Decadence, Wilde

Beauty in the sense of sensuality as a lived aesthetic or philosophy degenerates, if one continues on its paths, into decadence, which if one continues along further degenerates into darker territories, self-disgust, and so on. Marquis de Sade is a famous instance of someone who lived out the journey into the darker realms. The Decadent movement is exactly what that movement was called by its own protagonists as it emanated in late 19th century France, and it implied an ethos of excess and artificiality, the seeking out of pleasures, particularly pleasures that had the added spice of feeling perverse or forbidden. Perhaps it’s something of the death throes of the Romantic movement in an increasingly industrial and materialist age, but whereas the Romantic movement had a strong yearning for the spiritual, now as it runs of out of steam it instead retreats and resorts to a desperate wallowing in sensuality as a final island of resistance. This is where it tries to have its victory over, or perhaps apart from, the rest of reality.

Oscar Wilde was very influenced by the Decadent movement, with much of his subsequent writings and life fitting to some considerable degree within its framework, and the flimsiness of decadence as an ethos was brutally shown when Wilde met with brute external reality and prison. The ethos of self-indulgence was exposed to be so hopelessly irrelevant as any kind of answer or consolation in the face of such extreme trials. The point is not that Wilde deserved his punishment, but that this experiment in self-indulgent decadence, as is repeatedly proclaimed in his writings, got to confront very strongly how this aesthetic actually measured up to a life that included so much suffering that lay beyond the confines of some aspired to pleasure-filled bubble. As Wilde discovered and himself accepted, the ethos fails miserably. Too much of truth has been sacrificed for decadence to equate to any kind of answer to life. 

And to add while those at ease within that kind of world of self-indulgence would be delighted to celebrate the gift of someone like Wilde as an intellectual poster-boy and martyr for the movement, in truth such undignified confines are far beneath his gifts and capacities. It must have been especially painful for Wilde to see in sober clarity the kinds of mediocre people of so little depth he had dwelt with who actually were spiritually at home in those shallow realms, and for which he essentially sacrificed his life as a person and artist.