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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
Transition and decadence are terms that are often applied to the literature of our time. It all depends on the sense in which we use them. Properly understood both, I think, can fairly be used to describe certain tendencies that belong to modern literature in general and to our own age in particular. There is a widespread feeling that we are in the process of changing from one age to another, that we are in fact on the threshold of a New Age. This may be true, but that the signs of the coming spiritual revival are to be found in the works of contemporary writers is an assumption that we are scarcely justified in making. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence to show that contemporary art belongs not to the beginning of a new age but to the end of an old one. That we seem to be on the verge of spiritual collapse is certainly no guarantee that immediate regeneration will follow.
1 ‘The School of Baudelaire’ is used to designate poets like Laforgue, Corbière, Rimbaud and the early Mallarmé (e.g. Les Fenêtres) in preference to the word ‘symbolists’ as this term is susceptible in France to widely differing interpretations.
2 Selected Essays, p. 372. (London, 1932).
3 selected Essays, p. 372. (London, 1932).
4 Op. cit., p. 273.
5 Jacques Rivière, Rimbaud, p. 59 (Paris, 1930).
6 It is worth noting that Eduard Duiardin, the acknowledged master of James Joyce, who was the first writer to use the ‘silent monologue’ in his masterly novel, Les Lauriers sont cozrpés, was also the editor of Laforgue's Derniers Vers. The novel mas published in 1887 and Laforgue's poems (a posthumous work) three years later. But it is certain that M. Dujardin was acquainted with the poems before he wrote his novel.
7 Essais de psychologie contemporaine I, p. 8 (Paris, 1887).
8 Speculations (London, 1924). See also N. Berdiaeff, The End of Our Time (London, 1933).
9 Baudelaire's interest in exotic perfumes is important.