Sheer
DECADENCE For the English Decadents of the 1890s, certain ‘golden books’ – from Huysmans’ A rebours to Wilde’s Salomé with its distinctive illustrations by Beardsley – played a central role in defining the movement, as Matthew Sturgis reveals ‘It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.’ In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Lord Henry Wotton presents the beautiful and impressionable Dorian with a slim yellow-backed French novel. This volume becomes Dorian’s guidebook – his Baedeker of Decadence – leading him down a path of ever-more refined pleasures and calculated excesses, towards destruction. The book is not given a title but, as many of Oscar Wilde’s readers would have known – and as Wilde himself later acknowledged – the work was J.K. Huysmans’ novel, A rebours. Published in France in 1884, with English-language editions only appearing from 1922 (translated as Against the Grain or Against Nature), it tells the tale of an effete aristocrat seeking escape from the tedium and crassness of the modern world, in acts of aesthetic selfindulgence and perversion. In the end he abandons even sex, for the more complex pleasures provided by rare perfumes, artificial plants, late Latin literature and a jewel-encrusted pet tortoise.
It was the book that, perhaps more than any other, distilled the essence of Decadence. Drawing on the novel ideas of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, it rejected the nineteenth-century cult of material progress, and proclaimed instead a retreat into a realm of amoral aesthetic pleasure; a creed not merely of Art for Art’s Sake (a dangerous enough notion to most Victorians), but of Life for Art’s Sake. The artificial was to be ranked above the natural, the complex above the simple. The Dandy, the Bohemian and the Artist were to be the heroes of the new era. These were arresting new ideas, and they had a particular attraction in the artistic circles of 1890s London. They retain something of their force even now. Lord Henry Wotton – brilliant, informed, inquiring – would surely have been a member of The London Library, and I did wonder whether the copy of A rebours that he lent to Dorian would perhaps have been borrowed from St James’s Square. (The proscription against lending books to third parties is exactly the sort of rule that, as an inveterate subversive, he would have been delighted to flaunt.) But it seems not. The title is not listed in the Library’s 1888 catalogue, and appears only in an 1897 edition in the 1903 catalogue. The idea, however, that a particular book might act as the vade mecum to a new (and dangerously exciting) way of life was a pervasive one for the Decadent writers of the 1890s. The novels – and the histories – of the period are littered with such personalised sacred texts. And The
Top left Illustration by Arthur Zaidenberg of the character Jean Des Esseintes, from J.K. Huysmans’ novel Against the Grain (1884), 1931 English edition. Courtesy of Gilden Books Ltd. Above Max Beerbohm’s caricature of himself in a top hat, 1897. Courtesy of Maggs Bros. Ltd. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19
•
