ABSTRACT

British critical interest in literary decadence has usually been seen as having started with Pater in the 1870s and become more widespread only in the 1880s and 1890s, with the emergence of a self-consciously decadent movement in literature and the arts. The word 'decadence' had, of course, existed in English long before this period, denoting the decline of civilizations and thus encompassing cultural degeneration in a general sense. It was, however, only rarely applied by earlier nineteenth-century British critics to specific aesthetic effects and was not fully naturalized until later in the century.1 When, in 1823, De Quincey came across the term he felt it pointed 'to another language than English', and it was still considered a 'barbarous Gallicism' by one writer in 1871.2 We must, indeed, look to France if we are to find explicit discussions of literary decadence from the early to mid-nineteenth century. The first major anatomization of a decadent aesthetic was by Desire Nisard, whose study of the late Latin poets, published in 1834, compared modern French poetry to the degenerate works of Lucan and his contemporaries.3 Nisard's understanding of decadence was largely, although not exclusively, hostile, but in 1857 Baudelaire

1 The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest occurrence as The Complaynt

of Scotland (1549), Chapter 7, 'My tiumphant stait is succumbit in decadens'. A characteristic mid-nineteenth-century usage is in Lord Lindsay's Sketches of the History of Christian Art, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1847), I, p. 114, where he describes the eleventh century as 'marking the lowest decadence of Byzantine art'.