Like Aestheticism’s battle cry: ‘Art for art’s sake!’ the Decadents, as an offshoot of Aestheticsm took this break from the tradition of using art to convey moral messages and classical themes and instead went even further. As a movement of both writers and artists they rejoiced in a self indulgent approach that ignored even nature in it’s self obsessiveness and cultivated an attitude of anti virtue, anti civilization and sometimes love of the macabre.
Edgar Allen Poe for instance was a darling of the Decadents.
An example of a literary theme the Decadents invented which has evolved and is still explored today is the notion of the person who disdains the world around them and retreats into a self created inner world. This was the subject of the book Against Nature, by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Published in 1884 it was an unbridled sensation, attacked savagely by critics but adored and championed by a younger generation of writers and artists.
Charles Baudelaire, the poet and assayist was another inspiratrion and darling of the Decadent movement.”What do I care if you are good?Be beautiful! and be sad!” Emo, folks. Pure emo. “All that is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. Crime, the taste for which the human animal draws from the womb of his mother, is natural in its origins. Virtue, on the contrary, is artificial and supernatural, since gods and prophets were necessary in every epoch and every nation to teach virtue . . . the good is always the product of some art.” That’s goth.