Volume 26, Number 11 · June 28, 1979
Down There on a Visit
By Frank Kermode
Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet
by Richard Gilman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 180 pp., $8.95
It is easy to deplore the use of certain ready-made concepts such as 'Baroque' or 'Romantic' or 'Decadent.' They may short-circuit genuine historical or stylistic inquiry; they may obscure rather than illuminate the real problems. But they constitute genuine problems in themselves. Why do we find them convenient? Why will they not confine themselves, in an orderly way, to their business? We may insist that they should be used only to describe the art of clearly defined periods; they ignore us, and attach themselves to any art, of whatever period, that vaguely resembles that of the period we have in mind. 'Mannerist' has been applied to the poetry of the first-century poet Martial; it is used as a rough synonym of 'Baroque'; for the art of an intermediate period between Classic and Baroque; and for something that goes on all the time as 'a complementary phenomenon of the Classical of all periods,' to quote Ernst Curtius, who took the last view, and also thought Mannerism predominantly Spanish.
Review, 2919 words
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