Christa Giles

eal (the student in his room) and the imaginary (the
visitation of the sphinx), myth and actuality interpenetrate.
The sphinx, of course, is omnipresent in late nineteenth-
century art, and naturally both Wilde and Huysmans
would be particularly attracted to this symbol of the
unknown as they constantly extolled the value of the
mysterious in both life and art.
The poem ˝The Sphinx˝ is certainly erudite, elliptical,
and deliberately self-conscious, and whether or not one
considers it to be successful, is consistent with Gautier’s
definition of the decadent style in his famous notice of
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal in 1868:
The style of decadence…is nothing else than
art arrived at that extreme point of maturity
produced by those old 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 ageing and depraved passion, and to the
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