SOURCE: "From High Decadence to High Modernism," in Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 4, Winter, 1980, pp. 591-610.

In the following essay, Chamberlain links Modernism to the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement.

"Sympathy with suffering," suggested Oscar Wilde, "is the joy of one leper meeting another leper on the road." Misery likes company; but as well as company decadence needs an audience. Indeed, the one thing which the celebrated decadents of the nineteenth century needed more than their absinthe, their indolence or their sometimes picturesque debauchery was a large middle class to be offended, a phalanx of bourgeois outrage. "To bewilder the middle class" might be, as Arthur Symons suggested, itself a thinly disguised middle-class occupation; but it was, as well, an appealing obligation for those who thrived on the deliciously self-righteous pleasures it afforded.

Wilde, more than anyone of his age, advertised the conspicuous consumption of decadent pleasures. He did not...