STEPHANE MALLARME:
"To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the delight of a poem which consists of divining, little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery which constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object little by little in order to show a mental state, or, inversely, to choose an object and bring forth from it a state of soul by a series of decipherings."
-- quoted in Jules Huret, Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire, 1891.
THEOPHILE GAUTIER:
"The style of decadence... is nothing else than art arrived at that extreme point of maturity produced by those civilizations which are growing old with their oblique suns -- a style that is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language, borrowing from all the technical vocabularies, taking colours from all palettes, notes from all keyboards, forcing itself to express in thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours; listening, that it may translate them, to the subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of aging and depraved passion, and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on madness. This style of decadence is the last effort of the Word (Verbe), called upon to express everything, and pushed to the utmost extremity. We may remind ourselves, in connection with it, of the language of the Later Roman Empire, already mottled with the greenness of decomposition, and, as it were, gamy (faisandée), and of the complicated refinements of the Byzantine school, the last form of Greek art fallen into deliquescence. Such is the inevitable and fatal idiom of peoples and civilizations where factitious life has replaced the natural life, and developed in man unknown wants. Besides, it is no easy matter, this style despised of pedants, for it expresses new ideas with new forms and words that have not yet been heard. In opposition to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these shadows teem and swarm with the larvae of superstitions, the haggard phantoms of insomnia, nocturnal terror, remorse which starts and turns back at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams stayed only by impotence, obscure fantasies at which the daylight would stand amazed, and all that the soul conceals of the dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its deepest and furthest recesses."
-- Preface to Les Fleurs du Mal by C. Baudelaire; quoted in Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892).
PAUL BOURGET:
"We delight in what you call our corruptions of style, and we delight at the same time the refined people of our race and our time. It remains to be seen whether our exception is not an aristocracy, and whether, in the aesthetic order, the majority of suffrages represents anything else than the majority of ignorances.... It is a self-deception not to have the courage of one's intellectual pleasure. Let us delight, therefore, in our singularities of ideal and of form, even if we must shut ourselves up in a solitude without visitors."
-- Essais de la psychologie contemporaine, 1883.
PAUL VERLAINE:
"I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds."
-- quoted in William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure.
MAX NORDAU: On the fin-de-siècle mood:
"It is the impotent despair of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in the midst of an eternally living nature blooming insolently for ever. It is the envy of a rich, hoary voluptuary, who sees a pair of lovers making for a sequestered forest nook; it is the mortification of the exhausted and impotent refugee from a Florentine plague seeking in an enchanted garden the experiences of a Decameron, but striving in vain to snatch one more pleasure of sense from the uncertain hour."
-- Degeneration, 1892.
JAMES WHISTLER:
"Why this lifting of the brow in depreciation of the present --this pathos in reference to the past? If Art be rare today, it was seldom heretofore. It is false, this teaching of decay. The master stands in not relation to the moment at which he occurs -- a monument of isolation -- hinting at sadness -- having no part in the progress of his fellow men.... So Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there, cannot progress."
-- Ten O'Clock Lecture, 1888.
MAX NORDAU:
"Hysteria and degeneration have always existed; but they formerly showed themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitudes of discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing on it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which created favourable conditions under which these maladies could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to civilization."
--Degeneration, 1892.