The Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats

The garden of the Decadents had always been rather crowded. While Charles Baudelaire tended his flowers of evil, Joris-Karl Huysmans rested bemused by his collection of sterile hybrids and Vernon Lee, off in the middle-distance, consumed the pulsating hills and valleys of Italian landscapes and other more carnal terrains. Simeon Solomon’s pouting Bacchi slouched their way across Walter Pater’s springing violets and ripening corn, and Arthur Machen’s and Aubrey Beardsley’s precocious Pans trampled through George Egerton’s forest glades. But when Gilbert and Sullivan, in their 1880 comic opera Patience, brought attention to the “greenery-yallery” dandy-aesthetes, the reference was not to their thumbs. The correlation of Decadence with the natural environment conflicts with the standard characterization of the phenomenon from the mid-Victorian period to the present day as insensitive to humans’ links to nature. The dominant tendency in twentieth-century scholarship had been to describe the historical movement as either a withered, deviant offshoot of Romanticism, which boasted its own vigorous nature worship, or an early formulation of modernism’s investment in urbanism, artifice, and the unnatural. Decadent depictions of ritualized pagan acts have likewise more often been read as signifying the self-display and performative awareness of the sexually unconventional aesthete poseur, rather than seen as exploring any sort of sincere communion with nature.¹

While the naturalism of twentieth-century modernism has received considerable attention over the years, Decadence has remained a sort of marker of extreme artifice, and so has been presented as either dysfunctionally solipsistic or daringly avant-garde. The seeds of this formulation can be found in the works of Decadents themselves, including Aubrey Beardsley, the Goncourt brothers, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Rachilde, and Oscar Wilde. It was commentary on the movement such as Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) and Arthur Symons’s “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), however, that most forcefully developed the early critical association of Decadence with the unnatural, the deviant, and the sickly. Symons, for example, makes no acknowledgement of nature’s positive influence on Decadence; rather, he argues that Decadent art and literature’s “very artificiality is a way of being true to nature” because modern society is so utterly artificial itself.² “Nature” here is not used to refer to the products of the earth, but as a synonym for “context.” While this artistic mirror on the modern world can be condoned as a form of honesty, Symons argues that this does not make the work admirable. Instead, he reasserts as superior the notion of nature as biologically essential. Of Decadence, Symons declares, “healthy we cannot call it, and healthy it does not wish to be considered” (ibid.). Notably, in this piece Symons found “Decadence” most appropriate as an umbrella term encompassing various developments including Symbolism and Impressionism, but he changed the title of his study for its re-publication in 1899 to The Symbolist Movement in England. Through this public revision of the importance he himself placed on the Decadent Movement, he directly contributed to its decomposition, shifting it from a position of cultural authority to one of a more subordinate status, especially in comparison to the more aggressive vigor of Symbolism.

It is accurate to say that Decadence was heavily invested in the aesthetic and symbolic potency of urbanism and artifice, but many of the Movement’s artists and writers—from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, and from Britain as well as elsewhere—also relied heavily on nature and nature worship for conceptualizing and articulating their non-normative tastes and social values. Like Pater, most contributors to the movement were not pagans in ritual earnest—and this is, in part, my point. Rather than the confrontational posturing that has come to characterize the key proponents of the Aesthetic Movement and the historical avant-garde, Decadent authors and artists often encouraged a more subtle permeation of the modernist era with a disquieting pagan atmosphere. I am compelled to follow the practice in queer studies since Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence and describe such a maneuver as dissidence, which he defines as...