The coincidence of reading some classics of French symbolism and decadence, followed by the complete works of Oscar Wilde, and visiting Tate Modern’s Expressionist exhibition, made me try to sort out my understanding of these different movements, whose overlap confused even their own practitioners at the time. What I’m trying to untangle is the way that symbolism and the decadence frequently overlap, merge, are hard to tell apart, sometimes both occurring in the same stories or paintings.
Symbolism
Symbolist painting flourished in north European countries with a strong tradition of Catholicism which had been traumatised by industrialisation and the rise of a thrusting philistine bourgeoisie (France and Belgium). It speaks to a late-nineteenth century sense of the loss of Catholic faith and values in a newly modernised society. It is nostalgic for those values, for the deep aspects of human existence which symbolist writers and artists felt had been lost in the hurly-burly of modern urban life.
Primordial truths
The spokesman for the symbolists, Jean Moréas, wrote that symbolists selected and depicted symbols in order to evoke ‘esoteric primordial truths’ which the contemporary movements of realism, naturalism, impressionism and so on could not reach, truths (about ‘the Ideal’, the esoteric, the occult, about ‘archetypal meanings’) which cannot, in fact, be uttered or expressed using normal language or traditional art.
But although symbolist writers and artists spoke about these symbols as if there was a wide range of them and some symbolists did create image systems which were personal, private, obscure and pregnant with meaning – in practice these ‘deep meanings’ tended to gravitate around one subject – death.
The Death of the Grave Digger by Carlos Schwabe (1895)
Death
Death is the most commonly depicted subject in symbolist paintings, closely followed by related subjects such as the devil, sin, heaven and hell – Christian themes reversioned. Two classic symbolist plays – Axël by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1890) and Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande (1892) – are on the classic subject of Doomed Love, a classic subject of much literature but given a particularly funereal, static and morbid treatment.
Sex
And, of course, sex. It was the era of the femme fatale, tempting men to their doom etc, as painted by artists such as Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Franz von Stuck, Gustave Moreau. This mixture of sexual allure and mortal menace was epitomised by the ubiquitous figure of Salomé (story by Gustave Flaubert [1877], play by Wilde [1891], opera by Richard Strauss [1905]) – both Eve and Salomé, of course, being Biblical-Christian figures.
Sin by Franz von Stuck (1893) The Neue Pinakothek, Munich
Anyway, maybe the central marker of the symbolist movement is that it accepts nature, but selects from nature aspects, images, objects which it then supercharges with significance. Symbolism uses natural imagery but instead of trying to depict it as you see it (as the impressionists did) use it ‘as a means to elevate the viewer to a plane higher than the banal reality of nature itself.’
In style, symbolist paintings are (generally) realistic, often using the highly finished techniques of academic Salon art but to depict symbolic i.e. non-naturalistic situations. OK, you can immediately think of lots of painters this is not true of, such as the archetypal symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, but nonetheless you can see that he is totally figurative in intention and a lot of the symbolists were very traditional in technique, sometimes impressively so.
Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin (1880)
The Decadence
The decadence is superficially very similar to symbolism and can be difficult to disentangle, with its parallel interest in sensual excess and death but, for a start, it is older than symbolism. French poet Charles Baudelaire referred to himself as decadent in the 1857 edition of his influential poetry collection, ‘Les Fleurs du mal’, whereas the symbolists weren’t given their name till Jean Moréas wrote an article about them 30 years later, in 1886 – an article expressly designed to do what I’m trying to do now, clear up the confusion between symbolism and decadence.
(In fact it was only around the same time that the Decadent movement really became a movement –only in 1884 that Joris-Karl Huysmans published what came to be thought of as the ultimate decadent text, his novel Against Nature, in which he lists contemporary poets who he considered ‘decadents’. In the same year critic Maurice Barrès referred to a particular group of writers as Decadents. And it was only in 1886 – same years as Moréas’s article – that Anatole Baju founded the magazine ‘Le Décadent’ in an effort to organize the Decadent movement in a formal way.)
To start with I thought the fundamental difference between the two movements is that whereas symbolism accepts nature in order to select aspects of it to be regarded as ‘symbols’ of higher meanings, decadence rejects nature in preference for the artificial.
The protagonist of Huysmans’s decadent novel, Jean Des Esseintes, locks himself away from the world and embarks on a series of experiments to create completely artificial sounds, smells and sensations. Several times Des Esseintes is given speeches declaring that nature is clapped out, exhausted, and man’s unique gift is to be able to go beyond nature and create artificial objects which are more beautiful than anything in nature.
Artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes…with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible.
(À rebours, chapter 2, Penguin Classics translation by Robert Baldick)
This (amusingly ironic) approach was lifted wholesale by Oscar Wilde who, in essays and in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, repeats the basic premise that the highest aim of the human imagination (well, the imaginations of the kind of sensitive exquisites he is concerned with championing) is to create an art which transcends a nature which is stale and boring. As in this famous passage from his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying:
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised.
Higher meanings (symbolism) or no meaning (decadence)
Actually, as I’ve been researching and writing this note, I’ve realised there’s another key distinction between the two movements, maybe a deeper one than their attitude to nature (accept but supersede versus completely reject): and this is that symbolism believes there are higher or deeper meanings, the decadence thinks there aren’t.
Both movements believe the special, the chosen, the elect, the aesthetes etc are capable of subtler feelings, more complex emotions and finer perceptions than the ghastly herd, which is why their rhetorics so often overlap on this subject, in their descriptions of the psychology of aesthetic pleasure.
Both movements also share, as the previous sentence suggests, the assumption of elitism, that these secrets and meanings (symbolism) and finer sensations and perceptions (decadence) are limited to The Few and completely invisible to the vulgar herd and especially the ghastly philistines of the bourgeoisie.
But whereas the symbolists believe these finer perceptions point to deeper meanings and ‘truths inherent in the universe (God and heaven and so on), the decadents believe there are no ‘truths’ at all, except the ones which artists and writers create.
For symbolists the symbol and the work are tools or channels towards deeper meanings (although, as noted at the start, these truths have a disappointing habit of turning out to be a kind of watered-down Catholicism, stock stereotyped subjects taken from conventional religion – God, transcendence, sin, redemption and so on. But for decadents, the work is an end in itself. ‘ If there is truth of value, it is purely in the sensual experience of the moment.’
In A rebours Des Esseintes revels in the new scents and mixtures of liqueurs, in new combinations of precious jewels, for their own sake. They don’t point towards any deeper values shimmering behind veil or hidden aspects of ‘the Ideal’. The aesthetic experience is an end in itself, needing no justification. Exquisiteness is its own reward.
And this is very much the attitude you meet in Oscar Wilde. In essays like The Soul of Man Under Socialism (which is really a hymn of praise to Wildean individualism) he depicts the true artist as creating art out of his own personality, regardless of the world in front of him. And in The Critic as Artist, he goes one step further by provocatively asserting the independence of The Critic to write works which can draw their inspiration from the second rate art, or from beyond art altogether, or from nothing at all, just the expression of his own highly developed sensibility.
The highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.
Catholicism
Catholic Christianity is always hovering in the background – Catholic because it is the full-blooded, gold and incense and ritual wing of Christianity, as opposed to the bloodless, colourless moralising of Protestantism.
Both symbolism and the Decadence are based on a kind of disappointed Catholic faith, so angry with its disillusion that it turns to childish debaucheries and blasphemies in order to spite its disappointing parent, but permanently unable to escape its parent’s apron strings.
Catholicism colours the classic symbolist play, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël whose first act is set in a convent. Huysmans’ classic decadent novel, Against Nature, contains a whole chapter reviewing Catholic literature, as well as references to Catholic paintings and music, the book ends, unexpectedly, with its protagonist’s unironic prayer to God. In the novels Huysmans wrote after ‘Against Nature’, the lead character, Durtal, embarks on a long pilgrimage back to orthodox Catholic belief, reflecting Huysmans’ own journey back to the mothership.
Aubrey Beardsley, the classic illustrator of the decadence in England, converted to Catholicism in March 1897 whereupon he asked his publisher to destroy his trangressive and erotic prints (which his publisher, happily for us, refused to do) before dying of tuberculosis in March 1898.
On his release from prison (19 May 1897) Oscar Wilde wrote to the Society of Jesus requesting a six-month Catholic retreat (which was turned down) and didn’t stop trying to convert until he was finally accepted into the Catholic church on his deathbed (30 November 1900).
Summary
Similarities
Both movements overlapped in being aristocratic and elitist, the symbolists creating secret movements of initiatives and adepts, the decadents more literally depicting society’s elites – aristocrats – as, for example, in all of Oscar Wilde’s plays and his novel.
Both movements gravitated towards the same subjects, namely death and transgressive depictions of sex and sensuality – although the decadents tended to be more literal-mindedly sensual whereas much symbolist art is static and contemplative, a medieval knight contemplating a gravestone etc.
In their fondness for images of death, decay or depraved sexuality, both movements partook of what came to be called the fin-de-siecle mood of ennui, cynicism and pessimism, a tendency towards dark and morbid subjects.
Differences
As to the differences between the movements:
The symbolists 1) depicted nature but in order to make aspects of it symbolical i.e. pointing towards the occult, the Ideal. 2) For them, symbols were channels to deeper meanings which could only be depicted obliquely.
The decadents 1) rejected nature and pursued the artificial, just as 2) they rejected the notion of deeper or higher meanings, the Ideal etc.
The symbolists emphasised dreams and ideals; the Decadents cultivated precious, ornamented or hermetic styles, which explains why they sometimes invoke the concept of ‘art for art’s sake’, a separate movement from earlier in the century.
References
Related reviews
Fiction
- Les Diaboliques by Barbey D’Aurevilly (1874)
- Cruel Tales by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1883)
- A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
Art
- Symbolist Art by Edward Lucie-Smith (1972)
- The Post-Impressionists by Belinda Thompson (2nd edition 1990)
- Art Nouveau by Alastair Duncan (1994)
- Symbolism by Michael Gibson (1995)
Books & Boots 