How can you enshrine beauty in the sterilised environment of poetic artifice and simultaneously invade it with your senses? What is there in the interstice between the impervious sphere of artificiality and that of immediate sensuous and, indeed, sensual experience? And why is this pertinent at all? These questions aim at capturing an overarching paradox in the tension, dialogue and interaction between sensuality and artifice that, as I will suggest, lies at the heart of fin-de-siècle Decadence. This overarching paradox with the variety of its manifestations is the theme of this book. George Moore stages this paradox compellingly in his licentious and erudite Confessions. In the quotation above, Edward Dayne, the novel's protagonist, surmises that distinctions between making sense of the text and experiencing it with one's senses can be blurred. Crucially, he links the delights of perceiving art with those of the ‘flesh’, collapsing ‘brain-judgement’ and ‘sense-judgement’ (Moore 1972: 99). Dayne stresses that books can

Dayne can be ‘thrilled and driven to pleasure’ by a literary text: ‘[t]his is of course pure sensualism’ (1972: 99), he asserts. Moore was steeped in the 1880s Parisian avant-garde and was under the spell of such Decadent landmarks as Paul Verlaine's Fêtes galantes (1869) and J.-K. Huysmans's À Rebours (1884), ‘the breviary of decadence’ as Arthur Symons famously dubbed it.