The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) Read Online Free Page B

fascination with the alleged heredity of neurotic traits. Moreau was by no means alone in these preoccupations, which were shared by several more prestigious figures, most importantly the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, whose book on the psychology of genius was translated into French at the height of the Decadent Movement, in 1884.
    The emergent science of abnormal psychology was very heavily influenced by early evolutionist ideas, which made much of the contrary tendencies of “progress” and “degeneration” in searching for explanations of the palaeontological record. In France, of course, evolutionist thinking continued to be dominated by Lamarckian ideas – including the proposition that acquired characteristics could be inherited – for some years after the first publication in England (in 1859) of Darwin’s ideas. As the human sciences came uneasily into being analogies were constantly being drawn between society and biological organisms, so that the ills afflicting society could be explored by analogy with the pathology of disease. (It should be remembered that disease itself was not well-understood at this time; Pasteur did not develop the modern germ theory of disease until the 1860s and a considerable confusion of medical and moral attitudes persisted for some time afterwards.)
    The evident correlation between sexual licence and venereal disease was echoed in proto-psychology by dark superstitions regarding the effects of habitual masturbation, and no one could be sure to what extent the sins of fathers might be visited upon their sons. Montesquieu’s speculations about the decadence of the Romans were recapitulated and much amplified by theories of hereditary decadence which imagined aristocratic families devoted to luxury and vice becoming more effete and less sane with every generation that passed.
    In consequence of these speculations there emerged in the proto-psychology of nineteenth century France and England a new myth: the myth of neurasthenia. The neurasthenic was a physically weak and over-sensitive individual, likely also to be morally weak, permanently possessed by apathy and spiritual impotence. His (or her – though females were more likely to be diagnosed as “hysteric”) condition was primarily the result of bad hereditary but could easily be inflamed by self-abuse and other bad habits. The closeness of this image to the image of the Decadent personality is by no means entirely coincidental; the pseudoscientific theorists of degeneracy fed upon literary inspiration, and returned what they had borrowed with generous interest.
    But the proto-psychologists went further than this, offering speculations which put the neurotic victim of bad heredity in a rather more romantic light. Moreau and Lombroso were both concerned to argue that artistic genius was itself a species of neurosis, closely associated with bad heredity and eccentric lifestyle. The unfortunate victims were therefore offered a possible route to compensatory achievement; would-be Decadents were encouraged to believe that the madder and more miserable they were, the more justified they might be in thinking of themselves as men of genius.
    Baudelaire, who was one of many nineteenth. century writers to have his end hastened by the physical and mental corruptions of syphilis, was not the only striking example offering apparent support for this thesis. Gerard de Nerval, a friend of Gautier’s who was notorious for having strolled in the gardens of the Palais Royal leading a lobster on a leash of pale blue ribbon, had not only gone insane and killed himself but had transmuted his mental disorder into disturbed literary forms – most notably his phantasmagoric novella Aurelia (1855), published posthumously in the year ofhis death. Nerval’s poetry was not assembled into a collection until 1877, shortly before the heyday of Decadence. It included a supernaturaliste group written par désespoir: a product of his madness which