Absinthe, Opium, and Bejeweled Tortoises

Félicien Rops, La tentation de Saint Antoine

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.

~ William Blake

The culture I admire most, after the Japanese of course, is the French. Both share a tradition of refined hedonism, a propensity for sensual extremes, and an appreciation for the dark, dirty and just plain weird. Both perceive that aesthetics are a worthy enterprise in their own right, that they need not be subordinated to politics, religion (excluding the noble polytheists), architectonic function, or other banal pursuits whose sole aim is the suppression of desire and the exaltation of boredom.

Félicien Rops, Pornocrates

One country owes its relative resilience against the cancer of prudishness to its prolonged isolation, the other to its rebellious spirit. It was in rebellion to the banal notion of “progress” and to the naiveté and hypocrisy of the Romantics that, in France and later in England, a new literary and art movement arose. This group of writers and artists, which included among others the likes of Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Félicien Rops, and Franz von Bayros, espoused aestheticism – art for art’s sake – independent of moral or social concerns, and reveled in a life of sensualistic excess: erotic adventures, flamboyant fashion, opium, absinthe, poetry and painting. According to Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde’s professor/mentor, "To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life . . .”

Franz von Bayros

Decried as “decadent” by critics, these fin-de-siècle writers and artists came to embrace the term. As the writer Theophile Gautier wrote: “The style of decadence is nothing else than art at that extreme point of maturity produced by those civilizations which are growing old, their suns low in the sky – a style that is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further… taking colors from all palates, notes from all keyboards… obscure fantasies at which the daylight would be amazed.”

Franz von Bayros

If our civilization was decaying at the end of the nineteenth century, in what condition is it now? And yet so many artists continue to produce benign, sterile, mediocre art, pathetically attempting to straddle the fence that barely separates commercialism from the hypocrisy of political correctness, in the name of social change and human evolution. Let us not waste any more of our precious time gazing out over the bleak horizon, waiting for Jesus to come swooping down in his UFO and save us from ourselves, and begin rejoicing in the death of a civilization whose time has finally come. For without death, there can be no rebirth.

Aubrey Beardsley. Notice the influence of Japanese Shunga

 A good source for further reading on the decadent and symbolist movements may be found here:The Decadent Handbook.