novel in English.

It is stylistically so much more sophisticated and interesting than wilds. I think there's lots of people writing really interesting decadent novels. And I think someone like Evil and War is certainly drawing on the legacies of decadence, even if it's filtered through Ronald Furbank and neo-decedence. He's drawing on decadence as he's creating his own novel style. But I think war is really interesting because in the 1960s when war is interviewed by the BBC in his notoriously crotchety interview, he's asked about whether he is about whether he regrets sort of, you know, his 1920s interest in aestheticism and decadence. And he says, you know, I am still a pure East Thete now.

And this idea, I think, of war, the crotchety old conservative as an East Thete is one of the really interesting points about decadence that we haven't touched on. And that is that it is in some ways transgressive. when we think about transgressive art as being somehow progressive, decadence is also deeply conservative and deeply reactionary. But it's very, very elitist art, and it wants to suggest that popular taste is terrible, and popular taste really should be jettisons, and that the public should embrace their arts.

And so what they're suggesting is that the public has no idea, and the public are all fools, and so they should really be turning to an artistic elite. And so, of course, the decadence imagined that they are the artistic elite. And so you get some really conservative politics amongst decaders, which explains where someone like War, who is an arch-conservative, still has this sort of legacy of decadence. I think the politics of decadence are really interesting

and that it's sort of sexual transgressiveness shouldn't cloud the fact that it is often very, very socially conservative. But it's not elitist, does it, Alex? I mean, look at Wilde. I mean, look at Wilde's plays. I mean, look at Ronald Furbank. Ronald Furbank loved, yes, we have no bananas. It was one of his favorite records.

They embraced what other people would see as popular degenerate culture. I mean, what you say is true, but it's not universally true. It's not universally true, but I think that we can say that decadence often has a disdain for the common. And even though they might pick up some forms of popular culture, and why does, of course, using popular culture, He's doing that largely because he's trying to find an audience. He's trying to sell his work. There's something very, very, I think he's being very, very strategic there.

And so I think when Wilde writes sort of his true decadent works, which I'd say the Salome and the Sphinx, these are not popular works. And there's certainly some way away from his social comedies, which I would say are not in any way, shape or form decadence. But they could be seen as a particularly satirious. pitch, a take on a decadent society, which has lost its way. I mean, it's very interesting the way that Wilde plays with both conventional morality and

the subversion of it. You know, double standards, hypocrisy, all these things Wilde is exploring in the social comedies. But I think Alex is right. They're not pieces of decadent. They're not decadent works of art, but they could be seen as satires of a, decadent degenerate society. Yeah, definitely. Is decadence commodified, repackaged for a mass public? I mean, that's what Henry James hated about them. I mean, he wrote in his letters that he really hated it.

He had to go see them because he hated them so much and he wanted to hate them. And then he wrote catty letters about how the audience thought themselves so decadent, and he hated that. But yeah, they were decadents for a mass public. but I don't, I don't, but I think that's okay. Thanks a lot. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm John Ronson, and I want to tell you about a new podcast I've made for BBC Radio 4.

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