Alex Murray

Decadent Conservatism: Politics and Aesthetics in The Senate

Abstract: The relationship between late-Victorian Decadence and Aestheticism and politics has long been vexed. This article explores the hitherto under-explored confluence of conservatism and avant-garde literature in the period by introducing The Senate, a Tory-Decadent journal that ran from 1894-7. While Decadent authors occupied various political positions, this article argues that The Senate offers a crucial link between conservatism and Decadence The article presents the journal in its political and publishing context, outlining its editorial position on such issues as the Liberal Unionist-Conservative coalition governments, Britains relationship with Europe and the threat of ‘State Socialism’, as well as its valorisation of Bollingbroke and eighteenth-century Toryism, and its relationship to, and difference from, key Decadent journals the Yellow Book and The Savoy. It then goes on to articulate its relationship to Decadence by focussing on the presence of Paul Verlaine in its pages and its vitrioli...

Introduction: Decadent Poetics

The term decadence—designating variously a literary form, a movement, and a period of literary history—is notoriously hard to pin down. It derives from the Latin decadere, a ‘falling down’ or ‘falling away’, and the OEDgives the following definition: ‘The process of falling away or declining (from a prior state of excellence, vitality, prosperity, etc.); decay; impaired or deteriorated condition.’1 In Decadent Style(1985) John R. Reed suggests that we need to avoid using the term in the lower case, referring as it does to ‘all those carelessly defined manifestations of change that inspired anxiety and depression in the second half of the last century’.2 Yet the proximity to ideas of decline and falling away is, in many ways, what gives decadenceits semantic force, being both a term of opprobrium (connoting linguistic and moral decay) andthe ‘transvaluation’ (to use Nietzsche’s term) of the moral framework that allows for simplistic ideas of decay to circulate. The poetic is an integral part of this transvaluation, the literary text performing the de construc- tion of meaning and value. It was this point that Oscar Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, made in his lecture ‘There Is No Decay’, which he gave to the Bluecoat School, Liverpool, in February 1908. Ross declares that ‘what is commonly called decay is merely stylistic development’.3 He goes on to explain of decadence that ‘even if we accept Mr Balfour’s definition of its symptom—“the employment of an over-wrought technique”—we must remember that Decadence and Decay have now different meanings, though originally they meant the same sort of thing’.4