Free The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) by Brian Stableford

might have become a genuine Decadent writer too, but he was given no opportunity to do so, dying of tuberculosis in 1898.
    The early issues of the Yellow Book did endeavour to provide Beardsley’s art-work with some appropriate textual support, but the poetry was essentially staid and the most interesting item – Max Beerbohm’s ironically flippant commentary on the cult of artificiality, “A Defence of Cosmetics” – only proved controversial because some readers did not realise that it was a joke. A similar flippancy was exhibited by a series of “Stories Toto Told Me” which was contributed by the colourful con-man “Baron Corvo” (Frederick W. Rolfe).
    Any pretensions to authentic Decadence which the Yellow Book may have had were instantly jettisoned in the wake of the Wilde trial, though Wilde had never actually been a contributor to it. Beardsley was sacked for having (innocently) kept such bad company, and though he was promptly hired by Arthur Symons to work on The Savoy, a new periodical which was supposed to take up where the Yellow Book left off, the hastily-dropped torch of English Decadence proved too hot to handle. The Savoy lasted only eight issues, closing with a December 1896 issue in which all the text was supplied by Symons and all the illustrations by an ailing Beardsley; when it died, the English Decadent Movement, such as it had been, died too. A book by Symons which had already been advertised under the title The Decadent Movement in Literature was ultimately to appear in 1899 under the more diplomatic title of The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
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    The body of English work which was produced with the Decadent label actually in mind is understandably thin, given that the term was in vogue for little more than three years, and the work to which the label can be attached at second hand is not much larger. The most intensely lurid products of English Decadence can be found in a small group of short story collections issued between 1893 and 1896: Count Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death (1893); R. Murray Gilchrist’s The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances (1894); and three “Keynotes” volumes: Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (1894); and M. P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski (1895) and Shapes in the Fire (1896).
    Stenbock, who was by far the most enthusiastic Decadent in London, was not an Englishman by birth, though he had studied at Oxford and wrote in English; because he was a foreigner his conspicuous indulgence of the Decadent life-style was deemed understandable, if not forgivable. He lived amid absurd decorations, addicted to drink and drugs, and was more flamboyantly homosexual than Oscar Wilde. His mostly self-published poems had long been ignored, and he must have greeted the advent of an English Decadent Movement gladly, hopeful that he might now be discovered. Alas, though Symons did condescend to notice Stenbock, he did not shirk from describing him as “inhuman”. As it turned out, Studies of Death was his last work, though he probably would have soldiered on unrepentantly had he not died (his end hurried by contributory negligence) in 1895.
    Gilchrist, Machen and Shiel, by contrast, were all writers at the beginning of their careers. Although, as in Stenbock’s case, the collections named above are remembered today mainly because the supernatural stories in them are sometimes reprinted in collections of horror stories, all three went on to produce an abundance of work in a less Decadent vein. Two of the three, though, had been marked deeply enough by their flirtation with Decadence that they never quite shook off its legacy. Gilchrist, the odd one out, died in 1917, but Machen and Shiel both survived until 1947, when they were both in their eighties. Though neither of them was subsequently to write anything quite as over-wrought as “The Great God Pan” or the stories in Shapes in the Fire they retained certain Decadent motifs and stylistic