The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley 9780812207330

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction. “Workers of the Final Hour”
Chapter 1. “Partisans Inconnus” Aesthetic Community and the Public Good in Baudelaire
Chapter 2. The Politics of Appreciation Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire
Chapter 3. Golden Books Pater, Huysmans, and De cadent Canonization
Chapter 4. A Mirror for Teachers De cadent Pedagogy and Public Education
Chapter 5. A Republic of (Nothing but) Letters Some Versions of De cadent Community
Postscript. Public Works Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

The Decadent Republic of Letters

THE DE CADENT R EPUBLIC OF LETTERS Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

Matthew Potolsky

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney. Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Potolsky, Matthew. The decadent republic of letters : taste, politics, and cosmopolitan community from Baudelaire to Beardsley / Matthew Potolsky. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Haney Foundation series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4449-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Decadence (Literary movement)—England. 2. Decadence (Literary movement)—France. 3. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. French literature—19th century—History and criticism. 5. Literature and society—England—History—19th century. 6. Literature and society—France— History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series: Haney Foundation series. PN56.D45P67 2013 809'.034—dc23 2012014203

To my family

contents

Introduction. “Workers of the Final Hour”

1

Chapter 1. “Partisans Inconnus”: Aesthetic Community and the Public Good in Baudelaire

20

Chapter 2. The Politics of Appreciation: Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire

45

Chapter 3. Golden Books: Pater, Huysmans, and Decadent Canonization

70

Chapter 4. A Mirror for Teachers: Decadent Pedagogy and Public Education

103

Chapter 5. A Republic of (Nothing but) Letters: Some Versions of Decadent Community

131

Postscript. Public Works: Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire”

164

Notes

175

Bibliography

205

Index

225

Acknowledgments

231

introduction

“Workers of the Final Hour”

Community is made of what retreats from it. —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community

With surprisingly few exceptions, the history of the decadent movement has been told from the perspective of a single national tradition—with due acknowledgment of the French (most often), English, American, or German origin of this or that key figure or contributing intellectual thread. Written as part of a growing interest among scholars in cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and cross-Channel and transatlantic connections, The Decadent Republic of Letters regards decadence as fundamentally international in origin and orientation. The various names artists and critics have applied to fin-de-siècle literary movements tend to be identified with a single national tradition. Aestheticism was largely a British movement; Symbolism developed in France. Decadence, by contrast, was an international movement from the beginning, and had a lasting impact around the world well after the turn of the century. This book focuses chiefly on French and English writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, but the stylistic and thematic paradigms I tease out of the movement were adapted by writers from the United States, Latin America, Central Europe, and other regions. Defined by more than the familiar set of images, themes, and stylistic traits normally associated with the movement, decadence, as I present it here, is a characteristic mode of reception, a stance that writers take in relationship to their culture and to the cosmopolitan traditions that influence them. This stance originates in a transatlantic encounter: Charles Baudelaire’s translations of and critical writings on Edgar Allan Poe. These texts provided

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later writers with a durable source of inspiration, but also, and more important, with a model of how to be influenced. Following Baudelaire, later decadent writers look enthusiastically to writers from other national traditions: Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote one of the earliest appreciations of Baudelaire in any language and was admired by advanced French poets; Paul Verlaine lived in England in the 1870s and was revered by the English decadents; Vernon Lee spent most of her life in Italy but wrote in English and published her works chiefly in England; Oscar Wilde composed Salomé in French and was regarded by French writers as a major theoretician of decadence; Friedrich Nietzsche imported his definition of decadence from Paul Bourget’s widely read 1881 essay on Baudelaire. The movement was disseminated through translations, imitations, and critical appreciations—all techniques designed to provide a new context for the foreign and unfamiliar. Essentially internationalist, decadent writing is a form of cultural production that begins with and recurrently thematizes the act of literary and artistic border crossing. The radically syncretic and cosmopolitan texture of decadent writing accounts for the difficulty scholars have long had in defining the movement, or even fixing its major adherents. In his pioneering study of the fin de siècle, The Eighteen Nineties (1913), Holbrook Jackson identifies four characteristic elements of decadent writing: perversity, artificiality, egoism, and curiosity. Later scholars have added exoticism, morbidity, philosophical pessimism, and antifeminism, among other elements. None of these elements is exclusively decadent, however, in the way that the praise of nature is characteristic of Romanticism or the tracing of environmental influences on the individual is characteristic of Naturalism. Similarly, the major features of decadent style resemble forms of mannerism that extend into antiquity. The canon of decadent works and writers is equally unstable. Few of the writers I discuss in this book called themselves decadents. Wilde wrote canonically decadent books as well as society comedies; Baudelaire died before the decadent movement gained a clear identity, and was claimed by rival literary groups such as the Symbolists; Walter Pater resisted his association with the young decadents who championed his works; Michael Field abhorred the Yellow Book and its circle of contributors but read widely in the works of the French decadents. Noting the extreme difficulty of defining the term, Richard Gilman has suggested that decadence is nothing more than “the underside or logical complement of something else, coerced into taking its place in our vocabularies by the pressure of something that needs an opposite, an enemy.”  He argues

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that the word should accordingly be expunged from the critical vocabulary. Yet the idea of decadence was central to the cultural politics of the nineteenth century, and dispensing with it, as Gilman advises, would distort our sense of the age. For artists, intellectuals, and the reading public in the period, decadence was a viable concept with real consequences. As a literary movement with a name and a manifesto, decadence dates to 1886, when Anatole Baju published the first issue of his flagship journal Le Décadent, but the term had already circulated for many years before in advanced literary and artistic circles, and underwrote a project that attracted writers from both sides of the English Channel who found common cause in each other’s works. Etymologically, decadence means to fall down or from (from the Latin de + cadere). It describes a temporal contrast or comparison. A body, a society, or an artistic form falls away from something prior and better: health, virtue, tradition, and so forth. Eighteenth-century historians such as the baron de Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon adapted this definition to explain the fall of the Roman Empire. In 1834, the French academic critic Désiré Nisard applied the term to literature in his influential study Études de mœurs et de critique sur les poëtes latins de la décadence, arguing that French Romanticism marks a decline of artistic value from the age of Louis XIV, much as the discredited corpus of “decadent” Silver Age Latin poetry marked a decline from the artistic and political unity of the early empire. Nisard’s study fixed the constellation of ideas and metaphors literary decadence still evokes today, from the imagery of Roman decline to sensual indulgence, extreme erudition, and linguistic complexity. Writers later in the century deployed the term both to praise and to condemn. Théophile Gautier, as we will see in Chapter 2, used the word to characterize the “maturity” of Baudelaire’s poetry, turning historical belatedness into an artistic virtue. Max Nordau, in his widely read 1892 book Entartung [Degeneration], took the organic metaphor underlying the concept literally, accusing fin-de-siècle writers of laboring under mental and physical debilities. Baudelaire, for his part, mocked critics like Nisard, ironically noting that if decadence is indeed an organic affliction, then poets like him have little choice but to accept their fate: “It is entirely unfair to blame us for accomplishing such a mysterious law.” The writers I discuss in this book use the word “decadence” and its familiar associations in a wide range of contexts and toward a variety of ends; more often than not, they regard it with Gautier’s and Baudelaire’s revisionary eye, transforming a term of opprobrium into a means of self-defense or

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countercultural identification. But I am less interested in tracing these uses in any systematic way than in documenting aspects of the decadent movement that remain obscure even for contemporary readers. Critics since Nisard have characterized decadent writing as if its qualities somehow followed from the definition of the term itself, as if there were certain essential traits that mark a text (or a person, or a historical moment) as decadent. But this reasoning is circular: decadent texts are decadent because they have decadent traits, which can only be discerned by analyzing texts one already assumes (or takes on faith) to be decadent. Not surprisingly, the word and the movement fall apart under scrutiny— as Gilman’s study demonstrates— or hang together in provisional or fundamentally unconvincing ways that must be defended with every new scholarly foray. This fact accounts for the prevailing “introductory” orientation of scholarship on the movement: every scholar of decadence becomes, as it were, a decadent scholar, seeking some fi xed point amidst a kaleidoscopic array of names, texts, traits, rival movements, and stylistic gestures. I argue in this book, by contrast, that decadence is a consciously adopted and freely adapted literary stance, a characteristic mode of reception, rather than a discernible quality of things or people. It is a form of judgment and a way of doing things with texts. As Richard Le Gallienne perceptively put it in an article from 1892, decadence lies not in a particular theme or style but in “the character of the treatment.”  Decadent writers sort incessantly through the materials of the cultural past, defining their relationship to others in the movement by collecting disparate themes, tropes, and stylistic manners from around the globe and binding them together according to their peculiar tastes and proclivities. Foregrounding acts of selection, juxtaposition, and critical discernment, they piece together ostentatiously borrowed parts, rather than purporting to create in any traditional sense or according to a clearly delineated doctrine. Reception is for these writers a crucial means of production. Because it never adumbrated a single, unified doctrine, decadence attracted writers of strikingly various interests and talents, many of whom took up the stance for a time and later moved on to other forms, and even repudiated the movement altogether. The relationship of decadent writers to each another is closer to what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls a “family resemblance,” which is marked by “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing,” than to the overriding unity of purpose that characterizes (at least ideally) a traditional literary group. They are united by the things they

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like and the ways they talk about them. The decadents incessantly drew lines of affiliation back in time and across national borders, declaring their (permanent or provisional) allegiance to the movement by asserting a family resemblance with admired contemporaries or figures from the past. These lines shifted often, even for the same writer at different moments in his or her career. Baudelaire and Poe are constant points of reference; for others, influences as diverse as Pericles, Petronius, Apuleius, Ronsard, Nicolas Chorier, Sade, Blake, Flaubert, Verlaine, and Wagner supplement or even supplant their role. Works are “decadent” not because they realize a doctrine or make use of certain styles and themes but because they move within a recognizable network of canonical books, pervasive influences, recycled stories, erudite commentaries, and shared tastes. Each decadent text borrows from and expands the network, locating itself by reference to the names or books it evokes and leaving its own contributions behind. Regarding decadence as an evolving literary stance rather than a fixed set of traits brings into focus a mostly unrecognized vision of cosmopolitan community that pervades the movement. Critics have long argued that the key characteristic of decadent writing is a turn away from the world and the public interest to the interiority of the private self. True to the etymology of the term, decadence deviates from or rejects some norm. It is nihilistic, condemnatory, and destructive, a perverse mirror of the bourgeois individualism it claims to abhor. In his essay on Baudelaire, Bourget describes decadent societies as organisms in which the “cells” no longer work together in the interest of the whole; such societies “produce too few individuals suited to the labors of communal life.” Decadent style exemplifies this social atomization: “A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to make way for the independence of the page, the page is decomposed to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the independence of the word.” Nordau sees the decadent as a willful deviant, “an ordinary man with a minus sign,” suffering from a “mania for contradiction,” which only masks his fundamental conformism: “The ordinary man always seeks to think, to feel, and to do exactly the same as the multitude; the decadent seeks to do exactly the contrary.” More recently, George C. Schoolfield characterizes the decadent as a besieged elitist, who “regards himself as being set apart, more fragile, more learned, more perverse, and certainly more sensitive than his contemporaries.” Other recent critics have treated decadence more positively as a form of cultural critique, but they effectively define the movement in the same terms as Bourget and Nordau do. Charles Bernheimer writes, for example, that

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decadence entails both an appeal to and a subversion of accepted norms; it is “inhabited by a doubleness that puts fundamental moral and social values in question.”  Most famously exemplified by Wilde’s epigrammatic deconstructions of received wisdom, decadent opposition here becomes strategic, an overturning of bourgeois ideology through parody, paradox, and subversive appropriation. The decadent, however, is still a nihilistic outsider who rejects social belonging out of disgust with the bourgeoisie. I argue in this book that decadent writing, so long associated with isolation, withdrawal, and nihilistic repudiation, is in fact preoccupied with communities. The fin-de-siècle literary and intellectual world was a ferment of burgeoning countercultures. Avant-garde writers rubbed shoulders and shared the pages of journals with anarchists, socialists, utopians, Uranians, feminists, spiritualists, and radical vegetarians. Although they did not always agree with the goals of all of these activists, the decadents regarded themselves as a part of the broader counterculture, and participated in its efforts to imagine new forms of affiliation and sociality. Decadent withdrawal is always collective, a ritualized performance of what Regenia Gagnier calls “creative repudiation.”  Ostentatiously breaking ties with modernity and its dominant publics, the decadents do not isolate themselves but construct a new and more amenable imagined community, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term, composed of likeminded readers and writers scattered around the world and united by the production, circulation, and reception of art and literature. The decadents produced a remarkable number of collective manifestos and literary journals, but their interest in community is most powerfully evident in the themes and subjects of decadent writing, which look decisively beyond the frame of any localized national coterie to new and radically international frameworks for sociocultural belonging. Decadent writers were fascinated with the creation and destruction of communities. They were drawn to martyrs, who die publicly for a persecuted group, and drew stories and political concepts from moments of historical transition (late antiquity, the end of the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century) marked by underground movements, revolutionary collectives, and secret societies. Decadent texts describe a striking range of quasiutopian communities and promote new ideas about affiliation in the ways they address their readers. Significantly overlapping with the emerging gay and lesbian countercultures, decadence also provided a medium for writers to define communities united by sexual dissidence and nonnormative desires. The imagined community of other decadents provides writers from Baudelaire

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to Aubrey Beardsley with a coherent position from which to criticize contemporary political arrangements and to define the possibility of new ones. Take, for example, an undated list of titles Baudelaire put together for a prospective monthly literary review. This list may have been written as early as 1852, when he drafted a proposal for a journal called Le Hibou philosophe [The Philosopher Owl], or as late as 1861, when the future decadent Catulle Mendès was launching his own journal, the Revue fantaisiste, and frequently sought Baudelaire’s advice. A number of titles on the list evoke stereotypically decadent images of isolation and retreat from the world: “L’Oasis,” “L’Hermitage,” “La Citerne du Désert [The Cistern of the Desert],” La Thébaïde, “Le Dernier Asyle de Muses [The Last Refuge of the Muses].” Another group of titles, however, describes communities or principles of affiliation: “Le Recueil de ces Messieurs [The Collection of These Gentlemen],” Les Bien Informés [The Well-Informed], Les Hermites volontaires [The Willing Hermits], Les Incroyables [The Incredible Ones]. Another title, Les Ouvriers de la dernière heure [Workers of the Final Hour], alludes to a parable of Jesus (Matthew 20:1– 16)—better known in English as the parable of the workers in the vineyard— that concerns the mysterious nature of election (OC I, 53). Yet another, which Mendès adopted in 1875 for his most successful literary review, makes the underlying communal spirit of Baudelaire’s list manifest: “La République des Lettres.” The Enlightenment Republic of Letters was a loosely organized international group of writers and intellectuals who defined themselves as a polity apart, devoted to finding alternative models of affiliation and political order. Although the “citizens” of this republic lived under the rule of monarchs, they enacted the classical republican ideal of civic humanism and political participation on the page rather than within the borders of the kingdom. Working under the modern absolutism of the French Second Empire, Baudelaire resurrects this ideal in his list of titles, imagining a similarly international community of sympathizers brought together by writing and by a collective sense of alienation. The communal ideals pervading Baudelaire’s list suggest that the overwhelming critical focus on decadence as decline, deviation, parody, and subversion distorts the most significant aims of the movement. This is true of the themes and stories to which decadent writers are drawn and the styles in which they tell them. Careful study of decadent texts reveals their ingenious reversals of social and artistic norms, but it is difficult for even a casual reader to miss the role of encomium, tribute, and eulogy in decadent writing.

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Decadent characters lavish praise on their favorite books and paintings, swoon over purple passages from decadent classics, launch panegyrics for ideas despised by the bourgeoisie, contemplate with great admiration the perversities of Nero and Caligula, or punctiliously follow the lessons of their decadent masters. Baudelaire composes long and fulsome dedications to his works, defends abused or misunderstood artistic figures, eulogizes the lost Paris of his memory, and lauds the use of cosmetics or the musical strains of flies surrounding a rotting corpse. Conversely, but within the same discursive register, he vituperates popular artists and writes venomous sonnets to his lovers. Wilde’s Salomé is composed almost entirely of expressions of appreciation or condemnation. The play opens with the Young Syrian’s praise of Salomé’s beauty, while Salomé herself addresses John with elaborate and starkly alternating words of praise and blame. The rhetorical term for this mode of discourse is epideictic. Most critical writing is broadly epideictic, but decadent writers make the extremes of praise and blame central to both their critical and their poetic techniques. These techniques are not just a matter of individual temperament but a deliberate rhetorical choice, a way in which decadent writers appeal to an imagined community of sympathetic readers and writers by foregrounding the act of reception. The enthusiasm for the bizarre or recherché so often expressed in decadent texts carries a submerged communal element, embodying, as Kant noted about all judgments of taste, the liking of the perceiving subject along with an imperative for others to assent to the judgment. Just as Baudelaire admires Poe and Wagner for their insight into the failings of modernity or the transformative powers of art, so later decadent writers discover in the figures they praise (above all Baudelaire) a subversive, utopian, or nostalgic alternative to the present order. The reading of decadence as oppositional casts the decadent writer as a bitter outsider, condemning mass society in the name of a wounded individualism; the epideictic mode, by contrast, inscribes the decadent in a community of interest. The decadents were arguably the first literary group to realize the now-familiar, even banal association of subcultural affiliation with taste—the sense of attachment felt not by virtue of national origin or religious affiliation but through a liking for certain cultural forms. Expressions of enthusiasm, sympathy, and intellectual friendship are the coin of the realm in the decadent republic of letters. Recent theorists of community have sought to think beyond existing political practices by looking toward what Giorgio Agamben calls the “coming

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community.” Against communal bonds defined by blood, territory, language, and the opposition of friend and enemy that Carl Schmitt placed at the heart of political association, this sense of community registers the bare experience of belonging or being-in-common. Rather than comprising an essential identity, totalizing communion, or stable distinction between insider and outsider, it is a bond, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “that forms ties without attachments, or even less fusion . . . that unbinds by binding, that reunites through the infinite exposition of an irreducible finitude.”  In their effort to imagine a community founded on admiration and the exchange of texts, the decadents anticipate this project. They describe community as a dispersed phenomenon arising out of discrete moments of artistic production and reception, an almost utopian sense of belonging forged across space and time. It is not a completed “work” but a series of encounters and sensations. To play on Walter Benjamin’s well-known formulation, rather than aestheticizing politics, they find special political significance in the practices of reading and writing. Modern communitarian theory is closely associated with left and liberal intellectuals, but over the course of the nineteenth century a range of political groups laid claim to the language of community, from utopian socialists writing in the wake of the French Revolution—whose theories of association would influence Baudelaire—to far-right nationalists and traditionalists. Against the impersonal networks, state institutions, and mass movements of what Ferdinand Tönnies called the modern Gesellschaft (society), socialists and traditionalists alike sought to define a more intimate, if always vanishing or incipient, Gemeinschaft (community). Some decadent writers were drawn to utopian socialism, while others looked to anarchism, and still others cast their lot with reactionary Catholicism or (later in their careers) fascism. Regardless of the politics of their authors, however, the communities I find in decadent texts are radically open and aleatory, almost to the point of nonexistence, their members bound only by a shared sense of participation in a decadent republic of letters. Decadent communities embody what Ernst Bloch has described as the “anticipatory illumination”— an imaginary insight into real possibilities for social and political transformation gleaned from fictional worlds. Pushing the notion of community to a conceptual breaking point, the decadents produce a vision of affiliation no longer in thrall to nineteenth-century paradigms like the nation or the “people.” The centrality of this vision to the movement has largely been lost to posterity, but for

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the decadents it was an ever-present possibility. The sense of community, they recognized, could begin with the opening of a book, and end when the book is put aside.

* * * Recent scholarship on British aestheticism has persuasively teased out the underlying cultural politics of a movement that was long associated with the same apolitical turn from the world that still defines decadence. Aestheticist literary form served as a medium for marginalized groups—gay men and lesbians, middle-class women, socialists, and avant-garde artists alike—to criticize mainstream society and speak to others who shared their experiences and desires. Despite the fact that the lines between the two movements were exceedingly blurry, scholarship on decadence remains tied to the sense of isolation, social fragmentation, and nihilistic withdrawal that we find in Bourget and other contemporary commentators. I demonstrate in this book, however, that decadent writers engaged the most pressing issues of nineteenth-century political and social theory—law and the public good, constitutions and social contracts, nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism—from a wide range of political stances on the left and the right. More directly oppositional and more resolutely cosmopolitan than the aesthetes in their critique of contemporary communities, the decadents foreshadow the new kind of intellectual that Julia Kristeva names the “dissident,” a figure who challenges the master discourses of society not from the position of the sovereign individual doing battle with the masses but as an advocate of a transformatively “modern community.”  The decadents adumbrate their ideal of a modern community against the twin pillars of the nineteenth-century bourgeois ascendancy: liberalism and nationalism. The most significant revisionary scholarship on the fin de siècle has for the most part focused on cultural politics, detailing the ways in which writers in the period challenged contemporary norms of gender, sexuality, and economic value. This approach has provided a much more nuanced picture of the historical moment than earlier scholarship had allowed, but it has also tended to overlook the important ways in which these writers also commented upon larger macropolitical issues. One notable exception is the work of scholars such as Linda Dowling and David Wayne Thomas, who have found suggestive traces of the liberal tradition in fin-de-siècle writing, from the language of autonomy and self-cultivation, to the individualization of

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aesthetic experience, to the hope William Morris and others pinned on the politically transformative powers of artistic appreciation. But the decadents’ engagement with liberal and other political theories is considerably more thoroughgoing, and often more critical, than Dowling and Thomas indicate. Even those decadent writers most clearly influenced by certain strains of liberalism (such as Pater and Lee, who are often grouped with the aesthetes) are also deeply suspicious of the kind of community liberalism imagines in theory and brings about in practice. Their disdain for nationalism arises from similar concerns. The decadents object in particular to the way liberal thinking and nationalist thinking sweep together entire populations under overarching rubrics, ascribing rights and privileges—those enumerated in constitutions or evoked by the mythology of a national character—to subjects who did not choose or never desired to be so defined. The self-selected community of taste so often imagined in decadent writing is a frankly elitist protest against and revisionary alternative to this quasi-universalizing contemporary order. It is a cliché of scholarship on the movement that the decadents harshly condemned the bourgeoisie; I show in this book that their attack had reasoned and politically sophisticated (if often troubling) foundations. As Jacques Rancière has argued, art and literature are political not because they convey deliberate political messages or give form to the unconscious ideological positions of their producers but because they “change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible.” Aesthetic forms enable the politically marginalized—those officially excluded from political participation or alienated from the prevailing social order—to discover a collective voice. Decadent writers find this voice in older ideas of social and political organization and in the possibilities for association opened up by the rapid growth of print culture in the period. Turning the tables on contemporary critics who accused them of excessive individualism, for example, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Gautier, I show in Chapters 1 and 2, challenge the liberal valorization of individual self-interest by evoking the classical republican tradition of civic humanism. Disdainful of the rising tide of nationalism that dominated European politics after 1870, later writers like Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pater, Wilde, and Lee, I demonstrate in Chapters 3 and 4, counter the prevailing notion of a community united by ties of blood, a vernacular language, and geographical boundaries by advocating self-selected and international communities of taste modeled on the early modern libertine underground. Republican virtue and libertine subversion may seem radically opposed, but they both exemplify alternative models of community that make sense of the decadents’

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disidentification with bourgeois modernity, providing them with a shared idiom for the critique of contemporary liberalism and nationalism. In Chapter 5, I look at the ways Lee, Pater, and Beardsley describe quasi-utopian communities composed of dispersed individuals who gain (or retrospectively embody) a sense of unity in and through acts of reading and writing but who may never meet face to face. The theory of decadence, I noted above, arose out of the historiography of ancient empires, and long served as a commentary on the fate of modern nations, so it is easy to see how it could become a medium for critique as well. This critique was not lost on all contemporary commentators. Nordau characterized the decadents in Degeneration as part of a broader cultural threat to modern civilization, a threat epitomized for him by the tendency of writers in the movement to form alternative communities— specifically, artistic schools—that loudly rejected mainstream values. Yet Nordau is too easy to caricature, and with the exception of some perceptive discussions of the phenomenon in Pater’s writings, the fascination of decadent writers with politics and communities has remained obscure to later readers. The most obvious reason is the looming figure of Huysmans’s paradigmatic decadent protagonist the duc Floressas des Esseintes, from À rebours (1884), the novel that all but wrote what Eugenio Donato calls “the script of decadence.”  Sick of the world, Des Esseintes escapes to an artificial paradise devoid of people (apart from his servants) but filled with objects, apparently substituting the passive thrills of perverse consumption for life in the real world. Des Esseintes’s dramatic withdrawal defined the decadent movement in the nineteenth century, and in many ways continues to defi ne it for contemporary scholars. In an influential account of fin-de-siècle literary movements, for example, Gagnier cites Des Esseintes as the epitome of a decadent individual “psychologically incapable of living with freedom,” who seeks “immunization against contamination and an illusory autonomy” in the hierarchical and overtly structured world of art. By contrast with the sexually and politically radical aestheticism of Wilde and Morris, decadence is an escape from complexity and change, “a tiny, safe space” from which the writer can criticize bourgeois society without the cost of genuine political struggle. Gagnier’s taxonomy was instrumental in making aestheticism a significant object of investigation for Anglo-American scholars, but it also contributed to the relative neglect of decadence, which remains for most readers a shadowy and reactionary “phase” of aestheticism, a pale imitation of French forerunners, or a literary-historical wrong turn rather than an ana-

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lytical category of its own. Fin-de-siècle writers did not always draw such clear lines. For example, scholars at the forefront of the recent renaissance in the study of Michael Field (the collective pen name of Katharine Bradley and her niece and lover, Edith Cooper) have situated the poets firmly in the milieu of aestheticism, even stressing their thoroughgoing opposition to decadence. Yet Michael Field maintained friendships with many of the leading figures of the decadent movement, and eagerly read the works of Baudelaire, Swinburne, Verlaine, and other prominent decadent writers. As I show in Chapter 3, Michael Field’s collection of ekphrastic poems Sight and Song (1892) establishes a lively dialogue with Swinburne and Verlaine, borrowing recognizably decadent strategies to carve out a specifically female and homoerotic space within the movement. For Gagnier and other scholars, the deepest problems of decadence are political, stemming in particular from the association of the movement with reactionary thinking. The political views of decadent writers can be exceedingly cryptic, but as I have noted, they are not exclusively reactionary, ranging from the anarchist left to the monarchial right, often in the works of a single author. The classic instance is Baudelaire, who swung violently from an early interest in utopian socialism to reactionary conservatism in his later years. Other writers’ political views are similarly problematic. Swinburne cast himself as a defender of classical republican traditions and later became a jingoistic panegyrist of the empire; Huysmans began his career as a socially critical Naturalist, and later became an apologist for an ultraconservative strain of Catholicism; Wilde promoted socialism but also evoked the traditions of the British aristocracy; the French decadent Octave Mirbeau turned from an early conservatism to a later advocacy of anarchism; Gabriele D’Annunzio and Maurice Barrès were drawn to fascism in the twentieth century; Stéphane Mallarmé avoided identifying with any political party. This dizzying array of political convictions might be taken as evidence of ideological incoherence—a political style matching Bourget’s description of decadent literary style—but the decadents found common cause across party lines, seeing themselves as part of a larger movement despite their varying beliefs. As Richard Dellamora his written, “Decadent critique can be directed from liberal, socialist, and/or anarchist perspectives, as well as from conservative or even reactionary ones. Whether from the left or the right, however, decadence is always radical in its opposition to the orga nization of modern urban, industrial, and commercial society.”  The seeming chaos of decadent politics epitomizes the underlying interest in the fate of contemporary communities that writers in

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the movement shared with mainstream figures such as Bourget or George Eliot, as well as with fin-de-siècle sociologists such as Tönnies and Emile Durkheim. Whatever their explicit political lineage, decadent ideas about community are critical of contemporary society in ways that go beyond traditionalist appeals to blood and land. Indeed, decadent antinationalism takes aim at just this kind of appeal. Since the eighteenth century, taste has been understood as a kind of embryonic politics. In Friedrich von Schiller’s succinct formulation, “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”  The feeling for beauty is common to all humans, Schiller argues, transcending partisan interest and political circumstances to unite people sympathetically before they unite politically. Individual acts of judgment connect the subject to a larger community. A number of scholars, informed by Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, have noted that the nineteenth-century state achieved by political means what Schiller imagined in theory. The decadents make the politics of taste more explicitly partisan, and more directly critical of the hegemonic aims of the modern state, by investing their appreciative discussions of books, artworks, objects, and other writers with political imagery and ideas. Associating their outsider views about representation with a radical critique of modern social and political formations, they cast Poe as an avatar of republican virtue and treat the contracts formed between decadent teachers and students as parodic versions of the social contract. Baudelaire turns the praise of beauty into an attack on the division of public virtue from private pleasure that follows the establishment of bourgeois hegemony after the Revolutions of 1848. Decadent collections promote an idiosyncratic and cosmopolitan counter to the feverish scholarly activity that consolidated national literary canons in the period. Judgments of taste in these examples are an active site for political commentary, a means by which writers think their way into new forms of community. If decadence seems explicitly to turn away from the public and institutional structures of “politics”—to borrow Chantal Mouffe’s useful distinction—it implicitly addresses the dimension of “the political,” engaging both thematically and stylistically in the conflicts that underlie all social relationships, and that unite or divide communities. Decadence is at once a medium for political thought, a vocabulary for criticizing the foundations of liberalism and nationalism, and a method for imagining a community of the future. It would be wrong simply to dismiss the less savory aspects of the movement—its pervasive misogyny,

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orientalism, and antidemocratic elitism—but it is also wrong to let these attitudes entirely define our sense of the politics of decadence.

* * * The Decadent Republic of Letters traces the emergence and development of a decadent discourse about community and politics from Baudelaire’s early writings to Beardsley’s unfinished novel The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser. As we will see in the first two chapters of the book, Baudelaire set the stage for the decadent movement by charging his discussions of artists, writers, and social types like the dandy with the language and conceptual categories of classical republican theory. In Chapter 1, “ ‘Partisans Inconnus’: Aesthetic Community and the Public Good in Baudelaire,” I find echoes of this theory in a wide range of Baudelaire’s writings. Although he is deeply ambivalent about contemporary republicans, Baudelaire draws upon the language and imagery of the classical republican tradition to comment on the relationship between art and community. Against the individualism and legal formalism of the ascendant bourgeoisie, he defines the production and reception of art and literature as collective acts. Beauty is not an escapist diversion from reality but a public good essential to the workings of the polis, the true res publica of modernity. I follow this idea as it emerges in Baudelaire’s discussion of artistic schools in the Salon de 1846, recurs in his descriptions of quasi-aristocratic “families” of elite readers, viewers, and social performers, and is transformed in the writings on Poe. Informed by the counterrevolutionary writings of the political theorist Joseph de Maistre, Baudelaire characterizes Poe as a martyr who sacrifices himself to a tyrannous American public opinion for the benefit of a sympathetic community devoted to the production and reception of beauty. In Chapter 2, “The Politics of Appreciation: Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire,” I turn to Baudelaire’s earliest advocates in France and England, who characterize the poet in much the same way Baudelaire had characterized Poe: as a martyr for art and the foundation for a new community of taste. Reading key works of tribute published in the immediate wake of Baudelaire’s death— Gautier’s “Notice” to Les Fleurs du mal and Swinburne’s elegy “Ave atque Vale,” both from 1868—I trace out the ways in which the two writers both preserve and transform the poet’s ideas about community into what I call a “politics of appreciation.” Like Baudelaire, Gautier and Swinburne appeal to the imagery of classical republicanism. Borrowing the form of the Athenian funeral oration, Gautier characterizes Baudelaire as a warrior for

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beauty and the leader of an emerging countercultural community. He is a keen observer and recorder of modern decadence, who documents the corruption of the Second Empire and defends the rights of outsiders to form their own communities. Swinburne gestures toward the collectivist mythology of the republican city-state. His critical writings, which were deeply influenced by Baudelaire, make the appreciation of neglected figures a crucial responsibility of posterity; the critic posthumously provides the rebellious genius with the kind of sympathetic community he or she was denied while alive. In “Ave atque Vale,” Swinburne appeals to the republican trope of political fraternity to describe his sense of sympathy with Baudelaire, a sympathy founded not on personal interaction (the two writers never met) but on the production and reception of poetry. Gautier and Swinburne profess political beliefs starkly different from Baudelaire’s (and from each other’s), but together they canonize his claim that beauty is a contribution of the public good, and that reading and writing are collective acts analogous to political participation. Chapters 3 and 4 unearth a long unrecognized decadent critique of nationalism. Decadent writers are highly cosmopolitan in their literary and artistic tastes and correspondingly disdainful of the violent nationalisms that informed European politics after the consolidation of the German Reich in 1871 and the rapid imperial expansion by the major powers in the following decades. Turning from the example of the republican city-state—an ideal increasingly adopted by nationalist writers—the later decadents associate themselves with another important influence in the formation of the movement: the early modern tradition of libertinism. Closely tied since the seventeenth century to antimonarchial and anticlerical sentiments, libertinism becomes a medium for decadent antinationalism. Although their works are not often pornographic, the decadents fashion themselves as modern libertines, an underground and transnational movement united around their peculiar tastes (artistic as well as sexual) and self-consciously subversive of mainstream norms and beliefs. The example of libertine subversion differs markedly from the early ideal of civic humanism and responds to a different political order, but it, too, is based on a vision of community and affiliation fundamentally at odds both with the modern Gesellschaft and with conservative nostalgia for a lost Gemeinschaft. In Chapter 3, “Golden Books: Pater, Huysmans, and Decadent Canonization,” I trace the emergence of this subversive ideal by looking at the pervasive image of decadent collections and the interest among decadent writers

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in the process of canon formation. Decadent collections self-consciously look back to the libertine association of outsider taste with social and political subversion, an association materialized in the so-called gallant library of pornographic classics described in many libertine works. Like the gallant library, the decadent collection is filled with subversive books and objects, constituting a canonical expression of the decadent sensibility. Decadent collections take aim at the contemporary fashion for defining national literary canons. International, idiosyncratic, and manifestly artificial, these collections stand as an affront to purportedly organic national traditions in their design and their preoccupations. Looking at two works crucial to the formation of decadent taste—Pater’s The Renaissance and Huysmans’s À rebours—I show how collecting and canon formation are closely associated with images of national disintegration: porous borders, hybrid languages, and radical cosmopolitanism. This counternationalist model of canon formation informs the practice of what I call “mimetic canonization,” by which later decadents “find” themselves in the tastes of an influential mentor, much as the nation finds itself reflected in a list of national classics. The practice is suggestively employed in the infamous chapter 11 of Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which details Dorian’s collections and tells of his descent into decadence, and in Michael Field’s book of ekphrasitc poems Sight and Song. In Chapter 4, “A Mirror for Teachers: Decadent Pedagogy and Public Education,” I turn to another decadent appropriation of the libertine tradition. Both the decadents and the libertines are fascinated with the process of education. Libertine works are organized around scenes of sexual instruction and initiation that subvert social norms; the decadents similarly make education a central trope in their subversive attack on the form of the nation. I argue that the many stories of conversion, influence, and persuasion in decadence are directed against the specter of public education, which was a recent innovation in Europe and England. From its earliest emergence in the writings of early nineteenth-century German reformers, the idea of public education was closely associated with national formation. Schools shape the populace, transforming it from a collection of inward-turning small groups into a unified collective willing to defend the nation-state. Driven by vanity, desire, and a taste for domination or submission, decadent teachers and students become case studies in the folly of making education a means to or model for political order. I look at five decadent educational narratives that scrutinize the motivations of teachers and students in this way. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, and Lee’s Miss Brown all show teachers

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and students agreeing to pedagogical contracts that mock the liberal theory of the social contract. Rather than forming free and rational individuals, these contracts enshrine the students as paradoxically willing slaves. Turning next to Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and again to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I consider the discourse of influence that is so prevalent in decadent writing. Libertine works assume the ability of teachers to shape their students at will; for Pater and Wilde, by contrast, education ideally takes the form of an aesthetic self-culture that may be stimulated, but never fully directed, from above. Marius the Epicurean and The Picture of Dorian Gray describe the problematic lure of influence for both teacher and students, associating the desire for domination and submission their characters express with the alliance of public education and state power. Gathering together a number of conceptual threads pertaining to international and aesthetic affiliation that run through the book, Chapter 5, “A Republic of (Nothing but) Letters: Some Versions of Decadent Community,” looks at three decadent works about the Renaissance—Lee’s Euphorion, Pater’s Gaston de Latour, and Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser—that describe communities formed by reading and writing. Baudelaire imagined himself as a member of a quasi-aristocratic elite of taste; later writers make this elite into the model for a broader international community. Borrowing from contemporary public sphere theory, I argue that the decadents constitute what Michael Warner calls a “counterpublic”—an oppositional social body made up of friends and strangers and formed by the production, circulation, and reception of texts. Lee defines the Renaissance not as a unified movement but as a series of contingent communities formed around wandering and hybridized literary and artistic forms. Pater’s protagonist Gaston imagines community in terms of the story of Pentecost, in which the Holy Spirit descends upon the apostles as tongues of flame, each speaking the native language of the multiethnic group present at the event. Beardsley’s novel depicts the literally underground exile community of Venus and her retinue in the Hörsel, and addresses its readers by incessantly gesturing toward the familiar constellation of themes and rhetorical practices that had come to serve as shorthand for decadence. His work builds an address to the decadent counterpublic into its very composition. My postscript, “Public Works,” finds a new idea about community in Mallarmé’s memorial sonnet for Baudelaire, “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire.” Eschewing the traditional imagery of monstrous flowers and exotic landscapes that dominated the nineteenth-century reception of Baudelaire,

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Mallarmé describes the poet in terms of sewers, street lamps, and public cemeteries. I see these images as evidence of a break from the decadent repudiation of modernity and a move toward a more inclusive notion of the relationship between poets and their audience. Like a public work, the poet provides material support for the community, a crucial means by which it can come to recognize its shared interests.

chapter 1

“Partisans Inconnus” Aesthetic Community and the Public Good in Baudelaire

Great damage has been caused to terrestrial togetherness [l’association terrestre], for centuries, by conflating it with the brutal mirage, the city, its governments, or the civil code. —Stéphane Mallarmé, “La Musique et les lettres”

Le Salut public Several months after the December 1851 coup d’état that launched Louis Napoleon into power and replaced the unstable French Second Republic with the veritable police state of the Second Empire, Baudelaire wrote in a letter to his trustee Narcisse Ancelle that recent events had left him “physically depoliticized [dépolitiqué].”  The Bonapartist coup has long been regarded as a crucial turning point in Baudelaire’s political development. In the years leading up to the Revolutions of 1848, Baudelaire was an enthusiastic partisan of socialist and republican political theorists such as Charles Fourier, Auguste Blanqui, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He participated actively in the street fighting in 1848, and, as Richard D. E. Burton has argued in his meticulously documented study Baudelaire and the Second Republic, never wholly gave up his commitment to the republican ideals of the French Revolution. After 1852, Baudelaire began to read widely in the works of conservative figures such as Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph de Maistre, precipitating a turn in his political

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views from the collectivist ideals of utopian socialism to an antidemocratic and theologically driven conservatism. But Baudelaire’s turn does not, as Burton writes and as other critics have assumed, entail a “withdrawal from the public world of politics into one of private reflection.”  Burton is right to note that, after 1852, Baudelaire largely gave up the public activism that marked his involvement in the 1848 revolutions, and adopted the apocalyptic voice and exotic imagery that defined his influence on the decadent movement. Despite his evident claim to the contrary in the letter to Ancelle, however, he never ceased conceptualizing aesthetic concepts in distinctly public and collective terms. I argue in this chapter that a classically republican valorization of civic virtue runs like a red thread through Baudelaire’s work and fundamentally shapes his understanding of art and taste. Defining beauty as an endangered nexus for sociability and a means of imagining alternatives to the contemporary political order, Baudelaire looks to the tradition of civic humanism as an alternative to the privatization of aesthetic (and other) experience that marks bourgeois liberalism. He could not have been aware of the international decadent movement that arose in the years after his death, and his scattered self-identifications as a decadent are invariably ironic, but his account of the relationship between art and politics was a durable source of inspiration for later decadent writers and decisively shaped the themes and rhetoric that came to define the movement. Baudelaire’s civic humanism is utopian rather than pragmatic, addressing an imaginary community of aesthetic outsiders rather than the broader public of mid-century France. Yet it is this community of outsiders, and not the ascendant bourgeoisie or its political representatives, that best understands and serves the public good. Looking back to the long tradition in Western thought of joining art and taste to the political order, Baudelaire argues that artistic beauty should serve the commonweal rather than the private pleasures of its citizens. It is a public good, not private property. Plato’s Republic is an obvious, if vexed, reference point for this project. More germane to Baudelaire’s historical moment, however, is the eighteenth-century aesthetic tradition of Lord Shaftesbury, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich von Schiller, which had made its way into French philosophy in the early nineteenth century. For this tradition, as for Baudelaire (albeit in a different key), the pleasures of beauty are a kind of embryonic politics, which form a bridge between the individual subject and the larger public. Judgments of taste, in Kant’s formulation, are subjectively universal, true for the subject who experiences them,

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and formulated in a manner that assumes their validity for everyone else, anticipating the objectively universal principles that govern moral and political judgments. It is unclear how well Baudelaire knew this tradition, but he shares its understanding of art and taste as fundamentally social. From his earliest writings, he rigorously associates artistic production and reception not with the personal and individualistic, as one might expect, but with the public and collective. By contrast, the traditionally “political” concerns of the liberal tradition— laws, rights, and the social contract— come to seem matters of private interest. Baudelaire’s civic humanism casts the aesthetic community as a classically republican alternative to the modern (liberal) republicanism established by the French and American Revolutions. Classical republican historiography defines corruption—the hallmark of a republic in decline—as the substitution of private relationships for public debate and individual gain for the common good. Baudelaire analyzes the condition of modern art in terms of just this substitution, casting the artist and the critic as paragons of civic virtue doing battle against a tyrannical and decadent bourgeoisie whose universalizing constitutions and proclamations of abstract rights mask a corrupt self-interest. Nowhere is Baudelaire’s reworking of the conventional oppositions between public and private, collective and individual, aesthetic and political more succinctly played out than in the prose poem “Le Miroir [The Mirror],” first published in 1864: Un homme épouvantable entre et se regarde dans la glace. “—Pourquoi vous regardez-vous au miroir, puisque vous ne pouvez vous y voir qu’avec déplaisir?” L’homme épouvantable me répond: “—Monsieur, d’après les immortels principes de 89, tous les hommes sont égaux en droits; donc je possède le droit de me mirer; avec plaisir ou dépaisir, cela ne regarde que ma conscience.” Au nom du bon sens, j’avais sans doute raison; mais, au point de vue de la loi, il n’avait pas tort. [An appalling man enters and looks at himself in a glass. “Why do you look at yourself in the mirror, since you can only look at yourself there with displeasure?” The appalling man replies: “Sir, according to the immortal principles of ’89, all men are equal before the law; therefore I have

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the right to look at myself in the glass; with pleasure or displeasure, that is an entirely personal matter.” In respect of common sense, I was certainly right; but from the point of view of the law, he was not wrong.] (OC I, 344; PS 83; trans. modified) This prose poem is often read as an aestheticist repudiation of democratic ideals and bourgeois self-regard, in which the speaker confronts the appalling man’s claims to legal equality with the higher ideal of beauty. But the poem challenges the division between beauty and law it seems at first glance to enforce. For it is the appalling man, not the speaker, who assumes that aesthetic pleasure is “an entirely personal matter”; he insists upon an absolute division between formal political rights and private feelings. Baudelaire’s speaker, by contrast, assumes that beauty and pleasure should be debated in public—the poem is built around just such a debate—and that the public good relies on beauty as much as on legal equality. Aesthetic judgment is not merely an individual choice but a res publica in the most literal terms, as Baudelaire’s appeal to “bon sens” (good sense, common sense) makes clear. Beauty answers to the public good, while law only serves private interest and desire, despite the appalling man’s protestations to the contrary and the dismissive tone of the speaker. In 1848, Baudelaire helped to found a republican literary journal with the provocatively Jacobin title Le Salut public [Public Safety]. Even as he became disillusioned with socialism and moved from the radical left to the radical right, he continued to associate art and beauty with the public good. For Baudelaire, judgments of taste are political acts, ideally restricted to an elite yet crucial to the public good, even if the public (always and inevitably) does not realize it. It is the civic duty of this elite to remind the public of its debt to beauty and to underscore the false promises of laws and rights. Baudelaire’s early art criticism is quite explicit about this point. His first mature critical statement, the Salon de 1846, opens with a dedication entitled “Aux Bourgeois [To the Bourgeois],” that, anticipating “Le Miroir,” casts the aims of the review in terms of public policy. Having gained political power during the reign of Louis Philippe, the bourgeoisie now need to be educated in beauty: “The government of the city is in your hands, and that is just [juste], for you are the force. But you must also be capable of feeling beauty; for as not one of you today can do without power, so not one of you has the right [droit] to do without poetry” (OC II, 415; AIP 41). Baudelaire addresses his book to this

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new force as a kind of primer, which seeks to buttress the cultural authority of the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy on the one hand, which claims a monopoly over taste, and the working-class republicans, self-proclaimed heirs of the French Revolution, on the other, who favor utility over beauty. It remains unclear whether this dedication is earnest or ironic. Regardless, Baudelaire insists that art and politics cannot be disentangled, and that the critic’s task is political—fundamentally concerned with the polis— even if he or she never takes a coherent political position. Baudelaire read widely in the works of political theorists like Fourier and Blanqui during the 1840s, and their collectivist ideas ground his claims about the relationship between the critic and the public in the Salon de 1846. Their influence comes across most powerfully in Baudelaire’s defense of artistic schools, which draws on socialist theories of association. The penultimate section of the review, entitled “Des écoles et des ouvriers [On Schools and Workers],” opens with a street scene that describes a literal clash between aesthetic theory and public policy: If ever your idler’s curiosity has landed you in a street brawl [un émeute], perhaps you will have felt the same delight as I have often felt to see a protector of the public slumbers—a policeman or a municipal guard (the real army)—thumping a republican. And if so, like me, you will have said in your heart: “Thump on, thump a little harder, thump again, beloved constable! for at this supreme thumping, I adore thee and judge thee equal of Jupiter, the great dealer of justice [le grand justicier]! The man whom thou thumpest is an enemy of roses and perfume, and a maniac for utensils. He is the enemy of Watteau, the enemy of Raphael, the bitter enemy of luxury, of the fine arts and of literature, a sworn iconoclast and butcher of Venus and Apollo! He is no longer willing to help with the public roses and perfumes, as a humble and anonymous journeyman. He wants to be free, poor fool; but he is incapable of founding a factory for new flowers and new scents. Thump him devoutly across the shoulder-blades, the anarchist! (OC II, 490; AIP 113–14) Most recent critics have treated this apparent celebration of police power, like the opening celebration of bourgeois political power, as deeply ironic. Given that Baudelaire’s despised stepfather was a military man, who would lead his

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troops in defense of the public order in the streets of Paris during the Revolutions of 1848— on the other side of the barricades from Baudelaire—the ironic reading is entirely plausible. Here again, however, the question of Baudelaire’s specific political affiliation is less important than the underlying assertion that art and beauty are fundamentally public matters. Although the unlucky republican in this scene would seem to share Baudelaire’s devotion to civic virtue, he in fact represents liberal self-interest. Elevating individual rights (“He wants to be free”) over what Baudelaire takes to be the public good, he betrays the collective ideals embodied by art and beauty (Watteau, Raphael) and is punished accordingly. The pursuit of abstract rights is private and individualistic, however public and political the process of securing these rights may be. By contrast, the creation of beauty and pleasurable sensation (roses and perfumes) is collective (they are “public” and the products of a factory), serves the public good, and should be defended by the force of the state. This street scene helps to establish Baudelaire’s broader critical point in the section: that the superficial artistic individualism of the journeymen painters who were flooding the market with their mediocre work has replaced the “sovereignty of genius” that once governed the collective labor of artistic schools (OC II, 490; AIP 114). There are still true masters among current painters, but their “pupils” are mostly unknown to them, and their doctrines, carried by impersonal networks of communication, extend their dominion beyond the studio to regions where they are not understood. Those closest to the master “preserve the purity of his doctrines”; those outside the “family circle” borrow illegitimately from the schools. Baudelaire calls this group the “artistic apes”: “a vast population of mediocrities—apes of different and mixed breeds [singes de races diverses et croisées], a floating race [nation] of half-castes who move each day from one country to the next” (OC II, 491; AIP 115). The result of this individualism and mindless eclecticism is “an exhausting and sterile freedom [liberté]” (OC II, 492; AIP 116). The artistic apes, Baudelaire concludes, are “the republicans of art,” who glorify the individual at the expense of the community. Against this model, Baudelaire argues for a return to the “collective originality” of the schools that surrounded the great masters in the Renaissance (OC II, 492; AIP 116). Baudelaire’s terminology in this section, as I noted above, has its roots in utopian socialism, but one finds the same sentiments, and much the same political imagery, in later writings as well. In “Le Peintre de la vie moderne [The Painter of Modern Life]” (1863), for example, Baudelaire compares the struggle between the detail and structure in an artistic composition to a

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street battle: “An artist with a perfect sense of form but one accustomed to relying above all on his memory and imagination will find himself at the mercy of a riot [assailli par une émeute] of details all clamouring for justice with the fury of a mob in love with absolute equality [égalité absolue]. All justice is trampled underfoot; all harmony sacrificed and destroyed; many a trifle assumes vast proportions; many a triviality usurps the attention. The more our artist turns an impartial eye on detail, the greater is the state of anarchy. Whether he be long-sighted or short-sighted, all hierarchy and all subordination vanishes” (OC II, 698– 99; PML 16). Here again, Baudelaire associates the demand for formal political equality with lost artistic integrity and a threat to the public good, even using the same word (“émeute”) to describe the resulting disorder. Maintaining an impartial eye—the blind eye of justice, or the formal equality of the bourgeois nation-state—sacrifices the collective good to individual whim, and the entire community suffers. By contrast with the socialist vocabulary of “Des écoles et des ouvriers,” Baudelaire now speaks the authoritarian language of the right (hierarchy, subordination, the mob). But the analogy underlying both street scenes is the same: the artistic and the public good are ill served by the tradition of liberal individualism, with its elevation of the atomistic monad over the collective social body.

“Mon Semblable,—Mon Frère!” Beginning with his praise of the artistic schools, Baudelaire speaks to and for a literary and artistic elite that abides within the modern world but operates according to its own laws and institutions. It is a self-selected community within the broader society, a decadent republic of letters. As Walter Benjamin recognized, Baudelaire was the first poet to understand the nature of the modern literary public; he writes “to whose who are like him.”  Benjamin here refers to the shrinking audience for lyric poetry, but the point applies to Baudelaire’s other audiences as well. Baudelaire appeals to the aesthetic elite as “friends” and “unknown sympathizers [partisans inconnus]” (OC II, 779; PML 111), and characterizes this elite as an aristocracy. “I think,” he writes in the Salon de 1859, that “artistic affairs should only be discussed between aristocrats, and . . . that it is the scarcity of the elect that makes a paradise” (OC II, 633; AIP 168). Perpetually impoverished and a product of the stolid middle class, Baudelaire by no means saw himself as a part of any actually existing sociopolitical aristocracy. Rather, and in a manner that would influence the

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often deceptive class politics of later decadent writers (who were overwhelmingly drawn in both France and England from the provincial middle classes), he maps the traditional prerogatives of aristocratic life—its leisure, its history of artistic patronage, and, crucially, its perceived sense of responsibility for the commonweal— onto the ideal of an artistic life. The marginality of nineteenthcentury artists mimics the leisure that enabled aristocrats in earlier republics to serve the public good. Creating beauty and exercising the faculty of taste are acts of civic virtue, a contribution to the betterment of the polis. Gesturing toward the hereditary nature of aristocratic rule, Baudelaire defines his elite as a kind of family. The language of kinship, with its weight of nature and familial obligation, might seem to sit uncomfortably with Baudelaire’s civic humanist ideal, but it is in fact essential to it: artistic genius is a birthright, like aristocratic blood. Membership in Baudelaire’s elite is wholly elective, however. It is necessary yet chosen, at once natural and constructed. The language of kinship also underscores the bonds of sympathy that unite the members of the elite. They are an unnatural family, kindred spirits born into membership and bound by artistic affiliation, not by blood; the only lineage they recognize is artistic tradition, with the relationship between master and disciple supplanting that of parent and child, and recasting the republican virtue of universal fraternity. In the Salon de 1846, I noted above, Baudelaire contrasts the “family circle” of an artist’s true disciples with the “artistic apes,” who borrow from any and every master. The most authentic family is brought together by theory and the faculty of taste; the “artistic apes,” by contrast, are a “race,” their artistic failure figured as biological inferiority. Baudelaire’s family of taste is set apart from the masses and often opposed to the ruling order, but it is by no means divorced from the life of the nation. It is a vanguard, paradoxically bound all the more closely to the polis by its alienation from the mainstream. The members of this family are highly sensitive to political changes, living out the effects of historical transitions to which the rest of the nation remains oblivious. At the end of his 1863 obituary essay on Delacroix, Baudelaire ascribes a macropolitical function to his aesthetic elite. Noting that the death of great artists can have a powerfully depressive effect on mood of a country, he describes the passing of Delacroix as a “great national sorrow” that engenders in the populace a “sensation of growing solitude,” “a lowering of the general vitality; a clouding of the intellect” (OC II, 769; PML 68). The aesthetic elite experiences the sense of national loss before the nation as a whole does: “I believe however that this impression is chiefly confined to those proud anchorites [hautains solitaires] who can

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only make themselves a family by means of intellectual relations. As for the rest of the community [autres citoyens], it is only gradually that they most of them learn to realize the full extent of their country’s loss in losing its great man, and to appreciate what an empty space he has left behind. And yet it is only right to warn them” (OC II, 769; PML 68). An influential line of political thought from Plato to Hegel and Marx opposes familial and political bonds. Family is natural, involuntary, private, and insular, while citizenship is cultural, elective, communal, and outward turning. Baudelaire follows Aristotle in placing the family at the very heart of the political order, but this family is not the oikos of the Politics—a natural monarchy governed by the father. Rather, it is a “headless” household organized by shared taste, and by ideas alone. Significantly scrambling the traditional opposition between familial and public life, Baudelaire’s intellectual family of “proud anchorites” has a keen sense of political change. The ostensibly public community of “other citizens” remains unaware of its national loss, while the proud anchorites feel the loss out of proportion to the rest of the nation. The intellectual family Baudelaire describes is not opposed to the political world. Indeed, the community of anchorites takes upon itself the responsibility of warning the public of a tragedy it does not recognize. The solitude of artists and writers is not a threat to community but a crucial element of it. Baudelaire uses kinship terms in surprising contexts to describe such voluntary or countercultural communities and, in particular, to characterize those “heroic” figures—the flâneur, the lesbian, the poet, and the dandy— that Benjamin recognized as central to his account of modernity. The artistic schools idealized in the Salon de 1846, which Baudelaire describes in familial terms, are an important instance of this idea. In the prose poem “Les Foules [Crowds],” first published in 1861, Baudelaire compares the “refined” pleasure of wandering in urban crowds to the creation of spiritual or intellectual “families”: “The founders of colonies, the shepherds of people, missionary priests exiled to the end of the world, doubtless know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius [au sein de la vaste famille que leur genie s’est faite], they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives” (OC I, 291– 92; PS 20–21). The “art” of city walking is akin to the formation of new communities. From a position of figurative exile, the artistic flâneur creates a virtual family by thinking himself into the anonymous lives that surround him, much as the colonial and missionary figures the poem evokes create a new social body from the outcasts of another. In both cases,

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imagination (“genius”) creates a family where there was not one before. William Olmsted has noted the way Baudelaire’s poetic lists and groups often constitute “subversive taxonomies,” which posit open-ended communities of outsiders and thereby demonstrate the “solidarity of a large group whose actual connections may be nonexistent.” Baudelaire often designates such solidarity with kinship terms, as in his ambivalent appeal to the reader as “frère” in “Au Lecteur,” or his address to the isolated community of lesbians in “Femmes damnées” as “Pauvres sœurs [poor sisters]” (OC I, 114; FE 247). In the 1864 prose poem “Les Vocations” Baudelaire’s speaker overhears four boys talking about some gypsy musicians to whose itinerant artistic life one of them was deeply attracted. The speaker feels an immediate bond of sympathy with this boy and develops “the strange idea that I might, unknown to me, have a brother [un frère à moi-même inconnu]” (OC I, 335; PS 71). Here, too, Baudelaire figures countercultural artistic life as a form of kinship without blood ties. Although the members of Baudelaire’s aristocracy of taste belong to, and even perform a vital ser vice for, their respective nations, they also speak to a broader community of sympathetic outsiders across national borders. In the theoretical introduction to his review of the 1855 Exposition universelle, Baudelaire contrasts what he calls the “divine grace of cosmopolitanism” with the distorting effects of cultural nationalism on artistic judgment (OC II, 576; API 122). Establishment critics, he writes, will come to an international exhibition ready to denounce any foreign works as inherently suspect. Such a critic remains “locked up within the blinding fortress of his system . . . and under the influence of his fanaticism, be it Greek, Italian, or Parisian, he would prohibit that insolent race from enjoying, from dreaming or from thinking in any other ways but his very own” (OC II, 577; AIP 123). Theoretical systems are akin to nationalist prejudices, imprisoning the critic in a kind of colonial outpost and sealing beauty within existing national borders. The best critics, by contrast, are akin to “those solitary wanderers [voyageurs solitaires] who have lived for years in the heart of forests, in the midst of illimitable prairies, with no other companion but their gun— contemplating, dissecting, writing” (OC II, 576; API 122). Aesthetic response is a frontier experience where every encounter is new and potentially dangerous. Only loosely tied to a national tradition, the cosmopolitan wanderer is also a writer, who shares his or her impressions with other sympathizers. The figure of the dandy might seem to cut conspicuously against the grain of the collective ideals Baudelaire promotes in his criticism. Defined above all by his (exclusively, for Baudelaire) aggressively individual elegance

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and his aristocratic disdain for the multitude, the dandy fashions a cult of the self. Yet Baudelaire’s dandies also stand in much the same relationship to the larger national life that the proud anchorites in the essay on Delacroix do. In 1860, Baudelaire announced that he would publish a book on literary dandyism, featuring chapters on Chateaubriand, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and others. The book was never completed, but the title he gave the project in this instance is telling: Famille des Dandies. Baudelaire here and elsewhere characterizes dandyism in notably collective terms. In his canonical statement on the type in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” for example, he describes the dandy as a creature defined by laws and rules: “Dandyism, an institution beyond the laws, itself has rigorous laws which all its subjects must strictly obey, whatever their natural impetuosity and independence of character” (OC II, 709; PML 26). Institutions, laws, subjects: all of these terms point to collectivities that govern individuals and define their place. Dandies form a “school of tyrants,” “an unwritten institution,” a “haughty caste” (OC II, 710; PML 27; trans. modified). They are an intellectual family, a collective unit made up of solitary outsiders who define themselves through taste. Like the other members of the aesthetic elite Baudelaire describes in his writings, the family of dandies is highly sensitive to political change. Devoted to a culte de soi-même and defined by their spirit of “opposition and revolt,” dandies also belong to their proper nations (OC II, 705; PML 23). There are national traditions of dandyism; in some nations, like England, dandies find a natural home, while in others they are a passing fad. Regardless of their national origins, however, all dandies stand at the vanguard of the historical and political transitions that shape the larger community: “Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet allpowerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall. In the disorder of these times, certain men who are socially, politically and financially ill at ease [quelques hommes déclassés, dégoûtés, désœuvrés] but are all rich in native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to shatter as it is will be based on the most precious, the most enduring faculties, and on the divine gifts which work and money are unable to bestow. Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence [le dernier éclat d’héroïsme dans les decadences]” (OC II, 711; PML 28). Heroism is a collective ideal, as is the notion of a “new kind of aristocracy” defined by taste and talent, and made up of outsiders, marginal men “ill at ease” in their sociopolitical context, who would seem to be isolated by

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political change. Baudelaire’s adjectives, with their repeated use of the prefix “de-,” connote more powerfully than the English translation the sense of removal and displacement that underlies the condition of dandyism, and verbally suggest the association of this condition with historical decadence. The dandy’s sense of exile from the mainstream gives him a crucial vantage point, however. Like the speaker in “Le Miroir” and the proud anchorites in the Delacroix essay, Baudelaire’s dandies embody the necessary function of beauty in political life—a function that mass democracy, as the late Baudelaire never tired of reminding his readers, inevitably fails to appreciate.

“A Brotherhood Based on Contempt” The writings on Poe constitute Baudelaire’s most detailed vision of aesthetic community and the public good of art, turning the vocabulary of civic humanism into an unremitting attack on fundamental hostility of bourgeois liberalism to beauty. Baudelaire first encountered Poe’s tales in 1847, and between 1852 and 1865 he published three long critical essays on Poe and five volumes of translations, well over fifteen hundred pages altogether. In both bulk and seriousness, this encounter is almost unprecedented in modern literature, even more so given the extent to which Baudelaire’s translations and critical advocacy gave Poe a status in France out of proportion to his then-marginal place in the American tradition. Baudelaire’s letters reveal a long-running obsession with gathering information about Poe and popularizing his work in France. Baudelaire hunted down volumes of Poe’s writings, hounded visiting Americans to question them on nuances of translation, and encouraged his friends and literary contacts to promote Poe’s work in print. Critics have tended to read this obsession psychologically, and many of Baudelaire’s comments on Poe do indeed point to a kind of autobiographical labor. In a letter to his mother, from 8 March 1854, Baudelaire remarks on the “close resemblance . . . between my own poems and those of this man,” a resemblance he describes as “rather strange [singulier]” (C 1, 269; SL 66). Baudelaire took the title for his unfinished autobiographical notes, Mon cœur mis à nu [My Heart Laid Bare], from an entry in Poe’s Marginalia. The autobiographical reading of this obsession, however, tends to downplay the otherwise unmistakable political thrust of Baudelaire’s writings on his American double. Baudelaire first encountered Poe’s writing in the Fourierist journal

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La Démocratie pacifique, which published a translation of “The Black Cat” in 1847. The unsigned editorial headnote to the translation suggests that the story is evidence of just how far reactionaries will go to defend their belief in the “natural perversity” of humanity (OC II, 1200). Baudelaire would come to reject socialism’s own vision of human nature after 1852, but he never ceased to regard Poe’s work as politically significant. The Poe essays epitomize Baudelaire’s civic humanism, at once establishing a bond of sympathy with an “unknown sympathizer” and finding in that writer’s life a political lesson for the scattered family of “proud anchorites” Baudelaire addresses. It is often noted that Baudelaire defines Poe as a seminal poète maudit, driven, somewhat like Baudelaire himself, by a philistine public into drunkenness, poverty, and despair. More precisely, however, Baudelaire defines Poe as a writer deeply hostile to his political context. As Jonathan Culler has noted, “It is clearly important to Baudelaire that Poe is a foreigner, not only a stranger to France but a stranger in his own country.”  Poe’s sense of his estrangement from American culture is a running theme in Baudelaire’s writings on the topic. America, for Poe, was “a vast prison,” an “antipathetic atmosphere” marked by childishness, bad taste, and an all-consuming obsession with money (OC II, 297; PML 70–71). Poe is an exotic in his native land, going through life “as if through a Sahara desert” and changing his residence “like an Arab” (OC II, 271; BOP 63). Devoted to beauty and the supernatural, scornful of democracy, human goodness, and the belief in progress, Poe lives his life as “an admirable protest”; he is “like a slave determined to make his master blush” (OC II, 321; PML 95). The only national traits Baudelaire attributes to Poe are faults. In a letter to Sainte-Beuve, for example, he claims that Poe is “American only insofar as he is a charlatan [jongleur]” (C 1, 345; SL 84). Elsewhere, he notes the “altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute” that Poe gave to drinking (OC II, 314; PML 88). Reflecting more than just a bad fit between the writer and his context, Poe’s work arises from the writer’s opposition to his native land and to modern conditions of literary production: “this man found himself singularly alone in America” (OC II, 299; PML 73). Although Baudelaire laments this solitude, he also sees in it a model for aesthetic community. An outcast in America, Poe is exemplary in his determination, against all odds, to seek out community through writing and discussion. Baudelaire’s first extended engagement with Poe’s work, an essay entitled “Edgar Poe: Sa vie et ses ouvrages [Edgar Poe: His Life and Works],” which appeared in two installments in the

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Revue de Paris in 1852, was a selective translation, largely unacknowledged, of two obituary pieces on Poe by the American critics John M. Daniel and John R. Thompson. The passages original to Baudelaire incongruously characterize Poe as a victim of changes in literary sociability brought about by the French Revolution. In one original passage, for example, Baudelaire describes the changing relationship among drinking, sociability, and literary creativity before and after the Revolution. He contrasts the joyous and sociable drinking in the seventeenth-century circle of Marc-Antoine de Saint-Amant with its increasingly melancholy circumstances in subsequent centuries. The eighteenth-century school of Rétif de La Bretonne drank together, but as if in anticipation of the Revolution, “it was already a group of pariahs, a clandestine society [un école de parias, un monde souterrain],” increasingly alienated from the broader populace. Postrevolutionary writers drink alone, and their drunkenness has “a somber and sinister character” (OC II, 272; BOP 64). “There is no longer a special class,” writes Baudelaire, “which takes pride in associating with men of letters.” Modern writers have only their own fearful visions, recovered through intoxication, for “companions [conaissances]” (OC II, 272; BOP 65). When Baudelaire revised the 1852 essay in 1856 under the new title “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres [Edgar Poe, His Life and Works],” and published it as the introduction to his first volume of translations from Poe, Histoires Extraordinaires, he cut or condensed the passages about lost traditions of literary sociality, but the specter of postrevolutionary literary life continues to shape his depiction of Poe. In the 1852 essay, the baleful effect of the Revolution on writers—the loss of aristocratic patronage and the rise of market competition among artists—were felt as a loss of traditional forms of sociability. In the 1856 essay, Baudelaire’s Poe seeks in vain to recover or reimagine some version of that sociality. He is one of those “classless beings [êtres déclassés]” who can breathe only in the world of letters (OC II, 302; PML 76), but he does not want to live there alone. Having lost his position at the Southern Literary Messenger, for example, Poe continues to dream of “a Magazine of his own, he wanted to feel at home,” to have “a haven for his thought” (OC II, 304; PML 78). Poe equates home not simply with writing but with publication, sharing his work with like-minded, if unknown, readers. Baudelaire also puts a striking emphasis in his informal canon of Poe’s writings—those he translates and names in his essays— on the hoaxes and dialogues. A relatively small part of Poe’s collected writings, these literary forms have an outsized

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place in Baudelaire’s discussion of Poe because they explicitly describe or depend on literary sociality. Baudelaire’s Poe is a trickster who engaged his audience no less through his editorial work than through the hoaxes he concocted to fool the credulous American public. Baudelaire translated most of the notable hoaxes, as well as all Poe’s most significant dialogues: the three “angelic dialogues” (“The Power of Words,” The Colloquy of Monas and Una,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”), the two mesmeric dialogues (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “Mesmeric Revelation”), and “Some Words with a Mummy.” He also translated Poe’s work of speculative cosmology, Eureka, and quotes these lines from its dedication in his third major essay on Poe, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe [Further Notes on Edgar Poe]” (1857): “I offer this Book to those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities” (OC II, 321; PML 95). As his interest in the dialogues and hoaxes suggests, Baudelaire saw something inherently social in Poe, a “singular” sense of sympathy to which the letters attest, and which suff uses the tales. He is, for Baudelaire, the supreme poet of social bonds put under pressure, of sociality rendered uncanny. Poe’s murderers seek out auditors for their stories, and his detectives solve cases by reading minds rather than gathering material evidence. Like such famous tales as “Ligea” and “Morella,” the dialogues Baudelaire translated all concern the extension of sympathy after death. Baudelaire even construes Poe’s notorious drunkenness as a form of outsider sociality. Reworking his history of literary drunkenness from the 1852 essay, Baudelaire suggests in the 1856 essay that drinking is for Poe not a vice but a means of literary production: “Poe taught himself to drink, just as a careful man of letters makes a deliberate practice of filling his notebooks with notes. He could not resist the desire to return to the marvelous or terrifying visions, the subtle conceptions, which he had encountered in a previous storm; they were old acquaintances [conaissances] which peremptorily called to him, and in order to renew relations with them, he took the most perilous but straightest road” (OC II, 315; PML 89). This passage subtly assimilates Poe’s drinking at once to writing and to social engagement, and describes the private decisions of the writer as forms of engagement with the public. Poe drinks in much the same way a diligent writer uses notes: as a mnemonic device to recover valuable impressions, ideas, or quotations. This act of recovery is always social, a means of renewing relations with “old acquaintances.” In much the same way, Poe’s ability to a dazzle an audience with his drunken monologues becomes exemplary of the relationship between great writers and their audiences. Commenting on his “lack of

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delicacy in the matter of a public” while drinking, Baudelaire compares Poe with “other great and original minds for whom any company was good company.” The relationship between artist and audience, in this regard, is “a kind of brotherhood [fraternité] based on contempt” (OC II, 313; PML 87).

The Legend of Poe In an undated entry in his Journaux intimes, Baudelaire writes: “De Maistre and Edgar Poe taught me how to think [m’ont appris à raisonner]” (OC I, 669; IJ 57; trans. modified). Th is passage is often quoted as evidence of Baudelaire’s increasing devotion after 1852 to the reactionary political views of Maistre, views that Baudelaire frequently compares to Poe’s. The opening sections of “Notes nouvelles” are in large part a compendium of antidemocratic and anti-American aphorisms from Poe’s Marginalia and other prose, which Baudelaire claims Maistre would have admired. As Burton notes, however, Baudelaire writes that Maistre and Poe taught him how to think, not what to think. All three, that is, share a reactionary disdain for democracy and mass modernity, but the lesson Baudelaire learns from his mentors cannot be reduced to identifiable political positions. He borrows concepts from Maistre that help him define the political underpinnings of modern literary culture, but he is by no means slavishly devoted to his reactionary defense of throne and altar. Rather, he yokes Poe and Maistre to conceptualize the political origins of the postrevolutionary malaise from which artists and writers suffer. Poe becomes a kind of Maistrian hero, whose fate reveals the important relationship between modern literary production and modern political systems. Both the 1852 essay and the 1856 essay quote admiringly from Maistre’s 1821 work Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg [St. Petersburg Evenings], but it is in the revised version that Baudelaire brings out the full implications of Maistre’s theories for his account of Poe. As I noted above, the 1856 essay drops the explicit references to the Revolution that make up most of the original passages in the 1852 text, instead emphasizing a new paradigm for understanding Poe’s republican virtue that was merely implicit in the first essay, and which leads directly back to Maistre: martyrdom. Baudelaire casts Poe as a kind of literary saint, “canonizes” him as writer and quasi-religious icon at one and the same time: “I am adding a new saint to the martyrology” (OC II, 297; PML 70). Comparing America to the decadent Roman Empire, he describes

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Poe as one of the “sacrificial souls” whom Providence hurls “into hostile surroundings, like Christian martyrs into the circus” (OC II, 296; PML 69). He draws on the narrative resources of hagiography, calling Poe’s life a “legend,” detailing his persecution, first by American public opinion, and then, posthumously, by his Judas-like literary executor, Rufus Griswold, and casting his miserable death as a willing self-sacrifice. Baudelaire insists that Poe’s legend is exemplary. He offers him not as a model for imitation but, again in the tradition of Christian hagiography, as a source of comfort for the community and a motivation for good conduct. Poe sacrifices himself for beauty, putting the collective good above the individual life. And as with the original Christian martyrs, his sacrifice demonstrates both the saint’s devotion and the cruelty and hypocrisy of the tyrant who torments him. Baudelaire’s allusions to the tradition of hagiography draw on Maistre’s theory of sacrificial substitution or “reversibility [réversibilité],” which applies to modern politics the Christian principle that the death of one innocent can save an entire community. Maistre devotes the ninth dialogue of the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg to this doctrine. Given the imprint of original sin, he explains, there is no wholly innocent human being, and all worldly suffering is justified in the eyes of God. Human life is properly and necessarily soaked in blood, but the public perception of suffering can have important effects for the community. While the punishment of the obviously guilty person will satisfy the community’s sense of justice, the suffering of the apparently good one can have a redemptive quality: “When one reflects that these sufferings are not only useful for the just but that they can by religious acceptance be turned to the profit of the guilty, and that in suffering they really sacrifice for all men, one will agree that in fact it is impossible to imagine a sight more worthy of the divinity.” Salvation through blood is integral to the order of Providence in human history, and Maistre insists upon the contemporary political significance of the theory. His first major work, Considerations sur la France [Considerations on France] (1797), which Baudelaire also read, interprets the French Revolution as a providential intervention in human affairs, designed to strengthen the monarchy and punish the advocates of republican rule. Reproducing Christ’s death on the cross in the context of modern politics, the public execution of the great “innocent” Louis XVI offers proof of the guiding hand of Providence in human affairs and, by demonstrating the tyrannous bloodlust of his executioners, provides the downtrodden aristocrats and their sympathizers with a powerful martyr to rally around.

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Baudelaire does not argue for Poe’s Christ-like innocence, but he casts the legend of the American writer’s life in terms that clearly resonate with Maistre’s doctrine of reversibility. He repeatedly associates Poe with the divine. From an early age, and despite his poverty, Poe is exceptional: “He was truly marked by Nature, like those occasional figures in the street which rivet the observer’s eye and haunt his memory” (OC II, 309; PML 83). Singularly beautiful and graceful, he has an intense devotion to the eternal, to beauty, and to the supernatural order that goes conspicuously against the grain of the pursuit of material goods that defines his sociopolitical context. In “Notes nouvelles,” Baudelaire presents Poe as a teacher who argues for the divinity of beauty. Summarizing Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle,” he suggests that the desire for beauty is akin to the desire for the afterlife: “It is this admirable and immortal instinct for Beauty that makes us consider the Earth and its shows as a glimpse, a correspondence of Heaven. . . . It is at once by means of and through poetry, by means of and through music, that the soul gets an inkling of the glories that lie beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem melts us to tears, those tears are not the proof of an excess of pleasure, but rather evidence of a certain petulant, impatient sorrow— of a ner vous postulation— of a nature exiled amid the imperfect, and eager to seize immediately, on this very earth, upon a revealed paradise” (OC II, 334; PML 107–8). Attended in life and mourned after death, like Christ, by his beloved “mother” (actually his mother-in-law, the serendipitously named Maria Clemm), Poe suffers for the glory of divine Beauty. At the end of the 1852 essay, Baudelaire compares Poe explicitly to Christ: “I should willingly say of him and of a special class of men what the catechism says of our Lord: ‘He has suffered much for us’ ” (OC II, 288; BOP 85). In Mon cœur mis à nu, he reports that he prays every day “to God, source of all power and justice; to my father, to Mariette and to Poe, as intercessors” (OC I, 673; IJ 61). The cruel tyrant that martyrs Poe is public opinion, a phenomenon Baudelaire traces to the individualism inherent in the democratic order. Public opinion threatens the liberty of artists by pressing its (false) claims of equality. Even more than legal equality, American democracy valorizes equality of opinion— a position fundamentally at odds with Baudelaire’s belief in an aristocracy of taste— and in so doing effectively undermines the very liberties modern republics like America claim to secure for their citizens. Baudelaire’s account of American literary culture appeals directly to the traditional republican conception of political decadence as a substitution of

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private interest for the public good. America is a nation that “begins with decadence and starts off where the others leave off,” where the public never ceases speaking and therefore never allows the best work a chance to be heard. “At once young and old,” writes Baudelaire, “America chatters and gabbles on [bavarde et radote] with an astonishing volubility. Who could number her poets? they are countless. Her blue-stockings? they overwhelm the reviews.” The nation is a “ferment of mediocrities,” swarming with “compilers galore, literary parrots, plagiarists of plagiaries, and critics of critics” (OC II, 320–21; PML 94). America’s political decadence here lies in its anarchic literary activity and its literary decadence in its political principles, which elevate the chattering and self-interested individual over the needs of the collective. Poe’s frequent lamentation that America lacks an aristocracy is, for Baudelaire, an attack on American literary culture as much as on its political system. Difficult as it is for the true poet to be heard in the chaos of American literary culture, there is no worse fate under the regime of public opinion, writes Baudelaire in “Notes nouvelles,” than becoming a target of critical judgment. Publishing is the prelude to literary-critical violence: “What is difficult enough in a benevolent monarchy or a regular republic becomes well-nigh impossible in a kind of nightmare chaos in which everyone is a police-constable of opinion, and keeps order on behalf of his vices— or of his virtues, it is all one” (OC II, 327; PML 101). The imagery in this passage recalls the scene of street violence in the Salon de 1846, in which the police are praised for beating the “republicans of art,” who put their individual concerns ahead of the public good of beauty. As in the Salon de 1846, Baudelaire criticizes the ostensible enforcers of the public good for serving only their private interests. By contrast with the earlier street scene, however, Baudelaire here claims public opinion is allied with state violence, battering the true artists who struggle to be heard over the din. Although public opinion might seem to be democratic and collective, it really represents private individuals deputizing themselves to enforce their prejudices in the public sphere, with the tacit backing of the state. A fundamental perversion of democratic principles, public opinion threatens literature both by making the writer endlessly answerable to this public and by refusing to discriminate the legitimate from the illegitimate claim. Baudelaire’s critique of public opinion recalls any number of snobbish dismissals of mass literacy and democratic politics from the period, but its

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association of American literary culture with state violence is grounded on Maistre’s claim that democratic institutions necessarily undermine the very freedoms they try to secure for their citizens. According to Maistre, social contract theory relies on the false premise that political authority can be generated by unaided human reason. For social contract theorists, sovereignty belongs originally to each individual, who sacrifices some portion of it upon entering society in exchange for safety and companionship; written constitutions are intended to preserve the remaining share of natural right against the potential encroachments of the government or a tyrannous majority. For Maistre, by contrast, authority flows from God alone and passes to the people through hereditary lineage and ecclesiastical institutions. In his most explicit account of this contrast between divine and contractual authority, Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques [Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions] (1809), which Baudelaire praises in his correspondence, Maistre takes the fact that modern constitutions are invariably written as an emblem of their illusory authority. Unlike the divine rights “written in the heart”—and unlike, we might note, the “unwritten” laws that govern “institutions” like dandyism—those rights inscribed on paper cannot provide security for a fallen humanity. Drawing upon Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus, Maistre describes written constitutions as weak and subject to the predations of tyrannous usurpers like Robespierre: “He who believes himself able by writing alone to establish a clear and lasting doctrine is a great fool. If he really possessed the seeds of truth, he could never believe that a little black liquid and a pen could germinate them in the world, protect them from harsh weather, and make them sufficiently effective.”  Authority can have no worldly origin, and relies for its continuation on this sense of mystery. The postrevolutionary proliferation of written laws—apparently fixed but in fact open to endless interpretation—is a sign that order has already broken down. “The more nearly perfect an institution is,” Maistre claims, “the less it writes.” His political ideal is the English constitution, a traditional balance of power defined by key parliamentary acts, common law rights, judicial precedents, royal prerogative, and international treaties, but never formally written down like modern constitutions. The French Revolution, by contrast, is a “frightful book.”  Baudelaire regards Poe’s sacrifice at the hands of public opinion as dramatic evidence of Maistre’s thesis. The freedom of speech guaranteed in writing by the American constitution crushes the freedom of those outside

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of the mediocre majority. Public opinion threatens political order by making individual prejudice sovereign, and denying beauty its proper role as a supreme collective good. In the 1856 Poe essay, Baudelaire draws upon classical political theory to characterize the way public opinion subverts the very political order that gives it life: “What a pitiless dictatorship is that of opinion in a democratic society! Ask of it neither charity nor indulgence, nor any sort of flexibility in the application of its laws to the multiple and complex issues of the moral life. You might think that the impious love of liberty had given birth to a new tyranny, a bestial tyranny, or zoocracy, whose savage insensibility recalls the idol of Juggernaut” (OC II, 297– 98; PML 71). With the 1851 coup d’état lurking in the shadows, this passage traces the same nightmarish historical trajectory predicted by Maistre’s critique of social contract theory. Dictators were figures elevated by the Roman Republic to absolute power in times of emergency, who had the authority to suspend the constitution but were expected to step down after the danger had passed, and were forbidden to serve more than six months. Modern public opinion, for Baudelaire, entails a similar suspension in liberal democracies. Exercised out of individual interest rather than for the collective good, it destroys the very liberty of expression that authorizes it and that it would seem to epitomize. Liberty leads to the destruction of liberty, precisely as Maistre predicts in his account of written constitutions. Public opinion becomes a tyrant, the name given by Greek political theory to usurpers who would dispense entirely with the constitution of a city and rule as despots until they were overthrown. Governed by this tyrannous principle, America descends into the kind of human sacrifice Baudelaire finds in the legend of Poe. An avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, the idol of Juggernaut was, according to legend, carried on a cart whose wheels would ritually crush the worshippers helping to pull it. Baudelaire regards Poe’s literary martyrdom as something more than a metaphor for lack of literary success. His sacrifice demonstrates the inextricability of modern literary production from modern politics. Public opinion is the nightmarish uncanny double of the civic humanist virtue epitomized by the “proud anchorites,” crushing art through the very means by which the aesthetic elite hopes to nurture it: literary production and consumption. Seen from this perspective, Baudelaire’s accusation against America is not merely a snobbish dismissal of the new world but a reasoned and deeply troubling critique, influenced by Maistre’s political theory, of the tendency of democratic institutions to undermine the very freedoms they try to secure for their citizens. Here again, the artist recognizes a public good that the larger populace,

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driven by private interest that it cannot recognize, cedes for an illusory equality. Baudelaire writes as a proud anchorite, recognizing in Poe’s lonely existence a warning for all modern artists.

Armed Neutrality Baudelaire uses Maistre’s notion of sacrificial “reversibility” and his critique of social contract theory to unearth the political currents that shape the legend of Poe. These currents are suggested as well by another allusion in the Poe essays, one that indicates a way out of the tyranny from which Poe and other modern writers suffer. In the 1852 and the 1856 essays, Baudelaire frames his analysis with reference to Alfred de Vigny’s novel Stello (1832). The 1856 essay is explicit: “A well-known writer of our times has published a book to show that there can be no proper place for the poet either in a democratic or an aristocratic society, no more in a republic than in an absolute or tempered monarchy. And has anyone been able to answer him decisively? Today I offer a new legend in support of this thesis” (OC II, 297; PML 70). Poe’s life and death are proof that poets have no place in the “zoocracy” of modern bourgeois society. This passage is the only mention Baudelaire makes of Vigny in the essays (in the 1856 version, he does not name him), but Stello provides a telling context for Baudelaire’s treatment of Poe. Vigny, one of Baudelaire’s favorite poets from the previous generation of Romantics, was the original inspiration for SainteBeuve’s coining of the term “ivory tower.”  Baudelaire’s brief description of Stello might confirm the superficial applicability of the coinage to the novel, but Vigny’s account of the relationship between poetry and politics is complex, and highly significant for Baudelaire’s purpose. Vigny’s novel is a dialogue in which the fictional Romantic poet Stello, suffering from a deep depression, is “treated” over the course of an evening by the so-called Doctor Noir. Quite unlike Poe, who, Baudelaire argues, labors under the sign of a tormenting ill fortune, Stello was born “under the most auspicious star in heaven.” Nevertheless, he suffers spells of melancholy, during which only the “comfort of a human voice” protects him against severe attacks (F 4; E 4). When Doctor Noir finds him, Stello has isolated himself and is contemplating, “out of sheer despair,” writing a treatise “on behalf of a sublime form of government” (F 8; E 7). Doctor Noir is so alarmed that he offers to cure him through the “homeopathic” method (F 9; E 8) of telling him three stories about poets—Nicolas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert, Thomas Chatterton, and

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André Chénier—who die, in Vigny’s telling, as a result of the governmental forms under which they live: absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, and republicanism, respectively. He offers the death of the poets as evidence that political ambitions are fundamentally at odds with Stello’s poetic vocation. In the course of the stories, we learn that Doctor Noir has tended to these poets, and intervenes on their behalf with the ruling authorities of each political order. The three rulers all refuse aid, and all speak candidly to Doctor Noir about their disdain for poets and poetry. Vigny insists that the hostility of the rulers to poets is not specific to the three forms of government the doctor encounters but is fundamental to the relationship between art and political power. Doctor Noir tells Stello that “the essence of Power is irreconcilable with your poetic essence, and . . . one cannot expect it to do anything but try to destroy what conflicts with it” (F 197; E 173). The poets are “eternal pariahs” (F 188; E 165), their history “an unbroken chain of glorious exiles” (F 193; E 169). Doctor Noir’s “prescription” follows from this observation: he orders Stello to “separate the poetic life from the political life” (F 205; E 179). Although the doctor’s orders might seem to counsel a stereotypically aestheticist turn from reality to art, the judgment is pragmatic and does not require the poet entirely to sever the tie between art and politics. The crucial emphasis, for Vigny, is on the word “life.” Poets need solitude, while politics demands engagement in the public square. The poet should “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” allow politicians to “play their role,” and shun explicit political activity, as well as the lure of celebrity, literary schools, and academic associations, in favor of a solitary life devoted to the poetic craft (F 205; E 179). Retreat is the poet’s only answer to the depredations of power, regardless of the political theories that power serves. As Doctor Noir’s allusion to the theatricality of politics suggests, this turn away from active engagement in the public square is more complicated than it initially seems to be. Doctor Noir, much like Baudelaire—who, in symbolic mourning for the Second Republic, took to wearing only black after Louis Napoleon’s coup— defines the poet’s solitude in political terms. The poet, Vigny argues, should stand above the political fray but still intervene when necessary: “The solitary thinker observes an armed neutrality that mobilizes at need. It is he who puts his finger on the scale and decides the balance, now urging on, now restraining, the spirit of nations; he inspires public actions or protests against them, in accordance with what his foresight re-

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veals to him. What matter if his own head be endangered in the sudden advance or retreat?” (F 207; E 180–81). Doctor Noir’s prescription finds its echo in Baudelaire’s account of the relationship between the solitary dandy or the proud anchorite and the nation as a whole. As a practical matter, the poet cannot help but be engaged with politics; the most cunning poets do so only when necessary, and only on their own terms, preserving their hard-won artistic autonomy in all other instances. Recognizing a crucial distinction between genuine politics and the quotidian play of power, poets maintain an internal distance from the clamor of the public square. They speak to the “spirit” of the nation, avoiding direct competition with the status quo. The fact that even the most cautious poet’s head may be endangered by such engagement is a crucial reminder that poetry can never separate itself completely from public affairs. Vigny’s depiction of political power in Stello is deeply satirical; the rulers Doctor Noir encounters are invariably vain and duplicitous, and much of the novel’s irony comes from the fact that these rulers are unknowingly on the brink of their demise. Like the America that torments Poe, they are real embodiments of political decadence. The only answer to the corruption and falsehood that attends political power, Vigny suggests, is a return to an older ideal of association. “The Republic of letters,” Doctor Noir tells Stello, “is the only one whose citizens are truly free [la seule qui puisse jamais être composée de citoyens vraiment libre], for it is composed of isolated thinkers, often unknown [inconnu] even to each other” (F 206; E 180). Coming on the heels of the story of Chénier’s death under the Terror, Doctor Noir’s reference to the republic of letters is highly charged, suggesting that the political form of the republic can transcend the lure of power that makes poetry a potentially fatal occupation. Vigny’s republic is composed of individuals who never meet, never even know one another, and who share only their devotion to beauty and a desire to ensure its dissemination. It is precisely this kind of republic that Baudelaire seeks to define in his essays on Poe, and evokes in the list of journal titles I discussed in the opening pages of this book, as well as in the recurrent evocations of an elite family of taste that arise elsewhere in his writings. Adding Poe’s legend to the stories of Gilbert, Chatterton, and Chénier, Baudelaire takes on the role of Doctor Noir, updating his prescription for a greatly changed political context. Later decadent writers build upon this lesson, adapting it to their own political contexts and varying relationships to the public. Decadent writers fashion themselves as contributing members of

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an international republic of letters. Observing the “armed neutrality” Doctor Noir counsels, they continue to speak to and for a body of “unknown sympathizers” who understand reading and writing as deeply political acts— a signal contribution to the public good, however invisible this contribution may remain to a ruling order that lacks ears to hear.

chapter 2

The Politics of Appreciation Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire

I know of no sentiment more perplexing than admiration. —Charles Baudelaire, “Théophile Gautier”

The Precursor In the introduction to his section on the decadents and aesthetes in Degeneration, Max Nordau offers a suggestive analogy for Baudelaire’s influence over later writers in the decadent movement. “As on the death of Alexander the Great,” he writes, “his generals fell on the conqueror’s empire, and each one seized a portion of land, so did the imitators that Baudelaire numbered among his contemporaries and the generation following—many even without waiting for his madness and death—take possession of some one of his peculiarities for literary exploitation.”  With his typical blend of blindness and surprising insight, Nordau here identifies the remarkable extent to which the decadent movement defined itself through its reception of Baudelaire. For Nordau, Baudelaire’s less talented imitators merely pillage his works for their themes, rather than following their own talents (or lack thereof ): Catulle Mendès takes his lasciviousness; the Symbolists develop his mystical theories; Paul Verlaine borrows his mixture of sensuality and pietism; Algernon Charles Swinburne appropriates his Sadism. Denigrating the originality of decadent writers is a veritable cottage industry in critical writings on the period. Decadence, as Arthur Symons— surely no ally of Nordau’s—writes in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), is the work of “lesser men,”

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whose celebration of vice is a sheer pose. But imitation is also the sincerest form of flattery, and even the most servile expressions of admiration for Baudelaire, I argue in this chapter, are really forms of creative reception, the means by which later writers import the French poet’s vision of aesthetic community and the politics of taste into new national and sociohistorical contexts. Baudelaire’s rhetorical construction of an aesthetic elite united by taste and a devotion to beauty gives later writers a powerful heuristic for thinking about the political functions of artistic production and consumption. As we saw in the last chapter, Baudelaire argues that taste is a fundamentally political concept, evocative of the classical republican tradition of civic humanism. Beauty contributes to the life of the polis and provides new models of communal affiliation and political participation. Unlike the private interests that drive obviously public formations like laws and constitutions, beauty exists only for itself and thus serves the public good. Art is the true res publica of modernity. The decadent movement makes this claim about taste, beauty, and aesthetic sociability central to its reception of Baudelaire—no less so than it does his strikingly original poetic vision. Baudelaire, to adapt Nordau’s image, left behind a vast, ungovernable poetic territory, informed by a utopian vision of aesthetic community and sociality. Later writers developed this vision into an expansive critique of contemporary politics in large part by imitating and expressing admiration for Baudelaire himself. No figure was more widely imitated by later decadent writers than Baudelaire. They refer to him as master, father, progenitor, precursor, “Our Baptist”; he is apostrophized, plagiarized, made the subject of fulsome tributes and numberless purple patches; writers of all stripes claim to have found themselves through reading him. As Patricia Clements has observed, Baudelaire’s influence readily crosses national boundaries, offering writers a potent alternative to native literary traditions. Beyond providing the decadent movement with many of its major themes and critical principles, Baudelaire also influences through his powerfully original relationship to the writers and artists who influenced him. He provides a model for being influenced, functioning as what Catherine Coquio calls an “accelerant,” whose expressions of appreciation allow other writers to find themselves in his works and in the works that influenced him, much as he found himself in the work of Poe. Declaring their discipleship to Baudelaire places his followers within a circle of admiration, a community of writers bound together by a chain of

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reciprocal influences. Writers who admire Baudelaire in turn admire Poe, Wagner, Gautier, and others, borrowing from them as well as from Baudelaire himself. The chain extends beyond those writers Baudelaire actually admired to those Baudelaire’s admirers admire, on the more or less explicit presumption that Baudelaire would have appreciated them were he alive to read their works. The two most important early admirers of Baudelaire were Gautier and Swinburne, and their epideictic strategies would help to define the rhetoric of decadence. This chapter documents the ways in which their major tributes published in the immediate wake of Baudelaire’s death— Gautier’s “Notice” to Les Fleurs du mal and Swinburne’s pastoral elegy “Ave atque Vale,” both from 1868— shape the reception of Baudelaire through appreciation. Defining him as at once a quintessential decadent poet and as a model for understanding the politics of taste, these tributes make Baudelaire legible for the incipient decadent movement in much the same way that Baudelaire made Poe legible as a model for his own project. Gautier and Swinburne first define decadence as a project, as a cultural and political stance organized around judgments of taste and expressions of appreciation. This project finds its origin not only in Baudelaire’s works but also in the complicated network of tribute and imitation that formed around them. The “Notice” and “Ave atque Vale” were written out of admiration for Baudelaire, but they are also manifestos that make admiration itself a central preoccupation for the decadent movement. As we saw in the last chapter, Baudelaire casts Poe as a Mastrian sacrificial figure who suffered abuse and neglect from the public but produced works that spoke to a select few who were willing to listen. Rejected by his age, Poe was accepted by an elite (and elitist) “family” of sympathetic strangers. Both Gautier and Swinburne apply much the same paradigm in their reception of Baudelaire. Largely ignoring the specific political theories that motivated Baudelaire, they strategically adapt his critique of bourgeois liberalism and his evocations of civic humanism to the particular social and political contexts in which they found themselves. For both writers, Baudelaire is an avatar of classical republican ideals, a citizen-warrior whose writings serve not the patria but an emerging bohemian subculture of artistic, sexual, and intellectual outcasts— an aesthetic republic in exile from the decadent empire of mass modernity. Traditional republican historiography, as I noted in the last chapter, associates cultural decline with precisely those vices

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decadence celebrates: luxury, sexual dissidence, pleasure, and above all corruption. Decadence is a sign that the virtues of civic humanism have broken down. Nineteenth-century critics of decadence like Nisard and Bourget appeal to this historiography in their recurrent characterization of modern decadence as a fetishism of the detail that reflects the atomization of society. For Gautier and Swinburne, Baudelaire’s literary decadence is a source of political revival, a form of sacrifice that parallels the classical warrior ideal rather than epitomizing its decay.

The Poetics of Sacrifice Théophile Gautier’s “Notice” to the 1868 edition of Les Fleurs du mal is the single most important posthumous tribute to Baudelaire and, as P. E. Tennant writes, “was almost entirely responsible for Baudelaire’s reputation as the fatherfounder of decadence.” Most often cited for its seminal definition of decadent style, the “Notice” praises Baudelaire much as Baudelaire had praised Poe: as a martyr for literature and for the generation of writers and artists that emerges out of the ruins of the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. Gautier was asked to read the eulogy at Baudelaire’s funeral but was away from Paris when the poet was buried, leading to some grumbling among Baudelaire’s friends. The “Notice” serves as a belated substitute for this missed opportunity for appreciation. It is at once eulogy and critical study, and performs the important work of framing Baudelaire as a decadent writer, piecing together elements of his work and reversing traditional critical judgments to make decadence available as a purposive literary stance rather than a terminal condition. Gautier’s crucial innovation is to define Baudelaire as a loyalist, a warrior for the poetic ideal, who experienced the extremes of literary life not only out of devotion to his craft but also in the ser vice of an emerging dissident community. In this regard, Gautier, not Baudelaire, is the John the Baptist of the decadent movement; and like the Baptist, his most recognizable gesture is pointing to the true messiah, the sacrificial lamb of the decadent communion. Baudelaire’s sacrificial rhetoric echoes throughout the piece, though with a significantly redirected political thrust. Although the “Notice” seems on a first reading to be rather diff use, personal, and rambling, it alludes with surprising rigor to the Athenian epideictic genre of the funeral oration, which, as Nicole Loraux notes in The Invention of Athens, was undergoing an important revival in the political rhetoric of the

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nineteenth century. The funeral oration is defined by the praise of patriotic sacrifice, and scholars and politicians of many stripes laid claim in the period to the republican lineage of idealized citizenship the genre both lauds and epitomizes. Gautier uses the familiar topoi of the funeral oration to treat Baudelaire’s life and work as a form of sacrifice, but he systematically overturns the expectations of the genre. For Gautier, Baudelaire’s sacrifice is literary, not military. He presents Baudelaire as a classically stoic warrior, whose fascination with death and sacrifice becomes a form of political critique that places the poet at the head of society. Baudelaire is a figure of internal exile, a critical witness to modernity, who fulfills the vision of outsider sociality he himself had discerned in Poe’s sad fate, and maintains in his artistic practice the civic virtues that have fallen into decay in the larger society. Drawing on the canonically republican tradition of the funeral oration, Gautier memorializes a community of outsiders and exceptions. This society is not the Athenian polis of the Periclean idiom but the bohemian counterculture, composed of the very figures Baudelaire identified as ill at ease in the nineteenth century: artists, dandies, writers, lovers, ragmen, and so forth. They form a polity apart— a decadent republic of letters— devoted at once to plea sure and to self-preservation. Gautier’s idiosyncratic allusions to the funeral oration underlie the most significant rhetorical choices in the “Notice.” Although the piece was published more than six months after Baudelaire’s death, appeared serially before it was printed as the preface to Baudelaire’s collection, and is far too long to have been composed in one sitting, Gautier dates it 20 February 1868, lending it an oratorical air. Rather than recording the day of composition or completion, the date stresses the occasional nature of the “Notice,” and its implicit address to a community. Gautier strays most notably from the model of the funeral oration, which always praised the dead as a group, in his focus on a single individual. In other respects, he sticks closely to the conventions of the genre: the piece enumerates the poet’s major achievements, casts his death as a sacrifice for the community, and toward its conclusion seeks to console those left behind: “It is sorrowful, for the survivors, to see so fine and fruitful an intelligence pass away, to lose in a more and more deserted path of life a companion of youth” (F 164; E 86). He slyly plays on the traditional oratorical promise of the city to care for war orphans by closing his essay with a discussion of the prose poems, Baudelaire’s orphan texts, which were first collected in the same complete works edition for which the “Notice” was commissioned. The only prose poem Gautier discusses at any length, “Les Bienfaits

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de la lune [The Moon’s Favors],” tells of a sleeping child visited at night by the moon, as if by “a mother’s careful tenderness,” and brought under its influence. The moon becomes a foster parent, much like the city in ancient Athens. Gautier also follows the form of the funeral oration by defining Baudelaire’s artistic achievement in terms of violence and sacrifice. The essay lingers on images of death and loss, reading the themes of Baudelaire’s poetry as evidence of the poet’s warrior spirit. Gautier’s description of Baudelaire as a young man is especially telling. With black hair and prominent white brow, his head resembles a “Saracen helmet” (F 113–14; E 2–3). This idiosyncratic martial trait foreshadows Baudelaire’s destiny. The literary life is a kind of violence done to self and others in pursuit of beauty, a “sad, precarious, and miserable” existence, made up of bloody “battles [luttes]” to achieve an ideal from which most writers never return intact; in effect, the writer “no longer lives” (F 121; E 13). Even successful poets die as martyrs, “crowned with glory” and sinking into the “breast of their ideal” (F 121; E 14). When Gautier describes Baudelaire’s appearance as a mature man—the poet wore only black after 1851, as I noted in the last chapter—the warrior becomes a kind of saint, reinforcing the connection between poetry and martyrdom. His hair is now white, and his face “thin and spiritualized.” His lips “were closed mysteriously, and seemed to guard ironical secrets”; he has overall “an almost sacerdotal appearance” (F 120; E 12). Gautier’s comparison of writing and warfare is not wholly fanciful. Although the essay does not explicitly mention the Revolutions of 1848, the event shadows its account of Baudelaire’s legend. Here again, the use of dates in the essay is significant. Gautier claims that he first met Baudelaire in 1849, when the latter was still unpublished and obscure, though clearly marked for greatness. This chronology is almost certainly incorrect: by 1849, Baudelaire had published two Salons, several critical articles, Le Fanfarlo, his first Poe translation, and numerous individual poems. His talent, if not his lasting fame, was well established, at least in the literary circles Gautier frequented, where the various pseudonyms under which Baudelaire published his early works would not have been a mystery. It is more likely that Gautier first met Baudelaire in 1845. Gautier’s apparent error in dating is best understood not as a mistake but as a creative elaboration, which traces Baudelaire’s influence on his generation to the Revolution of 1848 and its chaotic aftermath: the fleeting establishment of the Second Republic and the conservative counterrevolution that culminated in Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851. Gautier

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does not mention Baudelaire’s revolutionary activity—he surely knew of it— but it is suggested throughout the “Notice” in his characterization of the poet’s work and influence. Writing during the waning days of the Second Empire, Gautier reads Baudelaire’s poetry as an anticipatory response to the disorder that Louis Napoleon sought to contain with the virtual police state he instituted soon after assuming power. Baudelaire is an avatar of classical republican virtue in an age of political chaos who documents the underbelly of a decadent modern empire. Gautier’s famous definition of decadent style should be read in the light of this historical context. Decadence, as Gautier describes it, is a self-conscious stance, which historicizes decay rather than celebrating it. Baudelaire challenges the nineteenth-century’s claims of progress by challenging its choice of historical analogies. Praising Baudelaire in the language of the classical funeral oration, Gautier appropriates the republican imaginary of classical Athens and the Roman Republic for the modern poet; the Second Empire with its social controls and displays of wealth and power resembles the decadent Roman Empire. Gautier discerns in Baudelaire a taste for social fragmentation and political disorder, and this taste allows him to document the aftermath of 1848 in ways unavailable to other writers: The poet of Les Fleurs du mal loved what is inaccurately called the style of decadence, which is nothing more than art arrived at that point of extreme maturity induced by the slanting suns of civilizations that have grown old. It is an ingenious style, complicated, wise, full of nuances and research, always pushing back the frontiers of speech [reculant . . . les bornes de la langue], taking color from every palette, notes from all keyboards, forcing itself to the expression of the most elusive thoughts, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate the subtle confidences of neurosis, confessions of senile passions becoming depraved and the odd hallucinations of a fi xed idea turning to madness. This style of decadence is the last word on the Word [le dernier mot du Verbe], summoned to express all and push to the utmost extreme. One can recall, à propos of him, language already veined with the greenness of decomposition, savoring the Lower Roman Empire and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek art fallen into deliquescence. (F 124–25; E 19–20; trans. modified)

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Gautier borrows from and radically transforms the prevailing nineteenthcentury definition of decadent style. Like Nisard and other neoclassical critics, who saw in decadent style the evidence of social and political breakdown, Gautier associates Baudelaire’s love of decadence with the end of empire. Yet the poet is a witness to decadence, not a victim of it—a researcher or explorer, who pushes back the boundaries of language and draws deliberately from the other arts and sciences to describe his political moment. Gautier plays on the language and imagery of extremes. From the Latin exter, meaning outward, foreign, or strange, the word names both spatial (as in the French extrême Orient, Far East) and conceptual limits. Decadence is an index of extreme maturity, extremes of language, of imperial dominion in extremis. But the word also describes Baudelaire’s stance as an outsider, an observer, and a translator. He is closer in spirit to the barbarians and Christians who take down the Roman Empire than to its doomed citizens. Gautier notes that Baudelaire’s favorite Latin writers are not high imperial figures like Horace and Virgil but social and territorial outsiders, whose language “has the black radiance of ebony”: the African Apuleius; the satirist Juvenal; and the provincial Christians Augustine and Tertullian, both also Africans (F 125; E 21). Rather than succumbing to decadence, Baudelaire is an outsider stoically anatomizing the fall of the empire. Gautier was by no means a political radical— quite the contrary, in fact, by 1868. Although he became famous for his flamboyant advocacy of l’art pour l’art in the 1830s and the sexual daring of novels such as Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), he disdained the revolutionary acts of 1848 and made himself comfortable in the Second Empire. Much to the chagrin of younger writers who admired his works, he was employed by the regime’s official newspaper, Le Moniteur universel, and later served as the librarian for Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Louis Napoleon. He remained critical of the bourgeois Philistinism that marked the Second Empire, but he never seriously challenged the legitimacy of the regime, and there is little reason to believe that he sympathized with or genuinely comprehended either Baudelaire’s early radicalism or his later turn to the work of Maistre. Indeed, the invocation of 1848 in the “Notice” arguably depoliticizes Baudelaire’s work by reducing revolution to a signifier for generalized social disorder. And yet Gautier’s use of the funeral oration deliberately connects Baudelaire and the revolutions with the idealized political model of Periclean Athens, an example radically at odds in its valorization of active citizenship with the purely formal manner of political participation afforded the populace during the Second Empire.

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Baudelaire here is at once an artistic and a political model, the epitome of the decadent poet and an avatar of republican virtue in the midst of what Gautier clearly perceived was a declining empire. Gautier’s dating of his first meeting with Baudelaire has yet another resonance: 1849 was the year Poe died. Baudelaire inherits the role he apportions to Poe: critic of and eventual sacrifice to a decadent mass modernity and the tottering empire that fosters it. Seen in this light, Gautier’s account of Baudelaire’s critical detachment takes on a significant political edge. With his hair resembling a “Saracen helmet” and a willingness to sacrifice himself for his art, Baudelaire models an aesthetic politics of internal exile. He depicts France itself as if through foreign eyes, conceiving “a land unexplored, a sort of rough and wild Kamschatka” (F 123; E 17) from within the heart of his native country. In a seemingly casual allusion with wide-ranging significance for his argument, Gautier connects Baudelaire with the legendary seventeenth-century Italian alchemist and court poisoner for the Borgias, Exili, who wore a “glass mask [masque de verre]” when preparing his “powder of succession” (F 135; E 40). The allusion compares Baudelaire’s contemporary readers to Exili, mocking them for their fear that the poems are somehow “poisonous” and need to be held at a distance. Earlier in the essay, Gautier had compared these poems to poison and disease, but he refers to the palette Baudelaire draws upon to describe his world, not to the nature of the poems themselves: “the roses of consumption, the pallor of chlorosis, the hateful bilious yellows, the leaden grey of pestilential fogs, the poisoned and metallic greens smelling of sulphide of arsenic, the blackness of smoke diluted by the rain on plaster walls” (F 133; E 36). These are the colors produced by the industrialized modernity Baudelaire’s poems document; the poet is only being true to his time in painting with them. Yet playing on the homophony of verre (glass) and vers (verse), Gautier suggests that Baudelaire and Exili do have something important in common. As if donning a protective glass mask, Baudelaire writes about the poisonous remainders of modernity; the homophony of Exili’s name with the act of exile (in French, exil) defines his chosen response. For Gautier, Baudelaire epitomizes this detached but critical relationship to his decadent age. He stresses the poet’s “British” reserve and formalized, almost aristocratic manners, and observes the same kind of detachment in the poetry and critical writings (F 120; E 13). The formal perfection of Baudelaire’s verse is a kind of “armour” distancing the poet from what he describes (F 133; E 35). He approaches evil like a “magnetised bird”: drawn into the “unclean mouth of the serpent,” he always escapes at the last moment to “bluer and

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more spiritual regions” (F 127; E 24). Many of the relatively few poems Gautier chooses to discuss in the “Notice” describe or epitomize the poet’s stoic detachment. He groups two poems—“Élévation [Elevation]” and “Le Soleil [The Sun]”—which are widely separated in the 1868 edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but which both imagine the poet soaring above the everyday world. Gautier praises the dandaical hero of “Don Juan aux Enfers [Don Juan in Hell]” for his refusal of emotion. The most significant poem Gautier discusses in this regard is “Bénédiction,” the opening poem of Les Fleurs du mal proper. In line with Gautier’s larger argument in the “Notice,” “Bénédiction” casts the poet’s life as a form of martyrdom. Scorned by his mother and his family, tormented by his lover, and overseen by a guardian angel who can only weep ineffectually over his charge’s sad “pilgrimage” on earth, the young poet dreams that literary glory will sanctify his suffering. In his commentary on the poem, Gautier describes the lover who tortures the poet as a Delilah, “happy in delivering him up to the Philistines” (F 134; E 36). Th is detail is nowhere in Baudelaire’s poem. Gautier’s elaboration makes plain his interpretation of Baudelaire’s life: suffering for Truth and Beauty, the poet sacrifices himself on the altar of a Philistine readership that cares only about money and outward propriety, not the Ideal. Baudelaire’s torment is part of a larger cultural conflict between artists and their bourgeois public, his critical detachment from modernity a mode of resistance as well as a defense. Gautier opens the “Notice” with an extended recollection, incorrectly dated, as I noted above, of his first meeting with Baudelaire among the small circle of artists, poets, and models who congregated in and around Gautier’s rooms at the Hôtel Pimodan in Paris. The “strange apartment” Gautier occupies “communicated” with that of Ferdinand Boissard by a private hidden staircase not to be seen from outside. This image of a social group circulating and “communicating” outside the view of the public aptly figures the countercultural sociality and practice of internal exile that defines Baudelaire’s contribution to modern poetry. When Gautier first met him, he recognized that Baudelaire was destined for leadership. Acknowledged by artists and writers, he remains, at this time, a mystery to the larger public: “Charles Baudelaire was then an almost unknown genius, preparing himself in the shadow for the light to come . . . his name was already becoming known amongst poets and artists, who heard it with a quivering of expectation, the younger generation, coming after the great generation of 1830, seemed to be looking to him a great deal. In the mysterious upper chamber where the reputations of the future are sketched out [s’ébauchent] he passed as the strongest” (F 113; E 2; trans. modi-

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fied). Baudelaire’s talent marks him as not merely a great poet but also as a kind of secular messiah-in-waiting, the harbinger of a new post-Romantic generation. Gautier’s images blend the typological with the aesthetic. Baudelaire’s future is “sketched out” like a drawing; shadow and light are figures for fame as well as the medium of painting. Gautier notes that the artist’s model Maryx (Joséphine Bloch), who was present at this fateful meeting, later became famous for depicting the allegorical figure of Glory in Paul Delaroche’s 1855 mural, “The Hemicycle.” In the mural, Glory hands laurel crowns to the legendary Greek painters Phidias, Apelles, and Ictinus, who are flanked by modern masters. In the scene Gautier describes, she figuratively hands the crown to Baudelaire. Awarded to victorious poets and generals alike, the wreath signifies Baudelaire’s posthumous role as the unofficial and subversive poet laureate. Rather than singing the praises of the empire, he inspires a small group of internal exiles during a moment of great disorder. The laurel wreath is also present in another allusion in the opening paragraphs of the “Notice.” Regretting the lost sense of community he felt at the time of his first meeting with Baudelaire, Gautier looks back to a crucial moment in the classical republican imaginary: the Florentine city-state of the Renaissance. “They have passed,” he writes, “those charming leisure hours, where coteries [décamérons] of poets, artists, and beautiful women were gathered together to talk of art, literature, and love, as in the century of Boccaccio. Time, death, and the imperious necessities of life, have dispersed these free and sympathetic groups; but the memory is dear to all those who had the good fortune to be admitted to them” (F 118–19; E 10; trans. modified). The tone of this passage is elegiac, but the allusion is cutting. In The Decameron, the group of Florentine young people who tell one another stories is trying to escape the plague and the social breakdown that follows in its wake. In his introduction to the collection, Boccaccio stresses the plague’s corrosive influence on social, political, and familial order. Having come from the East, the plague manifests itself in Italy as a disorder of sociality. It spreads by contiguity, infecting healthy persons “who conversed or had any dealings with the sick.”  Yet it also divides, separating the sick from the healthy, parents from children, husbands from wives, citizens from their city. Having all lost their families to the plague, Boccaccio’s storytellers leave the city seeking refuge in a series of country estates. But their escape is not merely escapist: in place of the old order they fashion a new imaginary republic, with a rotating leadership signified by a laurel crown, “the outward symbol of sovereign power and authority” for the group. Out of the ashes of one society, they form a new society based on

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art, complete with laws, sovereignty, and an orderly succession. Like Gautier’s bohemian counterculture, they constitute a polity apart, devoted to pleasure and self-preservation. Although it seems merely to look back to an idealized past, a kind of literary and artistic paradise lost, Gautier’s allusion frames his depiction of Baudelaire as a recreation of Boccaccio’s story. The nineteenth-century “plague” is a product of political uncertainty, authoritarian rule, and rising bourgeois hegemony after 1848; it is the decadence captured in Baudelaire’s style. Gautier hints at this association in his description of the model Maryx posed on a couch and listening impassively to Baudelaire’s paradoxes. According to Gautier she was wearing a white dress “dotted with spots of red that looked like little drops of blood” (F 118; E 10; trans. modified). Pointing at once to blood spilled in the streets of Paris, the poetic sacrifices of Baudelaire’s career, and to the bleeding from the nose that, Boccaccio notes, was the earliest sign of the plague when it first established itself in the East, Maryx’s dress typologically casts Baudelaire’s fame as the product of and the answer to political disorder and social change. The party Gautier describes is at once an ending and a beginning, a shadow of the future and a distribution scene memorializing the past. It traces the origins of Baudelaire’s fame to the end of the July Monarchy and finds the beginning of new poetic insights and new forms of sociality in the ruins of the old political order. Baudelaire’s critical detachment from modernity, bought at the cost of great personal suffering, engenders bonds of sympathy among the embattled artist tribe of the Second Empire. Like all funeral orations— and in line with the new society constructed within the Decameron—the “Notice” transforms death and loss into a renewal of community. Here, however, Gautier memorializes the emergent decadent republic of letters, a group of internal exiles whose form of association, imagined by Baudelaire and formalized by Gautier, will have a striking impact on the decadent movement in the decades after 1870.

“The Sense of Kinship Inly Bred” Perhaps no major writer has been so routinely denigrated for his expressions of admiration as Swinburne. His most recent biographer, Rikky Rooksby, notes that the “need to worship” was “Swinburne’s central emotional drive.”  He lavished almost boundless praise on his literary and political heroes— Lamb, Hugo, Mazzini, Landor, Blake, as well as Baudelaire— and metaphor-

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ically threw himself at the feet of the numerous and infamous femmes fatales that dominate his early poetry, a metaphor made literal in Swinburne’s lived passion for flagellation. Yet while readers often reduce these enthusiasms to a character trait— a mere reflex akin to the fluttering of the hands that was said to accompany his expressions of excitement— Swinburne himself was far more circumspect about the literary and political function of reception than his readers have given him credit for being. Jerome McGann notes that Swinburne’s enthusiasms were rigorously structured: “Swinburne was always an enthusiast who held himself subject to aesthetic and even moral laws more severe and demanding than any that could have been devised for him.” His openness to influence makes him the medium for many voices, one singer in a “communal effort toward the building of a thing which was greater than the sum of its parts.”  Like Baudelaire, Swinburne’s favored literary mode was epideictic, and he invests this mode with many of the same aesthetic and political effects as his French master. Harold Nicolson argues that Baudelaire’s stylistic influence on Swinburne was “transitory only,” a fascination mostly of the 1860s. The practice of appreciation that Swinburne develops through his early reading of Baudelaire, however, pervades all of his later work and is central to his own significant influence on later decadent writers in England and France. Swinburne’s review of Les Fleurs du mal, published in the Spectator in September of 1862, was the first substantial mention of Baudelaire in the English press and one of the very few appreciations of the poet published in any language during his lifetime. Swinburne refers frequently to Baudelaire in his work of the 1860s, making him available to the English tradition, Clements argues, in much the same way that Baudelaire had made Poe available to the French and that Gautier was at the same time working to make Baudelaire available to readers in France. The Baudelaire that Swinburne constructs— one of his “major achievements,” in Clements’s estimation— at once resembles and differs markedly from the Baudelaire that Gautier constructs in the “Notice.”  Like Gautier, Swinburne finds in Baudelaire not just the thrill of a genuinely new poetic voice but a heroic figure in the tradition of classical republican political theory, whose sacrificial relationship to bourgeois modernity prepares the way for a new model of aesthetic community. But by contrast with the stoic and detached observer Gautier describes—the fated leader of a small band of internal exiles— Swinburne’s Baudelaire is an artist publicly at odds with his age, a rebel and sensualist who speaks directly to Swinburne’s almost bodily

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conception of political involvement. He provides an incisive answer to Thomas Carlyle’s vision of hero worship, an unavoidable reference point for Victorian thinking about the relationship between politics and admiration. As Bernard Howells has shown, Carlyle was widely read in France in the 1840s and clearly influenced Baudelaire’s depiction of Poe. Swinburne’s responses to Carlyle swing from early admiration to harsh vituperation in the 1870s, and he reviled his late conservative politics, but his version of Baudelaire is built upon the same symptomatic relationship Carlyle discerned between the hero and his age. Muhammad and Luther became great leaders, Carlyle argues, because they were born into religious ages ready to hear their lessons; Dante and Shakespeare were revered by periods that still listened to great poets. But the main heroes of modernity, men of letters, wander like “unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites,” with few followers and no significant influence. Rather than gratefully receiving their message, modernity shuns them, persecutes them, and labels them mad. Carlyle highlights the example of Robert Burns, a great soul who was subject to “unreasoning, nay irrational, supercilious no-love” from an era whose nascent democratic ethos made it blind to the value of heroically exceptional individuals. Swinburne’s Baudelaire is cut from the same heroic cloth as Carlyle’s Burns and Baudelaire’s Poe, but he embodies a much different political lesson, and not just because Swinburne’s politics diverge significantly from the antidemocratic conservatism of Carlyle and the later Baudelaire. For Swinburne, the hero is necessarily an outsider, “born and baptized,” as he writes of William Blake, “into the church of rebels” (XVI, 55). Constitutional dissidents, such figures will inevitably clash with the conventions of their times; rather than being unfairly neglected by their age, they invite conflict with it. Swinburne writes of Blake that “we could hardly imagine a time or scheme of things in which he could have lived and worked without some interval of revolt” (XVI, 55). It is no surprise that the age should reject them, so the task of doing justice to such heroes falls to those poets and critics who appreciate their works in ways their immediate contemporaries necessarily failed to do. Writing with the benefit of hindsight or (as in the case of Baudelaire) from the distance of another nation, the appreciative critic produces the right conditions for the reception of the hero; the critic’s task is historical and political as well as aesthetic. In an extended theoretical discussion of praise at the end of William Blake— a book that draws its epigraph and major theoretical principles from Baudelaire— Swinburne describes his contributions to scholarship on Blake as an effort “to help the works of a great man on their way towards that

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due appreciation and that high honour of which in the end they will not fail” (XVI, 345). Quoting the familiar lines from Ecclesiasticus (44:1), “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers who were before us,” he argues that the attention of modern writers is most justly turned to neglected figures: “Among all these ‘famous men, and our fathers,’ no names seem to demand our praise so loudly as theirs who while alive had to dispense with the thanksgiving of men. To them doubtless, it may be said, this is now more than ever indifferent; but to us it had better not be so” (XVI, 346). Appreciation is a duty incumbent upon a communal present (“us”), a ser vice to those who were ignored or attacked when they lived, and a form of collaboration with illustrious predecessors carried out, as Elizabeth Prettejohn suggests, “regardless of the chronological or intellectual precedence one may have had over another.”  Literary reception here becomes a practice of republican virtue. Adopting Baudelaire’s evocation of civic humanism, Swinburne regards the critic as a public servant, part of a vanguard of readers spread across time and space who respond to the inevitable abuse and neglect that visionary writers and artists will suffer from the broader public. Although it continued to play a central role in nineteenth-century France, republican political theory was largely marginalized in England after the French Revolution, and was most often associated in the first part of the century with antimonarchial sentiments and working-class radicalism. In the wake of the first Reform Bill and the European Revolutions of 1848, however, mid-century intellectuals began looking to republican movements in other countries for new ways of thinking about representative government and the relationship of Britain to the international community. Swinburne became interested in this tradition of what Julia Saville calls “cosmopolitan republicanism” while he was a student at Oxford, and it underlies his enthusiasm for foreign poets like Victor Hugo and Walt Whitman and his fervent support for Mazzini and the Risorgimento. As both Saville and Stephanie Kuduk Weiner have shown, Swinburne was actively involved with republican political circles in the 1860s and 1870s, and understood his poetry as a significant contribution to the republican cause. Swinburne’s critical writings on poets like Blake and Baudelaire also contribute to this cause, seeking to recover forgotten or repudiated forms of poetic experience as a means of forging new ideas of affiliation. Literary production and reception are not the private work of atomistic individuals but acts of public service for a community of knowing readers. Although they both draw upon the language of civic humanism, Baudelaire’s reactionary and theologically driven conservatism after 1852 is

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fundamentally at odds with Swinburne’s democratic republicanism. Swinburne read Baudelaire’s art criticism and the essays on Poe as early as 1861, so these views cannot have been a mystery to him. He effectively ignores Baudelaire’s explicit political convictions, however, and finds in the French poet a form of poetic and erotic rebellion that resembles his own project. Much like Gautier, Swinburne effectively depoliticizes Baudelaire, not in order to deny his political importance, but to redefine it in his own terms. An open and unrepentant critic of modernity, Swinburne’s Baudelaire does battle for a quasi-republican ideal of poetic and personal liberty. In the Spectator review, Swinburne casts Baudelaire as a brooding and isolated decadent poet, whose writing has “the languid, lurid beauty of close and threatening weather— a heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hothouse scents in it.”  But he also describes him as a literary activist with the “courage” to profess that poetry should have nothing to do with didacticism, even at the risk of being dragged before the courts by the tyrannical authorities of the Second Empire. Baudelaire’s book becomes a kind of political refugee: subject to “a foolish and shameful” prosecution at home, it “now comes before us” in England battle-scarred but still eloquent in its appeal to a new community (XIII, 418). Swinburne imagines himself as an emissary for the book, aiding it in its effort to find its proper audience, again described in collective terms. Baudelaire, of course, remained in France after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, and even after his ruinous prosecution by the regime, but Swinburne characterizes him (or his book) as a decadent Hugo, a principled republican exile from the Second Empire whose poetry expresses opposition to tyranny even as it doctrinally refuses the outspoken didacticism of Hugo’s political verse. In his elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave atque Vale,” Swinburne draws upon a key classical republican trope to frame his reception of the French poet: brotherhood. As Clements has noted, Swinburne “takes sometimes lavish steps . . . to assert the blood connection between his early poems and a French tradition,” and often alludes to an international “brotherhood” of poets and writers opposed to narrow national models. Like Baudelaire, Swinburne frequently uses the language of kinship to describe the sense of sympathy and recognition he feels toward the heroes he discovers in the past or in other national traditions. In the roundel “To Catullus” (1883), he calls this connection “the sense of kinship inly bred” (V, 70). With its unmistakable allusion to the French republican virtue of “Fraternité,” and to the broader association of brotherhood with the classical republican political tradition, Swinburne’s address to Baudelaire in “Ave atque Vale” has political resonances that critical readings of the poem

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have all but ignored. As Jacques Derrida argues in The Politics of Friendship, expressions of spiritual fellowship have long been associated in Western political thought with a claim of brotherhood. The friend, writes Derrida, regularly appears with all “the features of the brother,” naturalizing affective and political ties and defining the organized collective as an endowment of nature. Legal and political equality are figuratively ensured not by a leader or a constitution but by the metaphor of consanguinity, the fiction that all men (and for Derrida political friendship is inevitably androcentric) share the same mother. Swinburne appeals to this fiction in “Ave atque Vale,” drawing upon the classical republican metaphor of spiritual and political brotherhood to express his mourning for and sympathy with Baudelaire. He epitomizes the Epicurean ideal of philoxenia (love of the foreign), seeking to forge bonds of brotherly affiliation where others find only unbridgeable difference. Derrida notes that the metaphorical equation of friend and brother has one of its major intellectual sources in the Athenian funeral oration, a genre, as we saw above, that conflates the natural family with the “familial” relationship of the republican polis to its citizens. In “Ave atque Vale,” Swinburne draws upon another classical funerary genre, the pastoral elegy. Long used by poets to pay tribute to a deceased fellow poet, this form shares with the funeral oration a strict set of conventions for praise of the dead and a pervasive metaphorics of sacrifice, here chiefly mythical (Adonis, Orpheus, Persephone) rather than military. Whereas the funeral oration is a manifestly public and political form, the pastoral elegy typically depicts individual mourning and reflects on the nature of literary tradition. Swinburne’s poem uses the familiar conventions of the genre but pushes them into the communal and political territory occupied by the funeral oration. Opening the poem with an individual sense of obligation to the memory of Baudelaire, Swinburne comes to recognize that the poet truly survives only in the community of readers created by his poetry. But the poem’s vision for such a community is ambivalent. “Ave atque Vale” was composed in 1867, the year of the Second Reform Bill, which greatly expanded democratic participation in the United Kingdom, and the year Swinburne first met the republican hero of the Risorigmento, Mazzini, who encouraged him to write the explicitly political poems that would eventually be published as Songs Before Sunrise (1871). Despite this context of democratic political reform, Swinburne defines Baudelaire as the property of an aesthetic elite, not unlike the readers of Blake, whom he characterizes as an “elect body or church” that alone can experience the “sublime profit and intense pleasure” of his writings (XVI, 86). And yet this elite is not so different

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in its constitutive desires from the democratic and nationalist agitators pushing for political liberty in England and Italy. United by a divine poetic gift and perverse desire rather than by the quest for democratic participation or national unity, the community Swinburne constructs from the memory of Baudelaire’s poetry is made up of unrepentant outsiders—parishioners in the church of rebels, citizens of an incipient decadent republic of letters— seeking recognition. “Ave atque Vale” meditates on the same sense of responsibility to poetic heroes that Swinburne defined in his account of appreciation in William Blake. In the opening stanza of the poem, the mourning Swinburne addresses Baudelaire as a brother and follows self-consciously upon the uncertain question (also characteristic of the funeral oration) about the duties of the living to the dead that the fallen poet poses in the lines from “La servante au grand cœur dont vous étiez jalouse [The great-hearted servant of whom you were jealous]” Swinburne uses as the epigraph to his elegy. He imagines himself looking at a copy of Les Fleurs du mal, which he calls the “veil” of Baudelaire, and asks which flowers he should dedicate to the poet’s memory: Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel, Brother, on this that was the veil of thee? Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea, Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel, Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave, Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve? Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before, Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat And full of bitter summer, but more sweet To thee than the gleanings of a northern shore Trod by no tropic feet? (III, 44) Playing upon the conventional flower cata logue in the pastoral elegy as well as the “flowers” of Baudelaire’s book, Swinburne wonders whether the most appropriate tribute would be traditional European flora—the rose, associated with love; rue, the symbol of contrition; and laurel, the traditional emblem of poetic supremacy— or the “fiery blossoms” evoked by the exotic atmospheres of Les Fleurs du mal. Although “pale” and “bitter,” these flowers were “sweet” to Baudelaire when he was alive. The question remains open until the six-

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teenth stanza, when Swinburne declares that he will “wreathe an unseen shrine” for the poet with “rose and ivy and wild vine” (III, 50). In the final stanza of the poem, he figuratively hands this “garland” to the “silent soul” of Baudelaire, his sense of obligation to the dead now fulfilled (III, 51). The intervening stanzas propose and discard a series of answers to the question raised by the opening stanza—how best to honor Baudelaire—before constructing an imagined community around the memory of the poet’s writings. In the first half of the poem, Swinburne remains fixated on the poet himself, imagining that poetic brotherhood entails an extension of the sense of kinship he felt for the living poet even beyond the grave. Conflating the poetic “veil” of Baudelaire’s book with the tomb that holds the poet’s body, he addresses Baudelaire as if he could answer back, speculating on his condition in the underworld and seeking guidance from his spirit. But this conflation of the corpus with the corpse engenders only despair, a sense of fellowship irrevocably lost. The crucial image for this loss is Swinburne’s sorrow in stanza V over the “hand unclasped of unbeholden friend” (III, 46). The clasped hand is a recurrent image for poetic traditions in Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878), the book in which Swinburne later placed “Ave atque Vale”; in Songs Before Sunrise, which was largely composed in the late 1860s, it figures the ideal of republican fellowship. The image of an “unclasped hand” ties the possibility of poetic brotherhood to the physical body. When the poet dies, the hand is lost, along with the promise of aesthetic and political community it figures. In stanza VIII, Swinburne describes his relationship to Baudelaire as a kind of pursuit, in which the mourner tries, and fails, to catch up to the fallen hero: Alas, but though my flying song flies after, O sweet strange elder singer, thy more fleet Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet, Some dim derision of mysterious laughter From the blind tongueless warders of the dead, Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine’s veiled head, Some little sound of unregarded tears Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes, And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs— These only, these the hearkening spirit hears, Sees only such things rise. (III, 47)

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Death seems to put Baudelaire’s poetic achievement out of reach, rendering the would-be brother a mere disciple and replacing the language of republican fellowship with that of subordination. The unduly self-conscious follower will always be at a remove from the “fleeter” poetic feet of the master, having only the “gainless” reminders of death: the poet’s “footprints,” Proserpine’s “veiled head,” effaced eyes and pale mouths, and the sound of weeping and sighs. The “hearkening spirit” listens but does not get an answer in return. Trying to follow in Baudelaire’s footsteps, to emulate his poetry and put himself in his place, Swinburne is left perennially behind. Swinburne later proposes and discards another role model for the relationship of the surviving poet to the fallen master: Orestes. Imagining himself part of a classical funeral procession—also a convention of the pastoral elegy—he pours a libation on Baudelaire’s pyre and lays “Orestes-like, across the tomb / A curl of severed hair” (III, 48). As many readers of “Ave atque Vale” have noted, the allusion to Orestes is problematic, and Swinburne explains both its draw and its inadequacy in the two following stanzas. Killing his mother and her lover out of vengeance for their murder of his father, Agamemnon, Orestes carries filial obligation to an extreme. This is one natural conclusion of the familial metaphor that organizes the poem’s tribute to Baudelaire, but Swinburne clearly recognizes its limitations: But by no hand nor any treason stricken, Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King, The flame that made Troy a ruinous thing, Thou liest, and on this dust no tear could quicken There fall no tears like theirs that all men hear Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear Down the opening leaves of holy poets’ pages. Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns; But bending us-ward with memorial urns The most high Muses that fulfil all ages Weep, and our God’s heart yearns. (III, 48–49) Unlike Agamemnon, Baudelaire was not the victim of a treasonous hand, however unjust his persecution by the authorities of the Second Empire and his neglect by the reading public. The comparison with Orestes also places

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Swinburne in the position of a son, not a brother, again obviating the ideal of republican fellowship. Moreover, the “ruinous” cycle of recompense epitomized by the Trojan War and the crimes of Orestes and his sister Electra, who aided him in the murder of their mother, are akin to a destructive “flame.” The act of vengeance, like the futile devotion of the follower, is a repetition, fixated on the dead rather than the community of the living, and on the natural family rather than the larger polis. It is fundamentally barren: the tears shed by Orestes and Electra cannot “quicken” the “dust” of the fallen. By contrast, the “opening leaves of holy poets’ pages”—akin to “memorial urns” held out by the Muses—are a symbol of preservation, not destruction. The weeping of the Muses differs from the tears of the vengeful child, and the ashes they guard are no longer aflame. This weeping creates a sense of yearning, a desire for community rather than the motive for its destruction. Poetic reception here is an alternative to violence. In the Spectator review, Swinburne reserves his most lavish praise for Baudelaire’s poem “Les Litanies de Satan,” calling it the “keynote” to the entire collection and “one of the noblest lyrics ever written” (XIII, 426). Although it takes the form of a traditional Catholic prayer of supplication—written in praise of Satan rather than God or the saints— Swinburne reads it as a gloss on Baudelaire’s own fate. Unjustly exiled from heaven, Satan becomes an advocate for “all the cast-out things of the world,” a leader of those whom no other deity will accept (XIII, 426). The second half of “Ave atque Vale” rewrites Baudelaire’s praise of the fallen angel. Swinburne imaginatively constructs a community of the cast out around the memory of the fallen poet. The turn of the poem comes when Swinburne ceases lamenting the “unclasped hand” of Baudelaire himself and looks again at the book he holds in his own hands. Instead of listening for the sound of the lost master or trying to look through the “veil” of poetry to its author, he listens to the words of the poems themselves. Not thee, O never thee, in all time’s changes, Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul, The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll I lay my hand on, and not death estranges My spirit from communion of thy song— These memories and these melodies that throng Veiled porches of a Muse funereal—

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These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold As though a hand were in my hand to hold, Or through mine ears a mourning musical Of many mourners rolled. (III, 48) In stanza IX, Swinburne comes to accept that Baudelaire himself is “too far off for thought or any prayer,” divided from his admirer by an unbridgeable gap (III, 47). Here he claims that the “shut scroll” of Baudelaire’s book contains the essence of the poet’s achievement and a key to the “communion” he feels with the poet’s spirit. The book itself becomes for Swinburne the very hand clasped in brotherhood—“a hand . . . in my hand to hold”—and stands as a monument more enduring and more fecund than the poet who created it. Akin to “memories and melodies,” thronging the “Veiled porches of a Muse funereal,” Baudelaire’s poems evoke for Swinburne the sound of “many mourners,” allowing him to imagine himself for the first time in the poem not as a solitary figure questioning the deceased master but as part of a community united by his legacy. As he writes in stanza XVI, “not all our songs, O friend, / Will make death clear or life durable” (III, 50). Those songs can be the foundation for new forms of affiliation, however. When Swinburne pours libations on the funeral pyre in stanza XI, his gesture brings forth two ancient deities who come to fill the place of Satan as patrons for the decadent fellowship that unites him with Baudelaire: Apollo and Venus. Swinburne characterizes Baudelaire’s chosen deity as a figure of revolution; all of the lines he quotes from “Les Litanies de Satan” in the Spectator review associate Satan with political rebellion, in particular with the imagery of the French Revolution. The sibling deities Apollo and Venus, gods sent into exile by the rise of Christianity, similarly figure the outsider’s resistance to the ruling order. They are subversive rather than revolutionary, however, poetic and erotic rather than violent. Instead of uniting the cast out around shared resentment, they offer them a powerful underground alternative— a community founded on artistic traditions and perverse desire. Apollo is the first deity to enter the scene of the poem. The Greek god of light is a central figure in Swinburne’s later writing, often standing for the unity of the literary tradition, what David Reide calls the “apostolic succession of poets.”  In “Ave atque Vale,” the god appears as a kind of priest, whose light and song provide an alternative model of devotion to the wrath of Orestes and Electra or the revolutionary resentment of Satan. With an excess of “sacred

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strength,” the god “Makes manifest his music and his might / In hearts that open and in lips that soften” (III, 49). The power to produce poetry is receptive, echoing the image of the “opening leaves” of the poet’s book that repudiated the vengeance of Orestes. In line with the decadent valorization of the disciple, the greatest artist for Swinburne is the one most open to influence. Rather than a distant master, he is a fellow parishioner in the “church of rebels.” Returning to the Eucharistic image of “communion” that attends his revelation that Baudelaire’s book can be the foundation for a new community, Swinburne describes Apollo touching Baudelaire’s receptive lips with the “bitter wine” and “bitter bread” of a new poetic Eucharist; it is the same god who “feeds our hearts with fame” (III, 49). In stanza XIV, Swinburne imagines Apollo mourning for Baudelaire, mixing “his laurel with thy cypress crown,” and saving “thy dust from blame and from forgetting” (III, 49): Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art, Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart, Mourns thee of his many children the last dead, And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes, And over thine irrevocable head Sheds light from the under skies. (III, 49) Apollo’s devotion turns Baudelaire’s funereal cypress crown, as McGann has noted, into a halo. The “irrevocable head” that wears this “crown” is not the actual head of the poet—now merely “unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes”— or the “low-lying head” of the murdered Agamemnon but the originating poetic function that makes Sappho, in stanza II, “the supreme head of song” (III, 45). Apollo folds Baudelaire into the communion of poets, a body of metaphorical siblings united by their gift of song and reciprocal admiration. The specific “children” of Apollo whom Swinburne names in the poem make up a restricted canon of poets set apart by their political or erotic dissent: Sappho, Catullus (from whom the elegy takes its title), Baudelaire, and implicitly, Swinburne himself. Venus arrives at the scene of mourning in stanza XV, taking her place alongside Apollo at Baudelaire’s tomb. Swinburne depicts her here, as in “Laus Veneris” (1866), his retelling of the Tannhäuser legend, as a figure of perverse and rebellious desire:

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And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean, And stains with tears her changing bosom chill: That obscure Venus of the hollow hill, That thing transformed which was the Cytherean, With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine Long since, and face no more called Erycine; A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god. Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell Did she, a sad and second prey, compel Into the footless places once more trod, And shadows hot from hell. (III, 50) By contrast with Apollo, this “obscure” Venus, the figure of exile who lures the German knight to the Hörsel, is “a bitter and luxurious god,” who has long since lost the mythic “laugh divine” of the earlier Olympian deities. Although she has been cast from the groves of Cythera she retains her traditional function of promoting social cohesion, allowing Swinburne to recognize Baudelaire as a brother in erotic rebellion. Like Baudelaire, he too is the “sad and second prey” of Venus, a modern Tannhäuser, who shares with both his medieval and his contemporary forerunners a cultivated taste for sin and transgression. If Apollo serves as a common poetic father, Venus becomes the perverse common mother who transforms spiritual friends and erotic dissidents into republican brothers, fellow outsiders united by a mutual recognition of shared tastes and common sins. For Swinburne, as for many decadents after 1870, writing and perverse sexuality embody two standing traditions of rebellion, providing parallel lines of affiliation for the imagination of alternative communities. When, in the final stanza of “Ave atque Vale,” Swinburne again addresses Baudelaire as “friend” and “my brother” and figuratively hands him the garland he has woven in the course of the poem, he acknowledges that its “thin” and sad leaves are, like the bosom of Venus, “chill” (III, 51). Swinburne’s point is not that his tribute is inadequate but that his sense of fraternity with Baudelaire ultimately arises from their common embrace of the condition of the outsider—they are both the sons of Apollo, both the “sad and second prey” of Venus in exile. His garland is akin to the “barren braid” of “sick flowers” that Swinburne imagines Baudelaire weaving in stanza XVII, an act of emulation that declares his shared allegiance to those heroic figures who brush their age against the grain, and repeats on the level of poetic reception the republican

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ideal of civic virtue that Baudelaire advocated in his critical writings. The shrine he dedicates to his friend and brother is “unseen,” a privilege of the select few, and the plants he chooses for the garland that will decorate it—“rose and ivy and wild vine”— combine the traditional fraternal virtues of love (rose) and fidelity (ivy) with the emblem of Dionysian abandon, the wild vine. Together, they underscore Swinburne’s devotion to Baudelaire’s vision, his enduring tie of sympathy with the ideal of poetic dissidence, perverse desire, and outsider sociality— a community, like the one Gautier imagines in the “Notice,” founded on the shut “scroll” of Baudelaire’s poetry.

chapter 3

Golden Books Pater, Huysmans, and Decadent Canonization

False again the fabled link between the grandeur of Art, and the glories and virtues of the State! —James McNeill Whistler, “10 O’Clock”

The Logic of Decadent Collecting Just prior to the famous passage in which he dreams of retreating to a “desert hermitage” set apart from the banalities of modern society, Des Esseintes fulminates about two problems: “He was constantly coming across some new source of offence, wincing at the patriotic or political twaddle [balivernes patriotiques et sociales] served up in the papers every morning, and exaggerating the importance of the triumphs which an omnipotent public reserves at all times and in all circumstances for works written without thought or style.”  Patriotism and poor literary judgment might seem to be distinct concerns, but the two offenses are equivalent for Des Esseintes and directly motivate his withdrawal from society. They epitomize the impossibility of finding an adequate community: “It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude.” He sells his ancestral home, breaks with all of his friends, and moves his belongings into a “refined Thebaid” on the outskirts of Paris, escaping from “the incessant deluge of human stupidity” to an isolated “ark” containing his favorite books and objects (AR 83–84; AN 8).

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Des Esseintes’s withdrawal from society into the rarified realm of his library and collections has long been taken as the very emblem of fin-de-siècle political quietism. But as I have argued, this kind of gesture is central to the decadent critique of bourgeois liberalism. Des Esseintes follows Baudelaire, Gautier, and Swinburne into exile, and like them casts his retreat in unmistakably political terms. But the target of Des Esseintes’s disgust underscores the changing historical context for the discourse of decadence. The 1870s and 1880s were periods of increasingly strident nationalist rhetoric across Europe, sparked by the consolidation of the German nation under Otto von Bismarck, the ignominious French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and imperial competition abroad. Baudelaire, Gautier, and Swinburne are cosmopolitan in their tastes and outlook, and often criticize the reflexive patriotism of establishment writers, but nationalism is not a driving concern in their works. For Des Esseintes, by contrast, it is an unavoidable feature of the political landscape. He is not alone in his distaste. As we will see, antinationalism is central to decadent writing after 1870, arising in a variety of contexts and in many different works. Decadent writers in the period attack nationalist sentiments from both the left and the right, and propose a range of alternative perspectives. Decadent invocations of civic humanism oppose liberal individualism to broadly imagined collective ideals. Decadent antinationalism attacks a powerful new conception of political community not, as one might expect, from the perspective of the individual monad but from that of a rival community united by taste rather than origins or geography. If, as Timothy Brennan has suggested, the form of the realist novel both mimics and helps to produce the form of the nation, decadence challenges the form of the nation much as it decomposes literary style. This chapter explores the critique of nationalism implicit in one of the most recognizable features decadent texts: the collection and its conceptual adjunct, the literary canon. Decadent collectors might seem to reproduce the bourgeois privatization of aesthetic experience that Baudelaire criticized, but the objects they collect and their opinions about them contain an oblique answer to the pervasive union of patriotism with poor literary taste that so bothers Des Esseintes. In particular, they question the most important institutional form of that union: the national literary canon. Decadent collections mirror the literary and artistic canons compiled for nationalist purposes by scholars, editors, and schoolmasters throughout the nineteenth century. They make explicit claims for the canonical excellence of the books and objects they include, and had canonical effects for like-minded writers and readers. Whereas

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national canons posit an organic unity between a people and its literary classics, decadent collections are idiosyncratic assemblages that draw from every corner of the globe, often bringing together artists, works, and objects that have little more in common than their opposition to some norm. Blatantly artificial, decadent collections reveal how canons are made and what political functions they serve, thereby challenging the assumption that the nation and its vernacular classics are joined in any natural or inevitable way. They constitute an immanent critique of the modern nation-state, attacking its association of literature with nationalism much as Baudelaire used the figure of Poe to attack bourgeois liberalism and democracy. I begin by tracing the spread of national canons in the nineteenth century and then turn to a close examination of two of the most important decadent responses to these canons: À rebours and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873). These texts were pivotal in fashioning the canon of works and authors that defines decadence as a literary style, but it is rarely noted how often they take up questions of political identity. Criticizing the nationalist insistence on a unified canon founded on a single vernacular language, they promote idiosyncratic outsider canons that advocate linguistic, cultural, and formal hybridity. These canons become models for the extensive practice of internal self-reference in decadent writing that I will call “mimetic canonization.” Building upon the language of appreciation and the valorization of artistic reception in Baudelaire, Gautier, and Swinburne, and inspired by the canons and collections in Pater and Huysmans, decadent writers in the 1880s and 1890s produce their own canons as a new form of sociality. The practice is exemplified by the infamous “Yellow Book” in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and by the canon of painters assembled in Michael Field’s collection of ekphrastic poems Sight and Song (1892).

* * * Scholars have long noted the centrality of collecting and collections in decadent writing. Des Esseintes collects books, paintings, perfumes, liquors, and exotic flowers. Dorian Gray follows Des Esseintes, collecting jewels, musical instruments, textiles, perfumes, and ecclesiastical vestments. Eliante Donalger, the protagonist of Rachilde’s La Jongleuse [The Juggler] (1900), has a house full of statues (most of them mutilated), wax figures, and exotic objects, all dominated by a strangely anthropomorphic vase. Octave Mirbeau’s narrator in Le Jardin des supplices [The Torture Garden] (1899) is hired by the

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French government to collect scientific samples of ocean life but ends up cataloguing the refined tortures performed in a Chinese prison. The English painter Claudius Ethal in Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901) collects masks, dolls, and rare poisons; Ethal is drawn to Lorraine’s narrator, the duc de Freneuse, by his renowned collection of jewels. Nordau, as always a keen but highly critical observer, claims that “the present rage for collecting, the piling up, in dwellings, of aimless bric-à-brac” is a key symptom of degeneration in fin-de-siècle literary culture. Even where they do not include literal collections, decadent texts are often constructed like them. In “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” Baudelaire depicts Constantin Guys as a collector and organizer of sensations: “And so away he goes, hurrying, searching. . . . He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.” Having gathered sensations on the street, he returns to his studio, where they are “put in order, ranged, and harmonized” in his art. Gautier, as we saw in the last chapter, describes Baudelaire’s decadent style as a collection of other styles: “borrowing from all technical vocabularies, taking color from all palettes and notes from all keyboards.” Pater casts Plato as a philosophical collector. Arriving in a decadent intellectual world “already almost weary of philosophical debate” and “sickly with off-cast speculative atoms,” Plato creates something new by reconfiguring received ideas: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is absolutely nothing new. . . . Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition.” As Barbara Spackman has commented, À rebours reads more like a bibliography than a novel; Foucault calls Gustave Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine (1874) “a phenomenon of the library.”  Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) are likewise built from collections of meticulously gathered historical and literary detail. Poised as if at the end of history, decadent writers distinguish themselves by sorting through the materials of the cultural past, collecting and arranging ostentatiously borrowed parts. There is nothing inherently subversive or even original about the lists and collections in decadent writing. One finds myriad lists in the Bible, classical epic, many forms of medieval and early modern literature, much travel writing, and the works of such canonical “encyclopedic” authors as Rabelais, Sterne, Whitman, Melville, and Joyce. The compilation of formal literary catalogues goes back at least to the Hellenistic period. Nor is collecting necessarily

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contrary to the public aims of nationalism. Many national museum collections began as idiosyncratic private collections. Recent scholarship in art history and material cultural studies, moreover, has demonstrated the pervasiveness of collecting across modern European culture. As Philip Fisher puts it, “The folding together of histories and collections is a fundamental fact of our civilization since the eighteenth century.” Although collections have been common among the wealthy since antiquity, social and economic changes in the middle of the eighteenth century made collecting a matter of great personal and public significance for most every level of society. From the rise of consumer culture, to the development of modern archaeology, the spread of imperial conquest, the establishment of public museums and lending libraries, and the formation of the art market, nineteenth-century Europe was awash in collections of every sort. Decadence unquestionably reflects this context. The decadent collector is above all a consumer and often collects objects made available by European imperialism or exhumed by archaeologists. But decadent collections do something distinct with these cultural materials. As we saw in Chapter 2, Gautier and Swinburne used the rhetoric of praise to imagine a community of kindred spirits organized around the figure of Baudelaire. Decadent collections extend and refine this epideictic labor by holding up certain books and objects as the epitome of decadence, illuminating the normally effaced continuity between personal collections and public canons. While personal collections typically reflect the private taste and experiences of the collector, decadent collections deliberately mimic the public form and function of canons, bringing together books and objects selected according not just to individual interest but also to communally recognized and specifically articulated (if hardly traditional) criteria of excellence. The decadent library shuns conventional classics but includes the classically erotic or subversive; decadent collections are made up of objects gathered for their singularity or their supreme embodiment of some rare perversity. As John Guillory argues in Cultural Capital, canons are just lists of books or artworks. The ideological alchemy that turns the list of canonical works into the reflection of a preexisting tradition is exemplary of, but not materially different from, the process by which all collections create meaning, identity, and a sense of tradition out of a sheer juxtaposition of names or objects. For Guillory, the very act of listing and collecting produces the tradition and cultural identity that canons seem only to reflect: “The canon achieves its imaginary totality . . . not by embodying itself in a really existing list, but by retroactively constructing its

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individual texts as a tradition.”  Canons transform metonymy into metalepsis, diversity into unity, projecting a lineage out of a list of names and titles. Whether the works in a canon are praised or criticized, their presence on a list of “classics” folds them into a retrospectively homogeneous tradition. The canonical example, as it were, of this logic was the formation of national literary canons across Europe and North America. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an explosion of historical and pedagogical work— dictionaries, anthologies, literary histories, educational initiatives— all directed toward defining, documenting, and transmitting national traditions. Over the course of the nineteenth century, these national literary canons displaced the older classical canon in the schoolroom and the public imagination. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson suggests that this intellectual project was inextricable from two closely related developments in the period: the rise of the modern nation and the proliferation of print capitalism. As old models of affiliation based on divinity, kingship, and rigid social hierarchies began to weaken, print capitalism offered new ways of understanding community. Print standardized the vernacular languages, giving them a concreteness and apparent historicity akin to Latin, and thus allowed people to regard the language they used for informal communication as a means of broader political organization. They came to imagine themselves as part of a linguistic community that transcended differences of class, status, religion, and political affiliation. These newly constituted linguistic communities, Anderson suggests, contributed to the rise of national consciousness and the modern nation-state in the eighteenth century. The national literary canon was a crucial part of these larger transformations, a consequence of what Pascale Casanova calls the “Herder Effect.” Producing a second literary revolution akin in its impact to the replacement of Latin with the vernaculars as a legitimate medium for poetry, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder and his followers established “a necessary link between nation and language,” making an illustrious vernacular literary canon a mark of national legitimacy. By contrast with the global focus of national museum collections established in the same period, national literatures epitomized nationalist ideology in their form and their contents. The canon provided a material bond between the linguistic community and the national history to which it laid claim. Prior to the nineteenth century, for example, the German nation was more an imaginary than a real political unity, a chaotic jumble of small states and principalities loosely joined by the Holy Roman Empire, sharing a common language but lacking stable government institutions. In quest of national unity,

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German thinkers like Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte appealed to the unifying power of language and literature. In his series of lectures Addresses to the German Nation (1807) Fichte described language as the “inner frontier” of the nation; the writer’s deepest calling is “to assemble his nation and consult with it on its most important affairs.”  The period saw the creation of two major dictionaries of the German language, collections of folklore and national tales, the institution of new pedagogical models focused on German literature, and literary histories that, in the words of Hinrich Seeba, “had to invent what it meant to be German in order to find it reflected in literature.”  England long had a stronger sense of national identity than Germany did, but motivated by the German example, critics like Matthew Arnold saw in literature an answer to the class divisions exacerbated by industrialization. Literary histories in the period regularly appealed to a unified sense of “Englishness” in the interest of national stability. The nineteenth century saw the beginnings of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the development of a new literary pedagogy based on English classics. The idea of English became, as Chris Baldick writes, “an agent of social harmony, capable of binding class to class . . . in common respect for the national heritage.”  In France, the teaching of a specifically “literary” language helped to legitimate the newly consolidated bourgeois political authority after the fall of Napoleon’s regime. The study of literature stressed the linguistic unity of the French nation, and privileged certain uses of language as more correct. In the wake of the crushing 1871 defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, French educational reformers saw literature as a means of healing the French national soul. Breaking the curricular hegemony of Racine and Corneille—long held up as exemplary models for French composition—these reformers brought the broader French canon into the classroom to restore the spirit of the nation. These developments are complex and, despite their common ideological aims, differ significantly across national contexts, but they all epitomize the peculiar logic of canonicity that Guillory identifies. Authors who have little in common other than their place of birth or primary language, and who may have written well before modern ideas of nationhood were available, are bound together in a catalogue of national classics and come retroactively to signify the national tradition and the national “soul.” Decadent writers were deeply critical of the modern state’s determination to make art and literature tools for the fashioning of national unity. Their countercanons mirror the logic of national canon formation but deliberately foreground the constructed nature of such traditions. Imitating the work of nationalist scholars, they demonstrate that

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“decadence” is not an essence but a product of canon formation itself, implicitly arguing that no tradition is natural or inevitable. Decadence challenges the authority and singularity of national canons by offering a cosmopolitan alternative to national literary traditions, and by showing how such alternatives can be imagined. Decadent writers found a powerful model for this project in the writings of the early modern libertines. As James Grantham Turner has demonstrated, the libertines actively promoted, and inscribed themselves within, an “alternative classic tradition” dominated by figures like Petronius, who were excluded from the mainstream tradition for their eroticism. Rejecting accepted standards of excellence, the libertine canon “adopts the aphrodisiac as a measure of literary quality” and reorganizes ancient and modern literatures accordingly. This canon was strikingly cosmopolitan, encompassing works from around the globe. As Steven Marcus notes, “Pornography produced a body of writing that was truly international in character.”  The material form of this canon in libertine writing is the so-called gallant library of erotic classics, which the heroes of many libertine novels proudly display in their homes and employ as a tool of education or seduction. Decadent texts recurrently evoke these libraries. Baudelaire and Swinburne strategically allude to Sade and other libertine classics. The titles of works such as Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884), and Aubrey Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhauser (1896) self-consciously reference widely circulated libertine books like Venus dans le cloître [Venus in the Cloister] (1683). Wilde’s Lord Henry, a character straight out of the libertine canon, has a copy of Abbé Prevost’s novel Manon Lescaut (1731) on display in his study. As Turner points out, Des Esseintes has several classics of libertine writing in his Latin library. Beardsley places a collection of famous libertine works— Sade, Prevost, and Apuleius, along with books by Verlaine and Zola—in the foreground of his illustration “The Toilette of Salome”: the canonical decadent femme fatale has a gallant’s library. Libertinism might seem diametrically opposed to the stoic imagery of republican virtue that Gautier and Swinburne evoke in their appreciations of Baudelaire, but for writers after 1870 the tradition serves a purpose very similar to the evocations of civic humanism in the 1850s and 1860s. In the years after the “Notice” and “Ave atque Vale” were published, the language of republican virtue and the ideals of sacrifice embodied in the Athenian funeral oration became so closely identified with nationalism that they lost the subversive edge they had had for an earlier generation of decadents. In his well-known

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1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” (to take just one notable instance from the year in which Huysmans began to write À rebours) Ernest Renan alludes to the Periclean idiom in his claim that nations are founded not on race, language, or geography, but on sacrifice. “A nation,” he writes, is “a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.” International in its origin and circulation and outwardly subversive in its intent, libertinism increasingly takes the place of the republican ideal as a model for decadent political critique after 1870. Modern pornography arose in the seventeenth century as a perverse mirror of materialist philosophy. Denying the supremacy of soul over body, libertine writers used sexual representation to challenge the spiritual and worldly authority of king and clergy. Although their works are not often explicitly pornographic in content, decadent writers adopt the libertine association of canon building and perverse connoisseurship—the activities Des Esseintes calls “studious decrepitude”—with political subversion. The decadents were not the only group to look back to libertinism in the period. Book collectors such as Henry Spencer Ashbee and Jules Gay compiled bibliographies of classic pornography that still inform contemporary scholars. Even more significant was the construction of a canon of homoerotic classics, a project to which Pater and Wilde made crucial contributions. Finding its chief point of reference in Johann Joachim Winckelmann, this canon elaborated a cosmopolitan “alternative classic tradition” defined by same-sex eroticism. It resembled both national canons and the decadent canon in shape and conception. Not unlike the national canon, the homoerotic canon seeks an incipient identity in a list of books and artworks, allowing individuals drawn to members of the same sex to “find” themselves as a potential community. Since the institutions of nationalism coincided with a new rigidity over gender roles and sexual propriety, however, the homoerotic canon was necessarily subversive. Wilde’s 1889 story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” at once plays on the decadent fascination with libertine literature and details the “discovery” of a specifically homoerotic tradition. The story begins in the library of the older Erskine, who seductively introduces the young unnamed narrator to the fatal sonnet theory of his friend Cyril Graham. Over the course of the story, the narrator becomes obsessed with trying to prove Cyril’s claim that the famous W. H. was an actor in Shakespeare’s company. In the process, he discovers (and constructs) a canon of works defined by homoerotic desire. Stretching from Plato to the Romantics, and including, along with

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Shakespeare, many figures drawn from Pater’s Renaissance—Pico, Ficino, Michelangelo, and Winckelmann—this tradition constitutes a repressed history of amatory friendship writing within the authorized canons of literature, philosophy, and art history. At the end of the story, the narrator has given up his belief in Cyril’s theory, but the canon he constructs remains as a legacy. Decadent canonization in its most familiar form differs from this and other subversive canons in one important respect. The paradigmatic decadent collections include books and artworks that were well known for their erotic, irreligious, or politically radical subject matter, but they also celebrate things that would strike no one as perverse or dangerous. Des Esseintes reads the works of Tertullian, Charles Dickens, and modern Catholic polemicists, and the ecclesiastical vestments and musical instruments that Dorian Gray gathers in his home are not obviously subversive or forbidden. Neither Des Esseintes nor Dorian Gray claims to discover lost meanings in these things, as the narrator of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” does in the writings of Shakespeare. Rather, they only come to seem “decadent” in the proper (or improper) context of the collection, and in the eyes of the perverse connoisseur. As Guillory notes, canonicity is not an essential characteristic of the canonical work but a product of its reception and transmission (a list of classics or a course syllabus). Decadence carries this effect of reception to its limits: anything can sound decadent when it is placed on the appropriate list or appreciated by the right person. Books, objects, styles, and themes become decadent by selection and juxtaposition, not by any inherently decadent quality they embody. Decadent texts make the very process of canon formation their chief subject, underscoring the fact that a canon is simply a collection that has forgotten or concealed its origins. Although it builds self-consciously on the model of libertine canonization, and overlaps with the homoerotic canon, decadence is distinct in its close attention to the ability of a canonical list to transform whatever it includes by the very fact of its inclusion. This attention to the ideological powers of the canon and its reception motivates decadent attacks on the form of the nation.

“A Strange, Delightful, Foreign Aspect” Pater’s The Renaissance is one of the touchstones of the decadent movement and among the most important examples of canon building in the period. Along with the figures praised in the critical writings of Baudelaire and

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Swinburne, the collection of artists, writers, and intellectuals Pater assembles in the book became a model for the way both English and French decadents understood themselves and the coherence of artistic groups. Although decadence is not a central term in Pater’s critical lexicon— and Pater himself was critical of the self-proclaimed decadent followers who rallied around his work—it is not difficult to recognize allusions to the concept in The Renaissance. Pater tips his hat to Baudelaire, for example, by describing the end of the Renaissance in France as “a refined and comely decadence,” a phrase that clearly points back to Gautier’s association, in the “Notice,” of Baudelaire’s decadent style with cultural maturity. But more important than the presence or absence of the word in his writings is the way Pater joins the idea of decadence with a critique of nationalism and the construction of an alternative canon. The Renaissance, for Pater, is a transnational community of spirit and taste, populated by individuals who are always literally in motion, always crossing national borders, seeking out new patrons, forming new erotic and intellectual bonds, and selecting among political, religious, artistic, and philosophical traditions. What Pater foregrounds in the Renaissance, writes Jeffrey Wallen “are instances of undergoing and transmitting influence.”  The originality of the movement, like the originality of decadence, lies in its creative reception and combination of the various traditions available to it. Against the ideal of a closed national literary heritage, Pater suggests that the most significant traditions are constructed by the tastes and desires of the individual or the small group of sympathizers, not by accidents of history or geography. The Renaissance allegorizes this claim about artistic and intellectual reception in its recurrent use of Heinrich Heine’s story “The Gods in Exile” (1853). Much as Heine’s fallen Greek gods are forced to make their way in a foreign land, so Pater’s exemplary figures make their way in and through the foreign traditions that the rediscovery of antiquity (figured by these gods) and the new mobility of modern artistic currents make available to them. Tradition itself becomes a means of expression. The major artists and intellectuals of the Florentine Renaissance mix national, historical, and religious traditions, and thereby create new traditions of their own. Pico, for example, engenders humanism out of his effort to reconcile pagan and Christian religious traditions: “Plato and Homer must be made to speak agreeably to Moses” (26). Michelangelo is both Greek and medieval, both a follower of Plato and “the last of the Florentines” (71). Leonardo’s Gioconda famously sums up “all modes of thought and life” (99). She is pagan and Christian, ancient and

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modern, the embodiment of Leda and Saint Anne alike. Pater suggests that she had “trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants,” making literal her association with cultural exchange (99). Winckelmann crosses over from the barren intellectual world of eighteenth-century Germany to Italy and Greece. He invents modern art history out of the combined distaste he feels for his homeland and the sense of erotic and artistic liberation he discovers amid the remnants of the classical world. The Renaissance has long been defined by the relationship between Europe and the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, but Pater also attends to the conflicted relationship among modern national traditions. The key figures in the book not only rediscover antiquity in the midst of a hostile Christian world order but also express cosmopolitan sympathies in the midst of national competition. The relationship between France and Italy dominates the book. As Carolyn Williams notes, The Renaissance is organized concentrically by nationality, as a chiasmic exchange between France and Italy, which is framed by references to the English Wordsworth (in the “Preface”) and the German Winckelmann. Pater opens the first portrait, “Two Early French Stories,” with reference to the influence of French culture on Italian art. Contemporary French writers, he notes, are “fond of connecting the creations of Italian genius with a French origin.” It is in this spirit that they put forward the theory of a twelfth-century Renaissance in France—a rebirth of the Greek spirit “within the limits of the middle ages themselves” (1). Pater figures the movement of the Renaissance spirit from France to Italy in the figure of Abelard. Chastened for his affair with Heloïse in Paris, he travels to Rome for absolution; in Pater’s telling, which plays fast and loose with the facts, Abelard dies on the way (in fact, he lived to return to France). Pater highlights national differences elsewhere in The Renaissance, attributing the general neglect of Michelangelo’s sonnets to “the influence of French taste” (65), noting that Leonardo “turned wholly to France” in his last days (101), and reporting that Winckelmann, in an echo of Abelard’s final journey, entered Rome carrying the works of Voltaire (149). But his account of the Pléiade in “Joachim Du Bellay,” mostly ignored in the critical literature on the book, makes the connection between nationalism and decadence pivotal. This portrait describes the influence of the Florentine Renaissance on France, much as the first essay details the influence of France on Italian culture. It is the last chapter that directly concerns a Renaissance figure, and it narrates the end of the Renaissance proper— an end that Pater, with his eye cast toward contemporary French poetry, describes as decadent. In his “Preface,” as

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I noted above, Pater explicitly associates the poetry of the Pléiade with French decadence: “The Renaissance put forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence” (xxiii). The chapter on Du Bellay follows up on this association by putting decadence and nationalism into debate and linking both to theories about language. Pater sees decadence and nationalism as products of the same cultural moment, different responses to the same conditions of change. He embodies the ideas in the two major poets of the period, Ronsard and Du Bellay: Ronsard is associated with decadence, Du Bellay with a nascent nationalism. The late Renaissance is marked by French borrowings of Italian styles. Gothic survives its general eclipse by “blending the somewhat attenuated grace of Italian ornament with the general outlines of northern design”; the many workmen who came to France from Italy had their “Italian voluptuousness attempered by the naïve and silvery qualities of the native style” (123). The poetry of the Pléiade is true to “the physiognomy of its age” (136), epitomizing the mixing and blending of traditions that marked the period as a whole. Whereas Ronsard’s decadence celebrates this cultural hybridity, Du Bellay’s nationalism tries unsuccessfully to resist it. As both Gerald Monsman and Patricia Clements have noted, Pater’s account of Ronsard in the chapter clearly alludes to Baudelaire. Like Gautier, Pater associates cultural decline with its increasing linguistic and artistic refinement. Much as Abelard represents the first stirrings of the Renaissance in the shadow of Notre Dame, so Ronsard’s poetry marks the last gasp of the Middle Ages within the Renaissance: it is “the finest and subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendor and temperate Saint Martin’s summer” (124). Ronsard’s poetry is “full of quaint, remote learning,” the product of “long study and reiterated refinements” (133). Like Baudelaire, Ronsard joins love and death, extending the seemingly exhausted traditions of Troubadour poetry “beyond their natural lifetime” (134). The imagery of death becomes in his works a “delicate ornament”: “the grotesque details of the charnel-house nest themselves, together with birds and flowers, and the fancies of the pagan mythology” (135). Ronsard’s poetry is intended not “for the people, but for a confined circle” (133). Its readers “are a little jaded, and have a constant desire for a subdued and delicate excitement, to warm their creeping fancy a little” (135). Pater defines Ronsard’s decadence not only by certain themes and stylistic techniques that evoke Baudelaire’s work but also by its receptivity to and

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mixing of distinct national and linguistic traditions. Pater notes that Ronsard turned to poetry when his planned career in diplomacy was derailed by deafness (135). His writing enacts in language the literal border crossing that defines this career. Although his works remain recognizably French, they do so by blending native traditions with foreign imports: “Casting about for the means of thus refining upon and saving the character of French literature, he accepted that influx of Renaissance taste, which, leaving the buildings, the language, the art, the poetry of France, at bottom, what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds their surfaces with a strange, delightful, foreign aspect passing over all that northern land” (125). Ronsard similarly mixes the vernacular with traditions of poetic form, combining ancient and modern traditions, classical and modern languages. He concerns himself, Pater writes, with “the true spelling of Latin names in French writing,” and meditates on the orthography of the letter é Grecque (i.e., Greek I, in French the letter Y ). Under his influence, “a certain number of Greek words, which charmed Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety and daintiness, a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into the French language” (133). Ronsard combines the scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry with the rhymed verse of old French poetry. Even his readers are international: Mary Stuart reads his Odes in her English prison cell and thinks of her days in the French court of the Italian Catherine de’ Medici (132). The interwoven account of Du Bellay contrasts markedly with the decadent mixing of traditions and languages in the portrait of Ronsard. Where Ronsard is open to international influence and “saves” French poetry by incorporating Italian forms, Du Bellay, in Pater’s telling, is fatally attached to the French nation. Pater begins his account by discussing Du Bellay’s prose work, the Defense and Illustration of the French Language (1549), one of the most important early defenses of a vernacular in Western literature. Du Bellay’s aim, Pater notes, is “to ennoble the French language, to give it lustre” (127). Du Bellay wants to defend French against the claims of Greek and Latin to greater poetic elegance. Drawing what will become by the nineteenth century a crucial connection between the vernacular and the national community, he criticizes his countrymen who reject their native tongue and try to write in classical languages. Since they are not themselves Greek or Latin by origin, their rejection of French makes them false and artificial. Only a cultivation of the “mothertongue” and a return to the “daily communion of speech” can provide the French people with an adequate means of poetic expression (129, 130). Pater

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describes Du Bellay’s determination to defend the French language against foreign incursion as an example of his “patriotism” (130). Unlike Ronsard, who opened the borders of his language, Du Bellay closes them off. The circumstances of Du Bellay’s life reinforce his nationalistic feeling. Ronsard sought out the border-crossing career of a diplomat, but Du Bellay entered the world amid diplomatic failure. He was born, Pater notes, the year that Spanish forces captured the French king at Pavia—an event that evokes the capture of Louis Napoleon at Sedan by Prussian forces in the opening days of the Franco-Prussian War. Du Bellay’s youth was spent dreaming of military glory and training to be a soldier. His education suffered, and he came to Greek and Latin literature late, and only because of an illness. Th is “fortunate shortcoming of his education” in classics served to make him “national and modern.” Unable to write well in Greek or Latin, he turned to the resources of “his own homely native tongue” (131). The linguistic and political nationalism that marks Du Bellay’s early life and literary theory also plays a role in what Pater identifies as the key incident in the poet’s career, a journey to Rome that he considered “the greatest misfortune of his life” (138). Du Bellay feels homesick for his native Loire Valley, and yet it is out of this homesickness that he would produce his most characteristic work. This poetry figuratively moves from Italy to France in much the same way that Ronsard’s poetry does; but it is written out of nationalism and patriotic longing, rather than the hybridization of traditions that Ronsard celebrates. Du Bellay’s nationalism is no less dependent on foreign influence than Ronsard’s decadence is; like Ronsard, Du Bellay can only become uniquely French by way of foreign influence, whether military, linguistic, or geographical. There is no national unity without a prior national hybridity, no singular tradition without the juxtaposition of multiple traditions, and implicitly, no national canon without a decadent canon. What Pater calls Du Bellay’s greatest achievement is a Latin poem by an Italian author that Du Bellay freely translates into French. Du Bellay composed this poem in France, but he had to reach beyond the borders of his native country to produce “the sweetest flower of his genius” (139). It has long been noted that Pater makes the artists and scholars in The Renaissance proxies for his own reception of tradition. Following Ronsard rather than Du Bellay, Pater foregrounds the hybridity and artificiality of the canon he constructs in the book. Although he casts the Renaissance as a tale of birth and decay—born in France, flourishing in Italy, and decaying again in France—he describes his group of essays in the same breath as a “series”

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(xxiii). The image of a series (from the Latin sero, to join together or put in a row) suggests an arbitrariness and artificiality that contrasts with the ostensibly natural story of birth and decay. Indeed, Pater suggests that the story of decadence itself is arbitrarily imposed upon his material. He begins the book in France not because the stories he introduces “constitute the best possible expression” of the Renaissance spirit but “because they help the unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France” (xxiii). While these two methods of organization—the organic and the serial—might seem to run at cross-purposes, they both follow from Pater’s juxtaposition of decadence and nationalism. The story of decay subtly links the history of the Renaissance to the contemporary discourse of decadence, while the “series” of portraits foregrounds the role of national traditions in the book. Pater’s collection of exemplary figures throws the notion of a single Renaissance, grounded on national soils and bound by a fi xed developmental sequence, very much into doubt. As Elizabeth Prettejohn has noted, the artists Pater discusses in his book appeared highly idiosyncratic to his Victorian readers, going markedly outside the accepted canon of masters. The chapter on Winckelmann extends the idea of the movement well beyond its traditional chronological borders, transforming the Renaissance into a perennial spirit, an ever-present, but never finalized, community of artists and scholars united by their tastes and desires. Much the same thing is true of the national designations Pater relies upon in telling his story. France and Italy are valuable models not for their inherent national qualities but for their openness to foreign traditions, both ancient and modern. The same thing is also true of Renaissance culture itself. The culture of any age, Pater notes in the “Preface,” arises “from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads” (xxiii). In most cases, the producers are solitary, and any unity in the age is discovered retrospectively. In fifteenth-century Italy, however, the vanguard becomes conscious of its own unity of purpose: “Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts. There is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which all alike communicate. The unity of this spirit gives unity to all the various products of the Renaissance” (xxiv). The Florentine Renaissance differs from other ages in its self-conscious sense of community— a sense of community that Pater’s book both draws upon and helps to perpetuate in its readers. For Pater, however, the “common air” this community breathes is not limited to a particular age or the citizens of a particular nation. Beginning with Abelard

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and passing through Winckelmann, the Renaissance implicitly finds its way to Baudelaire, Swinburne, Gautier, and Pater himself. It is a mirror of the decadent republic of letters.

Against Nation Des Esseintes does not seem to have any of Pater’s books in his library, but À rebours everywhere echoes Pater’s contrast in The Renaissance between decadence and nationalism. Huysmans opposes Des Esseintes’s fragmentary decadent aesthetic to the purported unity and coherence of the nation. The books and objects that Des Esseintes praises depict the collapse of national unity, not its consolidation. Drawn from around the globe, they embody border crossing and blended traditions. Huysmans also perceptively identifies the crucial link between nationalism and the vernacular languages. National canons are unified by the vernacular, but the works and objects Des Esseintes collects are linguistically hybrid, binding together different languages, literary traditions, historical periods, and regional dialects. They are themselves decadent collections. The decadent canons defined in À rebours propose an alternative vision of existing traditions, challenging the idea that any tradition is natural or inevitable. The novel suggests that national canons are diminished decadent collections that repress variety in order to proffer a fiction of unity. This critique of the nation is epitomized in Des Esseintes’s library. Although his tastes are limited to existing canons defined by language (Latin writers of late antiquity and French writers of the late nineteenth century), Des Esseintes selects works that describe or embody cultural and linguistic disintegration. He is drawn to declining civilizations, mixed languages, and confused national borders. As Linda Dowling has written, decadent writers shared a sense that the “cosmopolitan heterogeneity” of late Latin writing “offers a vehicle for antinomian resistance to established norms.” This is true of almost every work in Des Esseintes’s Latin library. The library excludes the monuments of Golden Age Latin in favor of writings from the end of the Roman Empire that show the “hybridization” of its language. Golden Age Latin is marked by structural, semantic, and thematic homogeneity: it is a “restricted idiom” with a “limited stock of almost invariable constructions,” best suited to the endless repetition of “pompous platitudes and vague commonplaces” (AR 109; AN 27). Des Esseintes criticizes Virgil’s lines for “their abject subservience to the rules of grammar” and despises Cicero for “the monoto-

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nous uniformity of his adipose periods” and for “his patriotic perorations” (AR 110–11; AN 28). The unity and uniformity of the Roman Empire are reflected in the monotony of its linguistic productions. Des Esseintes’s favorite Latin writer is the libertine precursor Petronius, whose style “borrows expressions from all the languages imported into Rome” and “extends the frontiers [reculant toutes les limites] and breaks the fetters” of the classical idiom (AR 113, AN 30). Each character in The Satyricon speaks a distinct and localized language: the uneducated converse in “the language of the streets”; foreigners speak “in their barbaric lingo, shot with words and phrases from African, Syrian, Greek”; and wealthy pedants use “a rhetorical jargon of invented words” (AR 113; AN 30). The African writer Apuleius, whom Gautier notes was also among Baudelaire’s favorites, likewise writes in a language “fed by tributary waters from every province, combining them all in a bizarre, exotic, almost incredible torrent of words [une teinte bizarre, exotique, presque neuve]” (AR 115; AN 31). Des Esseintes’s favorite early Christian writers bear textual witness to the fragmentation of the empire and its language. Tertullian writes sermons “while the Roman empire tottered” and its language “began to break up” (AR 116; AN 32). Saint Cyprian uses a pagan tongue that was “dropping to pieces at the same time as the civilization of the Ancient world” (AR 117; AN 33). Claudian hammered out his verses with “the Western empire crumbling to its ruin about him” (AR 118; AN 34). The barbarian invasions, which Des Esseintes tellingly associates with the rise of the vernaculars, complete this process. While the “barbarian idioms began to acquire definite shape . . . to grow into true languages [véritables langues]” (AR 121; AN 36), Latin “was rotten through and through and hung like a decaying carcase, losing its limbs, oozing pus, barely keeping, in the general corruption of its body, a few sound parts” (AR 120; AN 35). Des Esseintes’s collection of contemporary French literature also documents “the death agony of the old tongue.” In a direct reference to the canonbuilding activity of nineteenth-century scholars, he imagines a day when “a learned professor would compile for the decadence of the French language a glossary like the one in which the erudite Du Cagne had recorded the last stammerings” of Latin. Like late Latin writing, modern French literature has been “attacked by organic disease, weakened by intellectual senility, exhausted by syntactical excesses” (AR 321–22; AN 184–85). While the decay of Latin follows from its cultural hybridization, the decay of French is an effect of temporal and historical hybridity. The secular French books that Des Esseintes admires reject the contemporary world for the antique or the exotic. His

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favorite writers are “haunted . . . by a nostalgic yearning for another age.” Their works “return to past ages, to vanished civilizations, to dead centuries,” or depict a future “whose image reproduces, unconsciously and as a result of atavism, that of past epochs [époques révolues]” (AR 297– 98; AN 166– 67). He places Flaubert’s recreation of the world of ancient Carthage, Salammbô, alongside Edmond de Goncourt’s La Faustin, which embodies the “spiritual perversity” of the eighteenth century (AR 299; AN 168). He values Stéphane Mallarmé for the “Byzantine niceties” that are “grafted” onto the contemporary visions of his brain (AR 316; AN 181). Paul Verlaine’s poetry brings to mind “a Byzantine Madonna able to change at a given moment into a Cydalisa who had strayed by accident into the nineteenth century” (AR 305; AN 172). The temporal mixing that defines Des Esseintes’s taste in French writers reflects the decadence of the French language. Whereas Latin had decomposed over many centuries, “the decomposition of the French language had occurred suddenly and speedily,” carry ing out the process of decay in one historical moment: “The superbly variegated style of the Goncourts and the gamy style of Verlaine and Mallarmé rubbed shoulders in Paris, where they existed at the same time, in the same period, in the same century” (AR 321; AN 184). The Roman Empire was overrun by foreign invaders; the French nation is dismantled from within by nostalgia and stylistic experimentation. Among the few exceptions to the ideal of stylistic and historical hybridity of the books in Des Esseintes’s library are works by modern Catholic writers such as Lacordaire, Ernest Hello, and Barbey d’Aurevilly. Much like Baudelaire, with whom he loosely groups them, these writers examine the depths of the soul in morbid detail. Des Esseintes is drawn to Baudelaire for his exploration of the “hybrid passions” (AR 254; AN 133), but he likes Catholic literature for “the absolute immutability of its ideas and its idioms” (AR 255; AN 135). Inspired by Darwin’s speculations about the evolution of language, he compares the restrictiveness of this idiom to the relationship between a vernacular and national identity: “Confined to their own territory, imprisoned within an identical, traditional range of reading, knowing nothing of the literary evolution of more recent times and absolutely determined, if need be, to pluck their eyes out rather than recognize it, they necessarily employed an unaltered and unalterable language, like that eighteenthcentury language which the descendents of the French settlers in Canada normally speak and write to this day, no variation in vocabulary or phraseology having ever been possible in their idiom, cut off as it is from the old country and surrounded on all sides by the English tongue” (AR 276; AN 150). Like

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modern secular French writers, these writers are temporally displaced. But while Flaubert and Mallarmé embrace their historical hybridity, Catholic writers recall Pater’s Du Bellay, clinging to their “unalterable” idiom as a defense against foreign inundation. The authors Des Esseintes most admires manage to make even their restricted language hybrid. Hello uses etymological investigations to join radically disparate ideas with “links that were rather tenuous.” His “oddly constituted mind” combines the spirit of the patient analyst with that of a religious fanatic (AR 267; AN 143–44). Barbey joins the sacred and the profane, mysticism and sadism, a devotion to Christ and Satan. At once “devout and impious” (AR 275; AN 149), he is “pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength” (AR 272; AN 147). Modern Catholic literature repeats the decay of the Roman Empire on a smaller scale, and within the minds of its individual authors. Where Petronius and Apuleius admit foreign voices into the “restricted idiom” of Golden Age Latin, Hello and Barbey bring doubleness and perversity into the equally restricted world of Catholic apologetics. Many of the same hybrid qualities Des Esseintes admires in his books also draw him to other cultural objects. The artworks in his collection share the stylistic traits that distinguish his collection of Latin books. His favorite painter, Gustave Moreau, had “no real ancestors and no possible descendants,” his absolute singularity arising from the fusion of otherwise unrelated elements (AR 149; AN 56). Moreau paints legends “which had originated in the Middle East only to be metamorphosed by the beliefs of other peoples”; his imagery combines “an entirely modern sensibility” with “architectonic mixtures” and “unexpected combinations of dress material” (AR 149; AN 56). Moreau’s style is also hybrid, a fact Huysmans underscores by alluding to Gautier’s description of Baudelaire’s multifarious style: “His sad and scholarly works breathed a strange magic . . . so that you were left amazed and pensive, disconcerted by this art which crossed the frontiers [franchissait les limites] of painting to borrow from the writer’s art its most subtly evocative suggestions, from the enameller’s art its most wonderfully brilliant effects, from the lapidary’s and the etcher’s art its most exquisitely delicate touches” (AR 149–50; AN 56–57). Des Esseintes owns two of Moreau’s paintings of Salome—Salome Dancing (1876) and The Apparition (1876)—and his famous ekphrases of these works stress their blending of national and artistic traditions. The first painting depicts a tale from the Christian Gospels unfolding in a cathedral “built in both the Moslem and the Byzantine styles” (AR 142; AN 50). “The painter,” Des Esseintes reflects, “seemed to have wished to assert his

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intention of remaining outside the bounds of time, giving no precise indication of race or country or period” (AR 145; AN 53). He goes “far beyond the data supplied by the New Testament”: Herod resembles “some Hindu god in hieratic pose” (AR 142; AN 51); Salome holds a lotus blossom, “the sacred flower of both Egypt and India” (AR 145; AN 53). Moreau’s canvas achieves a perverse singularity by collecting and juxtaposing disparate national traditions. Des Esseintes praises the same qualities in his collections of objects. He describes the exotic plants he collects in terms that recall the national hybridity and bodily disintegration of late Latin. These plants arrive from China, India, South America, and the Antilles, attracting Des Esseintes for their artificiality and their evocation of injured bodies. Just as the Latin language rotted along with the nationally hybrid Roman Empire, so these foreign plants seem “ravaged by syphilis or leprosy,” “blistered by burns,” and “embossed with chancres” (AR 188; AN 84). Des Esseintes’s collection of perfumes echoes his canon of French literature. Like flowers, perfumes are closely associated with language, having their own syntax, vocabulary, and dialects; their history “followed that of the French language step by step” (AR 218; AN 106). Each age has its peculiar combination of scents, its unique “idiom,” and the scholarly student of perfume could undertake “an interpretation of these texts” (AR 219; AN 107). Des Esseintes creates decadent olfactory “texts” by combining scents. One work imitates the recursive structure of certain Baudelaire poems (AR 222; AN 109). Another one brings together the scents of many different nations, embodying in a new medium the linguistic hybridity Des Esseintes admires in decadent Latin writers by “paradoxically uniting . . . the pungent odours of Chinese sandalwood and Jamaican hediosmia with French scents such as jasmine, hawthorne, and vervain . . . creating out of the union and collision of all these tones one common perfume, unnamed, unexpected, unusual” (AR 224; AN 111). Much as Petronius and Apuleius embody in language the national fragmentation of the Roman Empire, and much as Flaubert and the Goncourts bring past eras to contemporary France, so both of these collections create a sense of decadence out of the selection and combination of foreign and native materials. Des Esseintes constructs his private canons as an alternative to the official culture of the nation. He praises national, linguistic, and historical hybridity, paradoxically finding unity in disintegration rather than in a single fatherland or mother tongue. Des Esseintes himself is also the product of a broken tradition. There is a notable “gap” in the collection of family portraits

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at the Château de Lourps, which divides Des Esseintes’s vigorous ancestors from their descendants, whose tendency to intermarriage leads to the increasing fragmentation of the house. Only one canvas, dating from the decadent age of Ronsard and Du Bellay, serves as a “suture” connecting the two halves of this lineage: a “sly” effeminate face, from the reign of Henri III, “the cheekbones . . . punctuated by cosmetic commas of rouge” (AR 77; AN 3). Although critics habitually regard what Huysmans calls the “decadence” of this family lineage as evidence of Des Esseintes’s own hereditary debility, the logic of collecting in the novel suggests another interpretation. Working within the “restricted idiom” of his aristocratic family, Des Esseintes resembles figures like Petronius or Barbey, who introduce hybridity into their constrained literary worlds. Collecting in À rebours is a mirror image of this activity, a practice endowed with all of the potentially subversive intentions Des Esseintes discerns in his favorite books, artworks, and objects. His decadence differs, in this regard, from syphilis—”the inexhaustible heritage, the everlasting disease,” handed down “from generation to generation” (AR 193; AN 87)—which is the only unbroken tradition Huysmans mentions in the novel. Although the family portraits seem to tell a story of decay, it is the idea of an organic tradition, the dream embodied in the national canons of the nineteenth century, that is really diseased.

Mimetic Canonization By contrast with his enthusiastic descriptions of other authors and artists, Des Esseintes’s praise for Baudelaire in chapter 12 of À rebours is curiously flat. Although his “admiration for this author knew no bounds” (AR 252; AN 132), he devotes far fewer pages to him than he does to figures like Barbey, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, and the terms of his analysis are stereotypical, touching upon all the familiar themes of morbidity, sensuality, and “monstrous” vegetation that characterize the pioneering appreciations of Gautier and Swinburne. While this lack of critical insight might merely be evidence that the cult of Baudelaire had reached its limits—Des Esseintes notes that he can no longer read his poetry (AR 301; AN 169)—his function elsewhere in the novel points to a different conclusion. One of the first objects that Huysmans describes in Des Esseintes’s new home is a “magnificent triptych” on the panels of which are copied, “on real vellum in exquisite missal lettering and marvellously illuminated,” three poems by Baudelaire (AR 95– 96; AN 17). Somewhat like

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Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16), which Huysmans describes at length in the opening pages of Là-bas (1891), this triptych tells the story of the Passion, with Baudelaire replacing Christ, and the torment of ennui replacing the physical suffering of crucifi xion. The two side panels describe the passage from the storm and stress of youth to the melancholy “autumn” of middle age (“L’Ennemi” on the left), and then to the resigned desire for spiritual transformation (“La Mort des amants,” on the right). The center panel, which reproduces the prose poem “Anywhere out of the World,” is a dialogue between self and soul, in which the soul’s only expressed desire is for escape from the world. This triptych almost parodically literalizes the sacrificial imagery that underlies decadent rhetoric in the 1850s and 1860s, substituting the imitation of Christ for the imitation of Baudelaire’s poetry. Des Esseintes’s “canonization” of Baudelaire is sardonic, but it aptly exemplifies the social and political function of literary reception among decadent writers. The three “quintessential” poems constitute a small decadent canon, an idiosyncratic juxtaposition of works that allows Des Esseintes to express his disdain for modern life and imagine possible alternatives to it. Building upon the practice of decadent epideictic refined by Baudelaire, Gautier, and Swinburne, works like The Renaissance and À rebours made collecting and canon building into decadent activities par excellence. Just as the national canon seems to reflect the nation and the moral character of its people, so decadent writing constructs a cosmopolitan counternationalist decadent canon that defines the movement’s critique of contemporary nationalism. The national canon assumes the existence of the character it constructs, but decadent writings explicitly foreground the relationship between canons and identity. Would-be decadents signal their allegiance to the movement, their belonging to a decadent republic of letters, not merely by adopting a certain style or subject matter but by praising, imitating, and canonizing the works and artists championed by other decadents. All canons are formed mimetically—they are never simply invented out of whole cloth— and therefore necessarily presuppose a community. But for decadents writing in the wake of Pater and Huysmans, what I will call “mimetic canonization” becomes a deliberate, and deliberately imitative, method of composition. A version of decadent epideictic, it makes canon formation a privileged subject of decadent writing. Rather than passing as an organic unity from an institutional authority (academy, teacher, textbook) to individual readers and writers, decadent canons spread by the serial imitation of other canons. Would-be decadents adopt the tastes of a master, add or substi-

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tute their own choices and appreciations, and then publish the selection as proof of their affiliation. These mimetic canons enable further imitation and modification, spreading “horizontally” among a community of like-minded writers and artists rather than “vertically” from institutional insiders to the mass of outsiders. The practice of mimetic canonization accounts for the common accusation that decadent writers were plagiarists: the same writers, the same periods, the same works, are praised and imitated by one decadent after another. These canons are rarely as programmatic in their political aims as those of Pater and Huysmans, but they operate according to the same logic that underlies their respective critiques of the national canon. The practice of mimetic canonization helps to produce the peculiar canon of ancient and modern authors that decadent writers—in a clear allusion to the practice of national canon formation—regularly define in their texts. Mallarmé’s tombeau poems, for example, pay tribute to a canon of deceased decadent icons (Baudelaire, Poe, Verlaine). Each poem laments the public’s failure to appreciate one of these icons and addresses a community that properly recognizes his merits. Critical works like Verlaine’s Les Poètes maudits (1884), Symons’s “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), and Remy de Gourmont’s Le Livre des masques (1896) construct canons of contemporary decadent writers on the model of those assembled by Baudelaire, Swinburne, Pater, and Huysmans. Decadent writings often allude intertextually to other decadents, writers and characters alike, linking a contemporary figure to the canon of “decadent” Latin writers, or writers of one national tradition to those of another. For example, Wilde often praised Pater’s The Renaissance as a “golden book,” a term he borrowed from a poem by Swinburne praising Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), and from the term Pater himself used in Marius the Epicurean to describe Apuleius’s Metamorphoses. Wilde’s allusion at once establishes a restricted canon of contemporary decadent masters (Gautier, Pater, Swinburne), puts that canon in relationship to Latin decadence as defined by Des Esseintes (Apuleius), and joins Wilde’s own name to the list through his appreciation of all three. Mallarmé’s hermetic poem “Prose (pour Des Esseintes)” (1885) and Lionel Johnson’s “In Honorem Doriani Creatorisque Eius” (1891) address fictional characters from decadent texts and allude explicitly to Latin antiquity: Mallarmé’s title comes from a name given to Latin hymns in the Byzantine period; Johnson’s poem is written in Latin. Both of these poems imitate Baudelaire’s Latin poem “Franciscae meae laudes [Praises for My Francisca],” which was accompanied by a note expressing admiration for “the language of the final Latin decadence.” This language,

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Baudelaire suggests, providing the template for Gautier’s definition of decadent style, is the most appropriate idiom for the expression of modern passions. John Gray’s collection Silverpoints (1893) comprises a veritable library of decadent taste. Gray dedicates poems to Verlaine, Wilde, and Ernest Dowson, as well as translating or “imitating” poems by Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Verlaine (again), and Rimbaud. Much like Swinburne’s declaration of “brotherhood” with Baudelaire, these references imagine a transnational community of literary and artistic reception, forged in and through imitation, translation, and intertextual reference. The logic of mimetic canonization finds its narrative analogue in the remarkable number of decadent characters who are radically transformed by their encounter with what Dowling calls a “fatal book.” Borrowing a trope from libertine writing, these encounters make mimetic canonization a central theme of decadent writing as well as the medium of its dissemination. A typical instance is the awakening of Raoule de Vénérande in Rachilde’s novel Monsieur Vénus (1884). Left alone by her guardian, the adolescent Raoule is transformed by a chance discovery of an erotic book in the garrets of her ancestral mansion: “Her eyes came across an engraving, they looked away, but she took the book with her. . . . About that time, there was a complete change [une révolution] in the girl. Her expression altered, her words became brief, her eyes darted feverishly, she laughed and cried at the same time.” From this point on, she turns away from religion and society. As Dowling notes, these books do not merely influence their readers but “seem to preside over or indeed produce a climacteric of mental and physical change” in them, remaking their identity on the model of the decadent canon. Rachilde pointedly calls the effect of the book Raoule finds a “revolution.” “I am what they made me,” writes George Moore, in Confessions of a Young Man (1886), of the decadent books that influenced him. The theme of the fatal book reflects the predominant form of sociality among decadent writers, demonstrating the extent to which decadent “identity” is an effect of reception. There is no better example of the “fatal book” narrative in decadent writing than the notorious chapter 11 of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde’s novel describes Dorian’s education under the influence of his rival mentors Lord Henry and Basil Hallward. Swayed by Lord Henry’s praise of his youth, Dorian imitates his epigrammatic style; Basil’s portrait becomes a kind of guide to him, “a visible emblem of conscience” that alternately accuses and excuses his behavior. Chapter 11 details the canonical effects (Wilde calls it a

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“poisoning”) of Lord Henry’s strange “Yellow Book” on Dorian. Wilde does not name the book in either of the published versions of the novel, but its lineage is not difficult to discern. In the magazine version of the novel, he compares its style to “the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Décadents” (103), and his description of this style is a pastiche of the tropes used to praise Baudelaire’s poetry. It was filled with “metaphors as monstrous as orchids,” and a “heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages”; the sentiments of the main character conflate “the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint” and the “morbid confessions of a modern sinner” (274). Even if Wilde had provided no hints about its nature, the book’s association with decadence would still be patent, for among its chief effects, described alongside hints of sexual scandal and drug addiction, is a mania for collecting. Dorian collects ecclesiastical vestments, perfumes from the East, jewels from Amsterdam, the finest cloth from Delhi, Dacca, Japan, and Java, and he seeks out “from all parts of the world the strangest musical instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilisations” (281). These collections earn Dorian a reputation around town for exquisite taste, and he soon becomes “to the London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome the author of the Satyricon had once been”—a reincarnation of the canonical figure of decadent antiquity (278). Collecting makes him a master, a model for others and a source of advice in matter of taste. Although he imagines that his various treasures “were to be to him means of forgetfulness,” Dorian recurrently “finds” himself in the objects he collects, much as a nation “finds” itself in the national canon (286). He procures nine copies of the “Yellow Book” from Paris and has them “bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods.” The book “seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it,” and its hero strikes him as “a kind of pre-figuring type of himself” (276). Dorian, Wilde notes, “had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up,” blending his own identity with his collections (284). Dorian also reflects throughout the chapter on the relationship between his collections and different forms of identity. When “burning odorous gums from the East,” he ponders the extent to which “there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life,” and sets about trying to “elaborate a real psychology of perfumes” (281). Ambergris stirs the passions, violets wake the memory of dead romances, and champak

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“stain[s] the imagination” (281). His collection of exotic instruments revived him at those times when Western music “fell unheeded on his ear”; when their “fantastic character” no longer answers to his needs, he goes to hear Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Opera, “seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul” (281–82). Saddened by the deteriorating influence of time on his collection of textiles, he soothes himself by reflecting that he “had escaped that” (284). In a manner suggested by the discovery of a tradition of amatory male friendship writing in “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” Wilde also uses the logic of collecting and canon formation in chapter 11 to evoke same-sex desire. He scatters the chapter with allusions to historical figures known for their sexual dissidence. He notes that Dorian went to a costume ball dressed as Anne of Joyeuse, who, despite his name, was not a woman but a court minion of the homosexual king Henri III of France—the same king who was drawn to Des Esseintes’s “decadent” ancestor in the picture gallery, and among the rulers during the age of Ronsard and Du Bellay. The chapter also refers to the Roman emperor Elagabalus, who was notorious for his cross-dressing and homosexuality. Wilde’s descriptions of Dorian’s collections are drawn almost verbatim from contemporary reference works, but the few details Wilde added to these passages allude to homosexual relationships. Among the numerous stories about jewels he copies from William Jones’s 1880 History and Mystery of Precious Stones, for example, Wilde inserts a reference, the only one not in the original, to a gift Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston, reputed to be the king’s lover. The tales of aristocratic criminality woven into a tapestry the hero of the “Yellow Book” Dorian owns were drawn from the pages of John Addington Symonds’s The Renaissance in Italy. In enumerating these crimes, Wilde adds a description a boy who would be dressed up as Hylas or Ganymede, both classical figures of homoerotic desire. Much of chapter 11 concerns Dorian’s search for role models, even as he becomes a role model for (and a corruptor of ) other young men. Toward the end of the chapter, for example, as he muses on the debauched faces of certain of his ancestors preserved in family portraits, he wonders whether his life was a mere repetition of theirs. “Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own?” he asks of one portrait (288). Wilde stresses that Dorian’s decadence is less a genetic endowment than an effect of mimetic canonization, however. As Charles Bernheimer has noted, “Dorian’s subjectivity is constituted as decadent insofar as it is a function of the desire of the other.”  Lord Henry gives Dorian the “Yellow Book” be-

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cause he was converted by it. Watching Dorian’s reaction to his praise of youth and beauty in the garden outside Basil’s studio, he is reminded of “a book that he had read when he was sixteen, a book which revealed to him much that he had not known before” and wonders whether Dorian “might be passing through a similar experience” (184). Under the influence of the “Yellow Book,” Dorian copies Lord Henry, who is himself a copy of the same book. Dorian’s favorite chapter in the book, many details of which Wilde took from The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, describes the hero “finding” himself by imitating stereotypically decadent figures from Roman antiquity. The first instance Wilde cites is suggestive: “In the seventh chapter he tells how, crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of Elephantis, while dwarves and peacocks strutted round him, and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censor” (289). Dorian becomes decadent by reading a decadent book and imitating its hero, who himself becomes decadent by reading a “shameful” book while imitating the decadent Roman emperor Tiberius. Much as Dorian’s decadence is reflected in his collections of curious objects, so the hero of the “Yellow Book” surrounds himself with a collection of curiosities that demonstrate the way in which objects become decadent only by juxtaposition. Even the book that the hero of the “Yellow Book” reads assumes a mimetic relationship between work and reader. Elephantis was an infamous ancient Greek poetess who wrote books (all of them now lost) describing sexual positions that, following the logic of libertine reception, would be imitated by her readers. Wilde’s account of Dorian’s transformation both narrates and exemplifies the relationship in decadent writing between collecting and identity. Where national canons assume that the vernacular classics reflect an organic community, Dorian’s identity is flagrantly “collected,” fashioned largely out of the objects he gathers in his home or copies from models that are themselves copies. Much as Dorian becomes decadent by imitating the “Yellow Book” and amassing collections, moreover, so Wilde defines himself as a decadent writer by miming Huysmans’s canonical association of decadence and collecting, an association that is itself a version of the Baudelairean rhetoric of appreciation canonized by Gautier and Swinburne. His indebtedness is not just a matter of literary influence but embodies yet another version of the tale of mimetic canonization he tells in the novel. Wilde makes mimetic canonization the subject of his story. He provides a microhistory of the relationship between canon formation and identity formation and, in his imitation

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of Huysmans and others, offers his own novel as an instance of the very history it describes. Mimetic canonization functions most powerfully in the period as a gesture of affiliation and identification, but writers also used the technique to question and critically revise the decadent canon. Michael Field’s Sight and Song (1892) is among the richest examples of this strategy. A collection of poems about an array of European paintings, the book inscribes itself within a canon of ekphrasitic writing that looks back to Keats and to the art-historical poems of Robert Browning, but it finds its most immediate inspiration in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Sonnets for Pictures” and in the prose descriptions of artworks found in Swinburne, Pater, Huysmans, Wilde, and others. Sight and Song gestures toward the decadent community in both obvious and subtle ways. Michael Field’s canon elaborates upon Pater’s and includes ekphrases of works by Correggio, Tintoretto, and Bellini as well as Leonardo (there is a poem on La Gioconda), Botticelli, and Giorgione. There are also a striking number of poems about martyrs. The book is scattered with images of hermits and saints; there are individual poems about Saint Catherine, Saint Sebastian, Saint Jerome, and Mary Magdalene, as well as scenes from the life of Christ and from classical tales of martyrdom, such as the flaying of Marsyas and the sacrificial death of Marcus Curtius. Like Poe for Baudelaire, these figures are set apart by their beliefs—the poems all stress their isolation—but brought together in the collection and more broadly by the ways in which they inspire the communities formed around their sacrifice. Saint Sebastian, for example, was emerging in the period as a homosexual icon among male writers of the fin de siècle; Michael Field’s three poems about him in the collection echo contemporary depictions of the saint as an emblem, in Richard Kaye’s words, of “willfully embraced perversities.”  Michael Field’s allusions to the decadent canon, however, typically graft female and lesbian perspectives onto the preoccupations of their mostly male predecessors. The many Venus poems in Sight and Song continue the poets’ running dialogue with Swinburne, whose writings had influenced their first collection, Long Ago (1889), as well as their early dramas. In the closing stanzas of “Ave atque Vale,” as we saw in Chapter 2, Swinburne evokes the Venus of the Tannhäuser legend as the fallen common mother joining him in brotherhood with Baudelaire. Michael Field recast the goddess as a renewed figure for lesbian sorority. The second poem in Sight and Song describes Correggio’s “Venus, Mercury, and Cupid,” which depicts Mercury teaching Cupid to read

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while Venus stands next to them. The scene cleverly suggests an alternative to the decadent canon’s prevailing male homosociality. Mercury and Cupid allegorically (and somewhat parodically) stand in for Baudelaire and Swinburne— or any other pair of decadent masters and disciples—whose sense of fraternity is mediated by a book. Venus, whom Michael Field identify as Cupid’s “mother,” seems merely to attend their interaction. The poem describes the painting as a love triangle: Cupid “comes between / Troubled lovers as a screen” (4). The identity of the lovers is somewhat ambiguous, however, since Venus is looking not at Mercury but out toward the viewer. This detail allows for a second triangle bisecting the surface of the painting, with Venus at one corner, Mercury and Cupid at the other, and the viewer at the apex. Michael Field read themselves into the scenario—and into the decadent movement—as daughters and lovers of Venus, spiritual sisters joined by their appreciation of the goddess. They imagine a specifically female decadence operating alongside the male community but also governed by its own interests and desires. The most famous child of Venus and Mercury is Hermaphroditus, a figure both male and female, who embodies the dual perspective of the poem. Two of the other Venus poems in Sight and Song revisit Swinburne’s “Laus Veneris,” the locus classicus for the image of a decadent Venus. Here again, Michael Field find a new perspective within a canonically decadent work, transforming familiar male characters and perspectives into female and lesbian ones. Swinburne’s dramatic monologue follows Tannhäuser’s postcoital meditation as the knight lies awake next to the sleeping Venus. Michael Field’s poem on Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars” reverses the scenario of this poem, describing Venus lying awake next to a sleeping Mars. Like Swinburne’s goddess, Venus here seems the very epitome of the femme fatale: Ironical she sees, Without regret, the work her kiss has done And lives a cold enchantress doomed to please Her victims one by one. (46) But the poem is told from the perspective of the goddess, not her “victims,” and Michael Field read sadness rather than cold sensuality in her face. Recognizing her power over men, and suffering isolation as a result, she is not a “fatal” woman but a victim of fate. In their poem on Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, Michael Field recast the scenario of “Laus Veneris” in the relationship

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between the viewer and the work. Taking on the role of Swinburne’s Tannhäuser, they meditate on the goddess while she sleeps. Rather than occupying an infernal lair under the Hörsel, Venus lies alone in a pastoral scene, her curves echoed by the hills in the background. She is a part of the landscape, not concealed beneath it: In communion with the sweet Life that ripens at her feet: We can never fear that she From Italian fields will flee, She is of the things that are; And she will not pass While the sun strikes on the grass. (105) Swinburne associates the sensuality of the decadent Venus with exile and damnation, valorizing her as a figure for other forms of cultural resistance. Michael Field, by contrast, describe Giorgione’s pagan and frankly erotic Venus as “Pure” (98), “Shameless” (99), and “Unimpeachable” (100), an epitome of “delicious womanhood” (102), and the object of a desiring female gaze. At home rather than in exile, Michael Field’s Venus revises Swinburne’s image while also preserving his association of the goddess with sexual and aesthetic dissidence. The only eighteenth-century painter represented in Sight and Song is Watteau, a figure important to the libertine tradition as well as to Michael Field’s decadent contemporaries in France and England. The book includes poems on three Watteau paintings, notably “L’Embarquement pour Cythère,” which is also evoked in works by Baudelaire, Verlaine, the Goncourt brothers, and Symons, among others. Michael Field look in particular to Verlaine, whose 1869 collection Fêtes Galantes was inspired by Watteau. In an early prose description of the painting, they call Watteau’s canvas “a vision of the Empire of love over men and women seen through the light of universal sun-down.”  This description casts the libertine scenario of the painting in terms of historical decadence (“universal sun-down”). It also alludes to the famous first stanza of Verlaine’s 1883 poem “Langueur”: Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs En composant des acrostiches indolents D’un style d’or où la langueur du soleil danse.

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[I am the Empire at the end of the decadence Watching the great white Barbarians pass by While composing indolent acrostics In a golden style where the languor of the sun plays.]  Michael Field’s description subtly conflates Watteau’s painterly perspective with that of Verlaine’s poetic speaker, the “Empire of love” with the “Empire at the end of the decadence.” Watteau’s procession of lovers becomes the procession of barbarians in Verlaine; the sunset is echoed by Verlaine’s languorous sun; and the libertine eye of the painter merges with the voice of the poet’s speaker. Nineteenth-century writers tended to cast Watteau as at once a utopian dreamer and a melancholic outsider, an ironic observer of the Arcadian scenes he paints. Watteau’s paintings embody this perspective in the darkclothed male figures in many of the canvases who stand apart from the groups of lovers and seem to look scornfully upon their pleasures. The Goncourts see this recurring figure as a portrait of the artist: “That figure with the eyeglasses or that flute player—it is Watteau. His eye rests negligently upon the entwined lovers. . . . His silent glances follow the embraces, and he listens to the love-making, listless, indifferent, morose, consumed by languor, and weary [rongé d’ennui].”  The published version of Michael Field’s “L’Embarquement pour Cythère,” placed at the end of the collection, elides the explicit reference to Verlaine from the prose description, instead merging his voice and the image of Watteau with the female voices in the poem. Michael Field’s lyric voice reviews the procession of lovers, trying to explain their “vague unease” and imagining resistance on the part of the women (117). The “weary” figure of Watteau is transformed into the “imperial” mien of an armless Venus statue, which observes the procession in the painting and “no joy discovers / In these uncertain lovers” (119). The poem and the book end with the Venus statue left alone and “Ironical” in the growing darkness (125). Like their rewriting of Swinburne’s Venus poems, Michael Field’s “L’Embarquement pour Cythère” constitutes a miniature decadent canon. The poets write themselves into a procession of decadent precursors drawn to Watteau but also appropriate the stance of the cynical observer—a cornerstone of the movement since Gautier’s “Notice”—for a female voice and gaze. These appropriations demonstrate the remarkable flexibility of mimetic canonization. It serves as a method of composition and a means of addressing the

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decadent republic of letters, allowing writers to “find” themselves in the tastes of others and to give voice to their dissent in a form recognizable to those “unknown sympathizers” who might share it. Taking up the decadent tastes of Pater, Swinburne, and Verlaine, Michael Field find new perspectives in a recognizable “library” of decadent classics.

chapter 4

A Mirror for Teachers Decadent Pedagogy and Public Education

Education, I tremble before thy dreaded name. The cruelties of Nero, of Caligula, what are they?— a few crunched limbs in the amphitheater; but thine, O Education, are the yearning of souls sick of life, maddening discontent, all the fearsome and fathomless sufferings of the mind. —George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man

Tales out of School I argued in the last chapter that decadent writers after 1870 make collecting and canon building a means of critiquing the rising tide of nationalism that followed in the wake of German unification. Manifestly artificial, and selected according to the perverse tastes of the collector, decadent collections oppose the putatively organic traditions represented by the canon of national classics, foregrounding the ideological alchemy that transforms a mere list of books into a reflection of the “national character.” Working against the imagined community of the nation, decadent collectors and canon builders address a sympathetic community of outsiders united by their devotion to a life of what Des Esseintes calls “studious decrepitude.” This strategy reflects a shift in the decadent political imaginary. By contrast with the evocations of classical republicanism that define decadent community for Baudelaire, Gautier, and Swinburne, writers in this period increasingly fashion themselves after the early modern libertine underground. International in its circulation,

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tracing its roots to anticlerical and antimonarchial philosophies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and later associated with the decline of the ancien régime in the years before the French Revolution, the libertine tradition provides decadent writers with a powerful example of a community formed around outsider tastes. Decadent texts are not typically pornographic, but they share the libertine’s association of perverse erudition with political subversion. Moore’s hyperbolic invective against universal public education in the epigraph to this chapter epitomizes another way decadent writers attacked nationalism with the tools provided by the libertine tradition: narratives of education. By the mid-1880s, when Moore was writing, every major Western industrial nation had instituted, or at least laid the legal groundwork for, a system of universal public education, and the topic had been widely debated for many years in the press and policy-making bodies. Following Prussian innovations from the early 1840s, governments across Europe built up vast educational bureaucracies that certified teachers, licensed and inspected schools, and imposed curricular standards and national examinations. Legislatures passed mandatory attendance laws, established primary and secondary educational systems, and created new taxes to fund the construction and staffing of a network of public schools. In time, the educational system developed, as Andy Green writes, into “an institution sui generis; an integral part of the state apparatus of the burgeoning nineteenth-century nation state and a vital pillar of the new social order.” Over the course of about fifty years, an aspect of child rearing that had for centuries been the prerogative of church, family, and guild became a central responsibility of the state, and a subject of intense international competition. The state school aimed not only to increase opportunity for the working and middle classes but also to foster national cohesion and to better position the nation against its international competitors. As Étienne Balibar has noted, there is a close historical and ideological correlation between the rise of the nation form and the development of universal schooling. Ideally (if not always actually) bringing together children from all social levels, the school sought to create a sense of national purpose that transcended social, economic, ethnic, religious, and racial differences. “Nationalism calls for universal education,” writes one early twentieth-century educational historian, “in order that there may be a general development of individual power—physical, mental, and moral—so that the nation composed of individuals may realize its full military and economic strength.”

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The most influential early advocate for the national significance of public education was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose series of lectures Addresses to the German Nation (1807), I noted in the last chapter, was a foundational text for German nationalism. The lectures also provided the philosophical blueprint for the Prussian school system, and were widely translated, reprinted, and discussed by educational reformers in other countries as well. For Fichte, the fundamental mission of the public school is national cohesion, and the school is a crucial prefiguration of the nation-state. Education, he argues in the second and third lectures, is both a pedagogical and a political task, harmonizing the child’s mind much as it seeks to bring together the disparate principalities and imperial territories of the German-speaking world: “What I am proposing is the complete reform of the current educational system as the only means of preserving the existence of the German nation.”  Rather than indoctrinating the students in nationalist ideology, Fichte’s school functions as a “miniature state [kleiner Staat],” in which students live and work together. It is a community unto itself, “an independent and self-sustaining commonwealth possessed of its own constitution” and governed by the joint efforts of masters and pupils. To ensure that he learns to sacrifice his individual needs to those of the community, Fichte argues, the student must “be brought completely and uninterruptedly under the influence of this education, and . . . be entirely separated from the community and kept safe from any contact with it.” The school is a nationalist training ground, an orthopedic technology that shapes the individual and the striving nation alike. “If you wish to have influence over him,” Fichte remarks of the student, “then you must do more than merely appeal to him; you must fashion him . . . such that he cannot will anything save what you want him to will.” Writing a little less than eighty years after Fichte, and in the wake of the dramatic changes in education that his lectures helped bring about, Moore complains that public schooling only produces deadening conformity. Universal education has “eunuched the genius” of the nation, making true distinction in art or life impossible. Everyone has become respectable. Upper, middle, and lower classes alike share the same tastes, opinions, costume, and way of speaking. Innovations in art or literature are persecuted like Christian martyrs in decadent Rome. “We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute,” Moore writes. Few decadent writers attended the kind of state schools that Moore attacks, but they often express a similar suspicion of public education. Moore proudly disdains the popularization of knowledge that was once the exclusive property of privileged men, but the

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decadent attack on education goes beyond mere snobbery, encompassing a systematic critique of the nationalist uses of public schooling. This chapter looks at five decadent stories about education that put Fichte’s “miniature state” under the microscope: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im Pelz [Venus in Furs] (1870), Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884), Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884), Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Subtly connecting the interactions of teachers and students with larger questions of political theory, these works challenge Fichte’s analogy between school and nation. As in their critique of national canons, the decadents draw perceptively on a central preoccupation of the libertine tradition. James Grantham Turner has argued that libertine texts are structured by an “erotic-didactic nexus,” which joins sexual pleasure with stories of initiation, instruction, and erotic self-fashioning. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates’s teacher Diotima famously describes education as a form of intellectual procreation. Radically recorporealizing this doctrine, libertine works define sex as a subject of intellectual inquiry and turn education into an erotic exchange. A work like the marquis de Sade’s La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), which alternates between lessons on nature and politics and graphic descriptions of copulation, makes the connection between sex and learning in libertinism almost parodically plain. Sade’s neologism for digital anal stimulation in this dialogue—“socratiser”— points back to the primal scene of libertine teaching, and literally conflates education with sexual stimulation, asserting an unbroken continuity, as Jane Gallop has noted, between the pedagogical and the erotic “examination.”  But Sade comes at the end of a long tradition of libertine narratives about relationships of teachers and students, from early dialogues, such as Nicolas Chorier’s Satyra sotadica (1660), in which the experienced Tullia teaches her young cousin Ottavia the secrets of erotic pleasure, to novels like Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit [The Wayward Head and Heart] (1738), by Crébillon fils, which details the social and erotic initiation of its young protagonist, Meilcour, under the guidance of Mme de Lursay and the notorious libertine Versac. Decadent writers are similarly preoccupied with education. Mapping an “aesthetic-didactic nexus” onto the erotic-didactic nexus Turner identifies in libertinism, decadent texts tell of conversions to the aesthetic life, initiations into artistic mysteries, and students transformed into literal or figurative artworks under the influence of their mentors. Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is the most prominent example of this kind of story, but it is

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hardly unique: one finds images, concepts, and practices of erotic and aesthetic education everywhere in the works of decadent writers. Perhaps the paradigmatic scenario is Des Esseintes’s brief foray into pedagogy in chapter 6 of À rebours. Walking along the rue de Rivoli, Des Esseintes comes upon an adolescent boy named Auguste Langlois, who is trying unsuccessfully to light a cigarette with kitchen matches. After offering him a light, he takes the boy under his wing and formulates a plan for his education. He gets Langlois drunk, brings him to a bordello, and gives him his choice of the prostitutes. While Langlois is being initiated into the pleasures of the flesh, Des Esseintes tells the proprietor of the bordello that he will provide the boy with three months of visits, with the aim of making this pleasure such a habit that he will eventually turn to crime in an effort to satisfy his newly cultivated desires. He speculates that Langlois will murder a rich man who catches him robbing his home. “On that day,” he says, “my object will be achieved: I shall have contributed, to the best of my ability, to the making of a scoundrel, one enemy more for the hideous society which is bleeding us white.”  Huysmans’s scene of education is dense with allusions to libertinism. The most obvious connection is Des Esseintes’s almost reflexive association of sexuality with a corrupting pedagogy and political subversion, but there are many other clues as well. The name Langlois, for example, was likely suggested by the case of Simon Langlois, a Parisian man arrested in 1706 for leading an underground libertine club devoted to cross-dressing, sodomy, and the mockery of chivalric and clerical rituals; he was called “Le Grand Maître” by his fellow initiates. Des Esseintes’s initial encounter with Langlois alludes to the originary pedagogical scenario of the Platonic dialogues, in which Socrates typically questioned young men he encountered on the streets of Athens. The young Langlois requires “illumination,” figured as his inability to light a match (in French an allumette), and the older Des Esseintes provides it for him in the form of sexual initiation. The proprietor of the brothel hints at the sexual politics of this model by suggesting that Des Esseintes’s real aim is seduction: “You rascal, so you like ’em young, do you?”  When he arrives at the brothel, Langlois is first approached by the “beautiful Jewess” Vanda, who offers him “a little good advice” while running her hands over his body. Like the prostitutes featured in early libertine whore dialogues, Vanda combines sexual arousal with instruction. Decadent allusions to libertine education diverge from the original in crucial ways, however. Libertine literature tends to depict education as a form of domination: teachers inculcate their knowledge into their students,

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manipulate them to break down their prejudices, and demonstrate erotic techniques on their bodies. Education here is a story of initiation, in which a master holds all the knowledge, using it to control the innocent or benighted student. Indeed, the teacher’s mastery and the student’s subjection are a crucial part of the fantasy these works convey. Libertine instruction often entails what Naomi Segal has called a “hydraulic” theory of pedagogy: a quasimechanical process, analogous with sexual penetration, in which knowledge is pumped like fluid into the student’s body. The libertine instructor Madame de Saint-Ange in La philosophie dans le boudoir, for example, compares the education of her student, Eugénie, with implanting, feeding, igniting, and inspiring: “I shall employ the better part of the time educating the young lady. Dolmancé and I will put into this pretty little head every principle of the most unbridled libertinage, we will set her ablaze with our own fire, we will feed her upon our philosophy, inspire her with our desires.” And this is precisely what she and her pedagogical partners do, penetrating their student physically and intellectually, and turning her into a brazen libertine who participates in the torture of her own mother. If libertine texts identify with the master, decadent texts, as we have seen, identify with the disciple. Making reception a means of production, they celebrate imitation, appreciation, and creative appropriation rather than power, authority, and the sovereignty of knowledge. The greatest master is the one most receptive to influence. The canonical model for decadent education is Baudelaire’s discovery of Poe, a teacher whom the student never meets, but whose writings help him “find” himself and his opposition to modernity. Taken up by Swinburne in his reception of Baudelaire and, as we will see below, by Pater in his pedagogical tales, the model also informs the practice of mimetic canonization in the 1880s and 1890s. The teachers depicted in decadent narratives notably depart from this ideal of education, however. Instead of allowing their students to “find” themselves, they seek to impose their will on them, to fashion them (in Fichte’s image) into imitations of their own ideals. They fancy themselves to be masters—and have typically been treated as such in critical discussions of the decadent movement—but their quasi-libertine pedagogy ironically mirrors the aims of nationalism rather than the subversive ideas they espouse. Much the same thing is true of their students, who all too willingly go along with their teachers’ lesson plans. Reflecting on the failure of his experiment in education—“The little Judas!” he remarks, “To think that I’ve never once seen his name in the papers”—Des Esseintes realizes that his plan, launched as a protest against bourgeois society, in fact reproduces the

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educational practices of the society he wants to attack: “All I was doing was parabolizing secular instruction, allegorizing universal education, which is well on its way to turning everybody into a Langlois.”  As we will see, other decadent teachers are not so circumspect about their methods, but the effects of their pedagogical experiments are similar. They speak the language of decadent masters and disciples but in practice merely “allegorize” universal education. Their pedagogical success constitutes failure from the perspective of decadent teaching.

The Pedagogical Contract There is no more pervasive figure for the decadent uses of libertine pedagogical models than Pygmalion. Ovid’s Pygmalion carves an ivory vision of his feminine ideal out of misogynistic distaste for actual women, and Venus rewards his devotion to her by bringing the statue to life. As an artist who creates an ideal woman to satisfy his peculiar sexual desires, Pygmalion is a libertine avant la lettre; as a man who turns from the real to the artificial in protest against his age, he would seem to be the very quintessence of decadent deviation. But the majority of decadent Pygmalions are educators, not artists, and they express their distaste for modernity by instructing and persuading their lovers rather than by crafting them from ivory or stone. The typical decadent Pygmalion follows the model of Severin von Kusiemski, in SacherMasoch’s Venus in Furs, a novel that had an important impact on decadent depictions of sexuality, or of Raoule de Vénérande in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus. Both of these figures fashion ideal lovers through a course of training that evokes the nationalist pedagogy promoted by Fichte and his followers. Sacher-Masoch’s Severin worships nightly at the feet of a Venus statue, a peculiarity that attracts the attention of the young widow Wanda von Dunajew, who is staying at the same Carpathian spa that he is. Wanda stalks Severin one night and poses as Venus come to life. The terrified and elated Severin compares this event to the animation of Pygmalion’s statue: “There, in front of me, on a stone bench, sat Venus, the beautiful stone woman—no the real Goddess of Love, with warm blood and a throbbing pulse. Yes, she had come alive for me, like that statue that had started breathing for her master [Meister].” Severin’s use of the word “Meister” is telling: although the word can describe an artistic master, it also carries connotations of pedagogical authority. Coyly avoiding the name Pygmalion, Severin both resembles and differs from his

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classical forerunner. As Gilles Delueze notes, masochism is defined by education: “It is essential to the masochist that he should fashion the woman into a despot. . . . He is essentially an educator, and thus runs the risk inherent in educational undertakings.” Severin clearly sees himself as a pedagogical rather than a sculptural “master.” Using all the educational means at his disposal— from pictures, to poems and stories, logical deductions, Socratic dialectic, and simple begging and pleading—he persuades Wanda to embody his ideal woman, a cold and cruel virago, who beats him and betrays him with other men. In a nod to the libertine tradition, he asks Wanda to reenact the story of Manon Lescaut. Wanda’s fancied animation is only the beginning of a longer educational process, which follows the pattern of Ovid’s tale but with a different aim. In fact, Venus in Furs is a reverse Pygmalion narrative, in which a real woman is transformed figuratively into an artwork. Severin’s ideal is not flesh and blood but, as Wanda comes to realize, “a woman of stone” (VP 121; VF 103). Written with obvious reference to Sacher-Masoch, Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus is also a reverse Pygmalion story, but with the gender roles reversed as well. In this novel, the aristocratic Raoule takes an erotic interest in a young working-class flower maker, Jacques Silvert. With a “dimpled chin of smooth and childlike flesh,” and the neck of a “newborn chubby babe,” the androgynous Jacques appears to Raoule as a blank slate, and she decides to shape him according to her tastes. She sets him up in a lavishly decorated studio, provides him with clothes to wear, opium to ingest, and artworks to appreciate. She soon takes him as her lover, plaything, and “pupil”: “Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can smash before becoming the echo of its vibrations” (MVF 42; MVE 41). Like Severin, she crafts her erotic ideal in flesh and blood, transforming Jacques into a dependent “girl” and “wife.” Literalizing the social construction of traditional gender roles, Raoule, whose aunt calls her “nephew,” by analogy becomes a man. The novel incessantly maps the conventional opposition of male and female onto the relationship between teacher and student. The student is dominated and therefore effeminate, while the teacher is dominant and therefore masculine, regardless of their respective biological sexes. Financially and pedagogically dependent on his teacher, Jacques becomes weak and passive, little more than a “lifeless object [être inerte] who let himself be loved” (MVF 94; MVE 93). Over the course of the narrative, his lifelessness becomes literal. Raoule’s friend, the baron de Raittolbe, compares Jacques with an ancient marble statue (MVF 117; MVE 116); Jacques’s dying words are “Oh! I’m cold” (MVF 208; MVE 207). After

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Raittolbe kills Jacques in a fencing match, Raoule has Jacques’s remains transformed into an automaton: a functioning wax figure, controlled by a hidden spring, which she embraces at night. “The red hair, the blond eyelashes, the gold hair of the chest are natural,” Rachilde writes, “the teeth that ornament the mouth, the nails on the hands and feet were torn from a corpse” (MVF 209; MVE 208). Taken from nature but shaped by art, this “anatomical masterpiece” is the supreme product of Raoule’s decadent pedagogy, an object she creates not with her artistic skill—she does not make the automaton itself— but with her authority and powers of persuasion. Revealing the underside of universal education, the fully “educated” Jacques moves only when and how the teacher desires. At the center of both of these reverse Pygmalion stories is a contract that formalizes the terms of the relationship between teacher and student. The contract is written for Severin and Wanda, oral for Raoule and Jacques, but the agreement in both cases is essentially the same, committing the parties to a regime of sexual role-playing. Such pacts or contracts between teacher and student are common in decadent writing, adapting a standard plot device in libertine narratives. Most educational relationships in the West are based on implicit or explicit contracts that trace their origins to ancient models: knowledge for sexual pleasure in the pederastic tradition; knowledge for money or recognition among the sophists. Sacher-Masoch and Rachilde subtly associate the pedagogical contract with the foundational metaphor of the liberal imaginary, the social contract, which theorists from Hobbes to Kant argue is grounded on the willing consent of the governed. All the parties to such a contract are rational actors who knowingly give up a certain measure of natural liberty in exchange for the promise of social order and protection afforded by life in an organized collective. Looking back to Maistre’s critique of written constitutions, which, as we saw in the first chapter, informed Baudelaire’s attack on America, decadent contracts tend toward the Faustian, and always lead to misconstruction or abuse. Agreed to in haste and often coerced, and motivated by desire or pride, they are rarely the result of rational calculation on both sides. Although they may follow all the rituals of consent, the contracts are typically asymmetrical or binding in ways the parties do not anticipate. The figure Sacher-Masoch and Rachilde use for this asymmetry is slavery, a recurrent problem for social contract theory. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues in The Social Contract (1762), slavery is both illegitimate and absurd: the terms “slavery and right are contradictory; they are mutually exclusive.”  One cannot freely and rationally agree to give up one’s liberty, Rousseau

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claims, so the relationship between master and slave falls outside the scope of any genuine social pact. The teachers and students in the two novels set out to form just such an impossible social pact within their respective relationships, however. For Sacher-Masoch, as Nancy Bentley writes, “slavery and contract are thus coexisting terms”; much the same thing is true for Rachilde. At the start of Venus in Furs, Sacher-Masoch’s unnamed narrator falls asleep reading the chapter on master and slave in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As if in illustration of Hegel’s claim that the master ends up dependent upon the slave, Severin persuades Wanda to draft a contract that will fi x their erotic roles. Severin becomes a slave and Wanda his imperious master, although it is clear that Severin’s slavery is a kind of mastery in disguise. Rachilde characterizes Raoule’s domination of Jacques in terms of charity, training, education, and artistic creation, but the most consistent analogy is again that of master to slave. Revealing the nature of her passion for Jacques to Raittolbe, Raoule says that she had “bought a human being whom she despised as a man but adored as a beauty” (MVF 75; MVE 74). “You will be my slave,” Raoule tells Jacques. “You have given yourself away, and you can’t take yourself back” (MVF 89; MVE 87–88). Jacques comes to refer to himself as “a slave” and to see his lodging as at once harem and prison. “I bought him, I belong to him,” Raoule claims, giving voice to the same Hegelian relationship of dominance and dependence that governs the plot of Venus in Furs (MVF 41; MVE 41). In a brief manifesto on sexuality that makes up chapter 7 of the novel, suppressed in most nineteenth-century editions, Rachilde links slavery to penetration, adding a further twist to Jacques’s assumption of femininity: “The inferior role that her form imposes on women in the generative act evidently gives rise to an idea of the yoke of slavery [joug d’asservissement]” (MVF 92; MVE 90). Sacher-Masoch and Rachilde parody the principles of social contract theory. The contracts in these novels are underwritten by persuasion and erotic desire, not reason and consent. They legitimate inequality rather than ensuring peace and freedom, reproducing the state of nature as an artifact from within culture. The pedagogical contract is an instrument of social control that mirrors the function of universal education. Rachilde is especially clear about this effect: Raoule is an aristocrat, and her “wife” Jacques is a working-class artisan; Raittolbe enters at the same time that Raoule enslaves Jacques into a frankly economic exchange with Jacques’s sister Marie, a prostitute. Education was (and still is) promoted as a crucial element in the social contract the nation-state maintains with its citizens. It is for this reason that Fichte seeks to “fashion” the German nation by “fashioning” students in his national

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schools. The decadent Pygmalions transform this function into a new kind of slavery that is readily accepted by the “slaves.” Wanda and Jacques are at first unwilling to perform the roles their lovers want them to play. Wanda repeatedly falls out of her role and needs to be prompted by Severin; Jacques tries to seduce Raoule but is rebuffed. Persuaded by the lessons and direction of their teachers, however, both of them willingly consent to their erotic roles and even come to embrace them. The contract reflects not the consent of the governed but the persuasive power of the teacher to engender consent in the student. The decadent dialogue with modern education is mostly implicit in Venus in Furs and Monsieur Vénus, suggested by the way both novels associate pedagogy with the (social) contract and the relationship between teacher and student with the relationship between master and slave. Lee’s Miss Brown brings these associations into even sharper focus and places them squarely within nineteenth-century debates about schools and social control. The story is similar to Venus in Furs and Monsieur Vénus. In the opening chapters of the novel, the painter and poet Walter Hamlin—a thinly veiled portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti—develops a passion for Anne Brown, the governess for the children of a friend Hamlin is visiting in Italy. From the start, Hamlin compares Anne with a statue, implicitly placing himself in the position of Pygmalion. He describes her complexion as akin to “old marble” and imagines her to be “some sort of strange statue.” Hamlin decides to paint a portrait of Anne, but he cannot capture her look. His friend Melton Perry provides a theory that Hamlin puts into practice with Anne. The working classes, he claims, lack character because they lack education: “It’s talking and jawing about things which don’t matter a pin that develops our character. The people who have no opportunity for that remain quite without character” (I, 63). Perry’s claim alludes to the conventional idea that painted portraits depict the sitter’s character, not just his or her external appearance, but it also has important roots in educational theory. In the Republic, Plato argues that education is a literal shaping of the soul, in which children take on an almost physical imprint of the lesson they are taught. A child’s mind is “plastic” and readily “assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wants to give it.” Perry’s comment has obvious associations with the Pygmalion story: education is a kind of shaping akin to, or at least comparable with, the formation of bodies and souls. The ruling classes shape themselves through discussion, but the “shapeless” souls of the working class need the guiding hand of an educator. With the aim of developing his sitter’s character and thereby capturing her look, Hamlin engages Anne in conversation. He recommends that she

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read Dante’s Vita Nuova, and later buys her a copy of the book. When he presents it to her, the effects of Hamlin’s “chatter” are evident in Anne’s countenance: “The girl’s face cleared into a kind of radiance” (I, 110). Encouraged by his initial success, Hamlin decides to fashion Anne into an aesthetic ideal he can paint, display, and eventually marry. He imagines that Anne’s beauty can be taught like a lesson plan. His initial analogy for this process evokes the German tradition of Bildung, which seeks to develop the student’s inherent abilities: “The rare plant of beauty was to be cherished, nursed into perfection, till it burst out in maturity of splendor, a thing of delight for the present and of wonder for the future” (I, 118). Just a few pages later, however, Hamlin compares himself with Pygmalion, reflecting that his life “should be crowned by gradually endowing with vitality, and then wooing, awakening the love of this beautiful Galatea whose soul he had molded, even as Pygmalion had molded the limbs of the image which he had made to live and to love” (I, 121–22). No longer an organic being with its own internal logic of development, Anne needs to be endowed with “vitality.” The teacher’s intention has also become self-serving. Rather than providing a thing of beauty to the world, he now adopts the libertine ideal of crafting a compliant lover. He notes with pleasure that Anne’s likes and dislikes are the same as his, and that her tastes can be traced back to “the books, the music, the pictures about which he talked to her” (I, 131). Persuaded by Perry’s theory that Anne has no character of her own, he implants in her the character of his ideal. Like Severin and Raoule, Hamlin presents his lover with a contract. “Will you let me,” he asks, “be your guardian, your father, your brother; let me provide for you, take care of your money, see to your education? I do not ask you to love me, but merely to give me a chance of trying to make you prefer me” (I, 151). Anne is “literally petrified” (I, 149) by the proposal, but she requests permission to accept it from her guardian, Richard Brown. The practical Richard is suspicious of Hamlin’s motives; nevertheless, he acquiesces to the arrangement provided Hamlin sign a contract that will bind him to marry Anne should she desire it. Persuaded by his claim that their arrangement will “secure her freedom,” Anne accepts Hamlin’s terms (I, 176). Hamlin ships her to a school of his choice in Switzerland and then brings her to London, where he presents her to his friends and patrons as the epitome of aestheticist beauty. Although her education had put her “in complete harmony with Hamlin’s habits and aspirations” (I, 227), Anne blanches at being put on display and becomes, like Wanda, increasingly “cold” toward her teacher. She is “half petrified” by Hamlin’s expectations (I, 307) and wonders whether her

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teacher only wants her as “a sort of live picture” (I, 309). Hamlin comments that she looks “very pale” (II, 61). Other characters frequently mention her coldness; Hamlin’s Russian cousin, Sacha Elaguine, calls her “Madonna of the Glaciers” (III, 309). Hamlin’s portrait of Anne remains unfinished, but only, as Kathy Psomiades has suggested, because Anne herself has become an artwork. Like Severin and Raoule, Hamlin is a reverse Pygmalion whose educational efforts turn a real woman into stone. Lee suggests that Hamlin’s educational methods infect the entire social world of the novel. Education, in Miss Brown, is inevitably a means of social and sexual control. In London, Anne is surrounded in Hamlin’s circle by bad influences that recall Hamlin’s influence over her. The spiritualist and libertine Edmund Lewis tries to seduce Anne by showing her a passage from Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, just as Hamlin had bought her the Vita Nuova. Sacha brings Hamlin under her influence much as Hamlin had done with Anne, indoctrinating him into spiritualist practices and drawing his erotic interest. Lee’s descriptions of Sacha’s domination belie Hamlin’s assertion, and Anne’s belief, that education creates free and independent subjects. Sacha sucks the life from Hamlin, leading him into substance abuse and rendering him wholly dependent upon her. Edmund Lewis compares her to a vampire (III, 7), and Lee often describes her wrapping Hamlin or Anne in her arms. When she is kissed by Sacha, Anne “felt her lips almost like leeches and her teeth pressing into her cheeks” (III, 201). The bad educational influences extend beyond Hamlin’s circle. Lee juxtaposes the narrative of Sacha’s domination of Hamlin with an account of the growing intimacy between Anne and her cousin Richard, who is known around London as “Education Brown” for his fervent support of universal schooling (II, 12). While Hamlin attends séances with Sacha and Edmund Lewis, Richard brings Anne books of political economy and tries to “convert” her to his educational beliefs. But this conversion is only the prelude to an offer of marriage, which Anne rejects with disgust. Richard’s effort to bring Anne into the fold of his missionary socialism differs little in either its means or its ends from Sacha’s corruption of Hamlin or from Hamlin’s shaping of Anne. In each case, education follows (or tries to follow) the libertine script. Although Anne repudiates Richard’s seduction, she remains curiously bound to her pedagogical contract with Hamlin. This contract presents the relationship between teacher and student—like the relationship between state and citizen— as a freely accepted agreement, but as in Sacher-Masoch and Rachilde, Lee compares its terms to slavery. When he first confronts his

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ward over Hamlin’s proposal, Richard compares Anne to “chattel” and accuses her of willingly making herself Hamlin’s “slave” (I, 186–87): “I would rather you had been seduced by a man you loved, than that you should have sold yourself coldly in this way” (I, 191). Anne rejects Richard’s analogy, but Lee clearly does not. She scatters allusions to Anne’s enslavement throughout the novel. Hamlin, for example, is the ancestor of slave-holding Jamaican plantation owners who had left England during the Civil War and were known for their excessive cruelty to the native inhabitants (II, 49). Mrs. Macgregor, Hamlin’s aunt, denies that her nephew is akin to “the regular slave-driving type of the Hamlins” (II, 110); but Hamlin survives on the fortune the family amassed through its use of slaves, and he lives for part of the year in the home his grandfather built after returning to England. Like his ancestors, Hamlin is an aristocratic libertine who travels to a foreign land and feels entitled to “buy” a person. When he shows Anne his ancestral portrait gallery and reveals the tainted origins of his fortune, she turns “ashy white” (II, 55). Her marmoreal pallor ironically figures both her horror at Hamlin’s family business and her continued subjection to the Pygmalionesque conditions of her contract with Hamlin. Later in the novel, Anne describes Hamlin’s love in terms of physical constraint: “She was in bondage, surrounded by walls, a slave,” while Hamlin “was her master, her proprietor” (II, 311–12). The poet Cosmo Chough tells Anne the story of Mademoiselle Aïssé, a young child who was sold into slavery by Turkish traders and brought to Paris, where she is educated and raised as an aristocrat. When her master, the French ambassador to Constantinople, returns home, he tells her: “You are my slave; I bought you, I educated you; now love me.” Chough does not complete the story, but Lee notes that Anne looks “very white” as she listens to it (III, 44). Anne’s complexion again draws a powerful connection between education and slavery, the social contract and the pedagogical contract to which Anne is bound. Seen in this light, the controversial conclusion to Miss Brown, in which the increasingly independent Anne agrees to marry Hamlin in order to counter Sacha’s bad influence over him, comes into better focus. Nineteenth-century writers commonly associated the marital contract with the social contract. As Matthew Reyonlds has noted, this association was prevalent in Victorian discussions about the nationalist aspirations of Anne Brown’s native Italy. In Lee’s novel, this final term of the contract follows the logic of the original deal. Although Anne regards her marriage to Hamlin as a free choice—“the sacrifice of herself” (III, 283), a willing “martyrdom” (III, 313)—it is perfectly consistent with Hamlin’s project. Even free of Hamlin, as Christa Zorn has observed,

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Anne would still be in thrall to him, a slave to his project and the logic of the pedagogical contract. “The generous education that Hamlin provides” for Anne, Zorn writes, “does not liberate her but tightens her ideological bonds.” Although Anne gains fitful insights into the nature of these bonds, she is never able to break them. At the very end of the novel, when they leave a party together, Hamlin’s face “radiant with the triumph of satisfied vanity,” Anne again resembles a statue. “Are you cold, my love?” Hamlin asks when he grabs her hand; Anne shivers (III, 317).

“That Desire for Predominance” Each of the three Pygmalion novels I have discussed criticizes the union of politics and pedagogy that underlies Fichte’s influential advocacy of universal education by drawing out the tensions between the ideals of individual cultivation and the overriding interest of the state in conformity and consent. Controlled by the desires of the teachers and contingent upon the willing subjection of the students, the virtual schoolrooms we find in these novels suggest that the pedagogical contract between teacher and student is a deeply problematic model for the social contract between the citizen and the state. Pater’s many stories about teachers and students similarly foreground the relationship between education and politics. Much to his dismay, Pater was often depicted by his contemporaries as precisely the kind of would-be libertine master that Sacher-Masoch, Rachilde, and Lee expose in their novels. Teachers in his works tend to meet unpleasant ends, however. In The Renaissance alone the body count is staggering: the paradigmatic scholar and lover Abelard is castrated by the family of his student Heloïse; the painter Verocchio is “stunned” by the work of his enigmatic pupil Leonardo, and henceforth renounces his own art; Winckelmann’s culturally myopic tutor goes blind; Winckelmann himself is murdered on his way home to Germany while his would-be student Goethe waits for his arrival. School-based education is especially deadening. Winckelmann, for example, gets “nothing but an attempt at suppression from the professional guardians of learning” and claims “to have been his own teacher from first to last.”  The most dangerous teachers in Pater’s writings, like Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1888), whose “rank, unweeded eloquence” leaves his students without secure moral guidance, tend to be present to their students, whispering like the devil in their ear, while the best remain distant or disembodied figures. Even Socrates is

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too much the master in this regard: “If he did not do [his students] good,” Pater writes in Plato and Platonism (1893), “[he] must do them considerable harm.”  These examples might suggest that Pater was pessimistic about education, but they follow from the same decadent revision of libertine pedagogy that informs Sacher-Masoch, Rachilde, and Lee. Erasing the role of traditional teachers, Pater privileges the student and the disciple. Like Poe for Baudelaire or Baudelaire for Swinburne, Pater’s ideal teachers influence their students not by direct instruction but by allowing them to “find” themselves. Abelard and Winckelmann, whose pedagogical tales bookend The Renaissance, produce great cultural transformations precisely because they vanish as practicing educators. The “spirit” of the Renaissance emerges from the very schoolroom in which Abelard’s pedagogical transgressions take place: “And so from the rooms of this shadowy house by the Seine side we see that spirit going abroad, with its qualities already well defined, its intimacy, its languid sweetness, its rebellion, its subtle skill in dividing the elements of human passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the body.”  Pater laments the lost opportunity for a great friendship between Goethe and Winckelmann but also suggests that the teacher’s death enables Goethe to serve as a stimulus for the entire nineteenth century. The dead Winckelmann is for him “an abstract type of culture . . . possessing an inexhaustible gift of suggestion.”  No longer defined by his role as instructor, Winckelmann becomes a “spirit” like Abelard, who informs an entire cultural movement. Marius the Epicurean, Pater’s novel about decadent Rome, puts this educational principle into narrative practice. The novel traces what Pater calls the “ ‘aesthetic’ education” of his protagonist, detailing the awakening of his intellectual capacities under the influence of a series of nearly disembodied teachers who represent the major ideas of the period. In his youth, Marius is surrounded by palpable absences that stimulate his mind. His father, “dead ten years before,” becomes along with the other “urns of the dead in the family chapel” a kind of “genius” for him (I, 10). During a visit to the temple of Aesculapius, he is awakened from “an hour’s feverish dreaming” by a young priest who becomes the first “master of his spirit” (I, 31). Deeply impressed by the priest’s lesson, Marius feels that it “would have been sweet to be the servant of him who now sat beside him” (I, 31). But this teacher precludes such devotion by vanishing: “His visitor of the previous night he saw nowhere again” (I, 35). Marius is educated over the course of the novel by other dead, distant, and vanishing instructors—Marcus Aurelius, Cornelius Fronto, Ap-

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uleius, the Christians Cornelius and Cecilia— each of whom enables the student’s development by resisting, avoiding, or failing to achieve personal domination over him. The decisive teacher of Marius’s early years goes against the grain of this ideal, however, and serves as an allegory for the dangers of subjecting education to the aims of state power. In his first experience of formal schooling, Marius develops a bond with an older student named Flavian, who is assigned by their academy in Pisa to mentor his younger charge. Pater’s descriptions of Flavian evoke the familiar image of the decadent teacher. Resembling a fin-de-siècle dandy, he is strikingly handsome and set apart by his exquisite taste, a “brilliant youth who loved dress, and dainty food, and flowers, and seemed to have a natural alliance with, and claim upon, everything else which was physically select and bright” (I, 51). Part of a “natural aristocracy” of taste (I, 52), Flavian is familiar with the range of contemporary literature and introduces Marius to the works of Apuleius, to which Des Esseintes, as we saw in the last chapter, gave a prominent place in his library of decadent Latin classics, and which Pater compares to the fantastic tales of Gautier (I, 61). Flavian uses his charm and knowledge to dominate nearly every aspect of Marius’s life. Marius serves as his mentor’s scribe, exchanging his abilities as “an expert and elegant penman” for the “profit of Flavian’s really great intellectual capacities” (I, 51). Later, he collaborates with his teacher on a poem. This collaboration is not reciprocal, however. Flavian conceives of literature as a means to “make his way effectively in life” (I, 51), and Marius, whom he regards with “half-selfish care” (I, 52), is valuable only to the extent that he contributes to this end. Marius becomes “virtually his servant,” writing down the words of the master for posterity. The teacher’s “domination” of his student “was entire” (I, 50). Throughout the episode, Pater associates Flavian’s domination of Marius with the effects of military and political power. He borrows Flavian’s name from the dynastic line that reigned during the time of the novel, and suggests that the teacher mirrors the age: “To Marius . . . he counted for as it were an epitome of the whole pagan world, the depth of its corruption, and its perfection of form” (I, 53). But Flavian also mirrors the violent nationalists of the nineteenth century, a connection Pater draws, much as he does in his portrait of Du Bellay in The Renaissance, through a description of the teacher’s literary doctrines. Flavian wants to lead a new literary school, and his doctrines, which Pater terms Euphuism, are a means to that end. As Linda Dowling has argued, Flavian’s doctrines engage with an important Victorian debate about the relationship between language and the nation. By

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contrast with the Romantic philology of Herder, which regarded the spoken word as a living power binding the speaker to a historical people, new scientific theories circulating later in the century—promoted by Pater’s Oxford colleague Max Müller—treated language as an impersonal system of meanings analytically separable from any given user or historical moment. Regarding modern vernaculars as if they were dead languages like Greek or Latin, scientific philology broke the organic link between language and nation that Fichte, as I noted in the last chapter, describes as an “inner frontier.”  Dowling argues that Flavian’s doctrines follow from these scientific theories and point to Pater’s own repudiation of Romantic philology. Flavian does echo figures like Müller by taking what Pater calls a “scholarly” approach to language. He describes words as material things, comparing them to precious metals, and regards language as an impersonal archive of expressions (I, 96). But many of his other ideas recall the theories of linguistic nationalism that Dowling argues he implicitly critiques. Flavian shares Du Bellay’s fierce devotion to the vernacular, for example, and defends it using the same terms as the French poet does in Pater’s discussion of him in The Renaissance. For Flavian, modern poetry should seek the “rehabilitation of the mother tongue, then fallen so tarnished and languid,” hopelessly divided between a pedantic literary language and a lively colloquial idiom (I, 94). Writing is “a kind of sacred service” to language (I, 97) that seeks to unite the contemporary vernacular (through neologism, the use of popular forms, and an emphasis on direct expression) with the entire history of the language (through the use of archaism, exploitations of etymology, and the recovery of lost figurative expressions) (I, 96). Against the teachings of the prior generation, which regarded Greek models as the highest exemplars of literary art (compare Du Bellay’s rejection of Roman models), Flavian wants to represent everyday life in Rome and the uses of the Latin language in all its variety. Pater also underscores the similarity between Flavian and the pioneering linguistic nationalist Du Bellay with a telling analogy. In The Renaissance, Pater writes that the young poet and his older brother “passed their lives in daydreams of military glory,” and that Du Bellay turned to literature only because poor health prevented him from pursuing a career as a soldier. Flavian also dreams of military glory; however, he sees writing not as a substitute for warfare but as its very means. Flavian plans for literary fame the way “the young Caesar may have dreamed of campaigns” and imagines that writing can serve as “the apparatus of a war for himself.” Language is the “true ‘open field’ for charm and sway over men” (I, 96). “The secrets of utterance, of

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expression itself,” Pater writes, “of that through which alone any intellectual or spiritual power within one can actually take effect upon others, to overawe or charm them to one’s side, presented themselves to this ambitious lad in immediate connexion with that desire for predominance, for the satisfaction of which another might have relied on the acquisition and display of brilliant military qualities. In him, a fine instinctive sentiment of the exact value and power of words was connate with the eager longing for sway over his fellows” (I, 94). Flavian sees writing as a means of influencing others, of bending them to his will, and of achieving his desires, as well as a means of defending the mother tongue. Serving as the chief medium for his domination of Marius, as a figure for the military power of the Roman Empire, and as an anticipation of the linguistic nationalism of Du Bellay’s nineteenth-century heirs, Flavian’s literary doctrines connect the relationship between teacher and student in the novel to the nationalist politics of the fin de siècle. Like Des Esseintes, however, Flavian succeeds in neither his poetic nor his pedagogical ambitions. Pater frames this failure as a broader indictment of the forced alliance of education with nationalist politics. After Marius and Flavian attend the Ship of Isis ceremony in Pisa, the student notices that his teacher is falling ill: “There had been something feverish, perhaps, and like the beginning of a sickness, about his almost forced gaiety, in this sudden spasm of spring; and by the evening of the next day he was lying with a burning spot on his forehead, stricken, as was thought from the first, by the terrible new disease” (I, 110). Flavian’s sickness presages an outbreak of the Antonine Plague, which ravaged Rome during the period of the novel. Drawing on the collectively written second-century chronicle entitled the Historia Augustae, Pater weaves an account of this epidemic with the story of Flavian’s death. Gautier’s allusion in the “Notice” to the plague from Boccaccio’s Decameron, as I noted in Chapter 2, figures the recovery of community in the midst of social disorder. For Pater, the plague underscores the parallel between Flavian’s educational practices and political violence. It is a signifier of social control gone wrong rather than social disorder remedied by art. One of the first effects of the disease is a reversal of the relationship between teacher and student. Flavian had once imagined himself as the master of his destiny, but now “he seemed as it were to place himself at the disposal of the victorious foe” (I, 117–18). His “easy dominion” (I, 50) over Marius breaks down, and the student becomes his teacher’s custodian. Marius devotes himself to “relieving” the pains of Flavian’s illness (I, 117), much as Flavian had earlier taught him the importance of “relieving the ideal or poetic traits” of daily life (I, 53). Pater also associates

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the plague with Flavian’s literary doctrines. He notes that the plague was brought from the East by the returning troops of Lucius Verus, Marcus Aurelius’s co-emperor. Flavian’s figurative comparison between writing and war makes him a literal casualty of the military’s return. His death is the unintended consequence of his literary ambition, just as the plague is an accidental result of military triumph— an “unsuspected foe” disseminated throughout the Roman Empire by its army (I, 111). Flavian’s body becomes a “fortress of life” (I, 112) attacked by an invading adversary in the same manner as the decadent imperium. Pater extends this parallel to Flavian’s poem, an anonymous work from the period called the Pervigilium Veneris, which epitomizes his doctrine but also uncannily mirrors the imperial legions as a figurative vector for the plague. Flavian’s poem embodies the restoration of the past and the interest in colloquial forms that defines Euphuism by incorporating as its refrain “a snatch from a popular chorus” (I, 99), which Marius and Flavian hear in Pisa one evening. This refrain is at once ancient, the relic of a long-vanished Greek colony, and colloquial, echoing through the town as an expression of popular devotion. But Pater sounds an ominous note when he suggests that Flavian had not merely heard the refrain but “caught [it] . . . from the lips of the young men” (I, 104). Later, he describes the song as an ancient “strain” (I, 108) that Flavian had recently recovered (“caught,” in the first edition of the novel). Pater’s pun on two senses of the word “strain”— disease and music— establishes an analogy between the plague and the poem. Flavian incorporates the refrain within his poem much as he incorporates the plague within his body, linking his doctrine to the military’s spread of violence and disease. Like the plague, the refrain is passed from person to person; and like the plague, it has an uncertain origin but forcefully imposes itself. At first, Flavian is eager to “labour at his verses” despite his discomfort (I, 113), but when the disease increases its hold, he only infrequently attempts “to fashion out, without formal dictation, still a few more broken verses of his unfinished work,” as if in defiance of his body’s corruption (I, 117). The progress of the disease contrasts with the brokenness and incompleteness of Flavian’s poem: “But at length, delirium—symptom that the work of the plague was done, and the last resort of life yielding to the enemy—broke the coherent order of words and thought” (I, 117). Flavian succumbs to the disease when he allows Marius to put his poem aside. Literalizing the fear of foreign invasion that marked Du Bellay’s nationalistic defense of the French vernacular, the plague kills the dominating teacher and frees his student to continue the process of aesthetic educa-

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tion that was tellingly threatened by Marius’s first and only enrollment in a formal school.

Under the Influence In the opening pages of Degeneration, Nordau sketches out a “natural history” of fin-de-siècle artistic schools. He observes that these schools are marked by an abnormal tendency toward discipleship. “If any human activity is individualistic,” Nordau writes, “it is that of the artist.” Contemporary artists, however, incessantly form “close groups or schools” that unite around “definite aesthetic dogmas.”  The fin-de-siècle master is a monomaniac, whose unwavering devotion to his delusions makes him the pinnacle of wisdom to other degenerates. This master attracts “hysterical, neurasthenical” followers who imitate his aberrations. Victims of a pathological susceptibility to influence, they cannot help but gravitate toward the latest theory, giving the master’s monomania the appearance of a coherent doctrine. The extreme devotion of the disciples in turn attracts a larger group of what Nordau calls “intellectual eunuchs,” who lack the power to produce their own ideas “but are quite able to imitate the process of production.”  “Unscrupulous copyists and plagiarists,” they are drawn to an aesthetic school by the lure of fashion and financial gain, and “without loss of time set about disseminating counterfeit copies of it.” These illegitimate copies popularize the movement, drawing ever-larger crowds of followers and corrupting both young and old. Nordau imagines a veritable “congregation” of adherents, rallying unthinkingly around the degenerate “sect”: young people who follow the multitude wherever it goes; superficial poseurs who do not want to seem behind the times; “decrepit graybeards” seeking desperately to appear young. Unlike healthy artists, for whom imitation is a means of conveying emotions or the principles of law and morality, the artists of the fin de siècle imitate from a constitutional inability to do otherwise. Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is undoubtedly the most important decadent educational narrative. As I noted in the last chapter, the novel cannily demonstrates the workings of mimetic canonization, showing Dorian’s transformation into a “decadent subject” through his (and Wilde’s) imitation of recognized decadent masters. The educational themes of the novel similarly draw upon all the major elements of the form that we have defined so far: the “fatal book”; the libertine conflation of sex and teaching;

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the Faustian contract (albeit one not explicitly made with a teacher). Lord Henry is akin to the many would-be libertine instructors in decadent texts; as I noted in the last chapter, he even has a copy of Manon Lescaut prominently displayed in his home. But the novel redirects the decadent critique of nineteenth-century educational reform. Sacher-Masoch, Rachilde, Lee, and Pater all challenge the association of the school and the project of national unity by demonstrating the nefarious intentions of the teacher and the lure of subjection that they represent. The Picture of Dorian Gray also critiques the student, who seeks out influence with the dogged determination of one of Nordau’s “hysterical” followers. While Nordau sees the desire for imitation as a form of compulsion, however, Wilde underscores Dorian’s complicity with his teachers, a complicity that recalls the purported power of universal education to transform its students into consenting subjects, fashioned, as Fichte suggests, to will only what the teacher desires. Basil and Lord Henry are highly effective educators, even (perhaps especially, in the case of Lord Henry) when they deny their pedagogical aims; but as Wilde shows, their influence depends at every point on the active participation of the student. Since its 1890 publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Wilde’s novel has been read as a tale of influence on the model of the decadent Pygmalion stories I have discussed. Dorian is the student, shaped from without by Basil’s praise and Lord Henry’s paradoxes, and decisively transformed by his encounter first with a painting and then with a book. “For Wilde,” writes Zhang Longxi, in a passage that summarizes a long-standing critical consensus, “influence seems to be the power of an older and stronger personality that hinders and even cripples the personality of the younger, hence a power either to be shunned or countervailed.”  In his first meeting with Dorian, Lord Henry sets out a theory of influence that seems to confirm this interpretation and to echo the broader decadent revision of libertine pedagogy. “All influence is immoral,” he tells Dorian. “Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him” (183). Influence, in Lord Henry’s analogy, produces imitations rather than individuals; the teacher “hydraulically” fills the empty student with his or her thoughts, passions, virtues, and transgressions; even the student’s sins are borrowed. It is one of the central ironies of Wilde’s novel, at least according to this familiar reading, that Lord Henry becomes precisely the “immoral” instructor that his first pas-

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sage unmasks: “The discourse denouncing influence,” writes Lee Edelman, here “becomes a potent influence.”  Etymologically, the word “influence” refers to an inflowing (from the Latin influere), originally of astral fluids that were said to affect human actions. To this extent, at least, it conforms to Lord Henry’s characterization of the process. Wilde’s characters claim at crucial moments in the novel to control their influence over others, or to recognize the deliberate influence others have over them. Almost every character uses the word “domination” to describe their relationships to other characters. Basil tells Dorian that he was “dominated, soul, brain, and power” by him (264). Lord Henry resolves to “dominate” Dorian, much as Dorian himself had dominated Basil, and excuses Dorian’s cruelty toward Sibyl Vane by claiming that women “love being dominated” (255). Reflecting on Basil’s love for him, Dorian wonders whether he “would ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend” (265). Alan Campbell leaves Dorian feeling “dominated by him” (312). But as Wilde told the court during his libel case, in defense of his novel, “I don’t think there is any influence, good or bad, from one person over another . . . it is quite impossible psychologically.”  Wilde made this statement under the pressure of cross-examination, but it provides a suggestive gloss on the workings of influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Influence, he suggests, is not something one imposes on another, like physical force; it always requires a willing collaborator. From the beginning of the novel, Dorian is a model collaborator, who seems all too eager to give himself up to the power of external forces: an artwork, a book, a teacher, a doctrine— even, as he claims after killing Basil, the movement of the celestial bodies to which ancient astrologers traced the vicissitudes of human character: “Some red star had come too close to the earth,” he tells himself (301). It has long been argued that Wilde’s novel repudiates Pater and his influence, but it in fact embodies Pater’s core insight into the student’s role in the process of education. At every point in the narrative, Wilde underscores Dorian’s active reception of influence, despite the fact that, in a telling departure from the Paterian ideal, he denies his complicity and never accepts responsibility for the choices he makes. A corrupt echo of Baudelaire’s discovery of Poe, Dorian accepts the received wisdom of his teachers as hidden elements of his “nature” which education only reveals and over which he has no control. This relationship to influence is dramatically evident in Dorian’s initial glimpse at Basil’s portrait. As many critics have noted, the portrait may depict the sitter, but it is in fact the joint product of Basil’s brush and

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Lord Henry’s talk, which produces the peculiar expression in Dorian’s face that the painter deems “wonderful” (185), and which allows him to finish his work. For Dorian, however, the painting—much like the “Yellow Book,” as we saw in the last chapter— seems to reveal him to himself: “When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time” (189). The painting is a revelation of his soul, a kind of “diary,” as he tells Basil later (296). In both cases, a work of art produced by other hands strikes Dorian as a revelation of his deepest nature. When he first notices the fatal changes in his portrait, Dorian decides to hide the incriminating evidence in his old schoolroom. Even as he comes to wield influence over others, Dorian remains in thrall to school, a perpetual student witnessing (while really bringing about) the degradation of his soul. The fate of the portrait is only one example of the way Wilde shows the influence of people and artworks on Dorian to be mediated by the student’s problematic reception of his teacher’s words. Dorian’s initial response to Lord Henry’s criticism of influence, for example, succinctly reveals the student’s self-deception: “He was dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. The few words that Basil’s friend had said to him—words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with willful paradox in them—had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses” (184). Dorian repeats his teacher’s figures for influence— echoes and music—but attributes them to his own internal development. Lord Henry claimed that influence makes a person into the “echo of someone else’s music”; Dorian thinks Lord Henry’s words “touched some secret chord” within him. And while Lord Henry claims that the teacher transfers his thoughts and passions into the student, Dorian imagines that these thoughts and passions are his own. What Lord Henry frankly treats as libertine manipulation, Dorian imagines as self-discovery. Dorian reiterates this idea at other points in the narrative. Lord Henry, he believes, has “disclosed to him life’s mystery” (185); he has “explained me to myself” (256). Even Lord Henry’s account of influence is the product of influence: in Monsieur Vénus, a book Wilde knew well, Raoule compares influence with an “echo” and “vibrations” (MVF 42; MVE 41). Dorian’s discovery of himself is an imitation of an imitation— ironically, of a decadent metaphor for the effects of influence on the student. Wilde also foregrounds the student’s reception in the most famous image of influence in the novel: the moment in Basil’s garden when Lord Hen-

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ry’s increasing sway over Dorian is suggested by the swaying effect produced by a bee pollinating a flower. Listening to Lord Henry’s paean to youth, beauty, and the New Hedonism, Dorian drops the flowers he had gathered in amazement: “The spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. After a time the bee flew away. He saw it creeping into the stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus. The flower seemed to quiver, and then suddenly swayed gently to and fro” (187). Critics typically read this passage as an image for Lord Henry’s pedagogical dominance over his student: the bee’s sexualized penetration of the flower figures Dorian’s reception of his teacher’s seductive influence. The flower seems to act autonomously (to quiver and sway), but it only responds to the movements of the force (Lord Henry) that occupies it. With his “pointed brown beard” (175) and infamous “yellow” book, Lord Henry does figuratively approximate a “furry bee” that penetrates Dorian. The word “sway,” moreover, refers both to a certain movement and to the effect of influence. While Dorian believes he is simply watching the bee, it is clear that the bee “sways” him as well, both erotically and intellectually. Much as bees take pollen from flowers and leave the pollen of other flowers behind, finally, Lord Henry both watches Dorian and contaminates him with his ideas— a contamination figured in the bee’s passage from the lilac to the convolvulus. But Wilde’s imagery can also be read as an account of the student’s use of influence. The bee is a common classical metaphor for the student. Seneca’s widely imitated Epistle 84, “On Gathering Ideas”—which the classically trained Wilde surely knew—uses the image of the bee to describe an ideal process of incorporating intellectual influences. According to Seneca, we should copy the example of bees, which gather nectar from a range of flowers and then transform what they have collected into honey. We should likewise blend and arrange what we take from each book we read “into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.”  The best students follow the example of the bees, moving from flower to flower and actively gathering ideas in search of edification. Although Lord Henry consistently compares Dorian to a flower—praising his “rose-red youth” and “rose-white boyhood”

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(184) and later contrasting the fleeting nature of his youth with the regeneration of flowers—Wilde also describes Dorian in ways that evoke bees. Just before the famous pollination image, when he becomes overwhelmed by Lord Henry’s talk in Basil’s studio, Dorian retreats to the garden. Lord Henry follows him and finds his student “burying his face in the great cool lilacblossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine.” Startled by his mentor, Dorian finds himself attracted to Lord Henry’s “cool, white, flower-like hands” (185). In passing from the cool white flowers to the cool white hands, Dorian enacts Seneca’s metaphor, moving from one “flower” to another. The familiar notion that the teacher penetrates the student with his influence is here belied by the image of Dorian as a bee collecting and blending influences according to his own inclinations. Education is a form of cross-pollination that makes the student’s willing reception a condition of the teacher’s penetration. In much the same way that Dorian finds Lord Henry’s ideas when he experiences the revelation of his soul, he also, as Patrice Hannon has noted, transforms his teacher’s throwaway epigrams into definitive lessons. What Lord Henry offers as mere witty banter becomes for Dorian a theory of life to be followed rigorously: “Dorian is not listening to theories but creating them,” Hannon writes. The student makes himself into an imitation of the master, guiding his actions by Lord Henry’s words. After Lord Henry presents Dorian with one of his many aphoristic warnings against marriage, for example, Dorian tells him, “I am putting it into practice, as I do everything you say” (54). When Lord Henry comments on the relationship between artists and their work, Dorian tells him that it must be true, “if you say it” (64). Dorian imitates Lord Henry’s cynicism and takes to influencing others, much as his teacher had sought to influence him. As we saw in the last chapter, he makes the “Yellow Book” Lord Henry sends him a guide to life, imitating its hero and fashioning his tastes on the model it provides. “Many movements begin with the appearance of the Disciples,” Wilde writes in an unpublished epigram, “and end with the arrival of the Founder.”  Dorian similarly internalizes Basil’s idolatry and his moralism, finding a series of mutually contradictory life lessons in the painter’s work. The portrait is at once a mimetic image of his beauty and a warning against sin. For example, Dorian tells Basil that the painting lends credence to Lord Henry’s idealization of youth: “I know, now, that when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that” (190). But when he first recognizes the changes in the painting, Dorian imag-

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ines that it teaches him to be a better person: “The portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to us all. . . . Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls” (250). Basil’s painting encourages and discourages hedonism, teaches Dorian to love and to disdain his beauty, to reject Sibyl Vane and to make amends to her. Even after he has decided to treat his portrait as a pleasurable spectacle rather than a moral lesson, Dorian continues to believe that the work carries a lesson. Now the painting corrupts rather than purifies, allows the viewer to be bad rather than exhorting him to be good. Dorian insists that people are responsible for their own choices—“Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it,” he says (329)—but he blames the artwork for his downfall. After Sibyl’s death, Dorian finds in the portrait a justification for leading a hedonistic life, much as he earlier found in it a warning against sin: “The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all” (257). The work here becomes a kind of alibi, deflecting responsibility from the spectator to the painter or to the work. “It has destroyed me,” he tells Basil (298). And at the end of the book, he continues to posit the same cause: “Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive him that. It was the portrait that had done everything” (355). The only thing these contradictory claims share is the conviction that the painting, like Lord Henry’s epigrams, holds lessons for life. Despite the pervasive sense that Dorian has been corrupted by art, only Dorian makes this claim. Dorian accuses both his teachers of pedagogical malpractice, though the charge rings hollow in the light of Wilde’s repeated insistence on his crucial role in the process of his education. Influences that once seemed to come from within are projected back onto the teachers who promoted them. Dorian briefly imagines that Basil might help him “resist Lord Henry’s influence, and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament” (269), but in the end he blames the painter for his unhappiness: “You only taught me to be vain” (260). He comes to a similar conclusion about the “Yellow Book.” In their last conversation, Dorian blames Lord Henry for the course of his life: “You poisoned me with a book once” (352). Dorian elevates his friends into masters and then blames them when the advice he imputes to them does not produce the effects he imagined. Lord Henry’s reply to Dorian’s accusation is telling. “As for being poisoned by a book,” he says, “there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence on action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books

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that show the world its own shame” (352). Wilde, as I noted above, would echo this sentiment in his defense of The Picture of Dorian Gray at the first trial, and had earlier used similar terms to defend the novel in the press. Art, like a teacher, can have good or bad effects, but these effects follow from the choices of the student, not only from the content of the work or the lesson. Wilde’s characters all suffer on some level from the effects of influence. Yet this suffering is self-imposed, the product of their belief in influence, and not an alchemical transformation of teaching into practical consequences. Like Dorian himself, influence in the novel always returns to the schoolroom, its politics an oblique commentary on the nature of Fichte’s “miniature state.” Dorian’s misrecognized complicity in his education underscores the difference between the pedagogical contracts that so many decadent students strike with their teachers and the reasoned consent that social contract theory regards as the foundation of political association. At a historical moment when Fichte’s intellectual progeny were insisting that the most important political bonds arise from an identity we do not normally choose—nationality—Wilde reminds his readers that no lesson, whether pedagogical or political, can have an effect without the consent of the student.

chapter 5

A Republic of (Nothing but) Letters Some Versions of Decadent Community

In a world of brutal and oppressed life, decadence becomes the refuge of a potentially better life by renouncing its allegiance to this one and to its culture. —Theodor Adorno, “Spengler After the Decline”

Attachment at a Distance I noted at the beginning of Chapter 3 that Des Esseintes leaves Paris for the isolated “ark” he creates in the countryside out of an acute disenchantment with contemporary communities. The last of his line, he lacks a family, feels no connection with his old friends, can no longer accept the teachings of the church, and regards nationalism with unmitigated disdain. But this does not mean he gives up entirely on the possibility of sympathetic communication with others. Indeed, he shares with the patriots he despises a sense that reading and writing are tied to the formation of communities. The works Des Esseintes chooses for his library offer him a sense of “intellectual fellowship.” He is drawn to writers whose state of mind is “analogous to his own”; their books carry him, “as if supported by a friend,” into new realms of sensation. The “last book in his library” is an anthology of prose poems he selects and has privately printed. The prose poem, Des Esseintes states, is the purest form of literature, “the essential oil of art,” and the collection he assembles leads him to imagine a kind of essential oil of community. Composed of works crafted with an eye to even the smallest detail, this book would serve as the

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medium for an “intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration between a dozen persons of superior intelligence scattered across the world [éparses dans l’univers].” Against conventional groupings based on family, class, religion, or nationality, Des Esseintes dreams of a dispersed international community united only by an intimation of fellowship among readers and writers who never meet. He describes a republic of nothing but letters. Des Esseintes’s vision of community has its source in Baudelaire, who, as we saw in Chapter 1, addressed himself to an audience of “unknown sympathizers,” an elite “family” of taste. Gautier and Swinburne praise Baudelaire for his ser vice to a community of outsiders, drawing upon the language of classical republican political theory as an answer to the rise of bourgeois individualism. In the 1880s and 1890s, such visions move to the very center of the decadent enterprise. Against the putatively organic national community, defined by fi xed borders and permanent affiliations, decadent writers imagine the prospect of what Bruce Robins has called “attachment at a distance” in the production, transmission, and (above all) reception of texts. In this chapter, I look at three works that epitomize this ideal: Vernon Lee’s study of the Renaissance, Euphorion (1884); Walter Pater’s unfinished historical novel Gaston de Latour (1888); and Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished pornographic novel The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser (1896). Focusing on moments of transition at the beginning and end of the Renaissance, these three works elaborate upon Des Esseintes’s dream of “intellectual fellowship” forged through acts of reading and writing. The idea of a spiritual or intellectual elite separated out from the mass of society is pervasive in Western thought, from the early Christian hermits (much admired by Des Esseintes) to the Coleridgean clerisy, but decadent writers pioneer ideas about community and affiliation that social theorists have associated with twentieth-century media and consumer cultures. Des Esseintes’s “spiritual communion” anticipates such contemporary phenomena as the virtual communities organized around common interests on the Internet, the “reflexive communities” of taste that Scott Lash argues are a central phenomenon of late modernity, and the “mass-mediated sodalities” that Arjun Appadurai finds in the circulation of migrants and electronic media images that defines globalization. The decadents remain tied to print culture, however, and tend to imagine new communities as atavistic returns to older manners of reading and writing, not utopian breaks from tradition. The decadent movement emerged when the Habermasian public sphere was becoming ir-

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revocably fragmented. Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers of all stripes increasingly addressed audiences that were at once predictable and largely unknown to them. Benefiting from higher levels of literacy and easier dissemination of the written word—a result of industrialized printing and the repeal of burdensome taxes and censorship laws—publishers targeted specialized market segments, and readers widely separated in space and time gained access to cultural materials that in the past would not otherwise have been available to them. No longer embodying the generalized bourgeois public sphere that Habermas finds in the eighteenth century, the audience for literature came to resemble the self-selecting group Michael Warner has called a “public.” A public is a relationship among friends and strangers constituted by the circulation of discourses. Unlike other forms of imagined community, such as nation and social class, which claim members whether they know it or not, publics arise from discrete acts of textual production, circulation, and reception. They consist in something more than just the relationship between writers and their empirical audience, however, since both parties presume “an ongoing space of encounter for discourse” that shapes their respective activities. Fundamentally reflexive, publics are at once produced by and productive of discourses as well as the various kinds of attention they receive. Warner uses the term “counterpublic” to describe a public that defines itself against a dominant public—the nation, the market, the professions, or the emerging mass media, for example. “Counterpublics are ‘counter,’ ” he writes, “to the extent that they try to supply different ways of imagining stranger sociability and its reflexivity; as publics, they remain oriented to stranger circulation in a way that is not just strategic, but constitutive of membership and its affects.”  Warner’s chief example of this kind of sociability is the queer counterpublic made up of the institutions, periodicals, and speech genres that constitute the modern gay and lesbian public sphere, but the term describes the decadent movement as well. As I noted in Chapter 3, the two emerging counterpublics shared key influences, styles of appreciation, and communal ideals, as well as several major figures, and a foundational association of nonnormative sexuality with sociopolitical critique. Like the contemporary queer counterpublic, the decadent counterpublic found its center of gravity in publications that stood in a reflexive relationship to the group they addressed. In London, there were periodicals like the Yellow Book and the Savoy (Beardsley was the art editor for both publications), as well as small presses and bookshops run by John Lane and Leonard Smithers; other cities had similar outlets for decadent works and ideas.

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Even more pertinently, as I have suggested throughout this book, decadent writers assume the kind of ongoing space for oppositional discourse that, for Warner, defines a counterpublic sphere. They refer to a canon of classically “decadent” writers (Petronius, Sade, Poe, Baudelaire), retell familiar stories (Salome, Narcissus, Pygmalion), allude to a stock of “decadent” historical moments (imperial Rome, Renaissance Italy, eighteenth-century France), and criticize contemporary society in terms of a restricted selection of political alternatives. Mimetic canonization brings new writers into the fold. Often treated merely as a set of common themes— or dismissed as plagiaristic appropriations—these literary materials and practices are the means by which the decadents participate in the decadent counterpublic. They actively construct the discursive framework of decadence, extending its range of themes and allusions even as they recirculate a recognizable body of existing materials. Like the imaginary decadent poet in Max Beerbohm’s comic portrait “Enoch Soames” (1919), who travels to the future only to find that the sole reference to his life and works is the story Beerbohm writes about him, decadence exists in and through a network of texts. The decadent counterpublic, like all publics, was at once empirical and imaginary. Although there were in fact small coteries of self-selecting decadent readers and writers in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, the actual readership for decadent writing was not as elite or oppositional as the decadents often present it to be. Middle-class readers bought the Yellow Book (which, despite its tarnished reputation after Wilde’s trials, was never exclusively decadent), and sought out works published by Lane and Smithers; publishers marketed their works to these audiences as well as to more elite readers. Many writers connected with the decadent movement— Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, and Stéphane Mallarmé, among others—wrote for mass-market magazines or gave widely attended public lectures. Arthur Symons’s seminal 1893 essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature” first appeared in the decidedly popular Harper’s Magazine. It would be wrong to take these facts as evidence that decadence was merely a marketing category, which allowed writers to profit from the symbolic capital of their apparently elitist rejection of the mass public. There is more than a grain of truth to this characterization, as recent scholarship has demonstrated, but it should not overshadow the social and political implications of the ways in which decadent writers imagined community. Drawing upon a body of decadent themes, alluding to canonical decadent books, and speaking to an audience

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of decadent sympathizers together make up a method of composition, a means of critique, and a gesture of affiliation.

Decadent Cosmopolitanism I have noted throughout this book that decadent writers were strongly cosmopolitan in taste and outlook. Baudelaire promoted foreign artists like Poe and Wagner as a counter to the rise of American-style democracy and French cultural nationalism. Swinburne looked to French and American writers not only to shock his insular contemporaries but also to promote the ideals of cosmopolitan republicanism. The decadent collection takes aim at the closed form of the nation. In an often-quoted passage from “The Critic as Artist” (1891), Wilde argues that the practice of aesthetic criticism can lead to a new spirit of international peace: “Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element.”  Cosmopolitanism is not inconsistent with deep national attachment, and recent scholarship has demonstrated that even mainstream writers in the nineteenth century were far more engaged with cosmopolitan ideas than traditional stereotypes of the period have allowed. But decadent cosmopolitanism departs from familiar ways of defining international affiliations in the period, which tended to presume the foundational principles of the nation-state and national belonging that decadent writers despised. As I noted in Chapter 3, Benedict Anderson argues that print culture enabled the formation of national consciousness by giving the spoken vernaculars the concrete status of Latin. For the decadents, the circulation of print underscores the failures of the national model, and points toward new forms of communal attachment. Vernon Lee’s Euphorion is little read today, even among specialists, but it strikingly exemplifies the way decadent writers use the workings of literary production and reception to think outside the national imaginary. Composed of seven studies on Renaissance topics, from Elizabethan drama to pastoral poetry, portrait sculpture, and the theme of courtly love, Lee’s book follows the scholarly works of John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater in its imaginative recreation of the Renaissance in Italy. Lee differs from her

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predecessors, however, in depicting the period not as an age of famous rulers and artistic masterpieces but as an age marked by the circulation, hybridization, and contamination of cultural and political forms. New literary genres and artistic practices arise out of the “cosmopolitan chaos” of the Middle Ages and then circulate in England and on the Continent, where they are taken up and recast by diverse groups and artists. Lee’s Renaissance is not a well-defined period but a precariously maintained “condition,” defined at every level by dispersion, discontinuity, and uneven development, evident only in scattered towns, and never without some admixture of the medieval: “In the North the Renaissance is dotted about amidst the stagnant Middle Ages; in Italy, the Middle Ages intersect and interrupt the Renaissance here and there” (31). Carried along by the armies, scholars, troubadours, and manuscripts traversing Europe over the centuries, and founded on the circulation and reworking of older cultural materials, the Renaissance is a mirror for the decadent counterpublic. While Pater casts the Renaissance as a return of classical influences, Lee finds its origin in the Middle Ages and in the crossing of European national traditions. At the beginning of the second chapter, she describes “a rude mystery play” about Pope Alexander VI (a member of the notorious Borgia family) performed by the troops of Charles VIII during their occupation of Rome (57). This play is “no clerkly allegorical morality; no mouthing and capering marketplace farce” but a means of giving dramatic form to rumors of murder and lust that were circulating in Italy when the troops arrived (57). In staging this play, the troops find their medieval traditions transformed by foreign contact. Mystery plays depicted biblical scenes and were performed according to the liturgical calendar. This performance, however, is secular, impromptu, and concerns a contemporary Italian story. It retains the form of the mystery play but opens it to new subject matter and new conditions of performance. No longer simply French and medieval, it is a cosmopolitan hybrid made up of native and foreign elements, a product at once of the Middle Ages and the emerging Renaissance. This mystery play exemplifies the origins and spread of Renaissance sentiments. It also underscores Lee’s strong resistance in the book to nationalism. Lee argues that the formation and circulation of the Renaissance depended on democratic, secular, and nonhierarchical communities, suggesting that the rigid ecclesiastical and social hierarchies of the Middle Ages hindered civilization by boxing it in. The Italian city-state is the idealized alternative to these forms: “Feudalism stamped out civilization; monasticism warped it; in the open country, it was burnt, trampled on, and uprooted; in the cloister it

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withered and shrank and perished; only within the walls of the city, protected from the storm without, and yet in the fresh atmosphere of life, could it develope, flourish, and bear fruit” (35). The nation, to which Lee refers anachronistically but with a clear polemical purpose, resembles a feudal monarchy, not the city-state, for it encloses people and texts within strict borders. Whereas the city-state “grows from within” and becomes weaker as it moves outward from its center, the kingdom and the nation become stronger as they expand and push against external pressures. “The city ceases to be a city,” Lee writes, “when extended over hundreds of miles; the nation becomes all the more a nation for being compressed towards a central point” (44). Lee values the city-state not for its organic unity or its embodiment of some abstract political ideal but for its radical instability. Although it is not itself a cosmopolitan political form, its incidental openness to foreign contamination enables the spread of Renaissance civilization. Like so many stories in decadence, this one begins with the fall of the Roman Empire. Lee argues that the origins of the city-state can be traced to the failure of the Teutonic invaders who overran the tottering Roman Empire to impose their own language and social order on the native inhabitants of Italy. As a result, Italian culture never came under the sway of feudalism, developing instead around the free and secular form of the city-states. But because the city-states lacked the hereditary or ecclesiastic authorities that ensured stability in other political forms, they were inevitably divided from within by power struggles. Disputes between rival city-states led their rulers to assemble mercenary armies from northern nations. These armies soon became invading forces, taking control from local princes. Like the Teutonic invaders, however, these forces were conquered by the vanquished Italian culture and brought the Renaissance with them when they returned to the north. The Italian city-states enabled the cosmopolitan dissemination of the Renaissance precisely because they failed to maintain the kind of political unity that would later come to shape the national identities of France and England. They cohered long enough to purify medieval culture, and then broke apart. The cultural productivity of the Italian city-states exemplifies Lee’s broader argument that civilization benefits from the disintegration of national bonds and the contamination of literary and artistic forms by imitation and adaptation. “Civilization cannot spread,” she writes, “so long as it is contained within a national mould, and only a vanquished nation can civilize its victors” (45). The full development of culture depends upon the defeat and foreign occupation of nations. In a striking image from the first chapter of the book, entitled

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“The Sacrifice,” Lee depicts Italy as a kind of sacrificial meal that nourishes the victorious nations: “Italy was a vast storehouse, sheltered from all the dangers of mediaeval destruction; in which, while all other nations were blindly and fiercely working out their national existence, the inheritance of Antiquity and the produce of the earliest modern civilization had been peaceably garnered up. When the storehouse was full, its gates had to be torn open and its riches plundered and disseminated by the intellectual starvelings of the North; thus only could the rest of mankind feed on these riches, regain and develope their mental life” (45–46). This image turns a familiar nineteenth-century conceptualization of national unity on its head. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, decadents and nationalists alike adopted the republican language of patriotic sacrifice to describe the nature of the political bond. In both cases, sacrifice functions rhetorically as an example of what Kenneth Burke calls “tragic dignification”: the argument for a cause based on another’s willingness to suffer for it. Lee calls upon patriotism to sacrifice itself for the good of transnational civilization. Unified political forms must suffer so that literary and artistic forms can thrive. As for Baudelaire and other decadents, martyrdom here is the founding gesture for a transformation of community. What Lee calls “the murder of the Italian Renaissance” (54) underpins a broader argument in Euphorion about the necessary cosmopolitanism of cultural forms. Lee argues that the culture of Elizabethan England— an example with obvious nationalist implications for her readers—was decisively shaped by travelers who visited Italy and carried their “first touch of foreign influence” back home with them (61). “All the intellectual wealth of England remained to be created,” she writes, “but it could not be created out of nothing. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon could not be produced out of the half-effete and scattered fragments of Chaucer, of Scotus, of Wycliffe. The materials on which English genius was to work must be sought abroad” (62). Elizabethan literature is a cosmopolitan alloy, a “strange Corinthian brass,” molded from “heterogeneous remnants, classical, Italian, Saxon, and Christian” (64). Lee’s account of Arthurian romance similarly stresses English hybridity. Lee traces these legends to Ireland, and notes, in another version of her sacrificial model of culture, that they became popular when the Celtic people were “dispossessed of their last strongholds by Saxons and Normans” (283). Translated and circulated by the victorious powers, the Arthurian legends soon became fashionable throughout Europe. These legends were cosmopolitan and culturally hybrid from the start, however, arising from a

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mixture of Celtic lore and the influence of “Roman colonists and Christian priests” (284). Like the knights-errant they glorify, the Arthurian legends are always already wandering, and by the time they enter Renaissance poetry they are inextricably twined with other medieval epic cycles, a “spectre vapour arisen from the mixture of Kelt and Teuton, of Frank and Moslem” (297). The most stolidly British traditions are thoroughly contaminated with foreign materials. Lee charts the rise of new communities out of this process of literary and political contamination. In her extended accounts of epic and what she calls “outdoor poetry” (encompassing lyric descriptions of nature and pastoral borrowings from folk culture), she traces the emergence of Renaissance sentiments to literary forms that, like the Arthurian legends, had lost all traces of national origin through cosmopolitan circulation. Moving from one cultural context to another, becoming the medium of high and popular culture, and emerging alternately as written and oral traditions, these literary forms are a meeting point for otherwise divided classes and national groups. Not unlike the decadent counterpublic, the Renaissance begins where communities based on national traditions end. Lee’s discussion of epic, a genre closely associated since antiquity with the delineation of political identity, focuses on the movement of Carolingian romance from medieval France to the Renaissance poetry of Boiardo and Ariosto. As these stories were imitated and altered, they rose and fell in fame, switching from written to oral forms and then back again, and in the process losing their national character: “Every epic cycle, and every tale belonging thereunto, was gradually adulterated, mingled with, swamped by, some other cycle or tale . . . till at last all mythical significance, all historical meaning, all national character, all psychological reality, were lost in the chaotic result” (275). Cosmopolitan circulation strips these stories of their national association but not their artistic appeal. When, for example, the newly fashionable Arthurian legends displaced Carolingian romances in the medieval imaginary, the lower classes eagerly took up the discarded tales and made them “democratic” (301). No longer the property of one social group or poetic tradition, they belong to anyone who wants to make use of them: “While troubadours and minnesingers were busy with the court of Arthur, the Carolingian epics seem to have been mainly sung about by illiterate jongleurs, and to have busied the pens of prose hackwriters for the benefit of townsfolk” (300–301). In a passage that echoes Des Esseintes’s praise for the hybrid Latin styles of Petronius and

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Apuleius, Lee describes the way in which popular artists reproduced these tales for the market place by retelling them in local dialects: “French jongleurs singing in impossible French-Italian; Italian jongleurs singing in impossible French; Paduan penny-a-liners writing Carolingian cyclical novels in French, not of Paris, assuredly, but of Padua— a comical and most hideous jabber of hybrid languages” (301). Lee tells a similar story about outdoor poetry. Like epic tales, depictions of nature and rural life move from courtly poets and their aristocratic audiences to the lower classes, where they are circulated by tradesmen and popular artists. “Vagabond ballad singers and story-tellers,” Lee writes, “creatures who wander from house to house, mending broken pottery, collecting rags or selling small pedlar’s wares—were the clothesmen who carried about these bits of tarnished poetic finery” (147). The lower orders transform these courtly traditions. Tales and stock images are split and joined to others, names and events are forgotten or invented, meanings are lost, and songs are jumbled together and rearranged. Thoroughly democratized, outdoor poetry becomes “a perfectly substantive and independent form of art, with beauties and refinements of its own” (150). Like epic, outdoor poetry produces a community through its circulation. The peasants who reconfigure courtly lyrics and the crowds that gather around the jongleurs in the marketplace are temporary communities formed around artistic taste, made possible by the cosmopolitan circulation and reconfiguration of anonymous literary forms. Having lost nearly every trace of their national and class origins, epic and outdoor poetry become newly attractive to aristocratic poets in the Renaissance. Lee focuses on two rather idiosyncratic figures—Luigi Pulci and Lorenzo de’ Medici—who play a role in Lee’s narrative akin to that of Poe or Baudelaire for the decadent counterpublic. Both poets rediscover seemingly lost genres by mingling with the crowds in the marketplace and retelling old stories for yet another community of taste. Producing new works out of the creative reception of old works, they mirror the practices of decadent writers. Pulci, for example, rediscovers epic “among the butchers and pork-shops, the fishmongers and frying booths of the market” (304), and incorporates the genre in his own poetry. His fifteenth-century epic Morgante is “the reproduction of the joint impression received from the absurd, harum-scarum, unpractical world of chivalry of the poet, and the real world of prose, of good-humoured buffoonish coarseness with which the itinerant poet was surrounded. The paladins are no Don Quixotes, the princesses no Dulcineas, the battles are

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real battles; but the language is that of Florentine wool-workers, housewives, cheese-sellers, and ragamuffins, crammed with the language of the marketplace, its heavy jokes and perpetual sententious aphorism” (306). This epic is a “hybrid construction” in the sense defined by Bakhtin: uttered in a single voice, but containing multiple voices and perspectives. A textual embodiment of the Renaissance, it blends high and low, old and new, native and foreign, into an original unity for a newly constituted audience. Lee reserves her highest praise for Lorenzo de’ Medici. At once poet and prince, he embodies the relationship between literature and politics. For Lee, Lorenzo is the first modern poet and the originator of Renaissance pastoral, who combines the refinements of high art with the vitality of folk traditions. Like the songs he collects and produces, he is of “mixed nature, or rather the nature in many heterogeneous bits, of the man of letters who is artistic almost to the point of being an actor, natural in every style because morally connected with no style at all” (153). Lorenzo’s masterpiece, “Nencia da Barberino,” much like the work of Luigi Pulci, takes its inspiration from the marketplace. Lee imagines the aristocratic Lorenzo elbowing his way through crowds of peasants in the Florentine streets searching for inspiration. His poem is “half narrative, half drama,” made up of “little fragments imitated from the peasant poetry” but shaped according to the canons of high art (156). Lorenzo writes in the voice and from the perspective of a peasant, entering by way of imagination into sympathetic community with the lower classes. This community, Lee makes clear, exists only in and through the poem. Lorenzo was “a heartless man” who pillaged the savings of the peasants who were his literary inspiration (165). His taste for their songs, however, engenders a cosmopolitan community based at once on native and foreign influences, oral and written forms, and high and popular art. Lee’s critical practice in Euphorion mirrors that of the hybrid Renaissance forms whose history the book traces, and imagines community along similarly democratic and cosmopolitan lines. Although she lived most of her adult life lived in Italy and did not visit England until she was in her twenties, Lee wrote all her major works in English and participated actively in the public discourse surrounding aestheticism and decadence for much of her career. She was a Victorian writer not by birth or geography but by choice, joining herself to the literary avant-garde in and through the circulation of her texts. The story Euphorion tells also describes the conditions of its production. Like Renaissance epic and outdoor poetry, the book takes up mostly

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borrowed materials and reconfigures them for a new audience. In an extended analogy that anticipates Michael Field’s grafting of women’s perspectives onto the preoccupations of the mostly male decadent movement, Lee recurrently compares the Renaissance to a textile. Italy, she writes, was not able to sustain the Renaissance, and having failed to “weave for herself a new, modern civilization,” had “to go through life in the old garments, still half mediaeval in shape, which had been fashioned for her” during the period (16–17). Over time these garments —never seamless to begin with—inevitably fray: “Wear and tear, new occupations, and the rough usage of other nations, rent them most sorely.” Patched up “with bits of odd stuff and all manner of coloured thread and string” by later eras, they are reduced to rags by the eighteenth century (17). The Renaissance is a threadbare garment that brings strangers together across time and space in a kind of intertextual (or better, intertextile) community. Lee compares herself to a spider— a creature associated since antiquity with textiles, weaving, and women’s labor— and describes the structure of her book as akin to a “crotchet” (23). She places herself at the end of this process and seeks, like the vagabond singers who bear the “rags” of poetic traditions, to sew together the scattered bits and pieces that remain of the original garment. Lee published Euphorion in the same year as Miss Brown, a novel that was not well received by the community of aesthetes whose interpersonal relationships, as we saw in the last chapter, it depicts quite critically. The image of community in Euphorion is a utopian alternative to the claustrophobic community of the 1880s that the novel unmasks, a decadent answer to the decay of aestheticism. Unlike the aesthetes gathered around Hamlin’s London home, the critical community to which Lee speaks in Euphorion is scattered across space and time. In the introduction to her book, she describes walking through the streets of Siena and finding “everywhere-scattered facts” of the Renaissance ready to be taken up and interpreted. But she warns her readers that real communion with the past is impossible: “We see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance world; but when we try to penetrate into it, we shall find that there is but a slip of solid ground beneath us, that all around us is but canvas and painted wall, perspectived and lit up by our fancy. . . . Out of the Renaissance, out of the Middle Ages, we must never hope to evoke any spectres which can talk with us and we with them” (22). In her epilogue, Lee recasts this image of Siena, claiming that the dramatis personae of her study are not “really existing buildings, books, pictures, or statues, individual and really registered men,

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women, and events,” but rather her own “mental conceptions” made up of her subjective impressions of these people and things (436). The critic does not speak directly with her public, any more than the men and women painted on the walls of Siena speak to the tourist. Instead, these impressions “exist only in my mind and in the minds of those who think like myself” (437). This is without doubt a vision of community: a cosmopolitan collective of dispersed individuals who think together about the same impressions. But unlike the community of aesthetes in Miss Brown, they do not need to communicate or even know about each other. It is a community without lasting affiliations, traditions, commitments, or identities—and therefore one potentially free of the coercion and manipulation that so disturb Anne Brown.

Literary Communism Pater’s unfinished novel Gaston de Latour returns to the historical moment Pater explored in “Joachim du Bellay” to reconsider the model of decadent community promoted in The Renaissance and later taken and politicized in Lee’s Euphorion. As Patricia Clements has suggested, community is Pater’s “central subject,” but his relationship to the subject changes markedly over the course of his career. Although the novel holds out the same hope for an idealized communion between reader and writer that Lee describes in her epilogue, Pater is also critical of his contemporaries and questions whether the actually existing community of decadents can ever live up to the ideals of the movement, ideals his own early works were crucial in fashioning. Set in the “decadent” age of the Valois, Gaston de Latour draws subtle parallels between the life of Pater’s young protagonist, Gaston, and the concerns of the fin de siècle. As in The Renaissance, Ronsard stands in for Baudelaire, ironically passing his declining years in his garden, sowing “flowers of evil among the rest.”  The unpublished chapters of the novel, which focus on the court of the Valois, are full of references to fin-de-siècle culture. Henry III resembles the decadent Roman emperor Elagabalus. Players at court perform a revised version of the Tannhäuser story, with the biblical Eve taking the place of the German knight. Pater’s account of the “poison daisy” Margaret of Valois alludes throughout to Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus. Margaret, for example, keeps the mummified head of a dead lover, Jacques La Mole, in her private chamber, much as Raoule assembles the parts of her own lover Jacques into an automaton. In a chapter entitled “An Empty House,” which originally had

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for its epigraph Wilde’s imperative to “live up to your blue china,” Gaston visits the home of the courtier Jasmin whose elaborate collection of beautiful objects recalls those of Des Esseintes and Dorian Gray. In another unpublished chapter, Jasmin’s young protégé Raoul (the name also comes from Rachilde) is tortured and killed out of unrequited homoerotic love for his mentor. There is an element of critique, even scorn, in such parallels; Pater questions the ability of his contemporaries to maintain clear moral distinctions in a world of glittering surfaces. But Pater’s oblique reflection on the decadent movement has a more substantial aim than chastising a few unduly enthusiastic disciples. Gaston suffers from the same breakdown of traditional forms of affiliation that sends Des Esseintes into exile. He is the last of his line, and thus only loosely tied by family to his ancestral home, the Château of Deuxmanoirs, which was created as a symbolic effort by Gaston’s ancestors to unite two families, so that they might “take their fortunes together” (2). Leaving this house, where he found “little sympathy” in his childhood, Gaston also leaves a crumbling familial model of community (12). The one time in the extant narrative that Gaston is called back to the house, to tend to his dying grandfather, coincides with the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. This event, which claims Gaston’s wife, and during which “a man’s foes were those of his own household,” underscores the tenuousness of familial and traditional political groups in the period (60). Larger political currents were also putting traditional ideas about community and political legitimacy under strain: “Men’s thoughts were then hard at work all around on the nature and basis of royal and all other authority, on the very basis of society itself” (117). The Reformation was making religious affiliation a bloody proposition; and the identity of France itself was in doubt, an uncertain royal succession and a deeply divided aristocracy leaving the adolescent Charles IX, guided by his Italian mother, Catherine de’ Medici, in control of the national destiny. His successor, Henri III, is self-absorbed and unable to control his kingdom’s splintering factions. As Wolfgang Iser puts it, the novel “depicts an upheaval that does not know where it is heading.” Confronted everywhere he turns with evidence of this upheaval, Gaston looks for the sympathy he lacked at home in a series of communities organized by reading and writing. In the second chapter, he joins “the episcopal household” (14), serving in the canonical library at the cathedral of Chartres, where he retrieves “dim manuscripts” for scholarly visitors (23). His clerical

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calling thwarted by the Huguenot siege of Chartres in the winter of 1567, Gaston moves from a community organized around the Bible to the secular literary communities formed by the writings of Ronsard, Montaigne, and Giordano Bruno. Later in the novel, Gaston works as a secretary in the court of Queen Margaret, editing her Memoirs. This “sovereign beauty of her day,” Pater notes, was also “clerkly”: “writing, writing constantly with a sort of really classic instinct for the genius of her native tongue” (97). Gaston’s relationship to his wife “all but repeats Abelard’s typical experience.” Having been hired as her tutor, Gaston seduces his student and is compelled by her family of “busy Huguenot printers” to marry her (64). In each of these instances, bonds of sympathy are forged by or around books, reading, and writing. Consistent with the broad ideals of the decadent movement, Pater explores the ways in which new political formations arise out of the reception of artworks. Turning implicitly from both traditional forms of affiliation and from rival modern ideas like the nation, he imagines new possibilities for communities defined by the circulation of texts, but he also warns of their limitations. The most pervasive metaphor for this kind of community in the novel is suggested by a day on the liturgical calendar: Pentecost. Easter, the most solemn day for other Catholics, seems to Gaston the “least evocative of proportionate sympathy”: “The empty tomb, with the white clothes lying, was still a tomb: there was no human warmth in the ‘spiritual body’: the white flowers, after all, were like those of a funeral” (69). “It was altogether different however,” Pater writes, “with that other festival which celebrates the Descent of the Spirit, ‘the tongues,’ the nameless impulses gone all abroad, to soften slowly, to penetrate all things, as with the winning subtlety of nature, or of human genius. . . . Into the close world, like a walled garden, about him, influences from remotest time and space found their way, travelling unerringly on their long journeys as if straight to him, with the assurance that things were not wholly left to themselves; yet so unobtrusively that a little later the transforming spiritual agency would be discernable at most in the grateful cry of an innocent child, in some good deed of a bad man, or unlooked-for gentleness of a rough one, in the occasional turning to music of a rude voice” (69). Whereas Easter focuses obsessively, even ghoulishly, on the body, and thus thwarts sympathy, Pentecost provides Gaston with a sense of community that does not demand the immediate presence of others. He is isolated in Paris, enclosed in a “walled garden,” but the feast day gives him a sense of connection with others.

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The “transforming spiritual agency” celebrated by Pentecost allows him to discern the good in others, and to believe in some force guiding and organizing events. In an echo of Des Esseintes’s “spiritual communion,” this sympathy extends over “remotest space and time” but addresses Gaston directly. The biblical story of Pentecost, narrated in the second chapter of the book of Acts, describes the creation of a community— a universal Christian fellowship united by the figurative “voice” of the Holy Spirit. Gaston’s reflection on the feast day downplays its Christian meaning, transforming the voice of the Holy Spirit into “nameless impulses” and distant influences, and the tongues of flame into versions of the “hard, gem-like flame” Pater valorizes in the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance. The biblical text describes the formation of a universal Christian community under the aegis of a single message. Gaston, by contrast, imagines a version of the decadent counterpublic: an artistic and literary community brought together by the circulation of discourses. But Pater also underscores the potential dangers of this form of affiliation. The “nameless” circulation of language can bind people into dangerous masses as well as benevolent communities. Pater refers often in the novel to rumors and conspiracies, which unite people in just this manner. The most significant problem, however, is internal to the community itself. In The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy describes what he calls “literary communism,” a community “formed by an articulation of ‘particularities,’ and not founded in any autonomous essence that would subsist by itself and that would reabsorb or assume singular beings into itself.”  For Nancy, as for other contemporary theorists writing in his wake, the gravest danger faced by the community is its transformation from a bare state of “being-together” into a totalized, and implicitly totalitarian, unitary identity. The crucial element of “being-together” in Gaston’s Pentecostal imaginary is literary reception, the discrete “impressions,” to use Pater’s favored term, produced by the perception of beauty. When the ability to experience such impressions becomes a personal distinction rather than an act of judgment, an “autonomous essence” rather than a fleeting impression of pleasure, it loses its character as a form of “literary communism.” The act of reception comes to describe a fixed quality of the individual, not a changing quantity of pleasure. This is the challenge Pater poses to the decadent counterpublic. The decadents imagine transformative communities based on literary and artistic taste. But taste can become a normative principle, much like the principles that deform other communities in the book. The same fire imagery that defines Gaston’s ideal of a Pentecostal community, for example, also describes

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religious conflict in the novel. The religious wars, which were fought over the translation of a text, “flame up” throughout the narrative (7). When Gaston enters the cathedral at Chartres he notes with discomfort that its stained glass windows transform the “placid sunshine” of the surrounding town into “imperious, angry fire” (15). The August heat on the eve of Saint Bartholomew’s Day is uncharacteristically “fiery” (65). The imagery of Pentecost circulates throughout the novel like a text in the decadent counterpublic. It offers both a utopian ideal and a problematic temptation, compelling readers to judge each instance, each “impression,” individually. Gaston’s meeting with Ronsard in the “Modernity” chapter demonstrates both the attractions and the dangers of Gaston’s Pentecostal ideal. Chief among the poetic “stars” of the Pléiade— a name that evokes both fire in the sky and a group of writers joined by their devotion to poetry— Ronsard is a poet of the coterie rather than the “vulgar” multitude. He speaks to the “select few,” and his writing conveys the sense, “flattering to one who was in the secret, that this thing, even in its utmost triumph, could never be really popular” (36). Ronsard is also closely associated in the novel with political power. Proclaimed the “prince of poets” (33), he surrounds himself with emblems of royalty: pictures of the three royal Margarets, a statue of Minerva inscribed with a poem by Charles IX, and “souvenirs received from various royal persons, including three kings of France, the fair Queen of Scots, Elizabeth of England” (32). He shows Gaston a portrait of himself dressed “in veritable armour,” ready to fight for a literary theory in the “battle of the Pleiad” much as others waged war over religious doctrines (34). Gaston first comes to know Ronsard through a copy of the Odes that he always carries with him. Like the “nameless impulses” of Pentecost, Ronsard’s book travels to Gaston across space and time, speaking “with the ready intimacy of one’s equal in age,” though it was written many years earlier (26). “The gifted poet,” Pater writes, “seemed to have spoken what was already in Gaston’s mind” (29), giving “the truant and irregular poetry of his own nature . . . an external and authorized mouth-piece” (26). Pointing toward something greater than poetry, Ronsard’s book conveys “a doctrine to propagate, a secret open to everyone who would learn, towards a new management of life” (36). It opens up for Gaston new ways of thinking about his relationship to the world: “Here was a discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed in turn to one and another, to be propagated for the imaginative regeneration of the world. It was a manner, a habit of thought, which would invade ordinary life, and mould that to its intention” (30–31).

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Gaston sounds less like a reader of poetry than a revolutionary or a missionary inspired by the Holy Sprit. With its language of regeneration, “privileged apprehension,” invasion, and “poetic rights,” this passage blurs the line between artistic and political innovation. Ronsard’s poetry provides a sense of “attachment at a distance” and offers a compelling alternative to existing models of affiliation. Pater evokes similar visions of a Pentecostal community in his portraits of Montaigne and Bruno. These figures are joined in Gaston’s mind by their common philosophy of “indifference,” a word Pater uses elsewhere in his works to describe a political stance. Here the word names the relativism underlying Montaigne’s skeptical refusal to choose sides, and Bruno’s seemingly opposed pantheistic belief that God is a universal spirit invested in all particulars. As Kevin Ohi has noted, this word is also closely tied for Pater to ideas of tolerance and sympathy. Indifference can describe both a lack of engagement (apathy) and an “eroticized communion or merger” (without difference). Indifference is a form of distancing that produces sympathy, a practice of disinterest that unifies. This is precisely what Gaston describes in his reflection on Pentecost: the “nameless impulses” that “penetrate all things” remain at a distance but also approximate an eroticized merger in their effect on him. Montaigne and Bruno, like Gaston, find this sympathy and communion through language. Living in relative isolation with his wife and books, Montaigne is nevertheless highly sociable, “ever on the alert for an interlocutor to take part in the conversation” (44). The Essays, which Gaston hears in conversation before they achieve literary form, are themselves a form of community. Each one is akin to “a life,” “having accumulated in them imperceptibly . . . a thousand repeated modifications, like character in a person” (43). Montaigne’s writings “owed their actual publication at last to none of the usual literary motives— desire for fame, to instruct, to amuse, to sell—but to the sociable desire for a still wider range of conversation with others. He wrote for companionship” (44). Reading the classics was, for him, “nothing less than personal contact” (50). Bruno, too, represents an ideal of sympathy in language. Once a Dominican monk, he is now “a citizen of the world,” leaving the cloister to preach the pantheistic fellowship of all things in the universe. Pater’s summary of this doctrine draws upon the same Pentecostal figures—fire and language—that marked Gaston’s encounter with Ronsard. Regarding nature as a book, subject to “detailed reading” (76), Bruno “betrays no original lack of the sensuous or poetic fire” (75), “kindling thought and imagination at once”

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with his words (74). He reserves his most poetic flights for the stars, which, like the Pléiade for Ronsard, produce a powerful sense of community. Looking at the sky, he feels an “ever-widening kinship and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants” (78). Bruno carries this effect over to his pedagogical performance: “When Bruno confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, his language, were alike the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of the audience” (79). With his face “lit up,” and his discourse akin to “fiery, volcanic soil” (80), he fashions a powerful bond with his auditors. For every such invocation of Pentecostal communities in the novel, however, Pater raises questions about the viability of the ideal, in particular its tendency to turn in upon itself and lose the openness and unpredictability of the communal formations he admires. All of Gaston’s early mentors, for example, cloister themselves from the world. Ronsard and Montaigne live in towers; Ronsard and Bruno evince a “remarkable distaste for the vulgar” (72). Pater parallels each of these mentors to problematic figures at the court of the Valois. Montaigne and Queen Margaret are both associated with Circe. The love poet Ronsard is implicitly compared to his royal patron Charles IX, who once scratched lines of his own poetry into a window at Gaston’s ancestral home (8). Bruno’s pantheistic fascination with stars is echoed in Pater’s references to the Roman analogue for Henri III, Elagabalus, who took his name from the Syrian sun god, Baal; Gaston attends Bruno’s lecture in Paris on the very day (ironically, Pentecost) that Henri became king. When Gaston leaves Ronsard’s home, a letter of introduction to Montaigne in his hand, he passes the Huguenot capital of La Rochelle, “the ‘Bastion of the Gospel’ of John Calvin,” conceded by the Catholic forces in the religious wars (42). La Rochelle is manifestly a community formed according to an oppositional doctrine: “They were there the armed chiefs of Protestantism, dreaming of a ‘dictator’ after the Roman model, who should set up a religious republic” (42). Situated in the midst of “a wide expanse of marshland, where the wholesome sea turned stagnant,” and populated with citizens who “scowled through the heavy air” (42), La Rochelle seems a stark contrast to the airy and tolerant elevation embodied by Montaigne, the ideal of poetic modernity promoted by Ronsard, or the pantheistic union imagined by Bruno. But Pater slyly asserts their continuity through several fortuitous onomastic puns: roche is French for rock, Ronsard’s given name Pierre comes from the Greek petros, meaning stone, and the name Montaigne sounds like the

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French word for mountain (montagne). Similarly, La Rochelle’s location at the border of land and sea echoes the associations of Bruno’s name: Giordano derives from the biblical Jordan River, while Bruno means brown, evoking land. The dream of philosophical and literary detachment that these figures embody has something in common with the Huguenot dreams of a religious “dictator.” Later in the novel, Pater again evokes this danger in a seemingly incidental reference in his account of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which he places between Gaston’s time with Montaigne and his discovery of Bruno. Pater notes that the Huguenot philosopher La Rochefoucauld was given one of the “white badges of Catholicism” to protect him from the antiProtestant violence (65). Much like the pun connecting the moralist’s name to La Rochelle and to Gaston’s three mentors, the white badge— suggesting paper—is a vivid emblem for the “literary” forces than can both form and deform community. Perhaps the clearest allegory in the novel for the challenge posed by a republic of nothing but letters is Pater’s depiction of Jasmin’s paradigmatically decadent collection of books and artworks, which Gaston examines while waiting for his friend to return home. The objects Jasmin has collected reflect their owner’s impeccable taste, but Gaston fears that they close off sympathy rather than engendering it. Entering the house, he feels “shut off . . . from the crude world outside” and wonders whether the sense of being “differenced” from the vulgar has benevolent or nefarious aims: “Did this novel mode of receiving, of reflecting the visible aspects of life commit one to an intellectual scheme, a theory about it, the remoter practical alliances of which one could not precisely ascertain at present, but would inevitably be led to in due course? Was this odd grace no more than the superficial expression of an intellectual aristocracy ‘differenced’ from the rest of the world by mere fashion or taste, or did it involve other differences from the vulgar, less innocent?” (88). Jasmin’s collection reflects the pervasive fin-de-siècle dream of an aesthetic elite set apart by its exceptional taste. But the very act of differencing transforms this elite into yet another traditional aristocracy, which makes taste an alibi for political and economic domination. Rather than bringing people together, the expression of taste liquidates community, drowning the individual in a profusion of things: “It might perhaps be that, after all, things as distinct from persons, such things as those one had so abundantly around one here, were come to be so much that the human being seemed suppressed and practically nowhere amid the works of his hands, amid the objects he had projected from himself” (88). The form of communal orga-

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nization (taste) stands in for its ideal effect (sympathy). Congealed in things, like prehistoric flies in amber, taste is no longer liberatory. In its divisiveness it resembles the religious conflict in Gaston’s age and the violent nationalism in Pater’s own. Gaston anticipates this point in his reflection on several objects in the collection that do not fit, notably some “nude fragments” of pagan sculpture. These objects are doubly suggestive: their unashamed freshness refuses to be assimilated to the “tricky indoor splendours” of the current age (87), while their fragmentary quality figures the way Jasmin’s expressions of taste sever themselves from the larger world. “After all,” Gaston thinks, “it was not quite true that all really beautiful things went together” (87). Because Gaston de Latour was never finished, it is impossible to know how Pater might have resolved the tension between the two versions of Pentecostal community he describes. One might speculate that Pater was unable to finish the novel not, as has been suggested, for personal or artistic reasons but because he could not solve this problem to his satisfaction. He seems to hold out one instance of sympathy as exemplary, however. When he finally meets Ronsard, Gaston is surprised to find that the poet, once in the vanguard, has now become old and melancholy, spending his time not on new work but on “amendments, not invariably happy, of his earlier verse” (35). As Ronsard is showing him one of his revisions, Gaston catches a glimpse of “the first book of the Franciade, in silken cover, white and gold, ready for the king’s hand, but never to be finished” (35). The Franciade was Ronsard’s abortive effort, published as a fragment in 1572—less than a week after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre—to write a French national epic on the model of Virgil’s Aeneid. The opening verse of the poem is an epic invocation to the muse, connecting the line of Charles IX to that of the Trojan Hector. It is not, however, the political theme or intention of the poem but its material presence for a new audience that creates sympathy between the poet and his reader: “Gaston, as he turned from a stolen reading of the opening verse, in jerky, feverish, gouty manuscript, let out his soul, perhaps. The poet’s face struck fire too, and seeming to detect on a sudden the legible document of something by no means conventional below the young man’s well-controlled manner and expression, he became as if paternally anxious for his intellectual furtherance” (35). Pater’s description draws on nearly all the figures associated in the novel with Pentecost, most notably the “fire” that passes from the “feverish” manuscript to the faces of reader and writer, which “strikes fire” at the recognition of sympathy (Pater’s “too” suggests Gaston’s face is also fiery). Reading Ronsard’s poem, Gaston becomes a “legible document,” part of a

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textual community Ronsard feared was lost with the waning of the Pléiade. This is a community formed by chance, out of Gaston’s “stolen” impression of a fragmentary epic. The sense of sympathy (and perhaps erotic attraction) between reader and writer arises out of the failure of Ronsard’s political aim. A completed version of this epic would validate a highly traditional form of community; as a “jerky, feverish, gouty manuscript” hidden away in a drawer, it realizes for Gaston the kind of literary community he only imagined before meeting the poet. The fragmentary quality of this poem, its incomplete physical form as well as its unfulfilled desire to invent a glorious lineage for the French nation, enables the formation of a new sense of community. Out of the incompletion of the nation, new political combinations arise. Ronsard’s nationalist epic is most powerful when it fails to achieve its nationalist aims. This scene is opposed in almost every way to the model of community Gaston observes in Jasmin’s home. Where Jasmin puts his taste deliberately on display, Gaston and Ronsard form a community of taste by chance. And whereas Jasmin’s home seems to shut its occupant off from the world, Gaston’s reading of Ronsard’s fragmentary poem is only the beginning of his secular career. The two visions of community are founded on the reception of artworks, and both respond to the failure of traditional forms of affiliation, but one is open and aleatory, the other closed and exclusionary. Lingering behind his companions after they have left the poet’s home, Gaston reflects on the bond of sympathy he formed with Ronsard, and implicitly on the community of taste this bond opens up for him. Anticipating a figure Walter Benjamin would later use to describe the relationship between reading and politics, he suggests that the authorship of modern poetry was collective, belonging “not so much to a star as to a constellation, like that hazy Pleiad he [Ronsard] had pointed out in the sky, or like the swarm of larks abroad this morning over the corn, led by common instinct, a large element in which was sympathetic trust in the instinct of others” (36). Pater associates Gaston’s image with the Hegelian concept of a zeitgeist, but it also anticipates Nancy’s notion of “literary communism.” The unity of a constellation is aesthetic, its stars joined only by the perception of a viewer informed by a tradition of interpretation. It is a product of reception. The communal constellation Pater imagines, moreover, takes the form of an open secret; it is available, as Gaston says, for all who would learn, not just for a cloistered elite. This openness— or better, indifference—is suggested by the pastoral image of larks flying in unison over

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the corn, which contrasts sharply with the kind of sequestered life that so many of the figures in the novel seek to lead.

Going Underground Lee and Pater stress the physical and social circulation of the major Renaissance figures and literary works they discuss. Much as Italian culture moves through Europe with the armies, scholars, and traders of the era, so epic tales and poetic topoi move up and down the social ladder, passing from the court to the marketplace and back again over several generations, becoming ineluctably “contaminated” in the process. The movement of Pater’s Gaston through the French landscape and among his mentors mirrors this circulation. In Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, unfinished like Gaston de Latour, we encounter a far more static world. Taking place almost entirely within the cramped confines of the Venusberg, and detailing the highly ritualistic proceedings of its denizens, the only literal circulation in the novel is the incessant roundel of sexual couplings Beardsley recounts in lavish detail. For Linda Dowling, the novel “represents the apotheosis of linguistic self-consciousness” characteristic of decadent writing. Beardsley depicts “a world of complete linguistic independence, where . . . everything may modify everything else.” But this world is by no means closed off like Jasmin’s collections. In its array of allusions and stylistic mannerisms, the novel ostentatiously assumes and addresses the decadent counterpublic. The circulation of stories Lee finds in Renaissance culture becomes for Beardsley a deliberate principle of composition, figured most obviously by the circulation of eroticized bodies, but also suggested by Beardsley’s use of familiar decadent themes and styles. Beardsley’s depiction of the underground community of the Venusberg also describes the community of decadent readers. There is no more significant indication of this community than the restricted canon of mythical stories that appear so often in works from the decadent movement. Like epic for Lee, the tales of Salome, Pygmalion, and Tannhäuser—to name only the most prominent—lose their national and religious associations in the nineteenth century, becoming cosmopolitan objects circulating in the decadent public sphere, and appreciated for their supreme perversity or anticipation of modernity rather than their ethnic or national lineage. The effect of this circulation resembles that of mimetic canonization.

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Writing a version of Salome was, for the would-be decadent, not only a means of indulging sexual fantasies but also a way of evoking a community of cosmopolitan precursors: the Precursor himself, crucially, in the person of John, along with the international body of prior writers who had told the story before. The Salome story is at once an object of decadent writing and a historical mirror for its vision of community. The Tannhäuser story functioned in much the same way. When Baudelaire wrote his defense of Wagner in 1863, the story was well on its way to becoming a touchstone for the decadent movement. Between the 1860s and 1890s, Swinburne, Pater, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and John Davidson, as well as Beardsley, to cite just British examples, wrote or painted versions of the story. In chapter 11 of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde notes that his protagonist would often sit at the Opera, “listening in rapt pleasure to Tannhäuser.”  As many critics have noted, and as Baudelaire suggests in his commentary on Wagner’s opera, decadent writers were fascinated with the story’s opposition of flesh and spirit, the worldly and the divine, and its repudiation of ecclesiastical authority. Venus in the tale is a prototype for the decadent femme fatale, and Tannhäuser foreshadows the sensual indulgence of the decadent hero. Originally a product of medieval popular culture, the story seems proleptically made for the decadent sensibility. The proleptic effect of the legend derives as much from the reception of the story as from its titillating or anticlerical subject matter, however. Retold once, the story might be regarded as a medium for fantasy or an act of rebellion, but retold many times it becomes a code, an address to the decadent counterpublic, akin in many ways to the tradition of midrashic commentary on biblical texts, as Megan Becker-Leckrone has persuasively argued about retellings of the Salome story. Each new version is a form of commentary, adding details, changing emphases, altering the narrative perspective, or finding hidden significance in marginal characters or events. And as in Midrash, the commentator both assumes and contributes reflexively to an open discursive field. Decadent writers frequently use such quasi-midrashic commentary as an oblique method of historical and political critique. As J. M. Clifton-Everest has shown, the Tannhäuser story was the subject of a nationalist debate going back to the Romantic era. Folklorists early in the nineteenth century traced elements of the story to myths and historical individuals from many national traditions: Celtic, German, French, Italian. In the wake of Wagner’s 1845 opera, scholars began to wage a fierce struggle over the story’s lineage, arguing

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for its specifically German, French, or Italian origin. Leah Garrett has noted that by the end of the century Tannhäuser was so closely, even generically, associated with establishing national traditions that music from Wagner’s opera opened the Second Zionist Congress, in 1898— despite the composer’s wellknown anti-Semitism. Decadent versions of Tannhäuser tend to challenge the association of the legend with a single national tradition. Pater compares Tannhäuser with Abelard in the opening chapter of The Renaissance, casting both figures as border-crossing antinomians. Swinburne gives his 1866 version of Tannhäuser a Latin title, “Laus Veneris,” prefaces it with a fabricated French epigraph, and presents the Hörsel as an underground alternative to the medieval religious imperialism of the Crusades. Later writers who allude to or rewrite the Tannhäuser legend activate a network of international references— Heinrich Heine, Wagner, Baudelaire, Morris, Swinburne, Pater— and implicitly add their names to this list. True to its plot, the story wanders across European borders. It is a narrative about cross-cultural contact that develops its meaning through such contact. It is often claimed that Beardsley was largely, even aggressively, apolitical, and would thus have cared little about the national origins of the legend he so radically sexualizes in his unfinished novel. But scholars have begun to find evidence of engagement in many of Beardsley’s works, most often through his parodic appropriations of recognized artistic styles, public figures, and classical tales. Linda Zatlin has argued that Beardsley’s work mounts a powerful critique of Victorian sexual politics through its depictions of modern male and female types and its borrowings from the history of pornography. In her meticulous reconstruction of Beardsley’s engagements with Wagner, Emma Sutton claims that Beardsley’s many references to the composer and his followers waver between admiration for the music and condemnation of the racism and nationalism that came to define its legacy. The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, Sutton suggests, poses a distinctly political challenge to the composer’s cultural nationalism. Filling the text with a cosmopolitan array objects and artworks from “various incongruous periods, national schools, and formal styles,” Sutton writes, “Beardsley subverts the stylistic and national traditions with which Wagner had aligned his own art.” Beardsley’s novel carries out a cosmopolitan subversion of nationalism in more ways than its deflation of Wagner. The Venusberg is a mirror of decadent cosmopolitanism, a literally underground society composed from a dizzying variety of national, linguistic, and historical traditions. Written in a precious and campy mock eighteenth-century idiom, and referring alike to

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real and imaginary, ancient and contemporary, native and foreign cultural materials, Beardsley’s novel is “timeless” in the sense Freud gives to the unconscious: it has no fixed relationship to chronology or temporality and is organized by desire and the association of ideas. This timelessness has a distinct historical referent in Beardsley’s age, however, for the Venusberg also allegorizes the decadent movement, which stands in a similarly hostile relationship to its own world. In “Ave atque Vale,” as we saw in Chapter 2, Swinburne makes Venus the perverse common mother who forges the bonds of brotherhood he feels toward Baudelaire. The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser takes up this association, imagining a range of historical and utopian models for decadent community, some antiquated, some utopian, and some reflecting the conditions of modern print culture and fin-de-siècle sexual undergrounds. In each case, Beardsley appeals to an imaginary community of other decadents, at once addressing and producing a cosmopolitan audience defined by taste. His novel makes the decadent counterpublic legible in almost every line, putting its stylistic mannerisms, thematic preoccupations, and erotic proclivities on full display. Beardsley was obsessed with publicity, and his pictorial works betray an almost morbid fascination with their public status as material objects. The drawings are full of books, readers, and allusions to contemporary artistic styles, and often include caricatures of public figures, most notably decadent rivals such as Wilde and Whistler. The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser plays up its status as a material object circulating in a counterpublic sphere. This status is strikingly evident in the novel’s complicated textual history. As Stephen Calloway has suggested, echoing a claim first made by Arthur Symons, Beardsley’s novel “can never have been written with any realistic thought of publication—in the ordinary way at least.”  The novel exists in at least two printed versions and in a manuscript, which Beardsley incessantly revised. The names of its main characters, and even the title of the work, differ in each incarnation. In the manuscript, Tannhäuser is named the Abbé Aubrey, while in the four incomplete and bowdlerized chapters published serially in the Savoy in 1896, with the title Under the Hill, he is the Abbé Fanfreluche, and Venus is called Helen. In the unexpurgated version, privately published by Leonard Smithers in 1907, nearly a decade after Beardsley’s death, the novel is entitled The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, and the main characters are renamed accordingly. It is not clear which version, if any, represents Beardsley’s final intention, and contemporary editions of the work reproduce this bibliographic chaos by piecing together various versions of the novel to approximate a fin-

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ished work. The tangled textual history of this novel is often attributed to threats of censorship, to Beardsley’s progressing illness, or to the author’s late conversion to Catholicism, but it is better understood as part of the story’s address to its public. Beardsley writes a “dangerous” book to be passed furtively from hand to hand, like the many other dangerous books familiar from decadent lore—precisely the kind of book, such as Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (which Beardsley illustrated) or the “Yellow Book” in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which so often shows up in writings from the period. It is telling that there have been two attempts to “complete” the work by later writers, one in English and one in German. Beardsley’s address to the decadent counterpublic is so deeply inscribed in the work that the posthumous audience can jump in and take over where the story left off. Beardsley also addresses and defines his public by gesturing to the conventions observed by other decadent writers Simply by composing a version of Tannhäuser, Beardsley evokes a constellation of predecessors. He also litters the novel with allusions to dozens of other books and artworks, both real and imaginary. In most cases, these references serve no obvious thematic or illustrative purpose, functioning instead as second-order allusions, which reference not the original work but the decadent convention of alluding to rare, foreign, or notorious books and artists. He often names books for the sole purpose of denying their ability to illustrate something. The opening description of the Venusberg, for example, refers to “gloomy and nameless weeds not to be found in Mentzelius” and to sculptures that “even outdid the astonishing illustrations to Jones’s Nursery Numbers.”  Elsewhere Beardsley alludes to specific pages in Alfred Delvau’s 1864 Dictionnaire érotique moderne, a compilation of French sexual slang. He describes characters by comparing them to comically specific literary and pictorial works: Tannhäuser’s hand looks like the hand of a woman in a drawing by Carmontelle (25); the bathroom in Venus’s chambers resembles a particular engraving by Lorette (59). These references are placed side by side with allusions to imaginary works, like A Plea for the Domestication of the Unicorn, which Tannhäuser finds in Venus’s library. Beardsley does not expect his readers to be familiar with Mentzelius or Jones or, with a few exceptions (such as his references to Wagner), to seek out the artworks he mentions. Rather, he appeals to his readers’ understanding of how allusions and descriptions function in fin-desiècle writing. Beardsley’s novel addresses the decadent counterpublic by evoking the public called into being by other decadent texts. Much the same thing is true of Beardsley’s pervasive uses of French slang, which underscore

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the French affi liations of decadence, even when they do not describe “decadent” subject matter. Other allusions connect the Tannhäuser legend with a network of familiar decadent source texts. When Tannhäuser takes a bath after his first night with Venus, he invites the young male valets to join him. He is especially pleased when the boys swim between his legs like “pretty fish” (59). This image epitomizes the freely shifting sexual identifications of the characters in the novel, but it also evokes a constellation of decadent commonplaces. The boys swimming between Tannhäuser’s legs echo Suetonius’s account of the decadent Roman emperor Tiberius, who trained young boys he called his “minnows” to “lick and nibble” him between his legs when he went swimming. As we saw in Chapter 3, Wilde draws upon the story of the same Roman emperor in The Picture of Dorian Gray to characterize the hero of the “Yellow Book,” a book composed of vague allusions to a range of decadent French, Latin, and English texts. References to the decadence of the Roman emperors, finally, are themselves canonically decadent, going back, as we have seen, to Baudelaire and Gautier. Tannhäuser’s bath is but one knot in a complicated fabric of references to real and imaginary decadent texts. Beardsley generates this kind of reflexive relationship to the decadent counterpublic throughout the novel, notably in his disconcerting habit of writing as if both to the imaginary public of the Venusberg and to a modern audience. Although, for example, he often addresses his modern audience directly, and even apologizes at one point for not being able to convey effectively “the habits of Venus’ retinue” for his readers (42), he also curiously speaks from within the public sphere of the Venusberg, reporting gossip about insignificant characters and claims about popular opinion. Ian Fletcher comments that many passages would be at home in the pages of the Venusberg Society Gazette. Beardsley rarely introduces characters in a conventional way, instead mentioning them as if readers were already familiar with their names and histories: “Pulex and Cyril and Marisca and Cathelin opened a fire of raillery. The infidelities of Cerise, the difficulties of Brancas, Sarmean’s caprices that morning in the lily garden, Thorillière’s declining strength, Astarte’s affection for Roseola, Felix’s impossible member, Cathelin’s passion for Sulpilia’s poodle, Sola’s passion for herself, the nasty bite that Marisca gave Chloe, the épilatiere of Pulex, Cyril’s diseases, Butor’s illness, Maryx’s tiny cemetery, Lesbia’s profound fourth letter, and a thousand amatory follies of the day were discussed” (41). None of the names in this list is significant in the context of the novel (few of them are mentioned before or again, and none plays

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a major role), but the way they are introduced underscores their significance for the public of the Venusberg, even if it violates accepted conventions of literary naming. Beardsley’s novel here mimics the literary effect of writing for a public. Much as decadent readers will know the significance of the Tannhäuser legend and the other writers who have taken it up, so Beardsley writes to an imaginary audience that knows about his characters’ histories and personalities. In this instance Beardsley’s empirical readers are on the outside looking in. The mock dedicatory epistle that prefaces The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser also draws attention to the book’s circulation and readership. Beardsley appeals to the fictional Italian prince and bishop Giulio Poldo Pezzoli, whom he asks for “protection” and for “the most remote place in your princely library” (22). Beardsley writes as if the public for his work no longer exists: “I know not by what mischance the writing of epistles dedicatory has fallen into disuse, whether through the vanity of authors or the humility of patrons. But the practice seems to me so very beautiful and becoming that I have ventured to make an essay in the modest art, and lay with formalities my first book at your feet” (20). He apologizes for writing in the vernacular rather than Latin, fearing that the prince should be “offended by a barbarous assault of rude and Gothic words” (21); and he laments the decline of the critical faculty, writing that “the offices and function of patron or critic must of necessity be lessened in an age of little men and little work” (21). As a counter to this sense of belatedness and decline—the hallmark of decadent cultural phenomena—Beardsley rhetorically conjures up an ideal public from the example of abandoned or superseded publics. The most obvious is the cosmopolitan figure of Pezzoli himself: a fictional Italian bishop and nuncio to Nicaragua and Patagonia, whom Beardsley addresses in English. In asking for Pezzoli’s support, Beardsley looks beyond his national borders for an appropriate audience. He also evokes the model of patronage, which had long since vanished as a reliable means of support for literary artists in the nineteenth century. Patronage, as Beardsley frames it, is based on the exchange of favor for honor, rather than of money for a commodity: “In times past ’twas nothing derogatory for great princes and men of State to extend their loves and favour to poets, for thereby they received as much honour as they conferred” (21–22). Somewhat like the decadent counterpublic, the system of patronage was organized by personal taste; by contrast with the modern literary market, it enabled the circulation of books as something other than commodities.

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Beardsley hints that his patron is a collector of erotica (the name Pezzoli evokes “pizzle,” archaic slang for penis), thus tipping his hat to the clandestine circulation of libertine texts, a constant point of reference, as I argued in Chapters 3 and 4, for decadent writers after 1870. Beardsley’s underground society reproduces the transnational imaginary community of libertine writing as well as the styles and themes of canonical libertine texts. Sex in the Venusberg is a foundational organizing principle of public life. Inverting the necessarily secretive experience of fin-de-siècle sexual minorities, almost every sexual act in The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser takes place before some kind of audience, and public gatherings are inevitably a prelude to or an arena for sex. Sex also functions as a form of address in the public sphere of the Venusberg, much as it does in libertine texts. Libertine literature conflates literary response with sexual arousal; in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous formulation, such books are read with one hand. Beardsley’s depictions of public sex make the libertine relationship between text and reader a paradigm for the relationship between the book and its imagined public. The novel does not merely aim to titillate its readers, it alludes to libertine titillation as a model for the way books at once address and call into being their publics. There is no better example of this relationship than Venus’s daily “performance” with her unicorn Adolphe. Venus begins the performance by warning Tannhäuser to keep his distance from the unicorn because he is apt to get jealous, but also stating, “Adolphe likes an audience” (63). She then brings the unicorn to climax by playing on his “tight-strung instrument” and evoking “an astonishing vocal accompaniment” from the animal (64). This scene is performed for the immediate benefit of the unicorn, but it is also directed toward two other audiences: Tannhäuser, who stands and watches it, and the public of the Venusberg, for whom “the outburst of these venereal sounds” is the signal that breakfast can begin (64). Public sexuality is only partially a matter of physical pleasure; it is also a code addressed to and created for an underground public. The theatricality suggested by the performance with Adolphe is part of a broader network of allusions to theater and performance in the novel, which likewise reflect on the relationship between sex and its publics. Of all the fine arts, theater is the one most immediately dependent upon the attention of its audience, and for this reason it fits Beardsley’s aims well. In all of his depictions of theater and performance, Beardsley stresses the interaction of the play and its public, highlighting the erotic effects of performance and recep-

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tion themselves. A scene from the dinner party is paradigmatic: “From harsh and shrill and clamant, the voices grew blurred and inarticulate. Bad sentences were helped out by worse gestures, and at one table, Scabius could only express himself with his napkin, after the manner of Sir Jolly Jumble in the “Soldier’s Fortune” of Otway. Basalissa and Lysistrata tried to pronounce each other’s names, and became very affectionate in the attempt; and Tala, the tragedian, robed in ample purple, and wearing plume and buskin, rose to his feet, and with swaying gestures, began to recite one of his favourite parts” (41). Theater here is the model for, prelude to, or effect of, sexual acts. Characters imitate (Scabius) or perform (Tala) theatrical parts, and Lysistrata is named after a play by Aristophanes, which Beardsley illustrated toward the end of his life. When Basalissa and Lysistrata become affectionate while pronouncing each other’s names, they hint that sexual arousal might come not from the content of the work (the names are not themselves particularly suggestive) but from the relationship of actor and audience itself. Given the proper context for reception, the mere act of addressing language to another can be titillating. Beardsley’s use of the word “express” in the passage is also suggestive, signifying both a linguistic and a sexual performance (ejaculation). Theater is a means of arousal for the performer, not just the audience. As with the pronunciation of names, here arousal depends not on the content of the work being performed but on the very act of public performance. The fact that these scenes take place during a dinner party connects them parodically to the language of “taste.” In addition to the many theatricalized depictions of sex in the novel, Beardsley includes descriptions of two conventional performances, both of which highlight the public function of sex in the Venusberg and thematize the cosmopolitan decadent counterpublic. The first performance is a ballet in which a group of libertines, bored with their normal conquests, set out to an Arcadian valley to “experience a new frisson in the destruction of some shepherd’s or some satyr’s naïveté, and the infusion of their venom among the dwellers of the woods” (47). In the first act, the libertines instruct the Arcadian rustics in sexual techniques; and in the second act, the rustics practice the tricks they learned in the morning on the “cultured flesh” of the libertines (51). A pornographic fantasy of cross-class, cross-cultural, and crossracial seduction, the ballet also recapitulates the imagined relationship between libertine texts and their public, in which reading is a means of initiation or sexual stimulation. The first act of the play is akin to a libertine work, which schools its readers (the rustics) in practices they later enact in the

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flesh. It is also an allegory about the dissemination of decadent community to new cultural contexts. Having introduced the pastoral folk to pleasures “almost too keen for their simple and untilled natures” (48), the libertines “abandon themselves to passive joys” (51) provided by the initiates, who at first could only make “the most grotesque and futile efforts to imitate them” (47), but who have now mastered all the new tricks they were taught. The public becomes producer, and the producer public. The second performance— of Rossini’s Stabat Mater, a musical setting for the Latin prayer on the Virgin Mary’s sorrows—turns this logic around, showing, somewhat like decadent collections, how even the most outwardly chaste work of art can produce an erotic effect. The audience in the Venusberg responds to the music not with religious feeling but with a sexual frenzy in which a group of men figuratively feasts upon the sexually ambiguous alto, Spiridion, an obvious parody of Oscar Wilde, who sings the role of the Virgin:  “The per formance provoked enthusiasm—thunders of applause. Claude and Claire pelted the thing with roses, and carried him off in triumph to the tables. His costume was declared ravishing. The men almost pulled him to bits, and mouthed at his great quivering bottom! . . . Sup, the penetrating, burst through his silk fleshings, and thrust in bravely up to the hilt, whilst the alto’s legs were feasted upon by Pudex, Cyril, Anquetin, and some others. Ballice, Corvo, Quadra, Senillé, Mellefont, Théodore, Le Vit, and Matta, all of the egoistic cult, stood and crouched round, saturating the lovers with warm douches” (75–76). Beardsley underscores in this passage the extent to which the consumption of a work or an artist (literally in this case) depends as much upon the nature of the public that receives it as upon the nature of the work itself. For a standard public, Rossini’s work is akin to religious worship; for the counterpublic of the Venusberg, it becomes a prelude to sexual acts, with the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist transfigured into the body of Spiridion and the urine of the “egoistic cult.” Whereas the ballet allegorizes the work’s seduction of its audience, this performance depicts the audience’s sexualization of the work. The audience in the second performance duplicates the division between performer and audience by dividing itself between the men who rape Spiridion and the members of the “egoistic cult,” who watch the attack and “respond” by urinating on the attackers and Spiridion. For Beardsley, we might suggest, every sexual “performance” in the Venusberg has its public, even after the footlights have gone out. The “egoistic cult” stands only a few feet from the spectacle, but Beardsley’s conception of the public it instantiates extends well beyond the confines

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of the Venusberg. Radiating outward from the pages of the book, this public merges with the cosmopolitan constellation of books and readers that made up the decadent movement. Although its collective physicality might seem radically to differentiate it from the abstract and impersonal “spiritual communion” Des Esseintes desires, the two visions of community assume and contribute to a single project: the decadent republic of letters.

postscript

Public Works Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire”

At the same time a decadent and a beginning. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

In 1892, Stéphane Mallarmé helped organize a committee to raise money for a monument in memory of Baudelaire. The committee tapped Auguste Rodin to design the monument, but he never completed the commission (the monument was not erected until 1902, several years after Mallarmé’s death; it was designed by a young sculptor named José de Charmoy). Although Mallarmé yielded the lead role on the commission to the older poet Leconte de Lisle, he was instrumental in crafting another monument for Baudelaire: the January 1895 issue of the Parisian literary journal La Plume. The issue included original poems about Baudelaire, critical essays, brief memoirs, a bibliography, and a selection of Baudelaire’s unpublished poetry; it was released the following year as a book entitled Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire. Mallarmé’s memorial sonnet, here called “Hommage,” and later retitled “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire,” stands at the head of the poetry section. This volume was the formal culmination of the canonizing work done by fin-de-siècle writers in the wake of Gautier and Swinburne, emerging out of the dense network of allusion, tribute, imitation, and pastiche that defined Baudelaire’s reception as the supreme precursor of decadence in the decades after his death. Mallarmé’s poem itself feels like a

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culmination, a monument commemorating the history of the decadent republic of letters. Baudelaire’s first interpreters compared their discovery of the poet’s writing to a private revelation; he is a friend, a brother, a mentor, a savior, a fellow exile, or a comrade in arms. Mallarmé characterizes Baudelaire in terms of what can best be described as public works. Rather than monstrous flowers and exotic landscapes, he describes a temple, a sewer, a streetlight, the city, and a public cemetery. This imagery clearly alludes to Baudelaire’s increasing importance in the period as the archetypal urban poet, but it also embodies a broader reflection on the relationship between the decadent poet and the public. Mallarmé tries to reclaim Baudelaire not as an outcast writing for other outcasts but as a foundation for the broader community. “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” has long been a frustrating and even disappointing enigma for critics. Robert Greer Cohn describes it as “overwritten, turgid, crammed,” as if Mallarmé were showing off for his deceased master. Paul de Man argues that the sonnet, which he describes as “oddly unsatisfying,” demonstrates that Baudelaire was for Mallarmé an “enigmatic stranger” whom he could only imitate, not comprehend or surpass. Mallarmé’s tombeau poems publically commemorate deceased fellow writers. Taking the form of graveside orations, they speak not only for the poet himself but also to and for a larger community, defending the value of figures overlooked or misunderstood by the public as well as by their casual admirers. Like the image of Baudelaire evoked by its lines, the poem is a manifestly public work, and it is best read in those terms: Le temple enseveli divulgue par la bouche Sépulcrale d’égout bavant boue et rubis Abominablement quelque idole Anubis Tout le museau flambé comme un aboi farouche Ou que le gaz récent torde la mèche louche Essuyeuse on le sait des opprobres subis Il allume hagard un immortel pubis Dont le vol selon le réverbère découche Quel feuillage séché dans les cités sans soir Votif pourra bénir comme elle se rasseoir Contre le marbre vainement de Baudelaire

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Au voile qui la ceint absente avec frissons Celle son Ombre même un poison tutélaire Toujours à respirer si nous en périssons. [The buried temple through the sepulchral sewer-mouth drooling mud and rubies divulges abominably some Anubis idol, the muzzle flaming like a savage bark. Or if the recent gas twists the shady wick—wiper away, one knows, of insults undergone—it lights up haggard an immortal pubis, whose flight/theft sleeps out according to/along the street lamp. What foliage dried out in the cities without dusk, votive, will be able to bless as it reclines vainly against the marble of Baudelaire? From the veil that surrounds it, absent, with shivers, the one, his very Shade, a tutelary poison, always to be breathed though we perish from it.] Most often interpreted as a multifaceted characterization of Baudelaire’s writing and reputation, this poem draws upon a dizzying array of allusions to Baudelaire, even scattering the letters “B” and “Ch” in almost every line. In his 1877 poem “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” Mallarmé presents the American writer—whose poetry he translated, self-consciously following in Baudelaire’s footsteps—as an angel rising from the grave and wielding a sword in the face of public disdain. The image of Baudelaire here is markedly different: apparently forgotten and alone, he resembles a buried temple and a solitary street lamp. At the turn of the poem, Mallarmé rhetorically throws up his hands and asks, somewhat like Swinburne in “Ave atque Vale”—a work he knew and admired— whether there can be any adequate tribute to his forerunner. He leans a garland of dried leaves against the marble of Baudelaire’s tomb but acknowledges that the gesture is “vain.” The final stanza appeals to an unspecified “nous [we]” poisoned and preserved by the “shadow” of the poet’s work. The poet himself may be “absent,” but he survives in his poems and for a community that continues to “breathe” their “poisonous” words. Borrowing another trope from Swinburne, Mallarmé describes this poetry as a “veil” that here “shivers” around Baudelaire’s shadow. The final line of the poem is the only one that does not include either a B or a C: the “we” subsumes the poet, erasing his personal identity even as it lives in the atmosphere he produced. Baudelaire the friend and brother vanishes to be replaced by an invisible spirit whose influence works silently in the community.

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The poem details Mallarmé’s effort to purge the dominant decadent characterization of the poet canonized by Gautier and Swinburne, and to replace it with a new conception of the relationship between decadence and the public. The first two quatrains of the poem, hinged by the word “Ou [Or],” present two alternative versions of this figure, both of which Mallarmé rejects. Criticizing Baudelaire’s reception in the fin de siècle, he argues that decadent writers have betrayed the poet’s most fruitful ideas about the public function of art. The first quatrain presents Baudelaire as an oracular poet—the Swedenborgian mage of the Symbolist imaginary—revealing mysteries to a populace (the Latin etymology of the word “divulge”: to make common or public) that ignores them. He is akin to a buried temple, an image evoking the traditional hermeneutic metaphor of surface and depth, carnal and spiritual meaning, but also hinting at his neglect; the word “ensevlir” means to bury or enshroud, but also to forget. Mallarmé draws on Baudelaire’s quasi-hermetic poem “Correspondances,” which compares nature to a temple that “speaks” in symbols. But poet here utters “confusing speech,” and his words are not the allegorical language of nature but akin to a stream of sewage. The image of mud and rubies alludes to Baudelaire’s characterization of his relationship to the public in a draft for an epilogue to Les Fleurs du mal: “Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or [You gave me your mud and I turned it into gold].” In Mallarmé’s poem, the mud remains partially untransformed, only scattered with rubies; Baudelaire’s mouth drools or foams (“bave”) rather than forming articulated speech, figuring incomprehension rather than alchemical transformation. For the public, Baudelaire’s language never transcends its low origins; it remains hopelessly “confusing.” The image of Anubis, dogheaded Egyptian god of the dead, underscores the hostile and defensive relationship to the public that this vision of the poet entails. Charged with protecting tombs, the god guards what is already dead. His bark, like the drool of mud and rubies, is an inarticulate expression that deliberately excludes outsiders. In the second quatrain, Mallarmé depicts Baudelaire as an urban figure in the streets of modern Paris, the canonically decadent inspiration for city poets like Arthur Symons. Substituting metaphors of light and darkness for those of surface and depth, he compares Baudelaire to a modern gas lamp that illuminates an “immortal pubis,” which flies (or steals) away from his attention. Most commentators, following the spirit if not the letter of the scene, have assumed

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that the word “pubis” metonymically describes a prostitute on the street, and hence reflects Baudelaire’s fascination with the dark corners of modern sexuality. The word “pubis,” however, has its roots in the Latin pubes, which refers not only to the sexual organs but to the adult male population—those who have gone through puberty and are eligible to participate in public life. Rather than the publicness of the prostitute, Mallarmé evokes the prostitution of the public, the simultaneous attraction to and condemnation of the unseemly and erotic that Baudelaire criticizes in “Au Lecteur.” The poet-streetlight illuminates the shame of the “immortal public,” the “Hypocrite lecteur.” Not surprisingly, he bears the “opprobrium” of the community, and is no less decisively cut off from his audience than the mystic of the first stanza. Mallarmé underscores the failure of this approach by alluding, as many critics have noted, to the opening lines of Baudelaire’s poem “Le Vin des chiffonniers [The Ragman’s Wine],” which also depicts an empty city street illuminated by a streetlight. Baudelaire describes how the ragman “se cognant aux murs comme un poëte [staggers against walls, as poets do],” and pours out political speech that even the police spies of the Second Empire see fit to ignore: Il prête des serments, dicte des lois sublimes, Terrasse les méchants, relève les victimes, Et sous le firmament comme un dais suspendu S’enivre des splendeurs de sa propre vertu. [Swearing his oaths, he dictates laws he’s made To vanquish evil, bring the victims aid, And there beneath the sky, a canopy, Grows drunk upon his own sublimity.]  Mallarmé’s allusion associates Baudelaire with the ragman, allowing us to read the flight of the “immortal pubis” as another form of avoidance. Drunkenly dictating laws to the populace, he seeks to “vanquish evil” and “bring the victims aid,” but the public quickly crosses to the other side of the street, only increasing the poet’s isolation and inconsequentiality. Neither of the models for the relationship between poet and public that Mallarmé describes in the quatrains of “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” proves satisfactory. The oracular vates, speaking a hermetic language and worshipped by a small coterie of followers, is forgotten by a public that cannot understand him, and repels the advances of any outsider. The urban truth

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teller, who shows the public its sins and preaches a new political order, alienates the people he would enlighten and is brushed off as if he were a drunken ragman. Neither figure lives up to Baudelaire’s ideal of an aristocracy of taste, which separates itself from the public not (or not merely) to escape from its vulgarity but in ser vice to the public good. Mallarmé asks at the turn of the sonnet whether any model for the poet’s engagement with the community is adequate. Much like the “wintry” garland of vines and flowers Swinburne hands to Baudelaire’s shade in “Ave atque Vale,” he uses the image of dried leaves to characterize his tribute to the dead poet. The leaves look back to the botanical metaphors that encapsulated Baudelaire’s legacy for the decadents, but they hint that those metaphors are desiccated. Mallarmé has long been characterized as a willfully obscure poet of the coterie, for whom the writer’s exclusion from the public sphere is appropriate, even desirable, but recent scholarship has found evidence of social and political engagement where earlier generations saw only retreat. Unlike Baudelaire or Swinburne, Mallarmé very rarely commented openly on political events. He was uniformly skeptical of the dominant political theories that animated the French Third Republic— socialism, anarchism, and the ruling republicanism— and there is scarcely a mention in his writings or correspondence of the traumatic suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, or of the Dreyfus Affair later in the century. Mallarmé often argued for a more substantive relationship between the poet and the polis, however, suggesting in a number of prose pieces that poetry should be foundational to the state, not a supplementary entertainment or mere commodity. In the lecture “La Musique et les lettres [Music and Letters]” (1894), for example, he advocates a tax on books to foster young writers. In “La Cour [The Court]” (1895), he promotes the formation of a poetic aristocracy supported by public funds. The nation benefits from the “fonds” (the word means monetary funds but also, significantly, the foundation of a building) provided by the poetic tradition, and it is only right that poets be recognized as instrumental to the community and encouraged in their work. Mallarmé figures this role in the poem by comparing Baudelaire to a sewer and a street lamp: his poetry is the material “foundation” for a functioning community. The final stanza of “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” provides a new metaphor for the poet’s foundational role. Mallarmé here describes Baudelaire as an “Ombre,” a word that means both shadow and, looking back to classical epic, shade. The Shade is missing from the veil, which shivers, revealing the absent presence of the poet—his effect instead of his actual body.

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Baudelaire’s Shade influences the present like a “tutelary poison” that paradoxically saves and kills. The key word in this stanza is “we.” Mallarmé speaks to and for a collective, a community which is defined by its reception of Baudelaire, and which, like Dorian Gray—who clearly haunts this image—has been “poisoned” by a book. Mallarmé’s “we” refers explicitly to the poets gathered (literally or metaphorically) around Baudelaire’s monument in the scene of the poem, but it also evokes the broader public evoked in the first two stanzas, and imagines a new kind of relationship between the two bodies. As Bertrand Marchal has noted, “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” includes a complicated series of allusions to Baudelaire’s “Le Flacon [The Flask],” a poem that also concerns how the poet is remembered after his death. The central image Mallarmé takes from Baudelaire’s poem is an allusion to Lazarus, whose stench figures the overwhelming effects of recollection on the survivor: Voilà le souvenir enivrant qui voltige Dans l’air troublé; les yeux se ferment; le Vertige Saisit l’âme vaincue et la pousse à deux mains Vers un gouffre obscurci de miasmes humains; Il la terrasse au bord d’un gouffre séculaire, Où, Lazare odorant déchirant son suaire Se meut dans son réveil le cadaver spectral D’un vieil amour ranci, charmant et sépulcral [Fluttering to the brain through the unsettled air, Rapturous memory pervades the atmosphere; The eyes are forced to close; Vertigo grasps the soul, And thrusts her with his hands into the mists of mind. He forces her to lie next to an ancient tomb, From which the cloying scent—Lazarus splitting his shroud— A gaunt cadaver moves to its awakening: Ghost of a spoiled love, enchanting though impure.]  In the biblical telling of this story, Mary and Martha of Bethany bring Jesus to their brother’s tomb, warning him that the body has begun to smell. Jesus orders the stone removed from the entrance of the tomb and calls to Lazarus,

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who emerges with “his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth” (John 11:44). Mallarmé’s poem transforms the shroud of Lazarus into the empty veil surrounding Baudelaire’s Shade, and the dead man’s stench into the “poison tutélaire” the public breathes. Baudelaire’s physical memorial is at once the “ancient tomb” of memory and the empty tomb of Lazarus— a scene of recollection as well as a reminder that the poet is never truly dead to his readers. Through this biblical story, Mallarmé resurrects the two defunct images of Baudelaire he criticized in the quatrains. Baudelaire’s poetry rises like Lazarus from the buried “temple,” reborn as a tutelary spirit rather than the incomprehensible babbling of a forgotten prophet. And much as the resurrected Lazarus burst out of the winding sheet that binds his head and feet, so the absent Shade repudiates the ineffectual “ragman” of the second quatrain. The imagery of the veil, which typically signals poetic obscurity, here represents constraint overcome; split like the shroud of Lazarus, it does not hide the poet from his public but reveals his absent presence. Lazarus also reframes the decadent thematics of sacrifice I have discussed throughout this book. Echoing the precursory role of John the Baptist—a figure central to the decadent imaginary—Lazarus foreshadows the redemptive resurrection Christ. He is not a sacrificial victim, however. Lazarus and his sisters are friends of Jesus, who performs the miracle of resurrection as a gift. As Roberto Esposito has noted, the Latin word communitas has as one of its roots the word munus, meaning duty, public office, and gift. Mallarmé, who often sought poetic inspiration in the etymological dictionary, brings all of these senses of the word together in his tribute to Baudelaire. Rather than standing as the remains of a grand sacrifice, he suggests, Baudelaire’s works should be accepted as gifts, as the foundation for a new poetic community defined by reading and writing. The “we” of Mallarmé’s final stanza names the small coterie of poets who admire Baudelaire and have preserved his memory, as well as the larger public that benefits from their labors. The two publics are no longer at odds, through a reconciliation by the oxymoronic “poison tutélaire” that describes Baudelaire’s memory. Baudelaire’s works arise from and support a collective enterprise, providing the material conditions for community. Mallarmé’s vision of community preserves what is innovative in decadence while rejecting the dark forces that threaten to turn it into a mirror image of the nationalist communion it deplores. He rejects the sacrificial image of Baudelaire because of the kind of community it creates: closed, defensive, and fascinated with blood. The community of the future

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will be open and aesthetic, modeled on the resurrection of Lazarus rather than the martyrdom of Christ.

* * * Mallarmé’s memorial sonnet for Baudelaire serves as an apt conclusion to this study. For Mallarmé and many of the other writers I have discussed, Baudelaire is not merely an influence but also an emblem for the kind of community which they found lacking in modernity, and which they sought to create in and through their works. Baudelaire wrote to kindred spirits, praising and blaming the people and things he observed not only out of individual taste but also as part of a broader appeal to “unknown sympathizers.” When Gautier and Swinburne defined Baudelaire as the canonical decadent poet in their respective memorial tributes, they drew upon the language of classical republican political theory, casting him as a sacrificial victim of modernity who waged poetic warfare against the bourgeoisie in the service of an incipient community of outsiders. By the time Huysmans wrote À rebours, Baudelaire was only one among the vast constellation of precursors Des Esseintes catalogues in his library, but the archetypal decadent protagonist continues to live within the republic Baudelaire founded. Despite his self-imposed exile to the suburbs of Paris, he, too, imagines that his reading and expressions of taste put him in “communion” with unknown sympathizers. Much the same thing is true of the other key figures in the decadent movement, for whom writing was not (or not merely) an escape from bourgeois modernity into a private world of fantasy. They all conceived of their work as part of a larger project: the construction of a decadent republic of letters. Unlike the modern nation, this republic is for the most part imaginary, but not for this reason wholly unreal. Lacking borders, a written constitution, or formal citizenship, it is made up of knowing readers and the privileged texts they produce, admire, and circulate, its bonds fashioned through a shared taste for the perverse and a common sense of alienation from the political, artistic, and erotic world engendered by bourgeois liberalism and nationalism. The decadents harshly condemned the cultural products of this world, from the art and artists who happily took up its banner to the institutional forms it promoted: the national canon, the state school, and the public sphere. But their condemnation of modernity was never merely nihilistic. The decadents always imagined some future ideal of association, even if only by looking back to an incongruous group of past communities, from the classical city-state to

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the libertine underground. They were openly cosmopolitan, rejecting national borders as constraints on the imagination. And they sought a sense of community through acts of appreciation, subversively finding pleasure in all the people and things that brushed the bourgeois hegemony of the age against the grain. Decadent writing is frequently serious and apocalyptic, but also willfully perverse and even funny. It answers the high seriousness of bourgeois thought both with the fever pitch of prophecy and with the low humor of parody and sexual innuendo. For every decadent Jeremiah pointing an accusing figure at his fallen age, there is a misguided Pygmalion left wondering why his attempt to fashion an ideal woman so hopelessly failed. When the decadent movement began to fall apart at the end of the nineteenth century, riven by outside attacks, internal division, changing fashion, and the spectacle of Wilde’s prosecution, the communal ideals of the movement fell with it and were almost entirely lost to posterity. Indeed, for Marxist critics of the 1920s and 1930 like Georg Lukács, decadence became a useful term for condemning the very individualism and social fragmentation that decadent writers attacked. But while the decadent movement itself came to seem a mere relic— dusty, pretentious, and vaguely embarrassing, even problematically regressive—many of its ideas and innovations flourished, contributing to a secret history of outsider taste and group identity in the twentieth century. The movement survived as a direct inspiration well after the fin de siècle for writers in Italy, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, and it more subtly underlies both the sensibility of gay camp and the dystopian aesthetic of late 1970s industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle and SPK. One hears deliberate echoes of the movement in the works of writers like Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, William S. Burroughs, and Angela Carter. The decadent fascination with community is echoed in the 1930s in the writings of Georges Bataille and other members of the Collège de Sociologie, and in the libertarian thinker Albert Jay Nock’s theory of “the Remnant.” More broadly, the decadent movement linked taste and community in ways that foreshadow forms of association on contemporary social-networking sites. Like Baudelaire for Mallarmé, the decadent movement split its funereal shroud after the turn of the century and became part of the very air we breathe.

notes

introduction Note to epigraph: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxxix. 1. In The Beardsley Period (London: John Lane, 1925), Osbert Burdett sardonically remarks that while the great names of high Victorian culture are little read outside England, “Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde have won an international reputation” (5). On the international diff usion of decadence, see also George Schoolfield, A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion, 1884–1927 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Sylvia Molloy, “The Politics of Posing: Translating Decadence in Fin-de-Siècle Latin America,” in Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 183– 97; David Weir, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against the American Grain, 1890–1926 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008); Robert Pynsent, ed., Decadence and Innovation: Austro-Hungarian Life and Art at the Turn of the Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989); and Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin-de-Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). See also Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe, ed. T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); and Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 2. I do not discuss Nietzsche at length in this book, but his idiosyncratic theory of decadence and his cosmopolitan address to the “Good European” suggest shared interests. See Bernheimer, “Nietzsche’s Decadence Philosophy,” in Decadent Subjects, 7–32; and Michael Silk, “Nietzsche, Decadence, and the Greeks,” New Literary History 35, 4 (2004): 587– 606. 3. Scholars of the novel have noted the importance of international exchange and translation for the spread of the form as well. See Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, eds.,

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The Literary Channel: The International Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). On the need for comparative scholarship in Victorian studies, see Sharon Marcus, “Same Difference? Transnationalism, Comparative Literature, and Victorian Studies,” Victorian Studies 45, 4 (2003): 677–86. The most influential current scholarship on Victorian cosmopolitanism has focused on mainstream figures or on earlier or later historical moments. See Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and the essays in two recent journal collections: the special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net on Victorian Internationalism (48 [2007]; http://www.erudit.org/revue /ravon/2007/v/n48), edited by Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Julia M. Wright; and the Editor’s Topic section in Victorian Literature and Culture (38, 2 [2010]) on Victorian Cosmopolitanisms, edited by Tanya Agathocleous and Jason R. Rudy. Walkowitz traces the practice of what she calls “critical cosmopolitanism” in writers from Conrad to Sebald to decadence, but remains vague about how and why decadence is important in this regard. 4. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen-Nineties (London: Cresset Library, 1988), 76. 5. For a comprehensive, if rather dismissive, account of decadent style, see John Reed, Decadent Style (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985). 6. Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), 159. 7. On Baju, see Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 57– 92. 8. See Désiré Nisard, Études de mœurs et de critique sur les poëtes latins de la décadence, fourth edition, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1878), 2: 381–94. On the origins and international diffusion of the word “decadence,” see Conrad Swart, The Sense of Decadence in NineteenthCentury France (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964); Matei Calinescu, “The Idea of Decadence,” in Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 151–224; and R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Hodder Arnold, 1983), 1–70. 9. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975– 76), 2: 320; The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1964), 93. Subsequent citations from Baudelaire’s French will be included in the text by volume and page number, and abbreviated OC. 10. On the curious obsession of critics with defining and introducing decadence, see Constable, Denisoff, and Potolsky, “Introduction,” in Perennial Decay, 1–32. 11. Quoted in Thornton, Decadent Dilemma, 46. Le Gallienne goes on to describe this character in stereotypically “decadent” terms, however: “At bottom, decadence is merely limited thinking, often insane thinking.”

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12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 32e. I borrow this formulation from Elizabeth Prettejohn, who uses it to describe the British aesthetes in her essay “Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting,” in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England,” ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 36–58. 13. The encyclopeadic quality of decadent texts accounts for the fact that many of the books and writers I discuss have sometimes been associated— both in the period and by contemporary scholars—with other fin-de-siècle literary groups. What makes them decadent (the dizzying variety of allusions and ideas they incorporate) also makes them amenable to appropriation. 14. Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris: Lemerre, 1883), 25. 15. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 306– 7. 16. Schoolfield, A Baedeker of Decadence, xiii. 17. Charles Bernheimer, “Unknowing Decadence,” in Constable, Denisoff, and Potolsky, eds., Perennial Decay, 51. See also Jonathan Dollimore, “Wilde’s Transgressive Aesthetic and Contemporary Cultural Politics,” in Sexual Dissidence: From Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 64–73; Françoise Gaillard, “À rebours ou l’inversion des signes,” in L’Esprit de décadence, Colloque de Nantes 1 (Paris: Minard, 1980), 129–40; Louis W. Marvick, “Aspects of the Fin-de-Siècle Decadent Paradox,” Clio 22 (1992): 1–19; and Michael Riffaterre, “The Decadent Paradox,” trans. Liz Constable and Matthew Potolsky, in Perennial Decay, 65–79. 18. See Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Ruth Livsey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); and Alexander Varias, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives During the Fin de Siècle (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1996). In her essay “Le Soir et l’aube: décadence et anarchisme,” RHLF 3 (1999): 453– 66, Catherine Coquio delineates striking similarities between the language of the decadents and their anarchist contemporaries. 19. Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Gobalization, 90. On this gesture of withdrawal in the larger context of modernism, see Heather K. Love, “Forced Exile: Walter Pater’s Queer Modernism.” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 19–43. See also Benjamin Morgan, “Aesthetic Freedom: Walter Pater and the Politics of Autonomy,” ELH 77, 3 (2010): 731–56, who suggestively demonstrates that Pater’s notion of aesthetic autonomy entails political engagement. 20. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 21. For a useful discussion of Baudelaire’s list, see Jacqueline Wachs, “A propos des ‘Titres pour un recueil mensuel,’ ” Bulletin Baudelairean 10, 2 (1975): 2–10.

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22. See Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Sophia Rosenfeld, “Citizens of Nowhere in Particular: Cosmopolitanism, Writing, and Political Engagement in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” National Identities 4, 1 (2002): 25–43. 23. At least since Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the fostering of communal ties was among the most important traditional functions of epideictic. In their treatise The New Rhetoric, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca describe epideictic as “an appeal to common values, undisputed though not formulated, made by one who is qualified to do so” with the aim of strengthening the adherence of the audience to those values (The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation [South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969], 53). On the function of epideictic in French postwar intellectual circles, see Eleanor Kaufman, The Delirium of Praise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Kaufman finds a similar relationship between praise and alternative forms of community in these circles as I find in decadence. On the contemporary uses of epideictic, see Rhetorics of Display, ed. Lawrence J. Prelli (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006). 24. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, xl. See also Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997); Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988); and Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). For the opposition of friend and enemy, see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. Geroge Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 25. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 251–83. See also Thomas Docherty’s description of reading as politics: “Reading-as-culture produces an attitude of readiness for companionship. . . . What else is this but a founding condition of the possibility of democracy?” (Aesthetic Democracy [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006], 76). 26. For a survey of utopian socialist thought, see Keith Taylor, The Political Ideas of the Utopian Socialists (London: Cass, 1982). On the radical right’s appropriation of community in nineteenth-century Germany, see George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999). As Nancy notes, “At every moment in its history, the Occident has given itself over to the nostalgia for a more archaic community that has disappeared, and to deploring a loss of familiarity, fraternity and conviviality” (The Inoperative Community, 10). 27. See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris, trans. Margaret Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 28. On decadent writing and right-wing politics, see Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 68–101; Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 77–113; and Erin Carlston, Thinking

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Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 42–85. 29. See Ernst Bloch, “The Artistic Illusion as the Visible Anticipatory Illumination,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 141–55. 30. In particular, see Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). 31. Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” trans. Seán Hand, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 292–300. 32. Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996); and David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). See also Sebastian Lecourt, “ ‘To Surrender Himself, in Perfectly Liberal Inquiry’: Walter Pater, Many-Sidedness, and the Conversion Novel,” Victorian Studies 53, 2 (2011): 231–53. For a broader perspective on liberalism and aesthetic theory, see Amanda Anderson, “The Liberal Aesthetic,” in Theory After “Theory,” ed. Jane Elliot and Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 2011), 249– 61. 33. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2009), 72– 73. See also Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 34. See Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 247– 68. 35. See Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 77–139; Dowling, Language and Decadence, 135–40; Prettejohn, “Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting”; and Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 101–48. For the sense of community among aestheticist women poets, see Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). Kirsten MacLeod notes that the decadents often “imagined themselves speaking to a community of like-minded readers while at the same time provoking their ignorant and unsympathetic bourgeois readers” (Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006], 29). On decadent readers and writers, see also Shafquat Towheed, “Containing the Poisonous Text: Decadent Readers, Reading Decadence,” in Decadences: Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature, ed. Paul Fox (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2006), 1–31.

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36. Eugenio Donato, The Script of Decadence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 37. Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 147–48. 38. Marion Thain, in Michael Field: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), argues that the poets “would never have been recognized as Decadents,” and that their writing constitutes “one of the most forceful challenges” to decadence in the period (15). 39.“Productive Decadence: ‘The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought’: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde,” New Literary History 35, 4 (2004): 529. See also John Goode, “The Decadent Writer as Producer,” in Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 108–29, who argues that decadence attacks on the organic model of literature and society alike. 40. Friedrich von Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 9. 41. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); and David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (London: Routledge, 1998). 42. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005), 101. See also Linda M. G. Zerilli, “The Practice of Judgment: Hannah Arendt’s ‘Copernican Revolution,’ ” in Theory After “Theory,” 120–32, who argues that political judgment is closer to aesthetic judgment than it is to logical proof: “Judgment is how we discover community” (129).

chapter 1. “partisans inconnus” Note to epigraph: Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. JeanAubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 653; Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 194. 1. Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 1: 188; Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 45. Subsequent citations from these editions will be included in the text, and abbreviated C and SL, respectively. Subsequent citations from Baudelaire’s published writings will come from the two-volume Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975– 76). Passages will be cited by volume and page number, and abbreviated OC. I will use the following translations, cited parenthetically in the text after the French original, and abbreviated as follows: FE: Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). PS: Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1970). PML: Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964).

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AIP: Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris, 1845–1862, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965). BOP: Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire on Poe: Critical Papers, trans. Lois and Francis E. Hyslop (State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle Press, 1952). IJ: Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, trans. Christopher Isherwood (New York: Howard Fertig, 1977). 2. Richard D. E. Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic: Writing and Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 174. See also Dolf Oehler, “Baudelaire’s Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, ed. Rosemary Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 14–30. On Baudelaire’s responses to revolution, see T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 124–77; and Geraldine Friedman, The Insistence of History: Revolution in Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 139–82. For a broader consideration of the politics of withdrawal in French poetry of the nineteenth century, see E. S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 3. The term “civic humanism” was coined by the German historian Hans Baron. See The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). 4. One might compare Baudelaire’s ideas to what John Barrell calls the civic humanist theory of painting that informed British art in the eighteenth century (The Political Theory of Painting: From Reynolds to Hazlitt [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986]). 5. On Baudelaire’s knowledge of Plato, see Marc Eigeldinger, Le platonisme de Baudelaire (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1951). 6. See John Wilcox, “The Beginnings of l’art pour l’art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11 (1953): 360– 77; Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art’s Sake and the Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 35–56; and Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 7. See Bernard Howells, Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History (Oxford: Legenda, 1996), who shows that Baudelaire’s use of the word “individualism” is quite tentative and politically charged. Compare, in this regard, Bourget’s characterization of Baudelaire’s decadent style as an index of excessive individualism, which I discuss in the Introduction. 8. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 94. 9. The most comprehensive treatment of the Salon is David Kelley’s introduction to his edition of the text (Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, ed. and intro. David Kelley [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 1–114). See, also Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic, chapter 1, for a survey of the political terms and positions implied by the vocabulary of the salon and other roughly contemporary writings. 10. Annie Becq, “Baudelaire et ‘l’Amour de l’Art’: La Dédicace ‘aux bourgeois’ du Salon de 1846,” Romantisme 17–18 (1977): 71– 78.

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11. See Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic, 14–32; and Gretchen van Slyke, “Riot and Revolution in the Salon de 1846,” French Forum 10 (1985): 295–306. See also J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and the Art of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 272–88, who argues that this passage and the “dédicace” should be read as rhetorical performances, not disguised political treatises. 12. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 170. 13. See Jean Bethke Elshtain, ed., The Family in Political Thought (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982). 14. William Olmsted, “Subversive Taxonomies: Remarks on Baudelaire’s Groups and Lists,” in Les Genres de l’ hénaurme siècle (Papers from the Fourteenth Annual Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century French Studies), ed. William Paulson (Ann Arbor: Michigan Romance Studies, 1989), 63. 15. On Baudelaire’s aesthetic cosmopolitanism, see Margueritte Murphy, “The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire’s International Sensibility and the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity,” in Art and Life in Aestheticism, ed. Kelly Comfort (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 25–41. 16. This title is given on the cover of the 1860 edition of Les Paradis artificiels, published by Baudelaire’s friend Poulet-Malassis. In his letters, Baudelaire often mentions this unfinished project, to which he gave various titles over the years. 17. I have drawn in my account of Baudelaire’s relationship to Poe on Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957); P. M. Wetherill, Charles Baudelaire et la poésie d’Edgar Poe (Paris: Nizet, 1962); Margaret Gilman, Baudelaire the Critic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire’s Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Michel Brix, “Baudelaire, ‘disciple’ d’Edgar Poe?” Romantisme 122 (2003–4): 57– 69; Jonathan Culler, “Baudelaire and Poe,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 100 (1990): 61–73; Louis Harap, “The ‘Pre-established Affinities’ of Poe and Baudelaire,” Praxis 1 (1976): 119–28; and Emily Salins, Alchemy and Amalgam: Translation in the Works of Charles Baudelaire (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 29–46. On Poe and French poetry more generally, see T. S. Eliot, “From Poe to Valéry,” in To Criticize the Critic (New York: Farrar, 1965), 27–42; and James Lawler, “Daemons of the Intellect: The Symbolists and Poe,” Critical Inquiry 14 (1987): 95–110. 18. See Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Writings, vol. 2, “The Brevities,” ed. Burton R. Pollin (New York: Gordian Press, 1985), 322–23. 19. Culler, “Baudelaire and Poe,” 64. 20. On Baudelaire’s depictions of America, see Dudley M. Marchi, Baudelaire, Emerson, and the French-American Connection: Contrary Affinities (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 21. For an account of Baudelaire’s plagiarism, as well as the texts of the essays by Daniel and Thompson, see W. T. Bandy, ed., Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973).

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22. Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic, 355. There are surprisingly few scholarly discussions of Maistre and Baudelaire. See, in addition to Burton’s comments, Mother Mary Alphonsus, “The Influence of Joseph de Maistre on Baudelaire” (Ph.D. dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 1943); Daniel Vouga, Baudelaire et Joseph de Maistre (Paris: José Corti, 1957); Bernard Howells, Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism, and the Philosophy of History (Oxford: European Humanities Research Center, 1996), 125–49; Kathryn Oliver Mills, “ ‘Rien d’arbitraire’: Joseph de Maistre’s Influence on Baudelaire’s Poetry,” Romance Quarterly 51 (2004): 212–25; and Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 11–74. On Maistre’s legacy in French thought, see also Antoine Compagnon, Les antimodernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Paris: Gallimard, 2005); and Jesse Goldhammer, The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 23. On the secular uses of hagiography, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). As Vouga notes, for both Baudelaire and Maistre the saint is paradoxically at once elect and abject— specially chosen to suffer (210–11). On decadence and martyrdom more generally, see Richard A. Kaye, “Oscar Wilde and the Politics of Posthumous Sainthood,” in Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 110–32. For a broad discussion of sacrificial paradigms in Western culture, see Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 24. Baudelaire’s poem “Reversibilité” seems to be a commentary on this notion. 25. Joseph de Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1993), 271. 26. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 30. 27. Many of Baudelaire’s prose poems take up the phenomenon of public opinion. “Le Chien et le flacon [The Dog and the Scent Bottle],” for example, compares the public to a dog that prefers the smell of feces to perfume. On the changing French literary public in the nineteenth century, see James Smith Allen, In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). On public opinion in Poe’s writing, see Stacey Margolis, “The Rise and Fall of Public Opinion: Poe to James,” ELH 76, 3 (2009): 713–37. 28. The classic treatment of modernist intellectual disdain for the masses is John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993). 29. Joseph de Maistre, On God and Society, ed. Elisha Greifer, trans. Elisha Greifer and Laurence M. Porter (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959), 29. 30. Ibid., 31. 31. Ibid., 37. 32. On Baudelaire’s interest in Vigny, see Claude Mignot-Ogliastri, “Baudelaire et Vigny,” Revue des sciences humaines 33 (1968): 239–58. 33. Alfred de Vigny, Stello et Daphné, ed. François Germain (Paris: Garnier, 1970), 3; Stello: A Session with Doctor Noir, trans. Irving Massey (Montreal: McGill University

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Press, 1963), 3. Subsequent citations of these editions will be included parenthetically in the text and abbreviated F (French original) and E (English translation). 34. In chapter 32 of the novel, Doctor Noir attacks Maistre’s theological conservatism, comparing the logic of his theory of reversibility to the logic that led to the Reign of Terror.

chapter 2. the politics of appreciation Note to epigraph: Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975– 76), II, 103. 1. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 296. 2. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899), 7. I discuss critical attitudes toward decadent imitation at greater length in “Pale Imitations: Walter Pater’s Decadent Historiography,” in Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 235–53. 3. Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 8. 4. Catherine Coquio, “La ‘Baudelairité’ décadente: Un modèle spectral,” Romantisme 82 (1993): 93. See also Liz Constable, “ ‘Ce Bazar Intellectuel’: Maurice Barrès, Decadent Masters, Nationalist Pupils,” in Perennial Decay, 289–308. 5. Baudelaire was dismissive of his young followers. In a letter to his mother from March of 1866, he responds with notable distaste to the emergence of a “Baudelaire school,” which at this point would likely have included Verlaine and Swinburne: “These young people have talent—but what sillinesses! what exaggerations! what youthful infatuation! For several years now, I’ve been noticing here and there imitations and tendencies that alarm me. I know of nothing more compromising than imitations and I like nothing better than to be left alone. But that’s not possible. It seems there is in existence a Baudelaire school” (Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler [Paris: Gallimard, 1973], 2: 625; Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Rosemary Lloyd [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], 251). 6. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 49–80. 7. P. E. Tennant, Théophile Gautier (London: Althone Press, 1975), 82. 8. Lois Cassandra Hamrick, “Interprétation des hommages rendus par Gautier à Baudelaire,” in Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire par Gautier, ed. Claude-Marie Senninger and Lois Cassandra Hamrick (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986), 205. Subsequent quotations from Gautier’s essay will come from this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text and abbreviated F. Translations of Gautier (modified where necessary) come from Charles Baudelaire: His Life, trans. Guy Thorne (London: Greening, 1915), and will be abbreviated E.

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9. Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 5. 10. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, I, 341; Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1970), 79. 11. On the course of Gautier’s relationship with Baudelaire, see Claude-Marie Senninger’s “Introduction” to Gautier, Baudelaire par Gautier, 10–42. 12. I have borrowed this formulation from Neville Morley, “Decadence as a Theory of History,” New Literary History 35, 4 (2004): 573–85. 13. See Lois Cassandra Hamrick, “Gautier as ‘Seer’ of the Origins of Modernity in Baudelaire,” in Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity, ed. Patricia A. Ward (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001), 29–41. 14. For the same reason, Gautier places the apocryphal story of Baudelaire’s forced journey to India as a young man at the very heart of the poet’s legend. Having returned from his Indian exile with his taste for poetry intact, Baudelaire continues to live and work as an exotic in his own land. 15. Exili’s poison of choice is significant for Gautier’s argument. “Powder of succession” is another name for arsenic, so called because it was often used by princes to murder younger rivals to the throne. 16. As Marie Lathers has noted, Gautier repeatedly refers in this scene to shadows (ombres), a word suggesting both death (classical “shades”) and futurity (typological foreshadowing). The word was also used in the period to describe the relationship between the model and the artwork. The young Baudelaire here stands in relation to his future— the future being “sketched out” for him— as a model stands in relation to the painted figure (Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001], 116–17). 17. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 51. 18. Ibid., 65. 19. Rikky Rooksby, A. C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 5. 20. Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 38, 82. 21. Harold Nicolson, Swinburne and Baudelaire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 3. See also Tony W. Garland, “Brothers in Paradox: Swinburne, Baudelaire, and the Paradox of Sin,” Victorian Poetry 47, 4 (2009): 633–45. Garland notes that Baudelaire is, for Swinburne, “a figure for admiration rather than direct influence” (633). 22. On Swinburne’s notable influence in France, see Charlotte Ribeyron, “A Channel Passage: Swinburne and France,” in Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Singing Word, ed. Yisrael Levin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 107–26. 23. Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition, 14. According to Clements, Swinburne very likely first read Baudelaire’s poetry on a trip to Paris in the spring of 1861, just months after the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published. He seems not to have read Gautier’s “Notice,” at least before he drafted “Ave Atque Vale.”

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24. Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition, 11. 25. Bernard Howells, Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History (Oxford: Legenda, 1996), 104–24. 26. See Wendell Stacy Johnson, “Swinburne and Carlyle,” English Language Notes 1, 2 (1963): 117–21. 27. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. and intro. Michael K. Goldberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 142. 28. Ibid., 38. 29. On “heroic criminality” in Swinburne, see Chris Snodgrass, “Swinburne’s Circle of Desire: A Decadent Theme” in Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher, Stratford-uponAvon Studies 17 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 60–87. Swinburne’s own taste for transgression is, of course, an important focus for criticism on the poetry, particularly Poems and Ballads, First Series. For a comparison of Swinburne and Baudelaire in this regard, see Richard Sieburth, “Poetry and Obscenity: Baudelaire and Swinburne,” Comparative Literature 36, 4 (1984): 343–53. 30. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 38. 31. Julia F. Saville, “Cosmopolitan Republican Swinburne, the Immersive Poet as Public Moralist,” Victorian Poetry 47, 4 (2009): 691–713. On Swinburne’s republicanism, see also Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 157–76; and Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 402–19. On nineteenth-century republicanism in England, see Frank Prochaska, The Republic of Britain, 1760–2000 (London: Penguin, 2000); and David Nash and Anthony Taylor, eds. Republicanism in Victorian Society (Stroud, U.K.: Sutton, 2000). 32. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Bonchurch Edition of the Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, 20 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1926), XIII, 419, 417. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 33. Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition, 22. 34. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), viii. On the languages of friendship in the later nineteenth century, see Richard Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Leela Ghandi, Aff ective Communities: AntiColonial Thought, Fin- de Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 35. See Marios Constantinou, “Spectral Phila and the Imaginary Institution of Needs,” South Atlantic Quarterly 97, 1 (1998): 137– 67. 36. See Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 75–111. 37. On the history and conventions of the pastoral elegy, see Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 1–37. My discussion of “Ave atque Vale” has benefited from Sack’s detailed discussion of the poem (204–26), and

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by McGann’s equally detailed treatment in Swinburne (292–312). I have also been instructed by Thomas J. Brennan, “Creating Something from Nothing: Swinburne and Baudelaire in ‘Ave atque Vale,’ ” Victorian Poetry 44, 3 (2006): 251–71; and Melissa F. Zieger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 26–42. 38. For a suggestive discussion of this image, see Margot Louis, Swinburne and His Gods (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 70– 71. 39. For examples of hand clasps and the related hand images, see the “Dedication” to Richard Burton, “In the Bay,” “Memorial Verses,” “Ad Catullum,” and “Théophile Gautier,” from Poems and Ballads, Second Series. From Songs Before Sunrise, see “Dedication to Mazzini,” “Eve of Revolution,” “The Halt before Rome,” and “Litany of Nations.” 40. In one passage Swinburne quotes, Baudelaire praises Satan for giving a condemned prisoner the pride to denounce “tout un peuple autour d’un échafaud [all the people around the guillotine]”—an image that evokes the mobs that gathered to watch the executions during the Reign of Terror (Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, I, 124). 41. David Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 170. On Apollo in Swinburne’s later verse, see Yisrael Levin, “The Terror of Divine Revelation and Apollo’s Incorporation into Song: Swinburne’s Apollonian Myth,” Victorian Review 34, 2 (2008): 129–48. 42. McGann, Swinburne, 297– 98. 43. Swinburne claims that he composed “Laus Veneris” before he knew of Baudelaire’s essay on Wagner’s opera, although he shares with “the great musician and his great panegyrist” a vision of the medieval Venus as “a fallen goddess, grown diabolic among ages that would not accept her as divine” (XVI, 366). Anne Walder tries to make a case for the direct influence of Baudelaire’s essay, but does so mostly on circumstantial grounds. See Swinburne’s Flowers of Evil: Baudelaire’s Influence on Poems and Ballads, First Series (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1976), 88– 97. See also Jerome McGann, “Wagner, Baudelaire, and Swinburne: Poetry in the Condition of Music,” Victorian Poetry 47, 4 (2009): 619–33.

chapter 3. golden books Note to epigraph: James McNeill Whistler, Whistler on Art, ed. Nigel Thorp (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 92– 93. 1. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 84; Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 8. Subsequent references to these editions will be cited parenthetically and abbreviated AR and AN. 2. Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 49. 3. Scholars have given a great deal of attention to decadent collections, linking them variously to consumerism, fetishism, the figure of the library, or the cult of details. See

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Kristin Mahoney, “Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical Consumption,” Criticism 48, 1 (2006): 39– 67; Victoria Mills, “Dandyism, Visuality and the ‘Camp Gem’: Collections of Jewels in Huysmans and Wilde,” in Illustrations, Optics and Objects in NineteenthCentury Literary and Visual Cultures, ed. Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 147– 66; Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 42– 64; Barbara Spackman, “Interversions,” in Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 35–49; Janell Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 107–53. See also Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 73–121. 4. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 27. 5. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975– 76), II, 694; The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 12. 6. Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire par Gautier, ed. Claude-Marie Senninger and Lois Cassandra Hamrick (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986), 124. 7. Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1910), 8. 8. Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 34; Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 91. 9. On literary lists, see Robert E. Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). For the history of literary cata logues, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 247– 72. 10. On museums and nationalism, see Flora E. S. Kaplan, ed., Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: The Role of Objects in National Identity (London: Leicester University Press, 1994); and Gwendolyn Wright, ed., The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996). See also Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 11. Philip Fisher, “Local Meanings and Portable Objects: National Collections, Literatures, Music, and Architecture,” in Wright, ed., The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology, 19. 12. On the theory, history, and politics of collecting, see Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Phillip Blom, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2003); James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 215–51; John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds., The

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Cultures of Collecting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting (London: Routledge, 1995); and Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 13. John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 35. 14. Ibid., Cultural Capital, 33. See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 15. As Jonathan Arac has argued, the “hypercanonical” status of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn allows it to embody the American character whether it is praised as subversive or condemned as racist (Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997]). 16. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991). 17. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75. 18. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, ed. and trans. Gregory Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 166, 161. In Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), Linda Dowling finds a similar association of language and nationalism in English Romantic thought— and in its later undoing by fin-de-siècle writers. 19. Hinrich C. Seeba, “Trostgründe: Cultural Nationalism and Historical Legitimation in Nineteenth-Century German Literary Histories,” MLQ 64 (2003): 193. See also Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 20. Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 82. See also Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: PrintCapitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 21. See Renée Balibar, Les Français fictifs: Le rapport des styles littéraires au français national (Paris: Hachette, 1974). 22. See M. Martin Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 23. James Grantham Turner, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 355. See also Jean Marie Goulemot, Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and Its Readers in EighteenthCentury France, trans. James Simpson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); and Catriona Seth, “The Circulating Library,” L’Esprit Créateur 43 (2003): 73–82. On the association of sophistication with deviance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 24. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 269. 25. The classic treatment of the continuity between decadence and libertinism is Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), though the book focuses chiefly on the influence of Sade and Byron. See also

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Eric Langley, “ ‘Lascivious Dialect’: Decadent Rhetoric and the Early-Modern Pornographer,” and Deborah Lutz, “Dandies, Libertines, and Byronic Lovers: Pornography and Erotic Decadence in Nineteenth-Century England,” in Decadences: Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature, ed. Paul Fox (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2006), 221–46 and 247– 68, respectively. 26. Turner, Schooling Sex, 394. 27. In the fi rst version of the picture, Salome’s library includes a copy of Les Fleurs du mal. 28. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 19. 29. See Rachel Weil, “Sometimes a Scepter Is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 125–53; and Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1996). On nineteenth-century pornography, see Colette Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815– 1914 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 30. Scholars documenting the relationship between the gay identity and fin-de-siècle writing have tended to focus on aestheticism. The pioneering books are Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). One of the few works to focus on decadence and homosexual identity is Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), especially 84–108. On homoerotic art collecting, see Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 51–82. 31. See George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); and Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1991). 32. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 55. 33. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), xxiii. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. 34. Jeffrey Wallen, “Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater’s Renaissance,” ELH 66, 3–4 (1999): 1033–1051. 35. Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 144.

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36. See Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 77–139; and Gerald Monsman, Walter Pater’s Art of Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 137– 66. 37. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting,” in After the PreRaphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 47. 38. Dowling, Language and Decadence, 152. 39. Agathe de Longevialle, “La Bibliothèque décadente: Tradition latine et modernité au tournant du siècle,” in Présence de l’antiquité grecque et romaine au XXe siècle, ed. Rémy Poignault (Tours: Centre de Recherches A. Piganiol, 2002), 197. See also Jean Céard, “Des Esseintes et la littérature latine de la décadence,” Studi Francesi 65– 66 (1978): 298–310; Julia Przybos, “De la poétique décadente: La bibliothèque de des Esseintes,” L’Esprit Créateur 28 (1988): 67–74; and Jean de Palacio, “À Rebours, ou les leçons du rangement d’une bibliothèque,” in Figures et formes de la décadence (Paris: Séguier, 1994), 203–12. 40. He also parodies the association of national literature and national character when his reading of Dickens creates a desire to visit England— a desire satisfied merely by sitting in a pub near the train station. 41. As Rodolphe Gasché has argued, the novel as a whole is marked by historical hybridity: “History and its interpretations appear fragmented and mixed together without real synthesis” (“The Falls of History: Huysmans’s À Rebours,” Yale French Studies 74 [1988]: 190). 42. Praz writes that Wilde “irresistibly reminds one of his sources” (Romantic Agony, 256). 43. I discuss Mallarmé’s memorial poem on Baudelaire in the “Postscript.” 44. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes I, 940. 45. Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus: Roman Matérialiste, ed. Melanie Hawthorne and Liz Constable (New York: MLA, 2004), 26; Monsieur Vénus: A Materialist Novel, trans. Melanie Hawthorne (New York: MLA, 2004), 26. 46. Dowling, Language and Decadence, 164. 47. George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (London: Heinemann, 1928), 54. 48. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. III, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 246. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. Unless otherwise noted, quotations come from the 1891 novel version. I discuss Wilde’s book at greater length in the next chapter. 49. In the novel version, Wilde changes the word “Décadents” to “Symbolistes” (274). None of the other significant details in his description is altered, however. 50. In the manuscript of the novel, Wilde names the book Le Secret de Raoul, by Catulle Sarrazin; both the title and the author are fictitious, but they allude to a veritable compendium of decadent books and writers. See Joseph Bristow’s notes for details (392–93). Bristow points out that the name Raoul alludes to the figure of Raoule in Monsieur Vénus, a book Wilde’s friend Marc-André Raffalovich claims awakened Wilde to his sexual identity. 51. See Bristow’s note on the passage (405), and Mills, “Dandyism, Visuality, and the ‘Camp Gem’ ” (154–55)

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52. See Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, ed. Nicholas Frankel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 209. Frankel’s edition reproduces Wilde’s typescript for the novel, sent to Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine but revised before publication. 53. Charles Bernheimer, “Unknowing Decadence,” in Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 59. 54. Suetonius writes that Tiberius stocked his villa at Capri with erotic manuals to provide models for his young minions to imitate: “A number of small rooms were furnished with the most indecent pictures and statuary obtainable, as well as the erotic manuals of Elephantis; the inmates of the establishment would know from these exactly what was expected” (The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, revised by James B. Rives [London: Penguin, 2007], 127). 55. See Camille Cauti, “Michael Field’s Pagan Catholicism,” in Michael Field and Their World, ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson (High Wycombe, U.K.: Rivendale Press, 2007), 181–89. 56. Richard A. Kaye, “ ‘Determined Raptures’: St. Sebastian and the Victorian Discourse of Decadence,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27, 1 (1999): 298. 57. I draw for this insight on the work of recent scholars, who have stressed ways in which the collection uses the familiar idiom of nineteenth-century art commentary to construct lesbian and feminist modes of describing art. See Jill Ehnenn, “Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field’s Sight and Song,” Victorian Poetry 42, 3 (2004): 109–54; Hilary Fraser, “A Visual Field: Michael Field and the Gaze,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34, 2 (2006): 553–71; Krista Lysack, “Aesthetic Consumption and the Cultural Production of Michael Field’s Sight and Song,” SEL 45, 4 (2005): 935– 60; Ana I. Parejo Vadillo, “Sight and Song: Transparent Translations and a Manifesto for the Observer,” Victorian Poetry 38, 1 (2000): 15–34; and Julia F. Saville, “The Poetic Imaginings of Michael Field,” in The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 178–206. See also Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 58. See T. D. Olverson, “Libidinous Laureates and Lyrical Maenads: Michael Field, Swinburne and Erotic Hellenism,” Victorian Poetry 47, 4 (2009): 759– 66. 59. Michael Field, Sight and Song (London: Bodley Head, 1892), 3. Subsequent citations from this edition will be included parenthetically in the text. 60. Michael Field attended a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser during the same visit to Dresden in which they viewed this painting. A detailed recounting of the performance—which began with Venus watching a sleeping Tannhäuser—immediately follows a long description of Giorgione’s Venus in their collective journal, Works and Days, held at the British Library. See BL Add. MS 46779, 88–90 (1891). 61. On the role of Watteau in the collection, see Kit Andrews, “The Figure of Watteau in Walter Pater’s ‘Prince of Court Painters’ and Michael Field’s Sight and Song,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 53, 4 (2010): 451–84. There are four different drafts of the

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poem on Watteau’s painting in Michael Field’s journal; they also recount a conversation about the painting with Oscar Wilde (BL Add. MS 46778, 95 [1890]). 62. Michael Field were reading Verlaine in June of 1890 while in Paris to see Watteau’s painting (BL Add. MS 46778, 134 [1890]). When Sight and Song was ready to be published by the Bodley Head, they requested that it be bound in the same manner as Fêtes Galantes (BL Add. MS 46779, 146 [1891]). 63. Michael Field journal, British Library, BL Add. MSS. 46778, 63 (1890). 64. Paul Verlaine, “Langueur,” Œuvres poètiques complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec, rev. Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 370. 65. Edmond and Jules Goncourt, L’ Art du dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Quantin, 1880), 7; French Eighteenth-Century Painters, trans. Robin Ironside (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9. Michael Field single out this figure in their poem on Watteau’s Fête Champêtre, calling him a “libertine” (64). On the nineteenth-century reception of Watteau, see Louisa A. Jones, Pierrot-Watteau: A Nineteenth-Century Myth (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1984).

chapter 4. a mirror for teachers Note to epigraph: George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (London: Heinemann, 1929), 143. 1. Andy Green, Education and State Formation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 79. On the transformation of education in the period, see also David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York: Routledge, 1998), and Dinah Birch, Our Victorian Education (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); on the French system, see Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1990). On the political function of literary education in the period, see Ian Hunter, Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (London: Macmillan, 1988); Franklin Court, Institutionalizing English Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); and M. Martin Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). 2. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 97. 3. Edward H. Reisner, Nationalism and Education Since 1789 (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 2–3. 4. As Guiney shows in Teaching the Cult of Literature, Fichte’s lectures became an important touchstone in French debates over education after the disastrous defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), Bill Readings points to similarly Fichtean claims in Newman’s discussions of literature and education in The Idea of a University (70– 78). 5. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, ed. and trans. Gregory Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 17. 6. Ibid., 138.

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7. Ibid., 31–32. 8. Ibid., 23–24. 9. Moore, Confessions, 144. 10. James Grantham Turner, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10. See also Jorgen Dines Johansen, “Literature, Pornography, and Libertine Education,” Orbis Litterarum 59 (2004): 39– 65; and Claude Reichler, L’Age Libertin (Paris: Minuit, 1987), 45–78. On sex and teaching in a range of later contexts, see the essays collected in The Erotics of Instruction, ed. Regina Barreca and Deborah Denenholz Morse (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997); and Jane Gallop, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). In Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), Linda Dowling shows how the erotic undercurrents of the Platonic dialogues served as a code for an emergent homosexual subculture in late-Victorian England. See also Ellis Hanson’s account of decadent tales about love between priests and acolytes in Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 297–364. 11. See Jane Gallop, “The Student Body,” in Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 41–55. 12. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 165– 66; Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 68. 13. Margaret C. Jacob, “The Materialist World of Pornography,” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 189. 14. Huysmans, À rebours, 165; Against Nature, 67. Des Esseintes denies his erotic interest in Langlois, but a similar encounter with yet another youth three chapters later secures the allusion: “They gazed at each other for a moment; then the young man dropped his eyes and came closer, brushing his companion’s arm with his own. Des Esseintes slackened his pace, taking thoughtful note of the youth’s mincing walk” (À rebours, 212–13; Against Nature, 116). 15. Huysmans, À rebours, 165; Against Nature, 67 (trans. modified). The name Vanda is surely an allusion to the character Wanda in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. On the importance of this novel for the French decadents, see Jennifer Birkett, The Sins of the Fathers (London: Quartet, 1986), 31–34. 16. See Naomi Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1–40. 17. Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 191. 18. Huysmans, À rebours, 166– 67; Against Nature, 68– 69. 19. On the Pygmalion narrative in the nineteenth century, see Anne GeislerSzmulewicz, Le Mythe de Pygmalion au XIXe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999); Essaka Joshua, Pygmalion and Galetea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2001); and J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). In Là-bas (1891), Huysmans’s protagonist Durtal proposes a new sin called Pygmalionism—falling in love with the product of one’s own mind—which combines

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onanism and incest: “In Pygmalionism the father violates the daughter of his soul, the only one that is really pure and truly his, the only one he can impregnate without the admixture of other blood. The pleasure is thus entire and complete” (Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-bas [Paris: Flammarion, 1978], 179). 20. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus im Pelz (Frankfurt: Insel, 1980), 22; Venus in Furs, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 15 (trans. modified). Subsequent reference to these editions will be given parenthetically in the text, and abbreviated VP and VF, respectively. 21. Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 21. I have written at greater length on education in the novel in “Bild or Bildung? Education and Imitation in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs,” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 9, 4 (1998): 343– 67. 22. On reversals of the Pygmalion story in the nineteenth century, see GeislerSzmulewicz, Le Mythe de Pygmalion, 253–88. 23. Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus: Roman matérialiste, ed. Melanie Hawthorne and Liz Constable (New York: MLA, 2004), 12; Monsieur Vénus: A Materialist Novel, ed. Melanie Hawthorne and Liz Constable, trans. Melanie Hawthorne (New York: MLA, 2004), 12. Subsequent references to these editions will be given parenthetically in the text, and abbreviated MVF and MVE, respectively. 24. Critical discussions of Rachilde have made much of this novel’s play with gender and sexual roles, which are far more intricate than I can explore here. See Dorothy Kelly, Fictional Genders: Role and Representation in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 143–55; Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 227– 60; Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 174– 206; Melanie C. Hawthorne, Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship from Decadence to Modernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 88–113; and Katherine Gantz, “The Difficult Guest: French Queer Theory Makes Room for Rachilde,” South Atlantic Quarterly 22, 3 (2005): 113–32. 25. See Gallup’s illuminating discussion of this mapping in “The Student Body.” 26. See Yun Lee Too, The Pedagogical Contract: Th e Economies of Teaching and Learning in the Ancient World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). For a broader treatment of the relationship between master and disciple in Western culture, see George Steiner, Lessons of the Master (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 27. As Deleuze notes, Sacher-Masoch’s fictional contracts always produce unintended consequences: “While the contract implies in principle certain conditions like the free acceptance of the parties, a limited duration and the preservation of inalienable rights, the law that it generates always tends to forget its own origins and annul these restrictive conditions” (“Coldness and Cruelty,” 92). Raoule compares herself to Faust (MVF 71, MVE 70). 28. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48. 29. Nancy Bentley, “The Strange Career of Love and Slavery: Chesnutt, Engels, Masoch,” American Literary History 17, 3 (2005): 479.

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30. Severin’s reading choices are always significant. Describing his erotic initiation at the hands of one of his aunts, Severin mentions that he was interrupted while reading Tacitus’s Germania, which he unsuccessfully wields “like a shield” against an overfriendly chambermaid (VP 41; VF 32). Tacitus’s description of the Germanic tribes who collectively defeated the incursions of the Roman Empire was, by the nineteenth century, an important touchstone for nationalist theorists in Central Europe; Fichte refers to it in the Addresses. On the significance of this work, see Christopher J. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: Norton, 2011). On SacherMasoch’s politics, see Ulrich Bach, “Sacher-Masoch’s Utopic Peripheries,” German Quarterly 80, 2 (2007): 201–19; Barbara Hyams, “The Whip and the Lamp: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the Woman Question, and the Jewish Question,” Women in German Yearbook 13 (1997): 67–79; John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin de Siècle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 58–88. 31. Severin and Wanda in fact agree to two contracts in the novel. The first affords Severin a year to win Wanda’s love and grants him “all the rights [Rechte] of a husband, an admirer, a friend” (VP 35; VF 26). The second contract negates the first one. Now Severin ceases to be Wanda’s fiancé and gives up all of his rights; Wanda, in exchange, promises to be cruel and to wear furs (VP 86–87; VF 75). Sacher-Masoch agreed to similar contracts (reprinted in modern editions of his works) with his own lovers. 32. Vernon Lee, Miss Brown, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1884; rpt. New York: Garland, 1978), I, 24. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited in parentheses by volume and page number. 33. Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom, second edition (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 54. As Diana Maltz shows in Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), the aesthetic movement inspired numerous educational “missions” not unlike Hamlin’s. 34. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 167. 35. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “ ‘Still Burning from Th is Strangling Embrace’: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 24. 36. See Matthew Reynolds, The Realms of Verse: English Poetry in a Time of NationBuilding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 37. Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 125. 38. In this regard, the decadents anticipate Antonio Gramsci’s description of schools as a force for hegemony: “Every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educative relationship” (Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith [New York: International, 1971], 350.) 39. On Pater’s Victorian reputation, see Nicholas Shrimpton, “Pater and the ‘Aesthetical Sect,’ ” Comparative Criticism 17 (1995): 61–84. Dowling traces Pater’s reputation as a

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dangerous teacher to W. H. Mallock’s portrait of Pater as the sexually ambivalent “Mr. Rose” in his 1877 Oxford satire, New Republic. See Hellenism and Homosexuality, 104–12. On Pater and education, see also Jonah Siegal, “ ‘Schooling Leonardo’: Collaboration, Desire, and the Challenge of Attribution in Pater,” and Matthew Kaiser, “Marius at Oxford: Paterian Pedagogy and the Ethics of Seduction,” both in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, N.C.: ELT Press, 2002), 133–50 and 189–202, respectively; and William Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 78–91. 40. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 143. 41. Walter Pater, Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text, ed. Gerald Monsman (Greensboro, N.C.: ELT Press, 1995), 82. 42. Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1910), 91. 43. Pater, The Renaissance, 3, 4. 44. Ibid., 141. 45. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1910), I, 147; subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 46. Carolyn Williams notes that Pater’s novel shuttles “typologically” between the Roman Empire and Victorian England, drawing comparisons between narrative events and their “fulfillment” in the nineteenth century. See Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 202–34. 47. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 166. 48. See Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 110–40. 49. Pater, The Renaissance, 130. 50. Critics commonly read this death as evidence of Pater’s repudiation of decadence, rather than as a challenge to Flavian’s pedagogy and its association of poetry and violence. Denis Donoghue comments, “Pater assigns to Flavian the qualities he himself was accused of having. Flavian is a pagan, a Euphuist, an egotist, and a sensualist. Not surprisingly, Pater kills him off with fever, victim of the plague, before the book has well begun” (Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls [New York: Knopf, 1995], 193). I discuss this critical narrative at greater length in “Fear of Falling: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean as a Dangerous Influence,” ELH 65, 3 (1998): 701–29. 51. Max Nordau, Degeneration, no trans. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 29. 52. Ibid., 31. 53. Ibid., 32. 54. Ibid., 33. 55. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. III, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 208. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. All quotations come from the 1891 book version of the novel.

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56. Zhang Longxi, “The Critical Legacy of Oscar Wilde,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 98. 57. Lee Edelman, Homographesis (New York: Routledge, 1994), 15. See also Jeff Nunokawa, “Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of the Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” American Imago 49, 3 (1992): 311–21. 58. Merlin Holland, ed., The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: Perennial, 2004), 102–3. Wilde makes this claim in response to Edward Carson’s interpretation of a passage about Dorian Gray’s bad influence on other young men. In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891)—written at the same time that he was revising The Picture of Dorian Gray for its book publication—Wilde tellingly uses the word “domination” (and borrows Lord Henry’s musical metaphor for influence) to describe the ideal effect of art: “If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play” (The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. IV, ed. Josephine M. Guy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 258). 59. As Sarah Kofman has noted, the painting begins to change not when Dorian utters his prayer but only when he comes to believe in its effectiveness (“The Imposture of Beauty: The Uncanniness of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray,” trans. Duncan Large, in Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999], 31). 60. On Wilde’s use and abuse of Pater in the novel, see Robert K. Martin, “Parody and Homage: The Presence of Pater in Dorian Gray,” Victorian Newsletter 63 (1983): 15–18; Nils Clausson, “ ‘Culture and Corruption’: Paterian Self-Development Versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Papers in Language and Literature 39, 4 (2003): 339– 64; and John Paul Riquelme, “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Modern Fiction Studies 46, 3 (2000): 609–31. 61. Dorian Gray, writes Rachel Bowlby, is “composed of the image of the artist and the words of the philosopher (“Promoting Dorian Gray,” in Shopping with Freud [London: Routledge, 1993], 16); he provides, Ed Cohen suggests, “the surface on which the characters project their self-representations” (“Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire and the Closet of Representation,” PMLA 102 [1987]: 806). 62.“The bee’s contact with the flower mimes human sexual intercourse and reminds us that Dorian is being penetrated, by Lord Henry’s ideas, if not by his body” (Martin, “Parody and Homage,” 16); “Lord Henry’s speech fertilizes young Dorian’s mind as the bee’s passage works to pollinate the flower” (Forbes Morlock, “ ‘Th at Strange Interest in Trivial Th ings’: Seduction in Derrida and Dorian Gray,” Parallax 12, 3 [2006]: 70). 63. Seneca, Epistles 66– 92, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), 279. On the diff usion of Seneca’s metaphor, see G. W. Pigman, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33, 1 (1980): 1–32. On bees in

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the fin de siècle, see Marion Thain, Michael Field: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 130– 67. 64. Note, too, that the stand upon which Dorian places the copy of the yellow book Lord Henry has sent him looks like “the work of some strange Egyptian bees” (274). 65. Patrice Hannon, “Theater and Theory in the Language of Dorian Gray,” Victorian Literature and Culture 19 (1991): 152. 66. Quoted in Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research (Greensboro, N.C.: ELT Press, 1993), 130. 67. See the newspaper debates collected in Stuart Mason, ed., Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality (London: Frank Palmer, 1912).

chapter 5. a republic of (nothing but) letters Note to epigraph: Theodor W. Adorno, “Spengler After the Decline,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 72. 1. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 297, 296; Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 166, 165. 2. Huysmans, À rebours, 320; Against Nature, 183. As Barbara M. Benedict, has noted, literary anthologies were traditionally communal projects. See “The Paradox of the Anthology: Collecting and Différance in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 231– 56. See also David Hopkins, “On Anthologies,” Cambridge Quarterly 37, 3 (2008): 285–304. 3. Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3. 4. Linda Dowling argues that the decadents responded to nineteenth-century theories about the social function of the clerisy. See Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 140. For a history of the clerisy in England, see Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). See also William Whyte, “The Intellectual Aristocracy Revisited,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10 (2005): 15–45. 5. See Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993); Scott Lash, “Reflexivity and Its Doubles: Structures, Aesthetics, Community,” in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 110– 73; and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 6. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). Recent work on this concept, often critical of Habermas, has stressed the fractures, exclusions, and discontinuities

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of modern publics. See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 289–339. 7. See James Smith Allen, In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patton, eds., Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 8. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Press, 2005), 90. 9. Ibid., 122. 10. On decadent journalism in England, see Ian Fletcher, “Decadence and the Little Magazines,” in Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 173–202. See also James G. Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); and James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000). For a survey of French publications associated with the decadent movement, see Louis Marquèze-Pouey, Le mouvement décadent en France (Paris: PUF, 1986). 11. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Kirsten MacCleod, Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); and Margaret Stetz, “Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the Eighteen-Nineties,” Victorian Studies 35 (1991): 71–86. 12. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. IV, ed. Josephine Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 203. On Wilde’s cosmopolitanism, see Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 147–76; and Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). 13. This is a point made by Anderson, as well as by Lauren Goodlad in “Trollopian ‘Foreign Policy’: Rootedness and Cosmopolitanism in the Mid-Victorian Global Imaginary,” PMLA 124, 2 (2009): 437–45. See my note 4 in the Introduction for a fuller listing of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism.

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14. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 15. Lee takes her title from an allusion in Symons, and dedicates the book to Pater. On the Victorian construction of the Renaissance, see J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). On Lee’s relationship to traditions of Victorian historical writing, see Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 25– 59; Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 55–92; and Alison Brown, “Vernon Lee and the Renaissance: From Burckhardt to Berenson,” in Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance, ed. John E. Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 185–209. 16. On Lee’s ethic of “decadent contamination,” see Dennis Denisoff, “Decadent Contamination and the Productivist Ethos,” in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 75– 90. See also the discussion of “cosmopolitan contamination” in Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), 101–13. 17. Vernon Lee, Euphorion: Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance, third edition (London: Unwin, 1890), 441. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. 18. Vineta Colby describes Lee as a lifelong “liberal with socialist leanings,” who was raised without nationalist prejudice (Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003], 272). Lee read widely in political theory in the 1880s and 1890s, often associated with socialist intellectuals, and was later reviled for her outspoken pacifism during World War I. 19. See Kenneth Burke, “War, Response, and Contradiction,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 234–57. 20. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 304. 21. On the reception of Miss Brown, see Colby, Vernon Lee, 103–10; and Laurel Brake, “Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle,” in Maxwell and Pulham, eds., Vernon Lee, 40–57. 22. Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 33. On Pater and community, see also Dowling, Language and Decadence, 136–40; Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting,” in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 36–58; and Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 101–48. I discuss Pater’s accounts of politics and community at greater length in “Literary Communism: Pater and the Politics of Community,” in Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts, ed. Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 185–204. 23. In his 1890 essay on Prosper Merimée, which he wrote while working on Gaston de Latour, Pater notes that Merimée’s historical novel about the period, 1572: Chronique

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du règne de Charles IX (1829), freely compares the “decadence” of “that favourite century of the French Renaissance with our own” (Walter Pater, Miscellaneous Studies [London: Macmillan, 1910], 21). 24. Walter Pater, Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text, ed. Gerald Monsman (Greensboro, N.C.: ELT Press, 1995), 36. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. 25. Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 94. 26. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 189. 27. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 75. 28. In The Renaissance, Pater uses the term to define Leonardo’s opportunistic relationship to power: “No one had ever carried political indifferentism further; it had always been his philosophy to ‘fly before the storm’; he is for the Sforzas, or against them, as the tide of their fortunes turns” (100). On the reception of Montaigne and Bruno in the period, see Jane Spirit, “Nineteenth-Century Responses to Montaigne and Bruno: A Context for Pater,” in Pater in the 1990s, ed. Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, N.C.: ELT Press, 1991), 217–27. 29. Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Queer Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15. 30. For a discussion of the most viable theories, see Monsman’s Introduction to his edition of the novel. 31. Dowling, Language and Decadence, 146, 147–48. 32. Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. III, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 282. On the dissemination of the legend, see Barbara Fass, La Belle Dame sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974). 33. Megan Becker-Leckrone, “Salome©: The Fetishization of a Textual Corpus,” New Literary History 26, 2 (1995): 239– 60. 34. J. M. Clifton-Everest, The Tragedy of Knighthood: Origins of the Tannhäuserlegend (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1979). On the politics of Wagnerism in the period, see David C. Large and William Weber, eds., Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 35. Leah Garrett, “Sabotaging the Text: Tannhäuser in the Works of Heine, Wagner, Herzl, and Peretz,” Jewish Social Studies 9, 1 (2002): 34–52. 36. See Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 37. Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 153–54. On the importance of Wagner to decadent writing, see Erwin Koopen, Dekadenter Wagnerismus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973).

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38. Dowling suggests that The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser should be read as a satirical roman à clef (“Venus and Tannhäuser: Beardsley’s Satire of Decadence,” Journal of Narrative Technique 8 [1978]: 26–41). On Beardsley and caricature, see also Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 114–28 and 243–95. 39. Stephen Calloway, Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 137. See also Geoff rey Harpham, “The Incompleteness of Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhäuser,” ELT 18 (1975): 24–32. 40. The first attempt, by Franz Blei, is appended to a German translation of the work from 1920; the second is by the Canadian author John Glassco, from 1959. My thanks to Dennis Denisoff for drawing my attention to the significance of these continuations. 41. Aubrey Beardsley, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser or Under the Hill, ed. Robert Oresko (London: Academy Editions, 1974), 25. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. 42. Jane Haville Desmarais notes that the use of French was part of Beardsley’s deliberate cultivation of a cosmopolitan persona in the press (The Beardsley Industry: The Critical Reception in England and France, 1893–1914 [Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998], 47). 43. Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, revised by James B. Rives (London: Penguin, 2007), 127. 44. Ian Fletcher, “Inventions for the Left Hand: Beardsley in Verse and Prose,” in Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Robert Langenfeld (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 242. 45. Beardsley’s publisher Leonard Smithers traded in classic and recent works of pornography. On Beardsley’s knowledge of libertinism, see Annette Lavers, “Aubrey Beardsley, Man of Letters,” in Romantic Mythologies, ed. Ian Fletcher (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 243–70; see also Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics. 46. On the resemblance between Spiridion and Wilde, see Dowling, “Venus and Tannhäuser,” 29–30.

postscript. public works Note to epigraph: Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 678. 1. For a contemporary estimation of Mallarmé’s relationship to the decadent movement, see Remy de Gourmont’s 1898 essay “Stéphane Mallarmé and the Idea of Decadence,” in Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas, trans. William Bradley (London: George Allen, 1930), 139–55. 2. Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 158. 3. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 183–84.

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4. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 70. 5. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975– 76), I, 192. 6. D. J. Mossop, “Stéphane Mallarmé: ‘Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire,’ ” French Studies 30, 3 (1976): 290. 7. I agree with Cohn that there is little in the poem to suggest such a literal reading of the image (Toward the Poems, 161). 8. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes I, 106; Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 217. 9. See Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: La politique de la sirène, (Paris: Hachette, 1996); Roger Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Damien Catani, The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarmé (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). See also E. S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), especially 92–125. 10. For a brief overview of the poet’s uneasy relationship to contemporary politics, see Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 202–15. Julia Kristeva argues that Mallarmé’s public apathy masks an anarchistic challenge to the political system. See La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 421–40. Kristeva’s association of Mallarmé’s writing with anarchist tactics has been borne out by scholarship on the close relationship between anarchism and symbolism in fin-desiècle France. See, for example, Richard Shryock, “Anarchism at the Dawn of the Symbolist Movement,” French Forum 25 (2000): 291–307. 11. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 637. On the notion of a “literary fund,” see Kevin Newmark, Beyond Symbolism: Textual History and the Future of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 68–105. 12. See Bertrand Marchal, “Baudelaire-Mallarmé: Relecture ou La Fleur et La Danseuse,” in Baudelaire: Nouveaux chantiers, ed. J. Delabory and Y. Charnet (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1995), 147–57. 13. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes I, 48; Flowers of Evil, 99. In “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” Baudelaire also uses the image of Lazarus to describe the effects of memory. 14. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 3– 6. 15. See, for example, Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 28–59. 16. I borrow the term “secret history” from Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 17. In her pioneering essay on camp, Susan Sontag cites Wilde and compares the proponent of camp taste to the dandy; the characteristically camp objects she lists include Beardsley’s drawings (“Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961], 275–92).

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index

Abelard, Peter, 81, 82, 85, 117, 118, 155 aestheticism, 1, 10, 12, 13, 142, 190 n30 Agamben, Giorgio, 8 anarchism, anarchists, 6, 9, 13, 32, 169, 177n 18, 204n 10 Anderson, Benedict, 6, 75, 135. See also community; nationalism Apollo, 66– 68 Appadurai, Arjun, 132 appreciation, 2, 8, 11, 15–16, 45– 69, 72, 77, 91– 94, 97, 99, 108, 133, 173. See also epideictic; mimetic canonization Apuleius, 5, 93, 118–119, 140; as libertine precursor, 77; as imperial outsider 52, 87, 89, 90; Metamorphoses 93 Aristotle, 28, 178n 23 Baju, Anatole: Le Décadent, 3 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 141 Baldick, Chris, 76 Balibar, Étienne, 104 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules Amédée, 30, 88, 89, 91 Bataille, Georges, 173 Baudelaire, Charles, 2, 3, 6, 8, 14, 71– 74, 79, 80, 86, 89, 90, 95, 99, 100, 134, 135, 154, 155, 158, 173; and civic humanism, 11, 15, 21, 22, 27, 31, 32, 46, 47, 59, 69, 77; and the Revolutions of 1848, 20, 21, 25, 51; as reader of Poe, 1, 15, 20, 31–41, 43, 58, 98, 108, 118, 125, 140; ideas about community, 7, 15, 18, 25– 31, 36, 103, 132, 138; in À rebours (Huysmans), 87, 88, 90– 92; influenced by utopian socialism, 9, 13, 20, 24–25, 32; influence on decadent movement, 1–2, 5, 16, 21, 45–48, 93– 94, 108, 184n 5; in “Joachim Du Bellay” (Pater), 82– 83, 143; in “Notice” (Gautier), 15, 47, 48–56, 69, 80; interest in Maistre,

15, 20, 35– 41; in “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” (Mallarmé), 18–19, 164–172; in the writings of Swinburne, 2, 45, 48, 57– 69, 91, 94, 98, 108, 118, 132, 156; views on America, 32, 35– 41, 111; Works: “Au Lecteur,” 29, 168; “Le Bienfaits de la lune,” 49– 50; “Correspondances,” 167; “Don Juan aux Enfers,” 54; “Edgar Poe: Sa vie et ses ouvrages,” 32– 35, 37, 41; “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres,” 33, 35–38, 40–41; “Élévation,” 54; Exposition universelle, 29; “Femmes damnées,” 29; “Le Flacon,” 170–171; Les Fleurs du mal, 47, 54, 57, 62, 167; “Les Foules,” 28–29; “Franciscae meae laudes,” 93– 94; Journaux intimes, 35; “Les Litanies de Satan,” 65, 66; “Le Miroir,” 22–23, 30; Mon cœur mis à nu, 31, 37; “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe,” 3, 34, 35, 37, 38; “L’Œuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix,” 27– 28, 30, 31; “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 25–26, 29–31, 73; Salon de 1846, 15, 23–27, 38; Salon de 1859, 26; “Le Soleil,” 54; “Le Vin des chiffonniers,” 168; “Les Vocations,” 29 Beardsley, Aubrey, 7, 12, 133, 155–157; Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, 15, 18, 77, 132, 153–163; “Toilette of Salome,” 77 Becker-Leckrone, Megan, 154 Beerbohm, Max: “Enoch Soames,” 134 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 26, 28, 152 Bentley, Nancy, 112 Bernheimer, Charles, 5, 96 Blake, William, 5, 56, 58–59, 61 Bloch, Ernst, 9 Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron, 55–56, 121 Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, 20, 42, 50, 51, 52, 60, 84 Bourget, Paul, 2, 5, 10, 13, 14, 48

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Brennan, Timothy, 71 Bruno, Giordano, 117, 145, 148–150 Burke, Kenneth, 138 Burton, Richard D. E., 20, 21, 35 Calloway, Stephen, 156 canons, 67, 70–102, 172; libertine, 77– 79, 160; national, 14, 71– 72, 75– 77, 86, 87, 91, 92, 95, 97, 103; homoerotic, 78– 79. See also decadent canon; mimetic canonization Carlyle, Thomas, 58 Casanova, Pascale, 75 Chorier, Nicolas, 5, 106; Satyra sotadica, 106 civic humanism, 7, 11, 16, 71, 77; Baudelaire’s conception of, 21, 22, 31, 32, 46; in the works of Gautier and Swinburne, 47–48, 59. See also republicanism Clements, Patricia, 46, 57, 60, 82, 143 Clifton-Everest, J. M., 154 Cohn, Robert Greer, 165 collectors and collections, 14, 16–17, 70– 79, 92, 103, 135, 160, 162; in À rebours, 71, 86– 91, 131–132; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 95– 98; in Gaston de Latour, 144, 150–151 community: aesthetic, 22, 31, 32, 46, 57; cosmopolitan and international, 5, 7, 18, 59, 80, 85, 94, 132, 135–143, 154, 156, 160; defined by sexual dissidence, 66, 69, 78, 98– 102, 142; defined by taste, 8, 11, 14, 15, 71, 80, 85, 132, 140, 150, 152, 173, 173; in decadent writing, 6, 10–11, 14–16, 18, 70– 71, 98, 103–104, 131–135, 143– 144, 153–155, 172; made up of outsiders, 21, 27–32, 48–49, 56, 62, 65– 66, 103, 132, 165, 172; produced by reading and writing, 8, 10, 18, 46, 59, 60– 69, 74, 85, 93– 94, 131–163, 166, 169–170; theories about, 8–10, 13–14, 36, 75, 132–135, 146, 171, 178n 23 conservatism, 13, 16, 20, 21, 29, 50, 58, 59, 184n 24 Coquio, Catherine, 46 cosmopolitanism, 1, 29, 59, 77, 78, 92, 135; characteristic of decadent writing, 1–2, 5, 10, 14, 16–17, 71, 77, 81, 92, 173; in Euphorion, 135–143; in Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, 153–163 counterpublics, 18, 136, 139, 140, 146, 147, 153, 154, defined, 133–135; in Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, 156–163

Crébillon, Claude Prosper Jolyot de: Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit, 106 Culler, Jonathan, 32 dandies, dandyism, 15, 28–31, 39, 43, 49, 119 decadence: definition of, 2–5, 7, 10, 22, 37 decadent movement, 1– 6, 21, 92, 99, 153, 101, 108, 132–133, 144–145, 153–154, 156, 163; Baudelaire’s influence on, 1–2, 21, 45–48, 56, 164–172; compared with aesthetic movement, 10–13; difficulty of defining, 2, 4, 177n 13; politics of, 10– 11, 13–15 decadent canon, 2, 5, 86, 92– 94, 98, 99, 101, 134, 167; and identity, 94– 98; as international, 17, 84, 86– 87, 90, 153; compared with libertine canon, 77– 79; compared with national canon, 17, 71– 72, 74, 76– 77, 92, 103. See also canons; mimetic canonization Dellamora, Richard, 13 Deleuze, Gilles, 110 De Man, Paul, 165 democracy, 31, 32, 35, 37, 38, 58, 72, 135 Derrida, Jacques, 61 Des Esseintes (character), 12, 70– 72, 77– 79, 92– 93, 96, 103, 107–109, 121, 139, 172, 194n 14; as collector, 72, 77, 79, 86– 91, 119, 144; desire for community, 70– 71, 131–132, 144, 146, 163. See also Huysmans, Joris-Karl disciples and discipleship, 27, 46, 64, 67, 99, 108–109, 118, 123 Donato, Eugenio, 12 Dowling, Linda, 10–11, 86, 94, 119–120, 153 Du Bellay, Joachim, 89, 91, 96, 122; and nationalism, 82– 84, 119–121; Defense and Illustration of the French Language, 83 Edelman, Lee, 125 education, 17–18, 75– 76, 104–130; and contracts, 18, 111–117, 130; nationalist uses of, 104–106, 121, 124, 130; libertine, 106–109, 115, 118 Elagabalus, 96, 143, 149 epideictic, 8, 47, 48, 57, 74, 92, 178n 23. See also appreciation; mimetic canonization Esposito, Roberto, 171 Fichte, Johan Gottlieb, 108, 109, 112, 117, 120, 124, 130; Addresses to the German Nation, 76, 105–106

index Field, Michael (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), 2, 13, 17, 72, 98–102, 142, 192n 61, 193n 62; “L’Embarquement pour Cythère,” 100–101; Sight and Song, 13, 17, 72, 98–102; “Sleeping Venus,” 99–100; “Venus and Mars,” 99; “Venus, Mercury, and Cupid,” 98– 99 Fisher, Philip, 74 Flaubert, Gustave, 5, 73, 88– 90 Fletcher, Ian, 158 Fourier, Charles, 20, 24, 31 French Revolution, 9, 59, 66, 104; in Baudelaire’s writings, 20, 22, 24, 33, 35; in Maistre’s thought, 36, 39 funeral oration, 15, 48–52, 56, 61, 62, 77 Gagnier, Regenia, 6, 12, 13 Gallop, Jane, 106 Garrett, Leah, 155 Gautier, Théophile, 3, 47, 48, 50, 52, 57, 71, 72, 86, 91, 92, 97, 119, 157, 158, 164, 167; Mademoiselle de Maupin, 52, 93, 115, 157; “Notice” 15–16, 47–56, 60, 69, 74, 77, 80, 87, 101, 121; on decadent style, 51–52, 73, 80, 82, 89, 94; use of republican political theory, 11, 15, 48–57, 103, 132, 172 Gilman, Richard, 2–4 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules, 88, 90, 100, 101 Gray, John: Silverpoints, 94 Green, Andy, 104 Guillory, John, 74, 76, 79 Habermas, Jürgen, 132–133 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 28, 112, 152 Hannon, Patrice, 128 Heine, Heinrich, 155; “The Gods in Exile,” 80 Herder, Johan Gottfried, 75, 76 Howells, Bernard, 58 Hugo, Victor, 56, 59, 60 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 11–13, 17, 72, 78, 92, 93, 97, 98, 107, 172; À Rebours 12, 17, 70– 73, 78, 86– 92, 107–109, 131–132, 172; Là Bas, 92, 194n 19. See also Des Esseintes imitation, 2, 36, 46, 47, 92– 94, 108, 137, 164; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 97, 123–126. See also mimetic canonization individualism, 5, 8, 11, 15, 71, 132, 173; Baudelaire’s views on, 22–23, 25, 26, 37, 181n 7

227

influence, 5, 17, 18, 118, 198n 58; in Marius the Epicurean, 118–123; in Miss Brown, 115–117; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 94, 97, 123–130; of Baudelaire, 2, 21, 26, 45– 47, 50, 166, 170–172; as decadent ideal, 57, 67, 80, 83– 84, 108, 115, 141 Iser, Wolfgang, 144 Jackson, Holbrook, 2 John the Baptist, 46, 48, 171 Johnson, Lionel: “In Honorum Doriani Creatorisque Eius,” 93 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 21, 111 Kaye, Richard, 98 Kristeva, Julia, 10 Lash, Scott, 132 Lazarus, 170–172 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 2, 11, 12, 18, 117, 118, 124, 141, 153; Euphorion, 18, 132, 135–143; Miss Brown, 17, 106, 113–117, 142, 143 liberalism, 10–12, 14, 18, 71, 72, 111, 172; Baudelaire’s attack on, 21, 22, 25, 26, 31, 40, 47 libertinism, 94, 97, 100–101, 110, 111, 114, 118, 123, 124, 160–162; and canon formation, 17, 77– 79; as model for decadent community, 11, 16, 78, 103–104, 173; theories of education, 17–18, 106–109, 115 Longxi, Zhang, 124 Loraux, Nicole, 48–49 Lorrain, Jean: Monsieur de Phocas, 73 Lukács, Georg, 173 Maistre, Joseph de, 15, 20, 35–41, 52, 111, 184n 34; Les Soirées de Saint Petersbourg, 35, 36; Considerations sur la France, 36; Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques, 39 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 13, 18–20, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 134, 164, 165, 169, 173; “La Cour,” 169; “La Musique et les lettres,” 169; “Prose (pour Des Esseintes),” 93; “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire,” 18, 164–172; “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” 166 Marchal, Bertrand, 170 Marcus, Steven, 77 martyrs and martyrdom, 6, 15, 48, 50, 54, 98, 105, 138, 172; in Baudelaire’s account of Poe, 15, 35–41. See also sacrifice

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Mazzini, Giuseppe, 56, 59, 61 McGann, Jerome, 57, 67 Mendès, Catulle, 7, 45 mimetic canonization, 17, 72, 91–102, 123, 134. See also canons; decadent canon Mirbeau, Octave, 13, 72 Monsman, Gerald, 82 Montaigne, Michel de, 145, 148–150 Moore, George: Confessions of a Young Man, 94, 103–105 Moreau, Gustave, 89– 90 Morris, William, 11, 12, 154, 155 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1, 9, 146, 152 nationalism 10–12, 14, 80, 86, 92, 116, 120, 122, 131, 151; and canon formation 16, 71– 79; and public education 104–109; decadent critique of 10–12, 14, 29, 81– 85, 92, 103, 130, 135–139, 155, 172 Nicolson, Harold, 57 Nietz sche, Friedrich, 2, 164, 175n 2 Nisard, Désiré, 3, 4, 48, 52 Nordau, Max, 5, 45–46, 73, 124; Degeneration, 3, 12, 45, 123 Ohi, Kevin, 148 Olmstead, William, 29 pastoral elegy, 47, 61, 62, 64. See also “Ave atque Vale” Pater, Walter 2, 11, 12, 78, 89, 92, 93, 98, 102, 108, 118, 124, 125, 135, 136, 153, 154; Gaston de Latour 18, 117, 132, 143–153; “Joachim Du Bellay” 81– 84, 143; Marius the Epicurean, 18, 73, 93, 106, 118–123; Plato and Platonism, 73, 118; Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 17, 72, 79– 86, 92, 93, 117–120, 143, 146, 155 Pericles, 5, 49, 52, 78 Pervigilium Veneris, 122 Petronius, 5, 89, 91, 134, 139; and imperial fragmentation, 87, 89, 90; as libertine precursor, 77, 87; Satyricon, 87, 95 Plato, 28, 39, 73, 78, 80, 106, 107; Republic, 21, 113 Poe, Edgar Allan, 5, 8, 14, 20, 53, 57, 60, 93, 108, 118, 125, 134, 135, 140; in Baudelaire’s writings 1, 15, 31–41, 43, 46–49, 58, 72, 98 Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 59, 85 Prevost, Abbé: Manon Lescaut, 77, 110, 124

Psomiades, Kathy Alexis, 115 Pygmalion, 109–117, 124, 134, 153, 173 Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette-Eymery), 94, 115, 117, 118, 124, 144; La Jongleuse, 72; Monsieur Vénus 17, 77, 94, 106, 109–113, 126, 143 Rancière, Jacques, 11 Reide, David, 66 republicanism, 7, 11, 13, 14, 23, 53, 77, 78, 135, 138, 169; and brotherhood 16, 27, 60– 69; and idea of decadence 22, 37–38, 47–48; and sacrifice, 35, 49, 57, 138, 172; classical (political theory), 15, 21, 22, 46, 47, 51, 55, 60, 103, 132, 172; cosmopolitan, 59– 60, 135; modern (political theory) 15, 20, 22, 24–25, 36, 42. See also civic humanism Republic of Letters 7, 43 Revolutions of 1848, 14, 20, 21, 25, 50–51, 59 Reynolds, Matthew, 116 Robins, Bruce, 132 Roman Empire, 3, 35, 121, 122, 137; and definition of decadent style, 52; imagery of disintegration, 86– 90 Ronsard, Pierre de, 5, 90, 96, 143, 145, 150; as image of Baudelaire, 82, 143; depiction in Gaston de Latour, 147–149, 151–153; Franciade, 151–152; Odes, 83, 147; open to foreign influence, 83– 84 Rooksby, Rikky, 56 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 98, 113 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 111, 160 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 110, 115, 117, 118, 124, 194n 15, 196n 31; Venus in Furs, 17, 77, 106, 109–113 sacrifice, 57, 61, 92, 98, 138, 171, 172; in Baudelaire’s account of Poe, 15, 36, 39–41, 47; in “Notice,” 48–56; in republican thought, 49, 71, 77– 78 Sade, Marquis de, 5, 77, 134; La philosophie dans le boudoir, 106, 108 saints, 35–36, 50, 65, 81, 98, 138n 23. See also martyrs; sacrifice Salome (character), 8, 77, 89– 90, 134, 153, 154 Saville, Julia, 59 Savoy, 133, 156 Schiller, Friedrich von, 14, 21 Schoolfield, George C., 5 schools (artistic and literary), 12, 15, 24–26, 28, 42, 119, 123, 155, 184n 5

index schools (public), 17, 104–106, 113, 115, 124, 172. See also education Second Empire (France), 7, 16, 20, 51, 52, 56, 60, 64, 168 Seeba, Hinrich, 76 Segal, Naomi, 108 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus: “On Gathering Ideas” (Epistle 84), 127–128 Shaftesbury, Th ird Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 21 social contract, 10, 14, 18, 22, 39–41, 111–113, 116, 130; compared to contracts between teacher and student, 18, 111–117, 130; as Faustian, 111, 124 socialism, 32, 115, 169; utopian, 9, 13, 21, 25 Spackman, Barbara, 73 students and teachers, 14, 17–18, 37, 103–130. See also education Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars, 97, 158 Sutton, Emma, 155 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 13, 47, 48, 56, 71, 72, 74, 77, 80, 86, 91– 93, 97–102, 135, 154, 167, 169, 184n 5; “Ave atque Vale,” 15, 16, 47, 60– 69, 77, 98, 156, 166, 169; “Charles Baudelaire,” 57, 60, 65; “Laus Veneris,” 67, 99–100, 155, 187n 43; on Baudelaire, 2, 45, 48, 57– 69, 91, 94, 108, 118, 132, 164, 172; Poems and Ballads, Second Series, 63; Songs Before Sunrise, 61, 63; “To Catullus,” 60; use of republican political theory, 11, 15–16, 59– 61, 77, 103; William Blake, 58, 62 Symonds, John Addington, 96, 135 Symons, Arthur, 45, 93, 100, 156, 167; “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” 93, 134 Tacitus: Germania, 196n 30 Tannhäuser (character), 67– 68, 98–100, 143, 153–163. See also Beardsley, Aubrey; Wagner, Richard taste, 4, 5, 17, 74, 94, 119, 150–151, 159, 161; and politics, 14, 21, 23, 27, 37, 46, 47, 169; as basis for community, 8, 11, 15, 18, 21–22,

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26–30, 43, 68, 71, 80, 85, 92, 102, 132, 140, 146, 152, 156, 172, 173; cosmopolitan, 16, 71, 135, 141, 156; outsider, 16–17, 68, 103–104, 173 Tennant, P. E., 48 Thomas, David Wayne, 10–11 Tiberius, 97, 158, 192n 54 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 9, 14 Turner, James Gratham, 77, 106 Venus, 18, 66– 68, 98–101, 109, 154, 156, 158, 160 Venus dans le cloître (“Abbé du Prat”), 77 Verlaine, Paul, 2, 5, 45, 77, 88, 91, 93, 94, 184n 5; Fêtes Galantes, 100; “Langueur,” 100–101; influence on Michael Field, 13, 100–102; Les Poètes maudites, 93 Vigny, Alfred de, 41–44 Wagner, Richard, 5, 8, 47, 135, 154, 155, 157; Tannhäuser and the Singers’ War at Wartburg, 96, 154, 155, 192n 60 Wallen, Jeff rey, 80 Warner, Michael, 18, 133, 134. See also counterpublic Watteau, Antoine, 25, 100–102 Weiner, Stephanie Kuduk, 59 Whistler, James McNeill, 70, 134, 156 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 6, 11–13, 77, 78, 93, 94, 125, 134, 144, 156, 158, 162, 173; “Critic as Artist” 135; Picture of Dorian Gray, 17, 18, 72, 94– 98, 106, 123–130, 154, 157, 158, 170; “Portrait of Mr. W.H.” 78– 79, 96; Salomé, 2, 8; “Soul of Man Under Socialism,” 198n 58 Williams, Carolyn, 81 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 78, 79, 81, 85, 86, 117, 118 Yellow Book, 2, 133, 134 Zatlin, Linda, 155 Zorn, Christa, 116–117

ac know ledg ments

Preliminary research on this book was supported by Barbara Spackman, J. Hillis Miller, and Julia Reinhard Lupton, to whom I am grateful for comments and insight at an early stage of the project. More recently, I have benefited greatly from discussions with and criticism by colleagues at the University of Utah and elsewhere. At Utah, I want in particular to thank Scott Black, Vince Cheng, Andy Franta, Bruce Haley, Brooke Hopkins, Howard Horwitz, Anne Jamison, Stacey Margolis, Elijah Milgram, Vince Pecora, Kathryn Stockton, Jessica Straley, and Barry Weller. Gillian Brown and Barbara Johnson were important influences on my scholarship—they are both missed. I am particularly grateful to Charles Martindale and Liz Prettejohn, whose invitation to speak at a conference on decadence in Bristol (United Kingdom) in 2003 set the project on its current course. I also want to thank Tom Albrecht, Stephen Arata, Megan Becker-Leckrone, Jennifer Birkett, Marshall Brown, Ellen Burt, Elicia Clements, Liz Constable, Colin Cruise, Whitney Davis, Richard Dellamora, Dennis Denisoff, Reginia Gagnier, Lauren Goodlad, Lesley Higgins, Richard Kaye, Philip Leider, Sharon Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, Julia Saville, Talia Schaffer, Elaine Showalter, Jeff Wallen, Carolyn Williams, and Julia Wright for their helpful comments, readings of drafts, willingness to share unpublished work, or invitations to present material from the project. Thanks go as well to Jerry Singerman at the University of Pennsylvania Press for seeing value in this project, and for directing the manuscript to the two anonymous readers whose reports helped me improve the book. I want to express my appreciation to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for early support in the form of a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship, and to the Career Development Committee of the College of Humanities at the University of Utah for granting me the sabbatical that allowed me to finish the book. I am above all grateful to my family—Anna, Zoe, Noah, and my parents— who cheerfully tolerated and enabled my all-too-common retreats into my study. This book is for them.

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Portions of this book have appeared in other publications. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as “Decadence, Nationalism, and the Logic of Canon Formation,” in MLQ 67, 2 (2006): 213–44, and is reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. A portion of Chapter 4 appeared in different form as “Fear of Falling: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean as a Dangerous Influence,” in ELH 65 (1998): 701–29. Parts of Chapter 5 were published as “The Decadent Counterpublic” in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 48 (2007); and as “Literary Communism: Pater and the Politics of Community,” in Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts, ed. Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 185–204. I thank the respective copyright holders for permission to republish these essays.