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Walter Pater
Pater was the exponent of a carpe diem philosophy suited to
an age when the old certainties were crumbling. . . .Live "intensely"...,
abandon your delicately responsive sensibility to the constant play of
sensations and impressions--sight, sound, odor, touch, taste.
This is, intentionally, a gross over-simplification,
though not necessarily a falsification, of Pater's "new Cyrenaicism," or
hedonism. It has the advantage of suggesting the way he was read
and explaining the kind of influence he had.
[Pater's aesthetic philosophy] resulted in the apotheosis
of beauty as the supreme experience of life, and of art as the superior
reality, atoning for the deficiencies of nature and totally unlike
any other kind of human activity . . . . Aestheticism offered the
mode of experience farthest removed from anything else available in an
industrial world. . . .
It followed that life itself was viewed as an art.
The Aesthetes replaced the brassy hedonism of the pleasure-pain calculus
with the ethereal hedonism of pure beauty, however captured and savored.
Oscar Wilde
To Pater's disciples, the only reality worth seeking was not material
goods but an intangible--the individual human experience. . . . "Life,"
said Wilde in A Woman of No Importance, "is a mauvais quart d'heure
made up of exquisite moments."
And so Aestheticism involved a complete revulsion
against received standards of values. . . .
Nothing better symbolized this spirit of revolt
against the contemporary bourgeois spirit than the flamboyant costumes
of the publicity-conscious Wilde set adopted as an outward sign of
their defiance. It was most fitting that an age which had been ushered
in by the Regency dandy should be ushered out by his grandchildren in velvet
knee breeches. Dandyism framed the Victorian period.
But these men and their willowy, Rossetti-inspired women postured,
as their forebears decidedly had not done, in the cause of Beauty.
The Decadent
As a token of their contempt for respectability, the Decadents extended
the Aesthetes' cultivation of the senses tothe realm of the abnormal
and perverse (according to the prevailing moral standards): sexual
aberration, drug-taking, absinthe-drinking--an array of viced sufficient
to rend the whole massive monolith of Victorian morality.