Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism

Martin Lockerd

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350137677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation, this book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Martin Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti -Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

1

The Decadents: Profligates, Priests, Pornographers, and Pontiffs

The decadent school of the 1890s was the most substantial Catholic literary movement in Protestant Britain until the Catholic revival of the mid-twentieth century. There were, of course, individual Catholic writers of genius between the early sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries: Crashaw stood out as the only Catholic among the metaphysical poets of the early seventeenth century. Dryden immortalized his allegiance to Rome in The Hind and the Panther (1687). Hopkins, whose merits as a poet arguably outweigh those of all of his contemporaries, stood alone in his genius—a master of poetic form ahead of but also isolated from his time. Newman, Pusey, and other luminaries of the mid-nineteenth-century Oxford Movement argued the merits of ritual and reunification and helped solidify the Catholic conversion narrative as an important part of the modern British intellectual tradition. Later, Newman’s Apologia (1864) and Dream of Gerontius (1865) would attest to his substantial literary merit, but his legacy rested primarily on apologetics and theology. The decadent authors and artists of the British fin de siècle were not theologians producing literature but poets drawn to the literary possibilities of a foreign theology and its Church. On the cusp of what many have characterized as an age of disbelief, the age of modernism, they formed a literary movement that openly embraced religion as a source of artistic inspiration and spiritual fulfillment.

This assertion may strike some as controversial. What could be more irreligious than decadence, with its emphasis on the “perverse,” on alcohol and opium, on homoerotic love and sensual experimentation, on artifice and synthetic pleasure? What could be further from religious art than Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, or Dowson’s “Non sum qualis” (“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion”), or Beardsley’s salacious illustrations of Wilde’s Salomé? As I have already suggested, the decadent relationship with Catholicism was never entirely orthodox; at least it has never been entirely acceptable to champions of orthodoxy such as G. K. Chesterton, who began his literary career with the express design of combatting the school of Wilde. Yet Chesterton himself acknowledged that, at least in the case of Wilde, the aesthete’s pursuit of beauty led inevitably to God:

Like a many-coloured humming top, he was at once a bewilderment and a balance. He was so fond of being many-sided that among his sides he even admitted the right side. He loved so much to multiply his souls that he had among them one soul at least that was saved. He desired all beautiful things—even God.¹

Chesterton combines disapproval of Wilde’s many-sidedness with grudging fascination and an acknowledgment of the sincere religious element in the artist’s soul. It is true that the number of decadent converts treated in this chapter who actually challenged or rejected the established doctrines of the Church remains a matter of debate. Nevertheless, heterodoxy or immorality in “Catholic” literature should hardly come as a surprise. The Goliardic poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were nothing if not irreverent. Chaucer, the father of English literature, was a Catholic who told bawdy tales set in the context of a holy pilgrimage. Even the most intellectually serious and devout artists in the broader Catholic tradition have never been entirely conventional. Dante, that exemplar of Thomistic imagination, had comparatively little interest in bawdy tales or poems in praise of wine, women, and song. Yet he constructed an afterlife that regularly pushes the boundaries of orthodox theology. The author of Europe’s greatest Catholic epic places a living pope in Hell, employs the pagan Cato as the greeter at the foot of Mount Purgatory, and makes a woman other than his wife or the Virgin Mary into an object of near-idolatrous adoration. These eccentricities came from the mind of a man born into a Catholic city-state centuries before the crises of faith that shook nineteenth-century Europe. At a time when doubt was outstripping faith, at least among the educated and elite, the profligates, priests, pornographers, and would-be pontiffs who made up the decadent movement distinguished themselves simply by treating religion as something other than an absurdity, or worse, a subject of indifference.

Scholars of fin-de-siècle literature are familiar with the decadent converts to Rome, but they remain largely unfamiliar to many modernist critics. Anyone looking for a wide-ranging study of the phenomenon should begin with Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism (1997). In the following pages, I seek to sharpen Hanson’s insights by focusing more exclusively on British decadence, somewhat broadly defined. It was, after all, the British decadents of the nineties whose influence, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, Pound and Yeats so emphatically sought to exclude from the literature of the early twentieth century. Most of this chapter is concerned with revisiting the work of those little-known figures, especially those neglected by Hanson. For this reason, Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson receive particular attention. It seems only fitting, however, to begin our survey of distinctly British decadent Catholicism not with an Englishman but an Irish Protestant.

Wilde and His Circle

Amid the obscure names that populate the roster of British decadence Wilde’s stands out as an exception. Looking back on decadence from the other side of 1900, prominent literary men like Chesterton and Eliot thought nothing of referring to the whole movement as the “school” or “circle” of Wilde.² Not surprisingly, given the elasticity of his mind and the often-paradoxical expressions of his many opinions and beliefs, the nature of Wilde’s relationship with Catholicism continues to instigate controversy. Following in the footsteps of Richard Ellmann, some critics remain dubious about the seriousness of Wilde’s engagement with Catholicism and go so far as to proclaim that he was an atheist. Others indulge in the opposite extreme. In 2000, Catholic apologist Joseph Pearce published The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde with the express intention of overturning Ellmann’s characterization of the artist’s lack of faith.³ Needless to say, his rebuttal did not produce any consensus in critical opinion, but it did illustrate the polarizing nature of a debate that continues to tell us more about its participants’ views on Catholicism than Wilde’s. Yet among Catholic intellectuals, usually keen on claiming converts of all stripes, Wilde’s approach to religion, as well as that of his fellow decadents, continues to cause as much discomfort as interest.

Nowhere is this aestheticized Catholicism more evident than in the infamously decadent eleventh chapter of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91). Under the influence of an unnamed “poisonous book,” presumably Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), the previously innocent Dorian throws himself with abandon into the cultivation of strange new sensations:

In his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that, indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it. (DG 102)

We soon learn that Catholicism has a part to play in Dorian’s decadent education and pursuit of experiences “alien to his nature”:

It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. (DG 102–3)

The Mass is not a tame thing for Dorian. In his mind, the “Roman ritual” is, paradoxically, both a sacrifice more terrible than those of pagan antiquity and a purely symbolic gesture. Wilde, always capable of staring paradox in the eye without blinking, depicts the central sacrament of the Catholic Church as simultaneously vacant of literal significance and more awe-inspiring than the older blood sacrifices it displaced. Such speculation might lead some to a more theologically serious engagement with Catholicism. Not so for Wilde’s pretty, vapid, corrupt, superficial protagonist. Dorian desires only a gilded gesture and a beautiful pose. He attends Mass as a voyeur, watching the solemn priest and pretty altar boys wrapped in beautiful gowns and performing ancient rituals amid incensed smoke. He looks longingly at dark confessionals, beside which he wishes to sit and overhear the stories of others’ sins. This Romish fascination, we are quickly reassured, never became anything more substantial:

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail. (DG 103)

The narrator’s closing metaphor defines Dorian’s fascination with Catholicism as an ephemeral dalliance draped in overt sexual innuendo. Playing at being Catholic is, for him, like an assignation with an anonymous partner in a disreputable inn on a moonless night. Though Wilde’s own flirtation with Catholicism was far more serious than Dorian’s, he understood all too well the importance of keeping the hearth and the hotel separate.

Almost always the standard by which critics initially assess Anglophone decadence, Dorian Gray presents a frivolous and superficial picture of the decadent protagonist’s interest in Catholicism. Dorian receives the lion’s share of attention from critics who either celebrate or deplore his almost solely “aesthetic” appreciation of Catholic ritual. Converts among the generation of the nineties were well aware that their religious interests had been caricatured in art and the popular press as little more than superficial gestures, and they enjoyed elaborating on the theme in an ironic key. The same year that Wilde published his expanded edition of Dorian Gray (1891), Lionel Johnson, who introduced Wilde to “Bosie” (Lord Alfred Douglas) and found a degree of immortality with his quintessentially decadent poem, “The Dark Angel” (1893), wrote a satirical anatomy of young aesthetes titled “The Cultured Faun.” Johnson’s young “faun,” disabused of all conventional ideas, steeped in paradox and epigrams, and infused with the nervous tension of Gautier and Baudelaire, cultivates an appreciation for Catholic ritual as a complement to his aesthetic development:

Here comes in a tender patronage of Catholicism: white tapers upon the high altar, an ascetic and beautiful young priest, the great gilt monstrance, the subtle-scented and mystical incense, the old world accents of the Vulgate, of the Holy Offices; the splendor of the sacred vestments. We kneel at some hour, not too early for our convenience, repeat the solemn Latin, drinking in those Gregorian tones, with plenty of modern French sonnets in memory, should the sermon be dull.⁴

In keeping with the Dorian mood, Johnson’s narrator scoffs at the idea of his cultured fauns actually converting to their pet religion:

But join the Church! Ah, no! better to dally with the enchanted mysteries, to pass from our dreams of delirium to our dreams of sanctity with no coarse facts to jar upon us. And so these fine persons cherish a double “passion,” the sentiment of repentant yearning and the sentiment of rebellious sin.⁵

Johnson, perhaps the most pious and theologically minded of his contemporaries, clearly took delight in ridiculing the spiritual superficiality of those young aesthetes of the time—imaginary and real—who were too caught up in cultivating sensations to actually produce art or save their souls.

As “The Cultured Faun” demonstrates, Dorian’s superficial interest in religion should not be taken as definitive of decadent Catholicism as an artistic movement. Far from extoling purely aesthetic flirtation with religion, Johnson depicts such dabbling as shallow and risible. Arguably, this was partly Wilde’s point as well. He portrays Dorian’s flirtation with Catholicism, along with all of his other pursuits, as a pretty bimbo’s attempt to live out someone else’s hedonistic philosophy (namely, that of Lord Henry) and imitate the exploits related in a Huysman...