Alfred Kubin, The Way to Hell, 1904 [top].
Cabaret l'Enfer, Montmarte, circa 1890s [bottom].
“Hyacinthe appeared before me completely naked, begging me to flagellate her. She had in her hand the scourge of a canoness: seven cordlets of silk in detestation of the seven deadly sins, with seven knots to each cord in remembrance of the seven ways of mortal failure.”
Remy de Gourmont, Le Fantôme, 1893.
Severe Spring’s still with us,
But growing gentler by the hour
In breaths of air just warm enough
Soul, give yourself up to the greatness of hope.
Paul Verlaine, “A Cold Wind…” Sagesse, 1880.
“Sadism and Catholicism, in French Decadent literature, became the two poles between which the souls of neurotic and sensual writers oscillate.”
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 1933.
J.-K. Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Adolphe Retté, Renée Vivien, John Gray, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde – It’s beyond my powers to enumerate all of the Decadents who converted to Catholicism, many on their deathbeds. The relevant question is: should we see their conversions as a repudiation of their Decadence, or a continuation of it? As one might suspect, the answer varies, and probably contains a bit of both.
The Decadence always existed in a basically Catholic moral universe, was basically reactionary, and had already reconciled with all things supernatural and mystical. So when one finally tired of cavorting with Satan, as Huysmans did of his explorations of Là-Bas, or when one felt guilty about just how far one had made it down the way to Hell, as Verlaine did about his affair with Rimbaud, it made sense to retire to the bosom of the One True Church. After all, it had all the incense, ornate ritual and dreamy archaism beloved by the Decadent. It’s not a difficult step from longing for the sublime in Art to longing for it in religion. Also, Paris was suffering from a surfeit of fin de siècle Satanism – even the cabarets literally opened their jaws like the maw of the Beast – so perhaps the Decadents had to abandon Hell for Heaven, because Hell had become too popular.
The French were ‘lapsed’ Catholics in a Catholic country returning with renewed piety to a theme that had never really left their life or work, but the English converts not raised in the faith were a bit stranger. But as Philippe Jullian points out, the English “did not go so far in the way of Satanism, possibly because the Catholic Church had an exotic charm for them, and going over to Rome was as momentous a step as becoming a Satanist for a Catholic.” The only thing that could combine pageantry, opulence, esotericism, historical fantasy, morbidity, curiously erotic guilt, sadomasochistic penitence, and belief in fantastically irrational and contradictory propositions better than the Decadence was indeed the Catholic Church. So in these converted Decadents I’m tempted to read an inseparable mix of genuine, contrite longing for the serene beauty of the Church with a final spasm of perversity, and perhaps most of all, a gloomy understanding that their time was up – that their only future lay, as Barbey d’Aurevilly put it, in death or at the foot of the cross.
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