Christa Giles

30
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
terrors, remorse which starts and turns back
at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams
stayed only by impotence, obscure phantasies
at which the day-light would stand amazed,
and all that the soul conceals of the dark, the
unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its
deepest and furthest recesses. 65