ments becomes possible. Decadence is their common meta-
physical concern, with deep roots that have been obscured,
for the most part, right up to the present day.

These "decadent" writers--symbolist, realist, parnassian,
for all are concerned with decadence--were in fact haunted
by the fear that Western civilization was fast drawing to an
end because of man's moral, social, political, and religious
decay. In different ways they elaborated upon this idea in
their fiction, but it remained a catholic concern. However,
their depictions of decadent men and women, i.e., their
literary heroes and heroines, have prompted many critics to
assume, erroneously, that the writers were in fact what many
of them were actually protesting against. Although few
decadent authors possessed Goethean tranquillity--how many
writers ever have?--it is certainly a mistake to equate them,
as many observers have done, with their decadent heroes.
The truth of the matter is quite complex.

Its complexity can be seen even in attempting to define
the elusive word "decadence." For most readers it has a
connotative, pejorative meaning, not a denotative meaning
designating certain men, particular movements, peculiar
ideas. This confusion endures. Arthur Symons, for one, drew
attention to the essential problem from the actual scene: ¹

The latest movement in European literature has been called by
many names, none of them quite exact or comprehensive--Deca-
dence, Symbolism, Impressionism, for instance. It is easy to dis-
pute over words, and we shall find that Verlaine objects to
being called a Decadent, Maeterlinck to being called a Symbo-
list, Huysmans to being called an Impressionist. These terms,
as it happens, have been adopted as the badge of little separate
cliques, noisy, brainsick young people who haunt the brasseries
of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and exhaust their ingenuities in
theorizing over the works they can not write. But, taken frankly
as epithets which express their own meaning, both Impression-
ism and Symbolism convey some notion of that new kind of
literature which is perhaps more broadly characterized by the
word Decadence.

-2-