The old enemy has merely changed his mode of attack:
instead of charging genius with madness, the abnormal used in an
abnormal sense is lugged in and though these imputations of
degeneracy, moral and physical, have in some cases proven true,
the genius of the accused one can in no wise be denied. But then
as Mr. Philip Hale asks: Why this timidity at being called
decadent? What's in the name?
Havelock Ellis in his masterly study of Joris Karl Huysmans,
considers the much misunderstood phenomenon in art called
decadence. "Technically a decadent style is only such in relation
to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a
classic style, a further specialization, the homogeneous in
Spencerian phraseology having become heterogeneous. The first is
beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the
second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the
parts." Then he proceeds to show in literature that Sir Thomas
Browne, Emerson, Pater, Carlyle, Poe, Hawthorne and Whitman are
decadents--not in any invidious sense--but simply in "the
breaking up of the whole for the benefit of its parts.
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