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PARTISAN REVIEW
number of social or psychic conditions. But those are not its
causes.
The newer writing is what it is, in itself, and in relation to the past,
naturally, but not totally dependent on it. Influences abound, granted,
learning takes place, models are accepted or rejected. But literature is
not written to compose literary history; moreover, the past may be
burdensome or even dictatorial, but it is never an absolute monarch.
Serious writers at any time write as they will and as they must.
They do not " fall down" or "away from" standards, for the standards
themselves .are constantly changing and new writing is precisely what
changes them. Only a lofty, categorizing, anthropomorphizing im–
pulse, one whose effect, if not intention, is
to
turn art into the material
for dissertations, would find decadence in what is really fluctuation,
the long rhythms of human expression. In cultural matters at least
"decadence" explains nothing and reveals nothing but our apparently
unappeasable hunger for neat, fateful explanations of the essentially
mysterious processes of creation .
"What those who speak of a decadent society or a decadent person
mean," wrote British philosopher
C.
E. M. Joad, "must have some–
thing in common with what is meant when they speak of a decadent
literature." There is some ·truth to this, though it is diminishing as the
word splits more and more sharply into its academic and popular
usages. What is common
to
all employment of "decadence" as a
pejorative is a quality of accusation,
to
the point of anathema, in the
interest of a defense of something valued, felt to be essential or, if it
does not yet exist, deeply desired. This function of the word has
frequently led to its being used
to
denote opposites at the same time. In
the eighteenth century, for example, French churchmen thought the
nation was growing decadent because of the waning of religious spirit
and practice, while anticlericals argued that her decadence was due
precisely to the persistence of religious institutions.
Intellectual and cultural history is full of instances of "decadence"
being used as a club to beat what is seen as the betrayal or repudiation
of one or another value. Oswald Spengler thought the "giganticism"
and inflation of the American mind and imagination absolute proofs
of our decadence, and wrote, in defense presumably of an ideal of
discretion or elitism, that "nothing more clearly displays the decadence
of Western art since the middle of the nineteenth century than its
absurd mass-wide rendering of nudes." According to Konrad Swart,
Charles Peguy thought the " degeneration of republican idealism into a
