I have dwelt at considerable length on the ancient causes behind the literary movement of our day. I have just warned that difficulties of every sort stand in its way. What’s more, I believe this movement has been too hastily defined and delimited. People speak of Decadence and Symbolism, yet I recognise no genuine literary decadence save in fashionable novels. I know of no literature that isn’t symbolic. Nothing could be more perfectly futile than these labels. The so-called Decadents, in writing with a language restored to its etymological sources, and through their love—excessive, we are told—of the rare word, bore witness above all to that wholly legitimate impulse never to let any of the treasures of the language lie fallow. They were mounting a reaction against the debasement and impoverishment, against the ‘decadence’ of the French language itself.
Yet this remains but one of the secondary hallmarks of the New Literature. To speak plainly, given the singular dispersion of the young writers who embody it, their common traits appear, at first glance, rather difficult to discern. The Romantics, the Parnassians, the Naturalists formed groups—groups that may well have been regimented, but groups nonetheless where they gathered and each knew what the others were planning. Today’s poets and novelists cross paths purely by accident, toil away in profound isolation, and generally prefer to steer clear of one another altogether. Why should this be? Perhaps because observing life or gesticulating at it allows one to unite without penalty, as the Naturalists and Romantics understood. The latter, being theatrical creatures, were scarcely troubled by applauding or hissing one another, and the former, like laboratory specimens, were thrilled to gather round the same microscope beneath the same lamp. Perhaps because one can still unite, and indeed must, to repel the barbarian invasions of Art, to defend Form against such incursions? — Yet see how, once that work was done, the Parnassians went their separate ways to write in solitude, each crafting a personal oeuvre where everyone claimed freedoms with form itself that had once been systematically proscribed. Indeed, one can gather together for analysis, but synthesis proves divisive by its very nature. The ‘all in one‘ renders each self-sufficient. Solitude is essential if life is to converge wholly within a single intelligence and come into full flower beneath a single hand. This very phenomenon, this scattering of young poets, betrays to me what lies deepest in their thought, what they are endeavouring to achieve. Theirs is no middling ambition! At the core of their thought lies the desire for EVERYTHING. They are hunting for aesthetic synthesis, and nothing else will do.
If not as a single group, you might counter, then surely they unite in smaller groups. After all, they have their reviews.
This brings us to the most intriguing aspect of their position. These reviews, which can be tallied readily enough, possess a distinctive unity all their own. Either they are established to champion a specific idea, a doctrine precisely articulated from the outset, or they spring from a single governing will. When it comes to those literary reviews that purport to transcend both doctrine and personality, their disinterested stance belongs to another age.
— La Jeune France, following ten years of hard-fought existence, expired from trying to satisfy everyone.
— La Revue Contemporaine enjoyed a briefer life but left more lasting marks. Its contributors lacked not talent but coherence. The entire younger generation found voice in this Review through Adrien Remacle, Edouard Rod, Emile Hennequin, Joseph Caraguel, Edmond Haraucourt, Charles Henry, Gabriel Sarrazin, Charles Vignier, Mathias Morhardt, Jean Moréas, Ernest Jaubert, Laurent Tailhade, Paul Adam, Paul Margueritte, Maurice Barrès and myself. They were joined by certain masters, amongst them Messieurs de Banville, Leconte de Lisle, Verlaine, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. But its manifold directions allowed too much latitude. A number of like-minded spirits found expression there, yet they never quite merged into one. Its success proved yet again that parliamentary governance in literature is untenable. The venerable ‘republic of letters’ has only ever been a patchwork of minor and major principalities.
— La Vogue was a delightful miscellany, though early signs were already there of a personal candidature taking shape. One finds here too the enduring influence of numerous writers who arrived as youths. Perhaps the most distinct and valuable is that of Jules Laforgue.
— We must pass over Le Scapin, an attempt at attempting a group, altogether sincere and altogether young—too young.
— La Revue Wagnérienne is quintessentially of our age. It too has run its course but had set itself these bounds. What the Review set out to do and achieved is evident in its name itself. The goal was precise articulation of Wagner’s aesthetic doctrines, not their vulgarisation. Through this invaluable periodical, admirably steered with an unerring sense of direction, Édouard Dujardin and Téodor de Wyzewa took pains that were far from superfluous105.
— The original Revue Indépendante was Félix Fénéon’s work, following his earlier and less consequential venture, the Libre Revue. It followed the old principle of gathering contributors bound by no prior doctrinal consensus. The second incarnation of the Revue Indépendante, a magazine of literature and art, proves more telling. It professed to stand apart from “vain decadent agitations,” but therein lies not its true significance. At first under Dujardin and Fénéon’s direction, it was virtually a one-man show by Téodor de Wyzewa. The arrival of Gustave Kahn saw him swallow up the entire operation. De Wyzewa vanished from the scene, at which point Kahn took the reins and set about furnishing, month after month for nearly a year, both exemplar and theory—often simultaneously—of a literature intensely his own.106.
Other journals have sprouted here and there, and that’s about all one can say for them.
A single one, Le Décadent, calls for specific mention. Its extremity was so grotesque that one cannot help but rue encountering there the occasional beloved name, Laurent Tailhade’s amongst them. Yet this very excess carries its own instructive weight. What renders this little sheet so absurd is its conviction that it speaks for a School, in an age when the term has lost all currency. No doctrine whatever informed the venture. Initially, the well-intentioned invoked M. Paul Verlaine’s name at every turn, but M. Paul Verlaine has long since severed all literary ties with the “decadent group,” a spurious collective assembled round nothing but absent ideas. I don’t doubt these young men burn with “the purest love of fine letters,” which is touching yet inadequate. Were it not for their inadvertent service in proving how utterly antiquated and illusory any pretension to literary schools has become, I should have left them to their essential void.
The same proof had already been furnished by Jean Moréas and Paul Adam with their foundation of Le Symboliste, an organ so fleeting it produced merely four numbers. Paul Adam proclaimed there, amongst other pointless pronouncements, that the entire literature of the seventeenth century has left us nothing worth reading. Moréas laboured mightily to write in splendid gibberish. Those who recognise the worth of these two young writers of genuine talent lamented such squandered energy.
Running parallel to these diverse forays into youthful periodicals, the established reviews adopted their own posture, which would prove piquant to examine, though I shall not do so here.
Suffice it to say that youthful boldness appears to have brought into greater prominence geriatric timidity. Yet perhaps the latter bears some responsibility for the former. The solemn reviews, hermetically sealed against anyone not to the Academy born, have betrayed their proper office, which is to guide intellectual currents, not stem their tide. What manner of composition must an article assume to earn a place in the Revue des Deux-Mondes? (An article ought to be written on this very question, though their pages would never accommodate it.) There was a time when one made one’s name there.
The scattering of the Young thus betokens their withdrawal from the fray, into independence. And mark this well: all these poets whom the “grand papers” have sought to cast as revolutionaries and rabble-rousers are straightforward, diligent craftsmen. Their entire clamour consists in publishing books. They lack even the childish urge of the Romantics—forgivable in its merriment—to épater le bourgeoisTN. For them, he might as well not exist.
Yet in the beginning, back in those antediluvian days when a modest literary leaf appeared, first as La Nouvelle Rive Gauche and subsequently as Lutèce, the Decadents made a show of forming a movement and staging a public manifestation, being quite prepared at that time to adopt this battle-standard. These atavistic impulses met their gentle comeuppance: Les Déliquescences.
Nothing even faintly resembling this can be found today.
Not that the fog has lifted entirely, nor that works of genius have erupted. But the work continues in silence. Certain very young poets, full of good intentions but perhaps too ignorant initially, are now, one hopes, acquiring what they lacked. Meanwhile, temperaments are making themselves known, whether sound or flawed from the beginning. Certain elements foreign to the French genius follow their natural trajectory and overstep the bounds of Sense and Taste, whereas the traditional strain simultaneously recovers its essential standing.
Beyond these formal qualities, one ought to note the fundamental ones. But can one properly or fairly judge contemporaries, one’s colleagues and competitors who, having scarcely crossed the threshold of maturity, have yet to articulate the personal equation of their own humanity? “Dissect only the dead,” counsels Alfred de Vigny. As for the living, basic good manners make it incumbent upon us to judge solely their works.
I shall treat the Decadents or Symbolists no differently from other artists who never swore blind allegiance to any master. I shall address only those who genuinely, and for themselves alone, pursue the New Truth.
I shan’t name everyone, and I declare forthrightly that my omissions carry no disdainful intent. The business of exhaustive cataloguing belongs properly to reference literature. Then too, a number of the chronologically young have minds that, however gifted, feel more antiquated than creation itself. Furthermore, I have no intention of establishing hierarchies. Nor shall I betray preferences. All whom I mention, I salute. They all, I trust, dignify these pages. By examining their theories, we shall watch the mists that shroud tomorrow’s dawn either thicken or disperse. We shall trace, in the New Formulae, the effects of causes embedded in the Accomplished ones. Brevity shall govern my approach: theories will be summarised without contention, and I shall offer sparse opinion on the value of these experiments. What I myself think will be found in the concluding pages.
TN: To shock or scandalize the middle classes—a characteristic Romantic impulse involving deliberate provocation of bourgeois taste and morality
Léon Hennique Novel 