The Aesthetic Adventure by Gaunt William

Author:Gaunt,William.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LANGUAGE. LINGUISTICS. LITERATURE, Literature, Literary forms. Genres
Publisher: Jonathan Cape Thirty Bedford Square.
Published: 1945-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

SALOME: L'APPARITION From a painting by Gxistavc Morcau

AESTHETICISM RAMPANT

little doubt that the work was decadent in this sense, without appreciating either its tormented conscience or the beauty of language. On the other hand, the word decadent was applied in a particular sense to indicate a mannerism and a suggestive power of words, a departure from classic principles, just as medieval writers in Latin might be said to be decadent. But however much the purist might insist on this meaning, it was not commonly used with such strictness. The term of disapproval was adopted out of bravado by the writers to whom it was applied, and with all its flavour of wickedness. Only a poet could do justice to all it suggested. 'I love', said Verlaine, 'this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiator, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the trump of an invading enemy sounds/ The maker of dictionaries might jib at such a definition but it was in this exciting shape that it made its appeal to artists. It made romance out of exhaustion and excess.

Certainly Decadence appeared in these colours to Wilde. The alluring thing about A Rebours was that it was 'poisonous*. He added to his repertoire of opinions, the approval of excess in which great French writers had been and were so wholehearted. With the necessity of having enemies and objecting to nature on which Whistler insisted it made up a new attitude, 'shocking* in a fresh manner, and expandable almost to the sifce of a philosophy, by the variations of paradox. His habit of paradox was growing. If the proverbial wisdom and accepted maxims of the mass of mankind were natural; then to convert wisdom into art it was only necessary to turn it upside down or inside out. Consequently he was able, by a slight exertion of his singular cleverness, to produce the effect of a refreshing truth, hitherto undiscovered, brought to light by a seeming profundity of thought. 'If one tells the truth one is sure sooner or later to be found out/ 'One should be careful to choose one's enemies well/ 'Nothing succeeds like excess/ However simple the recipe the result was none the less effective and as truth is many-sided it sometimes looked as if in reversing the accepted he had made an important discovery.

Such was the Oscar Wilde, who after his period of wandering settled

BATTLE

down in London in the 'eighties. He was much changed. The earnest pleader for child craftsmanship, the advocate of refined schemes of interior decoration, had become an ultra-sophisticated man of letters, reoriented, if not re-educated by his sojourn across the Channel.

Society and the Press were somewhat disappointed at finding him so far departed from the aesthetic pattern.

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