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

sympathies well into the twentieth century.
    Machen’s best novel, The Hill of Dreams (written 1897; published 1907), is a story of escape into the past more extreme and more determined than Huysmans’ Là-Bas , and presents a memorable account of splenetic civilization-phobia. Shiel’s best novel, The Purple Cloud (1901), has the last man alive in the world giving extravagant vent to his anguish amist the ruins. Machen and Shiel both sought philosophical foundations for their sustained Decadent consciousness, Machen in mysticism and Shiel in a quasi-Nietzschean conviction that the coming of the übermensch was vital to a renewal of the cause of progress.
    It is no coincidence that all four of these short story writers made extravagant use of the supernatural, nor that they did so in a more straightforwardly horrific way than either Gautier or Farrère. The English attitude to Decadence, even among its practitioners, was always spiced with a revulsion which lent itself readily to the construction of stories which are both macabre and morbid. “The Great God Pan”, one of the most nasty-minded stories ever written, extrapolates and displays this element of revulsion very cleverly. Machen, like Yeats, was very interested in contemporary occultism, and not merely as source material (which is how Rimbaud and Huysmans treated their readings in alchemy and satanism). Both were briefly associated with the Order of the Golden Dawn, which supported life-style fantasies combining Decadent elements with pretentions to esoteric Enlightenment, and it might be argued that the most wholehearted of all English Decadents was the one-time star of the Order, Aleister Crowley.
    Like his Decadent countrymen Crowley selected out that part of the Decadent apparatus which suited him (drugs, sexual perversion and charismatic wickedness) and left behind that which did not (neurasthenia and pessimism) but he proved less repentant in the face of popular scandal than any of those who needed a broader audience for their work – though he was ultimately forced into exile as a result. His poetry and his prose fiction are of some relevance but slight merit.
    There were other, much better, English writers whose life-styles tended towards what was popularly regarded as Decadent, and whose lives – for that reason – were spent mostly in exile. One was the lesbian Vernon Lee whose excellent supernatural short fiction plays lovingly with some Decadent motifs; another was Norman Douglas, whose novel They Went (1920) is an interesting late addition to the ironic tradition of English Decadence. Baron Corvo, who died in Venice, might also be added to the list, though the fact that he was persona non grata almost everywhere had as much to do with his sponging as any marginally-Decadent affectations he had once harboured. And, of course, Wilde too died in exile – in Paris, the one and only true home of all true Decadents.
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    Supernatural fiction was not the only genre into which the Decadent elements of English fiction could be safely transplanted. Shiel has the distinction of having penned the only collection of Decadent detective stories in his Keynotes series volume Prince Zaleski (1895) but he made more extravagant use of futuristic settings, as in The Purple Cloud. The idea of futuristic decadence as a probable – perhaps inevitable – fate for the human species is very noticeable in British fiction, and recurs obsessively in the work which H. G. Wells did during the brief period when the idea was fashionable in Britain, as in his evocation of “The Man of the Year Million” (1893) and the image of the decadent Eloi besieged by brutal Morlocks is the central motif of The Time Machine (1895). Future decadence came to be seen as a particularly horrible threat by the writers of scientific romance, who devoted much imaginative effort to the quest for ahappier fate without ever quite putting the nightmare behind them.
    The manner in which the