Christa Giles

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form, and compositional arrangement as structures of
beauty, so too did Wilde and Huysmans, identifying a
beauty of artificiality and excess with truth. They favoured
excessive decoration, precisely because it conveyed a fusion
of art and idea, which is of course one of the aims of
Symbolism. Due to the concern with form, expressive unity
was sought and achieved through the radical fusion of
thought and design. Thus Moreau, the artist perhaps most
closely identified with the Decadent Movement, wrote:
What a lovely art it is that, beneath a material
covering, itself the mirror of physical
beauties, yet also reflects the great workings
of the soul, mind, heart and imagination . . . A
day will come when the eloquence of this
mute art shall be understood. To that
eloquence, whose character, nature, and
power over the mind cannot be defined, I
have given every care, every effort: the
evocation of my thought through line,
arabesque and pictorial means, that is my
aim. 463
According to Wilde, form comes first and later embodies
the idea. Therefore, when a sonnet is composed, it is the
controlling structure which ˝determines or even creates
content . . . form suggests what is to fill it and make it