(2 of 4)
Art for art's sake shocked both conservative and radical Victorians—"its foredoomed end," said Socialist William Morris, "must be that art at last will seem too delicate a thing even for the hands of the initiated to touch." What added to the horror of the Victorians was that some of the new artists themselves were as amoral, antisocial and perverse as their works. The artist, the disciples of art for art's sake pointed out, was not a reformer, not a teacher, and certainly not a creature bound by ordinary laws. He was the last of the aristocrats in a world being turned over to mob rule. He followed his exquisite sensations wherever they might lead him; personal excess was his right. Poet Baudelaire managed to combine all the ideals: he smoked hashish, lived with Negresses, wrote brilliant, sensual, satanic poems. But, as an aristocrat, he dressed immaculately in the British manner and learned to drop phlegmatic monosyllables out of the corner of his mouth.
The Hard, Gemlike Flame. Many of the new esthetes determinedly marked themselves off from the crowd by what seemed to them the highest forms of both self-indulgence and self-martyrdom. They nourished what they chose to call nostalgie de la boue — "the longing for the gutter." Paul Verlaine, the outstanding poet of his day, was a diseased, perverted dipsomaniac who "wrapped his suppurating limbs ... in vile rags," lived off the earnings of prostitutes, and alternated between "maudlin ferocity [and] mawkish repentance." Accused of being decadent, he replied: "I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. ... It suggests a soul capable of intense pleasures. ... It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiator ... the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation."
Imitations of the authentic French originals sprang up in England like dubious mushrooms— gutter lovers, Beau Brummels, professional sensualists, practical jokers, drug fiends. Mildest, most influential apostle of the new, sensuous estheticism was Oxford's Walter Pater. As a child, he had loved to don a surplice and "preach sermons to his admiring Aunt Betty." As a youth, he had avoided horse play ("I do not seem to want a black eye"). As a professor, he coined a famed phrase when he solemnly urged his students "to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame." "Oh, for Crime!" But most of Pater's fellow esthetes took their rebellion more strenuously. In a series of sensuous, pagan hymns, Eton-educated Poet Algernon Swinburne (he had been expelled from the Royal Arts Club for laying the members' silk hats on the cloakroom floor and hopping on them) "shook [a] small, trembling fist" at the man he named "the Socialist of Galilee": Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake . . .