Against Pater

Abstract My final chapter pursues the thread of antinomianism in the writings of Arthur Symons and W. B. Yeats and their rebellion against Pater’s aestheticism, which established the break with Pater that defined the transition from Decadence to Symbolism, as well as offering a paradigm for early modernism. The Symbolist project required the notion of a secular aestheticism associated with Pater, to which Decadence is the natural heir, in order to frame its own distinct vision of ‘mysticism’, and it did so in part by ignoring other aspects of Pater’s vision. I show how Pater anticipated the rebellion in advance in the chapters of Marius the Epicurean warning against an ‘enervating mysticism’ consequent on cultural Decadence. This illustrates one of the central threads of my final section about the inherent potential for philosophical positions to be interpreted erroneously, or in opposite ways, one of Pater’s own most significant insights about the ‘personal’ reception networks of reading.