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

future decadence of mankind became a favourite bugbear of writers of imaginative fiction is, of course, symptomatic of a hostility deeply embedded in English culture – a hostility which is peculiarly revealing. Its force was given to it by Victorian moralism but its fury testifies to the essential corruption of that very moralism. From a modern standpoint we cannot help but take the side of Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensbery, not simply because Wilde was a great writer while Queensbery was an intellectual nonentity, but also because we can now appreciate that the Marquess’s stern repression of his own homoerotic tendencies into a fondness for watching semi-naked men beat one another half to death was no more laudable than Wilde’s addiction to the services of rent boys.
    On the day after the abandonment of the libel action which Wilde unwisely launched against Queensbery the National Observer published a leading article which asserted that: “There is not a man or woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the Marquess of Queensbery for destroying the High Priest of the Decadents. The obscene imposter, whose prominence has been a social outrage ever since he transferred from Trinity Dublin to Oxford his vices, his follies and his vanities, has been exposed, and that thoroughly at last. But to the exposure there must be legal and social sequels … and of the Decadents, of their hideous conceptions of the meaning of Art, of their worse than Eleusinian mysteries, there must be an absolute end.” Given such strength of feeling it is hardly surprising that the label was instantly abandoned by those who had briefly adopted it, and ardently denied in retrospect by all those who had never made the mistake of admitting to it. Art, whether wrought for art’s sake or not, was compelled to make its obeisance before the altar of morality like a reluctant heretic in the shadow of the Inquisition.
    Such an acute sense of danger speaks of a more than ordinary fear. It speaks, in fact, of an acute awareness of crisis. The English writers of Decadent poetry and fiction refrained from calling the British Empire decadent, and refused to think of the future as a hopeless condition – but their enemies, reacting as if they had, gave the game away. The Empire was in a state of irreversible decline, and what the future held was not a war to end war which would secure Anglo-Saxon hegemony for all time but a great orgy of stupid butchery which would test almost to destruction every optimistic philosophy of progress which could be rallied against its apocalyptic implications, whether religious, political or technophilic. The crucifixion of Oscar Wilde by the rampant spirit of imperial vanity proved to be the prelude to the crucifixion of an entire generation, sent to die in the muddied fields of northern France.
    We do not think of the English poets of World War I as Decadents, nor do we attach any such label to the futuristic writers of the period between the wars who foresaw another war which would put an end to civilization, and of course they had none of the affectations of the aesthetic Decadent – no impuissant neurasthenia, no splenetic interest in opium or perversity – but such writers certainly had what the French Decadents had initially failed to export to England: a sense of hopelessness; a haunting suspicion that all that was left for men to do was fiddle while Rome burned.
    And then, of course, came a new wave of mad emperors.…
    The only possible conclusion which the modern commentator can come to, in looking back at the English Decadents, is that they were not nearly Decadent enough. Though they wrote horror stories and stories fearful of a far future decline into comfortable impuissance , modesty forbade them seeing anything horrible enough to awaken them or their readers to the historical peril in which they actually