"We have a lot of negative, traumatic things washing over us all the time, and they can be undefined — it's sort of a modern version of mal du siècle," he says.
|
|
Condé Museum, Chantilly.Thomas Couture: The Supper after the Masked Ball, c. 1855. The Art Institute of Chicago.See Lawner, pp. 161–163. Of course not all mid-century painters were afflicted with the Romantics’ mal du siècle.
|
|
The only book Passos published during his lifetime was his poetry book Poesias (Poetry), in 1856. The poems mostly speak of death and the wrath of God, all of them with heavy mal du siècle traces. Having a very tumultuated life, and constantly assailed by diseases, he died in 1860, a victim of tuberculosis.
|
|
Edgar Degas, Melancholy (c. 1874) Akseli Gallen-Kallela,' painting Symposium made in 1894. From left: Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Oskar Merikanto, Robert Kajanus and Jean Sibelius. Mal du siècle (, "sickness of the century") is a term used to refer to the ennui, disillusionment, and melancholy experienced by primarily young adults of Europe's early 19th century, when speaking in terms of the rising Romantic movement.
|
|
Together, these psychological traits lend to originality, eccentricity, and a sense of alienation, all symptoms of le mal du siècle that impacted French youth at the beginning of the 19th century until expanding outward and eventually influencing the rest of Europe approaching the turn of the century.Shrimpton, Nicholas. Lane, You're a Perfect Pessimist': Pessimism and the English 'Fin de siècle. The Yearbook of English Studies 37.1 (2007): 41–57. .
|
|
The Yearbook of English Studies 37.1 (2007): 22–40. . while his own works influenced French and English artists through the use of modernity and symbolism. Baudelaire influenced other French artists like Arthur Rimbaud, the author of René whose titular character displays the mal du siècle that European youths of the age displayed. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and their contemporaries became known as French decadents, a group that influenced its English counterpart, the aesthetes like Oscar Wilde.
|
|
François-René de Chateaubriand's protagonist René characterizes the Romantic ennui that would become a benchmark of the Romantic esthetic in the first half of the century: > René is a young man who was suffering from the moral malady known as "le mal > du siècle". This was an "état d'âme"State of the soul that was not uncommon > during the first half of the nineteenth century, and that was often copied > and idealized in literature. It was largely boredom. Other manifestations > were: melancholy of an aristocratic type, precocious apathy, discouragement > without cause, distaste for living.
|
|
The "Ultra-Romanticism" changed the ways of the Romanticism in Brazil. Values such as nationalism and valorization of the Indian as the Brazilian national hero, a constant theme of the previous Brazilian Romantic generation, are now almost, if not completely, absent. This new generation, heavily influenced by German Romanticism and works by Lord Byron and Alfred de Musset, among others, now focalizes in obscure and macabre themes, such as pessimism, the supernatural, Satanism, longing for death, past and childhood, and the mal du siècle. Love and women were heavily idealized, platonic and almost always unrequited, and the presence of a strong egocentrism and exacerbated sentimentalism in the poetry is clearly noticed.
|
|
From an early age he took a special interest in the German language and literature, and was the first to translate two of Max Nordau's works into French under the following titles: Les mensonges conventionnels de notre civilisation (1886) and Le mal du siècle (1890). He contributed to many French and foreign reviews, such as La Revue du Nord, La Jeune France, and Le Messager de Vienne, and translated Charlotte Lady Blennerhasset's Madame de Staël et son temps (German: Frau von Staël, ihre Freunde und ihre Bedeutung in Politik und Literatur; 1890). His original publications include Les maîtresses de Louis XV (1881), Rouget de Lisle et la Marseillaise (1882), Jacques Richard et la presse (1886) and La mort de Danton (1888). He also edited the Poésies de Jacques Richard (1885).
|
|
The naturalist tendency to see life without illusions and to dwell on its more depressing and sordid aspects appears in an intensified degree in the immensely influential poetry of Charles Baudelaire, but with profoundly romantic elements derived from the Byronic myth of the anti-hero and the romantic poet, and the world-weariness of the "mal du siècle", etc. Similar elements occur in the novels of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. The poetry of Baudelaire and much of the literature in the latter half of the century (or "fin de siècle") were often characterized as "decadent" for their lurid content or moral vision. In a similar vein, Paul Verlaine used the expression "poète maudit" ("accursed poet") in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Tristan Corbière, Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or had been ignored by the critics.
|
|