Spencer interested me much as a philosopher of evolution and as a sociologist.
Yet, to be quite frank, I paid more heed to English and American literature than to English philosophy. I soon got to know it pretty thoroughly and could compare it with the French in its bearing upon Romantic decadence. Rossetti and Oscar Wilde I had examined already; and now, in London, I deepened my acquaintance with the Celtic renascence and, in this connection, verified my analysis of French Romantic sexualism. W. L. George among the younger, and George Moore among the older writers, seemed good subjects for this inquiry; but, since the war I have found in Joyce the most instructive case of Catholic-Romantic decadence. In him there is a really palpable transition from metaphysical and religious transcendentalism and asceticism to naturalistic and sexual worldliness in practice.
This element of decadence, so strong among French writers, is not to be found among the English. Not that it is confined to the French; it exists also in Italian and Spanish and, to a marked degree, in German-Austrian literature as well as in that of Poland and in our own. This peculiarity perplexes the historians of English literature. Some speak, very superficially, of English prudery and cant; others simply cannot explain a difference that is undeniable. In reality, the difference between France and England is the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, between the morality of religious transcendentalism and a morality more human and natural. Hence there is not in England and in English literature the same crisis that exists in French literature and in France; there is not the same dualism, the same conflict between body and soul. A writer like Lawrence is an exception. He seems to have got his decadence from reading Freud. On the other hand, the Irish, as Catholics, certainly go with the French. I look upon English literature as the healthier; yet, if I ask, with Taine: “Musset or Tennyson?” I answer, “Musset and Tennyson, the French and the English (with the Americans), but be critical of both.” And, while interpreting decadent eroticism in this way, I ask myself whether it can rightly be ascribed to temperament and race, for such an explanation of it is assuredly wrong and based on superficial observation of peoples.
The centenary of Charlotte Brontë, my favourite authoress, was celebrated soon after my return from Paris to London. In her there is Romanticism, if you will, but pure and strong
