FIN DE SICLE AESTHETICISM,

DANDYSM AND DECADENCE

IT STARTED IN PARIS.

Somewhere about 1850, there emerged in France a new mode of thought and feeling which has slowly but forcefully extended its sway over the consciousness of the West

THE DANDY at the heart of the 1890s lies the Dandy daring, hedonistic, rebellious against all cause and reason but his ephemeral own. His favorite outings take place in Paris museums, London living-rooms or Central European cafs; with his exquisite tastes and brilliant conversation, he transgresses and interconnects cultural trends and spaces.

When does Dandyism appear?

Clarles Baudelaire argued that Dandyism appears especially in those periods of transition when democracy has not yet become allpowerful, and when aristocracy is only partially weakened and discredited. In the confusion of such times, a certain number of men, disenchanted and leisured 'outsiders', but all of them richly endowed with native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to break down because established on the most precious, the most indestructible faculties, on the divine gifts that neither work nor money can give. Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages; and the sort of dandy discovered by the traveller in Northern America in no sense invalidates this idea; for there is no valid reason why we should not believe that the tribes we call savage are not the remnants of great civilizations of the past. Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons. The Painter of Modern Life

THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE

The New, intellectual, reformed Dandy of the 1890s creates the prototype for a particular kind of artist meant to combine genius and life in a revolutionary blend of aestheticism, decadence and incipient modernism.

Baudelaires Portrait of the Dandy

The wealthy man, who, blase though he may be, has no occupation in life but to chase along the highway of happiness, the man nurtured in luxury, and habituated from early youth to being obeyed by others, the man, finally, who has no profession other than elegance, is bound at all times to have a facial expression of a very special kind. Dandyism is an ill-defined social attitude as strange as duelling; it goes back a long way, since Caesar, Catilina, Alcibiades provide us with brilliant examples of it; it is very widespread, since Chateaubriand found examples of it in the forests and on the lake-sides of the New World. Dandyism, which is an institution outside the law, has a rigorous code of laws that all its subjects are strictly bound by, however ardent and independent their individual characters may be.
a dandy can never be a vulgar man. If he were to commit a crime, he might perhaps be socially damned, but if the crime came from some trivial cause, the disgrace would be irreparable. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird's, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.

The Man of the Crowd - Flneur

He admires the eternal beauty and the astonishing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained in the tumult of human liberty. He gazes at the landscape of the great city, landscapes of stone, now swathed in the mist, now struck in full face by the sun. He enjoys handsome equipages, proud horses, the spit and polish of the grooms, the skilful handling by the page boys, the smooth rhythmical gait of the women, the beauty of the children, full of the joy of life and proud as peacocks of their pretty clothes; in short, life universal. If in a shift of fashion, the cut of a dress has been slightly modified, if clusters of ribbons and curls have been dethroned by rosettes, if bonnets have widened and chignons have come down a little on the nape of the neck, if waist-lines have been raised and skirts become fuller, you may be sure that from a long way off his eagle's eye will have detected it.
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

LONDON IN THE 1890s

an entire age was simultaneously coming to an end as another was in the process of formation. London became one of the major cities of Modernism, closely associated in this international movement with Paris, Berlin and Vienna.

EMPIRES IN DECLINE

Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget! Rudyard Kipling, "Recessional," 1897

THE RISE OF MODERNISM

Cultural trends in the final decades of the century were thus moving in two simultaneous antithetical directions: declining Victorianism (the synthesis of moral, religious, artistic, political, and social thought that had produced the wealthiest and most powerful empire on earth) and rising Modernism (with its challenges by writers and artists to the cultural foundations of Philistine society, which habitually condemned daring innovations in the arts as immoral or degenerate).

Modernity

And so, walking or quickening his pace, he [the artist] goes his way, for ever in search. In search of what? We may rest assured that this man, such as I have described him, this solitary mortal endowed with an active imagination, always roaming the great desert of men, has a nobler aim than that of the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call 'modernity', for want of a better term to express the idea in question. The aim for him is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the-eternal and the immovable.

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

THE YELLOW BOOK

a quarterly literary periodical that lent its name to the "Yellow" 1890s. published in London from 1894 to 1897 by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, later by John Lane alone, and edited by the American Henry Harland. to some degree associated with Aestheticism and Decadence, the magazine contained a wide range of literary and artistic genres, poetry, short stories, essays, book illustrations, portraits, and reproductions of paintings.

AUBREY BEARDSLEY

Aubrey Beardsley was its first art editor, and he has been credited with the idea of the yellow cover, with its association with French fiction of the period.

This "yellow book" is understood by critics to be rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a representative work of Parisian decadence that heavily influenced British aesthetes like Beardsley. Such books in Paris were wrapped in yellow paper to alert the reader to their lascivious content.

 REBOURS (1884)

a novel in which very little happens its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. rebours contains many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. the novel broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature.

ECCENTRICITY

He won a great reputation as an eccentric,-a reputation he crowned by adopting a costume of black velvet worn with a gold-fringed waistcoat and sticking by way of cravat a bunch of Parma violets in the opening of a very low-necked shirt. Then he would invite parties of literary friends to dinners that set all the world talking. In one instance in particular, modelling the entertainment on a banquet of the eighteenth century, he had organized a funeral feast in celebration of the most unmentionable of minor personal calamities. The dining-room was hung with black and looked out on a strangely metamorphosed garden, the walks being strewn with charcoal, the little basin in the middle of the lawn bordered with a rim of black basalt and filled with ink; and the ordinary shrubs superseded by cypresses and pines. The dinner itself was served on a black cloth, decorated with baskets of violets and scabiosae and illuminated by candelabra in which tall tapers flared. - rebours

 REBOURS and OSCAR WILDE

It is widely believed that rebours is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The book's plot is said to have dominated the action of Dorian, causing him to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism. Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmanss A ReboursTo a correspondent he wrote that he had played a fantastic variation upon A Rebours and some day must write it down. The references in Dorian Gray to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Vintage, 1988), p. 316

BEAUTY & ART FOR ARTS SAKE

beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smilePeople say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible//Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.... Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism - that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season. . . . - Lord Henry to Dorian Gray, Chapter 2 in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

The Yellow Book and Oscar Wilde

Though Oscar Wilde never published anything within its pages, it was linked to him because Beardsley had illustrated his Salom and because he was on friendly terms with many of the contributors. In Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a major corrupting influence on Dorian is "the yellow book" which Lord Henry sends over to amuse him after the suicide of his first love. Soon after Wilde was arrested in April 1895 Beardsley was dismissed as the periodical's art editor, his post taken over by the publisher, John Lane, assisted by another artist, Patten Wilson .

OSCAR WILDES PREFACE TO THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY AND AESTHETICISM

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. (see impersonality of the artist; also to be found in Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and T. S. Eliots Tradition and the Individual Talent) Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

How Sir Belvedere Cast the Sword Excalibur into the Water by Aubrey Beardsley

Siegfried Act II by Aubrey Beardsley

AESTHETICISM

The Aesthetic Movement is a late 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values over moral or social themes in literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design. It belongs to the anti-Victorian reaction and had postRomantic roots, and as such anticipates modernism. It took place in the late Victorian period from around 1868 to 1901, and is generally considered to have ended with the trial of Oscar Wilde (which occurred in 1895).

THE ROOTS OF AESTHETICISM

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The Oxford don Walter Pater and his essays published in 1867 68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, following an ideal of beauty Decadent writers used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake" (L'art pour l'art), whose origin is debated. This principle lay at the heart of aestheticism. Aestheticism had its forerunners in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and among the Pre-Raphaelites. French symbolism influenced the best representatives of aestheticism Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne (and even early 20th century writers like James Joyce and the Bloomsbury artists).

WALTER PATERS LEGACY

One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clung about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve -les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For 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, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion - that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. - Walter Pater, Conclusions to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)

AESTHETICISM AN OBJECT OF RIDICULE AND SCORN

Aestheticism, the aesthetes, decadence and the Dandy were satirised in comic magazines such as Punch. The decade has also been called the decadent Nineties or the naughty Nineties.