Aestheticism and Decadence Dr Catherine Brown Topics covered

Aestheticism and Decadence Dr. Catherine Brown

Topics covered in this video Max Nordau Gilbert and Sullivan Punch

Max Nordau

Decadentism has not been confined to France alone; it has also established a school in England. We have already mentioned, in the preceding book, one of the earliest and most servile imitators of Baudelaire—Swinburne. I had to class him among the mystics, for the degenerative stigma of mysticism predominates in all his works. He has, it is true, been train-bearer to so many models that he may be ranked among the domestic servants of a great number of masters; but, finally, he will be assigned a place where he has served longest, and that is among the pre-Raphaelites. From Baudelaire he has borrowed principally diabolism and Sadism, unnatural depravity, and a predilection for suffering, disease and crime. The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art, have found their English representative among the ‘Æsthetes, ’ the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde.

Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works […] Wilde dresses in queer costumes which recall partly the fashions of the Middle Ages, partly the rococo modes. He pretends to have abandoned the dress of the present time because it offends his sense of the beautiful; but this is only a pretext in which probably he himself does not believe. What really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about

It is asserted that he has walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his head, and a sunflower in his hand, the quasi-heraldic symbol of the Æsthetes. This anecdote has been reproduced in all the biographies of Wilde, and I have nowhere seen it denied. But is a promenade with a sunflower in the hand also inspired by a craving for the beautiful?

But the central idea of his tortuously disdainful prattling, pursuing as its chief aim the heckling of the Philistine, and laboriously seeking the opposite pole to sound common-sense, is the glorification of art. Wilde sets forth in the following manner the system of the ‘Æsthetes’: ‘Briefly, then, their doctrines are these: Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines … As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject matter.

To us who live in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art except our own. The only beautiful things are things that do not concern us… The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.

Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan, 1881

CHORUS OF DRAGOONS Now is not this ridiculous, and is not this preposterous? A thorough-paced absurdity – explain it if you can. Instead of rushing eagerly to cherish us and foster us, They all prefer this melancholy literary man. Instead of slyly peering at us, Casting looks endearing at us, Blushing at us, flirting with a fan; They're actually sneering at us, fleering at us, jeering at us! Pretty sort of treatment for a military man!

BUNTHORNE (aside, slyly) Though my book I seem to scan In a rapt ecstatic way, Like a literary man Who despises female clay, I hear plainly all they say, Twenty love-sick maidens they!

Punch cartoons of the 1880 s and 1890 s

Topics covered in this video Max Nordau Gilbert and Sullivan Punch