Christa Giles

The reverence for the artificial issued from the
˝decadent’s˝ desire to be more than natural–to triumph
over the material. Baudelaire’s dandy would strive to
create ˝une originalité˝ which was at the same time
supposed to be ˝contenu˝ within the ˝limites extérieures des
convenances.˝ 72 Originality, then, was a means whereby
the dandy was able to transmute a life ˝terribly deficient in
form˝ 73 into art. The dandy’s nobility, his superiority, could
be gauged by the artificiality which he created or with
which he surrounded himself. In this respect Wilde and
Huysmans follow Baudelaire by maintaining (with the
customary dandaical inversion) that ˝absolute materialism˝
is paradoxically ˝not far from the purest idealism.˝ 74 That is
to say, a material form becomes the means of containing the
original, the spiritual:
In and of itself every idea is endowed with
immortal life, just like a person. All forms,
even those created by man, are immortal.
Because form is independent of matter and it
is not molecules that constitute form. 75
In Wilde’s view the artist was the master of form; and like
the dandy he gains his inspiration from ˝the dominance of
form.˝ 76 Beauty, then, was to be derived from form rather
than content and the dandy was the logical embodiment of
these ideas, being both self-created and a connoisseur of
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