Decadent Fiction Before the Keynotes Series

Abstract

In the late 1880s and early 1890s as attacks were launched against Decadence in novels and in the periodical press, a case for literary Decadence was being made by proponents of the movement, mostly through the limited venues of little magazines such as the Century Guild Hobby Horse, Pioneer, and the Artist and Journal of Home Culture.¹ Where critics of Decadence focused on its more sensationalistic aspects, proponents articulated intellectual theories that represented Decadence as a high artistic genre. These proponents included Havelock Ellis and Arthur Symons, who wrote influential essays on Decadence, Ellis for the progressive journal Pioneer (1889), and Symons for the more mainstream Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1893). Ellis and Symons became acquainted with French Decadence while visiting France together. In their articles, both focused on Decadence as a perspective or style of writing. In turn, they downplayed, though did not deny, the often risqué subject matter of Decadent literature. In describing Decadence, Ellis borrowed from French writer Paul Bourget’s definition: ‘The style of Decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word.’² In a similar vein, Symons described Decadence as ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement’.