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He recalled a friend of his goaded to ferocity by another's exuberance of rapture for some latter-day singers, crying out "Hang your Decadents! Humpty-Dumpty is worth all they ever wrote." "This," he continued, "is a variety of the mood which accepts Trilby. In Trilby we get back, as it were, to Humpty-Dumpty to its simplicity at least, if not to its pitch of art.
And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human.
In Germany he was connected with the almost legendary, politico-religious sect which bears the name Fahrende Leute; and, again, for some time, in an immense wagon drawn by gigantic Mechlenburgers, he wandered through the mountainous Hartz forest and along the banks of the picturesque Saal; he spent most time in Paris, where, with the theosophists he summoned up spirits, and with the decadents, otherwise known as incoherents, and still otherwise as the accursed poets; in the club of hashish-eaters he had dreams and visions brought on by using narcotics.
It was attacked immediately in The Daily Chronicle, a liberal paper usually distinguished for a certain leaning in favour of artists and men of letters, as a "tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction."
In such a night Stood Dido with a willow in her hand Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love To come again to Carthage. Marigny had indeed arranged a situation worthy of his nurturing among the decadents of Paris. He believed that in these surroundings an impressionable girl would admit him to a degree of intimacy not to be attained by many days of prosaic meetings.
"For what else have we been given brains, the moral sense, the knowledge of good or evil? There are those amongst us who become decadents, whose presence amongst us breeds corruption, whose dirty little lives are like the trail of a foul insect across the page of life. I hold it a just and moral thing to rid the world of such a creature.
Roughly speaking, these new schools the symbolists, the decadents, the dividers of tones, the professors of the rhythm of gesture date back about ten years. For ten years the division of the tones has been the subject of discussion in the aesthetic circles of Montmartre.
If wine be evil, song is evil too. His Bacchic Ode is full of the same enthusiasm. Bacchus received his highest honors at the end of the last century from the decadents in England. Poetry about the Mermaid Inn is bound to take this tone. This aspect is especially stressed by Alfred Noyes, who imagines himself carried back across the centuries to become the Ganymede of the great poets.
I thought both dull places which nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their friendship with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge calculated to épater le bourgeois at home, referring by name with easy familiarity to the dancers in the Quadrille Naturaliste, as celebrated in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining solemnly the chahut and the grand écart and le port d'armes and every evolution in that unpleasant dance.
Not Swinburne certainly, partly because of his undoubted difficulty, partly because of a suspicion held of his moral and religious tenets, largely from material reasons quite unconnected with the quality of his work; not Morris, nor his followers; none of the so-called minor poets whom we shall notice presently poets who have drawn the moods that have nourished their work from the decadents of France.
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