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1Dr. Richard Clarke LITS3001 Notes 02A

AESTHETICS AND POETRY OF THE FIN-DE-SICLE

The last decade of the Nineteenth century was characterised, artistical ly-speaking, by a strongly anti-Romanticand anti-Victorian impulse. Much of what was hitherto taken to be normal was flatly rejected by the so-calledavant-garde poets of the era. Similar principles to those embraced by the poets of this period would become

the staple fare of Modernist poetry. There are four inter-related strains in the poetry of the 1890's:

Aestheticism

This school of thought preached the autonomy and supremacy of art: lart pour lart, as its founding figureThophile Gautier termed it.# The goals of Realism and Naturalism (verisimilitude, fidelity to life, etc.) were repudiated in favour

of more purely formalist goals (their emphasis is on the stylised and the conventional). In his essayThe Decay of Lying, Wilde claims that art must keep between itself and life the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorat ive or ideal treatment. Wilde praises all art in which there is a frankrejection of imitation, . . . love of artistic convention, . . . dislike to the actual representation of anyobject in nature.

# The end of art is beauty and beauty is style. Style is the product of sheer hard work and won byscrupulous toil against the resistances of language. Ones audience is therefore not the general rabble

because only ones fellow craftsmen can appreciate such pains.# The quest for beauty has nothing to do with either the aspirations of the individual (Wilde claimed thatto reveal art and conceal the artist is arts aim) or the prevailing attitudes (the dominant ideology) of the age in which the poet worked: Art , Wilde claimed, has an independent life, . . . and developspurely on its own lines.

In short, to be its best, art had to be free of all other commitments, whether to the moral good, religious belief,truth to life or social amelioration.

Decadence

This terms reflects the focus, both in the poetry and in the poets lifestyle, on morally dubious subjects: theugly, the morbid, the perverse, the pathological, the self-destructive, the hedonistic, etc. (Hence, the title of Baudelaires most famous work: Les Fleurs du Mal.)# The Decadent writer saw himself as the late product of an overripe civilisation, jaded, bored (Perkins

44), satiated and yearning for fresh tastes to satisfy his dulled palate (44). Hence, the fascination withthe perverse.# Many of the figures associated with the Decadent movement practised what at the time was called

Dandyism. This was characterised by a contemptuous scorn for middle class values and norms(moral, sexual, etc.).

# The surrender to amorality, to monstrous and perverse emotions and sensations, was not simply partof an eff ort to shock ones audience. More importantly, it was thought that in the contemplation of these seemingly negative things (hitherto undiscussed in literature), a deeper reali ty and a strange andcompelling new beauty could be found that would lead the poet away from a superficial to a deeper reality. There is a touch of the Orphean to the moral experiments of many of the leading figures of this movement.

# Decadent also implies, as Symons put it, the sense that this was the fin-de-sicle: Decadence impliedall the qualities that mark the end of great periods, namely, an intense self-consciousness, a restlesscuriosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity.

Symbolism

Many English poets turned to the French Symbolist poets Baudelaire, Mallarm, Verlaine, and Rimbaud for their inspiration..# The French Symbolists were influenced by Romantics such as Coleridge in their quest to read the

signs of a transcendent reality in the physical. Since at least Coleridge, there was a belief that somenatural and man-made objects served as symbols that, when their significance was rightly appreciated,linked the physical world and its mundane concerns to the non-physical, spiritual realm beyond thisworld. From this point of view, art ought to turn away from the outward world of things, hence fromscientific curiosity, moral responsibility, poli tical passions, from description and argument (Perkins 50)

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2Dr. Richard Clarke LITS3001 Notes 02A

to focus, for critics such as Yeats, on the invisible life, the essences of things. All this was in aneffort to make, as Arthur Symons put it, the soul of things visible. In short, the Symbolist writer either affirms the Platonic concept that everything in the actual world of experience presents itself as areflection of something in the transcendent realm of the real (Perkins 51) or believes in an organiccosmos in which one identical Life or Spirit pervades the Whole (51).

#

The intuition of the organic unity or correspondences which bind all things provides the ground for aprominent device in modern poetry: the juxtaposition of seemingly alien or at least unconnectedobjects.

# What struck most English observers such as Wilde about the French Symbolists was not so much thetranslucence of the eternal in or through the temporal (to paraphrase Coleridge) as it was thesuggestive imprecision, the inexplicit vagueness and the density of possible meanings in Symbolistpoetry as a result of which the work takes on a depth, obscurity and mystery hitherto not witnessed inpoetry.

# The Symbolist turn away from nature as subject-matter and towards the city (especially the sordidaspects thereof) also intrigued English poets.

Impressionism

Impressionist poetry attempts to present a scene via the rapid notation of the onlookers impressions. The

scene evokes a mood upon which the poet does not comment directly. All that is reported is the onlookerscomplex of sensations and impressions inspired by the scene. There is no philosophical contemplation towhich the scene gives rise as is the case with the Romantic ode. Moreover, Impressionist poems offer deliberately blurred evocations of scenes rather than explicit , crystal-clear, definitive portraits (see the smudgybrushwork of the painter Manet). It is an art of visual impression without comment.# Impressionism is predicated upon epistemological skept icism or relativism: academics like W alter

Pater were of the view that no external object could be known in itself: one only receives animpression thereof v ia the physical senses that is determined by the perspective from which one viewsthe object in question. Pater puts it this way:

Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voicehas ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can onlyconjecture to be without. (qtd. in Perkins, 55)

For these reasons, the poet cannot be objectively true to reality in his work. All he can dois verbally render the subjective flux of his consciousness, the passage and dissolution of hisimpressions (56).

# Our consciousness of everything in the outer world is always in a state of flux: there is only a fleetingmoment in which one relates briefly to a particular object. Impressions are fugitive, always inperpetual flight (qtd. in Perkins, 55), as Pater put it. All one can do is render the impression brieflyreceived in this way, recording simply the object only briefly observed in this way along with thefeelings associated therewith. The poetry produced in this way is accordingly possessed of an auraof indefinable suggestiveness rather than definitiveness.

# The more intense the sensual experience, the more valuable it was to Pater: all such experienceshave the effect of sharpening our faculties of perception and response and, by extension, heighteningour consciousness. What matters, thus, is not the accuracy of ones impressions but the intensitythereof. To this end, any exquisite passion (56), any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strangecolours, and curious odours, or work of the artists hands, or the face of ones friend (56) constitutethe preferred subject-matter of art precisely because such things lead to a quickened, multipliedconsciousness (56).

# There is no attempt to assign meaning to the impression or to relate it to other impressions as to doso would be to render an account of a coherent world.